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

“Are you crazy?” he asked without any emotion.

I wasn’t surprised by His reaction. Of course, many people take me for crazy. For some reason, people tend not to believe you when you tell the truth, and, conversely, to believe you when you deceive them.

“No,” I answered calmly and not at all offended by His assumption.

“So who are you?”

The answer to this question, no matter how strange it may seem from the outside, interested me much more than, perhaps, it interested Him. I didn’t know what to answer, so I recited a few of my poems.

“I see, a spell-caster,” He said, thinking about something, and suggested visiting a haunted basement in the center of the city, where a lot of different people used to gather to cast spells.

I said, I didn’t want to go to the place with a lot of different people, because I had little interest in people, but He replied that witches sometimes needed to materialize and ground themselves. I promised to think about it, and we said goodbye. I had an official reason not to go, being already invited to cast spells in the district library, but even if I had had a hundred reasons, or not reasons, but a real cause, I knew in advance that I would have definitely gone with Him to that basement. I didn’t answer “yes” right away, since I wanted Him to write or call me. So we corresponded for the second day. I lived by His messages, as if each of them prolonged my life.

Flirting with the MWWN, I jokingly accused Him of giving me at our last date someone else’s magic wand, which I successfully gave back to Him. I complained that, despite my requests, He had never sent His photo to me, apparently, being afraid of a love spell. I said to have finally understood why the next meeting was scheduled for the date on which, according to the old calendar, exorcists cast out demons. In conclusion, I wrote, it was a pity that He saw me only as a spell-caster, and I secretly hoped for something pleasantly tender in response.

Oh, men!!! If you want to say something to a woman, better write! In messages, every woman can see what she wants to see if she wants to. For example, in commas, periods, spaces or ellipses, or even in their absence, as well as in the absence of the messages. If you call her, the result may be completely unpredictable…

The MWWN suddenly called me and said the following. His fingers were tired of typing messages for me. That someone else’s magic wand was nothing. It turned out that he had bought a magic ring to me, which, having forgotten to gift me last time, just as happily gave to someone else. He didn’t have His own photo, because He didn’t appear in them. He didn’t see me as anything, thought nothing about me and didn’t care at all whether I had demons inside or not. He didn’t care if I went with Him to that haunted place, and even, perhaps, I would do the right thing going to the library and not to the haunted place, because, according to His own experience, which He was ready to share with me (!!!), amazing encounters with people of the opposite sex sometimes took place exactly in libraries. Then He dictated the address of the basement. I was about to exclaim “Bravo!”, but kept silent, since He wouldn’t appreciate it. I remembered the phrase of a great woman, “If you need to explain something, there is no need any more to explain anything.”

I was often invited to cast spells, but most of all I liked reading to children. Children are such small people who have not yet acquired a shell. Light predominates in them, so they feel Another Reality. A little and very vulnerable girl who has no shell still lives inside me. When I cast spells to children, no matter how old they are, they look not at… (me, my appearance, clothes), but through… and see that little girl who is close and understandable to them. Children are fond of asking questions. Their questions are much smarter, deeper and more interesting than adults’ questions, so I like answering them. Many children write too, but often secretly, because they are afraid of being hurt, because they have no shell yet. I tell them the story of the beginning of my Path.

I was ten years old when suddenly and in large quantities I began to write both poetry and stories. It was not that my mother didn’t want me to become a spell-caster, she was categorically against it, being very scared that if I didn’t give up such activity, a hard destiny awaited me, like all those who cast. Mom gave me examples of the great spell-casters of the Silver Age: poverty, unhappy love, loneliness, death of their loved ones and, in conclusion, their own, and tragic! I was offended and tore my notebook, but… half an hour later I collected the small pieces and glued them together with adhesive tape. Mom didn’t talk to me for a long time, but she secretly took my creations to her office and read them to her employees.

Since then, I have been writing something down almost constantly. Without setting a goal to get on the list of officially recognized spell-casters, I followed the dictates of the Soul, step by step approaching the day when some of my works were published in the White Book, as Nonna predicted, and six months later I was accepted into the Most Important Society of Spell-casters of our Kingdom …Mom, are you proud of me?

We met, me and the Man Who Was Not, and headed to the haunted basement. I didn’t feel like reading. I wanted to stay close to Him. However, as soon as we went inside, He grabbed me like a kitten by the scruff of the neck and threw me onto the stage saying, “You are a spell-caster, aren’t you? So cast!”

All people who say that they write poetry are divided into poets and spell-casters. Poets write poetry. They write and exactly poems. Poems can be good or not so good. With a beautiful or terrible rhyme, or without it at all, even where there is no need for its absence. Poems can be kept in a strict rhythm, or they can limp. All poets want to write poetry. Many people first retire to a proper place, take a notebook, a pen, sit in a chair and decide to write something. Some write with difficulty, being exhausted by every line or even word, in their opinion, such is the fate of a real poet. Others write, without straining at all, about everything in a row, not missing anything that comes under their feet and in their hands, happens in front of their eyes and even behind their backs, because they believe that the amount of writing will make them spell-casters.

Spell-casters, as a rule, write down or record poetry. And often, unlike poets, they don’t feel like writing at all. They feel a surge of vibrations in a certain rhythm, the Soul starts vibrating to the beat, and the words fall on their heads like an avalanche, sometimes at the wrong time, in the wrong place, when there is nowhere and nothing with to record them. For example, at night, when you are almost asleep, or in the snow or pouring rain outside, or while you are driving and crossing space at a high speed. Poems torment the spell-caster until he deigns to give up everything to record them on an earthly data storage, or they get offended and leave, never returning. Sometimes they dictate too quickly, and one never knows what’s next, but there is no time to think – just to write everything down maybe, and only re-reading, one delves into the meanings.

They don’t always dictate clearly, or rather, it’s not always audible, so after the dictation, in some places the spell-caster begins to rack the brains. Sometimes they prompt you how it should sound in the original, sometimes not. Sometimes you don’t know exactly the meaning of the dictated words, and you have to consult a dictionary to make sure that such word is appropriate in the context. However, it never happened in my practice that a word turned out to be inappropriate. Once I had to get the Gospel to clarify the description of a historical event. I read about it in all four Gospels in turn. When you read each of them from beginning to end, you don’t notice the difference in the description, but reading the same event described by all the Evangelists, you see it quite clearly. As a result, I had to replace two lines, since they touched on the place where the texts of the Gospels diverged. It’s surprising that, on the one hand, the verses come from Above, and on the other hand, all of them, with some exceptions, are a reflection of yourself, your thoughts, feelings, of what is happening to you in the Earthly Reality.

The spell-casters’ poems always carry meaning, but they are as laconic as possible to convey it. Like the poets’ poems, spells can have rhyme or do without it. The works of the spell-casters carry the very vibrations that permeated the Soul at the time of their recording, therefore, being read aloud to other people, they produce the effect of a spell – listeners are immersed in that very state of the Soul when the Flow captures and takes you to the single Primary Source, Consciousness turns off and gives you the opportunity to feel Another Reality around you and inside. Ordinary poets don’t connect to the Flow, therefore their works don’t possess such heavenly power, they are earthly. Of course, spell-casters have also ordinary poems. Anyhow, quantity means absolutely nothing for spell-casters. There are periods when spell-casters don’t write anything down for years. The poems stop knocking on the invisible Door, or they knock, but the spell-casters don’t open it for some reasons known only to them.

Some people believe that spell-casters should write poetry from childhood. However, everyone starts writing at different age, and the quantity of years one writes doesn’t say anything at all. Everyone’s soul grows at its own pace. Many people think that they need to enter special institutes to learn to write good. You can learn to write perfect poetry. It’s impossible to learn to write spells. They are written in Another Reality. Its Great Power is present in them. Only the one to whom It provided the Key to the lock of the invisible Door, can become a spell-caster. Poems always belong to the Earthly Reality, as well as the poets themselves. However, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

I stood on the stage blinded by the light in the black-black basement. Yes, I am a spell-caster and do Magic. White Magic. The Magic of the Word. Every time I read, people looked at me as if I were a miracle, enjoying the flow of energies pouring into space, which I passed through myself and gave to them. They plunged into the lakes of Another Reality and, returning, didn’t remember what exactly I had read and in what sequence, but they talked about the magical state they had been during my reading. Their kind words used to warm me in return. However, there was a hungry flock of greedy vampires gathered in the black-black basement. I put my Soul into my words. I loved. He said I should take it as a game. Game with the Soul.

Returning home by metro, completely exhausted by vampires, I suddenly felt a colossal flow of energy beating to both palms. Good energy. I knew it as well as the opposite, negative one, which once used to enter me through my heels. Anyhow, I scanned the people opposite me and redirected the flow to the one who needed the energy much more.

I called Maria in Italy. Her abilities manifested themselves in early childhood. She showed the place where her mother would be buried in a year, although there was no cemetery there yet. After her mother’s death, Maria lived with the aunt, was often sick, more There than Here. When the war began, the girl left for Italy. Her personal life left much to be desired, but as she once told me, it’s always difficult to find someone who is stronger than you, but even more difficult if you can see. Maria saw everything that had happened to me lately, including specific dates and the appearance of people she had never seen, and the atmosphere of places she had never been, and ended our conversation, saying, “He was sent to you from Heavens to let you go your own Path. Pray to our Saint!” At home, I have a collection of Orthodox icons brought from Holy Places scattered around the world. There is an icon with the Saint, I knew nothing about at the time of purchasing, but I was drawn to Her. A few years later, I learned from Maria that She was the Saint protecting children with extrasensory abilities. That evening I turned to Her for help.

At night, I found myself in an intermediate dimension, from which one could pass to the World of the Dead. I realized myself, that is, I realized that I was sleeping, and it was a dream. It’s better not just to become conscious in dreams, but to take something from the Earthly Reality into the dream. The strongest ones know to take something out of the dream. I’m pulling out only texts for now, but once I took a ring into my dream. I have never parted with it since then.

An unfamiliar man and girl came up to me and said that I had to get the Moonstone from the bottom of the lake. Why me? And why Moonstone? Anyhow, I obediently moved to the shore. The bottom was invisible. The water was dark and didn’t move. Lake with dead water. Lake of Death? My Teacher says that the Moon is dead too. I lay down on the water surface without closing my eyes. Too deep! I would drown, having not enough breath.

“You can do it,” the girl encouraged me. “Everything is different here. You can breathe underwater or not breathe at all.”

I stepped into the lake, concentrated and went to the bottom, breathing. At the bottom, there was a huge shell with an irregularly shaped Moonstone, illuminating the lake from the inside with a ghostly glow. I pulled the stone ashore. What for?

4. A DREAM

“You are urgently called to school,” my son muttered when I crossed the threshold of our flat, and instantly disappeared into his room.

The teacher was no longer young and gave the impression of a fairly intelligent and kind woman. I could imagine anything of the possible reasons for the urgent call, except for what she said.

“I don’t know what to do with your child, it’s a nightmare! He wants to be the first in everything! Is this really conceivable? He raises his hand without waiting for me to finish formulating the question. He is the first to hand over the tests and begs to go to the blackboard. Not to mention the fact that he is always inventing some games for children and wants to lead them somewhere!”

I was ten or eleven years old when, during the winter holidays, my mother sent me to the largest and most famous in our Kingdom Christmas party, where parents were not allowed at that time. The central hall where the event took place accommodated an insane number of children of completely different ages. After the party, the children had to walk in a circle on the Square of the Three Cathedrals, which looked like a corral for horses and was fenced with iron partitions. Parents, standing behind the partitions in several rows, tried to get closer in order to find and have time to catch their kids out of a huge crowd of children wandering in that circle before they started another round.

The game “Find Me!” was a real stress for both children and adults. Firstly, because winter was still real then, the snow creaked underfoot, thus, after standing in the cold waiting for the kids for quite a long time, parents could catch a cold. Secondly, at that time it was customary to wear “uniforms” there. So it was very difficult to find among the thousands of identical felt boots marching sadly in a circle those on which your kid had struggled to put on the rubbers in the morning. On the other hand, the game developed the sixth sense – just feel yours!

My mother and I agreed that she would wave a scarf of the same color as the flag of our Kingdom at that times. However, it turned out that at least half of the Christmas party participants agreed on the same conventional sign. I felt sorry for my mother and decided to give her a gift – to go outside the first. I walked along the wide road to the magic circle, far apart from the main crowd. I don’t know how I managed that. I entered the circle and heard the joyful and excited exclamations of parents, “They are coming!” And I also heard them whispering, “God, who is so lucky? Whose child is this?” Then I saw my mother. She was smiling. So was I.

After my mother’s death, I often found myself in an unpleasant dimension, in a tense space with “gummy” time, where an inexplicable vacuum of something was felt. You leave almost all your energy there and come back completely exhausted. I usually passed into the World of the Dead (or rather, of those stuck between Here and There for some reason), where various entities live, including gray-wax ghosts, through a huge screen similar to a mirror, in a dream. My mother got stuck There, and we took turns visiting each other, she came to me Here, then I went to her There. The boundaries of spaces (dimensions?) became thinner even in grandma’s old flat, and There turned out to be right Here. First, the Door to Another Reality opens slightly, then you physically feel another space flowing into your local one, and almost immediately you hear Its sounds and, less often, see It.

Having adapted, I wasn’t afraid of drafts. However, due to the specific ability to take with me into Another Reality those nearby when the Door was opening, I was afraid for my son. I purposefully didn’t read him bedtime stories about Another Reality, tying him to the Earthly one. Once, when we were falling asleep and the Door creaked, I pretended that nothing was happening, but my son looked me in the eyes and asked in a whisper, “Have you heard that, mom? These sounds, what are they? Who is there? Tell me that you hear them too!”

I went to the child to say goodnight.

“Once I died, and then I was born,” the son suddenly said. “And then, when I die again and am born again, I will have a different mother.”

“Not necessary. Souls can meet in subsequent lives, but they don’t always recognize each other in their new bodies.”

“No, mom, we won’t meet again.”

“Why?” I was surprised.

“You will never be born again. I feel so. I know, they will let you stay There. And I began to see also a Man in Black. Who is he?”

“How do you see him?” I tried to keep calm, because after my mother’s death I had often seen the Man in Black; all wrapped in black cloth, he looked like a monk and, standing at the window, silently looked at me.

“He comes to me. Sometimes in a dream, and recently in the room, at the window. He always appears unexpectedly. I’m afraid of him. He’s all in black. Like monks. In some kind of cloth. I don’t know. I can’t see his eyes, but he looks at me in silence. I’m scared. Why does he come?”

“Ask him who he is. The next time he comes. Don’t be afraid, just ask what he wants.”

“It’s easy for you to say, you’ve never seen him! It’s more difficult in a dream. When I begin to understand that it’s a dream, I wake up.”

I saw my son several years before his birth. I knew how he would look like on the Earth. He was born an unusual child, preferred solitude and violently showed dissatisfaction when he was picked up or surrounded by calf tenderness. My son didn’t allow anyone to feed him with a spoon. His first word wasn’t “mom” or “dad”, but “myself!”

Before he started speaking, he often had nightmares and screamed heart-rending. I used to enter his room, turn on the light and observe horror pictures – he was fighting off someone invisible and didn’t react to me at all. I hardly managed to wake him up, but when he woke up and remembered where he was, he instantly calmed down and smiled.

In early childhood, my son had a favorite game with balloons. We used to come to the park, he asked me to buy him at least one, so I did. He took it and, as if unnoticed by me, released it into the sky. Then he turned to me and, looking plaintively into my eyes, asked me to buy another one. That could go on ad infinitum. It seemed to me that my son was teaching himself in advance to let go of everything earthly he really liked, just as in smart adult books we are taught to get rid of idealizations and attachments.

Later he began to talk in his sleep, very clearly and absolutely seriously, in an adult way, perhaps with his Teacher. “I can’t do this now,” my seven-year-old son once said in his sleep. And I was afraid that he wouldn’t become a Warrior of Light.

The MWWN disappeared… For several days, I clearly felt my astral body moving further and further away from the physical one. When one leaves, this starts about seven days before, the physical pain disappears a couple of hours before… I know this from my own experience. However, that time I wasn’t leaving, at least in the way people do because of illness, nothing hurt, just the other day I had received several bad news at once, cutting me without a knife. Not unexpected, I had a premonition of them for a long time. Anyhow, even if you feel and know that it’s impossible to change anything, you hope for a miracle until the last moment. No miracle happened. I didn’t want to see anyone or talk to anyone, except for Him. I sent Him a spell about me standing on the windowsill by the open window. He replied that standing on the windowsill in February was quite cool, at least for people, but I was a spell-caster, so it was even good for me to clear my head with fresh air a little. I wrote, I didn’t want to live and asked Him not to disappear.

“Don’t be sad, or wrinkles will appear,” he answered and disappeared again.

After exiting through the window, I found myself in an area that looked like a large, light corridor located in close proximity to the Earth. The Voice, neither good nor evil, absolutely impartial, guided me. Nobody condemned me for anything. We communicated mentally.

“Remember what you see to tell people,” the Voice said.

I visualized a sheet of paper and a pen and tried to write down, but almost immediately I realized the futility of the idea, I wouldn’t be able to take my notes out of There. The paper obediently disappeared into the air along with the pen. I waved my hand and looked around, closely examining the details.

The Voice led me along an intermediate state – corridor, where there were those who had just ‘died’. They were slowly floating in the distance. On the way, each of them looked through some pictures of the earthly life, as an exam. At the beginning of the corridor, everyone was shown the same pictures, a standard set revealing the Soul’s reaction to what was viewed, depending on which its further fate was determined. The deceased women were shown women with newborn children. Some souls began to rush about, being drawn to Earth to give birth to the babies they had killed in the womb. I was absolutely calm, so was the Voice, as if it knew that the subject didn’t concern me. I saw murderers, and then drug addicts, who were shown the places where they could quench their thirst. Tormented by the realization that nothing like that existed in Heavens, their souls felt an incredible attraction to Earth. I still remained absolutely calm. I remembered the “Tibetan Book of the Dead” and the books of a famous psychologist about idealizations and attachments.

One needs to get rid of them, still being alive in the body in order to die in a state no longer experiencing any attachments, i.e. unfulfilled earthly desires, otherwise one won’t be able to reach to the end of the corridor.

“Now look,” the Voice said calmly.

I stopped at the Window to the World. The Space of Light slowly decreased in brightness. I saw a city, cars and people, a metro station. It was raining. A woman came on a date with her beloved man. I saw them meeting. Astral tears started pouring from my eyes. The picture floated. The Voice looked at me with sadness, although it was invisible to me. An insane desire to live out love for the Man Who Was Not spun me around in a spiral and instantly pulled me back into my sleeping physical body. I collapsed into it and woke up horrified by hopelessness. To escape There from the nightmarish loneliness that day meant to be incarnated the next day in another newborn Here.

Escape to Another Reality lost any sense.

5. The TEMPLE of the SOUL

“Tonight you are going to RAM,” my colleague said in an orderly tone after listening to my retelling of the dream.

“No,” I objected, “I’m invited to the Beau Monde to cast spells tonight.”

“You won’t be casting any spells tonight. You need to get to know RAM. She comes twice a year for a week seminar. I just found out yesterday that she is here now.”