One day you wake up…again.
You’ve been drifting in and out of sleep for so long. Days…weeks… Years, perhaps. Decades? Lifetimes?
Vast periods of unconsciousness punctuated by fleeting moments of…what is it called when you are actually in your body, aware of your surroundings, free to move your body as you choose?
Sometimes when you wake it’s day and the light feels almost blinding. Sometimes it’s night and the sheets feel cool against your skin in the near total darkness.
You remember murmured conversations you could never quite make out, coming from the other room or from somewhere above and behind you. Remember straining to capture some meaning from what was being said. But the voices spoke in unfamiliar tongues. Or the words were murmured so softly as to be unintelligible. And you drifted back into that great dark emptiness reaching behind you for a clue you could never quite grasp.
A clue. A light. A landmark. Something to orient by.
Always in these waking moments your body has felt heavy. Sleep paralysis they called it. You tried to stir, to make your eyes open, to force your body upright. But the messages from the brain drifted off, faded away, shorted out before they could reach your muscles.
Until, inevitably, the theatre curtain in the back of your mind came rolling down, slow and steady and silent, signaling the onset of another senseless intermission.
This time feels different, though.
You sit up easily, swing your legs over the edge of the bed. You see clothes you know must be yours draped over the chair by the bed. The room feels vaguely familiar, in the way you’d recognize a room in a chain hotel, no matter what city you happened to be waking up in.
Tentatively, at first, you stand up. You dress yourself. The clothes fit. Your body.
“My body.”
The word sounds strange in your mind.
Bah-dee.
Bhodi.
My body dharma.
Something you repeated, sing-song in your mind, long ago when you were first starting down this path.
A sense of dread, like a touch from an unseen hand, cold, spectral, a jolt of energy shooting up your spine. The feeling radiates over the backs of your shoulders, down along your arms. Then sideways out from your sacrum and down your legs. Filaments of cold electricity or a flowing mesh of liquid ice.
You got to move. You got to move. You got to move, child, you got to move. When the Lord get ready, you got to move.
You glance around the room for any other belongings you might have had, then make for the door. The old-fashioned metal knob feels cool against your palm. You turn it halfway without opening the door.
Reflexively - years of training - you flick the switch next to the door. The overhead bulb turns off.
Perhaps I really am awake.
The plain overcoat must be yours. You take it down from the coat hook and put it on. The hat, too. You note with satisfaction that the brim, though unobtrusive, is broad enough to provide a protective shadow for your face. Quick tilt of the head is all you’ll need.
You turn the knob again, pull the door open. Surprised to find yourself stepping onto a busy city sidewalk. It was so quiet…
You fall in with the crowd on the sidewalk, matching your pace to theirs. The air feels heavy and thick. The crowd shuffles along, dull and silent and withdrawn, like one being made of many separate bodies. No one looks at you or at their fellow pedestrians.
You walk for several blocks before feeling the greedy eyes of an informant walking against the herd, skirting between kiosks and recycle bins and the slow-moving traffic on the broad avenue. Years of training, you tilt your head ever so slightly forward and down, and make yourself dead inside until you feel the danger has passed.
“Never look them in the face, nor do you look away.” You force down a shiver and quicken your pace on the sidewalk as a memory - perhaps from a dream? another lifetime? - of vicious teeth and rotten breath floats up into your consciousness like the steam from a sewer grate in — Detroit? New York? Paris? — one of the great cities in a world gone bye-bye.
You become aware of voices broadcast through the streets, sometimes punctuated by harsh music like the amped-up commercial jingles of the radio of your youth. The voices alternate and change as you walk on, male, female, older, younger. All speak with the same sing-song cadence, bright and fake as hell.
Talking heads.
Another jolt of energy as you realize now for certain what you’ve known since you stepped out into the street: You don’t speak the language.
You recognize some words. You could, with time, pick them and examine them. Like turning over a chunk of gravel to trace the pattern of the quartz inside. That’s a project for another time.
Propaganda sounds like propaganda in any language.
Like the ambient noise of traffic, the words run together in bursts of nonsense. Gibberish, double-speak, illogic — the soundtrack to a silent pandemonium.
Glancing at the buildings and the vehicles and the giant screens (bill-boards; Baal-bores; bull-boreds) you see very few printed words. Mostly images, an endless loop of images cycling on the screens, images designed to keep you in line, to re-mind you of your station, to make you long for what you’ve always desired most and must never be allowed to have: love, beauty, freedom, to live as Whitman said, a kosmos:
Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.
Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from,
The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer,
This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.
The images cunningly crafted to inflame your natural desires in a world where those desires are outlawed. Images like hydrogels, nanowires that self-assemble in the mind, invisible machines we feed with our life energy, redirecting our desires into a cycle of craving and addiction and bad karma.
The age-old bait and switch.
Images sown in the fields of mind like GMO crops, choking out the pure nature of human desire, perverting the imagination, teaching us to avert our eyes from the holy pleasures of this world given by Creator for our enjoyment. Entraining us into a mental slavery where people crave only substitutes: the saccharine, the artificial, the empty, the hollow, the self-agglutinative scraps that Master so beneficently provides us in exchange for our lives, our energy, our health and our souls.
The images are everywhere, weirdly more alive than anything else in the city. Everything else appears gray, faded, worn - the people as well as the buildings and the vehicles.
Colonized by what the Toltec seers called the Parasite. Devoid of hope, the living dead. Never knowing real love or human connection, greedy not for ecstatic moments or exalted acts but for numbness, sameness, equity…sleep.
You’re seized by the urge to run, to scream, to clamber up on the roof of the nearest vehicle and shriek.
“Wake up! Don’t you see?!”
The city appears to stretch on endlessly in every direction. But somewhere there are fields and trees and rivers and dirt and you’ve already made up your mind. You won’t fall asleep again. This time you’ll find a way out.
You stop with the others at a crosswalk, taking stock. You’re deep behind enemy lines. You’re going to need a compass. And a map. And a place to shelter while you get yourself oriented.
Beneath the waves of anxiety and the suffocating dread of the masses, you sense a small, cool light inside you, blue-white and gold-flecked, the color of stars in the night sky as seen from a hilltop once upon a time, far from the cities and the suburbs and the lights of what was known as civilization.
The light of knowing.
You know you didn’t wake up here at this crazy time to be reeducated or to rot in some gulag. You came here to participate in the greatest awakening mankind has ever known. You came here to help with the healing of Mother Earth and her children.
You know there are others who haven’t surrendered, others who haven’t given in to the fear virus, who haven’t been hollowed out by the Parasite. Others who have fought against the constant urge to fall back asleep, who have schemed and endured and clawed their way back to some level of awareness.
You know they’re here. You can sense their living heartbeats resonating with your own.
Years of training. Lifetimes? You’re almost starting to remember.
Find the others.
Don’t believe the hype.
The Controllers are desperate. They overreached. They had to - too many people were waking up.
This time we win.
These messages resonate with the blue light inside your body — congruent, harmonious, real.
But where do they come from? How do you know…
For a moment you feel dizzy, short of breath, on the verge of falling over.
Self questioning self — the Buddha?
The monkey mind is a Parasite playground.
Trust the wisdom of the body.
Without thinking, you duck into an alley, a narrow passageway between two buildings barely wide enough for a man to walk through without brushing against the whitewashed bricks on either side.
Years of training.
Your body knows the way.