“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
Anthropologists describe a condition among "primitive" peoples called "loss of soul." In this condition a man is out of himself, unable to find either the outer connection between humans or the inner connection to himself. He is unable to take part in his society, its rituals, and traditions. They are dead to him, he to them. His connection to family, totem, nature, is gone. Until he regains his soul he Is not a true human. He is “not there." It is as if he had never been initiated, been given a name, come into real being. His soul may not only be lost; it may also be possessed, bewitched, ill, transposed into an object, animal, place, or another person. Without this soul, he has lost the sense of belonging and the sense of being in communion with the powers and the gods. They no longer reach him; he cannot pray, nor sacrifice, nor dance. His personal myth and his connection to the larger myth of his people, as raison d'être, is lost. Yet he is not sick with disease, nor is he out of his mind. He has simply lost his soul. He may even die. We become lonely. Other relevant parallels with ourselves today need not be spelled out.
One day in Burghölzli, the famous institute in Zurich where the words schizophrenia and complex were born, I watched a woman being interviewed. She sat in a wheelchair because she was elderlyand feeble. She said that she was dead for she had lost her heart. The psychiatrist asked her to place her hand over her breast to feel her heart beating: it must still be there if she could feel its beat. "That," she said, "is not my real heart." She and the psychiatrist looked at each other. There was nothing more to say. Like the primitive who has lost his soul, she had lost the loving courageous connection to life--and that is the real heart, not the ticker which can as well pulsate isolated in a glass bottle. This is a different view of reality from the usual one. It is so radically different that it forms part of the syndrome of insanity. But one can have as much understanding for the woman in her psychotic depersonalization as for the view of reality of the man attempting to convince her that her heart was indeed still there. Despite the elaborate and moneyed systems of medical research and the advertisements of the health and recreation industries to prove that the real is the physical and that loss of heart and loss of soul are only in the mind, I believe the "primitive" and the woman in the hospital: we can and do lose our souls. I believe with Jung that each of us is “modern man in search of a soul."
Because symptoms lead to soul, the cure of symptoms may also cure away soul, get rid of just what is beginning to show, at first tortured and crying for help, comfort, and love, but which is the soul in the neurosis trying to make itself heard, trying to impress the stupid and stubborn mind--that impotent mule which insists on going its unchanging obstinate way. The right reaction to a symptom may as well be a welcoming rather than laments and demands for remedies, for the symptom is the first herald of an awakening psyche which will not tolerate any more abuse. Through the symptom the psyche demands attention. Attention means attending to, tending, a certain tender care of, as well as waiting, pausing, listen ing. It takes a span of time and a tension of patience. Precisely what each symptom needs is time and tender care and attention. Just this same attitude is what the soul needs in order to be felt and heard.
So it is often little wonder that it takes a breakdown, an actual illness, for someone to report the most extraordinary experiences of, for instance, a new sense of time, of patience and waiting, and in the language of religious experience, of coming to the center, coming to oneself, letting go and coming home. The alchemists had an excellent image for the transformation of suffering and symptom into a value of the soul. A goal of the alchemical process was the pearl of great price. The pearl starts off as a bit of grit, a neurotic symptom or complaint, a bothersome irritant in one's secret inside flesh, which no defensive shell can protect oneself from. This is coated over, worked at day in day out, until the grit one day is a pearl; yet it still must be fished up from the depths and pried loose. Then when the grit is redeemed, it is worn. It must be worn on the warm skin to keep its luster: the redeemed complex which once caused suffering is exposed to public view as a virtue. The esoteric treasure gained through occult work becomes an exoteric splendor. To get rid of the symptom means to get rid of the chance to gain what may one day be of greatest value, even if at first an unbearable irritant, lowly, and disguised.
I twist into these mournings, daylight saving me from the burning flame of darkness swallowing my emptiness while waves of irony wash over me i am toppled by the days and silently i sit hovering… wondering if i can float this time wandering thru wastelands of my mind picking up the book written by me on the other side of the dream the other side of the dream where it all spins into me… i find all the lost notes and all the lost tones and all the lost fractures of all my mended bones
I am painted the color red. I am tainted, the mother has bled
we D R I P together thru the weathered web, creating worlds in our head, to spew out into the ethers, to want neither this nor that nor wonder where its at, but to birth the beginning again…. knowing we are just seasons of rhyme
flowering in our own time chrysalis, wrapped up in a fairytale of all that is and was and wasnt for sale…
Across these moonbeams, these split seams, these written clingings to the dream…. across all these we call to invisible bodies that are singing in their invisible moments that are bringing their soulstuffs into existence to balance the tension of the desire to Be, and to not Be….
“We think in between the joints” Entire universes spread out like Time As Space hides Selves lost in sockets And held in rhyme, woven…wrenched From the mind and hidden in pockets Within the spine, the hips, The Shouldered relationships That bear the burden of Other Ways, to know here, to feel, hear And peel clear of stagnant flesh… Just one. More.Deep. Breath. Laying prone in a sea of flesh Held together by pure force of Will In a dance with past Feels and Reels That loop and tangle and twist As The feedback strangles the bliss Of Letting Go into the abyss Of the Space between The floor and Me As Self is reCentered in between The open Doors and open Seams Of I and Thou And dancing dreams. I release…. The tight grip That has ripped me apart For 41 years Held together by pure force of Will In a shifting atmosphere Of dizzy atoms here Playing tricks of light In a mind held so tight The body rebels… Swelling with the trapped rage In masked pages of the Word That Stages the painful dichotomy… Seams so loose It all spills out of me Chaotically I seem to lose autonomy Christened by the insistence Of my Fascial Lobotomy incised By internal programs That overRide Who I Am And climb thru the cavernous Space Between the Fleshy Creed That plays at Being Me…. It Dawns so suddenly The force of Feeling bleeds As pounding Heart Seeds frequencies Illuminating The maze that traps me…. Dramatic release…. A lifetimes unEase freed As the iron grip can no longer hold I leak right out of the mould And gather In a puddle of matter And Mater and Mother And matrix Of Self & Other And Open to the Fugue As the Swoon subsides…. And There I Am Peering In From Outside the Lines Where Dark matter Claims the Mind And Patterns The Play Of Somas Shame As it falls into the rhythm Of psyches Game.
A visceral reflection of how over muscled and controlled my Soma has been as a lifetime of the threat of puddling right out of my skin Has overcompensated To keep the chaos out( or in?) Hippos are meant to be soft And buoyant As they navigate the waters Of the emotional realm But mine has crystallized And been trained By the Martian masculine To grip so tight There is no room For darkness In the light Of Being. This I Know And See As I Do Now What is beginning To come Naturally. Let Go Into the Flow Of the See of Me Sew Seamingly slow And free.
Tik tok tik tok Thick sick crowds in wicked shock The jabberwockys devious mockery Blocking the neural cacophony As the Stage is A Set For The Sacrificial Offering Loud crowds face down On the ground As the hell Hounds snarl and froth And drown out the sounds Of the Gathered And Lost
This Is The Cost Hollow
Of your subservience Tik tok tik tok take stock Of implanted deviance Roll up your sleeve Again For these devious ingredients That lead to expedience As the kith and kin Decay within
This. Decadent. Dream
Just a part of the Play The curtain Call The Mass offering softening The Skin As the Thin membrane Crawls With awful parasitic alms Embalming the deoxyRibo Engulfing the light codes And rewriting The script Reworking the machine And beckoning the crowds To join the mosh Pit
Trampled Crushed by the weight of the Black Mass The frequency Blasts tearing The masks right off The beast The Feast of souls Sold Out and Sunken In The Needle needlessly punctures Skin Penetration Perpetration The Silent Weapon On Violent Stage Enters with Rage In Concert With plagues of waged war Against the brethren
CLJ 11-8-21
One year later….. how we feeling now, tater tot? Still the blind rot peels from the cloudy Eye Of what is… and what is not….. aLive (11-8-22)
As I woke in the middle of the night, tangled in hypnagogic bleed-throughs as Previous Me~s in Cyclic read-throughs…. I came back over and over again to myself being Drawn-and-Quartered…. As well as ‘DisMembered’ ….and variations of such….As the crowd looked on. Literally Pulled Apart. I’ve been doing intense Somatic Trauma Work lately ( again) as my inner Blueprint is pushed by the transiting Planetary Gods into Letting Go… Letting Go of the Stories deep within my Cell.ves that keep my body and mind in a State of PulledApartNess. Stuck in the Kinetic Underworld where I’ve locked away Memories so disIntegrating for so many lifetimes and fractal LandMines… that this Entire Incarnations Intention is bound up with Putting MySelfs Back ToGather aGain.
As I tossed and turned unable to fall back into Dream, my mind kept ruminating in my wrists, and the pain, of all my joints and connective tissue, a lifelong issue of Hypermobility and mutation of CollagenCreating which means all my joints sublux constantly, slip in and out, trying to DrawAndQuarter me over and over again til I finally look deeply enough to ConnectTheIssues of these Fascial Tissues and Put mySelfs Back ( literally) together again
My flexibility a gift and a curse… my joints held together by pure force of Muscular Will… which equates to constant muscular tension and alignment issues….when I stop doing the bodywork I need to do, every day, to keep myself Flowing and functional…. I pay. The Deep Trauma Memories stored inSide, are now asking to fully reLease. And bleed throughs of All kinds of Tangled Lives and Times are Arising. Deep, Intense Self Trigger Point work is my Grace…. Going into the pain and buried strains…. Seeking it out, and pressuring with pulsation to Let Go. It’s a religious experience for me, sometimes 5 hours at a time of Trance Trigger Descent, to complete the whole body, entering hallways and mazes of Soul, the Underworld where Fragments of My Being are Held….
All these things passing thru me in the middle of the night, and I realize I need to look at my last nodal cycle transit… 19 years ago… when Ketu last passed over my Sun/Uranus(trauma) conjunction in the first house( body) ….and I suddenly jump up, and go to my journals. So many transits affecting me in this very moment, all Related to a LettingGo of some serious Stuff.
I grab a journal somewhat at random.
It’s the exact time period I was thinking about. Haven’t looked through it in a long time. Opened it up, and the first page Felt like a message I coded to myself years ago, for this very moment of reMembering. Literally. putting my Members back together. Gathering my Appendages and reSeaming myself. To stop the Somatic Pulling apart, the Center Won’t Hold, as long as these memories are buried.
Drawn and Quartered. In front of the Crowd. Among other things. ‘Yet for a time my hands were crippled’ . The panic ( ah, the God Pan when he is not Faced and Fluidly Friended) of my wrists subluxing completely and losing my ability to create.
The following photos are from the Journal, and my Soul insisted on my reading it at that very moment. In Pans Night.
As Ketu moves into the 14th gate….edging over the next little while toward an exact conjunction with my exact sun/Uranus conjunction in Scorpio 1st house… this dream from last year on this date is so prescient…as I am been catapulted into an in depth intense and CATHARtic journey into my own Codings and Woundings, serpentine spine Wound Round by Time as Mind implodes.
Ketu always brings release. If one doesn’t give willingly, it will rip away in whatever way it needs. It’s time. Remembering is just as painful as the DisMembering….more so if the original trauma/s were Blocked or Disassociated from. But to Feel is yo Become Real. Said the velveteen Rabbit.
*the number 14 has been synchronously penetrating into my world over and over and over in the past 6 months. It’s in key 14. 14 is the key.
{Last nights Dreamtime: while handling many rattlesnakes and attempting to remove them From a room in someone else’s house….I analyze the connection to the stargates of the 64 Codons I.e hexagrams I.e squares on the chessboard …. and in particular my own internal relation to the 14th hexagram I.e Gate and the amino acid lysine. I find myself overlayed then in two different Dreamtime spaces at once, as if the intense focus along with the very ‘handling of the serpents’ creates an Opening into the gate itself. I awaken repeating over and over ‘it’s in key 14’
BlissNinja 