An Angel on My Shoulder

by David Callinan

  “What about Jesus Christ and Christianity in particular,” Paul pressed him.

  “The body is the cross. Jesus Christ is the ego sense or the ‘son of man’ and when he is crucified he is resurrected as the ‘son of God’, which is the glorious real Self. That is the truth of Christianity. Jesus Christ was a sage and the kingdom of god he spoke of is nothing more or less than the egoless state.”

  “And other religions?”

  “The same. The source is within you. There is no need to call it God. It is not outside you in some other dimension. Self-surrender of the so-called individual soul is the only way to return to the source, to the real Self. There are no half measures, even for the spiritual realms.”

  “And the mind, what of that?” asked Paul.

  “Show me the mind?” said the Swami. “I will show you thoughts coming and going. The mind is a series of thoughts. How can it be controlled by one of those thoughts, the desire to control the mind? The way is to find the source of the mind and keep hold of it. Then the mind will fade away by itself. Or surrender the mind to a greater overruling power that may strike it down. Meditation stills the mind but the Self cannot be meditated upon. When all thoughts are dispelled does the Self shine in its real nature having been obscured by mind and by thought?”

  “And what about death?” asked Paul.

  The Swami laughed. “If the true Self is eternal then there is no birth and no death. The body is born and dies. That is not the Self, which is consciousness. Consciousness does not exist as an individual state within the ego of a person. In sleep you are not aware of your body. On waking from sleep the ego arises, then thoughts. To whom do the thoughts belong? They must spring from the Self. In that state the Self means there are no individuals, only one being so there is not even a thought of death. If you think of being born you cannot escape the thought of death. The real Self is ever existent and the body is simply a thought, the first of all thoughts.”

  “But when people are asleep their bodies are still there in bed and other people can see them. So how can you say the body does not exist when you are asleep?”

  “You take the world to be real,” answered the Swami, “because it is the creation of your own mind. You do not see it in sleep because it is wound up and merged with the Self and the mind.

  “There is a difference between existence and reality,” explained the little man. “You look around at the world, its cities, oceans, land masses, multitudinous flora and fauna and its peoples and races and its inventions, machines and creations and you say, these all exist while I am asleep. The world may disappear while I sleep but it is still there in reality. I just switch on the television and watch the news reports or I ask a friend.”

  “I couldn’t have expressed it better myself,” Paul replied, more aware than ever that the Swami was somehow communicating telepathically, given the sophistication of his language.

  “Well,” the Swami giggled. “Yes and no. Yes, the substance exists as far as it goes as gross matter but when you die it merges into the Self which is ever present. What mankind will learn in the new age is to firstly understand and then experience true reality, even for short glimpses. This will demonstrate that the word reality means an unchanging Self, pure consciousness and from that perspective everything is an illusion. Even though the worlds of stars, galaxies and matter exist in a transient state, it is not reality by definition. When mankind understands this, happiness will follow. Wars and conflict will cease. Fear of death will be banished. Mankind will achieve the immortality it already has but will then be aware of it.”

  The Swami then said nothing more, despite Paul asking a few further questions. It looked as though the Vedic master class and this audience was over. Paul glanced at his watch. It was past lunchtime. The others would be wondering where he was.

  He felt somehow chastened, cleaned out from the inside and his mind was buzzing with thoughts and concepts. He tried to focus on the Swami but, despite being the hottest and brightest part of the day, the room had grown dark, some candles had flickered out. The Swami’s figure seemed to sleeping and Paul felt a distinct distance growing between them as if the old man was not on this planet and that a husk had been left behind.

  Paul rose to his feet stiffly, bowed for no reason he could imagine and shuffled backwards out of the chamber towards the bead curtained exit. He watched the Swami for any sign of movement or even farewell but it was as if the life had gone out of him. It was a remarkable experience.

  The sunlight and breath gasping heat hit Paul full on as he left the bamboo shack. He slipped on his sunglasses and decided to look for a tuk-tuk taxi instead of walking back along the beach to the hotel.

  As he reached the beach road opposite Abu’s tailor’s shop he spotted two tuk-tuks heading for him. Before a complex argument about saving two rupees could ensue, Paul jumped into the first three-wheeled little cab and shouted at the driver over the noise and smell of the paraffin driven two-stroke engine.

  “Fort Aguada hotel, fast as you can,” he commanded.

  The driver took him literally and gunned the engine to maximum revs pulsing fumes from the exhaust and other parts of the machine and roared off spraying dust in a cloud behind him.

  When he reached the hotel, he found Kate and Annie sipping drinks in the patio bar, all ready to go.

  “Where have you been?” demanded Kate crossly. “We’ve had lunch, it was delicious, and we’ve been waiting and waiting.”

  “Sorry, had my fortune told, “ Paul apologized.

  “We’ve ordered a taxi,” said Annie. “Here it is now.”

  They made Anjuna in around thirty minutes. Paul had forgotten it was Wednesday, the day of the weekly flea market. This had grown to gargantuan proportions and attracted, it seemed, every tourist within a thirty-mile radius. Paul was not in the mood for the heavy duty sales pitches from the local traders selling cheap jewellery, fabrics and tourist bric-a-brac but, surprisingly, the sight of the cheek by jowl crowds sweating and chattering as they negotiated the makeshift avenues of stalls under the shade of the trees cheered up Kate and Annie.

  Paul just wanted to reflect on his meeting with the Swami. It had left him curiously bereft and oddly rejuvenated. It also seemed to corroborate the claims of the angels even to the point of convincing Paul that what had happened to him was real. He chided himself for using the word real given what the Swami had told him but it was unavoidable in everyday conversation. He could understand the notion of reality as the holy man had explained it and accepted that the world and everything in it existed but was not real in the sense explained by the Swami. He just needed to contemplate it all and Anjuna on Wednesday was not the place to do it.

  Still, they plunged in. Paul had warned Kate and Annie to keep a tight grip on their personal belongings. Their answer was to dump everything on him to put in his holdall.

  The clamor reached bursting point at the centre of the market. Kate and Annie were pulled in and out of stalls, asked to examine the goods and then tried to escape with difficulty. There was a small bar near the edge of the market with a view over the beach. Paul told the women he was heading there for a beer and pointed it out to them. They seemed happy with that. He was a drag when it came to the serious business of bargain hunting. Paul bought a couple of samosas and egg rolls on the way to make up for missing lunch and found an uncomfortable chair at the bar.

  He settled down with a cold beer and looked out over the beach towards the headland.

  This place was notorious for drugs when Paul had last been here and it still was. He recalled many nights sleeping on the beach, stoned and smiling, watching the stars over the Arabian Sea and feeling that he had arrived in heaven. He didn’t notice the garbage and the pollution and he managed to avoid the corrupt drug police, members of which posed as dealers, made an arrest then demanded bribes.

  The occasional hippie still lived in the area, never having left. Looking at the beach now, it wasn’t as beautiful as he remembe
red. He would take Kate and Annie up to Arambol and Keri, close to the Goan Maharashtra border later on where the beaches were virtually deserted.

  As Paul enjoyed his samosas, he replayed the meeting with the Swami. In many ways their discourse was classical Upanishads philosophy but there was something else blended with it. The Swami had talked about the new age, as if this was something about to dawn, where mankind at last would universally touch base with real spiritual information and experience.

  This must be what the new Light of the World would set in motion. Paul wondered about him. He had no idea of his real name. All he knew was that he was a Native American. When he would meet him, and, more importantly, if he actually was going to meet him, assuming he did exist, Paul had no idea. The events leading up to the meeting with the Swami had all the telltale signs of destiny or prophecy in action. He had been told he would meet people who would impart information and knowledge so that his mind and soul would be conditioned to receive and understand what he was going to be told by the person he knew now only as Ru-Ah. Was the Swami the first of many? Paul was starting ever so slowly to believe that the angels had existed and that what had happened to him was prophetic. If so, it was bound to change his life and that of his family forever. As to when, he had no idea.

  Later, after he had managed to extricate Kate and Annie from the frantic clutches of the hordes of babbling traders and they had pushed and shoved their way through the dust ridden crowds towards the taxi area, they were stretched out on a beach of silver and gold sand under a clutch of sunshades belonging to a shabby beach shack almost alone save for a few parading tourists in the distance and some sleepy locals.

  While he watched Annie splashing in the blue-green waters and while Kate was engrossed in one of those monster historical sagas, he tried to get some rational distance between his experiences and his present state-of-mind.

  It was very easy to just dismiss the whole angel business and his prophesied destiny as a mental aberration that happened in the past and could now be comfortably buried and forgotten. The Swami’s discourse could be put down to just one more version of the commonplace Eastern mystical approach to life, death and the human condition. And it was also tempting to ponder on the impact any ‘new messiah’ would have on races, tribes and religious groups not part of the Western diaspora. How, for example, would a remote people living in the African hinterland or in the Hunan region of China or in the mountains of Afghanistan both receive and react to the arrival of such a being as the new Light of the World? Counter to that was the question of how those same peoples and their ancestors had come to believe what they already believed. With modern communications there were few parts of the world that could not be reached and if the being was powerful enough, as the human form of Ru-Ah would have to be, then his message and his spiritual presence would penetrate every corner of the world.

  Despite trying to sweep his experience under the bed and forget it, Paul knew that he had been close to death on occasions. If not physical death, then certainly his mind could have been extinguished forever.

  When he looked inside himself in his still moments, he could sense a tiny knot, as though his very genetic make-up carried a blemish or a bloom, and he knew this was angel presence. There was another knot also that he knew contained the dark force. They were lurking deep within him in the same way that a virus can infect a hard drive or that it was impossible to eradicate fully from a computer memory every vestige of every program or download. Buried somewhere so deep that they could only be discovered by profound self-examination, Paul nevertheless sensed their presence. They were dormant, awaiting a trigger mechanism to click into place.

  If the prophecy was true than his life would change and so would the lives of his family. But then, so would the lives of most people in the world. All he could do was live and watch and wait. Right now, his work was going well, his family was happy and healthy and it was blissful to lie beneath the Goan sun and order lunch and beers from the attentive shack owner.

  As for tomorrow or years from now, who could tell?

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  TWO YEARS LATER

  The cradle of civilization

  “Athens,” said Malone as he brought in a bottle of good Bordeaux and slices of melted cheese on toast, “is one place I have never been.”

  He poured wine for them both then lounged back in his enormous sofa nibbling at the crusted edges of burnt cheese.

  “It’s a conference,” said Paul. “It’s just business.”

  “I have no truck with business anymore,” sniffed Malone with a degree of self-satisfaction. “It disturbs the psyche. Business is ultimately bankrupt and one of the world’s great time wasters. Can’t be doing with it at all.”

  “Lucky for you,” said Paul with a degree of irritation. “Some of us have no option.”

  “I thought you’d be writing your angel book by now,” Malone replied. “So, what’s happened to all that? Have the angels let you down? I was expecting to hear some amazing revelations long before now.”

  “I don’t think about it. I’ve met one or two people that I thought might be part of the prophecy, but the trouble is, you keep reading special implications into every conversation you have. Anyway, it was all year’s ago. I only met the Swami and I told you about him ages ago.”

  “Kate all right, and the family?” Malone was always curious about families for some reason. “Just catching up. I haven’t seen you for six months.”

  “Yes,” said Paul. “Rory went to Australia as you know, stayed for a year then came back and now he’s gone back there again. He does worry me. He has no qualifications.”

  “He’s exploring life. He doesn’t need qualifications. They’ll just slow him down. What about those daughters of yours?”

  “Cassie is talking about getting married and Annie is at university. She’s got into scuba diving in a big way and spent four months in Fiji helping to conserve a coral reef.”

  “Wonderful,” breathed Malone sipping wine. “That’s the best thing she could do. And, how about the little woman? You never explored the deepest regions of your sexual fantasies then?”

  “No,” said Paul. “I’ve told you all this before. I think that was all mental stuff. It was a very confusing time. I didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t.”

  “Join the club,” smiled Malone. “Isn’t it divine not to know what’s real and what isn’t? Your Swami was right, you know. Existence is one thing and reality is another.”

  “I’m supposed to meet a writer, you know, to write the book for me.”

  “Maybe the time isn’t right. Just let it happen.”

  “That’s what I’m doing. I don’t think about it much. Whatever happens will happen.”

  “I’ve been exercising my pineal,” said Malone. “You know that the Atlanteans used to use giant crystals to generate power, a bit like today’s silicon chips, and they believed that they could create virtual crystals in their brains which acted as a kind of transformer and jacked up the effect of their third eyes. The physical site of the third eye is the pineal gland.”

  “What’s the effect been?” asked Paul.

  “Well, it’s early days,” muttered Malone, “but I think I am developing my third eye quite strongly. It was supposed to have been prominent in very early man, millions of years ago, before the brain truly evolved.”

  “I’ve heard that.”

  “As you know, Haeckel’s Biogenetic Law states that the human embryo goes through all the ancestral stages of man’s evolutionary development while in the womb. This means that, at some point, the third eye would be present. It’s just that it’s not recognized as such.”

  Paul glanced out of Malone’s glass garden door at the hills beyond just beginning to turn a deep shade of tangerine and he helped himself to more wine.

  “Maybe the pineal is the mechanism of telepathy?” he pondered.

  “Almost certainly is,” said Malone passing over the remainder to the
cheesy toast. “Every organ in the human body depends on something else. Even the heart, which has its own nervous system is governed by currents flowing from the nerve centers. Although the pineal is linked to the brain it is not activated by the nerve cells that surround it. It appears to be activated by messages that reach it through the eyes, by the movement of the pupils not retinal images. It affects the thyroid and is involved with our emotions,” Malone giggled and Paul was reminded of the Swami all those years ago in Goa. “Some wackos think that the pineal is a cosmic ray receiver or regulator. You wouldn’t catch me believing anything as outlandish as that.”

  Paul laughed and coughed at the same time, placing his hand in front of his mouth in case he spat wine all over the rugs.

  “Have you seen any of Dan Winter’s stuff?” asked Malone.

  Paul hadn’t.

  “Amazing. He’s an electrical engineer turned guru. He goes on about the golden mean and how the heart has a kind of formula for creating soul material. I’m going to spend some time studying his work.”

  The two men passed the next minute or so in silence, contemplating the mystery of the pineal gland and the mysteries of the world and savoring a mixture of crisp and crusty cheese and the rich texture of the smooth Bordeaux on their palates.

  “So,” said Malone at last. “Athens?”

  “Athens,” said Paul. “It’s been a long time. I was last there with Kate before we were married. We spent nearly a summer travelling around the Greek islands and nearly a month in Athens.”

  “So, what’s the conference about?”

  Paul looked at Malone to judge if he was serious. He appeared to be genuinely curious.

  “It’s to look at various ways in which IT networks and new computer programming developments can influence new ideas in business,” Paul told him. “It’s supposed to be a kind of visionary meeting of minds, a sort of lateral thinking forum looking at new directions and new ideas.”