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Ecto-splatt
AFTER cruising the ethereal regions unable to get a grip on my Coffeehouse Culture reporter’s notebook and pencil, the pull of responsibility brings me twanging back to my mortal frame with a jolt. Such is the price of frame, as they say. As always it takes me a moment or two to adjust; twice I try to walk through a door that on this plane needed to be opened. But bruises are the marks of the seasoned astral traveller. As we say in the ectoplasmic dimension: ‘It is all cruise and bruise.’
THE responsibilities that brought me back so hurriedly, dear reader, are those I owe to you. Striking forth into the great unknown to bring you the latest news and views from the discorporate, the disembodied and the spectral, we will be scouting the psychic worlds, visiting dimensions unvisited, tuning into the psycho-babble of the spheres and generally breaking new ground in worldly journalism. I mean, where else can you keep up to date with the worlds unseen? OK, so I know that The Sunday Sport is a pretty good bet but, quite frankly, it is a case of cruise or lose. And we cruise.
Yogis: Blissed-out & Blasted
WHILE I am contemplating the prospects for this column, Mr Bliss enters the room. I always expect him to swing in through the window on a liana with a rucksack full of priceless oriental treasures on his back but on this occasion he comes in through the door carrying a Hema carrier bag. Real life, ladies and gentlemen, real life.
He has just returned from one of his trips to India. This time it was for the swami shooting season, I believe. The beaters, I am told, taunt the hiding swamis into demonstrating their powers of levitation and as they rise above the foliage, the shooting party lets them have it. Sounds like fun.
We discuss the amazing contrasts one encounters in India. Mr Bliss fears, however, that the ancient Indian culture is under its final attack. For over 4000 years India has been one of the main repositories of the truth about consciousness. Throughout that time the profound knowledge that India possesses has given a structure, shape and raison d’être to the society it serves. And India has been proud and protective of its noble responsibility as the keeper of what must be some of the most important knowledge available in the world. In the face of almost insurmountable obstacles, it has maintained the purity and meaning of the knowledge as India’s spiritual inheritance and its legacy.
Suddenly, Mr Bliss tells me, all that is starting to change. India has stood up to the ravening hoards but it cannot resist the inevitable ingress of Western technology. It used to be the case that every Indian — rich or poor, Brahmin or Untouchable — was imbued with and empowered by the light of India’s ancient knowledge of spirituality. Increasingly, however, Mr Bliss tells me, young Indians look with contempt upon their spiritual heritage.
While we both express our regret that this culture should be in decline, we are reassured by the fact that only 30 or so years ago the largest and purest section of this knowledge together with a crucial technique that made it all come alive made the short hop from East to West. Simultaneously, we wonder if this is the Cosmos passing on the knowledge so that it will be kept alive. We believe it is. Mr Bliss says he will be writing all about the nature of this knowledge and how it made its way to the West in future issues.
As I feel my eyes closing and my astral body freeing itself, Mr Bliss realises that I am off. As he leaves I hear him tell me that he bagged no swamis in India but was, indeed, bagged by one himself (again).
HIGH above the world like Jonathan Livingstone Segal (the amazing flying Jew), I gaze down to see Mr Bliss leave the office. As he walks down the imposing steps of Vulture Towers, he removes a half-eaten kebab from his carrier bag. He is about to take a large bite when, from nowhere, he is surrounded by chanting, dancing Krishnas and he, too, is off.
The Library of Babylon
IT is difficult knowing what is for real and what is merely illusion when you are travelling through the unmapped regions of the Cloud of Unknowing. The answer, of course, is simple. In many ways the astral is exactly like the real world -- just a lot cheaper and less tiring. As those of us that spend any time at all in the real world know, reality is something we all make up as we go along. And it is the same in the slipstream of the psyche. Except it is more instantaneous.
Fancy a visit to Egypt? You've got it. Immediately. Before you can finish the thought Cairo comes into view and with a swoop and a dive the pyramids are below laid out in all their ancient splendour. Maybe you'd prefer Kathmandu, Peking, Machu Piccu, London, New York, Paris (though maybe not) or Frisco. All you have to do is think it and . . . . Wham! There you are. But that is not all.
As you may know up here time does not exist. Yesterday, today, tomorrow, they are all the same thing. Everywhere is as accessible as everywhere else and so is every time. Although on earth we all view time as a sequential phenomenon, it is not at all like that. Time is actually made up of an innumerable pile of 'nows' . We only think of time as sequential because it is conceptually confusing to think of it in any other way. There is, however, another quality to time that makes it rather less confusing in practice.
Time, you see, if it exists in any real sense, is also relative to both people and places. And that is the key. Every destination can be visited in any time period. Any point in history is accessible. It is amazing that we are not all History Majors. The signing of the Magna Carta, the Gettysburg Address, the Trojan Wars the sweep of the Mongol hoards, the invention of mayonnaise -- all these crucial world events can be witnessed first hand. The hang-up is, of course, that the gulf between this world and that is too wide for memory to survive. The lack of accepted parameters that might help in some small way to define where and when one is while surfing the ethernet makes for the sort of confusion that can only be discharged by infection.
So, where was I? Oh, yes. So I was thinking of a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, the original blind librarian (honest, it's true) called The Library of Babylon or something similar and suddenly I was there. Where? That is it. I don't know where. I had thought that Borges wrote fiction. But I was there. Confused? Well, now you know how I felt.
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