Oh! Here again?!

In the realm of the joker…

With its black humor

Frightening you out of your mind

With such pranks … as making you realize …

That you have gone insane.

You have made a mistake in time…

And wound up insane, in eternity

You have lost your mind…

… Irreversibly …

(that’s the punch line)

 

But relax,

This is just a joke

Nobody here would ever wish

To do you harm
Because in this place,

All are one

You only need to learn to trust

For everything is for the best
A thorn to get rid of a thorn

So just accept what comes your way
Sit back and wonder at the pain

 

As your heart and mind hit overdrive,

Blood racing through your veins, adrenalin pumped through your system,

Panic sets in.

The joker begins to laugh…

His image is before you as on a thousand television screens stacked into a solid wall

His very appearance communicates eternity, insanity

His very image is the punch line …

You have lost your mind irreversibly and in this state you shall remain forever –

That is his message – silent, wordless, not even symbolic.

You just know it – convinced beyond the shadow of a doubt, totally certain
Then you find that your utter certainty has no reality – this is the first lesson

 

That is a funny one…

So frightening that you forget everything

Cover it with a black curtain

Sweep it under the carpet

Put it in that place to which you never go and in which you never look.

Forgetting the most shocking parts,

Pushing the unbearable memories deep underneath the surface.

Your mind has been swimming in shallow waters for too long

Now you refuse to perceive that which you do not understand
Because it endangers the precious structure of the illusion you call knowledge

Your memory seemingly refuses to record when you are here
But when you come here again, you find that you remember everything

This theater is so familiar,

Like a place where you went when you were a little child,

Like a place which you know from before you were born

But how do you know this state?

You recognize it – have you been here before?

The last time you were here,

You recognized the joker and the joke immediately

So the question remains – how?

Have you been here before the first time you came here?

 

Taken back to the realms of your

Childhood nightmares

You cannot trust anything

No matter how certain you are

You are ever uncertain

Ripped apart just a second ago,

The void still hanging behind you,

Swallowing one half of you while the other half

Grapples to find at least some thread of reality,

At least a vague indication of the current space and time

Just relax and float downstream

 

What could possibly be ripped apart?

How could you possibly get drowned in the void?

These are only delusions that arise because you don’t know what you are

All are friends here – there is no need to know

No need to be certain
Just trust
Trust your friends

Let those nightmares sweep over you

They must come to the surface

No escape is possible – this is your bitter medicine
But it is all so different! You cannot understand it. Your mind cannot digest this

 

As you sink your hands into the

Thin fabric of apparent reality

With the gaping, eternal black hole void behind you

Swallowing half of your mind and body into nothingness,

Aware of the enormous darkness of nonexistence

That still lingers on the tip of your memory,

While the other half of you slowly grapples with

What is happening and what just happened

You come back, reassured that safety is still possible,

And after this, it can only get better – any place is better.

What has happened then?

Days ago when I was first

Surprised, frightened, transported to

The magic theatre of childhood`
Where I relived

Nightmares long forgotten,
As they were shown on the screen of consciousness.

Sights and feelings so vague as if they have never existed at all,

As if they were only created now,

And yet so familiar,

As if they are always endlessly existing.
That day I lived the life of a child that I once was,
For just a few moments, I was him

In a place across the ocean, in a time decades back,
With people who have since aged and changed

Living that which has already been lived – Déjà vu

Have I dreamt this up when I was a child?

Did I foresee the future?

Or is it that the future reflects the past – that the future continues the past

Grows out of it, like an apple from a tree, in the soil of my mind,

Or is it that there is neither past nor future

And it is all a play of consciousness?

 

As I fly through inner geometry,

The seemingly linear fashion of time is now twisted out of shape,

All connections of space and time severed,

Déjà vu in the strongest sense hits me in the head

At lightening speed, before I can react with a single thought –

A feeble attempt at understanding.

I have seen this show already without realizing its significance

I have seen this already in a dream.

Or is this only a memory of my dream appearing to be real?

But then what about reality?

 

Afterwards, when by the grace of the physical law

Which affects even the mental world

I am allowed into the familiar groove of

The soft and sweet, relaxed external life,

Into this apparent linearity and predictability

Into the relative certainty

Which exists in the eternal moment

When it is not experienced in its actuality,

Only a shadow of the experience remains.

Although I try to look, all I see is the silhouette, the dark outline

I know the size and form, but the significance is veiled

Again I enter the theater

This time I remember the horrors

So this is what it is! Oh! God, not this again

I see that very same joker,

Not funny at all, he must be the lowest of the low in this place

Approaching me like a speeding truck

I sense it before it hits

Now angry at myself – why did I come here again?

 

Grabbing the net of illusion

Weaved so carefully by the theater master

Frantically, I rip it apart, shaky, but determined,

Before it captures me completely within its unbelievable limitless magic

I remember the trick that joker pulled on me last time

And I do not wish to be made a spectacle of for fools to laugh at again

What seems exciting from the outside,

As memory presents it,

Turns out to be, in reality,

Exactly opposite, distasteful, unappealing, unreasonable, unbearable,

Why do I come here?

 

Memory keeps only that which we want it to keep

The movie of our memory has a G rating

Our motivations are a joke, because they are based on this incomplete picture.

In this way, we are drawn towards that

Which we would rather never have met

It is as if you have been to hell,

For thousands of years of damnation

With a threat from the devil himself of remaining there forever

And when he finally, reluctantly, unwillingly, is forced to allow your return to life,

And all that your memory will give you is the thought

“How curious was that place! Perhaps I should explore it further”

 

What have I missed, I wonder

I can recall the outline, but I know there is more

It has been three quarters of an hour perhaps,

Or perhaps only thirty minutes

But what I remember is only enough to fill one minute

Or perhaps two and a half, but not more

The remaining time gap is unexplainable, mysterious, curious

Perhaps I can learn more about that magic world

Besides, I have been rude with the theater attendant during my last visit

So, reluctantly I buy another ticket,

And once again enter the magic theater.

 

 

Determined to stay alert,

Most of all, to keep the joker from pulling

My specially crafted carpet of reality from underneath my feet while I’m not looking,

While I am utterly confused by the all embracing alternate reality of the show,

The intensity of which is unlike anything I have experienced previously.

With the instrument of my mind, I send signals of thought in patterns

Encoded messages designed to keep me connected to the sense of the physical

Each moment, these are stretched further, the space between them steadily increasing

 

Time is again slowing to a standstill

All that is left from the familiar universe

Are the five of six thoughts that manage to continue their limited existence

Circulating around a tiny void from which they arise like light from a lamp.

There is the potent little void within

And a dark, menacing, endless void without,

Which pulls me towards itself,

With an irresistible force against which I am as powerless as an

Iron flake near a huge magnet

Taking me into its own reality,

That familiar place of colorful, intense, long forgotten, cartoon childhood dreams

 

Outside the door, heart beating

I wonder – why am I so frightened?

The theater is mine,

The show that is currently playing is called

“The repressed memories and fears of this incarnation”

Some are real and some are dreams

All are pumped with emotion,

With explosive quantities of fear and tension,

And yet undeniably, this is my own mind, my own creation

The show is linked closely with myself – it is not impersonal

It is a show for one – made by me and for me.

 

Take me then, to that show once more,

You crazy maestro,

And do what you will with me,

Show me your next creation!

Part one was indeed most interesting!
Buying the next ticket at a price which is yet unknown,

Which is part of the mystery of it all,

But from the physical perspective,

At the price of another hour of tension, of not sleeping,

Of being dragged at light speed through the dirty and rough,

Smooth and cold roads of separate realities,

Through infinite, eternal, unknowingly personal universes,

Into that bottomless pit of insanity.

 

Do what you will with me –

I enter the theater

Voices calling hypnotise me

With their strange language,

Nonsensical and yet undersandable

Invisible entities surround me

Throw the net of Maya over me

No difference of reality from dream

 

I didn’t notice when my body has become a source of building material

For some town across the ocean,

Two european ladies, past middle age and with obese rough bodies, speaking in tongues,

Greedily ripping apart my plastic body from both sides simultaniously,

Splitting it through the middle,

Creating red streetcars and black and grey roads,

Entire cities with many colors and shapes,

With shining street lights, and busy crowds of people,

With many cars and trains, out of my being

Before I could even realise where I was or what was happening,

They were already well on their way with the job.

 

 

So this is my destiny,

To be shrunken down from my infinite, formless, dark body,

The conscious void itself –

More and more, to a finite, manageble form,

Under the directions of one being or another,

All of which are under directions from further beings,

To be separated from this unity of consciousness

As they mold me into red streetcars and black roads,

To lose touch of myself, by being embodied in forms

In which consciousness is not possible – what we call dead matter

A human birth is precious indeed.

 

I panic – do you have to do this?

Won’t you please let go, leave me?

No, they are giving all sorts of good reasons

They have to do what they are doing

In order to create a little town on the other side of the ocean

My body is the building material,

It won’t hurt at all – all pain is merely due to resistance

Fine, I say

This magic world of yours has no existance,

You cannot fool me, here I will remain,

I realise that I am powerless in your hands, so do what you will.

 

As they mold the concrete buidlings and the metal streetcars,

Ripping and splitting my self image more and more

With their gentle pulling

And shaping it with the ease of skilled craftsmen,

I notice that although parts of me are certainly lost in that unconsciousness

Of the small town across the ocean,

The split is never complete, something of me still remains

And I am amaized at the magnificent grandeour of my being, at the sheer size of it.

 

How is this feeling available to me?

It seems so distant – trains ond roads, cities and dead matter

Creatated from my being?

Am I not just this body, this innocent young body,

Foolish and inexperienced,

Alive only for a few decades, and gone in a few more?

At the same time I am this incarnation, in this episode of this cartoon,

And also the grain of sand in the middle of a trancendental desert in another world

I am that from which all is made, the thought and the thinker,

I am that which is the perceving subject, and also the non-perceiving object,

And I must also be the maker.

 

 

Is there a lesson here for me to learn?

Why am I so concerned?

As they shape and mold my infinite being, sending parts of me to live apart from me,

I experience no loss of self, feeling not one bit less than I have ever been

I am not an image which can be stretched out and

Ripped and morphed, like plasticine, into other images

Reality as we know it is just like that,

Images, which can be molded and shaped into whatever monstrous or heavenly forms

But I am not the image, or rather the image is not all that I am

I cannot be molded and ripped apart

Something remains – Who am I?

 

Timeless void

Gives birth to

The world as we know it

Inner world

Outer world

Other worlds

All like a dream

And the question Who Am I

Is for the first time

As unclear

As the Ultimate Mystery

 

My voice, the voice of my thoughts in the present incarnation

The voice which I take to be mine

Which usually speaks as this physical body does, with the same tone, but inside me,

Which is plastic and capable of

Transfiguring itself and taking on any characteristics whatsoever

That voice is an outside intruder, an agent which gives thoughts

Which are generate by outside causes, against my will,

The same voice as the voce of my body.

 

That voice, fools the gullible brain into believing that it is me

Who is the author of these thoughts

In the magic theater, that voice is transformed into

Various male and female voices, into non-vocal sounds,

It speaks different languages – sensible and non-sensensical

It pounds out thoughts which have a sound unlike that of this physical body,

Sounding quite unlke myself,

Radiating outwards in a circular fashion

From an invisible centre

Making me realise how external that thing which I thought closest to me, really is

This voice is not me, and neither is that image, the very image of my own existance.

 

 

That image – propelled unto objects

Ripped apart, drowned in the void,

At other times, narrowed down,

Squeezed to a point of light,

Tiny, rushing throught endless passages of inner geometry

Projecting itself unto living and non living objects,

Unto thought forms, naturally identifying itself with whatever object can be perceived

But it connot grasp that which I am prior to all objects – the perceiving subject itself,

The primal core

I must be at the centre

But it is unapproachable – a blindspot, a black hole, a void.

 

The state of no thought is eternity,

Is void, timeless, endless, bottomless void

As input enters the mind, it bounces into ths void, and is perceived

This pereptance echoes into the void over and over

A thousand times,

As a thousand different calls for response

And each time it is perceived by a different thought entity

The different thoughts, with their individual, differing personalities,

Like a crowd of people, or a big family, are really myself at different points in time

Yet I am also the observer of all these thoughts

At the same time as I am them.

 

The journey from the depths of the void,

From the blackness to the source of the call,

Is a journey through a multitude of these thought entities,

Through hallucinations of distant past,

Through previous times which have been long forgotten,

Through a barrier of light,

All this acting as a filter in any action whatsoever

Coloring the present with the long forgotten shades of long gone colors of the past.

 

Passing through the infinite wall of live, organic-colored matter

Through that point in the finite desert of my present incarnation

Which was precisely the middle, I got a taste of inevtable death

Already there, waiting for me, with only a little time left

Maybe a few decades and that’s all

Ripping through the barrier of light,

Turning some more corners within the tubes of inner geometry,

Rushing without knowing where, proppelled by another power,

I came to a halt before a ghostly, alien figure,

Partly engulfed in shadows, serene, non-judgemental

It is seemingly female but not very feminine.

 

 

We were face to face for only a split moment,

But it was enough to get a glimpse

And then, the form vanished, my body was given back to me,

Allowed to ease up, curling into that childhood pose,

Waiting patiently for the seemingly remote and nearly impossible possibility

Of returning into this world, safe and sane

I had to move very carefully, because

The movements of my body were creating reality,

Affecting the inner space, recapturing solidity

Stealing a lttle more of from that whirling nothingness with each little movement

Until there was enough reality to hold up the front upper half of my body.

 

I was happy to finally be back to ordinary reality, to this time and place,

I was almost certain at this point that I was in no immediate danger

But from the second of the start of the magic show

To the second previous to this one,

I did not know where I was or at what time

But now, a friend of mine has entered from within the ordinary reality

Through the back door, standing in the doorway between two worlds,

Talking to me, unaware of the magic theater

Even as I talked to her, I was not sure that this was real,

The endless nothing was hanging menacingly behind me,

And I was on the very edge of that bottomless void, afraid to accidentally slip within.

 

What did I expect to achieve?

There is such electrical tension in my entire body,

Such fear that everything seems without meaning

Due to its explosive energy

And the thought I have at this time is

I must love

I have to live this life as best as I can

Why did I ever enter this crazy place?

 

I would not reccomend this magic show to anyone

The stage director knows your fears more than you do,

The joker will make them more real than anything you have known before

The attendants will take away your memory and your reasoning

You will be as in a dream, but convinced of its reality,

Taken to a special, wacky cartoon childhood dream movietheatre

Mystified by the screen, taken from within time into no-time,

Unable to do anything at all, you realize beyond the shadow of a doubt

This show is eternal, this way of being is all that is available to you now,

It is forever, there is no exit from the theater

This is the kind of practical joke which the magician enjoys most.

 

 

The magic theater is not fun

The impression is that

There is a state lasting a panful infinity

Which you try to resist,

In which you inevitably panic and become tense

Passing quickly from state to state, all within that same eternity,

Too fast to register most of the impressions

Then I wonder

Who this “I” is

Who can be so changed by mental changes

This is not fundamentally who I am.

 

The separate reality created by the theater director is not pleasant

A more likely description would be ‘nightmarish’ –

As bad as you could possibly dream up

In your worst nightmare,

And lasting a small eternity

Whether the spectacle is beneficial in some way or not is undecided

Taken to the realm of dreams,

Unescapable realities of the subconscious mind

After each séance, one feels

“I should not go there again”

“ It is of no use and it is defnitely not fun”

 

There is a curious sense in which if you were to relax entirely

The experience would turn a totally different turn

You might even ride on the waves of bliss

In the ocean of sat-chid-ananda

But for that you must have self knowledge

Otherwise you are unable to relax entirely

On the contrary, you either try to resist through thinking

Or you are tempted to physically jump up and run away.

 

It is possible that the magic theatre

Has a very absurd and very frightening way

Of showing the flimsy, surreal nature of the ego

From the very start,

The flow of thoughts is slowed down until it is finally stopped

At this point your self image can become

Identified with whatever mental object you perceive

And with whatever is happening to that object at that time

The visions which follow are frightening

In a sort of “Don’t fuck around” way

The experience is as real as anything which has ever happened (to the mind)