Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (41 page)

Derek sobs, “He was me!”

A few odd thoughts about reincarnation occur to Gordon (it’s been that kind of a night), but he decides Derek probably isn’t ready to have that discussion, so he only says, “You must’ve had a nightmare.”

“No! It was real!” A toddler’s sense of indignation stanches Derek’s tears.

“If it was real, then Farmer François would be here stinking up the room with us. I think you just dreamed him.”

Derek gets a thoughtful look on his three-year-old face. “I think he died,” he says.

“He farted himself to death?”

“Yep!” Derek giggles. “He–he farted a real stinky cheese!”

“He cut the cheese and died?” Gordon just rolls with it. “He croaked on his own butt fumes?”

“Yep!” Derek sings, “He farted a horse! He’s dead, of course!”

Unbeknownst to Gordon, from that moment on Derek will never be afraid of his farts again. In fact, like most little boys, he’ll learn to revel in them.

□ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □

Okay, so that was my big fart breakthrough. Whoop-dee-fuckin’-doo…. I’m sure you’re all glad to know my farts won’t be scaring the shit out of me anymore. (I’ll get off this scatological kick shortly, I promise.) If it had been up to me, the whole subject never would’ve come up in the first place, but I have to admit it proves a point: traumas from our past lives can affect us in the lives we’re living now.

Like I told you earlier, in my last incarnation I was a boring old French farmer who died from eating unpasteurized cheese. The gas pains were really incredible, like a fleet of tiny Hindenburgs exploding in my colon. I carried a memory from that past life trauma into my new life as little Derek. So understandably, I had a phobia about farts. On an unconscious level I was thinking,
Farting = Death
. But then Gordon helped me remember that it was my prior self, as Farmer François, who died doing the Death Fart Dance and not the current me. All of a sudden, horrendous farting seemed kind of funny instead of threatening, and the phobia went away. Still, I’ll never be all that big on eating cheese. And as for Brie or anything else that looks like congealed snot inside a furry white pancake–just forget it. There’s no way.

Making past life memories conscious not only helps you get over weird phobias–it also helps you recover old talents and skills. Like, say you were really great at playing the piano in a past life. In your new life you could be a prodigy. In fact, almost all child prodigies are just picking up where they left off in a previous life, with a little hitch as they get used to their fresh young bodies. The greatest talents adapt to the changing times and make what was old seem new again–Mozart reincarnated as Jimi Hendrix.

My former talent for milking cows isn’t going to help me much in this coming life. Neither are the nautical skills I picked up as a deckhand on an 1830’s whaling schooner. (But there lies another phobia for me to get past: I won’t be too keen on deep-sea fishing anytime soon because, as my three-year-old self remembers,
Sharks will bite your butt off!
) What I really have going for me are my past life experiences with Gordon. We’ll be counting on each other for a lot in this segment of the Earth Adventure Series, so it’s nice to know we have all that shared history. It makes communicating much easier. Already, it’s almost as if we can read each other’s thoughts. Of course, we don’t even come close to the telepathy everyone has on the Other Side–but we’re doing pretty good by earthly standards.

A crude sort of telepathy is easy when you’re three. At that age the line is still blurred between magical thinking and rationality–there’s very little sense of what you can or can’t do. At the same time, memories of your past lives and the Other Side are still as vivid as they’ll ever be, outside of death or the womb. Soon, however, the money-grubbing, warmongering, materialistic world we live in will try to shackle you to its collective delusions about what is and isn’t possible–and then the doubting of your spiritual existence begins.

To transcend the constraints of the soul-squelching status quo, you need to cultivate what John Keats, in a letter to his brothers in 1817, called Negative Capability: “…when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”

Keats knew what he was talking about. He had one of the all-time great daimons on his side. His life showed all the hallmarks. He was born in obscurity (his parents owned and operated a horse stable). He was acquainted with death from an early age (a brother died in infancy, his father died after being thrown from a horse when Keats was only ten, his mother succumbed to tuberculosis four years later, as did his brother, Tom, four years after that). He suffered from a terminal disease (tuberculosis again–first choice among daimons for communicating with their 19th-century charges–along with a dash of gonorrhea). His greatest work was accomplished in the last years of his life (he died at twenty-five) while his health was inexorably deteriorating. In fact, three of his most famous poems (“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” and “Ode on Melancholy”) were written in just over a week–a feat unequalled until 1969, when Neil Young wrote “Cinnamon Girl,” “Down by the River,” and “Cowgirl in the Sand” in one afternoon while he was knocked out with the flu. (Just so you know, I didn’t draw that comparison to make you think that Keats actually came back as Neil Young–but hey, stranger rebirths have happened.)

Anyway, getting back to Negative Capability… Keats explained it as the ability to be open to mystery, to experience it, without having to find logical explanations for that mystery’s existence. Some things, like love, can never be fully explained. And how about truth, beauty, God, or the spirit’s immortality? You get the idea….

It’s kind of like the Zen doctrine of No Mind. You have to still the mind’s constant chatter and in its place create a receptive emptiness. All of your certainties, preconceived notions, fixed concepts, and strongly held opinions have to go by the wayside. Forget about the laws of science, the conventional wisdom passed on to you by your parents, and whatever you were taught in Sunday school. Take some time to be open to the mystery, The Way, Gnostic insight, your soul’s prompting–whatever you want to call it. Just don’t try to explain it. Live with it.
Be
it. See where it takes you.

I mean, what else is there, in any average, ordinary, mundane life as it’s lived on this planet, aside from the exhilaration that comes from reconnecting with the Divine?

As you become more adept at entering the state of Negative Capability, you may find yourself right in the thick of weirdness. Synchronicities could become commonplace. You might find you have the ability to see ghosts and spirits. Spirits from the Other Side will certainly become more interested in seeing you. Negative Capability allows them to communicate with you, if you’re willing. But take it from Gordon, it’s a real trick to keep your mind from that “irritable reaching after fact & reason” when a numinous shaman has just handed you the meaning of life along with a slice of pepperoni pizza.

That shaman was Gordon’s daimon, by the way, turning up for a rare personal appearance. Since daimons don’t actually assume physical form, what everyone saw was filtered through their own subconscious perceptions of what a wise entity like a daimon might look like. So Gordon saw a shaman, because like any halfway good teenage mystic scholar he’s been reading Carlos Castaneda and Mircea Eliade. Twinker saw an old woman because in her family the wisest person around is her maternal grandmother. And D.H. saw an alien because… well, because he’s D.H. and that’s just how his whacked-out mind operates. Jimmy and Skip didn’t see anything at all because they weren’t on the same soul-wavelength; to use Madame Sophie’s Sufi-derived terminology, “their hearts weren’t pure enough.”

Because it was Gordon’s daimon, only Gordon was able to hear what the daimon had to say. But even that was filtered through the language of Don Juan and those other peyote-puking sorcerer-types: “There’s a part of you that’s immortal. But you must go deeper into the physical, and be tempered by its onslaughts, before you reach your eternal apotheosis.”

Well, duh…. We don’t incarnate in these crap-ass human bodies because we actually enjoy being terrified babies who think they’re about to die a horrible death every time they launch a fart. (I’m sorry… I guess I’m getting a little too personal here, but being stuck inside a toddler’s body is reminding me of just how much life can really suck. Things will be better when I’m old enough to eat barbecued iguanas and make myself sick on peyote buttons, like Castaneda’s buddies.)

Compared to the Other Side, material existence is a nightmare. Sometimes life on Earth can feel like running through a haunted house with your hair on fire. At other times it can feel like you’re being ground down to nothing with triviality, boredom, and bullshit problems. (And who came up with the brilliant idea that we should all have to work for a living, anyway? Right after I turn ten, I’ll be pissing away the glorious summers of my youth by spending eight hours a day counting nuts and bolts in a hardware store. How stupid is that?) But the truth is we wouldn’t be here if life didn’t have lessons to teach us. Lessons that can’t be learned on the Other Side, for whatever reason. Lessons about love. Lessons about loss. Lessons about power, guilt, anger, betrayal, and fear. And you can read all you want about those lessons, and listen to other people tell stories about them, but if you’re truly going to understand those lessons on a deep soul level, you’ll have to go through them yourself. There’s no other way. You have to experience them.

Keats put it this way: “Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced–Even a Proverb is no proverb to you till your Life has illustrated it.”

So like I said, we map out all the major events in our upcoming lives on Earth before we come down here, signing up in advance for the sometimes harsh lessons our souls need to learn through physical experience. Destiny is the name for what we’ve chosen to do in life. Daimons kick our asses to make sure we do it–sometimes literally. By now you’ve probably figured out that Gordon’s daimon was that ass-kicking Easter Bunny. But even I don’t know why Gordon had to get rabbit-punched straight into the hospital way back then. Daimons work in mysterious ways, like that other guy (“Old Nobodaddy,” William Blake called him). All I can say is it’s a rough business, perfecting the human soul.

And just what exactly is a soul, anyway? Here’s the way I understand it, if you really need an answer. Basically, while we’re on the Other Side–or up in heaven, if you’re more comfortable with that term–we exist as pure spirit. That’s the part of us that never dies, our True Self, which will eventually merge with its creator (otherwise known as God, Allah, the Good, the One, or whatever…). But before that ultimate merger can take place, every spirit has to graduate from Earth School, which is kind of the spiritual equivalent of boot camp. Earth School is in session when a spirit gets together with a daimon and/or a bunch of guardian angels to chart another life on Earth and incarnate as a soul in a physical body. The soul–or astral body, as the Tibetans like to call it–is the sum total of our conscious and subconscious thoughts and emotions that are oriented toward the realm of the spirit (the ego, or False Self, is whatever’s leftover, oriented toward the body and the realm of matter). The soul exists as a body just as real as any physical body, although it’s less dense because it’s on a higher frequency or vibratory level (I’m sorry, but the analogies get fuzzy here…) in the cosmic continuum between matter and spirit.

Think of it this way: A spirit stays in heaven. A body is stuck on Earth. A soul can travel from Earth up to heaven (how high it goes depends on its level of perfection). And a daimon (as an emissary of the Light) can travel from heaven down to Earth. The various levels between heaven and Earth are what the Tibetan Buddhists call the
Bardo–
and that’s where daimons and souls usually meet. Advanced souls stay in contact with their spirits through the agency of a daimon–the soul’s mentor.

Each time we incarnate we add to our personal version of the
Bardo (Bardo
translates as “gap”), filling it up with the things and beings from our everyday existence, along with a random sampling of gods and archetypes from the collective unconscious and some of the flashier junk from our previous lives. The
Bardo
of a Manhattan real estate agent named Rupert, for example, won’t look anything like the
Bardo
described in
The Tibetan Book of the Dead–
although I guess you can never completely discount the possibility of bleed-over. On a bad night ´Svânamukhâ (dark blue, wolf-headed, carrying a human corpse to her mouth with both hands, her eyes staring) might very well emerge from within Rupert’s brain and appear before him to trash an Upper East Side co-op right as he’s about to close on it.

There’s a point to all this, I can assure you. When a physical body dies, the soul finds out that its consciousness, as a soul, still exists–which usually comes as a big surprise. At the moment of death, the soul ascends through a gently inclined tunnel of light and is met on the Other Side by its own spirit, which appears as a luminous being, or more simply, the Light. If the soul has learned everything it needs to know from its time spent on Earth, then it merges with the Light in full consciousness. We’re talking unity with the Divine here. Transfiguration. Earth School is over.

But what’s more likely to happen, instead of merging, is that the soul just gets a glimpse of its own spirit, then rolls over and falls asleep. That sounds pathetic, I know, but most souls haven’t consciously developed their skills at astral travel, so it’s hard for them to control anything once they’ve left their bodies. When they wake up again, they find themselves in the
Bardo.
And once souls end up there, they tend to get distracted by something-or-other in the
Bardo’s
never-ending freakshow (dancing girls, a really cool mansion, ´Svânamukhâ gnawing on grandma–it could be anything, really…). For a while, they forget about the Light. The
Bardo
is made of mental and emotional stuff, just like the astral body, and it has many entertaining and informative levels–with the human virtues up near the top (picture the life of Christ) and human evil down near the bottom (think Hitler). Each soul in the
Bardo
rises or falls through the varying densities until it finds its own level, where it stays until it gets bored and says something like, “This sucks. I want to go back to the Light.” At that time, the soul dies and its spirit absorbs whatever experiences the soul had that fit into the scheme of heaven. (In this way the soul is kind of like that little black box recorder that the FAA guys always search for every time a jet crashes. It records everything right up until the final moment when our bodies crash. And they all crash–there’s no use trying to deny that.)