Revenant Ash Revisited

From The Man To The Tree

We’re talking Darkness and Love.

Below and Above.

Daemon, Eidelon, middle self interplay.

Revenant Ash takes the refuse of the dying society and awards to it a potential that remains largely unknown. That this potential exists is beyond spiritual doubt. The call sounds out to those capable of hearing, not those awarded pedigree by other men.

We bring it back, here in a more precise form, one that has less of the nightmarish and tortured poetry of the first, but a more honed delivery, where some of the passages are clearer, yet the deeper meaning remains near.

If the link to the first version remains a hazy path to that original piece posted with Jack Heart, this offering is now readily available to any who might wish to catch a glimpse of an ancient and forgotten spiritual view of the self…

Revenant Ash

The power was out. In the darkness the street seemed to glow ever so slightly in contrast to the buildings. Above me thick clouds barred any heavenly illumination. I watched as the darkness became a safe zone for humanity. With nothing observable beyond touch, the wafting of the voice, with no schedule set to satisfy the endless demands of society, with nothing for the grasping urge to attach to, all that was left was the murmur seeking connection.

I was here, alone in the darkness when she found me. A single car made its way down the road, and in that moment when the headlights touched me I ceased being the darkness and became a man once more. She must have seen me then, her desire for interaction driving her to the next event in her life. The car passed slowly, and on she came, her feet making quick sounds across the pavement. The flame of her lighter suddenly revealed her face, no longer young, and her brown eyes reflected that flame, searching.

In that moment of the flame she had convinced herself that I was real. Her lighter extinguished and she moved closer, the afterglow somehow intensifying the darkness, the exhausting press of identity. “Quite a night”, she began.

She had thrown those words out casually, yet so much was riding on them. Suddenly my heart sank, and was crushed by a powerful sense of loss. I felt, in that simple, world weary phrase the defiance and resignation of one who never won at life. I understood her then, her desperation, and I knew in a moment where it would lead. She spoke in a slight Spanish accent, where the vowels are extended.

“I don’t mind it”, came my reply.” It’s very much like a dream”.

The lighter ignited once more as she lit her cigarette. “Do you smoke?”

“No,” I replied matter of factly.”I already have too many addictions.”

She laughed then, a sort of hoarse and low sound of genuine humor. Her dark eyes always seemed to catch a reflection of the flame, as if they hungered for something within it.

“I’m like that”, she admitted with a long exhalation of smoke.

She began her story then. It was a familiar story of being lost, of sleeping on hard concrete never knowing tomorrow. It was a story of hunger and desire and the cost of failure, of being held captive by forces too strong to resist. Her words filled the darkness with longing for what could not be given a price, after she had sold everything, even that which wasn’t hers. She spoke of a dream she had, or a vision, one night in a strange decrepit hotel room with the traffic roaring outside. Perhaps I should have shared with her my vision of the flaming rafters, that I knew when the US government burnt my home to ash, and that there is in this life the sting of death, and something in me died then. Yet these words would have somehow trivialized her story, so instead I only listened.

I understood her, when she said in so many words how she missed her previous life, but cruel fate had locked her into this unhappy place. She knew where she belonged, but was barred from ever returning.

Then I finally did speak up, and I told her that this place isn’t home, that I have memories of a world where the snow glows white as if ignited with rainbows, and the blue of the sky is no blue that anyone in this concrete palace has ever beheld with their own eyes.

She turned to me fully then, and in the light of her glowing cigarette made a quick gesture so that it streaked across my vision, leaving a trail. She seemed to be looking at me, as if to judge what to say next.

“Are you cold?”

“I know the cold”, I replied, “so yeah, I’m cold”.

She told me then of all her missteps, of the grip addictions had upon her, of the lives she saw snuffed out that could never be retrieved, and that she was one. She whispered hoarsely of the lump of stuff she could hold in her fingers that had so much power over her, over everyone who fell. She spoke of that perfect high that changed the earth and sky, and her desperate love for that state. She spoke of her fear of the cops, and how she was under a spell. Then she told me of things I could never repeat, for it wasn’t about what she had done, but how something within her had vanished, and she wondered if she ever had it at all. With each sentence the desolation of her heart grew and grew. I was so close to her agony that it burned like a storm, and I saw then the terrible truth of replacing one’s love for the torment of the high, as the addiction became its own blazing path. I was consumed by a terror of that ruin and cast into a shadow where hope was not even an idea. And when she finished her story and vanished into the dark that devoured her, a lingering odor of cigarette smoke and collapse, I was held desperately in the downward racing destiny so eager to plumb the depths of oblivion.

She was hidden

So far away.

Because of pain

And the escape.

She doesn’t know

What can be found

She only hears

The whisper of a promise.

And the voices sing

Oooooohoooohh

And the voices sing

Oooooohooooohh

And she walks away.

I thought then, for a very long time, grateful for the clouds and the failed electricity that only further embraced the dark, a darkness that made it possible to feel that loss of the familiar heavy self, the loss of that directive energy, that conditioned self all modern religions condemn.

It is probably very few who know that ‘Demon’ is derived from the classical Greek Daemon, a word perhaps best understood as genius, and that in the abrahamic mind all aspects of the self not suitable to their control were to be sacrificed on the altar of political power. Few understand today that who they are includes an essence beyond the physical, even as words fail to express this directly. The raw desire of the urge to step beyond, the ecstasy of escape is that base self crying out for the transcendence and participation with the forgotten genius, the divine love of the Daemon.

Modern man lives as much as possible in an embodied state. From a young age, the self is reinforced as a fact of physical existence. The open, dreaming child mind is imprinted through action and consequence to develop identification with the physical form as the boundary of existence. Yet this developing self is not truly located anywhere. Modern thought establishes the brain as seat of self, a sort of default position, yet the best behavioral psychologists cannot find a biological basis to this assumption.

The tyranny of embodiment must reduce the person to a simple core, and indeed it does. The error here is the assumption that this reduction is complete. The severing of the non-physical self is a recurrent theme produced by those who see themselves at the top, from the latest example produced by the World Economic Forum, the W.E.F., back to Rudolf Steiner who promised it through an injection.

The W. E. F. defines you in viciously denigrating terms. It claims that you are simply a series of electrical impulses, that your agency is an illusion, and they, your new masters have a plan for you; The mind, the self become words of no real meaning, no substance to the very idea that a self appointed group of power hungry psychopaths has some right or some authority to assert their control. They are actually quite funny to watch, their assumed sense of superiority becomes a kind of cosmic joke.

And she walks away.

Yet we can understand that the subtle communication of dreams exists, that destiny is an odd fact of life, that paranormal experience has long been proven to be a genuine phenomenon. We have for too long now been at the mercy of the merciless, those whose lust for power is so consuming that they will use any means available to secure it, and one of the primary methods for securing power over others is to steal their genuine heritage, and deliver to their victims a vision of the self that is without potential, without dignity, without grace.

The way of understanding the self must be based upon truth and reality to escape from the clutches of those shuffling dead who want you dead too, and deliver back to mankind the birthright of who they are.

In times of yore it was understood that the self was fashioned from diverse source and that the You, the I, are only centers that we learn to work from, the establishment of personality that develops with the maturing of the incarnate self.  For those with the sight have always beheld inexplicable things, the many impressions that dance and radiate around and through the human form, the intense centers of light, which always bespoke of something beyond simple explanation. We are not one wheel, and we are not one body, and we are not one energy.

Now that we are here, collectively arrived at the moment of change where the ways of the world are about to end, some violently, some with great upheaval, accompanied by mourning for what was, including the loss of hope for what could have been, now is the time where it would be well to remember the essential explanation of who we are, and that is the tripartite self.

The first and most common aspect of self is that which dominates the daily life of the person. We will call this our near self, because always it is nearest as we make our way through our day. It is here, in the near self that we erroneously think “we” reside, that true “us” that thinks the familiar thoughts and feels the familiar emotions, the “us” that likes, dislikes, and tries to make sense of its journey through this life. Modern man lives as much as possible in the arms of the near self, but even so, the near self floats restlessly upon a far larger, and far less understood second aspect of the self, which we will call the deep self.

The deep self is the unknown origin for the forces the near self navigates. Yes, we are all miracles. The deep self holds the darkest, unrealized terrors and the strongest, insatiable desires. The deep self has no need for time, and so refuses to be limited by it. The deep self can talk to the dead, which the near self can never do. It knows things simply by contacting them. It doesn’t particularly care for standard explanations of why things work, it has its own explanations, and knows what they do. The deep self has no boundaries, as they are understood. It knows no imposed morality, and it is consumed by transcendence.

Near self and deep self make up an essential duality. If the near self is the “angel” upon one shoulder, then the deep self is the “devil” on the opposite. The abrahamics divided this essential duality into two externalized entities, setting forth for thousands of years a way of thought and belief that ensures a civil war within the self, a war which splits the wisdom of the heart, and ails the self. The Fisher King suffers a great wound, and the salve will only partially make his life viable, until the nature of his wounding is revealed.

Modern psychology has only further enshrined this war, creating a set of expectations and beliefs that directly echoe abrahamic thought. There is no real application of psychology to this question, as it is not a psychological question. It is a spiritual one. Modern psychologists oversee torture and create television commercials, they do not understand the spiritual. Freud turned to Jung as their ship steamed to harbor in New York, and told his protégé that America believed he was bringing to them a great gift, while in truth it was a great plague.

If we are honest, we know that the deep self is the true power of the person. The motivations that move the person all derive from the deep self. Likes and dislikes, attractions and aversions, bent of character, and the residue of previous incarnations all are alive and active within the deep self. It is from here that the near self emerges to take the helm, and protect the person throughout their life journey.

Thus the deep self is the first person, and if life is kind, the near self arises as an effective second person from the timeless ocean of the deep self to attain a working rationality, a linear concept of a world of things and essential facts of life, which takes us now to the third facet.

It has been a matter of concern now for thousands of years, the question of the third facet of the self. What of that aspect that modern life ignores, even completely denies, that incorporeal ethereal self that is so easily forgotten, our Elder Brother?

She has ran

From herself far away.

And so she runs

To the buzz every day.

It’s an empty thing

When she feels about it.

It makes her hate

The world, she’s living it.

But she doesn’t know

What to do about it.

She thinks she lost

Something precious

She once knew.

She wants it back.

So she keeps fighting through

All the rage.

And the voices sing

Oooooohooooohh

And the voices sing

Oooooohoooohh

And she turns the page.

Elder brother hovers over who we believe we are. Is he above the Sun? Is he below the clouds? You cannot see him, with your physical eyes, it’s only the deep current which flows to where he thrives.

We are told by the Christians who hated him that Basillides wrote of this mystery of the self. He told those who would listen that the near self could never leave its world. It could never reach above to the greater mystery of who we are, only entertain that it might be possible. He instructed that the longing the near self shaped into a recognizable image was from the power of the deep self all along. Thus it is that only the current of transcendence can reach up to know the Daemon, Elder Brother.

Well, one says, if this is so natural, then why is it so hidden? Why is it so easily lost? Why are we told that it’s only a dream, and we need to get real in this concrete palace?

We came here, through the darkness so far away, as our cosmic parents wished us well upon our way. We just didn’t know what we were getting into, and in this world we forgot ourselves through and through. The burning tears, reminded us that we knew it, but we so rarely grasp that spirit within our reach.

We need a path, way, to discover that silver cord.

The splintering of the flow, which is incarnation, that split of everything into myriad parts, is not due to a source of shame. Our failures are not because we lived a certain way. Mistakes we made are not counted against us. We were meant to fall, and to get up every time. It must be understood that the simple is not always the true. The current of eternity runs deep, no matter what we do.

No matter what we do.

The ancient Gnostics knew no sin. The Cathari men delighted in the Cathari women who delighted in them. The bright eyed children were simply loved. There was no sin.

In a world where the true wealth was in high places there were no items of value to steal. Yet they did write books. The books they wrote were all burned to finest ash. The deaths they rode, are marked by disdain to this very day. Yet it was not them, who forgot the Elder Brother. It was not they who forgot him.

The deepest current, through longing flows up and away. It touches the wheel of the heart, which shines like day. The path is clear, when there is no sin to cloud it. The joining with him, releases the finest dew. The dew is light, falling upon your very skin, and you become complete. You are now the Tree.

She fell deeply in love

With something she always knew.

Her shame she left

Behind her in the dew.

She knew herself.

There was no doubt about it.

She walked the earth

Her feet were bare and brand new.

And the voices sang

Oooooohooooohh

And the voices sang

Oooooohoooohh

And she sang with them.

Postscript;

The three part person is a very old realization. Some say it hearkens back to the first Shamans, who passed down the knowledge of the Three Worlds. Others say it is woven from our own Wheels of Light. You can see them yourself sometimes, like pools of essential life, focused at the hips, the heart, the head, and least known, above us. It helps if one wishes to see them to rest in the darkness, and to never use the physical eyes.

This fusion of the three essential facets of the self has long been oppressed by the purveyors of monotheism and its brainchild, scientism. This ecstatic transcendence is available as the shame, the sin, and unworthiness leave our description of our Self, to be replaced, if that is the word, with that native and pure longing that seeks toward Daemonic communion with no earth centered claim, no narcissism to fulfill, no agenda to satisfy.

That the realized self corresponds intriguingly to the vast spiritual cosmos is neither surprise nor accident. We are one.