Posted by piph on May 07, 19100 at 18:56:12:
-- An Extent of Awareness
by, piphy
I am sleeping, and I am dreaming. Dreaming, yes, but I've been
working,long and with intent. I have found myself, out of time,
within the dream, in the center, swooning in the balance. A conscious
agent; who, or better not-who, yet with no-thing containing all-thing,
need eternally acquire form, organization in the create. And with
attending certain grace, must act without impediment, breathe
without amending stillness, and also, likewise, yet not furthermore,
remain concurrent in the present.
I am surrounded by a woman; an immense and powerful being. She surrounds me with her presence. She has my full attention. There is no need to speak. We possess exact communication. We have immaculate telepathy. She is vessel, voyager and machine. She is inviting me to accompany her to a place. Her invitation comes with an all-knowing awareness. There is no yes or no. There is only an already-being-there.
It is a sportsman's club, impressive, with vaulted ceilings, thick with leather chairs. The room, trimmed with red, calls out in powerful reverberation with a voice of a hundred hundred years. The rich presence of wood, large beamed ceilings and paneled walls, stares back with eyes fixed for an eternity in holographic caricature of itself. No longer living. No longer synthesizing water and light, the mineral into the vegetable. Plainly rooted, petrified and immovable. Fixed into image, the once animated matter yields the hall and becomes servant of Man in his ever-broadening desire for the sensual, the amatory, the carnal. My heart crawls out of my body, engulfs the humanity, and crawls back again.
I am calm. And I am breathing. I am being introduced to three women. Three vigorous and handsome women. Women who are in my immediate proximity. Women who look like me, and don't look like me. Women who could have been me, or I them. We do not speak. There is no need. All are telepathic. All have heightened senses. All communicate through the subtle reading of posture, gesture.
I glance around the room. My heart follows with speed-defying perception to the order of events. Which came first, the vision or the mood? The perception or the pressure? The query or the reflex? Whose game am I playing, anyway? Returning to my breath, and to the stillness of the void, remembering once again, I have forgotten myself. Found, restored. No longer lost to the magnetism of learned behavior, the debased monopolization of attention toward ghost reverberations of an imagined and phenomenal past, I at once regain the moment.
Non-phenomenal presence proceeds with my remembering toward my being, and again, with my awareness, brings my presence into the present. Impressions filling my senses, the large hall of hunters' trophies surrounding me, reminds me in stark fashion of something lost. The place is utterly masculine. It's not that there isn't a certain warmth about it, au contraire… it's just that the seams are all so snugly fit, the corners so impeccable. The hours spent dressing the impressive surfaces are evidenced in lacquer and oils that add just the proper amount of luster, the calculated ambient sheen to the already seductive amber light.
Attention diffusing and combining with my presence, I gather to witness the extent of impressions. Moving in three dimensions, self beholding of self, while at once seizing the manifold sensations of immediate surroundings, I feel love. Tender and alert, I notice women moving about the space. Many women. Only women. I begin, instinctively, if not mechanically, to anticipate a man. I don't seem positive, confident, even cocksure… Isn't that a man, there, in the corner beyond those two women? I observe benignly as my mind queries itself; begins a subtle, albeit appreciable, struggle within itself.
I move, yet not bodily, to see beyond the women who stand obscuring my line of vision from the object of my attention. Stretching my perception around them now to get a better look, gain an improved vantage, I can scarcely focus my ordinary vision. I am becoming annoyed. There is no good reason for my senses to be failing me now. Attachment to bodily sensation derails objective witness, spiraling down into a digression of transitory suffering. Returning consciously to my breath, I release the momentary suspension invoked by the dichotomy of this obviously male space and the apparent all female attendance.
Collecting my presence and returning to the moment, I appreciate that only one fragment of a moment has passed since my entering the room. Restoring my focused attention, I return my relaxed attention to the introduction taking place before me. I observe the three women. Notice their lean yet well-muscled bodies. There is a disciplined starchiness to their attention. Strong, yet ostensibly misguided. I notice they are armed with a variety of handguns.
With a measure of consideration now added to my discernment, my conscious attention diffuses in the space. I notice that, indeed, everyone within my view is armed with some sort of weapon. How could I have missed that before? A sportsman's club is an obvious place for weapons. Weapons are, after all, the tools of the hunter. Rifles, shotguns, the deadly cross-bow… but no, not handguns. Not automatic weapons. Not for sport or hunt. These weapons are specific. Built to sustain the close-up killing of humans; to support intense interludes, for personal gain or private device.
The hall gives up the stench of treatments of death. My senses fill with the amply encoded memories contained in this place of might and the sum brutality inspired within, toward the innocent and unsuspecting. Greed, power and violence: the dark and light of Man in all his maniacal, ill-spent glory. I take back my senses, leaving the psychometry of the artifact for another moment. I need my presence here, now, in the present. I am being summoned by an agent, spirit or beast, knocking upon the door of my stillness.
Telepathically, I am advised (though I wonder without hesitation by whom or what), to select a weapon for myself. Before any corporeal intelligence appears to respond, I find myself holding two cinnamon-colored .22 caliber six shooters. The warm coppery color reflects subtle shades of pinks and silvers back into my eyes. I behold them nostalgically, even lovingly. I load them effortlessly with equally cinnamon-colored slugs. The holster, not unlike a child's stamped leatherette, fell-backed version, materializes around me. I deftly holster them simultaneously, as if I have done it a thousand times before; no, more; innumerable times before.
Again, the sublime instruction: join the raiders, join the dominion of stiff and prosaic minds; the unsuspecting initiates and caretakers of the marked and sordid gleaming pasts of ill repute and unseen influence. I am spurred, galvanized and inspired to be with all, the one and many, to join the game, feed the delirium, go out and kill someone, or some thing. Instantly, with all of my being, I know this is not to be so. And yet I recognize that to fool these telepaths, maintain my own benevolence, and at once gain their confidence, I must mirror their own aggressions, reflect back to them their mental passions.
I focus the whole of my being, the entirety of my will and intention upon the notion of killing a rat. A rat, imagined, yet a rat who, even in my fantasized awareness, is granted full compassion and dignity. Buying my put-on contention, the telepaths assume compliance. Effecting this illusion, I have created in the bargain a cloaking device for my active mentation and bought myself a fraction of a moment's protection to devise a plan in secret. We gather together and leave the club.
Once outside, the deciduous trees, the clear light and assorted grasses offer a transient blessed rest, and I drink in the sweet recollection of the profound natural order, the civility and exactitude of creation. Moving quickly now, without thought or as much as a single attraction to any one object fixed in false illusion, I put the maximum distance unnoticed between myself and my unwelcome escorts. My resolve to lose this entourage, once unleashed in form, quickly annuls the disguise to my mentation and immediately reveals something of its essence to the aethers. A pursuit ensues. They will not give up. They cannot.
Changing form, direction, motion, being, presence, and awareness affords this game of silly chase an impossibly suspended guise from this place within the void. Only a fool or saint with true mercy and a measure of forgiveness exceeding the practical and self-serving will bear witness and not tamper with these, the acts of another. My abandoned cherished henchmen fire crack-shots in my insensible direction, though in their own unguarded awareness, leave themselves, systematically and unknowingly, within deadly range of my return. A return of fire, mark and aim, of which within myself, I know only to be skilled, tempered and accurate. How Do I Love Thee? A quiet and complete compassion overcomes me, and I can have nothing but adoration for the would-be victims now within my sites. Time and time again I allow them to steal away, always and ever believing their actions go unobserved.
Myriad shape-shifts removed, innumerable and countless graces bestowed, I find myself within their "own-bunker"; a place of contrived protection, invented with false yet tangible solidity, a real-to-their-touch asylum. Number 4, I suddenly know telepathically as once again they cue in on my location from afar. I stand, I am, in simple presence, peacefully, looking, watching, three emotionally charged women, dressed in black with belts, buttons and high-top leather boots flying, running down the hill toward my unearthed position. Once again, within my sites, the heart of the middle one, a beautiful prankish woman with thick red hair, cut off blunt, that dances in prefect harmony with itself while she paces toward me, savagely yet almost innocently, naively, unaware of my deadly vantage point. The never-ending chase in time, the void eternal, and the sacrosanct witness one dimension removed.
