How many other people were also there, some of them nameless or apparently without a defined task in this drama? Including those who had been born and had passed away, seemingly without leaving a mark. People who were seduced by his indoctrinations and his craving for power. They were all there in that huge picture.
Reincarnation, the Old Man pondered, was just another thought model amongst so many, to cut the illusionary flow of time into conceivable segments, allowing the mind to order them sequentially. As the mind was programmed to do. Having spent timeless ages outside the reality of physical things, Staretz, the Old, Wise Man, was feeling his heart beating in the rhythm of the universe now. Glancing at the books upon the shelves of his library, the ends of the shelves not to be seen, all the books he had been administrating, he knew what they contained. Stories…Reality lay beyond them all. As it lay beyond all belief systems. Not to be grasped.
Reality can be imagined as a many-facetted possibility of connections to be put into a story. The story of mankind, or that of a single individual. It is a river flowing and yet staying as the river. Each drop of its water containing the whole of ‘water-ness’. It is the notion of everything happening at the same time, no matter how inconceivable, or undesirable. For the mind.
A ray of light shot like lightning through the Old Man’s body. Time was useful after all, he thought, whether it really existed or not! Changes could be undertaken only in time. Now. At least this time never ends! And Shootik needed to know that he was ready. Ready to assume yet another task on this planet.
His oldness was an artificial stop in the flow of life for which he was there, in beyond-dimensional space. How else could he describe it? Whilst his youth, the eternity of his being, was kept alive and alert to all that ever happened and what was still happening in the world.
Stories were important, no doubt, but no personal story has an end in itself. The death of the person doesn’t put an end to it. It flows like a river into a field beyond dimensions, where its living elements re-organise themselves into new beginnings, open to all kinds of interventions from other stories. Unfinished as well, they all enable the River of Life to continue to flow.
Chapter 17
Coming Back — Come-Back
There are no farewells, unless one thinks of oneself as having a separate life from the rest of humanity and from that of the planet. Having experienced this in a timeless sphere, Antoine Casmir was about to return to the realm where time was a reality, marking the cycles of people’s temporal existence. Seventy-two hours after that car accident which had sent him into coma, he was now about to wake up.
The book with the aubergine cover, which everybody seems to have or to get just in time when something special is going on, or needs to happen…It was not only his book. He knew now the part which everybody played in the dramaturgy of his life. And the effects of it upon the lives of others…His drama was not only his. Still on the other side, he also knew what had caused the frontal collision and the purpose of both of them lying now, Jurij physically more injured than he, in the same hospital. Where lifetime is not counted in individual segments marked by arrival and departure, and not defined by personal identities, one’s being is connected with all that once was, and is still happening!
There are no farewells. Seventy-two hours of worldly time, or even less, can show this happening in no time at all. He had had a once-in-a-lifetime chance to experience this, in that out-of-time-library. He had become a Staretz, yes, a wise man, not by his own merit and not without the help of his friend, Shootik, that part of him to which, in his former ignorance, he had denied existence. Able to be everywhere, and in different appearances, Shootik had led him through the span of his seventy-two years of biological age. Ageless, provided he stayed on that other side, Shootik was his innermost core and his life force as well. Without it, he would be just a mass of flesh and bones getting cold in the hospital bed by now. If he did not decide to come back, Staretz, alias Casmir, knew this for sure.
The knowledge he had collected whilst being between the worlds could not be denied. Switching his attention to the physical side of reality, and that of his position in this world, all the dealings he had been conducting on behalf of the praiseworthy goals, serving human needs, as this was said to be in the companies he was directing…All the lies being told in their primarily financial, interests…All this would develop further, no doubt, in the same spirit of enterprise, unless he re-appeared in person to unmask the unholy thing. Putting his hand upon the aubergine-covered book, he decided: I have to go back!
It required a forceful act of free will to cross over from the invisible realm back into the physical. A crossing, in his case, moved by responsibility for sins committed and their ulterior effects upon the lives of those whom he had mislead…and those whom he had misused. Knowingly. Sins against humanity as a whole. Only free will and new decisions taken could offer redemption. The past does not simply die by itself. But free will does not exist of its own accord. It is bound to human effort to act accordingly. As much as he hated his former names and identities, Antoine Casmir needed to wear them again; if only to have the authority to accomplish what he had decided to do. His brother, Anatole, would be exposed, of course, and with him the rest of his respectable family. He had to be very careful, or they could declare that he had become insane. This was a major point to be considered.
Those who had built a powerful empire were the only ones who could bring it to a fall, knowing, as they did, and he knew to a large extent, where the weak points lay. But the fall alone dissolves nothing. The genes of what had been intended with the building-up of the empire survive. They search for another host, to be reactivated, and they have all the time of the world for this to happen. Nothing ever dies. Casmir knew this now. Seventy-two hours in ordinary time, and uncountable timelessness in which he had spent the equivalent of perhaps a century or more going through the stories of his fellow men, being the guardian of their books; all these experiences had shown him the relativity of time and its division into units. Eternity was timeless, and infinity just space. A borderless, mental space with nothing to measure it. No need to do so. And death…? Death was just a passage from a measurable part of existence into an immeasurable one. The oneness of a universe which makes all transient things new, if one only cares to take notice of them!
He had to be careful, however. Very careful not to reveal what he had come to know. He had to play the game, now that for him it was over, for quite some time yet, to be able to start a quite a different process.
There was no need to release and no virtue in releasing any information into the greedy-for-news-jaws of the public, which would just swallow it down, unable to deal with it anyway, before there was a chance of transforming the evil. A public unmasking of the dealings in which he and his people had been involved was certainly not the right strategy. A complete fall of this dynasty would just make it reappear somewhere else. Casmir, alias Staretz, was firmly intent on dismantling the dynasty of the many As, putting an end to their history dating from…ages ago. He might not live long enough in the physical world to witness the progress of what he now firmly intended to start. He might be on the list of those to be eliminated. This, however, did not worry him in the least.
The clock struck twelve when he was back and conscious of what he had thought. They…including the doctors and nurses at his bedside, would never know what had happened to him behind the screens of their awareness, to bring him back…except for one, perhaps: a smiling young fellow with curly red hair, holding a red balloon in one hand and waving him a hello with the other! Casmir smiled back at him, to the great astonishment of the doctor staring into the jolly face of a patient waking up from coma!
Was this the end…or just a beginning?
Afterword
What comes after is what has been before, a road of trials now coming to a welcome halt, revealing to the traveller its sense and purpose. You always come in the end to the place where you started your
journey. Now with the treasures found underway.
Life writes an unending story about itself, throughout the lives of human individuals who play their roles in it. It is the great love story of the universe, love being life’s force, omnipresent and like all supreme power, invisible. It moves the world and cannot be possessed. Love comes without being called and goes as soon as one tries to catch it and keep it tied to a particular state of being.
The beginning of a life story is never one’s own. It appears to spring from the residues of all human stories, still going on since the world began. Without them being dated, one inherits a selection of these remains, to become entangled in a much larger story. A story to which one has no key. The single chapters of such a life story do not easily connect with what is still going on beyond them. Life shows many faces, each one suggesting: I’m the one, just follow me! Belief systems spring from each of them and tend to break down in the course of time. Time makes all beliefs brittle. Time, the illusionist which misleads simple souls into believing that it is in the clock…and it ticks…becoming less with every minute, every hour…until it is over. Sometime.
Individual life stories and stories of relationships start far beyond historical time and geographical place, although not detectable by the ordinary senses. Fictitious as they may seem, the personages Staretz and Shootik play an unseen major role in people’s life stories. They are all part of the great mystery of human becoming. The understanding thereof, if possible at all, can happen gradually, through learning to read its hieroglyphs.
A living relationship becomes an adventure lived on a ship, launched into the uncharted waters of the ocean of life, yet to be explored. With no guaranteed port of arrival in a Promised Land, many voyagers, couples or not, are underway. Their personal experiences will be unique, the pattern which connects them nevertheless the same for all. It shows the stages which obviously have to be gone through in order to reach the threshold of a new level of existence. How individuals deal with the circumstances in which fate or chance puts them is decisive from a non-physical level, for the whole of life on this planet. Perhaps beyond it as well.
Having been invited to be a witness to this process in the life of two individuals, I count myself fortunate for having being allowed to look into the privacy of their personal affairs and the reality of that human being, which is not limited by a name, physical appearance and gender. It is that being which can willingly seek contact with other beings of its kind and through them come to know itself.
The column ’Write to Anna’ no longer exists. The small publishing company which hosted it for a number of successful years in what was once a popular women’s magazine has been taken over by a larger concern. Anna-Solveig still writes from time to time, to be in touch with herself, so she told me. When I last visited her in her lovely attic apartment in the heart of Amsterdam, she handed me some handwritten sheets of paper in a (surprise, surprise!) aubergine-coloured file with the words: “These are my personal notes on coming across that wrecked boat…” I knew immediately to which wreck she was referring. “I no longer need to keep them,” she said, “perhaps you’d like to read them.” No doubt I would.
More than this, with her permission, I include them here in a series of pictorial connections as a special addition to this book, uncensored and in their original form. The pictures they evoke need no further comments. The reader may be served by them, as I certainly was.
Jurij serves nowadays as first officer to a captain of a commercial cargo ship, crossing the world’s seas. He is happy, Solveig told me, for having come at last to a state of no need to be happy all the time. They see each other from time to time.
xxxx
Pictorial Connections
The Wrecked Boat
It appeared from nowhere one day, thrown by the stormy waves onto the beach of a small village in Portugal.
An absolutely wrecked boat, good for nothing except triggering people’s curiosity as to its history and where it had stayed so long despite the many holes in its sides and bottom, which would make it sink immediately.
Next day, somebody had moored it to a rock. What for?
Two people, a man and a woman, wondered as they approached it again. It was of no use to anybody, not even as old metal. Nevertheless, they felt unusually attracted to it. It was as though it was not completely dead, as though it had taken advantage of the storm to come on the crest of the waves, like a ghost from the past. The past of somebody, perhaps, who once owned it?
How old might it be? they wondered…For days it stayed within reach of the incoming waves, which could have reclaimed it. Maybe they would…they thought, coming back to see it, again and again. It was tragic to see it there, giving the impression that it wanted to go…Then one day they noticed that somebody had pushed it further up the beach, obviously intending to keep it there. And then it started speaking to them…
Holding On
Are we still holding on, although our boat has been standing still, precariously tied to the rocks, for quite some time now? Are we still trying to maintain appearances, nurturing hopes and making both ourselves and others believe that all is well? Are we still denying ourselves the wish to be on the move again, feeling the freshness of the breeze of new directions? Are we still suffering, resigned, leaving a lot of life unlived?
Let’s not do that. We would be holding on to something quite unstable. When on the rocks, we must become aware that even they can break. The moorings do wear out and when they tear, the sea will claim our boat, which will be driven by waves and wind, which won’t take care…
The ties which once were full of promise of paradise on Earth…We must wake up. It was a pretty dream! Let us neither blame each other nor anybody else for failing to make it come true. The Promised Land? We may still reach it, but not on this old boat.
Convention and routine, and centuries-old habits…We’ve carried them inside, letting them rule our life. They need to be replaced by…We will need some time to come to know by what…
Power Cut Off
We stumbled on the way which led us into our marriage…
Or were we tricked into it…Did circumstances, providence, gods or whatever else play parts in our life stories? Nobody told us at the time that the main purpose of a relationship is not to make each other happy in the first place, but to help each other to grow…and how could we have known this in advance?
“All roads lead to Rome,” they say…How about roads to other destinations, not on a map, which we may want to reach together? We need power to be connected to our fuse box, and we must take care of its distribution. Otherwise, the fuse which is overloaded will surely blow! Haven’t we experienced this state now and again?
Power for travelling together in whatever direction comes from different sources…One of them may be called spiritual, the other related to the body and its senses, therefore sensual. They have to meet in order to produce that joint supply of energy which we need to make us move.
The trouble is, or was, that we took too many deceiving roads, which led to dead ends. The energy-source, however, is still there, but the new road, open to travel now, is different!
Nothing to Stand On…
Or for…Once, the ground under our feet was smooth and soft, because it was padded with emotional warmth. Of course, we thought it would serve and warm us forever! But emotional warmth is soon dissipated when the routine of everyday life is established and hours are filled with duties to be attended to. Domestic or not, they absorb a great deal of energy.
Family, jobs, domestic affairs…Both of us had whole-heartedly booked this package-tour, hadn’t we? So who was to blame when it didn’t supply us with all the nourishment each one of us needed underway?
Though we felt how the ground upon which we stood or lay became uncomfortable, neither of us expressed it clearly enough. We tried to accommodate our different needs, didn’t we, not to disappoint, not to hurt each other. And in the end we did, even more so! Until we were f
aced with the fact that we had lost almost everything and had apparently nothing to stand on…Or for, in our relationship.
Just in time to realise that this is what happens when we allow ourselves, mostly without noticing it, to be lived by standards imposed upon us.
Gaping Hole
We did not notice when the first little hole appeared on the shiny surface of our life as newlyweds, expecting to live happily forever after. We…? We don’t notice anything in the same way and at the same time. It was you and I separately, noticing something in our own particular ways and judging it according to our different standards of importance or value.
Like a little hole in a sock, which is the obvious result of two surfaces rubbing against each other, the hole in our awareness of what-is-rubbing-against-what in everyday marital life can’t do other than become bigger and bigger. Unless we repair it somehow. But even repairs in socks won’t hold for ever. One day we have to face the naked facts…or naked heels and toes!
We tried to fill a lot of little holes in the course of our relationship, sometimes by simply shutting our eyes to them, quickly turning to something else, more important in our view, underestimating them…and sometimes through being overtired or too high-spirited to be bothered by them.
What starts by being a little hole grows bigger. There is no way of stopping it’s expansion, and a day came when we were faced with a gaping hole which, like the open mouth of a monster, threatened to swallow everything which had begun with ‘we’ and ‘our’…marriage to be saved? No. To be transformed. And it was the gaping hole which in the end pointed the way.
Frayed Moorings
For a ship, being moored is in some ways an unnatural state, except for short periods between voyages.
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