The Televisionary Oracle

by Rob Brezsny

  “Your success in this project may depend in part on your ability to remember when you were a woman. And I assure you with utter certainty that you were a woman. There was a period in your earliest life—indeed, in the life of every man—in which you were purely female. It was the first five weeks after you were conceived. That’s because every fetus starts out female. Every fetus, in the beginning, has a clitoris, an Ur-phallus. It is only at the five-week mark that those fetuses destined to be males endure the spontaneous explosion of hormonal abracadabra that transmogrifies their clitorises into penises.

  “Think back, men. Meditate back. You’ll find those five weeks. And when you do, the gifts of menstruation may begin to become available. Perhaps we may offer you some help in this task with the next part of your program tonight.

  “We’ll get to that in a minute. First, let me say that what we’re doing here now is but a bare introduction to the advantages of consciously dying every day of your life. If you’d like to know more, please sign our guest book. We will contact you.

  “OK. Now we’re happy to present you with a practicum that should allow you to begin putting to use the ideas we’ve spoken about.

  “To begin, place yourself in a comfortable position. Relax and breathe deeply.

  “Now bring your awareness to the inside of your abdomen below your navel. If you’re a woman, do your best to locate the inner walls of your uterus. If you’re a man, faithfully hallucinate that you feel a uterus.

  “Imagine that a ripe ovum has just popped out of your left ovary and has begun its migration into your fallopian tube. You’ve ovulated. As if in time-lapse photography, follow that egg as it journeys. Let your mind picture this if you want, but more importantly, feel the sensation in the appropriate place in your body.

  “Can you sense that there is a sentience in the ovum? It’s more alive than any other individual cell in your body, even the unripe ova it left behind in your ovary. Without getting sentimental or anthropomorphic, pretend that this little fragment of you is a potential new creature, a proto-being that vibrates at the same frequency as the first chains of molecules that were shocked alive by lightning bolts in Earth’s ancient primordial soup.

  “It’s important that you suspend any beliefs that might interfere with your ability to tune in directly to the actual living presence of this cell. What you’re doing has no bearing on your political or religious notions about abortion, for instance. To worry that it does will only encourage your chattering mind to try to hijack this experience.

  “Now imagine, as you follow your ovum in its travels, that it’s a highly specialized essence both alive and not alive, both belonging to you and serving the agendas of an ancient instinct that has no interest in your personal needs. Become aware that the ovum is on a quest driven by a primitive longing to find a nest.

  “Next, experience that perfect moment when its longing is satisfied. Feel its ecstasy as it nestles into the bed of tissue that has been prepared for it on your uterine wall. Exult in this homecoming—but not too long. In the ensuing moment, this inconceivably old entity launches the second half of its imperative: to be fertilized.

  “Simmer in this sensation. A thing that is alive yet not alive, that’s both you and not you, waits, yearning with a desire that’s millions of years old, to become fully alive. Feel it waiting. Imagine its vivid instinctual intent, its utterly concentrated animal readiness. Waiting. And waiting. And waiting.

  “And then visualize the moment when it gives up waiting. The exact second when it surrenders its lust to live and begins to wilt. Maybe your conscious mind is pleased there’ll be no pregnancy. But a different mind in you, a primitive mind, feels loss and grief. Opens to the underworld. Falls down the hole. Feels the breath of death.

  “Now imagine that as the ovum and its nest peel away from the uterine wall, they send a signal to your pituitary gland to secrete the hormone that will in turn detonate the ripening of a new follicle. Feel the signal. Follow the hormone. Tune in to the ecstatic twinge in your ovary as the cycle begins again. And wish yourself happy birthday.

  “Meanwhile, remain aware of the dying that is simultaneously taking place in your womb. And wish yourself happy deathday.

  “Imagine at this moment that you are between worlds. You’re both alive and dead at the same time. Womb and tomb are conflating.

  “And welcome to the Drivetime.

  “Steep yourself here in the threshold, looking both ways.

  “Now please visualize that you are the person you will be on the day your body dies. Pretend you’re fully aware that these are your last hours on Earth. Don’t worry about whether this is ‘real’ or ‘imagined,’ whether you’re psychically viewing the future or merely fantasizing. Remember: There is a realm that is neither ‘real’ nor ‘imaginary,’ but both: a realm in between. The Drivetime.

  “See where you are as you prepare for your adventure. Are you lying in a bed in a familiar place, or perhaps in a musty bed in a strange land? Look at your arms. Are there wrinkles and age spots, or is the flesh still smooth and clear? How old are you? Wiggle your feet if you can. Stroke your own cheek with tenderness. How does the inside of your body feel? Pulsing pain? Slow, dissolving serenity? Confusion and uproar? Resignation and excitement?

  “Since this is wherever you imagine it to be, maybe you’re not expiring in bed. Be frank. Do you think it’s more likely you’re going to die in an accident or during an earthquake or from a sudden heart attack? Or perhaps you’ve decided not to wait for death to overtake you on its own terms, but are going out to meet it. Can you see yourself standing on a beach, preparing to lose yourself at the bottom of the ocean?

  “If you want, run through a host of scenarios, letting each tell you some quiet or spectacular secret. But at last settle on one. This is your last stand on Earth. The sweet spot where you will take your final breath. Become aware of how much you love yourself. Tune in to your amazement about how beautiful and strange and difficult and mysterious your life has been.

  “See and hear and smell every detail of these closing moments. If nothing specific pops into your mind’s eye, make something up. What color are the walls or the sky? What time of the year is it, what hour of the day or night? What are you wearing? Are there companions here with you? How do you feel about being separated from them?

  “This last question may be the hardest. Leaving would be simpler if it weren’t for these grieving souls begging you to stay. Look into their eyes now and say exactly what you mean. In this propitious moment, everything can change forever. This is your chance to banish suffering you’ve caused, to correct a thousand mistakes, to alter the entire meaning of your life.

  “Or let’s say that these are not your final seconds. Maybe you have an hour or two remaining. If you’re dying of disease, your body is in full retreat from the fight. If you are to be killed in an accident, your subconscious mind is turning towards the Other Side as a dandelion swivels at dawn to follow the rising sun.

  “Become aware, then, that your heart is in conversation with death. Consider the possibility that your passing from this world will be nothing like what you’ve ever believed, and that your real education begins now. Does it seem pointless to become a student in these waning moments, or can you glimpse the hint of a reason to become more alert than you ever have before? What if this is a great awakening? What if you’re about to navigate an abyss as dangerous and exhilarating as the one you crossed in order to be born? What if there is another life on the other side of that abyss—a life as unimaginable as this one was in the moments before you arrived?

  “Let’s hypothesize that what you’ve heard is true: Your entire life can pass before your eyes at closing time. Do you want that? Say yes, and every experience you’ve ever had—every nuance of feeling, every amazing and trivial thought, every wordless memory of a memory—will flood through you in a vivid waking dream so compressed that only a person in your threshold state is capable of enduring it. Surrender to this ext
ravagant blessing. For all you know, it’s the fuel that ensures you’ll make it to the other side with your self-awareness intact. For all you know, it’s the key to a kind of immortality you never guessed the existence of until now.

  “As you relive your life in this timeless time, we offer you our love in whatever form you need it, from tenderness to adrenaline. We pray that you will see what you could not see before.

  “Spend as much time here as you need. We will leave you now for a while to muse and peruse.”

  “Imagine now that you have intimately experienced two kinds of death without having to endure the inconvenience of literally dying. You’ve zeroed in on that moment when the withering of one ovum triggers the bloom of a new one. And you’ve learned what your life feels like when you explore it from its last moments. Pretend that as a result you’re now ready to wield death’s purifying slash yourself—with love not cruelty; with joy not violence. You’re sensing what it would be like to become an adept of creative destruction, a master dismantler of whatever threatens to kill your soul.

  “Scan yourself now, searching for the hard, frozen fixations; the broken, frazzled obstructions; the angry, arrogant traumas. Track down the false hopes, short-sighted beliefs, and useless emotions that your death knows to be superfluous. Allow yourself to look at just one terrible truth about yourself; let yourself feel the suffering you’ve steadfastly refused to feel; come face to face with the ignorance you have nurtured most obsessively—the ignorance which, if demolished, would free you to become a more ultimate version of yourself.

  “This is where you learn firsthand what the alchemists meant when they said, ‘Dissolution is the secret of the Great Work.’ This is the time and this is the place to use the Death Medicine on yourself.

  “Continue breathing deep, hilariously sacred breaths. With each exhale, remember that your body is a furnace that destroys its fuel in order to live. With each inhale, imagine that enlightenment is not the accumulation of knowledge but the stripping away of amnesia. It’s as if nothing can ever again be dangerous; as if not even time can murder you. You’re better than dead. You’re better than alive. You’re dead and alive at the same time. From now on you will grow more ecstatically intelligent whenever you meditate on this: To the degree that you steal death’s method and use it to invigorate your life, the specter of your own corpse loses its power to scare you.”

  If you know anything about quantum physics,

  you’ll understand why the treasure you’ve been longing for

  has already been changed by your pursuit of it.

  It’s no longer what it was

  when you felt your first pangs of desire.

  Now, in order to make this prized experience yours,

  you’ll have to modify your ideas about it.

  Fortunately,

  you’ve come to the Televisionary Oracle

  at exactly the right time

  to get help in doing just that.

  In Tibetan Buddhism’s “Four Dignities of the Warrior’s Path,” which the Televisionary Oracle has borrowed for its own use, courage and ferocity are absent. In fact, the qualities regarded as essential have nothing in common with the training regimens of football players or Marines or lobbyists.

  The first dignity is translated in English as meekness, but that word doesn’t convey its full meaning. “Relaxed confidence” is a more precise formulation. A humble feeling of being at home in one’s body.

  Perkiness, or hard-earned, unabashed joy, is the second dignity. To develop it, the warrior diligently drives out the self-indulgence of cynicism.

  The third is outrageousness. It combines a delight in daring experiments with a passionate objectivity that is free of both hope and fear.

  The fourth dignity is inscrutability, which demands a supple willingness to be unpredictable in carrying out one’s moral vision.

  The Televisionary Oracle

  is brought to you by the state of mind

  poet John Keats inhabited when he said,

  “If something is not beautiful, it is probably not true.”

  I’ve been lying, beauty and truth fans. I’ve been riffing. What I described last time was my “menarche” from the standpoint of my smotheringly loving mothers alone.

  But it wasn’t real as far as I was concerned. By all the precepts of the Pomegranate Grail itself, it was a hypocritical fraud.

  The more I thought about it, the more enraged I became. The so-called guardians of the ancient mystery school had committed a profane crime against their so-called avatar. They had desecrated the sacred meaning of my rite of passage into womanhood.

  Let me explain.

  From the time I was a young child, the figure of Persephone was at the heart of my spiritual training. She was like Jehovah for the Jews, Ahura-Mazda for the Zoroastrians. The Goddess, I was told, expresses Herself in countless names and forms, but the stories of Persephone were most important for this age and my mission. (Mary Magdalen was Her word made flesh, Her Jesus or Buddha, but that’s another story.)

  It wasn’t until I was almost eight years old, while sitting in class on a spring day, that Vimala first shared the shocking news about my idol: Most of the people in the outside world knew only one tale about Persephone, and it was a terrible lie! According to this abomination, my Queen was a naive young girl picking narcissus flowers in a meadow when a big ugly brute of a demon-god named Pluto kidnapped Her, dragged Her down to his hellish kingdom through a hole in the ground, and made Her his prisoner-wife.

  I burst into tears on the spot. I felt what a devout Catholic girl might feel if a foul tramp spit on her silver crucifix. The story wasn’t true, I knew, but the fact that everyone believed it was devastating.

  Vimala’s intention in introducing me to this sacrilege was pedagogical. It was the formal beginning of her teachings about the loathsome sins of the fathers. The myths that I’d been raised on, she told me once I regained my composure, were the authentic and original ones. Persephone had reigned as the Queen of the Underworld eons before the patriarchy concocted the idiotic Pluto and superimposed his violent myth over the beautiful truth.

  Not that She had been Queen since time began. When the world was still young—so said the teachings of the Pomegranate Grail—the realm of Tartarus had no ruler. The souls of the dead dwelt there listlessly, in ignorance and without guidance, waiting to be reborn. Meanwhile, in the brightly lit world above, Persephone was a maiden like me, steadily growing in wisdom as She mastered the skills She would need to serve as Queen. “When you’re ready to seek the wilder, stranger path,” Her mother Demeter told Her, “the shades will rejoice. You will be their Redeemer.”

  As Her body grew and changed shape, Her longing for mystery deepened, as did Her courage to claim the power that awaited Her. And when Her drive to know the depths matched Her power to navigate them, She menstruated for the first time. Awakened both to fertility and death, She began Her quest, beginning Her descent at a shrine inside a mountain near the city of Clitor, where the River Styx, the menstrual blood of Mother Earth, originates.

  Now here’s the key: She went willingly into the underworld, and under Her own power. She abducted Herself. She was not a resistant pawn dragged below to serve the agenda of a controlling monster.

  Unlike myself. Unlike my own experience of first menstruation.

  With hair-raising similarities to the hapless Persephone of the patriarchal story, I had been kidnapped. Taken against my will. Forced to do the bidding and obey the timing of a tyrant with intricate plans for my destiny. Was it any consolation that my ravager wasn’t a Big Bad Daddy but my sweet generous mommies?

  No. It was worse. It was a violation which ensured that any escape I made, any retribution I exacted, would arouse tremendous guilt in me. Nevertheless, I began plotting my strategy within days of the morning my blood first flowed.

  My initial task was to remind myself of the lessons the still small voice had taught me when I first decided to prevent menstr
uation those many years ago. What lay behind my impulse to rebel was not merely juvenile pettiness. The stakes were much higher. I could not become the avatar unless I did it in my own way. And the ritual by which Vimala and company forcibly induced my first menstruation had reasserted their right and power to make me their puppet.

  One menstrual period later, in early February, I formulated a plan to reclaim my independence and save my soul; that is to say, to kidnap myself; to slip into the underworld from a position of strength and under my own power.

  I was in the menstrual hut, officially known as Persephone’s Sanctuary, which is in the building closest to my home. It was just my second visit to the sacred precinct. Until my blood first flowed a month before, the place had been off-limits, as it was to all who had never menstruated—even the avatar.

  It was after 11 P.M. I was in the large square adytum which occupies the heart of the top floor. Most of the other menstruators or postmenopausal crones were either meditating in the soundproofed chambers that line the west wall or already engaged in their dream incubation quests on the floor below. I had a strong psychic impression about the nature of the quest that Cecily was on. She was reaching out in the astral realms to her friend Priscilla, who lay in a coma in an Oakland hospital room. She was trying to coax Priscilla either to depart to the land of death or return to the living, but not stay stuck in between.

  Also creeping into the corner of my awareness was the sound of a djembe drum rhythmically beating in the music room. Tuning in to the intention behind it, I sensed Calley. I fantasized or telepathically perceived (at that time, I didn’t always know the difference) that she had launched herself on a shamanic journey not just through space but time. I felt her seeking out her Iroquois ancestors, hoping to sit with them as they practiced the dream-guessing rite, whose aim was to guess the dreamer’s ondinnonk—the secret wish of the soul revealed in a dream. The murmur of a strange and beautiful word circulated at the periphery of my inner hearing: qaumanEq. “What does that mean?” I asked Calley with my thoughts. “Shamanlight of the brain,” said a voice that sounded like hers.