The Archive of Stanley Messenger The Cathar Connection a novel by Stanley Messenger 6. DIARY OF THE JOURNEY

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They finally set out on the last day of July. It was a very different grouping of people from that which had gradually coalesced out of three very dissimilar pairs almost a year earlier. The doctor with his patient, the unlikely friendship flowering into love, the middle-aged cousin with his young protégé – life had fused them by now into colleagues on a footing of equality. Knowledge of each other’s weaknesses and strengths had by now forged a strong bond of mutual respect, so that they were consistently at ease with one another.

That this bond would now be put to a further test none of them doubted. But the nature of this was for the time being hidden beneath a growing expectancy and excitement as they drove onto the ferry late on the Monday evening. The clear sky was soon alive with stars. The young couple strolled about the deck, their sense of mission soaring almost visibly about them. It wasn’t long before they were deeply asleep in the cabin below.

Fraser took longer to relax. The responsibility lay more heavily on his shoulders, and whereas in former years deep resources of psychological experience would have come readily to his aid, he now found himself in midstream of an inner revolution. The farther shore was in sight, but not yet accessible. It required a quite new step of faith to put himself as much into the hands of these young people as they had put themselves into his. He was uneasily aware that his whole future depended on a successful outcome to the experiment upon which they were embarked.

For several hours he mused over the events of recent months, first on deck, and then later retreating from the mist and cold to the bar below. From time to time he made note in the same loose-leaf notebook with which he began Raymond’s case-notes. He planned to suggest that they now all used it as a diary for the journey. Soon he too was overcome by sleep. By the time they all awoke the sun was high in the sky. By the evening they were in Spain, had driven well past San Sebastian, and were bedded down in the Dormobile in the rolling Basque hills. Fraser wrote up the log for the first day’s journey.

***

The Car-ferry docked at Santander about half-past-three in the afternoon, Tuesday. As we drove through the town and onto the Bilbao road Raymond and Esther were larking about like a couple of kids. We were all in proper holiday mood, and this had overtones of sweetness, a gentle simplicity and sacredness, which was a far more definitive answer to the ponderous overshadowing of unresolved tragedies than any more solemn approach to the mountains would have been.

The fact was of course that at one level the victory was already won. We had come to terms conceptually with the nature and origin of hallucination, and this was common ground between us. What was still to be done – the resolution of connections and events in the outer world – was inseparable from processes of inner transformation, which in any case go on all the time, heightened almost beyond recognition as they may still be by such threshold-crossing crises as we had all recently been through.

This inner transformation in turn has an exact counterpart in the transformation on a more cosmic level. The latter kind of change one can describe as a laying aside of one form of incarnation, ie. the death of a particular personality, its metamorphosis in the spiritual world, consisting of the extractor of a sort of ultimate essence or seed, and then its re-embodiment through rebirth in an entirely different personality. What we had seen in Raymond could be regarded as this process taking place in a ‘sick’ form, involving mental illness. But it could equally be regarded as a priceless opportunity for a metamorphosis which had only partly or incompletely occurred for him before birth, to be worked through in association with others, on a conscious earthly plane. Only in this way, it could be said, is a gap left through which spiritual facts and processes incomprehensible in terms of earthly cause and effect, can break through into the realm of the comprehensible, the graspable. Out of this, motivations, plans of action, can again arise which are able to resolve what would otherwise remain at the level of breakdown, deterioration, and often of physical tragedy, disease, and premature death.

The mood which arises out of such understanding is one of deep relaxation, a profound loss of tension in the struggle to make sense of bizarre events. The breaking through of light into the shared mood can only properly be called an experience of divine grace. Something quite new began to break into the succession of events, a sort of happenstance or synchronicity that we all felt as a direct consequence of the spontaneous openness to light or enlightenment which we were sharing.

 

ESTHER Wednesday, mid-morning.

When I had read through this first entry which Alan made in the diary about three times, I not only began to understand it, I really began to think that the old dear had got something which it isn’t all that easy to understand except through these masses of verbiage. I tried to put it in my own words and didn’t get very far. In other words, I thought, we feel happy and blessed and simple because we understand things a little better, which gives us strength to carry on and face what could well be quite an ordeal. We’ve changed, and this will probably change the things which happen, and with any luck will also turn out to make sense in terms of reincarnation. Unfortunately, Ray had to get ill over it, but maybe this was a blessing in that we were forced to struggle hard to understand things more deeply. That may well open up new possibilities that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, such as helpful coincidences. All this makes us less tense, hence more open to enlightenment.

I don’t know if that makes it any easier for you little chicks. I know it still feels quite complicated to me. But one the whole I think we would miss something if we didn’t have to wrestle with Alan’s efforts to put very difficult experiences into words.

All the same, when we decided to keep this diary of events we thought we must find a way of stopping the old coot pontificating away, describing in advance everything that was going to happen before it happened. Circumstances favoured this, because we have a very long journey ahead of us, so we are taking turns at driving, and Alan is the best driver. So this gives Raymond and me plenty of chance to put in our bits of the writing. Raymond is a rotten driver, positively hair-raising on twisty mountain roads as we discovered very soon yesterday as we worked our way over the Spanish frontier and into the French Basses Pyrenées. So Alan is doing most of the hairy mountain roads, and I’ve been driving on the steady mountain parts, narrow straight second-class roads with a lot of stopping on verges to let things pass. Also I’m the natural history one of the three, and mainly control the picnic things, so I could pick good places to stop, sun traps with plenty of Alpine flowers and butterflies.

We had decided to do it the long way round, partly to see a bit of the Spanish Biscay coast, and some of the Basque country. I for instance was keen to watch them play pelote, which is like a particularly dangerous game of blown-up squash rackets using lacrosse sticks. We had a chance to watch for a few minutes near Cambo. But it was also so that we could approach the Pyrenean giants by way of the gentler terrain of the Basses Pyrenées.

Anyone who sees only one bit of the Pyrenées gets a very one-sided picture, my father used to tell me. It was his holidays there before World War Two that first fired my imagination to go there. He saw the Pyrenées as a sort of microcosm of the whole spiritual history of Europe, almost every valley and its ‘gave’ or mountain torrent and its dominating high peak in the background, embodying a distinct ‘mansion’ in the kingdom of whatever god overshadowed and protected the whole range, and each itself overshadowed by its own giant presiding hierarchy, whose home was in the high peak, a deva certainly, but at times some being even higher and more formidable. Even the names of the peaks, he said, embodied something of the mood that dominated the valley and its history.

My father first began to think about this on his first visit which was to Lourdes in 1938. At his magical spot the life forces are so delicate and open that a sensitive child who had lived there since babyhood suddenly came into contact with the highest of all earth beings, the Divine Isis-Sophia herself. The only earth being profound enough to become the mother of a child who could himself become the vehicle for the earth embodiment of the Sun God, the Son of God himself. So simple and pure was the child Bernadette that her experience opened the way for thousands of people whose conceptual and feeling life was of the crudest and most banal form of Christianity, to open their hearts there to a particularly pure form of blessing, which not infrequently spilled over into psychic and even gross physical healing.

My father wondered how it was that this sacred place had remained under the domination of that part of Christianity which had become most formalised, gripped by the most rigid dogmatism. The very place in the mountains where the forces of the heart seemed to pour through with overwhelming simplicity, reaching the hearts of millions of unsophisticated people, was at the same time controlled and cloaked by forces which could ensure that a price of almost total incomprehension, misunderstanding and formal obscurantism, was exacted from them. Never in this life could most of them hope to understand what had really happened to them.

As my father continued up the Gave de Pau to the foot of the Brêche de Roland with its colossal 1500 foot cliff, and the long climb up over Childe Roland’s famous path from Spain, he realised that this pass did not after all itself mark the highest and most dominating command and protection of the sacred valley of the Virgin. Behind it, hidden on the Spanish side, was a peak 1500 feet higher still. When he saw the name on the map, Mont Perdu, Monte Perdido, the Lost Mountain, his whole soul reverberated with the tragedy of Lourdes. For the time being, he realised, the heart centre of this whole range is darkened and obscured by that which can only he healed when the Christ Being comes again, and releases Christendom from its dogmatic thrall, reveals its lost origin, and links it once more with the Cosmos.

Later on he found himself a few miles further east, and faced with a very different experience. This was at St. Bertrand de Comminges, familiar to him from the first story in one of his favourite horror books of adolescence, M R James’ Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. This is the village where the very stones of the church excoriate with Gothic Horror. Bogles creep and leer from every corner, every gargoyle, every handhold of each pew seems intent on extruding and dispersing evil from the sacred substances of the tortured earth. A crocodile skin hangs on the wall to symbolise the death of a Dragon.

Legend ascribes to the village the distinction of being one of the principal concentration camps of the Roman Empire. Even Annas and Caiaphas were sent there. Later Bertrand was sent by the Pope as a man holy enough to expunge the evil. But something of the horror remains, as Montague James realised. It was when my father saw that this section of the range was ruled by a mountain called Maladetta, Pic Maudit, the Accursed, that he began to wonder whether the whole range was not perhaps a conversation between very mighty beings, keeping in balance a microcosm of forces, whose ultimate resolution would speak with mighty power a giant Word, a formidable mantric syllable out of history into the resurrecting Temple of Christendom in some future century.

The whole experience reached a kind of apotheosis for him when he came into the Cathar country, towards which, on this second day, we were slowly winding our way through increasingly impressive terrain. For at the top of the southern valley of the Y-shaped kingdom of ancient Sabarthez, (where in the heart of the mountains the last of the Albigensian Cathari were starved to death in darkness), at the head of the valley of the Sos, behind the castle of Montrealp de Sos, destroyed by Richelieu, and bearing the legend that it had been the Pyrenean version of the Castle of the Grail, my father read on the map – Pic Montcalm, the Mountain of Peace.

Father felt there was a threefold structure, a kind of devic architecture, giving a clue to the Temple lay-out of the whole range. Calm to the east at Pic Montcalm, the calm of death which awaits resurrection; a smouldering curse surviving in the middle east at Pic Maudit, and a mighty being at the centre at Mont Perdu, whose meaning was still largely lost and forgotten. The pattern was clearly incomplete, a jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing. There were tantalising clues, but he never had a chance to follow them up. My journey with Helène and Raymond, terrifying as it was, and if anything adding to the mystery rather than resolving anything, yet had the effect of involving me in the stories my father had told me as a sort of reassuring background. My determination to arrive at a rationale for Raymond’s experiences largely stemmed from the sense of ultimate meaning the very stones and streams conveyed to me, singing as they did all the time to me the songs my father’s stories faintly sang.

***

Raymond now takes over the log-book from mid afternoon on Wednesday.

***

This diary is becoming something of an inner pilgrimage, making visible an otherwise invisible companion, a fourth member who drives along with us, pointing out the features of the landscape, raying into the conversations a lateral commentary which is developing a personality of its own.

For some reason or another Esther had never got round to telling me about this experience of her father’s before the war. When I read it, it started to open up a quite new dimension of my own experiences. It gave me a fulcrum with which to attain a still more distant and objective slant on the saga of Ramón de Foix, the little Spanish by-blow of the Comte de Foix’s younger brother, from whose toils I have now almost completely emerged. It was not that I had in any way identified with the three streams professor Corstorphine had become aware of in his youth.

But what did emerge into my consciousness was the hitherto unnoticed fact that Ramón lived completely within the protection and blessing of the mountains themselves. For him the mountains were God. It was this more than the ‘parfaits’, more than the songs and legends, more that the ever haunting, ever present background melodies and lilting rhythms of the troubadours, more even than the ‘consolamentum’ itself, the holy consolamentum with its promise of a gateway through the impenetrable stone, through the shrieks of the torture, through the horrifying, overwhelming, yet releasing brightness and agony of the fire, into the Light that lay beyond the all-encompassing blackness of the freezing caves.

For Ramón the totally awe-inspiring presence of the mountains themselves was what counted; but not just the separate mountains, it was the very being of the Pyrenées itself, so tremendous, filling the whole sky. Yet in the same breath and breadth of vision the mountain was a gentle young girl. infinitely tender, Pyrène herself, the eternal white maiden of the heart of the mountains, patiently waiting by the shores of the lake in the depths of the cavern of Lombrives where the last Cathars died, waiting for the liberation when her lover, the giant Hercules, releaser and dissolver of the bonds of relentless stone, should come for her in the last days.

How many hours had Ramon sat in Lombrives by the precious font, the stalagmite grail with its cupful of holy water, Pyrène’s tears falling drop by drop from the roof above, never diminished, always there as a draught of hope for the pilgrim. So too would it soon be for the last five hundred for whom Ramon had felt so overpoweringly responsible. But he had failed to bring back the rescuer from England, the Templar who knew the way through the mountains into the top of the Sos valley, and over the pathways into Spain. They had died of hunger and cold and darkness. But not of thirst; the tears of Pyrène had been the draught of the consolamentum to the very end.

Ramòn died in despair, not even noticing that Pyrène’s love was still enclosing him, that she was releasing his beloved companions at the very moment when he was craving audience with his dying breath at Ashridge with the Templar Master who would be able to return and show them the path to safety. It became my task as Raymond to come to this realisation and to lay Ramón’s ghost to sleep.

There ought to be a special word to describe the transcendent tenderness and adoration that the successive embodiers of an eternal human spirit can come to feel for one another. I have been privileged to overcome the obsessive identification I experienced with a previous embodiment of my own higher being. It has been replaced by a feeling which must until recent times have been rare in human experience, a degree of sheer fellow-feeling quite unequalled by any love for a fellow human being I have met in any other way. It is neither Eros, nor philia nor even agape. Nor is it in any trivial sense self love. Yet it is a teacher for all these four. It must be something like the tenderness the creator feels for his creatures. It is the love the higher self feels for all the lower selves to which he gives a home. It is not I, Raymond, who loves Ramón. But there is slowly, from moment to moment, being born in me One, who loves Raymond and Ramón together, and begins to have a faint inkling how many others in our ‘family’ there are to love. And it is this family, this we, who begin to sense what that love must be like which truly loves our neighbour as ourself. What a self it is which loves that neighbour! And what a neighbour that is!

 

ESTHER Wednesday evening

I am writing at the side of a most wonderful little stream that encloses a flat grassy lawn, cropped, I suppose by rabbits and deer and mountain goats. Smooth and flat, incredibly green, and at this time of day and for the last two hours comfortably warm after a day of gruelling sunshine. Another stream separates from ours, a little higher up, so that the little lawn lies in the fork of a Y.

Earlier there were butterflies in profusion. I saw a swallowtail, and several of its cousin podalirius, some black-veined whites, and in the distance what I am sure was an Apollo, and of course many blues and the smaller fritillaries. But now only an occasional skipper flits by to roost on the tall pendant grasses, where the blues and fritillaries are already hanging in dozens like grey and gold droplet leaves. Soon we shall roost too in the Dormobile standing in the lay-by just out of sight up the slope behind us.

We are quiet and at peace now, but an hour ago we were in the middle of a disturbing emotional experience with which we have to come to terms. It is Wednesday evening. We must be somewhere near Lannes on the road between Tardets and Oloron. It is N618 on the map if you want to look it up. I’m not at all sure I shall be able to find it again; places look different if you have seen them with an altered consciousness.

It is probably misleading to call it a disturbing emotional experience, without calling it also an altered state of consciousness. Perhaps the only thing disturbing about it is the aftermath of having managed, more or less successfully to remain in balance and in touch with each other, in a state of inner acceleration and heightening which came on for all three of us quite unexpectedly.

It was after I did my butterfly walk-about and we had brought the picnic things out from the caravan. I was just about to lay the things out for the meal when I happened to catch sight of the other two at the edge of the green space and each about a hundred yards away from me, quite a distance. I then noticed that we appeared to form an exact equilateral triangle. It was then that the experience took off, as it were. For me that is – the others may have experienced it differently. What happened for me was that this triangle began to ‘buzz’ in my head, I felt a pressure there. It appeared as if the three points at which we stood became geometrically linked by straight lines, which I felt, but didn’t see, as light going to a common centre. The others clearly felt something too, since they both turned to face me as I got to my feet.

It then appeared as if the common centre began to rise into the air vertically till it reached a point where, with the three of us, an invisible but powerfully felt tetrahedron was formed. We were all looking up to this point as if expecting to see something there. But all that happened was that the tetrahedron itself, outlined with invisible light, began now to glow with warmth which felt inexpressibly gentle and tender. I almost giggled at the thought that I was being loved by a tetrahedron, but was quickly sobered by the consideration that if I were a bit less thick I might be experiencing it somewhat differently.

We then had the common impulses to walk towards one another, I think under the impression that this would somehow concentrate the tetrahedron, and bring the apex near enough to ‘see properly’, whatever that might turn out to mean. Anyway, this is what happened. I shut my eyes, or blinked, and opened them again, and found that the figure was in a short of way visible, and was somehow moving in colour as it got smaller, from invisible through yellow and apricot and peach towards a sort of rose-pink colour. I noticed the buzzing in my head had stopped, after going through a kind of intensification, and something like a rising musical note, which went beyond the audible range.

Then, quite unexpectedly we all stopped, as if we weren’t allowed to cross a line. But really it was because the rose tetrahedron ‘said so’, not be being in a frightening sense formidable, but simply because the tenderness now really did become past bearing, and this was formidable. I know that tears began to spill over my eyelids, but I felt I had to control them or I would miss something important that was being, or would be said. But after that, on one level anyway, nothing more happened. One moment we were looking at something at the same time in front of us and within us. The next moment we were looking at each other. But we were not the same. We were taller, or steadier and more solid, or more present, or perhaps none of these. Anyway, different, and dearer. We fell into each other’s arms. We walked back to the food.

At some point during the meal Alan handed me the diary, and said, "You’d better write it; better do it now while its fresh."

"I can’t possibly", I said.

"You’re probably the only one who can", said Alan.

"Then it won’t be written", said I.

However, I wrote it. The others haven’t read it yet. They probably won’t tonight.

 

FRASER Thursday

Time to ‘pontificate’ again apparently. Thinking about that word I realise of course that it means building bridges. The verbal bridges I build are, I should have thought, almost entirely to make things clearer to me, and are not particularly, perhaps not at all, audience-conscious. Raymond realises this better then most. He’s quite right that for a lot of the time when I’m with patients I say very little. But I have to do an awful lot of verbalising to get things clear to myself, and this gets one classed as an intellectual if one tries it out on people.

I really would like to get to the point of being somehow able to transcend verbalisation. What happened yesterday went some way towards that for me. But both Raymond and I agreed after reading Esther’s account that we wouldn’t try to describe it ourselves. We also agreed that it was nothing like what she said; reading it nevertheless added a new dimension which was extremely important to us on its own account. It also had the effect of bringing him and me closer together, but I don’t quite know why this was. Just listen to me saying that! One of the casualties on this trip is my capacity as a theoretical psychologist. I’m beginning to feel positively imbecile. Raymond thinks this is no bad thing. I seem to remember him saying earlier that the doctor as therapist might turn out to be the first casualty of deepened insight. I wonder if he’s right.

Apart from this there seems to be a general relaxation of any tensions that my still have persisted between us. And I think I shall stick my neck out to the extent of speculating that there may well be some kind of fourth presence along with us as we continue towards Lourdes. But I utterly decline to try and fit this idea into any previous frameworks I may have erected during this account or previously.

I feel a bit elderly and defensive today, and might well relapse into an Eliotesque self-pity. As to ‘daring to eat a peach’, we seem to be offered them at every other restaurant meal. I’m getting sick of the things. It’s too early for ripe figs, which I adore. But there are plenty of apricots, and little sweet plums called mirabelles which I consume in quantity. I don’t know what I’m waffling on about. I’d better stop.

***

They insisted on reading this during my next spell of driving. They rolled about the caravan floor with wild shrieks of mirth, alarming passers-by. Esther kept kissing my neck and ruffling my hair. We practically stampeded a flock of black goats near Betharram and thought we’d better stop altogether. In the end we calmed down and in fact cooled down by doing the marvellous underground trip in a boat through the caverns there. By the time we got into Lourdes it was almost dark, but we were in time for the impressive outdoor recessional, walking along with a thousand others in the dark, holding our candles and singing "Ave, ave, ave Maria". All my anti-Catholicism dissolved away and I calmly entered the emotional stream without thought or criticism. Afterwards I thought that consciousness had to breathe. There is room in it for everything provided it is balanced and rhythmical. "So there is in Mother Church", Catholics are inclined to say. "In theory, yes", I usually answer, "But if it were true in practice you would extend it, where it needs extending, to include what you describe as hearsay". "We do", they say, "heretics exclude themselves, precisely by not being balanced and rhythmical". And so the exclusiveness remains, side by side with Catholic comprehensiveness.

Being a heretic is a decision, a basic stance, which fits me as I fit it. Even if I seem to understand a bit less every day it feels often like the darkness before the dawn. I shall go to bed.

 

ESTHER Friday, about noon.

There is something special about traversing these mountains parallel to their main direction as a mountain chain. The obvious thing is that you go up to an enormous height on a zigzag road and reach a shoulder called a col, then do the same down the other side. On a col you feel protection and privilege at the same time. You have the magnificent views of both peak and plain, and colossal winds may sweep across parallel to the peaks. But you are protected by mountains, often on both sides, and shelter slightly down on one side or the other is quickly reached. A less obvious aspect is that every col is a frontier between two valleys. Sometimes two ‘gaves’ are visible, or at least their course will be, from nearly the same spot. Your consciousness can link two worlds: can be the arena for the dialogue of two devas.

The butterfly world is quite aware of this. Clear demarcations between two species or sub-species are frequently identified near a col. Nowhere is it more apparent that butterflies and their counterparts the flowering plants are the giving and receiving end of a language of communication between devic or elemental beings of a middle or ambassadorial level. Moving back and forth over such frontiers, as father did once in a space of only a few hundred yards in the Austrian mountains, where three closely-related mountain Erebia butterflies confronted one another across such a col, can bring one near to participation in a multi-facetted symposium in which one suspects all of nature is taking part.

How different is the experience when one approaches the range at right angles. Coming to Lourdes by road or train out of the flat lands of ‘civilisation’, one comes unconsciously under the influence of that particular river and its attendant towns and villages. The car is parked, the train vacated, the hotel porter handles the luggage, the landlady produces a timetable of masses and pilgrimages and guided tours. Massive Irish women smoking cigars sip holy water out of thermos-flask tops on the steps of churches. Medals and rosaries and plastic icons spill out of trays in hundreds of thousands from rows of blue and gold and silver market stalls and boutiques. Wading, swimming one’s way through the smoke and jangle of this, there is the Basilica, and below it the Grotto. Hideous lime-encrusted crutches and coins and personal effects of all kinds lie and lean in the water. Hospital chairs and wheeled stretchers trundle by. But the peace and the faith and the reverence are palpable. Through the cloying, garish, sickly miasma glows the fitful light of holiness, the valid reality, the timeless hope, sparkling with undiminishable power.

For those who suspect that there is a further cosmic background to all this, there is the road up through Argelès Gazost to Gèdre and Gavarnie, and behind them the Brêche and the high peaks. On the way the Catholics seek the strangely incongruous statue of Our Lady of the Rocks, outpost of the spirit of Lourdes in the middle of an ancient avalanche of tumbled stone. Perhaps for them it is not the statue, but the forbidding precipices and rock-falls that are incongruous, incursions of unredeemed matter into the reality of God’s Church. However, they resolve this, most of the pilgrim’s turn here and return to Lourdes and shelter and home. Mont Perdu looms in the background unseen and unsuspected. For the church there would not be much doubt which side of this confrontation is that of the lost, perhaps eternally.

Perhaps a similarly constructed, but utterly different story could be told about a party of ghost-ridden occultists, amateurs and dilettantes of the black art fringes, and with pentacles and herbs and all the knick-knacks of witchery, mincing up the Garonne valley to St. Bertrand in the footsteps of M R James, to try their hand at reviving the antiquated eidola of dust-covered horrors and turning their powers towards the fulfilment of hell knows what trivial and highly personal satisfactions. Like ruling the world or some such irrelevance! I don’t think I’ll bother. The point is made. Monte Maladetta makes its own comment. One comes to realise, however, through this exercise how utterly insulated from each other these stories are; and how this has something to do with the geometry, the approach to reality itself at right-angles, unaware of the lateral dimension.

It was precisely this lesson that seemed to me to have come home to roost in the contrast between the journey we are on now, and the one Helène and I undertook last year. These two journeys cross one another at right angles, and not only in the geometrical sense. The direct approach last year landed us in an earthbound involvement. We became imprisoned in a situation where what should have been transmuted into spirit remained caught down into the physical dimensions of rock and water and darkness and fear. Now we are homing into the world with a kind of lateral thinking. We are catching ourselves on the hop, submitting our own being to a shock assault out of a clear sky.

The Cathar cross which you find everywhere in churchyards in the Langue d’Oc region has four equal arms. It represents, not the crucifixion of the Lord, but the impact of spirit upon matter, the stark right-angled welding of God upon the being of incarnated Man, in the person of Jesus Christ. The discontinuity, the sheer lateral thinking of the Christ Event, what Rudolf Steiner calls the Mystery of Golgotha, is missed by those who think religions are all the same, and one grows naturally and continuously out of another. Of course, this is true too, but it only constitutes the soil. Out of this soil unique plants grow. This Cosmic Christian plant is a very particular Rose.

I don’t know quite who is writing this. It certainly isn’t Esther Corstorphine any more. Perhaps it is you, tetrahedron. No, it is I, who am also Esther, tetrahedron says. If I’m going to tell you everything I shall have to find a better name for you. I suppose it had better be ‘Rose’ a flower I have always had a love-hate relationship with. But equally I could call you ‘Cross’ in view of the thoughts that have been coming through in the last few minutes. Yes, I am quite aware of the associations you are putting into my mind. So ‘Rose Cross’ it is. I accept that this is who you may well be. I happily go along with the idea. It makes me feel very much at peace with you.

 

RAYMOND Friday evening, at a Pension in Foix.

While Esther sat beside me and wrote and gazed into the distance, and Alan dozed on his bunk in the back, I did the long hundred-mile trip along main roads through Tarbes, St. Gaudens and St. Girons towards Foix. For the time being we lost the mountains and became ordinary tourists covering the mileage.

I know I am not all that safe as a driver, a bit erratic and inclined to lose my temper with other drivers’ rudeness and aggression. Today, however, I felt an unaccustomed calm. So much so that I began to realise how much I have changed in the last year and a half. For a moment then I felt a touch of that sickening lurch over the abyss again. It is to do with the real effort of will it takes to say the word ‘I’ and be sure what I mean by it. Although I have lost the double identity feeling and am quite secure in this present Raymond personality, I still know that remembering Ramon has changed me. His fire and zeal is foreign to my quiet, rather self-effacing nature, and though I have managed to lay all that to rest in his English grave, a lot rubbed off on me while I was still trying to keep him alive. We come to resemble what we love.

Altogether the notion of reincarnation is not one to play about with lightly. It takes one quickly into a realm where the price of safety is truly eternal vigilance. It takes more courage to sleep when it can no longer be taken entirely for granted what one will wake to. I expect you have read the Castañeda books. If not, I shall tell you that one is called Journey to Ixtlan. The title is taken from the experience of the character whose birthplace Ixtlan was. But he opted, or was chosen, to go through an initiatory experience as a shaman or magician. This involves among other things the emergence of a second self.

One of the discoveries he made was that there is no way, once one has left the safe harbour of a simple identity, to find one’s way, as we say, ‘home’. The point of the title was, there is no journey to Ixtlan. Loss of simple identity is, among other things, a loss of innocence. One faces the long struggle, through the desert of experience, to a longed for, but by no means certain harbour, which Blake called Imagination, which in a sense is a restoration of innocence in a transcended form. I think what is happening to us all on this journey is the miraculous discovery that, although there is no turning back on the path which loses Ixtlan, it is not necessarily a path that has to be followed alone. The grace of companionship on the way, although one relies on it at one’s peril, is not necessarily withheld.

And beyond companionship, indeed inseparable from it at any level which gives relationships their real meaning, there lies the emergence of some form of invisible companionship. The precise form of this is describable in so many soul-languages that it would be superfluous to point far beyond the immediate one we three are experiencing. We could cal it the merging of our still inviolable separateness in a common fourth being, who sits beside us and guards us from these new perils.

I listen to him now, speaking through me, and it is still I who am speaking. "The dangers to which you have woken" he says "were there before you woke. It is not my role that has changed, but your participation in it. You are beings who till not thought you were sailing along the road of life in the same way as you fly in your dreams. Now you wake and look down, and see for the first time you are on a bicycle that you have been steering unconsciously. My presence made this possible. I am still here, but now you are intermittently aware of me. The bicycle was there all along. You steered it alright while you were asleep, so go on steering it now. There’s no need suddenly to get wheel-wobble and crash just because you’re awake. If you need to, go back to sleep. Things will go on as before. The difference is, now you have woken you will wake again. There is no way for me to make it so that you never woke in the first place. There is now way back to Ixtlan. But all is well. I am here. Sweet dreams!" "What price eternal vigilance, then?" "You missed the point. There has always been eternal vigilance. There still is. You have just become aware of it." "Whose vigilance is it?" "Why of course, our own. Go back to sleep. I’ll wake you with a cup of tea!"

 

FRASER Saturday

I have thought so long about it all that now I’m here I don’t know what to do with it. There is such a thing as being too articulate. I feel as if I’ve verbalised it all away into fragments. In a sense there is nothing left and I have a feeling of nakedness. I don’t think it is simply pretensions I am stripped bare of, though since Wednesday I find myself increasingly wondering whether I can possibly go back to my work. Maybe it really is just pretensions. I find it a shocking, really quite impossible thought that the whole of my posture as a psychologist is simply a frontage for an abject bankruptcy of inner resources.

In fact I know quite deeply that this is not true. On the other hand, something or other has been stripping my self-image down to some very bare bones ever since the experience in the mountains on Wednesday afternoon. I don’t think any of us will ever be quite the same again. AI as an older man probably had more to lose, and I am not making a particularly good job of patching up the fragments of my personality and presenting a front to the other two.

Although Raymond and I agreed to restrain any attempt to describe our experiences then and there, we have not been able to ignore the inevitable developments that have followed them. For me it has been as if a seed was planted right inside my consciousness, which has now begun to germinate and pursue an independent life of its own. Something tells me that if I can allow this to go on happening, and make sense of it, it will provide me with all the ‘front’ I need.

Having come to this thought I find I am able to follow it by realising that Esther and Raymond have each in their own quite different ways been changed since Wednesday just as fundamentally as I have. I must stop encouraging in myself the feeling that I am simply being dragged along in the slipstream of an experience that they understand much better than I do, and moreover that they can communicate it to each other in a special way which leaves me blundering along behind.

I find myself confessing that for years now I have had an increasing feeling of inferiority to clients. They live in a real world, I have thought, to which I have access only in the vicarious sense of listening to them. It is just because I feel myself on the outside of life looking in, like an astronaut crawling about on the surface, repairing a space ship, that I have been such an effective instrument in reflecting people’s lives back to them as a counsellor. I have seen it as my function to polish and re-polish a mirror-like surface of myself for people, so that by merely listening to their self-revelations I have enabled them to see themselves in a new light. The healing which has so often come about in people’s lives through this has been a healing reached by their own efforts to perceive this self-image in me, for which I have acted simply as a catalyst. Moreover the love and gratitude they have often expressed after the resolution of their problems I have seen simply as an extension and growth of their self-love to the point where it transcends the trivial and solipsistic and becomes a genuine reverence for their real being, upon which they could build in a new way.

What has happened, among other things, since Wednesday is that I have almost convinced myself that my professional life is little more than an elaborate cop-out. My bluff has been called, and I have been wallowing in the feeling that I am an under fraud.

I’m glad Raymond stated to write yesterday about the Castañeda books. The teacher Don Juan in those books is more scathing about the tendency in seekers to indulge in feelings of their own inadequacy and nonentity than about any other shortcoming. I shall now stop indulging, and attempt a hard, clear existential look at the actual processes which come about through my healing work, and try to see these objectively, as if it were someone else who had brought them about. This should not be too difficult, because I can feel almost from moment to moment as if the real weight of my sense of self is increasingly resting on a newborn squalling infant inside me who has only been in existence since Wednesday afternoon. This pinkish or rose-coloured child has no views one way or another about solipsism or self-pity, of which he has no experience. We, he and I, look out on the world with unalloyed wonder and expectancy. We have no preconceptions whatever about what is going to happen next, and so have no doubts at all about our combined, in fact, unified, ability to meet whatever comes. As for Raymond and Esther’s contention that we have been joined by a fourth member of the party, they are quite clearly correct. We are it!

 

ESTHER Sunday

If anybody has been thinking since Wednesday that we would arrive here like three Grail Knights in shining armour and ride in triumph up the Ariée to sort everybody out, rescue Helène, and ride home in technicolour silhouette into the setting sun, the events of the last twenty-four hours should have laid any such notion to rest.

We found a very nice pension in Foix with a motherly landlady who clearly wants us to stay the week. Yesterday morning about seven Raymond and I strolled out into the town leaving Alan asleep and leaned over the parapet of the bridge watching the river. Raymond was still in the serene state that has been with him all the time since Friday. The dialogue between him and the picture he holds of the life as Ramòn grows almost from minute to minute.

The sweet mystery of my participation in this lifts me at times into a state of such bliss I can hardly bear it in my ordinary life of feeling. It spills over into helpless tears, which our lovemaking only partly assuages. But ever and again we find ourselves turning at the same moment to ‘Rose Cross’, breathing out into an identification with him, and breathing in again to find ourselves. In these moments I find myself thanking Arthur Guirdham for that wonderful expression, ‘We are one another", which he used as title for one of the books he wrote out of this Cathar experience.

I really think that the acceleration of inward growth, and the sense of impending events that we all feel, and don’t particularly feel like talking about, has itself written ‘finis’ in the diary. I certainly don’t feel I can entirely share any more everything that is happening in words, especially with Alan. And this is not in any way because we feel a distance from him; on the contrary we are incredibly close. But of course he is quite right. The rebirth in him has plummeted to quite different depth in him from that in either Raymond or me. In a very unmistakable way Alan has become our child. One could regard this as the price he has to pay for the years long build up of sophistication in his conceptual life. But in another way he is also years ahead of us, on the threshold of a simplicity which, at least in this life, it may take Ray and I much longer to reach.

I suppose the main problem is how to afford Alan the real protection he needs without at the same time indulging his indulgence, which is a long established ploy to deal with his vulnerability, and won’t be dismissed in short order by his determination to be existential about his work. We also have to help him not to throw all that down the drain as his confidence in rebirth begins to flex its muscles.

Incidentally, before I forget to write it down, a phrase came to me early this morning which I need to incorporate in a poem. It was to do with achieving, through inner death and resurrection, the same degree of distance, ‘dis-identification’ (to invent a word for it,) from one’s present incarnation that one implicitly has from any previous incarnation. This is what Raymond is going through in his experience with Rose Cross. The mere understanding of previous lives of yours that other people tell you about already takes you one step along this road. In fact I think it can be better to…. What do I mean, ‘better’? Of course it’s not better, one has no control over how the relationship to far-memory evolves… What I mean is that it might be easier to come to terms with a sympathetic grasp of a previous incarnation if one were told about it by a former companion who remembered it, than to be plunged neck and crop into a hallucinated identification as Raymond was.

All the same, life itself actually brought him to the ‘mental illness’ bit, and he did actually battle through, and so surged ahead to a priceless vantage point, not for himself perhaps, but for others.

O my dear Lord, it is always of course for others. We are one another.

And that of course was what he was doing inadvertently all the time last year. Every time I had to battle with him and Helène in France and later with him and Alan in England, to keep my own feet on the ground. I came further and further into the actual grasping of the nature of reincarnation, what the real relationship between this self and previous selves really is, just how it is mediated by a so-called higher being common to all, so that one comes step by step nearer to the point when that higher being is able to burst through, hatching like a butterfly from the pressure to which one’s lower self is being submitted.

Death and resurrection. The lower self dies, as all previous lower selves have died, possibly through such a breakthrough, but in the end physically. Only then might one catch a glimpse of a perspective embracing one’s whole self, and all its successive personalities.

---oOo---

Be patient, for you will be met.
From ‘Recipe for a Threefold Conjunction’

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