Post by willowdown on Dec 28, 2008 22:31:23 GMT -5
At the threshold of Sleep, a young child came to me. Are you the dove of peace? I asked but it shook its head and laughed. Are you the owl of Artemis? The child screwed up its face and looked at me in puzzlement.
Perhaps it is the guardian of the gate of dreams, I thought and stared into its clear blue eyes. But presently the guardian of the gate of dreams came by and he was an old and stooped man with skin like ancient parchment and silver coins upon his eyes.
I followed him up the seven thousand steps to the Garden of Crystalline Flowers, which are all sculpted of ice and frozen tears and the little child climbed up after us.
After two thousand steps I thought to ask the child if I should carry it, for surely it must be tired? But my tongue would no longer obey the commands of my will, and anyhow, the child, as if sensing my unspoken enquiry, raced on ahead of ud as if on heels of mercury, pausing every so often to look back at us, to poke out its tongue at the blind old man and wink at me conspiratorialy.
Odious child, I thought.
At the fifth thousandth step it put forth white feathered wings from its shoulders and a pearly opalescence seemed to shimmer in the air about it.
"I thought there was something bird-like about it," I thought to myself, re-calling its glittering eyes.
But then it became a black-winged snake and a dull red fire began to smoulder in its gaze. Tears of sulphur fell from its face and where they fell they burned great holes in the very substance of the seven thousand steps.
I tried to shout a warning to the parchment featured Guardian of Dreams but it was as if a clamp of iron were fastened across my mouth and I looked on in horror as he stepped directly into one of the molten, reeking holes and plummetted silently into the infinite darkness below, his very flesh and garments dissolving upon him at the touch of the winged snakes venom, the silver coins upon his eyes hissing and bubbling.
And then he was gone.
At the sixth thousandth step the black-winged snake underwent another metamorphosis and became a fiery spirit of child-shaped flame. My voice returned and I forthwith commanded the luminous salamander to tell me whether it was an angel or a devil but it made no reply and continued to climb the mystical stairway on its tiny feet of fire.
All about us now the stars burned in Heaven as vast, coloured Spheres of unearthly and supernatural beauty, each emitting a unique and compelling musical signiture that vibrated the invisible ether about them with their combined harmony and compelling the subtle flesh and dream-blood of my own Akashic body to further decay, breaking down incrementaly as it was subtly transformed to fluctuating patterns of musical energy, shedding its remaining vestiges of corporeal form.
With eyes of fire I now perceived the flame-sylph before me as a pillar of white energy. This pillar slowly condensed and took on the appearence (I hesitate to say form) of a small and particularly beautiful silver Bell which rang exquisitely in the rarefied ether of the Void, and as it did so the music of the giant Spheres seemed to grow dim as if those vast coloured entities were listening attentively to this new sound.
And, indeed, presently the high pure note was taken up by the Spheres and worked into the living music of their song, absorbed as an integral and interacting part and then reflected back into the Universe of sound and vibration in a million subtle permutations and developments that engaged most wonderfully with each and every other dancing musical note yet still retained its own clear and distinctive tone.
All of these various vibrations and musical themes resonated through my own loose amalgamation of tones and sound textures, setting up waves and endlessly repeating ripples of pleasure and aesthetic appreciation in my consciousness.
Presently, after many aeons, I became aware that the tiny silver Bell had deepened to a golden colour and was tiny no longer. Indeed, it filled the entire Cosmos, dwarfing completely the myriad stars, suns and spheres of all Creation. It seemed to me that it was not unlike a vast golden heart and its deep solemn tones following upon each other and thrilling my attenuated body of consciousness with successive waves of bliss, were infact the living heartbeats of the great, invisible golden Entity that is the Universe itself, full of all the infinite beings, creatures and entities that are its living cells.
With every pulse of that great golden heart, Universal Consciousness itself expanded and contracted, as the worlds of matter and the psycho-spiritual middle-worlds were rhythmically manifested and withdrawn.
Many more Aeons passed. I no longer noticed the continual ebb and flow of Creation but had become absorbed in the deep underlying silence behind it. The expansion and contraction of the manifest realms, the continual process of creation and destruction, was the softest of flutterings against my consciousness, as of the wings of some delicate ethereal butterfly. Yet that butterfly contained all the worlds of men and women and other created beings who lived and danced (and, yes, suffered and perished) in the soft opening and closing of its pretty, gauzy wings, the quiet breathing of form and silence, music and emptiness that presently, like a flower opening its petals to some new sun, blossomed into a new and wonderful thing into which the last vestige of my self drowned, immolated, surrendered its being and the high pure note resolved itself into the sound of Krishna's flute and a million golden bees filled the ocean of light that is Vrindabhan with song and Your face arose before me...
Pattaya 1998
