The Book of Knowledge. Playing Another Reality. C. Castaneda award

Deathly silence reigned. I asked if there was another way to make an appointment. The doctor answered categorically, “No!” And again silence. Despite the fact that I had spent several hours in line, I was only the third and last person who wanted to get a paid consultation at their unique center that day. Somehow I didn’t want to leave there without paying anyone anything, so I just asked to listen to me, promising to pay a little more than the official price of the issue. The doctor thought for a long time and…

…didn’t agree, apparently preferring to speak at someone else’s expense rather than listen, but kindly offered to go to another hospital department and ask someone else to listen to me.

I am a stubborn creature. An old nurse in another department couldn’t figure out for a long time what I wanted from her, or how I ended up there.

“I read on a website on the Internet that…”

“Where did you read it?”

The old woman didn’t know what the “Internet” was, but that word had a magical effect on her, as a result, she dematerialized, immediately leaving her post. I was about to turn around and leave, when a man of about forty-five dressed in white appeared at the end of the corridor. As it turned out later, he was the head of the department. He came up to me and broke into a smile, “Oh, one more Leila arrived! Why did you come, eh, Leila?”

“I’ve read that it’s a center where you practically work miracles…”

“Leila, how old are you? And you still believe in miracles!” the Doctor said with a grin in a flirting tone, but I didn’t know what to answer, so he continued, “Leila, what hurts you?”

“Nothing…”

“If nothing hurts, why did you come?”

“To ask. You specialize in Woozles and Wizzles, providing consultations for payment, right? So I came to ask. Where do they come from? What to do with them? Maybe some pills should be taken or, conversely, not. In general, what’s allowed, what’s not?”

“Oh, Leila, God knows why one has some Woozles or Wizzles, what’s allowed and what’s not! Live as you lived. Nothing hurts you. What for?”

“But then it will be too late!”

“Then you will be welcomed here!”

“Don’t you cure everyone here?”

“We?” the Doctor asked in surprise. “Do we cure? You know, Leila, I’ll tell you so, as soon as you get rid of some Woozle, some Wizzle will immediately appear! Exactly! Nothing hurts you! Tell me, why did you come, huh?”

“But it’s written…”

“Leila, are you married?” the Doctor didn’t let up.

“Yes,” I answered categorically.

“Maybe, think once more? Just kidding… almost. We have friends, they come to our department and sell magic water, supposedly it lets people get rid of all sorts of Wozzles and Wizzles. So people buy it, drink it, and… half of them recover. Do you think the water is magical? The most common, drinking one, just in bottles with a magical inscription. Do you want me to sell it to you too?”

“No, thanks,” I said, nodding sadly.

“Leila,” the Doctor smiled, “relax and live your life as long as nothing hurts! Believe me, no one knows anything about Wozzles and Wizzles. It’s just a game, you see.”

Almost since childhood, I was advised to remove a small mole on my small back, but somehow I had no time for that. And then, as luck would have it, free time suddenly appeared, in an unmeasured amount, and someone told me about a wonderful commercial clinic where supposedly no one had any problem.

I arrived, obediently paid for everything that could be pulled by the ears for the upcoming procedure, and entered the Surgeon’s office. He turned out to be a strong old man of the old school. I was asked to undress, go into the operating room and lie on my stomach. The nurse rattled their instruments. At that fateful moment, I uttered one of my signature phrases, “Not Novocain.”

The nurse smiled enigmatically and called out to the Surgeon, who was still in the office, and not in the operating room, “Have you heard it, Ivan Ivanovich? The girl is intolerant to Novocain!”

“Yes, I have!” the Surgeon said joyfully.

They silently bent over my back, rubbed it with something, and… I screamed in terrible pain, feeling them cutting me alive with a scalpel. The scalpel froze.

“Without anesthesia?” I was in shock.

“Well, you can’t stand Novocain, and we don’t have anything else!” the Surgeon commented and made another incision.

I screamed again. The scalpel froze.

“Well, the last time now,” the Surgeon sang as calmly as if nothing had happened.

My third cry made a doctor with very huge eyes materialize in the operating room from the next office.

“What are you doing here? Even my patient has already escaped!”

“We’ve already done it,” the nurse answered, smiling.

Leaving, I silently but meaningfully looked at the Surgeon, and he replied me just as meaningfully, “And what if during the war?”

I realized him playing war.

However, I was lucky to know other doctors whom I respected. They first listen carefully, then think and tell you what they have come up with, voicing the pros and cons, and if you agree…

That evening I went to visit a very smart and cheerful woman, a guru in her field, who, having read my spells six months before, said that I was practicing real Word Magic, and she was sorry to be too old to experience similar emotions.

That time I couldn’t believe my eyes – the doctor looked at least ten years younger!

“Hello, Spell-caster!” she exclaimed joyfully. “You won’t believe it! I met Him! Twenty years later! Imagine, all these years I knew nothing about Him! It turns out that He lives over the Ocean. He came here to give a lecture, slipped, fell, woke up in a cast, ended up at my friend in the hospital, and I stopped by her because of some nonsense! Now I write your spells to Him in text messages. Haven’t you met your Prince yet?”

“Maybe I have, but… He doesn’t think so,” I sighed.

“It seems to me, just don’t be offended, there is no person to understand and contain you inside. Our men today are quite dead, weak, lazy. They’ll burst from you! They feel that you are stronger and a head taller, and bypass you a mile away.”

“Illusion! I am the weakest woman in the world.”

“Humble yourself, dear! To write the way you do, one has to be hurt constantly. Over time, you get used to the pain, the threshold of sensitivity decreases, so they will send you another pain, stronger than the previous one, so that you write again. Don’t expect anything good ahead. Better get ready for the trials you have never seen even in your nightmares.”

I came to the Teacher, who had been once an ordinary doctor, and then became a real White Magician.

“I see, I see what’s happening to you,” he said, smiling. “What does he look like? How old is he? Who is he?”

“I don’t know anything about Him. I remember nothing,” I whispered.

“Still, try to remember. Imagine the place where you first met.”

I looked at the white wall opposite and tried to concentrate. Suddenly, the air began to acquire color and density, just a little more and I would have felt it with my hands. It vibrated and began to move in space. The room floated. I got into a spiral. The walls, unlike the air, lost their density, became foggy, dissolving into Another Reality. It seemed that either I would move in that place, or that place would move to me.

“No, I can’t,” I breathed out from overexertion.

“You can everything!”

I tried to concentrate again, but that time I just saw two shadows on the wall, like waves, running towards each other, turning into a single whole, disappearing and reappearing on the opposite sides.

“Seven seconds!” the Teacher exclaimed in surprise.

I looked at him with a silent question.

“You merge together in seven seconds. Your energy, I mean. You are very similar. You’ll see Him again. And more than once.”

2. The SPEED

For some reason, many people on the Earth like alcohol with a good snack. I like speed with good music without alcohol.

I had a dream on the night from Thursday to Friday, when all dreams tend to come true for those who believe that they come true dreamt from Thursday to Friday. For the rest, those dreams that should come true, come true regardless of the day of the week.

I’m visiting my friend. Everything is foggy, I can hardly distinguish her outlines, as well as the furnishings of the flat, which I have not visited yet in the Earthly Reality, because my friend has moved recently. We are silent, but somehow tragically. Then she asks what really happened. I know in the dream, it’s something very bad, that I don’t want to remember at all. I brush it off, I don’t want to talk, and tears well up in my eyes.

I find myself visiting my ex-classmate. The plot repeats. We are sadly silent. He carefully begins to ask, “How did it happen, why?” I’m in pain. I refuse to remember. I start crying. Why do they torment me with their questions if I am not able to talk about it?

I come to someone else. I don’t know to whom. All the same, but this someone is too persistent and makes me remember.

Wide road of four letters. My car is in my favorite left lane. Replaying the situation, or rather, watching a movie from somewhere above, I see every car: to the right, behind me and in front of me. Is it dark or cloudy? The bridge appears in the distance. In the left lane the speed is high, 150 or 160 probably. There is an accident ahead, or something else invisible immediately, so everyone starts to slow down, except my car for some reason, as if I’m not in it and it’s driving by itself. Why? Did I fall asleep driving? I look at what is happening, but I can influence neither my car nor myself in it. Everything has already happened. Nothing can be changed. I weep, remembering, and someone continues to torment me with questions, “How? Why?”

BANG!!! Bang… bang… There is no unbroken part left from the car. The tow truck doesn’t arrive for a long time… Did they really show me the accident predicted by the fortune-teller in Rome?

Gera advised me not to drive on Monday and Tuesday, so that nothing would happen, but I missed my Fox and gave up on the warning. Moreover, it was time to renew the insurance. At the insurance office, they announced me a discounted amount for impeccable driving and handed me some paper for signing to confirm that no other my car had been stolen during the previous three years. Since my previous Fox had been dematerialized under mysterious circumstances exactly three years before, I didn’t sign it. After twenty minutes of waiting for a reaction to the problem I had voiced, I received an offer to wait another hour or two hours for the final answer from the central office. I sent the insurance company far away and, apparently, for the rest of my life. After driving a kilometer, I stopped at a traffic light. The driver of the next car opened the window and began shouting and gesticulating, drawing my attention to the Fox’s paws. I got out of the car and found the right rear tire flat, which meant that I wouldn’t be able to get back home or to my office. Having left Fox in a secluded place, I continued my way on the metro. In the evening, at the nearest tire fitting service, I was told amazing news – the wheel was absolutely normal, not punctured. No one understood why all of a sudden… They just pumped it up (and I still drive). Three years before they could have just made me a flat tire as well.

I like to drive fast. It happens rarely, since I live in a very large city, where there are probably as many cars as people, and maybe even more. And sometimes it seems to me that many people in this world love their cars much more than people. In our city there is such a huge road, which is called a word of four capital letters, similar to the synonym for the biblical “Hell”, and not so much in sound as in meaning, MRAR. They move along the Moscow Ring Automobile Road in circles. You can also drive if you manage to get into the circle before half past seven in the morning. Then everyone stands in the circle.

MRAR is a game that everyone plays by their own rules. There are, of course, rules invented by someone once, we are forced to learn them and pass exams, but I haven’t yet met a person who has never violated these rules. For example, not to occupy the left lane if it’s possible to go to the right, because the left lane is intended for those who like fast driving or are just in a hurry. It’s a good rule, but usually, in the left lane, there’s always someone, whose life principle says, “The slower you go, the further you’ll arrive.” That one wants to teach others how to live according to the rules, absolutely not going to give way to anyone and under any circumstances, inclining other players go right till the curb. There is a special category of drivers who play checkers on the road. A tragedy occurred before my eyes. A man was driving at a speed about 180. I was driving in the second lane on the left at a speed of 140, when he sharply drove to the far left, but had not enough time to carry out his plan. As a result of the impact on the barrier separating oncoming flows, he was thrown to the far right. The car sank in the clouds of smoke.

Once upon a time I played checkers at a very high speed too. To be honest, I like speed more than checkers. I even wrote the spell “Speed” after one Boy gave me a ride at 220 during our business trip abroad (although he insists on 230). After reading the spell, my ex-classmate Alexey wrote, “I tried. Two days ago. It doesn’t help.” However, despite the repeated warning signs from Above, I didn’t stop. Thus, one evening, having left Fox on the street for about forty minutes, I lost it forever dematerialized. I haven’t played checkers since then. I drive exceeding the speed. Sometimes. When everything falls down and I find myself in the Void.

…He was a Boy. Although he was no long so young. Much taller and physically stronger than me, he seemed to me so small, that I wanted to think of something to make the Boy grow up, because it was unnatural to look at him up, really looking down from the top. However, the Boy grew in breadth only. In fact, we must give him credit, he was a good Boy, or rather, the right one, and so much that he risked becoming a patient of my cousin, who had never become a surgeon, but worked in the “yellow house” (why people call so the abode of the strangers, I still don’t understand, in general, people are a mystery for me). In the head of the Boy, absolutely down-to-earth and practical, there was a terrible program that someone had once written and implanted there. Perhaps even the Boy himself. The program, similar to a virus, killed everything that came into the Boy’s field of vision, if it was not the same as him. The Boy played the rules written in that program.

That day we went to negotiations. Getting into his car and not even having time to close the door, I heard the order, “Put the bag exactly in the middle on your lap!”

My small purse was slightly to the right of the indicated place. I looked with a silent question at the Boy, and he immediately explained in a metallic voice, “When I put in sale this car in 10 years, it will be valued more if inside on the doors, there are no scratches from all sorts of iron things on women’s bags!”

There were no iron things on my bag, but the Boy didn’t tolerate any objections.

We got lost on the way. When I saw the sign to “that place” and exclaimed, “To the right!”, automatically raising my right hand towards the sign, without even touching the window with the outer side of my palm, the Boy commanded, “Take a napkin and wipe the glass urgently! My car has these rules, and if you don’t, you’ll have to wash it entirely at your own expense.”

When we got out of the car, the first thing the Boy did was open the trunk, where, in addition to all sorts of boxes, he was hiding… a ruler. He took it and began to measure something.

“Why are you doing this?” I was surprised.

“While we were driving, the boxes slightly changed their location in the trunk, and each of them should stand in a strictly designated place so as not to come into contact with each other and with the walls of the trunk. Because when I put in sale this car in 10 years…”

I breathed in and out deeply.

On the way back, the Boy bought two pies. When I dared to hint that there were two pies, he kindly invited me to enjoy one of them. As soon as I began to untie the knot of the plastic bag, the Boy looked at me disapproving and said in disappointment, “That’s not the way to untie it! Give it to me, I’ll teach you to do it correctly.”

I haven’t eaten pies since then.

On New Year’s Eve, an employee of the PR department received souvenirs for gifts to our partners, including diaries. The manufacturer put the Boy’s company logo on them. The Boy asked me to check the quality. I brought him a verified copy. The Boy took… a ruler. As a result of his measurements, the logo on the diaries turned out to be printed half a millimeter (!) higher than the previous year, so the circulation had to be redone within 24 hours in order to give away the correct diaries in time. I laughed. Probably he had a ruler hidden under his pillow at home too. And maybe not even one… It was good that the Boy couldn’t read minds.

I cast my spells to him. He sermonized.

“Do you want to become God?” I asked him once.

“I want to become King,” he answered unexpectedly.

“But Kings and morality are not very compatible, are they?”

The Boy got silent.

Sometimes the Boy really wanted something. Something so human. I saw him suffer, torn apart by contradictions, because it was not at all right, but he really wanted it. In such moments the Boy began to reason out loud, building a logical chain of consequences of what would happen if he took a wrong step. I felt sorry for the Boy. His whole life until his last breath was planned by him minute by minute and event by event. He absolutely denied the existence of the Higher Forces with their own plans.

I decided to show him a miracle, Another Reality phenomenon. I took off my ring and hung it on a thread.

“Ask any question watching it. If you see that the ring is spinning clockwise or counterclockwise, because it’s my hand rotating it, tell me.”

The Boy laughed, but still asked questions and watched carefully, very attentively. Then he exclaimed, “Well… I don’t know. But it’s wrong!”

The four of us had lunch in the canteen of the Cinema University. The Boy was discussing with one of us, but obviously not with me, the 999th episode of some television series and suddenly turned to me, “How can you live without watching TV?”

“She reads books,” the colleague retorted.

“Well, but how can you drive a car without checking traffic jams on the Internet before leaving?”

“I’m sniffing the air,” I answered the absolute truth.

The Boy winced in disbelief.

At the same moment, our table rose two centimeters into the air, moved to the right and landed safely on the floor.

“Bravo, Alice,” exclaimed the colleague, “even the juice didn’t spill!”

Since I told the Boy about the possibility of reading information from the air, he began to test the accuracy of my sense of smell. He called me in the evenings when I had already left our office and asked if there were any traffic jams on my way. As a rule, we left at the same time and lived in neighboring areas. The Boy always drove moving the right way, as it should be done according to the Internet information. I drove the way I felt. However, as a result, we moved the same way. And sometimes we even played speed together. Such game was some strange exception to the rules of the right Boy.

Apparently, the Higher Forces pushed us together so that the Boy would at least try to accept the idea that someone might be different from him and live differently. Not according to his rules. However, once the program implanted into the Boy’s head did its dirty deed, and we parted.

I met Alexey, the same ex-classmate who knew from his own experience what the speed game was. I could share everything with him, because he himself had been through a lot and was able to understand my feelings. He had known me since I was seven years old for who I really was, the real me, I didn’t need to be anyone else with him. The other day I read his 36-page story about the Void. He, like me then, reached the state in which it was no longer possible not to throw out the accumulated pain on paper.

“Love is the greatest medicine, it softens the pain and allows us to survive here and now, to get out of the Void. Later we get used to the pain, adapt to reality, it becomes easier for us, but to reach that later we need…”

“Yes, Alice. It seemed that fire, water, and copper pipes had long been passed, but no, those were flowers. A person is like a bridge which supports are cut down one by one and it falls into the abyss of Death. But you don’t need any earthly support. You have long belonged not to yourself, but to Another Reality. You are not like everyone else, you are not ordinary, deal with it.”

“I want to be an ordinary woman who is loved just because she exists. I have always loved, giving everything I had and asking for nothing in return, but no one has ever loved me. Besides, I didn’t choose Another Reality!”

“It’s not chosen. It chooses who it deems appropriate, without asking our opinion. It chose you. This is your Path.”

I returned home, where I was always welcomed by various magical attributes. For example, the magic ball I had found in the most ordinary – mystical – way on Lake Baikal.

I happened there in November at minus 20C. Baikal used to freeze in January, so in the evenings I sat on the seashore (I saw it as a sea, not a lake) and saw off the Sun. It was cold, but I took off my glove and held out my hand to it, the left one, hypersensitive. Huge waves of heat poured into me, and my hand didn’t freeze at all. One day a bird flew up to me. Whirling around right in front of my face, it whispered something, but I didn’t understand what exactly. When the Sun disappeared into the sea, I went to a mini-market where locals used to buy fish. I entered the souvenir shop and got surrounded by an uncountable number of stones in various shapes. I walked up to a display window and stopped.

“Can I help you?” the saleswoman asked.

I looked through, falling in Another Reality, “I need a stone. A ball. Like a globe. You can see water and lands on it. As if you are looking from above, from the height of an airplane, flying towards the Earth. I don’t know how to explain it to you.”

“Wow!” the saleswomen exclaimed in unison and looked at each other enigmatically.

One of them reached into the tray under the very display window where I was standing, took out something wrapped in paper and, taking it off, reverently held out a ball in her palm. It was that stone!

“Locals come to admire it,” the saleswoman said proudly. “An extremely rare stone. Many even believe that it doesn’t exist in nature, but look, we have a book about stones. Read about it. “A rare natural stone of indigo color found interspersed in malachite, stimulates the work of the Third Eye. In Ancient Egypt, it was considered magical, opening the way to Eternity, and in India – the one leading the owner to the highest levels of energy and spaces.”

In that dream, I tried to reach the Higher Spheres, where the Music of the Spheres sounded. At first, there were the usual spiral, noise or even a hum there, an invisible Force lifting you up the Flow, which resembled a pipe, at a tremendous speed. Someone was nearby. Invisibly. During the first trial, I was stuck in the Lower Astral, but I really wanted to hear what that Music was like. Thus, rising higher and higher in the same Flow, I began to catch magical sounds at some point. The speed decreased, everything around was filled with Light, muffled and bright at the same time, and all that Light was permeated with Music. I heard It quite distinctly. I hovered in space, enjoying the sounds.

I smiled – I reached it.

3. The MAGIC of the WORD

I found Him, the Man Who Was Not, many, many months later. That day, in order to meet Him finally, I had to use again a dangerous technique of working with Time and Space. I use it extremely rarely, in critical situations, that is, when failure to achieve a result threatens with disaster. I can’t explain what happens in such case, even in terms of Another Reality – a huge distance is covered in just a few minutes. Usually, while moving in space, I close my eyes, and look at my watch only upon arrival. We met. I didn’t want to tell Him why, but I said that… There was nothing to lose. He was coolly surprised. I was afraid that I would never see Him again.