Danny's Mind: A Tale of Teenage Mysticism and Heavenly Power

by James T. Bailie

  Chapter 10

   

  What exactly is Head Mind? It’s your inner Demander. The false Controller that always opposes. It’s the sticky creature in your head that says, “To exist, I need more.  And if I don’t get what I want, if I don’t get my way, I’m going to be unhappy or depressed or angry.  I need—every new gadget. I need status. I need you and you and you…to love me, to be my friend, to think I’m a great guy, and cool; that’s critical for me in order to be.  I need control over the future; escape from my embarrassing pasts; influence over people, the power of knowledge. I need constant entertainment, endless texts to tell me I’m popular (I am texted, therefore I am), cell phone games upon apps upon twitter so never to be bored—not for one single, solitary, oh, horrifying, second.  And whatever it is, more, more, more. Mr. Tan would call it ‘persona’ or ‘ego’. If you’re a Harry Potter reader, think of it as the Voldemort possessing you.  More into Tolkien? Then it’s your inner Sauron—the dark dissatisfier who fears and hates the world and wants to dominate it…or at least get lots of attention. It’s that voice in your head you cannot stop that governs 99% of everything you do. And here’s the funny part—just like Voldemort and Sauron, it’s a fiction.

   

  -  From His Recorded Words

   

   

  Light moves pretty fast. That’s what I learned in astronomy class that day when I was moved up front to improve my attention. But I’m not sure even light could have sped through the hallways faster than the stories about Danny.

  Michelle, of course, got it started. She’s a major deal in the popular crowd, and when that crowd gets a hold of something you know it’s gonna be the next “big” thing—high top tennis shoes, wrist tattoos, fancy backpacks, some favorite local cause to help the homeless or clean up graffiti. Pretty soon there were little daily lunch gatherings of students asking Danny all kinds of questions. They would get together either on the front lawn under some trees, or in the parking lot with Danny on the hood of someone’s car, or back in the bleachers. He never talked again about the whole near-death-thing as he did with Michelle (and me). And people stopped asking after he told them, it’s not important; and then as their faces got briefly disappointed, he would bring them back with, but let me tell you what I learned, because that is. And so it launched. This new thing called headlessness and Heavenly Mind. It took hold fast—I guess because you could actually do it, but also because Michelle, Danny’s cheerleader, was so enthusiastic about getting kids to try. These were the “activity people” for the most part, the ones who worked on the yearbook and got involved with student council and Japanese club and the Toys for Tots programs. Among this whole crowd, girls and guys, Danny was making a quite a stir.

  For the first week of it, I didn’t want any part. Though I watched occasionally from a distance. But then one day I was walking by a gathering with Michelle and half a dozen other kids by a clump of birch trees in the school yard. Danny was walking back and forth in front of them, talking. He winked at me, but I hovered from a distance, because sitting next to Michelle—not participating and with a pained “what-the-hell” look in his eyes—was Tim.

  Danny was asking people to consider their bodies; how bodies really move all on their own. He said something like: “An object is flying at your head, and your hand blocks it without thinking. How did it know to do that? What intelligence moved that hand?  Is taking a step any different? Let’s follow the body in headlessness: You have an idea to pick a dandelion. Eyes look over the ground. There’s a moment of suspense. Suddenly the right flower calls out, and while silent headlessness observes, Arm reaches out and Hand opens to grasp the stem. No one is directing it. Arm and Hand know their roles in the big play. Now you hold the dandelion. What will happen next? Headlessness waits for the next surprise. Suddenly Body, knowing just what to do, moves again.” He gave the yellow weed to one of sitting girls. “When we practice headless attention, total seeing, all our movements become miraculous, because we begin to realize—we really don’t do them. So what does? Feel into that.”

  He asked them to begin an exercise to feel the “invisible intelligence” that guides the body. And having already hung on every word he’d said, they did. Everyone followed. Except Tim. Some started walking back and forth circling their arms slowly, or picking up twigs or more dandelions from the grass, carefully observing each act. Sometimes they’d catch one another’s glance and smile as if they understood something together. Michelle looked more awestruck than ever.

  It didn’t bother me that Tim clearly wasn’t buying any of it. I didn’t buy it either. But if Michelle was dragging Tim in, it could turn into a real problem. So I decided right there and then to keep closer tabs on these assemblies, and on Tim specifically.

  I also found myself getting into a lot of minor fights. I guess my temper was running thin with the whole Danny mania. Up to now, I’d had my little buddy to myself. He’d been mine to talk to and pretend to listen to; mine to drive on the cycle; mine to cheer up; mine to swipe cookies for at lunch; and—if he was becoming annoying—mine to rough up a little. It was all going upside down. I was losing something important. I suppose if I’d lost a favorite dog I’d have looked for people to beat up too. At least, I think so. I never had a dog.

  Peter Beck was the first to tick me off. It was Tuesday morning during one of the impromptu sessions with Danny on the school lawn before first hour. Danny was sitting on his knees, holding a blade of grass in one hand and a can of coke in the other. He was excitedly explaining something about the world becoming friendly and supportive when you practiced headlessness. “You begin to sense that everything comes from the same place and shares the same energy. Imagine everything your eye falls on saying hi to you, like a close friend who’s happy you’ve recognized them, and knowing you share something very deeply in common. Feel it!” Kids around him peered into that contagious sparkle in his eyes and said, “Yeah, I sense it. I get it.” Although I think more than a few were just saying that to be cool. Then Peter Beck burped loudly from the back. I didn’t care that Danny didn’t seem to notice it, or that a couple kids gave him nasty looks.

  The next day I was walking by Peter’s table in the cafeteria. And all on it’s own, without guidance, Right Arm had the idea to shoot out and cuff Peter behind the neck, pushing his face into his lasagna. Left Arm, still in a cast, wanted in on the action and decided to shove Peter’s friend firmly down as he attempted to get up; then it patted his cheek to stay put. Peter looked up covered in meat sauce and pasta. “Don’t burp at Danny again,” I said. He promised he wouldn’t, and me and my arms walked away, all feeling good.

  Then there was Dave Johnson who was sitting behind me in study hall smacking his gum with his mouth open. I hate that sound. I remember my Dad throwing a beer can at me once when I was chewing gum like that at home. After study hall I slammed Dave against a locker and said—same as Dad had told me—“Chew with your f-ing mouth closed.” That felt good, too.

  But then I just got too touchy, like when some little guy I didn’t know simply bumped into me walking up a crowded stairway. It was an accident. But I slid him my elbow, anyway. He gave back a nice wumph, and I told him to be more careful. I was wrong about that one, and it didn’t make me feel good.

  After school, Danny and Mr. Tan resumed their little talks. At first Mr. Tan was curious about the NDE thing—and, for once, Danny broke his own rule not to discuss it. He said, first of all, he didn’t like the term; it made no sense to him, since death as some kind of ending was not a part of it; and, if it had been up to him, he would have called it a “body emancipation experience”. (A “bee” I thought to myself, snickering in silence.).  But then he told Mr. Tan the whole thing, just like Michelle on the bleachers. I guess this shouldn’t have surprised me, since they got along so well, and Danny trusted Mr. Tan. What did surprise me was when Mr. Tan—acting just like Michele and the other students on the lawn—become fascinated by the whole
Heavenly Mind idea and headlessness and the “psychological underpinnings” of the “cosmology” as he called it. Instantly he probed away with all kinds of questions and, as Danny responded to them, scribbled page after page on yellow paper which he stuffed in a binder. Danny didn’t mind any of this. And, honestly, I think he got a special kick out of Mr. Tan’s curiosity, because Mr. Tan could describe stuff using all that intellectual and scientific speak they both liked. I didn’t know any teenagers in that league. Also Mr. Tan was a white-board thinker. He was always drawing pictures on that huge board in the front of class to illustrate his psychology lessons, which was really helpful. He was probably the best teacher in the school partly because he drew a great stick-figure. Together he and Danny began putting Danny’s ideas into pictures. 

  They started with a simple little stick guy whose head was missing, replaced by a bunch of lines shooting outwards into space. I sort of understood that one. Then they tried other figures with heads filled-in and progressively larger circles growing around them (representing what they called, the dimensions…) until the last circle turned into a bunch of circular rays again. Then came the labeling and relabeling and more stick figures and arrows and some side charts and it all got too complicated for me.  I liked the first one the best.

  They never erased the drawings when they were finished—though Mr. Tan always made his own copies of everything for his binder—so they were always visible the next morning before getting erased for other classes. Kids caught on right away. Soon throughout the halls and public areas of the building the Danny stick-figures began appearing. Some were labeled “Danny’s Way”, some were labeled “Danny’s Mind”. You’re not supposed to put up posters without authorization, so janitors, teachers, and even Principal Steele on occasion tore them down. But they just kept showing up, sometimes in clever places like on the ceiling just above the stalls in the boys’ restroom—and it wasn’t me. This was just the kind of craze Danny’s teachings were becoming, and the headless stick-men were marching.

  A different kind of relationship developed between Mr. Tan and Danny—a real switcheroo. Danny was the teacher now. That was funny to me. But while they talked and theorized and drew pictures and Danny instructed Mr. Tan in all the techniques of headlessness, I sat at a desk pretending to ignore them, always waiting for Danny to walk home. I remember one time, Mr. Tan was trying the headless exercise where you point at yourself; Danny asked the question: “What’s pointing at what?” And after a moment in silence, Mr. Tan erupted in full blown laughter (which I’d seen happen to more than one headless practitioner), and said, “Okay, I got it now. Brilliant! Your headless practice breaks the self / not-self divide by dis-identifying consciousness from body and ego. Consciousness without the boundary fixation. Pure perception; no ego. That’s Heavenly Mind?”

  Danny said, “That’s a beginning sense of it. Though you make it sound very…academic.”

  “By design,” Mr. Tan smirked. “If I’m going to make this a credible academic presentation, I have to translate your insights into official jargon. Psychologists have their own language. I hope you don’t mind that I do it this way. When you’re dealing with professional academics, you have to talk the way they do. Otherwise, they won’t listen.”

  “Then pour on the jargon.”

  Danny and Mr. Tan kept working, and every now and then Mr. Tan got really excited as if he was on to some incredible scientific breakthrough. He even hopped into the air sometimes. I just continued paging through Conan. Sometimes I tried to understand what they were saying on the sly, but mostly I had no clue and figured it was something like getting drunk.

  One time, Mr. Tan asked me if I was getting it. I held out my book and tapped the cover to let them know my priorities.

  It took over a week, but eventually they came up with a big complex chart with pictures and sidelines which they agreed outlined the major stages and pulled together all the big ideas. This was their masterpiece. 

  “Yes,” Mr. Tan said to himself, standing with his hands on his hips. “This will be a good framework for putting together a bigger slide presentation. All colored up. Add some professional graphics. Maybe even get a studio arts student to help me animate it so we can really show the expansion of consciousness from head-centered to non-egoic, and what that implies. Danny, let me walk you through as a summary, and you critique me—since it’s sort of about you.”

  I groaned. “Aren’t you guys finished yet with all this…whatever it is?”

  “Joe, a few more minutes,” Mr. Tan said patiently. “If you’d pay a little attention…what I’m trying to do is establish the scientific grounding for Danny’s perceptions on how consciousness co-creates our realities. How the world we think we see is really is as much a creation of our minds, as it is—”

  “Yikes, Mr. Tan. Go ahead and do your summary. I’m good here with my book.”

  Danny said, “Let’s do it, Mr. Tan. Give me the whole spiel.”

  So while I wandered through my favorite Conan, a story called Red Nails, about the burly barbarian and a red-haired female companion fighting a dragon and some nasty subhumans, Mr. Tan directed his pointer smartly at the first stick figure and said, “Now, this guy lives purely from the egoic center, or Head Mind as our subject calls it. His perception is oppositional. He feels like he’s separate from the rest of the physical world and physically travels through it. Along the way, he encounters separate things or people that he experiences as objects outside himself and his awareness. And because they are outside they tend to either oppose him or support him…good or bad lodges in his perception, as well as blocks it. His understanding is distorted by seeing nothing but boundaries…”

   

  ——————————————

   

  …Valeria shouted, "Keep back, you barbarian dog! I'll spit you like a roast pig!"

  Conan halted, reluctantly, and demanded: "Do you want me to take that toy away from you and spank you with it?"

  "Words! Nothing but words!" Valeria mocked, lights like the gleam of the sun on blue water dancing in her reckless eyes.

  Conan knew it was the truth. No living man could disarm the flaming haired Valeria of the Red Brotherhood with his bare hands. He scowled, his sensations a tangle of conflicting emotions. He was angry, yet he was amused and filled with admiration for her spirit. He burned with eagerness to seize that splendid figure and crush it in his iron arms, yet he greatly desired not to hurt the girl. He was torn between a desire to shake her soundly, and a desire to caress her. He knew if he came any nearer her sword would be sheathed in his heart. He had seen Valeria kill too many men in border forays and tavern brawls to have any illusions about her.

  "Blast your soul, you hussy!" he exclaimed in exasperation. "I'm going to take off your—"

   

  ——————————————

  Smack! Mr. Tan’s pointer had moved to the next slightly different figure, and he was speaking pretty lively. “Now, we enter the realm of headlessness, where we begin to reverse the perception problem through a willed expansion of the individual’s sense of “I” beyond the egoic point in the head. This guy still sees a world with objects and boundaries, but he begins to see them as connected within his consciousness too. The boundaries don’t divide so much as join. There’s less good and bad, less happy or sad, but all are recognized as opposites necessarily supporting each other in inter-connectedness. And perhaps most important, this includes the boundary of the Self, as well. The individual’s identity expands and includes… Now within the overall headless stage we have several sub stages which evolve more or less like…

   

  ——————————————

  "What's that?"

  It was Sally who exclaimed, but they both started violently, and Joe wheeled like a cat, his great sword flashing into his hand. Back in the forest had burst forth an appalling medley of screams—the screams of horses in terror and agony
. Mingled with their screams there came the snap of splintering bones.

  "Lions are slaying the horses!" cried Sally.

  "Lions, nothing!" snorted Joe, his eyes blazing. "Did you hear a lion roar? Neither did I! Listen to those bones snap—not even a lion could make that much noise killing a horse—"

   

  ——————————————

  “Okay,” Mr. Tan boomed. “Here’s the finale. Here we encounter the highest level of human consciousness.”

  “It’s not the highest,” Danny cut in.

  “No?”

  “There are always higher dimensions. This is just as far as I’ve gone myself—so far.”

  “That’s interesting; I hadn’t expected that. Okay. So, this figure, as we’ve diagramed here transcending his physicality, represents the next—but not final—dimension of consciousness, which our subject calls Heavenly Mind, which represents to him a state of pure formless consciousness, without any egoic anchor or psychological boundaries. At this point, the individual has undergone a complete transpersonal flip. No this, no that. No me, no them. No inside, no outside. Everything encompassed. Everything unified. No problems. All is one movement. And the “I” sense goes from form based to identification with the whole, with everything and no-thing. When this occurs, we find…

   

  ——————————————

   

  "Sit down," Joe grunted at Sally, catching her by her wrist and pulling her down on his knee. He took her sword from her hand and shoved it back in it’s sheath. "Sit still and calm down. You'd only break your steel on his scales. He'd gobble you up or smash you like an egg with that spiked tail of his. We'll get out of this jam some way."

  Sally made no reply, nor did she seek to repulse his arm from about her waist. She was frightened, and the sensation was new to Sally of the Red Brotherhood. So she sat on her companion's—or captor's—knee with a docility that would have amazed Zarallo, who had anathematized her as a she-devil out of Hell's seraglio.

  Joe played idly with her red locks, seemingly intent only upon his conquest. Neither the skeleton at his feet nor the monster crouching below disturbed his mind or dulled the edge of his interest—

   

  ——————————————

  “Joe! Quit whispering to yourself. Time to go.”

  “You guys finished finally,” I grumbled, folding over the page where I’d left off.

  “For now,” Danny said. “I’m going to be the subject of some grand academic paper. What’re you calling it, Mr. Tan?”

  “My working title is: Insights of a Teenage Mystic: An Original Transpersonal Cosmology.”

  “Wow,” I said sarcastically. “We’re not going to have to read it in class are we?”

  “No, Joe,” Mr. Tan sighed. “It’ll even take me a few months to complete. You’ll likely be reading Conan in someone else’s class by that time.”

  Danny collected his books into his backpack and held out his hand for the Conan. I said, “Naw, I think I’m going to keep it this evening.”

  As we walked out the door Mr. Tan said, still drawing at the board, “Danny, you said there are even higher dimensions beyond your heavenly concept. If that’s possible and people can get there, what would such a person be?”

  “I don’t know. I just know there’s always more. Isn’t it better that way?”

  “I guess it is. The journey with no end point.” Mr. Tan grinned.

  I slapped the Conan against Danny’s butt. “You guys are really talking nutty. Let’s go.” I pushed him out the door.