The Day of the Iddhi

 by Chand Adekshna

Chapter 1

A Life in a Rearview Mirror

From Mirror after mirror

 No vanity’s displaced

I’m looking for the face I had

Before the world was made.

                                                                                                             —W.B. Yeats, “A Woman Young and Old”

            He reached for the door handle, giving the Koyomi Oerloeg mounted on the wall next to the doorframe a glance. It was nearly 9:00 on an old-calendar Wednesday morning in late October. On the ASAT calendar it was Year 3 on a Vagbhavavara morning of Fortnight Gebo. The temperature outside was 5 degrees Grad. Today’s Tip: “Gebo is the rune for gift; in this season, the Vata dosha tends to have more influence on the mind than Kapha or Pitta. The gentle wind from the west known as Zephyr (siva-vayu) interacts with that dosha either as Mitra (‘friend’), gifting one with joy, or Varuna (‘binder’), gifting one with a sense of emptiness.”

            Finding nothing interesting in the top news headlines, and nothing at all in his voice/text mail inbox, he ignored the Oeloeg’s flashing menu for Western, Babylonian, Vedic, Chinese, Aztec and Mayan astrological data, Aura reading, Ayurvedic pulse-taking, Elder Futhark rune and I-Ching hexagram casting, Enneagram counseling, Motoyama biofeedback analysis, a Q&A session with a Turing depth psychology therapist, and a half a dozen similar options. All just a finger’s touch away.

            With a snap of his fingers he remembered something. “Just a sec,” he spoke aloud, walking over to his library and work desk, index finger tapping his right temple as he approached his library, a wall covered top to bottom with shelves. Every shelf was booked to full capacity. Other volumes lay sideways atop the ones in rows, filling whatever space there might be from the topsides of a row and the underside of the next shelf up. He squatted in the far corner to pull the end book off of the bottom shelf. It took five to ten seconds to dislodge it; that’s how tightly he crammed these shelves. Still on his haunches he flipped open this hardbound edition of The Complete Works of Charles Fort. The middle 500 pages of the more than one thousand page book were hollowed out. All that remained of those pages were their blank margins, so that closed the book looked intact. He removed the item from the hollow, spent more time jamming the book back in  place than pulling it out had taken. He rose to his feet, dropping the item into a pocket of the insulated jacket he wore. As he walked back to the door he said to himself, “Since I can’t rid my thought life of the old guy, I might as well bring this along.”

            Charles stepped into the hall, locked the door behind him, and dropped to one knee to put his running shoes on. These were stored with several other pairs of shoes in a small black wooden cabinet on the floor to the left of the door to his four-room (plus bath and kitchenette) apartment in The Phanastery on Irmin Street.

            He laced up. He pondered Today’s Tip from the Koyami Oerloeg. “This Zephyr, the west wind,” he said aloud, “must be acting unfavorably upon me.” Burglaric thoughts had been troubling his mind; they sidled up out of nowhere to sidestep into his head, where they perched and chattered like magpies. The analogy was apt. In the lore of medieval Europe, the sound of magpies were said to represent the unseemly thoughts of those who did not pay attention in church.

             Wiederoy had practiced yoga since his university days. While in graduate school, he visited India in 1980 to complete some field work necessary for his Ph.D. He also learned a discipline of meditation of the shakti-tattva tradition. In 1987 for the first time in his life he visited Nepal. There he received mantra-diksha, initiation from an ascetic, into an ancient tradition of Vedanta-yoga. In the seven years that fell between his visit India and his visit to Nepal, he learned Sanskrit.

            Now his life was eighteen years into Century 21. The today was nothing like Wiederoy’s world of the past. The change was sudden and it was recent. Wiederoy became aware that strange forces were at work upon the planet only five years ago. Two years later, the march of history crossed an invisible border from which there would be no return. He is mind he could only compare it to a short story he liked as a teenager. Written by the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges, it told of a science fiction “fad” that drew people’s interest into the events of another planet, Tloen. But Tloen did not really exist. Nonetheless more and more volumes about the details of life on Tloen kept appearing. The people were told by scientists, “This is all rubbish.” They didn’t care. The hopes and dreams about Planet Tloen reached critical mass. One morning, the human race woke up to discover that Planet Earth and changed in one night to Planet Tloen.

            Less than four years ago, he entered his last year of employment as a professor of archaeology at the Baillie-Steinhorst Atlantic Union of Anthropic Sciences. He sat at his desk in his Department of Archaeology office. On the desk was a ring-bound notepad. He had just written up list of changes in his life that he’d have to have in place before his upcoming birthday. His concentration was broken by the sound of silver chimes over the all-campus speaker system. The chimes meant everyone ought to pay attention to the upcoming announcement.

            A woman’s voice began speaking. She introduced herself as Damkina Ninlil. He looked up at the speaker, a little startled. He held a Ph.D. degree in archaeology. Those named—Damkina and Ninlil—he knew well. They were names goddesses of the ancient Middle East. Ms. Ninlil explained that she spoke to us as the head of the Dalang Hieratic News Service. Wiederay had never of Dalang HNS. Ms. Ninlil helpfully explained that her news service would take over total responsibility for all news coverage from this day forward. The venerable CNN, BBC, Fox Network News and so on were history. As are all the previous radio news services, and news in print. Finis. Internet news coverage also would be handled by Dalang—nothing else but. Last but not least, the news reported on the tremendously popular SBY synthetic reality broadcast system fell completely under Dalang HNS. Dalang, she went on to say, was an “organon.” She helpfully pointed out that an organon is an organic part of a greater whole. An organon functions like an organ in a living body. Its duty is to serve the best interests of that body. After today we would come to know about the many organons assuming responsibilities in the public’s interest.

            Ms. Ninlil was just warming up to her subject. Previously, the companies and government agencies that we, the people, depended on for public health, education, wealth, welfare, law enforcement, military defense, and the overall progress of society to higher levels of fulfillment, were not organons. They were consumers, not providers. Their first concern was to make money. Their second concern was, as much as possible, to be a law under their own. Such values negate any real sense of service. An organon serves; an organon provides. Exactly as our heart, lungs and stomach serve us and provide for us. In the previous state of affairs, our collective health, education and welfare, and in all the other ways we had to depend on arrangements not in our control, we were being steadily weakened by parasites. Parasites aren’t interested serving you and providing for you. They serve themselves by taking from you.

            Those days are over. Great changes have been made. Great changes are being made. Great changes will continue to be made. My duty as head of Dalang HNS is to help each of your understand what these changes are, and how they are improving human existence.

            Today I wish to tell you a story. It is a story most of you don’t know. But you should know it, because it is the story of the new—how shall I say it in a way we will all understand? Yes—the new government. The new authority. The new system. But we shall not be using those words. One of our guiding principles is, “Without linguistic engineering, there can be no social reality.” This is another of my personal responsibilities: I will day by day inform you of the great new things happening in our world; as I inform you, I will also be teaching you a new language.

            Previously I said that I am head of an organon. The name of that organon is the Dalang Hieratic News Service. I said this oraganon serves a greater whole. What is that greater whole?

            It is the Dainanaten Policentrist Hierarchy. Dainanaten is a Japanese word. It means “the seventh heaven.” People should understand that real leadership is not born from the minds of men. It is sent down from the highest level of consciousness. That is why we are not ashamed of the word Hierarchy. It is a great word. Hieros and arche come to us from the ancient Greeks. Hieros means holy, arche means order. In a true hierarchy the human purpose has a very clearly defined spiritual dimension. Our life has to be lived in accordance with the Divine Plan. This is how a hierarchy serves society, and provides for it.  There is one more word to explain—polycentrism. It is the opposite of a dictatorship, where all the power is in one man’s hands, or one party’s hands. Policentrism means that, in this new world we are entering, there are many centers of power. They shall work selflessly to raise our fallen state up, up, up—to the Dainanten!

Let me give a little example of how Polycentrism works. In case you don’t remember, my name is Damkina Ninlil. I am the head of the Daland Hieratic News Service. But another organon has responsibility for broadcasting my report to you. That organon is called TET. I and Dalang HNS work in tandem with TET to satisfy the Dainanten; TET works with  Dalang HNS to satisfy Dainanaten..

            Wiederoy remembered he’d seen the word Dalang years ago. He tracked it down on his computer. It was from the Bahasa Indonesia language. Dalang means “puppet master.”

            While on the topic of broadcasting, Ms. Ninlil wanted to say a few words about SBY and its origins. SBY is a giant step forward in information delivery. A hundred years age, the great new technology of information was the movie. People thought, oh, movies, they are the greatest. But there was new twist in 1927. A few movies added a sound track. These were called talkies. By 1930—just three years later—silent movies were no longer being made. SBY is the new talkie, television is the old silent film. That’s why its only taken three years for SBY scanner unit sales to surpass TV sales. SBY is a synthetic reality system. Years ago people were waiting for a virtual reality system to be developed. It never happened because virtual reality with an idea that is opposite to synthetic reality. Scientists working to develop virtual reality were trying to put the picture all around you. You’d have to wear something like an astronauts’ suit to get the information delivered like that. Too complicated, too cumbersome, too many things to go wrong. Synthetic reality, on the other hand, puts you in the picture. Your brain is the receiver. SBY tech is based on a technology known by the acronym SIGIL. This stands for Synaesthesia Inducement Guided by Intersubjective Logistics. Sigil is also the name of a rune from pre-Christian Germanic countries. It means a magic sign. Sigil puts that magic sign in the form of neurosemiotic code into your brain right through the optic nerve. The neurosemiotic code stimulates a brain function called synaesthesia. Inside the brain a magic picture is generated. It has the same impact on your consciousness as seeing what’s pictured in real life. You are there, inside the picture, hearing sounds, smelling fragrances, touching objects, and tasting food. That’s synthetic reality. The experience of it is exactly the same as our experience of the world. I use the word magic because we don’t know exactly how the brain is getting this real life experience from a beam of light at a certain wavelength, a light that pulses on and off this or that many times per second. All we know is this has the power to transform consciousness. How? By magic! In essence, a sigil is any sense impression that has the power to induce a physically unexplainable change of reality.

            Wiederoy’s mind flew out of his old professor’s office and away from Ms. Ninlil, the puppet-master. He was in the hall outside his apartment in the Phanastery. He look down. His shoes were tied, he was still crouched down on the floor. He closed his eyes and rubbed both temples with his fingertips. His mind was really racing today. He rose from his crouch with a sigh and made for the stairs. Doubts had started to haunt him last spring after an old friend died. “Have you lived your life to the fullest?” they demanded to know. “Did you live a good life? Was it productive?”

            After 40 years of daily yoga meditation, he’d come to believe his mind was a sterilized laboratory, no place for the obsessive, objurgatory jabbering of an uncontrolled mind. He remembered an obscure word, “egrigor.” Defined as a thought-form that takes on a life of its own, yes…surely, some kind of egrigor has set up camp in his subconscious. From there it launched an assault upon his consciousness.

            Earlier this morning, he sat down to go through the first of three daily routines (sadhanas) of meditation. At his age, with his experience, he normally had little trouble clearing his mind of ambient noise. Yet like a reverse sun, a disk of night instead of day, this egrigor of shankaa (doubt) arose from the depths of his lower chakras into the inner sky of his heart. It shook his concentration with the force of a bulldog shaking a rat. He was unable to concentrate on mantra-dhyana—the most important sadhana of his day.

           

            This past summer he started talking to himself a lot. He was just trying to reason with this egrigor or whatever it was. “My whole life has been centered on the search for capital-T Truth. The path I’ve accepted demands I attain that goal. Indeed, the path leads to that goal. The path is the goal. Western civilization has reached a point where the promotion of spiritual values in society is given serious attention. Everybody admits that unless this is done successfully, there will soon be nothing left in the West that resembles civilization.  Spiritual values I put into practice in my life decades ago. For the last twenty, twenty-five years, the people I’ve told about the tradition I follow are amazed. ‘I want to come to that level too,’ they tell me.”

            But as he was soon to discover, giving attention to the egrigor by giving arguments why the egrigor shouldn’t be bothering him only provoked it. And what followed… He could only understand it this way: the egrigor divided into ten, and each of those ten divided into ten. Like a hundred archers advancing in formation, they unleashed volley after volley of arrows. Each shower of steel tips pierced successively deeper into his field of mind. “What is a full life? How do you know what you’ve done with your life is good? What is good?” As the months passed, the egrigor steadily increased its assault. His quietude was deteriorating. Yogis called this visheshashankhaa, the growth of doubt into many troubling particularities. As these doubts overwhelm the mind, one starts looking outside himself for a solution. When dhyana (meditation), then dhyana (concentration), are broken, the mind shifts into reverse gear. 

            The egrigor mocked him. “Even if you think you lived a full life, what about the life you’re living now, holed up in your cell on the second floor of this home for New Age retirees? What about the future? Look at you. You talk about the world around you adopting your values, but you’re more a stranger to this world than you ever have been. You’ve isolated yourself just like Bjoern did. You’ve convinced yourself that you’re better adjusted than him because you live in a city and raised a family. But you can’t relate to the way the world has changed any better than he could.”

            As summer passed into fall, he fell back upon the deepest resources of his heart, seeking armor and a sword to end once and for all the egrigor’s taunts. But all he came up with was an excuse, not a defense and certainly not a counter-attack. “At my age there’s just not that much to look forward to.” When this thought took wing in his mind, he condemned himself. “What irony has befallen me? Bjoern Ingvaldssen, for the last fifteen years of his life, routinely tossed off just that sort of reply whenever I tried to talk to him about the ultimate purpose of human existence. And now look at me.”

            The weight of his body pressed his right foot into the first stair-step down. As if it were extracted from every misery he’d ever experienced, melancholia seeped into his nervous system through the spongy tissue of his sole. Each step that followed took him deeper into self-loathing. As his brain sank from sight into the black pool, a few lines of poetry floated to the surface like the debris of a shipwreck.

The old men ask for more time,

while the young waste it. And the philosopher smiles,

knowing there is none there.

            He paused on the last step before the ground floor. “I memorized those lines for Bjoern’s funeral at sea,” he said aloud. “Who wrote them?” He stepped down onto the Marblix surface of the foyer’s floor. He found himself glided it toward the heavy chromium-steel and Fortiplex blastproof  security door. He heard the words “I can’t remember,” knowing they were only in his head. They were in his head…but he wasn’t. The past pulled him back to that day in the office. Damkina Ninlil…it must be a made up name! What if I was a German professor in Berlin in the 1930, and a voice on the radio says, “Ich heisst Adolf Hitler…” But his name was really Adolf Schickelgrueber. Stalin (“Man of Steel”) wasn’t Stalin. Damkina? Her voice was very near now. Ninlil? Your real is probably Bertha Skeezix. Who’s going to stand for Bertha Skeezix telling them, “We just took over your world.”

            “The mission of the Dainanaten Policentrist Hierarchy is very different from any political system that ruled anywhere in the world at any time for centuries. That mission is to turn human consciousness away from the alienation we’ve just powerlessly resigned ourselves to. Postmodernism—what’s that? What does it mean? It means the willful acceptance that life is meaningless. Goodbye to all that. Today is Day One, Year One of ASAT—the Age of Sigil-Actuated Transcognition.”

           

            Damkina Ninlil, of Dalang HNS, promised to tell us a story.  “Let me take you back in time,” she said, “to the second half of the 1800s. Something new was in the air. The general name for it, that new spirit that gave birth to a great number of spiritual doctrines and societies…it was The New Thought Movement. The New Thought Movement never really died, you know. At some point, in the 1960s, I suppose, it just popped up again with a slightly different name, The New Age Movement.   

            “In the 1800s, especially after the American Civil War, a New Thought appeared. It appeared in the minds of many people around the world, at the same time. You could say it was a second thought. People began to think, ‘Is science really helping us to answer the Big Questions? The churches, the priests—do they really get us closer to God? What is this world? It seems so mad.Why am I in it? WHO AM I?’

            “A great number of specific organizations came up then. They competed with one another to get the attention of all these people who pondering the New Thought. Come here to us, we have the answer. Join us. No, join us. Different paths. There was H.P. Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society. Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy. The Gurdjieff movement. These three were very influential, but there were other big organization, and many, many small and obscure ones.

            “There was one called MAM—Mental Alchemy Movement. It wasn’t a society with centers, getting people to join, getting rich. It was a loose affiliation. They had one particular interest: transformation. That’s what alchemy is. But MAM was about transformation of the self. How? By using the mind as a laboratory. But that was just theory. Nobody really had a set of instructions how to practice alchemy in the mind. The idea was interesting.

            “By the turn of the century MAM had begun holding ‘gatherings’ twice yearly on pre-established dates. The people gathering were mostly well-educated intelligentsia—scientists, linguists, psychologists, historians, investigators of psychic phenomena, authors and even government officials.

            Mental alchemy was building both positive and negative energies. The usefulness of the potential positive side caught the attention of a ancient race of sarpavyaghras, Serpentine Tigers. They live to this present day in a well-hidden refuge on the North American continent. It is a remotely located, impenetrable fortress. Few human have seen it; moreover, what these few humans saw looked to be a perfectly natural geological formation. Scientists call it “The Magnetic Mountain.” The Serpentine Tigers call it Alektoria, an archaic word drawn from magical lore that suggests invisibility.

            The sarpavyaghra race came into being in China. from among some followers and disciples of the Yellow Emperor, Huang Ti, a great mystic and healer. He was born from the womb of his mother after she was impregnated by a golden ray that beamed from the Shaptarishi constellation, each of its seven stars an abode of one of the seven great sages of the universe (Ursa Major). Huang Ti is the father of Chinese Medicine. just as in India Sage Dhanvantari is the revealer of Ayurvedic Medicine. 

            The Yellow Emperor is often praised as the father of Taoism. If Taoism was already present in China before his descent from the starry abodes of the shaptarishis, then it is correct to say he brought up from the level of village shamanism and re-established in the Imperial City as a philosophy and mystic disciple that, philosophically, parallels Sankhya, and as a mystic discipline, parallels ashtanga-yoga. So, whether or not he introduced the Tao to China loses importance as a question if we understand that Huang Ti brought it up to the pre-eminent position over all other systems of religion and metaphysics.

            A rapidly transformative but dangerous path of yoga is Tantric siddha-yoga, which has a Chinese parallel in Taoism: the Way of Dual Cultivation. Yoga and Taoism look at the cosmos as a manifestation of a fundamental duality: purusa (the male principle) and prakrti (the female principle) in yoga; Yang (male principle) and Yin (female principle) in Taoism. Huang Ti revealed the esoteric method of bringing the male-female principles out of the theoretical realm of intellectualization into the realm of mystic application.

            Dual Cultivation, from the standpoint of Taoism, is the “how to” of uniting Yin and Yang.  The lung (Chinese for dragon; Skt. naga) is Yang. Opposite the dragon is the tiger (Skt. bhagini. One who applies himself fully in yoga to be linking up in yoga with Transcendence must take care not to fall into the clutches of the tiger of nescience.) In China the tiger is the symbol of Yin. Every type of personality under the modes of material nature exhibits of some measure of Yin, some measure of Yang. The perfection sought in Dual Cultivation is expressed thusly: “to bring forth the power of Dragon’s fire”. Once again, we see a parallel. Tantric yoga-siddhi is achieved by raising the fiery serpent of mystic power from the lowest to the highest chakra.

            The brotherhood of eleven Gong-Gongs humbly approached the Yellow Emperor. They requested that he teach them to purify themselves of their inherent dangerous and unpredictable nature as descendents of the first Gong-Gong.

            Why they feared their inherited nature is explained in this Chinese legend. While the creation was still very new, the celestial emperor Yeo took up the scepter to rule it from heaven. The first Gong-Gong became so envious of Yeo that it went into a frenzy and nearly wrecked the cosmos. This Gong-Gong was coal-black and of vast dimensions. It had a great horn that grew out of its forehead area, between and a little above its two eyes.   

            The patriarch of all Gong-Gongs was not merely a fearsome thing to see. It was endowed with the siddhis of mystic yoga. Out of envy of the cosmic hierarchy, it made its way to the mountain Buzhou, which in Chinese cosmology a comic mountain similar to the Vedic Mount Meru. Gong-Gong attacked Buzhou with its colossal horn.

            The personified spirit of the mountain cried out as that great horn pierced his subtle deva-form at the same time it pierced the physical Mount Buzhou. With a flip of its neck and head the Gong-Gong tore the mountain away from the earth. This uncovered the heaving waves of the world-ocean. High seas spilled over the rim of the crater that for so long served as Buzhou Mountain’s resting place. Earth was drowning.

            Next the Gong-Gong turned his trans-dimensional horn against the sky. It ripped through the weave of material energies. The Gong-Gong’s mighty horn unzipped the bond that holds the material elements one to another. Things fell apart. The sun and moon went dark. A dreadful night covered the universe. The Gong-gong was to this all- devouring night as that night was to the Gong-gong. The legend ends happily, because a goddess appears and restores creation.