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The Archive of Stanley MessengerThe IntraterrestrialsA Foretaste of the New World |
L Good afternoon. Is this the I.T. School?
M It is, yes. Good afternoon
L Who am I speaking to please?
M I’m the interpreter on duty this afternoon.
L You call it ‘interpreter’. Are you a teacher at the school?
M I do some teaching, yes, when that is what seems to be needed.
L I see. Well can I come in? It seems silly to be standing here at the door.
M Yes, certainly. By all means come in. I have to wait till you ask, you see. I’m sorry if I seemed impolite. Here we are then. Would you like to sit here? This is the most comfortable chair. Can I offer you something to drink?
L No thanks, this is fine. Thank you very much. What a beautiful room. Van Gogh’s sunflowers. I have his ‘Blue Cart’. I think I’ll just take off my coat. There! So, where were we? Do you mind if I go on asking questions?
M Not at all. That’s how we like it to be.
L You haven’t asked me if I was thinking of joining the school, or even how I came to hear of it.
M No, that’s true. Obviously these things are important, but often they seem to come later. I think we both have to feel our way a bit first.
L It occurs to me you are already doing your interpreter bit for me.
M Well, yes! It actually starts the moment I open the door to someone. Just as...
L You were about to say...?
M (Laughs) Well, actually, I’m learning my job as an interpreter, just as you in a sense are learning yours as an inquirer or applicant. There is no set form. Another thing is that there is no actual moment when anyone joins the school. You are in it or you are not.
L Sounds a bit like Kafka!
M Point taken!
L The dialogue itself is the school then. It starts on the doorstep.
M It seems to me you’ve already joined the school. Probably quite a time ago.
L Well, I certainly feel very comfortable here. And I agree that we seem to have passed the preliminary stages, almost without noticing them. It’s almost as if you knew I was coming.
M Yes. It’s not the first time that has happened.
L Can you enlarge on that?
M What I mean is that one gets the sense of smooth running from the moment the door opens. The right interpreter meets the right inquirer and both are aware of the serendipity of the occasion. At other times everything seems to feel wrong from the start. Someone comes to the door and it all feels like the grinding of gears.
L Yes. How do you deal with that?
M Well, you improvise, just as in all the situations. I sometimes say, sorry, there’s no-one in at the moment. Would you like to come back on Monday.
L (Laughs) ...and do they?
M Yes, sometimes. And there will be another interpreter on duty. Quite often they then get somewhere, which may involve an indirect suggestion that they are not ready. Sometimes there is the advice there and then that they read a certain book, or join a yoga class or something. Off putting in one sense, but leading the inquirer towards the next step of introspection. But quite a lot of people don’t come back.
L What then? I mean, how do you look at that?
M I feel an interpreting job has also been done then. As much is done by what one doesn’t say as by what is put into words. You don’t block people’s paths, they block their own.
L So there is a good deal also you are not saying to me.
M You underestimate yourself. I have a favourite saying in connection with that. "Never answer a question someone hasn’t asked you" Everyone goes at their own pace. I feel this is going quite well, don’t you?
L Well, yes. But I’m impatient to get on.
M So am I. But that often means that it’s time for a break. Why don’t you come back this evening if you’re free?
L Er... no, I can’t manage that quite. What a pity When are you on next?
M How about tomorrow?
L Fine! Same time tomorrow afternoon?
M Suits me! See you then. I’ll see you out.
L I’ve really enjoyed this. I’m really most grateful.
M It’s a two-way process, you know. It wouldn’t work otherwise. I’ve enjoyed it too.
L See you tomorrow then. Bye.
L Good afternoon. Are you ready for me?
M Just about. How are you feeling about yesterday?
L Seething with questions, some more relevant than others, no doubt. I’m finding it difficult to sort out where to start.
M We can start anywhere. Come on in. Have you eaten?
L Thank you, yes. But I could do with something to drink.
M Come into the kitchen. Take off your coat. My goodness, you’re really tense, aren’t you? Sit on the stool for a moment. Let me massage your shoulders. Breathe slowly for a bit. There, that’s better.
L My thoughts have been going round and round since yesterday. I’ve been looking for something of this sort for ages, but I didn’t know where to start. Then on the way home yesterday I thought to myself, well, that’s funny, I was really beginning to feel quite keen about being here. But no sooner had I started settling into that feeling than there I was out in the street walking home! At the same time I felt really right about it. I can’t stand all these spiritual movements, all different, and yet somehow the same, and all so full of themselves.
M You feel more confident here?
L Yes I do. I think I want to go on coming. What I really want to know is...
M Here, let’s make drinks first. Are you into herb teas and stuff?
L No, I’d rather have ordinary tea please. Earl Grey?
M Coming up. I’ll have the same. You go in the front room and settle down. Switch on the fire if you need it. I’ll bring the drinks.
*****
M Are you comfortable there again? Warm enough?
L I’m fine thanks. You know, you’re not at all like my picture of a teacher.
M Well, that’s a relief. I don’t feel much like a teacher either. I think we slip into roles as they are needed. Don’t you think our society is obsessed by qualifications and credentials? At the moment I’m using this word ‘interpreter’. It seems to cover where I’ve got to in my role-adoption bit. I feel happy in helping people to sort out understanding about life, or at least a sort of preliminary area of that.
L You have an odd effect on me. This question of roles. Just making your remark about that changed my feeling about coming here. In fact it changed... it changed my role as an inquirer into something else.
M Yes. I felt it too. You are not only in the school already. You are already an interpreter, at least as far as I’m concerned.
L So my role in relation to other members of the school might well be different.
M Certainly it might. Of course, that’s up to them. But I feel it probably already is different.
L I suppose that’s partly a result of how your feeling about me affects them.
M Yes, certainly.
L For me it raises the question of what the school actually is, how its members hang together as a school. Do I get to meet other members of it?... all sorts of questions. For instance, I don’t even know your name.
M Or I yours! Neither of us asked. Incidentally our tea’s getting cold.
*****
M Your last remark had three important questions in it. Four actually. Which shall I answer first?
L What’s your name?
M I got a picture when you asked that of a door opening onto a landscape of multiple forms like rocks. Opening the door caused the forms to tumble about and realign themselves. When they had settled down your question appeared in quite a different light.
L Looking at you over this cup of tea I am seeing you through half closed eyes. I can almost, as it were, see your name as well. Something like Melissa, Miranda?
M Go on.
L I think it’s Melanie.
M I like it.
L Is that your name?
M As far as you are concerned my name is Melanie. It will do nicely.
L Why don’t you tell me your real name?
M I think that’s your first real question in this session. I mean it is something that really needs a bit of interpreting. It began when the forms started tumbling about and realigning themselves.
L Before my question in fact.
M No. Funny that. You confused your question with the answer you almost immediately found for it. Questions about names tend to do that. I think the tumbling forms in my picture were adjustments to the order of events in time. If you ask someone’s name it raises multiple questions of identity, which in ordinary life we gloss over with the disguise which appears on our birth certificate. In the school, that is almost irrelevant, unless we need it for some practical arrangement like a letter or an appointment.
L Or, for that matter, in almost everything we deal with in practical life. But I think I’m beginning to get the point. The school is a sort of jacking up of consciousness onto a level where we can decide what is relevant. Almost, we create our own reality, is that it? Isn’t that a pretty dangerous enterprise?
M Yes, extremely dangerous. People sometimes end up in mental homes doing the sort of things we in the I.T. school are doing.
L You sound fairly serene about it. Incidentally we are going at such a pace I’ve begun to forget a lot of the questions which seemed so urgent overnight. But you’ve just reminded me. What does I.T. stand for?
M That makes four unanswered questions now we’ve sorted out the question of my name. Or have we?
L Yes. I don’t feel any urgent need at the moment to know the name on your birth certificate.
M (Laughs). It’s not particularly private. But we’ve made the point, I think, about levels of reality. Actually it was you who made the point. There’s a lot more to be said on the subject but it will emerge in its own time. Meanwhile... do you want some more tea?
L Yes please.
M I’ll get it, while you put the questions I’ve still to answer into one. I think they are actually all the same question.
*****
L I don’t know how we’d manage without tea. There doesn’t seem to be any better way to create the necessary pauses in conversation.
M The question has come up frequently in the school. We have found other ways, but they seem to be particular to certain groups and situations. The trouble with tea and coffee is one of dependency. It’s all right if they remain fall-back ploys while a relationship is finding its feet, so to speak. Did you want to ask your questions about the school again?
L No, I’m happy to leave you to sort it out. You’re supposed to be the interpreter.
M I’m thinking of resigning and letting you take over.
L I’ll consider it. Meanwhile...
M Yes, meanwhile... your feeling the need for a more circumstantial picture of the school than has emerged from our explorations to date. There’s less to say than perhaps you’d think. We meet in each other’s houses. This is my house. I presume someone who had been here told you of the school.
L Yes, she gave me a leaflet. I’ve got it somewhere.
M There are many such leaflets. Anybody who finds it possible to do a turn as an interpreter makes their address available at specified times. By keeping it informal and mobile in this way the synchronicity has more chance to work. But as we said earlier it is always possible for sand to get in the works, and that is not always a bad thing. People get led on to the contacts they need and sometimes have difficult experiences en route.
L But do these one to one meetings lead on to group sessions?
M In a sense, yes, but more informally than you find in some spiritual and religious movements. Most movements start with some sort of arranged form into which the content finds its way, sometimes in a quite disciplined way. Many people seem to need this, and even insist it is necessary. We provide something different.
L Why call it a school? And isn’t that degree of formlessness somewhat dissipating of energy? You might as well be a group of friends meeting casually in a café or somewhere.
M Sometimes that is what does happen. But you expressed the difficulty yourself in one of your remarks yesterday. Spiritual movements and societies have this tendency to become in-turned and self serving. At the same time some degree of form seems to be necessary. We have allowed the forms to develop in a minimalist way in response to a need we have sensed in people, partly indeed to find answers to these deep questions, but more and more nowadays to share valid experiences of their own, as you are doing.
L Yes, I see. The school comes together out of the renewal of the impulses of its potential members by serendipitous contact. Contact first, then form, in so far as form is required.
M I couldn’t put it better. Moreover the forms can dissolve as easily as they arise, and no loss. New forms continually replace them.
L And I.T.?
M That starts a whole new cycle. Do you want to go on now, or leave it to the next session?
L Leave me with the name for now and I’ll come back later. I’m running late.
M I.T. stands for intraterrestrial.
L Intraterrestrial! Wonderful! Have you a phone? Oh yes, the number’s on the Leaflet. I must run.
M Here’s another leaflet in case. Yes, give me a ring. Forget the duty interpreter ploy We’ve made a good start. Bye then.
L Bye. See you. Sorry I must run. Thanks for the tea. Intraterrestrial! Well I never!
*****
L Good morning Melanie.
M Hello Love. Come in. Don’t stand there in the rain.
L Couldn’t get a taxi. I’ve walked from the station. Run in fact.
M We can dry your things in the kitchen by the Rayburn.
L I’ll just shake the umbrella first. There! I wish I didn’t live so far away.
M Where do you live? I’ll put the kettle on.
L Just off the Chalk Farm Road.
M Oh! So it’s only three stations on the tube. There’s somebody in the school on Haverstock Hill. Quite a number of people are working round there as far as I know.
L You think of it as work, do you?
M It can be jolly hard work at times. People have horrific problems. You and I have sailed into smooth waters, at least for the moment. Here’s your tea. I took it that Earl Grey is your tipple.
L Thanks.
*****
M Do you like that chair again?
L No, actually I thought of myself this time sitting back on the sofa. I was thinking about this room in the night and it felt really like home. Do you mind?
M On the contrary, I’m relieved. You may have gathered that I’m almost as fresh to this interpreter role as you are. A lot of this I.T. business is centred round the question of one’s own self-image. I’m realising that mine has been pretty poor on the whole. I seem to have gone over from asking endless questions to helping other people with a few answers. But I haven’t much idea where they are coming from. You give me confidence.
L Tell me about Intraterrestrials. I’ve already jumped to the idea that the name is a sort of extension of the notion of ETs I keep meeting people who are high on the idea that we are about to be rescued by a benign invasion of space-folk who will beam us up into other dimensions, while the Earth sorts itself out with a polar shift, a new ice age, Atlantis reappearing in the pacific or whatever. I gather you are not interested in that sort of scenario.
M I’m very interested in all that. I’m sure there is some sort of meaning to it apart from escapist fantasy. But I haven’t got very far yet with putting it into perspective.
L Is it a projection of something which is really going on inside people?
M Yes, I’m sure it is partly that, but not simply in terms of classical psychology. On some level I’m sure that these beings exist. But the whole science fiction scenario seems to be based on a very fundamental misunderstanding. The word intraterrestrial appeared for the first time in a conversation between some of us about three years ago. We had... (pause) I’m running a bit ahead of myself. That’s the trouble with the interpreter role. One is so full of ideas, explanations, speculations...
L Interpretations, in fact!
M Indeed, but before you know where you are you’re breaking my rule about answering questions before they’ve arisen in people, It’s always better, I think, to be one step behind people’s process than several steps in front. What I should be doing is asking you what sort of feelings... feelings I think rather than ideas... come up in you when you hear the world intraterrestrial.
L Yes, I’ve been doing this a bit during the night. The word itself has been opening one of your inner doors for me. But instead of tumbling rocks it was something I call a ‘presence’. The word focuses something I’ve always been somewhat aware of, but also insecure about, the notion that we are not alone on this planet. There are other beings than ourselves occupying this space we call Earth. But what seems to happen is, we have an insatiable hunger to tell stories about them, to build mythologies, religions, scientisms, anything to distance ourselves from our intuitive sense of immanent ‘presences’, which is otherwise intolerable, and generally speaking, scary.
M The two words that resonate most with me in all that are ‘scientism’ and ‘scary’. Scientific explanations of things always make me scared. I get a deep feeling that what has caused men to build up what they call science is mainly fear... well, fear and curiosity, but mainly fear.
L We’re women.
M Yes, but these days that’s not supposed to make any difference. You’ll have the feminists after you.
L Calling ‘presences’ Intraterrestrials is a very door-opening thing to do.
M It is, isn’t it?
L Who are they then?
*****
M I’m going to cal you Lucia.
L Why?
M Melanie is darkness, Lucia is...
L Light. I don’t feel much like light.
M You certainly bring a lot of light to me.
*****
L There’s a ‘presence’ here now.
*****
M I’m getting cold. Let’s put the kettle on again.
L I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t we go out for a meal?
M That’s a good idea.
L Have you a special place round here?
M There’s a new one up the hill towards Golders Hill. I haven’t tried it yet.
L Let’s try it now..
*****
L What shall we have? Oh, look. They’ve got s mixed seafood snack thing on a pancake. I’ll try that.
M That should ground some of your sparkle. You light-beings are all alike, can’t wait to grovel in the murk.
L On the basis you’d better start with a champagne cocktail. Sure specific for melancholia.
M I suppose I am a bit heavy. But I’m not actually miserable.
L No, darling, you’re certainly not. You’re actually very serene. I feel very comfortable with you.
*****
M This is a very good salad. What’s your fishy thing like?
L Scrummy. (Pause). Melanie, are you a lesbian?
M I thought you’d ask that at some point. I like women very much. I get on with women. On the whole women seem to trust me and relax with me. But, I haven’t experimented, and I’m not really inclined to. My feeling is that sex closes more doors than it opens. And of course there are times when doors need closing, otherwise spiritual exploration really does weaken your hold on reality. But I’d rather do that with men. I’ve had some good times with men. (Pause). On the whole in my experience spiritual exploration doesn’t usually go very well in a sexual setting. Sex is a world on its own. It doesn’t seem to have much to do with anything outside itself.
L Except having babies perhaps.
M Indeed. But apart from that it is also a wonderful world. What about you?
L I’ve played the field quite a bit. Both sorts. But I’m a bit jaded at the moment. I’m having a celibate sabbatical.
M You’re very pretty. But I don’t fancy you in bed.
L No. I think we’re all right as we are. Shall we have a sweet?
M Just a coffee for me.
L Let me get them.
*****
L So, who was this ‘presence’ back there?
M An Intraterrestrial.
L I’m scared.
M What scares you?
L I don’t know. The unknown, I suppose.
M Do you want to know things?
L Yes. But I want to be in control. I want to be me, to keep the initiative in my life. I’m scared of being taken over.
M Self-protection is a very powerful impulse, and a very valid one. There are real dangers in these unknown realities, and the first reaction to the intuition that this is so is fear.
L I’d rather be safe. Better safe than sorry.
M That sums up the whole reason why humanity remains cut off from reality. Better the devil you know. "Human kind cannot bear very much reality"!, says T.S. Eliot. But reality won’t leave some people alone. After all, you did come to my door. What were you looking for? Was it just curiosity?
L No, you’re right. There was something more. But back there in your room I was sort of paralysed. I wanted to open up to what I knew was going on, but I didn’t know how. I stayed all rigid inside. I sat there watching you, sitting with your eyes shut, breathing. Then I looked out of the window. Buses and people going by, and I thought what a bloody awful world. Then I looked at you, and I knew something else was going on, and I didn’t know what to do. Oh, I don’t know, it’s all... (cries)
M Oh, sweetheart, cheer up. It’s all a great deal simpler than you think. You are also a lot nearer to a breakthrough than you think. Let’s go back to the flat.
L Why don’t you come back to my place? I’m rather lucky. I’ve got this rather posh room in one of those old Victorian houses down in Chalk Farm. There’s some central heating, but there’s a massive open fireplace where you can have a really big fire going, logs and everything. Come and see it. Oh lord, I’m going to cry again. Let’s pay and get out of here.
M (Laughs) You’re a priceless girl. Most of my inquirers so far have been rather solemn and solid. You’re more natural somehow.
L Oh Melanie, I’m so glad I’ve found you. I suppose actually I lead a rather frivolous sort of life, but I haven’t had any proper friends since I left college. I need to know things. I really do. You’ve already started something in me I’ve been looking for, for ages. I’m so grateful.
M Darling, it’s you who are doing it. If I’ve been a way through for you to start something, that’s wonderful. But we’ve scarcely started yet. At the same time...
L What?
M At the same time I have a sense of having crossed a sort of bridge with you. It’s happening for me too. Let’s wait till we get to your place. I’ll try to tell you then.
*****
M God! It’s enormous!
L Yes without the log fire it would be an impossible room to heat, even with the radiators. Look at these enormous windows. No double glazing in those days.
M Masses of cupboard space. Whatever’s that thing?
L I suppose it must originally have been in the kitchen. All those little drawers were for spices. I keep toiletries in them.
M I really envy those book-cases. This must have been the library.
L Perhaps I shall at last start to read something. I’m disgustingly ignorant. Here, let’s get the fire going. You sit down. I’m used to the thing. There’s a kind of knack to these contraptions. Actually this one’s extremely efficient. Once it’s going it’s a real furnace.
M Can I do something? I’ll wash up these things.
L Melanie, sit down. Let me play mum for once. There, the fir’s beginning to respond. We’d better keep our coats on for a bit.
M Lucia, how old are you?
L I feel a bit funny when you call me Lucia here. It seems to belong to a special situation I associate with your house up the hill. I think of it as a sort of... a sort of temple or something. A sanctuary.
M It’s actually more of a forecourt than a sanctuary, though we do have a sanctuary. I think you feel my room’s special because you had a particular experience there, and because a number of other people have been through their ‘stuff’ in that room. Rooms build up a mood in which your ‘presences’ also feel more at home... But that can happen in any room. This room is still pretty neutral, but it already carries something of you in it, superimposed no doubt on the older library atmosphere.
L Such as what?
M Well, somewhat empty, spacious. A bit restless. But with a huge capacity for fulfilment. Needing love. And also capable of giving love. I think it’s the right room for you.
L I’ve only been here a few months. Since my last relationship broke up, in fact.
M Your celibate sabbatical!
L Exactly! (laughs) You asked me how old I am. I shall be thirty-three next birthday, which is tomorrow week.
M Lord, here we go again! (laughs)
L What do you mean?
M I have this extraordinary habit of coming across the important people in my life when they are thirty-three. There’s something very special about thirty-three. It was the year of Jesus’ crucifixion. Something happens to the whole of mankind in its thirty-third year. I look back on that year as the time I discovered my work.
L How old are you now?
M Rising forty. I shall be forty in October.
L Have you been married?
M Yes, twice. I’m still married, but we don’t live together all the time. He’s wonderful. But he has his own life as I do. When we miss each other too much we spend a few months together, and then we sometimes take big steps forward in our understanding of life and of each other. But we also have separate paths of our own to follow.
L Is he part of the I.T school?
M Very much so. Very much so indeed. He was one of those who started it. I owe him an enormous amount. He’s a very wise man.
L Don’t you want to be with him all the time?
M We went through all that a few years back, both of us. It was a very painful time. But this is a good deal better. We both look forward to our times together and make the most of them when they arrive. And we know they always will.
L What did you mean when you said you had crossed a sort of bridge with me?
M All sorts and conditions of people come to the door to ask about I.T. It happens to other people who decide to take on the interpreter role too. The loose structure allows something to work which we can call happenstance. Serendipity. In the East it is more connected with the idea of karma... not in its crude form as fate, predestination... more as a sort of subtle working of events under a kind of higher guidance. A man called Adam Bittleston once wrote a prayer called ‘Against Fear’, which began:- "May the events which seek me come unto me.", and went on to include people and spirits. The point of the prayer was that the working of this subtle kind of causation is implemented by what he called Ground, Love, and Light. Love is actually the substance of it, but Ground and Light are the essential parameters between which love operates. There is a huge power in this Love, and if it is invoked in the right way it can be overwhelming, in fact terrifying. What I am trying to say is that there was nothing wrong or even unusual in your reaction of paralysis and fear when the I.T. appeared in my room. It was largely you yourself who drew the presence towards us. I don’t yet have that particular capacity. But you most certainly do.
L I don’t feel that is so at all. I’m positively staved of love. I faff about all over the place, sleeping with this man or that for a night or two, and sometimes women too. I look for love, but I don’t actually find it, and I don’t really give it either. I’m a mess, and I feel extremely confused.
M Hence the celibate sabbatical, and hence also what is happening to you now.
L But why do I have to be so scared?
M Love is the most powerful thing in the whole of human experience. People think of fear as powerful, of hatred, and war, and bombs and tanks as powerful. So power comes to be associated with fear. You have a very powerful intuitive connection with love and light, but perhaps not yet with ground. What scares you silly is your own power of love. The bridge I felt I had crossed with you is...
L What?
M I’ve been struggling along for about three years in this interpreter role, and most of it has been pretty heavy going. A lot of the people who come to me I have passed on to others. I didn’t seem to have the particular answers they were looking for. But with you, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, something has sparked off as a clear road, not only what I sense for you, but for me as well. The being who came into my room was drawn to you, but it had to do with me as well. In fact it spoke to me in a certain way, because I was not afraid of the situation. Do you want me to go on, or shall we have a break?
L No, I want you to go on. There is something in what you are saying that makes me less afraid. In fact I’m beginning to feel something very special. I feel much more open to what you are saying. Let’s have a bit of quiet again. Here in this pace where I feel at home, and with this lovely fire, I feel relaxed. Do you mind if we are quiet for a while?
M Lucia, I love you very much. I thank you for something which is very precious to me as well (they are in each other’s arms).
*****
M Stop crying, you silly girl. Here, I’ve got some tissues in my bag.
L Who do you think you are, my mum? I want you to make love to me.
M No you don’t. You’re in a muddle. What you have to do is start to realise that you don’t have to open up on all your levels at once. You’re not used to being loved, only to being desired. Can you honestly say any of your lovers have actually loved you, apart from wanting to fuck you?
L It’s the same thing isn’t it?
M You know it isn’t. What do people want to do after you’ve made love?
L (Giggles) Make love again. No, of course you’re right. It’s like an empty space. You go on looking for the right person.
M There isn’t such a thing as the right person in that sense.
L I thought you might be the right person.
M So, bang goes the celibate sabbatical! Lucia, I do actually love you, you know. Get used to the idea that we are actually friends. You don’t need to desire me for that. I like you. I appreciate you. I think you’re lovely and wonderful. You can trust me. But I don’t want to fuck you.
L Oh lord. What am I going to do?
M Once you start letting yourself love people without being afraid you’ll lose them the next minute you’ll be amazed how relaxed you’ll be. You might even find you love a man without caring a damn whether he fucks you or not.
L That’ll be the day.
M Lucia, you found me by coming to my door because you were looking for a place where you could learn things, perhaps learn the secret of living. Were you afraid you were going to lose all that and me with it?
L Well, yes I was. I’ve always lost people before.
M As long as you need me you’re not going to lose me. I have no need whatever to send you away, abandon you, cut you off or anything else, because I’m not attached to you. I just love you.
L I love you too.
M Yes, I think you do. As you said yourself, we’re alright as we are. And if we want it to, it will open a hell of a lot more doors than lovemaking would. I told you I sensed a capacity in you for a particular kind of light-filled love. But it’s been stifled, and quite a bit damaged. It would probably help if you told me about your childhood, but all in good time. We’ve got all our lives (they hug again).
*****
L Tell me again about the being who came.
M You were aware of it weren’t you?
L Yes I was, but I was scared.
M Are you still scared?
L No, I don’t think so.
M Why not?
L Because of us. I feel you know what’s going on, and I trust you to lead us on to the next step. What is the being? Is it here now?
M In a sense they’re always here, whatever here is supposed to mean. But the particular thing that makes you call it a ‘presence’ is something different.
L What do you mean?
M Well it’s something you create yourself. A picture arises out of your expectations, or desire, or fear, or worship, and the appropriate being fills the picture you’ve made.
L So if you’re scared then it’s a scary being that shows itself.
M Well, it can be like that. It’s certainly possible to play about irresponsibly in psychic regions and attract all sorts of nasty entities. But at a deeper level there are much more powerful forces at work. What really drew that being into my room was the fact of you seeking something deeper in your life and a more mysterious thing about who you actually are, and what you have come onto the Earth to do. Also the fact that it was me you came to;’ something to do with your hidden connection with me. And then of course also the fact that life has taught me something about psychic healing, and that I am actually able to help you sort out your sexual muddles. There are depths within depths, and in the end there remains something quite mysterious in encounters like ours. That being has something to do with both you and me, and even if it is wholly benign it is still possible to be scared of it. I told you, it is your own power of love that really frightens you.
L This I.T. school is really something, isn’t it? Do you think that being has to do with this love power you say I have?
M What do you think?
L I think... I think the being is me.
M I think so too.
L I’m beginning to... I feel awfully funny.
M (Stands up) Lucia, hold my hands. Breathe. Go on, breathe deeply in and out. Go on. Deeper That’s it. Stamp up and down.
L What’s happening?
M You were going out of your body. Has that ever happened before?
L I don’t think so. I feel better.
M We need some fresh air. Let’s go for a walk. I’m sorry, Lucia. I let the session go on too long. I didn’t anticipate the effect moving so fast would have on you.
L I’ll put some coal on the fire, and some slack to bank it up a bit. Where shall we go?
M How far is Camden Town? I wanted to look in the Compendium bookshop for a book I’ve seen.
L Come on then. I still feel a bit funny.
M You’re fine. We’ll walk it off. Come on. What a life. Eh?
*****
L I feel quite ordinary again. Coming back on the tube...
M What happened?
L I don’t know quite. It was the faces of the people. There was something really quite horrible about them.
M How do you mean?
L Well, there we all were in the train lurching along the tunnel, and I suddenly realised I had never actually seen the train before, or people, or anything really... and what was so horrible was that, in a way, none of us was actually there.
M What about the faces, the faces of the people?
L Well, that was it. There was this row of faces, apparently all together, but actually we were all by ourselves. There was no connection between anyone and anyone else. Everyone was trapped on their own in a nightmare, an illusion of reality. I nearly panicked again. But I breathed like you said, and concentrated on that little girl’s dolly, and felt how she loved it, and everything sort of came together again. But for a moment I wondered if I could ever bear to be out in the world at all again. I couldn’t wait to be back in the house here.
M Sometimes it seems as if looking for knowledge, looking for a more real existence, is so dangerous that the path is best left alone altogether. Psychologists tell you to pull yourself together, come down to earth, get married, have a baby, take up tennis, anything. Anything is better than trying to get a glimpse of reality. You’ve just been on the edge of a precipice, and you stepped back. You’ve also had a glimpse of your real being, and that nearly yanked you out of your body.
L What am I going to do? I feel I’ve started something, opened a door which I can’t shut again.
M It’s all actually totally with in your control. Panic and hysteria are simply self-indulgence. They make you feel sort of special. Yippee! Goody-goody, I’m psychic. Look at me everyone. You said yourself that sort of thing is dangerous, and it is. Do you know what agoraphobia is?
L Never heard of it.
M Well, you caught a glimpse of that too this morning. It’s a fear of open spaces induced by a suspicion that the whole world may be a ghastly illusion, which of course in one sense it is. But if you indulge in that realisation it can threaten to take you over, as you found out. Do you mind me giving you a sort of elementary psychology lesson; "reality for beginners", so to speak?
L Not at all. It’s what I need.
M You’re sure? I’m always scared of patronising people.
L No, you carry on. I love it.
M Have you heard of Carlos Castaneda?
L I saw a lot of his books this morning. Looked fascinating.
M They are, if you read them at the right time. One of his most important bits of advice is:- "Don’t indulge!". Whatever else you do on the path, don’t indulge. Have you ever taken drugs?
L No. Thought about it.
M I’m not going to act the school-marm and say don’t. Though with your hypersensitive psyche I perhaps should. The important factor in all that is to have a solid base, and I don’t feel at the moment that yours is all that solid, thought it could quickly become so. You need to know who you are and where your identity is, and that however far you venture out from that identity you know how to get back. Most people who experiment with drugs do so wholly unprepared.
L Do you use drugs yourself?
M No.
L Why not?
M You could say that I was caught by reality in time. By the time I met people who were caught in the vortex of addiction I was already far enough into the experiences they had gained through drugs not to need to. Simply by following my bent in the course of natural development I found I had reached the levels they had needed drugs to reach.
L How do you know the experiences you were having were the same as they were getting through drugs, that you were not missing something essential?
M That has to do with something which develops in the course of the emergence of a certain sort of perception. You can call it clairvoyance, though I realise it is not the whole of what people wiser than me identify as such. All I can say is, you learn to rely on your perception of what goes on in people down to a certain depth, while at the same time knowing that you have only gone a certain way down that road. It is the same when you look at a tree. You know perfectly well that it is a tree that you are looking at, while still knowing that there is a lot more to perceiving trees or clouds or butterflies than you have yet attained.
L Yes, I can accept that. That is certainly part of "reality for beginners" isn’t it? I need to think about it more but there’s another thing. How do you think you came to that when other people didn’t?
M Protection, simply.
L What do you mean?
M I met my own being and started to follow it. When you do that you are protected. You are in the middle of doing the same thing. You have been walking towards the experience of your own identity... I suppose all your life... but more particularly since you started for my front door a couple of days ago.
L Following my bent.
M Precisely.
L And am I protected? I feel I am.
M Protection is something you have to ask for. But essentially, yes, you are protected anyway. Asking takes the process further and prevents complacency. More than that, if you do need, for karmic reasons, to follow a dark road for a time, you can do so with more awareness. And you can sometimes avoid unnecessary accidents.
L Why aren’t other people protected? I mean, why do so many people come unstuck, go down slippery slopes into the shit, or just do nothing, get more and more bored, sit for hours and hours glued to the telly, have sex, go out for a drink, have more sex, on and on and on. Why aren’t they protected?
M They are.
L What does that mean?
M Fundamentally there’s nothing wrong with anything anyone does.
L You mean people like torturers, child molesters, what they do is all right?
M Try and form a picture of someone like that, a child torturer, say, sitting in the middle of their situation with their victim. The screaming, the smell of vomit, the pleading for them to stop, the torturer is going on compulsively looking for the next sensation, hypnotised by her own horror. And next to them, invisible, as close to them as we are now to each other, the ‘Presences’, their own higher selves, carrying all this pain, protecting them, surrounding them with love while all this horror is being worked through, resolving lifetime after lifetime of interaction, passion, rage terror, mutual destruction...
L Oh do stop, do stop, Melanie, I can’t bear it. What are you saying? You mean all this horror has to go on happening. Isn’t there any end to it?
M "Where is there an end of it, the soundless wailing?"
L Underneath are the everlasting arms.
M I quote Eliot, you quote the prayer book. I would have expected the other way round! Lucia, it is all self-chosen, the whole thing. Perpetrators, victims, they are all one. They play both roles. We are all one. We’ve all done these things at some time or other, and had them done to us. We are one another.
L Why? Why? Why?
M For some mysterious reason, the only way to Love is through Pain. At some stage in our suffering of the deepest dullness of spirit only inflicting pain on others suffices to arouse our compassionate feeling. But woe betide us if we discover this truth in coldness of heart and use it deliberately to restore feeling in our own dead hearts. This only drives us deeper into the dark. Masochistic submission to others’ cruelty in self-punishment has the same effect. Only karma itself can be trusted to resolve the balance in truth and justice.
L So we don’t have to go on struggling through the dark for ever?
M No, we don’t. Ultimately we come out of the dark into awareness. We miss countless opportunities to do that, but finally the Light dawns, and we take one of them. That is what is happening to us now. You meet someone who starts you off on a process of waking to reality. But not until that is what you have started looking for. Often it is a mutual process, as it is for us now.
L Two interpreters meeting head on. You’re the senior interpreter. You’ve gone further than I have.
M I’m not sure that’s true. In some ways, perhaps. Good lord, whatever time is it? I must fly. We always seem to overshoot, sweetheart... Thank you! I[’m so grateful we’ve met (hugs).
L You’re opening a new world to me. It’s wonderful. Don’t let me go, for God’s sake!
M The whole thing is absolutely mutual. We are only at the beginning of a dawning, a new day, a world of light. It’s no good trying to put it into words. I’m off. You ring me this time. I’ll be home about six. Ring me! Bye!
*****
L This was a good idea, meeting up here.
M My father used to say you could see St Paul’s Cathedral on a clear day. We sometimes used to come up here with our nanny as children. We used to fly a kite.
L Did you have brothers and sisters?
M I had a younger sister. We were very close.
L Do you still see here?
M She died. She had polio.
L Was that a long time ago?
M Yes. We were still children. I was nine. (Pause). I suppose you could say I still look for her. For me this is what relationship with other women is about. I am aware of the search, this possibility, whenever I get close to a woman. The notion of a lesbian relationship confuses the issue for me, diverts the energy into a different channel, you could say.
L At first I was hurt when you pushed me back from that. But I felt closer to you afterwards. It was part of the door... one of the doors you were opening for me.
M I think sex is wonderful. At the same time I always have the feeling that it darkens the energy. Not hat there is anything wrong with that. In fact there can be a blazing radiance at the heart of an orgasm. But it is light in an enclosed space.
L What do you mean when you say you see me as a light being?
M Precisely that. Something very powerful. But I also sense you fear of this power.
L Are you saying I escape from this power by dissipating it in sex?
M I think you do, yes. But I am not saying sex is wrong. It is a necessary grounding of the light in darkness. Otherwise we would be shooting off into space all the time.
L How do I stop doing that? Doing what I do?
M You won’t do so until you are aware of the issue. Intuitively you had withdrawn into celibacy, but it threatened to come unstuck when you felt close to me. Then when I nudged things back into balance, and we had the experience of your true self approaching us, you threatened to shoot out of yourself altogether. What is this, do you think? What is actually going on?
L I think I’m unstable. I don’t know who I am. I’m frightened of myself.
M And you’re nearly thirty-three.
L You mean I’m immature? I ought to have steadied up sooner?
M No. You’re no more immature than most people in our day and age. But thirty-three is becoming more and more a special time for people in search of themselves, in search of reality.
L Go on.
M What you and I are doing easily becomes isolated from the world. Out here on Parliament Hill you can get a feeling of the whole of London spread round you... All the millions of lives going on in all the cramped little houses.
L Cramped little lives too mostly.
M I think a lot of Hampstead people come up here from time to time to get a glimpse of themselves. But there are fewer and fewer voices in our society giving them any guidance in this.
L So what happens when you are thirty-three?
M Doors start opening for people, as they are doing for you. How do you feel about what we have been doing in the last few days? Where do you feel you are standing? Who are you, Lucia?
L I’m opening and shutting my eyes. First I see Parliament Hill and the whole of London. Then I see me and my feelings and a world of inner doors opening. I’m on a sort of tight-rope, with darkness on one side and light on the other. I’m scared of falling.
M Visualise your ‘presence’, your being. Breathe, Lucia breathe in and out while you open and shut your eyes. You won’t fall.
L Why won’t I fall?
M Because you are beginning to see that there is something else besides batting from one side to the other between darkness and light. There is a third reality ahead of you as you edge your way step by step along the tight-rope towards it.
L It is my own being.
M Who is your own being?
L My light says it is your being as well.
M My darkness says the same.
L We are one another.
*****
L (Shivers) It’s getting a bit cold up here. Shall we go?
M Yes. Let’s go back to your place. I’m getting hungry.
L Why don’t we stop at that café in Belsize Park on the way, and have a bit of lunch?
M The trouble with Parliament Hill is it’s always so windy. Hence the kites.
*****
M Do you want to go back to your place straight away, or shall we stop and have another coffee? I like this place. I’ve not been here before.
L Let’s stay on a bit then.
M There’s something I want to suggest, but I’m not quite sure of the timing. Up the hill this morning I felt we’d come to a sort of threshold, as if we needed something new to happen.
L So did I, but I didn’t want to lose what we’d got already. I didn’t want to lose you.
M You won’t, and I won’t either. But we won’t do that by hanging on to each other. I’ve found my sister, darling, but we need to let go a bit.
L I know what! It’s something I’ve been wanting to ask for days? Aren’t there any other people in this damned I.T. school, or is it only you and me? Isn’t it time I met the boss?
M (Laughs) We don’t have a boss. But that’s what I’ve been waiting for you ask. As a matter of fact I rang him up this morning. I told him about you a few days ago. This morning he said he’d like to meet you.
L You’ve been holding out on me. Who is this guy? It’s not your fella is it?
M No, but they’re very close friends. They and one other started this affair together.
L So you weren’t in at the beginning of it?
M No. But they had only been meeting in this sort of way for a couple of years when I came across them. As a matter of fact I met this one first at a conference, and he introduced me to my husband. All very romantic!
L What’s his name?
M I think I’ll let you hear his name from him, see if you recognise it. It’s a funny thing about names in the school. They can change sometimes. It keeps things mobile.
L You mean he may not go for our Lucia-Melanie thing?
M We may not go for it either when we’re with him. We’ll see.
L Shall we go to my place?
M Why not? I’m in no particular hurry today for once.
L I really don’t think we need the fire, do we?
M Well, I’m warm enough. What’s happening to the seasons these days? One day it feels like winter still, as it usually does in February, and the next you hardly know if it’s Autumn or Spring.
L You know, Em, I’ve never related before to anyone in such a daffy way as this. What is it stops us asking each other all the usual questions people ask each other when they meet? In the ordinary sense we know damn all about each other, yet in another way we’ve got closer to each other in the last few days than... how long is it now?
M Just over a week. Last Friday you came to Golders Green.
L Gosh, is it really only a week? It seems like months.
M A lot’s happened. (Pause). How fast things develop between people affects our sense of time. When you meet ordinarily an enormous amount takes place unconsciously. The way the school is set up creates a special sort of expectation. It makes us all act a bit differently from the way we would usually behave.
L Yes, it makes you realise how conventional we are most of the time. Conventions make you oblivious of what’s going on. You don’t even know they are conventions.
M More and more I realise that, when it works, this so-called interpreter role can’t actually survive the process. Unless the dialogue quickly becomes mutual a false situation develops. This started to happen with us almost the moment we met.
L You mean the school is also a convention?
M It quickly becomes a convention unless it constantly changes, develops, adapts to what it stimulates as people meet in its frame of reference.
L Do you actually control this?
M Well, I certainly feel it is controlled. No, not exactly controlled, but guided.
L ‘Presences’?
M Yes, I think so. How do you feel it? What are the presences really doing in you?
L I have this feeling of something intensely aware and expectant and loving, watching with absorbed attention and concern every minutest change and movement in our awareness. It is as if something deeply within me is at the same time not me, something profoundly concerned about my freedom from interference, longing for me to free myself from what drives me compulsively down certain paths.
M Isn’t this just you yourself trying to untangle yourself from involvement?
L It certainly is also this, but not more so than my compulsion to get involved, especially sexually involved. I know exactly what you mean about a tightrope. But I feel more as if I am being pulled apart by two opposite forces which are at war with each other in me, one tangling while the other untangles.
M I keep coming back to this third thing. Don’t you feel sometimes as if this whole struggle in us is like a monstrous red herring? Something dark and malicious in us uses the conflict to divert our attention from the real issues in life? And there in the background stands this benign intelligence waiting expectantly for us to grasp what is happening.
L There you are then! Involvement, non-involvement involvement non-involvement, and on and on and on. Let’s tell them both to go to hell! Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Tweedledum and Tweedledee. (She dances round the furniture. Melanie picks up a cushion and starts banging at her. Bedlam. They end up shrieking and giggling on the floor).
M (Sits up) It’s a good thing there’s plenty of room in this great barn of yours or we’d’ve brought down all your precious knick-knacks.
L When are we going to see this gorgeous man?
M He’s not particularly gorgeous. He’s a bit tubby and wears glasses.
L I adore fat men. Let’s go and see him now.
M We can’t just turn up at his office. Unlike you he works.
L How do you know I don’t work? You don’t know anything about me.
M O.K. What do you do when you’re not examining your sub-conscious and pestering the life out of me?
L (Hits her with the cushion again) I like that! It’s your bloody I.T. school.
M I rather doubt that. I told you I was thinking of retiring. Why don’t you set up your own branch here? This would be a lovely room for people to come to.
L I might just do that. Em. Let’s be serious a moment. I want to...
M I’m always serious. You’re the frivolous one.
L I know, I know. But I do want to ask you something special.
M O.K, O.K. little sister (hugs her). What do you want to know this time?
L Stop playing the reluctant interpreter and LISTEN TO ME!!!!!!
M I’m listening, honestly. (They look seriously at each other).
L I was thinking of making this room over as an artist’s studio. I’ve been doing a course at art college for the last six months, doing modelling and sculpture. I sit for people, but I also work myself. The only thing is, the light’s not particularly good in here, otherwise I’d have brought some of the pieces I’ve been working on down here already. But since I met you I’ve been wondering whether this wouldn’t be a very good room for meetings. We’d need more comfortable chairs and so on, but what do you think?
M There’s something I’ve been thinking about for some time. I was thinking about it before you turned up, but it seems to be coming into focus now you’re on the scene. The school is changing. Up till now it’s been Richard and Joe and me, and one other, a woman called Fiona who I don’t know very well...
L Hang on... Richard’s your husband, is that it? And Joe’s the one you want me to meet. Bang goes your experiment with his name!
M Yes, never mind. Now Fiona is an old friend of Joe’s. I think they may have been in a relationship. When I met Joe at this conference she was there too and I had a brief talk with her. She’s a quiet, shy person. Joe is too, but quite voluble when he gets going. In the last few months she’s worked in the school situation very much on her own. But something Joe said the other day made me feel she wanted the four of us to meet together and discuss something.
L And is that everybody who’s involved?
M No. There’s a number of fringe people who occasionally get called in to talk to inquirers we’ve been less sure of at first meeting. It’s a sort of filter system. We touched on it the first time we met.
L So how many people are involved altogether?
M Well, that’s just it. It’s a fluid situation. I don’t even know actually how many it’s touched. We don’t want to define it and turn it into a sort of movement. I’m as tired of movements and societies as you are. They always become separate and in-turned. People are people. The structures which form need to be more subtle and fluid, with much more room for improvisation. At the same time there is a feeling in the air that a kind of core group might want to form in an ad hoc way. Not a foundation or society, simply a forum to enquire together what’s happening.
L Yes, I feel it needs to be a strictly functional thing. The next step in a process.
M That’s it. And I wonder whether you and this lovely room aren’t part of the answer.
L I find this very exciting. I can’t help wondering whether these I.T. beings aren’t nudging it along somewhere. But one step at a time. When can we see Joe?
M Why don’t you invite him here?
L Do you think he’d come?
M I’m quite sure he would. I painted a glowing picture of you.
L What are you doing, matchmaking? I’m all of a flutter.
M I don’t know about that. But I have a feeling you and he will get on.
L What shall I do, give him a ring?
M Yes, why not? I’ve got his number here.
L I’ll tell him you and I are planning to meet again here and would he like to come along.
M Sounds fine.
L What about Richard?
M All in good time. But I feel it won’t be long before all five of us find ourselves sitting round this gorgeous fireplace.
L I can’t wait. Look, Em, I’m sorry to push you out, but I promised a couple of chaps I’d meet them at the studio to sort out something about a new kiln they’re installing. I’ll ring Joe tonight and arrange something. Could you also ring him and see if what we arrange suits you? If not, change it and I’ll fit in.
M O.K. I’ll ring him in the morning. I think this is quite exciting.
L It is! It’s wonderful. I feel as if we’re on the edge of something rather overwhelming.
M You know why? It’s because anything like this attracts the attention of entities in other dimensions. It is their approaching involvement that gives us this feeling of impending events. There will be many more consciousnesses than us three involved when Joe comes.
L I.T’s?
M Precisely. Intraterrestial presences with plans and ideas of their own, inseparable from the searching’s and aspirations of people like us. Ask Joe about them. He is quite inspiring on the subject.
L Goodbye, my friend. Thank you for coming. Thank you for everything. Thank you for being you!
M Bye, sweetheart. See you!
*****
M Here he is. This is Lucia, Joe.
L Come on in. You’re not at all like our voice on the phone!
J What do I sound like, then?
L Tall, dark and handsome.
J Well I am tall dark and handsome.
M No your not, Joe. You’re tubby and bald.
J I’m not bald. Well, a bit thin on top perhaps.
L Come in the warm. I’ve got the fire going for you.
M Oh, you’ve got some new chairs! Oh Lucia, doesn’t that make a difference? Now it really feels like a place where there could be gatherings. Where did you get them?
L The studio had a shift round when some new students came, and these were surplus to requirements.
M So the students have to stand.
L Well, for the time being we can’t have a common-room, we need it for studio space. I’ve actually borrowed these, but we’ll see. Sit down Joe.
J Melanie told me you had a big room, but I didn’t realise how big. It’s a nice shape too. All sorts of open-plan possibilities.
L Yes, I’m still trying out different arrangements.
J May I sit here, with you two on the other side?
L Yes that’s fine. I’ve sort of adopted this place with my own old armchair facing the window. (Settling into chairs) Joe, did I hear you call her Melanie?
J Well she is Melanie. That’s her name. What do you mean?
L Melanie! What have you been playing at?
M Lucia! It’s perfectly all right, honestly!
L I feel awful.
J What’s going on?
M Listen Lucia. Think back. You were looking at me over that teacup, actually sussing out my name psychically. You’re a hell of a lot more psychic than you think. But you’re not very stable yet in some ways. I saw what was going on. That’s all. When you arrived correctly at my name I didn’t want to get directly into the business of psychism and all that. It was too soon. I didn’t deny my name was Melanie, but I let you think you were choosing a name for me, which you were. I told you names were a sensitive area. They can throw time into confusion, give power away, all sorts. Names are quite tricky. Have you read Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula le Guin?
L Yes I have. Marvellous book. If you know someone’s true name you have magical power over them. Be careful who you tell your true name to.
M That’s it. But she was talking about a time when things worked more loosely in a magical way. In a psychic sense we are both more conscious and less powerful now. Names are still important, and we can change them to suit particular circumstances.
L I still think you misled me. You talked about the name on your birth certificate being no particular secret, but you still didn’t let on. I think you were being tricky.
M Lucia, do you know me?
L I thought I did.
M Who am I then?
L Well now I know the name on your birth certificate, I seem to have psyched out, or guessed, your proper name.
M Who am I then?
L Yes, I see what you’re getting at. I actually know you better than any of this.
M You’re actually nearer to knowing me than the name Melanie. I few more steps and you might find yourself knowing who I really am, which I don’t even know myself.
L What are you saying? No, don’t answer that. O.K., I know what you’re saying. I’m psychic enough to suss out that you are Melanie, but...
M But that sort of psychism is neither here nor there. It appears to be very wonderful, leading towards Reality with a big R, but actually it gets no nearer to who people really are than the birth certificate does. What I’m really saying is this. The I.T. school is not, it seems to me a place where we stop at the level of psychic perception, and I didn’t want us to get involved at that level, at least not so soon. What do you think Joe?
J You both seem to have got a considerable way in a remarkably short time. It could have been a tricky situation. I could perhaps say that you’re not quite experienced enough, Mel, to avoid all the pitfalls. But I can see that there is quite a beautiful long-term thing going on between the two of you. You’ve obviously known each other for a very long time...
L Other lives, you mean?
J Exactly, and I don’t see how you could have avoided falling headlong in a certain way into each other’s processes. I can see what Melanie means when she sees you as a bit unstable. There is this out-of-the-body thing, and perhaps, (am I right?) you can get a bit hysterical at times, indulging in your own feelings, and so on...
L Yes, I suppose I’m a bit of a mess all round.
J Well you don’t seem to have had much help. You may wobble a bit from time to time, but it seems to me your actual path is doing pretty well. You’ve found your way to us. You’ve homed straight in on someone you’ve been involved with before. And she’s seen clearly beyond the muddle to something of your deeper nature as a light-being. I think it’s wonderful. I suppose, Mel, you feel you wobbled a bit, and your own insecurity made Lucia lose confidence for a moment just now. But as I say, you’re not very experienced yet, and this situation between you is a wonderfully protected path for you both. What about you Lucia? Do you like the name Lucia?
L Yes, I really do. I think I’ll adopt it.
J Do you want to tell us your so-called real name?
L Step forward birth certificate! I was christened Susan Margaret Maconochie. I’m usually called Sue. There are so many Sues about nowadays I feel like a sort of clone.
J So, exit Sue, enter Lucia. Is that it?
L Seems so. And what about you Joe? Have you always been Joe?
J Well I don’t seem to have been Joe in any other lives but this one! But it’s a nice neutral sort of name for most purposes.
L So are you aware of other lives, then?
J Have you talked about reincarnation?
M No, we haven’t actually. We’ve been to busy sorting our present selves out.
J Is that what you want to hear about, Lucia? Reincarnation?
L Well I certainly do sometime. But it’s not what I’m immediately thinking about. It’s funny, Em, but every time I bring up the subject of the name Intraterrestrials we seem to have got hived off onto something else. I’ve been thinking that that’s what I most want to hear Joe expand on.
M Do you know what I think has been happening? All the time your mind has been set on the question of names we have actually been faced with the direct experience of your own higher being, felt as a ‘presence’, and dealing with the effect this has had on us both. It is as if the world of the gods, or guardians, or however we want to think of them has already been answering your question by giving you a direct experience of it, instead of letting me attempt a sort of theoretical answer.
L Content first, form later, as it were. We said that about something else, didn’t we?
M Yes, we were talking about the school, and our sort of minimalist, mobile approach to the structure of it.
L Joe, how do you see this experience Em and I have been having of a ‘presence’, something she sees as a light being which is the real me? How do you see this in relation to the term intraterrestial?
M Give us one of your mini-lectures, Joe. He’s awfully good at this, goes on for hours.
J I see. You want me to put a sort of conceptual cloak round what you’ve been going through, do you.
L Something like that. How did you come to the term intraterrestrial? Well, I mean, it’s obvious you were drawing a parallel with all the stuff about ETs, extraterrestrials, which so many people nowadays go on about. I nearly said guff instead of stuff! But I suppose it’s not all guff, is it?
J Not at all. The trouble is, most people haven’t much of a context for it all., so it gets into the realm of science-fiction and speculation. What I really see as happening is that a lot of people are having a whole plethora of new experiences for which the world they were born into gives them no context. Broadly speaking, the public world, which really nowadays means the world of the media, is rapidly losing touch with the whole of what, for centuries, gave ordinary experiences a background of meaning.
L You mean what came in through education, religion and so on?
J Yes. In the last couple of centuries there’s been a growing culture of scientism; not so much science itself regarded as the spearhead of exact knowledge, but the belief system which has grown up round that among vast masses of untrained people. You see, only a relatively short time ago most people in ordinary life lived in a kind of cultural dream which went back centuries and centuries into the mists of time. There may have been bitter struggles within the religious culture as to where the true authority lay, but the idea of authority itself was not questioned. What it seems to me has happened is that, when more and more people began to be affected by the gradual take over by science of the whole cultural world, they didn’t at the same time, these ordinary people, lose their need for a cultural authority. They needed someone, in other words, who would tell them what to think and believe.
However, science itself was not like that. Science itself came out of a huge revolution in consciousness. More and more people were waking up to the idea that humanity itself could decide what reality was about, and to hell with classical and religious authority. But this waking is, of its own nature, an individual thing. It depends on individuals making their own way on a path of scientific investigation and knowledge. What makes science a corporate matter, and turns science from a path of individual knowledge into a system of beliefs, a sort of science oriented religion, is not science itself, but people’s unregenerate need for outside authority, someone to tell them what to think and believe.
So, we get scientism instead of science, an authority diluted and spread by the media, and built up in an education system, where teachers are mostly passing on stuff they have read in books rather than seriously questioning where their vested authority comes from, and passing the same scepticism on to their pupils.
M The poor little brats behind the desks, Eh? Well there simply isn’t time is there, with thirty or forty wild television soaked kids milling about, and the bloody national curriculum on top of it all. We’re a long way from the quiet Groves of Academe, knowledge contemplated in tranquillity. Fat hope of that these days.
L This started by being a way of getting into my question about Intraterrestrials. I can see how what you have been saying prepares the ground for that. I feel what you are leading up to is the connection between three facts. One, people are having new experiences, becoming more psychic. Two, this is taking place in a media dominated world.
J Go on.
L Three, the media themselves take for granted a belief system which thinks of itself as scientific, but is actually quite confused about the nature of the scientific process, and still defers to it as an authority, much as it did to religion before we began to ask awkward questions.
M So, science is in danger of replacing religion, or even actually becoming a religion.
L So we push our new experiences, which are really inner experiences out into a realm where we can try and cope with them with scientific, or rather with scientistic beliefs. And that leads to the ‘guffy’ aspects of all this extraterrestrial stuff.
J Broadly speaking, yes. This, you might say, was the sort of conversation Richard and I were having in which the name Intraterrestrial first came up. But years before that Fiona and I had talked about these things, about ‘spiritual beings’ as we called them, speculating whether there were other levels of existence behind the apparent sense-world, whether we humans were the only conscious denizens of the Earth, and so on. Fiona was an anthroposophist, if you know what that is, a follower of the system founded by Rudolf Steiner, who talked about "Spiritual Science", exact scientific observation of transcendent realities.
L Rudolf Steiner... aren’t there Rudolf Steiner Schools, dealing with difficult children and all that?
J That’s the chap, yes. Fiona had once taught for a while in one of them. She is still quite involved.
L Do you know about this anthro... whatever it is, Em?
M Anthroposophy. Yes I do. I’ve read a few of Steiner’s books. I feel it’s very important. There’s a whole movement , a couple of thousand or more people in this country, who belong to a society based on Steiner’s teachings. I haven’t joined it. I’m not sure how far in its present form it can carry the sort of developments among people we’ve been talking about. You’re a member, aren’t you Joe?
J Yes, indeed. I joined the society when I was quite young. But I’ve had similar problems with it to Mel’s. You must talk to Fiona. She’s the one with the most experience of anthroposophists.
L Joe, are you actually aware of supersensible beings, ‘presences’ as I call them, yourself? How do you see what we are talking about here?
J People come into this sort of realm from so many different directions; almost you could say from as many directions as there are people. As a boy I suppose I thought of myself as one of the religious ones. I went to a religion-oriented school, and all that. Apart from the chapel services there was a school prayer union S.P.U., which made a good handle for the heathen to use against us. SPEW! SPEW! They used to shriek at us. Most of the staff kept fairly aloof from this, though a couple of these were felt to be sympathetic, and even talked to us about the Bible. And there were other currents among the staff. The head was an orthodox anglican clergyman, and even brought in a distinctly high anglican chaplain. But a definite evangelical and fundamentalist underground prevailed.
So there was a sort of cultural divide in the school. And I was on the scientific side when I got into the sixth form, so I was split down the middle there too. Truth to tell I was never really comfortable, even as a junior boy, in the evangelical atmosphere of the S.P.U meetings,. There was something going on underneath which has less to do with Jesus than with a barely concealed, but unacknowledged sexual interest some older boys had in the younger ones.
This was by no means entirely unhealthy. In fact it kept most of the relationships on an emotional rather than an openly sexual level. But generally speaking, boys’ public schools in those days were a maelstrom of undealt with emotional and cultural currents. People said school was meant to be a microcosm of the world outside. But it was an all male society and hopelessly out of balance.
M Why are you telling us all this?
J Looking for an answer to Lucia’s question, I’m trying to get back to my own feelings as a boy. There I was in a scientific education with strong intuitions that there was something more to life, and all round me were people trying to pull me into ‘religion’, a religion which at some level I felt as squeamish about as did all the heathen monsters who yelled ‘spew’ at us. I ended up knowing that religion as presented was not the answer, at least not for me. I needed to know the truth about reality. I was being taught in the classroom a darwinistic biology which felt cold and arid, and out of school a weak piousness which made me slightly sick and ashamed. There was no adult at first I really trusted. I took refuge in the musical life in the school. I had a fine treble voice, and I sang my heart out.
And then there was a kind of breakthrough on the religious side. One of the staff became a member of what was then called the ‘Oxford Group’, later known as ‘Moral Rearmament’. Twenty or thirty boys, mainly the older ones, were drawn in. Things began to happen on the edge of the psychic, you might say. There was a slightly magical atmosphere about getting up in the cold early mornings, meeting in a quiet room unknown to the rest of the school, getting ‘guidance’, as they called it, and writing it all down in a special notebook. Commonplace personal stuff as it mostly was, yet it had a mystical aura, a direct hotline to God! When one morning five or six people all had the same guidance about a certain boy, that he should be approached and invited to join us, and then there was a knock at the door, and that very boy walked in, we felt the age of miracles had returned. It was in a way a turning point for me. I felt I had a sort of handle against materialism and physical science which no ordinary religiousness could provide.
Naturally all this, as I learned later, scared the pants off the school council, and I don’t think it lasted long after I left. Nor was it enough to stop me going over the edge as a young adult into emotional disaster, ‘nervous breakdowns’, as they called them then. Life had led me into a path of education which I increasingly knew was nothing to do with me, and into a career in medicine which I felt I had no real calling for. And I didn’t know how to ask for health. Well, that’s funny! I meant to say help not health! But it was certainly health I needed. I needed a source of spiritual health, and instead I got ‘nervous breakdowns’ months long periods of emotional agony, feeling as if my body was on fire, wanting to do nothing but sleep and masturbate, and if possible, die. I went and taught at a prep-school for a term, but this was only going back on my tracks, and I did try for a bit to get through my medical exams. Finally I somehow mustered the courage to leave medical school and throw in my lot with artistic and pacifist young people in London. I had done some amateur acting, and within a few months I found myself with a job in the theatre. For the first time in my life I felt free to be myself.
L Was this Oxford Group experience a reality, do you think? Was it your real path? What actually happened there?
J I think if it had been I would have gone on with it. But in a way, you know, those people, although they thought of themselves as part of the Christian church, were actually struggling out of the evangelical world into something much nearer to a meditative path of self-development. In that sense it was very much my path. For the first time I sensed a connection between the inner and the outer life.
I don’t know who we were praying to, or where our guidance was coming from, but whatever it was it seemed it could actually make something visibly happen in the outer world. In a vague sort of way I suppose this was a first step towards an awareness of ‘presences’ in your sense. And it was certainly a preparation for my response when I met anthroposophy for the first time.
M You know, Lucia, I’ve never heard all this stuff from Joe before. It’s really quite an eye opener for me. I’ve always thought of you, Joe, as very self-assured and authoritative. I’d no idea of you as having such a messed-up youth.
J I sometimes feel as if on a psychological level I nearly didn’t make it, Mel. There were certainly others round me, I can remember one or two, with similar experiences, who ended up in mental hospitals. Once you got into the hands of the medical profession and had one or two courses of suppressive drugs there was much less hope of coming through into a balanced life.
M You were very lucky. Thank god you gave up medicine.
J There was a lot more to in than luck. More and more I realise how very protected I have been. It was as though a guiding power knew that it was safe to plunge me fairly deep into the mire, and I would come out all right. There must have been certain things I could only learn in a condition of weakness and insecurity. I was very, very suggestible. I took everything on board. I had no defences. And it must be that for me there was no other way to become gradually aware of other dimensions behind the apparent ones.
L We are in a very shitty world, aren’t we? What you went through is no different really from what the whole world is going through. It makes me ask whether the whole of humanity isn’t being plunged into disaster, going right to the edge of dissolution, because that is the only way for it to evolve into a new stage of awareness and development. Does this mean, as Melanie thinks, that the whole of mankind is just as protected as you were.
J I think this is the implication, however unlikely it may appear.
M But most people seem to be quite unconscious of it.
J Well, there we go. That was why we got this idea of the Intraterrestrial School. We wanted, in a very basic way, to stimulate a sort of mobility among people who were looking for reality. We felt the time for formal spiritual movements was going by. Even such fundamental breakthroughs into spiritual science as anthroposophy were not addressing the needs of ordinary people, especially young people, who were looking for a more real existence. We needed to explore how people were actually meeting each other in their search for reality.
M Like giving a sort of shot-in-the-arm to coincidence, chance meetings.
L That’s it! Have you read that extraordinary book, The Celestine Prophecy?
M Yes. Very much to the point. He talks about a series of insights into the way things happen, how people meet, how we experience the meaningfulness in a series of events.
J In one way the I.T. school is becoming an experimental laboratory for just that.
M What are you thinking about, Lucy-Lu?
L I was thinking that in my own way I haven’t exactly lived on a been of roses either.
M I could say the same.
L Joe, would you say the kind of people who knock on your door are all misfits of one sort or another?
J That, certainly, but only a proportion of people who go through the mire go on looking for something different. The rest adjust to the status quo. Life’s like that, people say. You just have to get on with it. All you people who look for deeper meanings all the time are simply fooling yourselves. Life’s what’s under your nose. There isn’t anything else.
M And then there’s politics. A lot of people put all their energies into trying to improve things, things as they are.
L That’s to say, improve things for us, Tories, or improve things for everybody, Labour.
M Or find a middle way and satisfy nobody, Lib-Dems.
J Don’t let’s argue about that one, we’ll be here all night. There’s also sport. How many people who dig down into reality go in for sport, do you think? Not necessarily playing games, but identifying with those who do?
L Not a lot, I would have thought.
M And pop-music. Hoe does the music scene relate to the search for reality?
L I think it has a lot to do with it. A lot of it expresses the longing. I think a lot of the pop-scene keeps the longing alive, the longing for something different.
J Apart from specialist interests, that about covers it for most people.
M Nobody’s mentioned work or making money.
J I think we’re talking about two main streams of public preoccupations, depending on whether people still think it’s worth while taking an interest in something, making an effort, or whether basically they’ve given up and are just passing the time, or getting into mischief.
L I’d like to be a bit clearer about what our motives are in this I.T. business (the other two laugh). No, I’m serious.
J You really seem to be getting stuck in, don’t you? ‘Our’ motives, eh?
L Melanie says she’s thinking of retiring and letting me take over.
M No, I think I’ll stick around and see what sort of a mess you make of it.
J What would your motives be, Lucia?
L I’m beginning to be very, very interested in what you are doing. There’s a sort of ‘meaning of life’ underground, isn’t there? There’s a growing number of people milling around in a spiritual limbo, smoking pot, going to gigs or playing in them, going to lectures and workshops... circle dancing...
M Joining dems and marches, taking to the road, tangling with the police, and protesting, protesting, PROTESTING!!!
J ...and it’s all a huge fertile ground for the kind of people we’re looking for and who are looking for us, or for something like us. What I feel is that there is a great danger of polarisation, in people getting stuck in a particular version of a New Age, or a New Time, or whatever it is, and missing the sheer totality, the sheer apocalyptic totality of the revolution humanity is going through. We always want to domesticate everything. Tame it, make it ordinary. You know, there is a frightening tendency for the new age to end up just as bloody boring as the crud dullness of the world of television and the gutter press. Bloody old boring Glastonbury, for instance, all taking in each other’s spiritual washing, dissatisfied with the big spiritual movements of seventy or eighty hears ago, but ending up with the same old navel gazing.
L Are you saying we ought to spend time putting a bomb under places like Glastonbury?
M I think you’re a bit hard on Glastonbury, Joe. I know the dangers you’re talking about. But not everybody who goes to Glastonbury gets stuck in the spiritual mud there. There is still the place itself, and the incredible reasons which draw people there in the first place. I think you appreciate the power and beauty and vision of a place like that better from a distance. If you stay too long in places like that you suck them dry...
J ...not only that, you tend to stagnate yourself. I still say that many people who relate to Glastonbury and to a growing number of other places like Totnes, Stroud, Findhorn, Culbone, and places where the Steiner movement has established schools, like Forest Row, Brookthorpe, Kings Langley, and smaller centres everywhere, do tend to get stuck in patterns that don’t move. And it is often in those places that you find a growing number, especially of younger people who are increasingly restless about the way the spiritual revolution is going.
L What’s the answer?
J Mobility has a lot to do with it. Dissemination of initiative. Developing the ability to stimulate the curiosity, hope, latent insights of quite ordinary people. Cultivating loving affection for more or less everybody and everything. Looking for the soft underbelly of people everywhere who have petrified and hardened off virtually the whole of themselves, and sticking the knife in! Not the cruel knife of exploitation, indulgence and abuse, but the knife of compassion, insight, fellow-feeling. People are exceedingly scared of being loved and understood, in case they are exploited, indulged and abused. One needs to be very sensitive, but at the same time realise that at the end of the day love is inexorable. It demands everything.
*****
M We still haven’t said much to Lucia about intraterrestrials. She does really want to know what we mean.
J Do you Lucia? Melanie’s told me about the episode with one of your ‘presences’.. You felt you were meeting your own higher being, didn’t you?
L And then I nearly flipped.
J And at the same time opened new doors for Melanie herself, who is a lot better at knowing what is going on in people round her than in waking to her own processes, aren’t you Mel, love? (arm round her)
L Em, I love you.
M I love you too, sweetheart. But I don’t quite know how to answer your questions. Perhaps you haven’t expressed them clearly enough yet. Perhaps you haven’t even formulated them to yourself. Questions are a lot more important than answers. Quite often they provide their own answers if they are sufficiently clear.
L What I’m asking is... what I’m asking myself all the time is... Is that the whole story about I.T.s? Is this simply an increasing awareness of ourselves, or deeper and deeper levels of our own being... or is there something more? I’m in a simply horrific muddle about the whole spiritual bit... God. CHRIST, angels, the lot. O.K. then; extraterrestrials are obviously, at least partly, a sort of S.F. mythology, a projection of new things waking up in everybody. But a projection of what, for God’s sake? Are we alone on this bloody planet or not???
M Joe?
J I’m tempted to say "Don’t look at me!". But yes, there is something I can say. Lucia, it’s all very well coming to other people for answers. But I think you’re beginning to see that the I.T. school is primarily a place people come to for a clarification of their questions. What subsequently happens is not so much answers as something else. We start to see each other, and in seeing each other, in asking each other who they are, experiencing the extraordinary power of Names, and naming, we get into a kind of tottering insecurity about TIME! It’s as if time goes into a sort of sliding focus, like pictures on a screen slipping sideways. We seem to be on the edge of remembering something gigantic in which we are in danger of losing our identity...
M ...and at the same time reaching out...
J ...or in...
M Yes, reaching in to ourselves for a more fundamental identity. And this identity is the same for all of us. That’s the extraordinary thing. In that sense we actually are one another. But we don’t lose ourselves. On the contrary, we find a more real being in ourselves, and also in one another.
L And then we keep losing it again. We come down to Earth, as people say. Everything goes dull and ordinary again, and we’ve lost it. It’s got a lot to do with memory, hasn’t it, Joe? We seem to have lost our memories.
J That’s what religion and the old cultural education, still partly alive in the classical world of the universities, gave people. But it’s drying up. It’s like a corpse, flogged into life with less and less success in each generation. Academics have lost their memories too. They can’t remember what they’re supposed to be teaching people.
L Has science caused that, then?
J On the contrary, science is the result of it. Science isn’t dull and ordinary to proper scientists, Lucia. They see it as the Light of the World, and so it is, true science, that is. What Steiner saw is that science can take over and penetrate a spiritual dimension which was formerly the province of religion.
L That’s why I feel science is leading into the dark. It has a sort of dark light. Scientific discoveries always make me feel a sort of despair, as if I was being caught in some sort of awful trap.
M You know, that’s exactly how I felt the other day when you and I were talking about sex Lucy. Do you remember me saying about orgasms that I felt that the explosions of light in sexual experiences are enclosed, and cut off from other realities.
L Is science like that, Joe? Is there a sort of dark link between the excitement, the almost obsessive absorption in breaking through to the final truth, the ultimate particle of material reality, the ultimate control of D.N.A, and all that... is that the same thing on another level as the way we lose ourselves in sex, going from one experience to another, one person after another in search of the ideal?
J Yes, I think you’ve got hold of something there, something quite blinkered, that I hadn’t quite seen in that light before. It may well be that the more material people’s knowledge of the Earth becomes the more physically sexual their search for each other becomes. It’s the counterpart of something Richard and I have been