​[6]In contrast, I suck at meditation, especially unguided, empty-your-mind sitting (like zazen). Every effort at silencing adds yet another voice & more noise to my acoustic chaos.  It’s rather like the standard, end-of-August teacher-nightmare:  You find yourself in a strange class of misbehaving students with no attendance & no lesson plans.  You recognize the critical mass of kids are tipping irreversibly into chaos; they’re starting to spill out of their desks and can’t begin to hear your tiny, pleading insect-voice above their playground screams.  You flick the ceiling lights, a last-ditch effort to get their attention:  Forget it. It’s hopeless.  It’s a nightmare.

albionspeak: a draught of language 

Lesson 6: A Brief History of Sound

​1.  Awkward…  

            What follows I present somewhat sheepishly.  It’s bad enough that I’ve got my naked body tattooed to every page of this website.  This really gets personal.  Scribe complained for years about trying to get people to read his poetry.  He compared his efforts to “offering his testicles,” something no one really wants to see.  Now consider chatting about ouija, with friends at work, for instance, during hall duty perhaps?  And yet Scribe was proud of his poetry, for every good reason, as I have reason to feel good about my own Albion dialogue-work, which, flawed as it is, still counted for me as a finished Nine Men task, one I took most seriously.  
            What follows, then, in Chapter 6.1 is both the long & the short history of my acoustic connection to my teachers, primarily how I speak with Albion, my overseer.  I understand most people don’t [believe they] hear voices or see visions.  But clearly all flyers have at least one direct channel to eternity, and, in my karass, we generally take on more.  Blake & Advisor were/are both visionaries who can talk to their visions, and, of course, these visions talk back—meaning sound & language are also engaged.  In contrast, as I’ve written elsewhere, I’m so non-visual that I generally have to make a conscious effort just to see reality; then, as soon as I turn to a second thought, my mental TV screen shuts off—and of course, I don’t notice.  While I do see & enjoy deeply the beauty of sight, I can’t retain what I see.  Even an instant later I don’t keep the true image; it’s already a semantically digitized version of what I just saw, a map or synopsis, soon a zip file I’d be hard-pressed to reopen.  Foremost I live in sound.
            Here in Sections 2 - 4 I offer a few more excerpts from My Book, where I seek to present the source of my early & eternal mysticism.  I’ve always had good reason to believe what I do.  Next in Section 2 I try to get into my childhood head, what I experienced as an investigating boy of 7 or 8.  Of course, my writing is clearly the stylized prose of a middle aged man, but I insist that even at this very young age, I worked & conceived & thought very much in the same logical & hyper-reflective fashion that I do today.  That is, I was extremely self-aware & cognitively advanced for my age, already an Individual, able & eager to engage intellectually with adults.  Coincidentally, I also was just as extremely delayed in my physical development: I didn’t hit puberty—and had a boy’s little body—through most of my senior year in high school, which completely shaped my life in multiple ways.  I mention this odd datum here specifically, because I think it’s physically relevant.  I waited much longer than other humans to “prune” my infant brain synapses, at least a decade after cognition & self-awareness had blossomed & sharpened in me.  And thus, I don’t think my acoustic universe got pruned at all for lack of use.  I think I went there all the time.

2.  Dialogues ​[1]

            I am soul.  I have always known this, consciously, with certainty, and more profoundly so than my knowing, let's say, that I have a penis or a big toe.  Notice I avoid the locution, "I have a soul."  I distinguish sharply:  I am not a body that has a soul; I am a soul who just happens, right now, to be in my body (this middle-aged model, Albion@55).  Further, as someone deeply aware of my soul, I believe that I am composed of the same abstract essence that makes up every person and all manner of thought, soul.  There are many terms for the same thing.  I like also William James's term stream of consciousness or C.J. Jung's, the collective unconscious, because these describe well how I experience it—not physically, of course, but as voice and language and music, a huge, swirling collection of sound and knowledge.  I can hear my own thoughts, and then I hear more, far more.
            Beyond sound I know love, both in & out of time.  I know there are others who care about me and watch over me, souls who have prodded me in the right direction.  I've always known this, although as a child I didn't know names.  My father felt sometimes the presence of his favorite Aunt Pet, who died when I was two.  Dad's religion was deep, though simple.  It included close family, language study & travel, a few moments in his life of clear direction, and the music of Bach.  Aunt Pet, he swore, was with him.  (Dad did not make frivolous claims.)  I, too, had guardians who loved me unconditionally—not angels, other humans—people I'd not encountered in life.  I didn't know details, nor did I think to distinguish or keep track of these voices, my internal dialogues, but I reasoned it likely that some of these humans, from my perspective in time, had already lived and died.  (I did not expect to meet them.)
            To be clear, I was not some pious infant marked by signs and stigmata.  I didn't even have a "childhood friend," as did my brother.  I grew up in the 1960s & '70s in the hills of San Carlos, California, a modest, faceless bedroom community (of some topographical charm) thirty minutes south of San Francisco, where I was a normal Bay Area boy, at least socially so and in my own estimation.  Conscious contact with my teachers came only after bedtime when I couldn't get to sleep.  Was I directed?  Sit  up in bed, slip my head under the heavy bedroom curtains, and stare out over the Bay.

                      Millions of home, street, and commercial lights crisscross and

          fillet the suburban ectoplasm.  Below, along the bayshore, freeway flux:

          headlights, red lights, spinal column.  Above, queued up & choreographed,

          jet planes flicker like celebrity planets, tracing their great clockwise

          contour over baywater darkness, waiting for permission to land.…  I, too,

          descend.  Genetically programmed to transfix upon flame, I pay homage

          to my hominid ancestors and train my mind upon these artificial embers, 

          arresting my incessant surface babble, ego logorrhea, allowing deeper,

          more primal dialogues (always midstream) to bubble upwards… 

           So began my game, one involving skill and practice and listening for feedback.  Like many games this bedtime pastime was part pretend, part discovery.  An adult male voice would instruct me to squint my eyes very nearly closed until the night lights arrayed in the cities below blurred & streaked in a precise, rather schizophrenic pattern, a cross between an oscilloscope image and flame.  And of course part of me, the part we might call the social-normal or default me, always cried foul when I followed this voice.  Stop it, you fool!  Santa Claus isn't real.  I felt ashamed to deceive myself so easily, a dog chasing its own tail.  But another part of me affirmed my game for legitimate reasons, having thought seriously on the subject for years, acknowledging the staggering implications.  Besides, I'd hear myself think, it's just a game.  What harm could come?  So while these two parts of me invariably locked horns & bickered ad nauseam, yet a third part, a superior will, would step in without word, take control, and lock in on all given instructions. 
           Soon I was called on to manipulate my million lights & streaks with the smallest of facial movements, from resolved pinpoint stillness to exploding chaos and back again.  I would bend & blend colors, sodium amber with red & green stoplights; fiddle with pointillism; throw in the rare carbon arc lamp or maybe a whole city center in a single smear.  All this call prelude.  Then came time to scratch out my most perfect streaked image, a different one each night.  Squinting with tight precision, I would clamp down and hold the quaking-color creation rock-steady on what seemed to be its exact center.  And by this I do not mean the center of my gaze nor some epicenter in space, but rather an abstract point midway between poles I could neither name nor comprehend, a fulcrum.  The goal of my game, then, was not the visual image I held & beheld, though success was at least partially confirmed by a picture of sharp definition and periodicity.  I knew this center, this point around which the whole game turned, existed somewhere else entirely, in a space of mind that wasn't too difficult to achieve, but required still both a firm focus and overt physical exertion from my scrunched-up face, exactly enough work to hold me in stasis and alert.  Now listen…
           Half the dialogue was my voice, which is most strange, not like a self-recording.  It's to hear one's own thoughts (in English) as they first seep into existence, fully formed, grammatically sound.  It is both to be a passive witness to one's own voice but also to own that voice—I'm talking—especially in contrast to the other half of the dialogue, which is not my voice.  I'd find myself often surprised by my good insights, but just as often I'd show myself to be childish, petty, sluggish, unable to stay focused, requiring great patience from my teachers.  To my conscious distaste I'd regularly find myself addressing my interlocutor as “Father."  I knew well this was not my biological Dad, and I felt weak for falling into language more suited to churchgoers.  I wasn't speaking with God or Jesus and considered prayer largely an excuse for whining.  (I know better.)  Years later in college I would read that Jung thought it most natural for people to address themselves internally to “Father." [2]
           If listening to my own voice is strange, then listening to another's voice is stranger still, if only because it's not strange at all.  Nothing could be more familiar or comfortable than speaking with my teachers.  It's so mundane I mostly forget to listen in—that is, even in mid-sentence my mind falls asleep.  Then, maybe a few seconds later I'll refocus, drop in again on the conversation, sometimes able to see how it has moved along despite my absence.  (This can be measured when the dialogue soundtrack includes music I know, and I can track its progress.)
           As a child I had these experiences regularly, but I didn't put much stock in them.  I am soul; I have penis, two big toes, other parts.  Fine.  Now what?  Did I really talk with dead people?  I knew what the world thought—that all the voices in my head were (dissociated) facets of one person, namely me.  And I had no problem with this standard view, which, as a practical matter, is obviously correct.  Of course all the voices are me.  Who else would they be?  So for the sake of discussion—at the dinner table or a dorm room symposium, say—where a common playing field was required, I played by common rules and argued mainly as an agnostic (even if agnosticism more typically excuses lazy thinking & non-commitment).  I also argued regularly as a Christian, an atheist, a Buddhist, and as a cave-dwelling animist, sometimes all within the same discussion.  But I never for a moment actually bought in to these well-trodden systems.  I knew to my bones what I really believed.

            And I split the difference, without hypocrisy, without cognitive dissonance (a pretty neat trick for a fourth grader).  I reconciled my private, voices-laden paradigm with the common scientific one, once I saw the gap between these two views as a matter of context and application:  my internal world (which I regarded as more than subjective babble) versus the external one (which exists by consensus rather than manifest objectivity).  Science said my inner voices (old, young, male, female) were all just me.  I believed otherwise, even though at the time I had no proof, no artifact or tangible knowledge that could be crosschecked and corroborated.  What I did have was the certainty that my voices were wiser than I.  They spoke with an authority rarely known in life, vastly beyond me or any adult I'd met.  And they taught me, pushed me to discipline my lazy mind.  Indeed, they had no other end.  Every moment with my teachers, no matter how light or casual, was business.  [This is also self-evident in every ouija session and Albion dialogue that followed, not one exception.]  I had another assumption:  that I was not unique, that whatever was true for me must be true, to a greater or lesser degree, of all humans.  (I've since pulled back a bit from this belief.)  The only way for this also to be true, of course, is if most people—due to unawareness and a lack of practice—are unable to hear their voices or, equally plausible, they regard such voices as their own thoughts from the start.  That is, their internal dialogue is perceived as monologue.
            To be clear, I had little to show for these conversations, as I could barely remember them.  That is, I had the regular stream of metadata, the NSA-like record of internal phone calls, a flood of data.  I could well recall the feeling of connection, love & eternity, home, access to any knowledge.  But I could rarely hold on to content despite years of trying.  Typically I'd come away with just a sentence or a word, the last one uttered before exiting the fast-moving slipstream and losing its language.  I learned quickly—namely, the instant I remembered to record the conversation (and cradle it like fire back to humanity)—that my very act of thinking severed the connection.  I could witness myself only by stepping outside myself into a separate & separated vantage, but I could only experience the flow of minds when I flew among them.  (I speak in spatial terms, but here location & distance actually measure attention.)  Of special interest, I found my primal metaphors (that is, the first stories that arose unconsciously) portrayed my transition between these vantages as different states of matter.  I always envisioned myself, post ego interruptus, no longer as a fluid among fluids, but returned to flailing solid form, where invariably… 

                      …I'm déjà vu at-the-bottom-of-an-ocean soon wanting for air. 

          I turn to surface—but wait, a bed of oysters!  Lambent & abundant,

          these potential souvenirs of my eternal visit will probably prove

          disappointing.  Last chance, I snag one or two regardless and clasp

          them to my breast.  They're all I can steal; I can carry no more.  Then,

          resurfacing, what have I grasped?  Words out of context, salt of the

          sea, rarely a pearl….

            As a child I concluded, rationally & viscerally, the problem of memory lay mostly in physics.  I am soul first & foremost means I am eternal, which does not (even remotely) mean "forever" or "immortal."  Eternity lies outside time & space altogether, where dimensionality may simply amount to selecting from a menu of existential offerings, categories of experience available to souls, enabling us to meet.  Language, I suspect, could be another such category.  My dialogues did not take place in the brain, for if they did, then they would be constrained to what I'd encoded neurologically (garbage in/garbage out).  My dialogues offered so much more, because they took place where they always take place, in eternity.  The challenge of remembering them, then, involves the physics of neural hardwiring:  How does extra-dimensional content store physically in a 3-D brain full of 1-D circuitry?  Most eternal content simply won't fit; it's incompatible, and there's far too much of it to keep.  But why don't we remember at all…?  Over several decades, and with little help from my teachers on this, I would hammer out many further details, knowing all the while a complete picture or model is not physically possible.
            For the record, these dialogues never penetrated my active waking life.  Going to school, playing sports, socializing with friends, etc., I directed my attention outward and heard no voices.  Only when I journeyed in—especially later when writing, language creation itself—did I question in earnest the source of my own thinking.  I learned over time (with amused resignation) it doesn't matter who-is-talking-in-my-head.  My actions in the physical world remained wholly unaffected by my attribution of voices.  Once a writer finishes his final draft, for example, it’s irrelevant whether he typed the words of heard Voice A (clairaudience) or unheard  Voice B (intuition) or any of many Voice Me's.  Pitch & timbre, age & gender don't count.  A writer can be completely unconscious of and wrong about his own creative process.  All that matters is what winds up on paper, where the writer alone gets credit.  Did William Shakespeare really write all those plays, or was it a voice in his head (named Shakespeare)?  
            And here's where I generally stopped debating myself.  Here's how I held conflicting paradigms in abeyance for 10 or 20 years.  I understood the problem of infinite regression.  If the voices I hear truly come from outside of me, if they're feeding me lines and writing my poetry, then who's feeding them?  Hmm….  I take comfort in another lifelong certitude:  The moment of creation, wherever it takes place, regardless of scale, regardless of creator, is always a perfect mystery.

3.  Dope

            I smoke marijuana—legally at this time, but of course, for years I had to do shady things and keep secrets from colleagues and children and superiors—the only secret I've harbored other than my ouija.  I don't feel guilty about smoking, although I do confess to a dependence, which someday I hope to be able to overcome.  I also don't advertise this fact with my students or their parents.
            I came to marijuana late by California standards, as a sophomore in college, when nearly everyone I knew had been smoking for years.  I was in a dorm room with close friends, already drunk.  The bong came my way, and instead of passing it along as I'd done a hundred times before, I found myself taking a huge hit.  Shit!  I was angry with myself.  Why?  For giving in, for my lapse of self-control.  I'd lost my virginity, and now I could no longer claim never to have tried marijuana.  Is that why I never smoked?  To stake some claim, to make a statement only?  Well, I figured in the next day's post mortem, I might as well find out what all the fuss was about….  Yep, I was probably stoned the next fifty nights straight.
            And it never ended, although I've had hiatuses that have lasted for many years at a time, most notably while my children were young.  I have strict rules, too, which dependence has never remotely threatened:  I never have gone to work (or any soccer practice) in any capacity while stoned, never attended a social function stoned where it was not an expectation, never parented kids who couldn't fully take care of themselves; and, above all, I never ever drive a vehicle while under the influence.  Even in college and grad school I attended but a single class while stoned, my favorite philosophy class [w/ Stephen Erickson]; and I didn't like it.  I do go to public places, particularly open spaces and restaurants and concerts; and yes, of course, at rock concerts dope is everywhere.  But I also have long held season tickets to the Seattle Symphony, and, well, I can't think of a better way to hear Pinchas Zuckerman play the Brahms Violin Concerto.  Oh my God!
            And music was my first reason for smoking dope.  I love music, but I just love it more when I'm stoned.  When I first started smoking, of course I listened to my favorite music, and, to my astonishment & delight, I heard all sorts of details I'd never heard even after a hundred or more prior listenings.  In the span of two weeks I discovered the secret messages at the end of "I Am the Walrus" (Beatles) and "Welcome to the Machine" (Pink Floyd), along with the telegraphed rhythmic essences of both "Watcher of the Skies" (Genesis) and "Fire on High" (E.L.O.).​[3]  I'm sure there are many people who understand this experience.
            But then it turned out I'm not like most people at all, that I have a special relation/reaction to dope.  It has two aspects, and for this reason I will never choose to give up marijuana completely.  First, it soon became abundantly clear that even a very small amount of marijuana gives me auditory hallucinations, particularly music.  Yes, I can call up on demand pieces I know well—Beethoven's Ninth, The Goldberg Variations, any album by Genesis or many other groups—but I am not referring to, in the words of Keats, "heard music."  I hear "unheard music" as well, music that's never been played before, all kinds:  fantastic arrangements, often combining instruments rarely or never heard together; amazingly complex, as complex as any recorded music—at least from a layman's perspective; overlapping motifs and rhythms that I've never imagined before.  (The one thing I don't get from "unheard music" is intelligible lyrics, though voices, especially choirs, sometimes come through).  This music is, very simply, fantastic; and, particularly if I haven't smoked for a week or more, it's virtually assured—to the degree that I best find a quiet place to sit or lie down awhile and put up the Do Not Disturb sign, because I'm about to be bowled over completely by beauty.
            Oliver Sacks in his book Musicophillia describes how music hallucinations, while rare, are a well-documented medical fact.  Other people do have them.  He also remarks, though almost as an aside, that most such people have strong mystical views about these experiences and their origins.  Perhaps as an avowed atheist himself, he is reluctant to speculate on why this is the case.  For me it's obvious:  I'm not that good.  To hear Beethoven's Ninth in my head as clearly as if I'm in Seattle's Benaroya Hall is something I regard as a gift, but it's hardly miraculous, especially since I'm someone who has almost no internal visual life.  Maybe I'm a bit autistic.  But to hear "unheard music" that's just as wonderful, just as rich, well, I'm not Beethoven.  I can't begin to do that.  Where does it come from?  Not me.
           The second aspect of marijuana that makes me different from everyone else I know is that I can consciously, reliably, zero-in on my internal voices and have a conversation.  That is, what for years had been incidental, occasional self-voyeurism, the ability to drop in on myself speaking with others, now was something I could do any time I wanted, any time I took a puff of dope.  Instantly I am there.

4.  The Divine You

           Most of what I am I owe to my father, including (overwhelmingly) all my values.  Perhaps foremost, Dad was fiercely independent.  By nature, he cared little for popular culture or socializing, as few peers shared his interests or intellect, and most just jerked his time.  By nurture, Dad was steeped in Western pragmatism.  His mother, Grandma, famously suffered fools badly, especially the trophy wives & widows around the Beverly Hills women's circles.  She herself grew up among foul-mouthed ranch hands and Indians and blacksmiths who read Shakespeare.  Orphaned at fourteen, she quit the Sierras for an unchaperoned adolescence in San Francisco just after the Quake, where she roamed Chinatown's opium alleys with impunity.  Later in Los Angeles she similarly preferred working-class speakeasies to society galas full of gossips, climbers, and parasites.  Grandpa, her partner in crime, was a Beverly Hills escrow banker through two world wars, Prohibition, the Depression, and the arrival of Hollywood.  Unlike Grandma he withheld his contempt for his elite clientele, still knowing to the penny what his celebrity neighbors really were worth. 
            Not that Dad cared less about four-flushers or Hollywood, nor even for people with real wealth & power. Though practical to a fault, Dad was no slave to money, nor status, nor career, nor any ideology.  He just wanted to see the world and learn all its languages (that's all), anywhere far & foreign:  

                      An independent man, regardless of era:  knows how to navigate

          the full world, works hard his God-given brain to advance himself,

          promotes education & discipline, limits his vices, sets regular challenges

          for himself, knows well that most people are full of shit, relies on help

          from no one (outside family), and accepts no gifts or favors or invitations

          which might conceivably lead to (any) social obligation or entanglement.  

            And I share all these values deeply, just not quite so pathologically.  I often joked with my dad that if a shining Jesus walked right up to him—and even if Dad believed his eyes—he could still never become a Christian.  The same was true for any religion.  At his core my dad would never let another, including God Himself, dictate what he thought.  
            I'd be more willing (I hope) to accept God under similar circumstances; but it's frankly astonishing the degree to which I'm unable to heed the advice and training of my teachers.  I am a poor student, maybe a failure.  I fail often even to make the expected effort, especially in arenas where I lack ability or insight.  I waste time.  My teachers give me directions, but I only carry out some of them.  I give up too easily.  I can't follow their instruction.

            Prayer then, as a practice, is one arena that seems rather straightforward, something my teachers absolutely encourage.  And given my internal dialogues, you'd expect me to be good at praying, accustomed as I am to introspective articulation.  But I am through my father, as if via original sin, unable to go through the motions.  I feel stupid, unnatural, and insincere.  I mentioned already that as a child I considered prayer to be whining, or worse, begging.  Please, God, give me money.  I need a hot girl too.  Let me pass a big test, score a goal, or crush the competition.  Help me slay my rival and defile his entire family. (Or my favorite,) Show mercy on me, dear Lord, (for I deserve none).  And public prayer, especially before a TV camera & thousands of enraptured, compliant witnesses, I still find viscerally repellant, akin to mass masturbation, even if rationally I have no cause for complaint.  So what is my problem?  More to the point, what is prayer?
            For a start, here's an interesting technical aspect:  I don't know whom to address.  Perhaps scandalously, I don't know who or what "God" is, for just as I don't believe Jesus to be the one-and-only Son, neither do I believe in a one-and-only (omni-everything, bearded) Father.  Nor am I polytheistic.  So when I ask for help from "God," my pleas to the universe lack a definitive target.  And I can't get behind my voice if I don't know my audience.  Yes, consciously, vocally I call on "God," because, in whatever emotional need that brought me to my knees, I further need to address something, preferably someone.   But I have no other word.  "God," therefore for me, is a pronoun representing (we'll call it something fancy) the divine You, Infinite Intelligence—namely, anyone who might take pity on me in a position to act.  Just imagine then how much a small pronoun hangnail like this can gut the entire process.  I might as well cry to the vacuum of space. 
            My main problem with prayer, however, concerns content.  I don't know what to ask.  That is, I have too much self-respect, as well as respect for my indefinite God, to ask for lottery numbers or intervention in my love life.  In fact, I know better than to ask for anything.  That's because I believe strongly I already possess all I need to grow (that is, exactly so), including the various challenges and sufferings I've created for myself.  I must own them, as I must own my whole life.  Of course I want my sufferings to end, but not if I fail to learn what they teach.  I want to overcome my challenges, but not by peeking at the answer key.  I will not cheat myself.  If there's a "God" out there guiding my life, then surely He's put me through all this shit for good reason.  I can’t tolerate an unreasonable universe.
           In short, when I suffer enough to come to prayer (quite rarely), I know no God can help me better than I can myself.  No one else can speak for me; no one else can improve my character.  So I ask for wisdom.  God, please help me see.  But what do I expect to be shown?  Again, the answer key?  The future?  I ask for wisdom, but I expect it, erroneously, in the form of acquired knowledge, revelation.  Or perhaps (more deviously) I ask for a lesson on how to see more acutely.  Dear God, teach me how to fish for myself.  But is this wisdom?  Or is it rather technology—skills & practices & more acquired knowledge—which are power, certainly, but I don’t seek power, and no, like my dad, I don't ask for handouts. 

5. Praxis (Enter the Cricket)

            When I was about 9, I found a dime-store book on self-hypnosis which spelled out an easy procedure:  One began by lying supine, in bed generally, with one’s palms pressed flat against the mattress.  After some guided exercise to quiet the mind, counting sheep or counting down, the conscious self (the boy) would then quiz his own subconscious, framing all queries as Yes-or-No questions.  A question would be asked aloud, and then the answer would be indicated by raising the index finger of one hand—left for yes, right for no (or however designated).​  Always curious, I gave this procedure a try, and, to my surprise, it worked perfectly.  The fingers went up—seemingly of their own accord—exactly when & where they were supposed to, exactly as expected.  
            —Which, of course, rendered the whole experiment a failure:  I always got [what I thought was] the “right” answer.  Of course, I caught the catch-22, too:   If I asked “uncontrolled” questions, ones where I couldn’t know the answer, the raised finger could not then be crosschecked for confirmation.  Immediately my suspicious mind ran to Clever Hans, the counting horse, and his honest, foolish master:  That is, I’ve always known I could deceive myself.  To my knowledge, in fact, this counts as my greatest personal fear, my Orwellian “rat-cage” as I call it, self-delusion:  It terrified me even then, long before Germania & PTSD.  And yes, I heard voices and thus had some good reason for close self-monitoring.  But only now, in this very act of writing, do I finally see how fear itself was a clue for me, no doubt intended as a warning, for fear’s dark ripples wander the threads & webs of eternity irrespective of time’s one-way flow (like gravity waves perhaps?).  Impactful future events do in fact affect us backwards all the time, event-sucking time-wells of psychic shift or shock, which tip the scales & draw us toward such weighted dreams & abysses we can’t unthink to avoid them.  That is, even before the physical fact psychic events of magnitude make waves—not yet as material effects, but in Platonic form as caring, the target of our absent aches, which wells up from depths within us and fills a reservoir of pre-awareness.  When we seek ourselves, it is the echo of that dark lake that speaks back to us in recognition.  We don’t see ahead, but we feel the pull nonetheless (and might brace for impact!).  Thus as a child I already feared what later would befall me & define me for many years to follow—call it hubris, which is just a bold projection of fetal fear or unreadiness or unworthiness—the line of my mind that could not accept flight & fled, turning back on itself and tying an elaborate knot, myself blinded by myself & falling.  That knot wound around my whole lifeline, and the wounded child remains tied down to this day.  So even though I didn’t yet have a word for the cricket, I heard its chirping loud & clear, and, indeed, I heeded it. I needed “proof”—of my process, of contact with a separate, higher voice, something  concrete—because I dared not trust myself.​  
            Still, this little hypnosis experiment remained significant for me, a clue I couldn’t bury, perhaps because Albion knew my teachers would resurrect it for me decades later at the ouija board—although with another experiment doomed to fail, and rather spectacularly so, like a Monty Python slapstick:  Speaking as my personal teacher, Don assigned me homework from the board to practice dialoguing with Albion precisely in these terms, in Yes-or-No questions, where I was to visualize the spelled-out words (I assumed) as they appear on the ouija board, in Scribe’s calligraphy.  No sooner did Don advise this, than I immediately envisioned these words in their proper placement at the board, which “made sense at the time.”  That is, if I am to see both Yes and No, they must take up visual space and be positioned accordingly, right?  What I did, of course, in “placing” the words laterally in my mind—where left = Yes and right = No—was effectively to double the complexity of the task.  Now Albion had two required signals for a single affirmation instead of just one, both a Yes and also the yes on the left.  
           But wait.  With two words laid side-by-side how do I see which one is indicated?​[4]  I tried illumination—from above, from behind, self-illuminating—but found my lights dull & unconvincing, so I threw in color:  red =  stop = No, while green = go = Yes.  Right?  (No, “yes” is on the left.)  Finally, after weeks of flailing & failing, when in my visualizing efforts the red light kept lighting up the Yes side, while the green fucked up accordingly, I even briefly considered overlaying a (reliable?) acoustic signal as well—maybe a bell for Yes, for example, or two bells of different  pitch, to go with word, position, and color.  I am convinced that my teachers, Albion chief among them, sent me on this wild goose-chase intentionally.  At least we could laugh at my folly, which is better than crying, since in the end I abandoned Don’s “simple” model for the same reason I gave up on self-hypnosis:  Even when I found I could align word, position, light, and color, I still couldn’t accept the answer; I couldn’t trust myself.  “Chirp!”  Scribe could only shake his head.

           For eight or ten years after that, I intended formal dialogues with Albion routinely whenever I went running, roughly every other day.  I’d get stoned and for the next twenty minutes—before reaching the nearby beach & forest trails and turning my attention to beauty—I’d consciously focus on talking with Albion, who had a neat trick for his half of the dialogue:  He spoke in doggerel, verse of indefinite line length, but including both rhyme & rough-hewn meter, a “common man’s” poetry.  Albion obviously enjoyed imitating Shakespeare and acting over-the-top clever, often presiding over a kind of court jester’s outdoor tutorial—funny like a knife.[5]  Of course, I myself am no dummy.  I, too, can manage clever things and turn a quick phrase here & there.  So while there was no singular “proof of contact” when Albion rhymed words, he still had two clear reasons for his method:  Foremost, his stilted poetry was designed to distinguish his overseer’s voice sharply from my own normal voice, so that I might easily tell the difference.  That is, at my flying best I am Albion, and our voices are one.  But the goal is not merely to fly & become a unity; it is to be that while also understanding one’s components and their distinct functions.  Self & soul are indeed different and have different roles in the mind.  Albion the overseer insists I, the teacher, know how we work together, but also how we work apart.  I insist as well, though most flyers probably don’t care & don’t need to, to fly & produce amazing things.  Such may be a teacher’s burden alone.  
            The second reason Albion spoke in poetry was, indeed, to authenticate the process.  Yes, I can turn a rhyme or two.  But it’s really hard for me to do this when exhausted.  Thus, when on my runs I’d reconnect with Albion for the return leg home (less than half the time), his poetry-in-motion became more impressive simply as a physical feat.  He’d also then speak for longer intervals, extended stanzas, because I’d have grown too tired to live up to my half of the conversation—namely, to think critically & analytically and summon up enough voice to articulate words.  To be clear, listening is not “hard” for me as much as it requires stillness, and physical exhaustion actually makes it easier for me to hear, as all my extraneous white noise & music get swept away[6].  What was difficult was carrying out my end of the bargain, which was to further an intelligent discussion.  Coming up with smart English questions and “vocalizing them aloud in the mind”[7] requires active participation, present will & attention when all my will seemed needed to keep my legs churning beneath me.  Thus, the gap between our minds was magnified, while I, grasping mentally for words, marveled in perpetual awe, as my pied-piping overseer danced & pranced his way through complex metaphysics & language.  Many times, for instance, I’d listen to his verse, gasping & fighting through arthritic pain, wondering in anticipation how-in-the-hell he would both rhyme some absurdly difficult feminine end-rhyme (i.e., multisyllabic) and still advance what had to be a meaningful argument.  That is, these couldn’t just be silly word-sounds; Albion is no entertainer.  And pretty much every time, often timed with a vocal wink or tease or pregnant pause, he’d nail it—not just the right word, but one that would profoundly blow me away.  I’d just laugh, of course, or cough for breath rounding my mailbox, never feeling like Albion’s wit & clarity & humor & profundity were my own.  Who can make up miles of poetry day after day after day, literally for hundreds of miles?  Not me.  
            Then I’d promptly forget all the content…

6  Fog 

            Now I must get really personal, and I can’t believe that most people, if anyone, will relate to my experience.  Take my “facts” then as hypothetical and walk with me briefly, as I drag you through my mental minefield:

            Fact 1:  (Already discussed at length,) I hear voices & music that vastly exceed my modest talents & wisdom.  I can reach my dialogues reliably, though it’s usually work to do so.

            Fact 2:  (Discussed but not highlighted,) the voices & I are always engaged in a one-on-one Socratic dialogue:  Whether or not I am the student (and voice his words myself), or more often, I abide as a third-person observer listening to the student who has his own voice, I nonetheless always identify with the student and never with the teacher, generally an adult male.  Even when later I review the Albion dialogue transcripts (6.1), I find it impossible to “own” Albion’s responses.  Nor do I see him in these dialogues as a protagonist nor even as a central figure, for his eternal character cannot grow or develop within the story.  Only the student is capable of growth.  Thus, Albion’s voice seems as external to me as that of my teachers at the ouija board—except he’s less deferential & calls me on my bullshit.  Not me.  And yet he’s so obviously me, absolutely me—and not a future me, mind you, nor just more of the flawed fool I present right now:  a true & better me, my eternal aspiration.  

            Fact 3:  I’m so fucking weird!  O.K., I’ll entertain for speculation that there exist other people who are “acoustic like me.”  (Visual thinkers will have to extrapolate analogically from their own worlds to see mine; I can’t speak to your pictures.)  Few other acoustic people, however, reach their souls consciously and believe it.  When they do hear words & conversations (even all the time), they assume they’re just “thinking,” which they are.  But rarely do they line up the voices as I have, as one-on-one conversations.  And that’s what’s so weird:  When I drop in on my voices, I always find myself chained to some classroom desk with my benign, but no-nonsense teacher grilling & drilling me on moral awareness & abstract metaphysics ad infinitum.  That’s all we talk about.  Methinks this looks a bit like child abuse, muses the trained teacher in time.  When does that poor kid get a break?

           And thus perceived, the crack of doubt trips the cricket (or vice-versa), who adds his voice of reason & “concern for the child’s well-being”: 

                      "I see no necessity to this split-mind tutorial, which is unceasing in

          my mind, streaming 24/7 whether I listen in or not (like fucking CSPAN!).

          Why can’t I just hang out with my overseer in a smoke-filled dorm room or

          on a mountaintop?  Would he kick my ass at soccer?  Or why not research

          my karmic lessons through the Platonic paradox of astral sex (with a female

          projection of my soul)? 

                       "—Granted:  My classroom dialogues are, indeed, fun; Albion knows

          how to teach.  But why not grasp his deepest lessons through other means

          and forums?  Alas!, such is my teacher’s cross, which strikes me much

          more as pathology than pedagogy, for I can’t fathom that I’ve structured my

          inner life so starkly, so narrowly.”  (§Chirp!)  

            So let’s (push the cricket aside &) examine my starkness & narrowness to reconstruct Albion’s madness, for surely his Socratic imprint is no accident.  First, the alternative to a precise student-teacher dialogue, Q & A, is a free-form conversation, mostly wordless telepathy—which happens all the time.  Free-form, in fact, is my default state (everyone’s?) when I’m not stoned or sitting in my magic circle or physically exhausting myself in beauty.  In other words, Albion & I “chat” all the time, swimming in the same thought pool, and neither of us bothers with formalizing our thoughts through articulation.  This is unconscious stuff, the stuff of life, which is fine for day-to-day but does little to edify me.  I ask to be pushed.  So our “classroom” dialogues serve exactly the purpose they purport, to educate me beyond what I learn domestically, as “school” is our first formal training away from “home.”  And since the first learning target in this training is simply the awareness of distance itself (home versus away), this is reflected in the acute division & overt articulation of our voices[8].  
            In social hierarchies we know to respect certain formal boundaries, separations & distinctions that keep the institutional scaffolds from collapsing (regardless of worth or worthiness).  In the military, for instance, officers do not fraternize with enlisted men.  This does not so much make it easier to order soldiers to their deaths (though it might help); it keeps authority & communications clean, free from subtext & noise.  There’s no room for mixed chitchat in the mess hall, for instance, for you have to practice what you preach, day-in/day-out, even how you preach it, to make something integral to your life & being.  Even at meals, then, you must be determined to avoid any practice, like casual conversation, that could contribute to “the fog of war” once in battle.  Because orders must be understood.  In many commands, of course, all direct orders must be repeated verbatim by every soldier or sailor in the chain.  I’m glad Albion didn’t need to do that with me, but a beginning listener seeking his or her own overseer might consider just such a ploy:  That is, if you’re curious, dear Reader, as a beginning exercise simply repeat back everything you hear.  Say it aloud; better, type or write it down.  Why not?  Once you realize you can, you won’t need to.
           Teacher boundaries blur more easily than military rank, and so many teachers at every level get sucked up in the codependent Charybdises of their neediest (a.k.a., most fucked-up) students—soon involving other teachers, parents, counselors, coaches, doctors, therapists, parole officers, special ed alternative universes, etc.  A broad illustration?  Right after the 9-11 terror attacks concerned faculty at my school thought we should halt teaching school-wide for three days (or so) to “process” the event:  What do the attacks mean & portend?  (Recall how strange, no one could even stamp the event with a name.)  Are we at war?  Are we safe (in Washington State)?  How should we look at Muslims?  Who should we really blame?  (Uh, that’s ‘whom,’ I bite my lip silently.)  Most of all, How should we feel?  Parents were pushing us in all directions.  In the end I was grateful to be teaching mostly math.  We didn’t postpone school, fortunately, and most kids actually retreated to their homework & (one-week-old) school routines as a refuge from all the adult hand-wringing around them.  My daughter Deirdre was in sixth grade at the time and couldn’t begin to grasp the weight & enormity.  I knew her classmates could not as well.  Thus, math scores went up in the aftermath—one way to get kids focused…
            I mention this event from my middle school history to illustrate one facet of Albion’s burden with me:  While always present, Albion keeps his distance.  He sees me suffer—he does not dismiss it, for my pain is real—but, well, he won’t address it except as another metaphysical hurdle I, the self, must overcome.  He sees me dragging around shitloads of baggage.  That, too, is not his concern; that’s my job.  Only I can cut those cords.  He tells me I’m capable.  What is Albion’s role then?  Yes, he teaches me content I cannot find otherwise, apparently metaphysics all the time, but the content is not primary to his lesson.[9]  The most important lesson any teacher presents is the face he or she models.  Albion models the being I want to be—I hear his steady voice—above all, he’s someone perfectly present & focused who never strays from his task, sworn to a cause far greater than any task.[10]  That is, Albion teaches me because he is called to it by the Good, not because he benefits from my advance.  He & I are one, but Albion would make the same commitment to a perfect stranger if so called.  And yes, I do aspire to such indifference.

7.  The Cricket Can't Be Killed

            “Why don’t I talk to Albion anymore?”  The cricket who objects to the whole “unverifiable process” objects even to his own objections.  “Shouldn't I doubt myself?” I hear him chirp and smile.  He sounds just like me, like Albion, too, of course; but as me, he sounds even whinier, while as Albion, he becomes a kind of Turing-test machine who says “all the right things” while actually stating nothing (“sympathetic like a shrink”).  He’s got my language, my metaphors, and my brain, but he’s not real.  The cricket is the rhetorical voice, a programmed system of bells & whistles that reacts, no more.[11]  Still, he’s quite convincing, quite logical; but even when he’s not—when he’s an affront or a farce—he can effectively delay me.  He knows all my buttons and pushes them shamelessly.  ‘No point getting into a pissing match with an algorithm, I tell myself, then find myself pontificating with my pants down, chirping to fill the silence.  

            Let me offer an illustration, a parable without a story:  The cricket exists & is necessary, just as my home smoke alarm serves a vital purpose, though it’s so hypersensitive it goes off whenever I broil dinner or burn toast.  It’s painfully loud by design, of course, precisely so I can’t sleep through it; but then neither can I enjoy my wonderful supper while it’s sounding.  I could, of course, give up broiling altogether and limit what I cook, but I choose instead to disconnect my smoke detector, which requires me physically to fetch a chair so that I might reach it on the ceiling.  I broil with the windows open, even in winter; then, after dinner with the air cleared, I reconnect my alarm.  The key is that I leave the chair in place, in the middle of the hallway as a goddam obstacle in my path, so I won’t forget to reset it.  That is, I create one kind of physical signal to substitute for another.  Both grab my attention.  
            We are agreed, comes my consensus voice, that fire should never go untended, in fact that fire requires full attention in all but the most controlled environments, like a car or oven.  So the measure of one’s divided attention must be (inversely) determined by the measure of one’s control.  When we control physical fire in its physical environment, we free up mental attention (for dinner & dessert).  But we must leave a marker, one that takes our attentions back, for we never turn our backs on fire entirely.  
            Fire, of course, in this parable represents the flame of consciousness, infinity ready to consume us.  How do we protect ourselves, hold ourselves together as a lump identity?  We make no attempt, of course, to control abstract fire with physical measures, like smoke alarms or chairs (which is equivalent to idolatry).  But we do set a perimeter of abstract sensors & default responses to define our personal space & island refuge; and we set all kinds, in forms vastly more different from each other than sounds & objects, a million ways to grab & surround our attentions, including emotions & hormones & mini-PTSD switches, each one tripped by a preset trespass.  Thus the mind so extended is knotted & divided in a million ways, where each marker we lay trails a living thought, supping like a taproot from our attention reserves, a million sapping markers.  Many are long dead, of course, pruned or dried up from inactivity; but many others, extending from our dark infancies to the darker future still, remain quite active & wired to triggers unremembered, heeded but not needed, our inner lives littered with land mines.  
            The reason this parable has no story—with its annoying protagonist whose sole function steals our attention—is that while the cricket is protean, changing & mutating all the time, his changes serve no higher purpose; the vector lacks direction.  While “the life of a cricket” (a fiction) includes events & sequences & ever-new encounters, no narrative is possible without progress.  Even failed progress can write a story, but endless jumping without direction only swells the slag heap of gathered memories, where more is not better.  If you hold the cricket down with both hands round his neck, you can watch him shape-shift indefinitely, till he finally spills his secrets.  “Hold on for dear life!” you repeat to yourself, determined to pin him down.  Then you realize you’ve lost a decade strangling one insect only to become another.

            The reader might wonder why I largely discontinued my poetry-in-motion, as well as the Albion dialogues that follow, especially as I do not regard these exercises as failures and learned much from them.  Indeed, they served a clear purpose—and yet here I am, still not flying [as of 7/17].  The fact is, I do still sit down with Albion “officially,” as I show in Ch. 6.1's last two sessions, which are my only dialogues in a couple of years.  But writing now has taken over my life and draws on the same process & reserves, so after writing for hours every day, I have little left and little need.  I note that both of these recent dialogues fell in time between writing Lessons—namely, during intervals of assigned absence—and that my connecting with Albion amounted to checking in with my parole officer, little more.  I know what work I must do right now.
            For the record then, in both my running poetry & Albion dialogues, I simply milked the medium dry.  Over years of running, Albion’s pied-piping diminished.  Once I could recognize our distinct voices, the doggerel went away, and our voices grew closer.  Albion stopped showing off so much (not really his style), and I started sounding more intelligent, actively leading our discussions.  Eventually our voices could be distinguished only by our roles, where I, the self in time—now actively established in my questioner’s pov—play the role of, let’s say, an advanced student, who comes to his tutorial prepared & present.  Albion retains his authority but now offers me far less—answers to my eternal questions, yes, but I the self must discover what to ask.

            Let’s consider another image, one from my travels:[12]  Upon first arriving in Tanzania’s Usambara mountains (in 2006), my brother & I decided to venture into the rainforest without a guide.  Why not?  We had no place to go and a few hours to kill before nightfall.[13]  Where would the forest take us?  Not far apparently, at least on that first day, for the jungle tangle was indeed impenetrable, and every twenty yards or so the narrow, machete-hacked path diverged.  Above all of course, we knew we could not allow ourselves to get lost in an alien jungle.  Thus we’d walk single-file down the corridor of biomass, no signage anywhere, until arriving at the next fork in the mud, where we would then have to spend a surprising amount of time collaborating on a proper trail mark.  I believe we initially followed the sensible policy of “always veering right” at any junction, but many of these spurs just dead-ended around a bend; so we’d return to our mark and take the “left” path, having to take very clear mental photographs of each scene, especially if we then reoriented our mark, generally an arrow, to point the second path.  Quickly, however, this careful process became quite difficult, for the rainforest consists of branches & leaves all of near-identical color, and few rocks could be found.  Thus, most of our marks consisted of sticking identical sticks in the mud pointing the way or building cairn-sized teepees—sticks we knew well might get kicked over by the next passerby (annoyed by all our silly sticks “obstructing” his path).
            Consider how we ended:  After ninety minutes or so, we’d erected so many arrows & teepees that our trail marks started to confuse.  We tried to make each one original, since each needed to be remembered distinctly, but there are only so many ways to make a mark (without defiling a forest).  We counted our marks; we discussed them & evaluated them; soon all our efforts went into maintaining our mnemonics.  Our journey, thus, became a pure memory maze only, and we never arrived anywhere at all.  We did get to see a nice line of the world’s scariest army ants, capable of carrying off an entire horse piece-by-sawed-off-piece within a lazy afternoon.  We just stepped over them, and they became, in fact, about the only distinct landmark we found.  We had to cross them twice to exit the jungle.
            In this illustration the cricket is represented by our system of trail marks, while the forest labyrinth is the mind itself—the mind trying to find a way through itself.  Because my brother & I took such care, and despite our not getting anywhere, we did come to a kind of overview image of the jungle, a new kind of map for us.  Experienced hikers, we were used to trails, and losing trails too, but we’d never encountered this:  no single path from A to B, but a web of interlacing trails, fractal in their self-similarity.  Once we exited and were able to view from some distance the jungle within its mountain contours, it was clear all the trails must’ve wound up in the same vicinity, somewhere up on the mountain ridge.  It’s quite likely that natives then cared little to follow any one path or that they bothered to keep track at all.  Surely no one needed trail marks.  All they needed was direction.  

            Now let me juxtapose this Tanzanian episode with another from my travels, one of the stranger moments of my life, this time in 2009 near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness straddling the Minnesota-Ontario border:  My wife, daughter Rhiannon, and I had just “escaped” safely from our first serious canoeing, a four-day foray into this wilderness, which is more pristine than our national parks—no roads nor signs nor even trails—canoes only.  Indeed, if I were not so particularly gifted with maps & navigation, surely we should have gotten lost, so meager were our given directions.  The trip started beautifully, but then my wife came down with a migraine, followed by torrential rain, and three half-mile portages requiring me to balance a 44-lb. canoe on my shoulders with no way to swat the mosquito cloud sucking on my face.  But we made our rendezvous and that final morning traded our canoe & dripping-wet tents for mountain bikes and an anticlimactic spin back to the B&B and, whew!, hot showers.[14]  After a delicious early dinner, the women retired to the renewed comfort of a warm bedroom, while I chose to take in the day’s waning beauty—an extended northern twilight—with a nice walk.  A good time to spot moose!
            I got mildly stoned (my daughter being elsewhere) and found myself alone on a cross-country ski trail that ran between densely-planted conifers on either side.  Instantly I lost myself in the fresh air, the straight grassy path wide enough for a service vehicle, and the physical pleasure of an extra-brisk walk (since I hadn’t walked for days).  Undoubtedly I lost myself in conversation with Albion processing my wilderness adventure, debriefing to extract its Platonic lessons; and I relaxed.  That is, I stopped paying attention to what I was doing.  Why not?  I was walking a straight road.
            It took some time then, an hour or more, of my exaggerated “power walking” before I awoke to the strangeness of the scene:  All I saw, all I had seen, all before & behind me was exactly identical in appearance.  The path was dead-straight & uniform.  The sky was overcast & featureless, losing light.  The scrubby little conifers (by Western standards) were dense enough to form an opaque corridor for many miles, also utterly uniform.  The only landmarks I’d passed, in fact, after about 3? miles were the occasional fallen tree across my path, maybe two or three of these; and even they appeared the same—the same age & diameters, and all seemed to fall exactly perpendicular to the path.  I’d see one down in the distance, and I’d tell myself, “When I get to that tree, I’ll turn back.”  But then upon reaching it, I’d step over it and keep going, blissfully immersed in motion & thought.
            And then—was it the cricket?  Albion?—doubt slipped in.  I was stoned, just barely at this point, but not paying close attention, guard down.  Could I be… lost?  How can you get lost on a straight road without making a single turn?!  The thought crept in and took hold.  “Maybe,” I considered, “I did turn around at that tree” (one of them).  “Maybe I’m already on my way back but think I’m still heading away.”  Oh shit.
            Was I indulging a fancy?  Was I really lost, or was this just a fucking mind-game I was pulling on myself?  If I had been speaking with Albion, then he certainly abandoned me.  Suddenly I, the superb navigator who had just proven his wilderness mettle, really didn’t know which way I was going on a straight road!  I never panic; I did, in fact, laugh at myself in my ironic folly, but all my stress returned.  “O.K., time to head back.  Which way do I go?”  I turned around and began running with speed, knowing well that I might be racing entirely in the wrong direction.  Nothing else to be done, though, as it was getting dark & cold, and I had no flashlight.  Finally after about another forty-five minutes, without any sign or warning, boom, I was back, home, done:  No harm, no foul.  Whew again!  —All that real stress & real adventure when literally nothing happened.  My wife & daughter were reading in their beds.

8. Line of Fire

            In Lesson 5 I introduce the concept of a soul as an aleph point, an eternity squeezed down to its maximal focus. This concept stems from two sources: The first, which I started developing in high school, begins with a Venn diagram, usually drawn as circles enclosing defined sets (eg., the set of Me). The size of these drawn circles varies little on paper, regardless of how many elements are contained within, for the value of the depiction is not based on its size, but rather on how the displayed sets relate to each other, how they intersect. My modest invention then, came from my direct intuitions of Cantor’s mathematics, that some infinities are just bigger than others. I knew my soul was infinite; I also knew that another Infinity existed beyond me that completely overwhelmed my own, bigger in every possible direction—later revealed by my teachers to Scribe visually as the “terrible” Loom. Thus a human soul taken as a circle within & compared to Infinity can have no size—concepts have no size—so I conceived of Me and other souls as points, which thus can be graphed as though they had Cartesian coordinates. The second source of my “soul geometry” comes from Scribe’s primal vision of auroras, infant human souls unable to coalesce, unfocused thoughts—fog. When souls do gather into focus, their wispy luminosities intensify & ignite; and, when intended toward a distinct target, shoot like fiery meteors to a new location: They leap; they fly. In fact, from this overview perspective, that’s all they do.
            Two further assumptions can now be stated here as well: Firefishes fly in “straight” lines—however geometrically represented in this space—because, presumably, we choose the shortest distance to travel, as it takes energy to cover distance in this metaphor. Second, firefishes, if they know what’s good for them, aim themselves toward the Good. That is, souls move directionally and travel a perceived distance, which is why I think of souls as vectors.
            Now don’t forget—there is no ob. This conceptualization remains metaphor only, although, just as we humans share biological metaphors in life, I think we likely share this common base metaphor of auroras & firefishes. That is, I think other humans can & do live this vision. And I think this image is about as fundamental as we can get, as spacetime beings with bodies & brains, though space & time undoubtedly make up but a fraction of our soul’s total existence. The magnitude of a vector, then, as represented by its distance traveled, displays how hard it is for us to reach our target, how much focused intent is required for us to get there. “Bunny hopping” feels nearly effortless, conditioned & reflexive, while Nine Men tasks take us further than we ever thought possible. 
            But this is still just metaphor. I am fascinated then, tangentially, by the gathering body of evidence which confirms my image linguistically. That is, many of the world’s experts on language and cognition—who seek to find the deepest forms & roots of language via its cognitive structures—are turning to precisely the kinds of quasi-visual geometrical metaphors I offer here. There are many aspects to being human that I aim to reframe in my albionspeak paradigm (which still has no official name); and all must fit together nicely if am to succeed with my image. I leave it for Volume Two to explore these semantic structures in detail, the essence of language, but I need to highlight with boldface emphasis their vital importance at this time: I believe that language itself is the “fire of Prometheus,” stolen by a titan, or by Raven or Jaguar, or any number of other trickster spirits deep in prehistory, which now serves as the source filter for all we conceive substantively in our modern world. And I believe firmly it is a fire that burns out of control. Today most of us can’t imagine ourselves or think at all outside of language; it’s escaped all containment. Thus was Prometheus punished for just reason: It’s terribly, even criminally dangerous to let infants play with fire—just look at our planet.

            Now let me balance my near-total emphasis on language & cognition here, including my private internal dialogues, with another sure fact: We are hardly language alone. Love (perhaps especially sex), music, sports, painting, hunting & gathering, working with wood or clay, hiking in nature—all of these and countless other experiences are generally best perceived without language, outside cognition. Homo sapiens originally (at least 300,000 years ago) probably had very little language. No doubt, though, countless billions of human souls chose precisely such (silent?, holistic?, unfiltered?) lives anyway, to anchor their origins in an eternity foregoing language. 
            So as much as I know I am a domesticated “language-man,” I know also this accounts for but the minor part of me who needs to assert & flaunt & parade his ego self-awareness—probably the most convoluted corner of my soul’s identity, the whole Albion. No, I can’t conceive of myself without language, for indeed I can’t “conceive” of any self-aware reflection outside a left-brained language construction, which separates subject & object, myself from my reflection. But I do try to get past this dependence. I paint, for instance, surprisingly well for someone who can’t visualize (and doesn’t really care), perhaps precisely because I lack any projected mental imagery to interfere with my canvas. That is, I paint what’s there, ‘cuz that’s all I see. This fact I offer in sharp contrast to my awful piano playing, which suffers from many mental obstacles (not my fingers), the biggest of which is that I can’t immerse myself in my music. As soon as I start to listen to what I’m playing (that is, enjoy the music)—which, of course, is absolutely necessary to decent playing and represents my primary modality—then I focus on listening exclusively and lose my place in the sheet music. My eyes turn off; my fingers keep going, and five or six measures later I realize I’m lost.

             Recently though, I’m amused to add, I’ve made a little progress in piano employing self-deception; namely, I’ve learned to outsmart my cricket programming—just a bit, something to help me temporarily: I take off my glasses. It sounds so simple; it is. The fact is, I’ve been myopic since childhood and am never without correction—except in bed, in the shower, or while reading, which is noteworthy because my eyes are working overtime even as I’m not visualizing.  Now as I play piano, I must get very close to my sheet music, hovering over the keys, but I find my eyes hold on much longer before I lose track. Because I have conditioned myself for decades to fear “stumbling in darkness,” my cricket starts screaming the second I take off my glasses in the form of a small jolt of stress & heightened visual attention. (I congratulate myself on my little trick.) Now how long can I fool myself before the cricket catches up and changes his tune? Because he always does….
            Also I dance, literally, ecstatically to exhaustion, a few times a day now that I’m retired, whenever the music moves me. (Soccer used to fill this need.) I dance when no one else is around, but since it only takes a few minutes, it can happen almost anytime—while my wife is gardening, for instance, and I’m cooking dinner with the stereo blasting.[15] I love my dancing for many reasons. Foremost I fly—my whole body becomes the music—and it’s really joyful & healthy & good, so fundamentally the experience needs no further dissection. I do understand deeply, though, that in dancing I am Albion, and that this athletic live-wire can only help us grow closer. That is, in the moment I am fully aware that I’m connected through the music to Albion & flying, but in this particular instance my self-awareness doesn’t sever the flow. While the music maintains the momentum, my full presence is not engaged cognitively or linguistically, even, most strangely, as I respond deeply to song lyrics. I dance & I sing, but in these moments I’m not thinking in language reflectively, reflexively, or recursively. The kite does not fold back on itself, so no knot forms.

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9.  Clairaudience

            A final datum, a tidbit for comparison: The Albion dialogues which follow this lesson  (6.1) were important to me as a process, not so much for their content (none of which will appear on the final exam!). I include a few samples merely to document & model for the reader the depth of my praxis, which, despite any pain or good humor displayed therein, remained serious business only. That is, my pain & humor & the substance of my life serve merely as the tools of the lessons, like numbers you might “plug in” to algebraic variables to test & grasp the functional range of a particular equation, the numbers themselves not being important.
            I describe in my introduction to these dialogues that they were inspired by a singular event, Dialogue 5, a “sent” conversation with Albion of great length, while the other 100+ dialogues are much shorter. I also explain that I didn’t regard Dialogue 5 at the time as game-changing, the reason being I’d received much better language from my overseer already, many times, starting with the clairaudience poem that follows. Later, in Germany, I received such poems nearly every day for roughly two months, perhaps a dozen of which I still cherish as personal treasures. Dialogue 5 by comparison seemed rather crude.

            So let me set the stage for what follows here, my first true poem: I was 19 and facing my first real-life crisis. I had just abandoned “the proper path” as laid out for me by my parents, by myself & my teachers & respectable society, the one that secured a structured ascent to a respectable & profitable career (probably as a lawyer). That potential future was abruptly (& thankfully) cut off, but I had no back-up, no Plan B. I was home from college for Spring Break, in the midst of my first mild “depression,” not even sure if I could return to classes in a week. My parents were alarmed. I recall absently sitting on the living room sofa, where I almost never sat, because my dad routinely parked himself there to study languages. Thus there was a pencil & pad of paper ready at hand, which I picked up for no clear reason. A poem? I recall writing the Roman numeral “I” and thinking to myself, “Hmm,… I’ve never written a poem in distinct ‘parts’ before.” The fact was, I’d written only two or three poems ever.
            Three minutes later I was done.  I had to look up the word “imbued” in the dictionary, not sure if I’d heard the right word (or what it really meant).  Within ten minutes the “miracle” was settling in, pure wonder that I had produced something beyond me that was nonetheless absolutely me, a better me.  I knew that I was unlikely to reproduce anything like it consistently; that I’d hit a home run without knowing how, but I was going to learn how.  
            That gift, straight from Albion’s mouth, not surprisingly marked the critical turning point in that particular real-life challenge.  I’d go a bit lower three years later in Germany (nothing clinical), but never found myself in any real trouble after that—namely, my whole adult life.  Indeed, by any mortal measures, especially love & family, I am exceedingly blessed:  All the pain & suffering I so nakedly put on display here are entirely internal, in my head only.  Existential angst or anguish is how I perceive the separation of my soul & self.  It is pain I want to feel, to remember why I’m here, alive, and what all my work must be aimed toward.  So let me balance my narrative (for the sake of the child) as I truly proclaim:   “I’m the luckiest man alive!”  Everyone should feel this way.   
            May I offer you my testicles…?

§Albion

7/9/18




The City

I.

A mountain mist (in twilight) silences
The air inside a pagoda,
Saying only, “Listen…”

Stirring on a lake is heard
The lotus flower gazing in the water.
The image of its petals is imbued with proud fragrance,
As the envious cherry blossom looks on.

II.

A Chinese painter once went crazy,
Producing a fog which quieted the City.


III.

A toilet flushes:  here, then there.
It is the heartbeat of the City,
Sending fragrant pulses to peaceful waters,
Where lotus flowers wither,
And cherry blossoms are happy for what they are.

The City breathes and waits…
Someday all Chinese painters will be crazy.




4/79

[2]I would quickly dismiss Jung’s claim on the basis of gender inequality alone—not as a temporal socio-political issue, mind you, but as an obvious asymmetry, an imbalance:  What about "Mother"?

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alert

[14]Rhiannon, still in high school, rose to the occasion & deserves credit. While I carried the canoe, she carried everything else, making 2 or 3 trips during each portage.  My wife could barely move herself.  Unlike backpacking, wherein a migraine halts a trip, canoeing is just manageable, especially when there’s no alternative. 

​[8]Scribe, I’m reasonably sure, never set up a mental “classroom” with his overseer, which may well stem from his being a visual thinker (his love & mastery of language notwithstanding).  He did, however, have one hyper-clear direct line to his overseer, which he called “the Daimon of No,” after Socrates’s personal example.  It is well-documented that Socrates heard such a voice or guide, who did not tell him what to do, but only what not to do.  Scribe’s daimon—who we subsequently learned at the board was actually the higher Scribe—also signaled only what not to do; and for years this signal came to Scribe visualized as a single (black?) pebble.  Whenever Scribe saw this pebble in his mind, he knew immediately to stop whatever he was doing and change directions.  Apparently this could even happen (I recall once) while brushing his teeth, the rationale for which could never be determined.  He’d stop and never learn why (and he never once tested or challenged his “daimon" by not stopping).  This practice itself only stopped once Scribe & his overseer consciously sought & found superior measures for talking.

​[7]This sounds self-contradictory, but within my depths I often distinguish between pre-vocalized thoughts, which are still good English, versus acoustically perceived language.  Acoustic voices, of course, include pitch, emotional tone, and dynamics, which communicate much beyond mere words.   And yet pre-acoustic language often conveys these extra-lingual pre-sounds as well (no idea how).  More strangely, the unheard unseen “gestures” of my dialogues, like smiles or winks or accents of heavy gravity, occur regardless of perceived sound.  I liken this phenomenon (though I’m not sure why) to the fact that Bach is just more Platonic than Beethoven or Mozart.  Bach’s many masterpieces, for reasons I seek to understand, can be generally rearranged in many ways, and often are, where a flute concerto becomes violin, oboe, and piano concertos, each one sounding wonderful.  To rearrange most Beethoven or Mozart pieces, however, would be wrong, not what the composer intended, sacrilegious. 

[9]“WTF!  Metaphysics upon metaphysics—this is crazy shit, deeply knotted to obsession!”  Hear the cricket?  He’s incredibly reasonable; in fact, he’s right—that is, until I consider the alternative:  I ask, “What subjects should I instead talk about with my eternal overseer?”  Uh, I honestly have no better suggestion.  We do, of course, talk about soccer, kids, school, etc., but only because these activities & events form the substance of my life, wherein they each become nouns & anchor points for further metaphysics.  There is, in fact, no way to speak without such nouns.

​[5]These Albion dialogues fell in time not long after I’d completed my “metrical mile,” where I memorized 76 of Shakespeare’s sonnets mostly while running—though later also while showering & using the toilet, any activity that added not one more second to my impossible schedule.  (Thus time itself was incorporated into that task’s official rules.)  Dovetailing nicely with the preceding task, Albion then adopted & adapted “Shakespeare’s” language (more in style than fact), especially his inverted word order and odd word choice, often inventing fun, new compound nouns (also as if auf Deutsch).  And while strict iambics were not unusual, regular pentameter never was attempted.  (I naturally trend toward tetrameter—I think perhaps partly as a result of rock ’n’ roll’s double-four time tempo.  Indeed, my (street) running/breathing cadence is 4/4.)

[12]Albion insists I offer at least two examples of the cricket, just as we must always hold more than one image of the Jewel in our mind (or none at all).  This derives from our proscription that forbids us from creating idols, much older than the Old Testament.  Why are idols so bad?  Because they’re concrete, not the true Platonic form (or Jewel or Tao).  The Jewel that can be held in the hand (or worn in a crown) is not the eternal Jewel.  It is similarly quite dangerous to have but one image of the cricket.

​​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.

[3]These last two insights actually came together when I wasn’t listening to music (though I still give dope credit…).  I was reading from a Genesis fan book—I forget exactly—and there was a veiled reference to something special about “Watcher of the Skies,” and instantly I knew what “the secret” was, not having ever considered such an idea in my life before—whereupon I immediately called up the song in my head & confirmed my insight:  That is, I knew it before I heard it.  The book said that indeed “Watcher…” was the first song to accomplish [this secret].  And immediately my mind then jumped to “Fire on High,” a much greater leap since I’ve never owned any ELO, nor did my friends with stereos.  And since “Fire…” is an instrumental, it’s not even one of ELO’s bigger hits.  I’d probably heard it on the radio fewer than twenty times and “listened” to it carefully four or five times only, no more.  I’ll add for note:  At the peak of my Germany experience I saw Genesis’s Abacab concert, which was the best concert of my life, largely because I got a front-row spot (standing), and I was flying.  I saw ELO roughly a week later at the same Frankfurt venue, from the same exact spot.  Another great concert. 

​[4]“Yes” and “no” are two words that defy the standard “eight parts of speech” classification system.  They’re not adverbs, since they don’t modify anything; and they’re more than mere interjections because they mean something definitive and can’t be interchanged.  Some languages like Latin do not employ a yes/no system.  Welsh & Finnish apparently require verb forms to do the same trick.  Some languages have a four-fold division of affirmatives & negatives, while a few take three.

[11]I, the self & writer, wanted (repeatedly) to use the word “autopilot” here to describe the cricket—strangely, a new word for me in this context—but each time Albion said no.  That description, he explains, is accurate to the point of dangerous.  As soon as you think you know your cricket—especially if you have an image of derived & predictable algorithms—then you put yourself on autopilot.  Furthermore, you forget the real danger.  In desperation the cricket itself is capable of transformation.  That is, the cricket leaps (duh!).  Do not underestimate him!  It’s an amazing idea really:  To have a system of alarms smart enough to reprogram itself, to evolve autonomously.  But this must be so.  Otherwise we’d quickly outpace our sensors, then run forever blindly into ever greater dangers. 

Lesson 6
Images & Attributions (in order of appearance)
1.  Banner:  Rhiannon C. 2016
2.  Albion Glyphs: "Glad Day" or "The Dance of Albion," William Blake, c.179  
                 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/47/William_Blake_-_Albion_Rose_-   
                _from_A_Large_Book_of_Designs_1793-6.jpg

​[1]Sections 2, 3, and 4 shown here are among my first products as a “professional” writer.  That is, since early childhood I’d always wanted “to be a writer,” even though I was much better at math and I wrote very little outside of school—so I knew well my dream was foolish, nothing to raise a family on.  Besides, I had nothing to say, which is hardly trivial.  Then came ouija.  Then came many years of typing, but also commenting & annotating & explaining some of the most difficult abstract concepts in the marginalia of our transcripts; years became decades.  I knew from the beginning that my documentary duty, to preserve the ouija transcripts for posterity, required my best language:  I was writing to future generations of readers & seekers of the Jewel, a sacred task.  But I never knew if I could actually do it, be a pro, which means being able to put in a routine eight-hours-a-day of writing, inspired or not, for months on end & often having little to show for it—fucking self-discipline.  In 2014-15 I got to test myself, when my wife & I took the school year off, spending five months in South America.  That fall before the trip, I learned with proven certainty that eight hours can fly by, and that I actually prefer to work seven days a week, not just the six I put in for 32 years.  Talented or mediocre, read or unread, I’m now a pro.  God, I love it.

[13]Sunset happens instantly at the Equator—no twilight, no warning, and no illumination except our flashlights—watch out!

[15]And yes, I do dance unto utter ecstasy to unheard music as well, which, I’m well aware, might appear a bit possessed, like an Eleusinian or satanic rite, but this would be a rare event for me.  Unheard music generally shape-shifts enough in form that a consistent rhythm is unworkable.  I do much more often dance to known songs playing in my head—rather all the time as I move through my house & garden (not in public).  But if I choose to make dancing primary, loud stereo is best.  Also, I dance to anything.

∞!

[10] I would certainly add here that Albion always strikes me as one who possesses infinite patience, except that he himself dispelled this impression with his “grand-opening” utterance at the ouija board:  “… I WAIT AT [THE] HEAD OF YOUR KITE BURNING IMPATIENT
WHY DO YOU NOT COME TO ME?  WE ARE ONE ANOTHERS JOY”