The Table of Contents below is too long to display fully. If you click to the right of these Lessons,you'll see the primary source documents displayed under each. These original sessions are a world treasure.
A chain presents a useful image here in part because it’s linear. It’s easy to see and illustrates the step-by-step curriculum Scribe & I currently must follow. To proceed along this chain, I move to you first, Jane. To continue farther, I follow then through you, connecting with each of our friends in turn. But the sequence is both arbitrary and artificial, a construction devised outside of time to aid in our early flying lessons. As you know, Jane, true reality—the universe beyond this global stuffy room—far outstrips a single straight-line image, and no mind can travel its splintered amplitudes. Sometimes I try though anyway—as a masochistic game or thought experiment—to rotate my mental picture-of-a-chain along several perpendicular axes at once, as well as through time, to better approximate the outrageous complexities. What I get in the abstract—and what, in vision, once took Scribe’s breath away—is a vertiginous loom or network, a hyper-net, which forever defies definition, since it continually races away from us in every direction faster than our minds can rush to grasp any part of it. It is utterly unnerving. I can only compare it to the visceral anxiety or trauma one feels in an earthquake, or upon meeting a ghost, events which mock our awkward neural circuitries.
So isn’t wonderful then how in this dizzying hyper-loom, this universe of a billion brothers & sisters & alien uncles, there remains for each of us a single individual, our personal contact, to whom we always come first? That I am bound to you in this manner, Jane, proves (since you are still unborn) my own closest connection traverses the axis of time as well as space. Why, among the billions, you are my contact I do not know—unless (a partial guess) I’ve secured my soul to that moment distant when, wiser & more disciplined, I might serve as your teacher. Even now, here in these letters, I am preparing a face to meet your face. Yet it is also true that few of our friends could ever so greet their contacts (i.e., during life), since most are not contemporaries.
Take Anand, for example, our Indian fakir, who descended one summer without warning or fanfare: Suddenly Scribe found himself immersed in a new practice—composing poetry, he said, through “a different lens,” and entirely without planning. No matter that a thousand years & half the planet juxtapose such disparate lives in apparent opposition: Anand’s green world of waters provides for Scribe his first draught of the limitless ocean.
As no doubt, Jane, you offer me similar foundation. But let’s not confuse contact with mere inspiration: You are not my muse—you neither speak for me nor through me—nor are you the object of meditations. Instead, you tender that place of refuge where, when I’m lost, I recur by default to my deepest sustaining sources. The loom presents a maze of masks we try on for size, each upon the rest. But when I need an absolute truth, when I forget who I am and scratch the narrow path back to my most necessary essence, I listen not for my own cry—it’s too easy to deceive myself in narcissistic echoes—but for your voice, Jane. You harbor my sacred well self; and in this sense you offer me less the way out than the way home. You are anamnesis.
But where are you, Jane? And how do I sift the noise for your small voice, infant or otherwise, when my own mind is such an acoustic chaos, a blur of unintended thought, unable to direct itself or stay singularly immersed for more than a few seconds?
Fortunately, there are always clues. Even as I fumble for the right words, even as I stalk my interior landscape, scanning the horizon for your absent face, I catch myself imagining certain settings only, certain arbitrary & tell-tale conditions: outdoors, for example, rather than in a room; serenity, not intensity, nor even fun. I might not come to you straight away, but by uncovering these settings and these conditions I incrementally deduce your direction. And while often a difficult process, this holds especially true when I am most surprised by what I find. Each time we’ve spoken at the ouija board, for instance, others in our group have always been present, Scribe and our guide at the very least. Yet I never think of you in this way—among others. We are always alone. We have no agenda nor extraneous concerns, no time constraints; and just our being together, within the lucent envelope of contact, far exceeds the words which go unspoken.
Your hair, Jane. I know your hair. Not its color, but how it
smells and how it feels warmed by the sun. I do not see your smile,
but I know its warmth too. We sit together as I last saw you in a
dream, on a broad boulder by a mountain waterfall: no sound,
but pines; also sand—great grains of granite piling in the
fingerholds & crevices (brighter than scalpels & carried about
on the heads of large, but benign ants). Shadows of pine needles
in sharp focus; your bare left shoulder, blurred….
Never mind that I got it wrong—that this image of you in its magical setting was not, as I supposed, the long-promised Picture of Jane, but turned out merely to be a construct of my erratic (not erotic) dream life. (Nor did I ever glimpse your face.) Though the setting, objects & likeness of you were but symbols in a dream landscape, the emotional connection to you, the impact of contact, was entirely genuine. Such a feeling, like love, cannot be invented, can’t be faked. The warmth of your presence and subsequent pang which melted me upon waking affects me even now. I miss you, Jane.
But why you more than the others? Why, when each member of our circle is equally necessary to the rest—and I love each equally—why don’t I miss the others as well? It’s not even a feeling I consider. Could it be that I’m a softy for little girls? Why yes, perhaps I am (which is odd since I don’t particularly even like young children). Let us now acknowledge that your little-girl face was contrived for our benefit. Since our first meeting you’ve presented us with a number of faces, each one older & wiser & increasingly articulate. No doubt you could have donned these faces in any order, so the appearance of aging is a didactic conceit. (In contrast, the so-called flyers of our circle consistently appear as voices of experience & authority, ageless & wise, though certainly they too must embrace their own infancies.) Your child’s face then served to provoke my paternal instincts, as well as a Pavlovian teacher-response. Regardless of my personal tastes, children are vulnerable and prompt immediate attention. And as you well know, now that I have two daughters of my own, I am especially attuned (& susceptible) to the needs of young girls. For me your sweet innocence concealed both a fishing lure and a cattle prod. (This explanation, however, doesn’t fit Scribe’s situation; he has Anand.)
Not that your tender face was pure pretense. On the contrary, little Janie was very much with us, not just her mask, and what could be more genuine than a child? In casting yourself in lamb’s clothing—beyond merely casting a net over our attentions—you reminded us of the child within, the spontaneous actor in each of us buried under years of social conditioning. —Please recognize I’m not here spouting a cliché, since I’m not just speaking metaphorically. I refer to literal identities which exist forever both in & outside of time, and which, under certain conditions, reveal themselves in pointed loci of the brain (through electrode-stimulation, for example). Obviously it is not our aim to become children again, to suffer ignorance & require protection. But integrating those past selves with our present ones, seeking unity in all the possible future ones—surely this is our sacred consummation.
Even now your face reveals further layers. Those child’s needs, which sounded a bell & sent me salivating for contact, hinted at a deeper vulnerability, one that neither Scribe nor I could have then understood. (I’m only beginning to make sense of it now.) Yes, Jane, we knew you came to us from the future, that you were not yet born, but this was no surprise to us. Recall, my questions clearly anticipated this scenario. After all, we’d already confirmed the existence of our own eternal natures; and if, outside of time, we could talk to the souls of the distant past, then logic dictated future friends had to be equally accessible. Ironically, what I didn’t grasp was the importance of life itself. For example, when compared to the whole of Eternity, how can life, this existential linear blip, carry any weight at all?
But it does. Life, in fact, is the focal point, the crucible, where choices in time shape & define each soul and where time is the medium for human choosing. We fashion our existences out of the clay of time. Funny, but I think my talent for metaphysical systems actually interfered here with my understanding. I saw the big picture too easily—in this case, that all times must coexist simultaneously (or at least contiguously): Just as our long-dead friends are, in their own times, alive & exerting their free wills, so you exist also, Jane, in your time, doing much the same thing—living, learning, making decisions, etc. And when seen from this distant perspective, your situation appears no different from the rest of ours. But this view ignores the immediate necessity & in-your-face truth: “It is no good pretending that the task is foreordained” (your words).
If Scribe & I are just beginning our apprenticeships and can look forward to years of arduous discipline, then you, Jane, have even further to go. At least he and I have crossed the event horizon: We’ve entered our karass, the Jewel Net, and have chosen eternity over life’s more ephemeral gifts. You, on the other hand, have not yet chosen anything, and you may still, if you wish, pursue a separate path entirely (breaking our hearts in the process). I suspect somewhere in your own lifetime you’re soaring along quite gracefully, taking the world by storm; but from my immediate point of view, that of the myopic & temporally challenged, your very soul remains up for grabs.
And this is precisely why I need you, Jane—because you need me. If things go wrong, I might lose you; and worse, you could lose yourself. Now I can’t begin to disentangle the probabilities if, for instance, you don’t become the Jane I already know. But I do see that your future involves me personally, and I will always hold dear your very first words:
[Albion] I KNOW YOU JANE
YOULL MEET ME LATER
Because we will likely meet in life, I, the current albion flailing in time, finally must awaken to the awesome responsibility I bear. I am forbidden to prevent you from making your own mistakes, but I can & must prepare myself right now so that any negligence on my part casts no shadow over your development. (I always labor much harder for others than for myself.) I cannot guarantee your safe passage, but I will work with every fiber of my being to ensure you have the opportunities to choose wisely. Ideally, of course, I might be an inspiration to you. I might even make all the difference.
And in the process maybe I can become a better person, more human, more myself. As our circle’s albion, I incline to the grand perspective. Left on a high perch to my own devices, I might even content myself to witness the advance & retreat of civilizations, like glaciers, with bemused indifference. But you bring me down, Jane; you anchor me. Without your contact I may have little reason to choose one planet over another. But you make me care. And because I need to save you, I choose to save myself.
Until we touch…
Hail Aliah
§
albionspeak: a draught of language (2.1)
Letter to Jane - On Contact
February 1996
Dear Jane,
When we first met, you could barely talk. How old was your face then—three? four? Scribe pointed out with amusement how methodical you were in spelling out each word, your meticulous cursive, and how you felt it necessary to insert your name into every message, even mid-sentence. Of course you had me confused for a while when you said we’d already met in a dream. I didn’t recall any such dream. And what would be the point of Josef’s sending me one (you called it “a picture”) if I couldn’t remember it—carry it in my wallet, so to speak, and draw it out when feeling lonely? Fortunately, my confusion was short-lived: It seems you had your timeline a little off. That dream, your picture, is still in my future, just as you yourself are in my future. You were reminding me of something that hasn’t happened yet. Isn’t it interesting how I was less surprised than amused by your error—how from your vantage past & future could be so easily transposed and that such a mistake made perfect sense to me? Sure, I said to myself, a disembodied Goldilocks flitting about the fifth dimension might easily lose track of time—what could be more natural? On the other hand, when it comes to information received at the ouija board, I don’t quite believe in error.
While too young to fathom our curriculum, you engaged us nonetheless. Your endearing presence, made flesh through disarming utterances, impaled us to the zero: contact. Contact anchors the first cry of consciousness—where Nothing takes form & is made articulate—by providing a listener, the contact, who perceives the cry. “In the beginning was the Word,” says the Bible. Goethe disagreed and wrote, “In the beginning was the Deed.” Yet no creation exists entirely as an island; and since nothing can create its own antecedent, no beginning ever was.
You, Jane, are my contact.
alert
To make contact then is to enact a small genesis—not the birth of a universe, but the atom on which all else rests. We choose a single point, these baseline axial coordinates, to be the rock on which we build our church, carve a figure, or inscribe a monument. And yet this must be living rock, animate. It must both perceive & accept our intent towards it, as it must, in turn, perceive the threads which it intends toward other points distant. Otherwise the contact itself will run adrift; and to secure oneself to flotsam, to such a false contact—no matter how large or dazzling in appearance—is to extend the self by smoke & mirrors and engorge the abyss. If there is no opposing shore, there can be no bridge. (Later we may discuss idolatry .)
Contact describes both an event and an ontological condition. I often imagine a great chain, a living series of interdependent souls, where each individual is represented by a single polished link. Here contact defines neither the links themselves nor the intent which forged them. Rather it states a condition of connectedness without which the chain is simply loose scrap metal. Unlike the laws of Newton or Einstein, manifest in this universe as grand, overarching principles, contact names that quantum state which connects every link at every intersection to the next one in the chain. (Hence, “all contact is local.”) And just as a disconnected chain is not a chain, the link that isn’t linked is not (eternally) a link.
∞!
Images & Attributions (in order of appearance)
1. Jewel Mandala (2) (center enlarged): D.C. Albion 1994
2. Jewel Mandala (2): D.C. Albion 1994
3. Albion Glyph: "Glad Day" or "The Dance of Albion," William Blake, c.1794
4. Anchor & Chain
5. (a-c) Definition chain
6. Lock & key on chain pile Photo via <a href="https://visualhunt.com/">Visualhunt</a>
7. Red & silver chain links
8. Silver chain w/ red link
9. (beautiful & labyrinthine) Gold & silver chain mail jewelry
http://www.mailleartisans.org/articles/images/621-viperscaletut.jpg, fair use (permission sought)
10. Lock adrift in keys
11. Heart lock & key (chastity belt?) http://hdwall.us/wallpaper/skeletons_locks_keys_skeleton_padlock_desktop_800x600_wallpaper-314463.jpg, fair use
12. Silver chain to sky http://images.freeimages.com/images/previews/8b0/chain-1309227.jpg
13. Gold links close-up, source unknown (ubiquitous), fair use