The Book of Knowledge. Playing Another Reality. C. Castaneda award
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15 minutes passed, I constantly got in the way to all of them walking back and forth. The coffee was never brought, although I reminded the girl of her promise. The black walls of the Passage Court seemed to be about to collapse. I couldn’t stay there any longer, some Force pushed me out to run, run, run away. I was leaving. The Creepy Woman called out to me, but I didn’t stop, and she began to wail, “Oh, are you leaving already? Why? What about the flowers? They are coming soon! I didn’t even think you cast like that! May we invite you again?”
I nodded. The Woman let me go, but the girl called, asking where I was. A good question. Very appropriate. I didn’t know myself where I was then. The girl asked to come back for the flowers. I said it was a bad omen to return.
“What should I do with the flowers?”
“Gift them to the Woman,” I advised.
He didn’t call or write anymore. I was in a complete Void, and there was nothing and no one to lighten the Darkness.
…For five days I seemed to be dead. Someone performed automatic actions for me. I could no longer write spells, because, on the one hand, I had no strength left for anything at all, on the other hand, the one I wrote and cast them to didn’t need them.
Automatically turning towards the subway on the outskirts of the city, I heard the sound of a message from Ray, it consisted of the question mark only.
“I’m at metro A…” I answered.
“One stop down, exit to the right.”
It was not interesting to me how Ray ended up in these area, but I was glad to see him after so many years. We were having dinner in silence until Ray broke it with a question on a sore subject, “How does your Brother do? Are you in communication with him?”
“Almost not,” I sighed.
I accepted them both for who they were. However, Brother couldn’t communicate with Ray, moreover, the pathological tendency of Ray towards Black Magic…
Ray was a very powerful magician, although no one couldn’t say that from his appearance. They were the same age, but, unlike Brother, who played business, Ray played Black Magic, professionally and constantly, just as he constantly played with his own life and death. Anyhow, it was Ray who taught me to play with Time and Space. He artificially created extreme situations, setting, at first glance, absolutely impossible tasks, but I ended up completing them. Every time I scolded him for such experiments, feeling like a guinea pig, and he laughed. It was Ray who, by uttering a simple phrase, suddenly made me understand what Love is. Love meant Life for me, and the absence of Love meant Death, because Love gave me the strength to live. I had never realized the real Love essence before meeting Ray. It turns out that Love is when you accept your loved one as one is, without any exceptions and without setting any conditions, you accept and continue to love only for the fact that one lives in this world, to love just like that, and not for something, let one be free, without limiting in any way. You are happy that you can see your loved one, to talk even silently, and you are grateful to the Higher Forces for the fact that this person exists in your life no matter as who. Besides the fact that Ray had unique abilities to connect to the Universe Astral database, he was fluent in hypnosis and neuro-linguistic programming techniques. I often witnessed how he confused people completely, splitting their Consciousness into many small pieces, masterfully playing words, and no one understood what was actually happening.
Ray brilliantly manipulated the Consciousness of others, but exclusively within the framework of Black Magic, and, as a result, paid for his game. Life constantly put him on the threshold of Death. For a long time, I tried to hold Ray energetically and began to die myself. Once he sadly stated, “Two polar magicians of equal power cannot stay together, one of them must die.”
“What are you going to do?” Ray asked, feeling everything happening to me, otherwise he would hardly have happened nearby then.
“I have to give into the world what I know from the category of practical Magic. White one.”
“Well, as for me…”
Ray spoke, as usual, in broken phrases that could be understood only by those who read minds and not listened to words. I interrupted him with a question, the answer to which would let me know whether Ray’s plan involved White or Black Magic. Ray sighed heavily. I shook my head sadly, “You barely survived then.”
Ray drove me to the subway. We sat in the car hugging in silence. We both didn’t care who had been present in the other’s life all these years.
“Do you know where I have been?” I recalled my trip to a haunted place suddenly, and Ray laughed, instantly scanning me. “All those people were so funny and strange! They asked stupid questions. One of them was a murderous maniac, and I got scared. Why do others see nothing? It’s all written all on his face!”
“You see it, Alice, and I do, but are all people like us?” he said, stroking my hair. “I don’t want anything else. Emptiness. Tell me,” Ray suddenly asked quietly and somehow compassionately, inviting me to tell about the Man Who Was Not, I had never mentioned before, at least out loud.
“I’m tired of the Void too. I need HIM to be near. Somewhere. Somehow. Him, do you understand? What do you see about me? Tell me!”
Ray shook his head negatively and again stroked me so tenderly as once upon a time, the same September, when I had been at the edge of the abyss as well. So I didn’t want to think about anything, and I fell somewhere again, closing my eyes, pressing my cheek to his cheek, fell somewhere where there were no thoughts, but the music of tenderness was playing. Time stopped. The world stopped.
“Well, I’ll go,” I said, abruptly tearing myself away from his cheek when a very beautiful, but sad song sounded on the radio.
“You had short hair then,” he sighed.
I got out of the car and walked a few meters. He beeped to me. I turned around. For some reason, like many people, he didn’t like that I never turned around when leaving. Ray waved at me. I didn’t know when I would see him the next time or if I would ever see him again. Alive.
In the evening, I received a call from the Most Important Society of Spell-casters with an urgent request to find portraits of the most famous spell-casters of the Silver Age and put them in frames, I had to paint in the appropriate silver color, in order to hang them in the end in the central office. My soul shrank as I remembered that some of the spell-casters had hung themselves. I tried not to think about Death, but less than in a day I got a call from a small Community of Spell-casters. I was asked to urgently send my spells to a collective book dedicated to Sergey Yesenin. I shuddered involuntarily. At the same time, I had to release my own book on the topic of “A Spell-caster and Suicide” called “Dance with me on the windowsill!” with dedication to Marina Tsvetaeva. Death was wandering somewhere nearby.
Re-reading Yesenin, I entered the Flow. Everything merged together – their feeling of hopelessness, my loneliness and absolute darkness. I seemed to feel the same they had once felt. For several days, while in the Flow, I wrote spells, trying in vain to return to Earth. Standing on the edge of the Abyss, I thought that I lived in a huge city with a lot of people. They surrounded me everywhere: in the subway, on the streets, in shops, cafes, offices… Like me, they were always in a hurry somewhere and often late, because sometimes one needed to stop and help someone feel not alone in a crowd of people in a big city, just a few kind words were often enough for that.
Many people argue about the Silver Age spell-casters whether they really left on their own. Read what they wrote in their last years, isn’t it obvious that they were already more There than Here? Death is always attracted by ourselves. If those nearby, instead of watching from the auditorium what was happening, had climbed onto the stage and helped those leaving to emerge from their dying state, their spells would have been different, and Death would have gone away. Life can take everything away from people and put them on the edge of an abyss, but not everyone, hovering over the abyss, shows others what is going on in one’s soul. At that moment, someone utters an unkind word, and another one is no more on the Earth. They wonder why suddenly, but in fact, that word was the last straw of the patience. However, if there is at least someone nearby to support a person with simple human communication… Please don’t be late.
I used to open my personal email about once a month because I communicated with everyone through my office box. When another one “once a month” came, I discovered a letter of a stranger sent to me three weeks before. As I read his suicide note addressed to me, my heart sank closer to my heels, and the feeling of guilt came up to my throat and eyes. He wrote it in an absolute calm manner, like someone who had already decided everything for himself – no cries, no emotions, no accusations of anyone, not even a story about why in fact the person decided to leave. The stranger said that he had read my spells having by chance run upon them on the Internet, and he felt that I had passed through fire, water and copper pipes, so I would understand and not judge him. He didn’t ask me for help, just said goodbye to our world through the letter addressed to me. Of course, I immediately wrote an answer, but I knew that I was late. I cursed myself for opening my email once a month, perhaps I could hold the stranger. And until now, even though everyone says that I am not an employee of the Rescue Service, the feeling of guilt lives in my Subconscious, periodically surfacing.
The next morning on the subway, I ran into an ex-classmate who, after graduating from school, had taught me theory at driving course and recommended the best teacher of driving practice, an instructor. A bright man of about fifty, he used to joke kindly when I knocked down some sticks, trying to imitate driving into a virtual garage in reverse. When the practice course was over, my ex-classmate taught me the rules of the license getting game with the flirting name “Get me!” Actually, everything you need to receive from someone in this world, is subject to approximately the same rules. Sharing the latest news, my ex-classmate suddenly became gloomy and said that the instructor had left on his own. I didn’t even believe it at first. However, one day a girl incredibly similar to his late wife and with the same name Elena had come to him as a student at the driving course. She became a ray of Light for the instructor. He explained to the girl what caused his reverent attitude, and asked to communicate with her sometimes in a purely friendly way. Elena laughed at him and left his life forever. Considering himself unworthy of communication, the instructor decided to leave his life as well.
I wrote a spell about the spell-casters leaving for Another Reality unable to pass the exam of life, and I couldn’t help but send it to the Man Who Was Not. His answer killed me, “Meanwhile it would be better to be glad that your body with its nine holes is intact, that you didn’t get the fate of being deaf, blind or lame, that you have a human appearance! Why grumble against Heavens? Go away!” I was standing on the ground at that moment, but if I had been at home, I would have gone out the window.
10. SIGNS
I lay home looking at the ceiling. Spells were sent to the collection of dedications to Sergey Yesenin, portraits in silver frames were transferred to the central office. The doorbell rang. I reluctantly got out of bed and saw Lera on the threshold. We had got acquainted a month before in literary circles.
“You are all dark. You won’t last that long. I felt you and decided to stop by,” she said and added with a smile, “Don’t be scared, I see through, too, and like attracts like.”
We sat in the kitchen. She talked about herself. Lera was my age and, like me, had been a successful businesswoman, the owner of five salons that had to be closed instantly. Lera went through the same breaking period, as me, although the immersion into Another Reality happened to her not so long before. I suggested experimenting “on cats”, holding out two photos, of Ray and Brother, which I had shown to Nonna. Lera told the truth, as well as Nonna, but looking at the same photos, they didn’t say the same thing, each of them saw their own fragment of the picture.
“Sorry, I didn’t come to you at the Passage Court. I saw that everything would be dark there, and you as well,” then Lera spoke without photos about people she had no prior information, and I watched the flow of information coming upon her, in numbers and images, which Lera tried to interpret.
I placed my left palm opposite her right. Almost immediately, an energy wave appeared between the palms, and, beating into the palms in turn, it couldn’t dissolve or disappear in one of them. My left hand was the “receiving” one, like Lera’s right hand. Lera tried to read information from my palm, and I tried to read it from hers. Thus, we pushed the wave back and forth, but due to the equality of forces, no one could drag the blanket over oneself. It was funny to me, but I was waiting for Lera to feel the same. At some point, she gave up and laughed, “Well, what are you doing? You are taking it away from me!”
I gave her my right palm. Lera closed her eyes and started, “You are walking on the edge of an abyss. The abyss is on the left. You are on the right. There are mountains everywhere around. You are going to the highest one. And you’ll definitely get there if you don’t look into the abyss. You’ll gain secret knowledge. The Book of Knowledge is there. Usually, there is a Guardian Angel, or spirits, or someone else nearby, but you are alone. It’s the first time I see such thing. You probably came from the Higher Spheres. It seems, before you were born, although you decided to be born yourself, and not because it was necessary, you told them There, ‘Don’t touch me! I want to do all by myself!’ Now they are looking at you from There and have no right to help, since it was your decision. Do you understand?”
“I have a picture, painted after meditation. You’ve just described it. It was in Tibet, but in some other Tibet, I didn’t see it when I was there in reality. Imagine, some of the mountains are real, while others are different, ordinary people cannot see them. I don’t know what kind of place this is, but everything merges there, visible and invisible.”
“Shambhala!” Lera breathed out deeply. “You have been to Shambhala!”
We exchanged some mystical life stories, enjoying communication, because it was rare to meet a person who, like you, knew how easily it was to transfer Consciousness from the physical body to the astral one and back.
“Imagine, Lera, I went into a monastery shop on the Solovetsky Islands, realizing that I needed to find icons that could be purchased only there. It’s a waste of time to look at the contents of the shelves with my weak earthly vision. There was no one in the shop except me and two saleswomen. I asked permission to come closer, explaining the reason, but they refused, saying, ‘Tell us which one you need, and we will show you.’”
“Great test for the Third Eye!” Lera laughed. “Once again, you felt like a guinea pig in the hands of the Higher Forces, didn’t you?”
“Well, I closed my eyes and asked for a monastery in the sky, but the result didn’t impress the Higher Forces, the saleswomen got lost in thoughts, and I had to clarify without thinking, ‘The 3rd from the left on the 2nd shelf from the top.’”
“So did the monastery in the sky turn out to be on the third icon from the left on the second shelf from the top?”
“Yes, I wouldn’t have believed it myself, it was the icon with the founding elders seeing their future monastery. The same way I got the Stove icon, found behind the stove in which monastery bread was baked in the 16th century, and the Solovetsky image of the Virgin with a handkerchief in Her hand.”
“I finally understood to whom I brought Holy Water from the Caves!” Lera exclaimed joyfully. “To you! They forced me to take it, but I didn’t understand for whom, however, I took it!”
“It happened to me, too. I went far away to the Thirtieth Kingdom to admire a huge temple complex. For some reason, I wanted to take three of my books with me. On the plane named after a famous Spell-caster, I decided to re-read my book to pass the time. The stewardess hovered over me several times, and then asked for a book as a gift, as it turned out, she was fond of spells.”
“Aerobatics! Who was the second one for?”
“I was supposed to stay for a week in a transit Kingdom, traveling to its different cities. In the last of them, our guide had made her dissertation on comparative religion analysis, as I had done in my time. We started talking. It turned out that she liked spells, moreover, that day was her birthday.”
“Great! And the third one?”
“The third one was still languishing in my rucksack when a local driver from the Thirtieth Kingdom came to take me to the airport. I was already nervous. He knew no languages, except the local dialect, so we drove to the airport in silence, said goodbye with smiles, and I was already approaching the door, when suddenly he caught up with me and exclaimed in English, ‘Book!’ I looked at him with a silent question. Helplessly apologizing, he pointed his finger at my rucksack saying several times, ‘Irina… Travel agency… Book… Irina… You… book…’”
“Of course, you didn’t know any Irina!”
“As anyone else in that Thirtieth Kingdom, indeed. I took out the third book and happily got rid of it!”
“Amazing!” Lera laughed. “Tomorrow I’ll bring you water. You know, I see your Sun on a black background. You should re-paint the background. And the number ‘37’ comes. Be careful at that age, okay?”
I nodded obediently, Nonna mentioned the same number.
…When you don’t drive a car for a long time, it has a habit of not starting, being offended that you forgot about it. As people say, the battery discharged. I came to the abandoned Fox. It apparently sympathized with me and therefore, in spite of everything, started up. I had to take it for a walk. I went to the cemetery. I don’t like cemeteries. The Lower Essences, feeding on the energy of people grieving for their dead, live there. Usually, I come to the cemetery only in spring and on my father’s birthday, in the fall, to check if everything is safe and sound, and not at all in order to communicate with those who are not at the cemetery. I silently looked at the photos of my parents. My father was killed, and my mother died so that I could live. I had to live for some reason, but there was no life in the Void, existence only. It started to rain and I went home. On the way, I stopped at the newly opened gift shop. On a shelf, right at eye level, I noticed… the Girl with the Moon Cat, the same ones I had painted! I froze, not believing my eyes. I stood looking at the statuette for a long time, without touching it for fear that it would disappear. There was no price tag, but the inscription, “Enigma. Girl with the Cat.” A blond-haired Girl in a purple-blue, sleeveless, toe-length dress, straight out of my paintings, walked somewhere into the distance, holding a smoky Cat in her hands. Finally, I took them in my hands, afraid to drop the statuette. It was in a single copy.
I showed the find to my son at home.
“Where did you find it? This is a sign, mom!!!”
Nonna called me at midnight. She talked about herself. I told her about the Girl with the Moon Cat. Nonna agreed, a sign.
“Just which one?” I asked thoughtfully.
“A sign that you are on the right Path, Alice. This year has become a year of creativity for you. Remember, my dear, how many books of spells from your table drawer have been published! How many pictures have been painted about what you see There? Am I wrong?”
I agreed, but what was the sense, if the man I asked for human communication had written, “Go away!” Was it so difficult to give another person the possibility to talk to you? For some reason, I took the phone and wrote to the MWWN that it seemed like I had gone through everything on the Earth and it was time to leave. He replied, “Don’t die. The World of Magic will go out”. Very funny. I offered to meet to gift him my Blue Book, finally published and dedicated to Him, and He disappeared again.
Signs are sent to people all the time, but for some reason people don’t see them or don’t want to, continuing to search and even find them where there are no signs at all. It’s advisable, in addition to obvious signs, to learn to feel the Wind of Change. I like to receive signs of displacement in the Space of Options, getting into a transit zone. A transit zone is an intermediate state between two lines of life, like changing those of the subway. You are clearly no longer where you were yesterday, but not yet where you will be tomorrow. Everything seems to be the same, but something, barely perceptible at first, looks different. For example, you go to the same cafe every morning for many years, and the waitress knows that you drink coffee with two sugars. But for some reason, today she brings you… tea… without sugar. You leave the cafe, approach the car, but it won’t start, although yesterday you parted on a friendly note, and there is no reason for its whims. Then you take the subway, glance at the book the girl sitting next to you is reading, and snatch out, “Never say never”. Then, as in a chain, you get exactly what you always and absolutely sincerely believed would never happen to you.
One day, having left work early, I was wandering along the main street of the city in search of a gift. It was very hot and stuffy. To get to the other side of the street and continue the search, I went down into the underground passage, where there were many small shops with various things, and stopped at one of them, looking at the display window. Suddenly, I got so terrible headache that I decided to go down into the saving coolness of the metro and go home. While waiting for the train, out of habit, I glanced at the clock above the tunnel. As soon as I entered the train, my headache instantly went away. In the evening, it turned out that I had got a headache two minutes before the explosion in that very underground passage.
A few years later, I was going abroad for the New Year holidays. The travel agency said that I was late, since the airplane tickets had run out, but they offered me another place five days earlier, I agreed. On the eve of departure, some tourists returned their tickets, and I was glad to come back to the initial option of my trip. The next morning, I was woken up by a phone call of Brother, who didn’t know that I had changed tickets. “Where are you?” Not understanding his anxiety, I answered in surprise, “At home”. He sighed with relief and told me to turn on the TV, which performed a decorative function in my flat, since I hadn’t watched TV for many, many years. That morning I betrayed my principles and was horrified by huge waves, a tsunami, everything was in the water.
Water is known to cleanse, although, not all and not always. For some reason, the word ‘geese’ immediately came to mind. You can do a lot of interesting things with water. For example, you can write on it with a pitchfork. You can charge it and spell to it. Or you can silently look into the water and see. Since birth, I was terribly afraid of water, though not just any, but a selected one in such natural places as rivers, lakes, ponds, seas, oceans. Mom didn’t understand why, and tried to teach me to swim in the river near our cottage. I resisted in every possible way, scratching and even biting. At the same time, I was not at all afraid of water in bathrooms and swimming pools, no matter how deep they were, so as a result, I was sent to learn swimming in the pool. As I grew up, I learned to overcome my fear and even swam behind buoys in the sea. However, subconsciously… any waves, including small ones evoke in me (and, probably, will always do) a persistent desire to run away as quickly as possible.
That night I got the very same strange dream, shown to me periodically in numerous variations throughout my life. A City. A different one, not like all the cities on the Earth. There are completely different houses and no cars, in general everything is different. And then a huge wave appears. So big that it’s difficult to imagine in reality. Everything dies in this wave. I’m trying to run away, hide somewhere, but there is so much water that I’m drowning. The whole city is sinking. Everything is drowning. There is no one left. No one at all. At all.