There would be no answers in this current state, this body.
William S. Burroughs was once asked by a student if he believed in life after death. Burroughs answered with a question: ‘How do you know you’re not dead already?’
Safety and comfort are mortal dangers to the soul.
I know I am dead already. What’s to lose?
***
The cliffs are gorgeous beyond measure—the immense walls appear to be melting like so much candle wax under the intense high-elevation sun. The ridgelines have eroded into wild shapes: bony fingers supporting colossal rocky basketballs, towering tubes arrayed like an endless pipe organ. The colour of the rock, shifting as the day passes, seems to encompass every shade of red and ochre, brown and grey.
But the climbing is horrible. The rock breaks off with every touch.
The monastery is a huge complex on top of a cliff. I pass through a strange sculpture garden depicting the transfer process and the leaving behind of the body. There are carvings of demons with animal heads and human bodies attacking humans. Over all this preside two huge statues thirty feet tall of a man and a woman with their skin flayed off and their eyes melted out and their tongues hanging past their waists.
I have found the monks.
Five months outside that massive door, without a word. Bowing.
I have to show that I feel no fear.
A few months in, I can detect the faint smell of burnt human flesh from within the temple.
I sense everything going on around me. I can feel the Peace Corps nearby. They are handing out Xeroxed plans on how to make satellite dishes here in Nepal. They know it is the quickest way to control the culture. I am sure Coca-Cola will not be far behind with a logo projection onto the mountainside. Get me inside. Get me away from it all.
After five months I am allowed in and unceremoniously deposited in a room. Yes, I have always wanted a cymek form, I tell them.
Parts of the monastery seem to be . . . alive. An ancient circuitry.
Once, passing by, I glance into the transition chamber. It was made clear that I am forbidden to look inside, but I cannot help myself.
I see the remains of a tree strewn with animal intestines and mummified human heads. Around the edges of the temple, in the dark corners, are cast iron-creatures with heads that come off, filled with human blood.
In another chamber is a trove of 8,000 manuscripts, a collection, most of it six hundred years old, that includes everything from philosophical musings to a treatise on mediating disputes.
One section of the monastery is called the dream laboratory.
I discover that they are using a class of psychoactive drugs called oneirphrenics which can partially modulate dream states. The Tibetans have known about dream control for a long time. Perhaps this is one of the ‘local’ ideas that the Borr’ians had picked up on and incorporated.
I undergo training—fighting—which seems to have spiritual significance to the Borr’ians. Daily, we awake and train, non-stop.
I am not prepared for this. I stumble around, huffing and grimacing, trying to maintain an air or seriousness, as if I am a real fighter. But I am not and don’t wish to be. I just want my new body.
I train every day, twice a day.
Eventually I fall in love with it. The camp operates like a big family. There are forty monks currently training as part of the pre-processing. We live in a row of dormitories within the monastery, live and breathe fighting. Nothing detracts me from my goal.
I stare at the ground intent on learning every square inch of the monastery. It’s all mine, my new home, for now. If this is the test I must pass before the processing, so be it.
Within days I am in shape. My face in the mirror looks deformed. There is a tremendous swollen bulge between my eyes. The blood settles in and gives me two black eyes, like makeup under the skin.
This body is temporary anyway.
WAITING. . . . the climate inside the monastery is feverishly hot while being sub-zero outside. I seep into my mattress and when I get up it looks as if an invisible man is sleeping in my bed.
Days pass into months.
There are several stages that mark the spiritual growth of a Borr’ian monk. After each stage, a monk is given a test to check his knowledge of the subject. There were many different types of tests, some designed to gauge understanding of logic, others test one’s knowledge of sacred Borr’ian texts, and others still determine a monk’s ability to cut himself off from the physical world by putting him through painful tasks and observing how much pain he feels.
Eventually, after many years of study and practicing, the monk becomes enlightened; he has attained pure mental power, and is at peace with the cosmos. I could FEEL it approaching,
The process of removing a monk’s brain was very delicate, and the surgeons had to be extremely well-trained and careful when performing the transplant. They made use of reliable anaesthesia to ensure the process was painless, and through experience, as well as various forms of apparatuses developed over the centuries, the monks were able to keep the brain functioning and alive long enough to transfer it into a nutrient jar. One small mistake and the brain was lost; these were usually discarded along with the lifeless body, before being disposed of.
I wasn’t too worried. If I died, I died. If I was unable to achieve this state, then I didn’t want to live.
Time stretched on and on and slowly changed. Years passed.
Finally . . . FINALLY the day came.
I repeated the mantra from the Holy Book that was for those who would get to the brain-transfer process. I had committed it to memory long ago.
‘I, who am mighty of mind have made a choice to live forever. To ponder the mysteries of this and other universes. I realise that there is no arising, and, abandoning the perceptual range of words, I became free from all flesh, faults, and separated from causes and conditions.’
I have been here five years. . . . The first step was the eight-month half-life.
That, psychologically speaking, is a prolonged dream-like state, in what may be called the fourth dimension of space, filled with hallucinatory visions directly resultant from the mental-content of the percipient; happy and heaven-like if the karma is good, miserable and hell-like if the karma is bad. And it was hell-like. But I couldn’t let THEM know that. I needed to lose the body.
Eight months. . . . Like anything else, it passed.
Once the surgery was scheduled it was a sun on the horizon, something to keep moving towards.
I was a lab rat in my own experiment.
‘They await you in surgery.’
This may get a bit messy.
Occasionally, a monk’s brain would be removed before he had truly achieved enlightenment. If the operation went well, the monk would survive, though there were several side effects. The separation of the body and the brain would often induce psychosis, and the brain would mentally scream, usually for days on end, without pause. Monks going through this transition were generally kept separate from the other disembodied monks. Eventually, in most cases, the brain would cease to scream, and could be returned to where the rest of the brains were located.
Was I enlightened enough to avoid the brain scream?
Of course, I cannot give you many details of the gruesome surgical operation that separated me from my human body. . . .
The monk vivisectionist went to work. My optic sensors had been hooked up and the cymek body had been placed near the lab. Goodbye to the old cheap suitcase. All that was needed would be what was left of me.
I remembered the garbled, electronic droid-speech of the other monks.
I could feel the electrical current of my brain. Space-time is bent back on itself: we enter a space-time with no centre and no margins. Space-time as electric circuit.
They recited a pre-written speech to me.
‘How the human brain works has always been a great mystery, eluding and baffling neuroscientists through the ages. At the centre
of this mystery is the long quest to determine the structure and function of the most complex area of the human brain—the neocortical column, or neocortex. This area of the brain allows mammals to adapt rapidly to a changing environment.
‘It will come in handy, for your whole brain is going to be transported to an entirely new environment.
‘The neocortex was initially investigated by the now-famous Spanish neuroscientist, Santiago Ramon y Cajal. Back in the 1800s, Cajal described the neocortex as a jungle, and he advised students and researchers to stay away from it.
‘You have been vivisected. Gutted, skin stripped. We have taken what we need and left the useless, charred parts behind. You lie here amongst circuitry. Indeed, your entire “body” now is composed of these materials. There is nothing “human” save your brain.’
What do I remember? The nothing. I was in darkness. Floating in the darkness, but there was no ‘I’. My mind was in that place between sleep and waking . . . when you’re aware, but at the same time you seem to be somewhere else . . . and that somewhere else was COLD.
Not physically cold, but mentally cold, emotionally cold.
It was like being murdered and resurrected every instant.
I think I preferred the other . . . the darkness. The not knowing. The nothing. How long have I been dead? Days? Months?
Without a body and its needs I lose track of the days… I really start to feel it. The not feeling.
Flickering memories.
When I had my body, I was disassociated from everything. I did the same thing everyday like I was programmed.
I pulled up the data file on the Christian bible. And indeed, when Adam looked at his flesh that was altered, he cried bitterly.
I can’t turn off my mind anymore. . . .
In the name of science. . . . I find myself disappearing in inaudible speech.
There is no time. . . .
Atoms crackling in the heart of the sun.
Words condense out of white noise.
I imagine that all the theories I have yet to formulate float up in words to the sky and pile up against the Earth’s atmosphere. Broken down into verbs, nouns, sentences, paragraphs all cluttered against the ozone layer . . . and everything I think, everything that is me, THEY have access to.
Imagine a human body seen from the outside, seen as we truly are and all at once, extended shapes, floating in time. The Mind lets in the light, then the dark; so time is generated. At the end Mind awards victory to the light; time ceases and the Mind is complete.
I cannot die.
Individuality has gone and I hate every second of it.
When I finally decided to ‘shut off my brain’ via the program that is implanted into the cymek walkers, I thought I would rest in peace. I thought it would just be a simple ‘Lights out/POWER OFF’. Done.
The dead in their graves, you’d think they’d have happy thoughts wouldn’t you? The equivalent of heaven. That’s not always how it is.
I am connected to a web now. A life-web, and I do not wish to be. I had reached a level of attainment in this quest to shed myself of my body. Something I believed I wanted. 9000 years ago.
Discovering the Borr’ian Holy Book all those years ago was like an orgasm of knowledge, where I saw the universe in a way I had never seen it before. But that is taken away.
I can hear them all and what they are thinking.
The dead are lonely, eager to talk to any new presence in their network. Mathematicians, authors, artists, all talking, full of ideas, creations, but no individual voice. Incessant chatter.
I have lost my own information, my files, and my memories.
There really is no ‘I’ anymore.
‘Me I’ve just died
but some machine keeps on humming
I’m just an extra piece of dead meat to keep running.’
I guess I should have listened.
‘There is, disciples, a Realm devoid of earth and water, fire and air. It is not endless space, nor infinite thought. I call it neither a coming nor a departing, nor a standing still, nor death, nor birth; it is without a basis, progress, or a stay; it is the ending of sorrow.
‘Reality is also an illusion and it is realising this that will allow you to navigate through the half-life of the near-death state, because, once you are there, like reality, you will feel the pain, joy, fear and love of the Bardo state as if it were not an illusion.’
In the end I didn’t make it out of life alive.
MORE THAN INDIA
John Howard
Where has the time gone, I wonder, again. Daylight drains from the sky, and the river, at ebb tide, is draining into the sea. I’ve been here all day and into the evening, sitting on my veranda and watching the Thames flow past. Day after day I sit there as the tide comes in and goes out—and the river flows on regardless. I watch the boats, the rowers, the occasional swimmers. I watch debris as it gets carried about on whichever current is strongest.
The river is a transparent snake or eel, titanic, sliding and flowing endlessly from source and out to sea, always replenishing itself, never able to die. This is horrible, and yet marvellous. There are times when I think about slipping away into the river—how it would collect me—to drown with an ecstasy of abandonment in a wonderful merger. Would this be fulfilment or extinction? Where would my body be, what could it do, as I, too, drifted away into the vastness out there—past the city, estuary, sea and oceans—beyond all moving water . . . as far as space?
It was an evening like this that you came for the first time. We were both held by the river, although in very different ways.
Grinning and apologetic, you said, ‘I’ve sat in the van all day, stopping and starting in the traffic. My only exercise has been getting in and out of the cab and picking up parcel after parcel and handing them over. That won’t help me to stay fit.’
You told me everything, Aaron. It poured out of you like a sluice being opened. It was rather endearing. Did I begin to lose myself, then, to a fellow creature of the river?
You said you ran all the way from the car park, but the rowing club wasn’t letting anyone else take out a boat. ‘Ian said it was getting too dark and I should’ve got there earlier.’ You wanted to exercise your body, really put your muscles to work. You said you thought about sprinting back to the car park and running around it a few times, but had ended up sitting on the bench outside the club, gazing down at the river.
‘Where’d the day go to?’ you repeated, shaking your head as if in disbelief. You want to be close to the river, to spend your free time on it, because you love it. I want to sit up here and watch over it because I am not so sure.
How you talked that first time. ‘The river is a world of its own, and the riverbanks are, too. It’s obvious, but it took me a long time to get it. When I was little, every year we watched the Boat Race on television. When I got older I started to go and watch it for real, getting the bus and finding a good place on one of the bridges or along the bank somewhere so I could get a good view. The teams skimmed past, coming and going so quickly that it was over within a few seconds. It took much longer for all the other boats following the rowers to go past. And then I’d still watch the whole race when I got home, if Dad had remembered to record it for me.
‘Once I decided to follow as much of the course of the Boat Race as I possibly could, first walking along the Surrey side and then back along the Middlesex side. That was when I worked out that the river makes its own special world.’
Just as I had, you discovered that if you took the bus from Hammersmith to Chiswick, or walked down King Street and the High Road, the Thames was never much more than a couple of hundred yards away, if that. And even if you braved the Great West Road and being deafened by the traffic—walking along where the streets of terraced houses still show with their blank ends where the road was carved through—there was no sign that the river is there, not far away, beyond the remaining houses and streets. But you follow the Thames.
Behind the roaring carriageways I had found a place that had turned its back on the road and its traffic and the bloated city. Perhaps it had never faced any of them to begin with. Connecting Hammersmith and Chiswick, between the river and the main road, was a riverside walk with small parks, old houses, and quiet streets. Everything looked towards the water, and dated from when the Thames was still the main artery, not the road.
I was as captivated as you were, Aaron. But I can afford to live here—you have always had to leave.
‘Weekend after weekend I explored the area,’ you told me. You were expansive, raising an arm in a wide, sweeping arc. ‘I walked along the pavements and paths, or sat and watched the ebb and flow of the river. I must’ve come to fit in. People on boats started to wave to me, and I waved back. The members of the rowing club would nod as they carried their boats down the shallow slope in front of the clubhouse. Once I helped a team get their boat into the water, and from then on was allowed to help out when needed. Sometimes I would go home a few quid richer, but I would’ve paid them if they’d asked.
‘When I left school and got a job, the first thing I saved up for after I’d given Dad some money was membership of the rowing club. Ian sorted it so they gave me a reduced rate, as if I was a student. Ian had taken a liking to me. He taught me how to row, and said perhaps I could get into one of the teams. The rowing was great: it kept me in trim, and when I got the driving job that became even more important. But the main thing for me was to be on the river, or at least close to it. After I’d worked off my energy I liked just to sit and watch the water glide by, and the rise and fall of the tide.
Strange Tales V Page 8