Welcome again to my teachings, if this is your first encounter with my work, you should start at the first post and then proceed at your own pace chronologically through the subsequent. Should you reach this point, you will be the first; accepting of course my acolyte who dutifully commits my thoughts to computer.
I am communicating the decades of wisdom I have acquired, through a recount of an investigation of a haunted house in the North of England, during the summer of 2010.
Within that region of stillness, I sat in the lotus position. Around, all was light, a circling radiance that bore a vivid, silvered quality like moonlight. All was silent save for a sound which rolled like a wave throughout both that space and the ethereal form in which my awareness resided. As the resonating tone returned, the syllables of a mantra forming from its depths, a figure emerged as if called from the light by that sacred sound, until I beheld the vision of the young lady once again. The night sky shimmered across her billowing robe, a circlet of roses crowned her head and it was such soft, fluttering petals which she cast toward me.
( It was only later that I would recall the vision of the young girl framed in a jewel of light which came to me on the first day in the house and I now believe that it was the same being who appeared in various forms throughout the entire investigation; I believe this She was the Tara –
Lady Wisdom - who bears all to the isles of blessed non-attachment.)
Amid spinning petals, I rose beyond my spirit body. The figure faded, or perhaps expanded to embrace me in a welcoming blankness. I remained vaguely aware that in that cavernous crypt, the remains of the dead laughed with voices that were not their own as the life was crushed from my body. I was aware of Aquinas and Noz scrambling back to the cellar while slips of shadow twisted upwards from the assembled bones and corners of the place, drawn into the embrace of the stillness in which I rested. I was aware too of the Reverend’s spectre, snarling with a hate born from fear but it were as if I rode atop a mighty ocean of selflessness and the rage with which the presence snarled at my physical shell was as nothing against such vastness; the hate and the fear were diluted, drained into this radiant ocean in which I was suspended, stirred by syllables that moved through me and beyond me, calling me into our true source and inheritance, the light that circles beyond the stars.
Whilst immersed in this blissful peace, regarding my twitching, body, bound within the sheet with the detached disinterest one may devout to faces passed in a crowd (even though the heap of bones had now toppled forward, opening a wide gap onto the deeper caverns plunging below this, and the darkness seeping through now raised those remains, stretching them toward my remains I was unmoved by my fate).
It was the manifestation of the three, spectral figures once again all pointing to the breach in the bone wall behind my body, which drew my attention back to the physical realm. I recognised on this occasion, two females and a male, within those phantoms. All were in the state of ageless adulthood which tends to characterise the physical appearance of spirits and what features I could make out resembled the snatches of the ghosts I had encountered in the house. I had bidden the Reverend’s children into the light and yet something still drew them back to their family home. Remembering my responsibilities to all whose residual shades haunted the place, I reluctantly emerged from that ambrosial cocoon, allowing words to form within my mind:
‘Goddess, I have offered myself willingly to you, take my body if you so wish but free those whose shadows haunt this house and the caverns!’
As I prayed, I a circle of human skulls, surrounding what I took to be a mirror, came into mind. The Goddess in Her dark aspect, the destroyer of mortality appeared within that space, broken, bloodied teeth jutting from Her lolling mouth lolling. Even when that mouth closed across mine, those sagging breasts scraped my torso, the coarse pelt that broke from the folds of Her hide scraped my flesh, I felt no revulsion or dismay and with the abandonment of both the immersing bliss and of my physical form, the sacred syllables arose from within me; no longer external, they rose like the waters of a spring and fountained beyond me and I was borne on them, away from Death, away from mortality, into that mirror which received as if it were a pool of water.
I passed into awareness of cool, silent stillness and I was received into a deeper understanding of the powers with which I was in communion.
I emerged through a film of water across which leaves were adrift in sunlit. Below, a glow like that of the moon rose to fill the pool, whilst above, the sunlight showered down; across the surface, among blooming lilies, there was a molten mingling of the two like and a jewelled web was spun across the waters the air above sparked with globes of light drifting and spinning like honeyed bees, but the heart of the vision was the conjunction of the two lights, where a gossamer thread of silver entwined, serpent-like, around veins of gold.
I had never experienced such a profound vision of the mysteries of the Goddess rendered apprehensible for one still mortal – I understand now this was as an expression of the divinity which glows within nature, which I have been taught is the Shakti or the Kundalini. I frequently now invoke this image in my daily devotions.
Indeed, the loving union of active sound and inspiring light nearly drew me entirely into themselves and it was only when I became aware of another who was below me in the waters, that I was recalled to my work. I first perceived it as a speck, a stain expanding to the size of an egg and then larger, until the water exploded around me. Amid much flapping and splashing, the slick, expressionless face of a drowned man broke through the waters and then his leaden arms began slapping frenziedly toward me. His emergence was accompanied by a sudden eruption of terror; my willing acceptance of my mortality and dissolution was sprung apart by a sense that I was snared and was due to be dragged viciously downward; like one recoiling from a cold blast or from an eruption of thunder, I felt myself descend into my physical form.
What aroused my latent attachments, I cannot say. Perhaps it was the recognition of the Reverend in that corpse or perhaps it was the understanding that it was not the Reverend’s ghost which animated it. I like to think that my fear was for the vision of the Shakti – the Goddess within, in the form of the entwined lights and the pool – for certainly this demonic form represented an attack upon or a corruption of Her.
I recall that as the ethereal light dimmed a silhouette formed, like a cliff-face rearing over a sea-farer. This shadow grew into definition, until I had a sense of a hulking presence, bristling with elemental energy. I sweated, prickled by heat and gasped for breath as a titanic force buzzed around me. The pulsing syllables of the mantra were overpowered by a deafening grinding and creaking noise emanating from the thing. A shivering took hold of me, growing in violence until I was jolting and shuddering; this sensation was accompanied by dank, wet hiss smearing my face.
I have a vague bit disturbing impression of the darkness in the cave somehow animated, as if churning with animalistic might. I recall bones upraised upon it, like they were borne upon a tide of oil. I remember trying to wriggle away but I found myself bound tightly in the sheet. My head remained free and by the light of a discarded torch, I witnessed more of the blank mass bulge through the bones from the lower caverns. A deeper darkness than that in the tunnels flapped above me, it smothered the withered tree in its pot and the chair with its skeletal occupant. Skeletal mouths encircled me, gaping open and limbs clawed toward me as the air of the outside world was sucked through their orifices and returned as a whine and a groan.
Although I had envisioned this apparition before I had physically encountered it, I remember it gripping my body. I felt a substance which seemed at one moment to drag like the pull of the tide, the next, to whip and blast as the wind, before it grated with the abrasive strength of stone; all of these sensations were permeated by a cold, a freezing cold without, whilst my body burnt within. The sweat that was forced forth from me congealed under the dank touch of this demonic entity. Something like bone scraped across my slick skin, trailing grains that encrusted a mucus-like substance distilled from my sweat. Lying there, I recall thinking that my own sweat was forming into jellied things which pricked at my skin, as if seeking to break back through the membrane.
Whilst experiencing this entity, my perception of the world of spirit-light had now dimmed almost entirely. I can recall that there was a simultaneous awareness that this monstrous presence which haunted the earthly elements now reached through the spectre of the Reverend, as if uncoiling from the terror which resided still within his soul. Feeling my physical self polluted by a numbing force which gnawed its way back into my body, I understood with certainty that the Reverend’s demon even now corrupted the blissful state of consciousness, as if it would devour it.
Acting upon instinct, I willed it toward me, into me, so as to keep the light pure. I visualised the phantom of the drowned Reverend releasing inky threads that leaked through the water, staining its clarity and releasing further sprouting tufts of darkness that germinated through the pool; they veined the air above reaching through the radiance to blot out all trace of the radiant Kundalini...
‘Goddess, again, I identify you within this force, I imagine your form beyond this fury, I submit willingly unto you!’
The words formed in my mind and the mantra followed, bringing with them the sense that an
ocean of stillness broke around me. Again I willed the darkness, the terror it instilled and the indifference of the elements which nurtured it , all into my own soul.
I found myself imagining that the rot which had already infected me, bore directly through me, draining into the emptiness beyond me; although the wounds were psychic rather than physical, it were as if I were scratched from within, my innards decomposing into fluids which clung at my bones before they too were dragged beyond my shell into the true reality of my soul, which was the Absolute soul of all.
And then there was a flame, dancing across this abyss, a word in silence shooting through the space whilst the elemental traces of the demon streamed down into the depths below. The interplay of light and dark, of resonant sound and swallowing silence became a body that twisted, contorted inward and outward, unfolding on their push and pull, rising and falling over a contoured land where life rioted; vegetation sprouted and blossomed, birds took to the wing through the embracing rays of the sun, whilst the green land and far fields of ripening corn, unfurled into awareness. Unravelling through all of this, sinuously entwined with the still radiance, the sacred sound pulsed; through the deep, root-holding, bone-binding earth it resonated, through the swoop and trill of the lark and the flurried stasis of the hawk, it breathed and stretched like titanic limbs.
Personal awareness returned with a recognition that I was once again in the pool; the spectre of the Reverend had vanished along with the shadows which had leaked from it. All was still, save for a lengthening of the silver threads, which rose upward, into the sunlit radiance. Around this ascent, red flowers blossomed into air that sparked with gold; sweet bird song descended like a gift from God and with a flash like lightening or the gold of dawn breaking over a hill, the image of the Tara-Sophia, the loving Goddess who draws us from the ephemeral world to the eternity of our true soul, She who unlocks the divinity within, shone forth.
Every cloud-draped moon, every ray of light in summer leaves or across gentle waters emanated from the figure. Her ageless face looked down from the stars, Her plain mantle swept through the sky and from Her fell a light so profound that it pierced the centre of all awakening from the darkness words that wove creation around Her radiance. Time was slain, all was still, all silent save for the utterance that pulsed through the light, awakening it into form and dissolving it back again.
Even when the vision faded and I was back in the crypt, the sheet ghosting in the air above me before falling, draping itself over my stiff frame, even when I saw the shattered remains scattered around, I sat, not in a dishevelled sheet amongst the dead, but in the radiance of eternity and at one with the Goddess who once awoken within us, unites us with our true selves in Her own being.
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