16.  Consider the Vedas, the holiest texts of Hinduism, so holy that they may only be recited in Sanskrit by Brahmins, and where few in any audience can understand the meaning. The exact sounds, rhythms, and intonations are primary. Consider a Latin mass.

albionspeak: the gates of dis

Lesson 10: Sorcery                        

1. Espera

            April 24, 2021. I begin with today’s date, as I find myself writing once again in realtime, a temporal POV that does not know the exact future, but sees enough to know we are in deep, deep trouble. COVID-19 is still raging, despite almost half the country’s having been vaccinated. I myself am now two weeks past my one-&-done Johnson & Johnson shot and today got my first haircut this calendar year. I am expecting a nice summer window to socialize a bit, see my new grandson for the first time, and travel locally—before the next lethal breakthrough variant arrives next winter. As long as this disease rages globally, no American anywhere is safe.
            That said, life is definitely better with Trump out of the White House. I watched the whole January 6th insurrection from start to finish on my home TV, but was never seriously afraid for Congress, certainly not for America. This was a mob of delusional idiots. Even if such deceived racists had succeeded in holding all Congress hostage, I knew Trump would never “win” back the presidency. So at the time I felt the insurrection was not actually as important as the bigger news that day, when Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock both won their Georgia senate run-offs. 
            So the Republicans lost some close races, picked up some seats in the House, but have responded since then with desperate, unhinged, immoral, and essentially anti-constitutional efforts to disenfranchise every city & every minority. They’re passing the worst laws imaginable in the stupidest, most transparent power grab possible, free in their echo-chamber from any social shame. Florida just passed a law, for example, granting legal immunity to motorists who drive their cars into rioting protesters, where a “riot” may consist of as few as three persons. I recall when the Soviet Union construed a mob similarly. Half of our country is dangerously undemocratic, openly racist, and completely untethered to reality. They believe COVID is a hoax, that Joe Biden stole the election, and half of these people think the Democrats, Hollywood, & the Jewish cabal drink the blood of sex-trafficked children for satanic rites. I can’t make this shit up. The amazing thing is that “someone” did, and millions swallowed it. With armed Americans like these how can we tackle climate change?
            That’s my sorry world context today in a nutshell, on the brink of the unthinkable, precisely because so many people can’t think. And now I’m a flyer in that world, ready to go, to help, to serve humanity. I worked my hardest for four years writing my book/website, learned much, and transformed myself in the process. But my work & efforts have had no impact on anyone else. I have no regrets; indeed I learned so much from my writing. But I’ve touched no one, so I feel pretty useless. Yes, I was a good parent & teacher, which are valuable contributions to the planet; but I’ve been given such special treasures by my teachers, trained so long just to fly: Surely I am meant to give back. To make it “worse”—in this cricket self-analysis—I find myself still “training.” That is, instead of utilizing my writing skills, realized finally after so many years, no, I’ve largely put down my words & laptop in favor of three huge projects that likewise help no one else:

                        1) finally learning piano once & for all

                        2) finally learning Spanish to the point of fluency

                        3) finally painting my Third Drawing, the project most relevant

                                   to this lesson now.

            I do have news, however, a reason for writing here, an update: I’m in espera, which is Step 3 of an ancient 4-part teaching called the Lore of Feeling (not normal feelings). Vilansit taught Scribe & me the Lore of Feeling in 2002, which itself was a sequel to Jane’s analogous teaching the year before called the Lore of Colours. These twin teachings, you might guess, are much more about sorcery and less about abstract metaphysics. For that reason, you’ll understand, I did not introduce them in Volume One of albionspeak, though the main reason I didn’t include these lessons is I was not competent to do so. I’d read my teachers’ words, of course, and had reviewed them many times. But “words without thoughts never to Heaven go.” If you have little experience with colours or feeling, words alone can’t be absorbed. 
            I ended Volume One with Session 56 from 1998, Vilansit’s beautiful story from her own childhood, how she as a born flyer came to enter the Jewel Net by a deep choice, just as Scribe & I both did. It was my happy ending to Volume One, especially as my soul in 1998 was still very much in doubt.
            And 1998—which was mostly as far as I took the ouija sessions in Volume One—coincidentally marked Scribe’s own final year working toward flight. Only after I finished writing did I realize that I presented precisely the sessions I myself most needed to work through. That is, in 1998 I “processed” my teachers’ words as metaphysics rather quickly, but I couldn’t embrace them existentially until 2017. My book/website brought me to flight and then inevitably to my tiger; but Volume One did not take me personally beyond that (except in oracular content & audacity). Just as I did not include sessions from 1999–2005, I still had/have yet to work through many of these lessons myself. And working so hard so long on flight as my highest aspiration, I forgot that Scribe himself kept up his hard training ever-after he attained flight; i.e., he never slowed down—not just writing poetry, but more actively in dreaming & seeing, whole curricula of work, which I personally could not comprehend and put aside for decades. 
            No longer; no excuse now. Shit, I’m old. It’s now or never, and, of course, “the shoe fits” like a glove…

            So let’s document this overtly: I haven’t remembered more than a few dreams in twenty years, despite having had my life blown open via dreams at age 22, then following my dreams closely for another 15-20 years. But in my forties my dreams dried up, and I need now to get them back. Josef & my Guide are very clear on this: Josef doesn't stop sending me dreams. I choose not to remember them, despite consciously wishing otherwise. I’ve blocked myself.
            Similarly I have made great efforts to see the power tree next to my house, which shines like a veritable Roman candle in the “hidden” eyes of Scribe & Advisor. I have made dutiful attempts. One warmer summer I spent roughly thirty minutes every night standing & straining; I “saw” all sorts of shit, some of it possibly “real.”  But not confirmable, verifiable, repeatable; nothing beyond my imagination. (Recall Wallace Stevens: “We say God and the imagination are one…”) To be clear, seeing a power tree is, in fact, an act of imagination. There is no ob. All seeing is projection. 
            Quickly I must remind the reader that dryads are real beings. They are not us; they are entirely other. So in this sense what makes power trees special to us is that they don’t represent our own projections. They are not human, but they can interact superficially & harmlessly with humans. Still how we see our dryads depends on the human viewer: Ancient peoples and Blake personified their dryads—and so were able to converse on some level. Trees were truth-speakers (thus the shared etymologies). Moderns tend to see electric currents, where my friends quickly can find & confirm the “navel” of each power tree, the center of its power lines (meaning, incidentally, such trees do not exhibit radial symmetry, having separate “fronts” and “backs”). So when I imagine seeing flickering lines of light, as I have—lines that closely resemble the static electricity of a Tesla coil—I don’t trust my eyes; I blink, and, of course, lose the projection. Do you see my point? Every act of sorcery is an exercise in lucidity, exactly as one must learn to trust one’s overseer.
            Does it make sense to stand before a tree 150-300 times without (clear, certain) result and then to repeat this process? You’d think I’d know by now what doesn’t work with tree-seeing. Should I keep up this failure? When is giving up reasonable? If tree-seeing, btw, is not an end in itself, but rather a means for opening the hidden eye, perhaps I might try other approaches to this eye, evading for the time being my backyard dryad. To be exact, Jewel Net members have an affinity for trees; we see their aliah and even communicate with them. But this is precisely because neither dryads nor humans can affect each other; we see, but cannot harm, the aliah of a tree. So tree-seeing is safe training, while seeing the aliah of a person is expressly forbidden.
            So if I can’t see the aliah of a tree and dare not peek at humans, where else might I practice seeing aliah? Well, in dreams, of course. As our Guide showed himself to Scribe repeatedly in dreams, so has he stated plainly this is expected of me. Except right now I don’t dream. Hmm…

            An old saying: “Advance in one art is advance in all.” We pull; we see trees; we dream; we write, or we play soccer; and we work intensely hard on each of these precisely to train our minds. Each requires one’s full intent, to see or hear eternity and then make manifest these pure thoughts in spacetime. So since I am apparently self-blocked from direct sorcery at this time, I have to take on new disciplines precisely to develop the same intent, but in more “trustworthy” activities—namely, ones I accept more readily, ones that don’t seem utterly miraculous/ridiculous, even when they are.
            This is espera, a time of absence. I write from this moment mostly to document my state of longing, hoping not to prolong it. If I’m stuck waiting for revelations to ripen, I still want to feel productive; so documenting my process for posterity—confirming Vilansit’s teachings for others soon following—marks at least a little progress and seems more manageable in a downtime, since personal narrative for me isn’t particularly creative or difficult. What else should I do while waiting?


            Step 1 of the Lore of Feeling is sensing. It is feeling someone close to you, a shadow cast from behind that falls upon your back & shoulders. Someone nears, someone eternally close. Emotions stir, overwhelm—that’s how you know—but there’s more; reason fails. Can you trace the source? (The cricket cries foul from his time-out corner.) Strong emotions with no due cause are disruptive and felt as pain—in fact the most pain I’ve felt in a decade, outside of my tiger. Did you catch the caller ID before she hung up? If yes, you’ve reached Step 2, storing. For the record, this “awful” sensing persisted in me through most of March, an emotional analogue to my Birth of Venus music visitations, but more 24/7.
            Energy rushes in & around—it’s felt as pain, but it’s not the same. Because we normally feel pain only from physical or emotional ailment, sensing pain seems “bad”; it feels like an open wound, unrequited love. But it’s not bad; it’s just so real. Thus in Step 2 we store this feeling energy, which means both to face it and—as with the Lore of Colours—take this energy and “pocket” it for later. 
            To pocket energy is a specific kind of memory storage that we locate on the physical energy body, namely among our chakras. Our teaching (unlike others) names eight chakras, and we are taught to intentionally place certain energies in one pocket or another. Consider, memory is energy (eg., PTSD). To be clear here, in fact, I need to make a specific point: We’re taught to place feeling energy among the “midports” only, chakras 4-6 (solar plexus, heart, throat), because stored feeling can sometimes produce negative side-effects when placed in the higher or lower pockets/ports/chakras (details to follow in the ouija transcripts). Scribe & I each were tasked with “assigning” our chakras colours, which also meant assigning each of our circle’s members to the pocket with the corresponding colour. For example, Scribe assigned himself/vermillion to his heart chakra, while I place my own solar yellow at the solar plexus and save my heart for Jane’s fiery orange. My heart, in fact, is where I stored this feeling energy, although I don’t believe I sensed Jane. I sensed Jane has a counterpart, her twin in time.
            None of this can yet be confirmed—I have no ouija connection in 2021 and can provide little evidence admissible in court—but I have artifact clues, flying miracles, and confirming gut feelings, so I go with them. (“Consider the alternative…”) All I risk by announcing this here is my reputation, which has little value, and my personal bond with Albion, my overseer. We’ve worked on our bond for decades, of course, as I document ad nauseam, and he’s always led me true and fulfilled all our bargains. So if my “feelings” prove wrong here, I will feel some betrayal. Which means I’m fairly confident about my sensing, since Albion’s not an asshole.
            Another reason I’m confident is that I’ve sensed at least once before and was immediately & fully confirmed in this by my teachers: I’ve already described the incident in part, though the feeling actually built up over perhaps two weeks prior to the 2002 ouija sessions. I sensed O. 
            O was an amazing soul & man, among many things a great writer, which is how I became aware of him. Scribe, in fact, introduced me to O’s work while we were roommates in college, giving me one of O’s books out-of-the-blue. This book immediately became an all-time favorite in my personal canon, although strangely I didn’t rush to O’s other books. I savored O’s work so much, in fact, I dragged out my reading of his corpus over roughly twenty years, starting each book only when serendipity conspired to align the stars, only at the perfect moment.
            In 2002, then, the perfect moment arrived “innocently” just before Scribe’s summer visit. I picked up what turned out to be O’s most deeply personal work, which frankly disappointed me, because the content of his other books had so completely blown my mind. But I was moved nonetheless—the verb I kept abusing—as I found myself for the first time writing a letter to a public person, though in no way planning actually to mail it. Why was I writing? Ostensibly, I found O’s description of his own “detachment” proved remarkably aligned with my own analogous predicament at the time, specifically how I was able to connect up all my teachers’ words & metaphysics, but I could not place myself within this new body of knowledge. I felt gratitude to O for having taught me so much, and I wanted to thank him, though there seemed much more to my impetus. I had no idea I was sensing.
            And a clue: A day or two before Scribe arrived in 2002, of course I cleaned up the house, especially the study/library/guest room where he’d sleep, and, no surprise, at the time I had several of O’s books lying around, so they had to be re-shelved. I am proud of my study’s built-in wall-sized bookcase, which I designed then had a master carpenter craft & install. It’s one of my beautiful home’s nice features. And Scribe more than anyone, including me, would study its contents thoroughly, undoubtedly drawing all sorts of inferences, probably aware of every change to my collection over the previous year. So I found it odd then when I deliberately scattered  O’s books around the shelves. To shelve five or six as a block seemed like a red-flag declaration of identity, like idolatry.[1] I caught myself in the act of diaspora, so to speak, asked myself what-the-fuck I was doing, and immediately supplied a ready explanation, even an alibi: I told myself I didn’t want Scribe to know of my momentary obsession, as I felt he’d latch onto it, and it would become a distraction. That is, I had an explanation for my behavior, but there was no good reason to hide this from Scribe. Scribe, in fact, loved O’s work as much as I and, no doubt, knew all of it far better than I ever would or could.
            I recall well our last ouija night that year, feeling building in me till I was about to explode, far more than emotion but with a strong emotional component: We had not been speaking about O—neither the man nor the vowel representing him at the board. In fact, we’d had no inkling until that very week that many k-members had been encoded into our ouija board as distinct letters & symbols. Rather, most of the week’s lessons seemed devoted to asymmetries among our membership, feeling being one of many relations where energies flow largely in one direction only—a function of finite attention—and where perceptions of & between members can in the moment prove vastly different. Ostensibly that final night then, Scribe was being prepped to discover A, Advisor, still 16 months away, but my teachers were just as much preparing me for my someday finding Jane. Thus the lessons overtly foretold much that I’m dealing with right now. I did not make the connection then, in that final ouija hour, that Vilansit’s classroom instruction included a sensing “lab,” experiential practice which covertly revealed O beneath my awareness & cognitive defenses. Ultimately I just erupted, when approaching our final farewells I realized I couldn’t bear to wait another year, anguishing in feeling & doubt & possible delusion, and I practically begged my teachers for overt confirmation. Please just tell me yes or no; don’t leave me hanging here! My teachers obliged with total confirmation—for I had learned the lesson well—and the powerful sensing pain dissipated by the next day. Whew!

            March 2021 was much more intense—not in any singular moment, but because the moment was protracted, lasting nearly a month. And thus I now wait indefinitely without confirmation, thankfully no longer in pain. How long must I wait? Too long, I hear my cricket chirp. But Albion is on notice again. I trust him, which means I know my espera must resolve “soon.” Waiting in time as a prescribed action—in contrast to inertia or delay—essentially is a matter of timing. The prescribed espera has a proper end, Step 4, of course, toward which the feeling energy might be applied, guided by the mind to its worthy use. The mind somehow simultaneously intends & unifies all—the chakra, its colour, and the chosen end—bringing all into a single focused act. And the Lore of Colours is pretty straightforward in this, mostly just hard work & practice, but in the Lore of Feeling there’s a catch:
            So far the process that I outline, our Lore of Feeling, mirrors closely that of the Lore of Colours. In the Lore of Colours, when in life we behold a specific colour (meaning its energy grabs us in a waking moment with dreamweight), we may then embody this memory, like a name or language, in a specific pocket, starting with the chakra that most closely matches the colour displayed. The key difference between colour energies and feeling energy comes in Step 3, and it concerns proper timing. Colours are easy to apply to many tasks; the energy is relatively free to manipulate, ready to go. Not so with feeling, undoubtedly because a second person is involved, and, I believe, the energy itself is more profound, dangerous, if not alive. The sensing person—who has an asymmetrical relation to the person being sensed—has no control over the timing. Espera ends only once the energy has ripened in its chakra pocket, for like a great wine maturing in its oak, this process cannot be hastened. Nor when ready can this energy be withheld or applied much later; one way or another the transformed feeling will surely come out. Thus the winemaker waits and hopes. So while Step 4 in the Lore of Colours sounds aptly functional, bringing forth, in the Lore of Feeling the very Jewel Net in time may hang on its application, a silken fiber of pure compassion: This we call shining.

                                     The Lore of Colours (2001)       The Lore of Feeling (2002)
                  Step 1        beholding (a colour in time)       sensing (a feeling in time)
                  Step 2        embodying (in a chakra)             storing (in a midport chakra)
                  Step 3        becoming still (when ready)       espera (for the feeling to ripen)
                  Step 4        bringing forth (to worthy use)    shining (aliah as compassion)

​9. Dis

            I do not aspire to humility per se, certainly not false modesty. Accuracy is my I aim, ego be damned. I need “the truth” about myself, both good facts & bad news, flattering feedback or devastatingly otherwise. How else can you measure your progress without facts & evidence, without benchmarks & established precedent? 
            So let’s get to the facts that led me to my letdown. In this case, Albion smacked me upside the head with synchronicity, which always seems fun, even somehow in those instances when the message is decidedly not. Here’s how Albion cued me in:
            10/26/21—in fact, the very moment I finished canto 7 above, Albion’s realtime puzzle: As mentioned already, I found myself “finishing” before I felt I was done; but, well, I had no choice. In the flying flow of realtime, by rule I had to accept where & when Albion drew his finish line. That is, as the last paragraph of canto 7 was pure clairaudience, I just typed away straight through my Hail aliah to the closing date, though something Albion dictated therein verily stuck in my craw: 

                        Of course, my academic laziness only left me in later life feeling like a

            fraud & a bore. I seek to be whole.

            Now let’s be clear, I’m not always kind in my language. I call lots of people assholes, idiots, dildoids, & fools and even my own students dumbshits, though I liked most of them and taught everyone as best I could. In my defense, I am fair with my insults; in particular I call myself regularly a fool as well as a fraud—but never a bore. I may be crazy, I say to myself, but at least my craziness is fascinating & wild & many other meta-things. Surely I’m not boring. I didn’t like what Albion called me.
             Thus I noted Albion’s word, along with my own stinging reaction to it, as I typed the final date, and then turned my attention to other things entirely—in this case, to the New York Times daily mini-crossword, which rarely has words longer than five or six or letters. Crosswords, even the minis, often have themes. This mini—which I solved no more than a minute or two after “finishing” canto 7—included the words: boar, boor, and Boer, out of maybe a dozen words total. Hmm…
            If that wasn’t enough, the next morning, when I sat down on my couch for breakfast & the TV news, my wife sat working on a full NY Times crossword (from an old paper), and immediately she asked me, “How do you spell ‘bore’?” which was itself odd, because she’s normally a great speller. But she was momentarily confused among the different spellings (and in this case her crossword clue referred to drilling a hole). OK, Albion. You’ve got my attention. —And thus you, dear Reader, get a realtime look at School discipline.
            Except there was more, and it was nuanced: That same morning I got an email from one daughter highlighting something I said as “pure ego,” while in a phone call a moment later my other daughter, rather in passing, accused me of browbeating my wife, due to my ego & my writing. These twinned moments hurt, of course, and it’s a credit to our communication that we can be honest, without reprisals, without lasting wounds or scars. I said nothing and took my daughters’ views to heart.
            What’s nuanced here is that in both cases I felt my daughters got me wrong. I do have an ego, a big one no doubt. But in these instances I knew they had simply misjudged me, missed the whole point and stuffed me in a pigeonhole. Of course, they both got me wrong in the exact same way, that pigeonhole called EGO. And yes, my albionspeak curriculum is indeed 1000+ pages about ME!!! But that’s because I’m the only suburban sorcerer I know. My teachers are real; I have a real story with important lessons. Should I tell someone else’s story?
            Foremost, my children think I have a big ego. Which is not a terrible problem, if I choose in the future to talk less—that is, about albionspeak & eternity & the fate of the world. My family doesn’t want to hear about ouija. I accept that. 
            What I really need to accept, however, is deeper. It’s the knowledge that flyers are always misunderstood, that my children can never comprehend where I now must go unless one day they themselves go there. I recall watching mathematician Andrew Wiles on PBS’s Nova describe how he proceeded with “solving” Fermat’s Last Theorem, which took him seven years in isolation. He said it was like entering a dark room and feeling your way around for a while, touching walls & furniture, making mental maps, before finally finding a light switch. Of course, Wiles’ metaphor applies to anyone doing original research. If you want to discover something new, something no one has seen or thought of before, then don’t expect to find anyone waiting for you when & if you finally arrive. You’re on your own. By the time Wiles submitted his finished proof (specifically, of the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture)—after finding & fixing a fatal error that took months to get past—there were only a handful of people in the world capable of checking his work. It’s rather amazing, in fact, that the public is even aware of Andrew Wiles, since almost no one alive can begin to grasp what he demonstrated. We have to take his proof on faith.

            I would be remiss not to report here that I was wrong: No, neither V nor W nor anyone else from the Jewel Net “arrived” in June, neither in life nor in an appointed/anointed Picture of Jane dream. It’s important that I acknowledge my fuck-up, even if, months later, this prediction & its deluded oracle now seem so decades-old, dark-age history already. I don’t like to be wrong, but I must still embrace & hold high my mistakes & shame & folly if I am to learn this good lesson. And yes, for sure, my ego got the better of me here, the source of my error: this was no simple calculation mistake. And now, following this folly, a few years of quiet, immersed discipline should help reset my balanced scale. More than myself, I seek ma’at. 
            I also realize, dear Reader, that if I had been right, I would not be able now to provide this brief update. That is, once I am in contact with a fellow k-member, I must go dark on the subject completely, like the public face of the CIA which avoids all comments of any kind, neither confirming nor denying anything. So today, 18 December 2021, a week before Christmas, w/ the super-spreading Omicron variant surging to all-time highs among the braindead unvaccinated, I offer my last update with respect to Jane: I’m still waiting.
            Until I get more information, I am left with nothing but a hole, an absence—which is far more than nothing alone. I have my “monastic orders,” and I’m starting to appreciate my work; maybe seeing some improvement in my choice disciplines, dolloped rewards for my stepped-up efforts, which I still need, at least as an external measure.

            My karass has yet another metaphor for who & where I am right now, one which suited Scribe well in 1999 when he finally attained flight: We call it Dis, a descent through the underworld to outside, into sorcery. Upon his becoming a flyer, Scribe had an important dream which announced “the gates of Dis,” closed doors before him in a rock mountain wall. This moment, the dream informed him, culminated the journey he’d undertaken years before, his Nine Men stairway to the sun. The first journey, then, was to flight: upward, open, bright, & external; the second journey, once a soul can reliably fly, is down: dark, inward, internal, the infinity within. Importantly, both of these journeys involve fellow travellers, indeed two friends and a guide, whom in his Divine Comedy Dante combined into a single character, Virgil.
            To be honest with you, dear Reader, I don’t claim any deep insights about these literary metaphors. Sure I see the obvious, but frankly can’t distinguish one infinity from another. Largely here I repeat Don’s words as he related them to Scribe; more important, I relate how Scribe at the time interpreted his moment. The word itself Dis, we noted, is not widespread in classical literature; it just happens to show up in two of our all-time greatest works: Virgil’s name for the underworld in the Aeneid—normally called Pluto or Hades in Greek—winds up in/as Circle 6 of Dante’s Inferno, though reduced to a single iron-walled city which marks the entrance to Lower Hell. Significantly, the demons of Dis bar its gates and thus briefly delay Dante & his guide (again, Virgil himself). I see these allusions, the threads that tie the centuries of genius; I saw them at the time. Now I need to live them. What does this mean?
            Don insisted in 1999—even rapping me over the head, pedagogically speaking: The gates of Dis are never locked. Still, one must step forward to discover them. In Scribe’s case, he just knocked. All I must remember is to ask.
            There are other bits to the story, of course, allusions already alluded to in ouija Sessions 57 & 59 which open this very volume. Still, here’s a final thread not yet mentioned elsewhere, one that Scribe felt central to his journey: It concerns Dante’s angel—whom C.S. Lewis regarded as the sole authentic angel in literature—sent by Heaven to open the gates of Dis, a being of pure singular purpose, who cared neither for walls nor demons nor even Dante & Virgil per se. The gates shall be opened; it is the will of God.
            Of course, if God wanted Dis open and God is all-powerful & sees everything—including Dante’s full journey—why was it necessary to make Dante & Virgil wait? What is the lesson? And why did God delegate this task—creating thus a second task, the angel’s task—when a simple earthquake sorcery-thought (e.g.) would have worked the same magic trick? Of course, Dante’s heroes aren’t forced to wait long—this isn’t Kafka, nor is it espera. Virgil may be barred from Heaven, but not Dis, not with God’s passport blessing. So how could the local demon dumbshits of Dis, then, ever be permitted, nay invited to deny Dante’s divine right of passage? What game is God/Dante playing? Consider, God’s angel could have been sent twenty minutes earlier…

    

§ Hail aliah
12/23/21 

    

18.  I am reminded of a ubiquitous indigenous grievance, a deep personal injury reported by oppressed native children everywhere: having to wear shoes.

​20.  I need to highlight here that I employ most carefully the present perfect tense and not the simple past, which implies a finished action. Thus, “I have read Shakespeare” means “I am someone who has swallowed Shakespeare and identify myself accordingly.” Having restated my phrasing, however, I still find my language lacking, as I in no way can measure the depth of such swallowing. Surely I don’t claim to have mastered Shakespeare or that I’m finished with his plays. Indeed I claim the opposite, that I will probably never stop reading Shakespeare, expecting always to be amazed & learn more. 

7. Another slogan comes to my mind, a truly good one that fundamentally doesn’t translate well into English—that is, before history forever stained it. I still sometimes think in German, pure language thoughts sans associations, and for me these remain good words:

Arbeit macht frei.

Mandala 2 & Ouija Board 2, front & back

​8. This inverse proportion, where the larger the spatial enclosure or panorama leads to a slower perception of time, as well as the reverse, has been experimentally confirmed in the lab by Edward T. Hall. In fact, the data suggest strongly our perceptions of time in space follow a simple linear relation.

8. Humble Pie

            We need to debrief a bit, for it seems my many months of non-writing were not idle after all. It’s the process that matters. I now lay my cards on the table—all, that is, that I myself see, though many other cards remain unturned to me. What I see first, I must now oblige, is not pleasant to behold: a man so desperate to move forward that he has painted himself into the corner of a dream—a self-caged, chirping bore. That’s what I’ve become, and Albion has played me as a process, over these last six months or so, to let me down nicely. My ego needed curbing. 
            Thank you, dear Sir, may I have another?

            Some details are pertinent: First, I did indeed live a good & present summer of ’21, devoted to worthy moments. My daughter Rhiannon came home from grad school, allowing my wife & me our first COVID getaway, a beautiful week in the San Juan islands, while Rhiannon watered the garden & indulged all the animals. A couple of weeks later, Deirdre then took over the house w/ her talented husband & four-month-old beautiful baby boy, whereupon my wife & I metamorphosed into all-day on-call doting caregivers, and all life phase-shifted down the absolute tiniest wormhole for nearly five calendar weeks (as measured by standard chronometers outside this time-bubble). Apparently my bodily imprint of early parenting proved stronger than my conscious memories, for I instantly & easily engaged with my grandson on his fluent babbling terms, at his physical level, and of course I am delighted to announce that he’s perfect: He’s got every opportunity in the world available to him, everyone & everything working to his good. Which is wonderful. Then again, in the future, all these personal advantages won’t be enough…
            Now some necessary background details which I’ve carefully avoided until now, for reasons of privacy & relevance: These concern my family—my wife, two daughters, and now two more in our fold—who form the center of my life. I’ve written about parenting already, which I regard as the most sacred commitment a person can undertake in life—where “sacred” just means “eternal,” and eternity is the subject of my curriculum. Marriage, on the other hand, is a temporal contract bounded by life, a living, working partnership; and I claim no marriage expertise. Nor do I offer up my own marriage as any model, though my wife & I have managed to stay together for 36 years. We are each unique individuals who take in the world so very differently. I feel our marriage process is not transferrable to others, thus of no public value, except, I would assert, that marriage is constant, active work.
            I love my daughters, as I am loved & blessed. Each has matured into a brilliant, independent woman; each has surpassed me in multiple ways already. Of course I was instrumental in their development, gave them education, discipline, critical thinking, and world travel; and my wife & I truly modeled the Good. My children know all this, of course, and are grateful for their imprinting. As a retired elder in my clan now—by right of death & default—I have attained the patriarchal honor to roost at the head of the dinner table and to carve & divide the ritual carcass at both the Christmas & Thanksgiving gatherings, whereupon my sage wisdom is disseminated & recognized & roundly celebrated for the entire duration of the dinner toast. 
            My family, that is, don’t want to hear about ouija: 

                        Deirdre still shows scars from childhood, scars from having a dad

           who talks to the dead and from being firmly told that she can’t discuss this

           with “anyone at school or outside the family.” People would think your

           father’s insane. It could destroy his career. For me this was professionally

           essential; for Deirdre it tied a deep childhood knot, a taboo secret that filtered

           her identity. As far as Deirdre’s long been concerned then, ouija doesn’t exist

           —meaning that it’s not relevant to her world, meaning she makes sure we

           never discuss it. She hasn’t read albionspeak.
                       My wife, of course, has no choice but to live my ouija life, but she’d

           rather not. She doesn’t understand my universe at all and hasn’t finished

           reading albionspeak because she finds my writing unintelligible. In retirement

           she’s had a hard time accepting how long I can spend just sitting in a chair,

           just writing—10,000 hours at least. Retirement, like marriage, is challenging.
                       Rhiannon knows my work well and is fluent in albionspeak. She’s also

           an exceptional writer, linguist, and literary scholar, a brilliant mind who knows

           I am no scholar and that I struggle with poetry & philosophy. She values that

           I am a moral man, but she regards albionspeak (I believe) as second-rate &

           ejaculatory, something Dad had to work out privately. And she supports me

           in my proactive self-discovery process—perhaps one day it might tame my

           ego. That is, I’ve used Rhiannon shamelessly as my sounding board for so

           many years, she’s heard it all already, all the new revelations & metaphors &

           epiphanies over so many long forest walks with the dogs: It’s all the same

           shit, Dad venting & inventing. Rhiannon figures it’s her filial duty to humor me,

           useless in retirement, languishing somewhere between “out to pasture” and

           “pasteurized.”

            No, this is not reality TV. I simply highlight a few frayed threads of an otherwise healthy functional family. We have plenty of harmony & mutual respect & love. Outside of ouija, we talk about everything. —Except in 2021, I must document for context, for what more can be said of our sick sick nation in this global pandemic moment, this blackest of pearls? Who could have imagined such wickedness among us! Which is worse, I ask & weigh sarcastically—the millions of unmasked god-fearing high school graduates who believe Trump (of all hominids!) is the literal messiah? Or the exposed politicians who pander to these robo-mobs to weaponize the Big Lie? This is scary. Thus, it’s both easy & righteous, at home with the family, that nearly all of our collective attentions turn to the new baby, a focus of hope in our threatened democracy.
            So no, I did not spend my summer slaving over Albion’s epic puzzle above. I bounced it off Rhiannon in my June bemusement, but didn’t restart writing this canto until mid-August, once my daughters flew back to their own faraway ports & lives. No surprise, the sudden silence in the house proved vacuum sucking, and Albion’s aptly-timed puzzle left me wordless for weeks, unable to write, though I worked hard every day on it—thinking hard thoughts, cautiously believing without artifact or evidence that I was still making progress. I knew that the long process of thinking itself was necessary. I also trusted this process because I had no other course. 

                         Dear God, thank you: How lucky, how blessed I am, that my home—which I

            prefer in comfort to any castle on the planet—both mystically & literally serves as my

            “pure place of absence.” Once over-busy with child-rearing & career demands, my

            dream home now seems pure freedom. I have managed, beyond conscious aspiration,

            to create in physical life what most humans souls reserve for eternity only.

            Simultaneously, of all possible library ports, my physical house & pasture acreage is

            precisely where I most wish to devote 20,000+ hours happily studying. I just can’t

            believe my luck…​[19]

            Of course I never “solved” Albion’s puzzle. That’s how I felt when I found myself abruptly ending canto 7 and signing off: Wait! This isn’t finished…. While accepting my assigned tasks may indeed be primary to this realtime lesson, I saw clearly that I could never “finish” this puzzle except arbitrarily, since language is infinite. I also saw that language is not the same as knowledge. Knowledge exists (by definition), arrives as given, and even when revealed or derived through reason becomes the external tools & nouns of our manipulations. Language includes form & content, but it’s actually pure internal process, choosing verbs, how we link up knowledges, where the arranged words & grammars unlock absences needing to be filled. I saw that in his ma’at puzzle Albion had laid a pedagogical trap for me by intentionally blurring the distinction between knowledge & language. To “know” a language is nothing like “knowing” most knowledges. Recall my quasi-rhetorical question—which, I will now assert, came first from Albion, Is it better to have read Shakespeare or to read Shakespeare? Let’s test the functional range of this question with some algebraic substitutions (my own subsequent homework explorations).[20] Consider now several similar questions:

                        1) Is it better to have played soccer or to play soccer?
                        2) Is it better to have dug a hole or to dig a hole?​[21]
                        3) Is it better to have existed or to exist?

            What’s fascinating here to me is that these questions are easy to answer:
                        1) It’s always better playing soccer, present tense. 
                        2) A hole is always better dug, past.
                        3) Existence is always a choice, always present.

            In fact, after much playing around with this language game, testing Albion’s question-template in myriad ways, I now offer it to the world as a pocket compass oracle, a practical ma’at tip or divination tool for choosing wisely in life—good policy when you don’t know shit, though with an obvious proviso: So far at least, my hypothesis is based on induction, which cannot be proved; but neither are policies supposed to be airtight. I propose then, that Albion’s puzzle, which simply weighs side-by-side two grammatical verb tenses, can help direct us wisely, properly, toward wherever we find this weighing most nearly equal. In fact in my own weighings there are remarkably few substitutions that don’t tip the scales dramatically one way or the other. Here’s one of the very few that balances perfectly:

                        4) Is it better to have played piano or to play piano?

            Consider a few more then for contrast:
                        5) Is it better to have been a child or to be a child?
                        6) Is it better to have been a parent or to be a parent?
                        7) Is it better to have eaten or to eat?
                        8) Is it better to have shat or to shit? (10,000 library hours, really?)

            I may seem to belabor this exercise, but I am inspired by a goldmine in Albion’s temporal juxtapositions. From numbers 7 & 8 above, for example, one might dismiss this exercise as one that measures merely one’s subjective tastes, your petty Facebook likes versus dislikes. But number 5 above—in my case certainly—is proof otherwise. I had a wonderful childhood, but really don’t want to repeat it—that is, speaking from my older POV not-quite-so-wonderful, I prefer to stay old anyway. Similarly, parenting was the most important experience of my life; yet I wince in pain to recall for a second how hard how long I worked—even while insisting “I’d do it all again.” So yes, of course these weighings are subjective, where my figure in this 2021 POV makes very different choices from the same person with a younger or older date-stamp. But that’s the point: to find out your own best choices in time, now. Remember that the Good, our goal, is not objective: It’s the process by which we each become ourselves. 
            Which is why this verbal weighing tool works (that is, if it does); it incorporates & weighs time itself. Despite the apparent grammars, that Albion’s question pertains to the past & present, it actually demands that the weigher-in-time project themself into the future. For example, I don’t know yet what it’s like to play piano well; but in order for me to weigh these verb tenses side-by-side, I have to imagine myself as someone who has already swallowed the instrument, its musical canons, the theory & history. What would it be like to be that man? Being vs. Becoming: These are what Albion’s ma’at scale actually weighs, and profoundly, where the two sides balance, that’s the direction you might think to point yourself. 



§ 12/1/21

​19.  Let me proclaim a new discovery which has turned my home into a legitimate language Library: lingoda.com, an inevitable & wonderful use of Zoom & the global internet to link up serious Spanish learners anywhere (in my case) with fluent teachers & good curricula. Imagine: instant, focused Spanish conversations, at my particular skill-level, all from the comfort of my home study or bedroom alcove! Through this new application of tech—as well as lingoda’s creative marketing scheme, which incentivizes steady, daily participation—language immersion from my island home & library is now reality. 
     And from this footnote a strange, bonus observation: In virtual reality driving a car, hitting a tennis ball, or shooting up an alien landscape is all pure simulation, fake; but in virtual language learning the learning is real—that is, it’s no less real than in physical spacetime. This illustrates that language is already virtual, and we just normally confuse the physical sounds & linear sequencing of words for their abstract meanings. Once again, in biblical terms, this is idolatry.

5.  Miracles

            Let’s get to the nitty-gritty, the devil’s details that take us from normal human reality to sorcery, and for me the best way to get started here is with an analysis of miracles. Sorcery, I’ve already defined, is the technology of magic, the result of which is an act of magic, whether a simple card trick or Lazarus being raised from the dead. Modern Americans, of course, watching a magician perform a trick, assume from the outset that the “magic” is fake, mere sleight of hand, not the transformation of spacetime reality outside of physics. Lazarus, on the other hand, we call a miracle, because no doctor on Earth knows how to bring back a dead person, and we regard such an event as impossible. The fact is, both events involve inexplicable miracles; and both are perfectly possible in the hands of a master. “Miracle” thus names a purely subjective interpretation of the facts at hand, where, at some level, a miracle just illustrates the degree of a person’s ignorance.
            What I intend to do then is to present a wide range of miracles, both common & unique, the purpose of which is to train the reader to rethink their subjective interpretations. And let me start not with an assertion, so much as a proposal: In my mind the greatest physical miracle I know is not Lazarus, nor Jesus’s walking on water, nor “the miracle of life,” nor any of the zillions of attested miracles documented by the Catholic Church as a condition for canonization, but rather simply Hamlet. (I could pick Beethoven’s Ninth or The Divine Comedy, or another work, too; but Hamlet seems sufficient here.) Compare: As far as we know, after returning from the dead, Lazarus did nothing special with his life. Maybe he did something necessary & important; maybe he raised a beautiful child. (I’m assuming Jesus performed no gratuitous miracles.) But Hamlet, for sure, has profoundly influenced far more people in the world.
            Hamlet, you might object, is just a bunch of words in a play, ink on paper, written down as anyone can apply ink to paper. But I would admonish you for lazy thinking. Could you write Hamlet?​[10] Could Donald Trump pay someone, anyone, to write another, better Hamlet? How much would it cost, and if a billion dollars were not enough, would ten billion prove successful? No artifact alone can a miracle make; it’s all about process. Shakespeare’s miracle occurred in the moments of composing, how a handful of ideas became incomparable language. By my definition then, Shakespeare was a great sorcerer, maybe the greatest. And continuing, I would insist that you, too, dear Reader, are already a sorcerer, making miracles with every heartbeat and every utterance. The trick is to know the difference.

            Let me insert some fun here by relating my personal favorite miracle, almost a gratuitous event—except since I present it here, it might indeed finally serve some higher purpose: The miracle occurred in 1997, long after I was plenty used to incredible miracles (ouija, et al.). I was working at my home desktop computer, putting together the semester’s big Geometry project for my advanced class. I’ve mentioned already how my 8th grade Geometry class went much deeper & further in content than the standard high school curriculum. My super-students deserved more, because they could, and there was time in their development, a full extra year, to pursue more. So beyond proofs & constructions that most high schoolers never touch, I also required my students learn a little math history, how mathematics entered our global consciousness. Each student thus was required to present to the full class a biography lesson on a famous mathematician.​[11]
             So I was sitting at my desktop, redoing from scratch a project I had assigned for many years.​[12] For me in the moment—undoubtedly the Sunday before introducing the project—the work had two distinct parts: the hard part, which was to come up with a grading rubric & parent letter showing how each component was valued as part of a total grade (how many points), and then the fun part, where I listed 34 mathematicians and gave a quick synopsis of their accomplishments & significance—34 being the number of student desks in my class, where Geometry generally was my largest class. The hard part finished, I was nearing the end of my list of mathematicians, just off the top of my head, just one more genius to list in fact—what was his name?—18th century German, worked in St. Petersburg and Königsberg, Prussia—now the Kaliningrad Russian enclave, cleansed of its Germans following WWII—not Euler (& not Kant); rather the guy with the consensus “greatest conjecture” left in math, now that Andrew Wiles (also on my list) had solved Fermat’s Last Theorem: (abbreviated & reduced) “Every even number greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two prime numbers.” No one still has proved or disproved this; many have tried. What was his name?
            “Goldbach,” came the voice, not in my head, but rather from my five-year-old daughter Rhiannon, who had just wandered into the study and stood next to me.
            “Yes, of course,” I thought to myself, “Christian Goldbach.” Not until I typed his name did I catch the absurdity. Was this telepathy? I had indeed experienced telepathy like this before, in a couple of other miracles, where words & images were lifted inexplicably & directly from my head. No, this was much weirder.
             My daughter, who still could barely read, was standing in front of my record albums, pretty, though obsolete artifacts, as I’d long moved on to compact discs (CDs). She pointed: On the shelf was my boxed, two-record album of Bach’s French Suites, as played by my favorite pianist, Glenn Gould. She had simply sounded out what she’d tried to read vertically along the spine, Gould: Bach. That is, she’d read and mispronounced these two names as a single word, which was precisely the name I’d been searching for at that exact moment. Wow.

             I offer no explanation because I have none. I also don’t believe in gratuitous miracles.


§ 6/13/21

    

6. But a Dream

            Now let me offer up my key learning target here, which provides the eternal context for all the miracles to follow, one that derives simply, but profoundly, from everything I’ve taught so far. We know already, “OUTSIDE LIFE IS NO OB OR SUB,” while, self-evidently & despite this knowledge, within life we perceive & accept both objectivity & subjectivity. I’m a big science follower, for example, despite my criticisms, as science attempts to describe our best & most desperately needed shared objective experience. So here on Earth, our origin, we assign & ascribe objectivity to the ground rules & filaments of our simulation, and most of us stay nicely within our assigned lanes, each of us maintaining our blinders. Just as I don’t use my hands in soccer—which is a choice only, since I am physically quite able—in most of my life I am content to follow suit and not fuck overtly with the laws of physics. This also is a choice. Here’s my easy learning target:

                        Life is a dream, a “continuing,” albeit discontinuous one among

            countless others.

             Do you find this banal, unoriginal, and/or boring? If so, you probably aren’t much of a dreamer yet. There’s no end to dreaming, and I repeat: No role in the Jewel Net karass is more important than our dream master. That said, what does this imply?
             Actually it implies everything, but let’s start with the most relevant bits: Every dream has a place and figure. This applies even to dreams, as I sometimes have, that have no visual component or spacetime location at all. In such dreams I’m generally presented with a set of abstract knowledge, facts or circumstances or an established condition. Then I’m presented with a second set, an updated version of the first, but with differences: before & after. These sets offer place in the sense that they come as given and are perceived as objective & outside my POV. The figure in these dreams, of course, is me, though utterly incorporeal, just a subjective mind thinking in nowhere; but, importantly, he represents but a finite fragment of my total soul, one of zillions of possible figures. He generally has little overview, because he’s immersed in & as a specified POV.
             So dreams happen to us subjectively, just as “shit happens,” where the goal, obviously, cannot be forever to (pardon me) “eat shit,” but to rise to the challenge of each experience wherever & however it happens. The goal is to act, not react; to engage the simulation, learn all its lessons, and move on. Now consider: If I fly in a dream, despite never having flown in life, does that count as a miracle? Why not?

             The key to sorcery, for me at least, comes in two parts: The first part—which has no end I can see—arrives as an ever-deeper present awareness of unreality, that the world & everything we experience is, in fact, just a dream, a projection intended for our benefit. Dreams happen to us, but we ourselves are the creators. No, right now I don’t feel like I’m creating reality, because as a figure in this spacetime dream I’m immersed & relatively ignorant within my POV moment. However, at age 61 I’m also very meta-aware of these facts, so I actively seek the “point” or “learning target” of each experience (which is often not readily apparent). This means I’ve figured out the process of School, how School works and how to be a good student—which is a massive achievement, very much analogous to Euclid’s contribution to mathematics & logical reasoning—or, in a favorite zeitgeist nightmare, that historical moment when Artificial Intelligence, such as Skynet in the sci-fi Terminator movies, becomes self-aware.
             The second part of sorcery is enactment pure & simple. Once we realize (on many levels) that we ourselves are the creators of this dream experience, then we work to transform ourselves into beings capable of altering the projection. Flyers, of course, routinely alter their projections; but in this context I would not call most flyers sorcerers. When I flew playing soccer, for example, the physical results of my flying were plain to see, but I had no idea what I was doing as a conscious process. In fact, it was precisely the mystery of flying that led me to seek more. The distinction is critical. Most flyers don’t know what they do; they “just do it.” They might score incredible goals in soccer or build pyramids without formal mathematics, but they can’t trace (and rarely question) their own mechanics. Sorcery is conscious & intentional. Sorcerers know that what they do is actually “impossible”; then they do it anyway.
             Thus consider, dear Reader, how everything I’ve taught so far can be reduced to lucid dreaming. Josef teaches each Jewel Net member how to dream, which really just means how to exist, as everything we experience is a kind of dream, especially life. When we become lucid in a dream, we instantly & unavoidably alter the filaments of our dream projection with a fiber of present attention, allowing us to change the course of the dream, eventually its substance: We come alive. If we’re lucky, we arrive prepared with a dreamtask, and we work intentionally to master certain skills. If not, we tend to get caught up in distractions—the holosuite or Disneyland or a 30-year career of robotic repetition—and we fall easy prey to dream parasites, outside entities like moths or lice, who suck our energies dry feeding off our knotted filaments. Our only way out is to wake up within this dream, to become lucid in life and see with clarity which original course to pursue. 

             So let me end this canto on a personal note, regarding an unexpected side-effect or symptom of my becoming a flyer: As much as I felt existential pain throughout my adult life & training and employed it as a measure to keep myself moving forward, I’m in more pain now. The blinders are off; I see the world projection, and I cannot help but cry at the monstrous stupidity of humankind, both on the global level, but also ever more poignantly at the individual soul level. I know now what all flyers in the Jewel Net suffer in life, bitter helplessness: Yes, every serious thinker knows our world port seems hell-bent on suicide; that’s an overview which simply uses science & the objective evidence at hand to do the math, extrapolating the clear & horrific consequences. Yet good scientists also are aware that death & extinction are natural events. The dinosaurs went extinct; so shall we. And if “life is but a dream,” then why should we fear the natural, inevitable end?
             But today I see too clearly within this dream the eternal consequences, so many individuals whom I love, people with potential who have free will & opportunity, but who nonetheless slowly accept & surrender to Charybdis, often smugly convincing themselves they’ve “made it” in life, while they’ve really just fallen asleep. I cannot save them from their lazy thoughts & empty choices, most of which are not evil nor criminal nor even bad in any given moment. There’s nothing wrong, as I’ve pornographically illustrated, with fucking Helen of Troy in a lucid dream occasionally. But gather all these unwise, knee-jerk pearls together, moment after moment, and you’ve compiled a jumbled soul necklace going nowhere without any string, no purpose or story lifeline, going down. Now a flyer, I cannot look away. This is exactly what Josef endured in Egypt. Jesus, too, wept.


§ 6/18/21

​​14.  Now here’s a wrinkle I won’t investigate at this time, since my speculations above are hypothetical only: It’s possible—not at all a certainty—that unlike Josef and Vilansit who have clearly mastered English, Anand may not be as fluent. Scribe & I called him our “taciturn” friend, both for his quantity and quality. We assumed much of his difficulty lay in his rare fakir-content, difficult in any language medium. But Anand is rarely beautiful with words, while “Vilansit’s Story” I regard as one of the most beautiful short prose narratives I’ve ever read. Our Guide, too, is less fluent in English and says so plainly—which seems reasonable for an alien mind—until you ponder how a multi-present daimon might find any subject “difficult.”

7. The Art & Praxis of Ma’at: a Realtime Illustration[13]

                        It’s a demonstrated fact that my teachers speak superb English.    

             What needs overt acknowledgement is that English is more than its words:

             It involves culture & history & idiomatic fluency & nuance. English, like all

             other languages (except bigger), assumes a whole world of knowledge. 
                         —Okay, we acknowledge, human beings are amazing, and

             many people master several languages. Is it surprising then, that Josef

             knows the works of Shakespeare? Now consider the obvious: Josef didn’t

             study Shakespeare in Egypt.

                        So, poses Professor Albion, since apparently we read Shakespeare

             in eternity and, in fact, seem to be able to speak any language fluently,

             why should I (for example) devote my remaining days to pounding down

             Spanish, gathering idioms & grinding out conjugations, when I’ll have

             Cervantes, Borges, & Garcia Marquez all at my fingertips as-soon-as-I’m-

             dead anyway? Shouldn’t I—employing an economic model of

             “comparative advantage”—spend my short time left on Earth focused on

             what physical time & space uniquely offer? (If I could still play soccer,

             God I would.) Why not focus on sex, then, or tasting good food, the

             epicurean delights of the flesh, rendering unto Caesar’s Palace projection

             that which is Caesar’s?  

            I hope you can see, dear Reader, this is no idle puzzle. I remain, in fact, largely perplexed by my personal pearls—which might potentially offer a profound insight into our purpose here on Earth. Let me refresh the reader: 
            I felt when writing Volume One of albionspeak I had effectively “solved” or “summed up” our purpose/mission/Meaning of Life on Earth. What, after all, could prove more central to existence than “to be or not to be,” choosing existence or failing to choose? And, to be sure, I framed this singular existential choice in the context of the Good: We start here, now, on Planet Earth; and if we manage to live a present, worthy, & proactive life, full of learning and, hopefully, love, then Earth-Charybdis can become for us our image of the Shrine upon the mountain, our Point A before we leap.
            And yet we do come back; that’s the point of a Point A origin: We return here all the time because we chose & choose to be this life and not some other different one, where every memory activates a possible anchor to this port’s place & time, returning us to the scene. Now let me quickly debunk some silliness: While karass business cuts across the centuries, our souls do not, for any personal reasons, return as ghosts to haunt this Earth projection after death, both since there’s no “after” in eternity, but more because there’s no vessel figure to inhabit & possess within the projection, no available POV. The soul does, however, regularly return to attend to their own pearls of life, to relive them as present fibers of identity—which, ideally & existentially, do not just replay & repeat the same events over & over. Filaments repeat by default; free-will soul figures live & play on fibers: 

            “There is no ob, and I am not a robot!” 

            So shout I from the rooftops to make real my intent, where every voiced Word enacts ex nihilo a physical event, a fiber of vital existence. In contrast, Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence” just narrates a failed soul’s surrender to Charybdis, not realizing that the way out is right in front of us always, simply by living life so fully that we enact our deepest choices: To exist =  you have to be there when it happens. 

            How does this relate to my riddle? Let me realtime-speculate: My first tickle of an idea hits me like something out of Gulliver’s Travels, a ridiculous island for the insane. Suppose, offers the smirking student Albion from his/my desk, human souls actually do have to study a language in order to speak it. Accordingly, Josef, Vilansit, and Anand have all put in thousands of hours amassing & mastering English & Shakespeare & Milton & Keats & Scribe, but, of course, these hours came outside of their lives in time, on other ports in eternity, “library ports” perhaps, where one is encouraged to learn anything in any language. My friends would further have to practice their English with native speakers to reach fluency, which, if located not on a spacetime port, still necessarily traces language as a linear verbal sequence, takes pleasure in the mere word tale-telling. What, after all, is Shakespeare? The name of a favorite island? Or put another way, is it better to have read Shakespeare or to read Shakespeare? While no answer is expected here, this is not at all rhetorical.
           Now a silly follow-up question (since I seem already to have answered it): How long would this process take? That is, outside of time how long does one need to learn a language? On Earth, of course, the answer to that question varies from person to person and language to language, though most would agree the fastest, best way to learn is to live at least a few years where that tongue is spoken, interacting as much as possible with natives, in every conceivable venue & forum, while also studying books & media at home alone, memorizing & practicing phrases aloud—immersion, which names this process & mode of absorption, but which strangely, even in spacetime, is not particularly about time. How long, that is, doesn’t measure intent. 
            How long, in fact, just names a POV within its projection—a date-stamp. Let’s say it takes 10,000 hours to learn English well (a number thrown out by some psychologists as sufficient to mastering many skills): Then Josef, Vilansit, and Anand (to name three who lived before the Norman Conquest) all had to devote such quantities of time, learning & practicing their English skills, simply to speak with Scribe & me at our ouija board. And perhaps (ethnocentrically) we might point out that English is the lingua franca of the Modern Global Age and thus might be worth learning in any age. But what about the lost thousands of complete & distinct languages spoken over the millennia by very few individuals? I am acutely aware, for example, unlike most of my suburban neighbors, that mere minutes from my house several world languages are being spoken for the last time. These human treasures dotting western Washington state, most or all of them, will soon be gone forever.[14]
            So does that imply—I ask in mock dismay—that our own souls have to spend 10,000 library hours struggling with languages spoken by only small clans of Cro-Magnons, say, if we wish to interact with a single karass member from the Middle Paleolithic? Really? Do such members then get inferior teaching if we don’t put in the hours—far more hours learning, btw, than needed to deliver all of a caveman’s lifetime’s visions & visitations? And just how many languages are we expected to learn anyway? (Remember: We know well such interactions were far more common formerly than today.) I’ve always said that if I had a wife, a child, or a grandchild who became deaf, I’d surely learn sign—but I doubt I’d bother at my age for anyone else, as it’s just so much work. Even for family I doubt I could budget 10,000 hours left in my life, so I’d never get very fluent. 
            But back in eternity, after dutifully clocking 10,000 hours at the Library of Babel, I can exit to planes of existence, where, when I “return” to a point or port, no time will have elapsed. 10,000 hours as seen from the outside thus add up to an instant, just as an eighty-year lifetime can all boil down to a yes or no choice. All those library “hours” amount to a download that “took 10,000 hours” only because we chose/choose to live & to be those hours.[15] 

            Or consider the reverse: Let’s suppose our Cro-Magnon k-friend, a female shaman, say, wants to speak with me. If she studies English, the lingua franca of her world’s distant future, she can talk to me, along with all the members of my Circle Cup, both the native & non-native speakers. Is she ready for English? Is English then the language of Heaven? A lot of evangelicals seem to think so…. 
            So our kavewoman drops in on the Library, intent on learning English as a foreign tongue, for, we assume—since she’s a Homo sapiens like us—she already speaks her own Cro-Magnon language, fluent in all the subjects her culture routinely encounter: tracking & stalking, carcasses & sacrifices, water maps & medicinal plants, weapons & broken bones, angry gods & maggots, weather, sex, shit, death.  Cro-Magnon speech also includes, we can assume, many words for which we have no counterparts today—“moon dung” (we’ll invent), meaning anything that oozes from a milk tooth cavity, thus of small annoyance, versus “moon bladder,” meaning a water source safe from leopards; words sacred & profane to identify the acrid flavor of cave bear liver, which is toxic; or to describe a soul-possession as witnessed from multiple POVs both active & passive—perhaps the grammatical precursors to our own first, second, & third “persons”; three distinct suffixes to denote the inexorable stages of gangrene, which, following generations of allopatric co-manglings with the named lunar phases, might one day seed the groundwork for past & future verb tenses. 
            In addition to her common cave words & language, and apart from her clan, a shaman must study—both in life & eternity, commingled in dreamtime—whichever shamanic language she needs for the survival of her tribe, detailed practical knowledges memorized & transferred from shaman to shaman—despite spatial & temporal distances, despite generational absences, such as when a shaman died before training a successor. In the Paleolithic such temporal gaps in knowledge-lines need routinely to be hurdled—namely, circumvented outside of time, via dreams, via dancing, via songs & their words—otherwise humans would long be extinct!  (inevitable, simple deep-time math, I think). Thus such transmissions require a shared “secret” tongue, common to shamans only, as (I’m guessing) Cro-Magnon language would not prove adequate. That is, the sheer quantity & quality of so many sorcery knowledges can only be transmitted in the form of language, memorized or not, as words package the largest “bundles” of information, detailed time-sensitive instructions for a host of caveman contingencies. No surprise then, the human brain requires shamans to begin their training young. 
            For the real gap between a shaman & her nomad clan lies in her practiced ability to think outside of time while still present within it—that is, to think abstractly. A shaman’s language includes metaphors & grammars which invite open questions, anticipate creative answers, and extrapolate the future from studying past events & repeated patterns, seeking causal factors through keen observation & reason, not the inflections of gods. A shaman can react to changes by thinking, while no one else in her clan can do more than follow… 

                        …the path of the father gods, whose jealous skulls watch over the winter

            altar, and the path of the game, as gods drive their herds to the sun & the moon,

            and the family follow the footprints of their prey exactly as their fathers followed,

            careful never to stray from the star map or tarry too long in any one cave, even

            where waters stay sweet. 

            In a purely oral culture all valued stories must be repeated verbatim, as all in the clan know that an embellished or inventive narrative threatens the very message itself; vital information can be corrupted & lost to all future family even with the smallest verbal indulgence. Such stories then are repeated by everyone in the cave, or, eventually, a single member is assigned the right & task to recite a particular branch of knowledge, retaining for a lifetime all its words & rites—though with the other family expected constantly to interrupt & correct each other’s recitals, competing to remember the exact words of others, while singularly entrusted by elders to assume & embody one’s own unique language legacy, then to pass on these words & dance steps father-to-son, mother-to-daughter, shaman-to-shaman, until no one left alive can fathom any meaning in the language, till the words become sounds only.​[16] So, too, do the songs & words of a dancing shaman just seem like “chanting” to her gathered tribe. Would her words so sung stem from an ancient extinct tongue or one yet to be invented? (Might she sing in English all along?!)​[17]
            Now imagine how such a cave-mind—even one as advanced as our shaman’s—checks in, engages, & turns on to the likes of: Shakespeare & space junk, the Periodic Table & online sex, global soccer & corporate tax schemes, climate change & animal farms, criminal justice reform & refugee camps, traffic jams & computer spam, unmasked anti-vaxxers & trans-arctic hypersonic missile trajectories, colonoscopies & baroque music, fusion food allergies & opioid abuse, Alzheimer’s disease, the abyss, and also Republican insurrection fake news—to name but the tip of our lingua franca iceberg of ice-nine. Consider further that the Library’s Google Translator, even if perfected, cannot begin to help our shaman understand what her own language never experienced & shared. We know that deaf people who never learn (sign) language develop brain damage from neglect; once their unused language synapses are pruned in puberty, they will never think abstractly. (Does our shaman think to wear clothes in the Library?)​[18] Likewise, it’s shown that the physical brain of a trained musician functions quite differently from that of music-deficient people (most of us), as viewed in PET scans which display elaborate & tell-tale synaptic networks lighting up both brain hemispheres in “real” musicians only, those with childhood training. And yes, the earlier the musical exposure in life, the better these connections. (—To which I worry like a rosary bead our old k-saying, “an advance in one art is an advance in all.”)
            From this I conclude then, dear Reader, that asking a Cro-Magnon to speak fluent English might be akin to asking her to grow wings. Flying, in fact, as an achievable miracle in a lucid dream, surely should prove easier to imagine & project than speaking a modern language (a mere 1500 hours, say). It shouldn’t surprise us, then, if most cave-souls, given the chance, should flee in terror from our modern language world, and that even were it possible to absorb English fully, no cave-person could handle or would choose our cognitive nightmare. 
            So I ask again then, both for myself & my shaman friend, what is the point of existence? And by this I don’t mean “to choose or not to choose,” but rather in eternity why a soul would pick the year 2021 in preference to thirty-thousand years ago? Am I a superior being for my “superior” language? And how do I stack up compared to my distant descendants thirty-thousand years hence (assuming I have any)?

            Saturday, 10/16/21: A few days ago I had an official Q&A dialogue with Albion, one of only a couple this year, the occasion & topic being espera. The conversation flowed smoothly and felt authentic from the start. The news: Albion confirmed overtly, finally, that piano & Spanish are not just worthy pursuits; for me they are, in fact, necessary. Thanks, Albion, I needed that. We conversed for twenty-four rapid quality exchanges, until I, sated & grateful, asked for parting words. Whereupon Albion delivered up a short paragraph, one which seemed a touch too tender for him/for me, more than for business only—and which thus indeed meant business—though in the waning seconds of that extended pearl I just found his words extra comforting…
           Two days later I reread this conversation and indeed found it top quality, among my best dialogues. And yes, Albion did prove far more willing to confirm my speculations regarding my personal future. In past dialogue sessions, I’ll now relate, the only “course of action” that Albion ever recommends to me directly is piano. Going all-the-way back to Dialogue 5 in 2006, it’s his running joke in so many sessions, a finger-wagging signature nag: Whenever I ask/plead/beg for direction—which is rather the point of prayer, isn’t it?—Albion dollops up the word “piano” like a scoop of ice cream to a five-year-old, which further allows him to forego suggesting anything else. We both know, of course, above all he must safeguard my free will.  
            But not this time. Piano, Spanish, reading literature, writing poetry, and painting were all explicitly confirmed by Albion, some without my asking (where sadly, I report, the word “painting” I perceive first as pain). Suddenly my retirement seems packed with work, full, except Albion also implied I might actually get beyond my normal “torpor”     (Josef’s searing word) and enjoy myself: “You’re a monk now, but it’s not meant to be penance.” On the contrary, I have the opportunity, the rarest gift in life, to devote 20,000 hours & more pursuing precisely the knowledges I choose to embrace fully. It should be fun, I know absolutely, though I’m ashamed to admit I see only work at this time. I need discipline…

            Then I reached Albion’s parting words—which I won’t repeat here, for if I did, they could not convey their affect on me when I read them, nor do I connect to their meaning any new insight per se. But somehow Albion’s plain language triggered in me one of Blake’s “last judgments,” my first such milestone since swallowing my tiger over two years ago. In a nutshell, I simply accepted fully my current “monastic” existence—studying alone in my retirement cloister for, I must assume, the next several years minimum—laying aside for now my legitimate moral questions regarding the social benefit & utility of all my library hours: I am ready to work on these disciplines now. And I do know how to work, of course, as I have proven emphatically my whole life—except in school, I must note for the reader, where I generally excelled despite hardly studying. Of course, my academic laziness only left me in later life feeling like a fraud & a bore. I seek to be whole.

§ Hail aliah 
(whew!) 10/26/21

13. Albion posed this canto’s puzzle by giving me the first three paragraphs here in a single easy clairaudience stream (sans font & color)—followed immediately by the audacious canto title. Whereupon I tried to continue writing but found myself truly stumped for months. Thus I do not exaggerate: I needed this canto. This is a profound puzzle, and only by employing writing as my cognitive scalpel could I hope to understand what Albion posed. So for the record, while the first three paragraphs were dictated, the remainder took major work, many revisions to make presentable & intelligible, first to myself, then to others. These revisions, I insist however, are linguistic only; they remain true to this realtime query & discovery, the praxis.

9. This also illustrates what I remember well. I was a flyer in early childhood; I have many examples, and adults treated me as one. Starting when I was 8, Josef needed three years of persuading me through dreams to convince me to give up my bird-in-the-hand flying status for two-in-the-bush 48 years away. Scribe, on the other hand, who was always brilliant, I believe likewise gave up flight to enter our karass, though he entered the Jewel Net “much earlier” than age 11. So I speculate, adding one strange new fact: As smart as Scribe is, he has no memories prior to age 5—whereas I have dozens of clear memories from ages 2-5, including how I reflected at the time on those experiences. (My mom, I note, had pre-verbal memories from before age one.) Thus I guess that Scribe entered the Jewel Net around five.

​2. Indeed, we landed in Frankfurt, then drove immediately like madmen to the Riviera. Why not fly to Roma or Milano? The plane flights were close in price, but not the rental car. Insurance in Italy was at least $1500 more than for the same economy car in Germany. Having driven in both countries extensively, I appreciate the math.

15. For those who don’t do the math, let me point out that 10,000 hours to learn a language, say, at a steady pace of 1 hour per day, seven days per week, would take 27.4 years to learn. While I’ve already put in serious hours in both Spanish & piano, I must still budget at least two hours daily on each of these studies, for at least six days a week, if I plan to live out my bucket-list. To an aging man then, these disciplines represent more than just a serious commitment, as they subtract a major chunk of my remaining creative reserves. Why these?!

​11. I offered this project also so that my hard-working kids who couldn’t “get” the proofs, still could get an “A” in my course through hard work, especially as proofs weren’t much taught in high school and semester grades in my class did count toward their high school GPA.

​2. A Complete History of Mystical Painting

            I’m painting. That’s the immediate effect of all my sensing. And after roughly five weeks—before desperately needing this break—I actually had one full 9-hour day when I found painting “fun.” It’s always deeply rewarding, but it kills me. After a few hours of staring, then painting, then staring intently some more, my head physically feels like its gripped in a vice. But it’s no headache; no aspirin can help. It’s simply intending colour as color, nothing more. I often joke “my brain hurts”; yet on the physical plane I think this is almost literally true, as I am exhausted by all the new synapse formation. But it’s actually deeper, more profound. My mind hurts.
            So why am I painting? I have guesses, and the timing seems right, especially during COVID isolation, where all my espera studies have been reserved for this enforced monasticism—no mystery in advance, of course, to my eternal overseer. Some of these studies, like seeing trees, have been put off until precisely now. Some, even one foretold, arose unexpectedly. So another brief history, even as I offer my entire portfolio:
            You’ve seen my mandala and have already read about its strange arrival in 1994, a full year of work. I drew my power-image using magic markers, and I documented the event in my Letter to Vilansit in 1996 (Lesson 2.3), wherein I also narrate a follow-up event from a year later: I learned—via a prolonged clairaudience exchange—that this mandala mapped Scribe’s & my learning circle, Circle Cup. Each of our eight members is represented by both a port and, separately, a colour in Vilansit’s Triangle. Not only had I mapped our circle in precise detail, I had done so before I had any knowledge of this circle or its members. 

    [see photos 1a & 1b]







            For the record, this mandala is officially named Mandala 2, as Scribe received & retained my first Ishmael effort. Still Vilansit called Mandala 2 my “first drawing,” when she mentioned it unexpectedly near the end of Session 56, the last of the 1998 sessions and which, by coincidence twenty years later, I reserved as the final session & chapter of albionspeak: Volume One. Vilansit also analyzed my “second drawing,” the large spiraling phi mandala, which I had just completed and which marked my nine-men step into symmetry. [below] But then Vilansit went further with her discussion and referred to my “third drawing,” a future project which—as I wrote in my commentary inserted decades later—I never completed, never even contemplated. Instead, when I turned to acrylic paints, because magic marker fades almost immediately, I switched also my genre to realism and truly amazed & surprised most everyone. I never looked back.

​

​
             My inspiration for realism came in June 1999, in yet another profoundly sent moment in my life, straight from my daimon of yes: I had absolutely no prior inkling, especially as I was utterly immersed in the logistics & hyper-parenting of new travel: It came on the third day of my family’s first Europe trip, our first non-travel day to sight-see.[2] We’d been hiking Cinque Terra, Italy, specifically from Monterosso to Vernazza (in steamy vineyard heat with a six- and an eight-year-old), then continuing along the sea cliffs from Vernazza to Riomaggiore, arriving in dire need of an early, shaded lunch, where we indulged our purest sensory bliss: pasta pesto Genovese, possibly my favorite food in the universe right from the source, molto delizioso!
            Post perfect lunch and recovered from the heat, we set out again among the stairs & alleys of Riomaggiore (which is my favorite, I think, of Cinque Terra’s five cliff villages, though each is as beautiful as advertised). We explored the less touristed nooks & crannies, tried to get lost in the town’s maze-verticality, but there are only so many vistas & vias & scale possibili in a postage stamp, and all of them quickly wend to the village piazza, however cramped. Thus we started at the top of Riomaggiore, snaked our way around the far-side of the canyon face, descended back some crack of a staircase, till we hit the base street level & seawall and rounded the corner:
            Beauty did not hit me; I can’t even say if my experience was visual. It was pure certainty. I knew without any shred of doubt I would paint that very scene, even as I remained completely aware & calm. My wife recalls I said so simply—while she grasped the audacity of my claim—forty years old, and I’d never painted or drawn anything before, ever. I grabbed the camera from around her neck and took eight or nine rapid panorama snapshots from the spot—two minutes required at most, while Rhiannon & my wife escaped the noonday sun under an eve (and wound up in the painting!). Whereupon we trod onward to other postcard villages & valley piazzas, other wonderful scenes; that moment was done.
            That is, until roughly two weeks later with a follow-up surprise. This time Assisi marked the spot, a tiny scene, intimate in the silent tourist after-hours with its hilltop overview & horizontal sun. I reached the spot, a stone road & alley staircase, beautiful in its corner masonry. Beholding the scene, I grasped all in an instant and snapped a single shot, for I knew also with cocky certainty that I’d captured the perfect photo, needing no spare or second shot, and I would paint exactly the photo I’d just captured, precisely as framed. To my mind in time this sounds arrogant or ridiculous, even if backed up by flight, but taking one photo only was Albion’s effective way to highlight & thus document more fully this miracle. I knew.
            We returned home in late August, and after 6-8 weeks I completed my Assisi stairway, almost as a paint-by-numbers stone-by-stone reproduction of the photo. This marked my first use of acrylics (or really any paints), and it was a fascinating & encouraging experience, for I achieved real success—more real, in fact, than my perfect photo, which framed the scene, but lacked the depth & illumination of the physical moment: Thus Assisi, my framed painting, longs hangs in my home entry (as an entry within the entry); but more than the artifact, this painting task cracked opened a new & alien door in my mind, literally a new way to see, to engage & maybe awaken my underutilized modality of sight. Somehow while I could never draw worth shit (or so I always thought), apparently I could paint, especially when following a precise map. This I called “craftsmanship,” not art per se, just lots of titanium white, though there was no question I achieved flight many many times in order to fill the 2’ x 3’ canvas. One notable mystery to report: Somehow I instinctively knew without any practice or introduction—repeatedly leaping blind, spurred by a priori knowledge & memories—exactly how to mix any possible color combination I needed from the collection of cheap paints I’d bought; only the purely impossible remained out of reach, eg., solar yellow. Today, even after plenty of proven success, I still ask incredulous, whose memories are these?
            All that was prelude, practice, and confidence-building for my truly epic challenge—a pillar & scourge of my apprenticeship—Riomaggiore, the diptych that would take me twelve years to paint—longer than Odysseus spent trapped with Calypso. I get a medal for my effort, as nearly every square inch of the (2 x 2’ x 3’ = 12 sq ft =) 1728 square inches was painted over 5-10 times, acrylic being my necessary medium, as you can paint over your mistakes. Among my two framed pictures I count over 50 proven patches of pure painting flight, each achieved finally in a flashing volley of brushstrokes needing mere seconds or minutes, but repainting a patch I’d already worked on & visualized & intended for hours, days, weeks. Did I hold such faith in the inevitable, or was I just persistent to the point of stupid? I think I put Riomaggiore away half-done for 3-4 years at one point, at least two more years at another, before again pulling out my paints & easel, brushes & spattered tarp—stubborn, determined, desperate, and resigned to my purgatory. I attempted in those twelve years no other art, and it was several years after I finished it before I’d consider painting again. I am no painter.

​







    [see photo 3]

            I need to mention, to complete the record, that I counted one nine-men task just to draw Riomaggiore, two more to paint the canvases. And Scribe looked slightly aghast at the extent of my underdrawing—every door (48), every window (78), for example, the whole fucking scene down to the stone cracks and slatted boat ramp down the middle (the winking crack in my universe that escapes casual viewers). This drawing step, which meant copying in detail my assembled panorama snapshots, involved far more than just drawing, however. It began, in fact, with a detailed two-month study of the history of perspective painting (Brunelleschi, Alberti, Escher) and the mathematics of vision & drawing, which I found fascinating, though, of course, only to a point, math being infinite. I learned enough practically to draw the complex scene intended; additionally I studied & enjoyed some fine art—I didn’t need the trig for computer graphics.  
            I recall well sitting down at my dining room table, the only place big enough for my canvases, working out the perspective math, the horizon line & vanishing points, measurements & proportions—did I borrow a classroom meter-stick? I know my first base lines were straight, drawn precisely with a pencil & straight-edge. But those were quickly erased, and in less than fifteen minutes I’d abandoned everything I’d just learned about perspective, at least in any classical sense. My straight lines, I could see, did not match Albion’s POV, strangely that of my 240 degree panorama of photos, which I literally overlapped & taped together like a fan. The curved fan matched Albion’s diptych plan, for I found I conceived of my diptych as such, a double-hinged painting on a wall that could be closed from both sides slightly, like a book, from 180 degrees to about 120. And thus when the viewer stands enclosed within Riomaggiore’s canyon walls & buildings & piazza, the tiniest village scene evokes immensity, not quaintness. 
            Of course these insights took more than a decade to come clear to me. At the time I knew only the unorthodox geometry, which I instantly conceived in full & called “parabolic perspective.” To contend with my enclosed diptych POV I would bend the scene, like a fish-eyed lens, around the viewer, where the warped slatted boat ramp & overstretched central street would mask my horizon fault line, a tear in the seam, one that wrapped around the viewer as twin vertical parabolas reflected over the x-axis. I began drawing freehand furiously, erasing only rarely and decisively. Even so, it would still take me months, working every night after dinner, long past my family’s bedtime. Only to wake first each morning well before 5 AM…

            I’ve written already about my only other painting, a pair of small paintings actually that still took me years, my Indian Paintbrush, where one canvas copied precisely a photo of the actual Mt. Rainier flower where I beheld  vermillion. I think I largely succeeded, though I don’t think my work is exceptional. The second canvas entailed a painting exercise, where I took the same exact difficult mix of shapes, but inverted all the colors to their complementary shades (as shown on a color wheel). This canvas succeeded as a study only. Together—after more years of my weirdly-mirrored flowers getting hauled out from their closet hiding for 3-5 months of work, then being fully stashed away for another year, then resurrected again—did this completed pair of paintings count for Step 80 of my 81 (where my 2017-18 year of garden work & raised beds counted last). 
            Now, dear Reader, you have my life’s complete portfolio, literally. I don’t see, and I don’t paint, except that when I do, I achieve success far beyond reason, beyond training or perception—“not me”—especially since I don’t see & I don’t paint. I’ll add, for amusement, that I did once win first prize for a district-wide student art contest in sixth grade, which, I knew well at the time, proved the gods had a sense a humor—I might as well have won a beauty contest. I had, indeed, created something beautiful in my mind, conceived of as stained glass, but as technical craft, not art as I thought of it. My dad was a teacher, and I knew how teachers thought: I won first because teachers had been the contest judges and my work was so different from the rest, not because it was better. In my mind Joel Beaver’s crayon drawing of a motorcycle poppin’ a wheelie was obviously far better than anything I could draw. I knew also in 1970 that the older teachers would find Joel’s content rebellious enough to shun. 
            Significantly I recall as well the completion of that sixth-grade art project—the only visual art I remember from childhood, required for class: After I’d folded my 12” x 18” construction paper several different ways, I unfolded it and filled in the spaces created by the creases, using pastels & often a straight-edge, instinctively reflecting each chosen color over both the x- and y-axis folds (which was math that I’d not yet acquired in school). I then used black pastel and gave each of my colored polygons a black edge, which, to my delight, really did bring out the colors, much like stained glass. I was ten at the time, and my pastel drawing, if I could present it now, looked very much like my mandala. 

            Oh one thing, but this time not a postscript, rather something important. The art I list above counted as five nine-men steps, plus, let’s say, one more for Mandalas 1 & 2, which came prior to the Nine Men sequence. However, I count four additional men for a different kind of acrylic painting, the work that covers my home interior walls, specifically my living room, dining room, kitchen, and nook. These have their own tales & inspirations but include an added component, my wife, who with me painted much of the first two rooms, though following my designs & invented techniques; more important, she had to like these walls. Today, she’d never approve such an endeavor. Who dares paint their home interiors multiple colors, overlaying & layering & mixing ever more colors? Who has the balls? Not me generally, and not my wife ever, except in 2005.
            Without too much detail, let me intimate that my wife suffers from chronic depression/anxiety, a genetic chemical imbalance which can be largely corrected with  medication. While in general her depression is not severe, it colours who she is & how she perceives her world. My wife’s illness reached its worst effects & suffering in 2004, forcing her to get help & drugs to cope. But it would take a personal miracle—a private one I witnessed but won’t here relate—that set her abruptly on the road to improvement, which took months & years and remains the road she’s on, though with setbacks. The relevant point here is that Albion saw his opening, which was precisely when my wife was resetting her life and most open to suggestion & new ideas: Why not paint the house?

                         And here, in a quick little pedagogical parenthesis, let me add

            everyone should paint their house. It can prove a fantastic & powerful

            experience—first, as a creative process; second, as a family bonding

            activity. Then you get to live in your work—so much richer to live in!

            The key to beginning this process is knowing that acrylic paints can be

            painted over. You can make mistakes and correct them the same day.

            Who ever said off-white could be the only color in suburbia? Is this

            American-blank aesthetic a vestige of Puritan dourness? Or is it just

            that contractors & realtors (i.e., marketers to mobile, interchangeable

            masses) don’t want colors scaring off individual potential buyers?

             Paint your house!! Customize the light you live in. It’s remarkably cheap entertainment. Paints cost almost nothing, while even rented scaffolding (for six months for my high dining walls & living room Sistine sunset) remains a bargain compared to a sun-fried day at Disney World.

            I can add several more stories about painting my walls,

which involved many more mystical moments, punctuating vast

gaps of staring absence—though much of the actual painting was marked by pure stupidity, too, I now confess & cringe, as I spent scores of midweek midnight hours angling & dangling from the top rung of a high ladder before my picture window or hovering over the glass dining table, immersed in Platonic colour & stoned. I saw in my hubris how I tempted fate nightly, much as Don portrayed me dancing absently above pyramid blackwater. Did I care, was I cocky, or was I really just too lazy to move the ladder & tarp? Here’s my final story:
            Roughly eight years after (triumphantly) painting the living & dining rooms, I got permission to tackle my nook wall. I’d paint the kitchen at the same time, including the ceiling, as well as the other nook walls, but there’s really just one major showcase wall in those rooms, on which all eyes inevitably fall. My wife would be visiting her mom for a week. That was my window: My plan was to bring the outside, namely our beautiful front-yard katsura tree, in; so I did. I painted leaves & branches as though the ones that indeed scraped the nook window extended inside and along the wall. I even broke off a katsura branch and used it both as a model and as a paint spatter-maker, a wild, Jackson Pollock, messy affair, not possible if my wife had lurked anywhere within 500 miles.
            Success? Uh, I guess—that is, I did an excellent job, as measured by the only metric that mattered: My wife liked it enough to live with it, the highest bar. But I wasn’t satisfied. Yeah, it was good; but it wasn’t right.[3] After two or three weeks I couldn’t take it anymore. I painted over the whole wall—and then in a single continuous act I just found myself painting some basic color schemes & textures & geometries, something relatively easy that I could recreate from scratch right now via algorithm. I finished then in record time and reviewed what I saw. Nice, whatever it was—in fact right. But not quite finished, still incomplete.
            Strangely I have no memory of the final, amazing coup de grace moment, when I took my Riomaggiore magnum opus, still unframed in a corner & needing a wall, and mounted that diptych to my new nook wall. A mind-blowing miracle! My Italian colors & symmetries down to the precise shades & parabolas matched my spontaneous wall shades & lines beautifully. Without any conscious knowledge or plan I’d created in 2-3 hours the perfect backing wall for my painting, to the degree that they were clearly intended together all along. Riomaggiore thus in my mind is no longer a diptych—it’s the whole wall & diptych together as a single work. And to be clear, while I don’t claim this work to be anything more than an amateur effort, so far it’s the only artifact I’ve created that will survive me.​[4] 
            So it completely blows my mind, when I realize my favorite painting in the world is, in fact, my own. I love it for itself, as an independent artifact outside my identity or creation. If it were Van Gogh’s, it would be my favorite Van Gogh—though I know well I am no painter still. I know nothing of brushes or brushwork; I have no knowledge I could possibly teach, even while I’m generally sure of my teaching ability. I still have no idea what I’m doing when I paint or how I manage it. My painter’s palette is just a dimpled piece of plastic from a pre-school watercolor kit; I wipe with old diapers. Painting is my purest trust exercise; yet I still don’t see. How incredibly lucky and how fucking weird!

​5. I did master Spirograph, a commercial set of toothed drawing-wheels (like toy gears) which allow for fascinating, even beautiful pattern-making in four colors. However, it seems likely my interest—which included compass & straight-edge designs as well—was not particularly visual. I’m a huge lover of maps & atlases too (as are all the Jewel net members I know), which also portray visual information, but where the aesthetic must serve & be subsumed to the content. I invented my own Spirograph designs, though often as experiments with relative prime numbers, as the number of teeth on each of two wheels determines the shape of a pattern. I didn’t draw with Spirograph: I figured it out as necessity.

1. And I note, this is years before COVID and zooming, where now the bookcase backdrop for every pundit’s TV image is analyzed by the pundits’ pundits in the New York Times. Of course it’s true: You can learn a lot about a person by the books they display, only a portion of which, btw, have actually been read.

​3. A clear function of my daimon of no, though different in practice from Scribe’s or that of Socrates in that I got no overt sign, just an arbitrary certainty that carries a gnawing moral mandate, dreamweight. I repeat here out of caution to remind overtly: This “daimon” is a misnomer, no daimon at all, but rather our own overseer.

l

Assisi

Panel 9, Mandala 3

​4. This event is much stranger when one considers my limited palette of wall paints—in fact, just the cans left in my basement from the living room & dining room paint jobs eight years earlier. Stranger still, the perfectly matched colors I created could only have been created in the full speed of flight. If I hadn’t painted the whole wall at once, each color layer would have dried. But because I painted new layers over wet paint, they blended fully into unique shades.

Riomaggiore

​17. A mind-blowing exemplar to illustrate the power of a true oral tradition: Modern native Americans living along the Oregon-California border still have many stories that narrate the eruption of Mount Mazama along with its post-apocalyptic aftermath, now Crater Lake National Park, which was one of the largest eruptions Homo sapiens have lived to witness (and an amazing place to visit today). Now consider: Mount Mazama blew up 7,700 years ago!

​12. Most teachers (my wife, for instance) keep extensive files of projects & tests & hand-outs to be photocopied year after year. I never did, partly because I am almost disabled when it comes to such organization, but mostly because every year was different. Every test, for instance, would include questions I’d emphasized one year, but not the next, and vice-versa. Rather than try to modify incrementally, I’d just redo from scratch, knowing exactly which questions were fair and how to arrange them for the current class.

6. Many have called the Periodic Table humanity’s greatest achievement. (O loved the Periodic Table and studied it his whole life.) So I’ll add here for the record that Mendeleev ascribed his table to a single dream.
Why doesn’t science acknowledge that dreaming is essential?! Fact: The single most important human in the Jewel Net karass is Josef, our master of dreams.

​21.  In fact, in my mind I am very much a shovel-man (no other tools), having logged countless home library hours digging holes & trenches—for trees & transplants, for drainage & irrigation, for large animal graves—digging up weeds & gardens, but also wielding my shovel like a samurai sword against blackberry bushes the size of a bus. I feel almost as fit with a good heavy shovel as with a soccer ball.

​3. Third Drawing

            My reason for presenting six (eternal!) pages of my personal painting history is to show transparently how sparse my complete history is. I omit no doodles, no absent graphic wanderings during a boring lecture, no moment ever of casual interest, no personal connection to sight at all.[5] I often regard my visual organs the way evolutionary biologists like to link frog-consciousness to frog-eyesight, where “vision” at my autonomic level of awareness represents “a fly-catching device.” Only the mystical hammer of creation can move me to active & awakened seeing; I have never thought to paint otherwise. I don’t want to paint.
            So thus, from a scientific perspective, my complete set of narrative experiences present an entirely controlled data sample. Just as an epidemiologist might seek to grow in a petri dish pure & untainted plague (a fun example), so is my own life’s set of visual projects & projections, so few & rare, a truly untainted set. Albion has insisted on maintaining such purity all along so that I, the teacher, might rationally investigate & dissect this process, but also, of course, to pursue my hidden eye along this Platonic path, that quantum foam in my mind where color & colour intersect. 
            Can you see a candle flame in your mind? Now take away the candle and move to the edge of flame. See the gap between light & shadow? Now take away the flame but not its light, shining still shining, but on nothing in nothing nowhere. Such is seeing with the hidden eye.
          Such is painting as a reduced exercise, focused sight. Riomaggiore was a monster exercise, though in eternity size doesn’t matter. But in life, in contrast & via contrast, size does matter, as do the content cards we play & why. I am Riomaggiore, just as I’m poetry in motion on a soccer pitch. I haven’t just “done” these things in my life; I have embraced them as core identity. —And then I move on, to the edge of each flame, exchanging color for colour, stone for stone replacing my life’s shrine for another of pure mind. 

            So I was sensing… 
            I open my near-realtime narrative in medias res, much as Homer & the ancients embraced time as a circle: If you can’t sense history’s progress, any point on the paradigm circumference starts a story already circling back. Sensing is felt in time, but it exists in eternity first, where time & space don’t matter. Yes, O was alive in 2001 when I sensed him, though surely we also sense those who are “active not alive”; such silken fibers link any two members. So I was sensing… therefore means more than knowing someone’s near. Do the math: Since sensing so rare can surely come from anywhere, it can only imply a most serious message timed for us precisely. That is, it can’t be random or gratuitous pain. For what purpose otherwise would we so disturb our loved ones across time & space? As with any master painting or novel, we must, therefore, trust & assume the artist’s creation/projection is not casual, no accident, that intent & thought lie behind each word, brushstroke, or sensed pain as physical artifact, to be sought out proactively by the viewer/receiver at the chosen end of this asymmetry. Sensing is the opposite of passive acquiescence. It’s a call to action.
            So following the Lore of Feeling—once I discovered myself among its keen steps—I turned to my colours & chakras and did my best to pocket this feeling energy in my heart, Jane’s Platonic orange. This I pursued via orange visualization exercises, trying to see this precise hue in my mind & pulling toward it—which I did, a lot, slightly desperate; I had a constant bleeding reminder, silent stigmata. I did feel some success; my pulling got stronger.
            And I was aided in my efforts by my Mandala 2—not the old ouija board artifact, faded & skeletal—but the mandala’s youthful photo that I present in these lessons. Having viewed this colour map for so much of my life now, I was surprised before my computer to see my drawing in a startling new way: I zoomed in to my drawing, hyper-focusing on Jane’s orange at 4-6 times actual linear size, roughly 25 times the area—which I’d never really studied since I crafted my drawing before I had computer graphics—and I found my mandala beautiful & fascinating wherever I wandered in it, far more “beautiful” than at normal scale. (I also admired my painstaking marker-strokes, every polygon crafted like a careful labyrinth fingerprint.) I even took several random screen-shots of these magnified interwoven polygons and had them on my laptop’s rotating backgrounds & screen-savers—not for any reason except I liked them. 

​
            Then came another Albion moment, actually two I link as a single event in my mind, though they occurred two days apart:
            The first arrived while I was at my laptop pulling toward Jane’s port, the screen magnified to maybe 40 times actual size. I got locked in; I had orange in my pocket. But then I found myself drifting, moving slowly off the mark and strangely not resisting or objecting, allowing my gaze to shift to a different polygon, one whose colour remained unassigned, untended, no part of Vilansit’s rainbow triangle: green, floral & photosynthetic, kissed by sunlight. I was mesmerized, bathed in green within yellow; and I knew both who Jane’s twin was as well as her colour.
           I note for the record that no teacher

in my presence ever confirmed Advisor’s

colour. In 2004 he came as given, in his own

mind was always crimson (many good

reasons), and there he was & still is on my

mandala—not a member of Circle Cup &

not in our Triangle, but prominent nonetheless—the deep-red band overarching & embracing Scribe’s port, quite different from Scribe’s lighter vermillion. Of course knowing that green is the colour of Jane’s counterpart—whom we’ll call now W—also comes with asking an obvious follow-up question: What colour is O, then, and where on this miraculous balanced image does his colour lie? Had I never considered this before?
            The key to my answer, like any good multiple-choice test, was designed elimination. With green thus identified, there were only so many colors physically left on my image, particularly brown and gray. Now I’ll mention something else about this mandala: It represents, as I’ve stated, my personal learning circle, Circle Cup, but it also shows neighboring circles, sequenced arrays of colour bundled much as Vilansit’s Triangle is a bundle. Advisor & Blake belong to two different bundles, while O and W, I’m reading from my map, belong together in yet another. I could well be wrong on this, for I offer my deduction here, not a revelation—which, though I might prove incorrect, still marks an advance in my training, for I’m now attempting to decipher what was intentionally encoded by Albion & my teachers. Now is the time. Thus, I’m reading my mandala as a map & chart much, I fancy, as Dimitri Mendeleev divined reality from his own Periodic Table—which didn’t just classify the known elements of the late 1800s—but enabled Mendeleev to predict six new elements & their expected properties simply from pattern necessity.​[6] 

            Now the second moment, Part 2 of my singular “event” in March, which also occurred while zoomed in to my colorful mandala. In this instance I was not hyper-focused; I think also most of my sensing pain had subsided, meaning my storing of this feeling had proved successful. I was, in fact, just wandering my magnified image, asking after O’s colour, though to myself in simple curiosity, not with my voice or in any formal request. Suddenly, in the clearest clairaudience possible—with the same authority of the clairaudience moment in 1995 when I learned the mandala was a map—I was given a concise directive, though I immediately lost the verbatim language: Colour in the gray.  
            And I understood at once what I’d never guessed at before: I’d been tasked to paint (no magic markers) the true mandala, the original image I had seen in my mind’s eye 27 years earlier. Let me try to unscramble this, as I, the ma’at/game guy, find this Möbius twist of eternity delightful: In 1994 I spent a year drawing an image I had to see in my mind’s “hidden eye," generally one pair of polygons at a time. I had no idea at the time what I was doing, but in all the years since I just assumed I had been seeing our mandala in some Platonic form. Since it charts our interwoven karass relations like a map, I thought I mapped some “real” eternal nexus. But even in eternity there is no ob, which means there’s no ob map in eternity that I copied or saw.
            Thus in 1994, I now conclude, I didn’t map our relations; instead I saw and copied in magic marker a physical artifact that I would paint in acrylic nearly thirty years later. And the elements of the “first drawing” that I could not see, for reasons of time & timing & medium, were filled in with gray as place-savers. Perhaps I could have guessed this earlier, but I did not connect my mandala’s gray with the gray (i.e., mock black & white) on the reverse of this drawing. That is, the ouija board itself includes both color and areas, especially the vowels, which were intentionally “left blank” by Albion to remain “neutral,” ideally to be coloured in later. So our teachers told us without our asking or comprehending. So had I included gray as absence in my “first drawing” mandala.

            Today is May 10, 2021. Less than a month ago I put down my brushes, exhausted & depleted, and picked up my laptop, surprised to be writing. My mandala, I guess, is 98% done—there’s only the tiniest silver sliver left to fill in, but which can’t be completed until the rest is known. For the rest is huge, because the new mandala which I gloriously reproduced in weeks of flying, consists of a circle roughly 16” in diameter, twice the area of the original, but is painted in the center of a canvas that measures 24” x 36”; meaning, my mandala fills less than one-quarter of the canvas.     

​            (Inspired specifically by Marc Chagall’s stained-glass windows in Mainz,) I found myself subdividing the remaining white canvas into eight panels, roughly like a tic-tac-toe grid, with the mandala in the center, though the actual borders forming the grid still took me three days of contemplating dozens of notebook sketches, painting & repainting until right. 
            But then what? No clue—especially since I took on a single task, yet somehow now discover myself, as if naked in a dream, committed to eight more! What hydra is this? What goes in these panels? Here’s all I knew at the outset: These panels include content, not singular colors; realism, not geometry, not a map. (Oh God…) Today in espera I recall with false cricket-PTSD despair what I did not feel at the time. I began with optimism, as I expected & quickly received “aid from above”—though importantly as a flyer myself, not as a gift sent by a charitable teacher. Then I just happened upon Session 56 again and realized Vilansit’s 1998 unfulfilled words, like her 2001-02 Lorelei lessons, were intended for me now.

41.    Q (Albion):  Vilansit, have you any comment on my [phi] drawing?
         A:    [THE] FIRST DRAWING WAS IMPORTANT BECAUSE YOU BEGAN

                             INSTINCTIVELY TO INCLUDE IMAGES OF EACH OF US 

                 [THE] SECOND DRAWING IS IMPORTANT BECAUSE IT CONTAINS

                             AN  INTUITION OF COMPLEX SYMMETRY 

                [THE] THIRD IS TO…

42.                        BE A PICTURE OF YOURSELF AS YOU EXIST  BOTH IN

                             TIME & WITHOUT 
                IT MUST BE TRUE TO WHAT YOU KNOW ALREADY
                MORE IMPORTANTLY IT IS TO BE A MEANS FOR YOU TO SEE    

                             FEATURES THAT YOU DO NOT KNOW OF AT THIS MOMENT

​
                          I close this canto with a realtime progress update on this Third

              Drawing: After finishing for now Panel 9, Mandala, I divined vaguely and

              laid down foundational drawings & color patterns on Panels 3 and 7,

              quite different from each other, which seem juxtaposed & counter-

              balanced, but to no focused end I yet see. Panel 7, Altamira, as I write

              is all-but done, while Panel 3, Espera, remains barely started, though

              I’ve already repainted one staircase on it three times (due to tiny,

              mathematically precise parallelograms, maybe not possible). Panel 5

              has a pencil sketch of a Gothic comic book image that scars my brain—

              El Greco? I don’t trust it enough to paint it yet, waiting, staring. The rest

              is blank, but will percolate in time & space, playing out over the next year

              or few, guided by realtime revelations, providing its own narrative.

             For the first time on canvas I’m not painting from a photograph. What on Mandala 2 came as singular colours one-at-a-time now includes content revealed like reverse archeology, layers of color slowly built up by accretions, resolving to a knowledge, clues & information I need to learn at this time. For this colour/feeling exercise is undoubtedly timed with the shining arrival of either V and/or W—though I expect the former and not the latter—and which, I notably assert, stands in stark contrast to all available physical evidence. To be precise, my contact history with these two young women is scant & never initiated by me. W just contacted me, though strangely in a wink with no follow-up link, sparking my sensing in the first place. V I have literally not seen or spoken to since my daughter’s wedding, when I felt sure enough to name her (in my mind, never here). Yet, if I have to guess, I expect Jane, V, to arise first this June. 
            Why? It’s silly really, so silly I took months to notice: I’ve been (very oddly) singing a little song to myself for some time, during absent moments, most notably when I’m filling my marijuana pipe in the garage, singing to my two dogs in their beds. My jingle feigns from the 1920s, Al Jolson at a shitty microphone, with no singular tune or even theme, but variations & amused permutations on a rhyme:

                        Even the moon in June would swoon
                        For you & me

And then, of late, an unconscious addition, inserted variously: 

                        Even the moon in June would swoon
                        For you, Jane, with me.

            For, of course, in my Circle’s eternal little solar system of cat’s-cradle silk, I am the sun, and Jane is the moon.  

            So finally, for the record, the likeliest manifestation of my guess will not be a physical encounter, at least not in June, but rather my long-awaited Picture of Jane dream promised to me the very first time Jane spoke at our board. Let me insist, it’ll have to kick my ass completely with dreamweight if I am to confirm this prophecy. We’ll see… I’m sticking my ego-neck out here & rather expecting results to slap me back into my unzipped pants; I’m not a would-be oracle—except when looking backwards. But it is my job, my duty, to make & report educated guesses, then publish the results honestly. So you’ll know too, dear Reader, right or wrong, in realtime when I do. 
            Which is the precisely the point of writing in realtime.


§ 5/11/21

    

Phi Mandala, 12" x 18"

4. Moving in Overview

            Now I offer Albion’s overview of the pedagogy, so both the student reader & the working writer can catch their breath in time. Lesson 10, you might have noticed, is not my first realtime lesson; neither is it the first that came to me unprompted. Lesson 8, Gatherings, provides Albion’s intended model here: instant, familiar ground rules for this introductory lesson to Volume Two—which then lets Albion nosedive into new content. Consider from a teacher’s POV why a realtime lesson might seem obvious: 

                        a) I need to bring my student-readers up-to-speed asap if they’re to keep

             pace with Albion’s coming (cascading?) agenda in time. Thus while some of my

             narrative content in cantos 1-3 (the first minor triad) represent a review of Volume

             One—as expected with any course sequel—I “cover” the past curriculum largely

             by winking assumption & inference. Most of my stories are rather designed to

             immerse the reader, like an ocean baptism, into my working soul multiverse,

             which, to be clear, is pure sorcery. 
                        Remember, my modus operandi as a teacher was to blow away my students

             on the first school day in September, to shake them out of their summer

             complacency since most people think they already know everything. Just as

             important, it should be fun.

                        b) It follows then, in my pedagogical SOP, that I pull back a bit after my

             shock & awe intro—after the pieces settle and students, now softened-up, are ready

             to learn. This again marks Step 2 within the triad—School as your new home base

             —which is where I get to fill in & explain & balance what I’ve just introduced

             (though always pushing forward on several subtler fronts). Students, you might be

             surprised to hear, at this point are often relieved to receive lots of homework,

             especially repetitive drill & practice, as their brains want grounding &

             reinforcement, so I provide ample opportunity. Repetition brings confidence, trust

             in the process.​[7]

                        c) But what is this process? Let me offer Don’s words from Session 90 in

             2004:

18.    A:        EARLIER THIS VITAL NOTION WOULD HAVE BEEN TOO  

                                   CONFUSING
                     NOW WE SPEAK OF [THE] ASCENT OF [THE] MIND THROUGH

                                  [THE]  MIND & HENCE [THE] PRACTICE OF LEARNING

                     ONES MEDIUM

                     DO YOU FOLLOW?

19.    Q:        Please  go on.
         A:        SOME EASY MISTAKES?
                     TO MISTAKE THIS ASCENT FOR A SPIRITUAL JOURNEY

                                 A METAPHYSICAL SYSTEM      OR INDEED   A MANY

                                 STEPPED MAYAN PYRAMID TO [THE] SUN
                     IT IS NONE OF [THE]SE

20.               INSTEAD IT IS A PRACTICAL  IF ABSTRACT  TEACHING IN

                                WHICH ANY ADVANCED STUDENT - FLYER OR NO - MAY

                                PARTICIPATE

                        For full transparency here, I quote Don slightly out of context: This

             excerpt is drawn from a detailed lesson on ascent, a narrow five-step teaching

             presented over several nights, while I apply Don’s words & intent more broadly:

             Our process is sorcery. Let us now define this word precisely for albionspeak:

             Sorcery is the technology of magic, the intentional manipulation of spacetime

             reality. My definition here may sound occult & fantastical—and it is—but by

             definition, as with Don’s assertion above, it is absolutely & utterly practical.

             Sorcery is skill & ability only and omits all moral/ma’at considerations. Let me

             offer a useful analogy continuing my Mendeleev example: As chemistry

             systematized & demystified alchemy, I aim to normalize sorcery, even unto the

             mundane & organic—or, as the higher Scribe de-scribed in a rare ouija appearance,

             grant "amnesty between time and the always.”
                        After offering my broad definition above, let me now shoot it down a bit

             and compare sorcery to messy English words like “liberal” or “freedom,” which

             mean so many different things to different people that they lose function. Thus,

             within my Circle, we do refer to sorcery narrowly: We speak of ancient lineages

             of instruction, arts & lores & praxes, necessarily self-aware & lunar reflective.

             Sorcery, thus, is never common. Additionally, while the Maya, for example,

             employed their arts to abysmal ends, for us in the Jewel Net sorcery is necessarily

             moral, just as ideal breathing is a chosen, moral act. For us sorcery marks a

             necessary step toward becoming fully human.

                        d) Now the crux of the pedagogy, for what does fully human mean? In

             my own soul’s curricular bio-experiment I remain my lab’s singular, best guinea

             pig, still my only working case-study of [a normal suburban American male = x]

             trying to walk a sorcerer’s path. In Volume One I laid out my paradigm package

             largely in the abstract. Now in Volume Two—more than looking backwards into

             history—I need to make real what I have laid out. Talk is cheap; and I have always

             practiced what I preach. Thus I aim to prove myself & my claims by improving

             & transforming until I myself am living proof, though I note critically here: What

             matters is not the proof itself, whether simple artifact, like a painting, or a flying

             human embodiment, which marks but the destination of flight, Point B. Rather

             I emphasize process over product, transforming over the transformation. Thus,

             realtime writing. 

            My daughter Rhiannon informs me that what I call “realtime” lessons should properly be called “journaling,” now a self-aware, self-promoted literary genre. I confess I bristle at her pigeonhole: albionspeak remains my eternal curriculum for you, dear Reader, not my juicy autobiography, where my journey in time serves merely to document one longitudinal case-study. I do feel personal moral obligation, though, which I heed: If I teach & preach to others a certain course or path, I, too, must practice it in time. This sounds honorable, of course—I am no hypocrite—but it’s not always wise. Learning how to delegate to others is important, too; and flyers always skip steps that others need to take. If you commit personally to every task or cause or challenge you recommend to others, you quickly have no time for anything.
            And time is the foundational ground rule for every thing on Earth. At age 61 I’m counting down, finally acknowledging with a tear that I’ll never play violin or professional football, just as I’ll never converse in casual Nahuatl, taste wooly mammoth, or colonize Mars. I could fill up libraries with all that I will never accomplish. Most Americans think retirement marks the end of work & responsibility, a time for fun. For me it’s a last-ditch chance to catch up & balance my life, to make myself whole, mostly to patch up the gaping holes still left in my knowledge, areas where I feel painfully ignorant. For example: I don’t want to die monolingual! I offer no excuses here, no self-defense—just American distance, isolation, & laziness—especially when I consider how my dad, another suburban American, read daily in six languages. 
            So in syllabus overview here I forewarn my readers that I foresee further lessons in Volume Two immersed in the content of my very personal choices. I outline six bucket-list “projects,” very different in spirit from the standard bucket-list of “things to do” or “places to see” (which I’ve already accomplished). Each comes with its own history, often knots deep into childhood; and thus, to measure my progress in realtime, I’ll have to locate myself on a graph to establish the baseline origins of each, to chart how my longterm efforts stack up. This list, I’ll add, marks my ultimate “stationary” itinerary, a choice collaboration between Albion & me for how I might fill my final years, making few demands on my failing physical body. If nothing else, these projects should teach me self-discipline.

                    1) dreaming (“the way of night,” whereas the rest are “of the day”)

                    2) writing
                    3) reading (all the literature I don’t know, the poetry & philosophy

                                I don’t understand)
                    4) piano (including music theory)
                    5) Spanish
                    6) mystical calisthenics: i.e., visualization exercises, pulling, &

                                seeing dryads (while awake, though practiced at night)

                    *(7) painting right now, yes, but with no longterm plans or aspirations)

                    **Notice, by the way, I don’t include “physical exercise” here—as I

            have for nearly all my life—just as I don’t include “eating” or “breathing.”

            Exercise, in fact, like the projects above, will remain a serious, vital activity

            for me, but no longer is my body a domain where I can progress. In simple

            truth, I can’t begin to maintain my prior exercise levels (as I have knee

            damage, particularly); all I can hope to do is hold off immobility & incapacity

            as long as possible, to keep my heart pumping. That’s hardly aspirational,

            but it is hard work. 

             Now obviously there’s nothing wrong with any of the pursuits I do list. I would applaud anyone who came up with, and then stuck to, a similar bucket-list. But what makes these right? That is, I am not content to fill my remaining life with mere worthy treadmills. I might ask, for instance, why Spanish? Why not German, which I studied far more extensively & even taught (high school) early in my career? Some reasons are known & knowable, while some must wait for discovery in time.
              Here’s where ma’at & overview enter the discussion together: Ma’at, recall, names an Egyptian ideal, normally pictured as a cosmic weighing—iconically, of a soul, as in The Weighing of the Heart against the Feather—but this weighing actually represents more deeply a conditioned pattern of Egyptian dialectical thinking, where ma’at names the governing principle of any weighing of opposed ideals. We are, after all, essentially binary beings who compare two things side-by-side. The irony inherent in this cosmic image is that it’s conceived as a stationary scale, exactly balanced, equal & eternal (even “standing in the sun”), whereas our lives in spacetime at any given moment are never stationary or in balance. Ma’at, my teachers repeatedly drilled us, is “a moving balance.”
              As I suggested in Volume One, human souls/minds leap from point to discontinuous point: We leap because we have finite attentions that can take in only one moment at a time and between any two points lie an infinite number of others. If we didn’t leap over this infinite absence, we’d never reach any Point B destination; every bunny hop would read like an unfinished Kafka novel. Additionally, our finite attentions limit what we can absorb or how much we can learn at any given time; thus each moment is narrowly focused; we can do x or y, say, but we can’t do (or learn) both at once. Perhaps in the soul’s overview estimation a balanced life must include both x  and y, but life is sequenced; one moment must come first. Which one? 
              Let me quickly distinguish between albionic overview in eternity and normal mountaintop-gazing in time, where the “function” or non-aesthetic “purpose” of a physical mountain vista is to view a spatial scene big enough to make time stop, freeze the scene; thus it can be mapped & pinned & tied up in strings.​[8] Then we fold up our vista’s mental-map and place it in our pocket (or memory palace) for after we descend and need it later. In contrast, in eternity there is no mountaintop view, both because there is no ob, but also because there’s always more above us, higher mountains, as well as ever deeper valleys. So what does overview mean, if not a vista? 
              Overview is not visual, though it can be visualized the way the stock market can be graphed. In this personal context it is a direct perception or intuition of one’s life-trajectory. Obviously this perception comes from eternity, for within life we live only in our present moments, one moment at a time, each a pearl of possible wisdom, but singular & isolated. And we string our pearls along the fictions we tell ourselves. The key is that we existentially have free will and can choose which pearls in what order and along what story-line.
              My life offers many illustrations; and I’m sure, dear Reader, you can find your own: In college, for instance, I chose to play soccer (daily) over reading & studying (rarely). While at the time this did not seem like wise choosing to me—or good $$$ value to my parents—I’m eternally grateful now. As much as the planet needs thinkers, thinkers need bodies. In fact, there’s little doubt that a prime reason for our incarnation on Planet Earth is simply to feel & experience spacetime corporeality. Thus, Albion gave me great soccer in my twenties when I had a great body and best could play, thereby leaving so many great books for my seventies. Imagine if I had instead studied hard, as I was supposed to, and left soccer for my seventies.
              Let me thus summarize how ma’at & overview function together in our lives: Overview is an eternal perspective or charting of our lives that we perceive in time. If we could not see where we are in relation to where we’re going, we couldn’t choose a course. Ma’at chooses, one pearl at a time, and ma’at balances one’s total life by sequencing our different pearls of experience. At any given moment we find ourselves immersed & focused on one side of a scale, absent to the other “half” of our dialectics, but over a lifetime, ma’at aspires to an ideal balance, however our soul defines that.
              Recall now how in ouija Session 45 (Volume One, Ch. 7.2) Jane presented Scribe & me with The Eye Diagram, an overview graph, precisely so we could locate ourselves on our life’s largest leap—between entering the Jewel Net as children and flight in adulthood. Consider carefully why my teachers felt we needed this information then, that same scary session where Jane located me “on the threshold of sheer darkness.” People aren’t sharks, we must contrast, who need no overview map to trace a blood-path to a target; but sharks have no free will. In another instance, I’ll now reveal, the vowel that stands for me, U, itself visually graphs exactly this stretch in my life, where the x axis tracks the years from ages 11 to 59, while the y tracks how far I fell from flight before reascending. My U graph, in fact, is a true parabola, meaning that halfway through, at age 35, I indeed reached my nadir, and apparently the “event” was marked 200 years earlier by Blake painting me, though none of this was revealed until years later, once I had re-ascended high enough to comprehend.​[9]

              In mathematical terms, my graph is differentiable everywhere (meaning it’s a smooth curve) but continuous nowhere, just a nicely-draped pearl necklace. That is, not only does my curve display a clear & intentional trajectory, unlike many lives it has no jagged edges. Consider then also—as I do in the absence of knowledge—how V or W might manifest in a life if these letters also display these members’ life’s graphs—though quickly I must add here that O, A, and E (Scribe’s letter) do not correspond to their life overviews, while additionally I, our fallen albion, indeed does. Apparently he, like me, should have been a parabola, but he just dropped, which my teachers tell me is/was a function of speed, how fast or how slowly one descends and then reascends. I’m guessing I had little patience and was unwilling to wait as I myself did for 48 years (espera). Scribe, of course, himself zipped through his eventual stairway ascent, the Nine Men, but still needed 30+ epic years of living blindness before revealing himself. I still shake my head: There but for the grace of God go I.…

              Now, for a final image imagine a life’s pearl necklace where every pearl shines distinct colour.

​

§ 6/2/21

10. Or Don Quixote, as in Jorge Luis Borges’s wonderful fiction, "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote."

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​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.