The Art of Transmutation

THE AMARANTHINE CHRONICLES

BOOK I

JOHN KREITER
 DISCLAIMER

The information contained in this book is solely for educational and

entertainment purposes on the given subjects. It should not be considered
medical advice nor psychological advice and should NOT be used as a
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Copyright © 2023 John Kreiter

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 Contents
Preface
1 Stirrings of the Spirit
Lessons
2 Odd Angles, Hidden Doors, and the Promise of Freedom
Lessons
3 The Door Opens…The Secrets of the In-Between
Lessons
4 The Inner Senses and the Personal God
Lessons
5 Defining Transmutation, and the Lessons of a Child
Lessons
6 Becoming the Walking Crazy
Lessons
7 Dream Energy and Natural Desire
Lessons
8 Feeling-Intent and Going Beyond Words
Lessons
9 Simultaneous Selves and Managing Energy Channels
Lessons
10 Shininess and Opening a Crack in the World
Epilogue
Q&A Website
 Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages,
alchemy formed a bridge: on the one hand into the past, to
Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern
psychology of the unconscious.
― CARL JUNG
 Preface
WE ARE BORN INTO THIS WORLD in the same way that we wake up in
the morning. This is our morning and as children we live in a world of half-
dreams. During this morning period the world is not so hard, not as hard as it
will become, and the edges of it may still flow and merge with aspects of
ourselves and the universe.
If we are fortunate, we can gradually awaken as the sun's rays warm our
face, and slowly come to terms with the harsh realities of life. However, if
fate is not on our side, we may be jolted into consciousness by a sudden
shock to our senses. Whether it is the light of day, the jarring sound of an
alarm clock next to our bed, or a slap on the backside upon entering this
world, some of us must instantly begin to adapt and conform to the hard
physical universe.
But from the very beginning, from that first slap, we are taught and
reminded repeatedly that this is a hard place. The narrative across the span of
recorded history seems to be that we live in a hard three-dimensional world,
and the only way to get on with it is to grow up and start to accept the pain
and limitations of earthly reality. From the very beginning, we are told that
we are slaves, and we are taught to be tolerant.
To become tolerant means to accept all that is to come, to accept without
question the fact that we are a hard three-dimensional thing existing in a
harder three-dimensional world. And even though there might be some
dissent, our morning is a period when we begin to divide ourselves and the
world into the hard and rigid (that which is real) and the nebulous
unmeasurable (that which is supposedly unreal).
As morning turns into afternoon, the day stretches out before us with
endless promise. In this early afternoon, we think we finally know ourselves
and the compulsory laws of this hard world that we have been born into.
Overflowing with energy, we step out into the new realm that we have
mapped out and that has been mapped out for us. Most of the separations are
now set in place: this is real, this is hard, this I can perceive with my senses
that are now completely physical and rigid. That, on the other hand, is unreal,
ethereal, unimportant, and our rigid senses can no longer perceive such things
easily, perhaps not at all. Like enthusiastic zombies, we walk with tentative
but stumbling steps, trying desperately to turn ourselves into the new leaders
of this rigid horror that we have inherited.
Eventually, after a long and hopefully productive afternoon, evening
comes, and we see darkness looming on the horizon. It is here, upon seeing
the falling sun and creeping darkness, that we may finally begin to question
those things which seemed so obvious when there was more sunlight, more
faithfully accepted rationality, in the world.
But most people do not wish to acknowledge that there may be an
alternative truth. They resist accepting that they have been mistaken for so
long, that the world is incorrect, that society is misguided...that something is
wrong.
There may be many individuals who claim to desire knowledge of a
greater truth. They might feel within themselves that something is not quite
right or truthful. Some of these people may assert that they are well-educated,
have studied theology or science, and therefore understand the underlying
truths of the universe. Others may even profess to have glimpsed a higher
reality. However, if one could peer into their depths using inner senses, it
would become evident that they remain as rigid on the inside as they are on
the outside.
Most of us do not wish to know, even as the matrix bleeds from every
rotten corner. It is only when darkness has descended upon us and our
evening looms heavy that we finally and desperately seek whatever little
hope there is to be found. But in those fading moments, we do not truly desire
enlightenment; we merely yearn for some semblance of hope - a promise that
we will endure the darkness and the never-ending void that now weighs down
our rigid limbs with the threat of finality.
But there is always hope. The infinite and the ethereal beckon us
throughout our day, inviting us to explore realms beyond our imagination.
For some, an immense and sturdy door may present itself, offering passage to
these unseen territories. However, for most of us, no grand gateway will
stand before us; rather, we must tug at every thread to glean a mere
semblance of the hidden truth that the collective consciousness of the world
seeks to conceal from us.
The incalculable, that which is beyond rulers and the rigidity of the world,
is all around us and it beckons us. It may do so through omens or impossible
events that make us question the nature of the hard world that we are
supposed to be living in. The infinite and the ethereal will beckon us
repeatedly until hopefully before the last light falls, we finally wake up and
try to seek a greater truth – something, anything – to explain the impossible
all around us.
This book is about someone who faces the unexpected challenge of an
immovable door that appears seemingly out of nowhere, right in front of him.
In this case, the immovable door is a dark teacher – a master inner alchemist
– who must match his wit and power against the great mass of the world. Not
by fighting the whole world, but by confronting a young man - someone in
the early afternoon of his life – someone who seems so confident and sure of
the reality that is all around him.
To win this battle, the teacher must perform an act of seemingly
impossible feats – turning the world's narrative upside down and then
reorganizing it for their student. This is a monumental task for any teacher, as
they must first comprehend the prison that confines the student. If the
instructor fails to meet the student within the depths of this trap, they will
never be able to establish genuine contact with them. The teacher may shout
and plead; they might perform miracles beyond measure and do things that
are simply impossible according to their student's prison. However, despite
these efforts, the student would remain oblivious – unable or unwilling to
perceive what little they can grasp within the confines of their reality tunnel.
Once inside the prison, once inside the phenomenological[1] walls that
bind the student, the teacher must begin the slow process of first breaking
down those walls while simultaneously giving the student a wand of power
and a new phenomenology, a new intentionality, that can in time, allow them
to stand on their own in the face of a greater reality. Slowly, step after step,
the teacher breaks down the prison, and then the prison after that, opening
room after room, always leading the student to larger and larger spaces until a
moment comes when the neophyte becomes the adept, and on their own they
can fly free across infinity.
The great thing about a teacher is that they can take risks and speak
boldly. If they can control the location of the classroom, they can speak freely
and openly in an organic way that is sometimes almost impossible to
replicate in a regular book format. I pen the tale of Janos and the shadowed
man with the hope that its fluid, natural narrative will grant you access to
hidden truths that might have escaped your notice before. By embarking on
this journey through the story of teacher and student, I trust that you'll
uncover fresh perspectives and insights that will help you break free from
limiting beliefs and reach new heights.
Most of us will not be lucky enough to find ourselves in the presence of
such a teacher – such an immovable and living door. For that reason, we must
scrounge and use our cleverness to glean whatever techniques and
information we can gather from the scraps to be found out there. We must
push ourselves as individuals to practice, to remember, and never give up.
We must cultivate within ourselves an unwavering and enduring faith that
can withstand the dull and hard narrative of the mob world.
It is my hope that in telling the tales of this student and teacher, I can
make the impossible a little more possible for you. Perhaps you will never
run across a door like the one the young man faces in this story, but in
reading his adventure, it is my hope that his experience will open new angles
for you. Step through those new and odd angles; there you will find the
liminal – your own personal doorway into the infinite!
These are the tales of a young man who is prodded and pulled by an
immovable shadow, a dark teacher, into realizing that the world is not what it
seems to be. Through alchemical transmutation, he discovers the power of the
word made flesh and learns how to make himself wealthy in all ways.
In these pages you will learn how to make anything possible in your life
through ancient techniques that can allow you to transmute into existence
anything that your heart might desire. This book is the starting point for an
epic journey that will reveal the hidden truth about the world we live in,
which has been shrouded from us by a powerful force – a gravity I call the
Archon – that holds us back at every turn. From the moment we wake up
until our evening when light fades from us completely, this force exerts its
influence on our lives, draining us of energy and making it difficult for us to
reach our full potential. But it is my hope that the journey ahead will be filled
with revelations that will help you break free from this dark weight so that
you can begin to unlock your true potential.
To break the student's rigid mental prison, the teacher must employ the
language and cultural artifacts of the time in which the story is set. This tale
unfolds in a bygone era, but there are uncanny similarities between that age
and our own. By immersing yourself in this alternate world, you may gain
new insights into your own reality. The people of the past were not inferior or
less evolved than us; rather, they too were lost in a distinctive cognitive
landscape, a different phenomenological order.
All things change...but do they really? The crux of the problem lies in the
fact that as time goes on, it somehow seems to stay the same. This paradox
seemingly highlights the perpetual repetition of the nature of life experiences,
where no matter whose life or when it is happening, repetition and the
constant flux of life remain unchanged, never-ending. We find ourselves
caught within a kind of Eternal Recurrence as a result.
Eternal Recurrence is originally a thought experiment proposed by
Nietzsche that posits the question: If one could live their life over and over
again, infinitely, would they want to? The idea suggests that each individual
should embrace the possibility of an infinite cycle of events, including their
own existence. But Inner Alchemist’s through their ability to ‘see’ and
remember what they have seen, know that Eternal Recurrence is more than a
thought experiment, it is an energetic fact. No matter who or when we live,
we find ourselves within an infinite matrix of existence, bound by the
necessity to experience various life events in myriad ways. Although these
experiences may appear distinct on the surface, they all embody archetypes—
a hero's journey as Jung perceived it—in which our hardships, pains, and
horrors of living are perpetually repeated throughout an unending cycle of
life and death. Thus, we continue to live out countless lives of relentless
repetition.
But as I have said, there is eternal hope for us all. The boundless and the
ethereal continue to call out to us, inviting us into the realm of mystery and
wonder.
In this first book, Janos and the shadowed man reveal how to harness the
power of prayer and faith (the word made flesh) to manifest our deepest
desires. By unlocking the hidden secrets of alchemical transmutation, they
show you how to transform your life from within, creating a life that is truly
extraordinary, full of prosperity — both seen and unseen — and beyond the
trap of the mob mind of the world!
But their teachings also reveal the key to breaking free from the shackles
of time itself — to step outside of it and embark on an exhilarating journey
into the liminal spaces far beyond our three-dimensional prison and eternal
repetition.

[1] A philosophical approach that focuses on the study of conscious

experiences and phenomena as they are experienced by individuals. It seeks
to understand the essence or meaning of these experiences without making
any assumptions about their underlying causes, mechanisms, or metaphysical
reality. In phenomenological research, the emphasis is placed on describing
and analyzing subjective experiences in order to reveal the structures,
categories, and dimensions that constitute human existence.
 1
Stirrings of the Spirit
IT WAS A DAY LIKE A THOUSAND OTHER DAYS. Janos walked down
the main street of a village that had been his only home since the day of his
birth. He had been born in this village and he expected to die here. This main
road was the central hub of everything, the central hub of his life and he
knew it intimately. The best you could say about this place was that it was
timeworn, that it was well used, that it had been and continued to be a live
thing, a living thing. Every square inch of this village, and specifically this
main street, looked well-worn.
There were no straight lines, it was as if years of water had flowed across
every inch of this place, rounding every corner, corroding, and polishing
everything as life flowed across it. Thousands of shoes and bare feet touching
rock and dirt, bodies brushing against corners, wind blowing and rain falling,
and in time all had that smoothness that things acquire when they are tread
upon day after day, night after night, year after year of life and living. And
even though everything seemed polished clean through extensive use, there
seemed to be a fine layer of well worked in dirt or alluvium on everything.
The village was alive, it was an organic thing. This was his home, his
complete universe.
His time, this time, was a time of gregarious living. It was a period when
every second held within it the possibility of intense emotion, and a
complexity of experience and perception that were beyond anything
understandable by those who lived in the times to come. He could almost see
life pull itself from the earth, from the ground, from the walls itself and
scream out, “I’m alive!” Everything was full and thriving. A modern eye
might see everything as dingy and chaotic, straight angles were very hard to
find in his world. Everything was built by hand and best guess. But given
time, such a modern eye might be able to stop separating one thing from
another thing and begin to embrace the whole of it. And in doing so, upon
giving in to the sheer volume and the chaotic complexity of this old world,
they would realize that what at first had seemed like chaotic garbage and
mess, was in fact living essence of life and experience that had been deeply
stamped across everything. In time, such a modern eye might be able to
finally see that this other reality was not just chaos and disorder, but that it
was a realm beyond the imagining of someone who had grown up in the
modern and sanitized world.
The houses on both sides of the street where he walked were solidly built,
but oftentimes great license was taken in such construction…and at times
some of this construction could look like patchwork. Everything was layered
art, and this seemed to add to the sheer animate feel of this place.
He was walking down the main street of this chaotic little jungle, this
main street that was the core of his village, his home. This main street was
the widest road in the village and the best kept. It was the continuance of a
high road that led to the village, and it finally ended at the beginning of a
long country road that led away from the village. This main street was the
center of everything that happened so it was well maintained, level, and it
would see the most traffic, the biggest carts and the largest crowds would
travel and gather here. Being wider than all other roads it was also the center
of commerce and a meeting place; it was the heart and soul of the village.
During a busy day there could be hundreds of people walking up and
down this main street. Here is where you would find the big markets set up
on Wodensday (Wednesday) and Saturnsday (Saturday). The main street was
a place to set up venues for entertainment, a place where the latest news and
village affairs might be discussed. It was busy, full of all sorts of people
jostling about, children running everywhere. Large worn vendor’s carts
crowded the place, some stationery, others being pulled by hand, horse, or
small oxen. The smells were incredible and varied, and together they created
a symphony of perception that in time became not just aroma, but a signature
of the place, and no matter what visitors felt when they were first accosted by
that fragrance, in time they began to love that smell, they craved it.
Like a giant river this main street flowed across the center of the village
and moved and supported all the things that were needed to keep the village
alive and thriving. And just like any river, along both sides, stretching out
like vegetation and widening the river, stopping erosion but at the same time
feeding from it, there existed a true maze of shacks and rambling buildings.
The young man had lived here his entire life, certainly not on the main
street itself, he was much too poor and an outcast. His home lay in the
labyrinth of twisting and turning shacks that surrounded and supported the
main street. The farther that someone’s dwelling was from the main street,
the poorer and lower the social status of it and the people who lived in there.
And the young man’s house was so close to the edge of the village that it
almost met the tall dark forest that surrounded everything. The location of his
house mirrored his standing in the village, he was quite literally about to fall
off the side of this living thing, and if he did fall after one massive convulsion
by this thriving organism, nobody would care.
His whole life was the village, his first breath was this village, and in all
that time it seemed to him that nothing had changed. But due to the intricate
and chaotic nature of construction, due to the incredible diversity of life in all
its forms, in every square foot of this place he called home, this street, his
street, was so overflowing that his mind could not remember every part of it,
even now. Living in this place was like living in a dream. Every night it
would be the same place fundamentally, but like any dream this place
changed in odd ways. Like a dream, as he might turn to look one way or the
other, he would always find something new, like something seemed to
materialize or meld out of nowhere to become something new to experience:
a hole in the road, a fixed patch of wall or fencing, a vendor, different
clothing, a variation in smell like a never before heard overture to a coming
symphony. The place was in a constant state of change, evolution. Like a
dream it flowed and seemed to actually change as he turned one way and then
another.
So, as he walked there was a feeling of the familiar, but at the same time a
uniqueness to everything that was so hard to describe. In some ways it was
like entering a cozy but cluttered room; one that you could never hope to
remember in every minute detail. And in that sense, there was an endless
fascination to it all, like walking into a self-replicating flea market full of
anything and everything that a person could imagine…the small things
constantly moved, disappeared, were replaced by other things, or changed in
some odd way or another. For that reason, his senses, even against his wishes
at times, somehow delighted even in the grimy disordered mess of it all.
His life was hard, he had already lost his mother and his sister. Not too
many people that he knew of lived to old age. Life was thrilling at times,
overflowing with experience and feeling, but it could also be brutal. Now it
was just him and his father, toiling away making sour cabbage day and
night…this was his life, the sour cabbage maker, the stinker.
As he walked down the street, slow step after slow step, dreading to get
home to start another late day of toil, he noticed a woman staring hard at him.
Most people would ignore him, do their very best to not see him at all. That
was one of the more pleasant aspects of being a second-class citizen, an
outsider; people did not even want to look at you. Anonymity had become
precious to him, he delighted in what some might consider the curse of
invisibility.
But this woman was different, she stared hard trying to get him to look
back at her. And when he did look, her visage changed with that expression
that he had seen so many times, one that said, “How dare you, how dare you
look back at me you little stinker.”
He looked away quickly, looked down to the dirt ground. He tried to focus
his attention on the scattered pieces of debris to be found everywhere.
“What a stink,” she said out of the corner of her mouth and turned her
attention back to the woman beside her. He knew the woman that had spoken
to him well, she would sit or stand day and night by the door of her house
looking at the throngs pass by, almost always talking or arguing with the
woman that lived beside her. She wore her usual rough dress, clean but well-
worn. One foot was bare and full of grime and mud, on the other she had a
simple leather slip that looked old and very well used but relatively clean. He
heard her address her friend, neighbor, archenemy, “I am sure that damned
dog took it. I will poison the thing!”
“Oh, you are such a tough one, you will do nothing,” replied the other
woman. The other woman was sitting on a stool watching the people go by
next to her long-time neighbor. The two would comment on everything that
they saw like two seasoned theater critics. Together they were quite the pair,
and nothing missed their keen and judgmental eyes. The woman on the stool
was dressed very much like her nemesis and fellow pundit but wore a simple
bonnet of questionable sanitation on her head. Holding a strand of tangled
hair that sprouted from the bonnet like some treacherous weed, she looked
down at her friend’s dirty foot and laughed.
“Well, maybe it was not the dog that took your shoe, maybe it was that
smelly bastard over there, or some other ‘Gypcian’,” she said pointing with
her chin at the young man. “I would not doubt it, they are all thieves you
know.” She turned to look at the young man and wrinkled her nose.
The young man sped up a bit, looked up from his cheap, dirty shoes and as
his eyes focused on the panorama of the street, it seemed to burst to life
before him. It was like it had been waiting patiently for his attention, and as
soon as he remembered it again the street woke up before him, exploded
upon his senses. Children ran around him, screaming and screeching, some
pointing and calling him names. Dogs and cats, chickens and rats, all scurried
on the street in the dark and less obvious corners of this crammed little world,
each playing their own little game of life and death in the lost turns of the
street. There were vendors everywhere this late in the day, selling fruits,
vegetables, healing herbs, bread, eggs, cheese, and whatever knickknack
anyone could possibly want.
The young man wore a simple tunic, the same thing he had worn for what
seemed most of his life. On his feet were his well-worn slip-on leather shoes
with the too-soft soles. And just as his mother had taught him so long ago, he
looked and carefully made sure to avoid anything dangerous on the street. His
shoes were not very well-made, so he was careful to avoid any sharp objects
or dirty waste. Anything that went through his shoes and punctured his skin
could kill him in time. A scratch could go from an annoyance to death in his
world.
All knew that the ‘foul airs’ lay thick the closer you got to the ground. All
knew that they surrounded and were created by certain dirty things, vile
things of the earth. A person needed to have good shoes to avoid having those
dreadful fumes enter the body through a puncture in the skin, a cut on his
feet. If left untreated, even a simple scratch would allow the foul vapors to
enter deep into the body. If that happened such fumes would slowly poison a
person, and in time the rot and disease would spread until they died. His
mother would always check him for scratches as a child every time he got
home, and would clean any that she found with herbs, oils, strong tea, and
whatever clean water they might have. She had been a good mother until she
was taken away from him.
And so, he walked, looking at his shoes a little too much, lost in the
thoughts of his mother and absentmindedly avoiding the muck and the sharp
corners…then bang!
He was on the ground and being dragged. He looked up and saw a large
bulk. The bulk had grabbed him by the arm and was laughing and screeching
as it dragged the young man into a dark corner of the street.
“You stink like a rotten piss corner! I will have to douse myself in ladies
mint to get the smell and the foul off me!”
The large bulk dragged the young man mercilessly across the hard ground
and threw him into a dark corner. He was soon surrounded by three large
individuals, who looked down at him like three hungry cats eyeing a stunned
mouse crawling in the dirt.
“We need payment for your existence. If dirt and fowl like you will not
move from our street, then it must pay to be here. What have you to give me
today stinker?”
The big oaf did not wait for a reply but used his thick and well-made boot
to kick the young man once hard in the stomach. All the air left him, another
kick to the head, and thankfully everything after that was a bit of a blur of
distant pain and writhing movement. The thugs took turns, each kicking him
at least once, but were careful not to hurt him too much, just a bruising, just
good old-fashioned sport. Certainly nothing to raise too much commotion in
the street.
The young man was used to this, it had happened before, it would most
likely happen again. He was usually quick and on guard, ready to run if he
saw a cluster of older boys or ‘spirited’ men, but today he had been cowed by
the woman and had literally been caught looking down at his shoes.
They had another merry round of kicks, making sure the prey would not
fight back. Then they rifled through his belongings, the little that he had, and
they took everything, which was hardly anything at all. But worst of all, they
took his trusty old shoes. Certainly, they could sell those somewhere, and if
they had any sense, they would sell or trade with the woman down the street.
“Faith in God and a large dose of humor is what gets you through life,” his
father had once told him. He laughed…it hurt.
He rolled over slowly, dazed, sluggishly regaining his senses and clarity
of vision. The three ogres had left, and as he looked around, he noticed that
his powers of anonymity had not left him; not one person looked his way, not
even the cats and the rats. Nobody cared.
Then he felt a slight shiver, and looking around he noticed that one person
was watching. It was some dingy beggar sitting on the floor close to the foul
air. He sat across the street from him. If Janos was second-class, the beggar
was third he would imagine, and he figured that this third-class citizen, unlike
the rats, found some amusement at the sight of the pitiful young man lying in
the street.
He noticed that the beggar had long tangled hair cascading across his face,
this made his face unrecognizable. But behind the dark and tangled hair he
could feel the unwavering attention of a powerful gaze. As his eyes adjusted
and his head steadied itself, he noticed that he could almost see the dark eyes
of the beggar shining in the shadows. This gave the young man a chill that
ran from the back of his spine to the top of his head, but he also noticed a
peacefulness in those eyes. And it was that peacefulness that calmed the
young man somehow, and this was a great surprise because beggars seldom,
if ever, provided any kind of comfort to anyone. Beggars, he had noted,
usually wanted something for free, they seldom gave anything back.
Some said that the foul airs were responsible for such people, such
beggars. Others said that devils were to blame, that they would get into some
people’s heads and never leave. Whatever the case, such a beggar could not
help himself, let alone help another. But somehow that strong magnetic gaze
from this man was able to calm him, and for that at least he was thankful.
Indeed, the more he stared into those eyes, the calmer he became and in time
even his hands stopped shaking. There was a void-like intensity to those eyes
that made it next to impossible to ignore the beggar. And being that they were
third-class citizens, even he would ignore the beggars…but this beggar would
not be ignored.
“See, that is what you get for looking down at your shoes and ignoring the
world,” said the beggar. He slowly got up and walked across the street over
to where the young man lay in a heap. Everyone made a wide berth around
him, making sure to stay away from the foul and the devils that surely clung
to such a man. What power, a part of the young man wished he had such
power, a part of him wished that people would fear him and make a wide
berth for him.
“Oh look, they even took your shoes. At least now the source of your
distraction is gone.” Janos could almost hear the beggar smile.
The beggar was a disheveled mess. His hair was long, but somehow clean
looking…how odd. It hung from his head in an unruly fashion, but this
corona of tangle and mess made the man look fearsome and regal in some
hard to define way. It was like he was some kind of deity of the street, the
God of beggars, like a figment of the young man’s imagination come to life.
His clothing seemed to be made up of tatters all strung and patched
together. It was like he had wrapped himself with layer upon layer of ripped
and broken cloth scrap, made up of a multitude of colors, perhaps anything
and everything he could find on the ground and in the filth.
The final look was rather impressive. He had managed to cover just about
every inch of himself and had created a suit of sorts that somehow added to
the otherworldly nature of the man. As he walked towards the young man, the
scraps of clothing that he had wrapped himself with all hung down and
moved from side to side so that he almost looked like a walking bush. Indeed,
the odd tunic now seemed more like great camouflage as opposed to rotten
tatter. Had the young man not been forced to look at the strange beggar, he
may have walked right past the man without ever knowing that he had been
there at all. That was odd to be sure, usually beggars did their best to get the
attention of others.
“Well Janos, you are just an unlucky pilgrim today.” To this the young
man groaned.
“Let me tell you a little secret young man, nothing in this world is an
accident, and you are the one to blame for this.” The young man looked at the
dark otherworldly figure with contempt, and in reply to that look the beggar
responded, “Well, let us agree that at the very least you can take
responsibility for this current situation. Honestly, what else do you expect
from life if you walk through it carelessly staring at your cheap shoes.”
The man in tatters squatted down and sat on the dirty ground next to the
young man. His dirt-stained face had not changed as he spoke, it was like he
had no emotion at all, or was it that he just was not able to see that face
clearly. But the eyes he could see somehow, and they shone bright in the
night, brighter than normal, thought the young man, but aside from that
dancing glitter in the eyes, there was no expression, just a calm feeling of
nothing, a nothingness, and there was such peace in that nothingness.
The moment that the dark beggar sat down, he seemed to instantly become
part of the shadows and the darkness. His strange, tattered suit seemed to
blend in perfectly with the shadows and the multicolored grime all around
him. It was at that one particular and surprising moment that the beggar
became the ‘shadowed man’ to Janos. He was not just one of the shadows, he
was darkness, living darkness, and all he could think of, the only thing that
his mind could come up with to describe this being beside him was: the
shadowed man.
People walked by. They did not pay attention to the young man; he was
not worth any real citizen’s time. And they did not seem to see the beggar at
all. But the young man thought that even if they could, they would most
likely quickly look away hoping that the beggar would not pay attention to
them.
“Why don’t you take your great advice somewhere else. I have had an
overripe day already, and I certainly do not have anything to give you,
especially now. As you have pointed out, even my shoes have left me, so why
don’t you do the same and leave.”
“Oh, I do not want anything from you that you cannot give, and I am here
to give you something.” The beggar was staring straight ahead, not looking at
the young man or seemingly anything else of this world, giving the young
man another weird chill.
Slowly, the beggar reached into his tunic of tatters and pulled out from
some large hidden pocket a pair of shoes, but not any shoes, these were
exceptionally well-made leather shoes. They had a strong hard sole, they had
bindings and were made of leather that looked well worked, like it was
already soft but tough and sturdy. These shoes looked expensive, far more
expensive than anything the young man or a beggar could afford.
“Keep your shoes to yourself beggar, the last thing I need is to be accused
of larceny and latched to the pole in the town square.”
“These are not stolen, they are an old pair that I do not use anymore, and
that honestly have not fit me well for some time now. All is change, life is
change, even your feet are changing as we speak, what a marvel this odd
world. Anyway, I thought that they would be a fine gift for you Janos.” The
beggar took the shoes and put them beside the young man and kept staring
straight ahead, into unknown worlds.
The young man looked down at the shoes, the best made shoes that he had
ever seen, and he reached down to touch them. And just as his hand was
about to touch the shoes, the beggar said, “But nothing is free in this world,
which is something that I know you know quite well by now. Every gift is a
bargain. Everything in life is a barter of sorts, you give one thing to receive
another. This is the way of our world, our dimension.”
The young man looked up at the beggar and concluded that this shadowed
man must have many devils inside his head.
“Please, take your gift and your devil’s words and leave me be. I want
nothing from you and as I have said I have nothing to give.”
The beggar turned his head and looked straight at the young man, and at
that moment the beggar’s eyes shone beneath the crown of long hair. His
powerful shining gaze froze the young man and at that moment the entire
world faded away, so that only he and the beggar were left on a crowded road
at the center of nowhere, squarely in the epicenter of what seemed to be the
darkest void the young man had ever known.
“My dear Janos, there is much that you have to give, this is the only
reason that I am here. And as you give to me, I give to you, and as we give to
each other we are part of the cycle of life and death in this predatory little
world.”
The young man was frozen, he could only look into those shining eyes and
lose himself in the darkness that seemed to suddenly engulf him. Like a fine
cocoon, this void seemed to have built up a wall between himself and the
harsh and terrible world that was all that he had ever known. For this one
moment in time, he felt secure, safe, it was like being next to his mother
again, his poor mother.
“Everything that you have and everything that you will ever get in this
world, in this dimension, my devil words, all of it, are part of the give-and-
take of this voracious dimension. We live in a barter dimension; we
exchanged this for that and by one measure or another that exchange must
always be balanced.
“And so, for the shoes you must give me your time, and for that time there
will be other barters between you and I, other exchanges. And at each turn, at
each crossroad, you will be free to choose to barter or to walk away. All I can
do is throw jewels before you and hope that you will want to trade.” And
with that the beggar turned, picked up a shoe and slowly put it on the young
man’s foot. Then he slowly and deliberately took the other shoe and put it on
the young man’s other foot, and with care he laced them and made sure that
they were a proper fit.
The young man was still in a daze, and as the beggar put the shoes on him,
the world seemed to slowly wake up again and the cocoon of darkness that
had swallowed him slowly melted away. The beggar stood up and took a step
back into the street. The people all around seemed to flow out of his way as if
he was some giant rock in a slow-moving ocean.
“Come see me again sometime, that is what you owe me.”
And with that, the beggar and his funny suit melted into the street, and
before the young man could even think, the beggar disappeared before his
eyes, swallowed by the ever-moving crowd.
He looked down at his new shoes, and marveled not only at their fine
quality, but at the fact that they fit perfectly. He stood up on wobbly legs, and
thanks to those fine shoes he was able to make it home safe, this time making
sure to pay attention to everything around him, something that was far easier
now that he did not have to pay so much attention to every step that he had to
take on his journey home.
 Lessons
You should not walk across the world looking down at your shoes. The world
is fundamentally a balanced place, but part of that balance means that it is
also predatory. In a predatory world you need to have sobriety, you cannot
lose yourself in your feelings, especially your feelings of self-pity. If you get
caught looking down at your shoes, you may fall prey to the many traps of
this world.

U
Everything has a price in this world, even a gift.
 2
Odd Angles, Hidden Doors, and the Promise of
Freedom
“THERE ARE EVENTS IN OUR LIFE that have such force, that they will
ring in our minds forever,” father had said, and he would go on to say that
these were the things that we would present to God upon our death.
The young man did not believe in God or anything else. He just could not
believe that in a world so cruel and unjust there could be any kind of God, at
least not like the one that was depicted in the prayer book his father read and
quoted from. But meeting that beggar, ‘the shadowed man’ as he had begun
to call him in his mind every time that he recollected that meeting, well, that
was one event that might ring in his mind for a long time to come.
It was not so much that the situation had been in any way special or
different. He had already seen a multitude of odd beggars in streets and
alleyways doing all sorts of weird and illogical things. It was not the first
time that he had been robbed or beaten just for being who he was. He had
encountered evil before, young, and old; he had suffered the slings and
arrows of humanity, as they say. And if asked he would, in an open and self-
enlightened way, admit that he had become quite jaded early on in his life.
People held no real surprise for him anymore, they were strange and many of
them were evil. But something about that beggar seemed different, something
about him seemed incongruous, and even though there was no other
explanation that he could think of, he had this nagging notion that the beggar
was no beggar at all.
He had never received a gift from a beggar before, that was something out
of the ordinary. He looked down at his new shoes and once again was
surprised at the workmanship, the comfort. And that mysterious man; the
whole situation seemed different, it was as if time appeared to be slowing
down, causing the moment to feel as though it were stretching out
indefinitely. Could time just stop like that?
Now, that was a question that he would ask some supposed god in heaven
if he ever ran across one. He chuckled to himself and gazed at his shoes once
again.
And the stupid and crazy things that the man had said? He said that he,
Janos, was responsible for everything! What a crazy notion. What an insane
thing to think. How was he responsible for being born in this silly world, in
this crazy place. How was he responsible for being born a second-class
citizen in a second-class world?
He looked around the room he was in. He was in his father’s house; the
family shack as he liked to think of it. It was a structure completely made
from found and salvaged materials, each part fastened to the next with hope
and his father’s prayers. Each part worked and reworked again to make sure
all the holes were covered, and the structure did not fall apart. It was a
patchwork of different materials; wood mostly, some old blankets here and
there, mud and straw, a thatched roof, and anything that they could find on
the street. Now that he thought of it, the family home reminded him of the
odd tunic that the beggar wore that night; it was patches on patches. It was
like a slowly sinking boat. He and his father were desperate sailors patching
one hole after another, using anything and everything to plug up the holes
that sprung up, trying desperately to keep out the wind, the cold, the rain,
pests, and whatever foul air that might enter from the tangle of life that
surrounded them. And yet he had to admit that there was love here, he could
still feel the love of his mother and his sister, the emotions that somehow still
clung to everything like old cobwebs on a slowly sinking boat.
He glanced at his father toiling away in the corner of the house on one of
his many little projects. Janos supposed he must be trying to fix something, or
perhaps he was working on some new idea to improve the condition of the
house. At that instant he realized once again how special his father was in his
life, his last remaining family, and that it was his father who maintained that
little bubble of love that surrounded this place. The young man loved his
father very much and yet deep down somehow hated him, hated him for this
life, this place where they lived, surrounded by a warren of other people, far
away, so far away from that main street of the village. There was love in this
place, he loved his father, he loved the memories that clung to this place, and
for some odd reason he could not explain, he even loved the old, worn, and
yet immaculately clean furniture of this little shack, situated so precariously
close to the edge of the village.
He sat on a wooden chair next to a wooden table. On the chair were scraps
of whatever cloth could be found, each layered one upon the other, and as
one frayed away to dust, another layer of tattered cloth would be placed upon
it. These were the cushions, and in a way, they were fine cushions, and this
was his favorite chair, the chair that he loved to sit in every evening
whenever he had some time to himself.
The most interesting thing about living in a wooden structure, a wooden
house, was the noise the house would make throughout the day, especially in
the evening…dear God the creaking in the evening! Throughout the day, as
the temperature went up, the house creaked and adjusted to the heat. And at
night, the noises sometimes seemed deafening, especially if he began to pay
attention to them. Even though he was born and grew up in this place, he
could never get used to the noise at night. He remembered how as a young
boy the creaking and the sudden loud cracks would always get the best of his
imagination. As a child, he heard monsters and devils murmuring amongst
the incessant creaks and cracks, and eventually he would either crawl in next
to his sister in bed, or he would call to his mother and wait patiently until she
came to sit next to him as he tried desperately to fall asleep at night.
The old ship creaked and groaned as it slowly sank into the earth.
“We are all responsible for our lives,” the shadowed man had said. What a
silly notion that was.
He certainly did not want to live in this place, no matter what old
memories held him to it. He did not want to live in a shack at the edge of the
village, surrounded by the noises of the shantytown dwellers outside. He did
not want to live in a place where the groans of the house made it almost
impossible for him to sleep at night. He did not want to work with his father
making batch after batch of sour cabbage, and then try to sell his second-class
product in a market where everyone looked at them like ugly bugs squirming
about, looking for whatever scrap they could eat. He did not want to be poor.
Stretching his leg in front of him, he examined his shoes, the ones that the
shadowed man had given him, and marveled at their flawless intricacy. He so
wished he could have an entire wardrobe of things that were so well-made.
He wanted a big and elegant house, something that creaked less, leaked less,
and a life away from all of this, this damned shanty, this damned little town,
this damned little life.
His father would most likely think that he was being sinful for thinking
this way. Was there not some stupid provision in his worship against the
desire for better things, the desire to control one’s own destiny, the desire to
have some modicum of power?
“We are all responsible for everything in our life.” What a silly thing to
say, only a beggar, a lunatic, would believe such a thing. And if such a thing
were true, then he would certainly have changed his life. But as he looked
around this place, this house felt like a prison, a heavy prison holding him
down and weighing on his soul. And right there, right at that moment, he
made two simultaneous and equally spellbinding realizations that nearly
knocked him out of his chair.
“How did that man know my name!?”
“Did you say something my son?”
“No father, I just mumbled to myself a little.”
“Be careful, if you talk to yourself too much you will end up like the lady
down the street who seems to have entire conversations by herself,” his father
smiled, and the young man reeled. He tried to maintain his composure as he
clung to the sturdy patchwork table in front of him. And he thought again,
“How did that man know my name?”
But of equal importance, like a coal burning deep in his stomach, his
second realization was that he could no longer live this tiny little life, that he
had to go back and look for that insane devil again. He had to go find that
beggar, that shadowed man. He had to go back, and he had to look clearly
into that man’s face and demand answers. The burning in his belly would
accept nothing less than this, right now. He would tempt fate and go out at
night, which was never a wise thing to do, but he needed to find that beggar
and tell him just how wrong he was. He had to see that man again and ask
him how that man knew his name because Janos did not remember meeting
such a man before.
And with that the young man stood, walked across the dirt floor of his
house, opened the front door, and walked out into the dark night.

T
Janos stayed low, walked quickly and quietly, and always next to the darker
parts of the alleyways that led to the main street. Some people liked to walk
in the middle of the alley where most of the light was, his notion was
different, he preferred to walk in the shadows thinking that he would rather
quietly come upon trouble instead of letting trouble know where he was.
As usual the maze of shacks and houses that bordered and surrounded the
main street were full of people, all talking, laughing, screaming, fighting.
Some would linger in corners, or in the arches of their own doorways. There
were shouts, low whispers, the sounds of intimacy, crying children, all
coming from the ramshackle walls of the shanties that made up the labyrinth
that surrounded the main street of the village. The closer that he got to the
main street, the better the building materials and the construction became.
But for the most part, the whole area was full of odd corners and angles,
makeshift wooden and mud walls, littered debris, and some questionable
puddles here and there. And thankfully, he could finally hear the actual noise
from the main street itself. Instead of muffled noises and repressed emotion,
the noise from the main street sounded more open, more alive, filled with
light somehow.
As he stepped out from a back alley and into the main street proper, he
was greeted by light from the many torches and oil lamps that were set up to
illuminate the bustling thoroughfare at night. Unlike the warren of shanties in
the back that had little to no light, the main road was always well lit at night.
The people of the back streets would usually close their doors and windows
as best they could, and there was a general order by the ‘reeve’ (the
magistrate) that all the citizens of the back streets had to retreat to their
homes at night. But the main street was a different place, and here people
thrived at night and commerce carried on. At night most of the poor people
that lived in the shanties stayed away from the main street by supposed noble
decree, so this time was special. The main street was full of danger and
adventure at night. If a person was able to be there, they had either snuck in
or had enough coin to afford it.
The buildings on the main street itself were often robust and well-made
things. These buildings were usually taverns, alehouses, and inns. There were
some actual houses on the main street itself. These houses were usually quite
luxurious and well-built structures compared to the snarl of houses and
shanties that lay hidden behind the lights and the glamour of the main street
of the village. These were the houses of bureaucrats and civil servants, the
houses of rich merchants and well-to-do families. And from the market
square of the main street, which was at the very center of this bustling road,
one could see the manor house in the distance. He loved this place…he hated
this place.
The residents of these fine houses would often sit outside and talk while
watching the throngs roll by. Some would sit next to open windows with
candles lit, while others would congregate around alehouses and inns,
drinking and engaging in casual and sometimes boisterous merriment. Street
vendors moved about selling small items, while more industrious types set up
stationary stalls full of goods to sell. The smart ones would hang large
torches and oil lamps from their carts or vendor stalls to attract attention.
Many would sit and stare, and some of the wealthier people would do this for
most of the day. He envied them, the alehouse owners and innkeepers who
lived here year-round without ever having to think about the shanties behind
them. Theirs was a life lived along the main street, with a freedom he did not
have. They could follow this road up to the large manor house where the
Nobleman and his family lived in splendor or continue down that road to
another village. He wondered how far one could get if they followed that
road forever.
As he walked towards the main square of the village where he had met the
shadowed man weeks ago, he entered a darker part of the street with fewer
lights, vendors, and people frolicking about. This could be a dangerous area;
he woke from his inner monologue and began paying attention to the
shadows and corners that might hide predators.
There were other nights when he had gone looking for the shadowed man
and had failed each time. But today, he had purpose, questions, and
desperation. So, unlike before when he turned back in fear, this time he
overcame his fear of hidden danger and walked on, looking deep into the
shadows as chills rolled up and down his spine like tiny earthquakes. But the
shadowed man was nowhere to be seen; he was disappointed again.
“So full of wrath and rage today,” a voice from behind, deep in the
darkness. He was startled; it seemed like every single hair on his body had
stood on end. The shock was such that a chill ran through his body, and for a
moment he thought he might even empty his stomach or faint.
But he gradually collected himself. It was like he was pulling himself back
into himself…slowly…like an explosion coming back to its source. In time,
he felt more normal, like he had collected enough of himself to be himself.
He cautiously turned to be greeted by a patch of complete ink-black darkness.
“When a man has purpose, he glows. One can almost feel the point of him
as he walks forward, often tripping on his own feet.” From what seemed to be
the void of darkness itself, a silhouette materialized. At that moment, in that
place, it looked like the man had appeared like magic, like a ghost solidifying
before the eyes of a frightened disbeliever. The young man tried to
rationalize, thinking that the beggar must have been hiding in the shadows
and that he must have slowly walked forward into the light. This is what the
young man told himself; this is what the young man chose to believe; this is
what the young man had to believe or else he would run away screaming.
“Such a dramatic fellow you are. You have come to see me in such a
determined state, and now you look at me like a frightened slack-jawed fool.
Well do not just stand there in the middle of nowhere, out in the light. Don’t
let trouble know of your location, come here and greet your shoe benefactor,
your personal cordwainer.”
The shadowed man laughed a very odd laugh, and the young man felt a
soft but unyielding hand on his arm. The dark apparition slowly, delicately,
pulled his young ward into the darkness. Once in the depths of the shadow
the young man’s eyes adjusted in time, and he was able to make out the
complete outline of the beggar that he had met many weeks ago.
The man was wearing the same thing he had worn before, indeed he
looked no different, and it almost seemed like he could have been there, lost
in the shadows of this place this entire time.
The moment that he was pulled into the darkness, the young man noticed
and felt an instant separation from the world and was surprised to realize that
the other people walking along the street had stopped paying attention to him.
It was like he had stepped into a secret room in the darkness, and in that room
he was safe. That was a relative thing he supposed, given that he was in a
dark place with the shadowed man…well, how safe was that really?
“Relax young man,” the beggar spoke in that same odd half whisper he
had noticed on their first meeting. “Sit down with me in this dark little corner
and lose yourself amid the throngs and the safety of the darkness. Let us have
a chat, you, and I”.
They both sat down on the ground and assumed a similar position to the
one that they had taken those weeks back when they first met.
Almost instantly, the young man relaxed as he sat beside his dark
guardian. It was like the whole of him, his entire body and soul, knew at that
moment that in this place, in this little pocket of darkness in the middle of the
crowds just a few feet away from him, he was safe.
“Who are you? How are you able to live here like this? How is it that they
do not seem to see us? How do you do this?”
“I am nothing and nobody, that is my only true power.”
“But how do they not see us!?”
 “Well, if you keep screaming and jabbering like that, then certainly they
will.”
The beggar looked out at the street. After they had sat down, he had not
once looked at the young man. He looked just like the man that he first met
those many days ago, and yet, there was something different. He was no
longer that dingy beggar, that dirty inconsequential life. He was no longer
filth creating more filth. Now he was the shadowed man, the frightening yet
deeply intriguing man in the darkness.
The shadowed man continued to look out into the street and continued to
speak in that odd kind of half whisper which somehow seemed to go directly
from his mouth and into the young man’s ear. It was like the sound of his
voice could only be heard by the young man, like the man was making noise
solely for the young man to hear.
“In every place, no matter where you look, there are nooks that one seems
to see, odd little spaces and hidden corners that hide from the world in plain
sight. In every single square inch of the world, no matter how populated,
there are what could be called liminal places, tiny little spaces, sometimes
vast stretches, where the average laws of space and time are not wholly
adhered to, you might say.”
“I am sorry, but I do not understand what you are saying.”
“Listen to me young man because this is very important. The world that
you see around you is not the common, the commonplace. It just feels routine
and ‘everyday’ because you have become so used to the routine of your life.”
“What do you mean by the routine of life?”
“We all look at the world instead of seeing it. What this means is that we
are so used to looking at things and always finding exactly what we expect to
find, that we have conditioned ourselves into a kind of dullness. We are so
used to seeing the same thing day after day, hour after hour, that we have
become complacent and, in that complacency, we have lost the ability to see
the true nature of the world.”
“What does all of this have to do with anything?” The young man grew
exasperated being that he had absolutely no clue what the man was saying it
all. Perhaps he should run. What in the name of the devil itself was he doing
sitting next to this lunatic?
“Relax young man and allow my words to carry you. Let me ease you into
this beginning because what I say at this crucial point in space and time is
something that will carry you forward, and it might be the words and the
deed, indeed the only thing, that you might have to show your maker upon
the time of your end”.
The young man got a chill again, but he did not run, and he tried to
carefully listen to the words of the shadowed man. And as the man spoke, he
noticed that he became more and more relaxed, and in that relaxation his
mind was able to unlock itself and somehow the young man was finally able
to grasp a little of what the dark creature was saying.
“Whenever we look at the world, we see what we expect to see because of
a routine. Hidden treasure lies in every corner, but we skip over that treasure
because we are too busy doing our utter best to only see what we expect to
see.”
“What kind of treasure do you speak of?”
“No need to get greedy. This kind of treasure you cannot use to buy some
trinket. This kind of treasure leads to the only thing that is worth anything at
all in the end, and that treasure is freedom.”
The young man looked at the shadowed man and at that moment with a
slight startle he noticed that his dark companion was no longer looking at the
street. The shadowed man was now looking straight at him, and the power of
that gaze was such that it seemed to pin the young man to the ground, and
had he wanted to run at that moment, he knew that he could not have.
“In between this and that, there are hidden things.” The young man had
another chill.
“Do you see that woman walking down the street,” the shadowed man
used his chin to point. The young man looked up and saw a normal looking
woman walking down the street. She wore an unremarkable dress that was
clean and well made. Her dress and her bearing indicated that she was a
woman of some means, and she had a confident walk, her chin up. She
walked staring straight ahead, her feet shuffling a little. There was a tightness
in her mouth and as the young man looked, he noticed that there was this
stiffness in her, like she was trying to hold herself together somehow, like she
was trying to hold her world together as she walked on with great purpose.
“That woman is just like you on that day we met. Unlike you, who
happened to be looking down at your shoes with such great intensity, she is
looking straight ahead. Her mind is full of all those things that she will be
doing when she gets to where she is supposed to be; to her this moment
means nothing. At this moment in her mind she is not walking, she is instead
trying to finish a task, a chore, drudgery, one of many steps that she must
take to get where she wants to be. She is not in this moment walking, instead
she is in her mind and in her mind, she is already where she wants to be. In
some ways this is good because she may someday realize the power of her
mind and her ability to be in more than only one place at once, but in other
ways this is bad because it blinds her to the moment, it blinds all of us to the
moment. The biggest source of that blindness is our inability to see the things
in between this and that.”
“I think I understand what you mean by this and that, maybe. But you are
telling me that there is something in the middle, something that we are all
missing?”
“There are entire worlds hidden all around us young man! Complete other
places that people do not see, places that are right in front of their nose, but
they do not see them, you do not see them, because you are so lost in a
routine.”
“What you say honestly sounds a little crazy to me. I suppose this is your
way of telling me that this is why no one can see us right now. But I think
that you are crazy, and people do not look down at us because we are two
beggars in the street and people never look at beggars if they can help it.”
“Perhaps you are right young man, but just in case you are wrong let me
start from the beginning once again.”
The beggar stretched out his hand and swept the entire street with it from
left to right in a graceful arc, “There is this, which is what you expect to see,
and then there is that,” he pointed up towards the center of the street to the
town square, “Which is what you expect to see in the future. But in between
those two things,” the shadowed man raised his hand and placed it in the
middle and cut the air vertically, so that to the young man it seemed like he
was cutting the film of reality, “There are hidden worlds that most people
completely skip over. All that I have done is find a place in between this and
that and in doing so we have become invisible to all those lost souls out
there.”
“That seems too simple.”
“Not really, not at all. It is certainly far from simple to find those places.
First, you need to be able to see those things in between this and that, which
is one of the greatest challenges for us as human beings. Second, if you really
wish to find freedom and hide within those places between the expected and
the routine, what you need to do is become just like those things, those
hidden things.” As the young man looked at the shadowed man, he noticed
that the man was still looking out into the street with that odd intense and yet
relaxed gaze of his. The shadowed man’s eyes had become glazed over, they
shone in some odd way, like they were mirroring the lights from the street
somehow…as if they had their own glow. At that moment he felt like he was
sitting next to an animal, a dark predator.
“The world is full of these liminal spaces, hidden places that are in plain
sight. One could think of them as odd angles, places that look so regular that
almost everyone will pass them by on their way from this to that. But in those
odd angles hidden worlds lie, and in time it is possible to step through those
odd angles, as if they were doors, and across those doors there are…”
Silence.
“There are what!?”
“You are so dramatic, stop raising your voice. If you keep it up, we may
lose our little patch of freedom.”
Janos looked up in time to see the shuffling woman pause, as if she had
heard something or as if someone had ever so slightly woken her up from a
dream. He looked down, feeling sorry for himself, and before long the
woman continued her shuffling confident step again, her mouth clenched, her
eyes looking straight ahead on her way from this to that.
“Oh good, now we can begin our conversation about why you are really
here: your self-pity.”
“What the devil does that mean!?” The young man looked around
realizing that he had blurted that out quite loudly.
“Self-awareness and personal control are the quintessential essence of
individual evolution,” said the shadowed man as he turned to gaze fixedly at
the young man. And at that moment the young man felt the full weight of that
dark being’s intent. But behind it, there was utter self-control, this absolute
containment of power that was astonishing to feel. Never in his life had he
felt such contained power.
“I am sorry I forgot myself,” said the young man as his face flushed. The
shadowed man smiled. At least that is what the young man believed or
perhaps felt, because in the darkness he could not really see the man’s face
clearly at all. And for a second the young man lost himself in that thought,
“How did he know that the shadowed man had smiled?”
“We are all like this my friend, it is our endless struggle to become more
than mere puppets, unconscious fools being led around by the weight of the
world.”
 “What controls us?” asked the young man.
“That is a topic for another day. Today we must tackle some of that
misery and lack of self-worth that you carry around like a heavy chain that
grounds you to the earth.”
“I feel that it is my ability to not feel so sorry for myself that has kept me
sane in this crazy world. I feel that my life is harder than most, and under the
weight of all the hell that I have endured, I feel that I have done better than
most.”
“I would agree with you on this young man. Indeed, we would not be
speaking if you were not able to push past the chains of existence to some
degree.”
Janos looked at the shadowed man questioningly, but he continued to talk
as if he did not notice, “Some of us have had a harder life than others, but
each of us has their own pain and weight to bear. In many ways you could
say that those with a harder life are luckier than those who have never had to
struggle for much at all.”
“I cannot see how you could call suffering any kind of luck,” said the
young man with an incredulous scowl.
“Look at those boys over there,” the shadowed man once again pointed
with his chin, this time farther down the street and in the opposite direction of
the town square. The young man looked and saw two boys beneath a seller’s
stall. The moment that the young man became aware of the boys, the large
man who owned the stall noticed them as well. The boys were picking up
discarded and dropped carrots beneath the cart. Upon seeing them, the very
well-fed merchant started screaming and unsuccessfully tried to kick them
out from under the cart. The boys adeptly stayed clear of the man’s kicks,
picked up as many carrots as they could and then ran down the street.
“Those boys have a better chance in this world than that fat carrot vendor
ever will. The vendor has his own challenges, and I am sure that he does
whatever he can, that is our lot in this world. But those boys, their struggle is
every day and every inch, and at every moment of it they see their death; they
struggle against their death at every moment. They must count every single
swallow of food and struggle for all the things they have. This wakes them up
to the world, this wakes them up to the cause of things and the way of things,
this wakes them up to their life because they are in a constant struggle with
their death.”
The young man looked at the boys as they ran away. One stopped halfway
down the street and turned to look at the fat carrot vendor with a defiant
smile. His face was brimming with wild courage and freedom. The vendor
picked up a rock and was about to throw it when the young boy turned and
ran away, quickly lost amongst the people walking down the street that
evening. The vendor threw down the rock and cursed, as the people around
him looked at him and laughed. The fat vendor composed himself, shouted
another curse at the crowd, at the world in general, and then continued with
the business of life and living.
“The vendor and the boys are the same in the end, we are all headed to our
death. But along the way each of us will face our own trials. That fat vendor
has chosen a certain path and as I said, in the end it is no better than anybody
else’s because all paths lead to the same place ultimately. But from the point
of view of those who can see the world instead of only looking from this to
that, it is easy to see that the life of the boys and the life of the fat vendor are
different in certain ways.”
“How are they different from those who can see?”
“Those who can see, can see that the weight of the world has slowed down
that fat man, it is clinging to him you might say. He has chosen a certain path
and that path means that he tries to find the most comfort in the routines of
his life. Those boys on the other hand, because of the great difficulty of their
lives, because of their struggle and their vigorous youth, still have not cowed
to the weight of their lives. The circumstance of their lives forces them to
always be at the edge of existence. They cannot afford to lose themselves in
their routine because if they do, a creature like that fat man will catch them
and most likely kill them. The boys are forced to try and find those places in
between this and that just to survive. For them, life is not about complacency,
it is about survival. When the world is stacked against us, it either kills us or
brings out the best in us.
Those boys have a chance, and the sheer intensity of their lives means that
there is the possibility that doors might open for them. And the one, that
brave little one who turned to face his oppressor, well, that one might just
step through that door. And from there…”
“From there what?”
“From there infinity, and what that boy might do out there, well, that will
be his alone to witness.
“You my impatient young friend, are like that boy, and I am your door.”
The shadowed man laughed an odd laugh, and the young man felt another
chill up his spine.
The young man stared down the street and for a moment he imagined that
he saw that young boy catching up to his partner in crime and imagined them
both giggling at the great adventure and the loot that they had finagled from
the world.
“Every person on this earth struggles to one degree or another, and the fate
of each one of those people has been written by forces beyond your
imagination. And yet, and this is the odd part to me, we are and have always
been fully responsible for our entire lives. What a marvel, what a great
conundrum.”
The young man felt a cold chill and turning his gaze back from the street
to the shadowed man, he asked in a whisper, “What are those forces?”
“Well, from your point of view they truly are the devil, and this is indeed
a fight for our souls,” replied the shadowed man in a matter-of-fact tone.
“I do not believe in a soul, or in God for that matter.”
“That is an interesting statement for a person from this time to make, but
just because you do not believe a thing, it does not mean that that thing does
not exist, or believe in you,” the shadowed man laughed again.
“Let me take another tact with you, it seems that you are going to be a
difficult one right from the start,” the man was enveloped in darkness, the
man was the darkness, and from that darkness he looked at the young man
with an amused expression. The young man felt that amused gaze and he felt
ashamed for some odd reason and looked down at the hard dirt floor of the
street as the man continued to talk.
“Because people can only look and because they only seem to be
interested in getting from this to that, they cannot see the reality of existence.
But if you can see between this and that, then you will notice that life is far
stranger than anyone could ever possibly imagine. Being able to see into
those liminal spaces, those odd angles, means that you can see the cracks in
the world. And when you can do that, if you can survive the initial shock of it
all, you become aware of the fact that life is not just a struggle, it is also a
test.”
“What kind of test?”
“For you that is not the important point right now. For you at this moment
in time, this precious little bit of intensity that separates this moment from
that other one that is to come, in this moment, what is important for you is
knowing that you have a choice just like that carrot seller did, just like those
wild boys do.
If you choose the life of complacency, meaning if you choose the life of
working towards the easiest route, the easiest path, then you will be no better
than that fat vendor walking slowly towards his death.
You, like those boys, were blessed with a hard life, and that life has made
you see the intensity of every moment point in time. If you see your life as
something to be pitied, then you will never see the gaps in time and space.
Those magical spaces in between this and that which I have been telling you
about, they will never reveal themselves to you if you stumble unconsciously
down the road of self-pity.
But if you are now, from this day forward, from this moment point
forward, able to look at your life not as something to be pitied but as a
challenge, as a great adventure to be won, then you might be able to steal
from the world that wonderful gift that you have been blessed with, and in
doing so you just might have the courage to step through the door of time.”
The young man was stunned for a moment, but then a part of him seemed
to rally, a resilient part, a part that kept talking, that kept talking in his head,
and it asked, “And who the hell are you to tell me what to do?”
“I am someone who has stepped through the door, someone who has
accepted the possibility of a life beyond routine and self-misery. I have
accepted the challenge of life and I now see it as something that must be
overcome. I challenge you, young man, to see the weight and measure of life,
to look for the places in between here and there, and to try and battle against
that devil that screams in your head, that devil that wants to make you take
the easy path, that makes you want to hate yourself and the world, that wants
to make you think that somehow you are special in your struggles and in your
fate. Wake up boy, or the only thing that you will ever find at the end of all
your routine and self-misery, is your death.”
The young man exploded in rage. Something deep inside him seemed to
have been let loose, it was like a part of him was fighting to stay alive, to
survive, to defend the world, the beliefs, that were his!
And as he turned to the shadowed man, a roar in his throat, he realized
that he was alone, his dark companion had vanished.
And at that moment a spell, the spell, was broken and as he returned to
average life, he could swear that he heard a pop, like his ears had popped, and
at that precise moment the entirety of the main street seemed to flood his
senses. The sounds all around him exploded to life, rain beat down on him,
and instantly it seemed that everyone around him became aware of his
existence.
A tall well-dressed man walked by and cursed at him, kicking a bit of hard
gravel upon him, “Filthy beggar! Find another street you slug!”
The young man stood up, and like the two homeless boys that had gone
before him, he too lost himself in the crowd as he walked down the street. His
senses were keen, he felt alive and for the first time in a long time he did not
walk with the look of the meek, but with the look of the wild thing, the look
of the creature that knows that life is a fleeting gift, and that everything and
everyone around him is interested in taking that gift from him, not because
they are murderers, but because they do not realize that they are one of the
many individual raindrops which helps to cause a flood.
What a marvel, what an adventure. And the questions, so many questions.

Lessons
When a person is deeply committed to a purpose there is a change to them.
This change can sometimes be seen outwardly by their body language, but at
its root is an energetic change that is impossible to see with physical eyes.
For those who can see beyond physicality, a person is constantly changing
energetically, and that change is mirrored outwardly to some degree through
body language. For those who can see beyond physicality, when a person has
purpose they glow, their intensity grows.

U
In every place, even the smallest room, there are odd spaces, liminal places.
A liminal space can be defined as a threshold place between two spaces or
better yet, between two dimensions. In some ways these transitional spaces
can be felt as a feeling of ambiguity, desolation, like they are, and stand for, a
kind of threshold and a door between the known and the dreadfully unknown.
As such, these spaces are often empty of people and animals and people will
often look away from these places, doing their utter best to try not to even see
them.
And within these liminal spaces there are also odd corners, disjointed
spaces that somehow seem to be different, skewed in just the right way to
cause a sense of dread. It may be the result of angles that are warped, slightly
off somehow where consciousness is not able to see this warping clearly, but
it is felt somehow unconsciously. This natural feeling of oddness can shape
perception unconsciously and in time may even charge an area to the point
that this area becomes somehow empowered with an oddness of feeling so
powerful, that many strange things may seem to come in and out of these
odd-angled spaces.
If the young man looked, he could see that in every room, in every corner
of every place, sometimes small and other times quite large, there were
threshold spaces if he looked deep enough. To hide, all that you needed to do
was find these places, and incredibly, these spaces that sometimes contained
within them odd angles, could also be used as doorways into rooms beyond
time.

U
Death is an ally if you learn how to use its wisdom properly. It is the part of
you that tells you that life is short, that you should stop looking down at your
shoes and feeling sorry for yourself and instead embrace the moments that
you have. Soon, before you know it and hidden around every odd corner,
death is waiting.
 3
The Door Opens…The Secrets of the In-Between
IT SEEMED TO THE YOUNG MAN like it had been a very long time since
his last meeting with the shadowed man. Had it been anyone else, he was
sure he would have soon forgotten about it, his life was rich in experience
and time constantly demanded something from him. But that meeting with
the shadowed man was different somehow, it was like a part of him could not
let it go, like a part of him seemed to be permanently focused on those two
utterly strange encounters. That time with the shadowed man was like lost
time, and yet it was even more intense than regular life. How this was
possible, he did not know; it was like being part of another world.
In the many days since his last encounter with the shadowed man, the
young man had a long time to think about everything that he and the man had
talked about, and while he had made some progress on certain things, there
was so much still to think about. What he could not understand was why
there seemed to be this kind of endless depth to those meetings, like they
rolled on past what he could remember, like they were so long and
encompassed so much time in whatever weird way, that they seemed to
continue now. It was like those meetings could somehow intrude on and
overlap his present time.
When he looked back and tried to remember, there was an odd fuzziness
to those memories, or a kind of enveloped quality to them. It was like there
were memories upon memories, like each instance could take him down a
long road, a long descending staircase of forgotten reality, and the farther
down he went, the more difficult it became to figure out what parts of it were
actual memory and what parts were perhaps delusions of his mind. The
stability of his thoughts and his memories sometimes failed him when he
thought about the meetings with the shadowed man. This was a new
experience for him, and it added to a growing fear every time he thought of
that man and those dark encounters…and yet, he longed for those meetings as
well.
Sometimes he felt like he was losing his sanity, like all that he had
experienced was a delusion of his addled soul. If he was a believer then he
might just wonder if it was the devil that he had met, but he wasn’t so he
shouldn’t be scared now. Right?
The intensity of those experiences was such that they now demanded that
he spend his late evenings contemplating all that had happened to him in his
encounters with the shadowed man. As was custom of the people of his time;
night sleep was usually broken down into two segments. People usually went
to bed early, just as the sun was beginning to set, but then would often wake
in the middle of the night when the moon was ascending in the sky. They
would then spend that segment of time awake, doing whatever needed to be
done or whatever they wanted to do, and then they would go back to sleep as
the moon began to set after it reached its climax. This time was usually the
quiet time, a time when there were less people around than usual, but
depending on the waning and the waxing moon, this could also be a time
when there might be a great deal of movement outside and in the main street:
the fuller the moon, the more commotion and the bigger the crowds
wandering about.
This time was considered the magical time, something that some might
eventually call the 13th hour, and it was a time when many people would
simply sit around at home by the fire. Some would pray, others would have a
warm drink and talk with the family, a family that they perhaps were not able
to truly have any time with during the daylight hours due to the stress of life.
During a full moon, even this far back where the young man lived, the hustle
and bustle could often be heard in the maze of alleyways, as people dared to
go out, broke curfew and engaged with others for a few enchanted hours.
During this magic time, this 13th hour, most would relax and find a modicum
of peace in a hard and difficult life. This was truly a magical time for many, a
time free of some of the worries of the world. During this time, a person
could contemplate and let go a little of the many toils and troubles of waking
life. For many, the only time they were truly alive was during these few hours
as the moon climbed higher and higher in the sky to reach its final apex. The
young man had now grown accustomed to using this 13th hour, to
contemplate all the things that happened to him during his encounters with
the shadowed man.
During this contemplation period he wrestled with something that he
remembered the shadowed man telling him, which was that ultimately there
was a balanced exchange in all things. His dark teacher—he chuckled as he
thought of that— had said that all things were a barter in this world, that
anything that you had or would ever get would be, and needed to be,
something that had been or would be exchanged for something else. This
meant that anything that you have or will ever get must be obtained through
exchange, equal exchange.
Janos had no real idea when he had heard the shadowed man say any of
this exactly. It was like he had a general memory of his meetings, and then
underneath that, sown in between those moments, there were other moments,
forgotten periods, forgotten conversations. Indeed, it truly felt at times like
his conversations with the shadowed man had never stopped, would never
stop, like it continued even now. Was he losing his mind?
A part of him remembered the two meetings that he had had with that
remarkable man in those odd spaces, those subliminal spaces in the middle of
the main street, and he could remember that those meetings had an unusual
quality to them, a quality like he had stepped into a bubble and in that bubble,
he was free from time. In those spaces and that time with the shadowed man
felt like he was somehow fenced off from the rest of the world, it felt a little
like the 13th hour but even more profound. He remembered that in those
meetings he had spoken to that odd man for what seemed to be a short period
of time. But then, as he focused on any one topic of that relatively short
conversation, it was like each one of those topics could take him down into
whole other experiences, and details of conversation that he could not
consciously remember having had with that man. Within each topic
discussed, there were intricate details interwoven throughout them, embedded
within them, which extended beyond time.
It was like their meeting had created some kind of fork in his life and from
that moment on he was living two lives, not one. In one life he would
continue doing what he would always do in his regular life, and in the other
he continued his talks with the shadowed man, an endless conversation with
his dark companion.
And so, as he thought about what the man had said about balance, he
began to remember a long conversation they had had about equal exchange,
how everything that any of us had in our lives was an exchange for
something else. He also began to remember the man explaining to him that
we were all completely responsible for our fate, our lives. And as he focused
his attention on those details, those details that seemed to exist in a world of
their own, these contemplations of the meetings with the shadowed man
became a kind of deep reverie for him. He chuckled to himself again as he
looked at his father sitting by the fire reading his Bible. The young man sat
on his favorite chair by the dinner table, looking up, down, nowhere in
particular…looking deep within. He wondered if his father thought that the
young man had finally discovered religion. This would explain why his father
seemed to have made it a mission to leave the young man alone during his
contemplations during this magical time.
If his father only knew that it was not the sacrifice of the son of God that
he contemplated, but instead his meetings with what might be the devil
himself!
He almost laughed out loud when he thought about that. His father was
such a religious man, he did everything he could to try to fit in with the others
around here, forsaking the beliefs of his ancestors and worshiping the God of
the cross even. The young man thought that all of it was a joke, the old ways
and the new; the old gods and the new meant nothing to him. And yet, here
he sat in his humble little wooden house, hearing the creeks and the cracks of
the walls, as the wood of the house settled from the heat and the bustle of the
day. It was like listening to a ship creak and crack as it moved across an
endless ocean…and he was once again lost in a reverie that took him down
deeper and deeper into unexplored regions that he had never thought could
possibly exist, in a time of no time in a place of no place. The young man was
beginning to wake up to the incredible vastness of his inner mind, his inner
world.
If his contemplations had taught him one thing, it was the incredible
intricacy of his thoughts and mind. There seemed to be this natural ease to the
mind, it was like if he allowed it to let go and fly down the many roads
possible to it, it would take him to places that he could never have imagined.
He began to feel a freedom that he had never felt before as he began to steer
his mind consciously down roads that took up no physical space. These
voyages were not taken on horse and cart, on foot and down a regular path,
but somehow it did feel like traveling, like moving deeper and deeper into his
mind, and if he paid attention, as he was learning to do, he found that there
were indeed spaces and other places that seemed to stretch forever without
end. And for the first time in his life, the young man felt an ease that had a
most odd mood, akin to something he imagined to be freedom. For the first
time in his life perhaps, the young man felt like he could explore and be free
in those other places, free from all the people, the pressure and responsibility
of life. A life that he had never consciously ever agreed to have, not like this.
And there, he caught himself once again traveling down another long and
mysterious road, a road inside his mind that took up no space and yet
revealed to him other worlds that he longed to explore. But catching himself,
he turned from that road that led down to so many endless possibilities.
Thanks to his growing power of attention, his coalescing attention, he turned
his mind in a different direction, a conscious direction, he turned and moved
down the road that led back to the sermons of the shadowed man.
What does equal exchange mean?
He was starting to understand a great deal of what that might mean, but
there was so much still to try to understand. He could see that in a physical
and general sense there was indeed an exchange everywhere. All you had to
do was to look at the commerce of the village, and the streets anywhere. He
could not get, or have anything done, without giving some kind of coin or
bartering one thing for another, and each thing had a value assigned to it in
accordance with how hard that one thing was to get or how hard that thing
was to do.
But beyond this, it seemed like even those things that cannot be bought
through coin…well, it was like these things still had a price if one really
thought about it. He had started to notice that every exchange that he had
with any other person, even the exchanges that he had with his father, each
one of these involved some kind of barter. He would give respect to receive
it, he would give politeness to receive it, he would give love to receive that,
and in giving of any one of those things it was expected that he had to adhere
to a certain conduct.
To meet with any person, he had to give to receive, and inversely the only
way that he would give was if he would receive in exchange something
which he sought either consciously or unconsciously, if that made any kind of
sense at all. He noticed, if he paid deep attention, if he contemplated deeply,
that in any social exchange he would enter a kind of contractual agreement.
There was a contractual obligation set and managed according to what could
be referred to as civil laws, civility, where each individual person gave and
received in accordance with their ranking in an established social hierarchy.
He touched the table, the chair, and looked around the flimsy walls of his
humble home and noticed that every single part of it was in a way a marvel of
coordination and effort. Certainly, his home was not one of the classic homes
that faced directly into the main street of the village. His home was not large
or made of strong mortar and fine wood like those homes were, but
nonetheless each part of his humble little home was a marvelous creation that
had come together only because an innumerable number of coordinated steps
and actions had been taken. Even this little shack required many people to
bring it to life, all coming together, each bringing something to the table,
each providing a piece of material or a kind of skill and all this effort coming
together as a synergistic whole. All that commingling and barter of energy
became the balanced exchange that produced a final product.
Everything that he saw, everything in his life was an exchange, whether it
was this table or his father’s love. All he had to do was think beyond coin and
simple barter, and in that way, he could see that everything happened and
was, in accordance with something else that was given. For mere instances he
was sometimes able to maintain his attention long enough in deep inner
places, and in those places, he could glimpse the fact that even life itself,
seemed to happen in accordance with an equal exchange of other things.
And interestingly, at least to him, he began to glimpse what he would soon
discover to be the un-manifest and the manifested. He recalled the scriptures
and thought of Spirit, how the Spirit was made manifest and how the Spirit
gave rise to all things. And as he began to see the connection between those
things that were, and those things that were not, he was in those fleeting
moments able to glimpse the difference between those things that had
become, and those things that were soon to become in a future moment. His
mind began to see the connections between cause and effect. He began to
contemplate the idea of intention, of the will of man and the will of higher
powers, and how it might indeed be the case that there was a higher order at
work bringing all this incredible intricacy of movement and exchange, and
that this force was intricacy and exchange. How utterly marvelous!
Then, just then and a surprise even to him, he began to laugh. His father
turned to look at him and smiled, and he laughed some more, because his
father might be right after all, the young man may just have found some kind
of religion.
And instantly returning to his contemplations, upon beginning to just
glimpse the cause of things and the higher order of balance and existence, he
realized the futility and the utter stupidity of his self-pity, his sorrow. This
line of contemplation for some reason began to make him so angry that he
had to stop thinking about anything at all. His hands turned into fists, and
they shook, and he used every ounce of control within himself to stop from
screaming out loud.
It seemed that all his contemplation only brought up more questions, and
all that he really wanted to do was have a meeting with that shadowed man
once again. He needed to find that man again because it was like a curse, this
knowledge, it was like having someone pour the devil into him and he could
not get it out. It was an affliction, this knowledge, and the only balm would
be to find that man again to break this agony of questions and contemplation.
At that moment the young man set his will, he set his intent upon the goal
of finding the shadowed man. He would seek the dark devil, no matter what,
until he found him once again. He would find that man and upon finding him
he would tell him that this was the last time that they would ever see each
other. He needed that man to get out of his mind, to leave his mind alone, and
hopefully with such a decisive act the young man could break the spell and
banish forever that accursed demon that had been infused into his every
thought. He desperately wanted to return to his uncontemplated life, his dumb
life…his life of innocence. A part of him wished to fall asleep and never
wake up again. It was one thing to suffer, but it was another to know and still
suffer. He wanted to see the whole picture, he wanted complete answers, he
wanted rest. He didn’t just want partial knowledge and endless questions, he
wanted power, he wanted a way to be able to change his life for the better.

T
That very night, shaking with rage, the young man walked out into the streets
past his father’s questioning gaze. As he made his way up the alleyways into
the main street there was a part of him that was aware of the fear and the self-
pity within him, but another part had set itself on a goal and that part pushed
him beyond his self-recriminations, his fear, his convulsions of indecision,
and his anxiety. And that decisive part of him began to show him in a flurry
of incredibly quick images and feelings all the ideas that he had contemplated
for the many weeks since his first meeting with the shadowed man.
And as these contemplations burst in his mind, it was like the young man
was split into two people, two completely different beings. The first was
engaged in the act of walking and moving cautiously and carefully down the
maze of dark alleys that led to the main street, while another part of him,
another aspect of the totality of who he was, moved across inner spaces in
different times that were so distant and far away and yet they were also this
time somehow. There were two times and two places existing
simultaneously, one calculated and moved in the shadows as it maintained a
general posture that kept him alive in the world, while another part flew
across unbound places and once again dropped him deep enough into those
unmeasurable places so that he could once again begin to understand the
difference between the un-manifest and the manifested.
This was not a unique feeling, the young man had caught himself
daydreaming on many occasions throughout his life, but this time it seemed
more clear-cut. It was like he could pay close attention to his wandering mind
as it moved across inner spaces while at the same time being completely
aware of what his physical body was doing. This time the distinction between
those two aspects of himself and the lucidity of each simultaneous reality
were such that the young man really felt like he was two people; two people
who were somehow the same person and yet lived completely distinct lives.
And yet a third part of him flashed before and in between or perhaps above
the existence of those other two lives and from that third position it mused,
“What an amazing world. What a miraculous existence.” And as these
realizations about the complexity of his true reality began to reveal
themselves to him, he could also see a little bit, a tiny little bit, of those gaps
in time that his dark teacher had spoken of, those moments in between this
and that.
That third part of him seemed to once again swoon at the beauty of
existence as he saw the bleak faces of the villagers who walked past him in
the night. Like an odd, relaxed headiness one might feel drinking strong
wine, he disassociated from his inner and outer reality simultaneously as that
third part of him relaxed more and more, flowing like a bright untouchable
cloud.
It was like by paying attention to all three aspects of himself
simultaneously, he was able to relieve some of the ache of existence. And in
this more exalted state, the grime and the dirt, the sallow faces, and the pain
that he saw everywhere did not seem to touch him. In this disassociated state
it was like reality broke, or better yet it was like a new kind of reality was
revealed to him in between the cracks of what he thought was the only reality
possible. And in between those cracks a new reality was revealed where he
was able to somehow transcend physicality and the average worries and
typical shallow perceptions of his mind. In this new state he transcended his
old self and a new being was revealed that was aware of both his inner and
outer reality simultaneously. A simple concept really, being aware of both the
inner and the outer world simultaneously, but not an easy task…and once
attained, this dual awareness began to unveil numerous secrets that had been
obscured by the monotony of everyday life. It revealed a world that had been
there before his eyes the whole time and yet somehow hidden behind the veil
of the mundane!
He walked in this state of awe for a while until he rounded a corner
alleyway that finally led to the well-lit main street of the village, and there,
just as he rounded that bend, he felt a wave of malice. To the young man it
quite literally felt like a bitter wind, or like a wave of brackish water that had
suddenly hit him. It was like an actual wave of a liquid in a way, a wash of
feeling that spoke to him and, in a communication that was far beyond words,
it told him that malice and danger were approaching.
He instinctively stopped and without any kind of conscious effort
whatsoever, melted into the shadows of the alley. And just as he did so,
almost instantly like a shock of surprise, he both felt and saw the big brute
who had beaten him those many weeks ago walk by just a few inches from
where he was standing. The young man did not fret, there was no fear, there
was only this lovely melding between himself and the shadows, he was the
shadows and being such there was no fear, just acceptance of the dark
essence of himself as the world careened by.
The whole thing seemed like an odd play, like the kind that he had seen
once at the center of the village. It was like he and the thug were actors,
people pretending, and moving in tandem in some kind of predetermined
dramatic scene. Before he had realized anything consciously, his body
seemed to move and turn and almost melt into the silence of one of the many
shadows to be found in the alley. To the young man it seemed like that wall
of malicious energy that he had felt had somehow moved him, told him what
to do and how to do it. It was like the wave of energy that he felt and
identified as malice had somehow crashed into him and enfolded him. This
wave had moved the young man and had helped to create a silence within
him of such depth that it had quite literally turned him into a shadow.
So deep was the silence within him that the thug, the other actor in the
play, had walked by nearly touching him and yet had not felt the young
man’s presence at all. From the shadows, as the shadow, he turned his head
slowly and watched the big malicious man walk away down the alley,
seemingly never even suspecting that he had just been inches away from the
young outsider that he loved to hate and hurt.
When the large tyrant had turned the bend in the alley, the young man
stepped out from the shadow and continued walking towards the main street.
And still in a daze over what had just happened, that contemplative part of
the young man began to show him how and why things were. Completely
aware of both his physical reality and his internal universe simultaneously,
this new person, this new and more whole Janos began to finally see what
was hidden between this and that.
He understood for the first time what the shadowed man truly meant by
‘this and that’. He understood what the shadowed man was trying to say, that
there was an entire reality that existed in between and alongside the material
world. Most people were so lost in the material world, in figuring out how
they were going to get from this place to that place, that they failed to see that
there truly was an entire other world, a kind of spiritual realm, alongside the
material world itself.
For the first time the young man was able to perceive that other world.
And the only way that he could describe it was like a wave of intention or
energy that seemed to move across and through all things. There was a
radiance or energy, like a magnificent and brilliant sea, or like a spirit
perhaps, like a wave of spirit that moved across and through all things. How
could he have not seen this before? Or was it perhaps that he could always
see this wave of reality to some degree, but it was never clear enough, until
he was finally able to somehow unite, to some degree at least, that inner and
outer part of himself. The young man realized that for the first time in his life
he was lucid enough, awake enough to multiple aspects of himself, to finally
be able to see that which had always been right in front of his eyes.
This flood of realization was so great that the young man had to stop and
steady himself against a wall, as the flood of intention and energy from the
spirit moved across him and through him like a tide of warm and delicious
water. After taking a deep breath, the young man pushed off the wall and
walked further, this time understanding not only the cause of things, the equal
exchange of things, but also the underlying un-manifest, the spirit, that ruled
beneath, that held together, and that brought about all those things that could
be called the material world, the manifested.
This time, as the young man stepped into the well-lit main street and
began to walk up to the main square of the village, he did not stare down at
his comfortable and well-crafted shoes. Instead, his eyes were everywhere
and nowhere, and an aspect of himself was keenly focused but focused in a
broad way, and this broad view was difficult to maintain because it also
included maintaining contact with those inner aspects of himself that were in
different places. But his many weeks of contemplation during the 13th hour
had developed within him a keen and strong focus. This broad focus was
stable and lucid, so awake, for the first time so awake, that with it he was able
to see and feel the Spirit move through the street, through all the people,
through all things.
With it, he knew where to walk and naturally his body weaved and dodged
and moved him across the well-worn street. His movements were quick and
agile and yet there was no strain or stress in them. He walked in contact with
the Spirit and in doing so he became a kind of spirit himself to some degree,
like a wind that flowed so naturally that it was completely ignored by the
people around him, those who were so engrossed in their movement from this
to that.
And as he moved in this fashion for a while, totally lost in the utter power
and freedom of it, he once again felt an odd and intense intent. But this time
the intent was not malicious. This new intent felt oddly like an intent of no
intent, like a vacuous area amongst a whole tide of intense emotion and
churning tide.
Interestingly, this vacuous intent seemed to pull at him, and he let this
displacement naturally move him in that direction, until he found himself
before a big, shadowed patch within what otherwise was a well-lit street. And
there a part of him seemed to naturally and unexpectedly probe within that
shadow, it was like a part of him naturally moved into that shadow and tried
to scan the depths of it, until with a startle, the young man consciously
realized that there was a form within that void, and that form seemed to move
somehow, to coalesce, to move forward, and as it did so the shadowed man
appeared.
The appearance of the form of the man was expected, he had felt it, and
yet that other part of him that was still bound to the physical and material
space was so startled that the young man reeled back for a moment. The
shock was too much…one part of him had felt the movement deep within the
spirit, another part was startled to the point of blind fright, and a third part
knew that he was fainting, falling. And as quick as a devil escaping from the
pits of hell, the form of the man moved forward and caught the young man
before he could hit the ground.
 “You are so dramatic,” said the shadowed man as he propped Janos up.
The arms of the shadowed man upon him felt like unbreakable steel, like
heavy things that could easily rip through his soft human flesh. And yet, these
arms were also gentle enough to pick up the young man with ease and care,
so that before he knew it, he was being moved into the shadowed place in the
middle of the well-lit street and surprisingly there was no horror in this
realization, the young man only felt a sense of relief.
As Janos entered the cocoon of darkness, he felt the relief from the tide of
the intent and emotion of the people all around him. It was like his mind
could relax, a wonderful wave of relaxation rolled across him and enfolded
his entire body, his entire being.
“Your progress has been remarkable young man, and you have passed
your little test with flying colors.”
“What do you mean by test? Who is testing me? Why are you testing
me!?”
“I am no-one and I do not test you. Let us say that it is the world at large
that tests you and you have done very well. Had you not been able to find me,
our little conversations would have had to come to an end for a time at least,
but there is enough talk of that. You have done very well and so here we are.”
The shadowed man led the young man to a wall, and they sat down on the
dirt floor, staring out into the main street as was their custom. Then the young
man felt another shock as he realized that he had never truly seen the
shadowed man’s face. He could say that he had seen certain parts of it, he
could say that he had identified a questioning gaze, an intense stare. The
young man could say that he had somehow felt the shadowed man smile, he
certainly had heard him laugh that odd laugh of his on many occasions. But
like a man remembering with alarm that he had forgotten his bag of coins on
a market stall, he realized that he had never truly seen the fullness of the
shadowed man’s face.
It was like the shadowed man knew exactly when to turn, when to retreat
into shadows just so. It was like the man was somehow completely conscious
of every single moment and knew exactly how and where to turn, and how to
play with the shadows around him to such perfection that at no time had the
young man ever been able to see the man’s face clearly, completely.
“So, you have questions?”
“How is this all possible?” The young man looked out into the street and
saw that once again all the people moved past them following the tide of
general human intent without ever noticing, or caring enough to notice, the
two men sitting in the shadows of the main street of the village.
“Well, you know all of this already.”
“I know what I have felt, and I know what I am feeling, but none of this
makes any sense to me and at times I feel that I must be going mad. Are you
the devil?”
“I am no more the devil than you are,” at which the young man shivered a
little for some unknown reason. The shadowed man continued, “I would
daresay that I am less the devil than you. As to what all of this is…well, there
is not anything more to say than the feelings of it, anything else is
superfluous.”
The young man stiffened and turned to look at the dark figure beside him,
but the man continued as if nothing had happened, “I know, we all need
explanations at first, things are always too much for us to bear at the start.
But let me begin by saying that at the end of it all, you will know in time as I
have come to know in time, that words fail us. The crazy thing is that words
mean nothing in the end, and yet they are all we have in the beginning.
Ultimately the only thing that truly matters are those feelings and that
impossible to define inner knowing that is ours alone, that is individually
yours alone. It is only in those feelings and inner knowing that you will find
any real answers and any true relief from the weight of the world. But,
knowing that in the beginning we only have words, we can use these words to
help to cushion and guide us to some degree. With simple words then, I can
say that the world is not what we think it is.”
The young man relaxed into the darkness and turned to look at the people
walking down the main street of the village, noticing how they all seemed so
focused on physical reality, only physical reality, and the worries of a
completely physical life.
The shadowed man continued, “Each one of us believes, or has been led to
believe you might say, that the world is just what we perceive when we use
our eyes, our ears, our hands, our nose.” The shadowed man raised his hand
and plugged his nose and the young man chuckled.
Though cleaner than the maze of back alleys that surrounded it, the main
street was still quite dirty and from it there always exuded a cacophony, a
symphony, of smells coming from the alehouses, the inns, the endless
vendors selling assorted food. There was also the smell of waste and decay in
certain corners. Thanks to the young man’s new lucidity and increased focus,
he made yet another realization which was that smells moved and churned
and fluttered across the main street of the village in a similar way to how
intent and the Spirit moved across the world.
As if reading his mind the shadowed man continued, “Like that most
sometimes pungent…” they both laughed, “…aroma all around us, there is an
undercurrent of sorts beneath the physical that we can all perceive to some
extent but that we ignore, because we are told we should ignore it, because
we believe that it is the sane and Christian thing to ignore it.
How odd don’t you think, that on the one side we are fed religion and the
ways of God and yet right alongside that narrative, we are told that we should
ignore that ethereal aspect of reality, that somehow, in some way it is
superstition or even more frightening, the devil’s work.”
“But how did I come to this? How is it that I know what I now know?
How is it that I can do what I just did while everyone else seems to move
across without feeling the Spirit that moves through all things?”
“They all feel it to some extent, but they ignore it. This is the way of
humanity, to stand before infinity and turn away to look at the shiny object
dangled before them, instead of looking at the face of true freedom itself.”
The young man felt that now common chill run through him, and he clung
to himself and pushed his back harder against the wall, finding comfort in the
unyielding structure.
The shadowed man turned and looked at the young man and even though
the young man could not clearly see the face in the shadows, he could sense a
smile there, and what he perhaps imagined to be a twinkle in the shadowed
man’s impenetrable eyes.
“There is a current that is there for all to see and feel if only they are
willing to take the time to look for it. You have felt that current for a long
time, and a part of you has questioned and has asked, so in that sense you
might say that I am a manifestation of the universe itself answering your plea,
answering your intent.
Some of us are ready to step through and if our plea is strong enough,
sometimes the world at large answers in a way that is helpful to us. Your plea
has been strong enough, your energetic level strong enough and the answer to
your plea has been given. But most importantly, you have passed the first test
of freedom.”
“I am so lost. A part of me can understand to some degree, and I can also
sometimes see or feel the truth of it, but how can all of this be true?”
 “What you have felt is real, what you have done thus far is real, what we
do right now is real, as we sit here in this vacuum of space not seen or felt by
those around us, those who are only a few feet from us.”
“Perhaps they do see us. Perhaps we are a couple of insane idiots sitting
on the road pretending that we are somehow special.”
The shadowed man laughed, he laughed louder than usual, he seemed to
laugh as loudly as he could as a kind of test to see if anyone dared to look at
them. No one looked, perhaps no one cared.
“That is the funny thing about reality, a more reasonable part of you can
always find just the right thing to say. There will always be, if you look hard
enough, reason to doubt everything. But for now, let us pretend that we are
truly insane and that in trying to teach you my insanity, to answer your
questions about the kind of insanity that I adhere to, I must tell you about the
un-manifest and the manifested. In doing so you will begin to understand the
true nature of reality for a raving lunatic like me. But I must tell you that this
form of insanity is not mine alone, there are others who walk a path that is
like my own and the key component of that lunacy is called transmutation.”
“Did you say transmutation?”
“Yes, transmutation. Transmutation is the movement from the spirit to the
physical, it is the movement from the un-manifest to the manifested, it is the
solidification of what lies in between this and that.”
The young man turned his body, fidgeting, “I think I felt a little of what
you are trying to say. I considered such things in my contemplations. I
thought about the Spirit and creation and how the world becomes what it is. I
just did not want to go down that road because it seems a little too much like
religion to me.”
The shadowed man chuckled a little and continued, “I know that this is
hard for you, I have been there myself. I know that what I say to you right
now makes little sense or perhaps no real sense at all. But if you are patient
and follow the general path of your own individual knowledge, then in time
all these questions will be answered and you will know as I know, that there
are no words but only deeply embedded truths that you must feel to truly
know and understand. Another way to say this would be to say that there are
highly powerful currents, those currents that you have felt and that we are
now calling the Spirit, and it is these currents of the un-manifest that are
responsible for the creation of all and everything around us. Those who
follow a path like mine believe, as I believe, that the only thing worth our
time in this world, our very short time in this world, is the ability to perceive
and eventually even try to use those currents in the proper way. The only
thing worthy of us is learning to flow with that energy and learning to use
that energy so that in time we can master the ability to turn the un-manifest
into the manifested.”
“I am lost right now, and I feel like running away, nothing that you say
makes sense to me. As I said, a part of me suspects that we are insane. We sit
here thinking that others are not seeing us, but what is happening is that they
are probably all looking at us now laughing, looking at two insane idiots
sitting on the side of the road, waiting for the night guard to come along and
run them off the street.”
“What a hilarious thought, I love your sense of humor. All right, let us test
the nature of our knowledge against the knowledge of those who walk the
streets, the supposedly sane people all around us”.
“Give me something, anything, that will prove to me that all of this is real
and that it means something, because I am very close to running away right
now and never looking back at you or any of this. The weight of all of it has
become so much in my life, and the constant thinking on it has become so
much, that a very large part of me wants to be done with it and leave.”
“And yet another part,” said the shadowed man with a rasp, “wants to
follow me into the void itself and allow himself to fall deeply into the darkest
abyss because it knows that this is the only freedom left to it, the only truly
sane thing left for it, for you.”
“Speaking of that! Why is it that I seem to continue these talks with you
even when I have left your company? I mean, it feels like even when we are
not together, I can still hear you in my head, like we are still having a
conversation. I feel like our conversation never ends. How is it that I hear you
and remember things that could not possibly have happened?”
“That is a difficult question to answer now. All I can say of it at this
moment in time is that if you allow yourself to flow within the current of that
intent that you have felt so very clearly yourself, you can in time learn to
work with it, indeed work with time itself in a sense, and find nooks and
crannies within spaces, odd corners, where the intensity of reality finds new
ways. It is in those times, in those folds within time you might say, that you
will find the answers to those questions. You might say that I have used those
folds within time as best I can by filling them with extra experience, extra
knowledge, extra intensity of a sort that will help you to answer some of the
questions that you have, and to cushion the blow of some of those answers.”
“Nothing of what you just said makes any sense to me.”
“Do not worry about all of this for now if you can help it. You have done
very well. You have, to some degree yourself and through your own efforts,
been able to access some of those folds in time that I am speaking about.
Continue as you have, continue with your contemplations, and you will find
hidden within the folds of time, all the answers that you seek.
But for now, we must continue, and to do that you have given me the task
of proving to you that we are not insane dullards sitting on the side of the
street lost in our delusions.”
“And how is it that you intend to do that?”
“Well, quite simply, I am going to show you how to pray.”

Lessons
Time is very complex, and it exists outside of self-reflection and average
human perception. Janos learned that time does not stop when you are not
paying attention to it. Time extends outwardly and the past never stops
evolving even when you feel that you have left it far behind. The future is
also not determined like an unmoving rock waiting for you in the distance, it
is instead an ever flowing and ever-changing ocean of possibilities. The past
and the future are an ever-churning sea that constantly changes whether you
are paying attention to it or not.

U
Contemplation is all-important. The young man, remembering a memory that
he would soon forget, in a fleeting moment that would quickly be lost in
time, he recalled how the shadowed man taught him how to contemplate. He
had said, “Find a comfortable place where you can sit and find a modicum of
peace in this loud and insistent world. Sit instead of lying down because it is
most important that you stay awake, this is not the time to be sleeping your
life away.
In this comfortable place do the best that you can to turn off all your
physical senses. Imagine that you have some kind of lever, and as you pull
this lever down your physical senses turn off slowly. Practice this until you
feel that your physical senses are almost off, this can be an imaginative and
playful exercise, do not take anything too seriously.
Imaginatively and playfully feel all your physical senses turn off, and then
focus on what is left. This is the inner room of your mind; this is your inner
temple. Explore this temple and understand it for what it is, which is a liminal
space full of odd corners that can lead you to the very ends of the universe.
Within this space you can create rooms playfully with your imagination,
and these rooms can be created consciously to exact specifications, or they
can spontaneously burst into existence before you. Begin to explore this inner
temple whenever you can, as much as you can.
To contemplate within your inner temple, focus your attention on the
subject or the object that you want to explore. You don’t need to strain, just
focus on this subject or thing lightly and allow your mind to naturally explore
the intricacies of it. Thoughts may pop out of nowhere, the rooms of your
temple might change, and you may want to explore certain theories or
perform mental experiments in this space. Allow yourself to create a special
place for your contemplations, but always remember yourself and stay
conscious. If you forget what happened in your mind palace, then you have
lost consciousness and you need to get back to a conscious place again. In the
temple of your mind, you can discover the building blocks of all reality and
explore worlds beyond imagining.”

U
As Janos was able to discover the vastness and the complexity of his inner
temple, he was also connected to physical reality, because no matter how far
and how deep he went into that temple, his body was always a part of
physical reality. Due to this dualism, the shadowed man insisted that
throughout his day, he had to become aware of both his subjective mental
reality and his objective physical self. This became a great challenge for the
young man, a challenge that would most likely continue for the rest of his
life. But it was an incredibly rewarding and fruitful challenge that allowed
him to discover just how complex his awareness was.
As he was able to pay attention to his subjective and objective selves
simultaneously, he realized that his world was far more magical than he had
imagined, because if he allowed his mind to sometimes superimpose itself on
his physical reality, he noticed a kind of ‘mixed reality’ that imbued dark
materialism with intense color, vibrant feeling, and spontaneous images that
appeared in his mind and somehow described and enhanced the dryness of
the purely physical world.
The material world became alive thanks to this new kind of mixed reality,
and the young man began to instantly see changes in his overall happiness
and in his overall ability to understand the world around him in a deeper way.
It was like his mind created magical images and feelings of all sorts that
superimposed themselves upon his harsh material world, and these brought
intense color to his entire life. This was the secret to how the object that he
imagined himself to be, slowly began to turn into a magical being that was
not bound to material space and linear time.

U
If he began to understand liminal spaces, odd corners, and the mixed reality
that resulted from paying attention to his subjective and objective beings
simultaneously, Janos could perceive a world and an energy that flowed
through all things. The young man was beginning to perceive the Spirit that
moves through all things.
 4
The Inner Senses and the Personal God
A man is made by his beliefs...
as he believes, so he is.
― BHAGAVAD GITA

“BELIEVE ME WHEN I SAY the last thing I need in my life is prayer. My

father engages in it constantly and as far as I can tell he has gained nothing
from it.”
“Is your father at peace?”
“If by 'at peace' you mean lacking in drive and motivation, and for some
reason absolutely content in his poverty and his overall lot in life, then yes,
my father seems to have found a modicum of peace.”
“Then perhaps prayer is not completely useless.” The young man turned
away with a look of disgust and the shadowed man laughed his odd laugh.
“The thing that I want to teach you young man, is that the world is not
what you think it is.” Janos looked at the shadowed man sitting beside him
with a growing sense of frustration. “Would you say that your father is a
hard-working man?”
“My father is one of the hardest working people I know, and I expect that
he will probably die someday hunched over his working area, having worked
himself to death to try and provide all that he can for me and him.”
“That is the plight of many. Most people in this world are only trying to
do the best that they can,” the shadowed man extended a hand and swept it
across the entire street. As his hand arced before him, the young man looked
at the people of the street and for the first time, he really empathized with
others and how hard most people’s lives were. He thought to himself that it
must be the presence of his shadowed companion that had given him the
strength to look at people openly and allow all their suffering to flood past
the many walls that he had erected. He saw the weariness in the step of so
many, the wrinkles and the tired look in the eyes of all the people walking on
the street, and for the first time he truly allowed himself to feel pity for them,
to feel great pity for himself.
“Stop it with that silly intent! Self-pity gets you nowhere, and it certainly
will not help them!”
The young man looked down at the ground, not knowing what else to do.
“Oh, do not be such a weak little knave, do not pretend to be so soft. I
know that you have become very hard in your life, you have had to be to
survive this world,” the shadowed man patted the young man on the shoulder.
“Humanity should not be pitied because in pitying them we pity ourselves
and all that gets us is more weakness and more of the same kind of pain.
Instead, what we must do is learn to know the hidden realities, learn to know
the way of the manifest in the unmanifested.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that most of us, your father, all of us, we really do not have a
chance, at least we do not have a chance unless somehow we are able to wake
up to the hidden reality that is before all of us if only, we could learn to see”.
“I am afraid that you are losing me.”
“Well, I don’t want to stress you out too much young man,” the shadowed
man looked up to the sky and the young man got a sense of someone asking
for God’s help in dealing with a difficult fool. The man’s gesture was so
unexpected, and the pantomime was so subtle and yet so forthright, that to the
young man it became the funniest thing in the world, and he laughed. But
halfway through his laugh he stopped short because once again he heard the
shadowed man’s laugh, a laugh that sounded like an odd and melodious
cough. And for some peculiar reason that the young man could not explain,
this strange coughing laugh was the most delightful thing he had ever heard.
They both laughed as they looked up to the sky, and to the young man’s
surprise, no one in that crowded street seemed to hear, or if they did hear
them, they simply did not care.
“You had told me to be quiet before, but now it seems people cannot even
hear us laughing.”
“That is your doing. In our first meetings your mind was quite rebellious,
and it lacked focus. Now you have become more focused, or you might say
that you have begun to believe more wholeheartedly that this insane beggar
beside you is more than just some homeless clown. A part of you has quite
quickly become more focused and thanks to all that you have seen, you are
beginning to believe that what we are both doing right now is more than just
sitting here drooling and begging, while the truly sane people around us
carry-on productively and ignore us as any rational being would.”
The young man turned to look at the people of the street, and with wide
eyes and a smile on his face, he listened to the words of his dark companion.
“It is very important that you now understand, and in the future remember,
that this is just the first step in all that I must show you, all I must teach you.
Indeed, there is so much that you do not know, there is so much that we must
cover, that I am sometimes overwhelmed by the sheer weight of it”.
The young man turned to look at the living shadow beside him and
continued to listen without saying a word.
“We must start as they say at the very beginning, and from that beginning
our goal must always be to begin to understand how the un-manifest becomes
the manifested. This is the great secret to the way that I follow, and in
discovering this most sacred truth, all else is revealed.
As you can now perceive to some degree yourself, there are two parts to
reality, two distinct aspects of reality. Most people are only aware of the
manifest and have given themselves faithfully and wholeheartedly to the idea
that the manifest is everything, all that exists for them is whatever they can
perceive with their physical senses.”
“But what else is there besides the physical senses?”
“Well, there are other ways to perceive other than your eyes and your ears.
You now have experience in the use of those other senses yourself. It was
thanks to those inner senses that you were able to perceive a little of the Spirit
as it moves through all things. That was the little test that you had to pass,
and you did it quite well. If you had not been able to perceive the Spirit with
those inner senses, if you had not been able to use them properly to be able to
find me, then I would have been invisible to you. I would be as invisible to
you as we are now to the people who walk just a few feet away from us at
this moment. Had you not been able to find me with the help of the inner
senses, I would have been invisible to you forever.
It is only using the inner senses that a person can see beyond the physical
and directly perceive the Spirit that flows and moves through all things. It is
with these inner senses that certain people either accidentally or purposefully,
as is the case with you, have been able to break that invisible membrane that
keeps them separated from the un-manifest that is all around us right now.
The interesting thing about humanity is that most of us believe to some
degree that there is something beyond merely the physical. They may pray to
whatever God or gods that they worship; they may engage in all sorts of
ritual to tap into, and catch the merest glimpse of something beyond the
horror of a purely physical existence. They will worship and bow down to
any fool that charismatically tells them about the existence of something
beyond the sticks and stones reality all around them. And yet, those same
people will turn away from the manifestations of the Spirit any time and
every time that the Spirit tries to reveal itself to them. The Spirit is all around
us right now, it beckons us at every turn, and yet most of us look away.
Anything that does not fit our little notion of reality, we turn away from.
Perhaps some would prefer to have the Spirit presented to them in an orderly
packet, something they could easily understand and fit in a nice box. But the
Spirit is beyond the measure of any theology or philosophy, no matter how
complicated or how seemingly rigorous and powerful such a philosophy
might be.”
Seeing the confusion in the young man’s eyes the shadowed man
continued, “The Spirit reveals itself to us all the time, at every turn, but we
choose to look away from it and only see the mundane because deep down no
matter how much we say otherwise, most of us cannot at the core of us truly
believe that there is something beyond the physical. This is not our fault; our
attention is mesmerized by the physical and by the perceptions of the
physical senses.
You can think of that ‘mesmerization’ as a kind of ‘animal-magnetism’
that keeps our attention on the great demands of the physical world, and helps
us to cope with the impossibility, the infinity, of the Spirit. If people were to
truly accept the existence of the Spirit, to truly believe and know directly that
it is real, that it is not just words on a page or something that they worship
when they have a break in their day, then such direct knowledge would
shatter the continuity of their lives. And without the continuity of their lives,
they themselves would shatter because it is that continuity that keeps the
world going round and round for them, it is what keeps the sane from the
insane. It is that continuity that keeps humanity out and away from chaos,
darkness.
So, the average person both looks for and rejects the Spirit. They seek
something that they rightfully believe will break the walls that bind them to
the horrid reality of existence, while at the same time they fear the freedom
which lies beyond the walls of the mundane. Knowing at a core level what an
earth-shattering thing it is to go beyond the walls of the mundane, they may
accidentally call the beckoning of the Spirit evil, darkness, the devil or
whatever else. We are all in such a pickle.” The young man could almost hear
the sad smile spread across the shadowed man’s face.
“I, and others like me, are beings who try to extend the power of the inner
senses. There are many ways to do this, and from that perspective, you could
say that there are many kinds of roads to follow when one truly seeks the
spirit. If you follow the logic of this, you could say that there are many
lineages, many different groups that follow different roads and that all roads
in the end lead to a similar place. My lineage, my house…yes, I like that
better, my ‘house’ follows a road that is interested in the odd line, the odd
angles to be found between the un-manifest and the manifested.”
“You mean that there are more like you?”
“There are certainly not too many like me,” the shadowed man smiled,
“but yes, there are others, a few, and in that sense, you could call us an order,
a house that exists out there in the unmeasurable. We are a house that is
contained by no building, at least no building that you have ever heard of or
could ever truly perceive using your physical eyes.” The shadowed man
smiled that invisible smile once again.
“Do you talk to these people? Do you have meetings with them?”
“These are difficult questions, and they are certainly things that I will try
to address in the future, but for now we must focus on the spirit and the way
of discovering the length and breadth of the Spirit through the pursuit of the
line between the un-manifest and the manifested.
To do that, I must show you where that line is, and how to manipulate that
line in a certain sense, not by moving the line as it were, but by moving
things from one side of that line to the other. To move things from one side of
the line to the other is the way to turn the un-manifest into the manifested.
What those who belong to my house do is move things from one side of the
line to the other, this is the road that we take towards the inner senses and
towards the Spirit.”
“Are you trying to teach me magic?”
“Anything that is beyond, and I mean truly beyond, the physical and the
physical senses is magic to the average person, so in that sense one could say
that I am. But that would be a very narrow view of what I am showing you
because there is so much more to the Spirit, and so much more to be
understood and done. As I have said, the amount that you must learn in the
short amount of time that you have, is to me quite simply staggering.”
 The young man began to fidget, he found it impossible to sit still which
was quite unusual because during these sessions with the shadowed man he
had noticed that he was usually incredibly calm and relaxed. In the presence
of the shadowed man, he sometimes felt like he had taken a glass of stout
wine. But now he felt agitated and was about to get up, when the shadowed
man put his hand on the young man’s arm. This physical motion instantly
relaxed the young man, it was like a giant weight was placed upon him, and
all desire to get up and run and move about seemed to leave him.
“Sit down, we are not done just yet.”
“I don’t know what is wrong with me, a part of me wants to run away. It
feels like you are about to open some kind of weird door and all hell is about
to break out of it. A part of me just wants to run, and another part is nervous
but transfixed by your words.”
“Yes, that is the usual way. A part of us is always trying to run away from
the truth, a part of us wants nothing more than to be left alone in our own
delusion, in our personal routine. Unfortunately, the fates have conspired
against you and now you are stuck having to listen to a fool like me.” The
shadowed man laughed, and the young man felt yet another chill run up his
spine.
“And so, to begin we must begin with simple steps, beginner steps, the
beginner’s way you might say, to learn to access the spirit. And the best way
to do that is to learn how to pray.”
“As I have said, my father and all of those people around him, his friends
and all of the other poverty-stricken people that I know, seem to delight in
prayer, and aside from perhaps some emotional happiness, that prayer does
not seem to add up to much,” Janos replied with disdain.
“That may just be that you don’t understand the power of prayer, or it
could be that those people don’t really know about the Spirit and do not know
how to pray properly. I am going to teach you how to pray properly and then
you can discover for yourself if prayer is in any way relevant.”
The young man now felt more relaxed than he had ever felt before, he
could not believe that just a moment ago he was ready to jump out of his
skin. What was going on?
“What I mean by praying properly is that I am giving you a quick lesson
on how to work with the Spirit and begin to turn the un-manifest into the
manifested.”
“What does this mean?”
 “It means that I am giving you a magical wand, or I suppose with you it is
better to say that I am going to give you a weapon, and with it I will show
you how you can change your life. With this tool which we can call prayer,
you will be able to move things from one side of the line to the other and in
that way, you will be able to change aspects of the material world to whatever
degree your power lets you. But in learning to use this tool, it is my hope that
you will learn something far more important, which is the ability to become
one with the spirit.”
“Will I be able to become rich with this power?”
“With it, a person can do whatever they want, but if they follow the way
perfectly, soberly, then in time, as long as that sobriety keeps them straight
down the path, such practice will only lead them to a final conclusion, and
that conclusion is that nothing really matters outside of the Spirit.”
The young man sat enraptured by the words of the shadowed man. He did
not want to flee anymore. He wanted this moment to last forever, he
desperately wanted a way to change his life for the better. This intensity of
focus and desire felt like a growing energy within him and as this energy
grew it was as if the bubble that separated him from the people around him
grew stronger, more stable. As he sat there lost deep within the darkness, all
that mattered to him, the only thing that existed in his reality, were the words
of the living shadow beside him.
“We human beings can do anything we want, and the great lie that has
been told to us over and over again, is that we live in a world of sticks and
stones and that in this world we are just like the other objects that we
perceive all around us.”
“I don’t know about that. I mean if you look around, all you ever see is
people talking about religion and God. There are even those who believe in
the old gods and magic, and they seem to live and breathe that theology. The
world seems full of people who believe in things beyond the physical.”
“People like to talk a big game. They may talk about religion or magic and
superstition but in the end, this is merely a way for them to feel the
possibility of power without having to ever see it or touch it. As I told you, a
part of them knows that the unfathomable is around them and yet another part
of them denies this to keep the stability of their lives. One belief is pitted
against another and in the end, people are stuck, stationary.
So, in the end people go nowhere but they are given the hope that there is
something somewhere and lost in that hope, that complacency, they are
powerless in the end, stationary as I have said.” The young man looked up at
the stars and the shadowed man continued mercilessly.
“We are told that the only thing that can help us is God above, and yet it
seems to the average person that the only individuals who get ahead are those
ruthless types who will do anything for wealth and material power. You see,
that is the rub for the average person; they are told that the way to the power
of heaven is through some kind of spirit or God, but the only thing they can
see with their physical senses is that the only people to get ahead are those
who ruthlessly manipulate the material world.
Well, for those who follow the ways of my house, it is our duty, you might
say, to accept wholeheartedly as truth the idea that it is indeed the Spirit, and
only the Spirit which can save us from the ravages and the misery of physical
existence. To that end we fight an endless fight within ourselves until we win
and break the chains that bind us. This means that we somehow, in one way
or another, discover for ourselves directly the fact that the Spirit is truly real.
We must learn to see as you have seen. We must learn to see the Spirit so that
for us it becomes real, and we must remember that realization. We must
remember long enough to learn to see it constantly, because it is only through
the constant seeing of the Spirit that we can break the chains that make us
believe the only way we are going to get ahead is through material
manipulation. So, our way is to learn to commune with the Spirit, to
understand it as best we can, and then eventually, in time, to fully become
one with it. Time is the key, intensity…but I do get ahead of myself.”
“But how do I begin? What do you mean by prayer?”
“There are many ways to approach this, and I will let you decide on your
own how your personal form of prayer will develop. In the average world
you see one basic idea of prayer and working with the Spirit, and that is
usually the idea of creating some kind of personage.”
“What do you mean by a personage?”
“What I mean is that most people like to anthropomorphize the Spirit.
Most people give the Spirit human qualities and turn it into a human like
God, some kind of wise elder, like Zeus or some other Olympian sitting on
top of a giant mountain, surrounded by the host of his angels.
This is a good method to begin with prayer, and it can help with some of
the overwhelming nature and the unmeasurable quality of the Spirit itself.
But this is obviously taken too far by the average person and there are flaws I
am sure you are quite aware of. To give parameters to the Spirit is to bind it
and then to lose yourself in your own lies as you try to find something that is
beyond measure. You have pointed out some of these mistakes yourself when
you talk about how your father worships and how others worship in the same
way he does. But there are other ways you might say, other intricacies that
can be used and that help to expand what is possible. In the end I will leave it
up to you to decide what works best for you.”
“Are you saying that there is no God?”
“I am saying that the order I follow believes there is a tide of power, a tide
which you have felt yourself and have used yourself to find me on this day,
and I am telling you that at this time we could call that tide the Spirit, a kind
of Spirit which moves through all things. For us, for those who follow my
way, the way of the un-manifest and the manifested, for us, the idea of some
God on some Mount Olympus is a useful lie at times.”
“That is blasphemy you know, and if someone heard us, we could be
thrown in the stockade and tortured until we realize the error of our ways,”
the young man looked around trying to see if anyone had indeed heard the
words of the shadowed man.
But the shadowed man continued unperturbed, “What you must do young
man is learn to work with the Spirit, and in the beginning, you have license to
do and use anything that can help you break through the membrane of the
static existence of the average human being. If this means that you must
believe in an anthropomorphic God who sits above you, then this is what you
must do. I can tell you that there are other ways, and I can tell you the reason
for this.”
The young man looked up at the sky like a child looking up at an
imaginary father and he shivered a little.
“The reason my house is flexible with these outer beliefs is because we
discovered a very long time ago that words are as much an illusion as the
physical world. And yet, no matter how much of an illusion, these words and
that outer world can still hurt us, and they can still help us. We therefore
strive to use words, to play with beliefs, if need be, and in that way commune
with something far beyond anything understood by modern theology. To
explain what the Spirit is with words is impossible, and yet we must try.
While engaging in such efforts we could therefore say that the secret of our
order is our ability to understand the way of a Secret King, a kind of
dreaming god you might say. It is this Secret King, this dreaming god, that
we must learn to contact if we have any chance at all of working with the
Spirit.”
“But I thought you said that there was no God?”
“What is God? What are the limits and the range of God? I will let you
decide in your own time what you may want to believe about these things.
All I can say is that from my point of view and the point of view of my
house, this Secret King is not God per se. I call it the Secret King or the
dreaming god because I must use words to try to describe things beyond
words. That puts me in a bind and in the end, it really means that whatever I
do now I must correct later, or better yet I must allow you to naturally correct
this on your own later. But for now, in trying to explain all of this, I can say
that the complexity of communing with the Spirit is such that we must break
it down into parts.”
The young man had a look of frustration, but the shadowed man continued
as if he did not notice, “The Spirit is infinite and therefore to try to
understand or grasp even a small bit of it is impossible really. What we must
do therefore is break down the road to the Spirit into parts, and part of that
fragmentation of the spirit means that we must contact a kind of intermediary
force to the spirit. This intermediary force I have called the Secret King,
but it is better to call it a kind of dreaming god that is within you and all
around you. To contact the Spirit, we must learn to communicate with
that dreamer.”
“Sorry, you have lost me. I do not understand what you mean.”
“Think of yourself as being divided into parts, and within those there is a
massively powerful part of yourself that you have never had contact with
except in your deepest dreams. It is that part of yourself I call the dreaming
god, the Secret King. If we are to work with the Spirit, we must contact that
Secret King, that dreaming god, and with its help we can indeed move the
Spirit to give us and make available to us anything that we could imagine.”
“But how do I contact this dreaming god?”
The shadowed man looked up at the sky with what to the young man felt
like a pleading motion and they both chuckled. Thanks to that small act, all
the tension seemed to dissipate from the young man.
“Contacting the Secret King, due to the fact that he is dreaming, is a very
difficult thing indeed.”
“Why is he dreaming, why is he asleep?”
“That is a very difficult question which is far beyond you at the moment.
For now, take my word for it if you can, or perhaps believe that this giant
force that can commune with the Spirit is so far away that to us it feels like it
is as distant as a dream. Now, imagine trying to get the attention of this giant
powerful entity that is here, there, everywhere…dreaming.”
“How could it be here, there, and everywhere and yet still be so far away
that it is like a dream?”
“As you know yourself now, through your own efforts, the Spirit is here,
there, and everywhere. It is all around us right now and yet no one sees it.”
“Yes, I can see what you mean,” the young man’s forehead furrowed in
concentration.
“In that same way that the Spirit is here and yet not here, the dreaming
god is here but not here as well, and contacting it is as difficult as trying to
contact a dream. You might scream at it, and this might help. You might
plead with it, and this might work for you. Or you might think of it as an
actual God sitting on a giant mountain and pray to it, beg to it, and this might
help as well.
The secret to prayer is to first learn how to contact this Secret King. Often
all this variation really comes down to intensity; intensity of emotion or
endless persistence.”
“Sorry, I am not trying to be difficult, but I don’t understand what you
mean.”
“Think of it in the simplest of terms. Think of it like trying to contact a
sleeping giant. Imagine you are trying to contact a giant who is dreaming, a
giant who will not wake up no matter how hard you try to wake it. Eventually
you realize that not being able to wake this giant, you must try to
communicate with it, nonetheless. The only thing possible for you then, is to
try to somehow contact it within those dreams that it is dreaming. You might
try many ways to do this. You might begin by trying to get really close to the
giant’s ear and seeing if you can talk to it, perhaps if you repeat something
over and over, perhaps that way you can reach it in its dreams. It might come
to you that if you do something completely unexpected, something so
completely weird and different from the norm, that this will get the giant’s
attention in some small way. You could try dancing, screaming, spinning,
creating a beautiful piece of music, there are many things you might want to
try to contact the dreaming giant.
This is the first step and the most vital step of prayer. You must decide
how you will contact that sleeping giant.”
Sitting on the hard ground, ignored by all the people who walked just a
few feet away, all of this to the young man seemed like some kind of secret
play. His dark companion lifted his arms in wide arcs and now spoke in
enthusiastic tones, and all of this, like a secret performance only for him, just
inches away from the rest of the world.
“Some people as I have said, most of the people that you know I would
imagine, have turned that dreamer into an actual man, like a giant Olympian,
which is sitting somewhere in the heavens above. This is one technique, and a
good one if used properly. That is why I suppose it has become so popular
even for the average person. Unfortunately, not knowing the secrets of the
Spirit, the average person can never truly take advantage of this way of
contacting the Secret King.”
“How is this way advantageous?”
“It is advantageous because by giving the Secret King a well understood
form, people are able to access the intensity of emotion that can help in
contacting this giant intermediary force.”
“Could you explain how this kind of contact happens?”
“Let us think about this from your point of view. This is something that I
want you to contemplate. It will be your task to find a way to learn how to
contact that dreamer that is lost in its dreams. This dreamer has no body that
you could ever recognize, it has no physical parameters in any way that you
could ever identify with the physical senses. Even by trying to feel it with the
little that you can feel of the Spirit, you could never find the beginning or the
end of this dreamer. But your task is to contact it nonetheless, so you will
have to figure out a way to contact the dreamer or else you will always be
stuck living a reactive life, a life where everything that you have is just the
result of forces that you do not understand or control. I would imagine under
such conditions you may be desperate enough to try anything, is that not
correct?” The young man frowned.
“Your task, and the general nature of your contemplations after you leave
me tonight, must be to figure out a way to give the right kind of proportions
to that dreamer; you must look deep within yourself and, without pretense,
discover what the dreamer looks like to you. Once you have done this you
will have a clear picture of how you must contact this giant. So, in the end it
is all up to you to discover your own way, now that you understand your
basic task.”
“But why would I want to go through so much effort and trouble? Why
would I want to lie to myself and pretend that there is some God in heaven to
pray to? Why would I need to go through the trouble of trying to figure out
what some dreaming giant looks like in my head?”
“Let us say that you must do this because your understanding of the Spirit
is so minuscule, that the only way you will move forward is to actually give
structure to the structureless, because without a structure the general state of
your current mind will never be able to move forward beyond the little that
you know.”
“I still don’t know why I would want to go through all this trouble.
Understanding the Spirit, the little that I have felt and seen, that is fine
enough for me. I am not a religious man or a philosopher, my life is too hard
and there are much more pressing concerns.”
“You asked me what the advantages are, and this is the question that I am
trying to answer. In answering that question, I can tell you that the Spirit has
placed before you a wonderful little gift to try to compel you towards it. In a
certain sense you might say that the Spirit is appealing to your greed. The
Spirit is saying that if you come to me, if you commune with me, I will show
you how to find treasure where none existed before. This is how the Spirit
teaches us, it shows us that by learning and communing with it we can then
use that knowledge to improve our lives. By learning to contact the Secret
King and therefore learning how to commune with the Spirit, you will learn
to tap into a power that will make available to you all those things that you
have dreamed of having.”
“Do you mean that this is a way for me to finally get myself and my father
out of the misery of our current existence?”
“The Spirit and contacting the Secret King is the power that will allow
you to take conscious control of your life. It is the power that will allow you
to see why you must truly let go of self-pity, and instead begin to direct the
nature of your own existence actively and consciously. It is the power that
will show you how to transmute reality and create for yourself a life worth
living.”
“You said that there are other ways?”
“Yes, there are many ways, and each has its own kind of enticement, its
own reward. But in the end, this is just so much more illusion that we must
eventually overcome. The Spirit is not really trying to appeal to our greed or
anything having to do with purely material things. In a sense it is showing us
that what we believe the world to be is a lie, and that we are far more than we
think we are.
 Some of us might pursue a path that allows us to turn the everyday, the
mundane, into gold. Others might seek the Spirit to know secrets and
perceive the unperceivable. Others might wish to let go of any weakness of
the flesh and become untouchable by the ravages of the physical world. But
in the end, all is the same, all these diverse powers lead to a final and
inevitable conclusion: we are far more than the flesh. Further, it lets us know
directly that the only way to really know truth is to experience it directly for
ourselves at every moment, and this is only possible if we become one with
the Spirit.
But those are stories for other days, for you the task of your
contemplations is to find your perfect way to contact the Secret King. When
you can talk to your Secret King (the dreaming god within you), it will
contact the Spirit. It is the only power within you that can contact the Spirit!”
“Can you give me any clues on how to begin?”
“I have given you plenty. One way to contact the dreamer might be
intense emotion, another might be constant repetition.”
“What do you mean by constant repetition?”
“If you are not the pious sort, repetition might be the key for you. This
would involve creating a sentence, or a paragraph. I find that the more precise
and concise this sentence the better. This sentence would be something that
describes exactly what you want in a way that allows you to focus your
attention and your emotions completely and precisely on what it is that you
want to happen. Think of it like trying to give instructions to the Secret
King.”
“Could you give me an example? I am not exactly sure I know what you
mean.”
“It is as simple as writing or thinking of a particular sentence that
encapsulates what you want, what you would like the dreamer to help you
with. It could be something as simple as, ‘I want’, ‘I am now’, or along the
lines of ‘this is happening now…’
You can think of it as a statement of intent, a statement of will. It is a
sentence that you will repeat often with as much focus and emotional
intensity as you can. You must have unwavering attention, this is key.”
The young man pondered the words of his dark teacher, but he felt so
overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information that he could think of
nothing to say, no question to ask.
“The reason why I have said that the idea of an anthropomorphic God is
useful in the beginning is because it really helps in engaging your emotions.
By picturing the Secret King as human, by giving human-like parameters to
the dreamer, a person may find it easier to engage their emotions and to
communicate with something beyond form.”
“So, I am praying to the Secret King, not the Spirit?”
“For now, let us say yes. Contact the Secret King and he will engage the
Spirit for you. For you for the time being, the Secret King is the intermediary
to the Spirit. Learn to contact the Secret King with enough precision and
anything becomes possible.”
“Could you give me an example of what you mean?”
“Simply, discover what the Secret King looks like to you in your
contemplations in the temple of your mind. If the Secret King is a father-like
figure in the sky or like a giant dreamer dreaming an endless dream, it is
much easier to identify with that on a personal level, to communicate with it,
and to feel as much emotional intensity as you can.
Once you have this personification of the intermediary force that connects
you to the Spirit, you can move to the next step.
Without losing yourself in self-pity and sorrow, and this is very important,
without losing yourself in negativity, sorrow, self-pity, self-deprecation, you
must use this image and the method of talking to it or repeating a phrase of
intent and feel intense emotion as you contact this anthropomorphic God up
above. In contacting this anthropomorphic God in this fashion, you also
contact the dreamer, you see. What I mean by this is by turning the dreamer
into a personal God, you could engage emotions that are deep within you, and
use the intensity of those emotions to create a ripple within the dreams of the
dreamer which is the Secret King. If these ripples are strong enough, they
will affect the dreams of that great dreamer. And if you can affect those
dreams, then that dreamer may dream your desires. If the great dreamer
dreams what you want, then all those things that the dreamer has dreamed
will become a reality in your life, they will become a consciously created
reality in your life. It is the ‘consciously created’ part of this that is most
important.”
“Again, I’m lost. I just don’t understand…should I beg to God in the same
way that I see some people beg to God?”
“Yes, that is exactly it. By creating a kind of human like God, by turning
the great dreamer into an understandable thing such as a great God above that
will grant you what you want, you are then able to emotionally appeal to it,
you are able to desire and beseech it in a human way.”
“Well, I have never noticed such prayers to be answered.”
“The reason why they have never been answered is that such people
can never truly and fully desire, because to freely desire would be to go
against the very fundamentals of most of the religions of this time. Think
deeply about emotion and a person’s beliefs, even when begging to the God
that fits perfectly into the custom of the current era. Even begging to the God
of the times is a sin to some, one of the seven deadly sins.”
“Which sin is that?”
“Greed, envy, lust, sloth. Take your pick.”
“Oh.”
“And with the weight of all that guilt, it is no wonder that the prayers of
most people go unanswered.
So, what you must do is give yourself freely to desire. You must pray to
the dreamer with all the intensity that you have. You must beseech with total
and unhindered emotion, you must desire with your entire heart, you must let
all your emotion out and spill everything to the Secret King!”
“I am not sure if I can do that. There is a kind of shame to it, it feels
wrong somehow.”
“Interesting is it not? Perhaps in the future we will contemplate the
reasons why there is so much guilt and self-pity in doing something so
fundamental, so natural. But for now, you must believe me wholeheartedly
when I tell you that if you do not get over that guilt, that shame of facing and
engaging completely and openly in your needs, your wants, your desires, and
all those emotions that are a part of all of that, you will never be able to
contact the dreamer. And if you cannot contact the dreamer, then you are
stuck in your current life.”
“I refuse to accept that!”
“You can feel however you want about it. But if you are not willing to do
what I say and let yourself go in your communications with the Secret King,
either through repetition or through great desire, then you will never learn
about conscious and deliberate creation. Unless you do what I am telling you
to do, the un-manifest and the manifested will always be merely an illusion to
you. Worse than that, being that you have now seen a little of the Spirit, to
see it and not be able to contact it will be like a curse for you.”
The young man sat there in a daze. The words of the shadowed man had
shocked him, and there were aspects of him that could not even begin to
contemplate what the man had said. He did not know where to begin, what to
do next.
And as he turned to ask the shadowed man yet another question, he
realized to his great surprise that he sat on the street alone, the shadowed man
had quite simply vanished.
“Learn to do some real work you nasty bastard!” a woman yelled at him as
she walked by.
The young man stood up quickly. He had completely lost all contact with
the Spirit. All he could do was look around for danger and make his way
home as quickly as he could. He did not know where to begin, or what to do.
He felt more lost now than he had ever been in his life, and in that sense the
shadowed man and his words were now more of a curse than any kind of
help.

Lessons
Janos clearly remembered his dark teacher mentioning the inner senses, “It
was thanks to the inner senses that you were able to see a little of the Spirit as
it moves through all things.”
But within the folds of that conversation, if that made any kind of sense
at all, there was a deeper memory. It was like there was a conversation
inside another, a forgotten time, lost time. It was so hard to remember, so
easy to lose focus. But hidden there, like a dream within a dream, he began to
hear the words of the shadowed man:
“Just like there are outer physical senses, there are also inner senses that in
many ways are far more powerful than the outer ones.”
“How do I learn to use these...inner senses?”
“Take one small object from your life and memorize it, every single part
of it.”
“What kind of object?”
“An apple, a rock, whatever you want as long as it is small and simple to
remember. Then once you have memorized that thing, try to recall that object
in the temple of your mind. Even if you have difficulty visualizing something
in your mind, it should be much easier to remember it and, in that way, have
that image of the remembered things appear within your mind palace.
 Once you can clearly see that remembered object in your mind palace, try
to feel the inner reality, the inner structure that makes that object a thing
inside your mind. You don’t have physical eyes to see inside the temple of
your mind. You don’t have a physical body to feel with, and yet you are
somehow perceiving this object. By intending to feel the inner reality of this
object, by desiring this, you will instantly begin to feel something.”
“How do I intend or desire in my mind?”
“This intending and desiring cannot be explained with words. Just do as I
say, and you will instantly feel it. In the inner temple, desire becomes action
instantly.”
“Please clarify this for me if you can.”
“Once you can clearly see that object within the temple of your mind, try
to perceive it with whatever perceptive mechanisms you have while you are
in that place. You may find this new object, this memory, to be very
nebulous, and it may change shape, or it may move on you in different ways.
Explore your perceptions of this object as it flows like this, and in time it is
my hope that you will come to realize that in a way you are both seeing and
feeling this remembered object simultaneously. The way that you perceive
this object in your mind palace is different than how you perceive it
physically. It is like feeling-seeing, and if you desire to explore the inner
structure of this object, the instant that you desire this, you will begin to
perceive in this fashion. The power of your inner senses are incredible, and
this new feeling-seeing can help you to understand the inner construction of
things, it is an inner sense that I like to refer to as the ‘inner feeling sense’.”
“I think I understand.”
“Good. Once you can clearly see-feel that remembered object within the
temple of your mind, I want you to open your eyes and then look at the object
with your physical eyes. Now that you are looking at this thing with your
physical eyes, try to remember that ‘inner feeling sense’ that you were using
inside your mind palace and try to bring that new form of perception
outwardly into the exterior physical world, so that now you use it in
conjunction with your physical senses. See that object with your physical
eyes but at the same time try to see-feel it in the same way that you did in
your mind palace. In time, you can use this new sensual capability to perceive
things beyond physicality while in the physical world.”
“How do I bring that perception outwardly? How do I bring this out?”
“Everything is a feeling. All that we are is a feeling. To bring the feeling
of seeing-feeling outwardly, remember it from your mind palace and then
recall this feeling as you see the object in the physical world. Bring that
feeling outwardly by remembering it.
This is how you begin to move some of the powers that you have in the
inner temple outwardly, into physical reality!”

U
The Secret King is far greater than anything imaginable. It might just be the
totality of everything that anyone can imagine, and yet there might be
something even beyond this. The shadowed man tells Janos to contemplate
what the Secret King might be for him personally in the temple of his mind
using those inner senses that he is learning to develop.
He also recommends that the young man explore the nature of his personal
God. By this he means that the young man should, in exploring the Secret
King, also explore what his feelings are about God, about any kind of
personal deity. With great sobriety and honesty, the young man should
explore his beliefs about God.
In doing so the young man truthfully concludes to himself that even
against his own better judgment, perhaps because he has grown up in a
culture that believes this so ardently, there is a part of him that does indeed
believe that there is a reigning monarch high above him that looks down upon
him in judgment. For the young man this is a chilling realization, but it does
help him because it shows him how to begin to contact the Secret King. By
learning to explore his personal beliefs, he begins to understand how to work
with his own awareness, how to play with his own beliefs to get what he
wants from life in a conscious way.
 5
Defining Transmutation, and the Lessons of a
Child
THE YOUNG MAN SAT AND THOUGHT and thought some more. He was
sitting in his favorite comfortable chair, a simple wooden construction with
old, folded rags used as pillows. The chair wobbled a little if he did not pay
attention to his posture. The rags that he had used, which were bits of old
clothing and burlap that he kept adding one on top of the other to cushion the
hardness of the wood, had begun to shred at the edges and in the middle, but
this only added to the comfort of the chair. After years of use, the chair had
become a valued friend, and at this hour, the 13th hour, the time of his
contemplation, it was a friend that he used to ride away to distant lands,
places beyond time.
The chair was in the middle of the big room of the shack that he shared
with his father. His father had become used to seeing the young man sitting
on that chair during this time, and he would always assume that Janos was
praying or contemplating some aspect of the scripture. How proud he looked,
Janos loved that little twinkle in his eye, the half-smile. The young man knew
that his father thought that Janos had finally come to his senses, that his son
was now safe, his soul would be saved. Now they would all have a chance to
meet in heaven. His wife and his daughter were waiting for them there, and
now they could all be together. But the young man did not contemplate the
sacrifice of the son for the father, nor did he contemplate the Trinity, instead
he contemplated the words of the shadowed man.
And yet, it was prayer that he contemplated. This was not quite the
scripture, but he hoped that his father would be proud of him for
contemplating something at least within the periphery of worship. The
shadowed man had been very insistent that this had to be the new focus of his
contemplation: simple prayer.
And as he contemplated the intricacies of it, he began to realize that prayer
was not so simple, at least he could not grasp what the shadowed man had
wanted. He could not begin to understand the idea that a simple prayer could
somehow change life in some way. How was it possible that a prayer could
make something happen from nothing?
He now had the ability to see a little of the Spirit and because of that he
did not doubt the shadowed man’s words, at least not completely. At one time
he had considered the shadowed man to be just some filthy beggar, now that
mysterious figure had changed in his mind somehow. That dark figure was
now a source of wonderment and perhaps a little fear.
This is the conclusion that he had come to after many days of
contemplation, and yet he could not make the leap from the seriousness of his
conversations with his secret ally and the idea that somehow a prayer meant
anything at all.
The young man had always been a doubter, he could not bring himself to
believe that any kind of prayer, any kind of religious worship, would ever
mean anything in this harsh and nasty world. He had never seen anything
come out of religious practice. Certainly, the priests were rich enough, but he
knew that such priests were no better than merchants peddling a product.
But here he was, and once again his mind had led him down odd internal
roads, and this time not a pleasant one. He had learned to pay attention to
these little unexpected trips that happened inside his mind, and if he did so,
he now knew that these internal journeys had purpose and sometimes even an
intensity to them that made them incredibly vivid, surreal. The young man
was learning how to pay attention to his mind as it flowed freely from one
topic to another, and in his ability to pay attention he was learning about the
great power within him to seemingly move across space and time in an
almost instinctual way. When he really paid attention, when he woke up to
himself as he was lost in some kind of reverie and internal journey, he could
really feel the movement. In some ways there seemed to be no difference
between inner mental motion and outer physical motion, and this was
extraordinary to him!
During these contemplations that had become so important to him, the
young man had begun to understand the great depth of his inner reality and
could only marvel at the possibilities. Perhaps this is what people got from a
certain kind of prayer. It was like a conscious movement into another reality,
a reality inside his mind, and by participating in that conscious motion
inwardly, he was able to access more expansive worlds that were beginning
to become as real to him in a certain way as anything physical.
 He was beginning to realize that with true dedication, such inner reverie
could overcome some of the horrors and harshness of life. He was also
beginning to realize that if he was dedicated enough in his contemplations, if
he was able to maintain enough lucidity and focus during these inner
explorations, such examinations could reveal amazing secrets. Just the act of
going into that expansive world was enough to shake some of the burden
from his life, but beyond that for the young man, a person who really had no
access to any kind of books or written knowledge, this was the beginning of
true education.
But the shadowed man was not interested in these inner realizations, it
seemed. There was a practical quality to what that dark figure had discussed
in their last meeting; the shadowed man seemed to be all business, as they
say. There was almost a kind of desperation in the mysterious creature’s
voice.
The young man felt ill at ease all of the sudden, and that surge of emotion
seemed to carry him into a new location within the inner temple of his mind.
In this new place, there were sharp corners everywhere. It was a new area
within the depths of him and this area mimicked and augmented the sheer
harshness, the hardness, the sharp edges of physical reality. And there in that
new place, he discovered through a burst of energy and emotion within
himself new truths and realizations. The voice of the shadowed man rang out
within the depths of that new place, “Our way is a practical way, it is the way
of survival in this treacherous world.”
The young man did not remember when he had heard that exactly, but
now he heard the shadowed man say it clearly in this new room within his
mind. In this new location there were new feelings, the sharp corners and the
shadows created fear, focus, and that burst of fight or flight energy took the
young man deeper still.
In this deeper place the young man was almost forced to focus his
awareness on survival and living, on practicality. It was like a little room was
created especially for him and for his new task, the new task that had been
given to him by the shadowed man.
This new task was finding answers to the many questions that he had, such
as how do you turn words into physical reality, and how is it possible that a
prayer could change your life, your actual and physical life?
These questions hung before him, all around him in this new place where
there was no compromise. In this new place the corners became sharper and
sharper, the shadows became darker, and all this imagery and feeling
somehow mirrored the oppression that he felt in his life. In this new room
within the depths of the temple of his mind the young man was able to
become deeply aware of the fact that life was painful and difficult, and that it
was imperative that he learn how to change his life, somehow change his
reality.
The hard corners and the weight of this place, the press of them against
him, the shadows of them as they appeared before him by surprise, seemingly
out of nowhere…all these things in this new place made him realize that the
only thing that mattered now, was the ability to gain some kind of power,
some kind of way to control his life because up until this moment, everything
had been done to him, and he had done nothing consciously, freely. He was
amid shadows and hard sharp corners, and it seemed like the world had
always decided his fate. He was a slave to reality.
“We are all thrown into this dark and predatory jungle young man, and
most of us live out entire lives of quiet desperation, running this way and that
way, often not even conscious of the fact that we are running.
My desire is that you begin to become conscious of your life, and as this
progression of inner motion grows within you, it is my desire to also provide
for you a way to lessen the magnitude of that awakening. And the only way
to lessen the weight of that, to stop you from madness and self-destruction, is
to give you a weapon to fight the oppression of the world, and the nature of
that weapon is the power of transmutation itself!”
How was this possible? Every time he heard the voice of the shadowed
man ringing in his ears, he wondered how it was that he remembered things
that he could not possibly remember. It was like layers lost within layers.
Like there was time within time and in that lost time he had spent unknown
ages with his dark companion. The first idea that stormed into his mind
obliterating everything else was the thought that he had gone mad, that the
shadowed man himself was a sign of madness. Such thoughts would then
open secret compartments within him, parts of him that he kept hidden,
religious and superstitious parts that made him wonder if perhaps he was
possessed, that a devil had crept into his mind and that soon he would be a
beggar on the street.
But as he woke up to this new explosion of thought that was threatening to
take him into an unconscious part of his inner temple, he turned his attention
away from it knowing that this was not a road that he needed to travel down
right now. He turned his back on that road and changed the angle of his
attention…he changed his conscious focus.
Almost instantly he was back in that room amongst the dangerous fleeting
shadows and the sharp corners. There, he was able to truly feel the reality of
his situation, and surprisingly he realized that the shadowed man was trying
to give him a gift, a gift that he called prayer in their initial meeting. So, with
the vividness of that new emotion he thought deeper and focused longer and
in time he did realize that his dark teacher had talked of prayer, but his true
focus was transmutation. Prayer was just an inkling of the beginning of
transmutation!
But what was transmutation?
Janos was now deep within his mind. An aspect of him was beginning to
truly wake up during these times. As his inner lucidity grew, the young man
felt like he was being born into a new reality, one where he could maintain a
kind of conscious and lucid focus as he was hurled through unmeasurable
areas within his mind. And deep within those contemplations, and somehow
more and more conscious of that motion, the young man contemplated the
word itself.
Transmutation in the end was a kind of transformation or alteration. What
the shadowed man had said was that there was a Secret King, a kind of
dreaming giant that could help to become an intermediary between himself
and the Spirit. It was the Spirit that made the transmutations happen, but it
was the Secret King that contacted the Spirit to make all this possible. The
trick was to contact the Secret King, this was the only way, and in that sense,
he could think of this intermediary force as a kind of personal God or as the
face of the Spirit, the face of transmutation itself.
The young man could not remember, he did not have the words and yet
somehow a feeling was there and that feeling was a knowing, and that
knowing itself created an actual transmutation, it changed this inner room
with the sharp corners and turned it into something else.
This was transmutation!
Like the most perfect example of transmutation possible for him, thought
and emotion had turned one of the rooms in his inner temple into something
else. One place had turned into another, one thing to another, deep within his
mind. The young man began to understand the nature of transmutation. As
one thought or set of ideas led to another, the very nature of the rooms within
his mind changed, and through that almost instantaneous alteration as one
thing turned into another, he was beginning to understand transmutation. As
his focus changed, his thoughts and feelings changed, and as they changed
these instantly transmuted into new rooms. This new conglomeration of
thoughts and feelings created a new room. Natural transmutation within the
temple of his mind had changed the room with sharp corners into a new
room, a new place, and this place was a well-lit and softer room. This was
transmutation; his inner reality was showing him the nature of transmutation,
the nature of alteration, the nature of transformation through thought and
feeling alone…feeling-intent.
And now the young man remembered: intent. He finally remembered
clearly that this is what the shadowed man had said over and over. It wasn’t
just transmutation that he kept repeating, it was also the word ‘intent’. The
young man thought about that word, and he had no idea what that word might
mean, at least not the deeper aspects that the shadowed man had hinted at.
Instead, to the young man at that moment intent became will. He understood
will.
To will something was to consciously focus on doing that thing no matter
what. For the most part for him, and he imagined for most people, will and
the notion of the will was a physical thing. He willed himself to get up every
day. He willed himself to work, day in and day out. He willed himself to
ignore his pain, his father’s pain, and the pain and sorrow that was a constant
in his life. It was will that had kept him alive this long, and it was will that
would allow him to get up in a few hours from now and toil for scraps to
make more scraps in the hopes to have enough to be able to feed himself and
his father. It was will that would allow him to take step after step to make his
way once more to the main street of the village, and there it was will that
would allow him to withstand the people that he had to deal with, the
oftentimes careless and mean people, over and over again.
He understood will.
But what the shadowed man was saying was that will could then be used
in a different way. He had said that through will, the young man could
change the very nature of his life. But now he realized that will for his dark
teacher was not purely physical, and was instead a kind of inner action, and
inner direction of thought and focus that could somehow alter physical reality
in the same way that he had just moved from one room to another.
Was that man, that mad shadow, saying that he could change his life in the
same way that he could change the rooms inside his mind?
 Will was the key to the Secret King, to the dreaming god. But there was
more, there was something about doing something that would invade the
dreams of the Secret King. The shadowed man had said that he needed to do
something that raised enough emotion in him to cause some kind of intensity,
he had also used the word quickening at some point…so many lost memories.
How was this possible?
Focus, he had to focus. Through the power of this intensity, this
quickening, the shadowed man had said that perhaps with persistence of will,
such reverberations might begin to change a little of the Secret King’s
dreams. If the young man wanted to change his life, he needed to change the
dreams of the Secret King, the dreaming god. That was it!
That was how 'will' turned into intent! Will became Intent when the Secret
King began to dream what he had consciously willed!
But how in hell’s darkest crooks was he to contact some Secret King that
was everywhere and nowhere!?
And then he remembered: the dark corners! Janos had caught himself once
more. It was always like that in his contemplations, but he was getting better.
There were times when he could consciously pay attention to the motion of
his mind, and he would find incredible delight in such amazing motion. It
was like being awake for the start and the development of a lucid dream, a
dream where he could consciously act and participate in worlds beyond
imagining. It was the delight of watching and participating in an entire story
that took you to new places deep within your mind, and watching this journey
unfold in ways that you could have never imagined. He was also finding out
that he could take side journeys within those journeys themselves; he was
learning how to frolic within unsuspected spaces deep in his mind, and he
was beginning to realize, a nearly unconscious part of him was beginning to
realize, that these places that he thought to be deep in his mind were places as
real as anything physically measurable.
But he had to be careful because this frolicking could at times be so
intense that it made him lose any sense of lucidity. It was like in his lucid
thoughts an enticing new door would open and almost unconsciously he
would step through it and experience marvels. But if he was not careful the
glitter of these new sparks of unknown creativity would make him forget to
be lucid, and the moment that he lost that lucidity, he would lose himself.
That was the true battle, the battle to not forget the self.
This time, on this particular frolic, this new door had revealed to him the
soft room beyond the room with the sharp corners, and in that new place, he
had experienced a quickening that had shown him how will turned into intent.
And thankfully, he had not forgotten himself completely and for that reason
he could remember, he had caught himself just in time. Had he gone any
further he might have completely forgotten this incredible realization that he
had made, but he was getting better and better at remembering.
As he woke up from this nearly unconscious side journey, he once again
marveled at the intensity of experience that was possible in places that were
not physical at all. The difference between physicality and inner reality were
beginning to blur for him. But that was not important now, he had to stay
focused, he had to stay lucid and on track, he had to remember.
This new sideroad that he had taken in his contemplations had not only
shown him the secret of intent, but it had also given him some clues as to
how to contact the dreaming god. It was like this sometimes, experiences
happened that were impossible to describe with words and therefore they
would be difficult to assimilate into his reality, this made these experiences
slippery and hard to remember. But he persisted, and in that persistence, in
that unbending will, he grew internally in ways that could not be measured in
leagues or stones, or by any other kind of ruler to be found in the physical
world.
But whatever the case, upon waking up to his dream within a dream, he
returned ‘consciously’ now to the room with the sharp corners.
Back in the room with the sharp corners, deep within the temple of his
mind, the young man found inspiration once again. Here in this part of his
inner temple, the young man seemed to find it far easier to focus on the
urgency of learning to do the seemingly impossible in practical terms, in
actual physical ways. He needed to know about how to pray, how to
transmute, how to change 'word' into reality. He needed to do this in the real
world, not just in his mind!
Now he understood a little more about the dreaming god and how and
why it was important to contact it. He knew that it was only that dreamer, the
Secret King, that could bring about the interconnections between himself and
the Spirit. The Secret King was the key to external physical transmutations
because just like how he dreamt and could change the rooms in the temple of
his mind, the dreaming god dreamt the young man’s physical reality and if its
dreams changed the young man’s life would change. The Secret King was
lost in dreams in the same way that Janos could lose himself in dreams. The
dreaming god would never wake up from its slumber, so what he needed to
do was to change its dreams.
Within the room full of shadows and sharp corners, he turned and moved
this way, then that, and wherever he turned, a sharp corner would materialize
from those shadows. These corners would pierce his mind somehow, pierce
the essence of him, an essence that was hard to describe, being that he did not
really have a body within the temple of his mind. But it was these hidden
corners and the possibility of pain at every turn, that somehow invigorated
him and honed his focus. This room of shadows and sharp corners was the
perfect metaphor for his life.
But he could do better. So, to test his ability to consciously change reality,
the young man decided to exit this disturbing room and create a new one.
This time a conscious transmutation happened within the temple of his mind.
Instead of focusing on trouble and pain, he focused his mind on relaxation
and peace. As soon as that focus was sustained long enough, which was
seconds, a new room materialized around him. This new room was full of
silence and peaceful quiet, it was a room the color of crisp clean snow in the
morning, and yet the brightness did not hurt his eyes. This was a room
without walls and here the young man set about creating his very first
conscious prayer.
The shadowed man had said that he should start with a kind of script. And
so, the young man thought about this and thought about this some more. In
doing so he went deeper and deeper into the temple of his mind. In trying to
learn more about actual physical transmutation, he was also beginning to
learn how to navigate within the depths of himself.
After some thought and calculation, he finally emerged from the depths
with the simplest of ideas, he was going to start by consciously composing a
simple request, “It is my hope that my father is able to get the salt that he
needs for the season.”
This is all that he could muster, he did not believe in God. And even
though the shadowed man had told him that he needed to contact the Secret
King in any way possible no matter how weird or ridiculous, he could not
bring himself to include things that sounded like any kind of worship. So, he
would first try the idea of repetition, and see if through sheer repetition he
could somehow make ripples strong enough to be able to affect the dreams of
the dreamer.
His simple request was his statement of intent, “It is my hope that my
father is able to get the salt that he needs for the season.”
It was easy for him to memorize this statement of intent, and having done
so, after waking up from his long bout of contemplation, he set about trying
to turn that intent into physical reality.
Janos then made sure that at least three times a day he would repeat his
phrase ten times. He would make room in his busy schedule to repeat that
phrase when he could. From out of nowhere he seemed to remember a
forgotten memory, it was a warning from the shadowed man, “Focus is key.
It is the unrelenting focus of attention that is all important. When you say
your prayer, you must focus utterly and completely on it so that nothing else
invades your mind. You must focus on the words that you are saying and on
what those words make you think about, make you feel. You must focus until
all that is left of you is that focus!”
This was impossible for the young man. He would often start out trying to
focus completely on his statement of intent but usually after the third or
fourth repetition his mind would wander just a bit. Often, he would have
some kind of doubt about the whole process, feeling silly somehow. When he
felt like this, he knew that his focus had wavered.
But even though his focus was far from perfect, at times he could feel the
waves of energy as they moved across him and through him, intertwining his
world and knitting things to other things in ways that were impossible to
describe. There were even times when he could feel that exchange between
the Spirit and the material, times when he could feel an indescribable
intermingling that created an impossible to define augmentation of weight to
that which he was focusing on. And then, a part of him would somehow wake
up and he would feel like he was going mad, like he was being an idiot who
was being led into madness by some horrid demon that only he could see.
Insane or not, the young man persisted, and for an entire week he stuck to
his routine and repeated his statement of intent three times a day and with as
much focus of attention as he could muster. And during that time, he noticed
that he would become more positive about things instead of being his usual
gloomy self. He also noticed that his father seemed to gain energy as well,
like there was this positive intensity developing. In a way that was impossible
to describe, it did feel like they were on a streak of better luck, but that was it.
Soon enough the young man became tired, dubious of his efforts, and life
seemed to go back to normal.
And this became a time when the young man doubted everything. It took
him weeks before he could go back to his contemplations and after much
deep thought, he decided to change his statement somewhat, “By the great
power of the dreaming god, I desire, please I desire, that my father gets the
salt for the season that he needs to keep our little business afloat”.
And this he repeated three times a day for a week. And after that he
noticed even less motion, less movement within the realm of the Spirit. He
was ready to give up, and so he stopped. He figured that he was most likely
quite insane. There was no such thing as a shadowed man, and he should stop
deluding himself before there was no coming back from his delusions.

T
Several weeks passed, during which Janos had given up on his statement of
intent. On this day however, walking down the main street of the village,
which was crowded with people in the morning, he ran across a child that
would change everything.
It was quite literally impossible to ignore this child, it was the most
horrible whining he had ever heard. It sounded like the child was dying, like
the child was being tortured to death. Most often, as he walked down the
street during the day, he found it to be the safest policy to never look up and
around too much. He never tried to seem interested in anything around him.
He would walk straight ahead with a strong gaze, keeping his head down as
much as he dared without losing track of the people around him. He tried to
give off a feeling that all he wanted was to finish his business and move on.
But this time, he could not ignore the whining and the pleading coming from
this child. It sounded like the child was on its last breath trying desperately to
stay alive.
He turned to look and saw a well-to-do mother trying her best to control
what seemed to be an incredibly spoiled child. The child was not dying, he
just wanted some kind of treat. The child was standing in front of a vendor
selling honeyed almonds, while the mother tried desperately to walk away.
She frantically gestured for her child to follow and in quiet but harsh tones
implored the child that if it did not follow, he would be fiercely reprimanded.
But the child stood firm, he whined and screamed, “I want it! I need them
now, please!” And this would be followed by an awful crying like someone
was trying to rip one of the child’s arms out clean from its socket. And this
awful noise would only stop when the child took a breath to continue with his
dreadful pleading and begging, “I need it now! Give it to me noooow!”
The horrendous spectacle continued like this. It eventually turned into a
singsong, the most awful singsong that the young man had ever heard. He
had seen petulant children like this before, but this was the first time he had
been forced to pay real attention to such a display; the child was a prodigy.
The sheer power of the child’s pleading was impossible to ignore, and there
was this tone to the whining of the child that was quite literally painful. The
young man felt truly sorry for the mother. He finally saw her walk up to the
child and spank it and pull the child by the hand. But the child resisted and
whined even harder if that was possible. He would not stop; the singsong
whining and pleading became louder and louder. In a detached way he
noticed there was a kind of horrid melody to it, like an infernal rhythm. The
power of it was such that most of the people in that part of the street now
stopped and turned to look directly at the child and then at the mother with
disgusted and upset expressions.
It finally got to the point that the mother had to relent and had to go up to
the vendor and buy some honeyed almonds for her child. Upon receiving
them, the child became instantly quiet and content. It seemed like the awful
torture was over…for now. And like a spell being broken, the people of the
street seemed to slowly forget about the child and the mother, and like
zombies continuing their endless journey to nowhere, they all turned and
walked away.
Afterwards the young man could not forget that experience. The power of
it was such that he found himself in his favorite chair during the 13th hour
thinking hard about it. He could not sleep, he could not bring himself to do
anything else, all he could think about was that child. There was something
about it that resonated in his mind, and then finally as he fell deeper and
deeper into the temple of his mind and once again found himself in the room
with the sharp corners…there it hit him. That child had shown him how to get
the attention of the dreaming god!
The mother had become a metaphor for the dreaming god in his mind.
Through persistence and unfailing technique, the child had turned the
attention of the mother. Even though the child was in an inferior position, he
had performed like a true master creating a concert that in the end had rallied
the power of the crowd against the mother. The mother was not only forced
to pay attention to the child, but she was also forced to do the child’s bidding.
Somehow that pain, that pleading, that almost primal begging and whining by
the child, had broken through everything, it seemed to have cracked the
nature of reality itself. And the young man reasoned, if anything could wake
the sleeping god, if anything could reach the Secret King, that was it.
“You asked me once about magic. You asked me if I was teaching you
magic.”
“Yes, to me all of this still feels like magic. I mean, the word
transmutation itself sounds like magic to me.”
“Well, the child showed you the basics of it.”
“What do you mean?”
“That is all that magic is in the end.”
“Do you mean that magic is just whining like the child?”
“What do you think of when you think of magic?”
“I suppose I always think of some kind of odd ritual. Perhaps weird things
scribbled on the ground, and a crazy wizard saying something in Latin as he
waves a wand through the air.”
“That is a fair representation. And what do you think all that would
accomplish?”
“I would imagine that it is a kind of intricate natural philosophy that can
somehow bend demons to your will.”
“Demons at times, perhaps. But in the end, there is no real difference
between that magician you imagine and the child in the market.”
“I have never thought of a magician as a whining child.”
The shadowed man chuckled, “It is a similar technique applied on a
different level. If the magician is worth his salt, then what he is trying to do is
contact the dreaming god, and to do that he will use whatever technique best
suits his or her personal proclivities, and that person’s personal knowledge.”
“I get what you mean a little bit…”
“The child and the magician are doing something incredulous, something
beyond the pale and beyond most of the routine of everyday life. Such a
break in routine is done with the kind of intensity that the child had in the
market. Such a routine breaking performance, if done with enough intensity,
can open a connecting link to the dreaming god, the Secret King. Such a
connecting link, if intense enough, can even allow a crowd of witnesses to
see and contact their own versions of the dreaming god.
It is not just about the begging and whining, even though that is a
magnificent way to hold focus and intent, it is also about the novel weirdness
of what is being done.”
 “Are you saying that all of those odd phrases and all of that weird magical
symbolism that magicians use means nothing?”
“I am saying that from my point of view, as a practitioner of transmutation
within the unmeasurable spaces of my inner temple, all such symbols and
ritual mean nothing if they cannot open the right doors within spaces beyond
rules and measure.
I am saying that if you had half a brain, you could use the technique of
just desiring and turn that into a power that would be beyond any magical
circle or secret incantation to be found in a lost grimoire.”
Where this conversation came from, the young man could not say. This
conversation happened, he was sure of it. It had to be a memory, it was too
cohesive, it was too on the mark to be anything that he could just dream up.
But how could that dark demon know about the child!?
That conversation was a memory and yet it was now. How was this
possible?
Was he somehow talking to the shadowed man deep within his inner
temple? He dared not think. He could not think. Insanity was becoming a real
danger the more that he thought about this.
Deep within, odd corners became folds in time. And embedded there like
releasing shining birds from small cages, the young man felt new experiences
materialize that somehow seemed outside regular time and space. There, he
still felt and heard the voice of his dark advisor.

T
The next day, after waking from troubled dreams, the young man planned
new strategies. He waited until there was a day where he had some time in
his busy work schedule. And during this time, he did what he would seldom
do, which was to leave the periphery of the village and make his way into the
surrounding wood.
He certainly would not go into the woods at night, so he waited for the
perfect day when his father was occupied, and he could make an excuse to
leave the house. From where they lived it was easy enough to get to the dark
forest that surrounded the village. He had worked out and rehearsed his plan
in his temple figuring out every step, every effort. Thanks to this careful
planning, he knew that the most difficult part of his journey was crossing the
large clearing that separated the forest from the outer edge of the village. This
was an open area, and it was easy enough for anyone to notice him entering
the forest. He needed to be careful because if anyone saw him and recognized
him, they might suspect him of being a brigand or witch. Either one could get
him thrown in the stockade or killed. This was a crazy plan and he needed to
be very careful.
After a little bit of innocuous scouting, the young man found what he had
been looking for. There was a little valley of sorts that led straight from the
village to the forest. The shallow depression in this area was enough to hide
him from anyone looking from a distance. And the unevenness of the ground
in this area made it impossible to cultivate, so the briar and the young trees
grew wild here for the most part. This was great cover.
Acting as if he was walking on a typical morning stroll, he waited until no
one was looking and quickly moved into the briar. He kept his head down
and walked as quietly and as quickly as he could until he was in the thick
forest. There, among the cover of the trees, the young man looked and
listened and after satisfying himself that there was no one within close
proximity, he climbed a small hill and used it to try to find a secluded path
through the woods. What he was looking for was a small valley far into the
woods, away from any trail.
He was looking for a quiet area, one where he was sure not too many
people would travel through. He also wanted a small ravine or valley that
might be able to mask the noise that he was planning to make. He needed the
dark forest because he needed anonymity, he needed quietude and secrecy,
but at the same time he needed to avoid predators, both human and other, that
lurked in this place. He knew that what he planned to do could be dangerous,
but he had reached a point in his life where either things changed, or his life
was over. For him there was really no choice.
Finally, after walking for as long as he dared, he found the perfect spot.
This place was isolated, it was far from any trail that he could see, and the
small valley and thick vegetation should absorb most of the noise that he
planned to make.
He found a little clearing in a thick bramble of wood, settled his mind,
listened once more just to be sure he was all alone, and he began to whine
like a spoiled child.
“Please, I need my father to get the salt he needs.”
The young man looked around with a worried expression. He could not
bring himself to scream and whine as loudly as the child in the market. He
had made sure to walk as deep as he dared, but he had to try all and allow
everything to pour out of him naturally. He needed to give this final prayer
everything he had.
“I need my father to get the salt that he needs, help me please oh dreaming
god!”
He stopped and listened with every fiber of his being, and he could not
hear even a rustle. So, he continued a little more boldly, a little more loudly,
“I need my father to get that salt, if we do not have it, we may not have
enough coin to survive the coming winter. Please! Please! Please!”
At that moment the young man realized why the creation of a kind of
anthropomorphic God was so important. The God above sitting on a throne
was like the poor mother in the market. Having such an image helped with
focus, it was to that version of the dreaming god that he had to plead to.
Emboldened by the fact that no one was able to hear him this far into the
forest, he finally let go somehow, it was like a part of him just clicked off,
and he fully opened emotionally and wholeheartedly.
“I need that salt! Give it to me now! Please! I need it! I need it! Please do
not let me starve. I really want this, I want this now, give it to me now!”
And he continued like this, like the whine from the child in the market he
began to beg and plead to the dreaming god. Before long it was like the
floodgate of emotion that he had been holding back for so long, for his entire
life, finally let loose completely. Like the child in the market this begging and
whining turned into a kind of singsong, and he continued.
“I beg you please! I desire this! This is what I desire! Nooooooooooooow!
Listen to me Secret King, I need your help now, I need this now, give it to me
now! This is what I need. Give me the salt! The salt! The salt! Only the salt!
Oh, the salt!”
The young man continued like this, baying and begging in singsong as the
emotion poured out of him. There was finally a point where the release was
so complete that the young man fell to his knees in the wood completely
exhausted.
He did not know how long it had been, how long he had lain there in an
exhausted heap. But the sun seemed lower in the sky and the wood seemed
darker and somehow more ominous. He listened again to try to determine if
there was anyone around, wondering if his loud whining and singsong had
attracted the attention of some passerby. He heard nothing and was relieved,
but upon finishing this little experiment, he quickly realized that he needed to
figure out a different way. An experiment like this cannot easily be
replicated.
He stood on shaky legs, having exhausted himself completely in his
emotional appeal to the Secret King. He walked slowly through tall trees and
deep brush, grateful for his fine shoes. He walked until he was close to the
edge of the wood. Near the edge of the forest, he saw two men and his
instincts instantly told him that he should hide. The young man stopped and
hid behind some bushes until the men walked by, and then once the men were
a long way off, the young man came out of the bushes, and continued
walking until he cleared the wood. He finally walked through the little ravine
that he used to enter the forest earlier and soon enough he was at the edge of
the village and close to his home.
He did not know what to feel. All he knew was that the tension and the
anxiety that he had felt about his father, surviving the winter, salt, it all had
vanished for the most part; he was emotionally exhausted. He thought that at
the very least this method of prayer had helped to alleviate some of his
mental distress. But he was still not sure if it would help in any way with the
actual problem. Could such words, such emotions, really change reality? Was
transmutation possible?
All he really knew was that he could not repeat such an experiment. The
walk was too dangerous, and he had made far too much noise to get away
with it in the long run.

Lessons
Will becomes intent when the dreaming god, the Secret King, begins to
dream what you consciously willed. If the will was persistent and it was felt
with great intensity, then in time this will might be so strong that even the
dreaming god might feel the ripples of it. When the dreaming god feels these
ripples, he might begin to dream what you were willing, the moment that this
happens, will turns into intent.

U
Lucidity is incredibly important for Janos’ development. He learned that it
was very easy to forget himself, like he was almost predisposed to forget
himself and fall deeply into unconscious action. Lucidity meant self-
remembering, and it was a challenge that was to become one of the greatest
trials of his life.

U
It was possible to desire and plead like a spoiled child to control the dreaming
god. The young man discovered the true face of will when it was expressed
naturally, without guilt, without any of the camouflage and masquerade that
adults placed upon it, and such a discovery was staggering and life-changing
for him.
 6
Becoming the Walking Crazy
Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet
settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence
— whether much that is glorious — whether all that is
profound — does not spring from disease of thought —
from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general
intellect. They who dream by day are cognizant of many
things which escape those who dream only by night.
― EDGAR ALLAN POE

THE YOUNG MAN WAITED ATTENTIVELY, and for a few days nothing
seemed to happen. But after the fourth day his father came into the house
excited, with a big smile on his face.
The young man had been working in the back cutting raw cabbage into
fine strips, layering them inside large barrels and then adding rough salt and
cheap sour white wine to the mixture.
The chore was an easy one all things considered. The hardest part was
dicing the cabbage just right and making sure to remove the bad parts. Being
poor, they were never able to get the best quality cabbage, so it became a fine
art to know just how far to push it in removing the rotten and the unworkable
parts. The reason why they were still in business even though they were a
small, poor operation, was the fact that his father insisted on making sure that
they made the best quality product possible.
That was the biggest issue with their product, the quality of the
ingredients. They always had to make do with the cheapest things available.
Usually, the cabbage that they were able to acquire was somewhat rotten and
old, with many weak and discolored leaves. They had to know how to cut it
just right and make sure that they did not produce any sour cabbage that was
unpleasant to the eye. It was also very difficult for them to get quality sour
wine or brine. To overcome these difficulties, they had become creative in
how they mixed different kinds of cheap wine and vinegar. In the end, it
became a matter of recipe, and most people seemed to enjoy the final
product.
But the hardest thing for them to get was the salt, which they often had to
buy from out-of-town vendors. For that reason, his father would most often
dedicate most of his working day trying to find and trade for all the
ingredients that they needed. This meant that the young man spent most of
the time at home working on the product itself.
“What is it?” Janos asked, his attention momentarily sidetracked from his
chores.
In many ways, it all came down to his father. Depending on how much
and what he was able to get, they would either eat well or hardly eat anything
at all. Sour cabbage was their number one trading commodity and they used
it to pay for everything from food to medicine. But if there was one thing that
could make or break their year, it was salt.
Their past year had been a good one, so they had a little bit of coin, but
not much. Often, they had to settle for the worst product available. This
meant his father would spend a great deal of time scrounging around for
whatever he could trade or buy at the lowest prices possible. But it was the
salt that was the hardest to get, and even though it could be stored for a long
period of time, the amount of salt that his father was able to scrounge at any
one time was minuscule compared to their actual needs.
“I just got lucky boy; God looked down upon us this day for sure!”
They could pay, but they could not pay much and so it was a battle to get
the amount of salt that they needed. Often his father would resort to getting
salt that was meant for livestock.
His father always made sure that they had the best possible ingredients.
He worried about every batch, making sure that there were never any worms
or other impurities. All this scrounging and constant worry had taken a lot out
of his father, and he looked tired most of the time. If he thought about it,
Janos found it difficult to remember a time when his father did not have that
tired look in his eyes. The last time he had ever seen his father laugh out loud
was when his mother had been alive. Now the young man worried about his
father, and in a slow way, like an old toad roasting in the summer sun, the
young man was coming to terms with the fact that his father would most
likely die a difficult death just like his sister and mother. His father would
most likely die working. This was the fate of people like them, to struggle for
every little thing and still have hardly anything at all.
The young man used the power of his increasing focus to turn his attention
away from such difficult thoughts.
“What happened?” Janos finally asked turning his attention away from his
chores.
“I just ran into a trader, a man in charge of a large ship that has just come
up from the countries to the south. He brought a great deal of rock salt that he
has been trading and selling as he works his way across the countryside. He
has been able to sell and trade off most of it, but he has some left, and is now
trying to sell off his last bits before he returns to the port city. Yes, some of it
looks more like hard rock than salt, but with a little work on our part, we
might be able to get all that we need for the year just from him!”
“And how much does the man want for all of it?” the young man asked
with a doubtful expression. His father could get excited at times; he was a bit
of a dreamer and that would make him careless and impulsive. It was often
his mother who had been the most perceptive, and she had become skilled at
ensuring that her husband's overly optimistic views did not lead them into
unnecessary difficulties.
“We are going to make a trade. He needs some extra sour cabbage for the
long trip. That one batch that we had tried, with the old pine needle tea; do
you remember that experiment?”
“Yes, I remember. That was not a success, and we still have a barrel full
of that mess.”
“I told him how the pine needle tea was used around here to help with the
wasting disease, the scurvy, and after some consultation with the local
apothecaries, he finally got around to believing that it did indeed work. I told
him how we had added the tea to the one batch to experiment with taste and
acidity. We still have the barrel you said?”
“Yes, I haven’t dumped it out, but I was thinking about doing it since we
will need the barrel to start a new batch. The taste in the end was awful, and
sour cabbage with bitter tea tastes nothing like sour wine and salt…it’s just a
bland mess.”
“Well thank God in heaven you didn’t! That was God looking out for us
once again. We will need to take it in so that he can verify that it is all there
as we say. But he plans to take it all and give it to the ship’s crew so that they
can stay at sea longer. Sour cabbage is good for wasting disease, but sour
cabbage with the tea is truly special.”
 “Why doesn’t he just make his own batch of bitter pine needle tea?”
“He doesn’t have time and he is not willing to pay to have apothecaries
make a large batch for him for some huge sum. I told him that we had it
ready-made, that he could keep the container so that it would be sealed tight
until he needed it.”
“But what about the barrel? We will need another barrel.”
“The barrel is easy enough to get, we might even be able to trade for one
of his old barrels if we get lucky.”
“This is very good news!” Janos said, a smile spreading across his face.
“Maybe in the future we can make this odd concoction again and we
might even be able to charge a little more for this new ‘healing brew’.
Adding ‘the healing brew’ to our menu could be our ticket out of this old
rickety place.”
“Let us get through this father, see what the man says and make sure that
he does not cheat us. If it works out, it is an interesting angle for us for the
future.”
With that, his father crossed the room with a skip in his step to check on
the barrel, and Janos smiled. They had called this their experimental barrel
because they had been trying to figure out new ways to make do with less
sour wine. They had figured that perhaps the acidity of the pine needle tea
might help with taste. In the end all they were left with was a bland tasting
product that they were sure nobody would be interested in.
“I promised him the whole barrel,” his father yelled from the back room,
“he says that with it, he should be able to stay at sea for perhaps an extra
month or two. We got lucky, my son. Or should I say, there is no luck! It was
God above that helped us this day, his will. It was your mother looking down
on us and your sister. They look after us as does the great Father above.”
“Whatever you say. I just hope that we can get more wine for the season.”
“All we must do is trust in God above my son. I feel it in my bones that
this is a turn for us!”
And with that his father ran out of the house with a glint in his eye that
Janos had not seen in a long while. Janos could not help but smile, but was
this the result of his prayer? How do you know if a prayer worked? How did
you know if it was your efforts or if it was fate and luck? If the young man
had not said that prayer, would they now have the salt they needed? Could it
not be that this might have happened no matter what?
Was it the prayer or his father’s masterful scrounging? Could it have been
a little of both? He was as lost as ever. And he was also careful and doubtful,
to him doubt seemed like the greatest survival instinct possible…he had so
many questions to ask the shadowed man.
In the weeks that followed, his father was indeed able to make the trade
and got a huge amount of rock salt, sacks of it, along with a new barrel. And
as his father had mentioned, some of the salt was unusable. But together they
had pounded and worked at the rock, taking out as much soft salt as they
could, and after weeks of hard work, they had been able to extract all the salt
they needed for the year and then some.
His father was a good man, diligent, and would never sell anything that
would harm someone else. Because of this, they worked on the salt for days
on end until it was as fine as dust. They scrutinized the rock for the proper
clarity and color. They used gentle blows in order to only take the softer salt
from the rock itself. From there, they pounded into finer salt anything they
managed to pass through sieves. Always taking care to avoid over-pounding;
they only wanted the salt, not the rock reduced to dust.
The young man could hear his father's snores throughout the night as he
slept soundly, and somehow that noise allowed Janos to relax for a while and
get some much-needed rest himself.

T
In the months to come, the young man contemplated and worked on the
nature of prayer. In the temple of his mind, he contemplated transmutation
and what the shadowed man had said. And just like before, as he plumbed
deeper and deeper into the depths of his mind, he was awed by the fact that
he was able to travel across unbelievably odd places, vast spaces, without
physically moving. At times he could feel the Spirit that moves through all
things. Interestingly, the Spirit was both within the very depths of his inner
temple, as deep as he could go, and it was also in the physical world all
around him. During these fleeting moments when he could feel and see the
Spirit clearly, he could almost sense how it created the material world.
It was during these transformative moments that Janos began to remember
long forgotten exchanges with the shadowed man, and this caused a great
deal of anxiety in him. He felt great apprehension because these were
memories of conversations that his normal self insisted never happened.
Where were these impossible memories coming from?
 And perhaps the worst part of all of this was that his idea of past and
present seemed to be in question. These forgotten exchanges with the
shadowed man were so vivid that at times it felt like he was in two places at
once. When he recalled these impossible memories, it was as if he was back
there with his dark companion, sitting inside some lonely shadow along the
main street of the village. But he was here now, he touched the old table in
front of him to make sure that this moment was real. So how could he be in
both places at the same time? Why did it feel like he was in both places at the
same time?
This odd mixing of past and present, became so very real for him that
whenever this happened, he had to resurface from whatever contemplation he
was in like a deep-sea diver desperate for breath. Sometimes it was difficult
to wake up from such profound contemplation, but he pushed himself and
when he was finally able to open his eyes, he would shiver a little and touch
his hands, touch the table in front of him, just to make sure that he was back
in the normal world. This fear of losing all track of time and reality stopped
him from practicing contemplation for a while. He was sure that if he kept
going down these roads in his mind, he would go mad. And then, a horrible
idea would pop into his head, what if he was insane, had been insane all
along. What if there came a time when he was no longer able to wake up
from his contemplations…from total insanity?
The pattern of these non-ordinary memories was always the same, Janos
would be deep within the temple of his mind exploring some random reality
when all of a sudden he would remember that the shadowed man had said
something. But for the life of him, he could not remember ever having had
this conversation in real life. Sometimes these conversations were so long
that they felt like they had lasted for days, and yet if the young man thought
back to those times, he could not remember these exchanges with the
shadowed man or account for the time that such conversations would require.
Each occasion that he had met the shadowed man he could only remember
being with him for perhaps hours at most, certainly not days. So where did all
this extra information come from? Was he making all of it up? Was he going
crazy? When he sat on the side of the street, was he sitting there just
jabbering away to himself, drooling perhaps, talking to some invisible demon
that only he could see?
He could imagine himself sitting there babbling, talking to no one. The
people of the main street walking by, staring down at him, pitying him, and
repulsed by him at the same time. If nothing else, thoughts like this would
drive him to drooling on the street, so he decided to focus on other things. If
he was going insane, the upside was that he felt happier, so he decided to
focus his attention back to prayer. In the end he decided that losing a little bit
of his sanity was worth it, at the very least he would be a very happy lunatic.

T
After a few days’ time Janos was able to return to his contemplations. If this
was insanity then so be it, at the very least he now had a modicum of power,
he had his inner temple and within it he had been able to break the walls that
bound him to a hellish material existence. If the shadowed man was the devil,
then that devil’s hell was better than this infernal reality.
At that moment he happily became the ‘walking crazy’: those who are
conscious of the fact that they have lost their sanity, and that in losing their
sanity, they have reached a higher level of existence. And as the walking
crazy, the young man closed his eyes and fell deeply within, finding there not
darkness but other worlds, complete other spaces where he was free from all
physical pain and struggle. There the young man contemplated and came up
with different techniques and ideas to refine his style of prayer as his personal
devil had advised. He knew that he could not go back to the forest, it was too
dangerous, so he focused his attention on trying to develop techniques that
did not entail him screaming out loud like a spoiled child.
As the days progressed, he tried many different techniques, but everything
that he tried did not work half as well as his all-out pleading prayer in the
forest. He tried using repetitive phrases again. He also tried a whispered
version of the singsong and the pleading that he had done in the forest, none
of it worked very well. At that moment he remembered another conversation
with the shadowed man that he knew could not have happened, that he did
not remember ever having had, and yet…
“You are just too dramatic my friend. There is no need to get so worked
up and frustrated. Quite simply, desire is action. Do you understand? Desire
is action!” The young man felt a familiar chill work its way up his spine.
This was one of those exchanges with the shadowed man that he now
accepted as an instance lost within the folds of time. In this particular non-
ordinary memory, he remembered the shadowed man talking to him about
many things. He had said that people fought the very essence of themselves,
the natural person within themselves that would, if left to its own devices,
allow them to get and do whatever they needed. He had said that the natural
person desired, and in that free flow of desire, the natural person could in a
very spontaneous way work with the Secret King and the Spirit. The plight of
humanity was not a kind of evolution toward some superior hyper rational
existence, but a balanced and conscious return into a more spontaneous and
intuitive reality.
The shadowed man had also spoken about the unconscious. He had said
that we were all either conscious or unconscious. He had specified in a
detailed way, giving explanations for what we controlled consciously and
what we did not. He started by saying that feeling hungry was unconscious
but when we ate and what we ate, that could be conscious. He went through a
whole range of things like that, from blinking to breathing, to the beating of
the heart. When the shadowed man had finished, the young man had a basic
idea of what he meant by conscious and unconscious doing.
“When you fall asleep, or when you are not paying attention, do you stop
breathing?”
“No of course not,” replied the young man with a look of dismay on his
face.
“Then who keeps you breathing, is it the angels? You do not believe in
God or the angels, so who is it or what is it that keeps you breathing?”
“I do not know. I have not thought about it. My life is hard enough I don’t
have time to think of such things”.
“Well young man, it will now be your duty to make time in your life to
contemplate these things, and to follow the natural progression of your
beliefs. It is now your duty to question the nature of your beliefs and what
those beliefs lead you to do both consciously and unconsciously.”
“And why would I need to do that? The great benefit of being a
nonbeliever is not wasting time and energy on things that do not seem to
matter. In the end whether I believe in God or whether I believe in angels that
allow me to breathe makes no difference to me. The horrors of my life are
still there whether I believe in such things or not.”
“As usual you are wrong,” said the shadowed man as the young man
flushed with anger. “The only power that we have, and the only undertaking
that will make any sense to you, is the ability to transmute one thing into
another thing.”
“Why do you say that? And how does this relate to God and the angels?”
 “This is why contemplation is so important, and this is why you must
begin to understand the causality of things, the direction and the cause of
things that bring about everything in your life. Your beliefs are the cause of
all things, being that it is those beliefs that cause you to think certain things
and therefore create those things in your life. In almost all cases, beliefs are
assumptions that you make about reality, and these core assumptions are so
powerful, that in time they create either barriers or bridges in your life.”
The young man looked at his mentor in surprise as the shadowed man
continued, “It is easy to feel self-empowered when you can say that you
believe in nothing, that the only thing that you believe in is what you can
perceive with your physical senses. But if you made just a small effort and
paid attention to what you are doing, then you would realize that this is in and
of itself a belief, an assumption; just one belief of many possible, for you or
for anyone.”
The shadowed man took a breath, then he continued, “I admire your
efforts, and I can understand why it would be easier to go along with these
beliefs, they make sense because you have only used your physical senses
until I came along. But hopefully I have shown you that there is more to
reality than just the physical senses, it is my hope that your experiences have
shown you that there are other things that can be perceived, such as the Spirit
that moves through all things.
What I am trying to say is that you should not close yourself off to other
possibilities because if you do you become rigid, you become a skeptical
zealot. A skeptical zealot believes that everything is outside of them, that all
the rules of reality come from an outside source. They believe this because all
they have is their physical senses. A person is the total sum of their beliefs,
and to become stuck in one rigid assumption is a sad way to live.
To not become a zealot, you must be open to the possibility of something
more, you must at least be willing to accept the possibility that something
more could exist. A zealot is someone who believes without question the
assumptions that they have made about reality, they are people stuck in a
certain tunnel of perception, a reality tunnel, that they are not willing to look
outside of.”
Janos became stiff, turned to look at the shadow beside him and said,
“How am I a zealot? I am one of the few people I know who does not believe
in all the superstitious idiocy all around me.”
Without skipping a beat, the shadowed man replied, “You possess a
fervent devotion towards your convictions because you hold them to be
indisputable truths without scrutinizing them with an unbiased perspective.
You believe yourself to be open-minded, but in reality, you fail to examine
the origins of these beliefs that you so staunchly uphold. You assume that
everything is outside of you, that there are rules that control the world and
that all these rules come from a physical source that is undeniable. You
believe utterly in an exterior authority: your physical senses. The only
difference between you and the superstitious fools all around you is the
nature of your assumptions. You think that a rational stance makes you
smarter, more open minded, but you are no better than anyone else in your
life, you and all the people you know are unconscious fools who have never
taken the time to question your assumptions.”
The young man was instantly furious. He could somehow hear the grin
spread across the shadowed man’s face like some horrendous fissure across
the bowels of hell. His anger grew so much that it seemed to hit a boiling
point and he thought he was about to blow. And then, the voice of the
shadowed man jarred him back to the moment and to a semblance of
sobriety, “You are so dramatic. You are like one of those actors that performs
on the main square, crying and baying and having tantrums, anything to get
an applause from the audience.”
The young man was about to stand up to leave, “You know what, forget
you! You are the devil!”
The shadowed man put his hand on the young man’s shoulder and the
young man felt like a ton of rocks had been placed on top of him. He could
not move, and he sat back down, stunned.
“Our lives are the result of several underlying assumptions; this is the
power and the nature of beliefs. If we never question those original
assumptions, then we could spend an entire lifetime completely closed off
from certain things while believing that the illusions that we create because of
those beliefs are utterly real. You do not believe in God. This is an odd belief
for someone living in this period.”
The young man was able to move again, his indignant air was back in full
force, he turned and spoke, “Don’t tell me what I believe!” With that burst of
defiance Janos settled back down to the ground beside his companion
comfortably cocooned within the darkness. The young man knew perfectly
well that the lesson would only end when the shadowed man was done. Then
in a sudden realization, like a bubbling annoyance deep within him, he asked
“What are you talking about….’in this period’? And why do you always use
the phrase, ‘in time’?”
“Time is not what you think it is.”
“How do you know what I think of time?”
Unperturbed, the shadowed man replied, “If you knew the true nature of
time then you would not be caged by physicality. Time is what sets us free. I
do believe that you are making progress and for that I am happy, but there is
still so much to understand and to question. But I am getting ahead of myself,
and at this moment ‘in time’ I am trying to have you question the nature of
your own assumptions; your personal beliefs.”
“What do you mean?”
“You say that you do not believe in God, is this correct?”
“Yes.”
“Then if you do not believe in God, do you believe in angels?”
Janos thought for a moment then spoke, “Having felt and seen a little of
the Spirit that moves through all things, I am willing to consider the
possibility that there is more to this world than I might imagine, or have
imagined up till now, but quite simply, I suppose I do not believe in angels.”
“Then answering the question as to what keeps you breathing when you
do not pay attention is a question worth asking, is it not?”
“I suppose. I have heard some men in the streets talk about the natural
sciences. They say that men are beginning to understand the way of the world
using new methods and new philosophical models. They say that the average
superstitious fool on the streets is ignorant and that there is no need for angels
or demons or the like to explain the riddles of the world. They say that the
natural sciences can explain many of those things that are attributed to
angels.”
The shadowed man turned his face to look at the young man, and this
somehow gave the young man a chill. For a moment the young man thought
that the shadowed man was about to hit him, but instead in a thrilled voice
the shadowed man continued, “This is wonderful. Those sciences that you
speak of are perfectly suited for the task at hand. The emerging field of
natural sciences is founded upon tenets that have endured throughout the
ages. These new guiding scientific principles propose that profound
understanding may be attained by investigating interconnected elements, and
that a discernible order exists within our world, one governed by a set of
‘supposedly’ external laws that can be diligently scrutinized and quantified.”
 Wearing an invisible smile, the shadowed man continued, “I am very
proud of the fact that you have been able to overcome the weight of the
general beliefs of the time. It is a powerful thing to be able to forsake the
beliefs of others and consciously decide to believe something altogether
different yourself. But what I am trying to tell you is that if you do not
continue to question those beliefs as the power of your perceptions grow, you
will be stuck. You will be stuck because you will begin to unconsciously
accept someone else’s authority instead of your own. In this case, if you are
to believe these laws of natural science unquestioningly, then you will accept
in a rather unconscious way the supposed fact that it is only external and
physical forces that control reality. Do you understand?”
The young man thought for a while, and then finally replied, “I think I do.
If a person relies too much on authority outside of themselves, it is very easy
to lose yourself in that routine. That routine ‘in time’ becomes unconscious
and those unconscious beliefs become invisible to the self. These
unconscious beliefs then create bridges to a certain kind of understanding, but
they also block you from perceiving other possibilities. If that external
authority and those unconscious beliefs are never examined, then we can
become imprisoned within cages that were created by others.”
“Perfect! You can surprise me at times!”
The young man smiled, “Do you know about the natural sciences?”
This time it was the shadowed man who thought for a while before he
finally replied, “I know about a great many things. But the general nature of
these new natural sciences is problematic for me, and I can see a future time
when one form of blind worship will be replaced by another.”
“Do you mean that in a future time people will worship science in the
same way that they now worship God?”
“Yes, that is exactly what I mean.”
The young man pondered the shadowed man’s words.
As if trying to keep pace with the general rhythm of this new angle of
conversation, the shadowed man quickly retorted, “I personally prefer a
different kind of science, and an older term.”
“And what term is that?”
“I prefer logic.”
“What is logic?”
The shadowed man took a breath, then spoke, “That is a complex question
but for now let us say that logic is the ability to understand and then work
with cause and effect. In that sense then logic is the science of working with
our perceptions and the assumptions that we make in the face of those
perceptions. In trying to discover the cause of things, we are always led to
core principles. At first logic may be used to help us understand our physical
perceptions, but in time as the power of our perceptions grow, we can use
logic to help us understand and bring a semblance of order to the great chaos
of observations that are possible to us when we begin to use our inner
senses[1].
Logic, mind science, or whatever other thing you want to call it, tells us
that it is incredibly important to make sure that our original assumptions are
correct, or as correct and sober as we can make them. If this kind of mind
science is done properly, then those original assumptions that we have about
every single bit of our present reality must be scrutinized with every power
available to the logician. In this science this is called internal reflection,
contemplation, and experimentation.”
The shadowed man noticed that the young man needed further
clarification, so he continued, “Experimentation is a word to describe trial
and error. There is much nuance to the nature of experimentation, but for now
let us say that it is a verification of assumption. You, my friend, must in that
sense become a logician, a scientist of sorts, a scientist of the mind, and a
scientist of transmutation.”
“How do I become a scientist of transmutation?”
“Well, you begin by understanding that there is an order to things,
something you could call causation. Causation is the line from one
assumption to the next, from one perception to the next, from one thing to the
next, from one cause to a final effect. Beliefs, and especially core beliefs
(core assumptions), are the feet of a framework, a platform, which takes us
higher and higher, one assumption after another, until we give meaning to all
reality. If that core assumption is based on limited thinking, then it can
prevent us from seeing certain things, doing certain things, and inversely if it
is more open and capable, that core assumption can allow us to see the
unseen, or do the impossible.”
The young man was astonished by this revelation, and as connections
were made in his mind, he finally replied, “And this is why you want me to
tell you if I believe in angels?”
“Yes, exactly! I am trying to establish original assumptions and show you
how those assumptions, if they are not examined, can create a life of
ignorance and powerlessness.”
“No, I do not believe in angels.”
“Do you believe in natural science?”
The young man pondered this with all seriousness and finally answered,
“Yes, I might, I think that I believe in such a science. But how does this relate
to the unconscious?”
“Whether you believe in religion or natural sciences, you are believing
something in faith. What I mean by this is that you are believing something
because you are trusting a higher authority, whether that is a religious figure,
a learned individual, a religious book, or some highly controversial scientific
manuscript.”
“That I understand,” said the young man with a smile, “and it is something
I have never liked. I rebel against things because of my desire to find my own
truth instead of trying to rely on others to tell me what the truth is.”
“Yes, this is your great strength and the power of that focus, directed
towards finding your own truth, is part of the reason why I have been able to
find you. But I must give you some bad news, and that is that for a little while
you are going to be stuck.”
“What do you mean by this?” said the young man, suddenly worried.
“What I mean is that right now I am just another authority figure to you,
trying to tell you some truth that you will have to believe because of faith in
my authority. It is my hope that for a little while you believe my assumptions
when I tell you that what controls your breathing when you are sleeping is the
unconscious.”
“So, you are my new authority figure?”
The shadowed man turned his head up to the skies and said, “This is a
terrible plight I know, but in order to offset this, I am now ordering you to do
your best to prove me wrong in whatever I say. Let us say that the only true
understanding between us is that at every moment you try everything possible
to prove me wrong, that you assume that I am wrong to some degree until
you can discover your own truth through your own direct perceptions.”
Excited by this new challenge, Janos replied, “How can I do that? How is
that possible?”
“Well, I have told you about the Spirit, about how it moves through all
things and how it is a force that can both guide us and help us to realize
incredible potential. You were doubtful but through your own inner work you
were finally able to see and feel the way of the Spirit on your own, through
your own direct actions and perception.”
Janos smiled, “But maybe you have brainwashed me, you have dazzled
me with some kind of dark magic.”
“Then you must try to break this dark magic and perceive clearly for
yourself. Use my words as a challenge, prove to me just how wrong I am. In
the end you must find everything on your own, and the moment that you
prove me right or wrong in whatever way, is to me a most perfect day.”
“And how do I actually do that?” Janos pressed.
“Your inner senses, your contemplations, and eventually through your
growing power in the physical world.”
The young man beamed. He liked this idea, he wanted to be free, and this
felt like freedom to him. Doubt, he had realized a long time ago, was an
incredibly powerful survival tool. He finally replied, “Alright, that makes
sense, so for the time being I should pursue the nature of unconscious
behavior by trying to prove to you and to myself whether this unconscious is
real or not.” Then with a sudden thought Janos asked one more question, “Do
the natural sciences say anything about the unconscious?”
“According to the natural sciences and just briefly touching on their
general belief system about reality, a person might come to the conclusion
that perhaps there is no soul, there are no angels, no God perhaps, and the
only reason why you breathe when you are not paying attention is because of
some kind of natural biology.”
“Biology?”
It was the shadowed man’s turn to smile, “In the future perhaps, you
might have access to some books on the subject and you can study biology on
your own…you can read?”
“Yes, I can read, my father taught me.”
“Good. There is a wealth of information out there in books of all kinds,
and perhaps you might find great delight in discovering that knowledge. But
for now, let us say that natural science in its current state has very little notion
of how unconscious functioning happens, and so it is my hope that you will
assume that the unconscious is real no matter what such sources might say.
Pursue your own research within the temple of your mind with the
‘assumption’ that the unconscious might be a functional unit within all
human reality. Within your temple try to prove me right or wrong, and I will
look forward to what you discover and any debates that we might have on the
subject.”
 “Is the unconscious the Spirit?”
The shadowed man turned to look back at the young man, “In a certain
sense you could say that the unconscious is the Spirit, and yet it is not.”
The young man made a questioning frown as his dark companion
continued, “Quite literally words fail me at this point, and I will leave it to
you to pursue your own exploration within the temple of your mind. There, I
want you to explore the depths of this concept of unconscious and how it
intermingles and creates, or is part of creation, transmutation, and the Spirit.
Deep within the temple of your mind explore the connection between the
unconscious and the Spirit. You must contemplate creation; you must
carefully examine the line between the un-manifest and the manifested.
Moreover, you must begin to explore the relation between awake and asleep.
This is an incredible journey that will take you very far, and it is a journey
that you must pursue on your own. Perhaps in the future there will be things
that you will discover and share with me that I did not know, and I look
forward to that time. This is our way.”
The young man remembered that long conversation with the shadowed
man. Where that memory came from, when it had happened, and whether it
happened at all, the young man could not say. But from that day he began to
contemplate the unconscious, the Spirit that moves through all things, and the
discipline of how certain things were manifest and were not…even when he
was not paying attention to them.
This became the focus of his contemplations for months. Since his inner
work had now shifted focus, he felt like he was getting a little break from the
very frustrating puzzle of prayer and transmutation.
During this time, he learned to delve deeper into his mind. As his powers
grew, he found that he could go further and stay awake (lucid) for longer
periods. He began to glimpse the subtle nature of wakefulness and the
incredible viscosity of dreams. He noticed that there were times when he was
awake and himself, and other times when that part seemed to turn off
somehow and he became unconscious. It was by studying the transition
between lucidity and unconsciousness that he began to make a connection
between all that his dark mentor had talked about in that non-ordinary
memory that he had recalled.
As his power to focus grew and as his desire to know hurled him deeper
and deeper into strange new worlds within, he noticed an odd pattern. There
was no way that he could say it in words, no way that he could explain
exactly how, but for some reason there seemed to be a direct link between the
un-manifest and the manifested, and wakefulness and sleep.
There were so many questions! The young man doubted that he could ever
answer all those questions without having another meeting with the
shadowed man. Seeing the shadowed man again became such a deep desire
within him that he could no longer contemplate in the temple of his mind
anymore. He had to find the shadowed man!

Lessons
He should always doubt all dogmatic knowledge no matter where it comes
from. He learned that dogmatic knowledge meant knowledge that was gained
only through the five physical senses and only through the authorities, the
rulers, and the hierarchical system that governed the material world. All true
knowledge needed to come from direct personal perception and the young
man needed to doubt even what the shadowed man said. From that day on his
task was to try to disprove the shadowed man, if possible. To use the words
of the shadowed man as a guide but to only accept his own personal truth in
all things.

U
Personal truth meant those things that he was able to perceive and test for
himself in his own doing, either physically or in the temple of his mind.

[1] For an explanation of the inner senses, see Lessons at the end of Chapter
4.
 7
Dream Energy and Natural Desire
I love to dream, but I never try to dream and think at the
same time.
― H.P. LOVECRAFT

IT HAD BECOME A REGULAR RITUAL for him for about a week now.
He would wait until the fall of the sun when all of his chores and work were
done, and no matter how tired he was, no matter how much his hands hurt
and his back ached, he would leave his flimsy little home at the edge of the
village and walk the labyrinthine maze of dingy and dirty alleys that led
eventually to the main street of the village.
There he would walk up and down that main street, using every ounce of
focus that he could muster to try to feel the Spirit. And every time that he had
tried, he had failed. Failure meant that he would have some terrible
experience on his walk, either being called names by the locals of the village
or he would have to hide from some violent thug.
But he persisted past the pain because he knew that he needed to use the
Spirit to find the shadowed man. And that need within him seemed to
somehow rearrange something in his mind, and he found it easier and easier
to focus once again upon his inner reality. It was like his desire to see the
shadowed man had made enough of a ripple to disturb the dreams of the
Secret King. It was like a part of him, a part that he was not conscious of,
somehow began to arrange the structure of the contemplations in his mind
palace in some impossible to define way. This new mental arrangement made
it easier for him to focus and to understand exactly what he needed to do to
find his dark companion once again. Desire honed his focus, narrowed it, and
amplified his one desperate need. All that he could contemplate now was how
to find the shadowed man.
He spent many weeks like that, lost deep within the temple of his mind
once again. New discoveries were made; new ideas seemed to sprout and
grow deep within him. These ideas would become concrete things in his
temple, and they would lay the foundation and open roads to new directions.
These new directions showed him the connections that the shadowed man
had spoken of between the Spirit, the un-manifest, the manifested, and the
workings of the unconscious. He finally realized that to be able to find the
shadowed man again, he needed to solve the riddle of the unconscious!
After some struggle, he was able to see, to feel, to perceive in some
impossible to define way, the connection between the part of him that kept
him breathing when he was not paying attention and the Spirit that flowed
through all things. When he looked deep into this, he could with great focus
and in fleeting glimpses, see how the Spirit could go from nebulous clouds of
‘aether’ and into what he perceived to be physical matter. Deep within those
visions, so deep that it was often hard to remember all that he had
experienced once he regained a little more conscious lucidity, he was able to
see the assembling and the formation of those things in between aether and
physical matter. He could see how the nebulous aether might even take
the form of angels, at other times demons, sometimes odd and
multidimensional construction elves that went about creating reality, and
at times even the many gods of ancient pantheons.
Within the vaulted chambers of his mind, he was able to catch glimpses,
mere glimpses, of nebulous clouds of power as they intermingled and created
the variety of possibility in between this and that. And upon waking from
such transcendental and distant journeys that allowed him to connect with his
unconscious, he would often be surprised by the fact that he had tears rolling
down his cheeks.
The young man had begun to delve into the true essence of reality, and in
doing so he was beginning to discover the connection between all things, and
the transmutation of things. Janos’ father would sometimes notice these
emotions flowing from his son as he sat motionless, contemplating. A part of
him rejoiced as these emotions poured from his beloved son and another part
of him was afraid because he knew that his son was special. A person
changed after being touched by God, and he feared losing his son, he feared
losing his last remaining relative on this earth. He feared that his son would
leave him and join a monastery or join some other religious order in the
pursuit of greater worship. Thinking these thoughts, he felt ashamed because
he knew that he was a mere man, and he could not and should not stand
before the will of God.
 Finally, one day, after months of inner work and contemplation, the young
man was able to understand a little of the connection between all things, and
in doing so he was able to comprehend how in that intermingling between
this and that, between that which was and that which was not, there was also
a connection between the conscious and the unconscious.
To be more precise the young man had discovered a correlation between
being awake and being asleep. To define that correlation was almost
impossible, for him it was merely a knowing, but he could give such a
discovery a kind of causal structure. For the young man the connection
between the un-manifest and the manifested, between the conscious and the
unconscious, was a surge of a particular kind of energy. This was an energy
that he felt swelling within himself every time he went so deep within the
temple of his mind that he feared that he would fall asleep. In the simplest of
terms, he could call it sleep energy, which was like a wave of energy that
coursed through him, numbing him, numbing his brain and his thoughts, and
in that way closing the door to physicality, but opening a new door into the
realm of sleep and dreaming.
He had felt this energy throughout his life, he imagined that everyone felt
such a surge of energy just like he did, and most people referred to it as
drowsiness, as feeling tired. But now he understood the full power of that
energy!
To the average person it was the sensation that someone felt every time
that they were bored or sleepy, it was that surge of numbing and tingling that
made you want to lie down and sleep. Such a simple thing, and yet such a
powerful and important thing.
It took him a long time to feel drowsiness as energy. But with focus and a
keen desire to understand, he was able to feel that sleepy feeling course
through him and with precise and sustained discernment this drowsy feeling
went from being just a typical sensation to being an actual tide of flowing
energy through him. And if that tide was examined at the moment that it was
happening with great focus, it became what it was, which was a surge of
energy flowing through his system. It was like a power coursing slowly
through his entire body, but it was not an electrical burst of energy like
lightning, it was more like a soft energy, like a numbness as soft as a cotton
cloud flowing through him. And it was this soft energy that would loosen his
body, leaden his limbs, stop his thoughts, and eventually open the door that
separated wakefulness from sleep, that separated the aetheric from the
material, that separated the conscious from the unconscious.
After this revelation he began to call this drowsy feeling, sleeping energy.
The most incredible thing about this sleeping energy to him was the fact that
this energy was responsible for turning a part of him off, but at the same time
turning another part of him on. As this wave of soft energy coursed through
him, it would begin to turn off every single part of his body, including his
head, his brain. When this soft energy moved up and around his skull,
entering his brain, he could feel a change deep within him, at the very center
of his skull, somewhere deep behind his eyes. And as this energy grew in
power, this softness would turn off all his conscious thoughts, and then
something else would awaken!
Throughout his entire life he had taken this turning off for granted, never
thinking about it too much aside from the fact that it was on occasion a
desired feeling that would mean he could finally rest, sleep, forget the
troubles of the day. But now this drowsiness had changed for him, it had
become energy, and it had become incredibly precious power. It was the
energy that opened a doorway between worlds, a doorway between two
different parts of himself that were as distinct as night and day.
At first, he could only feel this energy move through him, watch it flow,
watch it turn his physicality off, and eventually, nothing. But through sheer
persistence and unrelenting focus, a kind of focus that had taken him months
and months to be able to perfect, he could now allow his brain to become
numb but maintain another part of himself awake. This blossoming part of
him was like a watcher that watched this magical process of energetic
movement as it happened in real time. Quite literally it felt like the meat of
his brain would go numb, just like the meat of his limbs would lose feeling,
and this numbness would somehow turn off the physical body and the
physical brain.
Turning off the brain meant turning off all his conscious thoughts, all the
persistent thoughts that kept jabbering in his mind endlessly when he was
awake. The great blessing of this sleeping energy was its ability to turn off
that endless jabbering of his mind. And the moment that his everyday
thoughts would stop or at least slow down to some degree, a door opened,
and a new kind of consciousness would awaken. It was this open door that
led to the dreaming world and to the realm of the Spirit that moves through
all things.
After many more weeks of trial and error, he was able to understand that
this sleeping energy could be harnessed. Using the feeling of bringing up this
soft cotton energy within himself, which again took him many weeks to
perfect, he was beginning to learn how to turn off the waking day thoughts,
the endless internal monologue which flooded his mind.
Eventually there came a time when he was finally able to feel the Spirit
that moves through all things clearly once again. By consciously being able
to bring up that sleeping energy into his brain he was able to turn off his
conscious thoughts. As soon as his conscious thoughts slowed down enough,
the Spirit revealed itself to him. This meant that he could now feel the Spirit
as it flowed through all things, and as it flowed, he flowed, weaving this way
and that way following its dictates.
The next evening, after all his work was done for the day, he set out for
the main street. This time he had a weapon, a new power, and with it he
would finally find the shadowed man.

T
Soon after entering the tangle of dark alleys, he used his focus of attention to
bring up the cottony energy into his brain. He instantly felt that pleasant
feeling of drowsy energy and as he relaxed completely and allowed his
endless thoughts and physical tension to disappear, he began to flow and
weave in perfect harmony with all things. After an undefinable amount of
time, because time had no real relevance once his conscious thoughts slowed
down enough, he eventually found himself in a shadowy part of the main
street. He did not remember walking this far, and this was startling,
frightening. For a moment his tension made him lose his connection to the
Spirit, but he caught himself in the same way that he caught himself when he
was falling into unconscious dreams. And in that moment of lucidity, he
pulled himself away from the hard reality of the average world by
consciously relaxing once again and allowing the power of that cottony
energy to connect him to the Spirit.
Scanning the street and the shadows before him, he could now perceive an
odd displacement ahead. There, in a deep pool of ink-black shadow, he could
feel the swirl of the Spirit somehow turning within and into itself in ways that
were impossible to describe consciously. If he had to try in retrospect, he
would say that it was like within the shadowed area there was far greater
depth to space than there was in any other place, like there was a hidden
place, extra space, deep within those shadows. It felt like there was a door, or
a kind of tunnel, which had materialized from the essence of the Spirit. The
shadow before him was as black as the darkest night, darker than all other
things around it. And as he used his inner senses to perceive it, it suddenly
became a true form, like a cube…a room!
And as he walked closer and closer to this coalescing darkness, it felt to
him like he was entering a passageway, walking deeper and deeper into
spaces unknown, into odd spaces that forked and turned in ways that were
not…sane.
“That took you less time than I thought it would actually, but I am quite
glad that you are here,” came a familiar voice from deep within the shadows.
Through a combination of physical perception and the awareness of the
Spirit that moves through all things, the young man was somehow able to
make out a dark figure deep within the recesses of the room of shadows. He
could make out a form, a form of something that could be anything, and as
his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he began to see that the form was an outline
of a man. The man was sitting on the ground, and eventually he was able to
clearly see the outline of the shadowed man as he always had.
“Well don’t just stand there drooling and attracting attention, come sit
with me and tell me about all that you have learned.”
The young man was hesitant at first, still adjusting to all that he had seen,
but eventually he began to walk into the depths of that dark room following
the voice. As he went deeper and deeper, seemingly pushing against the folds
of darkness, he entered what appeared to be an endless corridor. A part of
him, the part that had learned to stay awake deep within the recesses of his
inner temple, began to wonder what a person on the street might see. Would
they see him disappear into shadow? Would they see him take step after step
and not move at all? To him it felt like he was walking forever, endlessly
down a dark and soothing tunnel, but what would an average person see?
He thought of this because he imagined that even though his physical
body might be taking one or two steps, mentally it was like he was walking
endlessly, it was like the small shadow on the side of the street was stretching
out and he was going deeper and deeper into it, walking farther and farther. Is
this what losing your mind felt like?
As if reading his thoughts, the shadowed man spoke, “That is the
interesting thing about words, they can be used to describe our feelings to
ourselves in so many colorful ways. In a certain way therefore, you could say
that you are indeed losing your mind as you come deeper and deeper into the
folds of this little pocket in space and time. In the same way that you travel
deeply into the temple of your mind, in time a person can learn to move in a
more physical way into that kind of inner dimension, and in that manner
travel without moving. You might say, and this is an interesting little
contemplation experiment for you, that what is happening here is that I am
transmuting into semi-physical existence the temple of the mind itself.”
The young man finally reached the end of that long hallway. There, after
finally joining the shadowed man, he sat down beside his dark companion, “I
have discovered so much, but the farther I go, the more questions I have.”
“I will tell you this, you are far luckier than I was, I did not have anyone
to answer my questions. All my discoveries had to be my own, verified on
my own, and that was quite an experience.”
“What do you mean?”
“That is a story for another day. For now, I can say that you have traveled
very far, and I am very proud of you, and because of your fine work you
might say that the Spirit has allowed you to realize your wish. It has
manifested something that was only a desire before, it has helped to
transmute into existence not an object but in this case an event, which is to
finally be able to meet me once again on the street.”
The young man suddenly woke up to all that he had been able to do on
this day and turned to look at all the people walking by. They seemed only a
few feet away physically, and yet this was just the perception of the eyes. If
he used his inner senses, he could perceive the Spirit much more clearly, and
in that lucid and clear vision he could see that there was a great distance
between himself and those people walking on the street.
He could somehow feel the intention and the attention of those people. He
could somehow perceive in a direct way how far apart he was from them
now, how far away he was from them in so many ways.
“Hey! You aren’t going to go through all the trouble of finding me and
then falling asleep, are you?”
The young man caught himself. The voice of the shadowed man woke him
from his reverie. Embarrassed, he turned to look at the figure beside him.
After taking a bit of time to compose himself, he was able to become
cohesive enough to speak, “I am beginning to understand what you mean
when you said that it was so difficult sometimes to describe certain things in
words.”
 “Yes, that is the first inkling that things are wrong in our everyday world.
There is indeed an oppression in us, something that weighs us down in this
world. A part of the world at large makes it very difficult for us to know
certain things, it is like the ‘regular world’ is a ditch on the road that is so
deep that it can somehow obscure even the Spirit.”
“What do you mean ‘things are wrong’? That sounds very ominous to me.
Is this the work of the devil?”
The shadowed man laughed in that coughing laugh that always brought
chills up the young man’s spine. As his laughter subsided, the shadowed man
said, “That is definitely a topic for another day young man, I feel that you are
already quite overwhelmed by all that you have been able to perceive.”
“Why is it that people do not see the Spirit? My father prays all the time, I
see people going to church all the time and praying. There are many that
speak of seeing God, of seeing the great Spirit, of talking with it. I have even
seen people ‘talk in tongues’ when they somehow become possessed by what
they call the spirit. And yet, I have never felt that any of those people could
really see the Spirit, at least not what I think that I have felt or seen. It is so
hard to explain.”
The young man could feel the shadowed man smile as he continued to talk
without pause, “After finally being able to perceive the Spirit directly myself,
I can honestly say that I do not think any of those people have ever truly felt
the Spirit that moves through all things.”
“You are quite right my young friend; the average person cannot see. You
could say that there is a gigantic wall between them and the Spirit and even
though the Spirit tries desperately to make itself known to everyone, most
people just cannot let go of the hard material world. They are so focused on
‘this or that’, that they cannot see anything that lies in between those things.”
“Can animals see us here within the folds of this shadow?”
“Yes, the less domesticated the animal, the more likely that it can perceive
us. But most animals will realize that there is an odd shift to the general flow
of things around here, a shift in the natural flow of the Spirit in this area. For
that reason, being that this is odd to them, they will stay away.”
“I have noticed that the rats and other things seem to stay away from us
while we are here.”
“I’m glad that I could enlighten you. I suppose you were under the
impression that it was our bad smell that kept them away,” the shadowed man
laughed.
 After composing himself, he continued, “One way to explain what is
happening is to say that at this moment in time we exist and are enfolded
within a pocket dimension in between this and that. This means that the
average person will not see us unless they quite literally trip over us, but even
then, people can be so stubborn in their beliefs that they would invent
something or create some kind of hallucination to explain any odd aberration
in the continuity of their world. There is so much against us as average
people, and in many ways, it is not their fault, not completely at least. I often
find it hilarious to think that many of those ‘fire and brimstone’ preachers are
right, there are indeed devils that haunt our lives.”
The young man went from chills at the mention of devils to instantly
feeling a kind of weight or oppression that seemed to crush him to the hard
ground. This oppression grew in intensity until he felt like he would soon be
obliterated…and just as he was about to scream in panic, he heard the voice
of the shadowed man soothing him, “But as I have said, that is definitely a
conversation for another day.” He smiled, “Tell me, how is it going with your
prayer?”
It was like a giant floodgate opened within the young man. He began to
talk and could not stop until he told the shadowed man everything. He told
him about his failures, his contemplations, and finally his success using the
loud whining singsong in the woods. The shadowed man laughed at this last
revelation, “You are such a dramatist; I had an inkling that this was going to
be your particular path in this.”
“What do you mean? Have I done something wrong?”
“No, no. Everybody has their own way to follow in this. We each need to
figure out our own way to best contact the sleeper, the Secret King. And what
path we choose tells us a lot about ourselves, our character, our bent of nature
you might say. Such revelations are very important to us as we go deeper and
deeper into worlds unknown, worlds beyond measure.”
“What does that say about me? Am I some kind of jaded fool? Am I evil?”
“It just means that you have a certain character. A certain proclivity
towards a closer contact with aspects of the material world. Some might say
that parts of you, aspects of you, resemble an older way. But there are no
greater evils, no devils as you understand that term, in our path. Devils and
demons are simplistic conceptions of far greater things that exist in worlds
beyond human measure. Simplistic ideas of good and evil are used by the
unscrupulous to keep the sheep at bay.”
 “I refuse to believe that there is no such thing as evil.”
“A nonbeliever who believes,” the shadowed man laughed. When he
finally stopped laughing, he took a deep breath and continued, “From your
point of view, as an ordinary human, there is evil in the world. But there are
broader views, more expansive ways to see the world, and from those more
complicated causal insights, the nature of three-dimensional good and evil
does not apply. This means that in the path that we follow, we are forced,
commanded, to explore realms that are so far away from the common human
world, that our understanding of good and evil become the first things to fall
along the long road to infinity.”
The shadowed man saw the look of worry in the young man’s face. He
chuckled and patted the young man on the back, “I understand your worries
my friend, I have gone through the same thing and there is no way for me to
explain anything further until you discover things for yourself in your own
way. Do not worry about this for now. At this moment in time, it matters
nothing at all. Please continue telling me about your prayer, this is the
important thing right now, at this moment in time.”
“But––”
“When you see evil, look at it, see it with your new inner eyes, use your
new perceptive abilities. Look deeply into the face of the intent of those who
beat you that night when I found you, investigate the evil of the world with
your new abilities. Perceive it directly yourself and come to your own
conclusions. In the future we can talk about this further. For now, tell me
more about your prayer.”
The young man took a breath, tried to shift the focus of his attention as
best he could. In time his mind was able to change the direction of his
attention, and he began to speak about his great failures and his inability to
truly replicate the first success when he performed his prayer in the forest. He
told his dark companion about his contemplations, about how he was
beginning to see the connection between the Spirit, the unconscious, his
waking reality, and his dreams.
“Now this is good. You have made incredible progress my friend, which
to me is a sign that you are truly worthy of my individual focus.”
“There is so much about all this that I do not understand. Why are you
here? Who are you?”
“That is a discussion we will have on another occasion as well. I have so
much more to tell you. Right now, you are a fledgling of sorts, and there is a
great deal of groundwork to be covered before we get to any topic like that.”
Sensing the frustration and the growing unease in the young man, the
shadowed man continued, “Let us say that I am part of a certain cluster
within the great vastness of all of this.” The shadowed man opened his arms
to encompass the whole street and what the young man figured to be the
whole world. “This world is a vast place, far bigger than you could possibly
imagine.”
“Well, I can imagine quite a lot.”
“As much as you can imagine, this place is bigger and more intricate still.
And within this vastness that defies all notion of scale, I am part of the tiniest
of clusters that shines brightly in the darkest night. And for now, you are my
ward, my friend. In other words, you are a task, my personal task, and this
task is in some ways a blessing, and in other ways a curse,” the shadowed
man chuckled.
The young man became apprehensive. He was somehow able to feel the
great vastness the shadowed man was talking about, and in the face of that
infinity, a futility, and an odd desperation overtook him. To overcome this
melancholy, the young man began to ramble and tell his dark friend about his
frustrations in trying to discover the nature of prayer and transmutation,
“Why is it that I do not seem to get the kind of success that I would hope for?
I would love it if I could get some kind of orderly progress. Sometimes I can
transmute an event as you say, a favorable event, but most often there is no
seeming rhyme or reason to anything. Sometimes I may get partially what I
want, other times I don’t get anything at all. There are times when I feel more
motivated than usual and during those times, I try hard, and I do feel like I
get some kind of result. But then it’s like I wake up to myself and realize that
I might only be going mad, that all the things I think I have done are merely
coincidence, the fates, and that is all. In the end there is no way to pin down
anything, and there is a large doubtful part of me that feels like my successes
have come because of physical effort, not the Spirit. I often feel like those
prayers only make me feel better, more motivated, and in that motivation I do
more physically so I get more done. But at the end of it all, it is all physical
things, physical doings. Do you understand?”
“There is great truth to that in a certain sense. By focusing your intent
through prayer or repetition, you can align your power, and in doing so you
become a more focused engine of action instead of being spread out and
wasting energy everywhere.
 But there is more to this. I, and those who share that little shining cluster
that I told you about, believe that all true action is inner action. We believe
that all things come from the inside out instead of from the outside in.”
In frustration, the young man blurted out, “What does that mean exactly? I
think I am beginning to understand a little bit of this, but I would really
appreciate any clarification that you could give me.”
“Well, you might say that the whole of my work, the whole of our work
for a long time to come will focus on the true understanding of action. This
means that I must make it very clear to you that all action is inner action, that
all things happen in that inner space that I have had you explore. This inner
space has no bounds, it is as vast as the night sky, and far beyond any kind of
reasonable and common conception. Think about the shadows and the folds
within space as you moved deeper and deeper into this little room that we
now share. Just like these shadows all around us seem to weave into spaces
that are beyond regular space, the whole of reality bends and weaves in and
out of itself in this way. There are truly entire hidden worlds, vast universes,
in every square inch of what you might think of as regular physical space.”
His dark companion once again opened his arms to encompass the world and
everything. People walked by not seeing, not noticing, not really caring. “We
are all in a place in between this and that. Everything around us comes from
that in between place, which is a location beyond anything that the average
person perceives as space and time. This in between place is an inner place,
and from it all things are organized and then brought into what we would
refer to as physical existence. All true action comes from this in between.”
The young man looked around and used an inner part of himself to feel the
folds of the shadows that separated them from the people walking just a few
feet away. The shadowed man continued, “There is an incredible complexity
to everything and because of that complexity, everything seems haphazard
and broken to you. Your inability to get a decent response from the Secret
King, from your unconscious, is the result of your lack of understanding of
that inner complexity.
Think of it like this, if your prayer does indeed change the world, and as I
have been trying to point out to you, your prayer is nothing more than a kind
of intent projected into the great vastness out there, then it must be the case
that the prayers of all of the people around you, whether these prayers are
conscious or unconscious, must also trickle out into the vastness of inner
reality.”
 “Do you mean that my inner reality is shared with everyone? Is my inner
temple their inner temple?”
“Yes and no,” replied the shadowed man as the young man frowned. The
shadowed man took a breath in feigned exasperation and continued, “There is
great complexity and variance which can only be understood through direct
and personal perception; there are layers and layers. Aspects of you could be
said to be individual and your own, while other parts are shared and fly
across the vastness of the infinite night. There is so much, as I have said, that
you need to learn and know about, that sometimes I feel nearly crushed by
the weight of your ignorance.”
“Sorry to be such a disappointment.”
His dark friend laughed once more and for some reason this time the
laughter made the young man feel better.
“Wait! Are you saying that even the prayers of other people are answered?
Are you saying that all prayers are acknowledged?”
“Yes. But most people do not know the power of inner action. They do not
know that everything they do and think about, everything they focus on, all
these things change the great dark vastness out there, that sea of energy. We
are all like little buzzing insects, all of us flapping our wings in the dark
night. What we do not realize is that all that flapping creates a wind, and that
wind is a motion that flows across our lives following dictates and a
complexity of hidden action that is beyond measure. If we only look at things
in a common way, we will never be able to feel this wind or the tides of
change that it brings. This unsuspected motion by the totality of us all
flapping our wings in the night shapes our reality. How sad it is that people
do not know they are the ones that are responsible for the winds of change,”
the shadowed man looked out to see the people walking past them and the
young man felt a kind of dark gloom.
“Anyway, your lack of success comes from your inability to find a good
way to pray. I think you have hit upon a workable method, at least the
beginning of it. You should be proud of yourself; you have made incredible
gains. But to truly begin to understand what transmutation is, you must be
able to develop a more reliable way to contact the sleeping god.”
The young man pondered this and replied, “I just don’t understand what
you mean by transmutation I suppose. I mean a part of me thinks that
transmutation must be changing one thing to another thing, and this I can
understand to some degree. I have heard stories of dark and sinister
magicians who can enslave and use demons to make the impossible possible.
There is even talk of these strange individuals called alchemists who are
supposed to be able to turn lead into gold using some obscure science.”
“There are many ways to describe and practice transmutation. You might
say that we all engage in the act of transmutation all the time. In a broad
sense, you could say that you and your father take sour wine and cabbages
and transmute them into sour cabbage. In that sense then, what some of those
men that you describe are doing is transmutation. But from our point of view,
that is just scratching the surface of things and most of those men that you
describe have no understanding of the true way.
Here is a better way for you to understand this. You might say that a great
deal of such effort, especially when it comes to those alchemists and their
science…well, those men, they practice a kind of outer alchemy. So, from
that point of view then you could say that we practice a kind of inner
alchemy.”
Janos looked as perplexed as ever. There was no moon on this night and
the shadows looked deeper, darker. There was a sense of loneliness, of
infinity in every ink black patch of night. Janos felt so alone, lost in his
inability to fully grasp all that his dark companion said. The shadowed man
smiled, at least Janos had an intuitive feeling that he smiled, and he casually
tapped the young man on the knee with the side of his hand. This one simple
act had such sympathy, such mutual fraternity, that it instantly improved the
young man’s mood.
The shadowed man turned to his pupil, his brother in darkness and said,
“Such outer science has merit of course. It helps us find new ways to
overcome some of the problems of the physical world just like the natural
sciences do, but such men are stuck, their efforts will never allow them to
break free from the prison of materiality and the ego of the times.”
With renewed energy Janos asked, “Do you mean that those men will
never attain the power of transmutation?”
“Yes. Their transmutation is wholly physical, it has little to do with the
Spirit that moves through all things and as such there will always be a limit to
their power. But there is hope always and if those outer alchemists are
dedicated enough and learn to develop a more open-minded approach to
reality, then their great dedication and focus might allow them to find a way
beyond merely material alchemy. That is our odd lot and our fate in this
world, it is as if this entire world is designed to make us forget our true
nature so that we focus wholly and solely on physical reality and the
physical aspects of existence. But for those who can learn to feel the
Spirit, and those who can stay focused long enough on their link to the
Spirit, there is the possibility of making a startling discovery. And that
discovery is that all true action is inner action, that all true
transmutation of any worth is inner transmutation. So, the quest of outer
alchemists is either a stepping-stone into something far greater, or merely
desperate folly by people stuck in the material world.
It is my hope that in time, as you begin to move across the very depths of
time, you will begin to understand the complexities of true transmutation and
inner action.”
The shadows changed somehow; they were no longer pools of endless
horror. Now the night and the ink black shadows all around them seemed like
doors, like portals to endless adventure. With a smile Janos said, “I think I am
beginning to understand some of what you say, but honestly all of this seems
like such an impossible prospect right now. How do I carry on? How do I go
on from here?”
“The only way forward is one slow step at a time. You discover inner
action through inner action.”
“But––”
“Enough of your indulgence, it is just a way of feeling sorry for yourself!
By focusing on that feeling, that intent, you are transmuting into existence
more obstacles instead of getting straight to the root of things. There is still so
much that I must cover with you tonight and our time grows short.”
The young man felt a chill again, this time it was a chill so deep and fierce
that it felt like it would somehow wipe him out of the world, and he
wondered about his death at that moment.
“I am glad that you are finally beginning to understand what is really at
stake here,” said the shadowed man, somehow discerning Janos’ thoughts.
“From now on you must continue with your contemplations of prayer and
how it is that different methods and different intents create different results.
My suggestion is to focus on your begging to contact the Secret King, as this
works best for you. Every person is different and what works for you will not
work for someone else. But if something is working for you, you must begin
to use it no matter how much trepidation or guilt you might feel. That guilt
comes from unexamined personal beliefs. As I told you before, you must
examine all the beliefs that you have. But for now, I agree that you should not
make it a habit of going into that forest alone, at least not until you know how
to protect yourself a little better.”
The young man looked at his dark companion beside him sitting on the
ground in a patch of shadow in the middle of the busiest street of the village.
Janos marveled at the fact that the being beside him did not seem to be a man
hidden in the shadows, but an actual shadow made flesh. The shadow spoke,
“My great dramatist, have you not considered that there is no need to make so
much noise? All you need is your own place, a little tiny patch of space
within your house where you can spend some time alone for a while. You do
not need to scream or beg like that child. Certainly, this will help if it can
help you to muster certain emotions, but the Secret King does not have ears,
so there is no need to make a giant racket for him. Have you not heard what I
had been saying all along? This is all about INNER ACTION!”
The young man had not thought of this before. In a way, by screaming in
pain like the child all his efforts had been focused on doing a kind of outer
physical action for what was, in the end, supposed to be an inner action. In a
certain sense, he figured that he was trying to find a way to pray in the same
way that he worked in life. He had turned prayer into a physical experiment.
But the shadowed man had finally made him understand that prayer was as
much an inner action as the contemplations that he engaged in every night.
When he moved deep within the temple of his mind, when he moved into
what were sometimes magnificent spaces within his mind, he was not
physically walking or running, this was not outer physical effort. And he
finally realized that prayer was also something that happened deep in his
mind. His dark teacher was trying to show him something that was right in
front of his face the whole time, he was showing him the difference between
outer and inner alchemy. He was telling him something that he should have
figured out on his own, which was the fact that prayer did not need a holy
temple or a great deal of physical blustering. Transmutation and alchemy did
not happen in some crazy laboratory. All true action happened within, in
unmeasurable places inside the temple of the human mind.
“The Secret King, like the Spirit that moves through all things, exists here,
there, everywhere,” the shadowed man pointed as he spoke. “The Secret
King, like the Spirit, is not a material thing and yet all things that are material
come from it. This is the great contradiction of existence.
As I told you originally, some might try to turn the Secret King or the
Spirit itself into some kind of anthropomorphic God or some wholly material
science, but the Spirit is beyond form, and yet is the source of all form.”
The young man looked up at the sky and noticed that within their little
cocoon the stars above shone with a brilliance that was amazing to behold.
“At this time, this time,” the shadowed man pointed to the ground, “it has
now become the moment that I must reveal to you the secret to the true power
of prayer. Remember this is your challenge, that I prove to you the true
power of inner action. It is my hope that in understanding this power through
your own personal efforts, you will begin to not only understand how inner
action creates outer form, but also begin to understand a more intricate kind
of causality. It is my hope that in time you will discover your own answers as
to the nature of good and evil and how it is that we are all united by the Spirit
that moves through all things.”
The young man stuttered a little, his relaxation at that moment was so
intense that his body felt impossibly heavy, immobile. He felt like he was
dreaming, like his body was fast asleep but he was aware, awake somehow;
he was both awake and asleep at the same time. After some effort he spoke,
“So what do I do now? I feel like I am there but not quite?”
“It is your task to continue your contemplations with prayer, but as usual
you are quite perceptive, there is indeed something that must be added to the
mix, one final secret to prayer you might say.”
“And what is that secret?”
“That final secret is the secret of faith.”

Lessons
Thanks to his growing prosperity, the young man was finally able to buy a
book that spoke about the aether which was described as a ‘quintessence’. In
that book he discovered that this was a kind of fifth element on top of the
original four which were: earth, water, wind, and fire. This quintessence was
the void element, and it is what united all material reality.
The young man needed to prove this dogmatic knowledge within the
temple of his mind, and there he discovered that indeed there was a kind of
fluid that joined all material essence, and that this essence was a substance
that existed in a subtle realm beyond the reach of the physical senses, that
indeed it was a kind of Dark Matter.
 U
Drowsiness is not like an itch that irritates you until you scratch it, in this
case, fall asleep. Drowsiness is an energy, a force that can be harnessed and
used to turn off the endless jabbering of your conscious mind. After being
able to understand it as a force, Janos learned in time to be able to move that
force within himself.
He first needed to focus his conscious attention on the drowsy feeling, and
when he could do this, he could see-feel that drowsiness is like a tingling
sensation, like a current of power that radiates from within. Once he could
feel this through conscious attention and direct perception, he could then use
his conscious attention again to move that energy up and across his brain to
numb the constant jabbering of his mind. After that life altering discovery,
sleeping energy for him became like a rare ‘spice’ that must be cultivated and
hoarded, and finally used with great discernment throughout his days to be
able to begin the process of controlling the reactive and unconscious mind
that rules the world. In time the young man would call this mob mind that
rules the human world: the whispering doubt, the whispering.

U
Desire could be a double-edged sword if it was not used properly. He needed
to develop a kind of desire that was natural, that transcended the silly
fixations of the ego.
“Honestly young man, I think you got lucky.”
When the young man saw the spoiled child begging and screaming and
demanding in the market, he was instantly overwhelmed and captivated by
the power of the child over everyone, this was the bent of his nature.
The shadowed man had told him that prayer was the act of doing
something with enough intensity and precision that it was able to create
ripples across the sea of power that surrounded everything and everyone. The
loud and petulant child had shown him a remarkable truth: such ardent
demand and pleading commanded results. The child’s begging and whining
were impossible to ignore.
A child’s demand, a baby’s wail in the middle of the night, these were
impossible to ignore, by both the mother and in that case all the people on the
street. Such desire, no matter what the grown-ups thought of it, was pure and
genuine, it was nature and most natural, it was pain and the ability of pain to
get noticed; pain was there to help heal!
The young man’s realization was instant, but in his excitement, he rushed
out to duplicate what the child had done and in doing so he missed two
important points.
The first, was that in prayer he was not trying to get the attention of
another human being, another person. Instead, he was trying to get the
attention of the Secret King and as such there was no need for loud and lavish
physical action. He did not need to scream out loud, whine and beg, he did
not need to make a public scene or any kind of physical spectacle that could
be perceived using the physical senses.
His actions needed to contact the Secret King, the dreaming god, and
therefore his actions needed to be inner actions not outer ones. It took the
young man a long time to realize that he did not need to scream and make a
fool of himself in the physical world. Instead, what he needed to do was
duplicate the kind of intensity that the child had felt, inside the temple of his
mind.
Once he realized this, Janos was able to go into his mind and there
intensely feel desire, intense and unrelenting desire. Deep within the temple
of his mind, the young man could create a forest just like the physical forest
he had used. He could create a room, a sacred chamber, or whatever else he
thought he might need to pray to the Secret King. He could, if he wanted,
imagine himself pleading and begging openly without holding back his
emotions, while at the same time focusing totally on what he wanted. But in
the end, all of this visualization was just an aid to prayer. What was essential
was the feeling, the intensity of emotion that he had felt in the forest; he
needed to feel that intensity and focus within the temple of his mind. This
was inner action, not outer action, and it could be done anywhere and at any
time.
Secondly, and most importantly, the young man, through trial and error
and the admonitions of his dark teacher, realized that there was a fine
difference between ardent desire and self-pity. This is such an important point
that it is worth repeating, there is a fine (but incredibly important)
difference between the natural desire of a child and the self-pity that is
usually felt by most adults.
The child desires completely and naturally, focusing on the desire itself
and only the desire. Any seemingly negative emotion that it might feel, any
crying or whining that it might do, is the result of that natural need to have
exactly what he wants now. There is no focus on anything else aside from
just wanting, and the need to have that thing now.
In trying to duplicate the child’s natural desire, the young man in the first
few iterations of his beckoning of the Spirit, realized that he could have made
a huge mistake!
This mistake happens when an adult, in desiring something, desires with
their ego as opposed to desiring naturally. The child does not feel sorry for
himself, there is no ego in his desires and therefore no self-pity and personal
recrimination. At first, seeing that the child had felt so much anguish and
pain, the young man thought that he needed to duplicate that anguish and
pain, and as such he thought that he somehow needed to focus on his
troubles. But this is a mistake made by an adult full of self-hating ego. For
an adult it is very easy to lose yourself in feeling sorry for yourself while
beckoning the Spirit. If you do this during your prayer, then the Spirit
will only see self-pity and anguish…and it will give you more of that!
This is a terrible mistake, and it must be understood completely. If upon
beckoning the Spirit, you lose yourself in self-pity and feeling sorry for
yourself, then you will receive more pain, and not the thing that you desire.
This is the difference between the self-pity of an adult and the natural
desire of the child.
The shadowed man had said, “You cannot expect the dreaming god to
interpret your mood and sift through all your egoistic shenanigans to figure
out what you want. You must be clear, utterly, and completely clear, in your
communication with it at every moment of every day.
This means that when you try to get its attention, whatever it is that you
desire at that moment, whatever it is that you are focusing on at that moment,
is exactly what you will get. If you feel self-pity, then you will get more
things to feel pity about. But that child in the market was not focused on its
self-pity. The physical eyes of an adult might only see self-pity, but this is not
what the child was feeling. What the child was feeling was complete focus on
its desire, on wanting it now, on having it now, on seeing it now and begging,
insisting, demanding, more and more. Any anguish that the child felt was
the intensity of wanting so badly, that he could not ‘contain’ his intense
desire; his utter desire was so huge that his emotions made him cry from
the intensity of them. He did not feel self-pity and sadness for himself, he
felt utter desire of such passion that to the physical eyes of an adult it
looked like self-pity. But the child did not have a giant ego to hate
himself and the world because he didn’t have what he wanted, instead he
was like a little animal desiring purely with self-reflection.
In the end the child’s sole focus was on what it wanted. As such, its
pleading was able to stir his mother and indeed it might just have been able to
stir the dreaming god as well. The child got what it wanted, not the self-pity
and the hatred of the adults all around him. The child got candy while the
grown-ups only got more to feel self-pity about!”
 8
Feeling-Intent and Going Beyond Words
Faith is to believe what we do not see, and the reward is to
see what we believe.
― ST. AUGUSTINE

“IF YOU TELL ME ABOUT PRAYER, and then you say that prayer is just a
focus of intent, a way to access or contact a greater force, a dreaming giant as
it were, then I can understand to a degree. But I am not trying to be ironic or
clever when I say that the moment that you speak of faith, and faith alone,
well, that is the moment when I doubt.
My entire life has been full of people giving up their authority to someone
else; mine is the life of the slave. As far as I see it, all people seem to be
designed, or bred perhaps, to live in a hierarchy. It is like they all need to live
under the authority of someone or something else. My life is a life lived in
the service of others, not because I want to do this, but because others have
told me that this is what I must do. The whole of my existence is one
surrounded by people that act like children, people that need to be told what
to do by some supposed authority above them.
If it is not some government, some king, some noble, or some kind of
lesser authority, it has been rammed down my throat that above all of this
stands some kind of wonderful God up above. A part of me, thanks to all that
I have seen in just the little while that I have been with you, is beginning to
believe that there is far more to things than what I can perceive with only my
physical senses, and I can for the first time perceive those miracles mentioned
in scripture. I can even begin to believe in a higher order of sorts, a blessed
light as it were. But I wish to discover such a thing on my own and in my
own way. Basically, I want to go beyond the trap of endless hierarchy that is
constantly telling me how things are and what I should do. I want to be free
to walk my own path!”
After listening to Janos thoughtfully and carefully, the shadowed man
replied solemnly, “In this my friend we are in complete agreement.”
But the young man was insistent, full of pent-up energy, and this
demanded that he continue to make his point, “But now you tell me about
faith, that I must now have faith! I don’t mean to be rude but to me that
seems idiotic, especially coming from someone who seems so free in the
world. To me, the faith of the average person is just empty hope that some
master above them might deem to help them if only they can prove their
fealty. I cannot live like that.”
Astonished by the young man’s outpouring, the shadowed man took a
long breath and replied, “I think that all your concerns and your desires have
great merit. When I was young, I felt the same way, and it was because of
that independent and individual drive within me, that insatiable need, that I
was able to find the way of inner alchemy.”
“But how can you ask me now to give up my life to live in faith? Must I
now bow to some lord in the hope that I will be rescued? This to me sounds
like dependency, and that is the last thing that I want!”
The night air crackled with energy, the world seemed to stop under the
intensity of the moment. The shadowed man replied, “When we started to
talk about prayer you had similar trepidations. It took you some time, and a
great deal of contemplation to be able to finally understand that what I meant
by prayer was not the same thing as what other people might mean by prayer.
My form of prayer is not about hoping that some master above you grants
your wish, and yet the technique is so similar.”
“Yes, this is the part that I do not understand. I contemplate this for hours
sometimes and I cannot seem to grasp where the line is between the things
that you are teaching me and the things that the average human calls
religion.”
The shadowed man chuckled. It was a laugh of surprise and happiness, not
mockery. He was glad Janos was perceptive and had been contemplating
such things. He replied, “That is the great tragedy of the limit of our physical
existence. As I have mentioned to you before, words lie to us. We live in a
world where we think of ourselves as being material things, and yet for those
who can see the Spirit that moves through all things, that materiality becomes
a great lie, the greatest lie of all.”
“So how is your faith different from regular faith?”
“It is not my faith, but instead it is an energetic action.”
The young man looked at his companion questioningly as the shadowed
man continued to talk, “This is the part that is so difficult for us, this is that
line, or at the very least the boundaries of the average person’s reality. For
most, the world ends at the limit of their physical senses, this is where direct
perception ends for them. Everything beyond this is dogma, it is something
told to them by somebody else, mandated by somebody else.
It is my hope that I can give you a way to go beyond the average person,
beyond the five senses, so that you can perceive the nature of energetic action
yourself directly. I have called this energetic action prayer and faith, but more
importantly I have also used the word transmutation. This is an incredibly
complex topic for us human beings. It is an incredibly complex topic because
of our lack of knowledge and because we live in such small worlds; little
unconscious lives that seldom take us far from the place where we were born.
For that reason, I have tried to show you the way of this energetic action
which we can also call transmutation, through a process and a methodology
that you might understand. This methodology is prayer, and now, I am
introducing faith.
It is my hope that by using such simple and common words, words such as
prayer and faith, you may begin to understand a little of the incredible
complexity of the energetic action that is at the basis of all alchemical
endeavor. It is my hope that through your own ability to transmute things into
existence using this methodology, you can begin to truly believe, to truly
believe deep down at the very core of you, that transmutation is possible. It is
my hope finally that through that understanding and your eventual personal
ability to transmute yourself, you are propelled by your own inner
questioning to go further still, until you can leave the boundaries and the
walls of humanity far behind.”
The young man sat on the packed dirt of the street, encased within the
protective cocoon of shadows as he heard the scurry of rats in the darkness
far away from him. He welcomed that distraction of scurrying vermin and
thanked the rats silently because the intensity of the onslaught of the
shadowed man’s words was staggering.
“This is deeply important my friend, and it is a key point to understand
because if you do not, you will begin to be bogged down by great self-
importance. You and I, we are no better than anyone. Every person that you
see before you, all these people walking down this street right now, we, they,
are all engaged in energetic action. The only difference between some is that
they understand a little more of what they are doing.”
 Desperate, tired, the young man replied, “What are you trying to say?”
“What I am saying is that all prayer works. All faith has purpose, and it
works. In other words, all interaction, whether you think of it as being
physical or mental, is energetic action, and all energetic action creates
results.” The shadowed man smiled, took a breath and continued his assault
on Janos’ reason, “I am not trying to show you a way to stand above people,
to somehow get on top of people in that hierarchical way that you speak of.
Instead, I am telling you that words lie. I am telling you that perhaps to find
the truth of things, to find the inner reality that is the cause of all outer
effects, we must go beyond the words that deceive us.
I could start by saying that people are not the material things that they
think they are. We are all conglomerations, collections and groupings of
certain traits brought together by an intent that is far greater than any material
thing.”
Janos stared upward to the brilliant stars above. He saw past them, far into
the void of darkness beyond, and there, he finally found the door that led to
the inner temple of his mind. Lost in a timeless moment of contemplation, he
finally replied, “How does all this relate to words, and how they lie? How
does this relate to the fact that people practice faith and most often they
receive nothing from it? Are you telling me that you will teach me some new
way of faith that will somehow get me different results?”
The shadowed man replied, “A part of me finds your questions utterly
exasperating, and yet in answering them I come to certain layers of
understanding within myself that have eluded me in the past. You are both a
challenge and a blessing, the world is always like this.
Let me put it to you this way, all prayers are answered, always. The
problem with most people is that they cannot see beyond the material world
that makes them forget, so most often they do not see the inner motion that
their prayers and their intent create. Any time that any person has intent, they
can ‘will’ something, even desire something just like the child in the market,
they get results whether they realize what has happened or not. That spoiled
child, being free from the doubts and the mirage of the material world to a far
greater degree than an adult, had a far better understanding of how his will,
his great desire, was able to get something he wanted.
The average person, on the other hand, often fails to see the connections
between things. Unless it is something incredibly large, the average person is
for the most part completely blind to the huge number of coincidences all
around them. These coincidences are the constant and incessant shouting of
the Spirit. If certain people at a certain time might see and identify some of
these coincidences, they might call them omens, luck, or if they are religious
perhaps, they might even say that God has performed a miracle.
In that sense then I could say that the world is full of miracles. Whether
most of us wish to believe it or not, we live our lives in a state of grace and
miracles are happening to us at every second of every day. These miracles are
coincidences, lucky or unlucky circumstances, fate, omens, and sometimes
even outright apparitions and materializations which most people ignore or
attribute to some silly thing that fits within the boundaries of their limited
beliefs. These miracles and omens are the intermingling of reality, the co-
mingling of Spirit with matter! These miracles are the result of intent, will,
prayer, strong thought, and great desire. It is this inner action that changes the
world, and it is constantly changing the world even now, at this moment.
Inner action is the wind that I tried to describe to you earlier, the wind created
by the flapping of endless insects. We are those insects in the vast and
unmeasurable sea of energy all around us.”
“So, if prayers work and faith works, then people are not wrong in
worshiping some father figure in the sky.”
“This is where words curse us. People are wrong and yet they are right,
this is the great predicament the world is in. This dilemma comes from the
fact that we only have words to describe things that are beyond words. But
our biggest problem really is the fact that the average person can only see the
material world, their senses can only sense a material reality. Can you
understand what I am trying to say?”
The young man thought for a moment, then replied, “Maybe. Sometimes I
can understand a little. But I would really appreciate anything you could say
to help me, because what I think I know seems so fleeting and so convoluted
at the moment.”
“Being that the world is not what it is, that is, being that people are not the
material things that they might believe themselves to be, their actions,
whether seemingly physical or mental, are not what people think they are.
You have an advantage over most people in that you can now perceive
aspects of the Spirit. But that vision for you is very cloudy and imprecise so
you cannot see the connection between all action, which as I have said are
inner actions. It is not so much that prayer and faith work, but that all action
works. We are those buzzing insects creating that endless wind, that endless
tide within the vast sea of existence that surrounds all of us.”
“All action is inner action?”
“All action is inner action whether it seems physical or mental.
Some people might believe that only physical action can create change,
transmutation. Others might believe that it is only prayer, and a kind of
spiritual faith that truly matters and that it is the only real thing that can create
change in the world. Both camps of thought and belief are right, and yet they
are both wrong because they cannot see the Spirit. Everything that we do and
think matters but not in the way that most people understand. They do not
understand because they cannot perceive the un-manifest, they cannot see the
in between, they cannot directly perceive the Spirit that moves through all
things.”
“But to me what you are saying sounds exactly like what those religious
and spiritual types are saying, those same people that seem to be no better off
than anybody else.”
“In a certain sense we seem to be just like those types as you say, but what
I am trying to tell you is that because they cannot see the Spirit, the
spirituality of the average world is a perversion of sorts, a false
understanding. We differ from them because we strive to see the Spirit that
they only read about in their sacred books. Words lie and we have all
forgotten how to see. Those who only have the word will never know the
Spirit unless they try to perceive the Spirit themselves directly and trust their
intuition beyond the word. A part of what they do has merit because a part of
what they do comes from a body of knowledge that knew how to see the
Spirit, but the people of this time have for the most part lost the ability to see
the Spirit and therefore, only having words to understand things, they have
lost their way.”
The shadowed man turned to see the young man holding his head in
frustration, and he laughed, “What a challenge this is. You are such a
challenge to me, young man.”
“I am sorry. I do not mean to be such a fool.”
“Oh no my friend, forgive me. You are no fool, or I suppose it would be
best to say that we are all fools. The great challenge of trying to teach you is
wonderful to me, it allows me to pursue certain lines of the intricacy of
thought and awareness that I could never get to easily on my own. In that
sense you are quite simply a very frustrating and challenging test. And
believe me when I say that I was no better than you when I started. We are all
fools my friend, and I am blessed by your company.”
The young man turned to the shadowed man with a perplexed look on his
face, but his dark companion continued his monologue without pause, “If you
are not a material thing in the way that you think you are, then you are quite
simply something else. If you are that something else, then it is quite possible
that your reasoning, your logic about the causation, about the cause of things,
is different than you think it is. And being that your reasoning is wrong in
that sense, then perhaps your reasoning about how and why things work is
wrong as well. This is the great problem with most people. They are stuck in
a certain kind of perceptual fence that limits what they can do. Quite simply,
we are all being dumbed down. We are being dumbed down and for the most
part we must struggle to understand while being completely trapped in a
three-dimensional world that makes us forget.”
“Who is dumbing us down?”
“Oh, what a challenge. I must layer things and make sure that I present
them to you in a certain order. If I do not do this, you will be lost and
overwhelmed. Trust me that in time I will reveal as much as I can to you, but
for now the question of that dumbing down is something that I must answer
on another day.
But that dumbing down makes it seem like we are doing the right thing
when we are not. It also makes it so that when we do the right thing in a
certain way, we are blind to our success. So, in the simplest of terms, prayers
do work, and faith does indeed work, but the nature and the reason for why
such things work is beyond materiality. Even those who preach theology
often do not understand and instead fall prey to dogmatic ideals, like the
hierarchical horror that you spoke of. Part of that entrapment within that
perceptual fence means that most people must give a material explanation to
everything, even those things that are beyond the material.”
“But what about all spiritual teaching?”
“Even when certain teaching is based on written material by someone in
the past who could see, all of that is just words on a page. Words on a page
without technique, without the teaching of how to contact the Spirit, will
never help an individual to any great degree. If you cannot see, if those words
don’t teach you how to see yourself, then those words mean little in the end.
That is why I am showing you how to see, how to do; I am teaching you
techniques so that you can do it and see it for yourself.
Interpretation of words based on academic understanding of words means
nothing, you must do, you must see. Academics are paper dragons! There are
many modern interpretations and new words used in new forms as new
versions of theology are created by people that have never seen anything
themselves directly, but that only use words to create more words. Can you
understand what I am trying to tell you?”
“I think I am beginning to understand what you mean.”
“Prayer works and faith works, and the Spirit that moves through all
things is shouting this to everyone at every moment of every day, but most
people just cannot see. But for us, for those who can see, the nature of prayer
and the nature of faith become something different. To us these things are an
energetic fact, an energetic action. And all energetic action is inner action.”
“Can you explain to me what you mean by energetic action?”
“For now, I will call energetic action our ability to see the Spirit that
moves through all things and therefore see that all action is beyond
physicality. Energetic action is what we all do, it is our birthright as human
beings. For now, I will define energetic action as a person’s ability to see
beyond the physical senses.”
Noticing the young man’s confusion the shadowed man continued, “These
are things that you will never be able to truly understand from my words
alone. The only way that you will understand all of this is through your own
inner contemplations in the temple of your mind as I have shown you. There
you will need to perceive these things directly for yourself repeatedly until
they are deeply embedded within you. This is the only way that things will
become an energetic fact for you, otherwise they will always just be dogma
and the lie of words.
How crazy is that? I must use words to try to have you go beyond words,”
the shadowed man laughed his odd laugh.
Janos replied, “Let me see if I get this: what I am doing and what inner
alchemists practice may seem like prayer and faith when we use words, but
the energetic action that is at the root of what inner alchemists do is beyond
words. We need to use words to explain, and we might even need to read
books to understand, but eventually we must take that little bit of
understanding that we can gain from books and words and try to find our own
truth directly. Words in a book must become our guiding light, not our
unalterable dogma.”
“Exactly!”
“So, using words as my guiding light, can you tell me how faith differs for
those who can see the Spirit that moves in through things?”
“Remember what I said about the problem with words. Think on this
deeply as I continue. I do not want you to become lost in the dogma that
binds these words to materiality. I do not want you to fall under the yoke of
theology,” the shadowed man smiled, and the young man felt a chill.
The shadowed man continued, “I say this because it is possible to
understand a great deal of our way through scripture. I know that seems to be
going completely against what I just said, but as I have tried to point out as
best I can, there are those who can see, those who can see the flow of energy
and the Spirit all around us, and those who cannot and must rely on words for
everything.”
The shadowed man took a deep breath and continued, “This means that
those who wrote some of the incredible truths and power to be found in
spirituality and in spiritual works could see and what they tried to describe is
correct and good to some extent; they did the best they could with the words
that they had. As such, those who are part of that order that I speak of, that
order of inner alchemy, have often used the scripture and different aspects of
worship to try to explain some of the interactions that are at the foundation of
our energetic doing. It is even the case that certain passages in the scriptures
have been used as a kind of cipher to try to explain things that are happening
in inner reality and are therefore beyond those words themselves. Can you
understand what I mean?”
The young man nodded.
“Certain scripture can help us understand some aspects of intent, and in a
limited way can help us to communicate in a kind of cipher how to work with
energy. So, to try to explain energetic action I must begin with words because
this is all that we have for now. Remember what I have said, feelings are
everything…we are feeling.” The young man looked to his companion
questioningly, but the shadowed man did not stop, “Being that feeling is so
important, I must use anything and everything that I can to invoke within you
the feeling-intent needed to try to rally within you a deeper understanding
through those feelings. That deeper understanding that I am trying to convey
now is faith. What I am trying to say my dramatic friend is: please do not lose
your head.” The young man puffed his cheeks, stared at his dark companion,
and winked. The shadowed man laughed, they both laughed.
After gaining some composure, the shadowed man said, “Scripture says in
Mark 11:24, ‘I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have
received it, and it will be yours’. There is great truth in those words if you use
them correctly. But because people cannot perceive the Spirit directly and
only have words, they get lost in those words.”
“What is the truth of those words then?”
“People lost in the words do not understand the true inner action described
by those words. To understand those words, it is better to try to understand
the intent, the feeling, which runs beneath them, within them, instead of
trying to make every single word material reality. In creating more and more
material things, instead of trying to understand the Spirit as the Spirit itself,
people lose themselves in words and the hierarchies that they have created. It
is honestly a terrible cycle…anyway, I lose myself in my own folly.
The truth is that faith is an inner action, and the power of that inner action
is duration, for you for now let us call it duration. The underlying feeling that
is contained within those words is a feeling-intent of duration.”
“What do you mean by duration?”
“In this case duration means that faith must be remorseless. Faith cannot
stop, and when it is unstoppable, relentless, enduring, then the power of it is
quite simply beyond scope.” The young man looked perplexed, the shadowed
man smiled and tried to use his words to explain further, “If we try to forget
the words and instead focus our attention on the feelings that we get when we
read Mark 11:24, then we may be able to finally intuitively know what those
people who could see were trying to tell us. Once we have the feeling-intent
of those words, we can pursue that feeling-intent and with it we can discover
hidden truths if we follow those feelings deeply within.”
The young man smiled a little as he thought about the nature of his
contemplations deep within the temple of his mind.
The shadowed man asked, “Do you know the story of Daniel and the
lions?”
“You are definitely talking to the wrong man.”
“Well, the story in and of itself is not important, the words lie. But what I
want you to do is to try to understand the feeling-intent behind those words,
the hidden energetic motion, the feeling that they create within you. It is like
listening to a great poem or a beautiful song, it is the intent beneath the words
which matters. Think of it like hearing a story, but it is not the particulars of
the story that matter, but what the story makes you feel that is important. I
will try to give you the short version.
There was a man called Daniel who was accused of having too much faith
in something that was not in fashion at the time. So out of fashion were the
man’s beliefs that he was thrown in a pit full of lions when the rulers of the
day realized that they could not change Daniel’s enduring beliefs, his faith.
The rulers of the land, those that oversaw the rules and measure of that land,
told Daniel that if his beliefs were so great and powerful, perhaps they could
even save him from a den of hungry lions.”
“As usual I would imagine that this man was miraculously saved in this
wild and fictional story.”
“You would be right on that account, and if we were to lose ourselves in
religion, hierarchies, words, and the battle between whatever was fashionable
to believe at the time, then this would just be a simple story about the battle
between one group of beliefs against another: a war of beliefs.
But if we look deeper, if we look past the words and that remorseless need
within humanity to pit their beliefs against the beliefs of others in some
endless struggle to nowhere, then there are glimpses of energetic truth hidden
beneath the words.”
“I am trying not to, but there is a part of me that fears some attempt by
you at religious conversion.”
The shadowed man chuckled at that, and continued, “If you believe
nothing at this moment, then at least believe that, I completely understand
your trepidations. In another life, a life that I might share with you in time, I
found myself deeply lost in a kind of enduring belief. But this belief was not
on energetic action and freedom but in the belief of words, rules and rulers,
and the hierarchies created by dogma. At the time I thought myself quite
righteous in some ways, quite learned, quite the influential intellectual you
might say. It was very hard for me to escape that life, and the last thing I want
to do is put you in the same trap that I was in. Instead, I want you to
contemplate what I say here and then discover your own truth beyond these
words and all words. I want you to forget about the particulars of the story
and think about the underlying feeling-intent instead. Remember all that you
are is feeling, and then try to find your own greater understanding of that
feeling-intent in a direct way, as you follow that feeling and contemplate it
within the temple of your mind.
If you are paying attention to the words of this story in a purely material
way, then this story is just a kind of propaganda piece. From that purely
material hierarchies’ point of view, Daniel does indeed miraculously survive,
and he survives because his beliefs are the greatest. His God is better than the
other gods. This one God is so great that it can even save you from a pit of
hungry lions, so you should get over here and join us. As you can plainly see,
we are on the winning team,” the shadowed man for a second sounded just
like one of the merchants selling their products on the street.
The young man laughed and relaxed a little as his dark companion
continued to talk, “Lost in words and seeing only the superficial aspects of it,
this is no more than a story of political struggle. For too many people this is
all that there is to it. But there are some who may be inspired to seek a greater
understanding of forces that cannot be truly perceived or understood using
only words and the physical senses.
Let us say then that as an inner alchemist you must go beyond the beliefs
and the endless battles between one group and another. Because you can now
see a little of the Spirit, you can no longer continue like an average man
fighting some endless war pitting your beliefs against another. The words of
this story will cripple you if you let them, I think you are beginning to see the
energetic truth of this, so the only thing left for you to do now is to use the
feelings, the underlying intent expressed within these words, to take you
beyond the prison of the material and into worlds where true power exists.”
“How do I proceed in a different way?”
“Instead of just reading and then trying to force-feed what you have read
onto others, you must engage in energetic doing. What I am showing you is
actual technique, actual energetic doing that you must prove to yourself
through your own action, which as I have said is inner action because all that
you see around you is the result of inner action, not outer physical perception.
And as I told you before, I don’t expect you to believe me without question, it
is now your task to prove me wrong using those techniques that you are
beginning to master, using your contemplations, your ability to stop your
internal monologue, and your ability to travel deeply within.
And understand this: in order to present to you the intricacies of inner
alchemy and transmutation, I must begin at a place where your mind can
understand. I must do this because if I do not, a part of you will rebel and I
will lose you. Indeed, you could say that there is a part of you that would do
anything and everything to break our bonds, even if that means your
annihilation.”
“Now you have me scared, I do not understand what you are trying to
say.”
The shadowed man thought for a moment then replied, “Transmutation
happens through a process of inner action. Transmutation is the key principle
that unlocks a door, and as you will discover in time, it is the unlocking of
this door that will break the bonds of the trap that you are currently in. The
way of inner alchemy is basically a way to escape that trap.”
“Then why don’t you just teach me about the door and forget about all this
religious business?”
“Here you will have to trust me, and I know that this is hard for you or for
anyone. I must show you in steps because of that perceptive fence that I have
told you about. We are all being held prisoner by a force beyond reckoning,
and the only way that we can escape is one step at a time, slowly. If our
captor knows that we are trying to run away, it may just turn around and swat
us. If this happens you might not recover from such a blow.”
“What is this force?”
The shadowed man continued to talk as if he had not heard the young
man’s question at all, “There are many ways to get to that door. For some,
like me, it was a matter of great research and diligence. I had to work through
an endless number of books and information, hidden scrolls, and magical
grimoires to discover the extent of the trap and how to escape it. I was alone,
I did not have a teacher and because of that I discovered things in patchwork
at times, and this meant that I had great revelations that nearly broke me…I
am trying to save you from such pain.
Those revelations nearly broke me because my life was different from
your life, and nobody helped me by trying to show me things in a more
orderly way. In my life I felt like I had all the time in the world, and I was
incredibly complacent. So, it was an unbelievable shock for me to discover
that I had enemies at every corner, that my time was limited, and that what I
faced was worse than any hell I had imagined thus far. While your situation
might be different from mine in some ways, please believe me when I say
that we all lack time, that we are all on borrowed time here on this earth.
Your situation is different, you have me, I only had my books. In many
ways your life may even be more difficult than mine because you have
nothing, at least I had money and a modicum of political power. You were
headed down a difficult road, one that you would most likely not have come
back from had I not shown up, and yet what is to come may not be any less
difficult in some ways.”
The young man looked to his dark companion questioningly, there was a
tinge of fear on his face.
 The shadowed man was relentless and continued to speak, “The incredible
oppression of your life is such that if I do not work quickly, this life may
enfold you, trap you under its shadow, and once that happens you may be lost
to me forever. I must work quickly with you but at the same time I must layer
the information that I give you. I had years to work through my books and
understand everything holistically, you do not have those years, nor do you
have the resources to try to discover those secrets as quickly as I could have
with all of the resources at my disposal. I am sorry, I do not know how else to
say this, but you are uneducated and as such I must use terms and concepts
that you can understand. I must slowly build a supporting structure that can
withstand the weight of all that is to come.
Perhaps it would be best for me to just tell you everything and leave you
to it. In which case you would need to have that kind of faith that I am going
to tell you about and hope that in time you would make sense of all of it. But
that great force that I am now calling the Spirit, has commanded a different
fate for you. Infinity itself has moved a great many pieces and transmuted a
different life for you.”
“What fate is that?”
“Well, this great force has commanded the great blessing of my company
of course,” the shadowed man laughed.
After some time the shadowed man stopped laughing and finally spoke,
“A prayer that is performed correctly will create ripples strong enough to get
the attention of the dreaming god within us, the Secret King, the unconscious.
Sometimes such a powerful prayer will be more than enough. What this
means is that such a ripple will create, will transmute into existence, either a
set of events or a thing proper in our lives.
In accordance with the layering of information that must be used in this
phase of your tutelage, I have used many words to describe something
beyond description. I have used words such as the Spirit, the dreaming god,
Secret King, but you could also refer to that indescribable force as pure
energy, a sea of energy, simply energy. I have tried to separate this vast sea
of energy into different aspects, and I have said that the Secret King lives and
is intermingled among this vast ocean of energy that is all around us. In
simple terms so that you understand in the beginning, and you are not
overwhelmed as I was, you could think of your Secret King (your
unconscious) as being aware of this giant sea of energy. The unconscious
within you can directly perceive the Spirit, it can intermingle with it, and it
can even understand to some degree how to work with it.”
“Are you saying that there are different parts of me?”
“Yes. But never forget what I have said about words, they ultimately lie.
This is my attempt to describe the indescribable, but you must discover your
own truth directly. So, with that in mind, what I am trying to say is that there
is a conscious you, there is an unconscious part of you, and then there is the
Spirit, that sea of energy that is responsible for everything that you see all
around you.” The young man nodded.
“The trick to prayer and faith is the ability to learn how to use your
conscious to contact and work with the unconscious. You,” the shadowed
man pointed at the young man, “which is the conscious person, must learn to
contact your unconscious.” The shadowed man opened his hand and moved it
closer to Janos making a gesture like going deeper, going within. “You are
learning to do that through prayer and you have become relatively successful
at this, now I am trying to show you a different way to contact the
unconscious and the energetic sea; the new way can be called faith. Faith is a
slightly different feeling-intent than prayer that can allow you to contact the
great energetic sea all around us in a slightly different way. If done properly,
prayer and faith work as a team to get you anything and everything that you
could ever want. I am showing you transmutation through the power of faith
and prayer. Transmutation is an inner action, and that inner action relies on
feeling, feeling-intent.”
“I think I get what you mean.”
The shadowed man smiled, looked at his young pupil and said, “The
power of prayer then is the ability of the conscious part of a person to tap into
the unconscious part of them. If prayer is powerful enough, then this contact
with the unconscious will be strong and they will get strong results. This
means that for the first time in your life young man, you will be consciously
aware of having tapped into your unconscious and through its help
consciously change your life. Through the technique that I refer to as prayer,
which is a kind of word wizardry, I am trying to show you how to take
conscious control of your life.,” the shadowed man smiled, “I have also said
that prayer is a form of transmutation, and by introducing this new word I
have let you know that transmutation is part of a much bigger discipline
(inner alchemy) whose key goal is not transmutation itself per se, but the
conscious opening of a door. Layer upon layer I have now connected
transmutation to something deeper which I have termed inner alchemy and I
have said that its goal is not the transmutation of the outer world but the
transmutation of the inner self.
And while the beliefs of the time say spirituality is only about
otherworldly things and not about the ability to transmute into existence
material things, I can tell you that the art and the ability to perform
transmutation is directly linked to that door that leads to places beyond the
trap of materiality. Material transmutation is important because in
learning how to perform that kind of energetic action we grow in power.
We need to grow in power to find that door and to go through it because
whatever is on the other side of that door will not yield to anyone who
has not mastered the ability to consciously control their unconscious, and
therefore consciously control the great sea of energy all around us.”
The young man pondered all that he had heard. With an air of frustration
he said, “What does all that mean? First you say that transmutation is about
more than just material things, but then you say that material transmutation is
all important!”
“It means that this material world is a test. To get to that door that leads
beyond this place, and to be able to survive what is beyond that door, we
must first learn how to consciously change this physical world. The material
world shows us how to begin to work with energy. The physical world is a
test!”
The young man turned his eyes up to the night sky and saw that there was
a dark luminosity to everything. He could not explain this dark luminosity
except to say that somehow darkness had become light for him. With this
new perspective, the ink black dome above him had become a brilliant
infinity the pulled at his soul. The shadowed man looked at his young
companion and having a direct understanding of the feeling-intent the young
man was now experiencing, he could only laugh as his eyes began to shine
with that same dark luminosity. No one saw the two shadows on the side of
the busy street, no one cared. If infinity could care it might have, but being
that infinity had no beginning and no end, it did the only thing that it could, it
enfolded those two shadows within itself and in that enfolding, that shining
darkness grew so bright that all the world disappeared from view.
Encased within infinity, far away from the average world of humanity, the
shadowed man spoke, “I know that this is overwhelming. And even if you
were to understand intellectually it would still be too much for you to
instantly apply it as a system, as a way of life. For that reason, I am breaking
our time together into segments. This segment is your initial introduction to
transmutation through firstly the power of prayer and then through the power
of faith, which as I have said work as a pair.
But as you should know very well by now, intellectual understanding is
not enough for us. As inner alchemists the only way to continue with our
talks is for you to turn what I have revealed to you into power. The only way
that we can continue our talks is for you to turn my words into true power.”
“And how do I do that?”
“You do that by applying the techniques that I am trying to show you in
your life. You do that by directly doing what it is that I am telling you to do
and then decide for yourself if I am right and if this is the life that you desire
to have. And it is up to me to decide if you have been successful in turning
knowledge into power, or more accurately you could say it is up to the Spirit
to decide and for me to perceive.
Transmutation for all of us is a step-by-step process. Each step gives us
another piece that we can add to the temple of our minds. Piece by piece we
build a giant temple within our minds, a temple that will hopefully be strong
enough to withstand all that is to come.”
“What is to come?”
As was usual on this night, the shadowed man continued talking as if he
had not heard the young man at all, “This means that this temple must not
only withstand what is beyond that door, it must also be able to withstand this
world, this harsh and terrible physical world, a harshness that you know all
too well.”
“How do these techniques help in this world?” Janos realized the
shadowed man was not ignoring him, he was only explaining as best he
could. And thanks to that impeccable ordering of things, Janos finally
grasped the idea, “Wait…I understand! I have been contemplating this for a
while and after all that you have said, I think I understand.” The shadowed
man was silent, and he waited for the young man to explain. “Through
transmutation I begin to take conscious control of my life. And in doing so I
overcome the trials of this world. If I can overcome these trials, I can
overcome what is beyond the door.”
“Yes, that is it exactly my young friend! And so, to continue the next part
of our talk and in the next round of your contemplations, you must now try to
implement the mastery of faith.”
The young man half smiled and looked at his dark companion.
 The shadowed man said in an understanding tone, “Yes, it takes a while to
get here. This task of learning about faith is quite challenging and it may take
a great deal of time spent within the temple of your mind to truly understand
how to turn those concepts and that feeling-intent into power. Such
contemplations will push you and they will drive you to go deeper and deeper
into places unknown. You will need to continue to do this until through your
own personal inner action you can use prayer and faith effectively to change
every aspect of your life. If you cannot do this, this may be the last time that
we see each other.” The young man felt a chill.
“Now, your efforts with prayer alone are haphazard, but they are good
enough that they have proven to the Spirit, which I can perceive directly, that
you are worthy of the next step which is faith. Would you agree with this?”
“Yes, I have noticed that even though I have tried so many methods, so
many kinds of techniques, my results at best have been haphazard. I noticed
that while I had success with the salt, most everything else has been hit and
miss. And honestly, it is so difficult to know whether any seeming successes
are only in my head or whether there was an actual change, and actual
transmutation.”
“Well, it is my hope that this next technique will help you in this regard.
Faith then is quite simply a kind of sustained prayer.”
“Do you mean that I must be praying constantly my entire day? I have
noticed that prayer is quite tiring. I must be using up some kind of energy
because when I try to pray for too long, I get hungry, and my mind gets so
tired sometimes. I can get sleepy just from the effort of it.”
“This is something that is best learned on your own. I could tell you what
might happen, but in discovering these things yourself, they become so much
more relevant, so much more real for you. We are all feeling as I have said,
and without you knowing those feelings yourself directly, all that follows is
built upon shaky ground.”
The shadowed man looked up as if he was organizing his thoughts, and he
was quiet for a while. The young man used this time to rest his mind, prepare
himself for the assault to his mind that he knew was coming. Finally, the
shadowed man spoke, “All motion is essentially the movement of energy, and
all energetic movement has a cost. Working with energy also means
expending energy and there is always an adherence to a kind of equal
exchange between acting bodies. Transmutation means a give-and-take, a
barter. You give a certain kind of energy to receive a different kind of energy
you might say. Another way to say this is the energy expended as you
maintain unrelenting focus is given in exchange, it is the price you pay for
exchanging one thing for another.
The first method that I have shown you focuses energy with great
intensity, but it is short in duration. Like an explosion, prayer tries to create a
ripple within the dark sea that is big enough to create what you want. That
intensity means a large amount of energy expelled within a relatively short
period of time.
In the second technique that I am now showing you, the trick is to believe
for a prolonged period. The key to faith as I have said is duration and that
duration is like a drop falling into a wobbly bucket over and over. The drops
keep dropping, slowly, relentlessly, until the bucket reaches a point where it
overflows and tumbles over.”
“Won’t I run out of energy and fall asleep after so much prolonged
effort?”
“Part of the trick of the faith technique is to be able to work with your own
mind, to find your own way through your own efforts and in that way
develop the ability to sustain that prolonged belief. It is very important with
this second technique that you do not overexert yourself, so you must find
your own calm and quiet efficiency. In the first technique, through prayer,
you created one intense wave within the sea of energy all around us. Using
this new technique, faith, you create smaller ripples to be sure, but those little
ripples being prolonged, sustained, may have an even greater capacity to
contact the dreaming god and change the energetic sea. Do you understand?”
“I think I do. One is intense like a kind of explosion, while the other is like
a sustained wind.”
“Yes, that is it! But what I want you to discover in time is that while the
intensity of prayer can create great focus and give your life direction, it is
faith that keeps you going in that direction until transmutation happens. Both
are necessary in the beginning, but you may find in time that faith, being that
it is unrelenting and unbending, can surpass anything possible with prayer
alone. All of this you must discover on your own. I want you to try and pay
attention to the power and energy you use as you perform these different
techniques.”
“Why do I need to pay so much attention to my energy?”
“You need to pay attention to your energy because you are learning to
work with, not only the energy that flows all around you, but also with the
energy within you. You can think of it like a horse pulling a cart.”
“Pardon me?”
“Think of your focus of attention like a horse pulling a cart. With the first
technique you are whipping the horse and having it run as fast as it can for a
short period. There is a cost to this but there is reward as well when it is used
properly: you get to where you want to go faster. With the second technique
you are teaching the horse to keep going for a very long period. If the first
technique is a sprint, then the second technique is a marathon. There are
advantages to having a fast and intense horse and there are advantages to
having a horse that has great endurance. But the best of both worlds, the only
thing that will do in your case, is to have a horse that is both intense and has
great endurance as well. This is what you are working towards.”
The young man thought about what his dark teacher said. He played it
through in his mind, and finally asked, “So how do I have faith? How is faith
an energetic act?”
The shadowed man replied, “Think about that story of Daniel who was
thrown into the lion’s den. At that moment he could not pray, he could not
get on his knees in front of a pride of hungry lions and begin some kind of
monologue. He would not get halfway through it before a lion pounced on
him and ate him right up. Instead, Daniel had to have a kind of unrelenting
focus from beginning to end.”
“What do you mean by beginning to end?”
“As the story tells us, Daniel was a pious man. So, in essence he had to
have faith. He had developed unrelenting belief before he was thrown into the
den of hungry predators, and he had to keep that faith in the face of his own
impending death. Remember Mark 11:24, ‘believe that you have received it’,
believe, believe!
For Daniel, faith meant a belief that his God would protect him no matter
what. So unalterable and enduring was that faith that he was able to even face
a horrible death without any kind of doubt at all. That is true focus. That is
the kind of faith that you must strive for. Try to go past the outer aspects of
that story and focus on the feeling-intent.”
“And how do I develop such faith? I’m not sure if I completely
understand. How can you have that kind of intense faith without great
effort?”
“Let us take something in your life, a personal issue. For example, let us
say that you had used the first technique, which was prayer, to ask for salt for
your father. Let us say that this prayer had been successful to some degree, in
that it had created a ripple strong enough to be felt by your unconscious, and
the unconscious had helped a little as it always does. Perhaps this would have
been what some might call a lucky event, a lucky roll of the dice. But the
weight of the world was such that this prayer was not quite enough. At that
moment what you would need is something else to add weight to your intent.
What you would need is a way to maintain the motion of that wave that you
had created. You would need something to add weight and substance to that
initial intensity.
Faith is like a slow-building resonance that you would need to keep that
motion of energy going in the direction that you want. And this in the end is
the true power of faith: duration, continuity. The true power of faith is its
ability to create a bridge between what you want to happen and what is now
happening.”
“What do you mean?”
“The energetic motion that you create through sustained faith (feeling-
intent) allows for the creation of a kind of energetic pathway between
yourself and the Secret King, and then between the Secret King and the Spirit
itself. Prolonged and sustained intent, a feeling-intent that is unbending,
changes not only the world out there, but it also changes us.”
“How does it change us?”
“It changes us by turning a feeling-intent into something we can perceive
as being physical, material. It allows that great vastness of energy out there to
turn a feeling into a thing. Another way to say this is that sustaining our
feeling-intent changes us and the world from the inside out.”
“Can you tell me then what feeling-intent is? I think I understand
intuitively using inner aspects of myself, but I am having trouble
understanding intellectually.”
“In the simplest sense, you can think of feeling-intent as belief. Feeling-
intent is like having a prolonged belief that something is true/real.”
“So how do I keep that little wave of energy going?”
“Being that the technique of faith is the great bridge between one possible
reality and another, this is an incredibly important technique for us. This is
such an important technique that I must tread lightly here and with care.”
“Why is this technique so important to us?”
“As I have said, faith, which is a fine term for unrelenting focus, can
change one reality into another. It is the one technique that opens doors, the
kind of doors that we must step through as inner alchemists if we are to truly
free ourselves from the shackles of this world. For that reason, I must be
careful because a part of you, the lazy senseless part that doesn’t want to
change, might catch on to the fact that it is this technique (unrelenting focus)
that is key in breaking the routines of the mundane and the normal, and it
might rebel.” The young man felt the smile of the shadowed man grow bigger
as he felt that now common chill surge up his spine.
“Rebel? I don’t understand why knowing this would cause a part of me to
rebel. You just openly said what you are doing!”
“That part that I am talking about is stupid and lazy until the last moment,
so I can be obvious with words, but I must be careful with feeling. You are
clueless as to what I mean so it is clueless as well. I just want to shake that
part of you up a little bit, set it up for all that is to come, but we have other
business tonight. Let us stick to the topic at hand and contemplate enduring
focus, which we are calling faith from the perspective and the words used in
scripture. I just hope that you do not get all puffed up like an angry chicken
and run away on me.” The shadowed man laughed.
“I must be deeply entertaining for you,” replied Janos after he had gained
a modicum of self-control.
“You are indeed, but only for the best of reasons I assure you, and I have
to get a little recompense for all this enduring focus that I am engaging in.”
“About that…”
“Forget that for now! Our focus is on faith, and the reason why I asked
you whether you knew the story of Daniel and the lion’s den was because I
was trying to engage a certain feeling-intent within you. As I have told you
already, we are a feeling, that is the totality of us. If we can change our
feeling about things, about ourselves, then with the changing of that feeling
we change ourselves in time.
Let us try another story, do you know the story of Peter and how he was
almost able to walk on water?”
“I think I know a little of that one but probably not enough.”
“I will try to keep it short. The apostles are out on their boats trying to
cross the Sea of Galilee when a huge wind comes up and causes them to
worry that they might all fall into the sea and drown. Seeing this, Jesus
decides to use the situation to make a point, so he steps into the water but
instead of sinking, incredibly, he begins to walk ‘on’ the water. Walking on
water he begins to move towards the boat that is being violently buffeted by
the strong wind.
Seeing Jesus walk on water the apostles are calmed, and the apostle Peter
is so inspired that he asks Jesus to call to him so that he might join him and
walk on water himself. Jesus asks him to come, and Peter steps out of the
boat and walks towards Jesus, but the wind returns and for a second Peter
doubts, and as he doubts, he sinks into the water and must be saved by Jesus
who then reprimands him and tells him that the reason he sank was because
at that moment he lost his faith in the Spirit.
Just like Daniel who had to face a pack of hungry lions, this poor soul
found himself in a dark storm walking on water instead of drowning. Just like
Daniel, Peter did not have time to pray, all he had was his faith. In this case
Peter needed Jesus to gather enough faith to be able to step into the water and
walk on it for a while, but the minute that he saw the wind come back, his
focus was lost, and he doubted. And as he doubted, he sank into the water.”
The young man looked up at the sky and pondered the story.
The shadowed man asked, “What feeling-intent do you get as you hear
this story?”
“About faith?”
“Yes, about faith in general, and about what it would take for you to have
that kind of faith if you were in Peter’s situation. Allow an aspect of yourself
to become those men in the story and then try to feel the kind of feeling
required to be able to survive a pack of hungry lions or the kind of certainty
of belief required to be able to walk on water even in high wind.”
“I suppose I can understand that feeling if I place myself in that situation;
it is like becoming another person in the temple of my mind and then feeling
myself being that person. If I do that then I can feel a little bit of the feeling-
intent that it would take to walk on water or face hungry lions.”
“Now, do you think you could hold onto that feeling for a long time?”
“Yes, it would be like having a focus of feeling, and that focus would be
so intense that it would create a kind of vibration within me. Daniel
maintained that focused vibration while Peter could not.”
“Exactly. It is the holding of a certain kind of unrelenting focus that is the
key. Think about how incredible that is young man, hidden in this simple
story is a key that can help you open doors to fantastic power. It is through
the discovery and the pursuit of feeling-intent in stories, secret manuscripts,
grimoire, and even history and everyday living, that inner alchemists discover
and pursue hidden doors and keys that reveal the true nature of existence and
the way to power. By looking past the surface and focusing only on the
feeling-intent, you can find doors to other worlds that will reveal the most
incredible things to you.
Even common stories are sometimes full of arcane knowledge if you only
know how to look. And in time you will see that much of this repeats itself.
That repetition is very important because it reveals the underlying structure of
the foundation of all human existence.”
“Please explain this further.”
The shadowed man replied, “It is like a general narrative to all our lives
that we repeat, life after life. The knight in his shining armor that must face
the great dragon but during battle he doubts and fails, is the same feeling-
intent as Peter who doubts and sinks into the treacherous water. Feeling-
intent will help you understand the entire world and our place and purpose in
it. There is great importance in this repetition of life experience, lifetime after
lifetime, but I will leave that to you to study and find your own way. This is
most important young man!”
The young man felt a tingling and a quickening within him. He knew that
the shadowed man had revealed something of incredible importance,
something that he needed to pursue at all costs. It was like he was given a
peek behind a secret curtain, and all that he wanted to do for the rest of his
life was to step past that curtain and see the truth for himself.
The shadowed man waited for the young man’s energy to settle, then
finally he spoke, “But no matter where you read or hear these stories, they
will always be just words until you turn that knowledge into power. To do
that you must use what you have learned about moving deeply into your inner
temple and search for the truth of that feeling-intent in those deep inner
places. You must know this feeling-intent yourself directly. If you can do
that, you will know directly that such unrelenting focus in time not only
changes the world around you, but it changes you. In time that unrelenting
focus becomes something more, it becomes a new you.”
The young man turned to look at his companion and spoke, “I suppose to
me at this moment it is like believing something and believing it so strongly
that the very nature of the world changes around me to suit that belief. It is
like a new belief breaks what you or others might have thought possible, and
you shine with that belief. It is like that shine changes the world.”
“Yes! That is faith, the ability to maintain a focus, I like that better than a
belief. Yes, maintain a focus that makes you shine with a certain kind of
vibration. And certainly, for Daniel and Peter, such impossible deeds must
have required an incredible amount of shininess you might say. But that
shininess does not just change the world around you, it changes you.”
The young man looked worried for a second and said, “I’m not sure if I’m
ready for faith…that is unrelenting focus. I’m not sure if I have been able to
grasp the great intensity of prayer yet.”
“I’m not asking you to walk on water. For now, I only want you to
maintain a shininess of a certain intensity, so that the ripples created by your
prayer are not forgotten by the Secret King. This guarantees that your prayer
will be answered, it guarantees that transmutation will take place. You might
say that this is the key that turns your haphazard results with prayer into true
commands that the Spirit must obey.
This is your new task. In the temple of your mind, I want you to
contemplate the nature of faith, belief, sustained focus, and what I might
mean by intensity. I want you to try to relate what I might mean by intensity
to what you have described as shininess; remember to pursue the feeling-
intent beneath those words. In contemplating these difficult topics, you will
be challenged to go deeper and deeper into your mind palace, and this will set
up the groundwork that can carry our conversation into new directions where
I can reveal to you a clearer way to work with energy directly.”
“Work with energy directly?”
“This is a big topic that you cannot handle just now. As I have told you, I
need to familiarize you with certain things first. The art of transmutation is a
long one and it requires many steps; it requires an incredibly strong
foundation. You are lucky, you are fortunate enough to have me as your
magnificent and magnanimous teacher,” the young man smiled as the
shadowed man laughed.
“I did not have a teacher, I only had books, and that meant that I had to
learn everything in a haphazard way and then stitch things together within the
temple of my mind. But you are more fortunate in this regard at least, and
that means that we can jump across certain parts of that crazy patchwork road
that I had to take. And since I can give you more precise and more orderly
answers, I can make sure that in this beginning we take all the time needed to
build a good foundational structure for you to stand on as we go deeper and
deeper.”
“I feel like an idiot. I am not sure if I have ever read a book from start to
finish in my entire life.”
 “You are an idiot. We are all idiots in the beginning. Remember back
when you told me about the natural sciences, and we began to discuss logic
and experimentation. Think about the feeling-intent needed to be a detached
logician or scientist. With that feeling-intent, detach yourself from the person
that you are and try to study the very nature of your life up to now, just from
a logical point of view. Detaching yourself in such a manner and seeing your
life from a distance, you can see that you are an uneducated young man living
in an environment that is not conducive to great learning and understanding.
Your entire world at every turn his superstition and folly. This is not your
fault; you were born to this. So up until now you could be excused for any
lack of understanding. And indeed, this lack of understanding means that I
must use the words and the beliefs of the times to try to explain something to
you that is beyond such words. And I expect that once you understand what I
am trying to say, you will be strong enough to turn these words into true
power.”
The young man made a bit of a sour face but instantly realized that the
shadowed man was right. The young man did indeed live a poor life both
materially and intellectually.
“Good for you! You have already proven yourself to be far wiser than I
was in the beginning. We are all idiots, and I was a bigger idiot than most, I
will tell you that.”
After some time, the shadowed man took a deep breath and spoke,
“Forgive me if I must use scripture which might be a sore spot for you, but I
must begin with and work with what I have. If it is any comfort to you, I will
let you know that there is a great deal more to know. For now, just
understand that I need to use the metaphors and the beliefs of our time. I need
to use the stories that are well known in this time to be able to show you the
feeling-intent that lies beneath all stories so that you can discover the true
power that lies within them. I need to work with the popular culture of the
times.”
“Popular culture?”
“No need to worry about that now, our current focus is on the feeling-
intent of faith and the fact that faith can help you to understand the next step
in your evolution, your personal transmutation. This next step is one that you
must take yourself, and I think you are doing quite well. Your term shininess
is a term I like very much. And with it, like a shining light, you might then
begin to associate such things as you follow them through the temple of your
mind. It is my hope that in contemplating faith you will also begin to
contemplate the concept of power and how power is like the fuel, the creator,
the everything, the essence of all that we are, all that we can be.”
“Is power the Spirit?”
“Yes, in the simplest of terms, power is the Spirit. And yet there is so
much more to say.”
At that moment the young man felt a great vacuum, like a veil had been
lifted, or more like a great wind had come by and removed something. He
realized that what the great wind had removed was that vacuum that had
separated him from the people in the street. And just like that he realized that
the shadowed man was gone, and that people could see him once again.
He stood up quickly, kept his head down but was aware of everything, and
slowly but with gaining speed began to match the momentum and the tempo
of the people of the street, those who were lost in between this and that. By
matching the rhythm of the people all around him, he became one of them, he
became camouflaged within the midst of them. Those who had noticed his
emergence from the shadows almost instantly forgot about him as he became
just another object that perfectly matched the rhythm of the times, the rhythm
of their time, the rhythm of this material time.

Lessons
All coincidences, lucky events, and even certain kinds of omens are the
beckoning of the Spirit. Janos discovers that the Spirit is trying to get the
attention of humanity at every turn, and it does so by throwing coincidence
after coincidence in front of people. Like a glitch in the matrix of existence,
the Spirit is always trying to tell people, “There is more to reality than just the
material world! There is too much coincidence, there is something more
going on than just what your physical senses are telling you. Look at me!
Look at me and see!”

U
The young man discovered a way to find secrets hidden within the stories of
human existence, whether those stories are written or whether they are the
actual experiences that are happening to him and the people around him now.
Hidden within all human doing exists something that in later centuries would
be known as ‘the archetype’. The archetype is an unconscious knowing and
doing that is carried out by the human species, it is a recurring pattern or
motif that is present in all stories, art; all hidden there beneath whatever
words or symbols are the popular culture of the times. Archetypes are
constantly repeating and can be a symbol, an image, a character. But the dis-
balance is best seen as a pattern that is present in the collective unconscious
of humanity. This pattern shapes the entire human world.
An archetype is like an original model that lays down an enduring stencil
upon which all human action is based. It is this stencil, this archetype, which
leads to an endless cycle of life-and-death where things will be repeated over
and over again as every single individual makes their way across their life
following their own personal hero’s journey. And it is this journey that
always leads to eternal recurrence. If we fail to see archetypes and the eternal
recurrence that they create, we will always be stuck in a never-ending loop of
existence!

U
If a feeling-intent has enough duration, it can change us from the inside out.
It is unbending intent and relentless duration that are responsible for our
individual configuration.
 9
Simultaneous Selves and Managing Energy
Channels
JANOS SPENT MONTHS contemplating what the shadowed man had told
him in their last meeting. He would get up as usual during the 13th hour and
contemplate from his favorite chair in the middle of the room that he shared
with his father.
His father, having become used to the young man’s meditations, would
stay quiet and walk around his son. As he moved around the room, lost in his
own private thoughts, he would often have a little smile on his face. He was
proud of his son. He believed that his son had finally been shown the
kingdom of God as he knew he would, in time.
And knowing his father’s thoughts, by the way he quietly walked around
his son with that happy glint in his eye, the young man wondered what his
reaction would be if he found out that Janos contemplated the strange
teachings of a being that was in essence a living shadow…a shadow that was
no angel, who might be an illusion of the young man’s mind.
Janos chuckled despite himself; his father smiled.
He was beginning to understand, whether it was scripture, biology,
astrology, astronomy, all such things were only words on a page. The average
person did not want to make the effort, calculate, understand through direct
perception. What they wanted was an easy answer, one that they could accept
because a high enough authority had given their stamp of approval and said
that this was indeed fact. And thanks to that endorsement, they were satisfied
that the things that they read on a page were true, that the things that they
heard and were taught by sanctioned authorities were correct and beyond
question. They did not have to think, they just needed to believe and fight
with that blind belief against anyone or anything that would contradict the
sanctioned belief of the times.
But the demon in the shadows had taught him differently and there was no
going back now.
 Wait, no, that was not the truth. The truth was that he had always been a
doubter, from the very beginning he had seen the fault in those unquestioned
beliefs. He had thought that he was alone until the shadowed man appeared.
And whether demon, angel, or merely a made-up delusion of his mind, he
now had a new way of being. That new way demanded contemplation,
personal experimentation, calculation, and an endless striving towards direct
perception, direct knowledge. And that laughing demon, he had not told him
to doubt, he was actually showing him that there was indeed something
incalculable beyond the word and the superstition of the times.
As he twisted and turned down the sometimes-dark passages within the
temple of his mind, moving farther and farther into the depths of the self,
reaching, and turning into odd angles that then opened into dimensions that
cannot be traveled using physical limbs, he continued his search for the Spirit
that moves through all things. Across the odd corners and down the many
tunnels and rooms within the temple of his mind, he would chase different
aspects of the Spirit. And having gone deeper and deeper, and then deeper
still, he was beginning to see how the Spirit was power. He was beginning to
see the surface layer of things, and he was beginning to understand that what
the vast majority of people thought was real, was a tiny tip of a much bigger
ocean of energetic movement.
Because he could now perceive with inner senses as opposed to only his
physical ones, he could see clearly that physical reality was the direct
outcome of things that happened in those places that were unseen by people.
Thought, focus and intent intermingled, and often without knowing it, people
created their own reality from the very depths of the sea of energy that they
were not able to perceive. They came up with all sorts of names for that sea
that they could not directly or consciously perceive themselves, in the hope of
somehow corralling it and understanding it, but words were just things, and
they lived and were stuck in their own prisons.
The sea of energy underlying all creation was vast beyond measure, it
stood on its own, separate from everything and everyone, and yet, it was
everything. How could you possibly understand that with mere words?
Humanity unconsciously fed the infinite sea of energy with every single
thought that it had individually and as a collective. Every single turn of focus,
every single individual intent, no matter how frivolous and short, added to the
complexity of the infinite sea of energy. The human tragedy was not
loneliness, not a tragic scolding consequence of being left behind by
whatever God in some dismal Earthly kingdom. The human tragedy was the
fact that people had somehow lost the ability to see the Spirit. And having
lost the ability to perceive the Spirit directly, they did not know that the Spirit
was all around them and they barely understood how everything they did
contributed to the creation of their reality.
Deep within he could perceive it all directly: it was an incredible
menagerie, the most intricate web of rooms within rooms, some as small as
dots of ink on a page, others as vast as the sky. All this complexity of
structure was created by instinct and impulse, bubbling from an incredible
nowhere, an infinite well of creativity and power that was for him, at the
moment, beyond imagination. All he knew was that the nature of these
creations within the temple of his mind were related to core beliefs, personal
assumptions, which flowed within a sea of power, coalescing, birthing
themselves and developing into the most amazing edifices. These structures
would first materialize, transmute into existence, within these inner scapes of
his mind but then, in time, they would become fully fledged transmutations in
the outer world.
The young man was beginning to be able to perceive those structures in
his mind with a different perceptual mechanism, an inner sense. He
remembered even though he didn’t know how this memory came to him, that
the shadowed man had called this new perceptual possibility the inner senses.
These were senses that were for the inside. Like physical eyes they saw, and
he could perceive the shape and form of things, but how did they see? Like
physical ears they could hear and yet they were not physical. With hands that
were not biological he could touch and feel things, incredibly, he could even
touch with his eyes, or hear with his internal hands. The fluidity of perception
possible with the inner senses was astonishing.
Thanks to his hard work and the tutelage of the shadowed man, he was
mastering the ability to use those inner senses to understand the great web of
creation, both within his mind and without.
Now, deep within his inner temple, he focused his attention and
contemplated the great design of reality. And astonishingly, when he was
able to go deeply within, as deep as he was now, he stumbled upon and
opened up segments of forgotten memory, lost time!
This lost time was something that he found incredibly difficult to
understand. He could not comprehend how it was that he came across
forgotten memories that could not possibly have happened during his
remembered meetings with the shadowed man. How could he now remember
things that were completely outside of his conscious memory?
His dark teacher, yes that is what he was now, his dark teacher; he had
said that within the folds of intensity anything was possible. He had said that
time did not function in the way that the average person thought time
functioned. His dark teacher had said that anything was possible within the
folds of time, and that within the folds of time, space could exist in places
inaccessible to the average person. Average people could not see those things
in the in-between, and being that the in-between was enormous, entire
memories, life experiences, live events and realities, could be hidden there.
And Janos now understood how things could begin within the in-between.
To get to these forgotten memories, this lost time within the folds of the in-
between, he had to go so deeply within himself that the boundaries between
wakefulness and sleep would shatter. He understood the walls that separated
the mundane from the magical as being a weight, a heaviness. This heaviness
was like a mass being placed upon him, it was the same weight that you felt
right before you were about to fall asleep and lose yourself completely within
forgotten unconscious dreams. It was that same weight that grew more and
more profound when he was bored and desperately wanted to sleep. It was
that weight, that mass, that drowsiness, that quite literally created an orbit, a
wall that separated one dimension from another. This was the wall that hid
the in-between from the average person.
Possibly because he was now completely aware of this transitory period
within him, as he moved from wakefulness to sleep, that drowsy energy that
hid the in-between became true gold for him. The lead of drowsiness was
now the golden energy that opened the door to the deepest places. It was
that gold that he now used consciously, and with it he was able to remember
these forgotten conversations with the shadowed man. But like any drug, this
power needed to be used in a sober and balanced way. If there was too much
lead, then his whole consciousness could be obliterated which meant that the
part of him that needed to stay lucid in order to consciously navigate within
these worlds, would disappear. He had to learn how to maintain, control and
transmute the right amounts of lead into gold if he had any chance of going
deeply within. If he had too much, he would lose his lucidity, he would lose
his mind. If he had too little, then he would be barred from those magical
dimensions without measure. It was all about perfect control.
If he used too much, he would fall asleep during his contemplations, he
would then suddenly wake up as his body fell to the side and he would have
to start his conscious contemplations again. If he did not use enough, then his
contemplations would be lackluster, they would lack the richness of
experience and deep depth of feeling that turned an average visualization into
a true experience as real as any physical event. The transmutation of lead to
gold needed to be impeccable.
His expertise in this kind of transmutation was growing, and thanks to that
growing talent and his ability to go deeper and deeper still, he was beginning
to remember some of that lost time. There he stumbled across lost
conversations, incredibly long discussions with the shadowed man that felt
like they had gone on for hours. And thanks to his growing ability to
remember those lost conversations, he now realized that he had made some
big mistakes in his pursuit of prayer, and faith. But with this new knowledge
he would now correct his initial mistakes.
First, he would change his approach to prayer. For the longest time what
had led him in strange directions was the idea that he needed to make some
grandiose physical action. His first impressions had made him believe that to
make ripples strong enough to catch the attention of the great dreamer, the
Secret King, he somehow needed to do something huge and physical; a
grandiose outer action as the shadowed man might say. He now knew that
these actions did not need to have a grandiose physical quality to them. Janos
now knew through his own direct experience that inner action was far more
powerful than any physical ritual. And as a great bonus, this was an action
that could be done anywhere because the average person, lacking the ability
to see with the inner senses, would never be aware of what was going on
within the temple of his mind.
He did not need to go into the middle of a lonely and dangerous forest to
perform a large and boisterous ritual. This was physical action, and while it
might help to rally some energy and intensity, he discovered as he moved and
explored the great depths of his temple that all such action could be done
deep within dimensions that no one could see with physical eyes or hear with
physical ears. Such action could rally great power and incalculable energy
beyond anything possible on the physical plane.
His inner temple was becoming so vivid, so real to him, that theoretically
he could go into a forest deep within his temple and beg and cry there in the
loudest voice possible, and yet this voice would not be heard by anyone. He
chuckled a little at the thought of himself in some giant dark inner room
visualizing candles at every corner and picturing himself reciting an odd
incantation from a leathered grimoire. All of this could be done within the
temple of his mind, there was no need for the fanfare of the street sorcerer.
But in contemplating implementing such a technique, he realized that he
still did not have perfect focus. His inner temple was large and vivid, but he
still had problems consistently maintaining unwavering visualizations. His
temple was still not stable enough for him to live there or perform acts there
as if this place was completely real and concrete just like the physical world;
his skills were still far from perfect. This meant that at the very least he
would have to have a written or memorized statement of intent; a phrase, that
he needed to repeat. He still needed the aid of the physical world to some
degree.
The good thing was that such a statement did not need to be overly
complicated. It could be as simple as, “I need,” or, “I want”.
The statement of intent, at least for him, did not need to directly implore a
god of any kind, the Secret King, or even the unconscious. His personal
beliefs were such that he could not use a statement like, “God please give
me…” He had become too jaded in his short life to believe in or pray to any
god in heaven. So, for him, for his emotions to be truly real and deeply felt,
he needed to make his statement more literal or perhaps think about pleading
to the unconscious as opposed to an anthropomorphic god.
For him, his statement of intent became an equation of sorts, like a spell
but more akin to a science. For him, thanks to his growing love of the natural
sciences, he imagined his statement of intent to be like a mathematical
equation. He wished and imagined himself being someone who, in time,
would learn about arithmetic and geometry. Someone who would eventually
learn to speak Latin and read the great texts available on such advanced
learning.
This being his proclivity, his statement of intent became science, an
equation. He remembered how his dark teacher insisted on the fact that
feelings were all that truly mattered, so if the young man was to truly make a
difference within the great sea of power, his statement of intent needed to tap
deeply into his greatest desires and emotions which were for the sciences.
The shadowed man always insisted on personal work, on individual effort.
And now the young man realized how important this work was because
without this individual practice, there was no way to really understand the
great nuance and fine detail of feeling and focus needed in every step of this
process.
One of those intricacies of the process had to do with time. Did he create a
statement that implied that he now had his desire, or a statement that
forcefully commanded that he would have his desire in the future? And how
was tonality and therefore the subtlety of design important? Should he
command or did he word his statement of intent as a request?
He contemplated these possibilities and the words that created such
subtlety of meaning in his mind, and realized how much words affected his
feeling-intent and therefore his personal reality. He noticed that an ‘I want’
feeling was like pulling, like trying to bring something to himself, make it
happen, like the boy in that market so long ago. And he noticed that the
statement ‘I have…’ evoked a feeling of security and of having now; it was
what Daniel had to feel when he faced the lions. As he was finally able to
understand his own individual way of prayer and faith, he started to see and
feel the correlation between the words he needed to use in the feeling-intent
that he needed to create. For him a prayer was an ‘I want’ feeling-intent,
which pulled in, and faith had a feeling-intent that was best expressed by the
words ‘I have’, which was enduring conviction.
Each word had its own vibration that caused within him a certain feeling-
intent and those feelings and intent felt like they were either pulling things
toward him (in prayer) or radiating out and away from him as he felt them (in
faith). The feeling-intent of ‘I want’ was like tugging or pulling from the sea
of energy, while ‘I have’ was more like a radiating or a flowering within you,
like a personal shininess. One pulled, the other radiated.
There was so much nuance to explore, and the deeper that he went the
bigger the spaces within his mind became, so that in this quest for power
through transmutation he was beginning to also realize the great
incalculability of his inner temple, and the great limitlessness available to all
human beings. It was like he was pushing back on a wall at times, it was like
he was building upon nebulous darkness, giving structure to things that were
as ethereal as feelings and words, and yet in doing so he was creating edifices
that were beginning to feel as real to him as the chair that he now sat on, as
the table that he rested his hands on.
When he knew he had the perfect statement of intent for his prayer, he
started to implement it right away. He would repeat it to himself very quietly
in a whisper. He could do this anywhere; he did not need to shut himself off
or hide while he was doing this. All he needed was a little peace and quiet to
enter the temple of his mind and once deep enough, he would begin to repeat
his chosen statement.
He would start by repeating it once, paying attention to it with as much
focus as he could muster. Upon whispering the statement of intent, those
words would make him think about his desire, they would create a feeling-
intent within him. For prayer he had concluded that he needed to beg to get
the most powerful intensity possible, but he needed to do this in the proper
way as the shadowed man advised[1].
This relatively short duration and intense feeling-intent was key to prayer,
so he needed to use what worked best for him. He needed to use the words ‘I
want’ followed by whatever he desired. Upon saying that statement of intent
he would have a feeling, this was his feeling-intent for this particular prayer.
This was the feeling-intent that he needed to focus on, and by focusing on it,
and only on it, the intensity of that feeling grew. The more that he focused on
this feeling-intent, the more that it naturally became more and more powerful.
Human attention naturally augments the power of anything that it
focuses on.
And as that feeling of desire and need grew, it was like a power was
building within him. His focus fed his desire and this desire helped with his
focus. The more emotion, the greater the power. This feeling-intent-emotion
would then be turned by him, not into feeling sorry for himself but on what
he wanted. His entire focus would go to what he wanted, only what he
wanted. Intensity upon intensity, total and unrelenting focus! He remembered
the words of the shadowed man, “Desire is action, desire is action!”
Janos did not need to scream out and beg like the child in the street, he did
not need to whine in a singsong out loud, instead, in a way, he did all of that
within himself; in the end, only deep feeling mattered. He continued with his
focus, perhaps repeating his phrase one more time if he had to, but always
focusing more and more so that intensity grew, until after a while the power
of that feeling-intent seemed to wane. When this happened, he would repeat
his statement of intent, and the whole process would begin again. This would
go on until he had repeated his statement of intent and gone through this
process ten times. He noticed that each repetition would allow him to get
more clarity of feeling-intent and so each repetition would become more
precise, more concentrated. Each repetition created a bigger and bigger wave,
a bigger and bigger ripple that had to be heard, that must be heard, by the
Secret King.
 Janos thought that completing the ten repetitions took about ten to fifteen
minutes, but time wasn’t important. The only thing that mattered was
impeccable action.
After his prayer was complete, he began to work on faith. Thanks to his
many months of fierce contemplation, he had begun to realize that life was in
many ways like a dream. While in dreams things would change instantly in
accordance with his feeling-intent, in physical life these changes would occur
far more slowly. But in the end, at least for him, life was a dream. The line
between what it was to be awake, and what it was to be asleep and dreaming,
was beginning to blur for him.
Perhaps one of the greatest consequences of that blurring between waking
and dreaming reality was a growing realization that he was not a material
thing, an object, but that in fact he was energy. He was energy and he lived
within a sea of energy. Once that became a real thing for him, a truly and
directly experienced thing for him, then the nature of existence changed for
him forever. Thanks to that visceral knowing, he had begun to see why his
dark teacher loved the term shininess so much. Shininess was a good way to
describe the growing intensity of energy that he experienced when he was
deeply focused on a particular feeling-intent. He would become more shiny,
more intense energetically, when his focus was enduring.
From the perspective of energy, ‘shininess’ was a perfect word. Things
shone brightly when their power increased, when a certain frequency of
energy increased in the same way that the sun and the stars shone in the sky.
He also remembered his dark teacher had said that this shininess needed to be
unrelenting in the face of anything. Shininess needed to be able to withstand
any storm, any obstacle.
With these new thoughts and realizations, he worked for months within
the temple of his mind. It had become interesting to him how he had begun to
think of his time in contemplation as study. His father could not afford to
have him join any grammar or monastic school, so the little that he could read
was the result of his father’s effort. And the only books that he had ever read
or heard about for the longest time was the Bible and a little prayer book that
belonged to his father.
There were so many things that he wanted to learn about. So many things
that he wanted to study. He wanted to know about the natural sciences which
were amazing to him. He had heard of men looking at the stars with large
field lenses. He wanted to look at the stars and study them, he wanted to look
at all the things around him and know the workings of them, the process, and
the makings of all things. And now, thanks to the teachings of his dark
companion, he had begun his own line of study and experimentation using
methods that seemed almost magical, and yet the great power of them was
undeniable. He was developing his own laboratory within the temple of his
mind, and it seemed every time that he used it, it became more and more
powerful, more structured, more real.
For now, his greatest concern, the sole focus of his study, was a
communion with a force, a fury that was beyond physical substance and yet
was the source of all physicality. It was the source of the stars, the earth, and
all things. It was the science of science.

T
Janos quickly realized something incredibly important, which was that his
efforts had a price. This led him down a long and cavernous section within
his mind, an area that seemed far deeper than some of the others that he had
been able to discover thus far.
There, deep down in a vast chamber, he found himself face-to-face with
the shadowed man! This new place within the depths of his mind palace was
so cavernous that it seemed like a new world to him. This place was well lit
but somehow it had a quality of dusk to it, and as hard as he tried, he could
only see the outline of his dark teacher. This new place seemed like such an
oddity, the colors were muted and even though everything around him
seemed relatively clear, there were soft shadows everywhere and as hard as
he tried, he could not make out any features of the man’s face.
Even though he could not see those features, he could nonetheless feel the
gaze of the man. Then he heard a familiar voice coming from the man, a
voice that was soft and melodious like a whisper and yet a whisper that
seemed to pound into his skull, a whisper that was like a scream that reached
down into the very essence of him, “Nothing is free in this world. We must
give something for everything that we get.”
It took a while for Janos to find his bearing, but finally he replied
hoarsely, “I remember you had said something about equal exchange,” his
voice sounded muffled, it had a leaden quality to it, nothing at all like the
booming whisper of his dark teacher.
“Yes. That is one law you can count on, and what that means for you at
this moment in time my young friend, is that your efforts will eventually hit a
wall, but if you conquer that wall, you will have access to incredible new
dimensions.”
“What do you mean by new dimensions?”
“You can already see this wall in the horizon, and I know this because you
are beginning to discover through your own personal efforts that focus has an
energetic price, that there is a termination point to your focus. As your power
grows and your focus creates more stable transmutations both within the
temple of your mind and in the outer physical world, you will begin to clearly
see that such a focus has a price.”
“In these new dimensions, will I be able to see the price of focus?”
“Yes and no. I say no because there is far more to it than this, but I must
say yes because a part of accessing those new dimensions means that a new
way of seeing the world will become available to you.”
The young man looked at his companion questioningly. Seeing this
expression on the young man’s face, the shadowed man tried to clarify, “You
are beginning to know directly through your own personal perceptions that
the world is far more complex than you thought it was. As your efforts carry
you further, the nature of this complexity will increase even more until a
point comes when you will know the true and fundamental nature of all
existence. The fundamental nature of existence is energy, this is the new
dimension that I speak of. But such a growing complexity has a price of sorts,
and that price is energy: to be more, we must have more. To do more, we
must expend more.”
“That sounds like money to me. It sounds like the same barter system
based on profit and loss that exists in this crummy physical world.”
“The material world must reflect the inner world because it is from the
inner, as I have said, that all things come from. But the complexities of
energy are far more subtle than any physical monetary system and they of
course allow for a subtlety of motion and development that are quite simply
impossible within material space. And as I will show you in time, it is
through the understanding of our energetic reality that we find true freedom
far and away from the walls of materiality…wipe that look of worry from
your visage my young friend, this is nothing to worry about, it is a new way
of acting and therefore being in the world.”
The young man looked up at his dark companion and now took the time to
look at the twilight room inside the temple of his mind. His efforts and his
many journeys into inner space had begun to allow him to become more and
more lucid, in what could be referred to as inner worlds of such depth and
detail that they could truly be said to be complete other alien realms. This
particular room had such detail, such a sense of presence and realness, that
the line between dream and waking reality was crumbling at this very
moment.
And in perceiving the incredible vividness of this new room, he
understood the reason for the increasing vividness of all his contemplations.
There was an interconnectedness to everything, and on seeing this new place
he was aware of how much his power had grown, effort for reward. Thanks
to his energies he was now more lucid in the waking world, in his dreams,
and in his mind palace. The young man had to acknowledge to himself that
the cost of his relentless focus, all those nights in contemplation, was nothing
compared to what he had gained. He now had access to true other places,
other countries, continents, true other worlds. He now had the ability to exist
in spaces of such depth and personal meaning that his little village and the
shack that he lived in paled in every regard. Such freedom was far beyond
any monetary value, it was far beyond any coin or gold.
Besides the ability to enter whole other worlds far beyond the misery of
physical existence, of special interest to him was the fact that he could take
on different perspectives within his mind. For example, now he was the
young man standing in front of his dark companion, but simultaneously he
could also be another being looking down on himself. He could be the young
man down there, or a detached other being looking down on everything.
Within the temple of his mind, he could have more than one perspective at
the same time, and he loved that new perspective, he loved the perspective of
that being that seemed to float above and looked down completely detached
from everything.
In these places inside the temple of his mind, if he went deep enough, he
was beginning to discover that he could be in multiple places at the same
time, and incredibly, he could be aware of each individual perspective and
maintain a train of thought in each position; it was like he was becoming
multiple personalities, and each one of these increased his power, increased
his awareness. He was on the cusp of developing the ability to not just be one
person (personality) but many, which in time might allow him to pursue
multiple lines of thought at once, and to perceive things from multiple angles.
His idea of self was becoming more holistic, more expansive. This was
beyond price!
Such realizations would lead him down another path of contemplation that
was connected to other spaces within the growing universe inside his mind.
The nature of this new line of contemplation was that the new perspectives
and seemingly multiple personalities within himself had the possibility of
not only being in different points in space, but also different points in
time. This conversation with the shadowed man was in the past certainly, and
yet it seemed like it was happening now, so for him there were two now
points: he was the young man in his temple seeing himself from many
different perspectives all at once, and he was the young man sitting in his
favorite chair, inside his little home in the labyrinth of shanty-towns that
encircled the main street of his village. The incredible power of this was the
fact that at each moment-point, at each now-place, spontaneous events
were taking place that could not be the past because they were evolving
now in this present. Two now-points were existing and evolving
spontaneously and simultaneously. He was in two places at the same
time!
“Without saying it directly, I have tried very hard to have you make your
own personal realizations. These realizations are that focus equals energy
expenditure.”
Inside that room that seemed to be in perpetual twilight Janos replied, “I
think I understand what you mean but any clarity on your part would be
greatly appreciated.”
“What I mean is that I must begin at a point where you can understand me,
but as your ability to understand grows, I can then move to more complex
topics that were in the past beyond your understanding.”
“Do you mean that I was not smart enough to understand?”
“Yes, I suppose that is the blunt answer my dramatic friend. But it is not
as simple as that and I was trying to safeguard your fragile ego,” the
shadowed man smiled from the darkness. “This is not your fault I hope you
know that. We are all born into different kinds of prisons and depending on
the prison that the pupil finds themselves in, a teacher must change the
method of their teachings. If I do not take the nature of your prison into
account in my teachings, then you will reject all that I have to say because it
will be gibberish to you. So instead of tackling focus and the nature of energy
directly, I had to entice you out of your prison through something that you
understood, which was prayer and the idea of contemplating the word of
God.”
“I must honestly say that I thought the whole contemplation thing was my
idea and I have been quite proud of it.”
“Yes, well that is the way for us. We are narcissistic beings at best, at
worst we are full of self-pity. Nonetheless, you might say that I have subtly
been helping you in your efforts, your directions. But whatever successes you
have had have been yours completely, and you should be very proud of that.”
“Are you controlling my life?” Janos asked, suddenly worried.
“No, certainly not. That would go completely against the current of inner
alchemy that I follow. But it is my duty to make sure that you, at least in the
beginning, stay within a certain path that might guarantee your growth as
opposed to personal obsession.”
“None of what you have said has made me feel better.”
The shadowed man laughed, and his laughter seemed to echo in the
twilight room. After a moment he caught his breath and continued, “Energy
is everywhere, we are energy, the Spirit is energy. Our focus comes at a cost,
and the cost is energy.”
Janos replied, “I have noticed that when I focus too long on any one thing,
I get so tired, sleepy, and sometimes really hungry.”
“Yes definitely. Hunger shows you that focus is indeed effort and as such
you need to monitor your energy and take responsibility for it.”
“How do I take responsibility for my energy?”
“If you are successful in these beginnings, I will go into more detail on
this, but for now you can think of it like any work activity. You do not want
to waste your time and efforts doing something that will not get you much in
return or get you exactly the opposite of what you want.”
“You mean it is like chores; you want to be efficient about what you are
doing or else you will tire yourself before your work is done.”
“Yes, exactly. You must learn to focus your energy deliberately and in a
particular conscious direction, or else you will scatter yourself and lose
energy like a sieve. You must use your energy to fulfill your life in a
conscious way, with conscious purpose.”
“And how does this relate to faith?”
The shadowed man did not move, he stood there before the young man
like a statue. This twilight realm seemed to be his world; it was his true
reality and time had no meaning here. It could have been a moment or could
have been years, finally he spoke, “Faith is like being shiny all day. Faith is
like having that same underlying belief that you will walk on water no matter
what the conditions, that you will be able to face a pack of hungry lions in an
instant.”
“But how is it that I keep such a focus? First, I don't even understand what
this whole belief thing is, and second as I said, it is tiring.”
“These are things that you will have to resolve yourself, and the only way
to resolve them is through personal action.”
The young man bowed his head a little and the shadowed man laughed.
“It is very important that you do not strain.”
Janos asked, “And how do I do that? It seems like an impossible thing to
maintain a belief my whole day, and then to somehow not feel tired. All that
effort is exasperating at times, I feel like I could go insane!”
“No need for drama my friend,” the young man could almost feel his dark
companion smile his shadowy smile. “What I mean is that the only way in the
end that you are going to resolve these issues is by doing. As a hint I could
say that you must find a steady flow of energy that does not tire you out or
strain your body so much that you hurt yourself. As you said, think of it like a
chore or a physical activity where in maintaining faith you are in it for the
long haul, the marathon, not the short and intense sprint of prayer.”
“Explain further please.”
“In this beginning, think of faith as something that comes from your heart.
Think of it like trying to maintain a nice easy feeling for as long as you can
without strain. This should be a happy, easy feeling.”
“How do I find that feeling?”
“First start by remembering those stories that I told you about from
scripture and how they make you feel. Explore that feeling-intent deep within
the temple of your mind. Afterwards, follow that line of thought that you
came up with on your own, which was the difference between the feeling-
intent of ‘I want’ and ‘I have’. You are already there my friend; you just need
to put it all together.
As you explore the nature of this feeling-intent deep within yourself, try to
hold onto it and follow where it leads you. It is up to you to find your own
way and you know, and I know, that you have already been incredibly
successful. I am surprised how good you are becoming at navigating within
the inner temple of your mind.”
The young man smiled.
The shadowed man winked and whispered, “But don’t let your self-
importance grow too big or else you might not be able to fit it all in here.”
The young man frowned, and the shadowed man laughed.
“Could we stick to the topic please,” said Janos as his face reddened in
frustration.
The shadowed man continued to laugh as Janos brooded, but eventually he
gained control of himself and as his laughing fit subsided, he replied, “You
might wish to contemplate what it would take to have that feeling be a
permanent feature within you; contemplate what it would be like to have faith
all day and then contemplate that feeling. Do you understand?”
“I think I do.”
“Such contemplations will move you into different places and it is the
ability to move into those new places of being, and keeping those different
positions you might say, that is the most important thing ultimately. Being
that we are entirely feeling as I have told you, maintaining a new feeling is
the act of being in a different place, a different feeling position. If that
position is maintained and supported long enough then the inherent feeling of
who you are changes, you become a different feeling. The moment that you
become a different feeling, you become someone else.”
The young man did what his dark companion advised and tried to let go of
distracting and debilitating self-importance. He focused his attention on what
he could understand for the moment which was the many techniques possible
in the study of prayer and faith.
Having had a pretty good grasp of prayer, using his repetitive phrases and
an intensity of ‘I want’ feeling, he began to focus on faith, and eventually he
was able to understand what the shadowed man had said about a feeling
being like a place. To have faith was like a feeling that you felt continuously,
or another way to say this would be to say that faith was like being in a
particular feeling-place forever, relentlessly, consistently. This is the only
way that he could think of describing it to himself. In essence, this continuous
feeling would make you feel different, this difference would change you, that
change was a new way of being which would feel like you were different,
and this difference in feeling was like you were in a new place.

T
And so, the young man practiced maintaining a continuous feeling of faith.
He would first perform his prayer using his repetitions and his intense desire
of wanting, needing. He would feel those incredibly powerful emotions
(inner motions) of begging and needing; he did whatever it took to raise his
intensity, and all of this happened within the temple of his mind. He would
continue like this until he felt that the intensity had caused a wave in the sea
of energy all around him that even the Secret King could not ignore. He had
learned that the best ratio for him was to pray like this only once a day.
When his prayer was finished, which usually took him about ten minutes,
he would begin to focus on his faith, on the enduring belief that his prayer
was answered. To do this he had come up with another phrase (statement of
intent) that he would repeat to himself. This phrase used a slightly different
wording than the prayer. While his prayer might be ‘I want this…’, his
statement to help with a feeling-intent of enduring faith started out with
‘I have’. But it was not long before he realized that he had made a
mistake.
In time, as the shadowed man had tried to tell him, the young man
discovered that it was very difficult to maintain that feeling of ‘I have’ for
extended periods. Simply, it was quite taxing energetically to believe that
something was true and real, even though it was not physical, at least not yet.
It was like imagining an apple in front of you and then believing that the
apple was real, until the apple was real physically. Such a belief would have
to be maintained for days, perhaps months, and that was energetically
impossible for him; the strain on his system was too much.
For that reason, he began to change the wording of his faith feeling-intent
phrase. Eventually he came up with a perfect solution which was to
change ‘I have’ to ‘it is coming’. This was good for him, it was something
that he needed to feel within himself to know that it was right, and it was
something that he could only have discovered through his own efforts. It
boiled down to coming up with a phrase that created the right feeling-intent
within him, one that did not pit his physical reality against his desire. By
saying something to himself along the lines of, “The thing that I want is
coming, I know that it is coming,” he was able to bypass the feeling of pitting
one part of himself (his subjective self) against another (his objective reality),
and instead played with his own mind (his own psychology) in order to come
up with the perfect feeling-intent that he could hold onto and endure for hours
if need be.
His way of faith was like the feeling-intent he had felt when he
contemplated the stories that the shadowed man had told him about. He had
contemplated those stories as the shadowed man had advised and thanks to
that he knew that he was now on the right track. Using this new feeling-
intent, faith became a light focus, like a small whisper that he could maintain
without taxing himself too much. It was a belief that did not fight the reality
of his physical senses, but instead trusted in a power beyond himself…it’s
coming.
By changing the manner in which he framed his beliefs, away from
himself and away from what his physical senses told him at the moment, he
was able to believe in a power outside of himself, and at the same time was
still himself. To believe in the power of the Secret King was in essence to
believe in his own power because the Secret King was a greater aspect of
himself. This removed any responsibility that his ego might feel, and he
discovered that it was this ego focus that was responsible for taxing his
energetic system so much. Faith was a feeling that needed to go beyond the
egoic self. How odd, how nearly impossible to define!
To the young man, faith meant being connected to the Spirit by letting go
of his ego and trusting in something outside, beyond, and above himself. This
in time made him feel connected to the Secret King, connected to the sea of
energy, connected to everything.
Once he had that worked out, he focused on his efforts to increase his
energetic stamina.
At first, stamina was like that hardheaded deliberateness that he had to
have when he was doing his work or his daily chores. It was about knowing
what you had to do and working until it was done, and having the discipline
to do that repeatedly, day in and day out.
In time though, after he was able to understand the cycles of his personal
energy, faith became not a chore but a way to overcome the sheer heaviness
of his life; the difficulty of it, the pain of it. It was like when he was being
shiny, when he was deep in faith, he would shine enough that the world
around him did not seem as insurmountable. The light of faith carried him
through life. The key was his ability to let go of his ego and trust in
something beyond himself. Once he could do that, he found it easier and
easier to overcome the pain and the horror of his world.
In the end, faith was like having had good wine, feeling a pleasantness
that had the ability to make you drowsy, and tired if he had too much of it too
quickly. He needed to drink of the wine of faith slowly and with deliberate
care to maintain that wonderful feeling of shininess while at the same time
not becoming too tired or too weak. He had to consciously focus on that
external force beyond himself with the perfect amount of energy expenditure
and focus. There were times when he had a great deal of focus due to a
particular circumstance in his day, and then there were other times when his
focus would wane. So, he needed to learn to understand himself, judge and
measure the situations of his life, and finally understand the cycles of his
personal energy perfectly.
For example, if his father or other people were around, then it was harder
to focus on his faith, on that feeling of ‘it’s coming’, that feeling of trusting
something beyond the ego. During those times it was harder to maintain the
feeling of shininess because the presence of other people was distracting.
During these times he would have to make extra effort to be able to feel that
feeling-intent of ‘it’s coming’. It was like doing two things at once, a part of
him had to be in the real world, the material reality, while another part of him
had to be focused on faith which was an internal focus. It felt like he was
living in two worlds for a while, like he was lying to others, to his father, not
telling them about his practices, about his shadowed companion, about the
faith that he was trying to feel at that moment.
But in time, as his ability to keep focus in the background of his being
became stronger and stronger, it felt less and less like hard effort and instead
it became his new reality, his new normal. And that new normal allowed him
to transcend, at least to begin to transcend, the great pain of his life.
Faith became an incredible delight to him. The intricacies of it were
marvelous and he could spend long periods of time contemplating it. Faith
somehow transcended time because to have faith or even understand it, you
needed to have it in the first place. The ability to maintain faith, to maintain
prolonged shininess, gave him a new control over the events of his life. He
was beginning to realize strong and consistent results from his combination
of prayer and faith.

T
“This is a time to be careful, my friend.”
“What do you mean by that?” Janos replied with deep fear on his face.
“Hearing such things scares me and makes me want to stop everything. Will
this cause some great tragedy in my life or in my father’s life? Is this dark
magic?”
 “Perhaps this time it is my choice of words that has made you so
dramatic,” the shadowed man laughed. “It is nothing sinister. What I mean is
that you must be careful not to tire yourself out. As you noticed, you become
hungry due to relentless focus. You become tired because as I have told you
focus is energy, so the longer or the more intensely that you focus, the more
energy that you use up.
The intricacies of energy, especially as it flows through your body is
something that you might not understand now, but I can tell you that it is very
important.”
“You have never told me about how energy flows through my body.”
The shadowed man thought for a while, and then finally he spoke, “You
could think of your body like a large piece of land, and through that land that
is your body there flows across it many rivers and streams. It is those rivers
and streams that keep that land healthy and alive. It is most important
therefore to keep those rivers clean and free flowing so that they do not get
clogged. If they get clogged up, then the water that flows through those rivers
will begin to pool in certain areas and in those areas, you will have swamps
and dis-ease. Certain parts of the land will get too much water which is bad,
while other parts will not get any water which is also bad. The trick to health
therefore is to always have free flowing balanced rivers.”
“What does this have to do with focus?”
“When you focus with too much intensity you can think of it like the land
trying to squeeze into itself, like it is tightening up and pulling into itself to
get more water (energy) to be able to maintain that intense focus. This is like
a little earthquake, this tensing and pulling into itself, and such upheaval can
move the land enough that it disrupts the flow of your rivers. The trick
therefore is to always take it easy, to do things lightly, because you don’t
want to disrupt the flow of your rivers.”
The young man looked at the shadowed man questioningly, so the
shadowed man extended his hand and touched the young man around the
navel. “If you focus too hard then earthquakes will start here, and these
earthquakes are like a tightening, a tension, here. This tension will stop the
flow of the rivers. You must always strive to reduce any tension like this, the
less tension the better. This guarantees that your rivers will keep flowing and
that in time they will become stronger, bigger, healthier, in a natural way.”
“Can you see the flow of my rivers?”
The shadowed man laughed, “Yes, I can ‘see’ their flow and incredibly
they seem quite healthy even though you have engaged in a great deal of
intense focus. But in the future, I will advise you that during those moments
when you pray, and especially as you maintain faith throughout your day,
that you make some conscious effort to stay as relaxed as possible.”
“Do you mean my body?”
“Yes, keep your body as relaxed as possible. Make relaxation a key
priority. Also, this might seem strange to you now, but during these times
you need to try to keep your tongue on the roof of your mouth.”
“Do what with my tongue now?”
After the shadowed man stopped laughing, he continued, “As I have said,
there is so much that I must teach you that it is staggering to me on occasion.
Even though you have made incredible progress in this time that we have
been together, there is still so much more to learn.
For now, you will have to trust me on this. If you were a lone practitioner,
someone who did not have the benefit of my great company…” the young
man could feel his dark companion smile.
The shadowed man continued, “If you were learning this the hard way
without me to help you, then you would most likely need to know everything,
to read everything and then understand and do. In such a case you would
need something to bolster your faith, to keep you going. But, since I am your
ward in this regard, we must take a different approach, and that approach
means that you will have to trust me as I reveal things to you in a more step-
by-step manner.”
“What does that mean exactly?”
“Well in this case, it means that you will have to trust me for now. It is
hard to explain this all at once, and I prefer that you discover the intricacies
and the reasons why on your own. My tutelage means that we can take
chances, that we can have you learn straight up in the face of the fire. And in
this case, it means that you must trust me and keep your tongue on the roof of
your mouth.”
“Can you give me anything at all?”
“I have hinted at it, and you have begun to find your own conclusions and
your own realizations already, which is very good. Deep within the temple of
your mind, you have made incredible progress and you have felt some of this
already.
You have felt the energy that moves through all things. You are just now
beginning to feel that movement of energy as it changes things, as it moves
and ripples across everything. It is my hope that in time you will see that we
are energy ourselves and as such when such energy moves through us it
changes us as well.”
“How does it change us?”
“It changes us in the same way that it changes everything else. The
process of it is too complex for you to understand now, all that you need to
know at this time is that this process is transmutation.” The young man could
tell from his dark companion’s posture that he seemed to be contemplating
something.
After a few seconds of contemplation, the shadowed man continued, “This
is perhaps the wrong tactic. Let me ask you a question: you have said that
when you practice these techniques of prayer and faith you get tired, yes?”
“Yes, I get very tired. It is like I am giving up energy, or using up energy,
like doing physical work, except that sometimes it is even more tiring than
that.”
“In that sense then you can say that you are beginning to feel the flow of
energy in yourself and through yourself. Is there anything else that you felt
besides this feeling of being tired sometimes?”
“Yes, I have also noticed that there can be certain tension within me if I
focus too hard. It is like flexing muscles to do something inside, in the inner
space of my temple.”
“Good! This is too complicated to go into right now and we will go into it
in time so do not worry, but for now I will say that such tension is energy
collecting in certain areas. And this collection of energy can become
problematic, like working a muscle too hard can hurt that muscle. To
overcome these difficulties, you must learn to relax. You must try and do
things with less body tension.”
“How do I do that?”
“This you will have to figure out yourself through your own doing, but the
best way to do it would be to take it easy but to keep going. Try to maintain
your focus but try to make that focus lighter, less intense, until you become
more used to it. It is a matter of personal experimentation until your body
develops a certain ability to allow energy to flow through it in a more relaxed
manner.
Think about the metaphor I used of water flowing through a body of land.
To make land more fertile, we must introduce more water, not too much but
just the right amount. We could think of it like turning those rivers into wider
rivers or those streams into wider streams. This introduction of more water
into our land takes time or else there will be flooding, and we will destroy the
land that we are trying to enrich. By learning to relax but at the same time
keep going, you are allowing the rivers and the streams in your body to grow
slowly.
Our biggest obstacle is too much tension, because this means flooding and
we don’t want that. You want to slowly introduce more energy and the best
way to do that is to relax so that you have the least amount of tension
possible. You must therefore learn to relax your body, and to do that you
must try to do what you are doing but with less tension. You cannot stop, you
are too far along now, a part of you will not let you stop. So, all that remains
for you is to learn a new way to work with the power that you are now
accessing.”
The shadowed man let that sink in, then he continued, “Another thing to
do to not cause flooding, not cause tension, is to maintain proper alignment.
This means always keeping good posture and keeping your tongue on the
roof of your mouth.”
“Good posture I can understand, but why do I need to keep my tongue on
the roof of my mouth?”
“You keep the tongue on the roof of your mouth, because your tongue is
like a bridge or a canal that connects the biggest river that flows through your
body. The tongue is a movable channel that can allow you to consciously
control the flow of the greatest river that runs across the land that is you.”
“Physically controls the flow of my river?”
“Yes. Believe me when I tell you that I will go into more detail in time.
But for now, I am only interested in how well you can put your tongue on the
roof of your mouth.”
The shadowed man leaned in. The young man put his tongue on the roof
of his mouth and opened it to show his dark teacher. After a bout of mirth and
laughter, the shadowed man told the young man how to adjust his tongue to
put it in the best place possible on the back of the pallet, and then he
continued, “There, that is a good place to start. But you will have to make
adjustments yourself as time goes on.”
 “How do I make these adjustments?”
“You just move the tip of your tongue up and down your palate.”
“How will I know when to do this?”
“You will know intuitively. All you will have to do is feel the flow of
energy and adjust the tip of your tongue to the place where it feels best to
you; you move your tongue to the place where you think the most energy is
so that more energy can flow through it. You will know that this is the right
place because it will feel right, that is all I can tell you.”
Sitting in contemplation now, the young man thought about all that his
dark companion had told him. First, he thought about the fact that he had to
keep his tongue on the roof of his mouth. Obviously, he could not keep it
there when he was saying his prayer out loud, but right after he was finished
saying something and then intensely focusing on the intent and the words
behind that repetitive statement, he would place his tongue on the roof of his
mouth like the shadowed man had said. And to his surprise he did notice that
the growing tension that he felt sometimes in different parts of his body
seemed to dissipate a little.
This was a hard thing to describe, but it was like the tension in different
parts of his body like his head or his midsection, did not accumulate so much.
It was like the tension lessened and energy seemed to flow instead of pooling
in any one area. This greatly helped with the tiredness that he felt as well, that
feeling that he needed to take a nap after a great bout of intensity.
Secondly, after he finished repeating his statement of intent ten times, and
then practiced maintaining faith, he began to try to relax more. This again
was hard to describe to himself in words. If he had to, he would describe it as
trying to maintain a slightly lower level of energetic output for a long
duration as opposed to expelling an intense amount in a short period like he
did when he was deep in prayer. Like a trained athlete or warrior, he would
try to relax his body and only use energy when and where energy was
needed. This was the way towards developing endurance and allowing his
body to naturally develop the capacity to keep going longer.
When he thought that he had a decent understanding and some mastery of
these skills, he focused his attention on trying to maintain faith (‘it’s
coming’) throughout an entire day. Instead of trying to feel tension, like a
deep focus on ‘it’s coming’, he would instead let go of his ego self and when
he did so that feeling-intent became pleasure, like a good feeling, like a
shininess.
This ability to maintain an unrelenting faith without ego had many
incredible benefits. The most surprising of which was that his days became
less painful, less heavy, less meaningless. This ability to overcome the great
heaviness of his life was an incredible reward for his efforts, and yet, almost
as a side note after such wonderful relaxation and freedom, he began to
notice incredible results from his prayer. Faith was not only giving him
freedom and peace, but it was also showing him the true power of
transmutation.
He was starting to experience more success in his life. In the simplest
terms he supposed that he could say that for the first time he felt…lucky. It
was like he was gaining luck, like things were working out for him in a
positive way, which was an unbelievable feeling.
For the first time in a long time, perhaps for the first time in his life, Janos
felt like there was hope. There was this giddiness in him, a surge of power,
and he now looked forward to the future. His life going forward would
become everything that he wanted it to be!
 Lessons
Janos could be multiple people at once. And even though he was in the
beginning stages of this discovery, he could see that in time he might be able
to support multiple tracks of thought, explore multiple realities
simultaneously, and explore the many aspects of himself in a wholly
conscious way.
He was now beginning to see that he was multiple beings all existing at
once, and that life did not stop for those other aspects of himself even when
he was not paying attention to them! His mind warped, and his sanity did
bend as he realized that the person who he thought he was, was only one
position of many within the great expanse of the totality of himself!

U
Faith is like a fine wine that allows you to overcome the pain and horror of
existence.
Inside the holy grail resides the blood of the son of God, the blood of God,
and by drinking from it, immortality is yours because physical reality no
longer matters, physical reality, pain, and even death are mental positions.

U
The gold that is created from the lead that Janos feels when he is sleepy is far
more powerful than he first realized. This gold can be used to stop the
whispering doubt, it can be used to transport him deeply into the rooms
within his mind palace, and it can allow him to experience a vividness
beyond imagining.
The sleeping energy feels like lead because it is like a weight that courses
through you making your you heavier, numbing your limbs and brain. If you
can learn to focus with keen attention on this heaviness and drowsiness as it
courses through your body, that focus of attention can allow you to see that
this heaviness is akin to an energy, that indeed it is energy. Once this
realization has been made, this energy can be used in different ways, not only
as an unconscious power that allows you to fall asleep every night. When this
is possible for you, that lead turns into gold.
 The transmutation of that lead can, with practice, turn an inner alchemist
into a living dream. What this means is that for an inner alchemist who is
able to master this power, the boundaries between sleep and wakefulness
begin to crumble. This refined golden elixir opens up new worlds, dream
worlds that can be found deep within the temple of the mind. In time,
anything is possible when that power is sublimated.

U
Relaxation is critical in energy work because body tension constricts energy
while body relaxation allows energy to flow freely. To maintain the correct
flow of energy and inner alchemist must be as relaxed as possible and they
must try to always maintain perfect posture. Unrestricted flow of energy is
extremely important because when you begin to work with a great deal of
powerful energy, this energy can hurt your body if it is constricted. Like a
kinked hose, the pooling of this energy in any area along the energy channels
of the body can eventually cause problems. For that reason, the young man
learned about relaxing the body, maintaining correct posture, and always
consciously keeping his tongue on the roof of his mouth.
Deep within his mind palace, the young man remembered a forgotten
conversation.
“Keep your tongue on the roof of your mouth. A very powerful river of
energy flows up your spine, around the top of your head and down the front
of your face and down your neck. If your tongue is not kept in the right
position, this river stops flowing properly and you can get a pooling of
energy in the head area. As I have told you, any pooling of energy can cause
tension and this tension in time can become problematic if you do not take
care of the flow of your own energy. You must have proper alignment so that
energy flows freely along the length of your entire body, and proper
alignment means good posture and making sure that your tongue is kept on
your palate as I showed you.
And…being that you are so dramatic, it is most likely a good idea for you
to suck your stomach in when you are deeply focused in trying to maintain a
certain feeling-intent.”
 “Suck my stomach in?”
“Yes, pull it in a little bit, not too much to hurt yourself or upset your
stomach, but consciously try to pull it in when you are relentlessly focusing
your attention.”
“Why is this important?”
“By doing this you are making sure that you are not pooling too much
energy, which will feel like you are pushing out physically from this area in
your stomach,” the shadowed man reached out and touched the young man’s
navel. “It is easy for some to focus with too much force in the beginning. If
you tighten too much in this area, then the pooling of energy here and the
endless tension and constriction to your physical body can cause some pain.
To stop that, it is best to consciously pull your stomach in.”
The young man looked at his dark teacher with a questioning gaze. Seeing
this the shadowed man replied, “Have you ever seen the strongmen perform
in the village square?”
“Yes, on a couple of occasions.”
“Have you noticed that some of them will wear a tight girdle around their
waist and stomach?”
“Yes, I had wondered about that.”
“The fierceness of physical effort that they are making can begin to move
a great deal of energy through their bodies, and being that all physical
activity for us really begins in that spot near the lower stomach…” The
shadowed man touched the young man’s navel area again, “…a pooling of
energy here can be problematic for those strongmen. This great tension and
pooling of energy means that such men will begin to push out from that area,
and they can strain themselves if they are not careful. For that reason, those
strongmen have learned to use girdles to try and offset the push from the
stomach. You can think of yourself as a kind of strongman: they are lifting
heavy weights with their bodies, and you are lifting much heavier weights
with your mind.” The shadowed man laughed his odd laugh.

[1] See Lessons at the end of Chapter 7.

 10
Shininess and Opening a Crack in the World
IT HAD BEEN FIVE YEARS since Janos had last seen his dark teacher in
the bustling main street of his village. Five years since the young man had
found solace and peace within the shadows next to his dark companion.
Even though a part of him missed physical proximity to the shadowed
man, another part of him knew that he desperately needed this separation. If
he did not stop seeing that dark demon for a while, there was a part of him
that feared that he would truly go mad. He was beginning to lose all sense of
real-world continuity, and a more sensible part of him feared that one day he
would go into his mind palace and never come back again. He feared losing
his father, he feared losing his life which was ridiculous to him, being that his
life was far from perfect. And yet, a part of him fought for that life with every
fiber of its being, and the young man had to acquiesce to this force.
But it was like the shadowed man would not be put off, it was like a part
of the young man had gone too far down the road of shadows. He could stop
himself from seeking out that living shadow, he could stop himself from
trying to find that man in the shadows of the main street of the village, but he
could not stop his contemplations. He needed them, he needed to go to his
temple deep within. His mind palace was his only source of freedom, is only
real solace, it was his power, his life. But even these journeys were now
becoming problematic because he could now go so deep within the temple of
his mind that any sense of past and present were beginning to fade. If he went
deep enough, which he sometimes did out of a need to seek the wisdom of his
dark teacher yet again, he would lose himself in vast rooms where the
difference between a past memory and the present would fade. There, he
would have long discussions with his teacher in dimensions beyond time and
space, and these discussions did not feel like he was remembering something.
These were not memories, they could not be, these interactions felt like they
were happening now!
In those five years since their last ‘physical’ meeting, there had been a
great deal of change in the young man’s life. His mastery over prayer and
faith had grown and with that power he had been able to change a great many
things. But no matter how much his life changed, he always made time for
contemplation. Contemplation and moving deep within inner spaces were his
one constant comfort.
The young man had contemplated and thought about so many things in
those five years. Sometimes when he was feeling more relaxed and
lighthearted, he wondered at the comedy of it all. He thought about how his
father reacted to his change in demeanor. From his father’s point of view, his
son had become pious.
His contemplations and what at times seemed like fervent religious prayer,
was just that and only that from his father’s point of view. As far as his father
was concerned, Janos had finally found God. And the young man thought
comically that if he were to get a hold of a prayer book and some prayer
beads while he contemplated and was lost deep within his mind palace, his
father would most likely have some kind of emotional fit. If you were
someone in need of social camouflage, this would be the perfect way to lose
yourself in a society that kept order and was collectively driven by a very
specific kind of religious worship. He did not look down on his father or have
pity for him, he just hoped that such worship gave him enough solace in this
difficult world. He wished that he could tell his father about the Spirit, he
wished that he could show him how to see it as it moves through all things,
but these past few years had clearly shown him that certain belief structures
were too deeply embedded within most people.
His father and the people around him could only see with physical senses
and due to that limitation and the incredibly powerful belief structures that it
created, his physical actions needed to fit into a very particular paradigm.
They needed to see him worship properly and yield to higher order, this was
all that truly mattered within the walls of the belief structure that gave their
lives meaning. The young man did not worship anything, instead he sought
communion and power with a force that could not be seen and was barely felt
by the average world. When his father looked at him with his physical eyes,
he saw prostration to a higher force, but if he could see with inner senses, he
would know that the young man was engaged in deep inner action and was
making direct contact with the fundamental forces of existence. Janos could
either laugh or cry, he was the walking crazy, so he chose to laugh.
Then, at times, he supposed that his father was right in some ways. He
marveled at the fact that he could have long discussions about prayer and
devotion with his father, that he could use many of the words that all the
people around him used. He could speak of the Spirit and about contact with
the Spirit, and if he was careful and precise, he could in many ways tell
others exactly what he was doing. And yet, he did not prostrate and bow
down to the Spirit.
There was a subtlety to it all, an almost impossible to define difference.
He had prayed and talked to the Spirit, had faith, but in his growing
awareness of what he was doing on an energetic level, he had realized long
ago that there was a difference between what he was doing and what the
people around him did. The difference was in awareness and the conscious
control of feeling-intent. This was such a critical difference, the only
difference that mattered, because as he now knew all too well, feeling was
everything!
His way was the way of inner action and direct contact. His way was not
prostration in a sense that he was somehow lesser than the force that he
sought communion with. His feeling-intent was active communication,
interaction, which allowed him to become one with that power. It was like the
subtle difference between the desiring child and the ego-full self-pitying
adult.
His devotion to the Spirit had nothing to do with worship of a higher
anthropomorphic power that imposed an unyielding code of conduct. He was
not a beast of burden to be whipped or given a carrot depending on how well
he followed some ‘all too human’ social system. He was a free being making
direct contact with a force of pure energy, a force that was free. He was a
being that struggled to be as free as the force that he communed with. He did
not need to be told how to be and how to act, what was right and what was
wrong, because all such things flowed from him naturally once communion
was achieved. He was a free being who now had the potential to lose himself
in time, and there, on occasion make direct contact with a force that was not
interested in any kind of binding or control. His way was direct communion
and perfect inner action.
So, his father was right and wrong. He marveled at the fact that the
slightest change in feeling-intent could change a person’s entire world, in
time.
But he needed to be so careful, it was so easy to forget his lucidity in this
world. His ability to empathize with the entire world, with every single
particle of it directly, would allow him to see everything clearly from their
point of view, and it was incredibly easy to fall into the unconscious dream
that all the people around him were stuck in. If he lost himself in that
unconscious human dream, he could clearly see everything from his father’s
point of view and easily become lost. Stuck in this unconscious and
complacent human world, he could forget so easily. It was like falling out of
lucidity while he dreamed, losing himself in unconscious sleep, and falling
back into the life of the puritanical, superstitious, and oppressed zombie.
From that point of view, he could not see the Spirit, and from that point of
view the worries and the constant fear and hatred of average people of the
world became his own. When he was lost in that all too human point of view,
he worried that he had not met an angel in the shadows but that he had met
the devil instead. Understanding and knowing his father’s point of view
implicitly through his ability to project an aspect of himself and enter his
father’s awareness, he knew that from that belief structure his father would
imagine the shadowed man was the devil. From his father’s point of view,
such a meeting was a rendezvous with the devil, not the Spirit. Thanks to his
ability to tap into those deep feelings in the people around him, he could
directly understand the belief structure of the times. This direct knowing told
him that he had to be very careful what he said to others, even his father in
unguarded moments, because if such words got out by whatever accident, he
could end up burning on a pyre. How could the young man explain what it
felt like to commune with the Spirit to a person so lost in such a rigid way of
looking at the world? He trusted his father implicitly, but words spread, even
by accident, words spread.
His inner senses told him that many people around him saw demons at
every corner, and they justify controlling others, censorship, and
manipulation by telling themselves they are fighting evil. And deep within
himself, like some kind of incessant whisper, the young man heard those
words echoing in his mind. He now fully realized that it was that incessant
whisper that had made him cautious, that had made him avoid physical
contact with the shadowed man for the last five years. He feared that voice in
himself, he feared that voice in others, and sometimes that quiet voice won
out for a little while. Sometimes, when the voice grew from a quiet whisper
to a scream, he wondered if both he and the shadowed man were evil, sinful,
horror, part of the ‘Devil's brigade’.
Thinking those thoughts, the young man laughed at the sheer insanity of it
all. When he laughed his father turned to see him sitting in his favorite chair
and what his father saw was the delight of worship. But as he laughed the
young man felt a chill run up his spine as he thought of devils, demons, and
sin. And deep within his mind palace he saw the outline of his shadowed
companion and he felt a smile within those nonexistent features as the
shadowed man whispered, “So dramatic.” The young man chuckled once
again, his father smiled, and in places beyond physical perception the
shadowed man laughed and joined in the merriment.
Without even realizing it, the young man had naturally and easily moved
into some of the deeper parts of his mind palace, and deep within the
enormous twilight room without walls he came face to face with his dark
teacher once more.
He could only perceive an outline of the man in front of him and yet
somehow, he felt every nuance of the shadowed man’s expression.
“We are not children lost in the worship of a great and holy father. Our
interest is in communion. We are interested in directly contacting the Spirit
that moves through all things. We do not wallow in our self-pity hoping with
all hope that if we worship a higher authority well enough, in the right way as
it is written in some tome, we will be rewarded by being allowed to enter a
heavenly kingdom. We are alchemists, you and I.”
The young man looked up at his dark mentor and friend with surprise in
his eyes as the shadowed man continued, “We are, you are, inner alchemists.
What the average world calls worship we call communion. They worship
because they have very little understanding of any kind of perceptive
mechanism beyond the physical. The average world hardly believes or has
little understanding of anything except the five physical senses. As inner
alchemists we have honed ourselves to perceive with our inner senses and
with them we are able to commune instead of worship. With them, we can
perceive directly what they can only imagine, as they read some words on
paper and then try to duplicate and make real the dogmatic tenants of a
hierarchical system, a religion. Unlike the rest of the world that is lost in self-
pity and its righteous suffering, we see the world and our lives as a challenge,
as a great adventure that must be won.”

T
The young man had been able to greatly expand the temple of his mind in
these last few years. It was intricate now with many rooms, it was solid and
far more stable than it used to be, and it had the possibility of opening other
doors, other places that he had not explored yet, but that enticed him to go
further and further.
Each room and each new door opened entire other worlds of possibilities.
It was truly like unlocking a door after finding a key, and that key usually
meant his growing ability to understand and perceive new intricacies of the
mind and the Spirit with growing clarity.
Deep within the temple of his mind, new vistas and realities materialized
before eyes that were not physical but that were nonetheless as real as
anything could be. These new visions brought with them feelings, sensations,
and those sensations in time turned into seemingly physical things in his
mind, actual things in those amazing rooms, and those things felt as real as
anything in the physical world. Seeing all this, he understood transmutation.
He was able to directly perceive how those feelings and sensations seemed to
somehow pull to themselves similar kinds of feelings, until there was a point
where that feeling became thick enough to become more solid, more real.
This is how sensations and feelings became matter, actual objects in his
mind. He could understand that these more physical things in his mind were
indeed symbols that stood for a conglomeration of deep and strong feelings.
He was beginning to understand that all ‘things’ were merely symbols of a
deeper inner language of feeling. He was beginning to see the transmutation
of essence deep within his mind, and these perceptions led him down other
paths that led to other doors that then required other keys.
“We hide in the midst of people, within shadows that to the average
person do not seem like shadows at all.” He heard the words of his dark
companion with ears that were not physical but heard better than any physical
ears ever could.
It had become a common thing over the years, to hear the voice of his dark
teacher as clearly as he heard any voice in the physical world. Knowing all
that he now knew and perceiving so much more than he had thought possible,
he still wondered whether he had somehow gone insane and now lived in a
world of delusion…that damned incessant whisper dogged him still.
“There are very few of us, so very few. But you might find us in
unexpected places. You are right my young friend in suspecting that we could
hide in plain sight, that the supposed worshiper on his knees on a pew or the
devout priest before a high altar might not be seeking solace in the temple of
self-pity, but that in fact such a person may be working towards communion
and transmutation.”
Now seeing into the temple of his mind, Janos saw the shadowed man turn
to look at him, and this was suddenly quite frightening because in this
twilight world the shadowed man seldom moved. And that motion from the
shadowed man perfectly accentuated the incessant feeling within him that this
was not a memory of a past meeting with his teacher, this was happening
now. He was having a conversation with his dark teacher right now!
As usual, the face of the shadowed man was unclear, but to leave it at that
was wrong. It was one of those word problems that his dark companion loved
to go on about. In this case, ‘unclear’ did not mean that the features of his
dark companion were blurred, somehow erased by uncanny magic. Instead,
the features of the shadowed man were blurred because they were somehow
beyond the young man’s perception. It was like the young man did not have
the power yet to be able to perceive the shadowed man clearly. It was like
there was a force in front of that face that made it impossible to focus on, to
grasp it with his focus and intent. At one point the young man knew that the
creature before him was smiling, but how he knew this he could not say.
Words were built for the physical world. They are a blessing in some ways
and with them you could understand physical reality quite well. If you were
good at using them, you could explain just about everything with them but
sometimes these words would fail. Words were created for a world that was
linear, a world of sequential order and simplistic ideas of cause and effect.
Words were created for the average rational human world.
So, in trying to explain aspects of reality that were beyond the limited
rational norm, words often failed and the best that one could do was to try
and use metaphor, allegory, and a great deal of adjectives. It was this
breakdown of the rational consistency within him that had begun to make the
young man fear the shadowed man’s world. It was becoming harder and
harder for Janos to differentiate between physical reality and the reality that
he experienced while he was deep within his mind palace.
That rational order that most people took for granted, that most people
used to at least have a modicum of consistency in their lives, was beginning
to fade for him. He no longer had the world to cushion him, the routines of
basic perception were starting to fade in ways that were chilling.
The greatest source of rational and commonsense inconsistency in his life
were those odd memories that he was beginning to realize were far more than
only impossible recollections, lost time. It was that inconsistency between
past and present, between being here in physical space and then somewhere
else with the shadowed man, which had begun to take a toll on his reality. A
part of him knew that these were more than memories, that he was meeting
that shadowed figure in other places, other spaces beyond physical reality.
There were indeed forgotten memories, he could sense that much. He
somehow recognized that the shadowed man could bend time when they were
both encased within those cocoons of shadow. His inner feeling sense told
him that those conversations that he had had with his teacher so long ago had
gone on far longer than he had first surmised. But that was not the end of it, it
was not only forgotten memories now. Forgotten memories were
intermingling with direct contact. He was both remembering old
conversations and at the same time making direct contact with the shadowed
man in the present moment. This was not possible!
How could this be possible?
“A worshiper kneeling in a pew…does that person worship some great
ruler, some rule maker up in a lofty chair in heaven, or do they commune
with the Spirit that moves through all things?
We are shadows within shadows. We seek refinement, transmutation,
evolution. We see beyond and through the true evil that haunts humanity, and
we fight against that. But we do not do so by starting a revolution that would
only cause more sorrow, more pain, more self-pity, and more chains to be put
around our necks.
We seek to overcome through transmutation, we are the true children of
the Spirit, we seek freedom, not safety and conformity. We are mavericks
hidden amid the common. We seek individual freedom, individual power,
and individual power of such intensity that in time it can free us from
everything, every single binding force that has yoked humanity to this heavy
little world.”
In the last few years, he had devoted a great deal of time to his technique.
This was not devotion or blind worship to the way of the shadowed man, if
he could call it that. It was instead disciplined and unrelenting focus that led
to the direct perception of his own individual truth. At the thought of ‘the
way of the shadowed man’ Janos smiled and chuckled a little, his father
turned and smiled again. “Shadows within shadows, we hide in the midst of
them,” whispered the shadowed man.
 T
Through discipline, his attention had become incredibly precise over the
years. At first, he had trouble keeping his unruly mind focused on anything. It
took him a very long time to be able to keep his mind focused wholly and
completely on the ten repetitions of his prayer.
It was like trying to sustain his focus on a certain chore, only to wake up a
few seconds later to find himself doing something completely different. The
best example popped into his mind as he remembered his early efforts to try
to transmute a new house for his father and himself.
He would spend around ten to twenty minutes on his prayer, repeating his
statement of intent ten times, but he would never try to measure this time, he
would allow this action to happen naturally. The statement was, “I want my
father and I to live in a wonderful new house that is completely sealed from
the rain and the cold. I want to have a beautiful brand-new house that has all
the comforts that we could ever want. I now desire, I want, I need, this new
house for me and my father. I desire this house now with all intensity. I desire
a house with a warm stove, and clean, new furnishing.”
He would repeat this slowly ten times in a whisper, in the quietest place
that he could find. If his father ever caught him doing his prayer, he would
usually leave Janos alone thinking that the young man was praying to God.
This was perfect because it allowed the young man to pray whenever he
wanted without the need to hide so much. As such, it was now common for
him to pray in the open.
After whispering his statement of intent, he would focus on that statement,
focus on the feeling-intent behind those words, the desire expressed and
engendered by those words, the images that flowed into his mind because of
that statement. He would try to sustain that focus for as long as possible,
desiring with every cell of his body with such intensity that it felt like he was
back in that forest screaming and begging to the Secret King.
After each repetition his focus would become more intense, it was like he
was building on something, like his focus would naturally enliven, intensify
the thoughts and feelings that he was having. By the fifth or sixth repetition
his focus on wanting, desiring, needing that house would become so intense,
the feeling of having it and being in it would become so intense that there
was little difference between physical reality and the visualizations of his
prayer. With each repetition it was like the whole of his desires became
stronger and stronger and that pull would begin to build that desire first
within the temple of his mind, and then somehow in an impossible to
describe way, that affinity of feeling-intent would begin to change the outside
world as well. It was like he was creating something, like something was
building on itself, pulling itself together.
He would try to sustain focus for as long as possible and with each passing
moment it felt like the desired place became more and more real. The house
he desired and contemplated while in prayer became as real to him as
anything in the physical world. Brick by brick, repetition after repetition,
intensity upon more intensity, it was quite literally like he was building
something, like he was pulling something into existence. There was a
quickening, a coalescence, an ever-growing transmutation!
But his focus was still not perfect, and there were times when there might
be ever so slight deviations in his train of thought. If for whatever reason, he
paid attention to those deviations he would instantly move in the direction of
those deviations and that direction would take him farther and farther away
from the theme of his conscious focus, which was his desire and prayer.
Then suddenly, like waking up from a dream, the young man would
become aware of this train of unconscious thought. Like a dreamer waking
from a disturbing dream, he would wake up to the fact that he was thinking
about something completely different than his statement of intent. At that
moment, at every one of those moments, he would wake up and be frustrated.
Since physical time seemed to move at a different speed when he was deep in
such intensities of thought, he often wondered how long he had been lost in
some silly dream, some unconscious delusion.
Each time upon waking up he would reprimand himself, and as the
shadowed man had told him, he would then try to relax and turn his focus
once again to his statement of intent. This would mean that he would repeat
the statement of intent once more, and once more begin to focus more and
more on his desire, on his need. And it continued like this, over and over,
until one day he found that he could complete ten repetitions and focus the
entire time without the slightest deviation in thought or feeling. He imagined
that he was rather thick, because for him it had taken years of work to be able
to repeat his statement of intent ten times without the slightest deviation in
thought. He knew that intensity was taxing energetically, and being that
prayer was one of the most intense things he could do, he tried to not get too
mad at himself for his failures.
When he was able to sustain unrelenting focus for the full ten minutes, he
saw a startling increase in his power. It was like the power of his prayers had
increased in proportion to the unrelenting nature of his focus.
This meant that his prayers would often become real in the physical world
in one way or another. Even though he understood the term transmutation and
trusted that the shadowed man would reveal more secrets in time, he still
marveled at the mystery of it and thought that he could spend lifetimes
contemplating such things. All of it was incredible to him, it still amazed him
to see how the machinations of the spirit (inner reality) would change the
physical world to get him what he desired. Interestingly it was not some kind
of startling magic, it was not like something would materialize before him
with a flash of glitter. It was not at all like the fairytales that he had been told
as a child, it was not like a wizard with a wand, sparkles, a flash of light, and
then instantly something new, something impossible.
It was more like a coincidence, a simple happening, one lucky thing after
another, one spontaneous and yet logical and sequential thing after another.
The whole event was hidden before everyone’s eyes just as inner alchemists
hid in plain sight. For a long time, the young man doubted, and each time this
doubt would assemble in his mind he would lose hope and he would lose any
desire to practice the teachings of the shadowed man.
But then he would remember and contemplate the incredible difference
between his new life and the life that he lived before he knew of the
techniques that the shadowed man had taught him. Now he was more
prosperous, he did not scrape by, he did not worry about whether he would
survive the winter. He lived with his father in a better house, one that was
closer to the main street of the village. Their business had become
prosperous, and they were not looked down upon, at least not to the same
degree that they were before. They ate better food, and they could afford
better clothing which allowed his father to enter the better churches found in
the village. Their lives had completely changed, and yet, always, and yet.
A person could always make a rational statement and obscure within the
bounds of common physical-rational sense all the motion and the
machinations of the Spirit. A person could inversely make everything a
spiritual or magical thing and in that way turn everything into a kind of
superstition. That is why the inner alchemist could hide in plain sight and
commune amid those either lost in superstition or skeptical materiality. All
they had to do was pretend and associate all that they did with the popular
cultural beliefs of the time.
He thought some more and contemplated the acquisition of his new house.
His prayer had worked, and he could see the machinations of cause and effect
from a material point of view, and he could also see the workings of inner
reality and the outflowing from the Spirit. From an outer physical perspective
these transmutations that had an inner source were seldom any kind of
grandiose event. From an inner perspective the creation of his new house
involved the motion of currents and the accumulation of energy with a certain
intent that assembled slowly over time and in that assemblage developed a
weight, a heaviness. There was incredible magic beyond description in all of
this and yet most of the world did not see any of it.
Most of the world only had their physical senses and from a purely
material perspective the acquisition of his new house was no grandiose event,
it was not a flash of magic and fairy dust. Nothing happened that could startle
those who could only look at the physical world and had no access to the
inner senses. The house that they got was not a new one, but things seemed to
flow in odd ways that eventually allowed him and his father to move into a
place that was new to them.
After he had mastered the ability to keep his attention completely focused
on his prayer for an intense ten minutes of pure desire and focus, he began to
directly see the machinations of the Spirit. A few days after he was able to
pray for the full ten minutes without losing focus, his father told him that an
old friend of his mother and grandmother had contacted him. She was an
older lady who was in the last years of her life. She had a house about five-
hundred steps from their current house. The lady’s house was not new, but it
was built much better than their little shack that they lived in. And those five-
hundred paces were in the direction of the main street which meant that it was
in a far better location than their current house.
She had told his father that she had decided to move in with her sister who
lived in a larger house in the country. She hoped that this would help with her
health, and she wanted to spend her last few years with her sister. His father
told him that she was willing to deed the house to them if she would be
allowed to come back and stay in the house whenever she wanted to visit her
friends in the village.
The house that she was offering was much bigger, it was a better build,
and had enough room for them to set one room aside so the lady could always
use it when she decided to come back for a visit. His father thought it was a
good idea to take the deed and the young man agreed.
In short order they moved into this new and far more inviting place and
they were able to keep the deed to the other house as well, which they could
then turn into a formal work area to use solely for making their product.
Everything worked out perfectly and the young man got everything that he
wanted in his prayer. Certainly, there was some compromise in that the house
was not half as luxurious as the kind of house he had envisioned and wanted.
But it was a step up.
Was all this a coincidence?
From a purely physical perspective, it would be pure chance. But then
again, maybe it was not. And as Janos contemplated his life in the palace of
his mind, during his contemplation period on the 13th hour of everyday, he
would look back in fine detail at every moment of it and he realized that life
before the teachings of the shadowed man, had not been a great life. There
had been a hard to define turn in his life after he began to practice the way of
inner alchemy.
It was as if he was luckier now. If life was truly only happenstance and
coincidence, then it did seem like favorable coincidence had begun to turn in
his direction. Perhaps inner alchemy was just delusion, but he felt more hope
now, there was purpose, and most importantly perhaps, there was a feeling
that his life and all of reality was connected, that there was actual purpose to
things. Feeling and sometimes even seeing the manifestations of the Spirit
that moves through all things, he no longer felt so alone.
It was hard to define exactly which part of the teachings had affected him
the most. His ability to move deeper and deeper into the vast rooms of his
inner reality had certainly changed the fabric of his existence. He could now
discover his own truth and was excited about life, he now felt a sense of
adventure, like he was a hero in his own individual journey. Before, lost in a
world of pure physicality, and yet a world of hearsay and superstition, he felt
like a prisoner. The discovery of the temple of his mind had freed him from
materialism and the dogmatic core of physical existence that demanded the
acceptance of a consensual truth from a higher tiered authority.
Now he had a way to discover his own truth. He was quite literally facing
and directly perceiving all the mysteries that he had always wanted to
investigate. And these contemplations did not make him more superstitious,
they instead pushed him and made him want to learn more about the true
nature of existence through direct perception and personal experimentation.
He had become a voracious reader, now that he had more money, he had a
growing library and had begun to keep the company of a more intellectual
group of people, people willing to look beyond religious fervor and the
supposed truth presented by the ruling class. He was becoming a rebel and an
intellectual in his own right and this excited him and made him curious about
the true extent of knowledge.
But faith, that had been a massive and incredible challenge, but a
challenge with amazing rewards. His new library and intellectual
acquaintances for example were only possible because of his ability to work
with what the shadowed man called transmutation. Sometimes he was
completely sure of the power of the Spirit and of transmutation, and yet at
other times that little whisper, that doubting and petty voice that would not
stop, it would take over and during those moments he still mistrusted his own
perceptions. When those two aspects of his mind quarreled and would not
stop, he would fall back on simple logic and tell himself that whether it was
actual transmutation or whether it was only the ability to face problems
straight on, his life was now much better.
He let go of that worry and that endless inner quarrel for now and focused
on the technique of faith. For him the challenge of faith had been first and
foremost the challenge of extended focus, the challenge of cultivating and
sustaining a certain feeling continuously for an extended period.
It had been an incredible challenge for him to cultivate unwavering focus
while he was doing his ten minutes of prayer. Well, that was nothing
compared to the challenge of enduring faith throughout his day. Faith meant
that he had to preserve focus on a certain kind of feeling-intent throughout
most of his day, alongside daily life, and daily living. He needed to cultivate
that feeling-intent during his daily chores or while engaging in social activity.
Faith needed to become a very large part of his waking life, and the young
man sometimes believed that he was not up to the challenge.
The nature of this challenge was rigorous internal action. It was the
development of unrelenting focus on a feeling, on a feeling that could in a
certain way be described as a feeling of enduring shininess. He thought about
that word, shininess, and smiled a little and remembered just how much the
shadowed man liked the word.
“Shininess is a lovely word, and it is wonderful that you have come to it
on your own.”
 “Why do you like that word so much?”
“I like it because it’s a great explanation, a lovely description, of an inner
event. There is so much that I still must tell you, so much that you still must
learn, but your description tells me that you are moving in the right direction,
and that in time I will be able to reveal more and more energetic truth to
you.”
The young man still did not understand how it was possible to have lost so
much time during his meetings with the shadowed man. It was like he had
lost huge chunks of time and it was only through great effort that he was
beginning to remember what had happened during those moments that had
been lost within the folds of intensity, of time.
As his ability to recall some of that lost time grew, he was able to
remember that his dark teacher had always asked for a review of the young
man’s efforts, and he had always been very interested in finding out about his
shininess, about his faith.
“It is difficult,” he now remembered a conversation with the shadowed
man. His dark teacher had been insistent on hearing a review of all that the
young man had accomplished. The young man had thought about it for a
while, there was so much to say, but he finally spoke, “It is difficult. I don’t
know how it is possible to sustain such focus while I am trying to do other
things in my day. I get tired and there are so many distractions, there are
times when I need to do my chores and then I must do two things at once,
which now seems to me to be impossible.”
After listening to the young man patiently, the shadowed man replied,
“There are few things that are truly impossible for a person who has been
able to master their focus of attention.”
“What does that mean?”
“For you right now it means little, but in time things will change.”
“In time, you always say in time. What do you mean by in time? I feel so
lost.”
“Obviously you are not lost, you are right here at this moment. That is a
part of time.”
The young man looked up frustrated and the shadowed man laughed.
He had discovered so much nuance about himself and the path of his life
through the practice and the study of faith. He had learned that focus of
attention was as difficult as any physical task. Just like any physical activity,
he could strain and stress his physical body if he tensed too much when he
was intensely focusing on one thing or another, and he had learned the hard
way, earning pains in his midsection on a couple of occasions. But he was
learning to relax, to take it easy. He remembered the words of the shadowed
man, “If you keep your horse running at a hard gallop it will eventually die
from the stress. You must learn to walk your horse at times, you must learn to
have patience and to find a rhythm that you can keep without hardly any
tension, stress, or strain.”
He had learned that there was a certain up and down to his energy level
and that this rhythm affected his focus and concentration. Just like waves
crashing against the shore, there were times when his attention was strong.
But after those strong waves had hit the shore, they had to recede and so in a
cycle of up and down his attention had moments of strength and of waning
relaxation. There were times when his focus was keen and exact and he was
able to maintain faithful attention, and then there were times when he seemed
to lose energy and during that time it was hard for him to focus on anything
at all.
But he worked through this process, and he began to realize that it was
this work that really mattered because in tackling this challenge himself he
understood the nuanced detail of his mind, his psyche. His dark teacher had
said that nothing mattered more than personal doing. He had said that words
mattered little in the end unless they helped in conscious doing, and that by
‘doing’ he meant personal focus and individual inner action.
And so, the young man focused, and through his own efforts he was able
to discover so much. And in time his faith had become strong and
unrelenting, and he could preserve that faith throughout his day. His faith
became like a little engine that always worked tirelessly deep in the recesses
of his mind no matter what he was doing. At times it would be strong, and he
would feel very light and shiny, and at other times his faith would seem to
wane, and he did not feel as shiny. But the young man persisted even through
that waning of energy so that eventually he was able to retain his faith even
during his weak moments. During those times he did not feel especially
shiny, but he could feel that little engine of faith deep in the recesses of his
mind. He could hear it, feel it like a fine little vibration, almost silent, not
quite, but almost silent and always there.
As his power grew his technique developed. First, he would say his
prayer, his full ten minutes of intense and completely focused desire, and
during that time he could feel the building blocks of something coming
together, a coming together that he could only define as a growing in
intensity or more precisely as a growing transmutation of essence.
And then when he was finished praying, he would have faith; he would
have faith that his prayer would be answered…IT’S COMING!
This was faith, it was the ability to ‘feel’ that what he had prayed for
would come to pass. At least it would start out like this, but in time faith
became not just unrelenting focus, but unbending will, unbending intent. That
unbending intent eventually became not just a source of transmutation power,
not just the ability to be able to realize and make flesh that which he had
prayed for, but it would also become a guiding force in his life, a way to
preserve his power in the face of the heaviness of the world. And this was the
true power of faith in a way, it was its ability to bridge the gap between his
prayer and his contemplations within his inner temple and the material world.
Prayer was the key that opened a door between the contemplations of
inner reality and outer physical reality. When his faith was strong
enough that he did not doubt, all things were possible. Theoretically
everything that he could do in his inner temple could in time be realized
in the outer physical world.
Even with a small amount of faith, even when he was only able to
maintain faith for short periods of time, such faith would greatly augment the
power of his prayer. For example, a few years after he had first prayed for a
better home, he decided to try for an even better home, and a better life
situation.
Even though he had received some good results, even though he had been
able to transmute into existence an improved life outcome through prayer
thus far, he thought that he could do better. And the health of his aging father
demanded better.
He performed his prayer again, his ten times repetition using the same
phrase of intent that he had used years before when he was able to get a new
house, but this time he had his enduring faith to add to the equation. And
even though it was not quite perfect yet, he knew that it was strong enough to
withstand the horrors of personal reality and keep going past them. He
believed as Daniel did, that even facing certain death he would overcome!
He believed that his prayer would be answered, that the Spirit would hear
it and answer it, making it manifest. He had a faith that was beyond his ego
and as such this faith was unrelenting and it did not cause him any stress, and
he kept this faith as best he could, this unrelenting belief that what he prayed
for would come to pass. Until one day his life changed.
His father’s health had begun to force him to work less, which meant that
Janos had to work more and more. But the young man’s new power had
given him hope and ability, and he used that blossoming capacity, that
expansion of intellect and cunning, to begin to secure a great deal of quality
ingredients. With these, the young man was developing better ways to cure
and work with cabbage and other ingredients and was able to improve his
product substantially. In time, that evolving creation became highly sought
after and like tumblers turning perfectly in his favor to finally open up a
difficult lock, the young man was not only able to secure great ingredients for
his growing business, but he was also able to secure a better place to live and
to work on the family business.
Out of the blue, a wealthy merchant became interested in the young man’s
product, and he offered the young man a new place to live and work that had
everything that the young man needed. This new place was clean, closer to
the main street of the village, and more importantly it allowed him and his
father to live in a warmer and finely crafted home.
His faith was able to turn those tumblers and move the essence of things
all around him. With this growing ability, his confidence grew as well.
Furthermore, he was beginning to see, to truly see for himself in a direct way,
the alchemy of conscious existence, the transmutation of word and deed
made flesh.
Beyond this, his faith became something more, it became a shield that
protected him from forces and obstacles that in the past had all but destroyed
him. He had a new poise, an ability to take chances and move forward. He
would no longer be crippled by fear in the face of the challenges of the world.
Feeling his faith, and truly directly seeing the power of the word, he would
know that there was a Spirit that moved through all things and that this Spirit
longed for communion, it longed for conscious attention and conscious
recognition.
Incredibly, he could now perceive that the Spirit longed to both give and
receive direction from those who could commune with it.
 Epilogue
JANOS WALKED DOWN THE MAIN STREET of the village watching the
people flow by him. It had been six years since he had last had physical
contact with the shadowed man. In that time, he had been able to realize that
his contact and his communications with the shadowed man were far more
complex than he had thought. He now understood more about missing time,
and how it was possible for him to have long conversations with his dark
teacher that took no time at all in physical reality.
Through his own increasing ability to go deeper and stay longer within the
temple of his mind, he was beginning to understand the incredible flexibility
of what he was calling inner time. While in physical reality, time had a
certain pace that could be relied upon because everyone tended to perceive
time at about the same pace. But when he was in his mind palace, it was
much harder to pin down the pace of time, and he often noticed that
conversations and explorations that seemed to go on for what felt like hours
in his mind, would only take minutes in physical reality. He was beginning to
understand that somehow the shadowed man was able to play with the
intensity of time and in that way stretch minutes into what sometimes felt like
days.
This inner time was responsible for what he had previously called lost
time, and it was lost time because in order to find and remember those lost
moments again, he needed to engage in a very specific kind of focus while in
his mind palace. To recall the lost inner time, he needed to mentally pace
himself by matching the tempo of that time in his mind. To remember this
forgotten period, he entered his mental temple and matched the intensity he
had experienced during those events. This was a difficult inner action, and it
meant that he would have to follow threads of perception and intuition with
the greatest determination possible, like a tracker following difficult prey on
hard ground. He needed to have a finely developed inner sense and a great
deal of personal sobriety because he had to be able to discern between actual
lost time and random and unconscious dreams and delusions.
But incredibly, he was beginning to realize that not all these memories
were lost time, some of these events were not any kind of memory, there
were conversations that he was having with the shadowed man in the present
moment!
Some of these events were somehow attached to old memories, but the
memories themselves were like passageways that led to places where he was
meeting the shadowed man in real time! This meant that he was not only
remembering lost time but that he was also making direct contact with his
dark teacher in the moment. The shadowed man was not just able to change
the pace of time, he was also able to move across inner space somehow, and
contact Janos directly. It was like the shadowed man could do all the things
that he could do in the inner temple, in the outer physical world!
A few years back these realizations would have driven him mad on the
spot, but now as the walking crazy, this seemed …obvious. Moreover, he
noticed that to handle this growing complexity, his mind was beginning to
fracture and expand in curious and alarming ways. He evolved from one
personality into multiple essences (personalities), and all were overseen by an
expanding part of himself that monitored everything with a detached
indifference.
It was now dusk, just before the sun disappeared on the horizon, and as he
walked, he thought about how much his life had changed after he began to
seriously implement everything the shadowed man had taught him. In this
new life he had confidence, and he was growing in power. Now he dared to
walk down the middle of the busy street and allowed others to flow past him,
to see him openly. As the world and the people of the village streamed past
him, the young man felt like he was in the middle of a river. The people of
the village were like a current of water flowing past him, and it was
mesmerizing.
The blooming and the expansion of himself meant that at this moment
there was a part of him, a part that he had known his whole life that looked
about spellbound by the beauty of the purely physical world. But now there
were other parts, including one part that had begun to grow within him, a
detached and observing aspect that could exist simultaneously within his
mental temple and in the physical world. This was the part he was beginning
to like the best.
The detached watcher did not just see the main street of the village, it did
not just see the river and the glitter of life, it also saw beyond this into all the
facets of his inner temple. That part watched everything, and it saw a
complexity of existence that was beyond description. Simultaneously, he was
the young man enthralled by the beauty of the world as it flowed around him,
and he was also a detached spectator watching a play, watching actors on
many different stages across space and time.
The young man noticed the people of the village walking about, some
smiling, some laughing, all having a good time. He was enjoying himself as
well. The vendors scurried about, searching for the ideal location for their
carts and stalls, sometimes bumping into each other in their eagerness to
secure the best spot. People carried chairs out of their houses to the street so
they could sit and watch their evening entertainment, which amounted to
hours of casual people watching. For many, sitting outside their houses and
watching people walk by as they amiably talked to neighbors and old friends
was an essential social release after a long day of work.
As the sun disappeared, lanterns of all sorts would be lit. Vendors would
light individual lanterns that swung from chains on their stalls or carts. Some
lanterns moved, others were stationary as a procession of vendors and sellers
of all sorts would find a spot and then begin to put out their goods for the
evening market. These lights highlighted the river that flowed alongside him,
adding a lovely but unsettling warmth to the evening as he moved past. Even
the people sitting on the side streets would pull out little lanterns or even
simple candles and place them on rickety tables and ledges along the walls of
the street. The alehouses and some of the well-to-do properties had oil
lanterns built into the framework of their buildings. These would be lit every
night and would cast a soft golden glow that could withstand wind and rain.
In time, the entire main street would be lit up by a soft amorphous golden
glow that somehow warmed his heart and turned everything into a kind of
living dream. During this period the street felt truly alive to him, and it
became like a little patch of solace within a gigantic dark sea of existence.
The young man loved this time of day. He loved how one reality seemed
to change into a new one as the sun sank and one form of light was replaced
by another. Night was not a different time; it was a different place.
The young man walked on, no longer feeling an instinctual need to bow
his head before others. People no longer openly snickered and called him
names, but instead looked at him with curious expressions as he passed by.
Some would whisper behind his back when he was near.
While the young man walked, people continued to talk among themselves,
discussing his devoutness to God and his business acumen. Some speculated
that he might become a clergyman, while others believed he would be one of
the wealthier merchants in the village. Many points of view were offered, and
counterpoints were made. The young man’s heritage was debated, some
saying that he was of Traveler (Gypcian) heritage. In rebuttal it was proposed
that while the church might not want him, coin did not care very much about
heritage and that at the very least the young man was destined to be one of
the chief merchants of the village. And the conversation continued as the
young man slowly walked towards the main square of the village in a daze,
transfixed by the soft glowing orbs of light all around him and the movement
of the people. The young man walked slowly, flowing, enthralled by the
movement of life and light. He walked encased within the warmth of his
enduring faith and in that cocoon the world seemed like a spectacular miracle
to him.
As he walked, people continued to whisper. They said that the young man
had found God, that there was redemption for all. Some would say that he
may have lost part of his mind, that he had been touched by devils and not
God. Most of the people that had known of him for years would look at him
now with an odd mixture of reverence and fear. Whether it was God or
devils, some had begun to note that the young man had grown in wealth and
status in a relatively short period of time.
Whatever the case, whatever people thought, it did not matter to the young
man at this moment, because for the first time he felt like the river of life was
no longer trying to drown him.
But the whispers did reach a part of him, and as if coming to his senses, he
remembered that he was an outsider. He would never be part of the river
itself; he could never be part of the crowd, even if he tried. It would never
accept him—not someone like him—and for the first time, he reveled in this
realization. As he looked from left to right with calm and expansive eyes, he
could see some people pointing and others whispering. He thought to himself
that a whisper was better than a loud insult in some ways, but worse in others.
However, the shadowed man had given him a weapon against the insults of
the world.
For many years now, he had not seen his dark teacher physically.
However, he still held discussions with him in the temple of his mind, which
he now realized were lost memories as well as actual present communication!
But that doubting part of himself couldn't shake off the feeling that it was all
just a wicked dream, like he had fabricated the whole thing. That doubting
voice was convinced that he was simply mad. Those villagers who spoke in
low voices about devils were right; his personal devil was a shadowy figure
that spoke in a whisper and laughed maniacally at his emotional outbursts.
Another part chimed in and agreed with the doubting part, perhaps he was
mad. But if he was, he had been insane for a long time. He did not think like
the villagers did, he could not be what they were, he could not live a regular
life that seemed so normal to everyone else. So perhaps in his lonely madness
he had created a make-believe man, a shadowed man, to try to survive in a
desperate and cutthroat world. The shadowed man was just an imaginary
friend, a child’s creation that had allowed him to fight off self-annihilation.
The shadowed man was a daydream, a survival instinct, and with it, through
it, he had discovered hidden truths buried deep within the odd corners of his
mind.
But make-believe or not, what the shadowed man taught him had changed
his life. The way of inner alchemy, wherever this knowledge came from,
whatever it was, it had changed his entire life. The techniques worked, he felt
more in control like he was manifesting his reality, ‘transmuting’ things into
existence as his dark teacher would say.
Transmutation was marvelous. It was a key component of the teachings of
his dark and ethereal teacher. He could hear the words clearly now, so
clearly, “The essence of alchemy is the transmutation of base matter to gold.
But don’t let words fool you; base matter is the un-manifest, and gold is
matter itself, wealth, circumstance, or whatever else you make happen
consciously in this crazy little physical world of ours. Inner alchemy is the
mastery of the motion from the un-manifest to the manifested.”
In that sense then, his imaginary friend was truly a devil dangling wealth
and power before him only to lead him to damnation. Or perhaps this was just
the crudeness of his personal desires and simple imagination; the shadowed
man dangled gold before him knowing that the crude young man had little
imagination for anything else.
But there was more to his personal devil.
He thought about it, about his old and new life before and after the dark
meetings. He noted that perhaps the greatest gift of the shadowed man had
been something imparted in a roundabout way, and that was the discovery
and the use of the inner temple of his mind, his mind palace.
It was those contemplations, and the many proddings and examples that
his dark teacher had provided, that had opened incredible new worlds for
him. And Janos was being quite literal when he used the term new worlds; he
now knew there were entire other worlds! And if we judged the reality of
something solely by our senses, then those other worlds were just as real as
this one. The line between physical sensations and inner experiences had
blurred for him, making those worlds he visited in his contemplation equally
valid and sometimes more real than the physical realm. These were truly
alien realities that transcended mundane understanding.
He wanted to shout it in the air, to tell everyone that the walls that
imprisoned them and everyone in this material earth had turned out to be
paper walls that could be ripped and parted. He remembered the guidance of
his dark teacher and companion, “The only way that you will ever discover
your own truth is to experience it yourself, to perceive it yourself directly. To
do that, it is paramount that you stay conscious, that you do not fall into your
dreams and lose your lucidity as you contemplate and go deeper and deeper
into the temple of your mind.”
“What do you mean by me falling into my dreams?”
“Let us pretend for now that there is a giant force, like a weight upon your
head that makes you want to fall asleep and forget. When we fall asleep, we
forget ourselves and the world. When you fall asleep do you remember all
that you have done when you were sleeping?”
“Certainly not. I sometimes remember some dreams, but that is all.
Nobody can remember their physical body and all the dreams that they have
had while they are sleeping.”
“That is not true, we can develop aspects of ourselves that can learn to
stay awake. But that is a story for another day, for now think about that force
that weighs you down and makes you fall asleep and forget. To fall into your
dreams means to forget the self and lose yourself in a reverie that is seldom
conscious or remembered when you wake up. Your task is to not fall under
the weight of that sleep force, at least not during your contemplations.”
“We all need sleep. Am I supposed to not sleep anymore? I will go
insane.”
“You can sleep and slumber all you want during your regular life my
dramatic friend, but during your contemplations you must fight that force and
stay lucid, stay awake. The deeper that you go into the temple of your mind
the more powerful this sleep force becomes. You must fight with every part
of you to stay awake because if you do not then your contemplations will
become the forgotten dreams of the average man.
 That weight that I told you about, it will make you want to go to sleep
which means to forget and lose conscious direction. You will feel the power
of this sleep like a great weight. You may feel it like an actual weight, like
lead pulling your limbs down and making them heavy. Or this weight may
feel to you like odd currents running through your body that numb every part
of you. You must pay attention to these, and you must not fall under that
weight, because if you do you will slumber and forget. This is the slumber of
the slave, the trapped.”
The young man looked up to the sky.
“Pay attention. Pay attention young man! The world wants you to sleep
but you must pay attention. During your contemplations as you fall deeper
and deeper, pay attention!”
At that moment, the young man felt like he had woken up from a dream.
To him, after years of contemplation within the deep spaces of his inner
temple, this feeling had become common. It was like an odd shock, like an
energy pulse surging through his body, and as that pulse moved through him,
jarring him, he would wake up to the fact that he had been asleep, walking-
asleep in this case, as he flowed down the main street of the village lost in
unconscious thoughts. During those times, and this time, he would wake with
a jerk, his body tensing quickly, and he would reprimand himself for ignoring
his dark teacher’s command to pay conscious attention. Fortunately, he had
learned to pay some attention; that detached aspect of himself that watched
would pay attention to everything, and it was becoming stronger. He used
that aspect of himself now to recall what had happened, what he had been
thinking about, what his body had been doing while he had been sleep
walking. This helped but there was still a long way to go.
As the jolt of waking from his reverie coursed through him, he
straightened in a quick jerking fashion as if he had been zapped by lightning.
Some turned to see his jolt, but people were learning to ignore the young
man’s odd quirks.
In the past the people around him would have blatantly stared, some may
have physically or verbally abused him for even daring to be this far up the
main street of the village. Now people tried to ignore him, they would look
for a while but then turn their faces and pretend like they did not care, like it
was perfectly normal for the young up-and-coming merchant to stop in the
middle of the street in a sudden jolt. But they still stared behind his back,
there was still some animosity in their eyes, he was still an outsider, and these
thoughts had the potential to take him down a road of despair and self-pity.
And just as he was about to fall into that pit, he woke up again from this train
of thought and remembered his faith.
Yes! This was the greatest gift the shadowed man had given him. He had
to have unrelenting and enduring faith. Remembering this, his thoughts and
the focus of his attention turned away from self-pity. Waking from what
seemed to be a dream within a dream he remembered his faith and once again
began to walk and flow, encased within the protective power of his enduring
shininess.

T
As he walked, Janos was struck and delighted by a sudden realization. This
feeling was like a light kindling inside of him, and it was a sensation that was
becoming increasingly familiar as his connection to the shadowed man grew.
Suddenly and completely, he knew beyond doubt that his new understanding
of inner alchemy paralleled every aspect of his life. In a flash of insight,
Janos realized directly and profoundly that even the smallest details were
significant, and that all was interconnected with his personal growth.
So, upon reflection, he thought about how making sour cabbage was an
incredibly complex and beautiful alchemical formula. He mused then that the
true secret to this humble food lay not in the ingredients, but in the aging
process. Of course, quality ingredients like good salt, cabbage, sour wine, and
spices were essential, but it was the art of storing and allowing them to
mature that truly set one batch apart from another.
The seemingly simple process of making the best possible sour cabbage
was in fact a complex interrelation between multiple different things that
needed to be combined perfectly. Everything was a formula that combined
various elements in different states of being, some physical and others
ethereal (mental creation).
To create the best sour cabbage, the young man had relied on his prayer,
faith, and the ability to combine and realize many different formulae deep
within the temple of his mind. Thought led to strategy and logistics, which
refined thought and resulted in right action. He needed to know where to get
the best ingredients, how to combine those ingredients perfectly, what tools
to design to make and break down components to obtain the purest essence
possible.
 He did realize that this was just sour cabbage and not some incredibly
complex alchemical formula, but each thing, all things were art in a way;
how you do the smallest thing is how you do everything. Each thing
needed to be blended perfectly with other things to get just the right result,
and this process was not just a physical one, but a mental one as well. The
order of things needed to be thought-out perfectly, the intent behind each
motion whether mental or physical as he worked needed to be perfect, and for
that perfection to evolve within him, there needed to be a process, an internal
process that carried everything along like a wave; this was intent. And as this
inner action that developed and moved across space and time from inner
places to outer ones developed, it began to transmute into existence, an outer
result. The nature and the power of this outer result was therefore a kind of
procedural alchemy that included an incredible number of components. Even
sour cabbage was a fine alchemical art.
Some components were beyond physical perception, existing within the
mind as the will of the creator; creativity, imagination, and the depth of a
sacred order that seemed to come from a place beyond mere calculation.
These needed to combine with the ability to buy, connive, or get in any way
the necessary physical ingredients to create the perfect final product. There
was so much there, so much to anything and everything that anyone did; as
the young man looked around, the world glittered with the realization that
every step, every scream or laugh by all the people around him was alchemy.
He was beginning to understand a kind of sacred geometry, an underlying
mathematics that lay beneath the outer world. Everything was a miracle! The
young man was beginning to understand the incredible marvel of sacred
causation.
The greatest challenge in creating the best sour cabbage was now storage,
aging. The barrels he had begun using to store his sour cabbage were the
secret to his cutting-edge product. He had discovered a link between the
refinement of his sour cabbage and decay; it needed to be touched by the
vapors of decay just enough.
Thanks to his contemplations, which had become a university and a hall of
study and experimentation for the young man, he understood the nature of
those vapors of decay. He realized that everything in existence was a result of
a delicate balance between different substances, both real and ethereal. And
through personal experimentation, he discovered that this balance could be
pushed to achieve certain results; balance sustained and made things stable,
but dis-balance created motion that could be used to achieve any result,
depending on the extent and degree of that dis-balance.
To achieve a final product beyond the competition, he needed to work
with these vapors to infuse his sour cabbage with just the right amount of
decay. He had heard certain bakers and wine makers call this process
fermentation. And so, after much contemplation, he designed a new kind of
storage barrel, one that would allow air in through a valve at the top. He had
discovered through deep contemplation that it was natural air that carried the
vapors of decay. By controlling the flow of air, he could control fermentation.
With an intricate valve system that he designed, he was able to consciously
balance and dis-balance fermentation within his newly designed storage
barrels. Each valve was attached to a long copper tube that went deeply into
each barrel. The long tube had small holes throughout its length, allowing the
vapors of decay to infuse themselves deeply into each barrel. Using this new
system, he could control the depth of fermentation for each batch and create a
variety of different flavors by combining different types of cabbage and
spice. His finely crafted sour cabbage was becoming the talk of the village.
To bring his designs and flavors to life in the physical world, he needed to
develop a precise order of operations. This involved creating a causational
structure or formula that allowed him to combine all the necessary materials
and ethereal elements in the right way at the perfect time. He needed to create
a mental model of his design, refine it until he was satisfied that it was
perfect, and then slowly assemble the necessary resources and craftspeople to
produce the material version of his inner idea (thought-structure).
Within the temple of his mind, he was able to sense the sequence of events
as the cabbage fermented. His intuition, which had become incredibly keen in
certain areas of design, revealed that the barrels needed to be made from oak,
while the valves themselves needed to be made from copper. These materials,
along with the spices used and the finely controlled vapors of decay, would
create marvelous flavors. He then had to find just the right people to bring all
these designs together step-by-step until he finally had a working version of
something that had originated deep within the laboratory of his mind.
The entire process demanded a great deal of logistics and he had begun to
revel in the intricacy of all this strategy and planning. He loved the
engineering needed to bring forth a finely crafted outer essence from an inner
source, which to him was like fine art. He was still amazed and incredibly
delighted by each new creation; the subtle combination of personal will as it
moved from thought to physical deed was a miracle to him. He was
spellbound by every subtle ounce of inner motion and how different feelings
created different results, just like a great composer who needed to combine
all of this like a fine musical orchestra while ensuring that his final result was
not only perfect but also unique and beyond anything that his rivals could do.
It was all miraculous, what a concert, what intrigue, what a combination
of inner motion, action, material, and conscious will. Everything was a
formula, a kind of equation that required fine discernment to approximate
perfection. His dark teacher had given him all this. Without his dark
companion's tutelage, he would not know how to use, let alone trust, those
ever deeper inner machinations of his mind. And without the knowledge that
the shadowed man had revealed to him, he would still be stumbling across his
life instead of knowing how to turn an ethereal formula into actual substance.
To have the outer physical power to move his formula from deep within
the rooms of his inner temple and into the material world, he needed prayer
and faith. This was the great power over the material world that the shadowed
man had given him. Without it, he would not have the physical means and
material to re-create all his great ethereal creations in the physical world.

T
Just like perfect fermentation, prayer was also a formula that needed to be
perfected first within the temple of his mind and then allowed to age
perfectly. He started by having a very clear picture of what he wanted, what
he desired. He allowed this desire to run on its own in his temple, and as it
did so, he would notice if there was anything that needed to be added to it, in
other words, he allowed these desires to naturally bloom to their full extent
within his mind.
Once these desires had fully blossomed, he would then create the perfect
statement that would encompass all that he wanted and that produced within
him the perfect feeling-intent. Once he had intuitively engineered his
statement of intent within the vast rooms of his ethereal mind, he would
begin the process of transmutation into physical reality by repeating that
statement of intent ten times at least once a day, feeling intense desire and
growing emotion. For this process to be perfect, he needed to have perfect
focus; deliberate, precise, and sustained focus that did not waver in any way
during these ten repetitions.
 And then during his days, throughout all his days, he tried to remember
his faith like a shining beacon deep within his heart. His faith rang a note that
flowed from the very depths of him and out into the physical world. As this
note flowed out from him, it would begin a process of turning thought into a
sound, a sound that could only be heard by the inner senses. This sound grew
and became stable, and in time it became the ever-evolving essence of what
would eventually become a material thing or a physical event.
Remembering his faith once again, always recalling that he needed to
remember his faith, he thought to himself, “It’s coming!”
It was a feeling of knowing that what he had prayed for, that the tone of
that sound that he created through his prayer was becoming a reality. No
ego…it was all in the hands of a force that was him but was greater than him,
it was all bliss; the less effort he made the better it worked. He had faith
that his prayer would come to pass, he had faith in the Secret King, and he let
go of himself. And as his faith grew, his worries vanished and his ego
diminished, until he was able to let go of all material concerns and be at
peace with the universe. This allowed for a quickening to develop, a
shininess that grew, and as this glow developed it began to create something
new, an evolving configuration.
As he glided through the river of people, some looked at him with
curiosity. There was something otherworldly about the young man with
shining eyes. His attire was proper, indicating that he had some coin, and his
posture and bearing exuded a kind of charismatic self-worth that bordered on
the aristocratic. However, his features were somehow different, almost exotic
in a hard to define way. He was an enigma in this small village where things
seldom changed.
And this was the final gift of the shadowed man. Whether intentional or
not, he did not know, but he understood that faith meant far more than just a
means to material wealth. Slowly over time, as it aged perfectly within him,
faith had become far more than just a way to guarantee the realization of his
prayers and a way towards material wealth. It was a source of strength and
comfort in times of need, and a guide for navigating life's challenges.
Like one of the many keys that opened doors that led deeper and deeper
into the temple of his mind, the key to faith had opened what seemed to him
to be a door at the center of his being. This was a central door, a door that led
to the core of himself. As he stepped through this door, he realized that faith
was the fundamental force of enduring feeling-intent that was not only able to
change the physical world, but also a way to change himself. Slowly, as the
power of his unrelenting and enduring faith grew, he realized that he was
becoming something different!
This discovery was the essence of transmutation, it was about complete
reconfiguration, and it was a treasure beyond any money, wealth, or fame.
This floodgate of realization flowed through him like a thunderbolt from
heaven, and it felt at that moment like a sacred and powerful container deep
within him had broken open. The shattering of this container was releasing a
blazing sun and the light and the energy from that sun exploded outward with
such intensity and ferocity, that now it felt to the young man like he was
being consumed from within.
The flood of intoxicating light lifted him from himself somehow and for a
moment he had a vision of being in two places at once. He was the young
man walking down the main street of his village and he was energy flowing
through everything and everyone. The people around him were no longer
things, they had turned into fine glittering light, or it was better to say that
they had turned into a feeling, a motion that was connected to all other
motion that threaded the entire universe far beyond this world and into long
and immense horizons far beyond the reach of his perceptions.
Personal faith was transmutation, creation, evolution, growth, love. And
beyond his personal faith, he could feel the faith that held the entire universe
together, and that faith felt like a melodious ringing that could blot out all
sound, all existence. The sound that emanated from the instrument was akin
to the echoing of a resonant flute of incredible beauty. The frequencies
produced by the instrument were so fine, with simultaneous notes played
both low and high, all mingling and elongating, that the sound penetrated and
rang deep within all things. This euphoric harmony seemed to become louder
and louder until it became a blaze of sound. This blaze of sound grew louder
still, until he felt a glow, and then that glow became brighter and brighter
still. The glowing light was both one thing and everything, and that
everything touched infinity.
He still felt like his awareness was separated into two parts. One part saw
that joyous light and the other saw the average world and the people all
around him on the street. The part of him that was in the midst of the people
in the street noticed that they were all staring at him. He had stopped
walking, he was looking up at the light, the light that no one else could see,
how could they not see this light?
 Many of the people around him looked annoyed as they had to walk
around him. Others looked at him with what at first he thought was a look of
wonderment and awe, but if he looked carefully he noticed that it was not
admiration on their faces, it was fear.
The onlookers stared in annoyance as the young man fell to his knees,
disrupting the flow of the river. However, their annoyance turned to awe and
perhaps fear as the man opened his arms and looked up at the sky in
veneration.
But he did not care about those people anymore, how could they not see.
All he cared about was that glowing light, that infinite light. Then the
brightness hit a crescendo, and he felt a snap, like a crack somewhere. And he
saw it, he finally saw God!
It was like all the light in the universe had come together to create one
shining orb in the sky, like a flame glowing and blotting out everything. The
light shone down and the radiance of it was pure love, it covered everything,
everyone. No one else saw it, they were all staring at him on his knees in the
middle of the street, as tears rolled down his cheeks.
The brightness of God was overwhelming, it was a brilliant flame now
right before him that drowned out everything.
"Oh, my dear Lord!" exclaimed Janos. The people of the street made a
wide berth. Some stopped and stared at him and whispered to each other.
He had never seen such a glorious thing. It was like all light and all love
of everything beautiful and good was contained in that one bright shining
flame of light. And then from that light as if coalescing, he could see the
outline of a human being, it was like a bright shining person, and he knew
that this was God, and he cried and he loved, and the depths of that love
made him shudder with emotion. Was this death, was this the beginning of
life, he was in bliss, he was in heaven. Oh God!
Laughing. Laughter, like a ringing dry cough, melodious somehow,
endless. Sardonic.
“No, my dramatic friend, that is not God…that is Barbelo. Now stand up
and stop acting like a fool!”
Then more laughter, like a beautiful symphony, a chorus of angels,
accompanying his own Beatific Vision.

In the Gnostic formula it is understood that, though

thrown into temporality, we had an origin in eternity, and
 so also, we have an aim in eternity.
― HANS JONAS

When a blind person and a sighted person are both in the

darkness, they are not different from each other. But when
light comes, then the one who sees will see the light, and the
one who is blind will remain in the darkness.
― THE GOSPEL OF PHILIP
 Q&A Website
I hope you enjoyed this book.

In reading the tales of Janos and the shadowed man, you may have some
questions about the nature of their journey. I have set aside the following
page where you can ask any questions you may have.

https://johnkreiter.com/art-of-transmutation-qa

Have no doubt, this book is full of sophisticated and secret knowledge that I
hope will transport you into a new world of personal fulfillment and
discovery.
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