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The Archive of Stanley MessengerThe IntraterrestrialsA Foretaste of the New World |
M Are you seriously suggesting, Meruel, that the whole shenanigan at Avebury, – what is it? – five weeks ago, was a show put on for our benefit? I mean, how many people were involved during that week or ten days, three hundred, four hundred? I’m not questioning your judgement, but...
F M+ "Well, you should be doing so".
M What do you mean?
F M+ "You should be questioning constantly the whole time, every day, every hour, every minute, every sentence and every nuance of every thought that arises, in this scenario in which you have set up a communion between yourselves and what you refer to by this name Meruel. Melanie, I am not a puppet. I am not a sort of Disney cartoon figure, a caricature oracle you can come to and consult. I warned you, and I am speaking to you all now, do not put too much, too one-sidedly on Fiona. Fiona is a lot older and a lot more frail than the rest of you. This whole exercise will turn out to be a disaster unless you all learn very quickly now."
M What do you suggest?
F M+ "I suggest you relax. In one sense we have all the time in the world. In another sense humanity is up against the biggest crisis, the most perilous crossing of the most horrific abyss, the most formidable threshold of its entire existence on this planet. On the other side is glory. You are walking a tightrope. But it is very strange! You are in no danger of falling. Your paranoia, your paralysis in this situation, is an illusion. For you have wings. You can actually fly across. But do not simply let go and shut your eyes. The abyss is real. Experience it! Hover! There is plenty of time. All the time in the world. ‘Time stops and time is never ending".
M Fiona, are you all right? Fetch a glass of water, someone. Fiona, love, we’re all here. You’re all right. Just breathe slowly in and out. I think she’s having a heart-attack, Joe. Where’s her bag? She’s got one of those amyl nitrite inhalers.
J Here it is. I didn’t realise she had angina.
M She told me the doctor said it was very mild, at least until recently.
F I’m feeling better. There’s a dropper bottle with something called Onopodoron in it somewhere. It’s better than amyl nitrite, less violent, goes deeper. Look, Melanie love, in fact listen, all of you! We have to go into a new phase with these dear ‘beings’ of ours. Spontaneity is all very well. But, as Meruel is always saying, we are at the operative end of this whole exercise. We are ‘causal’, as those wretched Scientologists always insist people should be. But the initiative-will which takes us to the next step on humanity’s path is no longer personal, if it ever was. It is what Steiner calls ‘the CHRIST-will in the encircling round’. As Meruel said, we can fly now, but we must learn to hover, to savour the crisis we are in.
M M+ "I would like to continue the theme through Melanie for a little while. This episode with Fiona just now had to happen because you haven’t been aware enough of your need to carry the load more evenly, to recognise your competence as a group to pursue what you have been calling the Intraterrestrial path into its implications for the world as a whole"
J How would you sum up... I know it’s a silly question but…..
M M+ "Not silly. You have to see your way. You, Joe, made a star map of the five of you some months ago. At that time some of us responded to your vision by preparing a series of ‘crowns’, or what you at least would be likely to visualise as like the crowns your kings used to wear. They are actually energy vortices designed to relate to, and enhance the activity of, your own highest chakras, which you in any case have traditionally referred to as ‘crown chakras’. We have been keeping these crowns in reserve for the moment when your group was ripe to enter the next phase of its task. The interesting thing was that even at that time it was seven such crowns we prepared, not five. We realised, as you partly did, that your group was incomplete. And here you now are, all seven of you! There’s a lot of rejoicing going on up here, as some of you can begin to see."
L Oh Meruel, dear, thank you! What a wonderful gift. Can we wear them in fact, are we wearing them? Shall we be able to see them?
MG I can see them. They’re all different. Different shapes and colours.
M M+ "Maggie, you’ve brought a wonderful new dimension into this group, something it didn’t have before, and which from now on it will increasingly need. I’m not leaving you out, Andrew. We’re going to depend on you for something vital if the group is to avoid the dangers of deepening without also broadening its scope. But I am going to be very hard on you both also. You aren’t going to find being in this group at all easy. Maggie, what would you say is the thing about these five people you find most difficult to put up with?"
MG You want me to be honest?
M M+ "We won’t get very far unless you are. This isn’t a one-sided affair. They aren’t going to find you and Andrew easy either. You’re all going to stimulate big changes in each other".
MG I can sum up what I don’t like in a simple word. Class! Where I come from this lot would be written off as middle-class intellectual snobs, and bloody southerners into the bargain! But I’ve learned a lot since I came to live in the south. It’s opened my eyes to things my whole background taught me to despise and not to see. But I’ve a long way to go yet. I don’t understand half the things you talk about. Part of me still thinks they’re not worth understanding.
J Maggie, what is it northern working people really hate about southern middle class people with educated voices? I knew an actor from Bradford once, a solid professional, wrote poetry. He used to talk about the ‘flat, fat south’.
MG The feeling is that you’re self-indulgent and soft, but you still think you’re a cut above the rest of the country, the part that’s always done the hard work that supports you and gives you the leisure to indulge your fantasies.
M Do you still feel like that about us?
MG I’ve never identified all that much with my own class background. But when there’s a general attitude all round you and you’re growing up, you start to realise, as I did, that there’s something else going on as well, something most people aren’t aware of, and you start to change. You start to ask questions. You still live in the working class world round you, but you start to fight it. You find yourself a bolt-hole. I found mine in spiritualism.
A I found mine in politics, union work and that. But you outgrow these things, at least I did. You start to realise that what you are trying to corner, to identify, and to beat and come to terms with, is not the class enemy, it’s yourself. The class enemy is yourself in the mirror. It’s a shadow.
MG Most people I know up north never ask questions, or if they do, they don’t know how to face them. So they just pop back onto the old battle grounds and pretend they didn’t have the experiences that would have opened them up. The number of times I was told as a kid:- "Maggie, you’re too dreamy, get on with something, do!"
L It’s just the same with us. I’m sure it’s the same with everybody. My mother used to say to me:- "Susan, you’re so introspective. Wake up girl! You’ll never get married if you…." And on and on and on. Parents are awfully good for us, aren’t they? If parents understood us we’d never get anywhere.
J My mother understood me. I suppose I never really…..
L Yes you did. You got over her death when we got together.
MG I though your name was Lucia.
L Lucia’s my waking-up name. But I was Susan as a kid, and Sue till I met these people.
MG Have you all changed your names?
L No, only me.
F I changed mine when I grew up. My mother called me Mildred. Can you imagine? Mildred Stokes, I was called. Even the aunts at Garway called me that.
M Fiona’s a lovely name. I first heard it when I read the books of Fiona McLeod. And ‘she’ was a man, wasn’t she?
F William Sharp. That’s why I called myself Fiona. He was a distant relative of my mother’s.
J I never knew that.
*****
M M+ "All this is necessary clearing of the ground. I said you had enough time. All the time in the world, in one sense. But there is no time left for attitudes, for any sort of posturing. As Andrew put it, all such projections are simply yourselves seen in a mirror, multiple mirrors in fact. The whole world you have constructed over millennia is nothing but a vast stage-set of multiple projected images of yourselves. But it is getting distinctly worn. It is wearing very thin. Reality is approaching you at a great rate, and is starting to break through the illusionary skin which covers it, in all the weak spots."
J It seems to me the habit of projection is not so easily lost. What I mean is, we frantically try to repair the gaps in our disintegrating reality-sense with new projections.
MG Now that’s just what I mean about you people. What the hell is that gobbledy-gook supposed to mean? Can’t you put it in plain English?
M M+ " What he means is that when your reality is falling apart it terrifies you. You quickly try to build another one in its place. In one sense I, Meruel, am just such a construct."
MG Who’s this Meruel you all talk about? I thought your name was Melanie.
J M+ "They’ve given me the name Meruel. They’re gradually learning to accommodate me as a common voice to communicate with. So far it’s been only among themselves. But now you’ve come along things are different. You’re having a powerful effect on these five people. It’s almost as if they’re closing ranks, consolidating their common identity."
MG I find this quite spooky. Are you all this Meruel, or what? I can’t tell who’s talking. And anyway, my reality’s not falling apart. If anything it’s getting stronger. I’ve learned to ‘change gear’, as it were, between the different levels of it. There’s the ordinary world, and then there’s another layer which kind of links it together. Most people don’t seem to see it, but I certainly do.
J Meruel, I’m going to try to tell Maggie what I, Joe, think she’s doing. Maggie, when you see the thing you describe as a huge flower, or turning wheel at Avebury, do you see it all the time?
MG No, that’s what I said. I only see it when I look at it. I sort of turn and look at it, like when you turn and look at a person.
J Have you always been able to do that? I mean, did you do that when you were a child?
MG Well, as a child you don’t think, do you? Life just happens.
J Did you have this other layer of reality as a child?
MG It’s difficult to remember. I don’t much like thinking about it. The world most people lived in didn’t make sense, was how I saw it. The pictures I saw sort of glued it together, like. Otherwise there was something missing. I thought everybody was the same. But I began to see that most people only saw the surface of things. They didn’t know anything else was going on.
J Did you feel the inner pictures were more real?
MG Not more real but just as real. And in any case, what do you mean by inner pictures? I don’t get this inner and outer business. People are always talking about their inner lives. I’ve always just experienced life itself, but it’s incomplete. You have to turn and look at what completes the picture.
J And does it complete the picture?
MG No, there is always further to go.
J Further from what?
MG I don’t know what you mean.
J What do you think people are doing when they talk about their inner lives?
MG I simply think they’re stuck. They want to go further into the real world, but they don’t know how. So they go round and round in circles just talking about it and getting more confused.
J And you do know how to go further into reality?
MG Well, I certainly seem to see further into it than most people I meet. When I was a medium it was like having another sense-organ, an eye or an ear, and exercising it, training it to see more. I don’t use that in the same way now, but I still have it. I’ve turned it more onto the nature world, less onto peoples’ questions and problems.
J And where is this world you turn the extra sense-organ onto?
MG I find that a meaningless question. The world just is.
J Are you part of it?
MG I don’t know. Are you? Are any of us?
F We all are, Maggie. We’re all part of the world. But we’re something else as well. If you think back to the moment in Avebury when you began to share with us what you were seeing, I think you’ll see what I mean. You’ve got used to not being accepted by people, to being looked at as a bit queer. All psychics go through this. Then something happens like what happened at Avebury, and you find a space in other people which you can share. You start to put your weight on that and expand into it. In fact your clairvoyance actually works better, comes to life when you are being accepted by someone else. But you’re so used to your isolation you soon slip back into it. I though your visions at Avebury were beautiful, Maggie, but at the same time they seemed a bit empty, almost heartless. It was like watching a cartoon of reality rather than experiencing what was really going on. And there was a lot of fear. When you nearly got sucked into the vortex even I was a bit scared! What saved us was the fact that you trusted me, in fact you had begun to love me. You were on the very edge then of what we call the inner life, but you were not yet ready to acknowledge it. You still aren’t.
MG I’ve had too many shocks, too many let-downs.
F You have it with Andrew
MG That’s different. We’re almost the same person.
F And then that combined person shuts itself off from the world, and you’re in the same state as before.
A It seems to me you ask a lot of people, Fiona. I can see what you’re implying. You seem to be saying we should be on the same intimate footing with everybody. But there have to be limits. We need boundaries. Otherwise it would be emotional chaos. I don’t think humanity is ready for universal love.
F It’s not. But we’re on the way to a New World, a new level of reality, and it’s closer than people think. There’s a threshold approaching us, and we’re all approaching it. Over the other side of the threshold universal intimacy has a different quality. It’s on a different level. Meruel has something to say about that.
M M+ "What I’m trying to do as Meruel is to show you, a step at a time, something which is actually quite new to mankind. It can’t really be done, my dears, without some quite painful experiences. Let me try and link up with some of the thoughts which you have developed and verbalised over these months and years since you came together. First Fiona and Joe, and gradually Richard. Then Melanie to identify what was going on, and Susan-Lucia to throw light on that. New developments in humanity have a common pattern. Fertilisation, conception, embryonic development, and so on through all the stages familiar to you in your own lives. We beings who have been through all these stages in other parts of the universe, or in earlier stages of this planet, and have transcended them, are woven into the tapestry of the planet to monitor what goes on. We do this because you, who are in some sense our children, are going through these same things at a more advanced level of evolution. You rightly call us Intraterrestrial Beings. We are woven into the spiritual substance of the planet as volunteers, supervisors. I was alerted to the possibilities of this group of human beings by perceiving what could be called a karmic knot, a kind of seed, whose germination had the potential of raising human awareness and activity onto quite a new level. I recognised that the way you met, the ideas and feelings that evolved in you, were recapitulating something which happened for the first time in England four hundred years ago. This was the emergence of a new soul organ, the consciousness soul, the soul event which led to what you recognise as the European Renaissance. When we beings are alerted to events like this it is a very exciting experience for us. It’s like sensing the appearance of a point of illumination beginning to coalesce in the otherwise dark and murky sea of struggling humanity. You five people coming together was a recapitulation of a four hundred year old soul memory. Such recapitulations are always signs that a new stage for humanity is beginning. These events are beginning to happen all over the western world now.
J I sense that you are leading up to talking next about the painful consequences of some of this…
M M+ "Thank you, Joe, yes. I can do this more readily by talking through you than through Melanie. I honour your perspective, Joe, and the love in you that makes this perspective possible. The birth of the consciousness soul four hundred years ago was fraught with psychic and spiritual dangers. These dangers and agonies and ecstasies were articulated with tremendous powers and insight in what was written and performed at the time by the group of souls which you sum up under the name Shakespeare. Shakespeare was a multiple mouthpiece of the emergent consciousness soul which followed with transcendent beauty in romantic love."
A That’s just it! That’s just it!
MG There you have it. That’s where what became the class-struggle really began! Romantic love was always a self-indulgent middle-class thing.
A Mocked and caricatured by Shakespeare’s peasants and clowns, and yet at the same time underpinned by their labour and their servitude.
J M+ "Yes, my dear friends, this is always the danger. Waking into love is never free of the fear of loss. Every pop-record proclaims it. The waking process of the renaissance became the perquisite of those who were politically and economically in a position to lay claim to it and protect it."
A At the expense of the workers.
J M+ "That’s not entirely true. It is certainly true that the awakening reinforced the polarisation of the classes. But they were already firmly founded and established in the feudal system which preceded the awakening. But the self-indulgence and self-protection of the romantic movement, and the civilised, culture of science, art, and religion which grew out of it, were simply the shadow side of the enlightenment. The enlightenment itself was still valid. A tremendous opportunity was offered to mankind at that point in its history, particularly in England, to overcome the polarisation between kings and aristocrats on the one hand and the peasants on the other; between consciousness and responsibility and work on the earth with the soil and the nature-beings. The opportunity was missed, but it was not missed simply by the upper classes refusing to share their awakening into romance and intellect with those who worked the land. It was equally missed by the workers, who gradually lost their capacity to live in the elemental life of nature. They could no longer follow the elves and fairies into an inner magical world, which would have balanced out the more and more abstract, mental world of spirit developed in the religious conspiracy of kings and priests. Read "Midsummer Night’s Dream" again with that in mind. Read "The Tempest". In fact read the whole of Shakespeare! It’s all there. Shakespeare foresaw the tragedy potentially hidden in humanity’s awakening. That’s why you have no inner life, Maggie. It’s not only because the middle classes have stolen your birthright, which they have. It’s also because you and your class are scared to allow yourselves to feel where your insights are coming from".
L ¤ "You’ll have to introduce her to me".
R Hello, Ophromine. I wondered where you’d got to.
MG Now what’s happening? Andrew, what are we going to do with this lot? I’m getting proper scared. I gave up spiritualism, and now I’m back in all that spooky stuff. I know where I am with the pictures, they’re something I can control. But leave the spirits out of it!
L ¤ "I’m not a spook. I’m just as much part of your pictures as the giant vortex at Avebury. You only have to turn and look at me. I’ll stay where you can see me."
MG My God! Who are you? What are you?
L ¤ "Stop feeling scared. I’m quite safe. Breathe in and out. Now what are you seeing?"
MG You keep changing. While I was panicking you were tall and sharp and green. Your fingers were spiky like stinging insects. Your eyes were long and slanted. Now you’re much rounder and your hair is flowing. You’re pink and gold and blue and violet.
L ¤ "You can make me seem to you exactly what you like. It’s best for you if you talk to me through Lucia, rather than, say, Richard, for the time being. I love you Maggie. We’ll really get on. You can ask me things. Lucia will show you my light side."
MG You’ve got a dark side as well, haven’t you? I saw it.
L ¤ "My dark side is brought into existence by your fear. Beings like me depend on humanity to keep our dark and light aspects in balance. You teach us at the same time as we are teaching you.
MG Andrew, can you sense this being?
A I can see the change in you, darling. That’s my path. I feel good about what I’m seeing.
L ¤ "What you’re seeing now, Maggie, is not falling back into spiritualism. I don’t belong in the world of astral cast-offs, the shadows of people’s stale feelings and longings. I’m alive. When you gave up spiritualism you freed your clairvoyance to wander into a world of form and colour which was very cleansing. It was a kind of healing balm for your loneliness and isolation. But it was still itself a very lonely world. You were its only occupant, until later you drew Andrew into it. He couldn’t see it himself, but he was healed by it through what he sensed in you. In a world of such beauty and promise you felt you and he could wander forever, and never need to realise how lonely you were. But there were other things in your destiny, Maggie. Your secret garden is not uninhabited after all. You can see me! From now on you will never be able to forget that."
MG I can turn away from seeing you.
L ¤ "Not without turning away from the whole extended world of your visions at the same time. Then what will you do?"
F This was implied from the moment you and I met, Maggie. Denying the existence of an inner world becomes impossible the moment you truly share spiritual perceptions with others in a state of love.
MG Andrew and I share my world, and it is still just one world for us.
F That won’t satisfy him forever. Nobody can live vicariously through someone else’s perceptions, however close they are.
A We have to get out of this, Maggie. These people have no idea of privacy. They’re attacking the whole basis of our relationship.
F At the same time you can see the change in Maggie, and you like what you see. It threatens you because you think you are not ready for such a drastic change in your world. An inner life for Maggie implies a drastic change for you too. You said at one point that humanity is not yet ready for universal love. The only way it can reach that is when individuals who are ready for such a change acknowledge it. Humanity may not be ready, but are you not?
R M+ "That’s why you need Ophromine and his kind as well as me and my kind. You are meeting in us a very ancient current in human affairs, but in a new form suitable for the present chapter in human evolution. They knew all about it in ancient Greece, when I was identified with Apollo and Ophromine with Dionysos. We are talking about seed and soil, about what it is that grows and where it has chosen to grow. We are talking about Sun and Earth, about the source of humanity as a seed of the spirit and the destined planet of humanity’s evolution, the Earth, chosen by the CHRIST power as its theatre of operations; ‘the only planet of choice!’
M Seed and soil! Maggie, it makes no more sense to think of spiritual evolution as elitist and middle-class than it does to think of the world of clairvoyance as a crude and clumsy working-class version of pagan religion. Seeds need soil and soil is infertile without seeds.
R M+ "Now this is where the whole process comes into danger! This is what I meant by saying that in the first instance we drew you, Andrew and Maggie, into this situation because of Paul. From the start this group recognised Paul as a kind of threat to what they were doing and to what we were doing through them. Paul turned up in their lives at a vulnerable early stage in their discovery of each other. They over-reacted. Lucia in particular was susceptible to his peculiar ability to radiate a glamorous charismatic light over everything he encounters, because she too is a light-being. He wanted to blow it all up into a world movement before the seed had even put down its first tentative roots into Earth soil. Your group in Plymouth is the first fruit of this. But Paul reckoned without you and Maggie."
M Perhaps there’s an analogy there with Findhorn. Did something similar happen there?
R M+ "You’ll have to ask Ophromine about that. He had a lot of friends there. What I am seeing here is that Maggie and her perceptions are potentially Paul’s Achilles heel.. And you, Andrew, can if you will form a link between what is going on here and Paul’s spiritual inflationism. Your relationship with Maggie is in no way threatened by what is going on here. She is at the threshold of a new dimension in her clairvoyant abilities. This dimension is something this group lacks and needs. At the same time you can participate in this step she is taking as you have in all the others. This can be the dawning of an inner life for you too. And it will then be precisely this element that you can bring into Paul’s activities in Plymouth. You can ground Paul in a way that this group would never be able to do. You and Maggie belong to both groups. What is at stake here is the whole Intraterrestrial movement, whether it turns inwards and festers, as the nineteenth and early twentieth century spiritual movements did, or whether it can seed itself out into the lives of ordinary people as is happening in Plymouth.
M But at the moment in what seems to be a superficial and perhaps dangerous way. You and Maggie are very much needed on both counts.
MG I’d forgotten all about this sort of thing, Andrew. I used to see that sort of being as a child. But they laughed me out of it. And then I got to thinking I’d made it up and it was all kid’s stuff. I even got a bit scared of it. The life of pictures and feelings about peoples’ lives seemed safer somehow. Then that went sour as well. I’ve been getting back into the life of nature since I came to live in the south and met Andrew. But you’re right about the loneliness of it. I don’t know. I’ve got a lot to think about.
F I think you’ll be fine Maggie. I like working with you. I think we’ll be a help to each other.
A If we’re to get back before midnight we’ll have to be going. It’s a working day tomorrow. I’ve got a lot to sort out with all this too. It’s all a bit of a shock. I’m not used to people being so open with each other. I still wonder whether it leaves any room for you own life.
R It’s true your priorities alter in this I.T. work. You get more committed as you go along. Personal things, and what you call privacy, don’t disappear, but they fall into place in a different way somehow.
A I shall have to think about it. Meanwhile I’d still like to come up at weekends as we’ve been doing. It’s a long way, but the motorway’s easy enough if we drive at night and get to you on Saturday for breakfast.
R How far is it?
A I reckon about a hundred and eighty miles. We’ll be back about eleven if we start now. O.K. Maggie?
MG There’s a side of me that doesn’t want to go. I didn’t expect that! It’s almost like having a new family. I hope we haven’t been too awkward.
M The beings warned us there’d be difficult and painful stuff to get through. I feel we’re all doing very well. In one way, they said, there’s all the time in the world. But there’s also a feeling of urgency, and it presses on us all. I hope we haven’t squeezed you too hard. There’s a lot of love about, isn’t there, between us all? That’s what makes the difference.
*****
R The latest crop-circle magazine came in the post this morning. Talk abut the cat among the pigeons! That affair at Avebury has changed the whole croppie perspective. The magazine has twice the number of pages. Everybody in the croppie scene seems to have put an oar in, even the so-called hoaxers.
J Is there a completed diagram?
R Two-page spread. Here it is look.
J Fascinating! Now you can see why all the pentagram apices had slightly different angles. You can also see that the huge dowsable outer circle corresponds directly with the outer stone circle. You know, it was strange, wasn’t it? Ophromine had suggested that we met and talked together about crop-circles and my work with the menhirs. What actually happened was that we got totally caught up with Barbury Castle and never talked about menhirs at all!
R Then the Avebury thing overtook us and the real meeting Ophromine had suggested happened on a much larger scale. These beings of ours really know what they’re doing, don’t they?
M (Coming into the room) To put it mildly! Ophromine, what are you trying to point out?
¤ "You haven’t grasped really what’s going on, have you? You can be slow-witted sometimes, you people."
J What are you talking about Ophromine?
M ¤ "The hexagram, you idiots! Because the pentagrams are off-centre they capture your attention. You find yourselves looking at the ground plan of the stone circle, and you see that the pentagram drew attention to the energy focus in each of the inner rings of stone. Then you think back to Maggie’s experience, and her perception that the vortices of energy breathe backwards and forwards, into the Earth and out of it again, like volcanic blowholes. You are marginally aware of all this going on. Every member of your group has a different perspective on it. Except perhaps Lucia. Her perceptions of that weekend are somewhat in abeyance. And meanwhile there sits the hexagram, quiet, symmetrical, uniform, enigmatic. Minding its own business. Almost complacent, one might say. Sleek. Waiting for you dunderheads to wake up and ask questions. Even Maggie didn’t know what was going on, but you never commented on what she said. I’m not aware of a third focus of energy’, was her comment if I remember."
J Is there a third focus of energy, Ophromine?
M ¤ "Well, ask yourselves that. Fiona at least should have begun by now to wonder what the pentagram-hexagram theme was trying to say at Avebury. She’s wise enough in the ways of anthroposophy. Ask yourselves, my little chickabiddies! What is the actual relation between pentagrams and hexagrams? What planets rule roses and lilies, five petals and six petals? There was no indication of any of this at Ogbourne Maizey in 1992, was there? The ‘two eggs in a pan’ formation? That was a straightforward hint that man’s relationship to his ‘only planet of choice’ was beginning to wake up to new levels. The two eggs, humanity and its planet. The pan, the CHRIST presence in the etheric aura of the Earth. Now the whole theme reaches a new level of manifestation at Avebury itself, seven miles to the west of Ogbourne."
J Shut up a minute Ophromine. I want to think.
M ¤ "About time!"
J We’re talking about Mercury and Venus, aren’t we? The energies at Avebury have so far been on a mercurial level, polarised in movement between the inner and outer aspects of the planet Earth. And now suddenly, Venus appears, quietly holding the balance between the two inner circles.
M ¤ "Now we’re getting somewhere"
J So, Ophromine, clearly there is no third focus of energy in the Avebury formations. We’re no longer talking about energy foci. We’re talking about a dimensional shift. The energy grid system of the planet is on the blink. Something was going on there which calls the bluff on everything we have hitherto been thinking about crop-circles. It’s also gone beyond the range of Maggie’s clairvoyant perceptions.
R There was something I wanted to ask. What was it? Oh, I know. How many of those sixteen formations were actually in standing crops?
J We can see in Martineau’s diagram here. About nine or ten. It looks as if this one was right on the edge of a cornfield with half of it across a roadway. Richard Andrews must have had fun dowsing that.
R So nearly half, about three eighths of the formations existed purely on an energy level. No wonder the whole croppie movement is in turmoil. What on earth must George Wingfield be thinking? He can hardly believe Rob Irving can hoax an energy-field.
M I’m having a sort of deja-vu. What’s going on? Oh I know. Yesterday I was in the middle of a conversation with Meruel through Fiona. Meruel had been nudging me towards considering that this group of ours had been in a more ‘causal’ relation to what went on in Avebury that week than we had thought. We were beginning to reach the thought that it was in some senses a show put on for our especial benefit. Then Meruel began to put the pressure on, saying we were putting too much weight on Fiona’s insights, not participating enough, and so throwing Meruel itself out of balance. At that moment Fiona had her heart attack, and the energy changed,. We lost the thread. Meruel began to talk about crowns, and we had that big sort-out with Maggie and Andrew. The balance began to be restored by completing the structure of the group itself. The pressure on Fiona was relieved a bit. It was as if Maggie was becoming a sense organ for the group, something which had been missing, particularly for Fiona.
J Where’s Lucia?
R She and Fiona were talking in the garden ten minutes ago. Why?
J There’s something coming up. I don’t know what it is. It’s a kind of energy shift. You know, we’ve been down here nearly a month, and in a sense we haven’t really done anything yet. What’s happened to the original I.T. impulse? Lucia’s had all those leaflets printed and they just stand there in the cupboard.
M The right moment hasn’t appeared yet. The full tally of the group is only now beginning to form. Andrew and Maggie have to find their balance between here and Plymouth.
J Another thing. I have the feeling that we are approaching a kind of threshold in the possibilities of communication within the group itself. Actually I feel quite scared.
M This reminds me of a moment last year when Lucia first joined us. Something we set in motion caused a kind of realignment of the energies round us. It was like an inner earthquake, when tectonic plates in the Earth readjust themselves to relieve pressure. A lot of rocks started tumbling about in my inner spaces.
J I feel like one sometimes does before a thunderstorm.
R It’s this hexagram, isn’t it? There’s a change in the balance of Venus and Mercury forces in the Earth itself. So long as our energies are geared to polarisation we feel we can breathe. Look at the difference in energy in this diagram between the hexagram and the two pentagrams. You eye follows continuously round each pentagram. The freedom of movement allows you to shift from one side to the other, to feel in your body and sheaths the rhythmic interplay between ourselves and the planet. But the hexagram is on a different level. In order to bear its energies in your aura you have to rise to a level where you no longer need to oscillate between twin poles of experience. You have to be able to tolerate the stillness.
J The frightening thing about death is that you stop breathing. Your heart stops beating. This is what was scaring me.
M We’re moving from Mercury energies into Venus energies. Here come Lucia and Fiona. What have you two been talking about?
F We’ve been coming out of the green into the blue.
J I was with someone once who was dying of lung-cancer. There was a terrible day just before she died when she couldn’t get her breath. She didn’t know how to control her panic. Nothing worked, oxygen, inhaler, meditation, nothing! Then, quite of itself, her whole system crossed a threshold into calm waters. She didn’t stop breathing, but her system ceased making violent unquenchable demands for air. She lived another twenty-four hours and just slowly withdrew herself from her body, like taking off a glove.
L Yes, that’s how the green world moves over into the blue.
F When Maggie panicked near the vortex at Avebury she was sensing something of the planet’s agony as it approaches the death-throes of this particular age of the Earth. The energies circulating in those two giant interlocking pentagrams must in fact be slowly diminishing as the calm blue stillness of the Venusian hexagram asserts itself there.
L Maggie’s clairvoyance doesn’t yet penetrate as far as that. It will be interesting to see whether Ophromine can lead her in that direction.
R You know, these revelations have made sense of a five year old mystery for me. I could never make out why the unique Ogbourne Maizey ‘two eggs in a pan’ crop-circle formation appeared to be a kind of sketch plan of the Avebury stone circles. I could see that the ring round the two smaller rings was an attempt to unify duality, but...
J Richard, I had been told by Michael at some point that the planet Earth was the uniquely important place in the universe where CHRIST-energy and human energy could be brought together, with the ultimate aim of eliminating duality altogether from the cosmos.
R Yes, I see. Of course that is clear in the symbolism of both Ogbourne Maizey and Avebury. But why use a crop-circle to point out something visible at Avebury anyway?
J As I see it, that’s clear now, isn’t it? Ogbourne Maizey was saying:- "Keep your eye on Avebury! It will show you something about the moment when the CHRIST enters the heart of the material world" The Earth at Avebury is dying of lung-cancer, so to speak. At some point the energies will stabilise there, and it will be possible then to experience Venus there instead of Mercury.
R And that energy is not vortical in character, which is why Maggie was mystified to find that there was no third vortex. There isn’t one.
¤ "As Ophromine I am beginning to be quite pleased with you. Pleased and hopeful. I was beginning to wonder whether you would ever get there. You’re not the only ones who are experiencing a threshold crisis. This is not just a human problem. You can’t imagine what a scurrying and hurrying, a darting to and fro, is going on throughout the whole elemental world as billions of little gnomes, undines, sylphs and salamanders, as well as devic entities like myself, and vast regional entities linked with solar and galactic hierarchies, are re-allotted and re-assigned to their functions in the post-threshold world, a world which looms nearer and nearer, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. This is something we Mercurial entities can’t handle on our own. And your friend Meruel can’t handle the new Venusian energies on his own either. This is why what humanity is for the most part so desperately slow and stupid."
F M+ "And I as Meruel am beginning to reach a new dimension of possibilities as this group of human beings reaches, step by painful step, one insight after another which links these two realms. The gap between Ophromine and me is ‘normally’, so to speak, too wide, on this sort of individualised level, for direct communication. By opening yourselves to both these levels of your own perceptions and articulations you are doing far more than simply evolving spiritually as human individuals. You are opening doors through which whole categories of conscious entities can communicate with each other on a self-aware level, something which has never been possible in this planetary evolution before."
J How can we describe these beings, these categories you refer to, to ourselves?
F M+ "They are usually described in your so-called ‘sacred writings’ as Hosts. I told you once, I belong to a category of beings who have evolved a couple of stages beyond what you think of as ‘human’. You call them archangels. Your friend Ophromine brackets humanity at about the same distance the other side. Ophromine looks upon you as role-models for an embodiment of what will one day be a human manifestation on a future, more evolved planetary existence. Ophromine is a sort of cosmic adolescent, who regards you as adults, wonderful goals for aspiration, and at the same time frustratingly primitive versions of what will one day be possible. Ophromine is a devic aspirant to the human condition, whereas I stand upon the human condition much as you do upon the animal. For me, humanity is how I got here. I attained the human condition long ago upon the Sun, when it was still a planet."
R You said once you worked in the service of Michael. Is that what you meant by ‘Hosts’? Are you referring to Michael’s Hosts? How do you regard Michael?
F M+ "The nearest analogy is the way you regard human beings who you look upon as so-called ‘ascended masters’. Ascended Masters for you are people who have mastered the whole human condition, just as master carpenters are people who are in total control of everything that can be done with the material ‘wood’. Archangels regard Michael as an ascended master of what we experience as the archangelic condition."
R M+ "I want to move over to Richard a minute so that Fiona can breathe out. You’re getting more mobile in this process now."
J So Michael should no longer be referred to as an archangel?
R M+ "Many humans all over the planet regard themselves as higher animals, though I sometimes wonder what they mean by ‘higher’. Much of your animal rights movement is linked to this misunderstanding. It is the same in the archangelic world. We have riff-raff just as you do, groupies who get their kicks out of mob rule. They don’t want to evolve any further, and they don’t acknowledge Michael as being any different from themselves."
M So not all devas, angels and archangels are part of the Michael system?
R M+ "Not by any means. The Michael system, as you call it, has come into existence as a result of the CHRIST path towards the Earth. Michael’s ascent results from his commitment to that path, which not all hierarchical beings are committed to. Michael believes in humanity".
M Then are some human-beings also part of the Michaelic hosts?
R M+ "Humanity is a special case. Humanity is destined to become a tenth celestial hierarchy, ‘a little lower than the angels’. Michael chose to take on the role of a celestial guarantor of that process. This was a gigantic cosmic commitment which resulted in an almost universal realignment of the entire forces of the universe. The formation of the Michaelic Host is an aspect of that realignment. The emergence of that commitment by Michael involved an alteration in the nature of time. Michael’s ascent to the next level above the archangelic was the inevitable result of it. Michael initiated changes in reality as fundamental as those which took place when time emerged originally from the timeless."
M I’m getting a feeling of being stretched, as if you are trying to express in words levels of reality to which the process of human mental comprehension is not really adapted.
R M+ "Yes, that is the situation. You asked whether some human beings become part of the hosts of Michael. Questions like that illustrate the point. It would be like asking whether foetuses are part or the democratic system, and should be entitled to the vote. It is the difference between what is actualised and what is still only potential, a gleam in the cosmic eye! What we are talking about as Michaelic Hosts is an actualised reality in the cosmos, but we belong to an earlier stage of cosmic evolution that you do. Humanity from that point of view is still scarcely off the drawing-board. Humanity is ninety-nine percent just a good idea that might one day come to something. I am trying to convey to you what the Michaelic Hosts are and who Michael is. When we say ‘Michael’ we are talking about that aspect of the cosmic hierarchies which has been prepared to foster this ‘good idea’ we call humanity in a sponsoring kind of way, to take a chance on humanity coming to something".
J These are pictures that put human affairs in a somewhat unfamiliar light.
R M+ "Well, yes. We can’t pretend that from a certain point of view humanity amounts to very much yet. But the potential is indescribably great, gigantic. So much so that, a few hundred years ago in the spiritual world, Michael initiated what can be described as a School, a venue in which certain human beings who had matured sufficiently in previous existences were invited to come together and be shown a vista of what some of these potentials were. This so-called Michael School became a powerful incentive a hundred years ago for increasing numbers of human beings to come to Earth determined to spread a new level of insights about these vast potentials in human evolution. A high proportion of these souls found their way into Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophical movement and began to develop a true path of knowledge, a spiritual science. Other groupings too, and other teachers, found their way into awareness of what Michael had done and developed other aspects of a conscious cognitive path into spiritual realms. And in the spiritual world itself, one might say a few million foetuses turned over in their sleep and heard some very stimulating music!"
F We need to ask something, don’t we Lucia.
L We certainly do! Meruel. What is CHRIST from the point of view of what you have been saying? How does Michael relate to the CHRIST?
*****
F What’s happening, Richard?
R There’s a sort of silence. You know how with a computer sometimes you can set a process in motion by a certain question, and you get a sense that everything in the machine is being more fundamentally re-aligned. Something of that sort seems to have been put in motion by Lucia’s question. We simply have to wait. Oh. Here he is. He wants to know what day it is. (They laugh).
M Are you saying Meruel wants to know what day it is with us? It’s Friday, Meruel. I, the namer, Melanie, say to you, Meruel, that today is Friday! (laughter).
R M+ "Then tomorrow, Saturday, you will have Andrew and Maggie with you for breakfast. Michael is expressing a wish to give Lucia an answer to her question himself. But he would like to do so when all of your group of seven is present. Would ten o’clock tomorrow morning be a suitable time for us all to meet?"
M That seems fine, Meruel.
R M+ "Michael asks whether he can start to speak through Fiona, but he would also like to speak at times through Lucia and perhaps others. These are the new possibilities of communication in the group you were beginning to be aware of. This will be a new departure for us all. Michael is conveying a great blessing on you all which he is asking me to give you now."
*****
L Oh lord! What have I done? We seem to have hit some sort of jackpot.
R I don’t know what you’ve done, you crazy girl. But it’s obvious you have a basic approach which goes down well with ‘them upstairs’.
F As a group we constitute a certain mix of characteristics which works the oracle in a special way. It sometimes seems as if they have a special soft spot for Lucia. But then, so have we! However, the spotlight is by no means reserved exclusively for Lucia. There are times when it falls strongly on each one of us.
R Not excluding Andrew and Maggie, obviously. Michael made sure that when he spoke the group would be complete as it is perceived from, his viewpoint.
J I think Michael perceives the group as a single awareness. To be perceived as such by a higher consciousness must, I would have thought, be the prime requisite from our point of view for beginning to be aware of new possibilities of communication among ourselves.
F Perhaps we can start to understand from that a little about the difference between an archangel and an arch-e, or what ever you call a member of the hierarchy of Archai. Meruel clearly perceives us very much as individuals, as he must if his role is to explore and progress the possibilities we have of taking human group activity to a further point in its evolution.
R And thereby enhancing his own evolution.
M Exactly! Whereas Michael perceives the end-product of all that in its seed form and addresses that directly. My goodness, we’re in for a very special experience tomorrow.
F Maggie and Andrew. They’ll be pretty unprepared for it.
M We don’t necessarily know that. Everybody has a unique path in preparation for what is to happen next for them.
L Joe, come for a walk. I feel I’ve hardly begun to explore the country round here yet.
J Let’s take sandwiches.
L Bless you all, everyone! What a wonderful time we’re having!
*****
A We didn’t take so long today. We’re getting used to the route.
R What time did you start?
A We were on the motorway at four-thirty. We left the house at about twenty past. What time did we get here?
R It was about five past eight when I came down. You were just coming up the drive.
A I reckon we’ve pushed the average up to just about fifty. I know it was forty-five last weekend.
R Do you drive Maggie?
MG Yes. I drove quite a lot of the way today. I like it on the motorway. But I let Andrew do the twisty bits this end. He learns the turnings quicker than I do.
M What do you want for breakfast, Maggie? You like an egg, don’t you?
MG Yes, I could just do with a boiled egg. Thanks Melanie. Country air gives me an appetite.
A And me. I liked the way you did the porridge last time, Richard. Could I have that again?
R You certainly could. I’ll join you.
A We’ve got a lot to tell you. To start with, Paul wants to come up. He intends to appear some time tomorrow if you agree. He won’t stay; he’ll be on his way to London for the firm. But he’d like to look in for an hour or two.
R Sounds fine. So what does he want to talk about?
A I showed him one of Lucia’s leaflets. He was very impressed. Moved, in fact. He began at once to try out wordings for the centre spread. We brought a copy of his latest effort. I think it’s very good.
M We talked a lot about that. As you see, in the end we decided to leave it blank apart from the heading, ‘The I.T. School’, and the few lines at the bottom to explain what I.T. stands for, and how we came to choose the name.
A Morning Joe. Hi Lucia.
J You’re nice and early. Hi Maggie. That’s nice. We can have sit-down breakfast together. Is there enough of that porridge for me?
L Hello Maggie. I like the look of those eggs. Can you do me one? What a gorgeous morning again. Where’s the toaster?
A Yes, Melanie, we all liked the fact that the main space in the leaflet was left for people to write the stuff they wanted on the leaflets they themselves were handing out.
L Has Paul seen the leaflet?
A Yes, he has. He’s very impressed. He’s been doing his own version for the centre page. I’ve just been telling them; he’s going to look in tomorrow on his way to London. He wants to ask you if we can start using the leaflet now for our work in Plymouth.
L Can we see what he’s written?
A Yes, I’ve brought a copy with me.
R Eat your porridge first Andrew. Here it is.
A Should we wait for Fiona?
M She’s having hers in bed. I’ve just taken it. We’ve also got a great deal to tell you and Maggie. Fiona’s going to get up soon, and we’ll tell you then what we’ve in mind for this morning.
J This is all very interesting. So have the rest of your group down there seen the leaflet as well?
MG Not everyone. A few of us got together last Wednesday, not our main weekly meeting, just Peter and Mandy and Paul and ourselves. Paul showed it to them.
J Did they like it?
A It was a bit of a mixed reaction. I think Peter felt there should be a variety of ways of introducing I.T and that not everyone responded to written material.
MG Peter and Mandy and Simon and Brenda, and two others you haven’t met have been meeting on their own. We haven’t been to their meetings, but Brenda’s told me a bit about it.
A I know Mandy liked the leaflet very much. She very much wants to meet you Lucia. I don’t think you talked at Avebury, did you?
L No, but I thought she looked a very sweet girl. You know, perhaps it’s time we all went down to Plymouth one weekend instead of you coming here.
MG What’s been happening is, our weekly meetings have been changing. Instead of dear Paul holding forth all the time we’ve each been having a go at leading the meeting. Brenda did a very good presentation last week. She talked about dowsing and got us all on our feet with pendulums and rods.
J Read us Paul’s thing Andrew.
A O.K. Here it is. He ran a few off on the computer.
M Just a minute, Andrew. Here’s another pile of toast. All right, fire away.
A "Are the right things happening in your life? Are you coming across the people you really need to meet? Is your understanding of life becoming more meaningful? We would like you to have opportunities to open up new avenues in all these directions. At the same time we respect your freedom and have no wish to control what happens to you.
Making contact with the person whose address and phone number you will find on the back will start a process of meetings with people who have asked themselves these questions. Sooner or later, so we believe, this will lead you to people with whom you will resonate.
We call this process a School, and have called it the I.T. School for reasons we give below. We keep the whole process as fluid as possible. We are not recruiting people to any formal belief system, whether religious, scientific or practical-political. We do however want to share our experiences with you.
If these remarks arouse your interest you may like to pursue them further by telephoning the number on the back and arranging a meeting".
R And that’s it?
A That’s it. I’ve typed it out on one of Lucia’s leaflets to you can get an impression of what somebody reading it would actually see. What do you think of it?
J I think it’s terrible.
A What’s wrong with it?
J I don’t know. It makes me cringe. The whole thing sounds like a sales pitch for something it doesn’t quite mention. Softly softly catchee monkey. It even succeeds in making Lucia’s lovely painting look sentimental.
R I couldn’t help being reminded of the Jehovah’s Witnesses ‘Watchtower’ publication.
M Good taste is always a tightrope. The more you appeal to the emotions the nearer you get to the precipice of cliché and glitz.
L At the same time I’ve no doubt there are a good many people to whom it would appeal for the precisely the reasons that it offends our sensibilities, Melanie. I understand precisely Maggie’s and Andrew’s problems with us, Joe. We’re not talking about good taste and bad taste. We’re talking about real deep differences in how different social and educational backgrounds build up the tone of people’s emotional and soul lives. Maggie, how did you react to Joe’s and Melanie’s remarks?
MG I almost began to take them personally. I felt snubbed. I thought:- "Here we go again! Bloody middle-class snobs."
A I felt the same, personally hurt. When I read the leaflet I understood just how Paul appeals to so many people, especially to lonely people. It’s the same when they meet him. People feel taken in to a sort of warmth. They want to be with him and hear him talk.
M Yet it was you, Andrew, who felt that our sort of communication was an invasion of your privacy, too near the knuckle.
MG Until you get used to it, Melanie, the way you bring in these beings from another reality is simply scary. What Paul does is appeal to the experiences people feel they lost as children. People feel cared for.
J All the evangelising movements do that. In a sense their aim of comforting what went wrong for people as children can block people’s emergence into more adult experiences.
MG Even a few weeks ago I wouldn’t have understood what you meant by that. I feel now as if I’m on a bridge between the comforting path and the waking up path!
A My feeling is that Paul’s leaflet goes a long way towards bridging the sort of gap Maggie’s talking about. I agree it’s talking down a little bit to people, treating them as lost souls who need rescuing from their isolation. But the implication that people are free agents is also there. It’s not aimed at people like you, it’s targeting people at a different stage of the path.
MG I’d like to turn the whole thing round and ask you, Lucia, what you would put in the middle page if you were putting your own leaflets out.
L Yes, I’ve been thinking about that. You know, we can only share what we ourselves have to share. I could never put myself behind a leaflet like Paul’s, yet I can sympathise with the fact that it is those thoughts which my picture arouses in him. Actually I’ve sketched out a few notes which I had planned to put on some of them to take round the village here. I thought I’d put a few in the post-office for instance, and on the church hall notice board. Shall I read what I said?
(voices, ‘Yes please do, Lucia’)
"I paint under the name of LUCIA, and I have turned a room at Middle Town into a studio for my paintings and modellings, and also for my partner’s photographic work. We would gladly welcome you to see this work, and hope that anyone in the area who does their own work in photography, paint, clay, stone or wood would bring work here to show us, and if they like, use our facilities. It can be fun to work in the same space, and we have plenty here to share. In any case, do come and visit any time. Someone’s usually in."
Then I put the phone number and a note that the painting is also available as greeting cards and posters.
MG You don’t actually say anything about I.T. then?
L No. I feel all that needs to be said is there in print, in the title ‘The I.T. School’, and in what we put at the bottom in explanation of that.
MG I haven’t read it. Oh yes I have. I liked it.
R Read it out Maggie. I forget what we said.
MG "I.T. in the title of the School stands for Intraterrestrial. A lot of publicity exists in our day suggesting the existence of E.T.s, Extraterrestrial beings. We try to balance this by speaking of Intraterrestrials, that is, beings who live in and on the Earth. There is a much longer tradition of conscious entities who share the planet with us, including the elemental devas, gnomes, sylphs and others, and also beings of higher angelic hierarchies. Much of our work, including work in the arts, relates to such Intraterrestrial beings, and we happily relate to these in our lives."
I like it very much. Who wrote it?
L Fiona did.
A I think it’s excellent. So does Paul. I think his wording in conjunction with that is exactly what appeals to people, certainly to the sort of people we encounter in Plymouth.
J How do you feel about your leaflet gong out with Paul’s message inside it, darling?
L It makes me look at my own painting quite differently. It makes me realise that it can arouse feelings on a broader spectrum than I experienced in painting it. To be honest, it also makes me realise that I do have a sentimental side, as well as a more meaningful one.
M Do you mind that side of your work being appealed to?
L I don’t think I do, no. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with sentimentality if it leads people through to deeper emotions, and a more profound understanding as they mature. It depends on what people are ready for.
MG Oh here comes Fiona. Good morning dear. How are you this morning?
F I’m fine. How are you two? I thought I’d better come down. I didn’t want to miss anything. Have you told them what seems to be happening this morning?
R We haven’t got round to it yet. We’ve been too busy talking about what’s going on in Plymouth. Paul wants to look in tomorrow on hi s way to London.
F That’ll be good. How is Paul? How are things going?
A It’s all very active, and very interesting. A lot of people are becoming involved. Paul’s seen Lucia’s folder and is very keen to use it. We’ve been talking about what needs to be written inside, and I think we’re starting to realise what a wide range of possibilities there are.
F Something very interesting happened here yesterday. We’ve been going more deeply into what is really involved in these communications with Meruel and Ophromine. I realised, for the first time really, that they are just as dependant on us as we are on them. Quite new possibilities are opening up for them, not only for their communication with us, but even more strikingly for each other. We tend to imagine that the spiritual world is quite uniform, and that the beings in it are all aware of each other in a free way. But something happened yesterday which showed that our awareness of them can act as a bridge by which their consciousness of each other is also fortified and clarified.
MG That’s very interesting, because Andrew and I have also been feeling that we are becoming a kind of bridge between two worlds. It’s actually quite painful. We feel very much part of things here, but we come to them from such a different direction that it is like being stretched over a kind of chasm. We also belong with Paul in a quite different world, much simpler in a way.
F Well this is what we’ve begun to realise from another side. You see Meruel was beginning to explain more to us about the archangelic world, and how it related to the elemental earthly world Ophromine springs from. Meruel once told us that they all related to Michael as their leader, and this led to a description of how Michael has much the same relation to them as the beings we cal ‘ascended masters’ have to us. We began to realise that Michael experiences our group in a different way from that in which Meruel does. Meruel as an archangel sees its own being reflected in the way we in our group relate to each other as individuals. But Michael is at a higher stage than this. For Michael, this group of ours appears as a single awareness. At a certain point Lucia and I realised that we needed to ask Michael something, because we have twice been confronted with a presence we recognised as the CHRIST. So Lucia asked point blank how Michael was related to the CHRIST. Her question aroused very deep responses from this mysterious world we are becoming aware of. It was as if our relationship to all these matters was being realigned at a higher level. Meruel then said that Michael wished to answer this question directly, but could only do so to the group as a whole. This meant waiting till you two were also here. What we then did was to arrange that we would come together at ten o’clock this morning, trusting that you would want to become involved in the way Michael clearly sees you as being.
L It naturally crossed our minds that in the ordinary way we should consult you first. But this seems to be a necessary condition of how the group is. It would be nearly impossible to explain everything we would have needed to over the telephone. We thought if Michael sees you as an essential part of the group we could afford to trust that you would too.
A As far as I’m concerned there seems to be a kind of inevitability about the whole thing. There’s a lot I don’t understand, but it feels fine to me.
MG I feel the same. Isn’t it nearly ten o’clock now?
F About ten to I think. We’ve been having these meetings in a fairly formal way in what I call the aunts’ room, the one that looks out onto the garden. We got the room ready earlier, which means principally putting Joe’s menhir model in the centre with candles round it.
R ¤ "They do that mainly for me. Otherwise all the talk about ideas makes me nervous".
A Oh, I get. That wasn’t you Richard, was it? It was your friend Ophromine. Takes a bit of getting used to.
M And actually Ophromine you’re wrong. There’s a lot more to it than you think. This time we’ve actually got sixteen candles there, and they’re standing on a copy of John Martineau’s plan of the Avebury crop-formation with the two pentagrams and the hexagram. But we’re very glad it makes you feel at home.
F It’s time we moved in and got settled.
*****
F ++ "The joy! The joy, the glory, and the light! But beyond everything is the joy, born of Love, a Love so great that it can utterly penetrate and pervade all, yet without overwhelming, without annihilating. This is the joy into which you are welcomed in response to the choice you make to identify this moment as a moment of meeting with me, Michael, and through me with the CHRIST, whose countenance I am.
Lucia, sweet Lucia, shine! Illuminate the path for these seven souls as you pass through the door into the welcoming joy, into the glory, into the Light, born of the Love of the CHRIST. Perceive what you are meeting as you identify this moment. I, Michael, have changed the nature of time for you. I have opened for you a new door, a new pathway of access to what you call the present moment. Humankind had almost lost the capacity to experience the instantaneous. Everything had become dulled into the uniform greyness of endless continuity. I, Michael, have looked at what you call history. I have acknowledged it with reverence, and I have closed the book. You have no need of history, for everything has become now. This is what your prophet Eliot saw and called "the point of intersection of the timeless with time".
Melanie, priestess of the dark realm of will from which ascend the identities, polish the names and bring them into the light of renewal. Find new names for the experiences of the instantaneous moments, for occasions, for celebrations, for acts of presence, for statements of immanence which are hitherto nameless. Melanie, baptise with your naming power the practice of the presence of spirit.
Joe, explorer in the cosmic landscape, reflect the brilliance of instant perception from every corner of space and time. Mark and record the uttermost frontiers of reality for those who follow. Their gratitude reached you across the abyss of time and space, that they are not the first in the unknown wilderness. Nor are you.
Richard, receive from Lucia’s Light, from Joe’s scope of perspective, from Melanie’s power of the Name, the essence of what can be perceived by humanity, and allow the Concept of that essence to arise like mist into the realm of Thinking and there become clear. From the love which that clarity arouses in you words of Truth will rain into the hearing of mankind.
And now, Fiona, let Lucia carry my words, so that her Light-filled voice may speak an answer to her own question."
L ++ "I, Michael, perceive in each of you the manifestation of your essence, and behold it as forming a single Being. In Fiona that singleness and uniqueness shines most clearly as a quality of the Heart. CHRIST is present in the Heart of each one of you. It is only that in Fiona that presence has an extra quality which enables the rest of you to be aware of the CHRIST presence in yourselves. It is that awareness that opens the door to me, to manifest, especially through Fiona, a dawning visibility of the CHRIST in your group, something that can be called its Countenance. There is a fivefold form in your group which has grown to the point of being able to manifest this as a Unity. But it reached a threshold which threatened it with isolation from the reality which gave birth to it. This is what led the group to Avebury, where a similar threat, and a similar birth of transcendental healing, was taking place. Just as the Pentagram at Avebury, in both its centripetal and in its centrifugal form, gave birth to a Hexagram, a double triangle, which reunited it with Earth, so your group met there the two human beings who could both complete your group, and protect it from isolation from the world around it.
Maggie, you have the capacity to extend the range of vision of the whole group into a world of perceptions which it is now strong enough to bear. At any earlier point your kind of clairvoyance would have drowned the group in a psychedelic turmoil which would have dissipated its identity and power of growth. For you yourself this is another step on your path towards freeing yourself from the squalor and astral confusion of your spiritualistic experiences bringing form and exactitude into your clairvoyant perceptions.
And so finally to you Andrew. Just as Maggie is a citizen of a world of perceptions which can lift the group a timely step further into the etheric realms, and thereby bring the pictures into amore truthful form, so you, Andrew, can ground the group in the experiences of common humanity. You can express the realities the group is destined to bring to mankind in terms which make sense to them out of their own lives, something which you share as your daily reality. Without you, everything the group represents would float off in isolation. Without Maggie it would sink into abstraction and banality. You represent the two triangles of the group’s Venusian Hexagram, so that it can be suspended from the point of the one above it, and balance on the point of the one beneath it.
Let Richard now hold the baton, so that I can add a closing perspective upon these thoughts.
R ++ "There is now a seven fold pattern of relationships, a heptagram, which will bring a new dimension and a new quality into what you do. This in no way supersedes or diminishes the combined hexagram-pentagram which preceded it, or indeed the original pentragram which has been forming over the last twelve months. These enhancements were in turn preceded by an earlier form, the triangle which grew for many years between Fiona, Joe and Richard. Each stage of growth has manifested itself as a living geometry, and each one I, Michael, perceive as a unitary whole. This is my function in relation to the CHRIST, to present for mankind a visible, bearable, sustainable, and comprehensible Countenance of the changeless divine nature, so that the CHRIST itself can continue in its eternal becoming and enhancement. CHRIST is not what you, humanity , are. CHRIST is what you eternally become, I, Michael, am your guarantor that you can eternally change without in the process losing your divine nature and Being."
F ++ "Let us now through Fiona seal this event in the New Time, that it may both irradiate the cosmos from this point and at the same time germinate as a living seed of thinking in each human being whom your I.T. School reaches. Joe, could you express this for me before the CHRIST as an invocation, and Melanie, could you record in writing what is said? Dear Meruel, I ask you to hold the Form, so that all those present may participate with full attention in what is done. Dear Ophromine, I ask you to be present in the Pillar, in the Flames, in the Paper and the Pen in Melanie’s hand as she moves to record the words.
Let us rest in the stillness of quiet breathing as Joe prepares to speak."
*****
Joe prepares to speak the invocation. Melanie sits with paper and pen. The others close their eyes and breathe quietly. The sixteen candles burn steadily. The patterns of light and shade on the Pillar move in the candle light. Far away in Brittany the Goh Menhir stands in the dusk. Rain pours steadily down upon it and trickles through the fault line. Human endeavour is never complete.
Joe:
At the infinite plane all is Light
My bodily mind is reflecting Light at this point of intersection
That my soul may comprehend Light through its Human Intelligence
So may Spirit Humanity create Light and be GOD
May Light descend and ascend upon Earth between GOD and Humankind
*****
At the infinite plane all is Love
My bodily heart is resonating to Love at this point of intersection
That my soul may worship in Love as its World Temple
So may Spirit Humanity create Love and become CHRIST
May Love pervade the Earth and give birth to CHRIST in Humankind
*****
At the infinite plane all is Life
My bodily will is incarnating Life at this point of intersection
That my soul may fulfil Life as its Earthly Deed
So may Spirit Humanity create Life and achieve Mastership
May Life stream forth from Earth and serve the Cosmos as Humankind
*****
We perceive the point-centred power of the Lord-of –This-World
Denying Heaven
We feel Lucifer aflame within us storming the Heavens
Banishing Earth
There stands and strives between them Michael-CHRIST in Humanity
Its shining countenance redeems Lucifer’s Light
On the neck of the Serpent-Dragon rests its sword point
Through Michael-CHRIST, All Light Radiant as Cosmic Intelligence
Through Michael-CHRIST, All Love Resonant as World Temple
Through Michael-CHRIST, All Life Active as Earthly Deed
May the Divine be reborn upon Earth as Freedom
*****
M Style.
J I beg your pardon?
M I said ‘style’. The perpetual problem of how to live from moment to moment on this planet without falling over your feet and feeling ridiculous most of the time.
R Not most of the time. But certainly a lot of the time.
M More and more of the time as time goes on.
R Traditionally people have always solved it by ritual, which means balancing the body’s urge towards spontaneity by disciplining it.
L So when you urgently want to pee while an archangel is communicating you hold it?
M You go before the session starts.
J What then happens is that life becomes monastic. A rigid pattern of matins and trines and complines and vespers, with bodily needs fitting in as best they may.
L Or suppressed altogether. No sex, for instance. Till it bursts out at unexpected places.
M We sat there for an hour and a half this morning, unable or unwilling to move. Yet the final word was ‘Freedom’!
R Not Fiona. She slipped out quite soon.
M What was she doing?
J She went to the kitchen and made sandwiches.
L She doesn’t make a pompous point of that sort of practicality. She just does it.
R The temptation to schedule spiritual life and make everybody work to a time-table is enormous.
J So far our Beings have been pretty spontaneous with us.
L Well, we’re in this extraordinary process of creating each other, so since we’re spontaneous and fairly undisciplined, that’s the side of them which seems to manifest.
M At least at first. But this time, you notice, there was a need for the Beings to pay attention to our pre-packaged time system if they were to get all seven of us together at one moment. Saturday, ten a.m. on the dot! Please be there.
J Yes, but not on orders from outside. They asked first what was convenient.
M But then, having elicited a free decision it was succeeded by insistence.
J Yes, but it was our insistence. It is our nature which seeks a form, not theirs. They already have form, without the need for further discipline.
M And we need discipline. But it is free, spontaneous discipline we need. In other words STYLE!
*****
L Finding names for Michael’s timeless moments. That was what he asked you to do, Mel. Style seems to be one of them.
M Certainly a specification if not a full name. A pointer. Unless I’m much mistaken that’s Paul’s car coming up the drive. Faultless timing for lunch.
L Where’s Fiona?
M Lying down I think. Having made lunch and left the kitchen spotless.
L Don’t over to it love. The rest of us aren’t exactly slovens either. But she is pretty marvellous, I agree.
M Paul, hello! Welcome to Garway!
P Melanie! Lovely to see you. And Lucia! You’re ravishing, but I’ve sort of got over you! (hugs her).
L I don’t fancy you any more either, so perhaps we’re no longer a threat to each other. I’m so glad you said that. I wanted to avoid you, but there’s no need.
P Joe, Richard, hello!
J Hi, Paul. Nice to see you.
R You’ve caught us in a sort of waking dream this morning. We’ve all been on a kind of spiritual space-trip since breakfast. We’re just about through the jet-lag.
J That’s a very good analogy Richard. It’s just how it feels.
P I’m very glad to have come at that sort of moment, because that’s really what I need to talk to you about, particularly since Maggie and Andrew started coming here. Where are they, by the way?
M I rather think they went off for a walk soon after the end of our morning session. They must have gone about an hour ago.
P And Fiona. How’s she?
M She’s fine most of the time. But she does seem to need a lot of rest. We haven’t talked about this among ourselves, but I have been a bit worried lately.
R She moves more slowly. I put it down to the sprained ankle at first, the one she had just before our first combined visit here in May. That took a long time to heal.
P Maybe she should see someone. We have an excellent health centre in Plymouth where one or two of them are very open to alternative therapies. So we can get homeopathy, for instance, on the national health.
R I know she isn’t on anybody’s list since we moved here. There was a woman doctor in London she used sometimes to see.
J Perhaps we should all sign up with someone in Hereford for a general check-over. That would be less alarmist.
M You don’t really think she’s ill, do you Joe?
J I think it’s probably been in all our minds that she may by.
P I’d rather like a word with Andrew and Maggie. Do you think I’d meet them if I went down the hill?
M Well, that is the way they went. If you took the car you might well meet them down near the river. You could turn at the main road and come back the same way. They know it’s nearly lunch time. You could bring them back.
P I’ll do that. See you later.
*****
M We never offered him a drink.
R I felt he was a bit restless. He wanted to talk to his friends before launching out into whatever’s on his mind.
J It’s not difficult to anticipate what that might be. There’s a bigger and looser thing going on down there in Plymouth. He wants to tell us about it. At the same time two of his chief lieutenants are spending a lot of time with us. I feel he probably pictures us as being some sort of opposite camp with different priorities. I think he’s sniffing out the question of possible divided loyalties.
M I think we’re creating a polarising other half of that picture as well…..thinking of ourselves as deepeners and them as spreaders, and projecting a feeling of division. Maggie and Andrew don’t give me that feeling, though, that they are being pulled two ways. Not at all. On the contrary I think they are ambassadors in both directions. It is simply that there is a lot for them to digest in coming into the kind of intensity going on here. There simply hasn’t been time or occasion for the tide to flow the other way.
L Time and occasion! Exactly what Michael is conveying. I think it will balance itself out once we start experiencing Plymouth. I think we need to take that initiative.
R Soon. Here they come.
M I’ll fetch Fiona.
*****
L Who wants a cold drink and who wants tea or coffee? Or there are several herb teas?
MG It’s really steamy hot down there by the river. This is a wonderful bit of country you’ve settled yourselves into. I always feel hot tea cools you down quickest on days like this.
L Comin’ up, Maggie. Tea makes me hotter than ever. I need pints of orange juice.
A We saw at least four different sorts of dragonfly. I don’t know one from t’other.
MG Fiona, love, how are you? It’s lovely to see you. Andrew and I have been exploring your beautiful river.
F It is lovely, isn’t it? I used to play down there as a child.
MG Paul brought us back in the car. I was glad of the lift.
A You’d soon lose weight here sweetheart.
F Hello Paul. Welcome to Garway! This is your first time, isn’t it? I hope there’ll be lots more.
P It’s a lovely place, Fiona. I’ve never spent much time in the country. I’m a townie.
L Like me. But I’ve acclimatised very quickly. I don’t really miss London at all.
P To some extent in Plymouth we have the best of both worlds It’s a nice town, and I do appreciate being by the sea.
L We’ve been talking about going down to see you one weekend instead of Andrew and Maggie coming here.
P That’s one of the things I’ve been wanting to talk to you about. I think it would be a great pity if we lost touch. As far as I’m concerned the whole idea of I.T. started when I met you that first time in London. It was as if a seed was sown then which sprouted and grew very rapidly. I felt that what you were doing was germinating seeds which didn’t start to grow until they were planted out. We had definite evidence in our case at least that we had a highly fertile seed in our hands. I seem to remember that at the time I met you another one had sprouted in North London somewhere and was growing very rapidly in the same sort of way. You’ll remember how at the time I was seriously concerned that you seemed to show no interest in the results of what you were doing. I couldn’t understand how you could judge the effectiveness of I.T. if you had no feed-back channel, and didn’t even feel the need for one.
R Have you felt the same way since Maggie and Andrew started coming up here? Before you go on I’ll tell you now that we feel this was a very important thing to have happened. It was as if a channel of communication opened up at a very timely moment.
M Sit down Paul and have some lunch. You can’t think on an empty stomach. Has everyone got what they want to drink?
F Sit next to me Paul. I want to be sure I understand exactly what concerns you. You have a very powerful energy and I want to experience its quality. I know you have a very important function in the I.T. situation. I want to feel whether this function is working for or against what I conceive this Intraterrestrial impulse to be.
P That’s amazing! How can you possibly imagine that the active sprouting and spreading of the germinating seeds you have sown could be working against the I.T. impulse? Surely that’s what the whole impulse is about.
J Here Paul, have one of these prawn mayonnaise sandwiches. As an immigrant in Cornwall you’ve doubtless discovered the importance of fish for the brain. It cools it no end and nourishes it at the same time.
P I feel somehow you’re putting me off. Yes, I’m quite hungry, and the sandwiches look really good. Thanks. But I feel as if you’re stalling. I’ve got serious concerns, and I’d be very angry if I felt you were not equally concerned. I recognised straight away that you’d hit on an important idea with this I.T. scheme. At the same time I felt, and I still feel to some extent, that you were being less than fully responsible in the way you were promoting it. You talked about the need to avoid becoming isolated and in-turned, becoming yet another variant on the theme of religious cults or sects. But I feel that’s already what you are in danger of becoming. I sense a certain seductiveness in that very tendency. And one of the things that really upsets me is that Maggie and Andrew, who are two of the most important agents of the impulse in Plymouth, seem to be going the same way. Frankly we can’t afford to lose them.
R Andrew, have you any sense of divided loyalties in this new situation developing for you and Maggie? For example, have you discussed with Maggie the idea that you might want to leave Plymouth and come and live here? How do you feel about this Maggie?
MG Andrew?
A I think the idea has probably occurred to us both, though we haven’t discussed it. Maybe we should. But I don’t in any way see it as a question of loyalties. I think to a great extent that is a projected notion created by something which disturbs you, Paul. I think you feel threatened by something. It seems to me very important to find out what that threat is, and whether there is any substance in it. Would you like us to live here Maggie?
MG Not in the least. I feel very strongly that our work is in Plymouth. What I get here is very important to me, and more and more I feel that we need it for our work in Plymouth. But there’s something else too. I don’t know whether you, Paul, are ready to hear it.
P You’d better try me. We’re past the point of playing about. I think one thing we have in common is the realisation that something very important for humanity is going on. The question is whether we can agree on what that is.
A You aren’t half getting through those prawn sandwiches Paul. You picked the right thing there Melanie. I’d like another myself.
M Fiona made them. These communication mornings make us all hungry I think. Here, try one of these strawberry and nut ones Maggie.
MG You don’t care about my weight do you? But I won’t say no.
A I’ll tell you, Paul, what I really think, and you’ll have to forgive me if I say it very directly. I wouldn’t have been able to a couple of months ago, but I’ve become very clear on it since we began taking part in what they’re doing here. When it comes down to it Paul, I don’t think you have very much idea at all what these seeds you talk about actually are. You speak of these people having hit on an important and effective idea , and you’ve said to me several times you didn’t think this group had much idea how to promote it. Your great strength is that once you’ve got hold of something you have a gift for organising , explaining and spreading it around. You’ve done it very effectively for some time with the crop circles. They are something you can see concretely in front of you, visible and measurable. You’ve played an important part in the croppie movement in sorting out the issues involved. But with I.T. it’s different. You’ve treated it as an idea and promoted it as such. But what it is an idea of, you have very little notion. Maggie’s experiences intrigue you, but that’s as far as it goes. You haven’t at all made up your mind where to place them as realities in your own world.
R Let me ask you something, Andrew. I won’t ask Paul because I want an independent witness. You told us that at first when you started getting groups together Paul held forth a great deal of the time, and then that later on other people who had been with you for some time began to get the confidence to speak. What I want to know is, what does Paul actually talk about to these groups? How does he introduce the subject? People must ask him what I.T.s are, at least those who have seen leaflets or Lucia’s folder. What does he say about them? Does he talk about Intraterrestrials as if they were realities to him?
A What do you think Mag? It’s difficult to answer that. He certainly doesn’t down play them as if they were mere symbols. At the same time…..
MG I’ll tell you what I experience. He talks about them as someone who is referring to UFOs who talks if he hasn’t actually seen one. He give the impression that he probably believes in them, but that’s as far as it goes.
A I don’t think that gives quite the right impression, or rather I don’t think it’s the whole story, darling. You know Richard, Paul, if he’ll excuse my saying this, is a very excellent and experienced speaker. When he hasn’t made his mind up about something he is fair enough to put both sides of a story with great skill, and leaves people free to make up their own minds. At the same time, as I was about to say just now, he can’t help being honest about his own preferences. I’d describe you Paul as a middle-of-the-roader. You’re open minded only as long as the people round you are not too committed. At that point you veer towards scepticism. It’s commitment that threatens you, and to be fair, that includes materialistic commitment as well as the various paranormal belief systems.
P I don’t know if I’ve been put under a microscope or shoved through a wringer. I find it quite uncomfortable.
A A dose of your own medicine perhaps.
P What do you mean?
A You’re powerful, Paul. Powerful enough to infect a lot of people with your own uncertainties. As a result, the effect you have is a manipulative one. You’re not a nihilist, but you are an agnostic, and charismatic with it.
P So you think I’m a menace.
R Andrew’s expressed the situation very clearly, and I don’t think he concludes you’re an unequivocal disaster area! I certainly don’t not if his analysis of you is correct. Is it?
P It’s not too far out. But he underestimates some of the consequences of my scepticism. I think the consequences of allowing you to give free reign among ordinary people to a presentation of your so-called ‘Beings’ as objective realities is extremely threatening to independent judgement. It certainly threatens mine. You talk about charisma. That can take many forms, one of which is certainly the power of myth. Letting loose the sort of tales among ordinary folk that you tell, according to what Maggie and Andrew tell me, about your communication with supersensible beings is no different in essence, to my mind, from encouraging a belief in Santa Claus among kids. There comes a point where you have to come clean. There ain’t no such animal. When push comes to shove, consciously or unconsciously, you made it up.
L No, we didn’t. At least I didn’t. Did we, Mel?
M You know we didn’t.
J None of us did.
R We’re beginning to learn something about how consciousness, including its content, comes into existence in the first place. We know a bit about creation, and that includes being created as well as creating. If we created these beings then they certainly also created us. That’s the implication as far as I can see. In your terms, if they’re fiction, then so are we. They made us up.
P I’m not aware of any such implication. As far as I’m concerned, I’m the sole available point of departure for my own mental processes. I’m a Cartesian. I think, therefore I am.
R And before you thought?
P No one has any ground for supposing they existed before they were first aware of thinking, except for the indirect evidence of others. They existed then only as objects in other people’s consciousness.
F I know I existed before I have any awareness of having formed thoughts.
P How?
F I remember the dangler in my cradle.
P You regard that memory as evidence that you existed?
F Not really. I only make it as a comment on your statement. I didn’t think at that stage. But I don’t regard thinking as evidential in that sense. This sort of discussion doesn’t ask real questions. When we are able to think we can become aware of our own existence as permanent, not because thinking itself can reach such a conclusion, but because it can lead us to the discovery of abilities which can themselves demonstrate that such a conclusion is true. When we are in a body thinking arises in the form of concepts prompted by sense perception. We become aware of objects and processes in this way, ourselves among them. Body-free thinking is also possible, either as a result of meditation, or in involuntary out-of-body experiences. Furthermore, this thinking can actually be perceived if attention is paid to it. Castaneda’s Don Juan called this the second attention, prompt-free attention originating as an act of will. This act of will is the only valid evidence, if such is needed, of my own existence, and it is only apparent to me. You have no evidence of my existence, except by analogy with your own, until you choose to direct your second attention onto my thinking. You are then directly aware of my existence without resorting to analogy.
P From what you are saying, this so-called second attention is just as prone to illusion as the first.
F Certainly.
P Then how do I know that the Fiona I create by my second attention is real?
F You mean, what corroborative evidence do you have?
P Yes, if you put it that way.
F It was you who implied it. I was finding out whether it was what ‘knowing’ implied for you It appears it is. Like most people you confuse knowing with what you think of as proof, which in the last resort is no more than cumulative statistics, which by their own definition are never complete. Knowing in the sense I mean is a statement of reality which I make. It is something I do. It is the reality I create, and it is the only reality which, in the first instance, is valid for me. It is complete for me at the moment of its creation. You have access to it by virtue of directing your attention to it. I do the same with you, and in doing so extend what is real for me beyond the reality I create. That is the only process we are entitled to call real communication between us.
P What about tables and chairs?
F Indeed. What about them? What about the whole process we refer to as calling a spade a spade? All I can say is, I have come to view the whole scenario which we call the world as, shall we say, extremely provisional. In no sense is it real at the level of the questions I have been raising. But we don’t get very much further along the lines of what is brought into consideration by the path we have called Intraterrestrial if we insist on confusing reality with this working hypothesis we refer to as ‘The World’.
P What about these so-called Beings of yours, then?
F It would be more accurate to refer to them as ‘Coming-into-Beings’, which is a bit clumsy. But it’s a healthy exercise to picture them in that way, and also, of course, to picture ourselves like that. I sometimes picture them as species of mirrors in which we start to see what we are like at other levels of reality than the obvious one.
M M+ "I see you all as reflections of myself in different areas of what I call personality. So you are also mirrors for me in the reverse direction. I am held together as a self-aware entity by virtue of your communication with each other at that self-aware level. Steiner calls that level of communication ‘archai’. Or rather he calls Archai ‘spirits of personality’, which amounts to the same thing. I literally come into being as an archangel in the course of that process, just as you come into being as a human in the course of an assembly of animal processes. But I no more consist, in my self-awareness, as a mere product of your communication with each other, than you exist merely as a bi-product of animal processes. I am not a Cartesian archangel either, Paul. It isn’t a case of ‘you think therefore I am.’! It is however perfectly true that I owe my self-awareness to the growth of your conscious communication."
P So, who was that? I gather it wasn’t you, Melanie.
F No, that was our friend Meruel.
P Meruel? And he’s an archangel? Well either you’re crazy or it’s a con. Spiritual name-dropping.
R Would you consider letting us loose on your flock?
P I don’t know. In one way it would be a wonderful opportunity to educate their reality-sense. I’ve a good mind to let you try. I warn you though, I’d tear you to shreds. I don’t know. I’ll think about it. I don’t know how you do it. You’re as batty as fruit-cake. I must get going; I’ve an evening meeting in London.
A We’ll see you off.
P I simply don’t know what to say. You’re extremely convincing, especially you, Fiona.
F Thank you, kind sir!
P I’ve always been told psychotics are a hundred per cent convincing. I don’t mean to be rude but... .bloody hell!
F You must come again. You’re always welcome.
P I might well do that. Hell, I must be crazy myself. Bye all. Thanks for your hospitality. Those sandwiches were special, Fiona. Stay afloat all of you. Bye.
*****
L He called us psychotic.
J Yes. He thinks we’re crazy.
M Genius is to madness next allied.
R People who think they’re geniuses may not be technically mad, but there are certainly psychological risks involved.
J Everything we’re doing is a hectic cavorting along the edge of psychic precipices. You learn to steer or you come to grief.
F Meruel said as much to me on one occasion if you remember. It was just before I had that minor heart-attack. He talked about a tight-rope. But he then said we were in no danger of falling, and that our paranoia was an illusion. The abyss is real. We have to confront it, and that means actually overcoming fear. It also means overcoming destructive rage in ourselves and others. And it means total trust. We have to achieve a moment by moment conquest of doubt. We not only h