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The Intraterrestrials

A Foretaste of the New World

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Book 2

"A Seed Germinates"

Dialogue 1

L    I feel quite nervous. The others have given you such a build-up that I had started forming a picture of you as someone really quite formidable. Needless to say you are utterly different from what I had imagined.

F    You were expecting to meet a dragoness in her lair?

L    Not exactly that, but somebody a lot more reserved than I think you are. At one point someone even said you were a bit shy.

F    That was perceptive of whoever it was. Sounds like Melanie.

L    It was.

F    I do feel a bit shy still at times. I was certainly shy as a child. As for being formidable, well I can be that at times if that seems to be what people are asking for.

L    We thought you were probably going to suggest a general get-together of the five of us, well six if we include Paul. They’ve told you about him?

F    Yes. He still seems to be a bit of an unknown factor. It’s really up to him.

L    I’m a bit afraid he’ll try to winkle me out of the group and get me on my own. I’m furious with him and attracted at the same time.

F    That was a factor in my suggestion that we didn’t meet as a group yet. In any case I wanted to get to know you a bit first.

L    Am I being vetted?

F    Don’t be an idiot. You know, I wish they didn’t give people the impression that I’m a sort of mystical initiate behind the scenes of I.T. I’m nothing like as wise and wonderful as they make me out to be.

L    Well, you are older and probably wiser than the others. And I imagine in a group situation they tend to defer to you a bit.

F    Yes, that does happen when we have met a a foursome. You know, obviously, that the overall tone of conversations, even in as closely knit a group as we are becoming, alters radically with each mix of two, three or four people. When it is just Joe, Melanie and I there is a more equal balance. But with Richard it alters. It’s just a little bit less integrated, and I think this is what gives them a feeling that I’m controlling things from a higher level.

L    Are you?

F    Good question. You know, Lucia, you’ve been coming towards this little assembly of souls for some time. It was time you surfaced. There is a sense in which I do get tempted to exercise too much control over the situation. I need someone to share some of my own difficulties with.

L    I could say the same. I’ve found a great closeness with Melanie. She’s already helped me quite powerfully over my sexual hang-ups and muddles. She and I are already on quite an even keel there. I like her very much. But I feel... how can I put it? I feel she lacks a real sense of herself as a woman. She’s intelligent and clear and confident in dealing with someone like me. But when it comes to her own life she seems to come unstuck somewhere. I feel she really needs to wade in with Richard and tie him down somehow.

F    I’m quite sure that’s what you’d do in similar circumstances. But with Richard I think you’d be wrong. He refuses to be tied. What are all these personal relationship problems really saying to people, Lucia? Why do people go on and on in our time making just that sort of mistake with each other?

L    I think I know something about it, but I don’t know what to do about it.

F    What do you think it is then?

L    I think we’re afraid of bringing our sense of higher presences, intraterrestrials as you call them, into direct connection with other people’s experiences of the same thing. We try to work out our relationships in too limited a sphere of action, on too low a level. I suppose it is an astral level and a sexual level.

F    Yes, I know this is true. And when I try to do something about it, it simply takes me over. I invoke a higher level of myself as I think, and there I am exercising power over people in sometimes quite a formidable way.

L    Did you have close personal relationships when you were younger?

F    Yes, indeed. But after a few bad experiences, one particularly frightful affair, I simply withdrew. Then Joe and I were a bit close for a time, but it wasn’t really right. I’ve been on my own for a long time.

L    When you feel yourself being taken over by a sort of power thing with people, do you think it is this unresolved sexuality that comes into play?

F    Yes, I think you’re probably putting your finger on it. But I don’t know what to do about it.

L    My life has been almost the exact opposite of that. As I said to Melanie I’ve really played the field sexually, all over the place. But at the same time it hasn’t really touched my deeper levels. I seem to have left a free space where I can begin to be aware of higher beings, sometimes as quite a powerful presence. But my looseness on a sexual level has had a dangerous side as well. Melanie probably told you that when the contact we had encouraged me to be more deliberately aware of my higher being I was nearly driven out altogether. I suppose astrally I’ve simply made myself too loose.

F    It looks as if you and I represent two poles of the same thing. We need to find a balanced position half-way somewhere.

*****

L    I’m...

F    Stand up. (She does the same). Here, hold my hands a moment.

L    It’s coming back. I mean, I’m here now.

F    Breathe a bit more deeply. There. I’m here too.

L    Fiona...

F    Don’t be scared. Just breathe. Now, say what is there in your mind.

L    (Slowly) When two, or three, are gathered together in my Name, there am I, in the midst.

F    Who is speaking these words, Lucia?

L    I am speaking these words. I have spoken those words. These words will be spoken in me. I shall become those words.

F    Don’t stop breathing. Breathe your thinking. Think your breathing. I am in the midst with you. I am you. We are each other.

*****

L    Things can never be quite the same again.

F    No, but they will be very nearly the same. We forget very quickly.

L    That’s tragic. We need to be like that all the time.

F    No, it isn’t tragic. Forgetting is just as important as remembering. If we didn’t forget we couldn’t remember, and remembering is the clue to our whole path of development.

L    Why does coming down to earth have to be so painful?

F    Because pain is the door to remembering. When we are in pleasure, in joy, we are. When we are in pain, we become. When pleasure and pain are in balance, both present together, we achieve. And in achieving we fulfil not only ourselves but the earth itself. We are the earth. We are the earth’s awareness.

L    Stop now Fiona. I can only take so much of this sort of thing. I need time to digest it.

F    We need time, full stop. When you enter the timeless, and don’t forget to breathe, back you come into time. But the reality lies in the movement.

L    T.S. Eliot said that... "the point of intersection of the timeless with time." He said it was an occupation for the saint.

F    Yes, he talked about it all the time. "The still point of the turning world".

L    "There the dance is, and there is only the dance". But Fiona, does it really have to bring us all back into religion? If religion is really the price of all this I’d rather stay as I am. I simply can’t stand the atmosphere of religion and religious people. Religion always seems to me like sticking pins through butterflies. "You’ve just had a transcendent experience? Join the club. Sign here." They don’t just bring it all down to earth. They positively stamp it into the mud.

F    If they didn’t do that people at an earlier stage of development would lose touch altogether. Simple religions, and even trendy new-age mysticisms and occult games are necessary introductions for some people to the possibility of stillness and attainment. You not only have to have the temple, it has to have inner courtyards and outer courtyards, places of acclimatisation where people can start to lose some of their fear and scepticism. We are in such a courtyard.

L    Fiona, are you a Christian?

F    (Pause). Well, I haven’t signed on the dotted line. I don’t go to church. I’m not an anthroposophist either, although I did join the society. Like most people, when I was young I joined things. But I don’t operate very well in groups.

L    What about I.T.?

F    I.T. has this particular dynamic of disassembly, mobility, not allowing form to overtake content. You can’t join I.T., it’s simply a code symbol for a process. But I stalled your question.

L    About Christianity, yes.

F    No, I’m not a Christian. I think for the time being Christianity has blocked the path of spiritual development for mankind. Christianity has hi-jacked the growth of an awakening, emergent consciousness of the spirit in humanity and put a price-tag on it. The church recognised what was saleable and controllable in what emerged in Palestine 2000 years ago, and marketed it. Sin, atonement, advocacy, and hence priesthood, hierarchy, authority, these could all be marketed and placed as a solid structure between the awareness of humankind and humankind’s true being.

L    What is humankind’s true being?

F    You know that Lucia. You stood looking straight at it ten minutes ago. You showed it to me. You opened a door for me to see it too.

L    It was only a glimpse.

F    The glimpse we get of that reality is not partial, whereas the glimpses of sense realities are only scraps of the whole. When the light breaks through in that way, through the kind of chink that people like you provide, it’s the whole Light which momentarily we see. Light is indivisible. Each glimpse is, so to speak, a hologram of the whole.

L    And that is humanity’s true being?

F    Yes, it is.

L    Has it got a name?

F    Yes it has.

L    Can we speak its name?

F    Names are tricky. They do things to consciousness. They alter time. Spoken thoughtlessly or inadvertently they raise devils instead of gods.

L    Yes. Melanie and I have gone into that a bit. We talked about The Wizard of Earthsea. People need vernacular names, because true names hand power to the unscrupulous.

F    Lucia, without going into the state you brought us to just now, can you stand fully in your body and speak the name of humanity’s true being so that it is acceptable to the Earth, and stands there in our Earth consciousness as a description of what we are becoming?

L    Are we sufficiently protected to do that?

F    I am beginning to know how to invoke that sort of protection. My faint memory tells me that in the past I have been a magician, and I know the techniques and manipulations of power that put walls round what we did. But that is no longer appropriate in our time. We have sacrificed power to awareness of our own spiritual presence. Humanity’s true being protects us to a much greater degree than the old magicians could achieve. But we have to ask it to do so.

L    Let’s do that now.

*****

F    Speak the name now. Lucia.

L    CHRIST IN US.

*****

L    I feel tremendously powerful. I feel I could conquer the world.

F    You could. The first people to have that experience, to be aware of that identity, set out to conquer the world on its behalf. They created Christianity and destroyed half of humanity in the process instead.

L    Instead of what?

F    Instead of joy, then pain, then the marriage of pain and joy, which is the achievement, what is called the pleroma, the fullness.

L    What can I do with this power?

F    Bring it into balance with its opposite, with powerlessness. Apart from that balance power only destroys.

L    Is that done through breathing? Is that why you told me to breathe?

F    It is not only that we bring opposites into balance by breathing. Balance, poise, equilibrium, whatever we call them, actually create the breath, the heartbeat, the whole rhythmic system.

L    I can’t grasp this. Are you saying that if we could master the breath we could understand the world?

F    There are powers which would like us to think so. Breathing is so powerful that mastery of the breath is mastery of the world. What these dark powers don’t tell us is that this is a two way process. Mastering the world is at the same time being mastered by the world. The only way to make the world our prisoner is to be totally imprisoned in it. The idea that we can freely control the world from outside is an illusion. When we act in the world it is also the world which is acting in us. At the level of action in the world we are the world. Understanding the world is something different.

L    How do we understand the world?

F    In the first place by doing what we are doing now, by thinking.

L    There’s something missing.

F    There certainly is!

L    What is the missing factor?

F    The missing factor is we ourselves. We are absent from our own situation if we simply think and act, think and act. We also have to feel. We have to feel ourselves. We have to feel ourselves thinking, feel ourselves acting. We have to be, and we have to become aware of ourselves as being.

L    So in feeling ourselves we are in joy, then in thinking about the world we are in pain, and in acting we synthesise the two and achieve the pleroma, is that it? There’s something a bit wrong with that isn’t there? I mean we certainly feel pain as well as joy. And in becoming aware of ourselves we are certainly also thinking. Moreover in acting we feel both pain and pleasure and also we are aware that acting is a rational thinking process on some level. Isn’t there something contrived about this whole threefoldness of thinking feeling and willing? It’s almost as if they’re interchangeable.

F    They certainly are interchangeable, down here on the earth. But it is the fact that we are in physical bodies that enables us to hold them together. Otherwise they would fly apart. This is why we have to have physical bodies you might say. As spiritual beings we humans are in our infancy. The three forces or entities which manifest in us as thinking, feeling and willing are gigantic powers in the spirit. If we, as minute spiritual infants, were to experience them naked and unmediated, they would blow us apart. We wouldn’t survive for a fraction of a second. Our physical bodies are cunningly and wonderfully contrived to hold together, in a single entity, beings which, in their own infinite sphere, are engaged in titanic cosmic battles and towering harmonic agreements, which we could only survive after multiple incarnations over countless millennia of time.

L    You make our physical bodies sound like electrical condensers.

F    On one level that is precisely what they are. The physical human body is the supreme achievement of the creative universe. It is the only entity in the whole of creation which can contain within its tiny compass the entire scope and infinite variety of the cosmos, yet so stepped down energywise that it can contain the spiritual embryo which we ourselves are, and act as a vehicle and an instrument by which we can grow and mount upwards, and scale the heights from which it was created.

L    No wonder so many people nowadays say that it was implanted into the planet millennia ago by extraterrestrials.

F    That is partially a materialistic distortion by people who have not inwardly grasped the fact that the planet is a living organism which we become part of when we incarnate into it.

L    It isn’t itself simply a single undifferentiated organism though, is it? I mean it is inhabited by hosts of beings, ourselves certainly, but other sentient beings as well?

F    Which is why we arrived at this word intraterrestrials. We came to the realisation that the new-age movement was losing touch with the reality of its own earthly experiences. It is as if a materialist fantasy world of science-fiction had invaded human consciousness and was blowing it up like a balloon, progressively dispersing and thinning out human experience, and detaching it from the planet, of which it is an indispensable part.

L    Are there no gods outside the planet then?

F    Human consciousness is in danger of being dominated by space, and this means that the human soul is getting lost in the depths of time. What is supremely important is that we should find our way back to the intensity and concentration of the present moment in time and the present location in space. That is what we made a momentary contact with this morning when you achieved what you did achieve. The question of outside and inside is one of the inexhaustible mysteries. We have to think, feel and will our way into it in every moment of waking consciousness.

L    I feel you didn’t answer my question.

F    I didn’t. I felt you might answer it.

L    I think there are gods outside the planet. I think it is a male being which I sometimes feel approaches me, and that’s why I tend to be drawn out of my body towards it, and to be united with it. I feel it is my other half, or other side. I feel it is my more real self, and that it belongs to the stars.

F    Have you ever met a man who said:- "I think there are goddessess inside the planet. I think it is a female being whom I sometimes feel I approach, and that’s why I sometimes feel drawn into my body towards it and to be united with it. I feel it is my other half, my other side. I feel it is my more real self, and it belongs in the earth.

L    (Laughs loudly) How absolutely astonishing! You repeated my words exactly as a perfect mirror image. You must have amazing powers of concentration.

F    Well I think I’ve learned to listen! But the thing is, have you met such a man or men?

L    Well of course I have. Every time a man falls in love with me; and then we lose it all at once when we make love.

F    Exactly. Why do you think that is?

L    Well I have the feeling that men don’t actually see me at all. They see something else. I’ve always thought it was simply a mirror-image of themselves which they lose at the moment of orgasm. And there I am in front of them, all glamour dispersed. Mostly they are deeply disappointed and take it out on me. ‘Can’t think what I saw in her’, they say after a few more times. Post-coital depression sets in.

F    You’ve been unlucky. So have I. But perhaps it isn’t such bad luck after all.

L    Why?

F    We’ve been able to see some things a lot of people don’t see. They just get on with it. We ask questions, and I think we get true answers.

L    Don’t you think a lot more men than women project that sort of experience? Why do you think that is?

F    Oh, a lot of women make gods out of their men. But women are the real earth-beings. They make a better job of the projection! They adjust to earth realities... babies and washing-up. Most men go on fantasising and look for the goddess in the next pretty young thing.

L    Are you saying that women have more sense for the real divine than men?

F    No, not at all. Who creates the churches? Who scans the sky for UFOs and extra terrestrials? Who sends rockets to the moon and the planets? Men are natural denizens of the outer realities. That’s why they are reluctant to admit to the real existence of goddesses on earth. Men have as powerful a sense for the numinous as women have, but they have less sense for it in its incarnated planetary form. They want the goddess to be a phenomenon. They’d rather have a rock-star Madonna than the Sistine Madonna. They want heaven to stay outside where they think it belongs. Their GOD is unitary and above all male.

L    So they have created a male world to embody him.

F    And that male world is destroying the earth.

L    But men wouldn’t have been able to do that if we hadn’t made it possible.

F    Not only possible but in a way inevitable.

L    How?

F    By being the unattainable sexual goddess ideal for man. By putting all our energy into that. By aiming at Marilyn Monroe and then crashing down into our fat or skinny, smelly, boring monstrous selves. In a word, women’s God is also unitary, but female. We want heaven to stay inside where we think it belongs. So we have created a female world to embody our female God. And that female world is destroying the stars as effectively as man destroys the earth.

L    Stars are indestructible.

F    So is the earth, but humanity is having a jolly good short at destroying both.

L    It seems you are implying that there is something one-sided in the green revolution. We ought to be paying just as much attention to the way in which the reality beyond the earth is being denatured and eroded. We need a golden revolution as well.

F    We confuse GOD with the gods and goddesses. Outer space is peopled by gods of all shapes and sizes, some beneficent, some malevolent, destructive and anti-human. Inner space is equally populated by goddesses, and not all of them are on our side either. Feminists counter the male paternalist hijacking of GOD by attempting to erect a unitary goddess opposition. But that misses the point altogether. GOD is beyond polarity neither male nor female. GOD is all there is. GOD is Being itself, Being aware, Being aware of itself, Being thinking its awareness of itself, Being aware of thinking its awareness of itself. GOD is immanent in Being, but constantly transcends that immanence. So GOD creates polarity but is never subject to it. Gods and goddesses are another ball-game altogether.

*****

L    Fiona, when we went into those altered states earlier, that was something different from gods and goddesses wasn’t it?

F    You know it was.

L    Can you describe what was happening?

F    Do you know the word hierophant?

L    Yes.

F    Do you remember what it means?

L    I think you’re telling me that I was acting as a hierophant just now, and that I should remember that, because I’ve done it before. Is that what you’re saying?

F    Listen, I’m not teaching you. I’m not your teacher.

L    What are you doing then?

F    I’m doing what a man I know calls "putting myself in service of your higher being". At least that’s what I’m trying to do. As I told you, I find it very difficult to do that, and I frequently find myself controlling the situation instead.

L    I don’t think you’re doing too badly. I’m a lot less disciplined than you are. I flounder about more.

F    Well you’re less experienced than I am, but you’re not doing too badly either. You’re responding to suggestions and allowing things to happen without interfering in them. You’re also staying awake. You didn’t slip out of your body this time, so you’re responding to an intuition that you don’t want to be mediumistic.

L    That’s quite right. I feel quite sure that’s not what I’m meant to do. But what are you doing while I do my hierophant bit?

F    I’m more of what should be called a priest, if it weren’t for the fact that the word has been thoroughly downgraded. Most priests just go through the motions in a traditional way. They have no real idea what they’re supposed to be doing, they just hope that God knows and carry on as they’ve been taught to do. I’m talking about catholic priests, but in protestant churches they don’t even get that far, in fact they don’t even call themselves priests. They prefer to think of themselves as pastors, guides, shepherds of their flocks. But we don’t really need to go into all that. You know it already.

L    So what does a real priest do?

F    A real priest creates and makes him or herself responsible for what is called a temple. It doesn’t have to be a physical structure, although it is often helpful if something physical is there to act as a focus of attention.

L    What’s a temple for?

F    It’s a receptor, a receiving station, a set of parameters, a place where the god or goddess can manifest. In the last resort it is the earth itself which is the temple.

L    So the temple is the female half of what we’re talking about.

F    Exactly. In ancient Greece they had this picture of Zeus descending from the heights and impregnating the swan, Leda. But that is rather a primitive level of what we mean.

L    Why doesn’t the Christian church have hierophants?

F    You can feel, can’t you, that we’re getting nearer and nearer to the point when we are going to have to use the Name again, the Name that emerged in you when you became momentarily a hierophant.

L    The C-word. Why am I so obstinately reluctant to pronounce that word?

F    You pronounced it loud and clear an hour ago.

L    I feel that it itself pronounced itself in me. And before that it spoke one of its sayings in me.

F    But you were not being mediumistic then either. You were aware that the "I" of the Being and your own "I" were one being.

L    We’re talking about Names again. I feel that the saying of that Name in a purely referential – not reverential, referential – sense is straight blasphemy.

F    And this is the girl who hates religion and religious people.

L    Religion is blasphemy. Religion is a secularised compromise with atheists. Religion is a cowardly disguise for responsible spiritual life. And look at the result. In our time Christianity is nothing but tarted up humanism.

F    (Laughs). I think you may have to modify some of those statements.

L    (Laughs too). Oh, Fiona dear, what are we going to do about all this?

F    As you said, it’s about names. What has happened is that you feel the C-word is no longer a Name of Power in the Wizard of Earthsea sense. It has become a nickname, a soubriquet, something bandied about in pubs and on the street as an ordinary oath, a swear-word. What do we do when all our words are downgraded, when people have taken all the sacred symbols out of the Temple and desecrated them in the gutter.

L    But we know something different, don’t we? We know that it is possible to open ourselves to the level at which the CHRIST can speak in us. There! I’ve said the Name. And unlike a Roman Catholic I didn’t make the sign of the cross as I did so.

F    They know the Name needs protection. But they haven’t reached the point where their own being protects it in the act of speaking. Nor have we all the time. We have to trust the path, and that means losing fear and the superstition that goes with it. Then we can begin to restore the name CHRIST to its former power. Now I’ve said it too.

(They get up and hug)

L    I’m getting hungry. Whatever time is it? Christ, I must go!

(Covers her mouth)

Oh lord, whatever have I done?

F    You haven’t done anything very serious darling. The profane world is also part of reality. We are in it. We are transforming it. It takes time.

L    But why am I so thoughtless?

F    One day we shall reach continuity of consciousness, continuous presence. That’s the object of the exercise. We’re getting there.

L    When are we meeting again?

F    Keep in touch with Melanie. She loves to be the contact point. I’ll ring her. Anyway, soon, soon! Off you go. It’s been lovely.

(A last hug, and Lucia goes.)

*****

Dialogue 2

R    What’s wrong with you these days Mel?

M    Is there something wrong with me?

R    Well, something’s wrong. I don’t seem to be able to get through to you the way I used to.

M    No, that’s true, Perhaps the whole notion of ‘getting through’ to someone has something wrong with it.

R    What do you mean?

M    Well, perhaps if things are right with people in the first place the idea of getting through to them doesn’t arise. Did you always feel you had to get through to me from somewhere?

R    Well I thought I knew you. Heavens above, I did know you. I know you now. I love you very much indeed, darling girl. But I feel you’ve pulled away from me somewhere.

M    Yes I have. I know I have. I’ve told myself for ages that we’re a very well adjusted couple. We each have our own life and our own needs and we’ve found a modus vivendi that suits us very well. But in my heart of hearts I know perfectly well that, at least on my side, this simply isn’t true. I’m lonely and sad, and I’ve had to withdraw a bit to cope with it.

R    I’m really amazed. I had no idea you felt like that. Why on earth didn’t you say something? Did you think I wouldn’t understand? I think the world of you Melanie. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to make you happy.

M    People’s happiness is not ours to command Richard. We can only make people as happy as they can be in the part of them we actually see. If there are parts we don’t see we have no access to the happiness or misery in those parts. We can’t make people see us. It either grows out of our hearts or it doesn’t. So it becomes a great temptation, perhaps a necessity, to adjust to things as they are between us.

R    You’re saying I simply don’t see you. Are you also saying I don’t love you? That my love is an illusion?

M    Richard, in your heart you know that that can’t possibly be true. To doubt that would be to undermine your whole picture of yourself. And that picture is one you share with me. I see that picture and I love it deeply. I love you, Richard. I know that you are in some ways a very lonely man, that you need your loneliness and value it. I do my level best to guard and protect that need for a lonely path. But in doing that I’m beginning to fail myself. I’m not being honest with you about my real needs. And I know that if I fail myself I shall start to fail you. That’s what you sense in me and why you feel you can’t get through to me.

R    I think I know what you’re saying. You want me to come and with live you. We’re back where we were three years ago. You say you are protecting my lonely way, but your real self wants to be inside that space.

M    I think there are two halves of you that never meet. The love you have for me is in one space; the need to be by yourself is in another. I don’t think these two selves talk to each other. Moreover, I don’t think either of them see what is happening to me.

R    I’m beginning to think I’ve been deceiving myself about our relationship all along.

M    I don’t think you really trust that loneliness of yours. I think you are afraid of losing it. I think I trust it more than you do. In spite of the deep reality of your love for me I think you feel threatened by me. Richard, I don’t threaten you at all. Your freedom is of as much value to me as it is to you. I positively depend on your freedom. It is not I who threaten it. It is the division in yourself which does that. These two beings in you need to talk to each other. They need to resolve their differences. Then perhaps you will be able to turn towards me and really look at me.

R    Melanie, I don’t think I know you at all.

M    On the contrary, I think you know me very well. But there is a compliant, self-deceiving side of me which has begun to create a gap between us. Some conversations I have been having recently have begun to make me realise that I am afraid of losing you. I’m trying to be more honest with you, and that means putting our relationship at risk. I can’t be honest with you without being honest with myself at the same time. I have more needs in our relationship than I have been admitting. But simply declaring these needs will only make you feel more threatened. I feel you need to allow your love of me to make you more perceptive of me, otherwise you will end up with a romantic dream of me which will drift away and leave you with nothing. If you start to see me clearly as well as loving me you will see my needs and want to help me with them, as far as that is possible and right for you to do so. (Cries:) Oh Richard, I’m sorry. I’ve become a bit exhausted in our relationship, and not really known what to do next.

R    I feel I’ve been thoroughly selfish, only thinking about my own needs.

M    Living, thinking, striving very intensely in one’s life is an inherently selfish activity. Only love opens windows into that. It’s not easy to keep the balance.

R    What do you really want, Melanie?

M    O, that’s very simple and normal. I want to live with you and bear your children. And I want you at the same time to have all the scope you need for finding yourself in life, finding out who you are, and what you are really doing on this planet. Couldn’t be simpler could it?

R    Melanie, you’re wonderful. I don’t know how you put up with me. You’ll have to let me mull all this over and see what I come up with. I need to look more critically at my life.

M    There’s something else. I.T. is changing too. It’s reached a new threshold with Lucia coming in, and now perhaps Paul. You know what? I should go and have a heart-to-heart with Fiona if I were you.

R    Why do you think I should do that?

M    I don’t know. Just an inkling of mine. She’s a wise old bird. Normally she keeps her counsel, but if you put a pennyin her slot she sometimes disgorges a jackpot.

R    Well I might try it.

M    Are you staying here tonight?

R    I thought so. Why?

M    Lucia’s coming about lunchtime so I need to stay in. I wondered if you could pick up something for supper. We could eat together here if you like.

R    I’d love to do that. I’ll gather a few of the things we usually get at the market.

M    See you later, then. Bless you darling. I love you very much.

R    Me too. Bye.

*****

Dialogue 3

M    So you went to see Fiona? My god Lu, you look quite different. What’s been going on?

L    You feel different too. Stronger somehow.

M    I’ve had it out with Richard.

L    Oh bless you Mel! How did it go? Was he uptight about it?

M    Well he tried to be at first. But I just forged ahead. He was quite shaken I think. He went away in a pensive mood, but still warmly affectionate. I’ve burned my boats with him, but I don’t feel scared. I feel it’s all part of the general clearance that’s going on in the group.

L    I wonder if the reason impulses like this I.T. thing seem inevitably to get stuck in fixed forms has to do with people failing to do that. So instead of opening doors for people in general to start living in a more meaningful way they just get bogged down in their own ‘stuff’.

M    Rudolf Steiner talked a great deal about ‘karma’. In fact you could say that through him the whole eastern notion of karma was reborn in a western form. He cleared out the whole rigid notion of a sort of revengeful fate pursuing people, and superstitious pictures of ‘metempsychosis’...

L    You mean being reborn as a caterpillar or something if you were a bit of a creep in your last life... (hoots of laughter)

M    Yes, all that sort of nonsense, and he showed how the whole interplay of relationships on Earth is a self-devised and enormously intelligent device for untying in the next life knots one has tied in a previous one. But what was even more insightful, he showed how karma, so far from being a kind of grim revenge of the gods upon our misdemeanours, was the inevitable process of the fall of man into matter; and that this so-called ‘Fall of Man’ was at the heart of the divine plan for humanity.

L    How do you see that?

M    The whole secret of the difference between humankind and the gods seems to lie there. If we remain content to see the whole universe as based only on love, then humanity is intended simply as the latest version of self-perpetuating manifestations of successive angelic hierarchies.

L    So all the hierarchies of angels do as they’re told, but humanity is supposed to do as it likes.

M    Yes, exactly. But if doing as it likes is not also what God likes, so to speak, humanity simply ceases to exist; not out of a sort of divine disapproval, but because it is acting as a destroyer of its own created nature.

L    So, we see evil, tragedy and pain as sort of alarm systems to warn us that we are in danger of self-destruct. What becomes of freedom then? Do as you like but if it isn’t what God likes you’re clobbered.

M    No, because our freedom goes deeper than that. Steiner talked about the twin nature of humanity as ‘God-willed Man’ and ‘God-estranged Man’. The whole mystery of humankind lay in the notion that a being could emerge with a unique synthesis of freedom and love inbuilt into its nature. But if this freedom was simply bestowed on us from above it wouldn’t be freedom at all. It had to evolve. In other words, we were invited to be partners in our own creation. Freedom from the gods implied complicity with the gods. They had to agree, and not all of them did agree.

L    This gets very complicated. Why can’t it all be simple?

M    At the heart of it there is a prodigious simplicity, because at certain moments the author steps into the scenario and initiates a new cycle. Oh here’s Richard. Come in, darling. Lucia’s pressing me very hard to explain the entire universe, and I was just about to get out of my depth.

R    Where had you got to? Incidentally, as you see, I found the afternoon was free after all. I haven’t had any lunch. Lucia, can I help myself to a sandwich or something?

L    Go ahead. You know your way about my kitchen cubby-hole. There’s some ham and salad in the fridge. Put the kettle on. Melanie, let me get this straight. If we, as you say, were partners in the creation of our own nature, then at some level we accepted the necessity of pain and suffering as fail-safe mechanisms for the survival of our freedom in a world of divine law... divine law which was the product, the mechanism, you might say, of divine love.

R    We not only accepted it, we conceived of it. We were in on the mystery from the beginning. Where’s the butter? Oh here it is. Lucia, we talk about God as if he a sort of giant, archetypal person. But the notion of ‘person’ doesn’t come into it when we are talking about the creation of humanity. Lucia, we are God. We did it. And by ‘we’ I mean also the whole galaxy of angelic hosts, of which we are the latest edition, the contemporary version. The idea of ‘person’ comes later, after the Fall, you might say. Has Melanie told you Steiner’s picture of ‘God-willed Man’ and ‘God-estranged Man’?

M    Yes, I was talking about that just before you came in. Most of what I was telling her was a watered-down version of things you had told me. You came just in time.

R    As I came through the door you were saying something about the gods not all agreeing. They not only didn’t all agree. They stepped in, some of them, and exploited the new development with versions of their own. It was they who transformed the necessary safeguards which man and the angels had devised in order that freedom should not destroy the very nature of humanity as love. And created actual evil out of it.

L    You say ‘man and the angels’. Didn’t woman come into it?

M    The goddess had plans of her own.

L    ‘Mary kept all these things in her heart’. Mel, Mel, hold me love please. I go all out of balance. All right, I know breathe, breathe! I am breathing. I’m puffing like a porpoise. Why do I keep quoting these things out of the Bible? I don’t believe in all that stuff.

M    Lucia, you have to bring the different bits of yourself together or you’ll go a bit potty. You have to find a centre.

L    That’s what Fiona said. And it was when she said that, I found myself quoting the Bible for the first time.

R    I don’t believe those are just quotations, Lucia. When you said that just now about Mary I felt you were speaking directly out of the experience of Mary herself. What did you say the first time with Fiona?

L    "When two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst".

R    There, you said that without wobbling.

L    Yes, but this time I was only quoting. This is what seems to happen with powerful words. They get born out of you like flames, as it were. Then they condense and harden off, and they become simply quotations. I think that is what makes me so prejudiced against religion. It has lost its source in the flame.

M    The tongues of fire the apostles experienced.

R    It would help me a lot, Lucia, if you told us about these experiences you’ve been having since you joined us. How many times has it happened?

L    I think this just now made the fifth time. But they’ve all been different.

M    Well it happened twice when we were together, didn’t it, Lu?

L    Yes, and then twice when I was with Fiona. And now again here.

R    What seems to spark it off? Let me say, I’m not simply asking out of curiosity. I’m beginning to realise that your arrival among us is like the flowering of what the group has been aiming at all along. I feel it was a very wonderful happening.

L    But I’m also very muddled.

M    Yes, I think we have something for you too.

L    Fiona also said something of the sort. She said I had been approaching the group for some time, and now I had surfaced as it were.

R    Venus appearing out of the waves.

M    Stop flirting, Richard.

R    Well she is lovely isn’t she?

M    Yes, she’s very lovely indeed. Stop chewing that sandwich and dropping crumbs all over Lucia’s floor. Where’s that tea you were supposed to be making?

*****

L    You wanted me to talk about these experiences I’ve been having. I find I have to overcome a reluctance to do that. Why do you suppose that is?

R    Have you any idea why?

L    It would be a bit like getting undressed.

M    Yes. I’m beginning to feel we have to look at the idea that these episodes have a lot to do with your sexuality and what you are doing with it.

L    You mean they’re connected with...

M    Richard, Lucia confided to me quite a lot about her sexual life. Do you want the conversation to take this path?

L    I think it has to. I’m not usually so bashful.

M    You described what had been happening over the last months as a sort of celibate sabbatical! (Laughter)

L    Instead of defiantly playing the role of loose woman and getting increasingly uncomfortable with it.

R    Actually feeling guilty do you mean?

L    Not as simple as that. I enjoy being beautiful, and I’ve been through what most of my kind go through over that, knowing that there is a perfectly innocent side to it, but also that you can’t sustain it in the face of men’s sexual pressure; nor in face of the sort of prissy puritanism that surrounds everything to do with sex, especially among older people. So it’s more defiance than guilt. I’m beautiful and sexy and bugger the lot of you! It becomes a way of life.

M    But then it began to pall a bit.

L    Well, I did begin to wonder where it was taking me. Especially after some shaming episodes, like when a man I respected got interested and ended up calling me a tarty bitch in front of some of his friends who I also liked. So I withdrew a bit from all that.

M    At the same time there’s something about being celibate on principle that is also defiant, isn’t there? Some women make a profession of it, and it’s not usually the most attractive women who do that.

R    How has it been with you, Mel? I mean before you and I met?

M    Well I never felt myself as being in the front line of sexiness, Richard. Yes, I know what you’re about to say, but that is especially for you, and yes, I think I’m the sort of woman whose sexuality only emerges with a particular man. When that fails, as it so often does, there is heartbreak. But there’s also a secret realisation that one-man women are specially blessed in some way. It’s something you can’t take any particular credit for, it just happens.

L    All the same, a hell of a lot of women do take credit for it in an unpleasantly arrogant way. I feel women like me, whether we are tarty bitches or not, are as you said, Mel, in the front line. We take most of the brunt of men’s untamed and sometimes brute sexuality, and we get precious little support from the respectable majority in doing that.

M    Well, a lot of them say it is mainly you who provoke it.

L    They certainly do, and there is obviously some justice in that. At the same time, it’s a man’s world, Mel. Men broadly speaking call the tune in most of these things. Streetwise women dance to that tune, that’s all. We sort of draw off the excess energy, and in doing so very often it is we who get men to realise that there is a richer, more fruitful life with the little woman and her kids at home. Shit, I’m talking like a Hollywood film script!

R    I think you’re wonderfully clear and honest about it all.

L    If I am it’s because there’s space with you I.T. lot to come to the surface of my life, as Fiona put it.

M    What I felt we were beginning to come to, Lu, was that there was an actual connection between these, (shall we call them?), psychic episodes and the change in your sexual life.

L    When I’ve been thinking about them afterwards I’ve had the curious impression that these were events happening much more to you, and also to Fiona, than to me...almost that they were happening to the world, as it were, even to people who only heard about them happening, or read about them happening in a book. For me they were much more like losing consciousness, losing my hold on my body, speaking in spite of myself.

R    What you are talking about, Lucia, is mediumship. Many people claim that mediumistic phenomena are directly connected with suppressing one’s normal sexuality.

L    And yet I also know that what I was seeing and giving voice to was something absolutely wonderful.

M    It is absolutely wonderful, Lu. But do you remember what we said the first time it happened? I asked you who you thought the ‘presence’ was, and you said you thought it was yourself.

L    But now you seem to be saying that it was simply the result of my repressed sexuality!

M    Lucia, don’t allow the rubbishing values of our ordinary society to cloud your actual experiences. You experienced something wonderful and so did I. So, I presume did Fiona, though you haven’t told us yet what happened then. Just because a typical psycho-analyst would dismiss what happened as nothing but disorganised glands doesn’t mean that the episodes didn’t themselves occur, and that they didn’t open up new perceptions. What we are dealing with now is the possibility of further confusions and deceptions beyond the obvious ones.

R    This is really quite extraordinary! Joe and I have had endless discussions about who these Intraterrestrial presences really are, and a lot of the time we have come to the conclusion that there is no evidence that we are sensing anything more than a somewhat deeper layer of our own being. Are you confirming that?

M    I would be very hesitant to say there was no evidence. What I am saying is that as far as Lucia and I are concerned we have been experiencing a very powerful and wonderful presence which we sense as the visible approach of a deeper level of her own being. I find it quite distasteful and destructive to rubbish that as nothing but the product of Lucia’s wilful celibacy. The sexual aspect opens the door, but what that open door reveals is something ineffable and beautiful in itself, Lucia’s higher being. How much higher I’m not prepared to say. Possibly only as far as her astral self. We all have such higher levels and it is wonderful when they are revealed. But they can also lead to the possibility of further illusion. Seeing Lucia’s higher astrality world be wonderful, but it would also be illusory, especially if we start to think we are already seeing into the spiritual world. We are only touching the outer fringe of reality, and even that may be distorted by the fact that Lucia is somewhat mediumistic.

L    I don’t want to be a bloody medium.

M    You don’t have to be. Mediumistic vision is a sort of psychic illness. But that doesn’t mean that you are any more sick than the rest of us. We all have this potential, but in most of us it is concealed because we stay in our bodies. Your particular mix of, first, over-expression of sexuality and then suppression of it simply revealed in you what is potential in all of us.

L    And yet what happened was so wonderful for all of us. It was still more so when I got to Fiona. I really feel that there something more came through, something much more real and somehow in control.

R    That’s probably because Fiona herself is so much more in control. But I think we need to be with Fiona to hear about that. Shall we stop this now, and see whether she is ready to have this meeting with all five of us that we talked about?

L    Which raises the vexed question of Paul again. Have you seen him again. Richard?

R    No. He seems to have gone back to Dorset. He lives down there, quite near to where the conference was. I thought he would have been in touch with you. As a matter of fact I thought he was rather gone on you.

L    Do did I. I don’t know whether to be relieved or miffed.

M    He’ll surface again when he’s sorted himself out. I feel he wants you, but he doesn’t quite know whether he wants I.T. He’s afraid he can’t have one without the other.

R    (Laughs) Poor Paul! Oh dear I seem to have dropped him in it, don’t I? Look, I’ll give Fiona a ring and fix something up, shall I?

L    Stay now, won’t you, and have something to drink?

R    I think Mel wants to go shopping, don’t you love?

M    He’s suddenly getting all solicitous, aren’t you sweetheart?

R    What on earth’s that supposed to mean?

M    I’ll tell you later. Come on.

R    ‘Bye Lucia. I still think you’re beautiful whatever she says.

L    So do I. Get out of here, you two!

*****

Dialogue 4

F    I hope you didn’t mind me suggesting we met here instead of up your end of town. I had a particular reason, which I’ll tell you later, but I know it’s rather a long way for you and Lucia, Melanie.

M    Bless you Fiona it’s perfectly simple thanks to Richard’s car. He simply picked Lu and me up from her place, and Joe’s this end anyway.

R    No problem. These are journeys we’re all quite used to anyway because of work. Except for you Lucia, it’s a bit off your usual stamping ground, isn’t it?

L    On the contrary, it feels almost like coming home for me. Till I started the art-school course I had a room here in Abbey Road. My mum still lives in Carlton Hill where I was brought up, walking distance from this house. I really love St. John’s Wood.

F    How interesting! I wonder if I know your mother by sight. I have friends in Carlton Hill. Never mind, we can talk about that another time. The reason I suggested meeting here was to do with you anyway. I expect you’ve told the others about our talk here and how it went, have you?

L    Only up to a point Fiona. We talked quite a bit about me and my psychic episodes, but not about the special thing that happened here. I rather wanted to wait so that you could be here too. I felt it was important to be clear about what did happen, for my own sake As well as everybody else’s.

J    I seem to be the only one who doesn’t know what’s going on.

R    Yes, I’m sorry Joe. There doesn’t seem to have been an opportunity to tell you in spite of our meeting every day. Things move so fast.

J    That’s why I always lay such stress on mobility. But it needs a lot more presence of mind to keep all the balls in the air than it does when life is more compartmentalised. This I.T. life has a certain style which takes time to get used to.

R    It’s skill as well as presence of mind Joe. The analogy of juggling is quite apt. I see I.T. as a way of living out consciously things which usually go on automatically in a kind of dream.

F    What one discovers I think is that ninety percent of what happens in our lives we simply don’t notice at all. They don’t really move any faster, Richard. It’s simply that we block out everything which in our half-dreaming state we couldn’t take on board without going crazy.

M    In one sense, Fiona, things clearly do move faster. Technology for example compounds a problem which is there anyway. In fact, the more material stuff we take on board the dreamier we have to become to cope with it. Look how many people move in a sort of zombie mist from work to television and back, salted with a bit of sleep, sex and sport, and then back to work again.

R    Till cancer, ulcers, heart attacks or Aids rescues them from the nightmare and gives them a chance to reincarnate. (Shocked laughter, rather rueful).

L    Oh lord, is that really the sort of awareness that opens up in the I.T. School? I think I’ll go back to the peaceful existence of a streetwise sophisticate. It’s less of a strain.

F    Yes, but quite seriously, that’s why the Beings have nudged our awareness to the point of trying to get things organised. But not in the old style of sorting our lives into insulated compartments. It’s not a filing system we need, it’s an organisation that really is organic and alive, and as Joe says, mobile.

L    I remember you saying the other day, Mel that it’s also a rather dangerous procedure. You even said people sometimes end up in mental homes doing it.

M    The psychological profession, with few exceptions, is engaged in pushing things in a diametrically opposite direction. They condemn what we are doing in raising people’s awareness as over-stimulation, pushing people nearer to the precipice. They want to damp things down, tranquillise people, get them into more healthy physical activity, less introspection.

F    We, on the other hand, believe fundamentally that human beings are fully capable of facing up to the fact of their own mental, psychic and spiritual evolution. At the same time we know perfectly well that the path of awakening is fraught with danger. Particularly is this so for people who, for mysterious reasons, have a natural orientation towards psychic experiences.

L    Like me.

F    Yes, and like more and more people every day, especially in your generation and younger. Which brings me to why I suggested your coming here today. More preparation has gone on in this room than has probably happened in the other rooms where you work. I mean the sort of preparation we need for dealing with this new event in the life of the I.T. enterprise. That sounds a bit pompous, but it is also a reality. It is an aspect of what we call temple-building, the recognition of sacred space, and the actual creation of places conducive to the raising of awareness. Over the years, long before we called it I.T., this room was a place where Joe and I and others had worked in that sense. It used to be a lot more complicated and fussy than it is now, didn’t it Joe, bristling with altars, icons, pictures of prophets and saints and gurus, crystals and incense everywhere. At a certain point we cleared the lot out. Now there is nothing but this single artefact, which Joe made, and the candle.

J    You might call it a point of reference, Lucia. It’s the opposite pole to mobility, a voluntary, almost arbitrary, still point by which to measure what we are doing in I.T.

L    "The still point of the turning world".

J    Exactly. And you can stand it anywhere you happen to be.

L    Like Aaron’s rod in the wilderness.

F    And his breastplate with the pillars Urim and Thummim on it.

L    It’s beautiful, Joe. I’m trying to think what it reminds me of. Oh I know. It’s like a menhir, a bit like the one on Callanish which I’ve never seen except in photographs, or the one on St Agnes in the Scillies, which I have seen.

J    Oh have you, Lucia? How splendid! I’m glad you’ve seen that, it’s one of my favourite places.

L    Called Gugh!

J    That’s right! It’s on a little peninsula off the main island, which you can’t go onto except at certain states of the tide. You can’t see it from the main island, you have to walk round to the seaward side.

L    And then you suddenly come on it a little below you in its own protected valley with the sea behind it. You walk down a couple of hundred yards to it.

J    You feel it’s been waiting for you. (They look at each other, sharing this.)

R    I think all those stone-age monuments only come into existence when people look at them. What happens when too many people do it is, they cease to be able to do their job.

J    Like Stonehenge, which is beginning to look positively exhausted, worn out by being stared at by millions of people.

L    What is their job then, Richard?

F    Well, that is precisely what we are referring to when we talk about temples. Sorry to butt in, Richard.

R    No, I was trying to think what it is they do. I think menhirs are like concentrated, condensed temple-forms with a special relationship to people who worship there on their own.

L    What do you mean by worship? That’s another word that makes my hackles rise!

F    Yes, it’s sad how many people like you have been alienated from crucial experiences by the way religions have downgraded them. I feel you’re always experiencing worship, but you’d call it being awestruck, deeply impressed, coming to awareness of your own presence in relation to something. It’s when that gets tacked onto someone else’s dogmatic, proselytising, often downgraded notions of the sacred that people like you get so indignant about it. You probably have more capacity for true spontaneous worship than people like that do. They’ve been told by priests to worship. You do it anyway. But don’t fall into the opposite trap and think you’re better than they are. I’m not suggesting you do that, you’re too spontaneous. But plenty of rebels do. They become just as dogmatic in their prejudice against formal religion as the churchy people they reject. Also they are plenty of isolated struggling individuals inside the system who live what somebody called "lives of quiet desperation" surrounded on all sides by religious philistines. I think those are the ones I.T. is really geared to finding and rescuing, the ones who stay inside the system out of loyalty.

J    It was feelings like that which made me sculpt this figure when Fiona suggested we needed a kind of focal point in this Temple-room of hers, something to help us quieten ourselves down when we came in out of the trafficky hurly-burly outside. As you saw, Lucia, it is actually a miniature of a menhir. The one I modelled it on is called the Goh menhir which stands at the corner of a field in Brittany, north of Vannes. It’s very isolated, quite difficult to find, in fact you need a detailed map. You ought to go there one day, Lucia, it’s special.

L    I’d love to. It sounds my sort of place.

J    Perhaps I should take you there.

(Joe moves the pillar between them)

*****

L    I’m standing in the dark in the wind by the pillar on St. Agnes. It’s raining and the darkness is complete. There’s a tremendous storm at sea all round me. The whole island feels as if it’s trembling with the violence of the elements. I feel as if I’m out on the exposed headland of the whole of human life, and that you are all behind me, holding me steady. I’m not a medium, I’m fully conscious. I’m a sense organ for what the I.T. school is doing in the world. All the stone pillars, in a sense, are one, but each one is an antenna pointing out into the cosmos, and trembling, sensing on behalf of the Earth what is going on out there.

*****

F    Psychism is a precious and perilous gift, Lucia. People have been in the habit for centuries of treating psychics as only half- human. One minute they are guarding, even imprisoning them in oracles, pampering them and listening piously to their every word, and then the next minute they’re torturing them and burning them at the stake as witches. What we have to do is to humanise and demythologise psychic ability. There is so much of it now, ‘Gifts of the Spirit’, as the old spiritualist movement used to call them, are bursting out everywhere. We have the opportunity to purge the unhealthy aspects of them, and allow them to function as one means among many by which the two levels of reality, sensible and super-sensible, can gradually merge and become one again as they were long ago.

J    But this time consciously.

R    Yes, that’s the difference. You know, we can almost be grateful to the hyperactive, obsessive paranoid life in a technological age

for driving us down further and further into the dream of matter. It adds sharply to the sense of urgency in some of us to wake up and help to wake others to a New World of reality…

L    Christopher Fry... "It took so many thousand years to wake, but will you wake, for pity’s sake?"

M    That’s one of the precious lines George Trevelyan always quoted.

L    Fiona, you said just now that you were nudged into starting the I.T. school by Beings. Are you talking about specific Beings you are in contact with, or are you just saying in a general way that the impulse was prompted by the spiritual world?

F    At some level you know as much or more about that than I do. Perhaps it’s time we told them what we think happened in this room the other day.

L    You see, Melanie and I have been talking a lot about this and I don’t think either of us is clear yet, (do you, Mel?), about where the line is between projected images of our own deeper nature and the actual presence near us, or even inside us, of other conscious entities, other than our own.

M    Also much of this has to do with names and naming.

F    The Wizard of Earthsea again, wonderful Ursula le Guin.

M    The power of the Name to invoke the ‘presence’, to alter time, to reach reality, or equally to open up monstrous phantoms and demons of possession. We have to get the names right, and this means finally we have to acquire the power to bestow new names on things, and even on people.

L    As you did with me, Melanie, Lucia is not the name on my birth-certificate.

R    So you’re in disguise, are you?

L    No, it’s the birth-certificate which is the disguise!

J    Tell us what happened here for you, then.

L    Well, briefly, I’ve got a lot of misgivings and even hang-ups about religion, religious people, churches and all that side of life. But when Fiona and I started to open up the space here the other day, what seemed to happen was that a very high Being spoke in me. Fiona, it seems to me, started to ask me things and I felt this Being speak its own essence in me. That’s the nearest way in which I can describe it. Temporarily I felt that I and it were one. It spoke in me and I spoke as it.

F    Who is this Being, Lucia?

L    This Being is the CHRIST. Saying that now is different from saying it then. The CHRIST has taken a further step, now, today, in this moment, than happened then. After the episodes in Melanie’s room I felt only the pain of "coming down to earth" afterwards. This time I feel that the joy and pain are united. The CHRIST seems to me now to be something concretely present in our actual conversation. This is what "Gathered together in my Name" signifies. The actual naming of the CHRIST has this effect. We become one another in naming the CHRIST in this way.

M    I feel this has a special character because of Fiona, and what could go on between the two of you. Fiona has this special relation to the CHRIST, just as I have to the Name, and Lucia to the Light.

F    That’s why I asked you to come here. The CHRIST is the central secret in the problem of healing and protecting the vulnerability of the psychic, who otherwise falls into the sickness of mediumism. The CHRIST is the reference point, the pillar, the menhir. But the CHRIST is incomplete without the horizontal dimension as well, the Earth’s surface on which the pillar stands. Steiner called it "the CHRIST-will in the encircling round", and he described it as prevailing especially in the rhythmic nature of the Earth, where he said it was the element which conferred blessing on the human soul.

J    So the CHRIST has these two dimensions, you see, a vertical and a horizontal dimension, and these form a cross. It becomes an open question which came first, the intuitive perception of the cruciform nature of the CHRIST in the Earth, or the Cross on which Jesus, bearing the CHRIST, was crucified by the Romans.

L    Another case of synchronicity, apparently.

M    Redfield in "The Celestine Prophecy" would say that it makes no difference. All events and phenomena in the world are ultimately synchronous. Hen and Egg. Cart and Horse.

F    The Rosicrucians added a further dimension to the picture by figuring a rose-stem with its thorns, growing out of the vertical pillar of a black cross, winding round the crossing point, and then flowering as seven red roses in a circle round the centre of the figure. This was the blessing of the soul, healing and redeeming the inherent clash between spirit and matter indicated by the cross itself. Steiner also described how the rose was a demonstration of the healing conferred by the etheric, with its pure green sap, upon the astral, embodied in human blood. The blood, as well as being the physical bearer of the soul, is also the element in humanity capable of sickness, the bearer of the Fall, and potentially vulnerable to evil. The red fragrant sap of the flowering rose arises directly, like healed blood, out of the green sap of the stem and leaves in the etheric. The etheric world itself cannot be sick. Leaf diseases and stem or trunk diseases in the plant world are always invasions by an astral element, through insects or fungi, for example. All this represents how the living CHRIST force in the etheric Earth heals the vertical astral-ego element in the human. It both redeems and validates the Fall of humanity into matter.

M    Now I see why they were called Rosicrucians. The Name embodied their whole perception of reality, Rose and Cross.

F    The CHRIST is both humanity and Earth. Humanity and Earth are one.

*****

L    I didn’t understand everything you were saying about the Rosicrucians. The language is a bit too involved for me. Is that ‘anthroposophical’ language?

F    Yes, those were Rudolf Steiner’s images.

L    I resonate very strongly to the images without understanding all the relationships.

F    That grows with familiarity.

R    Lucia, when you had that vision earlier on out in the Scilly Isles, I didn’t feel you were out of your body, did you?

L    No, not at all. Very much not! I was very much aware of the elemental powers out there, but I was also very much here in the room. I felt you holding me here by your attention.

R    I was quite riveted by it. I don’t usually see much in the way of inner pictures, but as you spoke I could almost hear the wind and smell the sea.

J    I think we all could.

M    I couldn’t. I was too absorbed in what was happening to Lucia herself. I felt you were quite different, Lu!

L    I felt different myself. Being with you lot is having the effect of tightening me up, as if there were inner threads somewhere, contracting in me and sharpening the images I see.

J    I don’t think the process is confined to your just being with us, Lucia; do you, Fiona? There’s something else happening as well. I think you are also responding to the kind of thoughts which have been arising in the conversations you’ve been having with us all. There’s an element in these thoughts which goes beyond the personal, and it comes about because we’ve all to some extent been touched by what we call anthroposophy. In the first place it was Rudolf Steiner who touched off and developed thoughts which have this particular quality, but people who take them up are able to resonate with them and take them further.

F    What happens then is that they get embodied into a kind of thought-entity which goes beyond the personal thinking derived from our largely materialistic culture, and is to a great extent in opposition to it. Steiner identified it as a real Being in the spiritual Earth which he called Anthroposophia-anthropos, human, sophia, wisdom. It’s a synthesis, an ongoing process of growing together of purely human insights with the insights inherent in the living planet itself and the cosmos in which the planet is embedded.

R    You can see, can’t you, how utterly at odds that notion is with everything our present media-dominated culture presents to us from childhood up, something none of us can avoid from our mother’s milk onwards. It’s not only the folk thinking within our family situation which is embedded in a sense-material experience of reality, but that is hammered into our consciousness by virtually everything in our education, up to and including the pervasive influence of the philosophical assumptions of the universities.

M    And then all that is continually battered into us daily and hourly by the media, who promulgate a condensed, down-graded version of it into the very pores of our skin every minute of a twenty-four hour day!

L    Lord! You make it sound like the depths of Hell. Isn’t there any let-up? Aren’t there any chinks in the armour of the Devil?

F    Yes, there is still some innocence in the world. Most babies are still born relatively untouched. There is a great deal of active inner searching and hope among people creating enclaves of reality within the sleaze. Some of them coalesce and mutually strengthen each other as is happening in our group. And there are many such groups. But it is a shrinking asset. Spontaneous innocence doesn’t usually survive unaided. The presence of what we call the CHRIST is there as a natural endowment in every human heart, and there is a great deal to be said about that. But in most people it remains at the level of a seed, an unquenchable fire, but incapable of growing and taking over reality on its own. Humanity has reached the stage when the CHRIST on its own in each human heart cannot of itself overcome the darkness of the world unaided. The CHRIST has called upon the help of other Beings to tip the scale.

L    I.T.s

J    This is what we think.

F    We do more than think it. We know from the inner evidence of anthroposophy that the planet is peopled with hosts of other entities than the human. They have always been there, but as far as humanity is concerned they have been in a sleeping condition. But they are awakening. We become aware of them as intraterrestrial conscious agants because of this tide of awakening going on around us, behind the visible material front the world presents to us.

L    But what has tipped the scale? Why is this happening now? If I understand you rightly the darkness has almost succeeded in killing off the spontaneous innocence as seeds of mankind. Didn’t William Blake forecast a time when babies would be born trembling? It seems we have reached that time now. Are you saying that the tide has turned? Is there a hidden factor you haven’t mentioned apart from our own efforts and that of similar groups?

F    Yes. The tide has turned. The initiatives of groups like ours are spontaneous, but they are like germinating seeds. In order for seeds to germinate in the plant world the season has to be right. We have to recognise what season the evolution of humanity has reached. Impulses like this one of ours don’t create the seeds. They have been hidden in human ground for millennia. But we have only been nudged to start watering them because the time is ripe. The season has arrived.

L    This has an apocalyptic ring to it.

J    This is what I was describing as the evangelical atmosphere I experienced as a boy at school. They always talked about the Second Coming. But for them it was always just a jump ahead of us in time. After two thousand years the reappearance of the CHRIST was still receding in front of us, like the pillar of fire which the ancient Israelites followed across the wilderness towards the Promised Land.

R    Then when the Messiah did at last appear they didn’t recognise him.

F    There is a parallel between what happened 2000 years ago and what is happening now.

M    There’s a mood abroad among new-age people everywhere of a heightened expectancy, which you could interpret as meaning that the second coming of the CHRIST could happen any minute – NOW! What did Rudolf Steiner have to say about that?

F    Rudolf Steiner died in 1925, seventy years ago. He spoke then of the imminence of this CHRIST-event in his own time. He even gave actual dates. He saw it as the first glimmering of a spiritual dawn rather than as a single apocalyptic crashing event from one moment to the next. He said it would grow in people’s consciousness in this way too, as a process rather than as an instantaneous revelation.

J    At the same time the indication was that there was a discontinuous as well as a smooth growth, both in awareness and in outer events. There would be thresholds in the dawning, rather like the time before sunrise when the light sometimes seems to grow and then recede again several times before the sun actually appears. I see it as rather like the tide coming in. There is the steady advance of the waves, and then every now and again a much bigger wave appears and there is a more definite advance. A further threshold seems to be crossed, and then everything settles down to smooth growth for a while.

L    The seventh wave phenomenon. But what about the actual dates Steiner gave? When were they? In our time now? End of the century?

F    He gave the dates 1933, 1935, 1937 as the first glimmerings of the dawn.

L    Good heavens! That’s over sixty years ago! Are you serious? No wonder you draw the analogy with 2000 years ago. We seem to have missed the boat again, good and proper! Can this really be true? What about all this new-age millennialism then? What’s supposed to be happening now?

M    (Laughs) Good old Lu! You’re a very rewarding recruit to the I.T. school, Lucia, love. You ask all the right questions one on top of the other.

L    Oh do shut up, Mel. I’m totally confused. Sixty bloody years ago! Then we’re right bang in the middle of it.

F    In one sense, yes, deeply into it. What’s been happening to you in recent days sharply illustrates that. But we tend to take our own subjective experiences for granted to some extent, without seeing them in historical perspective. Sixty years ago people certainly weren’t having experiences like you’ve been having this week. Others, equally psychic perhaps, but with quite a different flavour. And then again in another sense, ‘bang in the middle of it’ is hardly an accurate picture. In another sense the apocalypse has barely begun. You know, I think it’s about time we had another break. The I.T. process is strictly analogous to the more macrocosmic developments we have been describing. It goes in waves. Lucia, what about going on tomorrow in your room, which I’m very much looking forward to seeing?

L    I can’t really manage tomorrow, Fiona. I’ve got special art-school things all day. Can we manage Wednesday? What about you others?

R    OK with me and Joe, isn’t it Joe?

J    Fine. Morning best I think.

R Melanie?

M    Yes, that’s fine. What about ten o’clock?

R    I’ll pick you up, Fiona. Joe and I will probably work in the office early, won’t we? So see you all at Lucia’s. Shall we take you home?

M    Lu, there’s something I want to talk to you about, OK? If you don’t mind, Richard, we’ll make our own way.

L    I’d rather like a walk, Mel. I’ll show you some of my old haunts. Joe, I’m really interested in your Brittany menhir. Let’s get together over that sometime, can we?

J    I’d really love that.

*****

Dialogue 5

L    What’s it about then Mel?

M    Look, if we cross the road here we can take a left turn down the hill and we’ll find ourselves in Maida Vale.

L    I don’t want to go as far as that. Look, this is Carlton Hill. I’ll show you where I used to live as a child. That’s the house across there. Mum’s moved now to a smaller house further down.

M    Do you want to call on her?

L    Not today. I think this is her club day. Oh look. The garden’s all different, they’ve paved it over.

M    I don’t wonder. I don’t know how plants survive at all in London nowadays.

L    My sister and I used to play down there in the area. I had a treasure-trove place under a big stone. It’s all gone; what a shame.

M    Being a child survives somewhere inside us though.

L    Yes, I think that’s important, keeping faith with it somewhere. I wonder what it’s like being old.

M    I think there’s some of it that isn’t all that different. That’s why I think it’s important not to forget. You need a space to expand from, to refer back to in the end, when you reach vast spaces that are utterly different.

L    Come on. I’ve seen enough. We can get a bus, back on Abbey Road.

M    And then another one practically home for me.

L    Oh, yes. Let’s go back to your place. What did you want to talk about, then?

M    You remember I told you there were one or two people working on I.T. in the Haverstock Hill area?

L    Oh, yes.

M    Well, I hadn’t heard of them for months. There was one chap in particular who seemed very interested.

L    How long ago was this?

M    It must be well over a year. I never learned their address or anything and I’d heard nothing since. Well yesterday a woman turned up at the house whom I didn’t like at all. She referred to these people and said there was quite a large group of them working, not in our immediate area at all, somewhere over Muswell Hill way she said. And then she started asking questions about me and my contacts, but not in the sort of sympathetic way we know about which gives you the feeling of being in the same line of country. It was... .

L    What sort of things did she ask?

M    Well to start of with she said she was secretary of their association and more or less implied that they’d sent her over to find out if I’d started a group and how we were working, and shouldn’t we get together and affiliate in some way. To cap it all she took out some stuff and started rolling a joint and offered it to me.

L    Didn’t she ask you first?

M    No. She made herself thoroughly at home. There was a sort of "all in this together" mood, slightly patronising and nosy at the same time, fingering the ornaments and so on...

L    What did you do?

M    Well, I stalled a bit. I didn’t actually lie to her, but I implied I worked on a one-to-one basis, leaving people very free. I said I’d had some very interesting talks with a few people and made a few friends, but that these were all very individual. Did any of them know each other, she wanted to know. I said I thought some of them had met, but that as far as I knew none of them had formed any regular groups. It was more a matter of spontaneous visits when there was something interesting to talk about.

L    So in a sort of a way you clammed up on her. (giggles)

M    Well, she still went on probing and poking, so I turned the tables a bit. When she asked what we talked about when we met I said it was all different depending on who it was. Some people were always going on about flying-saucers and all that, which didn’t interest me much, and so on. I gave the impression I wasn’t all that interested in what happened unless I made a good personal contact with the person concerned. She more or less gave up after that. But I did manage to get the name and address of the original chap in Belsize Park out of her. Finally she said in a rather indifferent way that I was welcome to come to any of their meetings in Muswell Hill and handed me a leaflet. Soon afterwards she left.

L    How did you feel afterwards?

M    Jaded and despondent. I felt I’d handled the thing badly and was a thoroughly unworthy representative of what we were supposed to be doing.

L    I think that’s complete nonsense, Mel. I think you did all that could possibly be done. I felt all the time you were talking that you were quite brilliantly defending the delicate and vulnerable aspects of what’s happening from that sort of invasion. There are times, it seems to me, when what Joe calls mobility demands a very skilful capacity for cut and thrust, sometimes attacking, sometimes taking evasive action.

M    Well, that was the trouble. I felt I’d really evaded the whole issue.

L    But was there a single moment, quite honestly, in which you felt you could have opened up and shared with her something which was important to you?

M    Not really, no.

L    Well, I think that’s the answer, then. It was she who was defensive, not you. The best form of defence is attack. Consciously or not, her style of aggressiveness constituted a cast-iron defence against anything positive you might have introduced into the conversation.

M    What shall I do about it?

L    I should go and see the bloke on Haverstock Hill, or better still write to him, and ask how he’s getting on. Tell him about the woman’s visit, and say you would like to know whether he’s interested in what’s going on there. See if he responds. After all, you were his first contact. There might well be something real in it.

M    That makes me feel better about it. Thanks, darling. You’re a wise girl. How would you have handled it?

L    Probably scratched her eyes out! But that’s the whole point, isn’t it? The fact was that it was you she came to see. Things don’t happen by chance. This was an occasion which called for defence, and you defended. I would probably have attacked, and might well have opened us to a damaging counter-attack. If I were you I should forget the whole thing for now. Se what this other chap and his wife are like. If Paul were here I would use this to show him the difference between keeping tabs on people and remaining awake to the possibility of further contacts opening up by themselves, and then responding to them.

M    Talking of Paul, I wonder what’s happened to him. Do you think he’ll turn up again?

L    I still don’t know whether to hope he will or hope he won’t. This is crop-circle season. I expect he’s grubbing about on his hands and knees in some Dorset cornfield. I think I’ve cooked off him a bit. All this other stuff is much more interesting.

*****

M    We’re nearly there. What have you been dreaming about?

L    Yes, I think I dozed off. I hardly noticed us changing buses. Did we change buses?

M    Of course we did you idiot. You paid the second fare.

L    So I did. We’re coming into Golders Green. Look at that woman’s hat. She looks like a barnyard fowl.

M    Come one, we get off here you crazy girl. Let’s shop a few things for supper. You eat with me this evening, eh?

L    That’s nice. Shall I cook you some of my special pancakes?

M    I haven’t let you loose on my stove yet, Have I? Are you a good cook?

L    Positively cordon-bleu. I have an international reputation.

M    Well, if Waitrose is up to your exacting standards we’d better shop there. Here we go.

*****

(brr brr)

M    Melanie here.

(Deep sepulchral voice!) Is that the Intraterrestrial Reception Unit?

M    Richard, you idiot! (Yorkshire accent.) What’s to do?

R    Fiona asked me to call. She’s got some news. She wondered if we could meet this evening. Joe and I could bring her to you.

M    Sounds fine. Richard wants to come down with the others, Lu. All right with you?

L    Fine.

M    Lucia’s with me. She says ‘fine’. Will you have eaten?

R    We’re having supper now. Joe would like a word with Lucia.

L    Hello, Lucia here.

J    Hello, Lucia. You all right?

L    I’m fine, love. How are you? As if we hadn’t been together half the morning.

J    Yes, I know we’re spending a lot of time together. It’ll probably settle down soon. Look, what I wanted to tell you was, after the conversation about menhirs I went through my photographs from last year when I was in Brittany. I wondered if you’d like to see them.

L    Now that really would be interesting. Were you thinking of bringing them down this evening?

J    No, I don’t fancy we’d have much time to look at them tonight. Fiona seems to be bubbling over with something or other. In any case there’s rather a lot of them and I’ve been sticking them up on my living-room wall where you can see them properly, with a map I drew at the time. I wondered if you’d like to come over here sometime and see them.

L    Inviting me to come and see your etchings, as it were.

J    Precisely. You couldn’t have put it better.

L    Joe dear, I’d be delighted. When do you suggest we do that?

J    Up to you.

L    Well, I’m at the studio all morning tomorrow. I’m free in the afternoon. But aren’t you working?

J    Richard and I more or less suit ourselves. These days we seem to do most of it in the early hours of the morning. Working for ourselves from home we can do that.

L    I don’t know anything about what you do, you must tell me about it.

R    (Back on the phone.) Get Mel to tell you. She’ll also be able to tell you how to get here. Joe and I have apartments and office space in the same building.

L    Good. I shall look forward to that. See you tonight then. Eight o’clock, Mel is suggesting.

R    We’ll be there. Bye now.

*****

Dialogue 6

M    Come in, everyone. Wipe your feet. Filthy day again.

R    It’s not actually raining. Hi, sweetheart.

M    What a damp hug. I’ll put everything round the Rayburn. Sit yourselves down. Five’s about the limit in this room.

L    I’ve been thinking about the different rooms we’ve met in. It’s not just a question of physical space. All three have quite a different atmosphere. Of course I haven’t seen yours and Joe’s yet.

R    I don’t see us meeting in our house. Too much of a working batchelor establishment. And anyway my room’s impossibly untidy and only two chairs. You’d all have to sit on the bed.

M    What’s Joe’s room like?

J    A bit bigger.

R    And a lot tidier.

J    In fact father bare. I just sleep there really. And the office is just an office.

L    I thought you said you had a living room.

J    Well, I call my room a living-room. The bed converts into a settee in the daytime. And I’ve got a table and a gas-ring.

L    Sounds bleak.

J    Well it is rather bleak I suppose. I hadn’t thought about this before, but all the places we feel at home in for these get-togethers are women’s rooms. Even when you live alone, most of you, simply as women, seem to create spaces it feels good for other people to come into.

F    It’s very interesting that you’ve got onto this subject because what I want to tell you about is very relevant to it. At least I rather hope it will be. I don’t know if Joe’s mentioned it, but I’ve got an old house in the country. It’s an old family home, although I’ve never lived in it except for brief periods between tenants, getting repairs done and so on. Years ago Joe and I lived together there for a few months, didn’t we Joe?

J    Yes, Love! That was our faded romance time wasn’t it? We were very happy while it lasted.

F    Life moved on, but I think we both retain an affection for the old place... it’s not exactly a mansion, but it’s quite large, four bedrooms and masses of space downstairs, and a really quite enormous garden, almost two acres. Anyway, why I’ve been thinking about it, and wanted to tell you about it, is that the old man who’s had it for the last five years has just died. His wife, who is a few years older still, feels she can’t possibly manage there alone: it was already getting a bit beyond them, and their extended family haven’t visited so often as their own families have grown. I’ve been talking to the eldest daughter who lives in London. The old lady’s agreed to go into a home nearer here so that they can visit. I’ve cancelled the lease, so in a few weeks time the place will be empty.

L    Where is it, Fiona?

F    It’s in Herefordshire, not actually in a village, but only about half a mile outside, a place called Garway.

M    Oh, I’ve heard of that. Doesn’t it have a Templar church?

R    You’re absolutely right. I remember visiting it once with a part of people from one of the Wrekin Trust conferences. Sir George Trevelyan took us. He had a genius for bringing places like that alive.

F    I remember it as a child. A couple of old aunts lived there, and I used to be sent to stay with them in the school holidays when my parents went gadding off to the continent. I had a wonderful time exploring the countryside on my own. One aunt was a naturalist and she taught me all about birds and flowers and butterflies. So, as you see, there is something nostalgic about the place for me. I don’t want to live there on my own, can’t afford to anyway, so it’s been let for years. But each time there has been a change of tenant the question comes up again what to do with it in the longer term. I’ve no-one to leave it to, and I don’t want to sell it, for sentimental reasons. The house has been waiting for something.

L    I remember, Mel, you saying that you’d been wondering whether London was the right place for this I.T. work. Had you been wondering about going to live in the country?

M    I had, yes. Not perhaps actually living there. Going to breathe in the country would be a better way of putting it.

F    It’s not really only a question of whether London feels right for us ourselves. London feels pretty awful and it’s getting worse. But the cities are places of tremendous need. I’m sure there are more and more people searching half-consciously for the opening up of an inner space, which is at the same time a longing for communication with others on another level. If there really is something we have got onto which can begin to address that need, then it’s important that we are somewhere where people can get at us physically. It doesn’t have to be London, but it does have to be near centres of population.

J    Of course there is another aspect of that picture and that is places like Glastonbury, Totnes, Stroud, Forest Row, Malvern, Mickleton, Findhorn, places where people in search of deeper realities have tended to congregate over recent decades, places where people are drawn together in loose communities engaged in a more active life of study and service.

R    I don’t think that this is at all an arbitrary thing. Those places tend to have a special quality in the first place which draws people to them. And this is where your mobility thing comes in, Joe. Places like that tend to get very in-turned after a time. They get stuck in particular attitudes. Even when they evolve it is only within certain limits. They still remain a bit precious and stifling.

F    I think though it would be fair to say that particular people outgrow places like that and are replaced all the time by others who can still find them helpful and nourishing. The trouble starts when a core of people get stuck in a dependency relationship to such places. Then gradually they become less healthy, no longer places where people can go through the life changes they need.

J    I know. I’ve got a bit of a ‘thing’ about Glastonbury, which I particularly experience as a place of stiflingly in-turned energy.

M    I, on the other hand, love the place. I come away revitalised whenever I visit it. There are different levels to such a place. People discover them, or don’t according to where they’ve got to in their lives. Places like that tend to sort you out. That can be wonderful at some moments and terrible at others.

F    Coming back to Garway, do you think, perhaps, that I’m on to something? I mean something that might be relevant to us as a group?

R    What are you suggesting, Fiona? Are you wondering whether the five of us might be interested in taking the house on as a joint venture?

F    Something of the sort, yes.

L    It’s a very exciting idea. It makes me feel very alive inside. I can feel it as a situation from which we might get a broader perspective on the work.

M    More than that as well. It could feel like a place where we go for revitalising our own energies, so that we have more to offer when people come to us.

F    Something’s happening which has occasionally happened to me before. I’m feeling a sort of extension of my own consciousness where I’m aware there’s something else wanting to express itself. It would help if someone wrote down what I feel needs to be said.

M    Here’s a telephone pad and biro. Who’ll write?

J    I will, Melanie. This has happened before.

F    It seems to be the same being who spoke last time, Joe. I think it’s a name something like... Me... Meruel. Anyway it wants to speak. It says:-

*****

M    "Dear friends, don’t be alarmed. Steady your hearts down. You’ll find breathing helps. It’s important you don’t allow glamorous feelings of excitement to take you over when things like this happen when you meet, as they will, more and more frequently in this time. Remember, Fiona, that it is you yourself who are speaking. It is you who are forming the thoughts, and you who are saying the words. You are not, as people say, "channelling" me, any more than you are channelling Melanie or Richard. I am simply beside you in the room as a thinking entity, just as they are. I have thoughts and feelings and intentions just as you do. But I don’t think verbally. I do not need a body or a brain, or even words or a language to express the thoughts. Nor am I using yours to do so. The initiative to express your awareness of these things in me is entirely your own. On the other hand I sense what is happening in your lives, and I want to support it. I’d like it very much if you felt happy about this and would allow me to take part in your deliberations".

M    Is Fiona right? Is your name Meruel?

*****

M    "You haven’t quite understood the situation, Melanie. Everything that is being said is being said by Fiona. You know about Names. If you and Fiona both call me Meruel it establishes what could be a useful link so that you can take part in this conversation. And that applies to all of you. You establish a convention, like a file on a computer. Meruel becomes an analogy for what is really going on. Your own names are just the same; it is simply that you are more used to them. The important point is that you do not from this moment on simply treat Fiona as a channel for what I, so to speak, "say". That simply nudges Fiona towards mediumship, which is no longer a valid way of communicating with beings in my situation. And I am not interested in a relationship of that sort with you either. There would be nothing, as you say, "in it for me". I have been drawn towards you because of what you have been doing by way of extending and raising the level of your own thinking and communication with each other. I believe I can play a useful part in that, and I would like to. I’ll withdraw now so that you can discuss what you think has happened, and how I can fit in there. One thing I will say. You are blessed by higher beings in what you are doing."

That seems to be all.

L    Well! Wasn’t that interesting! Interesting and wonderful. It makes me feel much more secure about what’s been happening to me recently. I think there’s been something a bit hysterical in the way I’ve been reacting to experiences along those lines.

J    Insecurity. If we feel insecure our bodies often take over and give us a signal which can attract attention and draw towards us the help we need. It’s better still, of course, if we can calmly ask for that help, but that’s a matter of knowing whom or what to ask. Failing that we provide ourselves with an alarm system, like hysteria or anger, in the hope that someone or something will come to the rescue.

F    Which they often do. Do you not feel, Lucia, that people have been rallying round for the last couple of weeks in response to your expressed needs, whether hysterical or not?

L    I most certainly do.

F    There is also an opposite aspect to what has been happening. For some time I have had the feeling that we other four were reaching a turning point. I didn’t know what it was or how it would manifest. I was waiting for a more specific indicator, something which would demonstrate unmistakably that the moment had come and would alert us to being able to recognise the direction we were supposed to go in.

L    You’re saying I was the alarm clock, are you? That’s what you meant the other day when you said I had unconsciously been approaching the group and it was time I surfaced. Submarine Sue. So my alarm clock was not just to get help, it was an indicator for the group as well.

M    Are you also implying that the appearance of the Garway house maybe the direction indicator we were supposed to look out for?

F    That’s what I’ve been wondering. You see, all this sort of thing is at the same time fraught with the possibility of superstition and illusion. It’s one thing to come to the realisation that events are synchronistic and serendipitious by nature, as "The Celestine Prophecy" points out. It’s quite another to follow their indication like iron filings round a magnet, in a slavish, zombie-like way. Our freedom only operates truly if we make the subsequent judgements by exercising normal intelligence and common sense. If common sense now tells us that taking up this house is a bit of risky nonsense, blindly refusing to look at the proposal from all sides because the idea of it attracts us, then we are simply the superstitious idiots most people think we are anyway. What do you think we should do Richard? You’re the practical one in this sort of field.

R    Well, I think the first thing we should do, as soon as it is practicable, is all to go down and look at the place. Let’s see what our feelings tell us about it. There are hundreds of thousands of attractive saleable properties on the market. It may be this has turned up simply to make us think about the question and ask ourselves whether a country house is the right sort of next step for the group.

J    At least it would give us some practice in making judgements about properties in general. It’ll make us ask the right sort of questions.

R    Exactly. Then the second thing I would like to do, if you agree, is to meet each of you privately and go thoroughly into the question of your resources, what you’ve got and what it would be possible, and also wise, to raise in the way of finance. Would anyone find that unacceptable? No, I thought you’d see that was sensible and necessary. It would at the same time oblige each of us to look seriously at the question of whether it was really what we wanted to do.

J    And equally whether we were looking in a healthy way at what was being indicated to us by our higher selves and the colleagues in the intraterrestrial dimension who we suppose to be guiding us.

M    We need to see it also in the context of our ‘non-I.T.’ lives, if I can express it in that way. It brings us slap up against the question of our degree of commitment to I.T. in relation to other possible responsibilities. I mean things like family and so on.

F    I suggest we leave it at that for now. Let’s go away and mull it over. But I take it we’d all like to go and look at the house as soon as possible.

L    Why don’t we go down with a view to helping you sort the place out physically, Fiona? You’ll need help with that anyway. I think it would be very nice if the help was us, if the others agree.

F    I would love that. It’s a generous suggestion. Much nicer than strangers picking things over. But I need to see the daughter first to see whether her mother’s personal things are still there. I think I’ll be able to let you know that in a few days. Well, thank you very much for your interest. I confess I feel quite excited about the whole thing, and I’m very much looking forward to showing you round the place, also Garway itself.

M    And the church. I’m fascinated by Templar places.

F    Well, that’s about it as far as I’m concerned, unless anyone else has something to say.

M    I have. I think it’s a wonderful, generous and really imaginative idea you’ve put in front of us. Whether it comes off or not the energy of it is sure to move forward the whole project into new areas. Bless you, Fiona, and thank you.

J    I’m sure we all feel the same. And I have an idea it’s going to happen. Meanwhile we’d better go and get some work done, Richard.

L    I still don’t know what you do. I’m beginning to suspect you’re secret counterfeiters or smugglers or contraband or something.

J    You’ll learn all about it tomorrow, Lucia, in between looking at my etchings.

L    Etcetera, etcetera.

M    What are you two up to?

L    We’ve got an assignment, haven’t we, Joe. Very clandestine and romantic. All about menhirs.

J    Anyway, I’ll tell you all about what Richard and I do as well. It’s actually rather dull, but it makes us a certain amount of cash.

L    That sounds useful. I’m off home as well, Melanie. Have you got room for me too, Richard?

R    A ta service, mademoiselle. All aboard, everyone. This’ll be about the last time we’ll be making this particular rendezvous. I’m moving back in here with Mel for a bit.

L    Oh, Mel! You didn’t tell me.

M    I was keeping my fingers crossed.

L    Bless you, darlings.

(General good-byes, thank yous, hugs and kisses)

*****

Dialogue 7

(Doorbell rings. Melanie answers)

M    Oh, Mr Phillips.

S    Yes, I hope you don’t mind us not ringing first. We just came along at the time you put on the leaflet. You remember my wife Anne.

M    Yes, indeed. Hello Anne. Do come in. This is my husband, Richard.

S    How do you do? I hope this isn’t inconvenient. Thank you for your letter.

M    No, not at all. We have someone coming later in the morning, but there’s plenty of time for a chat now. Let me take your coats.

A    I think I’ll keep mine on if you don’t mind Mrs...

M    My name’s Melanie. I hope you don’t mind me calling you Anne.

S    Yes, and I’m Stephen. I think you must be what the media call ‘new-agers’. Christian names and hugs all round. Takes a bit of getting used to, but really I rather like it.

M    Perhaps we’ll convert you! Actually a lot of it is rather on the surface with some people. But it does express a feeling that most conventional life is a bit stuffy and needs loosening up a bit. Maybe we overdo it at times. Now, where are you going to sit? Anne, how about this chair? Richard likes this one,. Can I give you some tea? We were just going to have some.

A    Thanks very much. It’s a pretty room, isn’t it Stephen? I like the sunflowers. Brightens it up, doesn’t it? No sugar, thanks.

R    I hear you’ve been following up our I.T. idea over in Muswell Hill somewhere. A woman cane to see us.

S    Yes, it was funny, that. I mentioned it to some chaps at work, and there was someone who already knew about it. Not through you, though. There’s quite a gang over Muswell Hill way. I went over there and went to some meetings. Got themselves properly organised apparently.

R    What did you think? Did you like what was going on?

S    Well to tell you the truth I don’t think they’d got the idea at all. It felt quite different.

M    Did you go Anne?

A    I went along the second time. I couldn’t really make out what was going on. There was a lot of discussion. Everybody seemed to have different ideas, and there was even some arguments. I didn’t like it much really.

M    But they were calling it ‘I.T. school’ were they?

S    Oh yes. There was one chap holding forth quite a bit on that. But I think he had a bit of a bee in his bonnet about some chap called... Lazarus, was it? He wanted us to start listening to a tape he[d brought along. But nobody wanted to do that, and somebody even switched the telly on, said there was a programme about the Moonies or some such. The meeting broke up after that.

R    All sounds a bit chaotic. I expect the man with the tape was a follower of a channeler who brings through a being called Lazaris.

S    Yes, that’s right. You’ve got it. Lazaris it was. He swore by the teachings of this chap. You know about it, then.

R    Yes, I’ve heard one or two of the tapes and read part of a book by the channeler, Jach somebody.

S    Was it interesting?

R    Yes, as far as it went, very interesting. There are several movements like that on the west coast of the U.S. They attract an enormous following. But I gather you didn’t much like the feel of these meetings at Muswel Hill. What did you think was wrong?

S    I’ve been trying to think about what you said, Melanie (is it?), when I came before. I know what it was really. You seemed much more interested to know what I thought about things than in telling me something. You didn’t start in on me and try to teach me something. All those people over there…well no, there was one woman, we talked to her afterwards, didn’t we Anne, who just sat quiet and listened…but the rest, yak, yak, yak, at the top of their voices most of the time.

P    I don’t think they ought to call it the I.T. school at all.

M    I think you have to let people get on and do what they want to do.

P    But won’t a lot of people get the wrong idea through them?

M    For them it isn’t the wrong idea. The name I.T. school is simply a doorway. If people get stuck in the door, try and fix things and organise according to preconceptions of their own, then we simply open other doors with other people. If necessary we change the name of what we’re doing. But the chances are it will simply peter out, or the Lazaris follower will draw a few of them into forming a Lazaris branch. The rest will drift away.

A    What you’re saying sounds a bit vague to me.

M    I wouldn’t call it vague, Anne, I’d call it mobile. We have to keep things on the move, so that people are able to keep their options open and not get stuck in side-issues. What we’re interested in is people’s own path, not in what they join or get attached to.

A    But don’t they get attached to I.T.? Isn’t that the idea? Haven’t you got a group round you?

R    Following your path doesn’t mean you don’t have friends, colleagues, people who see things the same way as you do. But people’s true paths in life are parallel, not convergent, if you see what I mean. True paths don‘t get stuck to each other.

S    Risky, isn’t it?

R    Very risky. But you get the point of what Melanie’s saying, don’t you, Stephen? I think what you missed over in Muswell Hill was freedom, space to breathe. Am I right?

S    What does I.T. stand for?

R    It stands for intra-terrestrial. We came to realise that wild ideas about E.Ts, people in space-ships rescuing mankind from its troubles, was missing the point.

S    Are there really people who think that? Sounds barmy.

R    There are more people panicking about the future of the Earth every day. Plenty of people, both in new-age circles and elsewhere, have lost hope in any of the so-called practical solutions which politicians and others offer. There is a real danger that more and more people will look for answers in a sort of science-fiction fantasy world.

S    What’s intra-terres... then? What you said?

R    We began to realise that the real help we need lies inside the Earth situation, not outside it. If there are indeed beings behind the scenes aware of humanity’s difficulties... in fact more than just difficulties, aware that mankind is in a desperate situation... they are here with us, inside our own situation, possibly even inside our own consciousness.

S    Religion, you mean?

R    Some of us think that religion has become yet another red-herring.. These are things that need a lot of study and discussion. Look, our friends will be coming soon, we shall have to break this up. I’d very much like to talk again if you’d like to.

S    Well I’d like to very much. What about you love?

A    Yes, I’m quite interested.

R    Let’s meet again. Give us a ring, Stephen. Here’s another leaflet with this number, and I’ll put my office number on as well in case you’d like to talk to me there. There’s usually someone at one or other of these numbers.

S    O.K. then. Nice to meet you both. I’ll be in touch. Thanks very much both. Very interesting indeed. Cheerioh then.

M    Good-bye then, Anne.

P    Cheerio. Thanks very much for the tea.

M    Pleasure. I’ll see you out.

R    Bye, both.

*****

Dialogue 8

L    Phew! You didn’t tell me you lived in a skyscraper.

R    Hello, Lucia. Come up. Found your way then?

L    Up is right. My god, have you counted these damn stairs.

R    Thirty-six exactly. Three floors. Twelve each.

L    I need to sit down. I’m worn out. No wonder you both look so fit.

R    Joe won’t be long. Come in the kitchen. He’s slipped out for some milk.

L    I need the loo first.

R    End of the corridor. There look.

L    Gosh, it’s quite roomy, isn’t it. Is that the office?

R    Yes. I’ll show you round in a bit. Oh Hello Joe. Lucia’s here.

J    Usual place was shut. I had to go down to the market, so I brought some biscuits.

R    Kettle’s boiled. Coffee for you?

J    Please. Oh, hello Lucia. Nice to see you.

L    Hi, Joe. Is that real coffee? Oh, no, I’ll have tea please. I don’t go for the powdered stuff. Sorry to make a fuss.

J    No problem. Your satisfaction is our pleasure.

L    Relax Joe. You look all nervous. (kisses his cheek).

R    He’s been fussing about like a hen with chicks with all his photographs and maps. You’d think he was going to give a weekend workshop instead of just showing a girl his holiday snaps.

J    You don’t know anything about it Richard. Lucia and I are engaged in a piece of serious archaeological research. Clumsy clots like you can’t be expected to appreciate the finer points.

R    I like that! Who did all the drawings for the grocery storeroom?

J    Oh that! Routine commercial stuff. I’m talking about artistic finesse.

L    Stop bickering you two and give me a cup of tea. You’re like a couple of kids. I’m totally exhausted. I’m supposed to be coming to an archaeology lesson. In this state I couldn’t tell a menhir from a mud-hut. What was that about a grocery store-room? Are you two in retail trade or what?

R    No, that was for a client. That’s what we do. When we met we found we both had qualifications in architectural and commercial drawing., so we decided to go into business together. There’s a lot of small firms round here which can’t afford to engage proper architects, so they employ us, mainly for minor changes in lay-out and so on. We don’t advertise, it’s all word-of-mouth stuff. You’re not really allowed an office in a residential building, so we work on the telephone with a fax-machine and slog round to clients’ own offices. We ought soon to be in a position to get an office of our own outside.

L    What about V.A.T. and all that?

R    So far it’s all been cash. But if we got any bigger clients we’d be in trouble. There are quantities of small businesses operating outside the law because the authorities make it too expensive to survive otherwise. People say we exploit the system, but larger concerns exploit us all down the line.

L    How?

R    Well for one thing we’re always last in the queue when it comes to settling their accounts. So we virtually have to avoid larger accounts altogether. But you don’t want to hear all our troubles. Go and look at menhirs. And then I’d like to invite you both out to lunch if you’ll let me.

L    How very sweet of you Richard. I personally would be delighted.

J    Me too. Come on then, Lu. Pray enter the wizard’s den.

L    Oh Joe! That’s a wonderful display. You’ve really worked on it haven’t you. Those poster enlargements must have cost a bomb. I take it that’s the whatsit menhir, the one you modelled the artefact on, the one in Fiona’s room.

J    That’s it. The Goh menhir.

L    I wonder what Goh means.

J    I never found out. But can you see how, a foot or more from the top, there is a break in the smooth line of the stone? I believe this stone was erected with enormous physical and inner effort towards the end of a path of awakening and initiation, many thousands of years ago and that this break near the top indicates that the process was never completed.

L    Do you think they failed in some disastrous way?

J    I think it’s very difficult to form a true idea of what we call failure. In order to set out on a path of achievement of any kind human beings erect, or find themselves situated in, some kind of enterprise, a business, say, or an idea for a unique painting, or a cathedral, anything you like. The point is we are never wholly in control of the terms of reference, the parameters as we call them, of what we set out to do.

L    You mean, if we are inspired towards some great achievement, the circumstances are never ideal, or perhaps unknown to us, they may be quite unsuitable.

J    Exactly, although even there we can be mistaken, because if we correctly understand destiny, karma as we call it, we ourselves in a mysterious way have taken part before birth in setting the scene, which then appears round us later as the circumstances of our lives. We have no memory of this, so the difficulties look as if they are part of the chance, often hostile, circumstances in which we are obliged to struggle.

L    So, if we have been wise, those difficulties may be the very ones we knew we needed to overcome the weaknesses in our past efforts.

J    Well that is how it would appear. If only it were so simple! You see it is only too likely that our karma is not always so wisely chosen. Steiner spoke somewhere of the fact that human karma has gradually reached a condition of considerable confusion. And this throws quite a different light on the whole picture we have of success as opposed to failure.

L    I’m beginning to have a horrific picture of what it would be like if some mighty human effort were to be flawlessly successful!

J    Yes, it is a horror, isn’t it? Because what we see in the world as monuments to our mistakes in carrying out our enterprises are also, on top of that, evidence that our aims were misconceived in the first place!

L    Why bother? If at first you don’t succeed, give oop!

J    So, now we look at the Goh Menhir, with it’s flawed summit.

L    And heave a sigh of relief, so to speak. Then what was it those people were actually trying to achieve, or thought they were trying to achieve?

J    I think it has something to do with a longing for something in their own bodies. Early mankind didn’t have the upright vertical posture we have now. There was a sort of species memory of the horizontal, of our spine being parallel with the Earth’s surface. Did you see Arthur C. Clarke’s film "2001"?

L    Yes I did! Wonderful film. I know what you’re referring to! It was that incredible sequence where all those monkey-like creatures were trying to scrabble their way up the enormous black basalt pillar that appeared in their wilderness. That scene…I felt it right through my body as a sort of physical lust for being upright, for verticalness. So you are saying that Darwinism is correct, that we are descended from these ape-like creatures?

J    There is an enormous pressure in our time to believe in Darwinian evolution. It is part of what I call scientism, as opposed to science, a belief system superimposed on a genuine path of knowledge.

L    A physical religion, as it were.

J    That’s exactly it. People shrink in terror from the idea that they can decide themselves from within what is true. They have an insatiable desire for authority, not only the authority of other people, so-called experts, to tell them what is so and what is not so, but even more than that, the authority of the physical world of solid inescapable facts received via their sense organs.

L    Yes, I remember in science lessons at school, it was always a question of proof, proof, proof. If you had an insight people always said:- "You don’t know that. That’s not knowledge. How do you know that? Prove it. You only feel it’s true because you’re a girl."

J    Female intuition and male clarity have to marry to get to what is true. Lucia, you know, don’t you, that I want you desperately. I can hardly contain it sometimes. I don’t know whether I love you or not, but I certainly want you.

L    I want you too, but we’re not going to do it here, all among the photographs and these mighty thoughts about the path of knowledge. Look Joe, stand up, hold my hands, look into my eyes and breathe. This is me, Lucia, person, human being. We are teaching each other, finding each other, recognising each other, perhaps even remembering each other. Don’t short-circuit it into sex too soon. See me, Joe! See first, fuck later. Get it? Go on, get that penis down. Relax. All right? Here I am, your friend Lucia. We’re getting to know each other, and I like you very much. I have an idea we may well be right for each other, but I don’t know yet. Here, give me a hug, a nice friendly hug.

J    You know, you’re the first girl I’ve ever met who really seems to know what’s going on. I think you’re incredible.

L    Yes, I am incredible. I’m a star, that’s what. I’m a proper little whore, but I’m a whore-plus. I’m a mistress of sexuality. I refuse to let my star-quality be wrenched apart from my straight wife-and mother womanhood by male prejudices and preconceptions. I can do, and actually propose to do what Monroe and Madonna in their different ways failed to do, be a whole woman.

J    So, we’re back where we started. Look at the Goh Menhir again. Is a whole woman possible, given the flawed outer conditions of life? Is it even a valid ideal?

L    No, of course it isn’t, not on its own. It implies its counterpart, a whole man.

J    Lacking which we just fuck. If at first you don’t succeed, give oop!

L    Fucking is more than a confession of failure. What we have to do is to keep the copulating and non-copulating life in balance. Women are usually better adapted to initiating that balance than men are, although I’ve only learned that the hard way. It’s something to do with knowing what it’s for, knowing we are on the earth. In the last resort fucking is about babies, which men tend to forget. In the morning when the ecstasy fades pregnancy is still a fact. It all seems very obvious stated like that, and I’m not against contraception, but it’s amazing how easily we ignore the underlying reality.

J    Especially when we realise that most of our social disasters and problems come from ignoring it. Thank you for reminding me. Yes, and now I’ve calmed down a bit I’d like you to look at this map and some of the other photographs. You see those red dots on the map. They mark other menhirs in the immediate district.

L    They seem to be on a spiral with the Goh Menhir at the centre.

J    Yes, but I drew the spiral myself. I have actually walked most of the spiral and there are real footpaths connecting some of them. Obviously landscaping changes radically over the millennia. Basically this is all heathland, but it has been increasingly farmed over the centuries. Last time I visited the Goh Menhir it was at the corner of a cornfield.

L    From the photographs it looks as if the other stones are mostly stubbier and shorter.

J    Yes, but they’re al pretty massive for all that. There’s a perpetual mystery about how on earth they were transported to the sites.

L    Some of them seem to be a quarter of a mile, or even half a mile apart.

J    The whole thing seems to be a landscape temple over a mile across.

L    I suppose archaeologists would simply say they are markers.

J    That, or religious symbols of some kind. I’ve never read any of that sort of archaeological study. But I’m strong on the feelings this sort of thing arouses. When I was young I once walked the four miles from Amesbury to Stonehenge in the middle of the night.

L    Alone?

J    No, I was with a girl. When we got in sight of the King Stone I suddenly started an appalling coughing fit. I could hardly stand. She must have thought I was a complete ninny. But I was sure at the time it was a sort of protection. There was some reason why it was psychically dangerous to be among the energies of the stones unprepared at that time of night.

L    What happened?

J    I’ve never been able to remember how the episode ended. We were members of a theatrical company. We must have got back to the lodgings before morning.

L    No hanky-panky then?

J    No. I was sweet on her as they say. But usually painfully shy.

L    You still are, aren’t you love? It makes a welcome change for a woman like me. It’s no problem to fight you off, but it makes me glad you want me. Don’t be hurt by it or feel rejected, will you? I’m taking my time for a very good reason.

J    I trust you Lucia. I wouldn’t be sharing this stuff with you if I didn’t. The things that happened to me over in Brittany that time meant a great deal. They were quite an important part of my inner journey, though they didn’t have any immediate consequences.

L    You didn’t become a specialist in menhirs then?

J    No, not the stones themselves, nor even what they represented. Something else. Let’s try and put it into words. It was as if, by being in the landscape, the stones highlighted what was around them, made it feel more real, while they themselves disappeared from reality. It was as if they were in another kind of space, a negative space almost. What they were in. the landscape of fields and grass and trees, was matter in space. But they, the menhirs, were a sort of anti-matter, like black holes among stars. I felt they were sucking me in, like going down into a whirlpool, a vortex.

L    Well, they were arranged in a spiral, weren’t they.

J    Yes, though it was by no means obvious till you studied the map. But you’re right. Perhaps it was the feeling of being sucked into negative space that led me to recognise the spiral form in the landscape.

L    And then of course there was this fault at the top of the Goh Menhir, wasn’t there.

J    Yes. I didn’t have this thought at the time, but looking back it seems as if the architects were only prevented in the nick of time from achieving something utterly disastrous for mankind and the Earth. Maybe if they had succeeded, the whole of Earth matter would have whirled down a plug-hole into anti-matter, non-existence, or anti-existence.

L    Success or failure, which was it?

J    Are you saying it would have been better for mankind if they had succeeded? In view, for instance, of what life on Earth has now become? Is nuclear exploration another suicidal journey on similar lines?

L    I’m seeing something, Joe. Hang on a minute. Gosh, I wish Melanie or Fiona were here. But no, I can manage on my own, just. I need to hang on to my body. Do what you did before and hold my two hands, but this time shut your eyes. Joe, they wouldn’t have destroyed mankind or the Earth. It would have been something worse. There is a tremendous mighty being standing there, behind the Goh Menhir, inside its negative space. If they’d crossed the last hurdle, completed the form, they would have handed the whole of creation, mankind, the Earth, the lot, into the final control of that vast dark power. All open-ended evolutionary events in human consciousness would have come to an end. The whole future would have been pre-empted, eternally fixed. Freedom would have ceased to have a meaning.

*****

J    What is it that stops that happening every time, Lucia? There must be something deeper still in us which stops us each time from placing the last card on the summit of our house of cards.

L    We keep our options open for something else, Joe. There is a true missing card in the pack, as well as the false one. The false completion of the game is physical perfection. Andrea del Sarto’s perfect model mistress. Madonna and Marilyn Monroe, the hard and soft versions of the false feminine ideal. Physical perfection is a side issue, a discard. It belongs on the cutting-floor.

J    So where’s the genuine article, Lucia?

L    It’s what I‘m half seeing now. But I can’t quite grasp it today. The other day with Melanie, and again with Fiona, I caught a glimpse of the joker in the pack, as one might say, of what humanity is trying to achieve. This ability to throw light on what’s happening when I’m with people seems to take a different form according to who I’m with at the time. I saw a Melanie version first, the secret of two or three human beings together arriving at what Melanie experiences as the Naming process and what this does to Time. The timeless human archetype, what we call the CHRIST, then appears "in the midst", gathered in the Name. Olive Pixley, who developed a system she called "The Armour of Light" called this process "The Rhythm of the Name". It was one of a series of what could be called deeds of light which she was shown. Later I was shown a Fiona version of it, which she asked me to speak. This emerged in the phrase St Paul used in the New Testament, CHRIST IN ME. Fiona is quite different from Melanie, so I see something different. Somewhere behind what we’ve been going through this morning there’s a Joe version of this which I can’t yet quite grasp. Perhaps if you tell me more about this spiral, and how you discovered it I shall see more clearly. You know, Joe, I get a feeling we’re taking all this a bit too fast. What time is it?

J    Good heavens, it’s nearly one o’clock. However long have we been in here?

L    We haven’t been in here, we’ve been half way round Brittany. Look, let’s find Richard. He promised to take us to lunch.

J    (Calls) Richard! It’s one o’clock. We’re hungry.

R    Hi, you two. Are you now qualified in stone-age lore, Lucia? Has he given you a certificate?

L    No, I’ve given him one. I found he knew damn all. I’ve sorted him out, though.

R    That’s all right then! Come on. We’ll go to my favourite place in Baker Street. Car’s round the corner. (They clatter down the stairs).

*****

Dialogue 9

R    So, what have you been telling the lady, my old friend? He doesn’t talk to me much about his landscape wanderings, do you Joe.

J    No, it’s funny that. We’ve known each other for years, and we’ve often talked the night out about the sort of things that led to the three of us, and later Melanie, starting this I.T. thing. But we never seem to get round to talking about old stones.

R    Any more than I talk to you about crop circles. And yet there’s a real connection somewhere. There must be.

L    I don’t know anything about crop circles at all. Incidentally, why do they call them crop circles? I’ve seen pictures of them and they seem to be all possible shapes.

R    The early ones were mostly discs and rings. Then they appeared in groups, so-called quincunxes. Only later did they appear stretched out in long lines connected by straight tracks, various fish-like and insect-like forms, and so on. It was quite an evolutionary process. But they started as circles.

L    Why do you think there’s a connection with Joe’s menhirs?

R    Well, it is a curious fact that when the interest started in the phenomenon in the eighties most of them were appearing in central southern England, mostly Wiltshire and Hampshire. And that is a part of England where so many stone-age monuments are found. There were occurrences year after year round Avebury and Silbury Hill, for example, and the West Kennet long barrow.

L    You’ve obviously got a theory, Richard, about all this, and I’d be very interested to hear about it. But Joe was still in the middle of telling me how he made some of his discoveries in Brittany, and I don’t want to miss the rest of that either.

J    Yes, and we don’t really need the maps and photographs for that, because it was more to do with how I set about trying to relate more consciously to the experience I’d been having In other words the menhirs and I were relating to each other in another kind of space than the one in which they were set into the landscape.

L    Joe was showing me on the map how the stones were set in an enormous spiral, centred on the particular one which was the model for the figure he made for Fiona’s room.

J    What I felt was that the approach the stone-age folk made to the central menhir site must have been ritually proscribed. I found existing roadways, and traces of former tracks which seemed to indicate this. But I don’t feel that this was a religious process in the way we understand it.

R    What then?

J    I feel that the vortex, or spiral, was constructed in a series of steps. I don’t know, but I think there may have been long periods, centuries, maybe even thousands of years between each step.

L    So, each step in turn may itself have been the focus of attention for a long, long time, the Goh Menhir of its day perhaps?

J    Yes, and I don’t think there was a blueprint. The spiral was the result, not the cause of the process.

L    They didn’t know it was going to be a spiral?

J    Well, not consciously they didn’t. But remember, at the same time they themselves were evolving, developing. Their consciousness was changing, century by century, millennium by millennium. The whole exercise was nothing but a projection, a signature in the mineral world of what was going on inside them. And this process was taking place also in the dreamy, misty, semi-fluid, almost substanceless forms of their own bodies, and every now and then throwing off onto the physical cutting-floor the failed, semi-animal products of their efforts.

L    Neanderthals and so on?

R    Yes, and these became the objects of attention for science, and are the so-called evidence for Darwinian evolution. It’s a jigsaw with all the essential pieces missing. Joe, how on earth did you arrive at all these pictures and ideas?

J    For most of it you already know the answer to that, Richard. You’ve read as much anthroposophy as I have. Rudolf Steiner perceived the greater part of the general picture nearly a century ago.

R    But there’s more, surely.

J    There certainly is.

R    You still haven’t explained why the end result was an Earth temple in the form of a spiral, a vortex. All you’ve said is that it was paralleled by developments in their own consciousness and in their own bodily development. All you’re... .. Oh my God!!

L    What, Richard? What’s the matter? You’re as white as a sheet.

R    Joe, you cunning bastard! You’ve been leading us on!

L    What, Richard? Come on. Give!

R    Well of course! D.N.A.!!

L    What? What do you mean?

R    The double helix! The twin spiral form of the nucleus in the human cell-structure. Those people were projecting the mathematics of their own evolving organisms onto the landscape around them!

J    I think it was more complex than that. I’ve never thought of the human form as in any way separate from the planetary form. I think the Earth and the human body are evolving as aspects of the same organism. Humanity, as well as being made up of autonomous individuals, is at the same time the consciousness, the sense organ, the system of antennae for the planet in its cosmic environment. It is a means for the Earth itself to know what’s going on around it. As far as the vortex was concerned, those people were getting as much from the Earth as they gave.

L    All this is a bit beyond me, though I feel the direction it’s going in. Look, do we have to go on sitting in this bloody café? I mean, it’s a nice restaurant Richard, and thanks for a delicious lunch!, but can’t we go back to your place now? I want to look at your photographs again, Joe, and the map you drew.

R    So do I now. I’d no idea you’d taken the thing so far, Joe.

J    Well you never asked. There has always been so much else going on. Let’s drop it now till we get back.

*****

J    Before I show you any more pictures and maps there’s something else on my mind, Richard. I don’t know how much it needs saying, but I’ll say it anyway. It was very exciting when you suddenly made that mental leap and spotted the connection between the double helix in the D.N.A and the tendency of the menhir-culture people, certainly in this instance in Brittany, to construct instinctively giant spirals in the landscape. I won’t pretend I hadn’t spotted this connection too. In fact a group of us some years ago on Dartmoor found another instance of it in a bit of ancient woodland. It appeared that some old thorn trees with double trunks had grown in a spiral about twenty or twenty-five yards across. I first noticed it when I was moved to step or climb through the gap between the two trunks of one of these, and noticed another pair a few yards away. I followed the indication, and lo and behold it happened again and went on happening. After climbing through half a dozen pairs in a diminishing circle I came to a little patch of very green grass the size of a large hearth-rug at the heart of the spiral. When I went into a sort of mild trance there I could feel how easy it would have been to slip out of my body.

L    You know what came into my mind as you were speaking Joe; all the old fairy tales about enchanted forests where someone follows a secret path and ends up trapped in fairyland for a hundred years. Perhaps you were lucky to find your way back so easily.

J    Well in a way I did superstitiously cross my fingers, so to speak, by carefully climbing back between the trunks the way I had come!

R    I had a feeling you started off by directing those accounts at me, Joe. Had you a particular reason for that?

J    Yes I had. I suppose it was a sort of warning really, though as I said, I don’t know whether you need it. It is to do with the sort of mistakes science constantly makes about cause and effect, not through mistakes in logic, but through putting two and two together in the wrong order. The sheer excitement of experiencing a sudden insight like that puts people off their guard. It is just at that sort of moment that science again and again jumps to a wrong conclusion about what causes what. And these wrong conclusions are cumulative. They have resulted in the building up of the whole one-sided world scientific picture.

L    How does all that relate to what you were talking about before?

J    Well, the big question is, for example, did the menhir builders find themselves constructing a giant spiral landscape temple because they themselves were organisms built up on a microscopic cellular pattern based on double-helix molecules? Or was it the other way round? Did the entire planet come into existence because matter itself comes into shape out of a non-material world, by whirling in on itself in spiral form? Is the human organism simply a special instance of this? Which came first, people or planet, Humanity or Earth?

L    Well, which is it Joe?

J    Wait a minute, I haven’t finished! The thing is, what happens when human-beings become conscious, when they start to want to play a part in their own evolution? The materialistic view of the world is fatally prone to one-directional cause-and-effect explanations of things. The answer to Lucia’s question is – neither and both. What is wrong in our current human view of the world is a step deeper than making mistakes about what causes what. The mistake is in the very notion of cause and effect itself. It gradually becomes apparent that this is not a cause-and-effect world after all. It is something different.

R    Joe, are you saying that this is not a logical world at all? Then science might just as well shut up shop altogether.

J    No, Richard, that is fortunately not what I am saying, or what I believe. The concept is a bit more difficult than that. It is rather that the things we put together and say that one causes the other are actually related to each other differently from that. The relationship is a mutual one. It all comes about from the fact that we experience time as one-directional. We say one thing happens and then another happens, as if somehow time was moving along. But it isn’t, Richard. It is still. It is we who are moving in time. This, as it were, is not time’s fault! It is an illusion created by our relation to time, which is a moving, changing one. We do not stay still in time. We move into it by incarnating into bodies, and we move out of it by dying, which is an equally protracted process. But all this while time itself, so to speak, minds its own business. The past stays where it is. So does the future.

R    But don’t they change? Are the past and the future fixed and permanent?

J    Far from it. They change constantly. But all their changes, variations, possibilities, or rather probabilities as Seth prefers to call them, are permanent, multi-dimensional, capable of going either way, or both ways, on demand.

R    You said this was a logical universe, but that sounds like chaos.

J    No, it’s not chaos, but it’s a much more complex and subtle order than we are used to thinking about.

L    I’m totally lost, Joe. I don’t know where I am. But at the same time I feel intuitively that you are right. I’ve got a specific question arising out of that.

R    So have I, Lucia.

J    Let’s put your two questions side by side. They’re probably connected if they’re not after all the same question.

L    I’ll say first, shall I? Joe, while the menhir-builders were centred on, say, menhir number three, numbers one and two were behind them, established, steps of their past, so to speak, or of their ancestors. O.K? Menhir number three was the peak of their achievement. What I want to ask is, what was happening at the place where, centuries later, millennia even, the Goh Menhir would one day be?

J    That’s your question?

L    Yes.

J    Well, let’s hold that question steady for a moment and see what Richard’s question is. Richard, what’s your question?

R    What I want to ask is this. If we are ditching cause and effect as the pattern of relationship between all the factors in front of us when we try to find explanations of things, then what the hell are we going to put in its place?

J    And that’s your question?

R    Yes.

J    What I find wonderful about this I.T. process is the way in which the questions people stimulate in each other are at the same time the emergence of their own being into awareness and presence. The deeper people’s questions probe the nearer to manifestation their visible intraterrestrial presences become. There’s Lucia, for instance. She’s never been to Brittany, but she stands there with the ray of her light-being focussed on the dark mystery of the Goh Menhir as if she hadn’t just seen it for the first time today in that poster on the wall.

L    And in your beautiful sculpture in Fiona’s room darling.

J    Yes, I forgot that. But I feel as if you’d known this whole scenario for centuries.

L    I probably have.

J    Maybe we both have. And Richard’s question is equally characteristic. The path of knowledge. The clear logical construct which knows the paramount importance of a firm logical foundation for everything if we are to avoid illusion.

R    Where do you stand in this, Joe? What’s your characteristic stance, your leitmotiv in life, so to say?

J    I always feel as if I’m hovering above the surface of life like a sort of barrage-balloon on a string... well, a whole network of strings actually. What holds me down is simply other people. If it weren’t for other people I think I’d just float away from life altogether.

L    I think you’re more like a T.V. satellite than a balloon, Joe. You provide the perspective the rest of us need. You circulate the Earth providing all the pictures others can’t see because of their more specific, Earth-bound functions.

R    What does your perspective have to say about our two questions, then?

J    I’d like to have a go at Richard’s question first. I think what fills the vacuum created by losing faith in linear cause-and-effect is best summed up in the word resonance. If the world creating the human form and the human form creating the world are equal and opposite aspects of the same phenomenon it gives me a feeling like music. It’s a feeling like an inexhaustible symphony of interweaving harmonies in which the two contenders, humanity and the world, are engaged in an eternal counterpoint.

L    I love that expression "inexhaustible symphony". It gives you the feeling that however appalling and disastrous the working out of human destiny appears to be, the overall process, including Steiner’s notion of mistakes in karma, and the last minute fault in the Goh Menhir, that overall process is still to be trusted.

J    I don’t know about you, but when I listen to a great musical work I always feel I am taking part in the creation of it. And all of that is implicit in the notion of resonance as a step beyond that of cause and effect. Do you respond to that, Richard?

R    Yes, I do. I don’t know how that affects the workings of my logical mind. I shall have to see, I’ve been reading Rupert Sheldrake’s book on morphic resonance. I think I shall have to read it again. Resonance, obviously, is a two-way process. It implies that the future is not just an empty space being filled from below by the accumulation of events in the present. It implies that the future is already there, so to speak, whatever ‘there’ may be held to mean. That in turn means that if causation is still a valid concept then the future is causing the past as much as the past is causing the future.

L    And that leads directly to my question, doesn’t it, Joe? At the time of menhir three, what is going on at the place where the Goh Menhir will one day be?

J    It’s very difficult forming pictures like this, chiefly because at this stage neither the pictures we form, nor the realities they represent, will stay in their places. The chief reason why most people, and that especially means most intelligent practical people, don’t get involved in all this sort of thing, is that it won’t stay put. At least in the first instance you don’t know where you are with it. The ordinary materialistic view of the world may be a lie but at least it’s a lie you can handle. Whereas all this other stuff may be true and alive, but you can’t fix it, grasp it with your old concepts. You yourself have to change to become as mobile as it is.

R    Yes, but the trouble is this apparently solid handleable material world seems at the moment to be rapidly rushing downhill into chaos. That’s why we felt that to start something like the I.T. school was somehow a real action in an unreal world. By keeping it mobile we felt it resonated with the situation in which it found itself, where all the comfortable realities were losing their dependability, their sharp identifiable outlines.

L    When the land all round you is turning into sea, you’d better get yourself a boat.

J    Yes, that’s what we felt. At least in the first instance you need a point of reference for the emergence of a new reality, a "Reality for Beginners"!

But almost at once everything changes. As you get used to the changes going on around you, you learn, as it were, to swim. You don’t need the boat any more. Reality for beginners has turned into a germinating seed.

L    I think that happened to me the very first day I arrived at Melanie’s house. It was almost as if she admitted that, in a way, the I.T. school formula was a spoof. Well, if not actually a spoof, then at least a very provisional formula. Not so much a boat as a pair of water-wings!

J    To have an introductory formula at all is almost an invitation to people to erect the institution your mobility attempts to avoid. But it’s difficult to know what else to do. You can’t go round knocking on people’s doors and saying:- "Hey, do you want to enter the New World?" The Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mormons have been trying it for years. It doesn’t really work. The problem with the I.T. method from the start is that everybody feels the need to jump out of the provisional boat and swim, but they do so at different points. People develop at different speeds. That was the difficulty that friend of yours, (Paul, was it?), spotted straight away. If everybody leaves the boat at the same point, some have learned to swim straight away, like you, Lucia, and others are left floundering. Where does your responsibility lie then, said Paul.

L    Melanie’s had a visit from two or three people who were in precisely that position.

R    What happened to them?

L    It seems to have developed rather rapidly, and in a quite organised fashion. Meetings and secretaries and so on, over Muswell Hill way, she said. She didn’t feel particularly happy about it, felt she’d failed them in some way. I think I helped her a bit to realise that they were free beings and had their own paths to follow.

R    Now that is just the point where I feel my young friend Paul, the croppie, would have wanted to step in and get them sorted out. I wonder what’s happened to him, by the way. I thought we’d be seeing more of him.

L    So did I. I was rather dreading it to tell you the truth. There was a lot of magnetism going on between him and me, which I would rather have been without. I’m rather afraid he will turn up sooner or later. I shall need your support.

J    You’ll get it from me. I’ll knock the bugger’s block off.

L    Oh Joe, sweetheart, you don’t have to act out of character. I much prefer you as you are. If there’s any teeth to be kicked in I’ll do the kicking myself. But Melanie told me firmly she thought he was genuinely interested in I.T., and would be coming back, not just because he fancied me.

R    What we shall need to watch is his propensity for taking things over and trying to run them. It’s not only God’s gift to women he sees himself as. I’ve seen a bit of that in the crop-circle movement. When he gets the bit between his teeth he tends to think he has all the answers. On the other hand he is quite sharply intelligent and he will have a lot to contribute if he does surface. It would be interesting to see what Fiona makes of him.

L    We’ve rather lost touch with our theme, haven’t we, Joe? My main question is still rather hanging in the air.

J    Yes, I got side tracked onto the question of how difficult it is to form pictures that stay in place when what were dead forms start waking and develop something like a life of their own. I think the best thing I can do is to tell you what happened when I tried to deal with the rather frightening realisation that these menhirs were occupying a different space from what was standing round them. What I did was to stand in front of each of them in turn and try to look into the alternative space I felt they were occupying. I’m not a very good or practised meditator in the ordinary way. I have some difficulty in understanding what most spiritual folk really mean by meditation. But if standing in front of an object with your eyes shut and trying to penetrate it with your inner vision is a kind of meditation, then that is what I was doing. The results in a couple of instances were really quite startling. With others nothing seemed to happen at all. Shall I try to describe what I saw?

R    Yes, please do, Joe.

L    Joe, why don’t we all three shut our eyes while you are doing that and try to visualise the same thing as you are remembering. Have you photographs of the ones you are talking about?

J    Yes. Here they are. There’s number two, rather dark, short, and massive, a few feet from the right hand side of the bridle path; and number three a bit taller and paler, and as I remember it a little further back. Shut your eyes, then. What I remember of number two was of a sort of incised circle, perhaps half an inch deep and a foot across, in the centre of the side of the stone facing me. There was nothing of the sort visible physically, as you can see from the photograph. As I continued to look inwardly at this incised disc the circle began to glow faintly with a pale greyish-lilac mist. And then a cross slowly formed in dark green, a quite large equal armed cross of the kind usually called a Canterbury Cross, the arms slightly spreading so that the outer ends form segments of the surrounding circle. Dark green on lilac would be too vivid a description, it was all more greyish than that. The image faded after a bit, but when I tried it again a few minutes later it repeated itself, though less vividly.

R    How long did you stand there?

J    I can’t remember. It’s a good while ago. I should think about twenty minutes. I didn’t think about it for a long while afterwards, but of course in all probability that particular symbol, indeed all the variants on the circle and cross theme, only appeared in human culture thousands of years later. Apart from a simple projection of my own, there could be several different explanations for that particular symbol appearing there in my inner space.

R    Like Christian pilgrims trying to combat what they thought of as evil paganism, and leaving a psychic image behind.

L    Yes, I rather fancy you as a monk, Joe.

J    I’d rather be a monk than a monkey, even with a black basalt pillar! But what I’d rather have as an explanation is that the counter-space these menhirs seem to me to occupy is actually open to different eras of future time. At number three, for instance, all the images I saw were Egyptian. A number of them appeared and then faded and gave place to others. I remember an ankh, a Horus hawk head, and I think a Pharaoh’s head-dress in black and gold.

L    So the spiral vortex may be something in time as well as in space.

J    Could well be.

L    And my Goh Menhir question?

J    I’ve found myself speculating whether places like that on the Earth may not be a bit like acupuncture points on the human body… places where the structure is more open to communications from the entire universe. Many people feel the same sort of thing at places like Chalice Well in Glastonbury, in some great cathedrals at the crossing point of nave and transepts, the altar stone in Stonehenge, and hundreds of other such places. They are places where anything can happen, and often where much has already happened. As far as the Goh Menhir is concerned, I feel it belongs to the future, perhaps the very, very far future. It seemed to me to be almost unthinkably alien, difficult to contact with ordinary warm human feeling. I went once with the same pair of researchers who introduced me to Brittany to a remote spot in a forest in South Wales. They had sensed that the crown energies, you might call them the pineal energies of a landscape temple were to be found there. By pooling our three capacities we found our way to the exact spot. The most clairvoyant of the three of us then made contact with a giant devic being, who warned us that the energies we had found there could be highly threatening to anybody who approached them with intent, but unprepared. It warned us, for example, on no account to bring parties of people there. I have much the same feeling about the Goh Menhir, which I have also visited with that couple. A place to be visited with caution. It is not good to short-circuit time.

L    I need to be off home. Someone from the studio is coming round.

R    Let me give you a lift. It’s time I packed up too.

L    I can easily go by bus, really.

J    Don’t you dare go by bus. I’m coming too. From now on, my girl, I propose to be at your elbow, night and day if necessary, in case that Paul fellow turns up.

L    Oh Joe! You’re a real darling. What should I do without you?

J    I don’t propose to let you find out.

R    Come on, lovebirds. I’m ready to lock up.

L    I want a last look at the photo-exhibition. I want to fix an image of it in my mind. I have a feeling we’re going to need it. There we are, then. Off we go.

*****

END OF BOOK TWO

INTERMISSION

A few days later on returning from the Art School
Lucia found a greetings card from Joe on the mat
Inside the door. He had painted it himself, and on
It was written:-

Dearest Lucia,
I once tried to share all this Menhir Lore with Fiona. Do you know what she said?
She asked:- "How does Love, which is tiny and intimate, and gentle, survive in the vast spaces of Cosmic Thinking?"
She answered it herself:- "In the same way in which the Atom, which holds in its spiral vortex the secret of all Space and Time, survives in the Pleroma, the infinite fullness of the Divine Heart"
This, darling girl, is the inexhaustible symphony I hear up here in my T.V. Satellite. Perhaps sometimes it touches the Music of the Spheres.
I love you very much. Joe.

On the facing card he had drawn a pentagram with their names.

FIONA

"CHRIST in the Heart"

RICHARD             

"Love of Knowledge"           

LUCIA

""Light upon the ‘Presence’"

               JOE

               "Freedom of the Cosmos"

MELANIE               

"Mystery of the Name "              

*****

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