🔥::::AndTheWordWasWithGod::::🔥

“Into the Abyss” begins in January 1999; I had been in College since September, I was set free into an entirely new environment in which no one had any prior history of me, or 'story' of who I was. I had been ecstatic for the new adventure of living away from home and exploring a new territory. I had already been in a very manic period, since the summer of 1998, and by the end of winter had fallen headlong into the Saturnian pendulum swing of depression and angst and my external indulgences and debaucheries weighing like lead in my soul as I struggled to come to terms with the other pole of my being. It was 1999 that saw me through college and all its run-ins with authority, all the experimentation with mind altering substances and the dance with the demon of alcohol and the intensity of my wild self and having no real structure to tether the reigns. As the year progressed and became more and more unhinged, I lost all interest in school. Mostly I played basketball in the rec center for hours a day instead of going to classes, and spent my nights in a whirlwind of partying and seeking the mirror of self in all its forms. By the end of the school year, I knew I would not return, but also didn't want to go home. So I stayed in Greenville for the summer, as I came more and more unwound.
Eventually, I left suddenly, and returned home, as I feared I was about to enter a chasm I could not escape from. (See 'Autobiographical Fractal
Framework' in Volume 3 for the more fleshed out version.)

Once home I had more life and death encounters with the Dark Lord and the Mania and Madness that was following me, that I called the Madwoman's Whisper. I was spinning out of control.... and then I dove into the Abyss. (See "The Trip' at the end of the book). In one sense it saved me from complete obliteration and a fate worse than death. In another sense, I was completely dismembered, and my nervous system shattered by the weight of baring Eternity. It would become the task of the rest of my life, to unfold all that I experienced and Saw and Underwent. I would be given the decree to Embody the Promethian Flame of Inspiration and Awareness into the Fleshly Abode so fully that the Body ItSelf would be the Divine Vessel of Transfiguration and Life. Would I be capable of Grounding that incredible Current, into this vehicle?

Not yet. I had to undergo a complete re-wiring, which required me to Let Go of any semblance of a 'normal' reality. I was banished from the everyday participation of life, and pushed so far inside that I felt like I was simply witnessing everything around me in utter shock and dismay......all boundaries obliterated between I and Thou, Self and Other.

“The Pain of Purgatory” starts off in January 2000, struggling to come down to Earth, flailing in the supersensible realms, trying to reconcile my pulsating Awareness of AllThatls with the strange clumsy body and mind and nervous system I was operating in. I was essentially an ancient Being trapped in the body of an emotionally immature and manically arrogant and impatient human form. An utter crisis. I had the option of doing what I was witnessing in my Soul Brother, which is to attempt to fly further into the Promethian realms and Neptunian Boundaryless waters of ever-more mind altering substances in order to avoid the shock of dismemberment and loss of Ego and to incubate further the grandiose messianic consciousness that always finds us when we rip away the veil so completely before having the inner structures necessary to ground the current or to integrate the Enormity of It All At Once. Or I could take the opposite path. The path of Initiaton. The path of the Adept. The path of slowly finding all the shattered pieces of the Mirror and reMembering the Self Seam by Seem to Be.....like Osiris, I was Scattered and strung among the shadows and wraiths of Psyches Dream.

I chose the path of Initiation. Even back in college when I first had some very deep hyperspace experiences, It was not the 'product' I was interested in. It was the Process. The inhabiting consciously of my own Synaptic Song......I would attempt to Put Myself Back Together, to Gather the Trust and The Truth of the Mother......

I ended up in Jamaica in early 2000, for a month; It was filled with further initiation and ledges of the abyss. I made it out Alive, and was able because of my time there in the Liminal, to drop some of the rage and darkness that had bubbled to the surface after all boundaries had been shattered.

The thing with Ego Dissolution in a vessel unprepared, is that all of those traumas and Shades and demons now come to the surface, the protective mechanism that keeps them away til the capability of dealing with them constructively, is gone. So I had Lifetimes of baggage and ephemeral feelings and traumas and shame and dangers pouring out of my seams; I had no guidance, no support, no tether to cling to, except my ability to express through my art and writing, the battles and the neurosis and the near psychosis at times.

After returning from Jamaica, I was staying at my parents, in a small little room my dad had added on at some point, that you entered via a little ladder, through the floor. It was like a little prison cell, or a womb, whichever perspective you choose. Oh the metaphors. Now that I was out of the tropical sunshine, in shell-shock still, and having been trapped in my Mind for millions of years in the Trip Space, I was so desperately craving the touch of Human Flesh, of something stable and secure to tell me I was Real and Here and Alive, and not still trapped in the PrizmCell. I can remember crying so long and hard and fully that I thought what was left of my body would just disintegrate into thin air. I knew I was trapped in the tower but didn't know how to get out. On the outside I tried to play along with the game of reality but It must have been pretty unconvincing. I finally got a greyhound ticket to California, after some visions I had that made it pertinent that I go there to meet my Destiny. So June 13 l left on the bus, with almost nothing and about 100$ in my pocket, headed for the unknown once again. I was still 'tripping' after all that time, my consciousness in such a state that it was like swimming through the Codes and the Nodes of the program. I felt completely watched and protected and in tune with everything on an existential level, and yet was suffocated by an unbearable loneliness. As I arrived in my new Playground, | was back inside the Manic space, for another ride on the MerryGoRound. But I met my Tether there in SF, and I began to reWeave a sense of self, slowly. Living in dingy hostels and hotels and maneuvering through the underbelly....how my Plutonic Soul cherishes those experiences! There would be plenty more adventures and struggles to come, but the poetry after arriving in SF begins to take on a more cohesive feel and there is less frazzling and disillusionment.

This journey would continue and by mid December I was once again en route home to Va, for what ended up being a longer visit than planned....and in which Saturn's misery was revisited as I was cast back inside myself to make sense of all that had come before, and find a way forward into a next step on the ever-turning wheel.

The danger with peak experiences and being so focused in the spiritual realm is that one very easily imagines oneself to be far more evolved than one actually is, bypassing the dense human realm, the messy emotional and physical reality that is so insistent. When you are 20 and you have been inside the Center of the Spindle of the Core Processor and swam for millions of years through the SpaceTime field of Mind, bushwhacking oneself through the tangle of Synaptic Vines you are pretty sure you have it all figured out and that very grandiosity and megalomania which is so typical of psychonauts and explorers of hyperspace can force the human ego into a prison and dungeon of abuse and repression which comes out full force at unsuspecting moments. The fragmented and imbalanced emotional reality seeps out of barely stitched seams, an amorphous molasses that threatens to strangle the Puer who struggles to stay in flight above all those sticky human dramas and foibles...that morass of psychic gunk that gets stuck to the Soul as it tries to purify itself in the Flame. I used to read things about awakening and 'the Work' that said until the age of around 40 one had no real ability to truly ‘understand'. I balked at those insinuations....not I, I thought, in my youthful arrogance...they don't know where I Have Been, What I have Seen". It is endearing now, looking back at that Self... but the painful journey of those 20 odd years of Growing Down Into Self and Body, and Actually Activating and Embodying and Integrating, in the Flesh and the Heart, All that One Has StoodUnder Spiritually....and so easily perceived with Mind...is Sacred Testimony. We don the vestment of Life, then, no longer the Puer trying to escape in a frenzy of mania into the unmanifest, but patiently plodding along in a beautiful dance with Saturn, learning to build forms and creating Art from the journey of turning the Poison to Power. The Drama of the The Puer and Senex. No longer burning everything and everyone around one in an uncontainable Fire and Fury of restless angst, but tempering the Athanor to a flame that burns with a compassionate warmth and passion that feeds the life around one and makes things Grow in the Radiance of that Light.

The Journey of Embodiment...

'Welcome to the Jesters Playground", Everything Said.

The Fool who goes through the twists and turns and lives to learn, comes Full circle on the Wheel.......realizes that he is all the characters in the deck....uses the 64 hexagrams, the 64 squares on the chessboard, the 64 Codons of the Human DNA to Weave the Self Alive Again, in Time again, becomes the Jester.......
and starts to Heal the Fracture.........of the Imagined Fall from Grace into Time and Space; The Loom ....

Charleen Johnston 
(From Linguistic Trickster Volume 5)
available on Amazon