He did.
Once victorious, there was no reason for the man to remain in his body any longer. He’d done his job––accomplished his mission. But how could I have told dad all that? My dad was perfectly aware of the Far Country. But regardless of what he’d said, it was still a ‘place’ for him.
I’ve known all along that it isn’t so. I never lost my awareness of where I came from. That always gave me an overwhelming advantage. I didn’t rise to the Far Country from the foibles of earthly life. I descended to it from above. The various realities are distinct, with defined rules, but they all coexist in the same space-time. Only the measurements and the dimensions change. Both space and time are but elements serving us to teach us perception of the universe. But not just the visible universe.
Visibilium omnium et invisibilium.
The realities are there to help us understand, to appreciate, or... to perceive the Creative Force. None of them really exist. Nothing exists outside the Undiscovered Realm. The other realities wink in and out of existence even as whole universes do when I venture into the Far Country.
But what the Far Country really offers is the possibility of sharing our perception of reality with other units of awareness. I suppose, mom, you would still call it ‘with other souls’. In the upper realms, the subjectivity of an individual outlook overlaps much more with other souls. With other individualizations descending from the Undiscovered Realm.
From my Home. My sweet and only home.
So much for now. Love you Mom.
Sacha
Sacha 13 + 364 days
Tomorrow is my fourteenth birthday. I think they are putting together something special. Probably some pagan ritual to mark the occasion. No matter. Occasions are usually fun.
Last night I had an insight. Whenever my consciousness rests in the Undiscovered Realm I never have any problems with visiting the Far Country or the Home Planet. A simple wish and the realities created by my previous visits unfold themselves, and the playing fields are ready for new experimentation. It’s like being in heaven yet having all the fun normally associated with having a body. I mean the senses, and all that. All I have to do is to pick up the resonance of the mental and emotional vibrations I left behind, and there I am sitting in my favourite villa overlooking a glorious lake, or flying over the most beautiful country in the world. And when I say flying, I don’t mean in a metal can, like on Earth. Just imagine... You can create all this beauty and never be in any danger of pollution playing havoc with your landscape.
Floating, suspended at the very center of the Universe in the Far Country, being master of all creation, where the stars, galaxies are but my toys, is a very different kind of euphoria. They’re not what we concoct in our imaginations, but whatever our mental body comes up with, instantly becomes the hypothetical reality. All realities are, of course, hypothetical. All of them depend exclusively on our perception. And the center of perception is the heart of our being. It is where our attention resides. And wherever we direct our attention that’s where we are.
But this is not what I wanted to share with you.
During the last week or two, I sensed a nagging suspicion that I am getting close to discovering the purpose of my life. Down here, I mean. And that purpose is, I’m pretty sure, to find my way back to the Undiscovered Realm. I mean, everyone always goes there, sooner or later. For a few instants of eternity. But that’s not what I mean. I mean to go there and henceforth never to have to go out, unless I choose to. I might forever want to come down to physical reality to share my perception with those I love. But I would do so as an act of my will.
This time, it was not exactly so.
When I began making preparations for my embodiment, it wasn’t that someone told me to do this or that. There are no bosses in the Undiscovered Realm. But it is a feeling like waking up, only in reverse. You know that if you don’t scratch it, it will drive you mad. So, sooner or later, you scratch it. Only the itch is the need to come down here, and do whatever has to be done to find your way back. Or at least get closer to your permanent residence.
So when all is said and done, the only way I could fairly define my life in this lanky body with a mop-a-top would be ‘The Way Back’.
PART TWO
The Search
Therefore search and see if there is not some place
where you may invest your humanity.
Albert Schweitzer
(1875 - 1965)
Chapter 7
The Rites of Passage
The Jews celebrate the coming of age of their sons a year earlier. The Bar Mitzvah is celebrated at a boy’s thirteenth birthday, at which time he is welcomed into the congregation of men. Sacha never felt excluded from such, even when he was three or four years old. Nor was he now prepared to forsake the congregation of women, a number of whom he held in great affection.
And then there is the Roman Catholic Rite of Confirmation. Although chronology is not observed as strictly as in the Hebrew faith, it is an occasion when a lad of a certain age is admitted to a full membership of the Church. Sacha’s parents did not bring up their son in any particular faith. They thought that the inner life of any person is and should remain inner. When you rear a son who takes frequent trips to, what can only be described as, ‘heaven’, it is hard to preach at him; particularly when more often than not they, Suzy and Alec, found themselves learning from their own youthful prodigy.
“Why do they wait so long to welcome youth into the congregation, Mom?” Sacha’s questions were not getting any easier.
“I don’t know, Sacha, but I suspect that since the christening is done to him or her, the confirmation is to be done by him or her. I mean, you can decide by yourself whether you wish to be confirmed or not.”
“You don’t mean that, do you?”
“I suppose not if you are a pupil in a Jesuit boarding school. But I suspect...”
“Yes, Mom. But I still don’t get it.” Sacha looked genuinely lost. “They wait until the child loses his or her innocence before making him or her a full member. Don’t they want the innocents to be their members?”
Alec, listening in silence, let that sink in, and then shook his head.
“What do you mean lose his innocence?”
“Oh, I don’t mean in the moral sense.” Sacha laughed out loud. “What I mean is that by the time children reach the requisite age, he or she have lost their singularity of thought. They became firmly anchored in, what they perceive as, dualistic reality.”
“Which you deny?”
“Of course!” He laughed again. “You’ve been up there with me. You travel the inner worlds yourself. You know that everything comes from a single source and that mind is the only creator.”
They had talked about this many times before. But whereas for Sacha this was an obvious, indisputable truth, Alec was rediscovering it every time he ventured into the Home Planet. Up there, it makes sense. Indeed, it could not be otherwise. If you don’t create your version of the universe, it just isn’t there. Until your arrival, until you accept it in your consciousness, it exists in a potential state only, even if at first sight you are not aware of its virtual nature. Then you breathe life into it. But here? It seems so much more tangible.
“Just how do you grab an atom, Dad?” He was listening to Alec’s thoughts.
“I don’t know, son. But to live down here, as you call it, I must accept certain rules—or I’ll go bananas,” he added, under his breath.
Sacha returned to the original subject.
“So why don’t they call confirmation a conformation, as it prohibits confrontation?”
This time they both laughed. Suzy was less amused.
At the age of seven, Sacha was smarter than most fourteen-year-olds. At fourteen, he could sit and pass any university entrance exam, in practically any subject. A genius? Not by his own definition. He kept repeating that he has no idea “what it’s all about.” His head was loaded with innumerable facts, but their purp
ose remained very hazy. And now he’d reached the Rites of Passage, a sort of Initiation into Manhood.
In the past, among the primitive tribes of Africa, or Amazonia, this Rite of Passage had been accompanied by rigorous tests that taxed a boy’s physical and mental dexterity. Sacha remembered his dad telling him about his own coming of age when he’d discovered the Princess. But what had taken his father years to discover was that in Sacha those same traits were always inherent. At Sacha’s age, Alec had just discovered the good news of the Home Planet. Sacha descended to it from above. Alec was surprised by every new discovery within the inner realities. Sacha took them for granted.
“Information or knowledge, better still ‘knowingness’, is disseminated throughout the universes. Look at your own Information Theory, Dad. What you’re missing from your equation is the fact that this information is already predisposed to fall into predictable patterns.”
“Why predictable?” Alec suspected he knew, but couldn’t resist seeking confirmation.
“All patterns already exist in their virtual state, and all patterns harbor a predisposition towards order and harmony,” Sacha continued. “When I visit Home Planet I do not create it from scratch. As I already mentioned, in its virtual form it is already there. It is a compendium of infinite patterns both virtual as well as those manifested over eons of time. I manipulate its reality. Or my perception of it. Countless generations of individualized units of consciousness made it come into being. It is as though it had no beginning. Nor will it ever be destroyed but rather it will metamorphose into other patterns, all ready and waiting, so to speak, to come into recognition.”
“Recognition by who?” Alec wondered aloud. He loved listening to his son.
“By Consciousness.” Sacha was speaking quietly, as though to himself. “The potential is infinite. And while Consciousness is really One, it seems able to individualize Itself into countless components. You can think of them, or us, as rather complex sensors the One Consciousness uses to experience Its own Infinite Potential.”
“Or to regard itself in its own creation...” Alec thought aloud. It took him more than thirty years to reach very similar conclusions.
“Yes, a mirror. As a sort of reflection of Its glory.”
Sacha didn’t imagine soul as a separate entity floating some distance over his head and directing his moves. He always knew that he is soul. Or at least a distinct wave in the ocean of Soul.
“Too many people use the Home Planet exclusively as a holiday resort,” he told his dad. “It is so much more than that. It is almost anything you care to make it.”
Way back when, in another reality, Sacha recalled the soft voice telling him to sit still. To sit in the light. To see the light. To feel it. Bathe in it. Absorb it. Then, after some timeless moments the gentle voice whispered... The light is you. And finally before the ancient teacher could say it again, Sacha understood.
“I am the light. The light is me,” he recalled his own words. “I am the object of my contemplation. I and the light are one.”
It was strange indeed that Sacha had always known that. Whenever he ventured into the Undiscovered Country, he was light. There, it was obvious. He merged at will with the light of others, with the light all around him. It was as though the globule of light that was his identity exhibited some surface tension, which, while being one with the light, could emerge from it and be, in a way, himself. Not as a distinct personality but as an individual awareness. After the last time that he and dad raised their consciousness to the Undiscovered Country together, dad found it difficult to reconcile the beings of light with the physical envelope.
“But we always remain entities whose essence is light, Dad. You know that?” Sacha said.
“You mean there is some kind of transformation...?”
“No, Dad. We remain one and the same. You don’t stop being you just because you put a set of clothes on your back, do you?”
“Then why is our real nature so hidden?”
“Is it? I’ve read of many people who can detect an aura on the edges of everything that lives. I can see it in people, animals, even plants. Life is life. What do you think this aura is?”
“The real thing showing through?”
“You could put it that way. The real thing showing through. That which we are cannot really be hidden, destroyed, or transformed. The real you remains always the same. What changes are the masks we put on to accommodate the exigencies of different perceptions of reality.”
Alec smiled.
“You talk like a professor of metaphysics,” he said.
“Sorry. I know it sounds stilted. But my language comes from books I’ve read. Perhaps one day I’ll write one using simple or ordinary language.”
“Which even your dad would understand?”
They both laughed.
So aura is the spiritual glow coming through into our physical realms. We certainly have it. Alec couldn’t see it all the time, but on occasion he saw the sheen, often of different colours clinging to Suzy. Especially when she was happy.
“Perhaps soul is a happy entity? I wouldn’t wonder,” Alec mused aloud. “In the Undiscovered Country overwhelming joy is palpable.”
But here, on Earth, and even in the immediate higher realms, one falls into the trap of becoming the object of one’s contemplation. You think a lot about your body, and you become your body. You are not only where your attention is, you are your attention.
In the past, whenever Sacha came down to the lower realms, he longed for that euphoric freedom he enjoyed in his true home. Now, mostly due to his sailing experience, he rediscovered the satisfaction of being here. On Earth. It would seem that his consciousness resided in a physical enclosure. Only it didn’t. He no longer felt constrained by his body. He shouted for joy the first time he felt the moment of freedom. Perhaps this was his Rite of Passage. It was the time when he felt no longer constrained by the construct of his own creation.
His mind, discarding all limitations, raced with him to the very edge of the sun’s corona. This was not the Home Planet. Nor the Far Country. He soared in total abandon right here and now. He stopped at the gates of the fiery furnace, then descended to the soft grass on which his body sat, cross-legged in perfect stillness. He was sitting across from an old man, an ancient, some five feet away, his face smiling in approval. Sacha was elated at having a witness to his accomplishment. It was as though he enlivened two bodies. Both physical yet one other, completely at his command. One obeying the laws of this realm, the other obeying his will.
“Is this the duality of good and evil?” he wondered.
The old man’s face lit up with a smile. Who was this guru?
Sacha felt no scathing of the infernal heat on his skin. He didn’t suffer from lack of air in the upper reaches of space. Nor did his body explode in the appalling vacuum. And as joyful as was the realization of having his body intact, so was the discovery that his body was an idea. That’s all it was. It was an idea expressed in terms very different than those of the Undiscovered Realm. There must be a reason for it, he mused.
“There must be a reason why I assumed a human form...” the thought nagged him.
“...no more prison,” his own voice reached him from a great distance. He looked down at the old man. The guru. The old man’s body had risen a few feet and hovered still directly in front of him. Sacha got up and looked closer at the smiling eyes.
“There is nothing I can teach you, my son. Rather, it may be you whom I should call my Master...”
Only then the impact of what transpired really hit home.
The face Sacha was staring at was his own.
At least for Sacha, the Rite of Passage carried other connotations, other proclivities, which tended to attract more of his attention to his growing physique. The vicissitudes of the hormones began to make their presence known, and confused Sacha’s idyllic dance within his youthful body. Though he gave no such impression, he was keenly aware of them. He knew from
books the theory of the process. He could write a book about it. But there was no time in his agenda for the changes occurring at the physical level. At least, not the hormonal ones.
He still regarded his physical body as one regards ones house––a transient abode at best. But one could not ignore one’s house. After all, one did live in it.
As far back as Sacha could remember he had always been a dispassionate observer of other people, perhaps tending to neglect himself. About his fourteenth birthday, perhaps due to those very hormonal demands, he began paying more attention to his own biological organization. He began watching, and making notes, on his own reactions to various events. It appeared that his body had a will of its own, that it was determined to react to certain events in a manner that had been encoded in its genes. He didn’t like to be held in a vice of the genetic code and wondered if there was a way to surmount it. He’d already learned that the prerequisite to conquering one’s enemy was to get to know him. Or it. From that moment on, he set about studying his physiology in minute detail.
He began with watching his breath.
He soon discovered that he’d been taking this seemingly natural function for granted. Not any more. By varying the rate of breathing he soon learned to raise and lower his body temperature. He wasn’t sure for what purpose he might apply this ability, but it was a step forward. Then he learned to reduce the rate of his breathing so low that a General Practitioner of Medicine, not equipped with special equipment, would have pronounced him dead. He’d read about the fakirs of the Far East doing this sort of thing, and now he understood the method. This could come in useful in a number of circumstances. It could act as a protective stance in moments of specific danger. People seldom attack corpses, although at present he had no idea, who would possibly want to attack him.
Sacha- the Way Back Page 9
