Welcome to the teachings of Sir Swithin Swift, I am a man who found enlightenment in India and returned to share this blissful liberation with Albion’s children. Any who are new to these teachings should 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.
The night following the haunting in the cellar (and my subsequent banishment from the pub) I was sat on a piece of grass adjoining the promenade just below the Magazines. The waning moon was in the sky and all was quiet, even across the river where the scrap-yards can often be heard. I was deep in Sabikalpa Samadhi (an egoless trance where the divine within is realised) when the radiance of this egoless state was shadowed as if by a cloud. I envisioned the walls of the inn above me parting and a hunched, old man emerge from them. He was clad in an apron, a plain shirt and breeches of a bygone age and he manifested before me, holding a lit candle. I recognised something in his features as ‘Ciaran’, the spectre who had looked from the sunlight windows of the inn, although there was no trace of anxiety in the features of this apparition.
He introduced himself as the ‘Keeper of the Casks’ and beckoned me inward. Before his little light, the hillside opened and I passed through a dank passage into the cellar of the inn again. The cave-like space with its metallic casks in rows opened before me and the Keeper of the Casks muttered a barely audible line, which I think was, ‘darkness drawn down, light passed back up.’
As he spoke a stream of ideas flowed through my mind; initially I was conscious of the traces of yeast fermenting in the casks – it was like I heard the soft pop and fizz of fecund waters. This impression was blanketed under a sudden sense that the dark presence I had encountered was manifesting around me. I could feel the ghostly presences trapped within it, like a hand feels the water within a sponge.
At that moment, bodies resting and rotting slowly in caskets rose into apprehension followed by the image of a boat where many bagged bodies rested in the hold around which the waves slapped and sighed. Then, like a dial switched on a radio, I conceived of a wooden cask, from which all was released; at once a sudden flood cascaded into the bright air, its exultant passage bubbling across the ocean’s swell, catching shards of sun until the bustle of the westerly breeze cast it up and chased it inland through wood, over field, tearing at fences, streaming through the moaning hedge, to the high hills and the stars beyond where it spilled and settled still into the celestial bowl.
Thankfully I was released from this bewildering flood of ideas by an illumination which ascended around me. I was aware of the cellar, but it was as if I were propelled beyond it on motes of light shed from a molten sphere below me.
Borne on such wings, I rose until I beheld the estuary and the bay spreading beyond. The tangible world no longer chained my senses and the inner world was aligned with it. I beheld the crescent moon under which the sea had drawn back unveiling a titanic shape that heaved its bulbous folds onto the sand. The vestiges of the sun (though long departed in the physical realm) cast a molten bronze across the shallow waves and dead men surfaced the gilded waters to clamber about the quivering, flopping mass. And the idea that sodden flesh and moist scales reflected back the upper radiance tripped me beyond the visionary form that encountered such visions.
Again, there was a pair of crossed bones, above which, She danced; Her movement was as the passage of moonlight through scudding clouds and I departed myself completely for Her, the Goddess that sits among the skulls, the Goddess who garlands Herself with death, even as she unfolds new life through sinuous contortions. Every skull about Her sang, even the crossed bones whined, exuding the divine harmony of the Ohm, the Logos. I understood with perfect clarity how Her light inspired this sound and as it resonated through Her radiance, the universe arose, woven from light and words of love.
To behold all, my self included, as a fleeting flicker of light glowing around a note resonating from the divine harmony, was to pass into the Goddess Herself and commune with the Absolute, with Brahma beyond brahma, the Empyrean itself...
Emerging from this state of blissful self-abandon, I was stood upon the promenade and yet also hovered above it within a burnished sphere hung between the worlds. I was aware of the dank cellar, the dark inn and the sea lapping at the rocks on the shore of the tactile world. Whilst in the world of spirits, the Shakti still shone like a Queen of Heaven and Her consort, no longer a blank force that would drag all into its taut clasp, now uttered the song of creation. From the cellar, glistening shreds slipped from the darkness, out toward a large, single-sailed vessel where the sea monster had been; a shadow crew on this ship summoned the shades aboard and with the moon lowering into the west, they set sail on silent, ethereal waters out to the seas beyond.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Whilst the minutiae of my day-to-day life are of little concern to my students, I should announce that alongside the funds raised from my ‘donation-only’ spiritualist evenings in a local hostelry, I have also begun to sell second-hand books! I sold two today, a copy of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound and a guide to ‘Kiddie’ walks in Cheshire.
No comments:
Post a Comment