David Narby - Chapter 9 - Simple Truth

As I arrived in GF, Clivid attacked me, saying, “Hix is gone! You made her do it...”

I was shocked and wasn’t listening to him anymore. Had Hix committed suicide? I looked around at the others and none of them looked too happy.

I asked, “What happened?”

Will answered, “Hix left you a letter and asked us not to answer any of your questions until you had read it.”

He handed me the letter and I wondered if it contained a suicide note. The envelope was addressed simply as ‘To David, please read aloud at your next Thursday session’. As I opened it my hands were shaking. The letter was a few pages long. I began to get my hopes up, suicide notes are usually only a paragraph long. The handwriting was beautiful, nothing like I would have expected.

Dear David,

Thank you very much for what you have done for me. You have opened my eyes to a different way of thinking and given me a new perspective on the world.

I asked Clivid not to attack you after I was gone but he kept saying that you were an ‘asob’ and that this was all your fault.

I asked, “What’s an asob?

Clivid answered angrily, “You’re an Arrogant Son Of a Bitch.”

Don’t worry about what Clivid tells you. He’s seeing this as a tragedy. He uses that expression a lot especially for anyone he thinks is more intelligent than him. I can see why he thinks you are arrogant, though, I used to think the same. Now, I realise that you are always so certain of what you speak about that it comes across as arrogance. It’s just your style.

Over the last while I have been talking quite a bit with Will, Smigs and Darukin. I asked them not to talk to you about our conversations and not to bring it up at any of your Thursday sessions. When Smigs talked about our history going back hundreds of thousands of years I wondered if I really knew anything and began to doubt what I had learned in school.

But, I suppose, I really have to thank Clivid. As you are aware Clivid regards himself as a Born Again Christian and is fond of barking biblical quotations at people. I challenged him once to show me where these were written down. He was very loath to show me. Eventually, after much badgering, he showed me a battered copy of The Catechism. Believe it or not, he actually allowed me to look through it. He explained that there used to be a Penny Catechism that is not published anymore. The lessons from the penny one were marked with an asterisk in the one he had.

When I got to Lesson Six I stopped. I began to use it to counter all of Clivid’s proclamations.

I asked, “What is Lesson Six?”

Clivid answered, “Lesson Six: God is everywhere. God is in Heaven.”

Clivid continued, “I should never have let her see that. She was never the same again. I could not get a rise our of her. Whenever I attacked her, she would just smile and say ‘Lesson Six’. Sometimes she would draw an outline of a 6 in the air or hold up six fingers. All I got from her was 6, 6, 6!”

I found this the best lesson I had ever learned. When Clivid tried to convince me that I was evil, I would just smile at him and say ‘Lesson Six’. He used to get so annoyed. However, I began to wonder, if this was the simple truth, why was there a need for all the other stuff in the catechism. I also began to question everything that I had ever learned.

Smigs and Darukin were invaluable in helping me understand our history, how our thought system developed and how it has been manipulated. Even though I’m still not sure if I want to believe it, their explanation of the event on which all Christian religions is based really upended me.

I looked at Smigs and Darukin. They shrugged their shoulders and Smigs said, “Keep reading, we agreed with Hix that we would only discuss this when you had finished reading the letter.”

Before that, though, let me emphasise why I found Lesson Six so great. It’s the greatest counter-argument to all our ideas of separation, to all our egos’ mad schemes, to everything we see going on in the world. The logic of it is overwhelming.

Yeshua Ben Yosef was the name of the man that we would call Jesus Christ. And when we use that name we think it is a first name and a surname. It’s not, Jesus is the man who became the Christ. Yeshua was the first man to fully realise that he was as God created him, that he was God’s Son, the Christ.

God is everywhere. God created Christ. Christ is everywhere. In the words of St. Patrick the mystic,

“Christ with me, Christ before me,
Christ behind me, Christ in me,
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ on my right, Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down,
Christ when I sit down,
Christ when I arise,
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.” 

St. Patrick is not talking about Christ as a body, he’s talking about a state of mind. And this state of mind is accessible to us all.

What I had believed was that Jesus Christ ascended into Heaven forty days after his resurrection. Smigs assured me that this idea was borrowed from the Egyptians. In fact, he asserts that most of the ideas presented to me as Christian were taken from older religions and reworked.

The way I had learned it, God created us and then abandoned us. We screwed up. Jesus Christ was crucified to redeem us. He resurrected and then abandoned us. We have to wait for his second coming before the world will be put right.

I suppose the idea of abandonment appealed to me because up until your last visit I had believed my parents had abandoned me. I have now accepted that they made a decision, a decision that I didn’t like, but, still and all, a decision they were entitled to make.

When I remind myself that “God is everywhere” I wonder why I believed that I had to die to get to meet God, even if it was only for the moment when he was sentencing me to eternal damnation.

I think this is part of a deeper conditioning. As a child the promise of a treat was used to make me be good. At school the boredom was relieved by the thoughts of the playground and going home after school. At work the drudgery was overcome by thinking what we’d get up to at the weekend.

Needless to say all this upset me. Will tried to console me by telling me that it was all just ‘broken promises’, that my parents and my teachers were doing their best and that there was no sense in blaming them or anyone else. I felt betrayed. I had invested an enormous amount of time and effort in learning all that garbage, and now I was learning that it was all lies.

I had bought into a though system that was completely wrong. The whole system rested on one totally flawed idea - we are separate, and our belief in the possibility of separation has convinced us that we are bodies.

What galled me the most was the constant harping on about us being sinners, and as such we are here to suffer. Clivid and his ilk always kept on and on about fire and damnation. Because we keep breaking the commandments and going against scripture we deserve to suffer, to roast in the eternal flames of hell.

Their selective quoting of texts from scripture did get me curious and I decided to read it for myself. Again, when I got to Matthew 20.29 I stopped. It states “God is one. Love God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. This is the only commandment.” 

Again I applied Lesson Six to this. God is one. God is everywhere. Then oneness is everywhere. I don’t see myself as being one with everyone and everything. I can’t see God everywhere, but I’m hardly going to start blaming God for not showing Himself to me. Then I realised that the second bit were the instructions for achieving the first.

Unfortunately, this had always been quoted to me without the last two words “as yourself”. The idea of loving yourself was selfish and frowned upon. I told myself to stop thinking about what had been said to me and concentrate on what the words said. Anyway, I don’t now and never did see any signs of people obeying the ‘love your neighbour’ bit.

“As yourself” means that I love others like I love myself. How could I? I never loved myself. I’ve always seen myself as a miserable little bitch who would be better off dead and the world would be better off if I had never been born.

Will explained to me that the purpose of our neighbours is to act as witnesses for ourselves. As we see ourselves we will look on them. If we see them as evil, then the evil is within us. We project onto them what we feel about ourselves. He also said that a Mental Asylum is maybe not the best place to look for witnesses.

The cases in here are too extreme. I feel safer in here than I do in the big bad world outside. He argued that I had become institutionalised and that the constant reminding by psychiatrists of my mental condition was not conducive to dropping that condition.

He liked to quote R.D.Laing, a psychiatrist he had worked with in Glasgow, Scotland.

“The secular psychotherapist is often in the role of the blind leading the half-blind. The fountain has not played itself out, the Flame still shines, the River still flows, the Spring still bubbles forth, the Light has not faded. But between us and It, there is a veil which is more like fifty feet of solid concrete. Deus absconditus. Or have we absconded?” 

So, I have decided to leave GF, not to seek fame or fortune, but simply to be myself and to love myself. Love is an attribute of God. God is everywhere. Love is everywhere. (Yea, Clivid got fed up of me saying that all the time, too.) It is also an idea that can be shared. The more I share it the more I get.

I may be that, like Laing says, I’ve got fifty foot of concrete to break through. I’ve started chipping away at it, and I know for certain that one day I’ll make it to the other side.

Let me revisit Lesson Six one last time. God is everywhere. God is in Heaven. So Heaven must be everywhere, within us, all around us, all the time. I know, David, that it is what you are searching for, and it is my fervent hope and prayer that you get there soon.

All my Love, Helen, ‘Hix’.

PS Keep it simple, David. For life really is. Complications and complexity have been introduced to keep us in the dark and to allow experts to thrive on our ‘ignorance’. Ask Smigs for his New Testament example of this.

That was it. Why all the drama? Couldn’t they just have told me that Hix had signed herself out of GF.

Will said, “Sorry about that. Hix asked us all to play along with her little charade to see how you would react. She wanted to see if you would be concerned that she might have committed suicide”

I said, “Yes, I was concerned, but I didn’t think that Hix was the slightest bit worried about what I think or how I would react.”

Will said, “That was a mask she used to not let people get too close to her. As she said in her letter, she really was afraid of being abandoned. Allowing her feelings to show had always led to her being hurt. She’s not over it completely yet. She left here intending to be herself and she said if other people didn’t like her that they could go and make love to themselves.”

I asked, “What did she mean by her PS at the end of the letter?”

Smigs said, “When she stopped reading the bible she asked me why there was so much scripture when the only bit that matters is so simple and so short. She said it was the same with the Catechism, everything is made complex, and complicated with concepts that contradict the simple truth.”

“Wow” I said, “That must have been a difficult question to answer.”

Smigs said, “I think that it was a rhetorical question. She wasn’t really looking for the answer. She was just annoyed that everything she had learned had all been designed to keep her ‘locked out’ of her mind. No one, until she met you, had ever questioned the reality of our thought system or the basis of our civilisation.”

I said, “What answer did you give her?”

Smigs said, “I gave her an example from the New Testament. In Matthew 20.29 Jesus Christ states a simple commandment as the only one necessary for attaining the Kingdom of God. In the Acts of the Apostles you can see this idea being subverted as the Church leaders struggle to establish their religion. In 325 AD the Synod of Nicaea formulated a creed that makes no mention of Love, a creed which they then go on to use to slaughter people who would not accept it.”

Will said, “I’m sorry lads, I’m going to have to break this up again. It’s getting late. We’ll have to pursue this some other time.”

David Narby - Chapter 8 - Strange Lessons

I had started reading one of the books in the house’s library called the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. The Tibetans proposed a simple technique, the same technique that Mi-Li-Sam had shared with me. Their argument was simple. If we were going to run in the Olympics we would not arrive at the stadium on the day of the race without any preparation. We would have trained and worked hard and would have had to run many races to prove that we were up to Olympic standards. They said to regard death in the same way. Death will be the biggest single event in our lives and we had better prepare for it. To do this we need to catch ourselves falling asleep, because sleep is like a little death.

Every night I did this and only caught myself falling asleep once or twice. But, what was very interesting, is that I was aware of things happening either before I woke up or just after I woke up. I would wake up and keep my eyes closed. Even though I knew I was awake and lying in my bed, I found myself in some strange situations. Where or when I was I had no idea and definitely had no control over them. And then I remembered what Ruishk had said at our first meeting on the bus, that it was my mind that decided when and where I would travel so that I learn my lessons. I had learned to trust the people in GF enough to be able to share these experiences with them and ask them for their explanations.

I was not sure how to bring up the subject on my next visit to GF. As it turned out, I didn’t have to. After our usual greetings and our inevitable chat about the weather Will started talking about strange experiences. He asked me,

“David, did you ever hear about the headless horseman?”

I replied, “When I was a boy I had a grand-uncle P who used to scare us out of our wits telling us all kind of weird stories. He often talked about the headless horseman. His stories were all local and about people we knew. I never had the courage to look for confirmation because P had a reputation for making up stories and making them interesting by pretending that they happened to locals. The other reason I never asked is that most of us are unwilling to talk about our strange experiences.”

Will said, “It’s true we don't like talking about them, definitely not in here and especially not with the staff. But we have accepted that you don’t share anything we say with the staff. Hix and Darukin had a strange encounter yesterday evening.”

I asked, “What happened?”

Will said, “They were standing in the corridor talking to each other, and Clivid thumped into Hix’s back. Her eyes popped wide open and she got a faraway look on her face. She said that she saw something strange but she’ll only tell us if you ask her nicely.”

I said, “She wants me to plead with her to tell us what she saw.”

Will said, “David, give it a try, just ask her nicely.”

I said, “Please Hix, tell us what you saw last night.”

Hix said, “That’s not asking nicely.”

I scratched my head and wondered, Will whispered in my ear that maybe I should try calling her Helen.

I asked again, “Please Helen, could you please tell us what you saw last night, if you don’t mind.”

Hix replied, “Why David, I’d be more than pleased to tell you.”

She was silent for quite a while. I was beginning to think I needed to ask again when she continued in a very quiet voice.

“As Will said, myself and Darukin were chatting. I got this very strong whooshing sensation through my body and closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them Darukin was gone and all I could see was a huge ball of incandescent rainbow light. It was like a huge bubble with a radiant light in its centre. Then my mind went blank and I don’t remember anything until I woke up this morning.”

Clivid ranted, “Now you’re beginning to sound like David. You had an hallucination.”

Hix said, “Just because you did not see what I saw you call it an hallucination. It was a real experience to me.”

Will said, “None of us saw what Hix saw, but I accept that that does not mean that she did not have a real experience. I suppose it brings us to the heart of the matter when it comes to our experiences outside the realm of accepted consensual reality. Because most of our experiences are subjective we can’t get agreement from anyone else about them.”

Darukin said, “Don’t go looking for agreement, just enjoy the experience and learn from it. We all have dreams that appear very real to us, but when we wake up we realise that they were not real, they were just dreams.”

Annorr said, “What we call our waking reality is as much a dream as what we experience in dreams.”

Will said, “Let’s agree, for the purposes of our conversations here, that any experience we have, whether we are awake, asleep or in some altered state, we’ll accept as a real subjective experience and not go accusing each other of hallucinating or being crazy or insane.”

Darukin said, “I agree, but let’s remember we are in an insane asylum, after all.” As he said this he laughed and we all laughed along with him.

Annorr said, “When I was learning Reiki I had problems using the symbols. Some time after I had become a master, I had three experiences in-between sleeping and waking. In the first one I was looking at a granite wall that had exquisitely carved Egyptian symbols on it. I just watched, and nothing happened. The second one was the same except that the symbols were Japanese. The third one was the same again but this time the symbols were Tibetan. Again, I just watched and was not really interested.

Then, I had a fourth experience where all the symbols were lying broken on the ground and a guide took me through the wall. We tunneled for quite some time until we came out in total blackness. I couldn't understand what they were all about until a psychic reader told me I was dealing mainly with primeval energy.”

I said, “That’s funny because in some of my recent experiences I was opening ley-lines around Ireland, Britain and Europe. One of the really vivid ones was that I was digging through a huge rock blockage between France and Germany.”

Hix asked, “What are ley-lines?”

Darukin answered, “They are channels for energy flow on or near the surface of the earth, just like acupuncture channels in the body. Stagnant or blocked energy in the body can be moved by activating acupoints. For the Earth the same affect can be achieved by placing large obelisk stones at nodal points on the ley lines. All these nodal points were identified by megalithic structures such as standing stones, dolmens or, the inappropriately named, burial mounds.”

Will asked, “David, what was the feeling you were experiencing while you were digging.”

I said, “I was feeling very frustrated and wondering would I ever get through to the other side. That same feeling of frustration permeated the experience I had of carrying the pope on my back for thousands of miles across a desert with the aim of getting him to the Pyrenees.”

Will asked, “And when did that one happen?”

I answered, “A couple of weeks before I broke through the rock blockage.”

Will asked, “And did you get him there.”

I said, “Yes, I did, much to my relief. I was delighted to get him off my back.”

Will said, “It may be that these experiences are mirroring some blockage in your life, some source of frustration for you. But, in both cases, you achieved your objective, you broke through the rock blockage and you did deliver the pope.”

I said, “I have made, as you probably gathered, a major life changing decision recently.”

Will said, “I think that the pope represents your ego, and your life work is a process of dropping it. The other thing that the feeling of frustration might be showing you is that it might be time for you to give up your stubborn endurance.”

I was tempted to react to this until I realised that I had always been like a dog with a bone. Once I got my teeth into something I’d never let go until the job was done. And then I remembered another recent experience on waking up.

I said, “I was flying all over the place with a few of my friends and then I realised that I had to get up. In my mind I could see myself reluctantly putting on a heavy rucksack that was very full of garbage.”

Annorr said, “Poor David, you really are getting triggered to drop your ego.”

Charlie said, “We are slowly but surely drifting away from the headless horseman and Hix’s experience of the rainbow bubble.”

Hix said, “Thank you Charlie.”

Charlie continued, “On one of your previous visits, Annorr used the phrase ‘we first make fragments of the whole, and then reassemble them without regard to all their true relationships’. In the teachings of the Shamans of Ancient Mexico this was seen as the function of the Assemblage Point. They saw the functioning of this point as key to how we perceive the universe, and getting control of it as giving us Mastery of Awareness. Their basic premises were

• The universe is an infinite collection of energy fields, resembling threads of light.
• These energy fields radiate from a source of inconceivable proportions.
• Human beings are composed of a vast number of these same threadlike energy fields, which form an encased amalgam. This manifests itself as a ball of light the size of a person’s body with the arms extended laterally, like a giant luminous sphere.
• Only a very small group of the energy fields inside this luminous ball are lit up by a point of intense brilliance located on the ball’s surface.
• Perception occurs when the energy fields in that small group immediately surrounding the point of brilliance extend their light to illuminate identical energy fields outside the ball. We only perceive the energy fields lit by the point of brilliance.
• The point of brilliance can be moved from its usual position on the surface of the luminous ball to another position on the surface, or into the interior. When it moves to a new position it immediately brightens up new energy fields, making them perceivable.
• When the point of brilliance shifts, it makes possible the perception of an entirely different world – as objective and factual as the one we normally perceive.

So, when we are having these strange dreams or experiences, what we are doing is moving our Assemblage Point or our point of brilliance from one position to another.”

Hix sighed and asked sarcastically, “Yes, Professor Casey, but what has all that to do with my experience?”

Will said, “Maybe, Charlie, you could explain it in simpler terms.”

Charlie replied, “OK, OK, we all think we perceive the world the same way. We have a fixed frame of reference for looking at the stuff of the universe. When Clivid bumped into Hix he changed her mode of perception. She shifted into energy awareness and saw Darukin’s energy emanations as light. All the rest of us continued to see Darukin as a body.”

Hix asked, “Are you saying that I was the only one that seen Darukin that way?”

Charlie replied, “Yes, your heightened state of awareness was unique to you. How long did you stay in that mode?”

Hix answered, “I don’t know, as I said already, my mind went blank...”

Charlie interrupted, “Are you sure you can’t remember anything else?”

Hix said, “Is this an interrogation? I don’t remember...”

She went silent for quite a while and then she continued, “The whole place looked very weird. I could see blobs of light around me...”

Silence again. Charlie was getting impatient. Hix looked terrified. Charlie was about to ask another question as Will interrupted him, “I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere with Hix, let’s leave her alone.”

Hix said, “It’s all right. I can talk about this, now. I seemed to be moving through time and space. There was a lot of flickering lights that I passed through. They may have been doorways. I came to an open door into a room that was filled with red light, like the red of a Valentine’s rose.

“The feeling in the room was intense. I was very frightened. There was a bed in the room with two figures lying very still on it. I looked and looked at them and began to wonder who they were. Slowly it dawned on me that they were my parents. I tried to pull myself closer to them. I could not move. They were too still, no sign of breathing, no movement at all. My sense of dread was mounting. I was beginning to panic. I collapsed.”

Hix started sobbing, “My parents are dead.” I went over to her, and very uncharacteristically for me, gave her a hug.

Charlie said, “You just had an intense recapitulation experience.”

Will said, “Charlie, I don’t think this is the time to get into explanations. It’s getting late. Maybe we can get into it the next time we meet.”

Annorr said, “Whatever you call it, Charlie, I think Hix was ready. If we just live our lives, everything we need to learn will be presented to us when we are ready.”

Hix got up and as she left the room she said, “I don’t think I need this any more.”