The Book of Knowledge. Playing Another Reality. C. Castaneda award

PROLOGUE

“What does this mean to you?”

asked the Man Who Was Not.

“A game,” I answered.

“This is not a game,” Raisa Akhmetovna corrected me. “People are playing,

we are not.”

“You are one of us, I recognized you right away, even at the airport, when you met me with the delegation,” Maria, an Italian woman, said in a whisper.

“What do you mean one of us?” I asked.

“You are a clairvoyant. You communicate with the Other World. You have the key. From the Door…”

My officemate at my first job didn’t yet know what “idealizations” and the Space of Options were, but due to certain problems, she went to a clairvoyant, taking with her the maximum number of photos of all her loved ones and not so, in order to understand who was who. The next morning, I waited with interest for the story about the results of her campaign.

Marina gave me a strange look, closed the door to the room and said solemnly,

“You have a pillar!”

I remained silent, waiting for the continuation.

“The clairvoyant looked through the photos, said that you are not tall at all, but very tall, because you have some kind of pillar… of energy or something else, coming out from your head, sorry, I don’t remember exactly, but she sees it!” Marina said in a conspiratorial tone, looking for something above my head, but obviously to no avail.

“I see, the stone flower doesn’t come out,” I said.

“Oh, if I were a clairvoyant!!! I would be the happiest person in the world! I would SEE everything!!!”

I remained silent. I don’t like arguing with people.

Many years ago I came to Malta. That day an excursion was planned somewhere. I walked down the hotel stairs. The Russian group had already gathered in the hall around one of our tourists, who was talking very loudly. Suddenly, a woman noticed me and shouted, “Do you see? Look, look at her!” Everyone followed her advice, but I got afraid that something was wrong with me. I examined myself from head to toe, and everything in my appearance seemed to be human: body, dress, shoes, bag… I approached the group and was about to ask what her scream meant, when the woman took my hand and, meaningfully looking at those around, said, “Don’t you see? There’s a glow above her head!”

Next was Rome. They told me that I was going to the Shareholders’ Meeting. Before, I didn’t know what it was – the Meeting of Shareholders. It turns out that this is when people start drinking heavily already at the airport of their hometown A, an hour before the plane departs for city B, and stop drinking on the way back at the same airport in their city A after the plane lands from city B.

One of the evenings, playing the Shareholders’ Meeting game, we went to the central square of the city, where fortune-tellers, palmists and astrologers gathered and, for a small fee, offered to tell everything that had happened and not. Everyone wanted entertainment, but due to the too trivial fates of my colleagues, they decided to use me as a lie detector. As soon as the fortune-teller looked at my palm, she exclaimed, “Wow, you are a spell-caster! I see a series of books. Not now, later.”

The fortune-teller talked for a long time about my past, then about my present and said in the conclusion, “You yourself know what will happen to you. Why did you come to me?”

A few years later I ended up in India. One comes across palmists and astrologers at almost every turn there, moreover, some of them, a little luckier for some reason, are on duty around the clock in hotel lobbies in the hope that at least someone wants to know the truth. However, judging by the sad expression on their faces, not many people want to know it.

Returning to the hotel from another excursion to the temples, I approached the astrologer on the duty and held out my palm to him.

“You know everything yourself, and not only about yourself. Are you here to check how well I see? You are a spell-caster. You’ll have a whole series of books. Not now, later. You’ll become famous. You have been writing a lot and for a long time. Few people write as much as you, and even fewer write as deeply. You are an ocean. Nobody can contain you. They are not enough for your depth. People sit on the shore, look at the ocean and admire the waves. Some swim along the shore, but are afraid to swim far. And no one, not even those who try, can sink to the very bottom to know what is there. And there is a completely different world, ANOTHER REALITY. You belong to Another Reality. Since childhood. You had no childhood, right? You were born to be the SUN, but you became the MOON. Sometimes the SUN awakens in you, as your nature, you are drawn to it in order to become it, but the absence of childhood has already forever put the stamp of the MOON on your Subconscious, not allowing you to be the SUN. You are torn between communicating with people and being a hermit. You would like to leave for a monastery. At the same time, sometimes you explode and burn like the Sun, warming those around you and illuminating their path. You are a star. Do you see the star sign? In a few years, you’ll either die or be able to change your life completely, starting from your place of work, field of activity, environment and family, and ending with the country of residence. Look here!”

He pointed to the fork of the Fate Line. Up to a certain point, the two branches diverged in different directions, but suddenly broke off on the same segment. Exactly in the middle of the gap, a third line appeared and continued down to the wrist.

“Whichever path you follow out of the two possible ones before the age I told you and where both of these lines suddenly break off, you must step on your final and unique Path or… die.”

That Saturday evening in February I was standing in an underground passage next to a bookshop. I felt bad about what I saw in my near future. In the flow of people rushing to the metro entrance, I noticed an old nun. For some reason, I already knew that she would definitely come up to me and start talking morals, but I was wrong, she came up and smiled.

“You feel bad because you see, but God loves you – you have a golden crown over your head. There is a chapel nearby, in the forest. Take the trolleybus and go two stops. Today is Saturday of Parents. Light two candles for the repose of yours. You must save yourself for the Light.”

Having said this, the nun disappeared into the crowd.

I didn’t know that there was a chapel in the forest. I knew that there was a maniac there. For several years, he had been killing those who, apparently, were looking for the chapel in the forest. “I wonder if there was someone who was looking for the maniac who was looking for those who were looking for the chapel.” Having thought about that, for some reason, I obediently drove two stops on the trolleybus, went out into the street and began asking rare passers-by if they knew how to find the chapel in the forest. It was very dark and snowing. Passers-by shied away from me, as if I was asking how to find the book I needed in the Library of the Universe. Several paths led into the forest. I followed one of them. Darkness. Snow. Silence. No one around. Deaf forest. I walked for a long time. A very long time. And that nun began to seem to me just a figment of my imagination, when suddenly a Light started flickering somewhere in the distance.

1. The MAN WHO WAS NOT

We met by chance in a bookstore. When I say “by chance”, it means absolutely not by chance, but completely purposefully, that is, in a way deliberately programmed by the Higher Forces, based on cause-and-effect relationship, the chain of which we are not able to calculate logically. I don’t believe in randomness.

Previously, books came to me through people. Random people I met instantly disappeared in an unknown direction, having managed to tell me only the title of the book that was worth reading and the name of its author. They voiced what was really necessary at that time. I learned to meet the right books directly, without intermediaries, a few years before, and since then they stopped sending me people who ran past rapidly in the Space of Options shouting out the titles of the books and the names of their wonderful authors. For example, when I was focused on a comparative analysis of the religions of our world, I went into a church shop and inexplicably, but immediately proceeded to the farthest dark corner, where on the bottom shelf of the rack, a single copy of something in a purple hardcover without any identifying marks, except for the price tag, was gathering dust. It was a photocopy of the comparative analysis of religions published on January 20, 1893, with the notes of someone who had read it in the 19th century.

That day, I was scanning the contents of the shelves in another bookstore, when He gave me a strange look and walked past, turning my life upside down. People often ask, “What is He like, this Man of yours, Who Was Not?”, and I don’t know what to answer, because I always look not at…, but through. I didn’t see His face, didn’t pay attention to His clothes. I felt amazing energy going beyond the personal space. The energy of a person who was stronger than me and could…

Sometimes I see people as geometric figures. Try it, I’m sure there is nothing easier, and you will definitely succeed. Sooner or later. If you really want to and if you are allowed to see. On the one hand, it’s quite funny, because it’s a kind of game, on the other hand, it’s useful, as it helps in communicating with these people. Ordinary people can be squares, triangles, circles, rectangles and zigzags (lightning bolts). Oh, yes, such people do exist too, take my word for it. Who are you?

For example, one of my acquaintances is a rectangle, and moreover, a vampire – the most terrible combination, probably. No, her ears are quite ordinary, and her teeth don’t betray her true nature at all. She speaks for a very long time, slowly and monotonously, in the sweet voice of the Fox from the fairy tale about Pinocchio, enveloping the victim with words, asking a lot of tedious questions or, worse, crawling into the Soul with indecently frank questions, which answers she doesn’t need in principle, but it’s precisely the fact that you get irritated and waste energy by responding that brings the vampire into a state of euphoria. Even if I say that I’m very busy, she’ll say goodbye for another ten minutes, because she understands perfectly well that I won’t be able to hang up because of my basic good manners. So, one day she called me while I was in the bathroom. I politely apologized and promised to call back, but she clearly didn’t like my proposal. She asked where I actually was. I told the truth. Then she asked what I was doing there, and I had the imprudence to answer honestly, “I’m cleaning my aura of negativity.” What else do they actually do in the bathroom after a hard day at work? However, for my acquaintance, the answer became almost the discovery of America, and she bombarded me with questions, “Why are you doing this? Do you have problems? Maybe you can tell me about them now. How do you do this? What temperature is your water? Do you pin your hair up or should it be loose? What brand of soap do you use? What do you think will happen if you add a few pinches more of sea salt to your bath than the amount recommended by the manufacturers and indicated on the label? Are you dissatisfied with something? Probably, there is someone next to you?!” Since then, when she intends to call me, I find myself unavailable. For example, in the subway, where the connection is lost, or my phone suddenly runs out of charge.

However, there are also not quite ordinary people. I see them as three-dimensional, complex-composite, in each of them there are simultaneously several figures nested within one another or intersecting in space. For example, I am a pyramid inside a sphere, which is pierced from top to bottom and exactly in the center by lightning, that goes beyond the scope of the sphere. I became such figure over time, being a triangle from birth, I turned into a pyramid, overgrew with a sphere, and was struck by lightning in the end.

Looking at the Man Who Was Not with a different vision, I immediately realized that He was a complex figure too – lightning inside a sphere located inside a cube. I needed him in order to remain on the Earth. In the last period, each facet of life, one by one, suddenly collapsed, pinning me in a corner, cutting off oxygen, curling up like a snake loop around my neck. Standing on the edge of the Void, I was looking for a Door to Another, unknown to me Reality, but on the same earthly plane, so as not to disappear into the Other World until the hour of my next incarnation.

I felt lonely and wanted to talk with a person like me, at least similar to me, in our common language, inaccessible to others. I thought about Nonna, a famous clairvoyant, winner of the “Battle of Psychics” on TV TNT.

I wanted to meet her, but I had no idea where she lived in our huge world. Sighing heavily from an unrealizable dream, I went into a cafe next to my house to enjoy a tête-à-tête with coffee at least, but at the next table by the window I found… Nonna.

“Hello!” I exclaimed in shock. “You are Nonna, I know! I need you.”

“What for? Is there anything I can do to help you?” She was surprised, because she always felt who she could help and who she couldn’t.

“I just want to talk to you.”

“Okay, sit down,” Nonna sighed with relief. “Sorry, I’m exhausted, a vampire has just called me.”

We looked at each other in silence for a while, then Nonna started, “You’re completely in a web. Torn between mother and son, you cannot combine them in this life. I see blood, a lot of blood, you are dead, just like me. You are one of us, you were There and opened the Door.”

I didn’t tell Nonna what “web” meant. Spiders were the most terrible phenomenon for me in the Earthly Reality. I delved into myself for a long time to find an anchoring point, realizing that the reason belonged to the current incarnation, since in my early childhood I hadn’t been afraid of spiders. Not getting to the bottom of the truth, I turned for help to Gera, one of my Teachers. She asked me leading questions, and I answered without hearing my own answers.

“Why are you afraid of a spider?”

“It’s scary.”

“Why? It’s so small and defenseless.”

I burst into a terrible laugh, “Defenseless? It’s huge and omnipotent!”

“What can it do to you?”

“It will kill me!”

“Imagine that you take it and put it in a box.”

“I can’t even look at it from the outside and imagine it. How can I take it with my hands?” I shuddered.

“Okay, I take it and put it in a box. In a gift box. I tie it with a ribbon and a bow. What is this box like?”

“It’s red. With black ribbons,” I answered automatically.

“Let’s make a fire. Look, I’m throwing the box into the fire. It’s burning…”

“It will never be burnt!” I screamed. “It’s immortal! Eternal! It was, it is and it will be! It never dies! Look, the box has burned down, but it’s alive! It’s crawling out of the fire!”

Gera sighed heavily. I almost cried. We parted on nothing, however, after walking about ten meters down the street, I stopped dead in my tracks because of an instant insight, a fragment from childhood that suddenly flashed before my eyes.

I was twelve. We were at our cottage. Sunday. Mom said that she felt really bad, that shouldn’t happen after the surgery, she urgently needed to return home to the city to call an ambulance. We were sitting on the bench under an apple tree. I kept silent. It was starting to rain. I felt that the several options for the future existed the day before abruptly collapsed into the only one – Death. I refused to believe it consciously and, as a result, I sent the terrible thought of Death to the Black Box of the Subconscious. And for a long, long time, almost until my mother’s transition to Another Reality, I would think that she would definitely recover sooner or later. I understood that I was about to weep. Not to upset my mother, I ran, “escaping the rain,” to the barn in the farthest corner of the garden, where my friend, the little White Rabbit, lived. It was raining. I ran very fast, weeping, biting my lips just not to scream in despair. Having pulled the door towards me with all my strength, I buried my nose in the center of a huge web, neatly woven along the width of the doorway. A huge fat black spider with a large cross on its back sat right in front of me, and I screamed, “MA-A-MAAAAAAA!!!…”

We talked with Nonna for a long time and even laughed at the ways the Knowledge used to come to us. She told me how my father had died. Then we opened our palms and held them opposite each other until Nonna said,

“You’re pushing, pressing hard! What a strong energy you have! I can’t stand that, put your hands away, put them away.”

When I told her the way I wrote spells, Nonna exclaimed, “Amazing! You dragged me along to another time! I fell through and saw a poor room, you and me inside, you were in another body, in something gray, some kind of shawl, and a kerosene lamp was burning there. What was that, Alice? Silver Age?”

I shrugged my shoulders, and Nonna continued, “Now I see a book, yours. With spells. Magic. On the bookshelves. It will be released in less than a year, and you’ll become a famous spell-caster, do you believe me? The number ‘37’ comes to me. Take care of yourself! You can die. Surgery or something else. I see blood, a lot of blood. And if you survive, so then…”

The fortune-teller in Rome predicted a terrible car accident for me, but she didn’t tell me when. The palmist-astrologer in India didn’t say what exactly, but said “36”. Nonna said “37”, a surgery or something with a sea of blood. However, I had already been dying, and Death is not as terrible as doctors.

I didn’t get sick with anything and had practically no contact with the type of people who played the game “Let’s heal everyone!” and called themselves doctors, until I died for the first time at the age of 11 and was brought back. My cousin dreamed of joining them since childhood. Every time she stated that out loud, our grandmother sighed heavily and, like monks fingering a rosary, listed all the items that her granddaughter due to her girlish memory would be able to forget during a surgery in the patient’s body. However, someone was very lucky, since my cousin didn’t become a surgeon. She works with those called insane here.

However, after resuscitation, my physical body liked to play pranks. Periodically, it asked questions that puzzled the doctors. At first they tried to treat me like ordinary people, but my body’s reaction was exactly the opposite of the expected. Then they used a creative approach, setting up experiments, prescribing everything in a row. As a child, my mother taught me to be obedient and patient, but one day I couldn’t stand it anymore and demanded at least some kind of diagnosis. The doctors resisted for a long time, pretending not to understand what I wanted from them, because all those years they tried so hard to help me, and despite the fact that several times due to their efforts I had ended up more There than Here, I was still alive. Apparently, I was too tired, so I showed excessive persistence, and a miracle happened. I was given a referral for an examination, as a result of which it turned out that what was happening to me was unknown to science, and, accordingly, I had to negotiate with my physical body directly, without intermediaries. Believe it or not, I was happy about such diagnosis. The doctors were upset just as much as I was overjoyed.

Once I came to a widely advertised center at a very cool hospital, in which, judging by what was written about it everywhere, even a fairy tale would become reality. I just came. It was impossible to get through by phone, no one had answered any of the numbers listed on the website and in other advertising sources for several weeks.

Having found with difficulty the doctor’s office for those who came without a referral, that is, for those who paid their own and quite a lot of money for a consultation, I got in line and patiently sat at the door for several hours, reading a smart book so as not to waste time. When I finally entered the office, the doctor first asked if I had an appointment with her. I asked how that could be done. The doctor silently handed me over a business card with the same phone numbers no one had answered. I said that I knew them by heart, but, unfortunately, I hadn’t been able to get through for several weeks. The doctor, in a completely calm voice, looking into my eyes, answered, “Right, and you won’t be able to. They have been out of business for a month now.”