Spirituality and the Ego

Blog - November

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Sculpting an Initiation


It took many years for the stage of life to be set up just right so that the Hurricane Period would occur with the intensity that it did. Just when it began potentiating I cannot know for sure. To this day, it feels like it fit perfectly into life's pre-written script, sculpted outside of Time, and masterfully orchestrated.


There are many ways to tell the story, for it came about not for a single purpose but for many. Exactly what happened could also be interpreted in a wide variety of ways. Were all the perspectives to be seen at once, they might collectively make a circle. And so I shall continue telling the story in short spurts, so that I can circle around and around in the hope that, eventually, a 360 degree perspective is presented, which is what the story deserves.


The difficulty I have in explaining the Hurricane Period stems from the wide variety of experiences I had during the 3 weeks in which it occurred. This was, properly speaking, my Initiation as a Spiritual Seeker. I witnessed many portals opening up, many landscapes of thought flashing in my mind like lightning, vistas that I am still exploring to this day.


Spirituality and the Ego


From one perspective, the Hurricane Period was an unfolding of lessons illuminating the nature of the ego. There are many definitions of the word "ego" and quite often it is linked to matters of self-esteem, or too much of it. From my experience, I personally prefer to bundle such an interpretation of the ego with the function of maintaining one's integrity. More formally speaking, I would define the ego as the autonomous, largely unconscious aspect of the personality which is responsible for developing, solidifying, and upholding the integrity and the identity of the personality. As one lives a life and the experiences affect a psychological movement in the personality, the ego is what is responsible for solidifying the changes so that they are integrated with the overall identity of the personality.


The ego is usually defined as the inflated sense of pride with respect to others, but to me this is just one version that an ego can assume, usually because the ego, being largely unconscious, autonomous, and therefore susceptible to a high degree of influence from the emotions, is greatly influenced by the good feeling behind finding pride in the self. There are many spiritualists who make it a central point that the ego must ultimately be destroyed in order to achieve adequate progress on the spiritual path. A strong ego can be detrimental when it prevents movement where movement is due for growth and exploration. However, I believe that a weakened ego or a self-destructive one can be just as deleterious as an improperly configured ego, for it results in ambivalence, fragmentation, and the inability to build and grow in reaction to life's lessons. That the ego can be both detrimental and helpful on the spiritual path invites us to explore its nature in order to evolve.


The Emergence of a Dragon


The Hurricane Period marked the end of my employment at my first job after graduating from college. I joined just as the internet boom was beginning to peak and quit months before the stock market began to plummet, just before the year 2000. The company was at 30 employees when I joined, and reached 250 by the time I left a year and a half later, only to gradually return to its original size after the market crashed. Because of the rapid growth, people like me, who had hardly any work experience, filled leadership positions that would have ordinarily required much higher levels of seniority. We certainly worked hard enough to do the best job we could, but our professional roles, like the technology stock prices at the time, were inflated and thus they were subject to correction, just as a bloated ego invites itself to be put in check. My company was situated in the famous Multi-Media Gulch in San Francisco, and the entire area was bustling with internet startups trying to go public and cash out. One day, I had a vision of dinosaurs parading the area and this was my first hint of the up-and-coming collapse.


Around this time, I wrote a short story that depicted a group of highly reputable men that gathered together from throughout the land. The purpose of their meeting was to discuss a very startling new discovery; that a real-life dragon, hitherto thought to be a purely mythical creature, had been spotted in a cave.


My inner life at the time was taking on a strange shape. Due to the intensity of the workload and the resulting deeply personal involvement in the job, I was developing my identity largely around being a professional software engineer, while my deeper self had nothing to do with such a deviation from the spiritual and artistic life. A chasm within me began to pronounce its existence and I started sensing a self-destructive side of me develop.


One day, a message surfaced in my mind that said that I was a dragon slayer. I did not know what that meant. I asked a friend of mine and she said that I was battling the self, or the ego, that it was a commonly experienced passage of the spiritual path.


The Dismantling of the Ego


During one of my lunch breaks I met a fascinating character, who I will call friend s. He exhibited a high degree of intelligence and over time I realized that he possessed an enormous amount of personal power. We would meet from time to time for lunch and discuss various topics such as spiritual philosophy and art. These areas were not exactly his domain, for he was very business-minded, but he would take whatever idea I'd introduce and run with it to the far reaches of the earth, usually returning a week later with a magnificent response. Over time, however, I began to notice a dark side emerge in his character. There surfaced vague elements of competitiveness, machismo, greed, and a deeply felt dislike of others. My own character was not finely tuned, to say the least, at this time, and I naively resonated with some of these traits; they existed inside me to some degree and his influence made them come out. And in this manner, my ego moved further in a direction that was dissonant with the deeper parts of my psyche, as my own negative side became more and more accentuated.


My self-destructive side continued manifesting and, whenever I was alone, it was common for me to feel a strange pain that was not physical but one that I can only describe poetically to be a "laceration of my dream body". My solitude had always demanded a high level of purity in order that I reach my higher states of mind and it is still common to this day that a stretch of solitude begins with a period of discomfort, if not a full-blown, anxiety-filled struggle. But, the pain during this period was becoming unbearably intense and a profound sense of weakness began to overtake me. I had a vision that complemented my state, showing a large bridge-like structure whose steel hangers were being dismantled one by one. This was what my ego was going through. Another vision that stood out was of a snake made of blue light readying for the attack.



One night, I was in an especially visionary state. My visions opened up to a point of clarity and I was asked a question that went something like this: "Would you rather continue developing a work-related ego or would you rather return to being an artist?" My obvious response was that I wanted to return to my art. And the vision said: "In three months, you will experience your downfall at work, after which you will enjoy a year and a half of artistic creativity." I saw an image of two parallel lines, one representing the ego of the artist, the other representing the ego of my professional self. The line symbolizing the latter abruptly curved at one point to the line of the artist, as if depicting me slipping through a worm-hole.


Gradually, my relationship with friend s became subliminally confrontational and there were problems with some of the others at work as well, except at the job the negativity was even more hidden. My own ego transformed further into the negative, much like a puppet maneuvered by invisible strings, and my self-destructive side manifested exponentially as a result. My constitution became more and more frail until I felt like an open wound.


In exactly three months after I had my vision, the hierarchical structure of my department at work shifted and, as a result, I was suddenly completely stripped of my power as a technical lead. The blow to my ego was so acute and so threatened did I feel psychologically that I mustered up all my spiritual power in order to cope with the event. The Hurricane Period opened up with full force as a result. As I noted in earlier posts, I invited the movement so as to evolve as quickly as possible.


My ego now mutilated, I felt like a ghost without its shell of a body. The final release into a state of selflessness with respect to the job, however, took much spinning about in the hurricane for the ghost to really come out. The speed of the psychological movement was quite frightening since I sometimes went through hell and heaven in a matter of seconds. It took hardly a day or two that all sense of personal stability was lost.



My visions, however, were now full-blown. Whenever I failed to follow their instructions, I fell back into a hellish pit of turbulence, the oscillations now random, chaotic, and painful. Whenever I was able to pay close attention to my visions, I sped through insight after insight after insight, the oscillations taking the form of upward-rising spirals, possessing a poetic order, enigmatically intelligent.


In the movie "the Matrix", the characters while plugged into the matrix could ask people on the other side to download information into their brain. The download involved large amounts of data all jam-packed into their brain within seconds. This was similar to what I experienced but if the information came too fast, it wouldn't register consciously, so the speed rarely came anywhere as close. The form of learning was typically as I described in earlier posts, that of spiraling through oscillations centered around the subject at hand, combined with much synchronistic conditioning to help me interpret life's events as if I were in a dream.


Contrast Building


The Ra Material, which could very well contain the most advanced teachings on metaphysics readily available to the public today, upon discussing the steps necessary to understand mental discipline states that the self must be examined and the polarity in our reality must be internalized.


Where you find patience within your mind you must consciously find the corresponding impatience and vice versa. Each thought a being has, has in its turn an antithesis. The disciplines of the mind involve, first of all, identifying both those things of which you approve and those things of which you disapprove within yourself, and then balancing each and every positive and negative charge with its equal. The mind contains all things. Therefore, you must discover this completeness within yourself.


Hurricane Thinking took such exploration of polarities and accelerated the process to the nth degree, and it all came about instinctively. It is not a form of thinking I would advise, for it can rip apart a personality as it did mine. I am sure the Ra Material spoke of internalizing the polarities in a calm and meditative manner. But, one of the main benefits of experiencing the Hurricane Period was that I was able to see life's evolutionary process, which typically occurs over a long period of time, accelerated to the degree that the enlightening psychological movements inherent in life's evolutionary process could be traced and witnessed in action. The increased speed made the evolutionary process visible as an upward-spiraling movement.


A month ago, the following words surfaced in my mind: "contrast building". I will do my best to define the term: "contrast building" is the developing of biases through experiencing contrasting states of mind, perspectives, or processed catalysts of the mind. It is similar to the gathering of a group of individuals with contrasting views on a specific subject to debate relevant issues until a conclusion is reached, except that contrast building occurs entirely within the self as it travels psychologically over time.


The ego, in addition to its other functions, slows down the movement through the upward spiral (upward if indeed one is learning life's lessons and progressing in the subject(s) at hand) and, in doing so, anchors the individual and gives her/him time to more thoroughly explore the proclivity of any point in the spiral. The personality, then, having had the time and ego-based involvement to process, synthesize, and integrate the specific proclivity, or anchor point, then moves on to the next point in the spiral with a solid backing of experience when the next movement goes into effect. And thusly contrast building keeps adding to the foundation of the spiral so that one does not fall back and re-learn lessons that have already been experienced. In contrast, during the Hurricane Period, there were a number of lessons that I had to learn over and over again simply because the speed of the movement made it too difficult to assimilate and integrate the revelations.


Therefore, it is my opinion that, contrary to popular spiritual teachings that encourage the dissolution of the ego, the process of balancing which is central to spiritual development relies to a large degree upon a healthy ego so that the necessary solidification takes place that enables one to become deeply involved in the lessons at hand.


I currently view the ego as an aspect of the personality which attempts to emulate the process of crystallization, but typically does so in a clumsy manner, being largely influenced by the emotions. The good feeling of self-pride bloats the ego and the personality takes on an identity that goes beyond its true boundaries. The bad feeling of low self-esteem makes the ego cower inward and become self-destructive, causing the disintegration or fragmentation of the personality. Either state of the ego, or the oscillation between the two is the sign of an undisciplined ego and can indeed hamper spiritual growth. But, this is merely a sign that the ego needs to be better configured. The question is: How does one tune the ego? I believe the answer lies behind the fact that the ego responds to the emotions.


Max Freedom Long is the author of an excellent book titled "The Science Behind Miracles". In it, he delineates three separate aspects of a human being: the Higher Self, the Conscious (or Middle) Self, and the Lower Self. The Lower Self is comprised of the emotions and other automated, unconscious portions of the psyche. He then postulates that the middle, conscious self cannot directly influence the lower self in a rational manner, through logical communication. There has to be some sort of impact for the lower self to change its natural course. The communication must use to a certain degree the language of the lower self.


I believe that the ego can be placed in the same category as the Lower Self, and the methods of tuning are largely emotion-based. One can then infer that one of the reasons why living life intensely is so beneficial to spiritual development is that the ego becomes involved in life's lessons and not just the conscious self because life is lived out with a high level of emotional charge. Thus, the ego remains in tune with the lessons and aspirations of the conscious self and there need be no dissonance even when the main drive of the conscious self is towards evolution. The regularization of the personality is the result.


What are some of the feel-good experiences along the spiritual path? Ecstasy is one of them. Does not the feeling of ecstasy reconfigure the ego? In my own experience, it has. It replaces the desire for the relatively stale feeling of self-pride with a marginal flick of the wrist. My ego is driven towards spiritual development, mainly because it wants to experience the ecstasy again and again. The interesting thing is that when I go without experiencing ecstasy or similar feelings for a long period of time, my ego resorts to self-pride to get its kick. Take me back to a higher state of mind, and my ego quickly resorts to its humble configuration.


Archetypes and Power


Another point of interest I will add here with regards to experiencing life with an ego torn apart was that I felt as if I beheld the archetypes, which I can only describe as pure power, power that affects our every experience. My visions gave me protection from their power, but when my visions were absent I felt as frail as can be. When my visions returned I felt the power of the archetypes run through me, and thus my strength oscillated in and out.


Today, it is a prominent question in my mind whether the oscillations of the Hurricane Period came from the the visions themselves, or that the movement came from the archetypes while my visions directed me so that the influence of specific archetypes were called forth through my visions-influenced proclivity. I am beginning to believe that the latter is correct; in fact, a visionary message surfaced a few months ago saying: "we speak through the archetypes".


A Precursory Look at Building the New Ego


One night during the Hurricane Period, my visions told me to go see a movie called "Fight Club" which was playing at the theaters at that time. A part of me found that movie entertaining but in the middle of it, my visions suddenly told me to get up and leave the theater and I did.


A few days later, I was hanging out with a friend of mine at work on a cigarette break (the same friend who told me the meaning of the term "dragon slayer"). I mentioned the movie to her and she asked me how I liked it. I replied that it seemed well done, but I walked out in the middle of it because my intuition told me so.


"You mean you missed the ending? But, that's the best part!" She was practically shouting.


"Really? Perhaps, I'm supposed to hear the ending from you," I said.


The movie was about a bunch of guys who got together and formed a fight club, for the simple reason that they could meet up and get into fights with each other. It was about the wonders of male testosterone and all the derivative complications it could produce such as machismo, maintaining suppressed aggression, and the like.


My friend proceeded to tell me the way the movie ended. Do not read this paragraph if you do not want the ending spoiled. The fight club started getting out of hand and instead of containing the violent adventures amongst themselves, they turned into destructive exploits against public society. Right before the climaxing finale of the destructive behaviour (something about blowing up a bomb, I believe), the main character realizes that the other members of the club were but figments of his own imagination, that throughout the entire movie he was simply fighting his own self. Hmmm...very interesting.


The cigarette break was over and I went back to my desk. Right then and there, I got a phone call and it was friend s. He proceeded to tell me how he had wanted to punch me in the face earlier that day while we were having lunch because I had disclosed some secret I had forgotten about in front of his colleague from work. It was not my usual experience to hear a good friend talk to me like that. In fact, it was my first.


My instincts (or my visions) kicked in, especially having just been told the ending of the "Fight Club" movie (which was an excellent example of synchronistic conditioning), and I retained an immaculately positive demeanour. I had also just found out that day that the job he had had his friend offer me would entitle him to almost 20% of my rate per hour, instead of me pocketing all the money. Instead of being mad with him for his hidden intentions, I insisted that he stick to the same plan if I were to take the job. I emailed him repeatedly reiterating my insistence, even adding an "I love you, brother" in one of them, and he called me back in tears begging me to stop harassing him. I suggested that we get together for dinner later that evening in order to clear up the confusion between us. As I drove to the street corner where we were supposed to meet, my visions told me quite clearly that he wasn't going to show up. Nevertheless, I waited for an hour at the corner purely as an expression of my devotion, as a Gesture to Spirit, as Castaneda's don Juan would say.


(Were I to experience such an episode again, I might not take on the same positive stance, with such absolute purity. I now realize that I was playing with fire, for I was calling upon the Archetypes. This is the closest I've gotten to using sorcery with another human being, albeit unconsciously. I cannot say for sure that this is related, but he came down with an illness that lasted many months after this episode. I had a number of dreams that told me that I had caused his illness, albeit indirectly. One can either see it that way or interpret it as a mere coincidence. I, myself, commit to neither interpretation.)


I would describe this episode as being in the "Eye of the Hurricane", for this was when I was completely rooted to the spot, untouched and unmoving, as the positive and negative forces I was dealing with were completely out in the open for me to see, racing after each other like a dog trying to catch its tail. Such polarity builds much potential. It was not too long before I lost my foothold in the positive stance and I got swept back into the oscillation, and throughout the Hurricane Period I alternated back and forth between periods of extreme turbulence and periods of very solid stability. During those times that I was firmly rooted were critical periods that usually involved crucial interaction with others. For example, I was worried stiff that I would be caught in a bout of turbulence during my job interviews and thus have difficulty landing new work, but every time I really needed to be, I was solid like a brick. The "orchestration" of this period was impeccably tight.


I feel the need to reiterate that the degree of negativity that I was experiencing at this time was not so great when compared to what some people go through in more (much more) traumatic sitautions. The marked difference is the degree of intensity with which one lives life, and also to what extent one's most basic and fundamental proclivity strives for purity and the heights. Back then, I had just come out of a college life of sheltered purity in solitude where I kept up my intensity to the maximum, with little understanding of how or even why to tone it down given how fruitful life can be while retaining this proclivity, especially as an artist. Coupled with the necessity to retain my personal purity in order to reach my higher states, the slightest negativity which entered the circumference of my psyche had quite far-reaching, destabilizing effects on my ego, which, although I wasn't aware of it at the time, retained its heights largely through positive polarization. To state this more accurately: the solidification of any aspect of negative polarization as a part of my identity automatically started a dismantling process in which the ego started to crumble. As the Hurricane Period progressed, my personality started regressing to that of a child. And as I wrote in "Human Erasure" months later, I was reborn into "a new form of infancy".


The Philadelphia Experiment


In "L I F E and Extreme Astronautics", I mentioned the article titled "The Philadelphia Experiment" which David Wilcock had written. The synchronicities leading up to reading this article are worthy of note, which seemed to spotlight its contents so that I would pay close attention. Wilcock can be described as a type of theoretical physicist who was largely self-taught through massive research of the scientific literature, some of which is very cutting edge. Although Wilcock is someone I regard very highly, I am not sure how much of the scientific discourse in this article is in line with mainstream science and thus the reader's own critical discrimination is encouraged.


I came across this article a few months ago and I emailed it to myself so that I would skim through it at work if I felt the need to take a break. Earlier that week, I was contemplating the mechanics of Hurricane Thinking and I was wondering in which direction one is flung after experiencing a quick oscillation and why. There are some movements in consciousness that the psyche accepts so that they become sticky (in which case the ego solidifies around the new proclivity so that it becomes a part of one's identity); others are on some level rejected and swing consciousness back to the departure point or further beyond it. If all people oscillated in the same fashion over varying lengths of time, then the argument stood that the pendulum ultimately swung one towards the Truth. I focused on this question till my entire being resonated with the pursuit of finding the answer.


While at work, I was contemplating the issue when I got an image like a diagram that seemed to depict the roadmap for an arbitrary oscillation. The image then changed so that the skeletal arrangement of the paths taken could be seen to comprise a circular structure with one line that led up and to the right. In my lingo, a path to the right constituted the positive path, and also the final destination of the oscillation, the grand finale, so to speak. That very instant I glanced out of my office and saw a woman walking across the street. She was taking off her jacket and she did so curiously while her right arm was stretched up and to the right, in a very similar fashion to the image that had just surfaced in my mind. I then recalled the quote by Ra about shedding that which was no longer necessary as one progresses down the evolutionary path and she seemed to be symbolically doing just that with her jacket. My story "Human Erasure" was about deliberately escaping the human domain and it was born out of the Hurricane Period.


Perceiving the synchronized events, I remembered Wilcock's article since synchronicity was one of the commonly discussed topics on his site and user forum. I opened his article and one of the first words I read were: "...if you create a strong-enough flow of current between a negative and positive pole, you will get an anti-gravity ‘thrust’ that starts propelling your device in whatever direction the positive pole is pointing."


I have always been interested in seeking the parallels between properties and processes in consciousness and the scientific observations of our physical world. This seemed like a potential correspondence, especially if "the strong-enough flow of current" was seen to represent living life with great intensity and an anti-gravity effect was likened to the elevation of one's state of mind. In "Human Erasure", Astronaut X escapes Earth's gravity, which represents the Human Domain. During the Hurricane Period, the oscillations were rapid psychological movements between opposite polarities, and I experienced states of mind and psychic abilities that I never imagined to be possible, in addition to periods of profound enlightenment, ecstasy, and forms of mentation that I now like to describe as "cosmic thinking" (more on this later).


Wilcock explains how an aircraft that resembles a UFO would be constructed based on this anti-gravity effect. "...You’d have the entire bottom of the ship be a negative plate, and the small sphere at the very top of the ship as the positive plate. You can navigate the ship by breaking up the negative plate into a series of pie-shaped sections and varying the current flow between them." This explains why so many UFO crafts look like round discs. The picture below from the article looked remarkably similar to the image which surfaced in my mind when I was contemplating the mechanics of Hurricane Thinking (the similarity could have been due to the fact that I had glanced at the picture earlier that day (I don't remember if I did or not) and thus the re-surfacing of the image in my mind was a form of synchronistic conditioning that highlighted the connection):




The article proceeds to talk about what allegedly occurred at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard during the Second World War. Basically, "strange ‘warp’ effects were being observed" at an arc-welding facility which used extremely high voltage to weld metal plates. "What they saw was truly unprecedented. With the electrical blast came an equally intense 'optical blackout'. The sudden shock of the intense electric weld impulse was indeed producing a mysterious optical blackening of perceptual space...The more outrageous fact was that the effect permeated the control room, causing 'retinal blackout' even when personnel were shielded by several protective walls...Workmen began noticing that tools and other weighty items, left on the floor or around the chamber, were somehow 'misplaced' during the heavy arc discharge process."


The article then proceeds to discuss time-space, which I've already delved into in previous posts, but I will summarize the term again here as the flip-side of the space-time fabric through which we experience our ordinary reality. Instead of 3 dimensions of space and one dimension of time, time-space has 3 dimensions of time and one of space. Back to the article:


...with a strong enough high-voltage current, you can bend space PAST the ‘crossing point’ of light, and reach ‘crescendo’. At that point you have created a direct portal into time-space. When any person or thing in our reality transitions into time-space, it becomes invisible to our perspective.

A vortex into time-space may appear as a jet-black "hole" in the space in front of you, a slate-gray surface as in the case of certain stargate technologies, or as a mirage-like bubbling ‘lens’ effect within the room around you in other cases I’m aware of.

You can go THROUGH time-space to instantly travel anywhere in our space or time...


I wrote "Human Erasure" many years before I was introduced to the notion of time-space. Recall that Astronaut X awakes to find himself orbiting the moon, following an inevitable trajectory through Space, which is the flip-side of the way we experience our reality, in that we move inevitably forward through Time. He begins to go back and forth in time to recall parts of his life, and eventually begins to recall various versions of his life that never happened, or that occurred in parallel realities. This was where the story was becoming too complex for me to complete writing it and I eventually had to quit for fear of distorting the archetypal patterns behind the piece by using my own, all-too-human imagination to fill in the blanks.


In any case, since the story ultimately describes one man's psychological journey out of space-time into time-space, the question is: What did this man do in order to enter time-space? Keep in mind that this story is the fictional equivalent to my own real-life story of having gone through the Hurricane Period and, a few months later, slipped into the most ethereal period of my life, one which, without exaggeration, rendered all previous and later experiences pale in comparison.


The answer to the question can be summarized by the term "extreme astronautics". Just as extreme measures were taken to create the time-space portal in the naval shipping yard of Wilcok's article, Astronaut X utilized similarly extreme maneuvours to escape the human domain, just as I brought on the Hurricane Period to accelerate the evolutionary process to the maximum.


But, before I delve more into the "Human Erasure" story, I want to introduce my previous works of fiction. In most of them, the theme of invisibility (or transparency) is present as a highly enigmatic leitmotif, the mystery of which is un-penetratable. Invisibility in my fiction is what I now understand to be the entrance into time-space. Therefore, this theme existed since the early days, but it was not thoroughly dealt with until the story of Astronaut X emerged.


The discussion of entering time-space from a scientific perspective does not diminish the quality of mystery I find in this topic. And I believe that this observation stresses the enigmatic quality of our existence, especially when we research the far-reaching extremities of consciousness and our relation to the cosmos at large.


The artist in me wasn't truly active until my late teenage years. In a sense, that's when I was truly born. Quite appropriately, my first story was narrated in the voice of a child. The boy had a friend named Timothy who would grow transparent and disappear from time to time. At a certain stage of the boy's growth, he began to become transparent too and this signaled that it was time for them both to venture out into the great forest, where they eventually grew into the size of giants. (That my characters became giants when they reached the "other side" is a repeating theme and I will discuss this in depth over time.)


I also began another story at around the same period about a woman named Thea who represented 'the most obscure form of night.' 'Tales of Crimson and the Child of Thea' followed; the anima gave birth to a baby girl. Crimson is an adolescent boy who in many ways represents myself a few years before and right after the Hurricane Period.


Crimson is a compulsive fire-spitter, in a magical way. His fire has the ability to transform a building or any other man-made structure into a giant crystal or crystalline sculpture. This only occurs when he is successful, however, and when he is not, the fire burns in a semi-magical way till it scorches the structure black. Crimson's fire-spitting is a metaphor for my art or music making and his tendency towards excess was similar to my own obsessive compulsion to always remain artistically productive.


The following excerpt is perhaps the most central part of the story and it was written after the Hurricane Period:


She found him grappling with a dragon; a luminescent dreamscape creature half-made of fire and the other half golden shards of light stitched together by some other-world god. Throughout the battle, it would oscillate between gaining and losing transparency, as if Crimson had deliberately snatched it from another reality in order to fight the monster in his domain.

Sparks shot out sporadically from the struggle with the beauty of a fountain of jewelry and electric noises whipped through the air with the potency of lightning. And then, a miracle occurred: out from the dragon's mouth, appearing like the masterpiece creation of a genius artist, a long thread of fire manifested and speared itself for hundreds of meters till it hit a tall building two city blocks away. The resulting explosion could scarcely be described in words. The ripples of fire that burst forth changed color and produced undulating waves in such a manner that the beholder of this sight could not help but follow the movement with his entire being. The far away ripples resonated in the Child of Thea's innermost foundations of sobriety to produce a massive shift in state of mind that tummeled her through long forgotten memories of her infancy. They strobed before her and died away almost instantaneously. Suddenly, with amazing swiftness, a sea-horse looking creature of green-hued effervescence flashed into eyesight and started darting about the streets, his eyes shifting back and forth in a wild, searching manner. A vaguely familiar feeling rose up inside of her and watching this creature move about so sporadically almost made her sick to her stomach.

"Was this a toy I used to play with when I was a baby?" she asked herself but the look it had was far too outlandish. Its crazed movements started getting faster and faster until she could only catch sudden glimpses of its whereabouts every few seconds. She felt her insides starting to spin and she instinctively decided to try to focus all her attention on Crimson's fight with his dragon. Gradually, she became more rooted. Her sea-horse looking friend transformed into a marginal oddity that flickered about the streets like a light reflected by the quivering diamond of a necklace.


In the meantime, the dragon had by now shrunk in size. Whatever Crimson was trying to do apparently seemed to work. It was not like its size had proportionately grown smaller, but that some of its limbs had doubled up and folded inward. She grew aware of the unsettling feeling that what she was witnessing did not take place in a manner of minutes, but spanned days or even weeks. She was riveted to her spot while the rest of the world sped by about her, hypnotized by what seemed to be an archetypal process. She felt aware that she was growing into a woman.


Finally, the dragon had been reduced to apparent invisibility and Crimson fell to the floor exhausted. He immediately tried to get up, but his ailing limbs got the better of him and he fell down once again. The Child of Thea left him in peace and walked back home.


The next day, she saw him walking about the streets without the slightest limp or sign of the wear and tear of battle. But, his eyes gleamed curiously with the strong, solidified color of a precious stone though she could not decipher which color it was. He disappeared around a corner.


And on the following day, she again saw him walking around, with the same gleaming eyes and their ambiguous hue. This time he wore a peculiar look of intent on his face so that he was absolutely beaming with energy. He noticed something about the neighborhood and stopped in his tracks. Looking around he seemed to be satisfied with some aspect of his surroundings as if having found a long lost secret garden. And he withdrew inward.


He suddenly took a deep breath and for a split second, nay a microsecond, he entirely disappeared before her very eyes. It happened so quickly that her awareness could barely register the act. To her profound surprise, When he flashed back into existence he was spitting a long line of fire from his mouth that extended smoothly through the air and latched on to a 5-story building. The entire structure lit up in one big burst of alternating colors, like molten jewelry exploding from a sacred volcano. It was a spectacular sight and it transformed the neighborhood into some prehistoric magic ritual performed by the gathering of sorcerers from throughout the land.


That fire-spitting corresponds to my creative projects here suggests that it is the projection of the ego which is responsible for a work of art, even a masterpiece creation. However, Crimson achieves a successful fire spit after temporarily disappearing into time-space (a meta-reality in relation to ours), which reconfigures his ego so that an ego projection can affect crystallization. Crimson first had to grapple with the dragon, to shrink its size. Thus, the ego had to be transformed into a state of relative selflessness and only then could he perform his disappearance act.


That Crimson's ego was a dragon and that of the Child of Thea a seahorse suggests that the nature of the male ego is different than that of the female. But, I would prefer to think of the Child of Thea as a character related to the anima. In my September posting, I wrote of how the anima was represented as a flying horse in my vision of the Pegasus that ultimately fell into the black hole. There is a correspondence here between a seahorse and a pegasus, but not an exact one, probably because the child of Thea is a child. That would also suggest that Crimson's ego represented as a dragon is probably the ego of an adolescent male, with a tad too much creative aggression, as is my character with respect to my obsessive drive to creatively produce.


It is interesting to note that in Freedom Long's book on the relationship between the Lower, Middle, and Higher Selves, The conscious, middle self is only able to communicate with the higher self through the lower self as mediator. In Crimson's case, it is the ego-dragon which is responsible for the fire-spitting. The dragon-ego along with Crimson still have to disappear into time-space, however, to be configured correctly in order to perform a proper fire-spit. Just how Crimson achieves the disappearance is still unclear, but, just before he does so, there is a great look of intent that Crimson exudes, as well as undefinable hue in his eyes.


Just how much the Crimson story conforms to archetypal patterns is a big question mark in my mind. The "Human Erasure" story came with a lot more inspiration. During the creation of some of the scenes, I was seeing the world in white, sometimes my being felt completely drenched in the white light. The merits of that story with regard to the subject of spiritual development in general is questionable, however, for Astronaut X uses sheer aggression (akin to Crimson's look of intent), coupled with what I will later define to be "extreme astronautics", in order to escape the pull of planet Earth, in a similar way as I used aggression and an "Evolution or Bust!" attitude to call forth the Hurricane Period.


Such use of unrestricted aggression to maximize the efficiency of evolution is not an appropriate way to develop oneself spiritually, as I've learned, largely due to the resulting fragmentation of the self, and the negativity that naturally comes with the pain from going through changes at a rate too fast to handle. And so the "Human Erasure" story ends almost nightmarishly.


Astronaut X follows his inevitable trajectory down into a bottomless crater and the story ends with him recalling a car accident he had experienced in his youth due to his reckless driving, an expression for his manic obsession for speed. The undulating lights of the automobiles passing him by while stuck in his wrecked car drive into him the appreciation of the endless oscillations and rythems that are inherent in life itself. Just as the recalling of the memory crescendos with intensity:


Like sharp, needlepoint spears, the vast field of stars broke the crust of his skin to suddenly desiminate him into an unfathomable expansion, the surging wind of a burst celestial body.


The following excerpt from the Crimson tales serves as a necessary precursor to the "Human Erasure" story:


She dreamt of him wedged in a man-sized chunk of crystal; in search for the crystal's fire, the dream said. Why? To melt himself free?


Crimson fossilized in bedrock, such were the perils of mining the earth. She found his manic, tormenting obsession with spitting fire very delusional, very silly. Yet, she was strangely attracted to him for his compulsion. That quality which she found childish also bound her to him with a strength that could only originate from the realm of the supernatural. She longed for him. She would forever stand by his side in hope that one day he would call for her, despite the isolation of his extreme narcissism. For, somehow, as he was held fast in his own festival of mirrors, she would emerge as one of the many stray reflections of his possible selves, the sudden materialization of a forgotten desire surfacing from that part of his depths that linked him with the external world. Yet, she feared that if they were to meet in his inner world, his version of her would suffice and she would at best become the mere replica of an underworld goddess, the stale icon of a living deity of love.


At the time this was written, I was still very much a solitary. There are many reasons why solitude was so attractive, which I shall not delve into here. One of them was that my regularized focus on evolution was simply unmatched by the others I met, and secondly even if they were, my own path was unique and I did not wish to be diverted from my 'work'.


Since much evolutionary catalyst comes from interaction with others, this missing aspect must be compensated in solitude. Crimson's extreme narcissism demanded the creation of his own internal gods and goddesses, his "festival of mirrors". What this translated to was the internalization of polarity. The catalysts that arise from interaction with other selves comes from contrasting views, beliefs, proclivities, and attitudes. In other words, each self has her/his own sets of balances with respect to the various polarities. Evolution in solitude, then, demands the manifestation of an inner dominion, prolifically rich with the contrasting multiplicity of the self.