Book 1:8 The Rif

 Alice Falls into a Wabbit Hole

The Secret Doctrines

THE ETERNAL PARENT WRAPPED IN HER EVER INVISIBLE ROBES
HAD SLUMBERED ONCE AGAIN FOR SEVEN ETERNITIES.

TIME WAS NOT, FOR IT LAY ASLEEP IN THE INFINITE BOSOM OF DURATION.

UNIVERSAL MIND WAS NOT, FOR THERE WERE NO AH-HI TO CONTAIN IT.

THE SEVEN WAYS TO BLISS WERE NOT. THE GREAT CAUSES OF MISERY WERE NOT,
 FOR THERE WAS NO ONE TO PRODUCE AND GET ENSNARED BY THEM.

DARKNESS ALONE FILLED THE BOUNDLESS ALL,
 FOR FATHER, MOTHER AND SON WERE ONCE MORE ONE, 
AND THE SON HAD NOT AWAKENED YET FOR THE NEW WHEEL, 
AND HIS PILGRIMAGE THEREON.

Book of Dzyan

Cafe Hafa today

Next day we left the riad and decided a last visit to the Cliff Café would be a great exit memory to take away from Tangiers. Tom struck up raves with a group at an adjacent table, American college kids traveling across North Africa in a kombi. Four guys and twin girls who were younger sisters of one of the guys. All in their late teens & early twenties.  Chinos, check shirts and backpacks. The girls were in shorts and desert boots with khaki military style canvas shoulder bags, their hair in plaits. They wanted to go to the Rif and buy up kif in quantity and Tom thought it would be an interesting experience.  I didn’t really want to be a part of this. They were not the kind of people I enjoyed being with, gap-year kids mainly. One of the guys, a Canadian, was nice enough, but the others were noisy and arrogant and like so many Americans (obviously not all – there were/are many luminous exceptions!)  I met on my walk, thinking the world was there for them as their playground to plunder. Maybe it was their front to get through the culture shock of an unknown world with noisy self-assertive bluffing. Definitely not into simple living and high thinking, more like simple thinking, high living. They just wanted to get stoned, out-of-it, wasted. Most of them were hung-over from a night in the bars. 

So I said I’d rather prefer to stay in Tangiers instead. I wanted to find beads and colored threads to take on the donkey walk and I hadn’t begun to explore Tangiers properly. I wanted to find the ethos that had inspired so many expat creative spirits, the worlds within the obvious exterior, to tread in the footsteps of Hemingway, Bowles, Burroughs and others whose very names conjured up fantasias I wanted to immerse myself in, to milk and sorb. Tom did not have this lust of the soul, his world was the hippy dream. Then Arlo turned up, minus all his instruments except a few flutes, and he seemed keen to go along. Tom turned on his full charm offensive, determined to convince me, saying it was only a side-trip, we’d be back by dusk and we could stay another day if we wanted.  So when it came to decision time I went. Truth was I didn’t want to be separated from him. The beads could wait.

We, all nine of us, jammed into the van and I guess someone knew the way and a boy who seemed to be about fifteen decided he’d drive. Big mistake!  It was awful. I endured hours of uncomfortable bumping round on the rear floor of the kombi, unable to see the passing scenery and not knowing where we were.  Eventually we stopped on a ridge surrounded by dry lands with a tiny hamlet visible way below down in a deep narrow valley. We slid and stumbled down a goat track into a wadi with a few huts up on the banks where we were challenged by some tough and mean-looking Moroccans who  herded us into a bunkhouse to supposedly wait for the OK on the kif deal.  I had no idea that I was in any kind of dangerous situation, deluded by safety in numbers and kif was legal, wasn’t it?  I was so very tired so I climbed to the top bunk looking down on the others. I had my drawing book with me and started drawing a mandala, but soon it turned into a view of the chaotic mind-state churning inside my head.

Deus-X 

 There was a general air of paranoia and unease.  Everyone was stoned.  The guard by the door wouldn’t let us out and no one was happy with that.  It certainly wasn’t the mint tea and honey bread Moroccan hospitality they’d expected. 

At first Arlo & Tom played happy music on drums & flutes, but as the hours dragged by Tom became very weird. He amused himself and no doubt some of the others (he liked playing to an audience) by taunting me, telling me I was Alice about to go through the Looking Glass, drumming and singing mocking songs, about a little girl who thought she was a princess and kissed too many frogs, parading my naivety before the others until, inside, I was a wretched humiliated wreck. Except I didn’t give him the satisfaction of knowing that with any response, maintaining my Mona Lisa sphinx mask, feigning indifference. Was his previous loving caring behavior all an act, a ruse to get me to this place where he would sell me to some filthy peasant? I played it cool, deflecting and ignoring him and instead of going crazy from his stupid teasing, I wasn’t going to give these people a scene to show them our frailty. Finally I fell asleep. 

I was woken by the arrival of a group of dirty tough-looking men and some raggedy kids who herded us out into the yard and told us to go.  Apparently there was no kif today, or maybe they didn’t like us, or thought we were a bad risk.  Certainly the latter would have been true.  Back up the hot steep slope we all slowly plodded, with the raggy kids herding us, twirling little lariat ropes, mocking and sneering at us, throwing insults and spitting to show their superiority over the dumb foreign bimbos.   I didn’t like the feel of it all and broke the spell they were casting by picking up the youngest, a three-year old with a runny nose full of pussy snot and playing with him.  Laughing and dancing with him on my back, playing horsy. By the time we reached the road and the kombi the mood was a little less hostile and paranoid and the kids went back down the hill, thankfully. My hair was slick with snot, but we were safe.

While waiting for the rest of the group to get to the top of the steep path I sat sharing a joint with the Canadian, a student from Vancouver who was being very stand-offish with me, as if I had broken some unspoken race rule in my behavior.  So uncool!  I was still feeling very insecure after the whole experience and this guy didn’t help.  I felt I had to soften him up too.  So I started talking about the Native American Indian Church and the peyote, about which I knew stuff all, only parroting what Tom and Arlo had told me, and how much of that was reliable I didn’t know.  I said “Peyote is a cactus.  You eat the little buttons and it gives you a spiritual mystical experience”  I mean, what did I know ! Nothing!  The snotty Vancouver kid must have picked up on my bullshit and he threw it back at me “ a cactus ?” he replied with a dismissive snort, using deep irony, as if he knew it all, and the facts were otherwise.  Well I didn’t know at all, so I just let it ride, replying “mm” and gazing out over the Rif valleys in what I hoped was a cool front of stoned Sphinx-like reverie.   

 Inside I started churning.  Paranoia set in as I went thru the Looking Glass, spiraling inward, feeling myself shrink and disappear in a tiny black spot.  I was lying.  I didn’t know.  I was repeating stuff I’d heard Arlo & Tom discussing, but with no real knowledge.  Rosemary Clooney started singing “Sailor Boys have talk to me in Eengleesh”  in my head. All the way back to Tangier I lay on the kombi floor wrapped in my hooded burnoose fighting it, feigning sleep, but in a demented state, cringing in shame at my inability to speak The Truth.  I seemed to be in some court in which I was being judged as fit or unfit to continue on the quest.  Was peyote a cactus, or not ?  Answer the Truth or be Damned. 

Huge figures of authority and power loomed over me, pouring their vibes into me, insisting that I change my ways or be dammed. These people I was with were actually the disguised Council of Higher Beings. I had somehow arrived in their Cosmic Court on trial for my worthiness to be admitted to the echelon of higher minds, now found to be a fraud. Fatally flawed. Only Pure Souls qualify to live with the Gods and I was found lacking.

Then I slept again and woke to everyone getting out in the dark in a square in Tangiers. My mind had cleared; it had all been a bad dream and things felt normal again. I was pleased to walk away from the others who all resumed their dumb kids personae. 

But the experience had unlocked an inner world I hadn’t encountered before, although the more I explored the notion, the more I could find the source in ghostly memories of my time of exploring the esoteric a decade before, when I spent lunch hours browsing the Adyar bookshop next to my workplace in Sydney.  

The Extraordinary Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

Reading the Theosophists , especially Madame Blavatsky,  had intrigued me then with all the references to enlightened beings, yogis, shaman, the Cosmic Brotherhood, the wise ones and so on. 

Threads that had persisted to bring me here, now, filled with the need to find that enlightened state for myself, first-hand, real. I had unleashed an inner need for contact with high minds, the real thing. Not just high-minds but fully enlightened all-seeing, all-knowing Immortals who roamed the Universe seeking the Ones who bore their seeds and waking the Sleepers. That way I could find the truth about It All. Did these higher beings exist? Immortal telepathic minds who existed on another plane?  Madame Blavatsky..... she was the key!  In her writings about Tibet she had supposedly encountered such beings in the high Himalayas and translated some of the ancient scrolls like the Stanzas of Dzyan, which some said were written in a language unknown in human ethnology possibly pre-dating Earth, from telepathic transmissions by cosmic entities.

Memories of those early readings came flooding back, filling my mind with questions I could only answer by finding the proof myself. Had some ancient beings from Atlantis survived in some secret sacred place somewhere, some Shangri-La only accessible to those who had passed the tests and were pure minds? Were they the spirits who had entered my mind and had showed me the Way? Was I being called to join the Illuminati?

I would test that and find the truth of that notion, I thought, as we hiked up the Medina hill to Sven and Ute’s pad to beg a bed for the night. We’d see Tangiers tomorrow and then get on the road again.  Atlantis was calling and the signal was getting stronger…come to me…come to me….I heard from deep within.

I determined to stay clear of tourists after that experience.  I had it out with Tom. If we wanted the real higher mind states, we must surround ourselves with those intelligent enough to understand and act accordingly.   Only mix with those on our trip, as much as possible.  Like minds. Travelers and those on the quest, the Way.  Deeper inside I determined to only speak the Truth, and otherwise remain silent.  The better world had to have the right information in it and if I perpetuated bullshit, then I would never get it right and we would never get it right.  So went my shredded reasoning, brainwashing me onto the Way of Truth.  Damning me and redeeming me simultaneously.  The Utopian Tunnel vision that excluded being human and fallible, the way ahead was a quest to join the Immortals in the Pantheon of the Gods. Simple beautiful people. You could see it in their radiant eyes – the Light of Love and Beauty – a warm light that shone from them and was reflected back from the wellspring of Love within me, surrounding us in an aura in which we bathed and were uplifted.

See what you want to see, hear what you want to hear. A sure recipe for delusion. The ravings of a tortured demented naive fool. Arrogating Ignorance. But I did have some of it right; buried in the morass of warped fragments of nonsense I was trying to patchwork into a quilt of a workable reality were pieces of an emerging grand design.

The germ that still lay covered in the husk Burst forth, one nature, from the fervent heat.- from Stanzas of Dzyan

Anu 2008 - Apophysis

But for now let’s move on to how the romance of Casablanca met my  naive expectations in Blog #9 : Ayesha Reborn.