James: The following is an excerpt from a Vedanta book that I have been commissioned to write with the following caveat: no Sanskrit, no mention of Vedanta. At first I was flummoxed but Isvara quickly suggested I write a Purana. The Puranas are the Vedas in code. If you like it and think it should see the light of day, please donate on the website so we can publish it. Mention that the donation is for The Wall and we will send you a complementary copy when it is published later this year.
The Wall: A Modern Purana
A few million millennia after the Christian Era, the Wall became fed up with selfishness, and your world began to awaken from its slumber. Having served their evolutionary purpose, binary thought and diversity slowly disappeared from the gene pool. Millennia later, when Wallians started showing up here in numbers, only one beautifully engineered disease-free physical body is activated by the Wall, should an individual who is not individual wish to enjoy the pleasures of the physical senses. Although it is available on demand and downloads in seconds courtesy of the government, few avail themselves of it. Consciousness retreated to the eternal world of the subtle body, where individuality creatively blooms under the Wall’s compassionate watchful non-binary Eye. We call the subtle body the sixth sense because it produces a much higher order of bliss than the other five senses combined.
In any case, when Wallians appear they come from Time, which is binary, vast and ancient. They usually appear when my subtle body is inactive. I am always surprised by their bodies, demeanors and unusual stories.
Although Menacham’s physical body was well-dressed, robust and vital, his mind was emaciated and dressed in dirty tattered black-and-white striped pajamas. He seemed strangely confident and equally troubled. He didn’t wait to introduce himself when my scanner booted up my body, but immediately began to speak.
He said, “My story is killing me. To get it out of my system I crave to share it with someone who might understand. Maybe I can share it with you because you are a luminous stranger, but I lack the courage to ask to ask you for that.”
“Sure, why not?” I replied, nonchalantly.
“An old programming has been generating intense feelings of anger, hatred and contempt that do not have any obvious reason and can attach themselves to anything in the environment,” he replied.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.
“I don’t need sympathy,” he replied. “You are supposed to listen. I keep asking myself why I need such intense negative emotions. It is like I am a soldier going into battle. I fight demons all day and collapse into a heap of stupefying self-pity in the evening: drinking, eating, mindlessly watching TV and sleeping to relieve myself of the stress of battle.
“Where I live I visit a place in the mountains every week or two on the edge of a big cliff far off the beaten path. Suddenly I felt the urge to turn around and I saw a pair of huge black wings coming straight at me. A raven landed gracefully six feet away. I wasn’t eating anything and had never observed ravens beg for food or seek human company like other birds may do. This was no ordinary encounter.
“I rarely look people straight in the eyes. For me it is like looking directly at the face of God. But I could not help looking into his welcoming, shiny, perfectly black eyes. We sat there for a long time like stoned old friends looking into space. When an eagle glided by I could feel an electric current flow through his body. He was a messenger from Odin.
“A week later he appeared again at the same spot and started vocalizing in raven language. For some reason I instantly knew he was telling me to go deeper within, beyond signs and symbols. His words sent me on a wild ride of self-discovery, which opened a Pandora’s box related to ancient Israel and the Holocaust, and I discovered that Odin had been my god for a long time. Because he is a healer of souls, many people are afraid of Him; they don’t like the bitter taste of his good medicine.
“Chained to the Tree of Yggdrasil, he willfully suffers for knowledge of the red, black and golden runes, which are the energies that make up the world of experience, not mere letters. I may drag my feet, kick and scream, but his powerful dedication inspires me to embrace suffering as my dearest friend. I wanted to learn everything about him.”
I nodded. I was captivated by his humility, honesty and purity, but said nothing as he continued.
“Although I was born in the Warsaw ghetto between the big wars, I found National Socialism beautiful because it gave incredible strength to my yearning to free me from bondage. When I was sent to Dachau I was chosen to work in a metal factory in Germany, whose owner was a very distant, cold man. Everybody was afraid of him. But there was a strange bond between us; we stimulated something profound in each other. He saw to it that I was well fed and properly dressed. He trusted me completely. After a few days he moved me to his estate in the country. I could have easily escaped, but I felt it was not honorable to betray his trust. On the wall of my room was a plaque with the words ‘My honor is my loyalty,’ the principle of the Gestapo. What a powerful principle if a person uses it for the devotion to the truth.
“Once in the middle of summer he asked me to a replant a tree that needed specialized machinery to avoid the damage to the roots. To make things worse it was growing tight against one of the factory’s brick walls.
“But all I said was, ‘Jawohl, Herr Director,’ and stared digging. People were walking by, commenting that we were mad, but I could see that they secretly admired us, not for digging, but for striving to attain something impossible.
“I vowed to replant that tree or die trying, which caused such a powerful energy that I was lifted out of my body and for the first time I felt free from that petty goddamned soul to which it seemed I had been indentured for all of eternity. The freedom didn’t last, but inspired the events that put me on a ship from Hamburg to Australia. At the time I did not realize I was watching my life unfold from a place beyond it.
“I worked hard to establish myself in the new world, which was not without suffering but Odin was with me. He is a fierce god, not a god of peace. He rides an eight-legged warhorse looking for people qualified to leave suffering behind, that his Valkyries will take to Valhalla where they work hard all day and feast on the fruits of their actions all night. He also set loose the witching power which is dormant in the mind until it is invoked by devotion to His name, but I avoided it because I knew it would only dig my hole of suffering deeper. I stayed true to Him alone, not His powers, because I could not shovel my way out on my own. One day, He said these unforgettable words in my clairaudient mind: ‘Work hard. Dig your well deeper. Think of nothing else. Your loyalty taps the bubbling eternal spring behind your suffering. Knock the door and ring the bell, a window opens and you will see who is there.’
“My faith in the God of my birth helped to resolve my German-Jewish karma, but I dug deeper and found the Neo-Non-Dualists. I soon tired of their completely chaotic, unstructured, accidental, incomplete form of discourse. I became convinced that there had to be a coherent skeleton of ideas to guide me through the enlightenment jungle. I needed a no-nonsense, no-bullshit, down-to-earth, four-wheel-drive approach.
“Then one day my shovel removed the final stone, and clear water bubbled up. I was in a bookstore, and the title How to Attain Enlightenment written by a forest-dwelling redneck from Montana almost jumped off the shelf into my hands. Every cell of my body tingled with joy when I opened the cover. I immediately went to the mountain to consult the raven, but it didn’t appear. I understood that Odin had carried me on his great wings as far as he could.”
He fell silent, lost in thought for a long time. He didn’t seem to be aware of me, so I asked, “What happened next?”
“A week later I woke up around 3:00 am. Everything was perfectly still. A powerful force sat my body upright in the room space, which was vibrating to the most unusual sound I had ever heard, as if the whole cosmos was a single syllable. And out of that sound the words ‘I AM PURE, UNLIMITED CONSCIOUSNESS. NOTHING IN THIS WORLD CAN AFFECT ME!!!!!!!!’ appeared.
“So what do you want from me?” I asked.
“‘Who said those words?’ he asked.
“‘You did,’ I replied.
“‘I did not. I heard them. Someone else said them,’ he countered as his golden energy field became light orange.
“‘It was not a who,’ I replied. ‘It was a what.’
“‘I’m not a what. I’m a who.’
“‘I know it seems that way but unknown to everyone a dark power that lurks behind the mind reverses the relationship between the personal and the impersonal you. Those words are a statement of what you are. They free you of the story-telling, well-digging you. The first thing you said when you appeared was, ‘My story is killing me. To get it out of my system I crave to share it with someone who might understand.’ The story belongs to the personal you, which is not a real you.”
Gold returned, his shoulders slumped and he was listening again.
He said, “I made a lot of statements that sound like I am entirely convinced that what I said it real. Maybe I’m going mad.”
“You are quite sane, believe me. You shouldn’t doubt those words. There is only one ‘I.’ Confident knowledge of it allows you to let go of your story and with it the belief that you are a who.”
“But I think I need to learn a new way of living in this world.”
“I disagree. You don’t need to change one thing. You are not an ax murderer or a child molester. You are fine in the world. No more digging. Leave Menacham alone. Take a stand in what you are. It is the royal road to freedom and non-binary love.”
Because it was more than he could assimilate, his mind went blank, the transmission ended and he vanished through the Wall but reappeared a few seconds later before my scanner deleted my body.
“I’m glad you’re still here,” he said.
“I was just about to leave. What’s up?”
“I had had a vison just now. Maybe you can tell me what it means. I was kissing someone or something and I suddenly realized I was kissing death! There were only cheekbones, no flesh. The kiss was sweet and passionate and celestial music was playing in the background.”
“True knowledge only scares the unreal personal you. It is actually sweet music. God is telling you that Menacham is already dead. Don’t try to keep him alive.”
He disappeared through the Wall, and I knew that I would not seem him again.
