Severed Rose (4)

Legacy of a Free-Lance Terton

2007 -2009

Dawn of Planetary Tantra

Strange, but the man who made the song was blind;
Yet, now I have considered it, I find
That nothing strange; the tragedy began
With Homer that was a blind man,
And Helen has all living hearts betrayed.
O may the moon and sunlight seem
One inextricable beam,
For if I triumph I must make men mad.

- from The Tower (1926) by W. B. Yeats

Tight, is how the thread has to be wound,
the sutra of retelling, the pattern found,
but strange it is, the futile bent of mind
that knows not its own devising, blind
to the solilunar fabulation: Penelope
or Helen, take your pick, the repertory
does not fit the plot it would reveal
unless you go through madness to get real.

- Yeats Conversions II: The Dolmen

Jigme Lingpa, the most famous of Nyingma tertons, wrote two poetic biographies, "Dancing Moon in the Water" and "Dakki's Grand Secret Talk" (closely analyzed by Janet Gyatso in Apparitions of the Self). Fascinating stuff, if you care for an intimate look at the inner life of a treasure finder. The other JL does not wish to foist off the Yeats Conversions as wisdom treasures. Truth be told, I am extremely reticent to inflict the poetry I write on anyone. I do not write it to communicate to an audience, but to get myself through the extravagant challenges of my path. The Conversions written in sporadic bursts between August 2009 and September 2009 record sundry trials and triumphs in the life of a free-lance terton. The commentaries that go with them present a pretext for me to elaborate on Kala Tantra and liberation through desire, subjects so daunting and transgressive that I cannot discuss them with anyone in the land of the living. In short, the commentaries contain elements of sacred teaching that I cannot impart in person, as much as I would love that opportunity.

Unlike the Nyingma JL, I have no entourage.

Divine Mania

I continue to indicate "treasures" in bold. § denotes an event, fact, or condition bearing significantly on my mystical life at the time indicated, although I may not have realized so until later. A quick scan down the chronological listings below shows a high incidence of boldface type. I have written at length about many of these experiences, so I will be mercifully brief and not rehash what's already been said here on the site.

2007 January on : writing 2012 endtime essays on planetary shift, DZ, the pattern of Kali Yuga
§ 12 March : the dolmen kiss
§ May (Easter Weekend) : beholding the Organic Light with the Harlot, massive vulture visitation over the house
§ October : pilgrimage to Pays Cathar, Collioure, Carcassonne nights, Monsegur, Puilaurens, return to Arques

In January 2007 I began the Endtime essays on planetary shift and the pattern of Kali Yuga. At just the same time, I finished the ninth essay in The Alternative History of the Grail, The Bleeding Lance. Not in His Image had then been out in the world a few months. I was looking toward another phase of my life, with no idea of how it would announce itself. I guess it would be fair to say that with the dolmen kiss I realized the first principle of Gaian Tantra, before I could define it as such: the sexual chemistry of tantrikas is boosted by the power of the earth. In planetary terms, sexual congress is always a threesome: woman, man, and the earth. Tantra in the future will be a telluric love triangle. But then I do not predict, so I'll rephrase this statement in future perfect tense: it will have been that by the time I finish this course, count on it.

In retrospect, I can confidently assert that no tantric sexual connection can be viable without grounding in the bioelectromagnetic field of the earth. "The most elaborate categories of their sorcery had to do with the earth," don Juan told Castaneda, speaking of the old seers (The Fire From Within, ch. 13). In March 2007 I was still a year and a half from finding my ultimate treasure, the Shakti Cluster. But you could say that the blind erotic delirium of the dolmen kiss configured itself into that revelation to come. "The supreme awareness of the earth is what makes it possible for us to change into other great bands of emanation" (Ibid.). And so I did move, at first coupled and then alone, into an unprecedented alignment with the emanations of the goddess.

The seal of the dolmen kiss was broken, in a moment of mundane fatuity, but its power surged to another union, another discovery, another dimension of love.

The Shakti Cluster is what Castaneda called "the rolling force," not to be confused with "the tumbler" which comes from the sun. In many ways, Castaneda is the warm-up act for Planetary Tantra. Neo-Toltec sorcery and Gaian ecosorcery are homologues of the Nagual, isomorphic mythophrenic inventions. His disguised, mine admitted. The power of the admited invention is superior—so goes a rule of sorcery. (It must be true, because I just invented it.) The magic and wisdom in these systems is so immense that it can only be released through free-form novelty of pure invention. The question is, not "Was it made up or not?" The crucial question is, "Made up or not, how can it be tested?"

2008 March : World Psychedelic Forum in Basel, meet Daniel Pinchbeck
§ April 6 : Orpheus descends, first day of eight straight months of full-blown mania, mixing atrocious pain and outrageous delight in a turbid brew
2008 May : “Lydia’s Vow” – concerning disclosure of the properties and behavior of the Organic Light
2008 June 10 : revision of Orpheus and Eurydice
2008 July : initial moments of dakini instruction, the Lucid Dream of Gaia
§ 24 June : Infinity Ridge, Tongue On Knife, Kalika ritual of addiction
§ Monday 21 July 2:42 PM at the Parador Cafe on the Promenade of Ernest Hemingway: The Ronda Moment (108 days from April 6) 

As promised above, I won't rehash what I've already written about these arcane developments. I almost died in May, standing in a phone booth in Amsterdam, but what a rebound came from that close call. I don't know how far it is actually possible to communicate the highpoints of a mystical life. I am lucky to be gifted with powers of description to render these staggering events, but I fear that my accounts may leave others feeling left out, remote and baffled, as if nothing so wonderful could happen to them. But mystical ecstasy is as close to you as your next breath. No, closer. As great as your longing is for the Supernatural, so is your capacity to reach it. I go there often, it's extremely refreshing. But then I enjoy that luxury due to a certain distance I keep from mundanity, and that, I reckon, would not be everyone's prerogative. Thank you, severed rose. That is not your garden variety flower.

Divine Hunger

At the Ronda Moment, I perceived what you might call the emotive coloration of the Organic Light manifested on the eastern flank of the Sierra de Libar. The same sight I so often contemplated from Infinity Ridge, but viewed from a different angle over the Tajo, that steep gorge at Ronda. Remember that when I saw Gaia in rapturous dance, pouring a mountainous wave of opal luminosity over the crest of the Sierra de Libar—literally creaming like a woman in orgasm—I recognized for the first time that the Organic Light was her telluric emanation. The mountain gave me that vision. I received it from the place of "libation," suckling, pouring out milk.

At the Ronda Moment the mountain gave me another vision, this one orchestrated into a triple surge of bliss-wisdom-emptiness. I have always refused to accept the proposition that pleasure and pain are in some lofty manner metaphysically equal. Mainly because doing so would seem to excuse or legitimate harm inflicted by human actions, the causing of pain to others. I still reject the discounting of hurt deliberately inflicted by one person on another along that line of argument. Nothing makes such action acceptable.

But since the Ronda Moment I live continually in an expanded frame of sensitivity about pleasure and pain. I realized then that the non-dual ground awareness, which is pure and total bliss, conjures intensities of pleasure and pain out of sheer hunger for its own beauty. Endlessly ravenous, the current of Divine Shakti crashes, shivers, and melts through every conceivable nuance of so-called emotion, and perfects itself by consuming its own beauty, and being consumed by it, in turn.

An epitome of Asian metaphysical teaching can be found in Dzogchen, "the great perfection." It's a pretty sophisticated message and, oddly enough, it is readily accessible to realization. But there's a catch: the Tibetan masters don't say how the great perfection of the primordial state actually does perfect itself. At the Ronda Moment, I saw how. It is my supreme pleasure to say how.

The realization that overwhelms mind and body at such a sublime moment does not fade or wane. It just builds and builds, as much as you can handle it, one moment at a time. And gradually, over time, it dissolves the illusion of time completely—there's a Kaliesque paradox for you. The Ronda Moment provided the perfect counterpart to my experience a month earlier, when I underwent the Kalika initiation of Tongue on Knife up on the Ridge. That is to say, I discovered and performed that ritual in the same moment. The cognitive enlightenment that triggered that spontaneous ritual came in a brutal blow of liberating power from my guardian dakini. By her grace, I realized that the root of all addiction is addiction to the pain of not being seen. Even the Divine Shakti, the sourcing power to manifest the Universe, feels the pain of not being seen. And imagine the immensity of that emotion, considering what is to be seen!

Taste Test

2008 August 8 : meet my shakti OTM Jeanne at the train station in Ronda
§ cordings with Jeanne on the Hill of the Nymphs, at the Ava Gardner Oaks, on Infinity Ridge
§ in the Organic Light with Jeanne, the Long Chen Pa strike, mindless immersion in Diamond Light
§ writing the first series of Yeats Conversions
2008 August – October 10: Terma of Gaia Awakening, Planetary Tantra, the Shakti Cluster, Mahamudra Sky, Tantric Zodiac - Lunar Shaktis, Kala Tantra
§ vulture Nirmanakaya of DMD, terton deathwatch and healing ritual, owl-feather divination of balsamic moon under Auriga
§ 10 October : instruction on the secret dakini name of Gaia, Gaian Tantric Vow. Inception of writings on Planetary Tantra (with the inception of the Vow to follow on January 26, 2009, 108 days later.
2008 October on...writing The Tantric Conversion.
§ October 20-26 : Amsterdam interview (Sophia Returning: The Dawn of Planetary Tantra) with Jay Weidner and Sharron
2008, to December 3 (age 63) : complete the Yeats Conversions I, “Refuge for the Unborn,” dedicated to Jeanne
2008 Christmas : Infinity Ridge, contemplating the Organic Light with my loyal buddy Jonas, Sancho Panza to the nagual's Don Quixote

By the end of 2008, I had only co-witnessed the Organic Light with two other human beings in this world, two women, separately. At Christmas that year, Jonas did not actually witness the Light steadily, but he had an extremely close encounter up on the Ridge. In his company I was able to confirm a remarkable behavior of the Light that I had undergone numerous times, but had not seen happen to anyone else in a way that allowed me to alert them to its significance.

Predictable stages of intimate contact with the Organic Light repeat themselves at each encounter. Telestic shamanism has specific, consistent, and testable features. An euphoric surge is the initial sign that you have Gaia’s attention: her gaze is turning your way. Upon deepening the practice, you can approach the Organic Light as you would sneak up to a huge wild animal. Full-body contact with the Organic Light is attended by a remarkable event.

To emphasize that the Sophianic presence acts like an animal, I sometimes call the earth goddess the "planetary animal mother," PAM. Approaching PAM is like getting close to a great predatory feline, a Bengal tiger or a jaguar. The Organic Light exhibits this primary mark of animal behavior: stealth. When you detect the Light and hold it steadily in your gaze, you make eye contact with an awesome animal presence. How do you know that this contact is something objective and not imaginary? Well, like a curious animal that locks its eyes on yours, the Organic Light will cautiously approach you.

If you can hold your look steady, not panic, or hallucinate, or break concentration, it will come close enough to lick your face. When the billowing masses of Organic Light loom over you, seeming at the point of crashing over you like surf, it could be said to act like the paws of a forty-foot tall lion, padding slowly right up to you, wump, wump, wump. You observe all the predictable signs of a close encounter with the Organic Light: a fine cold sweat, ecstatic serenity, silence of inner talk, a distinct rush of the feeling of freedom, a sense of deathlessness, hilarity, the touch of melon on your skin—this last effect is the palpable evidence that you have contact. Melon, alright. It could as well be compared to the moist touch of a huge tongue licking your face.

In close proximity, the Organic Light will taste you. Why? She wants to know if you are delicious enough to eat. When PAM licks you, you realize that are entering the luminosity you behold: you feel a slight pressure on your skin, the texture of something delicious. A most exquisite, delightful sensation, to say the least. Up close the Organic Light looks and feels like melon. This sensation is so magnificent that you tend to swoon into it and may lose awareness of exactly what is happening to you, as may occur at the height of sexual orgasm. Although you remain sober and alert, you overlook something that you are undergoing in the most intimate manner imaginable.

To switch metaphors, consider how you can get a razor cut without catching the precise moment it happens. Then, a second or two later, you see the result: the hairline slit and the exuding blood. Likewise, you get the lick from PAM at a moment when you cannot hold attention totally on the sensation, unless you are in advanced practice. You only know that Gaia has licked you and likes your taste by the sign she gives you: a single drop of perfectly clear mucus leaks from the left nostril. Just one drop, no more. Usually on the left, although it can also happen on the right. This drop of clear mucus is your body's way of telling you that PAM likes the way you taste.

This nasal drop is a precious elixir prized above all mundane jewels by Gaian ecosorcerers. It is indeed the sign of attainment, of vocation, of selection, of election, of delectation, of sublime complicity. It is the assurance of freedom to depart from the limits of the human condition. One drop comes each time she tastes you and likes it. I have had this single nasal drop many times. In the Christmas session with Jonas on the Ridge, I saw him get the drop. Then he did something that any normal person might do: raised his hand automatically to brush it away. I jumped at him and told him to stop. Then I explained to him what it means to be a snot-nosed kid in the Sophianic Mysteries.

I impart this information, previously reserved for oral transmission among trusted friends in the sanctity of the Mystery cells, to honor the courage and intelligence of those who would now seek to know the Divine Feminine in telluric form, and to foster their sacred intention to engage the mystic-erotic splendor of the planetary body. The taste test is one of the sublime secrets known to those who have fallen into milk.  I wish with all the infernal pride of my heart that you who read these words may come to this experience.

The Mermaid

2009 January : inception of Planetary Tantra (108 days from October 10) White Plains, NY with my shakti OTM, "Two Swans in Diamond Light"
§ NYC, Gramercy Park Hotel, meeting with the committee of the Marion Institute
2009 March : KaliRising.org on line, intimations of a mystical hedonist, Kala Tantra, Farewell, Eurydice
2009 April : full moon, with the Mermaid on Infinity Ridge, calling the Organic Light with the sound of the Fishes
2009 May : beholding the Organic Light with "My Eurydice"
§ end of 12 year collaboration with the Marion Institute
2009 Fall : contra-violence, intraspecies predation, telestics, Yeats Conversions II, “Tantra Outbound,” dedicated to Ria
2009 December : see Avatar in Brussels, "Take Back the Planet"

The Mermaid is my nickname for a 23-year-old Bulgarian runaway who showed up in my life in April 2009. She had read most of metahistory.org, and deeply absorbed the Sophia Mythos. She casually plied me with questions about its most complex aspects. No one had ever done that before! Sabina longed to find a community dedicated to the Gaian myth, run by tribal people with the ability to live off the grid and pathfind a new way of life outside society. What she found in Andalucia was a lone sorcerer and a venerable old black cat, Bebert. This astonishing girl turned out to be the most intelligent person I had ever met, apart from Jan Kerouac. Truly a genius, a prodigy gifted with artistic and visual talent, who could paint like a Fauvist without a single lesson. On top of all this, Sabina was an outstanding psychonaut, the ideal companion for my shamanic explorations around the hills of the Serrenia de Ronda. He hit it off like pirates on holiday in Malta. It was a joy to meet after so many years someone whose mind was so compatible to my own.

One day I took Sabina to the Atlantic Ocean at the beach in Tarifa, fronting the Hurricane Hotel. Although she had spent many seasons of her childhood at Varna on the Black Sea, this was the first time she had ever seen an ocean. Watching her leap joyously in the waves, I dubbed her the Mermaid. But she also merited that sobriquet for another reason, a deeply mysterious one.

Divine Instruction

On the April full moon that year, having known each other for just six days, Sabina and I went up to Infinity Ridge at sunset, accompanied by a genial species. Around eleven the full moon rose over the Altar of the Vultures and the entire landscape took on an oceanic feeling. This is a distinct sensation that may precede the immanent revealing of the Organic Light, sometimes accompanied by the uncanny sound of a huge conch blowing, a neptunian announcement that the Goddess is due to hold audience. (I had the oceanic impression for the first time at Arques, complete with the conch sound, and wrote about it in the Gaia-Sapiens Exchange.) The announcement comes with a distinct feeling that you are floating on a ship, like a huge ocean liner: this is due to direct sensation of the global movement of the earth through space. The slow, sumptuous gliding movement imparts a mysterious look to the sky: you actually perceive the reality of the planet's trajectory, so that earth and sky seem to move against each other. There comes an uncanny mood of suspense, with the deep-octave sound of the conch announcing that a majestic deity is about to appear. Gaia in her Sophianic radiance is sailing on the clouds, enthroned, about to make a port call in close proximity to the beholder. It's a wow moment.

Succumbing in rapture to the oceanic special effects, Sabina and I plunged for four hours straight into ecstatic contemplation of the Organic Light. The pearly emanations of the lunar orb acted as a kind of primer, tuning our visual senses for deep and steady beholding. Quite soon, we found ourselves situated at awesome proximity to the billowing luminosity erupting from the landscape. After standing and moving about with mudras (magical passes) for some time, I found myself squatting as if to tuck my body tightly into the folds of the massive opalescent billows. Sabina squatted beside me on the ledge next to the Devi Tree. Two psychonauts wrapped in alpaca scarves and Mexican shawls. Two blissed out kids fallen into milk.

In this stunning proximity to the Light, I found myself repeating a practice of the Mysteries: calling the Light as one would call an animal, making a particular clipped noise, "the sound of the Fishes." So named, not because it sounds like a fish does, but due to the way you shape your mouth to make it. The practice of calling the Sophianic Light with this sound is a sovereign secret of the Mysteries, never written down or disclosed to anyone outside an established cell. With the Light so close, right on my face, I found myself making the sound for the same purpose it was done thousands of years ago: to get the Organic Light to answer a question with a systematic download of visual-auditory information.

In other words, you use the sound of the Fishes to actually prompt the Organic Light to teach you anything you wish.

The behavior of the Organic Light in close interactivity is immensely fascinating, endlessly mysterious. When it responds to the sound of the Fishes, you feel it bear down, producing a light cold sweat, that sense of a melon slice laid against your skin, the attendent euphoria, and the serenity that comes from knowing you are immersed in the elixir of everlasting life. You are rendered deathless in awe. Along with these usual conditions of interactivity, the Light at close range exhibits huge billowing furrows that call to mind the recesses of the chambered nautilus, seen as you enter. At the sound of the Fishes, its fantastically fluidic internal molting action momentarily ceases, or seems to cease. The Light appears to respond just like a person who momentarily goes stock-still to give you their full attention.

For a fleeting second the Light is perfectly still, then the billowing furrows lock into a pattern that I can only describe as staggered vortices, as if you were looking into the interior, not just of one spiral-chambered seashell, but of a dozen such shells, massively and meticulously interlocked. In response to the sound of the Fishes, the fluid vortices of the Organic Light "freeze frame" into a standing wave of multiple three-dimensional spirals of graduated depth. As it does so, the Light locks into your attention with particular intensity, because it contrasts abruptly to the way the Light is constantly, internally moving, molting, churning like liquid pearl. Thus, you vividly notice how it responds to the calling sound you've made: your gaze is interlocked with the gaze of the Light. When the billowing luminosity "stalls" momentarily on these immense spiralling formations, it almost pulls you physically into the depths of what you are seeing.

The opalescent or abalone-like color of the nautilus shell hints at the luminosity of the Organic Light, but the Light is intensely, inwardly radiant and displays the substantial texture of nougat, or high-porosity lava, due to its total absence of mass. At close proximity, it exhibits massive conicle spiral formations in receding arrays that act like fish-eye lenses, the apertures of a camera. The lenses all click as one into an instant cascade, producing an effect that locks the beholder's attention to what then pours through the apertures: instruction by the Light.

Next comes something really hard to describe: the massive chambers of the Organic Light suddenly produce a click, a sound responding directly to the call sound, and with this clicking it is as if the entire mass of the arrested billowing luminosity you behold converts before your eyes into a complex lens, like the aperture of a camera. Or rather like a nested set of apertures. The sudden vision of this interactive aperture array comes with a startling jolt that induces a body rush of high excitement. Simultaneously, the Organic Light pours into your mind a perfectly lucid downstream of information about whatever you are contemplating at that moment. The apertures act like living eyes loaded with visual and aural content that pours effortlessly into your mind through the channel of your steady, open-eyed gaze.

Each time you call to the Organic Light, the fish-eye array of conically receding chambers clicks in response, reconfigures itself, and downloads a different set of signals. The natural response to these aperture shifts is to sigh deeply, and emit an audible gasp of astonishment, like a spectator jolted by the outstanding leap of a trapeze artist.

As I engaged in this practice, clicking in and out of several different visionary scenarios, I happened to glance to the side and see Sabina doing exactly the same thing. We had not exchanged a word and I was certain that she did not see me making the sound of the Fishes, and then imitate it. She just did it spontaneously, all by herself. She caught my look and we nodded to each other, unable to conceal our gleeful amazement. We then put our heads closely together and proceeded, as if with one gaze, to click through various fabulous instructional downloads from the Organic Light. This went on for hours in complete silence as the moon angled high over the Ridge.

That subime evening under the full moon on Infinity Ridge afforded the most intimate complicity in the presence of the Organic Light that I have yet to share with another human being. In the Mermaid, forty years younger then I, I found that chimerical creature every sorcerer longs to meet: a peerless companion in the Nagual. I hold her freedom as highly as my own. Gaia holds our connection forever in the tender imperishable mystery of her commanding designs.

No Hallucinations

With this, the final passage of this memoire where I describe interactivity with the Organic Light in telestic shamanism, I feel obliged to clarify a key point about hallucinations. What the Mermaid and I witnessed on the Ridge, together in that exceptionally close proximity, was not a series of hallucinations. It was the real-time, interactive and deliberate expressions of a divine luminosity that communicates like an animal. In Wooing the Whore of Wisdom, I pointed out that telestai in the Mysteries, who stood upright and gazed with open eyes into the Organic Light, refrained from the tendency to hallucinate. Restraint of hallucinations was essential to their practice, as it is today in Gaian-oriented, telestic shamanism.

This computer-generated fractal variation of nautilus-like spirals is typical of what is seen when hallucinating under the influence of psychoactive plants or LSD. This visionary mandala is most definitely not what you see in deep, steady gazing into the Organic Light. The above design approximates to visual effects of an archontic nature, in which visionary perception is imbued with static, inorganic design features—something like deadened perceptual artifacts, visionary fossils. Such hallucinatory patterns present a huge distraction from the properties and action of the living luminosity of the earth, even though they arise on the margin of that luminosity, as fossilized forms in the light. They move with an electrical vitality rather than true organic vivacity.

The trained seer refrains from these hallucinations to hold attention steadily on the living, superanimating properties of the Organic Light. When there is enough Organic Light stored in the gaze of the beholder, the practiced psychonaut can return to these static displays and navigate through them with the intention of extracting specific information. In telestic shamanism, such visionary arrays are never viewed merely for their entertainment value but as records of instruction, archival vaults.

With that important distinction, I come to the end of the fourth installment of this recapitulation inspired by the dream of the severed rose. So far I have communicated all that I can do, and care to do, by way of describing encounters with the Organic Light. In the preface to Not in His Image, I said that I would give an account of first-hand mystical experiences. I did so, but I did not put that account in the first person, as I have done here. Consequently, a couple of people asked me when or if I was ever going to relate my experience of the Organic Light in the first person. Well, there, it's done.

Severed Rose 5 will be mercifully brief compared to the forgoing installments. I have yet to offer an interpretation of the lucid dream that kicked off this wild outburst in the first place.

jll: 27 October 2010 Andalucia