Parallel Journeys Part III::
Parallel Journeys Part III
© Jonathan Zap
I lay awake for many long moments, feeling a sense of déjà vu, of eternal recurrence. I seemed to be at the center axle of a wheel of time, a nexus of possibilities with spokes radiating outward to all other moments of my life. It was as though this were a moment foreordained long ago, and now that I had reached it, awareness of who I was and why I was here had become much more complete and my center of gravity had shifted. Along every spoke of the wheel intuitions poured in, too numerous for individual awareness, but some sort of bookmarked themselves, notating themselves for future recall, a need to read certain Gnostic texts, a need to avoid certain foods and to eat others, an emphasis on fruits of certain colors, and gemstones of the same colors, deeply felt intuitions about what I needed to intensify inner transformation. I sensed Tommy and Jeremiah, they were overlapping fields, and I was a third overlapping field, and these fields had colors, or more like color temperatures, they were more like fields of plasma, luminous, amorphous, ever-changing, shimmering, sparkling, crackling. Tommy’s field shimmered more, Jeremiah’s had more crackling, my field---so much harder to observe yourself---had a lot of tension in the core, the tension was alchemical, it served a purpose, but it felt too dense, felt like its purpose no longer served, that it had to open up, shimmer more, it felt more like a dense inner dynamo, too metallic. I saw that these three overlapping fields had not quite harmonized, I saw that many of the book marked intuitions were about how to move my color temperature, to change my field to harmonize more with theirs.
Again and again my mind returned to the last words I had sent to Tommy which reverberated with fateful irony as I realized that they applied to me as well as to him.
And then I sensed Tommy drawing closer, sensed his will and energy keeping contact alive, he needed me to help him know certain things, and his presence, as much as Jeremiah’s, enhanced my awareness, and I sensed him as both younger and older.
I also sensed his otherness, sensed how differently we related to time, thought and feeling. Time slowed as he drew near and the most definable otherness was that he approached with his awareness, not with a barrage of words. His consciousness was profoundly less verbal than mine, he communicated more a direct transmission of his self rather than specific thoughts encoded into words. It was more of a radiance, a shimmering wave form of feeling-toned awareness. The strangest thing about it was how natural it seemed and how weird and deceptive and out-moded verbal communication has come to seem since I have experienced it. Tommy’s way of communicating was something hidden in the background of verbal communication. With him, that something was brought forward, and words were way in the background.
Since experiencing this quality of communication it has been difficult for me keep patience with verbal conversation, which so often seems an irritating and shabby contrivance, a carnival slug made of lead, its engraving worn down from use and the cheapness of the metal.
My thoughts were interrupted by an strangest sensation that the air pressure in the room was different and so was the temperature and humidity. And then I saw the oddest thing, a corner of the room seem to be missing and it opened onto a desolate city street. The strange thing was that it seemed perfectly natural in a way, as if it had always been that way and I just hadn’t noticed. It was as if the room were a box, a box with an open corner that happened to coincide with this empty street, just a random impingement of two dimensions.
The
realm opened up before us was dark, the air flowing into the room smelt of darkness,
the darkness of an eternal city of night.
And we could sense that there were dark forces present beyond the
threshold, but the opening of the portal was not a dark trick, there was the
feeling of larger inevitability, a need for us to enter too vast for rational
consideration. The main reluctance I
felt, the hesitation that had to be addressed, was the delicate situation of
being in my parent’s house---I just couldn’t allow them to be shocked by an
inexplicable disappearance. I knew that this realm was flowing in a time stream
separate from the time stream of the visit to my parents and the world in which
I had spent most of my waking life. Probably the crossing of this threshold
would be like entering the bridge realms, the experience that transpired would
be independent of my native time line, but I also knew that there were no
guarantees, journeying into the unknown was always perilous. But then again, life is always a journey into
the perilous unknown.
This was a
nexus of decision, too many factors and unknowns to be fully considered, and
when I looked back on it, I realized that this was the moment when telepathic
communication with Jeremiah reached an entirely different level, a level where
subject and object, I and thou, seemed to dissolve and our minds and intuitions
functioned as one, as if we were left and right hemispheres of one brain, the
corpus colesium of our telepathy too dense and many layered to keep up the
separation of who was thinking what as thoughts, feelings and realizations
seemed to arise from our mutuality
rather than one of us or the other, and the mutuality of our intuition sensed
the inevitability of our crossing the threshold….
We were
on a long urban street, which could almost have been some depopulated area of
the Bronx, but it was not a cold, December night
and there were no cars or lights. Caleb was there, waiting for us, the
adolescent son of a family I knew. How
long had it been since he died in a thoughtless moment of adolescent risk
taking? Five years? Six years?
His face still bore some of the make up and eye shadow and a slightly
tattered version of the costume he had worn that Halloween night when he driven
himself and a friend off a mountain road at an absurd speed, traces of
substances not known to aid driving in his blood.
His eyes
were large, sad and very aware, pupils enormous, and feeling-toned telepathy
poured from him, feelings of guilt and abandonment, awareness of his death and
the consequences, the pain it had caused, the tragic waste of lives that held
much promise. The telepathic bond with Caleb was raw and uncontrolled---memories,
feelings, images spilling out of him. He
came forward and embraced me, feelings of neediness and deep compassion, guilt
and love held him here, a level of the lower astral, and there were others here
he couldn’t abandon, Jared, the boy he had driven off the embankment, still in
shock, his condition maybe even deteriorating, others he had met who had taken
him and Jared in, wounded souls, souls that needed his care…
Caleb looked two or three years younger than he had when he died. Intuitively I sensed that the stress of his
situation had caused a kind of reverse aging, a symptom of shock and overwhelm. There was a desperate and haunted look in his
eyes.
“Caleb, do
you want us to go with you to where Jared is?” His eyes, sad and enormous, assented and we
followed him down the darkened street.
There were what seemed like abandoned apartment buildings, vacant lots, most of what we saw seemed lifeless, but occasionally there was a window, light leaking through a closed shade. Behind one such window the sounds of a man and woman locked in exhausted and hysterical argument, recrimination and counter recrimination, a sense that the argument had gone on for a long time, a very long time.
Feelings of loss, abandonment, guilt and a weirdly tragic sense of stagnation, of being stuck in time, permeated my being and I couldn’t tell how much of this came from the telepathic and empathic link to Caleb and how much from the whole realm. There was, I sensed, a dark emotional magnetism, a tragic magic, pulling me, commitment to help Caleb the point of connection which had possibly opened the portal into the realm.
A woman passed us coming the other way on the street. She wore a shabby overcoat, and although she was not old, she held herself as if she were old, her posture hunched over, what looked like strips of dirty t-shirts tied around her wrists. She gave us a weirdly fearful indirect look, a look that didn’t make contact at all, a look of accusatory victimhood as if we had abused her, or wanted to, a look that would have magnetized the sadism of anyone who was an abuser. Her neurotic torment had a frightening magnetism, the whole street seemed filled by her self hate, a kind of miasma floating all around us like a smell of stale urine, and part of the miasma was an infinitely bitter self pity that accused others of her misfortune. Instinctively, the three of us drew closer together. There was no sense that she could be helped, at least not by me. To step into the field of her attention at all was to be immediately cast as an abuser and drawn into a universe of neurotic torment. After we passed her I saw Jeremiah look back, and hold out his hands in a gesture of blessing, I saw a tiny sphere of cobalt blue Vehrillion sapphire elemental leave him and enter the miasma.
Caleb led us to an apartment building which was missing part of its outer wall at ground level. It looked like it had been hit by a bomb blast a long time ago, the exposed wall had jagged edges. We stepped through the open part and into an interior space of support columns and junk, derelict furniture and so forth, and on the vinyl sofa seat of an old car was Jared wrapped in a blanket. His eyes did not make contact with us, and his head still bore signs of the wounds he received in the accident. He was obviously in some sort of state of deep shock, a state I found quite disturbing. Caleb sat down next to him, put his arm around him, whispered his name aloud as if hoping he would reanimate, but he seemed frozen, his blue eyes were open, but the enormously dilated pupils didn’t seem to take us in. Caleb’s efforts seemed both touching and pathetic, and I knew I was out of my depth, I had no idea how to reach someone so far gone, this was a case for Jeremiah’s medicine and I knew that Caleb was the one I could reach and that he had reached out to us from this realm. I knelt down by the car seat and Jeremiah followed my example.
“He hasn’t always been like this.” Caleb whispered to us. He took one of Jared’s hands and held it between both of his, and I could feel the transfusion of Caleb’s life energy into Jared, but with no apparent result. “At first he spoke a little bit, fragments mostly, he asked where we were a couple of times, but gradually he became silent…he still has some awareness though, if I try to move him it upsets him and he twists himself in pain. I think there is something about the open wall that he needs, he has to sit facing it, and he prefers to sit on the car seat than anything else…he doesn’t like to be disturbed…” Caleb looked at me, his eyes intelligent and haunted. “I know we’re no longer alive… not alive as we once were, where we once were, but I don’t think Jared can accept that, he just shut down… It was my fault, you know… I was the driver and I was stoned out of my mind…I killed both of us…not just our bodies…I think Jared’s soul is dying…that’s why I had to call to you, suddenly I sensed you could step across, and I had to do something…”
Caleb conveyed so much more than his spoken words. The telepathic bond with him was in some ways more intense than it was with Jeremiah. It was far more emotional, and Caleb’s emotions were much more recognizable than those of Jeremiah. More recognizable than my own emotions, strange as it is to admit that, as his being was centered on feeling, while the leading edge of my perception was intuition and thinking and, as far as I could tell, it was about the same for Jeremiah. The communion with Caleb was intensely emotional, but at the same time my intuition and thinking were heightened and energized by depth of feeling and a will to help these two lost kids.
Intuitions came pouring in, realizations of various sorts, not all of them directly about the present situation, but all of them had tendrils of meaning connecting them to the present situation. For example, I had realizations about the telepathic communion with Tommy which had also happened on what was becoming the longest night of my life. The communion with Tommy was also feeling-centered, but distinctly different. Tommy’s feelings had great depth, but they were more cosmic feelings, feelings with so much spiritual awareness mixed in, the feelings of what some would call an old soul. The depth of telepathic communions I shared that evening with Jeremiah, Tommy and Caleb were in disturbing contrast to Jared. He seemed to be in his own universe of numbed out pain and unreachable… he was like a planet in the most distant reaches of a solar system, the surface frozen, barely illuminated by pale and distant sunlight.
A kind of triage surfaced in my intuition----Jared was clearly a case for Jeremiah’s magic, he would know how to reach such a distant planet, if anyone could, while Caleb needed me---someone who knew his family, who knew him as he was…
A moment after I had this realization I sensed Jeremiah focusing his energy on Jared, concurring with the triage intuition. The telepathic communion with Jeremiah continued, the intuitions and realizations were partly formed by the communion, the ongoing mutuality of our psyches, even as I had drawn more apart to focus on Caleb. As a narcissistic personality type I was foolishly and unconsciously giving myself credit for intuitions and realizations that came from…who can say where they ultimately come from----a network of other psyches? A guiding intelligence implicit in the multiverse? Whatever it was it had me saying things to Caleb before I knew what I was going to say.
“You are alive, we need to clear about that, you may be in a different body, a different realm, but you are very much alive.” Caleb reached out to hug me. His body felt frail, but human.
I realized that the opportunity to help Caleb was also keeping me safe
in this realm. There was such a clear
moral purpose, helping a worthy soul in peril, that the powerful tendency field
of this realm couldn’t take full root in me. Similarly, Caleb had survived here because of
his moral purpose, his loyalty to Jared.
“Zeitgeist” might be a more familiar way of describing what I am calling a “tendency field”---the spirit, or more literally the “ghost” of the time/place. Some might think of “Zeitgeist” as an abstraction, someone’s interpretation of what was going on, but in the case of this realm it was more like living in the presence of a powerful and toxic field of electromagnetic energy.
Imagine rolling out your sleeping bag directly under high tension power lines. You put your tent up and sometimes there is a weird humming in the hollow flexible aluminum tubes that hold the tent up. You camp out under the lines, never leaving their field of energy. There will be moments where you ignore the effects of the field, and it is in those moments when it can most dominate you, working by infiltration into the depths of you.
This realm had a toxic field, potent and insidious, a dark zeitgeist, as real and inexorable as gravity, but also as light and pervasive as the air, infiltrating your being with every breath. The tendency field was dark, but with definable properties, and I sensed it trying to pull me into a loop, into some dark and repetitive loop of thought forms, dark and dense emotions, mechanical actions. It’s field was like a bad psychiatric med, a neuro-pharmaceutical rubber hammer to the head, a callous traffic cop in the neural network, spraying down over heated brain cells with a toxic chemical wash. To use the psychological metaphor, the tendency was to magnify neurosis and intensify stereotyped thinking and acting, the loop becomes your universe, and as this happens you are being hollowed out, essence is being corrupted or consumed, until there is nothing left but the loop, a hollowed out mechanical resonance in time, like the ghost that always says or does the same thing, like a looping holographic projection.
The field pulled you toward being inorganic ultimately, but at first the pull was toward dark and dense emotions. And yet as dark and unappealing as my descriptions of the realm may sound, there was something deeply seductive about it as well, there was a glamour of tragic magic that was captivating. It was a place that embraced my pain, my problems, my areas of darkness and burnout, and seemed to invite me to stay with them here forever. Even weirder was the sense that this place served a purpose. It was like a quivering vital organ exposed on the operating table which looks unpleasant and grotesque to a squeamish observer, but which also efficiently serves a vital function. I wondered in those time-slowed moments what functions the realm might serve. Perhaps if I understood that, I would know what would help Jared and Caleb.
I wondered if there might not be a recycling process underway, a recycling of living tissue or energy out of essentially dead forms. Perhaps the recovered energy is restored to a spirit coalescing, regathering itself in another incarnation. In other cases maybe the spirit doesn’t coalesce, some people die before they die, they murder their own souls with addictions, toxic thought forms, neurotic loop worlds. They descend into reptilian consciousness and while their bodies continue to draw breath and have a pulse, their spirits are already dead, or at the very best horribly disintegrated. When the body stops, the remaining husk of a personality is taken to this realm for the hollowing out of the organic to be completed, and the realm acts like lice cleaning a wound of dead tissue. Perhaps in still other cases, the magnification of the neurosis could help molt an essentially vital spirit out of an obsolescent exoskeleton of neurotic scar tissue. The neurosis gets magnified and hollowed out until the spirit can no longer tolerate the confinement and slips out of the decaying husk of human identity. And maybe there are middle ground cases, spirits whose vitality is still there, but marbled with decay, and perhaps these are the spirits that the living sometimes try to reach with intercessionary prayer, or perhaps, as in this case, with a more direct intervention.
Jared may have been in that last category, a spirit that had withdrawn into itself, that could yield to disintegration and reabsorption, or spontaneously reanimate and molt. Caleb had been keeping Jared from disintegrating, but slowly he was losing ground to the corrosive zeitgeist. Only an alchemical master like Jeremiah had a chance of successful intervention.
All these realization came within a time-slowed moment or two after being embraced by Caleb. His depth of experience with this realm, and my thinking and intuition, merged telepathically, and formed many layered realizations.
We were also becoming aware that Jeremiah was beginning to get somewhere with Jared. There was continuous eye contact between the two now, and we could feel and see shimmering waves of energy around Jeremiah as he poured vitality into Jared and with real effect. There was starting to be a healthful glow in Jared’s face, and though his pupils were enormously dilated, his eyes were engaged with Jeremiah. Caleb and I stood next to each other, witnessing the process, and then, by some unconscious mutuality, we began sending energy into Jared as well. Our energies were merged, mine and Caleb’s, forming a kind of luminous cloud around Jared, while the energy from Jeremiah was much more focused.
And then we saw a wonderful thing, Jared took a deep breath, and somehow we could see from his eyes and how he took the breath that it was a conscious action, not an autonomic reflex, that there was once again a living personality making choices. Jared was awakening, and there was intense telepathic exchange between him and Jeremiah--- I could not perceive the content, but felt the intensity. We felt Jared’s awakening like the first dawn of a sun that had gone cold and was now reigniting and becoming luminous.
Suddenly, I was shocked out of this reverie by a powerful telepathic alert from Jeremiah: Danger! Feeders! Approaching at high speed! Jeremiah stood up, pulling Jared to his feet with him. And now I saw one of them, and the weirdness of its form shocked my mind. It was shaped like an inverted cone, a dull gunpowder grey, and it either spun like a turbine or vibrated so that its edges were blurry, and there was an electricity about it, a static electricity crackled in the air around us. And we sensed that many more of these things approached. Aloud, Caleb said, “We’ve got to draw them away from here!” The reason was a telepathic overlay----the woman who had taken them in was upstairs, working in a kitchen lit by a single hanging light bulb, and the center of her life, her son, some sort of autistic savant who built strange geometric models all day, was sitting in his darkened room, fear breaking through his strange mental universe. These two were so fragile, we had to move the attack away from them. “This way!” Caleb lead us through a gap in the back wall and we were running from the building, and surrounding us was a horrible buzzing, the sound of a billion hornets, the swarming of the feeders…
We all sensed the intention of the attack, this was a massive immunological alert, and we were the antigens, we had been employing energies, especially what Jeremiah had employed with Jared, that were utterly forbidden in this realm. The feeders were almost completely mechanical beings, like spinning drill bits or, perhaps a closer metaphor, like the erase heads to be found in old-fashioned tape recorders. We were to be erased, cauterized and absorbed into non existence, and the feeders were like mechanisms, programmed with only one intention, absorption of our energy, and the swarming, buzzing mass of them could only be resisted for moments.
We ran into another building, Jeremiah leading us now, my impressions of it a mosaic of splintered perceptions seen through the orange magma of adrenalin rush. We were running up a staircase, and then we were on the top floor, on a landing, the ceiling partly destroyed, and by some unspoken consensus we were all standing very still, and Jeremiah was doing something, something from the Vehrillion, there were shimmering fields of energy around him, it was a revelation of the magician or wizard, and we could sense the near perfection of his focus, someone imbued with the power to shift the matrix.
And now the matrix was shifting, there was a sort of spherical distortion field in my vision where a moment before there was a ruined ceiling. The sphere was growing, and becoming more definite, and in another heart beat it had all the complexity and radiance of a living planet, and then it encompassed us, there was a splintering and we were in a darkened room, huddling close together, our bodies altered and a bit in shock, and all of us, except Jeremiah, were trembling.
Seismic shockwaves flowed through me, the interface between my mind and my body was unstable, new kinesthetic sensations flooding in, a dangerous state of disequilibrium that felt like it could become a seizure, perhaps an incarnation seizure, as I had experienced in the Bridge Realms. Jeremiah surrounded us with a harmonizing field of energy which helped us stabilize and become calm. Shock transformed into awe and the awe became a recognition of grace. We had been spared annihilation and were now in a different realm, re-embodied, an amazing feeling, a different center of gravity, a lighter, more flexible body, it appeared to be an idealized version of my body when I was an adolescent, the shift in sensations too profound and multi-layered to be languaged. All this had to be processed and reach equilibrium in heart beats, and once I regained my equilibrium I was able to perceive the others and sense that their bodies were also altered, though still familiar, still their essential forms, but different, I could sense that Caleb was more like the age he was when he had the accident, two or three years older than how I had last seen him.
The interior space we were in was almost completely dark and I sensed that there was someone else with us, someone in shock, someone who had a large field of energy which was non threatening, high vitality, chaotic. -----The sound of a lighter being sparked and a small flame emerging from an ellipse of plastic, orange fire light silhouetting a face, a young face, intense, luminous eyes, highlights of long red hair, seemed to be a young male, and he was staring toward our part of the room. “Who’s there?” ---his voice a tremulous whisper, “Is someone there?”
He moved the lighter and was lighting candle wicks, a tray of multicolored candles that had all melted together into a coagulated mass of colored wax. Candlelight threw back the darkness and he could see us now, and we all sat there very still. He was a young male, perhaps seventeen, long red hair and green eyes dilated with awe, and there was a telepathic radiance about him, sparkles of his mind entered mine, not because he intended them, but because his mind was not contained, it was spilling out into the room, and a thought form, one of the sparkles, was that he had taken LSD, taken too much he feared, and he wasn’t sure if we were real or an hallucination.
Respectfully, we all remained still and silent, not sure if we should step out of his perceptual uncertainty and into his reality, he seemed in such a vulnerable state of mind, and an empathic bond amongst the four of us told us to hold back, not to shock his fragile equilibrium, so we sat there very still. Scarcely moving my eyes I took in a bit of the room, it was his room obviously, the room of someone creative and highly individual, but something was off, not quite right, and then I saw the stereo, and it started to gel in my mind. The stereo had a record changer on top, an early Seventies look to it, and then I saw other details of the room….and they also seemed like they might be from that era, but possibly a different version of that era.
Intuition (or was this a message from Jeremiah?) told me that this boy, and in his present state, was our anchor point in this parallel realm. His chaotic and disturbed condition, partly an out of body experience, generated a portal, or was in itself a portal. Jeremiah had focused on opening a portal at our end, not on where we would end up once we passed through. We crossed into some sort of possibility nexus, and inevitably were drawn toward a moment in a parallel realm which had an essence or energy that resonated with that of our strange group of four.
We left the lower astral fearing annihilation, and that was close to what the boy was feeling, a precarious, fragile state. Stress fractures already ran through his sanity, he was barely keeping it together, a miscued word or gesture from any of us threatened to shatter his delicate equilibrium. There was a decision to be made----the thought forms were from Jeremiah----he could create a cloaking field around us, we could withdraw from his perception and make our way out of the house, or we could initiate contact, this boy was a root soul in this realm, the anchor point that allowed us to enter it, and perhaps what opened a portal on his end was a will in him to connect with travelers, and to contact parallel realms… The boy made our decision for us, “Who are you?” he asked, and it was a real question that wanted answering, not a fearful testing of the darkness, and we all knew he should be answered, and I sensed that I should address him, I was the only one of us who had lived through the era which seemed to be current in this realm.
“We are friends…travelers…we had to cross over and something about your
energy drew us to your realm….it was you, not the chemical you took that drew
us here…”
I could feel his mind accepting this, within the chaos there was a core of deep inner strength, and I caught the edges and glimpses of a long history of paranormal experience. This was no teenager randomly experimenting with substances, but an old soul who had put himself in such a state because of some moral purpose…I could almost sense what the purpose was--- in some way he was seeking help for a world in peril.
Something shifted and now there was so much feeling-toned telepathic content unfolding within me, an empathic telepath, I remember thinking. I beheld some of the visions that haunted him, that led him to dose himself out of a desperate sense that he must do something. I saw the faces he saw, glimpses of grey-faced men planning to unleash mass horror and death. These visions burdened him with feelings of responsibility, a precarious world somehow on his shoulders, and in his case it did not seem to be an adolescent messiah complex, but a humble and frightening recognition, a sense that the visions had come to him because he was required to do something. But on the plane of ordinary reality he was unable to think of a single thing he could do.
Despite his years, it was apparent, perceiving this telepathic content, that he had a wise, compassionate, but also realistic sense of other people, and he knew that telling about his visions was not going to accomplish anything. At best he would only panic a few people close to him who also couldn’t do anything on the ordinary plane. There were no specifics in his visions, no details of time or place, no names, no dates, just an overwhelming feeling of imminence.
Although the visions were terrifying he felt that he must bring them closer, and this was why he had taken the acid, this was the moral purpose, and it was helping to hold him together even as his brain chemistry was disturbed and chaotic. He felt that we were here in response to his intentions…
Were we? The intensity of situation felt like it was overwhelming me, I was still in shock from the body change, the sensations of being sheathed in a new form, a different quality of aliveness, a body that was younger and much more flexible. And then I sensed that much of the overwhelm I was feeling was actually located more in Jared, and somewhat in Caleb who was sensing Jared’s instability. There was a danger he could shut down again and I knew we had to get him out of here. A decision formed in me and was accepted by the group, Jeremiah would stay here with the boy and I would get Jared and Caleb out of the house, we had to adjust to this new realm in some more neutral place, not in a room that was like being inside the mind of this intense young mutant and his overburdened acid trip.
I got up quietly while Jeremiah formed a more exclusive telepathic bond with the boy. There was a large window near Jared and I looked through it, faint moonlight showed woods beyond the back yard of the house, other houses on the left and right, the thick green grass of high summer, a few hundred unobstructed feet and we would be in the woods. I opened the window, it was only five or six feet from the ground.
Caleb was aware of my intentions and he gently got Jared to his feet. Jared was slightly shaky and frail, but it was visually incongruent, because Jared, whom I had never met in his earlier life, was significantly taller than me or Caleb and very athletic looking, the musculature of a young collegiate athlete. He had the strongest body, but his psyche was in shock, and we had to guide him to his feet, and get him moving through the window. Caleb went next, and I followed, feeling the light, adolescent springiness of this body as my feet hit the grass, I closed the window behind us, and we were walking on the grass, the sound of crickets all around us.
Even a few seconds of walking produced an enormous improvement, a solidification in Jared, the movement, and the athletic, graceful body were grounding him, and there were similar effects in all of us, and our emotions were becoming more human and familiar. I felt a bond forming, it was hormonal and energetic, the bond of three young males walking together in an unknown landscape, instinctively forming that male adolescent tribal bond, it seemed to be something that our bodies were doing for us without the need for any intention.
It was strange, but not at all unpleasant, as I felt the shift in age roles, in the previous realm I was decades older, but in these new bodies I appeared to be about two years younger than these two. I estimated that my body was about seventeen and Caleb looked about nineteen and Jared about twenty. We wore different clothing----blue jeans, sneakers, solid colored t-shirts, all of it seemed comfortably worn, very plain and unobtrusive. Did Jeremiah think of that? I wondered.
We were walking now along the edge of the woods, the houses on our left, back porches lit by yellow bug lights. I noticed that Jared had taken the lead with me and Caleb walking just behind him flanking him on either side. An automatic adolescent male ranking had occurred, Jared clearly recognized as having the alpha body, Caleb and I had similar builds, slim, slightly shorter than average, but very flexible and quick, the untrained athleticism of very active adolescent males. On some bandwidth of male primate intuition we had already registered and adapted to Jared as the physical champion. He was older, larger, stronger and exceptionally handsome, an intense physical charisma, like the captain of a college lacrosse team that had just won the division championship.
The social rankings felt so natural, and yet it was all so odd, in the previous realm Jared was pale and gaunt, and psychically as fragile as a glass figurine. But that was then, and the reality of our present bodies now was so powerful, and I felt my personality shifting, my social identity had been shocked into malleability. Although I knew it intellectually, I had never fully realized how deeply my identity was built up around being a specific age in a specific body type, and now that those givens had shifted, my social identity was shifting, a new identity not fully formed. Caleb and Jared were experiencing their own versions of this process of adaptation.
In the lower astral realm they had bodies, but they were gaunt, more on the pale, ethereal side, mal nourished, animated by nervous energy. In this realm their bodies had so much more human vitality, hormones, tanned skin, rippling muscle. They were so much more alive and physical now.
As we walked we became more fully merged with our new embodiments. We also became more distinct and less telepathic. Telepathy had surrounded us atmospherically, like a moon lit cloud, and it was disorienting at times, hard to know which thought or feeling belonged to whom, and sometimes it didn’t have individual origin, but was a mutuality. And it was such a mutuality that had us all walking along the edge between the field and the woods, keeping the backs of the houses a few hundred feet off to our left.
I sensed a message from Jeremiah and spoke it aloud, “They are leaving the house, coming to find us with food and drink.” My voice was a different register than it had been, a bit strange to my ears, but not unpleasant. We turned and began walking back, the woods now at our left and the houses on the right.
Jeremiah and the boy approached. He was carrying a plastic shopping bag of food and we could see he was sober now, Jeremiah had apparently done something to speed the dissolution of the drug. The five of us sat at the edge of the woods and ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and drank apple juice from paper cups. We were all ravenously hungry, our new bodies soaked in the calories and the food, ordinary as it was, tasted delicious. Awareness of the food mingled with telepathic communion,
Jeremiah and the boy, Paul was his name, had shared a great density of telepathic communication. Paul had shown Jeremiah the visions which had haunted him, and I could see them now myself, unfolding in my mind, enveloping me with their uncanny intensity--- there were men standing above an illuminated display, a black and white satellite image projected onto a ground glass screen, advanced military technology, but from the early Seventies, consoles of sheet metal enameled in flat grey with switches and displays, uniformed men wearing headsets who sat at consoles, their faces tense and concentrated. I was inside the vision, an invisible observer in a place of tense men and humming electronic circuitry, a place that was the apex of a vast pyramid of men, bureaucracy and military technology, a place from which nuclear war could be initiated, distant missile silos on alert, missiles with multiple warheads, and standing above the illuminated display a balding man in a white buttoned down shirt, eyes of cold abstraction and will to power, a man imbued with the power of super technology, the power of hydrogen bombs at his finger tips, the apex of the pyramid, and the weapons systems shared a will with him, a will to see their life cycle completed, a will to unleash the fury of shattered atoms at the pyramids of the enemy. At the apex of the enemy were similar men whose minds held parallel thoughts of death and power, of missile ejaculation, the use it or lose it thoughts of paranoid, technocratic men in late middle age--- use it or lose it, use it or lose it, use it or lose it…Use it! Use it now!
I could see and feel the fiery ejaculation of missiles freed from the somnambulant cocoons of their below ground silos suddenly alive and screaming upward into the stratosphere, all the engineering, the programming, the automated systems finally achieving realization, targeting and guidance systems synergizing into trajectories of geometric precision, all of it culminating at the moment of impact into an orgasmic thermonuclear glory, the blossoming hemisphere unleashing the power, the heat, light and radiation of a star, the shockwave expanding the circumference of obliteration, the death zone in which millions of souls were suddenly unsheathed from their bodies.
But suddenly the whole vision was peeled up, an amazing moment of telepathic alchemy from Jeremiah and the Vehrillion, and I saw the vision that had enveloped me as a separated object like an unscrolled illuminated parchment shimmering with power, runes and moving images squirming and alive on its surface, and at the edges of the illuminated parchment were spindly nerve cells, long luminescent neurons that (it was implicitly known) ran directly into the mind of the Demiwraith. It was the Demiwraith that energized this vision, it was no inevitable time line but a glowing seed of death fantasy that lived in the minds of late middle aged men who were at the apex of the pyramid, teetering at the edge of sexual impotence, and in private moments they trembled with the power of reaching for the ring of power, of what they could unleash, use it or lose it, use it or lose it, cried the ghost in the intricate machinery and in their aging bodies, use or lose it, use it or lose it, but the likelihood is that they would lose it, the vast pyramid had the inertia of bloated bureaucracy, it would resist the disequilibrium of such a massive ejaculation which would deplete, maybe even destroy its own bloated body in the chaotic discharge of mutual thermonuclear orgasm.
The vision which had enveloped us with a feeling of prophetic inevitability was revealed now as a death fantasy generated by the mind of the Demiwraith, a fantasy, not an inevitability, a fantasy the Demiwraith had infected into Paul’s mind as a trap for his mutant emergence, a spell woven with fell and subtle power to shrink and shrivel his mutant spirit into fear, paranoia and messianic delusion.
>