The Third Thing
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
TSEliot 1943
The sensation in the body is of shock. Every system comes online to survive while the mind mostly shuts off. Sensory vigilance is on a maximum setting. Any human exchange is deathly quiet so as not to trigger any live wires within a system on high alert. Eyes in the back of the head.
All systems alert, on your toes, shivering on the inside while the outside is on fire. An all-points bulletin out for The Other, loud and threatening and scary and screaming. A childhood trauma taking hold of the present moment in present day adulthood.
Reach for something, something of solace in the material surrounds. The fine motor skills are jiggling and uneven. The sounds of anger shattering though life and limb. The words are unreal, bound to another time past, freaking forth from an unremarkable trigger.
Ungodliness rips through the dispassionate controls that had blanketed the past with superior restraints. All in one moment that posture is smashed. A tsunami of hatred overwhelms everything, everything is drowning in an age old despair of abandonment and aloneness.
Another child in a different frame waves from his highchair, free of despair and filled with happy parents love. You never know when the blast may come, the reverberating slam, a dark look levelled at the heart to hurt and maim. Theres no rapport. Theres no help.
Outside there are miles of wasteland and the nearest human is a strange stranger. Northern lights dance with a menace over the frozen snow, heedless and wrapped up in solar origins like a vain narcissist dancing in the cold.
Theres nowhere to go. Staying risks not surviving. Stillness is the only strategy. Still and quiet, unmoving and terrified.
Departing the body before its time while looking out into the darkness through a very big window. Another dimension comes in to view. There is an opening there, a black portal shows itself. The blackness is ringed with salivating creatures, gargoyles and ghosts. Each ugly agent shows a different and haughty face of malice. These are the entities that feed off human indignities, hatred and unbending sorrows. They heard the cries. They have come to feast.
Miserable eyes lock on to the stunned out-of-body body, scanning for its horror, the horror they have come to binge on. Mouths are gaping with insatiable hunger for evermore human distress. Come their eyes are saying, step in through our dark portal, into the horrors where we live. You will slowly die there and we will live, exciting your fears, your fright, and delighting in your endless pleas for salvation.
The belly trembles and shifts. Theres a reach for something, rolling a smoke, throwing back a shot, but anything suppressive makes the roiling worse. Theres been a possession. Something has taken over the body and mind. It took control. It fed the hungry ghosts. Such a meal as they would make themselves visible for more.
What unlocks these dimensions? How is it they could be seen? Was the prize so great they would risk becoming visible for the sake of feeding on a victims fear? Was leaving the body the prerequisite to seeing into this other plane of existence? Was it disassociation that opened into the realm of an alien kind?
Poppycock! Rubbish! Madness! I hear you objective realists and material objectivists crying out. Careful, dont talk too loud. Their hungers are close. To be frank, I imagine unexplainable close encounters of third kinds are more frequent than most people would like to admit.
It was clear to stop and not be drawn in, into their world of terror and need, to turn away from the black invitation to enter their hellhole and share in their bottomless appetites. It was the despair of abandonment, opening a dark gate into astral realms of hungry ghosts, animate beings, daring to be seen and known, for the sake of their next meal. When they revealed themselves, it was clear to stop and not give a speck of fear to their hunger.
Once the choice was made the horrible vision disappeared into the darkness beyond the window. The body was suddenly heavy. All was spent and the detritus of the departing wave was strewn about to be picked up and handled and thrown out with little ado but shame.
These were the days of entering the cult. This was the beginning of many visits from dark beings. They might wrap around you in a meeting, a third party between you and the guru, slimy and sucking off any insecurities or doubts. We were not to mention them. We were not to feed them, as if they were animals in a zoo and not inter-dimensional events occurring between the etheric plane and our material sectors. It was his laboratory, designed to feed his appetites, and no otherworldly etheric terrorists were going to be given any room on his stage. Besides, they might give him away. They might reveal his masters.
From the other side, there were also visits from beings of light, ephemeral gossamer beings filled with spark and a glory light. We gazed through other gates into the beyond of life where saints could be seen, radiating an alien brilliance inside golden shining mansions, magnificent spaces of a life transformed from this incarnation to the next. There were winged beings that came to rest, like little birds, upon the shoulders bowed in surrender. Rainbow coloured wings of liquid light, pouring into the pure and silent. Heavenly.
We see what we want to see and we understand what we see according to our beliefs. What we make of what we see according to belief becomes either a hell realm, or a heavenly realm, or any one of the possibilities in between and beyond. My thoughts turn in wonder at the warning signs and dark visitations that came and went and came and went while we attended his meetings. Realms of dark entities opening up to be seen was not uncommon in the cult. These extraterrestrial encounters were not healthy experiences. We must have been a great feeding ground for the likes of them. By the master, they were deemed negative and all negativity was faulted and squelched.
From the beginning the horror was so close but we kept on, balancing precariously in what we imagined was good and true. When the Dark Lord himself came in to view, we were too far gone to see.