Deathstiny

Post Vision Emancipation

No place in this society for the spiritual.

Its a world of naked money entitled

A place of misery

A tonic to history

Both personal and divine.

Some of us have certain experiences that are very real. You can tell they are very real in a variety of ways, perhaps the most common being that these inner kennings do play out in this so-called real world, after manifesting within. The so-called real world thus affirms the experience, leaves one with a bit wonder over it all.

A funny example; it was me having this vision of the stain of evil, and the trees becoming aware, and using that awareness to muster a defense and fend it off, which they were very successful at doing. In front of the emanation point of this evil was a black as oil dwarf with a tentacle head, then I met my neighbor, and it all made sense.

Sure, for most people they have no patience for this kind of stuff. What the Hell does this have to do with real things like politics at work, figuring out how to buy that new vehicle, and getting the bills paid?

It never seems to register that such experience points to a much greater world, one that society and the people in it cannot comprehend.

The initiation into the spiritual does not empower, it shatters. It does not affirm, it shocks. Initiation will not grant power, it actually takes it away. The absolute truth is that society has no use for spirituality, unless it can be turned into money, feed the gears of industry, appear on balance sheets, act like a weapons technology.

Spiritual experience offers none of that. The initiation into spiritual states often involves death. I am not referring to this in any form of allegory. It is exactly as I have said, no hyperbole. If you manage to find yourself at the edge of death, teetering at one moment toward life, and the next to extinction, it actually places one in a very unique state. I have had the great fortune to be in this liminal state more than once, and I can state without exaggeration that it is in this state where the most powerful spiritual initiations occurs.

Certainly, there are some nuances to this. I’m not advocating flat-lining to gain this experience, I am simply reporting how it came to me. Nor is this presented to convince anyone. Here on substack I relate some of my experiences with balancing above the open arms of a very genuine death. We aren’t talking about wondrous joyous things. We are merely relating in prose a meeting with the Ending. By we I mean me, because not one of us are simply one thing, but this is a discussion for another day. We will return to the topic on the desert of spirituality in society after I present ‘Lines’, an honest record of the death experience which appears in slightly different form as a pdf file here on A Shadow of Yew.

********

LINES

Mike Kay

I was deep in the throes of the worst initiatory illness I had experienced in this life-ever. Racked with unimaginable agony, my neck swollen, making anything, even breathing next to impossible, I was asked if I wanted someone to take me to hospital. My mind had shut down with my body, and any connexion with regular life was fleeting and temporary. I’ve read some notes I jotted down then, so incoherent that I realize I was outside of linear time. I replied that I wasn’t going to hospital, because while this was the worst torture, going there, into the jaws of the beast, was a final act of resignation, an act I wasn’t going to willingly complete.

Initiatory illness is unique amongst illnesses. It plunges one into the nexus of reality, determined to provide the conditions to examine all past actions and responses, on an intelligible level, beyond the waking mind. Initiatory illness challenges all notions of perception, all conclusions about existence. It offers dreams that are from the future, more real than what most call reality. It is a vast space without comprehension laid upon the marks of this world we take for granted. Initiatory illness is the opportunity to traverse fully the energy returns that bind and control, and to walk on a path free from these chains.

There are those who disdain metaphysics. Confronted with an entirely unique experience of existence, they shut down to the most essential levels, practicing at life without any obvious motivation to do so. Yet it is not in the nature of phenomenon to simply exist. All phenomenon seeks to return to source, like a reverse time wave. It was at that point, after the torture had almost driven me into full collapse that I began to hear the music, and the beauty, the reality, and magnificence of the higher order was revealed through it.

It is impossible to describe the Music of the Spheres. It isn’t classical, and it isn’t Jazz. It isn’t made with any electronics, yet the notes and the harmonies and the melodies and the choirs carry better and more purely than any earthly composition. The Music Divine has a quality all its own, in that it brings to awareness the mystic order of the cosmos, a magnificent view into reality far more profound than what can be apprehended by mind and sense.

Even as I listened in perfect silence to the harmonies, I wished with all my being to remember everything, and as I so wished, I knew it was impossible, for no mortal form could long maintain the intense state of rapture that opens one to the Music, and no memory was made through the physical senses, as the very experience could not be held with the same faculties with which we recall physical sound.

The unexpected wonder of such a reveal is balanced by the sorrow of having to leave it behind, for once the initiatory illness has had its conditions satisfied, it relents and allows the sufferer his choice. I could not understand the words that were sung, and the songs themselves began to fade as health and a measure of strength returned. Initiatory illness leaves its mark, and I carry with me the mark from it still and the physical damage. Those around wonder if I will ever be fully well again, they remind me I’m not dead, and that I have capabilities still. Its almost a worry, and I love them for their concern, as concern has been very sparingly provided me in this life. Yet the return to life is akin to awakening in a prison, after one’s spirit has flown far and wide.

The Neo-Platonists and Gnostic sages wrote extensively, fervently even of the true desire of the divine, that the desire for higher beauty was as an engine that motivated the whole of the soul. The Music of the Spheres explains all their attempts at conveying, that truth hidden from the lower mind. If it seems strange that such a glimpse is afforded to those on the very edge of death, then perhaps it could best be described that this world is a veil, and the repression, torture, and endless insanity of this existence is only this place unto itself. The suffering and pain, when ignited by the spiritual visitation, causes the glare and blindness of this incarnate existence to fade, and a different form of perceiving take hold.

As we move closer to extinction, the reveal is, simply enough, an affirmation that a higher order does indeed exist, and we are an expression of it.

The west, as is obvious to any who study its ways and means, is little more than a nullification methodology. The west gains its power through reductionism. It has no means, much less access, to mysteries such as the Music of the Spheres. Consumed with a great and errant boredom, that does nothing to alleviate the black hole that was the western spirit, the west forever seeks in objective realms that which it will never find. Thus the west creates great works of fiction, also known as religion, as its only feeble attempts to ascend to profound truths.

Upon the eve of destruction, it may behoove us to examine a particularly western nihilistic belief, one which was fully formed when Irenaeus penned his four unreadable volumes that attacked everyone, especially Gnostics. We are discussing, of course Transmigration, that aspect of the life cycle that returns the motive force to the material sphere, and in simpler terms, Reincarnation.

At first glance, western hostility to the doctrine of rebirth is rather anomalous. The ancient Greeks, who were the single largest force behind the creation of the Bible, minced no words when it came to their hold on the tenets of rebirth, often discussing in detail, that which was perceived intelligibly. Socrates himself laid out rational arguments for the acceptance of transmigration as a feature of this life.

The Druids, who with Pelagius crossed over into Christianity in a vain attempt to bring it a soul, were quite comfortable with the cycle of rebirth, and saw the higher functioning that humanity was capable of as a potential to be achieved in this life.

Even the Gnostics, leading the way through the erudition of Basillides, tracked the history of life through myriad births and deaths, all defined by a deep identity of that life force, that steered it through experiences good and bad alike.

With such formidable sages supporting the cycle of life-death-rebirth, one probably begins to wonder exactly how the church pulled off its one life scam, leaving a legacy of mean determinism as the only recourse for the tortured western mind. What we find in the great collective emotional wave of anti-spirituality that is Christian history, a decision amongst church officials that forever casts its shadow upon the western psyche.

The Council of Nicea, this one in AD 532, heralded the final triumph of the haters of reincarnation. Stating the obvious, that a congregation certain of its guaranteed rebirth is far less likely to be swayed by bloodcurdling tales of fire and brimstone, and the psychological terrorism of church dictates, church officials deftly sidestepped the issue of the truth of rebirth, and focused firmly upon the political realities of control.

The legacy of this political decision is obvious. To this day, philosophical and power centers in western society profess their unending loyalty to the one life to live explanation. Even the lower echelons of society find the idea attractive, as if lies are somehow tough minded, practical, and some type of bottom line. In the end, they never even imagine, even for an instant that their assumed realism is a phony political move to cut them off from their inheritance.

Initiatory illness is the deep exploration of memory and deed. The physical mind dethroned, initiation is an indelible mark of experience upon which memory finds its energy. A political faith with no rebirth rejects all greater identity, that mysterious activity which bridges beyond an individual death, and in that politically inflamed eagerness to be free of eternal law, it drives itself away from the only source that gives it life.

Tibetans depict the wheel of rebirth as powered by livestock familiar to any farmer. The allegory is clear, that the cycle itself is a direct expression of the soul of the world. The wheel moves on urges, impulse, it is unconscious, it is destiny, and it is binding. Karma is as much an aspect of this cycle as is death, for both are implacable forces that cannot be appeased.

The Vision unfolded before me, of a vast almost colourless plain. Everywhere, in every direction, the plain undulated into eternity. Suddenly, something caught my attention; black stains spreading in certain areas, almost a sort of allegory for the energy centres in the body still asleep, the stains marked the surface.

Yet upon a more careful examination, there was no stain. Rather, the dark spots were a near endless series of lines, incised into the very stuff of the plain, crisscrossing each other at different angles, layers upon layers of lines, all leaving their own unique mark. Yet the lines were not impervious, they could be lifted, examined, and erased to leave no trace. I knew that doing such erased one’s karmic history, and with it whatever merit had been accrued. This was an act that required great mastery, otherwise the erasure would remove all record of that life lived, and in a very real sense it was no longer lived, as its entire cosmic history was removed. All is not lost for those who pursue such error, however, as the energy of that life echoes and reflects across eternity to all the other lives, lines that created angles and vectors to it. The only real danger is in wholesale karmic destruction, for this could well result in the total extinction of the life form.

Each and every incised line in each of the apparent stains was a unique life traversed. Lines were the record in eternity of the passage of the living soul. The vision began to close, and the stains, the lines, the records began to fade into the workings of the incarnate mind, emotion, and body. Yet the remembrance, and the knowledge, continues on.

The ancient sages told us that the lifetimes we lived stained the essence we call our souls, changing colours with each new life, every added experience. Lines, every different kind of line, stacking upon each other, making every angle and vector possible, exploring and defining the very limits of human experience. Lines added with each new life lived, a flash, a moment in the cosmos, a Butterfly born in the waxing summer sun, flickering across the green expanse of the forest to vanish before the winter chill.

Lines, the intersection of countless narratives, all a brief dance, before etching their paths upon the ground of eternity.

***************

Having returned from these and other such experiences, one realizes how little this society cares about any such reality. I can attest that such topics certainly are anything but popular.

What is particularly interesting is the odd fact that those in society see that construct as the nexus of literally everything, of all creation and all fact, which is ridiculous to anyone who has experienced a Deathstiny event.

Of course, as the potency of the initiation fades, as it is wont to do in this blinding existence, most simply give up and return to crushing society doing exactly what it demands. They might at times speak offhand of things they experienced, but they soon return to the matter of navigating a brutal and vicious reality.

A society that refuses to be informed by reality is a society unhinged, and that is where we stand today. The commonplace theme is to confuse the submerging into the collective, and the blissful pleasure of escaping one’s hard limitations as a spirituality, but to those who have been there, the collective is nothing more than a sugar high.

There is an odd duality between the extreme egotism and narcissism that is ubiquitous today, with the imagined tonic of the collective. Both somewhat represent opponents in the ongoing debate of what matters in this life. An endless sparring duality with no conclusions.

What does one do with spiritual experiences, if one is like me? Well, not speaking for others, one simply refuses the will of society to bulldoze one’s senses. One largely quits opening up to a humanity that is hostile to such notions as the greater self and a spiritual reality that exists outside of someone’s bible. One must choose between the reality one has seen, and the one enforced with civilization’s cudgel.

So this piece, like most others on A Shadow of Yew represent in essence that struggle, to honour the hidden reality despite the unhinged howling of society, and bring that wisdom to a point of recognition. In a very true sense, what this is, is a confession, and an attempt to create a record, because certain amazing things just need to be expressed.

Embrace the mystery of existence.