I am communicating the decades of wisdom I have acquired, by a recount of an investigation of a haunted house in the North of England, during the summer of 2010.
“My soul’s fire fades to ash
Strength departs the heart
When I behold thee, Lord…”
...the words of Arjuna to Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita, my translation. My encounter with the Goddess in her hideous aspect, during a vision awoken by the Moon, brought these sacred words to mind. An encounter with the divine may be terrifying, just as terror may lead us toward the Absolute; as illustrated by my enlightened acceptance of Mother Nature’s impersonal aspect ushered a vision of apparent peace and love into my consciousness.
Why should a universe which is unforgiving enough on a physical level, communicate through such terrifying images? Is it an abstract adaption of mortality? A mystical memento mori which offers us a chance to accept our death, the Samadhi perpetual? If that is so, then how blessed are we to be offered the chance of preparing to let our temporal selves go? How the universe tempers its brutality with compassion!
I have previously described my summer’s activities as a quest to prevent Saturn strangling and devouring Shakti! What is Shakti? Simply put, Shakti is the power which animates the world, it is the divine principle buried within matter. The Shakti can be personified as beautiful and nurturing or as this hideous, monstrous mother who gorges on the live flesh of her young. If the latter is not feared but loved, the blows that lay one accepted as allowing another to live; if she is regarded as an expression of universal love then we may come to terms with the nature of our lives and our psyche is ushered unto the vessel which will bear us unto the Isles of the Blessed.
As to why physical pain must accompany existence and its attendant death, I cannot say; there are many who would say that death and loss are suffering enough. There are some who delight in pain one way or another deluding themselves into thinking they have mastered life. Perhaps we should suppose that those who accept the reality of suffering and death whilst assisting in the relief of others are those who shall master our true lives among the beyond the celestial sphere.
I can however, reveal a little more about the meaning of that curious phrase (Saturn strangling etc.) to adepts who by now should have gained some understanding. The divine power (Shakti-Tara, or Sophia if you will) which animates all life and which calls upon us to escape our dependence on physical existence in favour of the spiritual, was under threat from ‘Saturn’.
What is Saturn?
My literary work, as I have been compelled to call it, has been spent chronicling the encounters my Maternal Uncle – Sir Parnassus Mang – experienced with a giant in the south-west of England. This giant had both a physical and spiritual manifestation (in the form of a chalk giant on a hillside as a life-giving power and as a psycho-pompous – a guide of the dead, respectively) – and it was known locally as ‘Saturn’ after the Golden Age, over which Saturn / Chronos presided. Saturn thus possesses positive and negative associations according to Classical mythology: he devoured his own children to perpetuate his reign, before being overthrown and bound within the underworld, which was sighted in Britain, according to Plutarch.
To name the phenomenon which he encountered in the hills of the West Country ‘Saturn’, was to personify it without limiting its influence upon the land; my maternal Uncle wisely identified the giant with Krishna in his loving and terrible aspect, seeing any power emanating from ‘Saturn’ as ultimately derived from the Soul Supreme, the embodiment of the Absolute. His adventures can be read in the novel form available to read on your computer as ‘Binder of Bone, Keeper of Corn’.
Now I have not been rambling in my discourse so far (as suggested by my acolyte’s impertinent wife). Nor have my words have not been carefully chosen. That would be absurd! An enlightened man allows his words to well spontaneously from the well-spring of wisdom within.
The investigation of the house at St Hilary’s first attuned me to the threat which I faced across the summer just passed, although how far the visions which befell me in the house was generated by my own soul, how much it was specific to the house and how much universal, I cannot say; indeed as all is ‘Brahma’, or a refraction of the light eternal, I think it little matters.
My reward for accepting the Dark Mother seemed to be the vivid impression of a young man smiling from the sun. The youth’s features reminded me of a friend from my days in India. Just as the smell of smoke took me back to the funeral pyres on the riverbank, where I used to observe my devotions, so that vision brought to mind the Ashram, where we would greet the sun, climbing over the ancient temple. Sadly, that young man died on the subcontinent. I used to think that he had gained his enlightenment before he entered Samadhi although his silence in later years suggested that perhaps he was still bound to Samsara; however that vision in the stairwell persuaded me otherwise and reinvigorated my mood which had become rather melancholic.
Once I was able to descend and face the young men after these visions, I found them dining upon a late meal of oven chips and instant noodles. Once done, I agreed to sit in séance again with one young man stood on the landing above me and another on the stairs below me, observing proceedings. Although Crass and one of the others were concluding some sort of investigation in the cellar which involved all manner of crashing and bashing, I quickly slipped into trance.
I imagined the full moon, rising over the house and over the church, draping its veil of silver across the gravestones and I saw also the ocean spreading beyond. I became a wave, rising to draw he moonlight into my crest and so shining I passed across the waters. I became aware of a light in the distance. It was frail, like a candle atop a hulking outcrop, a fire on a distant shore.
Smoke then wafted around me and I was no longer in the sea but sat on the shore with a person, pale with ash, alongside me. I felt a peace from that one and I was back once again with the guru who had nurtured me on the banks of the sacred waters and through him, I plunged into the peace of the line of gurus who had guided one another, back through the ages, back unto their source, the All-Father, Krishna himself. A meditation upon such ideas can be most rewarding, even attuning you to the Divine source of all peace.
From my vantage point of calm detachment I perceived that three other persons were emerging from the gloom. The light had grown now into a fire and I they were silhouetted beyond it. As my awareness alighted upon them, the fire diminished and they drew me back to the house where I beheld the three positioned upon the stairs, each pointing down.
My accomplices perceived these indistinct figures too and were busy filming, blessedly in silence. There were several other shadowy presences, smaller, withered and equally featureless emerging onto the stairs. There was an uncomfortable sense of revulsion accompanying these husks, it was not a feeling from within but rather one that was imposed, rather like overhearing particular unpleasant discourse in a public place (a phenomena that I was alas familiar with since accompanying the young men to the Cheese.)
The manifestations overlapped a particularly calamitous crash from below, followed by Crass’ cry of, ‘I knew there was a space behind here, it’s a false wall.’
Even before he called, I had detected a space under the stairs; the spirits pointed it out to me and the smaller shadows emerged from it. I sensed that it was a cramped passage, bored into the rock, leading away from the house toward the graveyard. I can testify that a breeze trickled past me at the moment, drawn down toward that space, that space which inhaled the salt winds and the storm-charged rains and into which the dead of the graveyard tumbled from their coffins...
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