I carry a darkness within me. It is the shadow of my former sins and cravings, a shadow magnified by the presence of another...
To any who are new to these teachings, please consult my previous posts which form an account of an investigation into a haunted house, carried out by this author and some assistants in a Northern English town during the summer 2010.
Like any spot that is long-settled, yet also lightly-populated, even lonely, the Downs and the Vale had their share of hauntings. Shadows cast by the accidents and tragedies of rural life had, through the long ebb and flow of the seasons, blended into the rustling woods and mossy rocks that bordered the flowing waters. Perhaps a lonely traveler, passing late over the moors, picking their cautious way back through the steep, wooded hillsides to the comfort of the village inn, might catch a glimpse of a pale, grief-stricken figure looking from across an abandoned mill pond; they might hear faint voices, their strands of song splitting faintly from the wind, or perhaps they may catch a whisper from the creaking bows of an oak, but to an inhabitant of the vale, these shades were as much part of the landscape as the stones and trees that they had known all their lives.
So I wrote about the haunted Wessex that my maternal Uncle, Sir Parnassus Mang, explored at the end of the last century but one. I composed these lines shortly after my experience in the house at St Hilary’s in my hometown of Wallasey on the Wirral peninsula.
I was in India, a country from which I had never thought to return and which I still miss – how I pine for thee, Mother of my Sadhana (spiritual path), Mother of Samadhi (an experience of enlightenment) - when I received a vision in which I was instructed to commit Mang’s experiences to paper. I began composing what I could recall of his deeds although as I progressed I found new memories and insights surfaced into awareness.
Several drafts were started, one even completed, before I finally heeded the growing urge to return to the land in which my ancestor found his true Self.
(These ‘adventures’ are now available as ‘Binder of Bone, Keeper of Corn’, in down-load form from Amazon, ed.)
It was hard returning home from a land where amid the frenzied commercialism, the desperate poverty and self-absorbed wealth, there were poverty-stricken saints, whose chants billowed forth on palls of incense from shrines; where the endless, arid plains and crammed, squalid cities were relieved by sacred hills and holy rivers that swept the devote beyond the glare and the stink and the choking dust into luminous contemplation of the Absolute resting within and beyond the world of sense.
It seemed appropriate that, as Sir Parnassus oft reminded me, the Romans had conceived of our Albion as an Island of the Dead. Here, at the edge of the world, fallen Saturn was bound. It was to this island that boatmen would ferry the souls of the deceased and the voice of Dis Pater could be heard, calling all to their beyond .
It was after the investigation of that house by the church and after the experiences which unfolded from it, that I began to think anew of this island. It was certainly that of the dead but not in a faded, hopeless fashion, but as a treasure trove of haunted sites where the temporal world slows and we glimpse something of the lives, deaths, passions, hopes, frustrations, injustices of other times.
Within such cracking of the prison of space and time implied by Ghost-lore, there can be found the understanding, the enlightenment even, that the self is only a shadow of the true Self; that our spirit’s true home is with the collective storehouse of all spirits, Prakriti, or Brahma, the a divine self beyond our earthly self.
The blanking out of the ego brings a peace so profound and deep that one can never leave it and so initiation is offered into the spheres beyond, where the consciousness of the incarnate dissolves in communion with the eternal stream of the ancestors circling Absolute Reality.
Although I did not realise it at first, over last summer I understood what Sir Parnassus had tried to teach me: communing with the phantoms on this mist-haunted island is to commune with the Shakti within and without – the Goddess of this land and with her counterpart, the Father of the dead and Lord of the sun-bathed fields...
Before that understanding and communion could occur, there were many adventures that I engaged in. I did not seek these experiences out. All I required was a place where I could scribe the history of my Uncle’s enlightenment. Initially I found this in the ‘Magazines Hotel’ where I passed hours in one of the back rooms engaged in work; there were many distractions, notably in the form of the other clients. One such individual, who had goaded me with the label ‘homeless’ (I see this as a mark of esteem rather than a source of amusement or contempt) even reacted to my claim that I was resident there, by arguing that the establishment no longer accepts overnight guests. I am at a loss to explain why my domestic arrangements may be of interest to anyone – the devil is certainly not in these details! It is true that I am not an overnight guest at the Mags. I chose to spend my night hours engaged in deep meditation whilst communing with nature. The frailty of the human form demands alas, periods of ‘dis-engagence’, which may occur whilst I sit, composing my thoughts in a quiet corner of the pub when not committing them to paper.
As I indicated in my last post, it was not just the living patrons of the hostelry that conspired to draw me from my literary labours; there were other presences in that building, soaked into the wood, seeped into the stone. I could sense them as I wrote and even when as I was forced to converse. Although I sought to leave them be, it was the power that bound them to the hotel which was drawn to be, magnifying the stain the otherworld had left within me as it did so.
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