You've got rhythm

Pathologies of the Soul, Chapter 33

This chapter is rather unusual, in that with only one young exception, names, dates, and locations have not been changed to protect the innocent.

On Christmas Eve, 1991, I was that odd Australian guest known to frequent the home of David And Louise Mathieson in Hollywood, California.

David, is a spiritual warrior, cleverly disguised at that time during working hours as a computer consultant. Believing that Christmas, having been a time for new birth and celebration for many thousands of years under many other names,David thought this evening should be no less interesting for him. He suggested the CHRISTOS EXPERIMENT, with me as the experimental subject.

The Christos Experiment is a rather odd-sounding method for accessing past or alternate lives. I had never heard of it before, but it had apparently come from notes in an unpublished Magick text book from Western Australia.

I'll try anything at least once to get into an altered state, that doesn't have side effects or produce a hangover. The technique involved a series of improbable sounding steps. First one person was to perform a light circular massage on the subject's temples, and another person simultaneously massages the ankles, until a buzzing sensation is produced. Being a Chiropractor, Dr Louise produced a massage table, and they each worked on an end of me until, for no known reason, I buzzed all over. Very gentle, but peculiar.

There followed a delightfully illogical series of steps including all sorts of things from visualizing my feet stretching out of my feet, to describing my front door before floating above the house.

Once in that state, the idea is to land somewhere, and it might happen to be in any other life at all.

In the first life I landed, my feet were in winter boots. It was around 1920, and I was aged around 74, walking in the snow by a lake in Copenhagen, pondering some philosophical pronouncement of Søren Kirkegaard. This was not particularly interesting to me, as all that seemed to be the most ordinary thing one could have been doing in a 1920 winter.

David asked me to move above that life, as this was Christmas, and it would be surely more fun to dump me somewhere really different.

The second life I landed in was as a 7 year-old Swedish girl. It was Christmas Eve, mid-afternoon but already quite dark. Her parents owned a wonderful concert grand piano, and the girl was showing off to the neighbors how she played the piano. I will not name her or the village, as this book could reach there before she grows up. This was almost interesting as the last time I had seen that life was 5 years ago, and thought it was a future incarnation of mine. The interesting part was she seemed to be around 2 years old then, and 7 years old when I look five years later. This opened the questions: do future lives age when you look at them later, or was she some parallel life?

Whatever she was, I wasn't going to risk complicating her Christmas celebration by whatever it felt like to have me (as Rowland in California) poking around her universe too long.

David said: "Yes that's almost something, but no surprise. Can we have something really different, a true Christmas surprise? You always are rather strange, but can't you just accidently land somewhere that is totally strange for you?

I landed for the third time. This existence was Totally Strange: there were seven hairy ape-like creatures just grooving along, dancin' in a circle saying "You've got rhythm." They felt everything they had to communicate only needed us to join in the dance, but they managed to fit in answers to David's excited questions. David was very happy, as there were somehow a very powerful personal experience to me, yet whatever they were blew my concepts of reality.

After a while David asked seven apes dancing in a rhythm "Are you Rowland's Higher Self?" There were very happy at being asked such a sensible question, as they thought that should have been very obvious to us! I reacted like a stunned mullet. Seven hairy apes add up to my one Higher Self! I asked if everyone had such a Higher Self, they said no, can't you see David's looks like a reflection of the Moon on the Water? This was weird, but the strangest part was it was somehow making a glimmer of sense. What was their Teaching? Aberration can't exist when You've Got Rhythm!

David was fascinated at something so unexpected, so he kept asking "them" questions about all sorts of things: the future of California, the connection between them and the visible human race, his prospective music career.

He asked the main cause of the future. Their answer was that in their dimension we were merely a collection of children's stories, and that the future in our dimension depended on what library books were read by the children in their dimension. If none of the children in their world borrow the book about the big Californian earthquake, we won't have it. Can we influence what books will be read by their children? They were too busy dancing to have ever thought about that. Why should they worry about what stories their children read? We don't worry about what fairy stories our children read!

David asked their basic advice to the Earth plane. They said the future of the planet will be so musical, we'll all be dancing as long as we avoid the "black spot in the heart." What is the black spot in the heart? That question really astounded them. How could we imagine we are sentient beings, capable of evolution, if we don't even know that? Finally they managed to comprehend we actually didn't know, and they found a way of describing it in a way even we could understand, even though we did find it a little difficult at first.

The "black spot in the heart" is our potential for disconnecting from instinct and roaming off on some sweetness and light spiritual trip! What's wrong with that? Out of hundreds of possible examples, what about the constant wars and inquisitions held in the name of religious truth, or the spiritual suppression of teenage instinct that only comes out as violence? The "seven hairy apes" thought they were the higher self, and our potential to embark upon "angelic" spiritual crusades was the deepest pit of the subconscious mind, liable to erupt with it's chaos at any time!

They perceived human thought or the "angelic" higher self as lower, as only those suppress the sanctity of rhythmic instinct.

We wanted to know how one gets from their plane to incarnate on Earth. At last we had asked a simple question we could surely understand. All you need to do is dance in a spiral, having a groovy time, till the seven of you nearly crash in the centre. At that point you suddenly notice each other, and leap back, quite startled to the perimeter of the spiral. You dance into the centre again, and again leap back startled. You dance into the centre again a third time, and this time don't notice each other, but collapse into a disjointed heap. Now you have incarnated on Earth!

Any further advice: act out the dance! Their promise was rather cryptic: we would then land on Earth on Earth. This may be nonsense, may be a new state of presence and attention in harmony with the Earth, or we may land at random irreversibly in another dimension. I can't wait to find out, but I haven't yet found seven people with a deep desire to act out such an unconventional ritual. Maybe it would do nothing, and just maybe it would do something very strange.

Surprise, it was 3 action packed hours! I thought only 1/2 hour of Earth time had elapsed.

A rhythmic Christmas with Kötbollar (Swedish meat balls) and Rødkøl (red cabbage with apple) was celebrated, with me as the chef. Day of the birth of the Sun, one of our favorite timekeepers.

During Christmas and the following days the most puzzling thing happened: it all started to make more and more sense!

Rhythm more real than solidity, animal self as sacred, to be out of tune with instinct seen as blasphemy.

I came to see that reality is split by defining that there is a "higher" self, and that act of definition makes perceptible and "instinctual" self; each facet of the split are on the same level. When one's consciousness encompasses both, living life is a great joy. When one takes one "side" as the "real" or senior side, both are conscious, each pointing the finger at the other as the subconscious, source of temptation and evil, to be not seen and dismissed. That produces a stimulus-response, dissociated life, the "waking sleep" described by the great philosopher Gurdjieff.

The rhythmic grounded self is the Black Chakra now being described by the Dali Lama, the faculty of living life in harmony with nature and in accordance with our creative contract with Mother Earth.

Copyright (c) 1993 Rowland Barkley