I’ve seen enough ruined dreamtimes,
seen enough wraiths wandering listless or gathered and fierce in vast craters
of shattered black basalt. These places beneath dark skies that burn and bleed
like wounds in the firmament. These places of annihilation, places of
forgetting and forgotten. Bombed cityscapes seem to shimmer at the crater’s
edge, there and then gone, and there again. I am standing in the tear, the
subatomic agony of ruptured particles, fallen superpositions. Around me the
howling, sobbing wraiths dim and flicker, the cacophony fades and I am now
alone in this place. An interloper riding a corrupted signal dying faintly in
the void. I am always shocked by how horrifyingly, unpalatably physical it
feels. The grit and rough stone beneath my bare feet, the feel of the wind on
my face, the sheer radiant darkness that I would have called ugly if there were
anything else in this place to compare it with. It is instead rather beautiful
in its way, this luminosity of absence, just alien enough to feel familiar. The
young stone girl is there in the centre of the breach, sitting cross-legged and
frozen in the circle of ash, her left hand upturned, palm open. Her eyes are
pieces of uncut onyx, unblinking, unmoving, although they watched my long
approach from the crater’s rim. I press the piece of unpolished quartz into the
upturned palm.
Her stone becomes flesh, her eyes become lamps of Innermost fire. She
turns her head, peering at me fully now. There is amusement in her eyes, but
also challenge. “Come again?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Always the romantic, dreamwalker. A holy fool of good intentions. It
is indeed what I like most about you.”
“I’m no fool,” I tell her, crossing the boundary of the ashen circle. I
sit cross-legged with the girl, her slim shape wrapped in ragged strips of
blackened muslin. She continues to peer at me with eyes of flame. Eyes that are
the only colour or brightness in this place. Still, this half-smile on her
lips.
“And this time?”
Very quietly I say, “Tell me of the Mind of Man, their stories, their
fictions and fancies, their subconscious energies...all these things that
govern soul-making and the potentialities of their spirits.”
She smiles openly now, eyes still burning. “What can I tell you,
dreamwalker, that you yourself do not already know?”
“Tell me,” I insist. “You know why I ask, why I’m afraid, and why I come
seeking your counsel once again. You are not hateful, even here in this breach.
It’s the thing I like most about you.”
She laughs gently, never breaking her flame-lit gaze. It is both
thrilling and unsettling to be peered into so deeply, to be recognised so
clearly. She senses my thrill and my fear. She takes my hand in hers. It looks
like flesh, but it feels still like stone.
“Dear sweet boy, your earnestness is agony, and rather beautiful. I
do not mean to belittle you. It is crucial that you care. Most travellers that
press my palm are seeking other things. But not you, and so, sweet boy, I am
always happy to indulge you. This is not the true abyss. There are many wounds
like these. I am but one sentinel, there are others like me.”
“I know,” I murmur. “But we have lost touch with our spirits and our
dead. Very few of us commune with them. Fewer still honour them.”
She caresses my face and I am vulnerable, childlike, shy. “I was
birthed of holocaust, sweet one, but my knowledge is neither particular nor
occulted.”
“Share with me still,” I ask tentatively.
“You wish to know of duality? The Dark Twin of God?”
“Yes.”
In
the circle of ash beneath the ruptured firmament she fixes me with her fire.
She begins.
“Angel of the Abyss, dark twin of God. Devil, Lucifer, Antichrist,
Demiurge? This confusion of names and competing cosmologies?”
“Yes,” I whisper. “There is dark magick at work in my world now, a
psychospiritual inversion. If we are all Love and Infinity made manifest, then
this magick seeks to invoke its cosmic reversal.”
She gazes into my heart through my sight. “Yes,” she tells me. “This
imagined Dark Twin of God. Some call him Abaddon, Apollyon, Lucifer, Devil,
Demiurge, Iblis. You give him many names in your religions, your spiritualities
and fictions. Voldermort, Sauron, Morgoth, the Broken Book. You swap names
around and argue over ontologies, demonizing the religions that came before you
or contemporaneous with yours. Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists,
all hating, all fighting, when you should have been working together to
comprehend the problem of evil. The problem of evil was supposed to be an
integral facet of the Great Study of humankind – all faiths and all creeds
coming together for a common good. It is this way in the astral realms beyond
the breach in which we now sit...centres of learning in which spirits come
together to share one another’s stories, dreamscapes, rituals, rhythms and
secrets. But it does not matter what you call this imagined Dark Twin of God,
what name you ascribe to him. He is your conception of utter depravity and
control, he is the nameless one that rapes and kills children, the one who eats
the flesh and drinks the blood of his former kin. The one who breaks spirits
and minds and hearts, the one who defiles, abuses, annihilates.”
I have tears in my eyes as the girl of flesh-like stone peers at me with
her eyes of fire, holding my hand gently.
My voice is trembling now. “Why does such a vision even exist in the
innermost minds of Man? It terrifies us, castrates us, makes us weak and
passive.”
“Sweet, sweet child, he is terrifying because he is not in pain. He
is joyful, an endless conscious perversion. Your scholar and your shaman can
fight about who or what this Dark Twin of God really is – endless arguments
regarding his ontology – but you cannot if you are honest deny his presence in
your world. You cannot deny that these unholy energies have colonised much of
your thinking and many of your territories. Even a fiction can be sharpened to
a razor’s edge and drawn across the throats of your churches, your temples and
altars and sacred spaces. He is the quantum superposition of every fallen
state, the thing there and not there, and no religion or spirituality can claim
safe haven from his reach. But, like your vampires of old, you have to invite
him in.”
“Yes,” I tell her. “Yes, I can see now with even greater clarity how
storytelling transfigures like a fractal in each human mind – always the
interplay of dark and light, this duality that seems inbuilt into our
perception of material reality.”
“Indeed. The nameless abomination is a phantom, a rumour, a fancy
used to explain every form of human or cosmic violence. But we are entangled
with everything at the subatomic level, interconnected to every possible
reality and every dimension by virtue of the fact that sentience itself is the
flame of God, multiplied and fractalised throughout the myriad. All is dream,
all is spirit, nothing is physical until an observing consciousness awakens
within that frequency. This is what worlds are, traveller; dreams viewed from
the inside.”
“Yes,” I say once more. “Yes, I’ve always known such things. But the
pain...the horror. It takes my breath away.”
She peers, she sees, she comprehends. “Sweet boy, I too know of this.
The horror you speak of, it raped me a thousand times and almost stole the
light from my breast. Some worlds are denser and thus more difficult than
others, and we must assume more valuable. These dark forces you imagine who
wish to rouse the living inversion of the creative principle, the Nameless One
that is the true adversary of consciousness...they do not govern the arc of
your spirit or the spirits of your kith and kin. But all worlds know of him.
Alien tongues speak of him. And like what you call God, his names are also
Infinite. He exists as a caution, a warning, a Gnosis of what the absence of
Love can truly become. He isn’t really or merely Abaddon, Apollyon, Antichrist,
or the other gods of other faiths. For some he is a wild pagan thing. For
others he is order and law. These are but placeholders, evolutionary fictions for
young minds. He is something that we all know, something that we can all become
if we ignore our own spiritual intelligence. Why do you suppose I placed myself
here, within this ghost of holocaust? To acknowledge what was done, and what I
truly am. What I can be again as this light grows steadily in my breast once
more. Truly he is an alien god, and we the sentient should never know him.
Because truly we are all gatekeepers, and we know exactly how to call him
forth, we know exactly what it takes to invoke him. Theist and Atheist alike.
He is the most ancient of cautions and the ugliest, cruelest nightmares of
every possible world. But as every religion and spirituality tries to teach
you, twisting and turning at the fractal level even when corrupted or rewritten,
you must read between the lines.”
“My friends and loved ones are afraid right now,” I tell her. “They
haven’t the strength left to peer into the gaps of their own cognition.”
“Then you must carry that Light for them, sweet warrior. Holy fool. Child
of Infinity.”
“I’m trying...but...”
She grips my palm a little tighter and I know that she could crush it if
she chose. I can feel the power in the stone of her hand.
“Listen to me, traveller. It is not the absence that is truly in
control. It has always been the presence. No matter how much they draw the
absence in, either through psychospiritual technologies or acts of the sickest,
most degenerate violence, it is always Presence that lives forever. Evil is a
ghost, a phantom, a non-local vampire. But Love is forever, as well you know;
the force that ultimately governs the fates of all entities in this myriad.
These are not merely our spiritual cosmologies, they are the sentient
geometries from which these cosmologies are developed by consciousness in-situ,
in real time. There is only one story, sweet boy, and it is the greatest story
ever told. We must all of us reconnect with our souls, with our faith, and
recognise who is ultimately in control. These dark energies seem all-powerful
to you right now, but they are not. The creative principle is all-powerful.
Evil is weak and petty when you finally see it for what it is, but Love is
strong and true and eternal. Remember this,
storyteller, and go forward now.”
