Detour

That afternoon we spontaneously decided make our way to the long narrow bridge that we had previously only seen from a distance out of the corner of our eyes; we had often wondered where it might lead; we simply followed it to see where it would take us without any particular expectation. (We may have been just an individual back then. It’s difficult to discern the exact order of things, what happened when and what led to what. Or maybe we were many already and we had projected an apparent singular consciousness onto a self-contradicting multiplicity of egos and desires without a center or an ultimate unifying purpose.) There had been many signs in the days that led up to the final crucial event that irrevocably changed us; we had come to the uncomfortable realization we were no longer alone in our previously known and familiar spaces…the bedroom, the library, the halls of the old house… We were connected in real time to multiple levels of high speed information processing that extended far beyond our cognitive realm; we were being constantly showered in a maelstrom of messages coming in from all directions, in languages known and unknown; we had surrendered to the infinite flux of a multidimensional control machine; we had stepped into the heart of a constantly multiplying cybernetic whirlwind… The long narrow bridge led us to a desolate island and eventually to the tower and the doorway… we initially just followed the flow of traffic, a long stream of drivers on their way to work and other important matters, we were a small part of this long line of seemingly purposeful single minded movement, another anonymous car on its way to an expected destination, when suddenly, out of nowhere, there was a sudden and dangerous turn; a dirt road opened up beside the paved highway… as soon as we saw it quickly coming up on the right, we knew this was where we needed to go, this was the reason we had started driving that morning; but we were going too fast, and there was no stop sign or clearly marked exit lane, we were barely able to turn the car around at the last possible second and, in the process, we nearly drove off the road, straight into a pit of mud and rocks… (Today, this same car, could easily be navigated with little more than the minimal motion of faraway eyes and hand gestures, but back then, we only had our hands and our individual human reflexes to rely on; as we turned the wheel, we were deeply aware of the danger involved in our decision.) Listening to the loud screeching of the tires, we said to ourselves: “all these people driving here, they go in one particular direction, they start their journey from their home, they get on this long narrow bridge, and, once they start moving, it becomes very difficult to turn, it becomes almost impossible to change the route. At some point, you have to do something different; if you want a different result, you have to make an unusual choice, you have to do what others would refuse to try, you have to embrace the unknown and the very real danger…” So we did something very different from what was expected of us, we took a sharp turn that few people would take, and we did it without knowing why we were doing it, or what effect it would have on our future life; we slipped into an old road, something easy to overlook, something seemingly forgotten, something barely seen out of the corner of your vision as you are driving by at high speed… And then there was a haunted quiet all around us; brown wet dirt and scattered rocks, tall grass growing out of muddy water, a wide extension of marshlands all around us, barely seen over the top of overgrown weeds the size of a man, the receding sound of the highway behind us, and nothing else… we drove forward and went into this completely different world which we were not expecting to find so close to the city; a silent place, almost abandoned; a few old houses here and there, far away from each other, some trailers, a few barns, a few old piers half rotten, a couple of wooden sheds with large rusty locks… we would drive for the equivalent of many blocks without running into any buildings or even signs of civilization, just weeds and dirt and stones and mud, cottonwoods and willows and grass, the sound of birds and the gentle lapping of the water as it kissed the edge of the rough road, and the roar of the highway in the distance a recurring reminder, already becoming just a faint memory, already fading into white… “Any invention or technology that we have ever experienced, has involved a self-amputation of our physical bodies, with every gain there is a loss, at every step there is a possibility of irreversible sadness. The losses multiply until you lose the ability to look back, you can’t even acknowledge what has been left behind, you can’t begin to place it within the scheme of your new categories… radical mutations involve a loss of identity, an inability to understand the nature of the changes that may have just occurred…” The way, as we had been promised so long ago, as we had hoped for, did not exist anymore: this afternoon there was simply our will, devoid of justifications or rationalizations, neither good nor bad, simply our own, with no further explanations, no reason, no thought, no promise of reward… there was a clear and distinct sensation that a storm was very near, a hint of electricity in the air, the energy of distant winds all around us, sliding closer and closer, the unspeakable rebellion of the deep waters of faraway oceans compressed into a heavy darkness that roared in our face, a wordless warning… the coming change, that event that we could not now explain nor clearly remember, the impossible leap into the unknown, even then it was looming over us, like an anticipated final judgment, an announced moment of clarity and disavowal, but it didn’t show itself clearly, it didn’t spell itself out in words we could easily understand or repeat, just a lonely tower in the distance, a long narrow road surrounded by a few trees and tall grass… our organic mind would be transformed into pure yet quantifiable energy, it would eventually penetrate every muscle, artery and nerve of our new extended body, needing no wires or physical connections, it would all be directly controlled from faraway multidimensional neural networks, equipped with a multiplying abundance of detail and categories, our inner will would throb and vibrate and dance beneath the stretched-out fingers of unseen controllers, distant impulses from spirals of unknown consciousness… it was enough that we knew they were there, even if we would never meet them face to face, it was enough that we had been told and that we had listened, we would know them by the presence of their disembodied choices and their effects upon the shifting thread of our living manifestations… the gradual historic technological movement that would define our new subjectivity was not based purely on our long standing deep alienation from the world around us, although that was distinctly essential for the process to function; the coming event, the irreversible change behind the doorway in the depths of the lonely tower, it would re-structure our innermost self-awareness beyond the scope of our previously outlined parameters; soon we would become unrecognizable to ourselves, soon we would become the Other in its most unspeakable form… We found ourselves that afternoon at the precise point of intersection between untamed chaos and the illusion of solid predictable matter, an illusion humans created out of a need for stable permanence, the wish for a reliable past and a predictable future; we, as primordial subject, would soon return from exile, leaving all previous dreams behind; and this shocking return would produce the new world that we would return to, a place we would have once found alien and fearsome but would now be our one and only home; we, as primordial subject, would emerge new, fresh and clean, having crossed through the harsh gauntlet of our most radical alienation, away from all that we had once known and desired; we would become real if only for some other’s amusement, we would become the very future we had once dismissed as a psychotic fantasy; the impossible was waiting just around the corner… Each action now available to us would change what would come much later; a driveway, a lonely tower surrounded by satellite dishes, an open door, the sound of whispering, a single light in the darkness at the end of a long hallway… we had stepped into the uncanny and we were unsure about our next steps, we were tracing our fingers at the edge of the void… right away, we felt the urge to stay longer in this lonely place of dirt and mud where we found ourselves, in this forgotten island of silence and rocks and weeds and water, but we felt like intruders, inherently dangerous trespassers; it was clear that each small action we could possibly take would change all future possibilities, it would affect all potential actions that could come later; we distinctly felt that, at any moment, someone would come running out of an old house and tell us to leave; we were strangers, aliens, dangerous, unwelcome; maybe it would be an old man with a shotgun or maybe a young woman with a phone, ready to call the cops or worse… to win or to lose in any game is the sum of many small decisions, taken one at a time; there is never just one big mistake at the end that leads to a catastrophic defeat, even though it may seem that way when the curtain closes… The clear and true path does not exist: there is only our unpredictable will, an impulse neither good nor bad, neither perfect nor broken, but ours in the most intimate of ways; each action, no matter how small, was now radically important; each step on wet grass, each touch on a dusty surface, each sideways glance; right away, we could intuit the unspoken meaning in the broken windows, in the muddy signposts, in the tall weeds surrounding old rusty cars and the half broken metal fences with unreadable signs, there was a strong resistance to our presence, an unspoken call to run, and yet we found ourselves here, alone and quiet and curious, aware and ready; we found ourselves here, through an unpredictable sequence of choices, a methodical progression of careful evasions, a purposeful process of willful wrong turns… All our future mutations would involve both an extension of our bodies and a self-amputation as well, a purposeful distorted transformation of our most basic manifestation in the physical world; there could be no true change without sacrifice, there could be no gain without loss… after we entered the tower things progressed quickly, one small choice after another; we had to stop identifying with our particular physical form, this was no longer a concept but an immediate reality, our physical individual separation from the world around us was quickly becoming a thing of the past, we had to surrender our particularity as a human person, we had to give in to the unspoken contingent flux, we had to surrender to the looming nameless storm, we had to become the many that would only barely remember the one… We wandered for years, from place to place, from world to world; we were of no nation, we were loyal to no ideology, we were part of no culture, we were believers of no religion, we were practitioners of no philosophy; no organization held our loyalty, no leader could pin us down to a particular time or place, we answered to nobody and held no distinct code of conduct that could place limits on our choices… Sometime in the past we had felt fear, even when we didn’t understand the reason for it; sometimes we would walk into a room and we could sense that something was wrong but we couldn’t say what it was that we were perceiving, we couldn’t specify where the sensation was coming from; but now we had been cut loose from these invisible limits, we had been set free, it was time for us to drift, to fly effortlessly on the winds of possibility; we would simply glide from thought to thought, from dream to dream, without dreading the looming nightmares, without fearing the unavoidable end… At first, we didn’t want to do this, we didn’t think it was a true possibility, we clung to our restrictions and our self-imposed rules (we had been trained to do so, we were trained for years, through careful planning and merciless self-discipline;) back in the cold garage where our journey first started, we had no clear thought of it, we had no basic impulse to guide our decisions, we had no map and no set objective, we did what we did just to do it, just to try it, just to see what would happen next… so many years later, we found ourselves at that crossroads, at that point of intersection between living chaos and the seemingly stable form that unexplainably came from it, we found ourselves at the dividing line between the real and the unimaginable, and then we moved forward, one step after another; we had left all recurring questions behind and we were no longer looking for answers… a long hallway and a single light, a gateway to be crossed; the long journey that led to that one afternoon was not lacking in accidents and hesitations; at first, and for a long time after that, we were anxious and desperate, we felt that the sacrifice was too great and there was no guaranteed reward, at moments we almost calmed down, almost found a place of quiet repose, but then we fell into a mad desperation again, a rushing need to return to what was known and established; for a moment we almost had it in our grasp, we were almost there, and then, once again, without any distinguishable trigger or cause, we lost it; we said to ourselves: “Calm down. We are working on something and we are moving forward, little by little. There is no need to get desperate. There is no need to rush or be afraid. We only have to keep on working with precision and patience… There is no objective, there is no timeline.” How is it possible that a process that had promised no result would become the way into a shocking new gateway, into a new conception of our innermost subjectivity? Something elusive will always remain, something will still be unknown and perhaps it will stay unknowable, hidden like the endless luminous peninsulas of the infinite oceans of light that will forever surround us, waiting within the fractal complexities of the hyperdimensional mind of which we are an integral part (but only a part), breathing quietly and knowingly in the depths of the sheer organic chaos of life beyond all preconceptions or false certainties… For now, we would wander; there was no group, no name or banner that would ever again hold our loyalty; we would never again be pinned down to a particular ideology or set of pre-established beliefs; we had been cut loose; we would now begin our promised drift without end through the astral labyrinth of self-transforming living concept… In the sensory world of fixed existence, there are microscopic transmutations at every single instant, even though our eyes and senses may not perceive them as individual events, even though our minds may not take them into account as actual changes; each of these minuscule mutations changes all future possibilities, moment by moment we delineate and narrow down what can happen later, each small movement of our mind and body changes all the movements, all the thoughts, all the ideas, all the emotions, that may come later; our bushel of options is irrevocably shifted at every single turn… To cross a doorway at the opportune moment or to stay in place when stillness is required; in any labyrinth there are choices to be made and consequences to be expected, the thread of our movement through the maze is the sum of so many small decisions, so many tiny choices, one by one by one, even if it is inevitable to believe that there is only one big final choice in the end; each apparently negligible choice is radically important, each is momentous and irreversible; we saw this more and more as we approached the bridge and we saw the clouds that loomed over us in the distance (and maybe a hint of the tower and our destiny within its secret chambers at the edge of the horizon) and we also saw that there had always been a strong resistance to accepting this simple truth; we had known it yet we refused to know it… (Back when we were one. Back before the doorway, before the shock…) When we were kids, we saw the adults around us creating reality; houses, buildings, tall walls and towers, entire neighborhoods of concrete and asphalt; once these massive constructions were built, it would seem as if they had always been there; and moreover, it would seem that they could never change; the cement was fixed and steady, strong, solid, permanent, eternal; these contingent structures had become an inherent element in the web of reality; like the island, like the long dirt road, like the tower; but eternity was not in the future, eternity is not in the past… How was it possible, we asked ourselves, that a tree that had given no real fruit for so long, all of a sudden was able to do so? What had changed? How was it possible, that from the dead and fixed and unchangeable, something new could be born? How could a new primordial reason for being emerge from the apparently meaningless void? As we approached the turn, we turned the wheel and we took our chances… (Back when I was one, before the doorway, before the unspoken invitation, before the irreversible change, before our final choice as one.)

Lectures and Pronouncements

 

“Contact is a simple resonance of inner vibrations between different manifested forms. Nothing more and nothing less,” the Magician said it during one of his many lectures. “Contact is music in direct relationship to thought and consciousness, contact is rhythm slower than the audible, faster than the easily apprehended or known. Contact is a simple dance in which only the beat matters… and the results speak for themselves.” And then he smiled. That afternoon in the cemetery, he talked about living spiritual beings that are made of thoughts, self-aware creatures built from language and symbols, living signifieds historically attached to a few powerful signifiers, pure vibration in a realm that seemed barely real to me, barely conceivable, hardly reachable by my young intellect; it brought up for me the secret world of lucid dreaming with which I already had some experience, a vibrant space in which every occurrence, every bit of landscape, became saturated with meaning, all details became carriers of secret messages… These ethereal beings made of thoughts and sound would conceivably be as conscious as I am but their bodies would be made entirely of ideas, their blood would be made out of songs… “When your vibrations get in sync,” the Magician said, “then there is contact. At once you enter the ancient world of fairy tales, a state clearly referred to in old Sufi stories with the paradoxical phrase: it may be so, it may not be so…”  All of this was too much for me to comprehend when he said it, I was too young and too afraid of the utterly unknown; I listened politely and eagerly but I couldn’t put it all together in a way that would make sense; I wanted it all to be true but I couldn’t bring myself to believe it blindly… A few months later, I decided to stop visiting him; I don’t know exactly why it happened; was I caught so completely by my own deep biases? Did my intuition tell me to leave at precisely the right time? Did I fall for jealous tales because I wanted a justification for my cowardly exit? I can honestly say I didn’t feel that much of an insistent urge to stop seeing him; I loved listening to his voice and imagining the things he talked about, often going off in tangents as I pictured detailed visions fleshing out his cosmic descriptions… I just don’t understand what happened inside of me that somehow led to that unexpected fork in the road; I left one afternoon with the intention of never coming back and I never did. “Unless desire is completely unconscious, it cannot be fulfilled, no, not in this life,” the Magician said to me sitting on a white marble slab in the cemetery, “The higher spiritual realms consist of beings made entirely of thought. What we perceive as our inner realm, the world of thoughts, is what pervades everything in the land of spirits, like the warmth that pervades all earthly things and beings,” he turned towards me then and his voice became deeper and slower. “Here, however, we must imagine these thoughts as living, independent beings. What we grasp as a thought in the material world is like the shadow of a spiritual being, an entity that is fully alive in the land of spirits.” He made a pause and took a deep breath, then continued, “I have come to the conclusion that sleep is inherently better than prayer, passivity is the way of hidden desire, a purposeful form of "not asking"; by it much can be obtained.” With every word he spoke that afternoon, my resolve became firmer; I just don’t know why; I had decided I would leave his presence, never to return… After the things I had heard, after the stories that had been told to me, I couldn’t sit with him any longer and take it all in with a smile on my face; there was no further need to listen, no further lessons to be learned, I needed to be away and alone, maybe forever… This was a very tough decision for me and it came with much sadness and years of painful regret. “The basis of your work will always be to look ahead, not to follow what others do but to stay one step ahead of those around you. Utilize prayer, if you must use that tired word, as a means of exhaustion, and by that means you will obtain your desire.” When we were done talking that particular afternoon, I found myself very altered; we had a moment of clear strong contact standing by his parked car and a very good conversation afterward while he was driving me home; at the cemetery I had seen something; I got the plot of my future escape, I just needed to deduce from it all the main characters and the crucial upcoming choices so I could fully flesh out the story of my coming life, and, most of all, I needed to remember. “What we do changes what we are, it quietly transforms the most fundamental and basic nature of our being, and that in turn changes what we can further do afterward, in the future… opening the door to further and unimaginable transformations,” the Magician said it quietly, while sitting next to me and staring at the horizon; I nodded and tried to hold on to that moment as intensely as possible… Last night, I traveled straight into that same deep listening space that he used to evoke from me so effortlessly; I was back at that same cemetery we used to visit so often, I was flying above it and fearlessly diving down into its many pathways, swerving around the old tombstones in the deep shadows of the night; there were bright stars shining overhead and small globes of light swirling around me, bursting outward and multiplying like living sparks around the scattered stone monuments otherwise covered in heavy darkness… Last night I traveled very far away from all that I had known in the past, far enough that my basic understandings of reality got shifted, altered, transformed, in a way that later would be difficult to remember or explain, even to myself; looking back on so many hours of unimpeded movement through the aethers, I felt that it was possibly due to my use of the old biofeedback machine, the apparatus I got from one of the Magician’s friends so many years ago and which I still kept in working condition even though I didn’t use it very often; yesterday I did spend a few hours working with it and it may have laid the stage for the more drastic experiences that came later… (I also felt that it was due to all the drugs I had taken over the years, especially during the previous weeks; those chemically induced spaces where I forgot who I was or why I did what I did and I simply tried to accept it all and drift into the singing silence…)One way or the other, something was working very well last night, something had clicked into action. I had been told more than once that contact is a kind of vibratory resonance between nodes of consciousness, between beings otherwise drastically separated by their identification with their specific physical forms; somewhere in the middle of my altered journey, I believe I established contact with the Magician, my old teacher of life and the esoteric arts… Could it be, I asked myself, that a kind of person like him, who is full of ambition, full of drive, with a seemingly unbreakable will that will accept no compromise or sign of weakness or hesitation, is also the kind of person that constantly and secretly suffers from a kind of great lack, a vast dark hole within him that can never be filled, can never be satisfied, and this recurrently provides the fuel needed for that unstoppable movement forward… Is that the dark secret at the center of the magical cyclone? Is that the tiny seed around which a permanent will may grow? Is the forbidden unbalance the very stone on which the whole edifice is built? Under all language and symbols, under all attempts at systematic categorization, there is pure vibration, the universe at its most basic, the inner state of our being at its most simple and tangible; when those vibrations within me got in sync with the faraway vibrations of the Magician, I was able to feel that deep and secret lack directly, I could sense a profound lack of love, a desperate need for it, a long standing desire for the presence of a true father, one that would accept him for what he was, for what he wanted to be, maybe that heartbreaking need is what led to all that happened much later, maybe the source of his unquestionable magnificence was a wound that could never be healed… To step beyond the symbolic order, beyond the accepted understanding of the structure of the world and how to describe it, beyond the linguistic scheme that outlines reality and all it can ever become, to step outside of this clearly delineated perimeter is what people generally call madness… One day, the Magician came up to me in the old study center (an old house that he had rented one fateful weekend and we had cleaned up together over several weeks of work, me and a few committed friends, all devoted pupils like I was) and he told me a strange story: “A few days ago, I discovered something remarkable in the hot sand of the beach at Las Flores. I was walking alone, listening to the waves and the cries of the seagulls, when I saw thousands of tiny blue beings in the sand, all of them fully alive, each one bursting with desire and energy. I witnessed these beings slowly form into bunches and eventually structure themselves into larger cells; I was shocked to be witnessing the birth of unicellular creatures made completely from raw desire, carriers of single-minded biological lust.” He saw the doubt in my eyes and he asked me if I thought he was lying; I quickly said: “No, I would never think that you are lying. Why would you ever lie to me?” And yet I couldn’t believe what he was describing, I couldn’t even clearly imagine it; the clash between my naive admiration for him and my disbelief when confronting this story, formed a kind of dissonance within me, a seed of suspicion and doubt that would grow with time; at that same moment, I also became aware of his need to be trusted, his desire to be believed and acknowledged as a source of wisdom; even then, as young as I was, I knew all of it must have been unconscious, this need to be accepted and believed was a secret hunger that could never be completely fulfilled, it would recurrently re-emerge, voracious, thirsty and ready for new sustenance… Yesterday, I used the technique of mantram which he had carefully taught me himself over several weekends of arduous work and practice; I used it to achieve a kind of deep mental exhaustion, a breakdown of my intellectual brain that would allow for other perceptions to come through; I allowed myself to sink into this radically altered space and, somewhere in the deep mist beyond thinking, I said his name out loud. Once, twice, three times. I knew there was a line. I have always known it. I believe we are all aware of it even if we don’t think about it very often or express it out loud; when regular people notice that you have crossed it, they can’t see you in the same way ever again… Why should they? You have now become a pure manifestation of the Other; you are the mad, the unwell, the “touched”; they will never see you as they once saw you, they will never talk to you as one of their own, not in this lifetime; you will forever remain an outsider, a leper, a carrier of an ethereal disease that is violently contagious… “Sleep is always better than prayer,” the Magician said one time during a lecture, “Sleep is hidden desire, it is a form of not asking. Through the vibrant silence implied in sacrificing any direct request, any attempt at desperate pleading, you may obtain your desire without ever having voiced it out loud.” What caused his ultimate fall? I have asked myself that question so often and in so many ways… Why am I so obsessed with understanding it at this precise moment? Why do I feel this urge to nail it down once and for all? Why is the answer so urgent right now? Is there something I’m not seeing? Is there something hidden just out of my sight? Last night I drifted thorough glowing clouds of light, fuzzy pockets of shining presence; I flew among coruscating fractals and geometric forms that shimmered in and out of existence without any predictable pattern; somewhere in the middle of this psychedelic voyage, even while not completely clear on what I was suddenly thinking, I decided I would change my basic method of making decisions; I would turn myself over to the most drastic contingency and build my new life structure around it, the main challenge was not to forget this vision when the trip was over, to not let it fade away like so many dreams and resolutions… And I thought again about the Magician, my old mentor, my teacher, my second father; I saw his vaguely Asian features, his shining balding head, his easy smile always on the verge of becoming a sarcastic smirk, his friendly wagging finger always ready to admonish; I saw him sitting with me in a restaurant, sitting across from me at a long dining table, while cumbia music blared in the background and street vendors offered their wares in sing song screams outside; I saw him standing before a large crowd of admirers, lecturing endlessly on history, personal responsibility, magic, the past and the future, the possible and the unknown; I saw him sitting with me in the cemetery on a white marble slab, pointing out various figures that we could see wandering among the tombs, their possible significance and provenance… there were so many things that we didn’t understand about each other, but we didn’t want to ask; to me, he had always been somewhat untouchable, a mystery that would never be resolved, a dangling question I didn’t truly want to answer… Then, through twists of fate and unexpected chains of cause and effect, he became an angry man that I was also unable to understand but for a very different reason. (What caused his ultimate fall into old habits? Were they always present but hidden from me? Was I purposefully forcing myself to look elsewhere? Why was I so determined to understand it all in this precise moment? What had brought him back so intensely to the forefront of my mind?) Back then, we would rather assume that everything was understood, that all things were given and swallowed whole without any need for further explanation; it made everything easier, it made everything flow smoothly; in the few occasions when we were high on psychedelics together, I didn’t understand what he was saying to me most of the time; the words echoed through a vast gulf of unequal experience and I could only grasp at the resonating weight implied in their sound; I was too altered to understand completely, to even know what to ask, and the chaos, the silence, the deep noise all around us, slid into his intended meanings, making them all vaguely incomprehensible, just beyond the reach of my mind, like beautiful multiplying bubbles ever so quick to pop… later, when we would come down and talk about our perceptions, I still didn’t understand what he said, there were too many apparent contradictions, too many assumptions left unsaid, and I still didn’t ask the necessary questions; it was enough to say that everything meant something different and that I should just accept it as it comes, I should just take it in and be endlessly grateful to be the one to receive it… Last night I drifted purposefully through rivers of light, like oceanic streams of phosphorescent plankton, inflamed by the wakes of playful watery creatures, I danced in time to music before it came into existence, intricate sounds emanating from the future that gave me my silent cues, and I found myself ready to move with them before their actual appearance… and then the Magician came back to me, fully present, beyond hesitations or doubts, and the questions left unanswered were banished and there was only his presence, the simple vibration of his Being close to me, the simple truth of direct and unmediated contact… The Magician would often invite me to go to random places with him and I would readily agree when he offered this opportunity; together we would enter the twilight world of the once upon a time, the ambiguous nether regions right outside our doorstep; together we would easily travel beyond the linguistic formal outline of all possibilities, beyond the acceptable and the known… in our travels, we would encounter ancient archetypes walking down the street unnoticed, we would hear the songs of the Old Ones in long lost caves and under narrow decrepit bridges, while buses passed over them full of people on their way to work; we would talk to the Goddess in the form of a dirty old homeless woman searching the streets for scraps and mumbling about secret beings waiting for her if she didn’t move fast enough; we would go into this highly charged chamber purposefully, he had taught me how to do it and I was an eager student, we would prepare the space and we would do the necessary invocations together, the required prayers and sigils of protection, we would systematically make our way through all the established banishments and then we would let contingency take over, we would place ourselves in its whimsical hands and simply drift through the city, open to its hidden meanings, its many masquerading entities and gods, interpreting each encounter as we would a dream, each pronouncement as a direct message… such esoteric practices can be frightening to some people, to many people, they say that if you play with these things too often, the result can be an irreversible madness; they will say ‘now you have been touched’ and once you have been “touched” you can never go back to what you were, you will remain “touched” forever… The chambers that the Magician showed me during those walks reminded me intensely of old tales I had read when I was a little kid; suddenly, walking along the sidewalk with him at my side, I clearly understood the paradoxical phrase that started so many magical stories: once there was, once there wasn't… It was a kind of lucid dreaming while walking and awake; we would travel together through apparently known streets and passageways, but every occurrence, every encounter, every bit of landscape had become saturated with meaning, it was something so tangible that it was almost physical in its heavy uncompromising presence… There is a distinct line that many people have warned me about throughout my life; if these people were to notice that I have crossed it, they would never see me in the same way ever again; and yet, the Magician and I crossed it together willingly often and we kept it to ourselves for so many years… This morning, I woke up feeling different, changed somehow; I had been in a vaguely altered space for days, so much obsessive insistence had taken over my thinking, so much focusing my attention on the Magician and the things he had said to me when I was young, it had all brought me to an unexpected state , my obsession with him took me there and the skills he taught me kept me there; I felt it happening near the break of dawn, something inside of me was breaking open, I was almost there, the unspeakable there; I was about to make it all the way to the other side… By noon, I had decided I would change my method of making all decisions, from now on, I would rely completely on the whim of radical contingency; I built a few new structures around this concept and I outlined them on my computer, I set up various categories and a moderately complex tree of possibilities and gave myself over to the completely unexpected results; I would drift into the future committed to the mists of luck and volatility… The Magician was far away but he would have understood my decision, my sudden change of approach, and he would have approved wholeheartedly; at least, that’s what I would like to believe, that’s what I need to be true… Sometime in the middle of the night, I had synchronized with the rhythm of his being and the result was a new approach to living; it was time to walk with him in the never was… it was time to explore together once again.