Out of Thick Jungle
The Earthly Adventures of a Child of the
Septima Race
Introduction
This book, Out of Thick Jungle has been inspired by many friends, teachers, students, and fellow reflective beings who have heard bits and pieces of my journey and have enthusiastically responded, "Wow! You have come a long way." By sharing Out of Thick Jungle, I am not claiming "oneness" or "enlightenment" but am simply offering the adventure of my journey as a lost child born within the depths of Babylon who has crawled, kicked and scratched his way out of duality, suffering, depression, ill-health, ADD, disillusionment, repetitive psycho drama, addiction and injury towards a state of peace, grace and overstanding of my true divine heritage.
I offer continual thanks and praise for all of the omni-dimensional light beings, angels, guides, fairies, plants, animals and fellow initiates along the path that have and continue to offer synchronic reflections of the divine soul evolution that allow me to breath in each experience as a cherished lesson in this universal school of life on planet earth.
Although hundreds of books have helped to shift, shape and mold my evolutionary being, I would like to acknowledge several that have encouraged me to share my journey out. As an aspiring yogi, I read Parmahansa Yoganandas, Autobiography of a Yogi. At age four Yogananda had dreams of remembrance, he was recognized by enlightened beings as a reincarnated master. He recounted his early life re-awakening and remembering what it was like to be enlightened, and there-after shared many stories of what it is like to be a fully awakened yogi.
Although inspired by his stories, I couldn't help but ask, "What about the rest of us who aren't reincarnated ascended masters?"
I don't know about you, but I certainly didn't come into this body with the slightest memory of being awakened. I was a screaming crying, selfish, angry, jealous, hot tempered little red head, that didn't have the first clue about being compassionate and surrendering to the powerful wisdom, truth and love of spirit.
I offer this book as an inspiration to you, the sons and daughters of man. May the stories of this spiritual adventure to help you make the transition from wherever, whoever, whatever you are now to “that what you will become” -- pharaoh.
Another author who I would like to thank is Jon Krakauer, adventure novelist who reported Into the Wild and Into Thin Air. Each of these books portrayed passionate adventurers who embarked on epic journeys of self-discovery and found death rather than the awakening they were pursuing.
Not that Krakauer’s books have ebbed the flow of beings drawn towards either the outdoors or the truth, but rather have left a vacuum for a success manual. To fill that void, I offer Out of thick Jungle as the epic journey of a once adrenalin junkie, adventure freak, fanatical rock climber, who followed his heart unto the brink of death and has returned with the truths that set him free.
This book, Out of Thick Jungle, is a spiritual adventure of my earthly pursuit to answer the timeless questions: Who am I? and What am I.
As a both an extreme climber and yogi, I have used some climbing lingo and spiritual expressions which may sound like jargon. Rather than breaking up the flow of the story by defining each term, I have included a glossary at the end of the book. Words that are defined in the glossary are italicized the first time they are used.
There are now over 6 billion people on the planet. Some folks have had hundreds or even thousands of human lives on earth. Others are younger souls. Some kids are born with higher physical and mental aptitudes, skills or even mastery of one or more form of art, craft, intellect, sport, or other human endeavor. They seem to just be remembering things they have learned before. Others have to work harder at each aspect of being human in this life.
Similarly some kids are born as very evolved spiritual beings. On one extreme of the spectrum, the Indigo Children were once ascended or nearly ascended masters and enlightened beings like Yogananda from ancient India, Tibet and Egypt, who have chosen to reincarnate at this moment in history to give the Sons of Men, Us mortal earthlings, a shove in the right direction.
Me, I am a first timer, that is here in human form for the first time. I was dropped off on the planet and landed in the womb of my dearest mother sometime in early 1966, in the dawn of this age of Aquarius. Just as the vibration of unconditional love finally reappeared upon the earth, I came out kicking. Mom says that I broke her sack at seven months and almost didn't even make it into my earthsuit, this human body made of flesh, bones and blood. And that would have been a shame as I am here on a very important mission. I am a child of the Septima Race, a volunteer human here for the very first time with the mission of obtaining liberation in one lifetime to co-create Eden on earth .
Of course, I didn't remember none of that – not where I came from, who I was, what I was here for, nuthin. I was born under fluorescent lights at the Summit Hospital in New Jersey, 7:30 p.m. September 25, 1966. I was pulled away from my mom and put in a plastic incubator. Yeah, like most of you, I was scared to death. But I made it through and after that I was just a kid growing up in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, getting to go to McDonalds on my third birthday, and so psyched about it that I ran through our screen door, jabbed a piece of glass into my wrist and had to go get stitches. But I was still happy when I finally got my good tasting, steroid laden chemically enhanced beef patty on a sesame seed just been sterilized, refined, processed and chlorinated bread-like bun.
The gulf between the contrasting phases of my life was widening. The moments of clarity from stepping through the veil while rock climbing were growing clearer and clearer, and were lasting longer and longer. Each vertical ascent shed layers of the imposter that was controlling my life. After each weekend awakening, I returned to the dim-lit engineering dungeon at General Dynamics and was thrust back into a reality that made less and less sense. Between proofing flow calculations and bull-shitting in the pen, I began to see through the ego-madness around me.
One day in the midst of it I decided to step outside. I walked down the shipyard, past the full-scale wooden mock up of the USS Seawolf attack class submarine. The killer whale, that if ever completed, would have the fire power to annihilate entire portions of the globe... quickly.
“Why am I working for something that I hope never gets made?”
Immediately came in the stream of answers, “To protect national security, to gain valuable engineering skills, to pay for school…”
I looked out over the sound and felt the peacefulness of the ocean. Behind me I felt the hum of the submarine factory. The date was the 17th of August, 1987, we had a four-day weekend coming up, time to go up to the mountains. I spun around and returned to work. On the way back in, I ran into a cluster of engineers from another department. They were discussing plans to spend the holiday at a bed and breakfast up near the Presidential Range in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. As soon as I heard them mention the Presidential range, knew I was going to hike the range and I knew I was going to do it solo. They had room in the car and gave me a lift.
It seemed like only moments later when I was standing on the side of the road with a backpack and waving goodbye as they sped off to the B&B with hot tubs and beds. My legs were bursting with energy. I turned up towards the hills and disappeared into the forest. Although I had spent much of my youth in the woods and mountains, I quickly realized I had never spent the night alone in the deep forest. I passed clusters of slower moving tourists along the way and was soon up on a cloud-swept ridge above the tree line. Even the first week of September the air was frigid and the wind fierce. Giant piles of stones marked the trail every few hundred meters along the ridge, and I grimaced at the thought of the weary, winter hiker plodding through drifts of snow searching for the top stone to guide the way.
On top of the first summit the clouds parted allowing me a view of the entire range leading north to the summit of Mount Washington in the distance. Inspired by the site, I sped off and soon realized that rather than tiring, my legs felt stronger and stronger each hour. That evening I wanted to camp solo, but as dusk approached I neared an alpine hut in the forest and gravitated towards the cluster of humanity. Before I even reached the hut though, the loud chattering reminded me that I had come for solitude and I started hiking back out towards the trail. Just before passing the tree line into the wind-swept tundra, a voice called out from a small campfire.
“Where you headin out to at this hour?”
I peered through a dense cluster of fir trees into a campsite to see three figures around a fire.
“Not much protection from the wind beyond this point… not for another 3 or 4 hours along the trail anyway.” Continued the bearded one on the far side.
I stepped into the light around the fire so we could all see each other. We held silence for a moment and he spoke again.
“A little bit too much ruckus for you down there?”
“Yeah” I nodded in agreement.
“This is the most remote sight, beyond here you’ll get blown away.”
“I don’t mind the wind.” I said resolutely.
“Your welcome to join us here if you choose.
“Thanks, but I came up here to go on a solo journey.”
“Suit yourself.” Came his reply “We were just about to share a joint if you….”
“No thank you,” I reflexively snapped back, “I don’t smoke.”
“No smoke solo wind sleeper.” Spoke one of the silent figures.
I turned, marched up onto the ridge and mused over the interaction. “I always run into those people, those pothead freaks, and they always invite me to join them.” The path narrowed and rocky ledges descended from either side. The wind howled and blast me in the face. Darkness consumed the mountain and I felt suddenly foolish. I spun around and was soon standing around the warm fire again. No one spoke for a long time until the bearded guy suggested I set up my tent while there was still a glimmer of light.
When I returned to the fire, he introduced himself as Wolf, pulled out the joint and said. “We waited for you to share this.”
Again I replied unconsciously, “No thank you.”
When the joint came around, the ‘No smoke solo wind sleeper’ guy offered it to me. When I refused he simply raised his eyebrows and motioned for me to pass it on. As I held the joint I again felt the foolishness of my rigidity. I quietly took a hit off of it and passed it on.
Soon afterwards the awkwardness was replaced by a sense of familiarity. We shared experiences from the day’s hike. I mentioned how I felt my legs getting stronger and stronger as the day wore on. Wolf responded subtly that this area might be one of my power spots.
“What do you mean power spots?” I asked.
“The earth has special high energy areas or vortexes. Each person is drawn to different vortexes. Mount Washington is a vortex. Maybe it is one of your power spots.”
“I never heard of anything like that before.” I said. “It sounds kind of crazy to me.”
He looked me in the eye and said, “Is that crazy or is it crazy they don’t teach kids in school about this stuff.
“What stuff?” I asked naively.
“The living mythos of mother earth, us her children and the coming age of light.” He said.
I rolled my eyes, raised my thumb and forefinger and looked around in abject amusement for support to ridicule the far flung fantasy. But the eyes mine met were not amused, they were solemn and silent as the deep sea. With an exhale, my white man fire self-extinguished and I turned to see Wolf’s eyes sparkle with the radiance of the inner earth. I listened as he shared stories about many things I had never heard about. He told us about the energetic nature of the earth, and how we are part of it. He spoke of electromagnetic lay lines that circle the planet and of nomadic tribes, people being pulled to specific points on the planet to receive information and energy we need on our journey.
Through the dancing flames of the fire, the images Wolf’s story faded in and out like a dream until we all faded to sleep our sleeping bags around the fire. I dreamt intensely that night and woke up at first light unable to remember which parts of the night were dreams and which part were the stories.
Wolf was already up stirring together the coals to rekindle the flame.
I poured water for tea and oats. “That’s funny…” I said half to myself. Wolf looked up from the flame, and prompted me to continued.
“The oats. It’s funny how I eat the same breakfast out here in the middle of nowhere as I do at home. And How I would eat the same thing if I had all the money in the world.”
“Exactly, the rest is meaningless.” He said.
“Well, not meaningless.” I contested.
“Distractions preventing us from seeing our true nature.”
“Well the car that gave me a lift is what allowed me to see this nature.” I said opening my arms to the panorama.
“Live simply, walk the earth and the mother will guide your way.”
After the meal my engines were running. I quickly tore down the unused tent, packed up and said goodbye.
“No goodbyes” Wolf said, “pure programming: buy this, buy that, good bye, bad buy, win, loose duality… drop it.” He paused and looked up at me, “Until we meet again.”
“What a strange dude.” I muttered to myself as my legs churned up the trail.
The next evening I found a spot to camp solo and fell fast asleep. I dreamt but remembered little in the morning. As I prepared my oats and tea, I began thinking about dreams. I had hardly noticed them in the past few years. Dreams and visions held little or no value in the ebb and flow of life that was on full throttle.
In college I had many dreamy regurgitations of the numbers and equations memorized in fanatic all night study sessions, but they were clearly just echoes of my busy mind. I searched back through the years of college and high school. Not a single fantastical or prophetic dream came to mind. Not since I was a child. What happened to them?
Along the trail I pondered the few dreams of my early childhood and the absence of them later in my life. I vaguely remembered the dream of seeing the Alps as my once free-spirited uncle flew to Europe.
The approach to the base of Mount Washington soon pulled me into the present waking dream as I gazed at meadows of wild flowers and magnificent vistas. Then as the trail turned up the rugged south face, all thoughts of dreams vanished. Biting wind and snow flurries that streaked horizontal across the sky greeted me as I punched it up the final few hundred meters to the summit. I crested the final peak and raised y hands in glory, only to find a virtual tourist town of folks that had driven up the back side and bought shirts saying, “I survived Mount Washington.”
After a brief celebration, I headed back the way I had come feeling the lightness of the descent. I bounded and skipped down the well-trod path from the summit. Midway down, I stopped on a rock outcrop and the vision of my childhood dream reappeared as vividly as the night I had it.
From a plane flying in a graceful arc above green rolling pastures, I saw foothills rise through dense forests and disappear into a sheer uplift of rugged, snow-capped peaks. I peered into valleys as they squeezed into canyons that rose to distant highlands beyond.
The plane swept along the front range and I peered into countless valleys until it circled away from the mountains down a river leading to a city in the distance.
“So this is the Europe.” I heard my uncle’s voice .
I turned around as a gentle breeze urged me further down the path. The switch backs had dips and lifts allowing me to use my momentum – accelerating through the downhill and coming almost to halt at each rise. The pounding of my boots on the stones as I ran down hill gently jarred my brain which shed layer upon layer of conformity. I began hearing the echo of shoulds and woulds implanted into my consciousness.
“You should stay with one company throughout your Cooperative Education program. You should begin work immediately after finishing school…”
At each rise in the path questions arose to life plans that simply were not questioned.
“Wow, these are my college years, time for exploration, growth and self-discovery, before focusing on my career. Next Summer is my last block of free time, between school and career: “two years in a high tech firm to learn the robotics technology, complete an MBA program, and then start my own business.”
I slowly dropped into the next dip that curved around the mountain a few hundred meters. As my pace quickened I saw the picture of myself returning to General Dynamics, completing my cooperative education, firing through my senior year and…and…and…
“No..… No.… No..No.No! NooO,NoOoOoOoOoO…” Came out the sound of my spirit crying softly, not having been heard for years. With each foot stomping, skull jarring step, the voice grew until as I was running through the bottom of the dip, the sound turned into a staccato drone. At the top of the next rise, I drew in a deep breath and held it until a broad smile spread across my face, and I exclaimed “Yes, I am going to Europe next Summer.
At that moment the decision was made. The next week in Connecticuit, I went to the library started researching job opportunities, visas, and any link that might land me a job in Southern Germany or Switzerland. At the same time I checked out some German language books and immersed myself into the language I had been drawn to in highschool. German had been a struggle for me in school, but now I had incentive, I had nine months to learn it.
So my decision had been made for me. I was in no shape to go off on a grand climbing journey. After quickly finishing up my project at IBM, my Mom accompanied me up to start school in northern Germany. Even that was pushing my limits. I often felt disoriented and saw halos if I stayed out past dark. My first impression of braunshweig was daunting. Besides being completely flat and in the middle of Germany’s industrial belt, the city felt cold and bland.
My mother stayed with me for a few days until I was strong enough to make it on my own. Once she left, I immersed myself in the German student life. As I wanted to focus my degree in Robotics, I began research in the optics division of the school where a team of engineers were creating sight recognition systems to guide the robots. Again the project was challenging and I dove into it. A few weeks into the semester, I was invited to the Volks Wagon manufacturing facility in Braunschweig to see the facility where our robot vision designs were to be applied. As the director gave me a tour of the plant and showed me the computer rooms full of engineers and programmers, he spoke of the highly lucrative opportunities for an American Engineer who spoke fluent German. He then took me up into an observation deck over the production floor to see the fully automated manufacturing facility.
I looked down and saw an area the size of a foot ball field covered with fast moving machines and parts churning along. There wasn’t a soul visible, except a few people sitting up in control booths. As the director began his spiel about the efficiency of the factory, a sick feeling erupted in my stomach and I asked to be excused. I ran to the rest room and puked my guts out.
“What is going on?” I asked myself, and then returned to the observation deck. Glad to see me back he resumed his speech. And again I felt sick. I looked down and knew, “Something is wrong with this picture.”
After leaving, I biked back towards the University and stopped in one of the few green spots around Braunschweig. I sat down and cried, for the first time since loosing that tennis match in ninth grade. My chest heaved and I sobbed. I looked up after a while and saw the familiar face of Gabi, an architectural student, who I had met a week earlier.
“Hey, are you feeling alright?” She asked me.
“Yeah, I just… I just saw something that left me confused and feeling emotional.”
She invited me back to her house for dinner and we talked long into the night about what had happened at Volkswagon. As she heard my experience, she offered “Maybe automation isn’t the right direction for you to pursue.”
“Yeah, but I am here on this scholarship to study Mechanical Engineering, and…”
“Well you are enrolled in the University, right?”
“Yeah”
“Well you can take any classes you want to. German universities don’t demand that you only study your major. Some people stay in the University for years so that they can broaden their education to all areas.”
“But isn’t it too late in the semester to change classes?” I asked.
“No, you have until this Friday.”
“You mean I can study anything I want to?”
“Sure, what do you want to learn?”
“I want to study European History and more languages, things I never got to study in Undergraduate school.”
So we pulled out the University course book, and I morphed my life from one track to many. We laid in bed together, giggled and laughed and held each other intimately, but not sexually. I realized I had never done that before with a girl, and it felt warming to my being.
The next day I signed up for Russian language classes, European History, German Literature and a few other liberal arts courses. I still had to finish the German language proficiency program before I got credit for any of my other classes, but with the training I had under Frau Grunau, I easily passed.
Gradually I became enchanted with Braunschweig. I soon realized the School had a rock climbing club and an indoor wall. Instead of seeing the nearby smoke stacks, I focused on the enjoying the inner city and meeting people. Frau Bagh, my Russian teacher was an elderly Russian woman whose energy was amazingly vital. As the school only offered one Russian class and I wanted to learn more, I asked her if she would tutor me outside of class. She agreed and instead of paying her for the classes, she asked me if I would build a room for her in the attic of her townhouse. I soon found out that Frau Bagh was running a one lady international embassy for people trying to escape out from the iron curtain of both The Soviet Union and China.
Over the next few weeks, I met dozens of immigrants that she had helped gain residency in Germany. Before the attic room was even completed, Peter, a Russian man fresh across the border showed up. He had been working in East Germany as a civil engineer and decided to head south for Austria. As soon as he made it to Germany he called Frau Bagh who had helped other people he knew.
Peter slept on the couch in her apartment where “many people have for many years” as Frau Bagh often said. Along with building her an attic room I also helped her with shopping and other needs. Pretty soon I was spending as much time with the Bagh embassy project as I was at the University. One morning I took Peter with me to the supermarket. We were walking and talking as we entered the store. And then he was no longer with me. I turned back and saw him standing in tears at the entrance of the store, staring into the rows and rows of food and merchandise. I turned around and looked at what he saw. Abundance, he had never seen it before. As I walked over to him a tear formed in my eye for him. Feeling the tear, I immediately started to repress it, and then remembered, its OK to cry. I embraced him and took him on a his first western shopping spree.
Afterwards as he saw me sitting at the table struggling as Frau Bagh relentlessly grilled me on Russian vocabulary and grammar, he asked, “Scott, why on earth do you want to study Russian? You don’t want to go there, be glad you are here.”
I looked up at him and said, “The only way that that Iron Curtain is going to fall is if we establish industrial ties between the East and the West, and both sides can come to work together. If I can speak English, German and Russian then I can work between these worlds.”
Little did I know that the Iron Curtain was on the verge of collapsing.
The next night, November 8, 1989, I was hanging out in a bar with a few of the students from my German class. As midnight neared, everyone left except Pauool, one of the French exchange students and I. We ordered another round of beers and lauched into rambling/probing a socio-philosophical conversation that soon ended up in Berlin.
“Berlin!” he shouted over the clatter of the bar.
“Berlin!” I sounded back.
Then we looked at each other and shouted in Unison, “Gehen wir nach Berlin!”
And the next morning after our hangovers subsided we walked over to the Autobahn exit and started to hitchhike to Berlin. Neither one of us could believe what we saw, an endless traffic jam heading east towards the border with both western cars and many of the little East German ‘trabis’. The little two stroke engines of the trabis sounded like lawn mowers next to the efficient western cars.
“This is going to be easy.” Pauool said, and we walked from car to car, knocking on the windows and asking for a ride.
I walked up to a little trabi and an enthusiastic east German guy named Volker invited me in. Paul got in an Audi with someone from Hannover heading across the border.
“What is going on?” I asked “Why are there so many cars? What are you doing over here in West Germany?”
“Have you not heard,” he replied “the wall has come down! We are allowed to come to the west freely.”
After my initial shock, I looked at him and asked, “What are you doing going back? Didn’t you just get here?”
“Yes I came across early this morning, and now I am going home to Magdeburg.” He said flatly.
“Wait. You have been separated from the west, for…”
“My whole life.” He volunteered.
“And now you are going back? What have you gotten your dose of capitalism or what.”
“Yes, I used the greetings money to buy everything the west has to offer that I cannot get at home.” He said.
“And that being what?” I asked curiously.
He reached in the back seat and pulled out three Tina Turner albums.
“That’s it?” I asked totally perplexed.
“Nope, also got these.” And he pulled out a pineapple and bananas. “These are the only things that you have over here that I don’t back home.”
“You’re kidding, right?” I persisted.
“Well the only things that I am interested in.”
“What about the free life here, the movies, the abundance of material wealth, the culture, aren’t you even curious to experience it for a while?”
“No,” he answered emphatically, “I have many friends and a good life in Magdeburg. I don’t need much more.
I rode with Volker to the border where the guards made me get out and go through the gate with the other westerners. I jumped in the Audi with Pauool and we sped off towards Berlin. As we soon found out, the East German government had opened up the borders form easterners wanting to go west, but not for westerners wanting to go east.
“That’s strange.” Pauool noted. “I wonder why only one way.”
Berlin was surging with energy and commotion that we felt from far away. The driver asked us where we wanted to go. We looked at each other and again in unison said, The Brandenburg Gate. The old center of Berlin that for the last 25 years had been the focal point of tension between the east and west.
The driver took us to the 17th of June memorial about a mile away and we got out to walk from there. We joined the thousands of people converging on the vortex. It was just before dark. Still a few hundred meters from the wall, we could here the chorus of chants coming from the front.
“Die Mauer muss weg! Wir wollen rein!”
The wall must go! We want in!
We entered the throbbing mass of bodies and slowly made our way to the wall. We agreed to meet at a landmark at midnight if we got separated. I had a contact from IBM who had invited us to spend the night at his parents apartment. Pauool and I soon got separated and I found myself surrounded by people from all over the world. While the energy was moving us slowly towards the wall I started to feel something I had never before felt in a crowd. Everybody loved one other. No matter where I turned people offered me hugs and we shared shouts of joy. I saw Turkish people embracing Germans, Russians hugging Indians. All traces of nationality disappeared and all were one. My heart started to tingle and expand, I felt a high I had never felt before.
Soon I was up at the wall. I scrambled up and edged my way forward. The wall around the Brandenburg Gate was three meters thick, while the rest of the wall was only half a meter. Apparently someone had tried to crash through the wall in a truck years ago, so they fortified it. The wall made a semi-circle facing the actual Gate which was a hundred meters away in East Berlin. In front of the East German side was a battalion of several hundred armed soldiers blocking westerners from coming East. As I made my way to the front row, the chanting consumed me.
“Die Mauer muss weg! Wir wollen rein!”
“The wall must go! We want to come in!”
“Die Mauer muss weg! Wir wollen rein!”
I chanted with the mob for a half hour becoming part of the spectacle. I saw a few people lower themselves down and then be quickly escorted back up on the wall by the East German soldiers. Then I wondered why more people didn’t jump. Everybody was still on the wall, not going over. I chanted for a while longer, then worked myself up into a frenzy. “Die Mauer muss weg! Wir wollen rein!”
Then in an explosive motion, I launched myself up and out, back arched and arms spread, still screaming until I came slamming down onto the pavement three meters down. I felt my feet, poorly protected by flat bottomed Docksiders, crunch as I tucked and rolled. Pain shot up both my legs. When I came to a rest, I looked up and saw this barrel of a man waving a rifle come running up to me screaming, “Das war! Das war die schoenste sprung de ich je gesehen habe.”
“Oh no he’s gonna shoot me.” I thought as I rolled the other way.
Then the translation made it to my mind, “That was… That was the most beautiful jump I have ever seen!”
I looked at him again and he was smiling from cheek to cheek. “All night people have jumped and climbed down the wall, but no one like you did. You were all spread out like and eagle and you hovered up there like an angel.”
Just as he spoke the entire other side of the semicircle started spilling into East Berlin. The line of guards rushed forward to keep them contained, but there numbers grew. Soon several hundred people were swelling into what used to be termed no man’s land.
My guard helped me up and escorted me back to the wall. “Soon, soon enough we will all be free to cross this border.” He said and gave me a boost up onto the wall.
I sat there with my feet hanging off of the wall and watched the struggle between guards and the western crowd. Meanwhile my feet started throbbing. I pretended like it would go away, but shortly before midnight, when I tried to stand up, I could barely put weight on them. Using the shoulders of loving people, I crawled my way to the western side and looked at the ground so far away. I lowered my self as far down as I could hang, and then tried to psyche myself up to let go. My feet cried out in protest, but there was nothing else to do. Finally I let go and just before my feet hit the ground, I was caught in mid air by two giant Polish guys who merrily carried me around as they danced and sang songs of joy. I motioned them over to a bench where Pauool and I were to meet and they gently set me down as if I was a fragile doll. I wondered if they knew I was injured.
Only a few minutes later, Pauool showed up with Randal, a Canadian student from our German class. We sat and exchanged stories until the bitter night air motivated us to seek shelter. I tried to walk, but my feet refused. Pauool and Randal helped me along as we made our way to a taxi who took us to my friend’s apartment.
That night I laid in bed and felt my whole body vibrating like it never had before. As I shut my eyes I kept seeing the picture of everyone loving one another. I hoped my feet would be better by morning, but they weren’t. The next day my friends took me to the hospital for x-rays which showed that nothing broken, just severely bruised. They gave me a pair of crutches, but even with those, I could hardly move. So I returned to Jan’s house and got to witness the next few days of jubilee on the TV in his parents living room. During those days, while Pauool and Randal were roaming around the city, I kept having visions of the first night, all loving all.
Already by the second day, the mood had shifted. The pure euphoria had lifted and tension between different nationalities was visible on the TV. Pauool and Randal reported the same, the energy was still high but a nothing like the first night. We stayed in Berlin for a few more days until I was able to hobble along with crutches and then we hitched back to Braunshweig.
Torres del Paine in the Southern tip of Patagonia is at the end of the world. It’s an empire of granite walls that does battle with the Gods. As a climber, if you have a strain, one gene, a trickle of big wall blood in your body, it will run pure to the heart when you step off the bus and see the three spires of Paine. Mesmerized you start walking, talking to the Guanacos as you are drawn to the base. You ignore the howling wind that slaps you in the face, the gray swirling lenticulars, and fear that sends trekkers running on a circuit that never comes near the towers themselves. In the stunted lenya tree forest below the glaciated cirque, where the leaves’ shadows dance thrashing to the music of the wind, you stop, and embrace the international tribe, a micro-culture of big wall climbers who have sold cars, quit jobs, said good-bye to lovers and hauled hundreds of pounds of otherwise useless gear to live in crude wooden shacks at the base of the towers. All for the slight possibility that the horrendous weather will break for a day so they can share the summit dream. Life at Campamento Torres is climbing extreme.
Cameron, Mike and I stepped off the bus at the park entrance, still twenty miles from the base of the three Torres, just in time for the clouds to break and for us to catch a peak of the enormous towers. No team had ever climbed all three towers of Paine in one season. That was our first goal. Beyond that, we wanted to establish several new routes on some of the smaller, unclimbed towers. We had arrived a few days after Christmas and planned to stay until mid March.
We spent the first few days hiking gear and food up to our base camp at Campamento Torres. Our first priority was to repair an old wooden refugio which had been left by previous climbers and battered to pieces by the fierce winds. The work kept us focused and warm as the storm didn’t cease for the first 10 days. The temperature at the camp hovered just above freezing during the day and dropped rapidly at night. We each had separate tents to sleep in, but the refugio became our home.
We baked bread, ate lots and planned our summit strategy. The North tower was the most accessible. The west side of the 2,000 foot spire was streaked with vertical cracks, many of which had been climbed before and were of moderate grade. We decided to anticipate the end of the storm, hike up into the west side valley set up advanced base camp and prepare to charge the moment the storm lifted.
Patagonia is renowned for some of the best big wall climbing in the world, but its reputation of having the worst weather in the world is even more famous. In the archives of climbing magazines, are numerous stories of teams sitting through the entire southern hemisphere summer and only being gifted a couple days of climbable weather. But in those same articles are the stories of the impeccable cracks on flawless granite that made the wait worthwhile. The historical weather patterns in Torres del Paine provided 36 to 48 hour windows of clear weather between fierce storms.
The question for us was, when do we anticipate the end of the storm. If we leave too early, then we risk running out of food at our advanced base camp. If we leave too late, we might miss the window of clear skies.
When were one of the first teams to arrive at Campamento Torres. As the storm persisted, other teams from around the world arrived on a daily basis. We were soon surrounded by Germans, Austrians, Japanese and Chilean teams. Each team had their method of weather forecasting. The Germans had a barometer which they watched with scientific vigilance. The Chilean team watched the sky for the Condors, “When the big bird flies high, the skies will clear.” Said Pablo Besser from the Chilean team.
Another member of the Chilean team asked us how we knew when the end of the storm was near. Cameron, Mike and I looked at each other. We really had no idea, but in unison, we replied “Instinct.”
As the days passed and the storm persisted we observed as first the Germans and then the Chileans each psyched themselves up and departed only to come back a few days later to wait again.
As the days drew into weeks, the three of began to get on each others nerves.
Cameron and I had been climbing partners for four years, but we had never lived together. We were an odd couple for sure, but on the wall we inspired one another and pushed our limits. We met in Yosemite Valley on my birthday in 1992 and within an hour were on our way to climb Separate Reality, a famous roof crack that soars 600 feet off the valley floor. They say timing is everything, and in our case it had been just right. He was an experienced big-wall aid climber, strong as an ox, with honed skills in the technical aspects of wall climbing. He aspired to become a better free climber and to start climbing the big walls fast and free, without using aid climbing techniques.
I was a sport climber from the East coast and had honed my skills on the short steep sandstone wall of the New River Gorge in West Virginia. I had led my share of traditional routes and actually loved the adrenalin rush of being up above natural gear. I longed to be way up off the ground on the big walls of the West coast.
After our first day climbing together, we decided to put our partnership to the test. We tackled Astroman, another Valley hardman classic that soars 1200 feet off the deck. We woke up before dawn, drove to the base, and sat in the car constructing tape gloves to protect the back of our hands from the rough granite cracks. For inspiration I turned on Enya, Shepard Moon.
Cameron stopped what he was doing and stared at me. “Enya? We’re listening to Enya to get fired up to climb?”
“Yeah.” I answered sinking into the meditation of the lyrical music.
“Dude you are the strangest climber I have ever met.” He chuckled in amusement.
We cruised up the classic route and for the next three years, despite our differences, just kept on cruising bigger and harder routes and climbing them faster and faster.
Cameron lived on the East side of the Rockies in Boulder Colorado and I lived on the West side in Salt Lake City, Utah. We both lived to climb, yet each hung on to a thread of professional life that funded and continually interfered with our ambition to climb. I was an environmental engineer and he was studying to become a metallurgical engineer. We both aspired to the day when we could step out of the corporate world completely and truly devote ourselves to climbing.
Although we both climbed daily with local climbing partners, we met sporadically for big adventures. On the wall I shared free climbing technique with Cameron and he constantly tutored me on the technical aspects of wall climbing. Our strengths complimented each other and we constantly rose to the occasion.
On Thanksgiving weekend in 1993 we met in Moab Utah to climb my first aid route, the Briar Rabbit on the Cottontail, a 1200 foot tower of mixed mud and rock in an enchanted place called the Fisher towers. The first day we climbed 400 feet and left fixed ropes. We returned the second day to push for the summit. Climbing by headlamp a hundred feet below the summit at 11 p.m. in sub zero degree weather on mud that crumbled beneath our fingers, I melted into a useless heap of fear. When it came time for me to lead my pitch, I froze.
As he handed handing me over all of the gear, he noticed something was wrong. My ego was too big to ask, so he volunteered. “Do you want me to lead your pitch?”
After a simple nod from me he climbed off on the lead end of the rope. An hour later as we sat on the summit, beneath a billion stars, I told him I owed him one, although I couldn’t ever imagine Cameron backing off of any climb.
But less than a year later, midway up the King of Swords on the Diamond, a seldom repeated 1200 foot route that tops out at 14,000 feet on Long’s Peak in Colorado I had my chance to return the favor.
Our journey started at 1 a.m. when we left Cameron’s house in Boulder. For inspiration I blasted the agro music of Henry Rollins “Liar.”
“What happened to Enya?” He asked mockingly. But he knew what had happened. I was fueled by a different fire than before. My heart had been torn open stomped on, and left to rot. Within me the fire raged and I focused it all onto the rock. Within a span of four months I made the a quantum leap from good climber to elite climber. Cameron and I became climbing machines, racing up routes with the speed and grace we once thought only possible by those untouchable few.
At 3 a.m. we started hiking up the 10 mile approach , in the pre-dawn light scrambled up the snow pack to he base of the rock and just as the sky turned blue began scrambling up the 600 foot approach chimney below the route. About 500 feet up, we realized were in the wrong chimney and were forced to scramble out onto the face and climb an extra 600 feet on terrifying low angle slabs with hardly a handhold and poor protection. While I was in the middle of the most exposed section, some climbers above us, unaware that we were below, knocked loose a few good sized boulders that screamed passed me and sliced open the back of my hand. It was 9:30 a.m. by the time we reached the base of The King of Swords, three hours behind schedule. We were shaken, but still fired up. Cameron led the first pitch, then I followed with the second. On the third pitch I saw him hesitate, look down a few more times than normal. He stopped on the tip of a mini spire and shouted down. “It doesn’t look good. I’m not sure where the route goes.”
I pulled out the photocopy of the route topo, saw that it wandered up and right and told him. He looked at sky, mist from below was rising to form clouds and the sun was already almost directly overhead.
I could read his mind. Cameron was a veteran of many routes on the Diamond including a winter solo ascent. He had warned me about the unpredictable weather.
“Maybe we should bail.” He shouted down, “I’ll set up an anchor here.”
I couldn’t believe he was even considering retreating. Maybe I was naive, maybe I didn’t know the severity of being a few hours late. But maybe I just needed to shift the energy, to get us back on edge. I climbed up to meet him and offered to climb ahead and check out the wandering pitch.
I knew the success of our climb hinged not on the difficulty of climbing that I encountered, but on how I portrayed that difficulty to Cameron below me. As I moved up and out around the curved wall, I ran into a series of thin ledges that disappeared into a blank looking face. I put in a solid piece of gear and headed into the mist.
From his position, Cameron was unable to see the features of the rock. So I started lying. “Awe, it looks awesome!” As I stopped to wedge in a tiny steel nut into a thin seam, I confidently told him I had found fixed gear from a previous team. His energy shifted almost immediately and he sent me up encouragement, which I soon needed as the climbing got harder and harder. Finally I reached a crack system that lead up to the distinctive corner which marked the route. I breathed a sigh, as I yelled off belay.
“You lying sack of shit.” I heard him accuse me as he climbed past the supposed fixed gear. But by the time he reached the belay he was grinning and ready to tackle the crux pitches ahead.
We finished the route without a fall and made it back down to the car by 11 p.m. hallucinating with the dancing lights of our headlamps.
Climbs like the King of Swords were our training ground for Torres del Paine. The differences being, towers of Paine were bigger, farther away, subject to more fierce weather and we decided to climb them as a team of three.
I barely knew Mike. He and Cameron had met while I was in Alaska for the Summer and climbed well together. Like Cameron, he was a dominant alpha-male mountaineer. And to him, no matter what my resume read, I was still a sport climber who didn’t belong in the mountains.
Mike was a mountaineering demi-god, raised in the high Sierra, he had been raised within the old guard of climbers with crampons strapped to his feet. Broad chested and tireless, he had been dubbed the Lung with Legs. And with the name he carried an ego the size of Mount Whitney. Within a few days of arriving at Campamento Torres, he made it clear that he was there on his own agenda,
“I want you guys to know that just because we came down here together, doesn’t mean we will climb together. Other friends of mine might show up down here and if they do, I will probably climb with them.”
“No problem dude.” I replied, fully confident that Cameron and I really didn’t need a third partner anyway.
But when none of the superstars Mike was expecting showed up, we committed to climb as a group of three. I could only hope that we climbed together better as a threesome than we got along as hut mates. Outside of our climbing agenda we had little to nothing in common. They listened to Tom Petty and Big Head Todd and the Monsters, while I grooved on ambient techno, trance and tribal tunes. Luckily we found common ground in Phish , Sublime and Soul Coughing.
When the weather showed signs of clearing, a week later, we moved to an advanced base camp on the west side of the towers. The glacier-carved valley along the west side of the towers is barren, boulder strewn wind tunnel. We set up our tent behind a large boulder and still felt like we might be blown away from the frequent gusts. For three days we sat and waited for our window of good weather. At two a.m. each night we took turns sticking our heads out the window to search for stars. I was on watch the third night. I peeked out ready to get pelted by sand and snow and saw a sky full of stars above.
“Wake up boys! We’re going rock climbing!” I screamed to roust the others.
We spent the next half hour preparing tape gloves to protect our hands, cooking up some oats and reshuffling the gear. By three a.m. we were on our way.
A half-mile long low-angle slab of granite surrounds the base of the towers west side. Under ideal conditions, the slab could easily be scrambled up, but now layers of ice and snow covered it. Fortunately previous teams had left fix line up most of it for us to ascend.
The Lung with Legs was already a few hundred feet up by the time I reached the slabs. Cameron was just beginning.
“That guy isn’t much into waiting around, is he?” I remarked.
Cameron looked down and shook his head.
A few hours later we reached the base of the north tower, picked a line and took off. The rock was superb, the climbing fun and our climbing adventure had finally begun. Nine hours after leaving the deck we summited, shared a brief celebration and rappelled down.
We made it back down to the ground after 12 long raps from the summit of the North Tower of Paine. Although off the ‘rock’ we were hardly on the ‘ground.’ The three Towers of Paine are solid plugs of granite that shoot out of the top of glacier covered mountains on the southern tip of Chile. To get back to the ‘ground’ we still had to pack all our gear around a cirque, out along the knife blade ridge and then carefully descend the half-mile long ice-covered slab that lead us down to the valley floor. From there, a six hour hike separated us from the nearest living plant life and our home at Campamento Torres.
Cameron went to retrieve our packs from where we had started climbing 9 hours earlier while the Lung and I coiled ropes. When Cameron returned we distributed the gear between our packs. The Lung picked up each of the packs to weigh them, then proclaimed, “Lefty, yours is the lightest.” And then he threw me the heavy 60 meter lead rope.
I protested briefly and he retorted, “You gotta carry your share sport climber.”
“Hello! You guys are both, what 20-30 pounds heavier than me.” I said, but he was already walking away. I looked at Cameron for support but he simply said, “Come on lefty, carry the rope.” And he too started hiking down.
“Assholes” I muttered under my breath as I packed up the rope.
I dreaded that hike down. Although admittedly slower than the Lung, I could hike up hill for days, but going down with a heavy pack worked me, particularly my right knee.
Ever since my sophomore year college, when I was a triathlete, the outer corner of my knee occasionally swelled up and hurt. As a triathlete I avoided it by training in the pool and on my bike more than running. But for the past couple years of big wall climbing, hiking in and out big loads to remote corners of the planet, the pain had become quite intense.
I had visited several orthopedic doctors who had all given me differing yet deluded prognoses. “You are too old” (when I was in my mid twenties); “You have scarring on the inside of the knee cap that needs to be scraped off”; and most recently, “You have Condro Malasia, an inflamation of the knee caused by an misalignment of the bones”. They all wanted to operate on it, but I had refused solely on the principal that it works fine for days or weeks on end and then hurts.
Within the last year the pain had become a constant nuisance until I visited a cyro-massage therapist who combined ice treatment with muscular manipulation. After a brief look, she hypothesized that the skeletal imbalance was caused by a muscular imbalance, due to overdeveloped lateral quad muscles and weak inner thigh muscles. She pointed to the tough wall of muscle that encased my quad, of which I was quite proud, and said, “Your illiotibial track is welded, its always in tension and thus always pulling your knee out of alignment.”
In one treatment she alleviated the pain. It came back a few days later as the muscle memory engaged. But within a few sessions the condition was completely gone.
However, my cyro therapist was far away right now. Before I had made it mid-way around the cirque, my right knee pain reappeared and I knew that the hike down would be torturous. I looked ahead and saw the Lung and Cameron already heading out along the knife blade ridge. Immediately below me was a giant cirque of ice. My eyes followed it down to the valley almost a mile below. It was so smooth. How nice it would be to just slide down the snow field and end up on the valley floor.
I dismissed the idea and took a couple more steps. The pain in my knee flared. I looked ahead. The Lung and Cameron were almost at the tip of the ridge already. “Whatever happened to companionship”?
I took a few more steps and then looked again down the cirque. Maybe it wasn’t so far fetched. I traced a path down the bowl and saw it was clear until a break about mid-way down. And then from there it looked clean to the bottom as well. “It must be some kind of a little cliff or something.” I said to myself. “Maybe I could slide down to the cliff band, climb down it and then slide the rest of the way. I wonder how big the cliff is.”
The Lung appeared from behind a boulder out on the ridge. From there he could see the cliff.
“Hey Mike!” I screamed and pointed down the cirque. “How big is that cliff!”
“Pretty big!” He screamed back.
“How big!”
“Twenty or thirty feet.”
“Ahh, that’s not that big.” I said to myself.
“Yeah. If I can find a sharp rock to drag in the ice behind me I can slide down there, stop and down climb thirty feet and then slide to the bottom.”
My knee agreed with me.
I looked around for a suitable rock. Took off my pack, straddled it like a horse and tried out my theory. I slid a few feet and then easily stopped myself with the rock.
“No problem!” I said and pushed off down the slope. I slowed myself once with the rock, then hit a patch of ice and took off like lightning. I tried to brake with the rock and it was instantly ripped out of my hands.
As I sped towards the cliff, I crouched low on the pack, focused and ushered forth a primal scream. I shot over the cliff and rubble directly below it, desperately clinging to my pack. The last thing I wanted was to have to hike back up the cirque and retrieve it. I landed hard on the smooth slope forty-feet downhill from the cliff, and bounced off the pack, but managed to keep it tight in my grip. With powder flying, I sped down the slope, spinning around and around until I was able to clamber back on top of the pack and ride her down like a boogie boarder having just caught a mile long wave.
As I finally came to a stop and the snow settled around me I looked up and saw a large German figure running towards me.
“Das war! Das war der schnellste abstieg den ich je gesehen habe!”
Was I having a flashback?
No. It was Carston the Bavarian adventurer, who had taught us how to make bread. He came running up to me and patted me on the back.
“Crazy Man! That was the fastest descent I have ever seen!”
“Uhh, yeah…” I said “Faster than rappelling the slabs, huh?”
We looked up and saw Mike and Cameron just beginning the long descent.
“While we wait for them, can I offer you some hot soup?” He offered and we walked over to his camp beneath a boulder.
Some hours later Mike and Cameron came to join us. Cameron entered camp first. “You crazy bastard!” he said with a big grin on his face.
Mike entered, looked around solemnly and later said, “That was risky.”
Another storm kept us holed up at Campamento Torres and I had time to ponder. Mike was right, my glacier slide was risky. I had gotten lucky and walked away with only a few tears in my Gortex shell. But one rock, a crevasse or any number of things might have easily ended my life or at least ended the expedition with an epic rescue. My knee was still bothering me and it was clear that I needed to do something about it fast.
I conceded to the reality of the situation, either I heal myself or I quit the expedition. Quitting was out of the question, so I committed to healing my body.
I wandered up into the solitude of the cirque below the towers to begin my healing process. As I walked I recalled how injuries had plagued my entire athletic career. As an aspiring junior Olympic gymnast in high school, I broke my ankle two weeks before nationals. Two years into climbing, I developed carpal tunnel syndrome just as I was breaking into the elite 5.13 difficulty range. Then a tick bite in 1989 infected me with viral meningitis in Germany just as I was about to start climbing again. After that elbow tendonitis kept me from pulling hard for two more years. A year ago, just as I completed a winter season system training with a coach in Bavaria, I pulled a tendon in my ring finger. And now the flaring knee pains.
Each injury had struck just as I was on the verge of succeeding in major athletic accomplishments. But each injury also guided me into complete life changes which all shaped the being I had become. For a moment I lingered on the idea that, the injuries had happened for a reason, and then I cast out the absurd notion.
“That’s ridiculous.” I muttered to myself. “I am not going to let this weakness prevent me from climbing these towers.”
Ever since the tendonitis in my elbow, I had intuitively known that movement held the key to healing. In Germany I experimented by twisting my arm in unusual positions and then moving it through different ranges of motion to ease the pain. But at that time I never had the focus and the commitment to unravel the mystery. But now I had both.
I placed my focus on my right knee. The cryo-massage therapist I had worked with had used ice and physical manipulation to release tension in the surrounding muscles to eliminate the pain in my knee. It made sense. Bound energy form years of extreme, repetitive use had to be freed. The question was how could I achieve the same results without being able to physically manipulate the muscles and apply hot/cold packs on myself.
I shifted back into engineering mind set. The muscles held tension with bioelectric energy. In order to release the muscle memory, she had applied physical, kinetic, and thermal energies.
My thought process was simple. I knew I had more energy than my therapist, and I knew that all energy was transferable, so all I had to do was figure out a way to focus all my energy into the particular muscles that needed to be released.
With that conclusion, I began to dance. I moved through slow, deliberate sequences of motion and observed intently. Having studied robotics in college, I viewed my bones as a system of linkages. The muscle/tendon structure was like the servo motors that control the position of linkages on a robot. In robotics we had used inverse kinematics to determine the angles necessary to move each linkage for the end of the robotic arm to arrive at an exact point in space. I applied the same theory to my body intuitively to determine what postures I had to place myself in to draw all the energy into and out of a target muscle group. As I gently moved through sequential muscle contractions, I noted the specific movements which focused the energy into and out of the tense muscles on my outer thigh, buttocks and lower back.
Dancing in this manner on top of a large flat rock underneath three of the mightiest towers of granite in the world, I lost track of time. For hours I moved into stillness and back into motion. I manipulated each and every limb, including fingers, toes, head, jaws and eyeballs to pinpoint the exact position of my entire skeleton to draw all the energy out of a specific muscle. When I felt the muscle was completely drained, I relaxed and allowed my body to reverse the motion and lead me into an inverse kinesthetic position, in which every muscle that had been contracted was now released and the muscles that had been stretched were now contracted.
Over time I noticed the sequence of contractions between the extremes played a crucial role in the way the energy flooded into and out of the target muscle. To compact the energy into the target muscle, I initiated the movement at my extremities and zeroed into the target. To drain the target muscle, I initiated movement at the center and moved out towards the extremes..
As the sun began to set, I descended to our base camp. My pains were still with me, but I had gained crucial insights into the mystery of my body. The next morning I headed straight up into the cirque to continue my journey within. I repeated the series of motions that flooded energy from my extremities into my tense muscles. Each day I looked deeper and deeper within. Soon I was visualizing the flow of energy through individual muscle fibers rather than entire muscle groups.
While exploring I let my imagination be free. I visualized the muscle fibers to be long systems of water pipes that were clogged in the specific areas. Each time I moved through a series of expansions and contractions, I imagined sending a flood of water through the pipes to clear out the blockage. Within the muscle, I realized there must be thousands of individual muscle fibers, and clearing each one required similar yet slightly different motions.
As the days rolled on I noticed distinct patterns in the movements I was creating. Rather than linear motions, I was following spiral motions very similar to that of a flower blossoming. For two weeks while overcast skies loomed overhead, I immersed myself in my unwinding process. So fascinated was I in the constant discoveries I was making that I never became discouraged even though the pain in my knee still flared up every evening as I slowly and painfully made the long descent back down to our camp.
Without realizing it I was also developing a certain level of detachment which made the constant flow of drama and bickering that persisted in the camp seem suddenly very comical. Without me to project their egos onto, I now noticed Cameron and Mike bickering between each other. It was almost as if I wasn’t even there.
Over the weeks my healing dance had become more coordinated with my visualization. Rather than directing my movements and calculating the exact sequence of muscular contractions, I began to follow an intuitive flow. I moved and breathed rhythmically and relaxed into a state of peaceful awareness.
One morning after several hours passed timelessly, I spiraled upward and came to stillness. I visualized the energy at my extremities, and then glanced up to the sky. High above several condors circled and between them the clouds parted slightly, allowing a glimmer of sunlight to beam down upon me for the first time in more days than I could remember. The moment lingered and I experienced a feeling of immense joy. As I started the series of contractions that led me to the next inverse kinesthetic position something magical happened.
As I visualized the pulse of water flooding down along the channel of pipes leading to the stiffened muscle fibers in my lower back, I suddenly felt a real pulse of energy that flowed through my body exactly where I imagined it to be. At first I thought I was imagining it, but after a few minutes it was unmistakable. The pulse, about the size of a small lemon, radiated and tingled with warmth. It followed the exact channels that I had visualized, and wherever it went I felt a soothing release in my muscles. As the pulse bounced back and forth through my body, I soon realized that it was guiding me and I was following its journey.
I was mystified, mesmerized. I had spent seven years studying the higher sciences and had explored every type of energy known to man. This mysterious pulse defied them all. What was it? For half an hour I remained in a state of rapture, allowing the pulse of energy to circulate through and heal my body. After cleansing the muscle fibers responsible for unbalancing my knee, I shifted my attention to my shoulder and the energy ball guided me through a completely new set of movements that strengthened and healed my rotator cuff syndrome.
For a short time afterward, the pulse of energy seemed to take on its own identity and we literally danced together. It spiraled up and down my body as I moved in ways I never knew possible. Then it came to the tip of my fingers and simply vanished into thin air. I was ecstatic and super-charged. I wasn’t sure what had happened, but I knew I had been healed.
I jumped off the rock, and sprinted and darted up through the boulders with youthful vitality. And I didn’t feel a twinge of pain. Circling around a large house shaped rock I came upon a wind sheltered flat area with a few tufts of grass and a single wild flower growing in it. Despite the ominous weather, the flower had a beautiful purple bloom. I stopped, knelt down and marveled at the flower. I was nearly a mile above the nearest plant life, and here is a flower. How strange, and how perfect.
I laid down, felt the warmth of the hidden sun radiating off of the dark rock and let my mind wander. I didnt know it at the time, but I had just forever changed. Until that moment, I was a rationalist. I believed in science. Although I called myself agnostic, I was a Darwinist aetheist. I believed in evolution as a natural scientific progression of a life on earth unguided by any greater power or being.
Science had unraveled all of the earthly mysteries and debunked all of the experiences that less intelligent peoples had explained through the creation of gods and myths. Even my own healing, I had engineered by applying concrete physiological theories. To heal was no miracle. But the nature of that pulse of energy… What was it? Where did it come from?. Would it return?
I held out my hands and felt a faint glow in my fingertips that drew my awareness upwards. Again I saw two condors flying high above and I suddenly remembered the words of the Chilean climber Pablo Besser, “When the condor flies high the time to climb is nigh.”
Whoa!! I looked over and the giant central tower seemed to call me. I jumped up and bounded down towards camp. The lifting clouds were not yet visible from below and I found Cameron and Mike huddled in the Refugio, intently watching a loaf of bread in the oven.
When Mike saw me he asked, What the Hell are you so excited about?
“The most amazing thing just happened to me, I was up in the cirque stretching and all of a sudden this pulse of energy came into my body. It moved through me as I moved like this.” I said and launched into a demo of the healing dance I had learned. “The pulse of energy cruised through my body and wherever it went… it healed me.”
Mike looked over at Cameron. They both smirked and Mike calmly said, “Dude, it sounds like you have been up there by yourself for too long. Maybe you make a supply trip.”
“What are you talking about?” I protested. “I have been up there learning to heal myself and now I am healed. Check it out my knee is fully functional.”
They both remained silent. I looked to Cameron for support, but all he said was, “A pulse of energy?”
“Yeah man. I was moving and visualizing and all of a sudden this glowing pulse of energy came into my body and I wherever it went it healed me.”
They both grinned.
“I am serious you guys. I am healed. Check it out, no pain, full movement. I am ready to climb”.
“I don’t know Lefty” Cameron continued, “Maybe you should take a trip back down to Nogales, buy groceries and hang out with the kids at the hostel for a while.
“Nope, tomorrow we climb! The clouds are lifting.” I said
“What did the pulse of energy tell you the weather too?” Mike said with a laugh.
Almost on queue a blast of wind and sheets of hail rattled our hut.
“Well if you are not going down, then I am heading down.” Mike said and cast Cameron a ‘you can hang out with the lunatic look.’
Nothing was the same since returning from Patagonia. Sure I was still a fanatic nomad climber and had a tick list of routes and first ascents all over the Rocky Mountains and great basin that I wanted to climb, but I was forever changed.
I was now guided by the spirit of Elongar and the vision of Roraima. Except knowing it was somewhere in the Grand Savanna of Venezuela, I had no idea where Roraima was or how to get there, but I knew that I was going to climb it.
Between moments of focus on the rock, I spent more and more time doing Elongar, playing with energy, and moving pulses of this mysterious healing substance through my body. Six months had passed since my first experience harnessing the healing energy in the cirque below the towers of Paine. My ability to harness the energy on command had grown significantly from my initially attempts. Already I had established the connection between the movements, the breath, the visualization and the need to follow rather than lead the healing dance. The act of following, I envisioned as essential for entering the trance, getting my mind out of the way to allow the force to guide my motions.
Within a month of landing back on American soil, I headed back to Alaska for another salmon season and ended up fishing in Bristol Bay, for an intense six- week experience. Every day we entered the arctic rodeo, a grueling 12 hour “opener” when thousands of boats were allowed to toe the line, i.e. fish as close as they could to some arbitrary longitude set by the fish and game department to meet the rush of salmon, and haul in as many fish as possible. Never in my life had I seen anything as arcane and brutal as the Bristol Bay fish slaughter. Sheer greed and power transformed the placid bay into a churning cauldron of aluminum boats and whitewater.
Whereas salmon fishing in Kodiak Alaska was guided by a strong etiquette and proper action, Bristol Bay was a battlefield where the fastest, strongest boats charged the front line, often running over the nets of other boats. It was a savage fishery, but who was I to judge, I too was there to earn a quick buck.
In the evening while other deck hands played cards and smoked cigs, I spent hours out on the deck of the boat moving with the rhythm of the waves, practicing bringing the energy to my hands and through different parts of my body.
Midway through the season I tweeked my back while pulling in a full net of fish during a storm. That evening, while everyone else slept, I decided to apply the self healing. This was my first chance to apply Elongar to heal an acute injury.
I spent several minutes simply moving. Then I focused on flooding the strained muscle fibers with life energy. Within my mind I created the visualization of the in flowing energy bringing fresh blood, nutrients and magical healing power and the out flowing energy carrying away damaged tissue, pain and anything that needed to be released from the shoulder.
I struggled with my initial efforts as I had to apply the inverse kinesthetics to figure out the proper motions that directed the energy from my entire body through the newly injured area. Once I isolated the pathways to my back and knew precisely what movements guided the energy there, I had to turn my mind off. Until I relinquished mental control, the action was merely physical and visual. Slowly however I made progress, entered the trance and felt the magical flow of life energy ebbing and flowing through my body. With concentration I focused the energy into concentrated pulses and allowed them to soothe my injured muscles. Within a few hours I felt the healing process complete.
The next morning I woke up with barely a twinge of pain left from the severe strain only 10 hours before. I smiled to myself, even as the other deck hands made fun of me, imitating my strange movements of the night before.
It was easy for me to ignore their reaction. We came from different walks of life, outside of fishing and drinking, we didn’t have too much in common.
What did the captain make of my daily Elongar practice on the deck of his boat? Occasionally he watched for a few moments and then he’d shake his head and turn away. He thought I was a complete freak. But personal opinions of each other mattered little on the small boat. I respected his role as captain and he respected my role as competent, psyched, motivated, deck hand. We were there to catch fish, as many as possible in the short six week season when the schools of salmon rush around the Aleutians on the way to small spawning lakes.
At the end of the season my captain gave me a fat check, we shook hands and knew that we would never see each other again.
I returned from Alaska just in time to see my sister give birth to my nephew Kieran in Sacramento. My parents were in town as well and we had a joyous family reunion, celebrating the first creation of life in our family since my birth thirty years before. During my visit with family, I only had a little time to share the mystery of Elongar as all our energy was focused on little Kieran. Little did we know at the time, this little being who we soon found out to be “suffering” from cerebral palsy, was really an ascended master, who chose to come back in his condition in order to teach us important life lessons.
One day out for a walk along the river, my Dad mentioned his hands were cold and I showed him some movements he could do while walking to bring warming energy to his hands. They all broke out into laughter as I let spirals of movement flow down my arms.
“If you think I am going to walk around waving my hands like a lunatic, you are out of your mind.” He said.
For a moment they all imitated the movements and then broke out laughing again.
“Scott, if you are going to do that, could you walk ahead of us. We don’t want people to think we are weird.” My sister said jokingly, but not really joking.
So I kept my arms at my side like a good boy.
Back in Salt Lake City the agenda was climbing as usual. New routes to be done on limestone crags out at Pequop on the Nevada border, amazing pocketed red granite far south in the Henry Mountains and scary new big wall routes to be put up in the ominous Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado.
Beyond the immediate goal of these local new routes, everything I did became training for my next big adventure down to the grand savannah of Venezuela. Of course I still had no idea where these mysterious towers were, or how I was going to get there or who if anybody would be psyched to go down there with me. Over the summer I had written letters to a few of the European climbers who had been down to climb Tepuis in Venezuela, but I never got a reply.
I was met within a few days of returning to Salt Lake City by Kent Wheeler by one time boss and bigwall climbing mentor. Kent had just become a father to baby Maya and we both shared the glow of witnessing the creation of life. Moments later we were on our way to Idaho to climb the pristine granite at Elephants Perch in the Sawtooth Mountains. During the road trip, I downloaded stories about my adventures over the last year, Patagonia, the discovery of Elongar, my breakup with Cameron and Mike, and the adventures in northern Chile and Alaska. Kent laughed and grinned ear to ear as he soaked up my adventures vicariously. As a new father, his climbing adventures would be limited to weekend excursions, at least for a few years.
As I told him about the mysterious energy work and spirit of Elongar, I waited in anticipation to hear his experiencial wisdom, but he had none. He simply shrugged his shoulders and we carried on to the next topic. Kent’s love for climbing and his love for me were unconditional. He wouldn’t have cared if I had grown a tail or sprouted wings while on my journey, he was happy for me to have made it home safe so we could climb together again.
My reception from the rest of the Salt Lake climbing community was less gracious. Although psyched about my climbing achievements, many climbers gave me that familiar vacant look of disbelief, whenever I mentioned anything about spirit or and healing energy. I learned to keep the mysterious energy of Elongar to myself. The few times that I started doing Elongar in the gym or at the crag, I noticed people giving me strange looks, frowning and later avoiding me. Climbers who I once considered friends slowly pulled away, and labeled me as a metaphysical freak.
This alienation wouldn’t have been so bad if, at the time I had another family of friends or group of people that I could openly share my newly discovered passion with. But the climbing community was all I had. After Eight years of living for rock climbing, I barely knew a soul outside of this extended family. The concept of a sangha, or spiritual family of compassionate beings who honor and empower one another to be who they are, simply didn’t exist in my vocabulary or my world view.
Of course there were exceptions to this unspoken estrangement within the climbing community. Seeing me move energy, a few of my Australian mates were less covert in their reactions, exclaiming loudly, “Lefty you’ve fully lost it now. You’re a full on quack.” Coming from Australians, however, I knew this to be a complement as all Ausies are proudly quacked one way or another.
So at least I still had a few mates to go swilling with at the pubs, but I needed to find a new bigwall climbing partner. I had learned from experience that unstable Aussies, despite talent and strength, weren’t necessarily the best comrades for life threatening adventure climbs.
Finding a bigwall climbing partner is like finding a soul mate. You have to be able to live together, 24/7, travel together, sleep side by side, wake up at four in the morning, see each others bad sides, and then go climb together -- all with perfect synergy. And only on the wall, when it gets really scary, do peoples real monsters come out.
Cameron and I were surely an odd couple together, but on the wall our partnership worked. We had met randomly in Camp 4 at Yosemite. What were my odds of meeting another climbing partner with whom I shared the same psych, motivation, skill, strength and synergy? Pretty grim in Salt Lake City, I thought. So I started traveling to other climbing areas, hoping to randomly meet more open minded climbers.
As the months rolled by, and the Salt Lake scenario repeated itself wherever I went, I became haunted by phrases, “You are crazy.” or “Hey, there’s that nutcase guy.” Slowly I learned to isolate my spiritual beliefs and practices until I became a closet energetic being. The drain of living in denial was intense. I empathized with closet homosexuals all over the world. At least gays and lesbians had people to share their sexual tendencies with. I was completely alone with my spiritual beliefs.
Slowly the continual alienation began to eat away at my soul, devour my self confidence. I began to question myself whether I really was crazy. Maybe I had lost it. Maybe this strange sensation that I felt flowing through my body was truly a figment of my imagination. Maybe it didn’t even exist. Was I becoming schizophrenic?
Occasionally over the next few months I found the solitude to practice Elongar and once again truly feel the vital life energy course through my body. “Yes, I had healed myself of injuries with this energy, right? It’s here; I can feel it, right? So what if I am the only one who can feel it. I am not crazy; am I?”
Doubts started gaining momentum in my psyche. I needed to find other people who identified with me, who shared knowledge or insight to this mysterious substance. Ten months had passed since my first encounters with the spirit of Elongar, and I hadn’t met a soul except my friend Patti, the Chilean goddess, who shared any interest or support in my “esoteric” pursuits. And the memory of Patti was fading quickly behind the wall of judgment from my family, the climbing community.
Who was I to turn to? Having been raised by conservative parents in the Deep South, surrounded by hypocritical Bible belt religious fanatics, educated in a University full of closed minded engineering nerds, and a professional career within the stifling corporate institutions, climbing had been the light that guided me to freedom. Climbers had always been the free-spirited, open-minded, alternative lifestyle seeking individuals with whom I had been able to express myself and live the life that I wanted to live. The fact that I was now being ostracized frightened me.
Ironically, my own judgments about other spiritual groups kept me isolated from wise and compassionate beings. I had heard about the New Age movement, but I discredited it as the airy-fairy imaginative concoction of a bunch of rich, white women who were bored with life. The life energy that I was dealing with was real, not to be confused with crystal energy, angels, and light beings from places like the Pleiades.
Even though the yoga and meditation teacher I had studied with years ago in Virginia had spoken about kundalini energy, his fanaticism and Gurumania turned me off. “You can only gain realization through interaction with the Guru.” So I took the stretches and meditations and did them on my own. I was thus not drawn to seek more wisdom of yoga.
I had heard about tai chi, kung-fu and the martial arts. I even knew that they dealt with some form of energy that could be concentrated to crack skulls, break bricks and create other forms of destruction, but I wasn’t drawn to seek guidance about healing life energy from a master of martial or combative arts.
The healing arts of chi kung, acupressure, shiatsu, reiki, etc, were still unknown to me. The rainbow family and universal beings of love and light simply didn’t exist in my universe. I was in essence still a relatively closed-minded, conservative, physically oriented climber, who happened to have tapped into some strange form of energy, and now I was beginning to think I really was crazy.
After all my family thought I was nuts, my friends thought I had lost it, the whole climbing community thought I was crazy. Maybe they were right!.
So who was I to turn to? In desperation I looked back over my whole life, all of the people I ever knew and figured surely there must be someone with energetic insight. After much pondering, I thought of three old friends who might resonate with the spirit of Elongar. My old girlfriend Elizabeth, who was then studying modern dance at the University of Colorado, Steph who had given up a professional career as a lawyer and was living as a climbing bum down in Moab, and Eliza, a free-spirited climber from Mount Shasta who was now living in Yosemite. Time was running out, I had to find a sympathetic soul.
Towards the end of October I got in my car, drove to Boulder, Colorado to visit Elizabeth. We spent an evening in her apartment catching up the last couple of years since we had seen each other. Eventually our discussion led down to Patagonia, and I started telling her about my experiences up in the cirque, about the healing energy that pulsed through my body and healed my knee and shoulder. She was initially silent but receptive. As the story unfolded and I told her that I had spent the last 10 months learning to harness this energy her expression became a little more distant. When finally I began doing Elongar to show her what I was talking about. Her silence morphed into that pale vacant look that I had seen so many times before. She wanted to believe me and even tried to nod positively occasionally, but in the end I could read it in her eyes; she too thought I had lost it.
The next day I was in the car heading to Moab. My own blinders, however, prevented me from seeing on my way out of town the Naropa Institute, a world renown center for the healing sciences. That evening I was in Moab at Steph’s trailer.
We too shared a beautiful connection and caught up on the time since we had last seen one another. As I mentioned Elongar and the energetic experiences I had while in Patagonia, Speph’s eyes went wide. “Wow, you healed yourself with energy. That’s cool.” Her reaction encouraged me and I opened up to share more. She held a perfect smile on her face the whole time, even when I started performing Elongar. She had no idea what I was talking about, and didn’t really care. Like Kent she was glad whatever I did worked and was happy to see me again. No judgments.
I hung in Moab with Steph for a few days to climb desert towers, but eventually felt the pull to head for Yosemite to meet Eliza. Somehow I felt sure that she would be the one to help me understand the nature of the mysterious life energy. I called her and excitedly she told me that my timing was perfect because the next evening was the annual Yosemite Institute Halloween costume party. So I stopped in Fresno at a thrift store to put a costume together. I decided to dress up as Pape Luche , the mystical Curious George of Chilean author Parcel Paz. I bought a pair of royal blue bell bottoms, a bright red jacket and some dye to color my hair black.
I arrived at the valley early, the day of the Halloween party. When Eliza got off work, we climbed ********** an awesome 5.12 arching crack just off the road. That afternoon we lounged on her porch and started talking. I broached her on the subject of life energy, and began the story of my healing experiences in Patagonia. I was confident she would know what I was talking about.
But she didn’t. As I mentioned pulses of healing life energy, trickles of doubt started leaking through her perfect composure. Moments later her expression shifted and she said, “That’s really weird.”
Not Eliza too. I pleaded with her and told her I was sure of all my friends she could relate to this new form of energy. She apologized for not meeting my expectations and tried to remain cheerful, but slowly slipped behind that vacant look of being in the presence of someone who is crazy.
I was crushed. There was no one left to turn to. As we started getting ready for the costume party the doubts started filling my head again. “Maybe you are crazy.” I looked into the mirror in the bathroom. I didn’t look crazy. Then I shaved off my beard, dyed my hair black, painted my face white and put on the clothes of Pape Luche. When I looked back in the mirror, I admitted to myself, “OK, now you look a little bit crazy.”
Eliza looked a little startled when I came out, but then told me I looked cute without a beard. She was dressed up as Tiger Lilly.
The party was out of the valley at a farm. We walked through the hour glass and were soon surrounded by dozens of wildly imaginative creatures. Several figures asked me who I was supposed to be and, I told them Pape Luche, who they of course had never heard of. And then one of them ventured to say I looked like a dead person. Soon the consensus was formed - I was "the dead guy."
Eventually someone turned on some hippie rock the menagerie of animals, insects, fruits and boxy appliances began jumping up and down in staccato unison. I joined into the frenzy of bouncing bodies for a few moments and then was drawn to begin moving in negative space.
"Uh ohh! Don’t do it." I heard the voice of reason in the back of my head. “Can’t you just be normal and go with the flow of the crowd? Keep your energetic movements in the closet. You know what will happen if you start…”
The temptation was too strong. Dancing was the most natural time for me to slide into trance and let the energy flow. As I broke away from the staccato motions and let my body slide through the gaps of negative space I felt the reaction of the people around me.
“Hey, what’s up with the dead guy?” people started to ask one another.
I slid further and further into the trance, hoping no body would notice. The sensations became electrifying as I felt currents of energy stream through my limbs.
"I can’t be crazy, the feeling is too real." I said to myself.
“Yo, dead guy! Is that some kind of crazy dead person’s dance?”
I grasped the opportunity immediately. Yes, that is it. I am a dead guy and this is the way dead people dance.
“Hey, check out the dead guy!”
Suddenly all reservations vanished, I was a dead guy, free to dance the way dead people dance, and for a while I did. But I was still all alone. The wall between the living and me the dead grew and grew. The hollowness in my throat swelled, and slowly the realization and belief that yes, maybe I had lost my mind started to creep into my subconscious. No matter how clear the energy moved though me, how lucid it all seemed to me. The doubts were winning.
I danced in my own little bubble, let the energy flow up and down, brought it out to my hands, and whirled it in spirals up and down my body. “It’s so tangible, how could it not be real,” I asked myself.
Around me I wide gap had formed, as if the others didn’t want to be near the dead guy. From within my bubble, I heard only the occasional mockery and laughter from beyond and I started spiraling into the darkness of depression. Victorious, the echoes of doubt reverberated through my head, “You are crazy, crazy, crazy…”
The vast darkness engulfed my guiding light and extinguished my internal fire until barely a spark remained. My movements slowed as I made one last turn, drawing my feeble energy towards my navel, approaching the most yin state of death itself. And at that very moment, a light pierced the emptiness.
An angel walked out of the kitchen with two missionaries close behind her. She approached me, looked deep into my eyes and beamed me with pure unconditional love that flowed through me like a wave of radiant life force. My energy, barely more than a dull ember, pulsed with vitality and spiraled up my body. She waited for the energy to reach my hands, and then lifted her hand let it flow into her body.
She played with it the same way I did. With even more awareness, she spun it around her body, bounced it down through her center, changing it to all the colors of the rainbow. Then she lobbed it to me, over her head like a hook shot. My eyes went wide. Even as the bundle of now blue green energy splashed down through my body, I couldn’t believe it.
But knowing how the mind has a tendency to get in the way, I exhaled, relaxed and intuitively whirled the ball of light around and passed it back to her. We danced together playfully, tossing the energy back and forth, building it up and letting disperse in a bubble of light that spread out across the room. The whole time the two missionaries stood in silent observation on the side of the room. If there were other people present I was no longer noticed. We were in fairy land.
Without uttering a word, my eyes asked her, “Who are you?”
She simply smiled back at me.
I felt like a lost child who had finally found family. But family of what nature.
After some time she half turned to the missionaries and loud enough for the three of us to hear, said, “Look, he has this gift and he doesn’t even know what it is.”
They nodded in agreement.
“What gift?” I asked back to the wind.
“Look, he has this power and he doesn’t yet know how to use it.”
Again they nodded.
Again I was baffled.
“Look at him. He doesn’t even know who he is?”
Again they nodded. By now I was truly intrigued. Who was this girl, what did she mean I didn’t even know who I am. My imagination went wild. Am I from some other planet and they are here to bring me back? Are there more beings like her?
The music paused and we walked into the kitchen together to share a candy apple. My mind burned with questions to ask her, but we just sat there staring into each others eyes. Finally she broke the silence, “We are leaving soon. You may come with us if you choose?”
“Of course, I’ll come.” I said, not even knowing what she was talking about.
We started to leave and I remembered Eliza. I asked her to wait for a few minutes so I could say goodbye to my friend. I walked around the house looking for her, and more questions arose in my mind. Leave, what did she mean, “leave?”
Eliza was no where to be found. Someone told me they had seen her out by the bonfire, so I went outside and she wasn’t there either. Staring into the flames, I lingered, and prepared myself. Somehow I felt like they were really going to “leave,” and by going with them there was no coming back. I didn’t know if we were going to leave this plane of existence or what, but I knew we were leaving for good. I thought about my parents, my sister, my nephew, and all my friends in the climbing community. They would understand.
I bid them all farewell and walked back inside, ready to depart. But the angel and the missionaries were gone.
“No way!” I groaned, and ran outside looking for them. The farm we were in was out in a meadow and was only accessed by a long dirt road, a half mile of which was visible. There were no cars leaving. I searched through all the parked cars and asked all the staggering beings I ran into if any of them had seen the angel and the two missionaries. No one had.
Surely there must be some mistake. Maybe they were waiting for me inside still. I ran back in the house and searched. By now the party was dwindling and I found mostly half drunken corpses lying on the floor.
“Hey look it’s the dead guy.” Muttered a sunken form.
“Hi, have you seen the angel and the two missionaries?” I asked.
Again no one had.
I further asked if anyone knew who they were. Of the few folks that had remembered seeing them, no one knew who they were. They all thought they must have been friends of mine. “Pretty strange for a closed party,” I thought.
Finally, I gave up hope of finding them and went outside to sit under the stars. “Why did I hesitate, I should have just left with them immediately.” I chastised myself. My family and friends would have understood.
Sometime later Eliza emerged and apologized for leaving me. “No worries,” I assured her and together we headed out to the car. We drove back to her place in silence and each went to sleep in separate worlds. I felt like crying all night long.
In the morning I told Eliza about the special angel and the two missionaries and asked her if she knew who they might be. She too, had no idea.
As she got ready for work, I gathered my things and prepared to leave. She could tell I was deeply moved by the experience and apologized for not being more supportive of me. We shared a big hug, I left and I didn’t know if I would ever see her again.
On the way out of the valley, I couldn’t resist driving by the farm for one more search. Maybe, I thought, the folks that lived there would have a better memory now that they were sober.
“Hey look it’s the dead guy.”
“Good morning dead guy, what’s up?”
Again I asked about the mysterious angel and the two missionaries. A few people had a vague recollection of them, but no one had a clue who they were or where they came from.
From Yosemite I headed up to Sacramento to visit my sister. For the first part of the trip, I was choked up with self pity and a feeling of infinite loneliness.
“You are so stupid.” I badgered myself, “Never hesitate. Why did you linger so long by the fire? Now you are alone again.”
Tears started dripping down my face. I stopped by a grove of giant sequoias, got out, and walked around. I sat down underneath one of those ancient souls, and suddenly had a revelation..
Until last night, I was lost. I might have been the only human on the planet who knew about this energy. And then this angel appears, and she can harness it too, with even more skill and awareness than me. If one other conscious energetic being exists, then the energy must exist. If it exists, then I am not crazy, and if I am not crazy, then I am not alone and there must be more of us.
A small flock of birds appeared and circled excitedly about my head. The weight of depression, anxiety, loneliness and fear that I had been carrying for months simply lifted and vanished into the ethers. A huge smile, sparkling with the moisture of fresh tears appeared on my face and my whole body relaxed. I knew I wasn’t crazy.
Arriving back in Sacramento, I sank into the comfort of my sisters home. As siblings, we could not have been more different from one another. She has dark brown hair and olive skin, I have red hair and freckled skin. She was happily married to a doctor, lived in a half a million dollar house and enjoyed luxuries. I was a scrappy full-time climber, who lived out of my car and found peace by going to the most hostile parts of the planet and tempting death in a contrived dance of rock climbing.
Despite our differences, we were close. She loved to listen to the stories of my adventures. Even if she would never dare to live such a life, she liked to live vicariously through me. Likewise, even though I could never live such a life of responsibility and luxury, it eased my soul knowing she had attained what she aspired for.
We spent the day together and I told her the whole story of the saga I had been through over the last year, all the way up to the Halloween party I had been to the night before. As I got to the part where I lingered by the fire and then missed the angel, she interrupted me, saying, “That’s so unlike you, to hesitate, you normally jump right in with both feet.”
“I know, I know…” I moaned reliving the agony of the night before. “But its ok,” I rallied to my defense. “Now I know she exists. At least one other person on the planet knows about this energy, and she knows more than I do. Therefore I am not crazy and there must be more of us.
“Oh no,” she moaned in loving mockery, “There aren’t more people like you out there.”
“Yes there are, and I am going to find them.”
“How?” she inquired.
“I am coming out of the closet.”
“You’re gay?”
“No, I am bringing Elongar out of the closet. For the last six months, I have only done it in private. It is time to bring it out. I don’t care what other people think”
“You’re not going to do those movements you do in public, are you?
“Yep”
“You are going to get arrested.” She said jokingly.
“No I won’t.”
“Well you’re not going to do them around the house are you? The neighbors will think you are weird.” She said only half jokingly.
“I’ll do them down at the park when I take Sasha for a walk.”
“What if…”
“Linda I am going to do Elongar in public.” I interrupted her.
“Oh-h boy,” she sighed.
That afternoon I took her golden retriever Sasha down to the park, threw the ball for him till he could barely walk and then found a quiet place where I could focus. Starting with my hands, I let them begin to move and then let the wave move up my arms, shoulders, torso and soon my whole body began the energetic dance of Elongar. No music to guide the movements, just the whispers of the trees above.
Sitting next to me, Sasha watched intently. As I brought the energy to my hands, Sasha’s eyes followed. “Aha, the dog can see the energy too.” I repeated the experiment over and over. Each time Sasha followed precisely.
Over the next hour a number of people walked by. Most of them gave me weird looks. A few of them laughed and made fun of me. I simply focused on my movements and ignored them. Finally an older black man walked up to me and asked if I was doing tai chi.
“No,” I told him, “I am doing Elongar.”
“Well it sure looks like tai chi,” he said “you just keep doing that young man, it’s real nice.” And he walked away.
From that moment on, Elongar was out of the closet. By doing it in public, on the streets, in parks, in dance clubs and any place where I would have otherwise been standing idly, I began meeting all types of people who either had wisdom to share or wanted to learn about what I was doing.
And I learned a valuable lesson. Whenever you dare to do something different, some people are going to laugh at you. As you overcome insecurity and gain confidence in what you are doing, you will realize the source of this laughter is simply other people’s fear.
“It’s a little late to be going down there don’t you think?”
“Nah, it’ll be fine.”
“The Henry’s in November?”
“I checked out the weather and there is a huge high pressure system moving across the west, guaranteed sunshine for a week.”
Kent was a renown sand bagger. Maybe not so renown, but he was notorious for sand bagging me. The day I met him during my job interview for the environmental consulting firm he manages, he suggested we continue the interview on the rock up in Fergeson Canyon above Salt Lake City. Claiming he forgot the grade but remembered it wasn’t too hard, he sent me unsuspectingly up a 5.12 arête. After a half hour trembling epic, I managed to on-sight the route and when he lowered me down calmly offered me a job.
Time and again I fell for his subtle sand bagging, which almost inevitably resulted in my hardest climbs or most memorable first ascents. But over the years I had begun to recognize the twinkle in his sand bagging eyes.
Too bad I was talking to him on the phone. Why would he be sand bagging me to go freeze down in the Henry’s in November?
“We’re not going tele-skiing or anything like that are we?” I asked, recalling the first time he took me out tele-mark skiing. During the wonderful two hour hike up though a thick pine forest, he constantly ignored my questions about where the ski slope was that we would ski down. Then at the top of the ridge, when I realized there was no open slope and we had to carve our way through the same forest we hiked up, I again saw that twinkle in his eye.
“No, come on. This may be the last chance we get to go climbing down there this year.”
“Alright, I’ll put together some food and meet you over at your house after work.”
“Don’t bother, I went shopping last night. I got all the food and my gear here at work. Just swing by and pick me up when you are ready. I’ll call it an early afternoon. We just have to drop my car off at the shop on the way out of town..”
“Very auspicious,” I mused as we hung up. I hadn’t seen Kent in almost a month, he had no idea when I was coming back in town, and the day I arrive, he’s got the car loaded, food stocked and knows that I am going to drive him down to the Henry’s.
.
The Henry Mountains, located mid way between Canyonlands and Zion in Southern Utah, was the last mountain range discovered by white folks in the continental US. The area around it is so dry no overland exploration routes ever ventured near it. It wasn’t until Leslie Powell floated down the Colorado River in 1850's that he caught a glimpse of the four prominent 12,000 foot plus peaks of the Henry Mountains.
Hidden deep within the lower hills of the Henry’s is the Horn, a cluster of red granite tooth- or horn-shaped domes that protrude out of the hill side. If ever there was a sacred climbing area, the Horn, a.k.a. the Temple, is it. Looking out over the eastern desert floor of Canyonlands and the Colorado River Basin, the monolithic formations create an amphitheater of god/goddess faces that come alive during the twilight moments of sunrise and sunset.
While climbing areas all over the country turned into over crowded outdoor sport arenas in the early 1990’s, the Temple sat patiently, offering solitude to the few of us who climbed there. Of course, Kent was the one who discovered it and who kept it secret. Of all the treasured climbing areas he had introduced me to, the Henry’s reigned. Surely other climber explorers had found the horn, as we occasionally found a piton here or there on the classic cracks, but Kent ushered the era of face climbing at the Horn. Using hooks that fit snuggly into tiny solution pockets left over from the rapid cooling of the igneous stone while it was still deep under the earth’s crust, Kent discovered, he could free climb up a blank face until he got scared, hang from a hook or two and drill in a bolt, and thus establish amazing free climbs up improbable looking faces.
The first sporty bolted route at the Henry’s was wedding arête, put up by Kent and his wife Susan during their celebration of Union in 1990. In the three years that we had been climbing in the Henry’s we had put up a dozen or so sporty face routes and free climbed almost all of the perfect cracks. The most amazing of which was the “Holy Schmoke” a 150 foot slightly overhanging finger and hand crack that summited the biggest formation at the horn.
The setting sun set the sky ablaze as we drove in the 20-mile dirt road, winding through aspen forests and pinion pines. We also spotted a few buffalo belonging to one of the last free ranging herds in the Americas.
Kent was right; the sky was royal blue and the temperature pleasantly chilly. And we had the whole place to ourselves. Or so we thought. As we pulled up to the camping area a familiar Toyota pick-up was parked.
“Looks like Johnny made it down too.” Kent exclaimed, referring to the famed British Salt Lake residentclimber/cynic - Johnny Woodward.
“I wonder who he is here with?” I pondered.
We set up camp, got a fire going and started preparing a meal when Johnny and an unknown partner came walking into camp. During our introductions, his partner, Jose Louis Pereyra and I recognized one another.
We had first met four years earlier, my first winter in Salt Lake City. I picked him and another climber up hitch hiking up into Little Cottonwood canyon on their way skiing. Then we met again, ironically a week after I had quit my job and was on a non-climbing road trip with a girlfriend up through the Northwest.
“So we meet again, Scott Lazar.” Jose offered as we made eye contact with one another.
We shared dinner and opened up a few Sheaf Stouts that Kent always made sure we had on hand. Jose declined a beer. As conversation ensued after the meal, it became apparent what and odd climbing partners Jose and Johnny were. Kent and I tried to maintain a positive tone while Johnny started off on a slanderous bender insulting half of the climbers in Salt Lake, and Jose sat back away from the fire, his head buried in a math book ignoring everything else.
“What a couple of weirdoes.” I thought as I retired to my sleeping bag.
In the morning I asked Jose what kind of math he had been studying,
“Wave theory,” he said emotionless.
“So what is wave theory about?”
“It’s very complicated. I doubt you would understand it.”
“Try me,” I volunteered, knowing I had three years of engineering calculus, and a honed mind from studying nuclear physics in grad school.
Jose just looked at me, silently, and then said “Yeah, maybe one day I explain it to you.”
And that was it for our morning discussion.
Kent had introduced Johnny to the Henry’s earlier that Summer while I was in Alaska, and despite my fears of Johnny letting the word out, he too honored the secrecy of the Horn. Jose was one of the best crack climbers in the country, and Johnny invited him to come down and dine on the Holy Schmoke.
Kent and I set off after breakfast to work on some new unfinished projects we each had. Johnny and Jose went up to start ticking off a number of the classic cracks. Around mid afternoon, when we had topped out on Kent’s new route, ________, Jose was just about to jump on the Holy Schmoke. From our perch we had the best seats in the amphitheater so we decided to watch the show.
Loaded down with a battery of camming units and stoppers, Jose calmly started up the cruxy 5.12 finger crack. Remembering how grim some of the jams were and how shaky I was when I put it up, I was amazed to see Jose churn through the moves and hold steady for the awkward gear placements. We sat in silent appreciation for the next half hour until Jose shouted from the Summit, “OK Johnny, Off belay!” in his funny Latino accent.
“Do you know where Jose is from?” asked Kent.
“No idea, somewhere in South America I imagine.”
That evening when we met back at the camp, I complemented Jose on his clean ascent of the Holy Schmoke, and he gave me a thumbs up, saying, “Nice route man.”
“Thanks”
Later on around the fire, Jose disappeared into wave theory and Johnny asked me about Patagonia. I gave him the run down on our ascent of the three towers of Paine, about freezing my ass off, getting frostbite, loosing my tent underneath the ice cave and then about meeting the brother from Venezuela with the pictures of Roraima.
“… lush green jungles underneath 2,000 foot sandstone walls. I don’t know how, but I am going there.”
“Sounds awful,” he resounded, “snakes, vegetation, all-day approaches…”
Knowing Johnny had climbed at the New River Gorge and could appreciate quality sandstone, I launched into detail about the apparent similarities of the rock. Then, remembering he despised going anywhere with over a half hour hike, I realized I was wasting my time. “Yeah, you’d probably hate it down there.”
Jose hadn’t ushered a peep the whole discussion, but at my final remark he looked up at me and smiled.
In the morning Jose and I got to chatting and I asked him what his plans were after the Henry’s.
“I don’t know. Johnny has to go back this afternoon, but I am free to do whatever.”
“You ever been to the Black Canyon?” I inquired.
“Nope.”
“Kent and I started a new route down in the Cruise Gulley a few months ago. It’s a bold line out this 40 foot tiered roof up a vertical arête to the summit. Probably 12 pitches or so. Interested?”
“Hmm. Sounds interesting.”
“Hey Kent, would you be put off if Jose and I went and finished Quaelgeist?”
“Nah, just take a crow bar to knock off that big block,” he answered, trying to instill a bit of fear.
“What’s he talking about?” asked Jose.
“Nothing. There’s this huge block on half way out the roof that looks like its about to jump off on its own. But its way solid, it hums like a tuning fork when you stomp on it.”
“Stomp on it?” he said raising his eye brows.
“Yeah, you kind of got to climb around it and stand on it before doing the crux moves. That’s as far as I got last time.”
“Sounds cool, let’s go.”
So that afternoon, Kent and Johnny headed back to SLC and Jose and I were off to the Black Canyon. A few miles out onto the highway we ran over something that looked like a huge tarantula on the road.
“Whoa, did you see that?” I asked
“Yeah it looked like a huge tarantula.” He answered.
“No way lets go check it out.” I said as I stopped the car.
Jose protested briefly, “No, let it be,” before I spun the car around and zoomed back.
“There it is,” I pointed out as we approached, “ Aww, its just and old piece of rubber.”
“That’s what it is now.” He said disappointedly.
“What do you mean… now?” I asked.
“Well it was a tarantula until you ruined it by having to go back and verify it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“That’s wave theory.”
“Oh-h…” I could tell this was going to be an interesting trip. Little did I know that this adventure was just the beginning of a physical and spiritual partnership that was going to take me places, both in the body and out of body, that I had only dreamed of going to… including the Tepuis of Venezuela.
The five hour ride to the Black Canyon passed rapidly as Jose tried to lay out the foundations of wave theory to me. It would be much later that I even began to grasp what he was talking about.
We stopped at a grocery store outside the canyon for supplies.
“I don’t have very much money for food.” He said handing me a few small bills and change.
“Yeah, me either.” I said, realizing how fast the money I brought back from Alaska was evaporating from my wallet. “We don’t need much.”
Taking advantage of the parking lot lights, Jose had already sank back into his wave theory book, so I offered to get some food. I added up our combined bills and change it came to around six bucks -- pretty meager for a few day project down in the Black. I bought some carrots, a few granola bars, bagels and a bit of cream cheese and headed back out to the car.
Jose looked up as I arrived and I gave him the bag of groceries. He looked in and gasped, “This is it? We got to eat more than that man.” And then he proceeded to pull out a credit card which we took back inside and used to buy a frugal but yet righteous amount of food. And thus began the mystery of Jose’s scarce abundance. He obviously had access to some money, but chose not to use it unless, as in our case, he was with someone who really was poorer than he was.
We rose early in the morning and descended down into the misty depths of the Black Canyon. By the time the fog lifted, we were below our line, staring right up into the gaping mouth of the huge roof. I pointed out where the route went and how far we had gotten before, just above the ominous block. I told him I really didn’t care which other pitches I led, but I really wanted to finish leading the second pitch.
“Then I’ll take the first one.” He volunteered, and off he went.
Fifty feet up the corner Jose slipped and plummeted 25 feet, banging into the rock several times on the way down.
“Holy schmokes man! Are you all right?”
“Yeah, I’m fine, but I think I banged my head.”
I could already see blood dripping down his face. “You’re bleeding bro! I am going to lower you down.”
“Hold on,” he said, putting his hand on the wound, “I think its all right.”
“Dude! Lets put a bandana on it or something, come on down.”
“No, its OK.” He said and a few moments later when it stopped dripping, he yarded on the rope, pulled himself up to his last piece of gear and finished the pitch.
“Whoa dude! You are hard core!” I offered for support as he clipped the anchor.
When I got up beside him, I saw his whole head was matted in blood, but as he thought, the actual cut was small. But he could still be in shock.
“How are you feeling? Do you want to keep going or should we head back and get you cleaned up?”
“I thought you wanted to lead the second pitch?” He asked ignoring my question.
“So you are OK?”
“Yeah, Ill be fine.”
As I started up the second pitch, he shouted after me, “Hey, what does Quaelgeist mean anyway?”
“It means "spiritual tormentor" in German.”
When I got underneath the block and prepared to reach around and pull myself up on top of it, we made brief eye contact, and he said, “Quaelgeist, I see.”
The moves off of the block were strenuous and I had to dance back and forth between these two overhanging corners to reach the end of the roof. The gear was good but far apart, and a fall would have left me dangling out in space. Finally, just before the lip I got a solid cam in, relaxed and pulled myself around the corner onto a good ledge.
Making quick work of the second pitch on toprope, Jose joined me on the ledge just in time to greet the morning sun appearing over the canyon rim.
“Hey Lefty,” he said after a moments silence, “Have you ever heard of Angel Falls?”
“Yeah it’s the tallest free-falling waterfall in the world. I think its somewhere down in Venezuela.”
“How would you like to come do the first free ascent of it?”
“What are you talking about, Jose?”
“Will Hair and I won the Mugs Stump Award to do the first free ascent of Angel Falls and we need a strong third climber to come along.”
“Are you shittin’ me Jose?”
“No, I am serious.”
“Oh, that’s right you are from Venezuela aren’t you.” I said suddenly recalling our first meeting in Salt Lake four years earlier. “You’ve climbed some of those tepuis down there, haven’t you?”
“Only a couple.” He said modestly.
“Fuckin-A, man! Here I am rackin my brain, how I am going to get down toVenezuala to climb or even find these tepuis, and here you are …”
“Do you want to come with us or not?”
“Hell yeah I do!”
“Awesome! We are leaving in a month.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah, we already have our tickets. You’ll have to get yours separately.”
It took a few minutes to sink in, and I finally broke out in ecstatic bliss, “I am going to Venezuela!” and started laughing.
A few minutes later, while Jose was racking up for the third pitch, I asked him, “Hey, how come you never said anything the other night back at the Henry’s when I was going off about that vision I had of going to climb a tepui?”
“Timing is everything.” He said simply and headed up the rock.
The next afternoon, we completed Quaelgeist and headed back to Salt Lake City.
We met Will back in Salt Lake and discussed details for the expedition. Will had a book with pictures of the Falls, and he had collected articles of all the previous ascents. It was first climbed in 1976 by a Japanese team and then again ten years later by a Venezuelan team including a young Jose Louis Pereyra. It turns out that Jose had climbed more Venezuelan tepuis than anyone on the planet, and it was his mission to go back and free climb Angel Falls ten years after his aid climbing ascent of it.
Will kept bugging Jose about details, “How are we going to get to the wall?”, “Do we need permits, etc.” and Jose just kept ignoring him. It was quite comical.
The Mugs Stump Award was only 1,500 bucks and it barely paid for their flights down to Caracas and bought our food for the expedition. If I wanted to come I had to buy my own ticket down there ($800) and then we each needed an additional $400 bucks to cover ground transportation to get from Caracas to Angel Falls and back again.
When I got home I assessed my finances.
I couldn’t believe it. Four months ago, I had a check for six grand in my hand and now I don’t even have enough money to buy a flight down to Caracas. What the Hell happened to it all. OK I had bought a laptop for a grand cause. I was going to be this prolific climbing writer, sending articles to the mags to pay for all my adventures. That never panned out. I sent in pieces of literary art and by the time they got done editing it I couldn’t even tell I wrote it. “Screw that, better to be broke with a little dignity.” I had erroneously decided at the time.
Well now I am in a jam, I finally get the opportunity I have been dreaming about all year and I can’t even scrape up the cash to get down there. I needed 1200 bucks total and I only had 500 to my name, and my credit card was already maxed out. If I still had my old engineering job, I would have made that in a week, but then I wouldn’t have been able to leave for a month either. I was so deeply entrenched in duality.
It was November 14th and their tickets were for December 16th, barely a month away. I had to come up with some cash fast, or I would have to pay a fortune for last minute flights. What can I sell?
I looked around my disheveled bedroom/ gear storage space in the house that I had probably only spent a dozen nights in over the last four months. Why was I even there? Oh yeah, Johnathon, Dean, Ian and I…We started with this romantic vision of recreating the infamous SLAB (Salt Lake Area Boys) house, where the whole climbing community would come to train, hang out, slack line and whatever. Now there were a slew of climbing gyms in Salt Lake where people trained; no one was ever home (except some sulky dude from Bend, Oregon that had claimed the area behind the living room couch, who was always there), and when we were home together, we had to deal with bullshit things like the rent.
And how much had I paid for this romantic vision…The rent was only $250 bucks a month each, but that was half of what I needed to get to Venezuela. Too bad we had already paid through December 15th.
“Uggh! I got to get out of here.”
I called up Will and asked if I could bivy in his basement for a few weeks until we left. He was happy to let me crash there and we decided it was probably the best way for us to organize the logistics of the expedition.
When I got off the phone I asked the sulky dude if he wanted to move into my room.
“No man, I kind of dig it here behind the couch.”
“Yeah I know you do dude, you’ve been digging it FOR FREE for the last three months. I just got invited to go on an expedition to Venezuela real soon and I’m asking you if you want to move into my home so I can save some cash.”
“Ohh I See.”
“Do you have any cash at all?”
“I got a hundred bucks…”
“Perfect! Its yours.”
“Wow, thanks dude.”
I only needed $200 more and I could buy the ticket. The prospect of calling Man-Power or some other temp agency loomed in my mind. “There’s got to be a better way. What can I sell?”
Just then the phone rang, it was my old friend Mark from Virginia Tech, the sole link between my old life and my new one. We graduated together in 1989, both went to a fiber optics job interview together, I decided to run off to Europe and he took the job. Now he was married and making close to six figures a year in Portland Oregon, and I was wandering around the world climbing rocks. I hadn’t talked to him in over a year.
“Yo, what’s up L-man.” He still called me by my college nickname.
“Whoa dude, you wouldn’t believe…”
“I’ve been keeping tabs on you brother. I went down to Sacramento for work and I got a chance to visit Linda and Michael. They filled me in on all your adventures.
“That’s cool. What have you been up to, how’s Kim?”
“She’s wonderful. We’ve been out on a few hikes in the Cascades. You know we don’t get out all that often to do the big adventures like we used to, but we sure like living vicariously through your stories. Where you heading off to next?
I told him about the vision of climbing the jungle towers I had while still in Patagonia and then told him about the synchronistic meeting with Jose and being invited on the expedition. And then I told him about my financial crux.
He laughed when I told him $200 stood between me and fulfilling the dream of going to Venezuela.
“Well L-man, how about if your good buddy Mr. Brogley helps you out a little bit? I’ll throw a couple hundred dollars in the bucket to see you go make the first free ascent of Angel Falls.”
“Are you serious?”
“Kim and I are both working these days. What’s a couple hundred bucks? Don’t tell her I am giving it to you though.”
“You are amazing. Thanks brother.”
That left me with only $400 to make in three weeks to cover the ground transportation. No problem. I called the airlines to made my reservation. All the flights were booked for December 15th so I bought a ticket to leave a day early. “I’ll have an extra day to play in Caracas.” I thought reminiscing about the chill days hanging with Patti in Santiago, Chile. Little did I know what I was getting into.
I moved my few belongings into Wills basement. Other than climbing gear, the laptop and some clothes, the only belonging I had was a cool velour loveseat that Jonathon and I had snagged from a parking lot (kind of near a dumpster) on a midnight ride through downtown on my birthday.
Over the next few weeks Will and I got to know one another. He was a school teacher at an alternative high school and a good ole boy from the southeast too. We found out we had a lot in common. We trained together, researched Angel Falls, went climbing a few times and started amassing all of the gear we would need for the expedition. Luckily The North Face, Black Diamond and a few other companies kicked in and gave us a bunch of gear that we needed.
Jose wasn’t around much and when I asked Will about Jose, he said “Jose is a complete mystery. He is like the wind. He rents an apartment in Salt Lake but is never there.”
I could relate.
“He disappears for weeks on end and then suddenly appears and we go climbing together. I’ve never seen him work. He never has any money, but then he’ll go out and buy a new hang glider.”
“Interesting” I said.
It had been a while since I had spent time in an urban scene, in Santiago Chile. So while I worked at the climbing gym, setting new routes to earn a bit of money, I wandered back out into the nightlife. As in most ultra-conservative towns, the sterile clean productive Mormon town of Salt Lake was balanced by the jack Mormon, gay/lesbian counter-culture, with fringe skin head, straight edge, and raver kids. The club scene in Salt Lake was a pleasantly dysfunctional mix of the above with a few hopeless fraternity kids wandering around.
I just liked to dance.
Now that Elongar was out of the closet, I was psyched to bring out the energetic healing movements onto the dance floor. When the grooves were right and I found pockets of light between the clusters of aggression and crude sexuality, I slipped into trance and danced.
As my departure date neared, I checked finances and realized I had exactly the $400 needed for the ground transportation to Angel Falls. I was relieved, but then wondered if I needed any spending money. The day before leaving on my trip I was training down at the Wasatch Front climbing gym with the owner Christian, who had just bought the gym.. Afterwards we sat down on the cold floor, and he exclaimed, “ We need a couch in here.”
“How about a loveseat?” I offered, seizing the opportunity, “I have a beautiful one that will fit real cozy in here, and you can have it… for $40.”
He laughed, bought the couch and I got my spending money for the trip.
That night, my British friend and old house mate Steve Downes, the Philosophy Professor, threw a party. Of course it was off the wall. I got there late and ran into lots of booze, lots of people, and awesome dance music. I cruised around, saying hello and good-bye to people I wouldn’t see again for another month. Got sucked into and pulled myself out of deep philosophical discussions with some of Steve’s students. Entered into a loving bout of verbal assault with the Australians and finally made my way out into the front room with the music.
And there I met Raven. Long jet black hair flowed over her broad shoulders. Her eyes were closed, and her body moved with ethereal grace and quivering pulses of staccato that connected her intimately to the mechanized sounds of the band Massive Attack. I watched silently as orbs of red/orange energy floated up and around her body. She was the most beautiful dancer I had ever seen, and in touch with her energetic body too.
A rockin groove from the Chemical Brothers pulled me out of stare and I began to move along with everybody else. The vibrations were high and my bones seemed to melt into a chaotic synthesis of lyrical rhythm. I fell into trance quickly and soon felt like I was floating. As I turned our eyes met, and from across the room our energy bodies expanded and flowed into one another, creating a flame colored vortex of pure light. As if slipping through the crowded room on an infinite wave of space time, our physical bodies followed and moments later we were dancing within a unified sphere.
The bubble didn’t last long as an abrupt shift in musical genre threw us each in different directions. I followed the music into a faster break beat intensity and she went into the kitchen. I shifted my energy to synchronize with some of the young skater kids who were trying to break the self consciousness barrier and make their bodies flow.
Raven appeared moments later holding a rum and coke. She walked fearlessly into the throng of bodies, piercing any distractions with an almost icy glare. Midway through the tune, standing in complete stillness, she coolly voiced, “Its amazing, the same music can be channeled into that…,” she said pointing at Matt who was still moving awkwardly, “or into this.” She said, pointing to me.
“Piss off Raven!” screamed Matt as he walked off dejected.
“Who is this girl?” Her words carried both the ruthless slash of a sword and the grace of honesty.
With the beginning of the next track by Orb, she put her drink down and brought an electrifying energy to our posse. We danced on and off for a few hours, sent energy flying up and down our bodies, talked a bit and got to know one another.
She intrigued me. She morphed from one being to the next depending whether she was dancing, talking, observing or being silent. She was evidently young and smart, maybe too smart. She unleashed her slashing tongue a few times on unsuspecting victims and then always seemed to regret doing so.
One of my Australian mates saw us hanging out and later offered, “Watch out for that one Lefty, she’s heartless and strikes like a pit viper.”
I wasn’t scared.
A couple hours before my flight took off, I made it back to Will’s house, finished packing and rousted him to give me a ride to the airport. With me I had two 70 pound haul bags and a small carry on pack that probably weighed more.
With a thumbs-up, I left him at the terminal and said, “See you tomorrow in Caracas.”
I slept soundly the whole way to Miami where I had a lay-over for few hours. Soon the announcement came that our flight to Caracas was going to be delayed a couple hours. Jose had arranged for his friend, Nelson, to pick me up from the airport in Caracas, so I called the number Jose left me and told his house mate Pedro the flight had been delayed. He said, “No problem.”
Unfortunately, a few hours later another announcement came through that the flight was delayed even longer. I called again and this time gave him the flight information so he could check on when we were to arrive. Apparently there was some big tropical storm slamming the coast of Venezuela and we had to wait until it cleared before we could go.
While hanging out at the airport in Miami I met a number of college kids from Venezuela that were heading home for Christmas. By the time we boarded the plane, we were becoming friends. We all sat together and took advantage of one dollar Polarcitas, little 8-oz Venezuelan beers. They all raved about Caracas, “Great party town! Bars stay open all hours of the night, not like in America where everything closes at 2 a.m.”
“Awesome.”
“You half to try cocaine when you are in Caracas,” suggested one kid, “Its really pure, not like the crap you get in the States. And it’s cheap too.
Huh. I had never tried cocaine before but I was definitely curious to give it a try.
When we landed a couple kids gave me telephone numbers, “Mi casa es tu casa.” And a few of them offered me rides in to Caracas. Apparently it was a half hour ride from the airport into the city.
“No thanks, I’ve got a ride already.” I thanked them and bid them farewell.
We saw each other again at the luggage carousel, and again they offered rides which I declined.
Slowly they each left while I stood there patiently waiting… and waiting. Finally I realized I was the only one left and my bags still hadn’t come.
“Oh Christ!” I moaned, “If they lost my haul bags we are hosed.”
I had 300 meters of rope, the power drill, most of the rack, the solar panels plus all of my own personal climbing gear. My whole life was in those bags!
A few minutes later I heard some grunting and this guy emerged from underneath the rubber curtain of the luggage carrier, dragging one of my haul bags behind him. When he saw me he muttered some profanities in Spanish and slid the bag down to me. A few seconds later he returned with the other bag.
“Phew!” I shouldered all the gear and lumbered my way out into the airport expecting to see Nelson. It was four in the morning, the place was dimly lit and empty, except for a few dark figures hanging out in the shadows.
Two of them approached me enthusiastically. “Hola Amigo!”
I felt bad energy immediately and waved them off. They persisted calling me amigo and offering to take my bags.
“No gracias, tengo un amigo.” I said wondering where Nelson was.
“Estamos amigos de tu amigo,” they insisted and kept offering to carry a bag.
We continued the game for some time until I started getting beligerant and telling them to fuck off. Finally bewildered at my intensity, they chilled out and we all waited for Nelson for a few minutes.
“Tu amigo couldn't make it.” The bigger guy finally said .
My Spanish was a little rusty without using it the last six months, but I could understand what he was saying.
“Your friend is not here. Your plane was four hours late. He couldn’t wait that long, so he asked us to pick you up. We are friends of your friend.”
I was beginning to feel like a beligerant American asshole, but intuitively I didn’t trust these guys.
“Here is a calling card.” The bigger guy said handing me a card, “Call him yourself.”
That sounded pretty safe. Without letting either of them touch one of my bags I carried, I let them lead me up the stairs to a phone. I dialed Nelson’s number, remembering Jose’s words, “He doesn’t have very much money so maybe you can give him a few bucks for the ride.”
Maybe I just misjudged these people, Venezuela was a third world country, maybe I just mistook desperation for crookedness.
“Hola.” Said a sleepy Pedro on the other end of the line.”
“Hola Pedro. Its Scott, I am at the airport. Where is Nelson?”
“Ohhh, Scott your plane was four hours late, Nelson couldn’t wait that long.”
That was the same story that these guys had given me.
“There are two guys here, they say they are friends of Nelson’s and want me to go with a taxi.”
“Si, go with the taxi.”
So they were friends. Plan A fell through so now we are on Plan B, I rationed. Suddenly I realized how much I had over reacted. I asked Pedro for directions to his house, but had a hard time understanding him. I gave the phone over to the bigger guy and he talked to Pedro like they were old friends while he took directions.
When he got off the phone I apologized for being so rude downstairs and we made introductions. The bigger afro-latino guy’s name was Antonio and the skinny dude who hadn’t said anything yet was Louis. I let them each grab a haul bag and grinned as they slumped under the weight.
“Very heavy, “ moaned Antonio, “What do you have in here?”
“Climbing gear.” I told him and then proceeded to tell them about Jose and Will and the plans for the entire expedition as we walked out of the airport and waited for a cab.
They knew the cab driver. His name was Alberto. That seemed strange to me too, but I now I just had to go with the flow.
I was among friends, or so I thought. Little did I know that we were never heading towards Caracas.
So this is the city that partys all night, I thought. Then half provoking them, I challenged, “Hey isn’t there anywhere we can stop to get a Polarcita. Its only four a.m.”
Alberrto and Antonio exchanged glanced in the front seat.
“What are you guys sleepy?” I taunted teasingly.
Alberto pulled over at a mini-mart and bought a twelve pack of the tiny beers. Before finishing the first beer, I raised the gauntlet once more, “How about dancing? Are there any clubs open? What kind of town is this anyway, do people party here or what!?”
This ruffled them a little bit. After a little more encouragement, Alberto turned around and headed back into the seedy district we had just left.
Louis finally started speaking when he got a beer in him. He spoke very slowly so I could understand each word, “Your plane was four hours late. We were glad we were able to find you.”
“Thank you Louis,” I said, “I am glad you were able to find me too.” And I put my hand on his shoulder and looked him in the eye to thank him for speaking clearly for me to be able to understand. When our eyes met, I noticed his eyes were completely dark, no spark, no life, like that of a shark. I hoped he wasn’t ill or something.
We had all had a couple of beers by the time we pulled up to the sleeziest dive bar I had ever seen. By then we were becoming pretty good mates. Antonio prepared a line of cocaine and turned around to offer it to me.
I was already flying from the beers and the flight, being in a new country. “No thank you “Antonio, not on my first night in Caracas, maybe later.”
Then it was his turn to give me that look of what kind of a whimp are you. He cut the line in half and offered again.
I really wanted to try it. It might as well be now, I reasoned and inhaled the pure white powder through my right nostril. It was like nothing I had ever experienced before. No shedding veils of perception or subtle illumination, I felt pure superpower activated, raw physical empowerment on the right side of my body.
We walked into the bar, passed a guy leaned up against the wall pissing in his pants, entered the pool hall. The story had already ended there. We looked at each other and headed back out to the car. Alberto knew of a better place.
I motioned to my right nostril, made a sign like real big. Antonio got the hint and prepared another little line of cocaine for my left nostril.
I sniffed it up with less hesitation and immediately felt the balance of power equalize.
While we were driving Louis once again spoke to me and actually repeated the same lines he had said before.
I let him finish, thanked him again, thinking he was just trying to be nice.
A few minutes later he repeated the same story. This time I told him in really clear Spanish so he could understand, “Louis, I understand what you are saying, It’s OK we can move on now. Listo.”
He nodded in agreement and then we pulled up to the second bar. This one had music and a few more people milling about, but there was nothing for us there. Antonio then said he knew where we should go and once again we piled into the taxi and zoomed off.
A few minutes later, Louis again started repeating himself. The private club Antonio led us to was packed, but there was a guard in the parking lot who wouldn’t let us by.
Antonio talked with the guard for a minute and then pleaded, “Come on let us in, I am working (estoy trabjando).”
The guard was adamant and Antonio was pissed. We drove off and I kept hearing those words over and over again, “estoy trabajando.” What did he mean he was working, I though we were friends.
A few minutes later Antonio directed Alberto to stop so he could buy some crack from a guy on the street. They all lit it up in the car and offered me some. I declined. At that moment we shifted into separate realities. I remained clear and poised while they all turned inward and sluggish. Suddenly I felt like something was desperately wrong.
Dawn was approaching and we still hadn’t left the little beach towns near the airport. Alberto pulled over onto an overlook above the ocean and we all got out of the car to witness the most amazing sunrise I have ever seen in my whole life.
Dark black cumulous clouds from the tropical storm covered the sky except in the far east where a thin slice of crystal clear blue sky was visible. As the sun burst into view, on the horizon, it sent the most brilliant pinkish orange rays of light across the sky painting the turbulent edges of the storm clouds.
For a long moment time stopped, and we stood, four human beings as one, silent, arm in arm, to witness the divine light of the coming day. As the colors faded and the sun disappeared behind the clouds, we came back into our individual bodies.
I decided to ask the question that was burning in my mind, “Antonio, what did you mean back there, when you said you were working? I thought we were friends.”
“We are not exactly friends….” He said obviously hesitant and cautious, “We are mafia.”
“What do you mean mafia?” I asked starting to assess the possibilities of escape.
“Your friend Jose, he is Venezuelan mafia. “Yeah, your whole expedition is mafia sponsored.”
“It is huh?” I said stalling for time while I racked my brain to try to make sense out of the situation. Suddenly pictures of Jose the mafia king started drifting into my imagination. True, he did always seem to have money and never told anyone where it came from. But what about the Mugs stump award? It was only $1500, barely enough for two plane tickets… Could Jose be mafia? I tried to picture him again. He was one of the purest individuals I had ever met, he didn’t smoke or drink, all I ever saw him do was rock climb and read math books. No way…
He hired us to entertain you.” He said, gaining conviction.
Knowing what our rough budget was, I asked, “How much money do you guys have to entertain me?”
“Money, no es importante.” He said, “You can have beer, drugs, women anything you want.”
“I want to go to the beach.” I said.
“OK”
And off we went to the beach. I felt like I was in some kind of a twisted lucid dream. I could have left at any time. The only thing that mattered to me in life, was climbing Angel Falls, and I wasn’t going anywhere without my gear.
Alberto drove us down to the a café on the beach and we sat there, drinking more Polarcitas waiting as the clouds dispersed and the sun came out. There were still a number of people there, a few hookers cruising by and a cute waitress that ignored us like the plague. Every time a girl walked by Antonio made a sign for pussy with his hands pressed together and asked me if I wanted her. Each time I laughed, and said no.
Finally he asked, “What’s wrong with you man, you don’t like women?”
“Yeah I love women,” I told him, “but I just can’t fuck any piece of meat that walks by. I have to have a spiritual attraction to her.”
He wrinkled his brow and said, “What are you talking about? Pussy, women, fucking…yeah.”
There was no language barrier between us, we just lived on different planets.
Although it wasn’t the most pressing thought on my mind, I was still trying to figure out how I was going to get out of the situation I was in. Maybe the ocean would offer some clarity.
I told them I really wanted to go for a swim and Antonio volunteered Louis to challenge me to a race. “He’s good swimmer.” He said shaking Louis by the shoulders.
There was a jetty extending for a half mile out into the ocean with three partially sheltered lagoons where we could swim.
“Where do you want to swim?” asked Antonio. “You can swim right here, muy tranquilo, or the next one, more waves, or the third one, even bigger waves.”
Whatever my escape plan ended up being, I knew it would play into my favor if they thought I was crazy, so now was the time to start convincing them. I imitated the psycho captain I worked for my first year in Alaska, let my eyes bulge out and with a suicidal tome in my voice, I said, “ I am an Alaskan fisherman. I like rough water. Lets go swim out beyond the breakwater!”
“Are you crazy?” retorted Antonio, “There are huge waves out there, you will get killed.”
“Yeah… I like big waves.” I said looking as much like a lunatic as I could.
Louis was getting a bit nervous but never said a word. Alberto was chuckling and Antonio conceded, “OK, then beyond the breakwater we go.”
So we started walking out the long jetty. The last breakwater was made of huge slabs of broken concrete that had been piled up. And remnant of last night’s storm there were six to eight foot rollers smashing into them and sending spray all over the place.
We stopped in the last dry area. Louis stripped down to his under shorts and I stripped down all the way. The last thing I took off was my money belt. I held it out so they could see it and said, “Seguro? Is it safe?” Knowing that it only had my pass port and forty bucks in it. The rest of my cash was buried deep in one of the haul bags.
“Si, seguro” they said, assuring me that it would be safe.
I followed Louis up onto one of the concrete blocks and we both got a blast of warm spray in our face. The slab of concrete was covered in algae and truly getting pummeled by every wave. Louis started quaking and said, “No, I am not going down there.”
There was no way I was gonna go in without him. So I waited for a gap between the waves, grabbed him by the waist and together we slid/ran down into the next oncoming wave. I dove into it and came out on the other side safely and watched as Louis almost got thrown back on the rocks. When I realized he was safe, I started swimming out. The other guys were out of site in the dry zone.
“Clarity! I need clarity!” I started repeating as I swam.
When I was some distance out, I decided to dive. I took a deep breath and dove down into the oceans perfect white noise. I followed dancing streaks of sunlight down and down until only blue light was visible. I dove and dove, determined not to surface until I found a solution or the bottom. The water was really deep, and at some point I just stopped diving. I let out a bubble and slowly drifted up with it, watching it grow. It seemed like a lifetime had passed since I was on the surface.
When my face broke into the fresh air, the first thing I saw was Louis dog paddling about 15 meters from me. At that very moment a white cap curled over his head and he inhaled water. He started choking and slapping at the water frantically.
“Holy Schmokes! He’s drowning.” I thought to myself and instinctively started swimming over to help him. On the way over, however, I realized, “ I prayed for a solution, and this is it. I got to take this guy out. He’s drowning, all I have to do is hold him down for a few minutes. Yeah! Those guys aren’t watching. Then there will be only two of them. In the confusion, I will be able to grab my stuff and get out of here.”
As I covered the distance with strong powerful strokes, I felt myself raising out of the water to pounce Louis like a shark.
I justified the action by remembering, “He doesn’t have any life in his eyes.”
“I got to take this guy out.” It became my mantra. Ten meters, five meters, three meters, two…Just as I was about to pounce on him he looked up at me with a glimmer of life in his eyes and moaned, “ I don’t want to die.”
I came down and beside him with a splash and lifted him up out of the water as much as I could and started swimming him lifeguard style all the way around the breakwater to the placid side of the jetty.
The whole time I chastised myself. “You idot! You had the chance and you blew it. You prayed for a solution and what do you do, you save the guy. You are hopeless. Now you deserve whatever happens to you.”
We came to shore on a soft sandy beach and when the others saw us Louis started screaming, “He saved my life! He saved my life!”
Louis explained to them what happened and they laughed at him and said nothing else of it. I checked my money belt and they hadn’t touched it. On the walk back to the café, they snorted some more cocaine, and I declined. I was clear.
We stopped at the café for another beer, and I decided it was a good time to start scrapping together a way out of there. “I am going to call Pedro and tell him we are having a good time and will be in Caracas later.” And I got up out of my chair.
This flustered them noticeably. Recovering composure, Antonio said coolly, “Sorry, there is no more value on the calling card.”
“No worries. I got dollars, I’ll get some change.” I spun immediately and walked into the waitress a few meters away. I held out a five dollar bill and asked for some change to make a phone call. She stared deeply into my eyes with that “What are you doing hanging out with those scum bags?” look in her eyes.
Silently I replied, “I know, I am in a bad situation here. That’s why I need to make a phone call.”
Just as she was about to hand me the change, Antonio and Alberto came up behind me and brotherly lifted me from the shoulders. Antonio said, “No, don’t call here. Let’s go to the telephone center, it will be cheaper.”
Instead of resisting, I put my arms around each of their necks and reciprocated their intensity multifold. They basically carried me up to the taxi parked on the hill 30 meters up above the café. When we got to the taxi, I turned around and saw her gaze was still fixed on me intently. The message in the airwaves was loud and clear, “Now you are in trouble!”
“I know!” I beamed back to her before I got in the taxi and slammed the door. I simply was not leaving without all my gear, period!
As soon as we drove away the mood shifted drastically. All camaraderie vanished and silence filled the air. A few miles down the road we pulled into a driveway. Antonio broke the silence as he spun around in a rage with his finger in my face. “Ok, this is the deal, you are going to give us $400 dollars for more cocaine that I am going to get right now.” And he got out of the car and went inside.
Of all numbers he could have picked, he had to choose $400 dollars; the exact amount of money that I had with me, the exact amount of money that I needed for the expedition. Bad Choice.
On cue, as if all my life I had been rehearsing for this moment, I started going insane from the inside out. I began breathing through my nose with the fierceness of a dragon. My eyes turned bright red and I allowed them to spin wildly in all directions. I started pumping my stomach with each ingoing and outgoing breath. I became acutely aware of my energy center just below my navel. I began to feel energy from the earth rushing up my spine. I felt energy form the sky flooding down through my head into my torso. I felt energy from the ocean miles away fluidly coursing through my limbs. And I felt the energy of Louis and Alberto. I was sucking all of it into my being.
I hadn’t moved a limb, but steam must have been rising off my body. Louis started quaking in the seat next to me and he reached forward to get Alberto’s attention.
Alberto turned around and saw me transforming into the Tazmanian devil, and screamed, “Amigo, what’s up? Chill out!”
In a voice that I hardly recognized as my own, I told him “I don’t like this. You guys said you were friends… I am not some rich American! I am a rock climber!” By the end of my sentence I was roaring and my pulse was quickening.
“Amigo, chill out! It’s OK. Money no is important.” And he took a couple bills off the dash and ripped them up into bits. “Come on we give you good time, buy beers, cocaine, the beach, I take you to Caracas. What can you give us?”
I breathed a long slow exhale, brought my pulse down and thought about it for a minute. Maybe he is telling the truth. This has been an amazing adventure, I was going to pay 10 bucks for a cab anyway. What is it worth to me?
“Forty bucks!” I offered back.
“Forty bucks, that’s perfect.” He said “Tranquilo”
I brought my breath under control and remained in total stillness, waiting for Antonio to return. We drove off as soon as he got in and the two of them started talking. Their tone gradually rose. I knew what they were discussing.
By this time I had figured out the lay of the land and knew which direction Caracas was. We were headed that way.
A few miles down the highway, Antonio finally burst. He spun around with his finger in my face again, and screamed “No forty bucks is not enough! Minimum $100.”
“Yes, forty bucks!” I screamed back, thrusting my face in front of his.
We batted the numbers back and forth for a few rounds and then he sat back down saying, “We’ll see about that.”
I too sat back and focused all of my energy on Caracas. I watched the signs bring us closer and closer. They started bickering again, and at the last second, Alberto pulled off onto the exit for Macuto and we headed into the densely populated urban center.
Without exploding I calmly said, “You guys are a bunch of fucking crooks. I want you to stop at the first hotel and let me out.”
Alberto nodded.
I watched as we passed a first and then a second hotel, and suddenly all the energy that had been collecting in my center exploded. I slammed my fist into the window and felt the point at which it would break. I thrust both hand onto the back of the front seat, knocking both Alberto and Antonio forward. And I screamed, “Stop the fucking car.”
Louis, who had been silent the whole time suddenly reached over and grabbed both of my hands. I melted into absolute nothingness, turned and looked him deep in the eyes.
“Louis” I said in a soft voice, “Let go of my hands or I am going to kill you right now.” I had never been more serious in my whole life, and he knew it.
He released my hands and I said calmly, “Stop the car at the next hotel.”
Again Alberto nodded. Again we drove right past a hotel and again I exploded. Again Louis tried to grab my hands, but this time I evaded him and pinned his neck up against the glass window. With my other arm poised to send my forearm through his face, through the window and out onto the street, I screamed, “Stop the fucking car or I am going to kill Louis!”
To my advantage, Louis knew I had the opportunity to kill him in the water, but didn’t. He froze with fear. Antonio on the other hand tried to grab my free hand. At that moment I was no longer in the driver seat. I watched as some other spirit, a kung fu martial artist guided my one hand through the most elegant form of push hands so I was able to successfully evade Antonio’s groping hands time and again until he finally gave up and sat back down.
I kept screaming “Stop the fucking car or I am going to kill Louis!” louder and louded and started shaking him gently into the glass. If anything happened, I was taking Louis out.”
We approached the inner city, traffic thickened and pedestrians were walking all around us.
Antonio reached under his seat and pulled out a police badge. “Let go of Louis, I am with the police.”
“Fuck you Antonio! You are not the Police! You are not the Pope! Now stop this fucking car or I am going to kill Louis and bust this whole car up!” I screamed in a increasingly shrill piercing voice and started shaking Louis more and more violently, knowing any instant I was going to explode and kill him.
At that moment Alberto reached under his seat and pulled out a big silver barreled pistol. The car was stopped in gridlock traffic and he turned to me and said, “Let go of Louis, I have a gun!”
Without thought I put my face right up to his and screamed back, “Yeah motherfucker, you got a gun, then you better shoot me in the fucking head or I am going to KILL LOUIS!!! And Bust this whole car up!”
Our eyes met and time stopped. The pedestrians outside all froze and mid stride, Antonio was collapsed with his hands on his head in frustration. Louis was becoming part of the window.
An angel appeared on my shoulder and asked me, “Did you just tell a guy with a loaded gun, to shoot you in the head?”
“Yes!”
Alberto and I each looked all around until our eyes met again. He put the gun back under the seat and time started again. He said, “Ok, get out.”
“Louis you get out and get my stuff out of the trunk first.” I said.
“No” he said in meek defiance.
“Louis!” I screamed and continued to pound him against the window.
“Ok” He said as he got out and pulled my haul bags out of the trunk.
I grabbed my backpack and started to get out. People were now surrounding the car. As I walked toward the back Alberto got out behind me. I spun, ready to tackle him if he had the gun. Amid a circle of gaping onlookers, he approached me and held out his hand to shake mine.
The insult was too powerful. I launched into the offensive, prodding him in the chest with my index finger, taunting him, “You wretched thief, put a gun to my head…”
He put his hands up to innocently protect himself, and voiced back “You loco, crazy American” and ran back to the car.
Now it was just me standing behind my three bags surrounded by a crowd of pedestrians… who all thought I was crazy… who all wanted my gear… who were all hungry wolves trying to stop me from getting to Angel Falls.
I growled under my breath as I eyed everyone of them ready to take them all on. I surrounded myself with a titanium shield and braced myself for an attack from all sides.
She came in from behind me on the left. She sliced through the titanium walls, melted my armor and gently stroked my arm like a mother her child. I turned and when our eyes met, my whole defense system collapsed.
“It’s Ok,” she said, “They are gone.”
My body tensed for a moment, quivered and then I broke down weeping into her arms.
“Oh my God, I was going to kill Louis.”
“Its Ok, you didn’t kill anybody.”
“Oh my God, I was going to kill Louis.”
“It’s Ok. It’s Ok.”
“No, I was going to kill him.”
“It’s Ok. It’s Ok.” She repeated holding me close to her breast.
After a few minutes in the arms of the Goddess, I was approached by one of the other curious onlookers who asked what happened.
I started to recap the story in brief. When I got to the part about the gun, another man interrupted, “Wait a minute, You said there were three of them and they had a gun and they let you walk away with all your stuff?”
“Yes” I said letting my eyes glow with the intensity of the experience.
At that moment a police officer pulled up on a motorcycle with a flack jacket and a sawed off shot gun strapped to his back. “What happened here?” he demanded, pulling the gun out in front of him.
The Goddess turned around and in a 30 second animated monologue I couldn’t even imagine understanding, recapped the whole story to the part where they let me out on the street.
The officer jumped on his bike without a word and took off in the direction the taxi had gone.
“Do you have friends here?” she asked me.
“I ‘think’ so?” I answered unsure. I didn’t know what to think any more, were Pedro and Nelson part of this same goofy mafia? I pulled out the telephone number.
Someone offered a cell phone and dialed for me. Pedro answered and as soon as he heard my voice he started weeping. “Oh my god Scott. Where are you? We thought you were dead. I am so sorry. I should have never told you to go with the taxi.”
“I’m Ok. I told him. And gave the phone to my goddess savior to fill him in on what happened.”
When she hung up she told me that she lived near my friends in Caracas and could give me a ride there. Some of the crowd started to wander off, but a number of people helped me carry my stuff over to her car across the street. As we started loading it in, a couple cop cars pulled up with officers wearing different uniforms.
The man who had leant me his phone and who had continued to help carry bags over to her car whispered in my, “Not all the police in Venezuela are good. Don’t tell them anything.”
One of the officers got out of the car, walked up to me and started firing off questions, “What’s going on here? Were there any drugs involved?”
I looked at him and responded with a shrug, “I don’t understand Spanish.” We continued loading up the car, the officer persisted for a few minutes, asking more questions. The guy behind me kept whispering, “Don’t tell them anything.”
So I didn’t.
Then from the other side of the car, my goddess savior said, “Come on, tell them. Maybe they can help you.”
But she was offering me all the help I needed – a ride to Caracas.
A few moments passed. We had most of the bags stuffed into the back seat of the car with the goddess’ mother. Then the first police man on the motor bike drove right up to my side. “Is this the gun?” He asked, pulling out the same hand gun that only a short time ago was up against my head.
“Yep, that’s it.” I responded.
And he drove off again – no more said.
Finally the bags were in the car. The other police man had given up and was sitting on the curb. My goddess savior got in the car and said, “Come on…”
And just at that moment, the taxi car came driving up and Alberto was wearing a police uniform, the same one that the second bunch of cops were wearing. I was getting framed!
“That guy wasn’t a cop before!” I screamed in desperation to the crowd of people all around. “I am getting framed!”
“Chill out, tranquilo.” Shouted the second officer.
The car stopped in front of me and I peered in. I was wrong. Alberto wasn’t driving, a police officer was. Alberto was in the back seat with Antonio and Louis. They were all handcuffed. Another officer opened the back door. The three of them cranned their heads to look out. Our eyes met. I let out a deep growl to meet their sneers.
“OK confirmation.” Said the second officer, half laughing at our animalistic behavior. He shut the door and the car drove off. All the officers returned to their cars and left. The crowd of people continued off on their morning errands and I was left standing by the car.
My goddess called to me, “Are you coming?”
I got in the car and we drove off in silence until we got out of the city. A half hour later we were out on the open road with lush jungle covered mountains on either side. All around us was life; birds, animals, plants. I opened my window and felt the fresh air on my face. Coming out of my blank expressionless stare, I remembered who I was and what I was doing in Venezuela.
I turned towards my goddess savior with a huge grin, and said, “I am not a gangster, I am a rock climber. I came here to climb Angel Falls.”
“Look mama,” she said, “he’s not crazy. He’s a rock climber. He’s going to climb Angel Falls.”
Her moms eyes went from frightened to horrified. “He’s loco!!”
Our outboard driven long boats turned a large bend in the river, and we all peered ahead to get a view of Angel Falls, the tallest freefalling waterfall in the world. But still the clouds kept her hidden from view. For two days we had been motoring up the ______ river from Canaima, our last contact with civilization.
Our mission was to free climb the sheer rock face to the left of the falls. Something no one had ever done before. We were a team of eight, three climbers, two photographers, and three support the clouds broke and Angel Falls rose out of the mist above us. A torrent of water, swollen from the previous night’s rain blast out of the top of the plateau over a hundred feet and then Free falling 3,300 feet from the top of Auyan Tepui. Rains from the night before
This section can be as detailed historically as we want it to be, we wrote several articles for international climbing mags about the ascent and it can be retold in may ways.
Day 12 was the glory day. From the top of the wet slabs, we blasted up the thousand foot head wall. This is what we had come for, 8 pitches of slightly overhanging sandstone weaving up through discontinuous crack systems. I felt like I was back in the New River Gorge, a thousand feet of beauty mountain. The rock ate up gear and we didn’t need to use a single bolt except at the belay stations. By nightfall we had come within what looked like one or two pitches of moderate climbingpast a couple of hanging gardens to the summit.
As our mission was to bring the entire team to the summit and spend the night up there, we decided to retreat to our bivy cave and all summit together the next day.
Lazily we enjoyed a fabulous breakfast of Arepas and started ascending the fixed lines with sleeping gear and food for the next day.
Will and I went up first to lead the last couple pitches and the rest of the team followed. Around mid-afternoon Will led up a short pitch and disappeared into a wall of foliage. He belayed from there and soon I was off on what we thought was the summit pitch. Half a rope length up the rock face was capped by a wide hanging garden. I scrambled into the garden and gaped up at a steep 80 foot prow between me and the summit. Driven by the expectations of the summit, I decided to keep going. Halfway up the well-featured rock became blank, the climbing difficult, and the gear sketchy. I kept going until at last I was confronted with a cruxy 5.12 section with no gear. Will was still below the garden, out of sight and sound. I descended to my last piece of gear, backed it up and belayed Will up to the garden. With him directly below me, I found a few hook placements, dangled nervously for a moment and then hauled up the drill to put in a bolt – our first one on the whole route.
Even with the bolt beneath me, it took me a while to figure out the moves and muster up the courage to pull them off. What seemed like hours later, I finished the pitch and scrambled into the jungle on the summit. Will followed and we fixed lines for the rest of the team to jumar up. Already dusk was approaching.
We wandered around, trying to find a path leading up to the broad flat summit we had seen from pictures, but eventually realized a couple hundred feet of more vertical rock separated us from the summit. Gradually the other team members appeared, anxious to celebrate. By then it was dark, and we had to decide whether to bivy on the ant infested jungle sub-summit we had reached or climb into the night to find the true summit.
Spying a crack leading upward, I put on my headlamp, asked for a belay and headed into the darkness. The crack lead about 50 feet up to the top of a giant boulder that extended out into the nothingness. I fixed a line for everyone to follow and from there we all set off through a labyrinth of jungle canyoneering to the summit.
We arrived at the summit triumphant, fulfilled, exhausted, and wet. Before the sounds of our cheers echoed off the canyon walls, the rain started pouring. We threw together a spartan meal and all sought out nooks crannies, and small caves to sleep in. We awoke, some of us in puddles of water, in time to see the amber rays of the morning sun filter through the mist rising off the tallest free flowing water fall in the world. On one side of us, loomed a primeaval jungle studded with gothic sandstone towers. The other side looked like the edge of the world, only misty clouds visible far in the distance.
The roar of the falls was deafening. The top of Auyan Tepui is an 800 square mile plateau, the size of Rhode Island. Water from the night’s storm that draining from over half of that area came blasting out through a narrow canyon and disappeared off the end of the world.
And all around us was life! Beautiful green bromeleids, lush grasses and multi colored floral trees contrasted the deep orange colored rock towers. We had truly made it to the land of the lost. I expected anytime to see dinosaurs.
The morning was spent in respective silence and awe, each of us finding our own space. After breakfast, our Venezuelan photographer Pedro asked me if I would jump off a 10 foot ledge for a picture. From his perspective, it appeared that I was jumping off of the water fall. I agreed the shot would be amazing so I volunteered to jump. Some of the other guys came around to watch while he adjusted focus.
When he was ready, I jumped up into the air, kicked my legs back like doing a backscratcher with skis and landed softly in the mossy ground.
“Ohh, I missed!” he exclaimed, claiming he didn’t expect me to jump up so high. “Can you jump again?”
“No problem.” I said, ready to scramble back up for another shot.
Just then Will, who had been watching jumped up and said, “I wanna jump, take a picture of me.”
Pulsed with a dose of ego vanity, I jumped to my feet, scrambled up the cliff and got ready to jump before Will, “No, this is my jump.” I claimed and Will conceded allowing me to take flight again. The second time I was more confident, jumped a little higher, out just a little further, more air time. Pedro snapped the picture and down I came right onto a hidden root in the soft ground.
Snap!!
“Ohh! My ankle.” I screamed as I rolled over in pain.
Having sprained my ankle countless times in my youth, I recalled a similar intense pain.
“Ohh what a dummy.” I muttered to myself realizing the stupidity of my action.
It hurt so bad I couldn’t even put weight on it and soon it swelled up black and blue.
“I think I got a really good shot” voiced Pedro in an attempt to make me feel better.
“Great.” I bemoaned sarcastically.
I soaked my foot in the cool water to help the swelling go down. Within a few hours and a good tape job, I was able to bear weight on it and started hobbling around. Ramon offered to lead an exploration further into the interior of the tepui, and despite my pain, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to join.
By early afternoon we began the long and arduous task of rappelling the route and cleaning all the fixed lines. My foot actually felt better hanging than walking so I didn’t mind hanging back and cleaning the route while the others descended.
The next day brought no relief to my pain, and I agonized about the treacherous descent down through the jungle and the long hike back to the river. But luckily for me, a helicopter showed up the next afternoon and we were able to load all our gear in it, and I caught a ride down to the river. I truly felt like I was in the hands of an angel, as we descended in less than 2 minutes, the same terrain that we had spent 10 days laboriously climbing. Unfortunately for the rest of the team, except Jose who happened to jump on the helicopter when it returned for the second gear run, a dense fog mysteriously rolled in and the helicopter was unable to pick them up from the ledge above our bivy cave. As they had already sent all of their gear down, they were forced to spend a chilly night in a steady rain all huddled together.
Luckily the weather cleared I the morning and the helicopter was able to return and pluck our friends off the wall. We celebrated our reunion with a huge batch of oatmeal and then loaded everything onto the native longboats for the first leg of our long journey back to Caracas.
During our journey and for the few weeks that I had still in Caracas, I focused on applying Elongar to heal my ankle. From my initial efforts, I was aware of something very different from the work I had done on injuries to the muscle-tendon network. I cultivated energy and moved it down to my ankle, but it seemed to be a different density than the energy I was used to working with. I decided to have it x-rayed.
My wings trimmed from my triumphantly photogenic plummet off the summit of Angel Falls, I returned to Salt Lake City and created a cozy, healing den in the basement of the Professor’s house. My talus bone had been sheered in two and actually required orhtoscopic surgery. Luckily I still had an active insurance policy to cover the operation.
I began my winter hibernation in Snowy Salt Lake City meditating on whether the healing life energy I had discovered a year ago could be utilized to help bones heal as well. Then a few days after my operation, I received an unexpected visit from Raven. She had heard about my mishap and came by to say hello. Within minutes we were sharing our pasts.
She grew up in post-grunge Seattle, and started climbing at a young age. She had talent and actually first came to Salt Lake still as a young spindler to train with a coach. Her passion later shifted toward dance and she decided to come back to Salt Lake to study Modern dance at the University of Utah.
Our conversation later swung towards life philosophies and she bared a cool, rational, almost heartless attitude toward life. So brazen were her statements that I presumed she must be hiding behind them.
Then I asked her about love.
“I don’t believe in love” she replied point blank.
“In what? True, romantic, eternal, motherly, …”
“Love is a weakness, a dependency that enslaves people.”
“I can be. That’s for sure. But there are all kinds of love. Love can be empowering as well.”
“Yeah, well the whole soul partner love, I think its bullshit. It doesn’t exist. People are attracted to one another for a while and some of them end up having kids so they stick around to raise them. But eternal love, nah, I don’t buy it.”
I laughed and remembered my how I struggled to utter those words, “I love you” once upon a time. I was already in my mid twenties in grad school, swimming in a lake on a warm sunny day with my girlfriend and several times it almost blurted out of my mouth and I held it back. Then while dangling on this rope we had found hanging into the water, we looked into each others and I slowly eeked the words out. At that moment my whole being burst forth and merged with hers in a ball of green light that I had never felt before.
“Love is.” I stated simply coming back from my past life recollection.
“What is that supposed to mean?” she asked defiently.
“Love isn’t something you believe in. It simply is. And when you ‘is’ in love you’ll know it.”
Raven came by on and off and brought flicks that we watched together. It was ironic that the energy of the dance is what had drawn us together, but the first month of our relationship, we just laid around bedside, journeying to far corners of thought in conversation alone. During this time I told her about Elongar, and shared with her some of my experiences with harnessing life energy.
She was initially very curious and contributed crucial reflections. Knowing she was familiar with the way energy moved through her body when she danced, I was able to describe the movements of Elongar to her.
as the echo of the dance movement that bounced back at a slowed pace through the body.
“The energetic healing aspect of Elongar,” I shared, “ results from a combination of that movement guided by spirit and combined with active visualization and rhythmic breath.”
During this time we started sharing intimate moments together. Of course, we weren’t ‘together’ together at this time because she was dating a number of guys.
Jose was my ghost companion through my recovery. He showed up mysteriously, brought me yummy fruits and we started making plans for future adventures.
Between visits I sank back into my meditation, increasing my awareness and sensitivity to the energy of bones. During this time I learned to harness more the power of visualization, as the cast prevented me from physically moving the ankle joint. My recovery was rapid and within a month I was walking about. As soon as the cast came off I set myself to the task of regaining strength.
Meanwhile I had moved into an open room in the Venezuela house with Jose and a few other Venezuelan friends. Jose and I started creating a theatrical slide show presentation of our Angel Falls expedition with the intention of touring around the country.
Raven visited more and more and soon we were dancing together, practicing sexual magic and talking about creating a performance piece. Then one evening it happened, we were lying in bed together and she looked at me, silent for a long time. Then she started to voice something but was unable. Moments later she tried again. I held her, kissed her on the forehead between her eyebrows. She looked at me and whispered, “I love you.” Then immediately burst into tears.
Over the next few months I witnessed the most amazing human transformation as little by little Raven’s heart peeked out from behind a lifetime of shielding. Bursting through the layers of defense, shone an emerald glow of compassion, caring and true devotion.
I too was in love and for the moment the restless anxiety of an adrenaline junkie was soothed.
Raven and I grew closer and closer. We played together, danced together, inspired each other and spent as much time as we could with one another. And on occasion we embarked on psychedelic journeys together. Over her Spring break we mad a road trip down to the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, of Colorado. Our mission wasn’t to climb and get scared on some heinous route, but to take pictures for an article I was writing and take ecstacy on the north rim at sun set.
Raven had been given a couple hits of ecstacy. Neither of us had either done it before, so we decided that alone, surrounded by the spirits of the Black would be the place to try. As the sun sank and we began to fly, the physical dimensions of the canyon gave way to an ocean of energetic beings and endless waves. We became but two noodles intertwined in a cosmic soup of multiple dimensions. As the light faded with the setting sun, our attention focused inward and we began the magical journey of sensory exploration. Our bodies slithered over one another, tickling with heightened sensitivity until we met eye to eye, open heart to open heart and embraced forming perfect union.
And then came the day Jose and I left for our cross-country slide show tour.
“You’re only going to be gone for six weeks. I’ll be fine, maybe I can even focus on school. You are going to have an amazing trip.” She reassured me as we left and gave me a gift for the journey. She had recorded a collage of her favorite songs for us to listen to during the journey. “When you listen to this, I will be with you.”
We had 15 shows lined up in colleges, climbing gyms, retail stores and civic centers. And we had a blast. Between events locals took us climbing to their favorite areas and the tour turned into one of the most memorable climbing trips ever. But not just for the climbing. Spending countless hours on the road together, Jose and I began to merge the principles of wave theory and Elongar.
We were both formulating profound mystic philosophies. One based on empirical wisdom and the other on precise mathematical models coupled with shamanistic teachings. Both of us were academically trained and shared a profound love for nature, our common laboratory. These similarities, combined with a deep respect for one another opened the channels of communication.
Sitting in the car, he launched into a essay on wave theory. “ We are all particles in the time space continuum. You can fight the flow…”
“Wait a minute, what do you mean the time space continuum?’
“Time and space, together create a surface like the ocean with an infinite number of waves. You and I are particles, like driftwood floating on that ocean.
“You might be a piece of drift wood Jose, but I am a motor boat; ‘self will’ brother, anywhere I want to go.”
“Ha Ha” he chuckled, “Not so! You may think you have the power to go against the flow, but there is no where to go. You can only be. The more effort you make alter the current, the more waves you have to plow through.”
After statements like that we often shared long periods of silence. I didn’t always agree with his theories instantaneously, but I never rejected them either.
“So what about us, are you saying that we were fated to go on this tip together and there is no way we could avoid it?”
“Every particle is floating through time space at a particular vibration. You and I, we have caught the same wave and we are riding it together, that’s all.”
“And some day we will drift off on our own waves again?” I asked.
“Maybe. Remember time is infinite, lives are short, some waves stay together a long time.”
As he said this, my thoughts drifted back to Raven and our experience in the Black. I hoped our waves would go on forever together. The tape she had made for us played continuously while we motored along. It was an intricately woven medley of songs of the heart and soul. When we made it to Aspen, Colorado, I called her. She said things were great, she missed me immensely, but was focused on school. I shared with her some of the highlights of the trip and assured her I would be back soon.
After the slide show in Aspen some local kids invited us over to their pad to crash. When we got there, one of the kids rolled up a joint and “in honor of your kick-ass adventure to Angel Falls” and passed it around. I accepted and passed it to Jose who already had his head in his math book. He looked up momentarily, grunted and looked back down.
“Jose!” I whispered, and offered again.
In all the time I knew Jose, he had never smoked herb, never drank beer and sometimes, like this one didn’t even take interest in other humans around him, but preferred to sink into academic wave theory.
He looked up at me, and again we shared a long moment of silence. That was the first time we experienced a version of soul travel with each other. While the others patiently waited, we looked deep into one another’s eyes, and had the following discussion.
“Would you like to join us for a ceremonial toke?”
“What for, man that stuff just dulls your mind.”
“Maybe? Maybe it will enhance your perception… warrior. How are you going to know if you don’t try.”
He closed his book to the applause of our hosts and accepted the joint. I am not sure if that was Jose's first time smoking the sacred herb, but I do think it was the first time he smoked with the conscious intention of liberating his mind. After a few minutes enlivened conversation, the rest of us shifted our attention, and allowed Jose to sink into a peaceful deep meditation.
The next morning we were on the road again. In contrast to the verbal wave theory that I absorbed, Jose gleaned life energy teachings by watching me do Elongar in the car and outside while we were camping. For many days he said nothing and simply watched between pages of math that he was reading.
Then one day while driving, he turned and asked, “ What are you doing when you move your arms around like that?”
“Right now I am concentrating energy,” I said, “And now I am letting it flow up my arms, back down to my hands and… over to you. Do you feel it?”
“While driving he lifted his hands slightly form the steering wheel, ducked his head and shoulders slightly and waited as the energy ball drifted into his lap.”
He held his pose for a few moments and I could tell he was really trying to feel it.
“I theenk I felt it.” He said with his thick Venezuelan accent.
“Of course you do.” I said to reassure him, remembering how vague the sensations felt to me the first hundred times I tried to recreate my first experience with it.
“What does it feel like to you?” He asked me.
And I had to think for a while, as I had never put it in words before. “ Sometimes like a viscous fluid moving through my limbs, other times it is really ignited like a sparkling ball of plasma.”
Maybe I deedn’t feel it then, will you do it again?”
I laughed and told him “Sometimes it feels really light like a feather dragging through my body.”
He motioned for me to do it again, so I gathered chi, this time concentrated it a little denser with some deep breaths through my nose and then sent it his way.
He squinted, struck his reception pose and waited again. After a few moments, he said “do it again… and again… and again.” Each time I practiced altering the density of the energy ball slightly. And soon he was able to truly feel the energy.
In this way we traveled, each sharing and learning from the other. And thus began the most amazing spiritual partnership either one of us had ever had. We each became the other’s first true student, often challenging the information and making the others wisdom grow.
Within a three weeks we made it to the East Coast and gave a slide show at Clemson University where I had gone to grad school six years earlier. After a rowdy performance, an old classmate of mine invited us over to crash at his place, and I checked my email for the first time in a week, hopeful to hear from Raven.
There were a number of messages from her. I read them in order. The first was written in beautiful prose, soft and surrendering. She shared beautiful reflections of exciting dance pieces she was creating and simply said I was with her wherever she went. The second letter was more chaotic, admitting that she couldn’t get me out of her mind and was having trouble focusing on her upcoming performances. I was kind of flattered.
The third letter was short and precise –“the pain is too much for me to deal with, I am constantly thinking about you every moment of every day, and I can’t focus on school… I am cutting you off. Bye.”
I was crushed. What was she talking about. I got up and walked across the room staring blankly at nothing.
“What’s up with you?” Jose asked
“Whoa. I exclaimed, “Raven just cut me off.”
“What do you mean, cut you off?”
I let Jose read the email.
“Ahh, don’t worry.” He said, “she obviously just misses you and this is her way of dealing with it. As soon as you get back everything will be fine.”
Again we looked at one another in silence. This time it was his turn to ask the questions.
“What do you want to do, drive back tonignt?”
“No”
“Are you attached to her?”
“Ummm…”
“Ahaa. Of these attachments you
must be free if you are to become a warrior.”
“Sigh.”
Meanwhile my old classmate looked on in disbelief. “Dude, here’s the phone. Give her a call.”
Jose just grinned, and I called Raven. She answered the phone pleasantly and soon as she identified me, her voice turned icy and vicious. And I knew what had happened. The nurturing and trust that we had spent months cultivating as she slowly braved to open her heart, had suddenly vanished. With the swipe of an unseen sword, the iron gates had slammed down, protecting her fragile soul from experiencing more pain. And I was the source of that pain. So I was cut off.
By the time I hung up, my heart had been pierced and I was devastated. As I went off to sleep, I recalled a lifelong history of relationships that left me wrecked. Ironically almost all of them had been with dancers. Three years earlier, it had been Paige, also a modern dancer at the University of Utah. A coy Mormon girl, she had opened up and allowed me to assist her in a process of emotional processing. What I hadn’t known was underneath each layer that we “healed” were a dozen more that caused more and more pain. As each new trauma surfaced, the emotional pain became directed at the person who was helping her – ME! In the end she loathed me and secretly slept with her next lover whenever I was away.
That break up ignited the fire that sent me up some of the most dangerous, yet brilliant routes I had ever climbed. To immortalize the lesson, I gave them names like Frauen Frei, Codependency, Pagan Rage and The Perfect Child.
Luckily for me I had Jose with me to help me keep it together. We had a few days off on our schedule and made a journey up to Linville Gorge in North Carolina. Seeing a pristine blank section of steep rock, we put up a few routes and immortalized what Jose told me was me not learning from life lessons and thus experiencing repeating dramas, (i.e. Raven-13. 5.11d X)
But this life lesson was far from over. Over the next several weeks while we finished our slide show tour, I continued to email and call Raven. By the time we were up at the New River Gorge, for our last presentation Raven had opened the gates allowing enough love to shine through to draw me back to Salt Lake City.
Meanwhile, however other options presented themselves. Jose and I now had saved up a bit of money from our tour and we were otherwise free to continue the road trip or plan another adventure.
Then a third element entered our camp. We met photographer John Burcham at the New River Gorge, who had just come back from the most epic trek / rafting trip over about 300 miles of remote Alaska. And he was keen to head back to Venezuela with us to tackle another tepui. So we decided to delay our trip back to Salt Lake and climb together with John.
The night after we decided to stay longer, I awoke from my sleep and heard a distinct voice telling me it was time for me to return to Salt Lake to begin teaching Elongar. Although accustomed to kinesthetic intuition, I was not yet ready to listen to a voice out of nowhere, so I didn’t mention it.
The next evening I heard the voice again, this time more clearly. I told Jose in the morning. He suggested that we start aiming back towards Salt Lake yet continue our road trip. Climbing with John the next morning, I attempted a classic steep 5.13 at Endless Wall. I slipped while trying to clip the thrid bolt and decked. The rope caught some of my weight, but I got spooked pretty badly. Jose offered to finish the lead, but I decided it was best to get back up on the horse again after falling off and jumped back on after a short rest.
The second time I climbed through the roof crux and made it onto the face above. All spread out in a corner, I popped off again. Although I was just above a bolt and in no danger of grounding, Jose instinctively yarded in on the rope and sucked me under the roof. My left foot slammed against the wall and my toes stretched back, ripping the tendons on the inside ankle and arch of the foot.
The pain was intense. But the emotional agony was far worse and I burst out in tears. What was going on? In ten years of climbing, I had never been hurt, and now within six months I had crippled myself twice. My friends looked on compassionately and then we began the long hike back to the car.
I hung out nursing my new injury at our friend’s house at the New for a few days while Jose and John went climbing together. I was certain no bones had broken, but I was weary that I had completely ripped a tendon on the inner arch of the foot. So again I focused my energy on healing my body. The initial recovery went rapidly and within a week I was able to walk lightly on it.
I was beginning to wonder whether the gift of healing energy I had discovered wasn’t becoming a curse. Just because I learned to heal myself didn’t mean that I had to keep destroying my body in order to apply it. And then it dawned on me; the voice, the message to go back to Salt Lake to teach Elongar. Yes! It was time for me to share my discovery to help other people learn this amazing method of self-healing.
I spoke with Raven several times during the next week and told her about my new injury and my inspiration to return to teach. She shared compassion for me and at the same time said she missed me and urged me to come home in time to see her performance at school in a week. Also one of her roommates had just moved out and she asked me whether I wanted to move in with her to begin creating a life together.
I was moved by her sudden burst of affection, and drawn by the vision of us living in harmony together. I felt for sure as soon as I returned and was able to provide trust and security for her again, our relationship would thrive again.
Meanwhile Jose, John and I formulated our plan to return to Venezuela to do the first ascent of a new route on Autana, a sacred tepui further south and deeper into the jungle of Venezuela. Jose had attempted it several times, but never had been able to summit it. With our combined resume, and John’s amazing photographic abilities, we felt certain we would be able to receive grant money and sponsoring for the expedition. We decided to aim for next December, the beginning of the dry season in Venezuela for our departure date. Before leaving, we drafted a proposal and prepared to send it out to all the grant-giving institutions.
Fueled by love and driven by expectations, I drove through the night while Jose slept in the car. We made it to Utah in an amazing time of less than 35 hours. As we headed into Salt Lake, Jose yawned and said quite calmly.
“ Remember, things are never as they seem to be.”
“What on earth do you mean by that Jose?’ I asked.
“It’s really important for you not to have any expectations when you return.”
“Yeah, I’ll just play things day by day.” I said lying. I was still so attached, so driven by the expectation of returning and reuniting with my princess that I was fully unconscious of any other possibilities.
Jose looked at me for a while in silence, trying to pierce my veil of ignorance and then just closed his eyes again.
Raven was on her front porch when we arrived. She ran down to the car and we fell into each others arms. The three of us spent the afternoon together. Jose and I recounted adventures of our journey and Raven brought us up to date on the scene in the city. That evening Jose took the car over to his house, leaving me with a few bags over at Raven’s.
We made and amazing meal, created visions making a studio, redecorating the house, and planting a garden. That night we nestled into each others arms, made passionate love, and drifted off into peaceful slumber.
I awoke shortly before dawn in a cold sweat of fright. Was it a dream or was it true? Raven had turned and attacked me. She had launched into a vicious verbal assault, full of scathing loathsome remarks. She hated me.
I glanced over at her, still asleep, facing away, her energy pulled away from me. It must have been a dream, but so creepy.
I lay beside her for a moment thinking “I’ve been here before.” And I had, years ago with Paige. In the twilight hours, before waking while she was still in her subconscious mind I had repeatedly gotten these shocking dreams. Then she would wake up, paint on a smile and hide behind the lies.
The memory was too real. I silently crawled out of bed and went into the living room. I sat on the couch and meditated in silence until the sun came up. Then decided to go for a walk down to the coffee shop at 9th and 9th a few blocks away. It was the one section of Salt Lake with character, and it was the one place where you could go and be sure to run into people you knew. I wandered around for a bit, had a Late, bought some treats to bring back and saw a flyer for an Astanga yoga class being offered the following morning. Something about it caught my eye. The teacher was a former dancer for Pilabolus in New York and he didn’t look like he suffered from the same guru-mania as my former yoga teachers.
When I returned to the house Raven was awake. As soon as she appeared from the bedroom, my deepest fear became harsh reality. There were no lies, no painted on smile. Her face was contorted in a fit of rage. “Where did you go?” She snapped.
I held out the treats in an enticing display and spun her around to redirect the flow into the kitchen. She was tense as a high voltage electrical wire.
We shared the pastries but I could tell things were not good. Between distractions her onyx black eyes and drilled me with accusation.
Before I could create another distraction, she launched into the same full-scale verbal attack I had just heard in my dream.
I sat there and listened to every pent up emotion, fear, trauma, projection, and rejection as it came flying out at me. I focused on my breath, tried to let the remarks float by me, even though so many of them were directed right at the core of my being.
“What are you doing, thinking you can just move in over here? You are some kind of a homeless freak, and now you are crippled again. You can’t even dance. You are always going on and on about some kind of life energy that you can feel, but nobody else on the planet does.”
Breath…
The flow was all one way, she was much wittier than I and her quick tongue lashed out insults and brutally cutting comments faster than I could even think of things to say. At the end of her emotional deluge, I simply bowed my head, picked up my bags and said good bye.
Although I had managed to keep my composure, internally I was enraged, but again in moderation. I remembered the night I found out about my old Mormon girlfriend’s lover. Even my roommates and most of my ‘friends’ already knew but none of them had the heart to tell me. In the middle of a downpour, I stormed out of my house up into the foothills above Salt Lake. I walked and walked, higher and higher until the rain turned to snow and was melting off my perspiration. Ten miles out of town in utter blackness I ran into a deer and exploded in a rage of fear/anger/pain, struck out at the animal and unleashed a primeval scream. The poor, frightened animal jumped 20 feet and bolted off into the mist. Seeing this I collapsed on the ground and wept until the falling snow soothed my soul.
Maybe I was making progress. Although steaming with anger, I was beginning to see the cosmic joke of my own repetitive dramas. But her words still stung.
As I walked her accusations bounced around my fragmented mind. “She was the one who invited me to move in, now she is condemning me. What does she mean homeless, I am a nomad rock climber. And of all people, how can she deny the life energy. She has seen it, felt it, we have played with it together.”
Luckily my friends Steve and Cynthia lived only a few blocks away. I cut through a back lot, hucked my bags over their fence and crawled over. They were having breakfast at the time and broke into hysterics as they saw my bags come flying over. By the time I crawled over they were at the door to greet me.
“Lefty! What a surprise to see you here.”
I shared the story with them over tea and biscuits.
“I told you to watch out for that one.” Steve reminded me of his words the night we had met.
“Yeah, Yeah.” I answered, “Well Leftys done left now. I am out of there.”
But I wasn’t. That afternoon, Raven came by balling and apologetic. “What have I done? I don’t know why I just freaked out. I am so sorry, please forgive me.”
I looked at her thinking, “You’re kidding, right? Please tell me this is a joke.”
But at the same time with my heart I was feeling her pain. I knew what she was going through. I knew she loved me and it was her own tortured soul that was creating this almost schizophrenic behavior. I had felt the full power of her heart and knew that if we could ride out the storm of her process, our partnership would be magical.
“Please don’t leave me.” She said softly.
I pulled her in close to me and we embraced. As we picked up my bags and started to walk back home, I said goodbye to Steve and Cynthia. Steve tried to remain positive, but I read the expression on his face, “Get ready for the roller coaster.”
And roller coaster we did, the next couple months we fluctuated between moments of divine love and long periods of high drama.
During these intense times, I kept my sanity by practicing Elongar in nearby Liberty park. I also began attending the Astanga yoga classes that I had seen advertised the day I came home. What a blessing. Although my first day I snickered at how linear the movements were, I loved the combination of strong fluid breath with the postures and felt really calm after each class. I also respected the teacher who was self-empowered rather than suffering from guru worship as my previous teachers had. It was obvious he was sharing an experiential and scientific wisdom passed down from his teachers.
We soon formed a friendship, and I shared with him my motivation to start teaching the movement energy therapy Elongar that I had created. He encouraged me wholeheartedly to begin teaching and at the same time opened my eyes to the vast amount of ancient wisdom that might help me further develop my work.
His influence impacted tremendously and I immediately began researching other forms of mystic healing, self-healing meditative practices. I truly had been living with blinders on. And the focus of learning helped allow me to endure the turmoil at home.
One day while Raven was at school I began rearranging the spare room to create a studio for us to work and study in. When she returned she exploded in another fit. “What do you think you own this place now? You are lucky to even be staying here.”
“No, I am paying rent, remember.” I said
We rode out the tempest and managed another day. The next morning however, I awoke again feeling pure hatred coming from her subconscious mind as she slept. Moments later she rolled over, and sneered at me with a demonic glare in her eyes. And then she rolled back over and fell calmly asleep.
“This is getting really intense.” I thought.
I wondered how long it is going to last. And having learned about codependency from my last relationship, I was cautious of trying to become her healer. I wondered if she would be interested in counseling.
After breakfast when I felt like she was in a stable mood, I proposed the idea of counseling. Bad idea.
“What do you think I am crazy. You’re the one who everybody thinks is a freak, you and your Elongar, movement energy therapy.”
“So is that the source of all your frustration. All you friends think I am a freak and you don’t know whether to believe them or your own intuition?”
“What do you mean my own intuition. You don’t even have a job. You are living off of money that you and your crazy Venezuelan friend made doing a stupid slide show tour around the country and then you crippled yourself again. My intuition tells me you are a loser.”
The projections were flying, I made the mistake of playing into her game a few times, but each word out of my mouth unleashed a frenzy of hurtful accusations from her.
Finally she said, “I don’t even know why you are here in this house.”
Clearly it was time for me to leave. But where to, I didn’t feel like going back over to Steve and Cynthia’s, that would have been too repetitive.
At that moment Jose drove up and knocked on the door. I had barely seen him since we got back from our trip, and like magic, here he was. Raven disappeared into our room.
“Boy am I glad to see you.” I greeted him.
“I am not sure why but I woke up this morning and felt like I should come see you.”
“Perfect,” I said, “hold on a minute.” And I went into our room, packed my bags and collected all of my new books on different forms of yoga.
“Where are you going?” she sneered.
“With my crazy Venezuelan friend. Bye.”
We headed off towards Little Cotton Wood Canyon to go climbing. Jose listened with detached calmness as I took him on a tour of the roller coaster ride I had been on, and said simply, “Remember, no attachments.”
Someone had already moved into my old room up at his house, but he invited me to come live in the living room until I figured out what to do. Of course, although I knew it was over, I still pined for Raven, the beautiful loving Raven that I once knew who was disappearing behind the Raven that hated me. I didn’t see her for over a week and I felt certain in my heart that my Raven would surface again and come invite me back in her life. I often played the mixed tape she gave me, nostalgic for the moments we love we shared together.
She came by a few weeks later to give me some things I had left at her house. She was obviously cold and bitter. Before she left she gave me another mixed tape she had made and then asked if she could have the old one to listen to.
I gave it to her, but told her I really enjoyed it and would like to have it back some day.
And then she disappeared form my life without giving me the tape back.
I sank into a hollow depression as I realized it was really over. Jose had been practicing guitar in his room and a few minutes later he came out and saw me down. I told him the story, and just as I said, “She’s gone.” A bird flew into the window, flew around the room a few times, landed on the lamp and then flew back out.
“Ahaa,” he exclaimed, “there is our message from the abstract.”
The abstract is the word that Jose used to describe spirit, God or what I called energy. “What’s the abstract’s message?” I asked gloomily.
“When a bird flies into you life, welcome it and thank it for its blessing, but when it wants to leave, let it go. It will come back if it is supposed to.”
“Not exactly what I wanted to hear.” I said.
“The abstract does not exist to flatter your ego.” He said as he disappeared back into his room.
The next few weeks were really tough for me. Between moments of focus, I kept suffering from long periods of insecurity, distraction and emptiness. I was haunted by the reasons raven left me. I kept hearing her words over and over again in my mind, “…energy you can feel but nobody else on the planet does. You are a loser…”
Her chattering monkeys had invaded my headspace and they were working me. I wanted to begin teaching Elongar, but I only had the vaguest idea of how to explain what I did to other people. And the came the question of finding students. Rather than do anything about it I sat around listening to the tape Raven had given me over and over and over. In contrast to the last tape, this one was a choppy medley of soul wrenching, twisted tunes; Nine Inch Nails meets Rage Against the Machine. I kept searching for a message, a glimmer of hope to hold onto.
Jose noticed my doldrums and said, “You have fallen out of the flow.”
“Oh that’s good, I thought I was out of my mind.”
“In order to get back in the flow, you have to keep the mind focused.”
“On what though?”
“It does not matter. Whatever comes to mind just do it.”
“But stupid things keep popping up in my mind.”
“Do not judge them just do them. If you feel like doing Elongar, do Elongar. If you feel like going climbing , go climbing. If you feel like reading a book, read it.”
“The problem is my mind keeps jumping from one thing to the next.”
“It does not matter. Just connect your actions to you mind. Soon you will return to the flow and the abstract will guide you.”
“Ok” I said and went and began scouring the kitchen. Everyone was so preoccupied with their external lives that the kitchen had been neglected, for years as far as I could tell. It had disgusted me since the day I got there, but it was a big job. So I dove in; threw out all the moldy food, washed all the dishes, scrubbed cobwebs and mildew off the cabinets with vinegar, used boiling water to peel away layers of smeared yuck off the refrigerator, polished the sink. Hours went by unnoticed as I sank into my project.
Just as I finished the door bell rang and Raull, one of Jose’s Venezuelan friends came in. I immediately noticed he was walking funny and asked him about it. He had injured his shoulder working out in his yard the other day and had been in pain ever since. I felt the urge to tell him about the self healing technique that I had developed, so I told him about it and asked if he wanted to try it.
Enthusiastically he said, “Sure.”
I began by explaining to him the process, including the components of movement, breath and visualization. Then we identified exactly where the injury was and what motions affected it. We created an energetic flow system to bring energy to that part of the body and connected movements to help guide the flow. I described to him how to break down the linkages of the body to pulse the flow in towards and away from the area. And then we began the movement, very slowly, with me guiding each limb.
Never before had I taught someone how to do Elongar, but it was instinctive, as if I was guided through the process. As his movements became more and more fluid, I introduced the breathing. I was amazed how quickly he was learning. Within an hour, his movements and breath were coordinated with his visualization of energy flow. But he still didn’t feel the mysterious pulse of energy that I was describing.
“Ok now comes the hardest part. Now you have to turn your mind off and allow the energy, or spirit or abstract, to guide you.”
“What do you mean?’ he asked
“Hold fast in your mind what you want -- to heal your shoulder. Begin the movements, keep your awareness heightened, relax and allow the process to happen. It’s like following someone in a ballroom dance, but the moves never repeat themselves. You enter the trance and dance to heal yourself.”
Without any hesitation, he began moving. Occasionally I tapped him on different parts of the body where he wasn’t aware. His breathing was rhythmical, and soon I saw it start to happen. His upper body seemed to transform from a solid three-dimensional body to a liquid ethereal form. It was so strange to see him transform.
“Is that what I look like when I am doing Elongar?” I asked myself. No wonder everyone thinks I am such a freak.
As came out of his trance, he turned to me and smiled. “I felt it. And I felt the injury get washed away. It’s magic, no?”
“Yeah, its magic.” I admitted.
And more magic was at work, over the next few weeks, random seemingly unrelated people with various pains and injuries kept appearing at our door. I often thought Jose was masterminding it all from back in his bedroom, where he spent most of his time. One day I asked him about it.
“Not me, the abstract. You are back in your flow and spirit is feeding you what you need to grow.”
During that time I began developing terminology for teaching and honing my process. Not everyone had the same amazing result as Raull, but nearly everyone noticed some change in their condition. I did begin to notice that the Hispanic people seemed more receptive to it and received better results than the Americans.
I told Jose about the trend and he said, “Of course, most Americans are afraid to believe anything exists outside of the physical world. In Latin America we have are less dependent on technology to answer all of our problems, and people are more open to spirit and energy. It’s hard to heal yourself with something that you don’t believe in.”
Another opportunity soon opened up for me. I was asked to house sit a couple’s house for the summer. I moved in and the emptiness of the house engulfed me – no Jose, no random stream of visitors, just me, the silence and Raven’s ghost. My memories of her and her lingering words infected me like a virus. Luckily I had the cure.
As soon as I moved in I started making flyers advertising Elongar – Movement Energy Therapy. I offered people who were suffering from injuries, chronic pain, back aches, and joint problems a modern self healing modality harnessing ‘Life Energy.” And I offered my services for donation. I hung them up all over town. My conviction grew, the more people I talked to. I decided that I was going to teach the whole world Elongar, and if she was the last person to get it than, so be it.
Noble as my intentions were, I was still suffering. I was still in love and desperately attached. When I came home from my missions to hang up flyers, I had a few hours of peace and then the virus would start crawling back into me.
I tried busying myself, focusing, engaging – short term cures. I began to realize the virus was not her or her ghost, it was in me. Finally I decided to just experience the pain. I sat on the living room floor and felt waves of emotion swell over me. I burst out into tears and cried… and cried. For almost a week I sat in that house and did nothing other than sit and let my pain, self pity, insecurities, selfishness, wash away. After each deluge of tears I felt able to explore a little deeper and deeper into my being, and stand a little firmer on the ground. As I later found out from a shaman, I was cleansing my emotional well.
My emotional cleansing didn’t end that week. In contrast it just began.
Contrary to my hopes, people did not respond to my clever flyers en masse. I received a few curious phone calls and had the opportunity to teach a couple of people a week.
In the meantime, money from our slide show tour was running out and I needed a source of income. As if on cue from the abstract, I ran into someone who had a high rise window cleaning business and needed help. Jose and I both jumped at the opportunity. A week later, he said he was frustrated and needed to leave town so he handed over all of his clients and we were in business.
Window washing was good fun and good money. Also it offered the exposure and solitude of big wall climbing right in the middle of the city. Some days I listened to the wind and some days I brought a Walkman. One morning, eight stories up on an apartment building, I decided to put in Raven’s tape. I was slowly overcoming my suffering, but was still drawn into her music occasionally. I heard the songs, and realized how much she was suffering and I felt compassion for her. I felt freed from the relationship and the pain, as if I finally had learned from the lesson. And in that exact moment my walkman popped of my harness and I watched it descend until it exploded into a million bits on the pavement below.
“Good bye Raven. Thank you.” I voiced, seeing the 70 foot fall as a message from the abstract.
From that moment on, I was definitely back in the flow, manifesting students and teaching opportunities and washing windows for income and a physical outlet. During this time I also continued my search to find an existing self-healing modality that was similar to Elongar. Surely someone sometime in the history of the planet had tapped into the same mystical healing energy that I had.
In addition to Astanga yoga, I began studying Kundalini yoga and different forms of Hatha yoga. Although definitely similar, these Indian forms of yoga were distinct from Elongar. With the encouragement of a friend, I decided to enroll in a school of the alternative healing arts. The curriculum was very broad, covering traditional Chinese medicine, shiatzu, acu-pressure, as well as massage techniques, cranial sacral therapy, myafascial release, reflexology, crystal healing, and past life regression. How ironic, only a few years ago, I would have totally mocked such a school as a bunch of airy-fairy types with too much time on their hand.
I had become a sponge for wisdom to deepen my own understanding of Elongar. And I thought for certain, one of those modalities might tap into and harness life energy the same way that I did with Elongar. My studies at the school deepened my understandings of energy and spirit. I learned of the different forms of intuition. In addition to the kinesthetic intuition that I had begun to develop, there were also visual, aural, and olfactory intuitions. I also met people with enhanced intuition in these other senses. One girl saw spirits hovering over people’s heads, another guy could smell fragrances as healing energy flowed, and another woman heard voices that guided her.
My eyes were opening wider with each day. Yet none of the modalities were similar to my practice. During the first semester of school, we watched a Bill Moyer’s video on Qi-gong and I realized that was the energetic art similar to what I was doing.
Qi-gong was not offered at the school so I asked around and found a Chinese women in Salt Lake that was giving Qi-gong classes. I went and began studying with her. She taught us an elegant series of movements that gathered chi and used it to wash the body. As I did the movements and practiced the visualizations I felt energy moving in my body.
The practice was much more mental than Elongar and relied more upon the visualization than the movement. Over the next several months I studied with her, and she often spoke of passing the chi. Each time I expected to feel a wave of energy coming form her, but I never did. One day I asked her and she admitted that her chi was not very strong, but next week ‘the master’ is coming from Bejing China and he had the Qi.
I hadn’t seen much of Jose or Will that Fall as Jose had disappeared on a climbing trip and I had immersed in my new life. But one day I ran into Will and he suggested we go out one night. I suggested the Manhattan club. Although my schedule was pretty full, I still had a little time to dance. Dancing to good music was the ultimate form of Elongar, and I was steadily overcoming my insecurities of dancing Elongar in public. I used to need a few drinks in order to relax enough to dance into trance out in the clubs. But after stepping into my roll as teacher, it came easier for me and I was able to completely relax without alcohol, which enabled me to focus more on the subtle movements.
The Manhattan Club was a lounge with a small dance floor. That night it had great music and a high vibrational crowd. I felt free, relaxed, flowing.
Towards the end of the night, a woman approached me and gave me a gushing compliment and we started talking. Somehow I started telling her about teaching Elongar as a self-healing modality. When I finished, she pulled out a pen, wrote down a number and said, “You have to call my old boss. He is looking t hire someone to do exactly what you do.”
“Really?” I asked, and looked at the paper. It said Cliff Spa at Snowbird, Paul Wright.
“Your kidding, right.”
“No, I am serious.”
“The Cliff Spa up on the top floor of the Cliff Lodge at Snowbird. They don’t even let people like me in there.” I said remembering getting rousted out of there for trying to soak in the hot tubs after skiing one day a few years back.
“Call him.”
So I did, and he invited me up for an interview with the fitness director who I would be working underneath. On the way up I tried to let go of the mental picture of a thudish muscle-bound jock fitness director and kept my hopes high. When I arrived, I was amazed to see my friend Peter, the Astanga yoga teacher. He had been hired a week earlier.
We both laughed, and he took me upstairs to see the most amazing studio I had ever seen. A spring-loaded hard wood floor, panoramic windows overlooking the slopes. And it was all ours.
He asked me how my teaching had been going.
And I told him, “Honestly, its been tough. The private instructions have been great, but the few chances I have had to teach a whole class have been challenging. I am still trying to figure out a good way to describe the movements to people.”
“Teaching is an art, especially if you are making it up on your own. Be patient, you’ll get it. And there is no better place to learn than here. You will have a steady stream of new students every week. Welcome aboard my brother.”
And suddenly I had a new job, teaching Elongar – Movement Energy Therapy. It was a gift from heaven.
Qi Gong Master Runtian Huang came
the following week and gave a workshop up at the University of Utah. Over a hundred people, mostly academics from the
medical school were in attendance for the first morning seminar in a lecture
hall in the University of Utah, School of Medicine. Through a translator, he
spoke to us about chi - - universal energy. He told us the how it has been
harnessed in China for thousands of years for medical purposes and for the
martial arts. He then demonstrated some tricks, harnessing the chi to perform
physical feats. First he sat on a table in full lotus and lifted his body off
the table with his palms flat. Then he did it again, using only the tips of his
fingers. He showed us the tips of his fingers afterwards, and they where white
from pressing onto the hard surface.
“Now I will use the chi.” He said and performed the same feat again using only his thumb and index finger from each hand. The audience oohed and ahhed. Afterward he showed us his fingers and there was no discoloration from the pressure.
It was a cool trick. But I wasn’t really impressed with his physical performance. I knew a number of climbers that could do one arm one, finger pull ups. That is amazing.
A while later, he said, “Now I am going to give you the chi.” He instructed us to hold our hands out in front of us, palms up, and close our eyes. This is what I had been waiting for. I knew that if he had the chi and could really send it to us, then I would feel it. I took a few breaths, relaxed, and did as he said. For a few moments I felt nothing, and then I began to feel a trickle of a cool fluid seeping into my wrists. I intuitively moved my arms gently to open the passage and allow the light tickling substance to move through my body. It flowed up the inside of my arms and then into my trunk. The more I opened the channels the more chi came gushing in. The feeling was amazing, and left me euphoric. I completely left the lecture hall and was traveling through the energetic corridors of my body.
Then Dr. Huang clapped his hands together and told us to freeze our position and open our eyes. He was still forty feet away from me in front of the room, and it felt like he had put an IV into my veins. I thought that everybody in the room was having the same experience as I was. But when I opened my eyes, I saw that they weren’t. There were only two or three people still in the receiving position with their hands up in the air. Most everyone else had dropped their hands and had disgusted unbelievable looks on their faces. A number of people got up to leave, which prompted more people to do the same. Dr. Huang stood silently at the front of the lecture hall and let the commotion settle. Over half the room left, leaving about forty of us, who Dr. Huang motioned to move closer together.
“The chi is universal, yet subtle, and not everybody is able to feel it.” He said, and went on to explain the different qualities or densities of energy, “The human body is like a valve through which the energy flows between heaven and earth. The chi flows through everyone, some more some less. There are practices that allow more energy to flow through the body, to open the valve wider. This is the practice of qi-gong.”
As he said this, my ears rang and I felt the vibration throughout my whole body. Finally I had met a master. I knew qi-gong was the ancient relative of Elongar that I had been searching for.
Dr Huang stayed in Salt Lake for a few weeks. For those of us who were interested, he gave an intensive weeklong workshop and taught us dozens of exercises and meditations to allow more energy to flow through us. He also took us up into the foothills above Salt Lake, where he said “there is much chi.”
This week was like a lifetime of learning for me. As we hiked through the hills, I tagged along beside Dr. Huang and his wife and soaked up every bit of wisdom he had to share. Most importantly, I learned that the ‘life energy’ that I harnessed through Elongar was really ‘universal’ life energy or chi. Its source was not within my body or anyone’s body, as I had thought, but its origins were in the earth and sky. Chi, universal energy, is everywhere. It streams between the earth and sky and through every living creature on the earth. If the chi stops flowing you die.
He had us lie on the ground and feel the energy of the earth move through us in long slow pulses. We stopped randomly and he asked us to feel the energy. One time he had us close our eyes and turn in slow circles, feeling which direction had more positive energy for each of us and which directions were more negative. He explained how everyone is going to be drawn to different energies. Looking down upon the city, he had us hold out our hands and feel the energy. I felt this cold negative energy and started to recoil away from it. Then he said, “Now think of some positive contribution, something that you would like to give to the city to make it better.”
I thought about giving the city a public bouldering area in Liberty Park and instantly felt a warm positive glow. I was totally in awe. Being in his presence seemed to amplify my sensitivity to the energy.
He explained how as we open ourselves up to the energy we can continually receive more and more benefit from it. Eventually he said, you can nourish your body solely from the chi. This sounded a bit suspicious until he gave us an energetic lunch.
We sat in a circle on top of one of the hills and he prepared our lunch. He picked up a flat piece of granite and said, “This is our meat.” Picking up some snow, he placed it on top of the stone and said, “This is our rice.” Then he took a handful of dry grassy mountain grains and stuck it into the snow, “These are our vegetables.”
He then talked us through a visualization of eating the meal while he walked around each of us and passed the symbolic food over our heads. Again I was skeptical. Energetic food?
But as he passed our lunch over my head, I truly felt the meal going down and literally filling me up, satiating my appetite from hiking the whole morning.
On the last day of the workshop, I hiked along side of Dr. Huang, and through his wife began to ask him the many questions that I had.
He answered a few and then he looked at me (or more like, through me) for a while and then he said something and his wife translated, “You have much chi. But remember the chi is not yours, it simply flows through you. As you know you can use it for your own self healing, but you can also use it to heal others.”
I asked what he meant by that but she would not explain.
Then he said something else to her and she grinned. It was the first time I had seen any expression come from either of them. She looked at me and said, “Master Huang says, you will soon see.”
The next day I tried to settle back into my normal life. I had already begun teaching Elongar up at the Cliff Spa at Snowbird and I was still working on the project to get an artificial boulder garden built in the local park. My mind, body and spirit were still reeling from the experience of the workshop, I asked myself, “What did he mean, I will soon see.”
And then the phone rang. It was a climbing friend of mine Zoe, who I had met briefly at the beginning of the summer, but hadn’t seen in a long time. She had been climbing in Yosemite a week ago and was struck by a falling rock on the back. Hospital x-rays showed no broken bones, but now a week later she still could barely move and was in severe pain. She had been to see several massage therapists and healers but no one was able to help her because the whole area was still too sensitive to touch.
She told me, “My spirit guides told me to come find you. They said that you can help me.”
“They did?” I asked unsure of myself. Although I had been teaching Elongar for over six months, I had always guided people through their own self-healing. I had never even tried to heal someone else. And in her condition she wasn’t even able to move, so how was I going to help her.
And then the words of Dr. Huang
echoed through my head, “you will soon see.”
I invited her to come over and I looked at her back. The rock had struck her on
the ribs, just above her right kidney. The whole area was still bruised and
inflamed. I really wasn’t sure what I could possibly do to help her, but I
asked her to lie face down on a soft mat.
“No touching, no movement, just pure energy.” I repeated to myself.
I came up beside her and put my hands just above the injured area and tried to create a visualization that somehow bridged the gap between us. For a few minutes I concentrated on her back, but didn’t feel any energy flowing.
Intuitively I wanted to move my body to create a flow, and then realized that I was free to move, as long as I didn’t touch her and she didn’t move. I pulled my hands back a little and began to generate a flow of green healing energy. As the pulse came to my hands, I visualized it flowing from me into her back, as if we were one being. She responded instantly, “Whoa, I feel that.”
This encouraged me and I continued to guide the energy from me to her and back again. Each time the pulse of energy left my hands she responded verbally. She was obviously very sensitive. Then I remembered Dr. Huang, “The energy is not yours, it simply flows through you between earth and sky.”
I opened up my visualization to include the whole cosmos, and to allow warm earth energy to flow through me, through Zoe and up into space. And then felt the flow of energy return back into the earth.
To this she started giggling, “Whatever you are doing, it feels really intense.”
I continued letting my hands swirl a couple inches above her body, sometimes feeling healing energy flow in to her back and sometimes felt heavy, sticky energy coming out of her. After a half hour of intense focus, my hands were simply guided away from her body and I knew that the session was over. Before I said a word, she said, “You are done, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. How did you know that?”
“I don’t know, I just know.”
“Well how does you r back feel?” I asked her.
“Amazing” She said with a grin as she rolled over and started slowly twisting and stretching.
“Be careful” I warned.
“I can’t believe it. The pain is almost totally gone.” She said, “what did you do?”
“Uhh…” I said searching for words to describe what had just happened. “I am not really sure, but I kind of did Elongar including you as part of me. And then the energy of the universe…” I still felt really silly trying to describe the experience.
She saw my hesitation and came up and gave me a huge hug. “It doesn’t matter what you did. You are an amazing healer. Thank you.”
After she left, I sat on my futon and tried to make sense of what I had just done, or witnessed being done. It was still all at the boundary of my ability to grasp it. However, I was exhausted from the experience, and soon fell asleep.
Hours passed and I woke up in a dream to see a strange lady with long dark hair and horse-like eyes sitting at the edge of my bed. She was staring at me in total silence. I tried to speak to her, but couldn’t voice a sound. For several long minutes she stared at me and I began to get nervous. Finally I started to voice myself, “Wh… Who.. Who are… Who…” and then I woke up out of the dream and sat straight up in my bed and screamed, “Who are you?”
“Oh, it was only a dream.” I said to myself. The clock read 3:33 a.m. And then I turned and looked at the edge of my bed. She was still there! With complete silence she stared at me, yet she was asking me something. “What?” My mind raced. “What does she want me to do. No not do, see! Yes she wanted me to see, what? Boulders in the Park! No.”
A picture flashed in my mind of Zoe and I earlier that day, the healing energy. Yes. What about it? And suddenly it came to me, The energy, the healing. It is real. Honor it, embrace it, be it.”
As this thought came to my mind her expression relaxed. She smiled and disappeared.
“Wait! Who are you? Come back…” I screamed to the blank wall at the other side of the room. My heart was pounding, a bead of sweat was on my forehead.
“Who was she? Is she my spirit guide?” I remembered the angel on Halloween. “Why do all these people disappear before I can ask them anything?”
I sat up in bed wired. There was no going back to sleep. I reached over to my desk and dug out a package of Drum cigarettes. I rolled up a cig and smoked it.
“What is going on?” I asked myself.
I really wanted to visit Dr. Huang and ask him about the mysterious lady. He was going to be in Salt Lake for a couple more weeks and he said I could call him, but I didn’t want to pester him so soon. Better just to practice what he had taught me and wait to see him on Friday when he was going to teach our weekly qi-gong class for Miss Su.
At dawn I hiked back up into the foothills above Salt Lake and practiced Elongar with the new moving meditations of qi-gong. The serenity seeped into my pores, the chi flowed through me and soon I felt at peace and in stillness again.
That week I began teaching my first elongar classes at Snowbird.
Out of the blue, I received an email from Raven. I almost froze when I saw her name pop up on my computer screen. It was strange getting email from someone who only lives three blocks from you. But those three blocks could have been three continents. For the past six months, we lived in separate worlds - the same neighborhood, many of the same friends, but different waves for sure. After months of struggling to release her memory, I was finally free – and now she writes me.
As I opened the mail, I expected another storm of criticism and ridicule about some aspect of my being. But the letter wasn’t mean. In fact it was uncommonly sweet, almost friendly. Without actually inviting me, she mentioned an upcoming performance this Friday and hinted that I might want to go watch it. At the end she wrote, “I feel like we are going to see each other really soon.”
“I wonder what she means by that.”
As I headed off to Snowbird to teach, I mused over how quickly my life had changed since I stepped off the roller coaster with Raven. I grinned when I recalled her reaction over Elongar, “that energy that you can feel, that nobody else can.”
“What would she think of Dr. Huang or the mysterious lady that visited me at night. Would she have been one of the people to walk out of the lecture hall? The sadness and the insecurity she had left me with all seemed real far away.
The next few days saw a new to routine. Wake up at dawn, drive up to the Cliff Spa, do my own practice of Elongar, yoga and/or qi-gong. Seven a.m. teach two classes of elongar. Afterwards chill out, read, teach an occasional private lesson and be present to help folks out in the fitness room. Then on powder days, surf the best snow in the world. Shift energies to calm the mind, get ready for school.
Returning to the Awakening Spirit school for the alternative healing arts after the time I spent with Dr. Huang was rewarding. A few of my classmates were quite perceptive and they noticed ‘a shift’ in my energy. They were all interested in hearing my experience and it felt really good to share it with people who accepted it, embraced it and reflected on it for their own self growth. We had become sangha or spiritual family.
Now that I had found qi-gong, the ancient energetic healing art that I had been looking for, I was able to dive into my Shiatzu and Acupressure classes with a mission. I wanted to fill in the gaps of knowledge, learn everything about the Chinese meridian systems, the pathways of energy flow and the mechanism of flow in the body. Human anatomy and physiology became paramount for understanding the physical body.
I left work early on Friday to go practice qi-gong in the park before my class in the evening. I bumped into Jana, a friend of mine there who had a really distressed look on her face. She was with her two kids.
“Scott, healer energy boy. There is someone who needs your energy right now.” She said gravely as she approached.
She had just come from the Main Street reopening ceremony in downtown Salt Lake.
“Jana, what is the matter, what happened?’
“During the ceremony, they did the sky dancer routine. You know Craig, right?”
“The climber gone dancer kid from New York?”
“Well he choreographed a vertical dance in which he and five other guys rapped off of the new First Security Bank building as part of the ceremony. They did it once and everything went fine. Then they decided to do it again and one of the guys fell.”
“Holy Schmokes! How far?”
“A long way.”
“What happened, did he free fall or was he on the rope?”
“I’m not sure exactly. They all slid down the rope for a ways and then the rest of them stopped and he just kept going.”
“Was it Craig?”
“No it was one of the other guys, I don’t know who. The police covered it up pretty good as to not create a panic in the middle of the ceremony. I never even got a chance to see him, before they rushed him off to the hospital. But he has to be messed up pretty bad, he fell from at least 70 feet onto the concrete.”
A cold chill raced up and down my body as I visualized the guy sliding out of control down the rope and smashing into the concrete.
“Please send him all of your healing energy, he’s messed up really bad.” She said and then took off to get some food for her kids.
Whoa! That brought some focus into my practice that afternoon. I channeled as much energy as I could and directed it all towards this guy who was now at the hospital. I wondered who it could be, there weren’t that many climber / dancer guys out there that Craig could have hired for the dance.
I told Dr. Huang and the whole qi-gong class about the accident and Dr. Huang showed us specific techniques for remote healing and we focused our energy on him during the class.
Afterwards I returned home and contemplated going to Raven’s performance. “Should I go or not…”
Just then the doorbell rang. It was my friend Kent, a dancer-yogi-healer who my Astanga teacher Peter had introduced me to. He was now also studying at the alternative healing school with me.
“Hey Scotty. Let’s go up to the University. There’s a dance performance tonight and I hear it is supposed to be quite good.”
“I guess that answers that question.” I said continuing my internal dialogue.
“What question?” He asked.
“I just posed the question to the abstract, should I go or no, and it answered me through you.”
“Why wouldn’t you want to go? Ohh because of Raven.” He said answering his own question. “You haven’t seen her in a long time, have you.”
“Nope, and I feel really good about it.”
“Come on maybe it will be good for you guys to see each other again. She has been in a real funk lately.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. It just seems every time I see her she has been really cynical and arrogant.”
“What’s new about that.” I said
“I’ve never known her to be real compassionate, but she’s gone overboard lately. Whenever anybody makes a mistake, she unleashes that pit viper tongue of hers to make them feel like a loser.”
“I thought she reserved that behavior solely for me.”
“No man, she has become almost relentless.”
We got to the performance late and took two seats on the back row. I didn’t know which piece she was in, so every time the curtain opened I held my breath. I was nervous. Even after six months apart, after accepting that we had gone different ways and forgiving her, my body remembered dancing with her, making love with her and being in that blissful state of union. I knew that watching her dance was going to be hard for me.
Intermission came, and although I had seen all of her classmates, she still hadn’t appeared. Suddenly I got a really sick feeling in my stomach.
A classmate of Raven’s, named Mani, came out into the lobby during intermission. Mani was one of her only friends that seemed sad after we broke up. When she saw me she came running up with tears on her face and threw her arms around my neck.
“Oh my God, I am so glad you are here. Did you hear what happened?”
Instantly I knew. The main street performance, the accident, it wasn’t a guy, it was Raven. My heart dropped and landed in the pit of my stomach and stayed there as I listened in horror to the details of the accident.
Raven was the only girl performing in the vertical dance piece with five other guys. She tucked her hair in and they all wore hats to look alike. They used an automatic device called a grigri to rapel down the rope and be able to stop with hands free. Thirty feet from the top of the six story building, they stopped and created a horizontal pyramid with Raven at the pinnacle. Then they all rapelled down from there dancing and running on the wall. They were scheduled to only do it once, but decided to perform it a second time.
Apparently raven put the rope through the grigri backwards the second time, rapelled down with everyone else until they stopped. As soon as her hands let go of the rope, she started sliding again and accelerated all the way to the ground.
“She’s busted up real bad.” Mani said unable to hold back tears. “They don’t know if she is going to survive.”
“Where is she?” I asked.
“At the LDS hospital in the intensive care unit.”
The lights blinked signaling the end of intermission and Mani had to run back stage. I looked at Kent who had witnessed our interaction and said, “Let’s go.”
A few minutes later we were at the hospital in the waiting room with a crowd of other people. I found Craig and asked him how she was.
“Not good man, she decked from 70 feet. She broke seven vertebrae in her back, her left ankle, her right femur, both pubic bones, her right shoulder and she ruptured a number of internal organs.”
“How are you doing?” I asked him seeing he was really shaken up.
“I’m alright. But…” His voice trailed off as he looked up at me allowing me to read his mind, “…is it my fault…I was responsible for… shouldn’t I have checked…. We were all experienced climbers… I thought…”
“It’s OK man. Its not your fault. She’ll be alright.”
He looked sharply at me. “You got to see her man. She is so messed up you can’t even tell it is her. I don’t know if she’s gonna make it.”
“She’ll make it, she’s strong.”
We waited for a few hours while a constant stream of people came and went. Around eleven p.m. Mani showed up with Raven’s roommantes and a posse of dancers. We met them in the hall and her roommate glared at me and asked sneeringly, “What are you doing here?”
I looked at her and didn’t respond.
“I don’t think you should be here. Raven wouldn’t want…”
“Would you shut up!” Mani interjected. “Of course he is here.”
“I think Raven would be pissed if she..”
“Can we just forget about all of that. He’s here to help her because he loves her just we we love…”
“How is he gonna help her?” Carla snapped.
“How are any of us going to help her?” Mani asked.
“We can pray and send her all of our love.” I said and offered a moments silence.
We all went into a quiet room, sat down and prayed silently together. The focus lasted for a few minutes and then the room erupted into chatter and distraction as everyone tried to deal with their emotions as best as they could.
Kent sat silently in meditation the whole time. I tried to be as normal as possible and act as a bridge between them and the silence. During that evening I really began to grasp the contrast between my worldview and the collegiate modern dancer reality that Raven had constantly shifted between. No wonder it was tough for her.
Kent’s statuesque silence really bothered some of the girls. One of them asked me, “What’s up with him?”
“He’s meditating.” I said.
“What for?”
“So he can focus all of his energy and direct it towards Raven.”
“Like that’s gonna help a lot.” She said sarcastically and walked out of the room.
Soon all the dancers left and Kent and I remained sitting through the night. In the morning Kent left and then her family arrived from Seattle. Her little brother, Alex, ran up and gave me a teary hug. I hadn’t seen him since last March when the three of us had gone climbing together for the day. What a different reality we were in now. Her Mom appeared and greeted me cordially, then I got to meet her father.
Raven had been in surgery all night and no one had been allowed to see her. The doctor came out around 8 a.m. and filled us in. They had been able to stabilize her condition, but she was still critical. He said she had miraculously not damaged the spinal column, despite seven broken vertebrae. Her lungs were collapsed so they had her on a machine that breathed for her. Also she was suffering from edema and internal bleeding from several organs that had ruptured.
The doctor only allowed two people in at a time to see her so her parents went first. Her mom came out a few minutes later in complete tears. Alex and I walked in together expecting the worst. But nothing could have prepared us for what we saw. Her body was completely deformed, she had tubes sticking out of her mouth and into her nose, and her face was swollen beyond recognition. She was still in a coma and was strapped to a rotating bed to keep her fluids moving.
Mani returned in the afternoon and we went in to see her together. She was still unconscious, and seemed like she was having a hard time breathing. We stood there in silence for a while and then Mani spoke. “That stuff that you do with energy. Raven used to always talk about it. Everyone told her you were crazy, but now…can it help her?”
“I can try.” I said and asked Mani to put her hands on Raven’s feet.
I walked over to the west window and opened up to the energy of the sun. I let it fill me with warmth and waited for a sign to approach Raven. After several moments, as if a gust of wind blew through the closed window, my hands were guided above Raven’s body. As they reached her torso, I felt intense pain and I gave with all of my heart and asked that I be guided to give her as much as possible. I could feel huge gaping holes in her energetic body, and for the next 20 minutes let my hands be guided as they swooped in circles above her and then out to the window and then back again. I consciously facilitated giving her as much energy as I could and taking away as much pain as possible.
Mani watched in silence the whole time, and then said, “You are helping her. I can tell. Her breathing has gotten better, and she isn’t convulsing as much.”
I was suddenly really tired so we walked back out into the lobby and ran into my Australian friend Geoff.
He looked at me and said, “You look like shit man. What happened to you?”
“I’m OK, just a little tired. I’ve been here all day.” I said.
“Dude you have been doing your crazy energy work on Raven haven’t you? You are depleting yourself.”
“No I’m fine.”
“Look at yourself man. You can’t give everything you got to her. You better go outside and get some fresh air.”
Mani and I walked up into the canyon to catch the afternoon sunshine. Geoff was right, I was empty. As we walked I let the sunshine fill me back up.
Across the canyon some kids were playing and I heard one of them scream, “Give it back!”
Another one answered, “Its not yours!”
I had no idea what they were talking about, but I immediately heard the message from the abstract. The energy, it’s not mine to give.
“What a blunder.” I said aloud. “It’s not mine to give.”
“What’s not yours to give?” Mani asked.
“The energy.”
“But it helped her, I know it did.”
“Yeah, but its universal energy, not just my energy. I have to get out of the way. Dr. Huang told me I am just a channel between the earth and sky. Once, I get out of the way I can channel even more energy to Raven without getting drained.”
Mani looked at me bewildered for a moment, and then asked, “Who is Dr. Huang?”
“My teacher, a master from China.”
“So there are other people that do Elongar also? You have a teacher? Raven said it was something you made up.”
“I did, or it came to me from somewhere. For a while I thought I was the only one on the planet that felt it. Then I met an Angel who…”
“You met an Angel?”
“At least someone who appeared as an Angel to me. But now I know I am not alone. Raven feels it, or at least she did.”
“I know she hurt you a lot the way she ditched you. She can be pretty vicious.”
“Yeah, but it made me stronger. When she left, I set out to teach Elongar to the whole world. And the first thing I did was find something similar that already exists. Masters in China have been doing Elongar for thousands of years. They call it qi-gong. Master Huang just came here from Bejing and I have been studying with him for the past few weeks. He has taught me so much.”
“Like how to heal others?”
“Yes. And that the energy is not mine to give.”
“Wow. I knew you weren’t really crazy? But Raven…”
“Ravens got enough to think about right now. Come on, let’s go.”
Back in the hospital, Mani told Raven’s parents about the energy work I did with Raven and how she responded to it. I then asked for their permission to continue doing energy work with her. Raven’s mom, a ballet teacher originally from China, was familiar with energy healing and thought it was a good idea. But her dad, a German Engineer was visibly weirded out and skeptical about me doing energy work with her.
Being an ex-engineer myself, I tried talking to him to help him understand the physical nature of energy work. But I soon realized that I lacked the vocabulary. He kept giving me that look like I was talking about nonsense.
He asked me if he could come in and watch me do energy work with her and I gladly invited him and Suzi in. Mani came as well.
“Your presence will help.” I told them as we entered the room.”
With Suzi holding her head, her dad holding her left hand, and Mani touching her feet, I again entered into the healing mode. This time I remained conscious of the energy moving through me, through us, from earth to sky. I started recognizing patterns in the energy flow and seeing as well as feeling some of the characteristics of her maligned energetic body. I could also feel both Suzi and Mani ‘s energies flowing into Raven.
When we finished, her Dad said he didn’t feel anything, but it doesn’t seem like its doing any harm, so he gave me his permission to continue.
For the next two weeks Raven remained in the ICU. She was mostly unconscious, but occasionally opened an eye and was able to look around. She was most frustrated that she couldn’t speak. We all took shifts so that someone could stay with her at all times.
Since I had work and school during the day I offered to spend the evenings with her.
My schedule became intense. After school I ran up into the foothills above Salt Lake and gathered energy with Dr. Huang’s visual meditations and my own intuitive movements. I don’t know why but the energy in those hills radiated. Every time I went up there, no matter how cold it was, my hands warmed up and felt like they were glowing. Then I ran down to the hospital and spent four to six hours a night standing by Raven’s bed channeling healing love energy to her. Rather than drain me like it did the first time, each healing session filled me with vitality too, which was important because at 6 a.m. when Suzi arrived to take her shift, I had to go straight up to Snowbird to teach.
A few days later, I was in the grocery store and bumped into this strange woman with deep blue eyes. I said “Excuse me.”
She just looked into my eyes for a while and said, “You are the one.” Then walked off.
“What did she mean by that.” I wondered as I checked out at the cash register. On the way home I realized I wouldn’t have time to cook and eat at home so I stopped at a sushi bar. After ordering, I turned around and there she was. The same lady was already sitting at a booth eating sushi. Our eyes met and I was drawn over to her. She motioned to me to sit down.
“You are the one, aren’t you?” She asked.
“What one?”
“The one who is doing healing work on that poor girl that fell on Main Street.” She said.
“How do you know that?”
“I’ve seen you, I have been doing work on her as well.”
“On Raven?”
“Is that her name? Yes”
“I’ve never seen you at the hospital.”
“No, I’ve not been there. I work from my home, less distraction.”
“Ohh” I said, realizing she was in a whole-nother league of awareness.
“You are doing amazing work, but there is something I must share with you. Have you ever heard of an invocation?”
“No.”
“When you begin to harness the energy, you can invoke the help of the ascended masters and if they are available they will amplify the amount of energy that you are channeling.”
“The who?”
“You are really quite new at this aren’t you. The ascended masters, Jesus the Christ, the Buddha, Saint Germain, any enlightened being who is now working on a higher dimensional plane. You need to ask for their assistance to help you or help us help her.”
Again this was testing my limits of my beliefs. Only two years earlier, I was a non- believer, an agnostic Darwinist. Like a three-dimensional brick, I didn’t know or believe that anything beyond the five senses or modern technology even existed. Then I started feeling life energy, experienced miraculous healing, and learned to harness the energy. Only within the past month had I been tuned into the universal energy or chi concept and realized my ability to heal others. Now this lady who I have never met before, who somehow knows me, is telling me that there are higher dimensional ascended masters out there who are listening and ready to jump in and help affect the vital flow of healing energy.
It was funny, but I wasn’t laughing. She wasn’t laughing. She was dead serious and I believed her. “So who are all the ascended masters?” I asked.
“There are many. Just invoke the ones you are familiar with and in time you will be introduced to more of them. If you like I have a wonderful book you can borrow about the ascended masters.”
Somehow I knew this was more important than the first half hour of my Swedish massage class at school so I gave her a ride to her house and picked up the book.
That evening after class, I went back up into the foothills and began my gathering chi meditation. A light snow had covered the ground and the hills sparkled as if alive. Once I felt the energy flowing through me I added the invocation. It felt a little strange asking these ascended masters whom I had never known, but I asked anyway.
“Hello Jesus and Buddha and all other ascended masters of pure love and light who can hear me. I am asking you to please send me your love to help my friend Raven, who is pretty messed up. I guess, if you are ascended then you already know about her condition.”
I waited for a few seconds and then felt his amazing rush of energy come flowing down from the sky, through the top of my head and out my hands and feet into the ground. I walked down to the hospital feeling as if I was on fire. When I got to her room, I noticed her breath was difficult, her pulse was higher than it had been and she had muscle spasms in her sleep, maybe from bad dreams or from pain.
I began my healing meditation and entered the trance. Her breathing quickly quieted and soon the muscle spasms stopped as well. I stayed by her side the whole night. Occasionally I repeated the invocation in case the ascended masters had gotten distracted, but never felt the same rush like I did the first time.
The next Thursday, I ran into Kent at the bookstore. I was looking for books that would help me explain the energetic healing work to Raven’s father. Kent told me about an amazing book called Vibrational Medicine, which I bought along with the Tao of Physics.
He hadn’t been to see Raven since the first night and asked how she was doing. I briefed him and then told him I was spending evenings doing energy work with her. He was a Reiki master and offered to join me that evening.
Kent’s presence was powerful. He stood at the foot of her bed and placed both hands on her feet while I stood at her side. Working together we were able to flush the energy through her body. At one point, when the energy was really flowing, I looked down and saw both of Raven’s arms fluttering while raised slightly off of the bed. Her eyes were still closed. I glanced at Kent to see if he saw it and he nodded. Then I went back into my trance with eyes closed.
Some timeless moment later Kent called my name and I opened my eyes. Raven was awake and staring wide eyed at me. She was trying to say something, but of course couldn’t. She raised her good left arm, grabbed the edge of the sheet on her chest and pulled it down, exposing her left breast. Then she fell asleep again.
I looked at Kent bewildered.
He whispered, “She had been trying to get your attention for the last few minutes. Maybe you should work with your eyes open so you can be more present in the physical world too.”
“Good idea.”
We continued healing for a couple more hours until a nurse came in to check on Raven. When she saw the exposed breast she quickly covered it up, gave each of us a cross look and left. We didn’t realize it, but the nurse thought we had uncovered her. In the morning she told Suzi who became livid and took my name off the list of people who were allowed in to see Raven.
When I arrived Friday afternoon, the staff simply said I wasn’t allowed in.
Heart broken, I left and wandered around for a while before going to my qi-gong class. I was happy to see that Dr. Huang and his wife were still in town, and I filled them in on the accident and my involvement in it.
He smiled and simply said, “you will soon see.”
I then told him about getting kicked out of the hospital.
He then told me, “You don’t have to be beside her to help her now. You have already tapped into her energy. You can do remote healing from home or on the mountain.”
“How do I do that?” I asked.
“You close your eyes and see her, imagine she is right in front of you. No difference.”
I was skeptical, but agreed to give it a try.
The snow had been falling for a couple days and the foothills were covered with a thick layer. I slept in Saturday morning and then went for a hike to gather energy. When I began the invocation, I told the ascended masters that I needed extra love from them because I was now forced to do my healing work from long distance and it might be harder. Again I felt my energy amplify as they tuned into my work and when I went to leave, I noticed that the snow had melted under my feet.
I arrived back home, took off my shoes, lit a few candles in the fireplace and turned on some ambient music. I was soon ready to begin the remote healing. I centered, silenced my mind, sat in meditation for a while and then stood up and faced the same direction I always did while standing by raven’s bedside. I asked for guidance and began the energetic dance. With the freedom of my own space, I was free to move. And move I did. Using the staccato of the music I marched out a rhythm with my feet and let my hands spiral through the cosmic airwaves. The two impulses met and created a lyrical motion in my abdomen. My mind was focused on her being. My heart was open.
As the energy spun forth to my hands I offered it above me, thanking the power of the sun. I let it bounce off of each of the four cardinal directions honoring the truth, love and wisdom of masters past and present, east and west. I touched it to the ground and felt my connection with the crystalline core of white light in the center of the earth. I called in the support of all ascended beings.
And when my entire body was quivering from the flow of energy, my heart opened up and I offered myself to her. I offered that I may absorb the impact of her fall, that I may share the pain of her injuries. I offered her all of my love to ease her suffering that she may once again be whole and free to dance.
I don’t know what moved me to break the rules I had just learned, to again place my own being between the currents of universal love and Raven’s karma. Maybe it was cockiness, maybe it was ignorance, or maybe it was pure love.
Barely had I uttered my intention when the small Hindu bells that hung above my front door gently rang. A strong gust of wind blew the front door open and moments later the draft slammed it shut. I turned and even as I saw the shimmering particles spiral into the room, I felt her presence. Raven’s spirit glided up beside me and we started to move. Following divine choreography, we melded together as one and danced in perfect union.
At first our motions were fast and excited, we moved with lightness and joy. Our fluidness triggered muscle engrams and memory synapses of movements and emotions we had shared long ago. Then gradually the dance slowed and I felt my heart beating faster. For long moments we seemed to be suspended in the air, defying gravity and then slowly, very slowly we began to fall. From airy heights, we started a slow spiral. Our arms were out wide and our head turned to the right side. Then down we came until we made contact with the floor below.
What forces allowed us to hover inches off the floor as we felt each part of the fall, I still do not know? But first hit our right hip, not hard, but soft, allowing us to absorb the initial impact of the fall. Then came the mighty compaction of the spine, but again the force was spread out over long seconds allowing the cushioning discs to absorb the impact and prepare to spring back to life. Then came our legs gently sinking into the carpet/pavement. And finally landed the right shoulder and head with arms tucked around to protect it. This last portion of the fall lasted the longest as we had morphed into a fetus shaped rubber ball that slowly compacted.
For long moments we lay on the ground, breathless, but heart pounding. We felt the resonating vibrations of every bone in our body that flexed in the fall. Slowly the breath returned. Tiny sips of air, growing with each breath until the life force of spirit returned with the power of a mighty river. Then the force of the fall, distributed in the flex of the ball we had become sprung forth and lifted us to greater heights than we had ever imagined. Our spirit rose, circled the room/earth as again we danced... effortlessly. Our spirits slowly disengaged and we were free.
The door opened again on its own beckoning us into the sunlight. We flew out into the brisk air, heard winter birds chirping and threw our arms up to the sun. While I stayed grounded on the earth, I saw Raven’s spirit soar up into the air. I held my arms up, bidding her farewell until she disappeared from sight.
I stayed outside for a while until my bare feet started to get cold on the snow. I was radiant yet exhausted. Once inside I walked around the living room and briefly questioned myself whether what I had just experienced had really happened. Everything looked so normal. I sat down and doubts slowly crept into my rational mind. I decided to go down to the Coffee Garden for a distraction. I went into the front room and picked up my shoes. As I put them on, I got fresh paint on my hand. Startled, I looked back to where the shoes had been lying and saw two perfect impressions of my shoes on the painted floor. That floor hadn’t been painted in five years.
“Oh my God.” I gasped. My shoes had melted the paint on the floor. Again the abstract had spoken and I was guided to honor the experience.
I awoke the next morning with a strong desire to contact Dr. Huang. It was his last day in Salt Lake City and I felt a need to share with him yesterdays experience and also to receive any last bit of wisdom from him before he left.
Through his wife, I summarized the amazing interaction I had with Raven’s spirit while attempting remote healing. He frowned slightly when I told him the part about absorbing her fall with her, and asked me if I remembered to step out of the way and let the universal spirit guide the healing.
I intuitively responded, “Yes.” But we both knew otherwise.
Afterward he told me I learn very quickly, but I still have much to learn.
No kidding. I felt like I was trying to onsight climb El Capitan with only a year or two of climbing experience. I had many questions for him, but I only asked him one.
“If Raven’s spirit can come visit me, can I also contact other spirits. And if I do, are there good spirits and evil spirits or are they all good?”
“Very important question.” He said. “Yes you will contact other spirits. There are many. Some have chosen to be here to help.”
“Like the ascended masters?” I asked
“Yes, like ascended masters and arch angels. Some spirits are disembodied, lost, roaming the earth, afraid or unable to go to the light. Many of these spirits are suffering from human traumas, emotions and attachments. They are not clear and of pure light.”
“Can they hurt us?” I asked.
“Yes and No. If you are unconscious of them, they can drain your energy, they can attach themselves to you and cause you many problems. But love is always stronger than evil. So if you align yourself with the light, if you open your heart completely and fill yourself with pure love, they can not hurt you. But you must have pure unconditional love.”
He then told me that one of his jobs was to go into graveyards and channel chi to disembodied spirits to give them enough energy to leave earth and return to the light.”
He then lead me into his studio and taught me a few more qi-gong meditations that he said I would need. Then he stood in front of me and told me to relax, while he did a series of unknown motions and sounds. After about ten minutes he told me, “ I have filled you with enough chi to learn on your own for a year. At the end of that time, we will meet again, or another master will teach you.”
“A year?” I thought to myself. Is he crazy? I had learned so much in the past few weeks, my entire universe had shifted. The thought of not seeing him for a year worried me.
But he was right, even after he left the lessons just kept on rolling.
A few days passed and I did not return to the hospital. I was focusing on my classes up at Snowbird and at the Awakening Spirit School. The I received a phone message from Raven’s mom Suzi. Apparently Kent had gone by and explained to her what had happened and she decided to invite us back.
Cautiously I returned and assessed the atmosphere. I did not want to be there unless I was truly welcome. Suzi gave me a warm hug and apologized for overreacting. Surprisingly, even her father was enthused to see me. I had left him the Tao of Physics book to read, and he also had a good conversation with Kent, both of which made him feel better about the energy work.
They told me Raven was doing much better. She now had a note pad and was able to communicate when she was awake. Her internal injuries were healing remarkably fast and most of her fractures were in place and healing. The major concern was still her spine. One of the lumbar vertebrae had been completely crushed and the doctors were considering fusing three vertebras together in a risky operation that would seriously limit her movement forever.
I was a little nervous about seeing her. Which side of her was going to be present? Would she have experienced the healing dance we had together as a dream, or not at all.
All of my concerns vanished when I entered and saw that she was still in critical condition. I sat by her bed and held her hand for a few hours until she woke up. It was the first time we had communicated since long before her fall.
I said “Hello” and we looked at each other for a while.
Then she wrote, “Pretty stupid mistake, huh?”
“Shh” I said, putting my finger to my lips. “Now we have to focus on getting well.”
Then she wrote out, “Thank you for coming and staying with me.”
Now that she was awake I felt obliged to ask her permission to do healing work on her. First I told her that I had been trying to help her. She nodded. I asked her if she felt anything when I was working on her. She shook her head no. Then I asked her if she wanted me to do more. She nodded yes.
Then she wrote that she was sleepy and I left.
The next few days were really optimistic. Raven was gaining vitality every day. Her father returned to Seattle to work and her mom and I started to really bond. I had told her my frustrations of trying to teach groups of people the movements of elongar and she offered to coach me how to teach.
“Scott, I have been a ballet teacher for over 20 years. If you show me what kind of movements you do. I can show you how to teach people.”
We spent afternoons in one of the empty hospital rooms doing and teaching elongar. We even went out to some thrift stores to pick out smart for me to wear while teaching. Those days made a profound impact on my teaching ability.
Mani was there a lot as well. Sometimes we would all visit Raven together. Mani jokingly said she preferred communicating to Raven when she had to write her repsonses out. We all laughed and agreed.
Everything was progressing fine. Then the doctor told us the next day he would take the tube out of her mouth, so she could talk again. That evening I stayed late with Raven, but not all night. As I left, I bent over and gave her a kiss on the forehead and said see you later. She opened her eyes and shot me a sharp glance.
“Goodnight Raven” I said and left.
The next afternoon, I returned to the hospital and Raven had been moved out of the ICU to a normal bed. Her mom and Mani were both with her when I walked up. As soon as she saw me she snarled and said, “What are you doing? Spending so much time with me, hanging out with my mom, giving me so much love and healing? Are you trying to get back with me?”
The words hit me so hard I almost fell over. As I regained composure, I looked at her and said, “Hello Raven, I thought it might be nice if you can ever walk again.”
“I’ll be able to walk just fine without your help. Thank you.”
I looked at Suzi and Mani. They were both startled as well, but were sticking by her side. There was nothing else to say, “Raven if you prefer that I leave, I will. I can only be here if I am welcome.” And I left.
She had such a nack for stabbing me in the heart. I went home and sank into the couch completely baffleed. Minutes later the doorbell rang. It was Jose. I hadn’t seen him in weeks.
“Where have you been Jose?” I half demanded.
“Lake Powell” He said simply.
“What have you been water skiing down there for the last month, or what?”
“No. Crack climbing. I found a line that I really like. It’s the most perfect crack climb I have ever seen – 115 feet of overhanging rattly fingers capped by a 30 foot 30 degree roof with thin hands.”
“Uggh! Jose that sounds like a nightmare to me.”
“No… Iz purfekt.”
“Did you send it?”
“Oh no, its very very hard.”
The simplicity of climbing seemed really nice. My life had suddenly gotten quite entangled in drama again.
“How is Raven?” he asked.
“Ohh, you heard about her fall.”
“It was on the front page of newspapers all across the state.”
“She’s doing better.”
“Have you been helping her.”
“Of course, what do you think, well, at least until today, ohh fuck.”
“Ha Ha Ha, come on tell me the whole story.”
He listened as I recapped the last couple weeks of high drama; qi-gong workshops, spirit guides, chance encounters, healing work, new teaching opportunities, all the way to getting smacked in the face by Raven a few hours ago.
Afterwards he simply said, “She is the perfect teacher for you.”
“What are you talking about? I don’t need lessons on how to become an ungrateful bitch!”
“No, you need lessons on unconditional love.”
“What?” I said half offended.
“Why have you been giving her so much of your energy.”
“Jose, I thought it would be nice if she could ever walk again.”
“Is that it?
“What do you mean, is that it?”
“When you are done you are planning on just walking away.”
“Yeah. What do you mean?”
“You don’t have any desire to get back together with her after this.”
“No! Well if it happened naturally…but its obviously not gonna happen.”
“So now you are done with it.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
‘Then you were never giving unconditionally.”
“What?”
“Now is when you really have to give to her. Even though you know she is going to slap you in the face. You have been called to help her heal, so now you have to do it without any expectations, no rewards – pure love.”
“Well I am not going to go where I am not welcomed.”
“You just told me you can do remote healing from home.”
“You’re right.” I conceded, “I’ll keep giving everything I can from home.”
“So did you get free ski passes at Snowbird with your job?”
“Yeah. Do you wanna go?
“Yeah, yeah, yeah…”
I truly thought this next round of Raven karma was over for me. Every night I spent a few hours meditating and sending her healing energy. I presumed her healing was progressing and everything was fine without me. Then one night I get an urgent call from Suzi at the hospital.
“Scott can you please come down here?”
“Hi Suzi. You know I can’t come down if Raven doesn’t want me there.”
“Scott, don’t listen to what she says. We need you down here.” She said as she burst into tears.
“Suzi, what is going on? What’s the matter?”
“Its Raven, ever since you left she has been having nightmares. She wakes up in the middle of the night, screaming. She thrashes about and tries to pull all of her tubes out. The doctors are getting really frustrated. They say if she moves about to much she might go paralyzed.”
“Do you really think there is anything I can do to help?”
“Would you just please come down here and stay with her. She always slept so peaceful when you were here.”
“I don’t know Suzi. I might just make her mad.”
“No it won’t. Please come.”
“OK”
It was already dark out, but I decided to go up into the foothills to harness chi before going to the hospital. Something told me I was going to need all the energy I could get.
It was a frigid night, but dead calm. The fresh snow sparkled under the moonlit sky. I walked up onto the rounded top of one of the smaller foothills and began my meditation. The stars seemed really close.
I began gathering chi, called in the four directions, thanked the celestial bodies and the earth. I called in all the support of the archangels and the ascended masters. And soon I felt the familiar warmth and radiant glow throughout my body. My hands tingled with the sensitivity of heightened awareness and soon became like magnets drawn to the hospital. I knew it was time to go.
While walking through the Avenues, I held my hands out in front of me and let them guide. Halfway to the hospital, I felt a strong force pulling me to the west. I tried to ignore it, but it persisted and I decided to follow it for a while to see where it would lead me. I followed the force west for several blocks and then north a few. It lead me to an abandoned building in area of the Avenues I had never been to before.
I was guided to a particular spot on the hill overlooking the city on the east side of a large five story building. I listened and felt for a while and the force was definitely pulling me to that exact spot. It started spinning me in slow circles. At the same time I felt a rush of warm air rise up around my legs. The spinning stopped and my attention was drawn to a specific window on the second story of the building. In it I could see the reflection of the city lights below, like in all the windows. But the lights in that window were different. Were they moving. I felt a pull in that direction. The attraction was strong and I felt like I should go there.
I noticed how peculiar it was that the radiant warmth around me was only below my waist and my upper body was chilly. In that instant a freezing cold, clammy chill wrapped around my upper body like a cloak. I reacted immediately. Up to that moment I had been in reception mode, hypersensitivity turned on to feel the presence that guided me there. But then with strong forceful breaths and slicing motions with my hands, I created my own energy field – a white light connection earth and sky.
“You ain’t got nothin on me.” I said and pushed the chilly force away.
The presence swirled around me and continued pulling me toward the window. I experimented relaxing my own energy and each time it closed in on me.
“What on earth?” I asked myself.
It was the strongest energy I had ever felt, warm but then cold. I could tell it wanted me to climb in that window. I looked at the window, hesitated, and with a wave of my hand I dismissed it by saying, “I don’t know who or what you are, but I can not play games with you. I am on a mission.” And I started to walk down to the hospital. But the truth was, I was too scared to go in that building.
I walked into the hospital and tracked down Raven. They had moved her to a new room. Suzi greeted me in the hallway. She was a nervous wreck.
“Thank you for coming. They want to do an operation to fuse her lumbar vertebras together. I don’t know if… What do you think? One of the vertebrae is crushed. She can’t sleep at night. She wakes up screaming… They want to tie her down. I can’t let them tie…”
“Whoa Suzi, calm down. Have a seat. Take a breath. Everything is going to be OK”
“Please go see her.”
“OK where is she?”
She pointed me to Ravens room and I walked in. We looked at each other in silence for a minute. Her eyes were soft, slightly humbled yet still fierce.
“How ya doin?” I asked.
“They want to fuse my back bones together.”
“Yeah I know.”
“What do you think?”
“So you’ll be able to walk…”
“But not bend…. I want to dance again.”
There was another moments silence, and I looked deep in her eyes.
“Raven I know you have the power to heal yourself.”
“How do I do it? Can you teach me?”
Shooting stars crashed in through the roof of the hospital. Jets of lights spun in wild vortexes distorting time and space. The doors of perception flung wide open and the course of destiny hinged on the dust of a miracle.
“I will teach you everything I know Raven. I have learned amazing truths in the last six months. But I have also learned that there are masters, true masters with skills far beyond mine, who can help you even more. I have been studying with a qi-gong master from China. I can bring him here. We can bring others as well.”
She looked at me, and the fire in her eyes beamed with a brilliant luminescence. And for the first time in over half a year, I saw her smile.
“How do I begin?” she asked.
I couldn’t believe it. The angels must have been at work. I smiled back at her and said, “With your breath.”
She nodded as if she knew intuitively already.
“The breath is your spirit, it connects your mind and your body with the power of… God. With universal energy, chi, the abstract as Jose would call it.”
She rolled her eyes as I mentioned Jose.
“So you have to concentrate all the potential energy in your whole being and focus it into this union of mind, body and breath. You obviously can’t move too much right now. So you have to focus even more on the mechanics of the breath.”
She listened intently and absorbed everything I said. I described to her some basic energetic pathways, abdominal breathing and a few meditations to begin to harness chi in her energetic center, the tan tien.
We were interrupted from our timeless space capsule by her mother who stuck her head in the door and said, “Scott, the nurses are here. They want to change her sheets.”
“OK Suzi, I will be out in a minute.” I said and dropped back into the zone. We breathed together and I traced my hand over her body indicating where the physical flow of breath should go and where the chi would flow.
“Wow, I feel it in my stomach.” She said as the chi began to condense there.
After a few minutes I began to explain how she could draw the ball of energy from her center up into her heart and then back down to her spine, where she could flood the damaged vertebrae with green healing energy.
“Scott! The nurses want to …”
“Mom! Hold on a minute please!” Raven pleaded.
We finished the initial exercise and I told her, “I better go. Practice that as often as you can. And later we will do more.”
“Are you leaving?” she asked with a slight inflection of emotion.
I looked at her for a second, paused and said “No.” Internally I heard myself say, “I will be with you till the end of time.” But externally I simply said, “I’ll come back as soon as they are done changing your sheets.”
I walked out and the two hospital aids came in. Out in the lobby I came face to face with and frantic Suzi. “Scott we have to do what these people say. They are our only hope, if we piss them off, they won’t give her the care she needs and…”
Tears were streaming down her face. She was so scared and I could feel her pain. I opened my arms and offered her a desperately needed hug. She embraced me for the first time ever and together we took a deep inhalation. I felt our hearts meet, the floodgates open and a stream of pure unconditional love trickle from my heart to hers. She gasped for a moment, and then we started to exhale together releasing the full current of love energy. She sighed and her whole body began to relax. Then all of a sudden she tensed her body, recoiled and pushed me away.
“What are you doing? Get away from me.” She screamed putting her arms in the shape of an ‘X’ in front of her. Her face was contorted in an expression of anguish. “I haven’t felt pain like that since I was 19 and my mother….” She burried her words in sobs and started to back away form me.
“Oh my God. Suzi I am sorry.” I said realizing that the burst of love uncovered some childhood trauma that had been buried behind layers of denial.
“Get away. What are you doing here?” She screamed and ran away.
“Oh no! What have I done?” I asked myself.
I wandered out into the waiting area and sat down in meditation. Finally Raven had opened up to the power of love and then in an instant of stupidity I blasted her mother with an open heart and tore open an old wound. All I wanted to do was help her calm down, relax. It was just a hug. Why did I have to open the valve so much? When am I going to learn to control my energy. Why do I keep traumatizing people who I love?”
I sat in meditation, slamming myself for my stupidity for a few hours. Suzi never showed back up. I hoped that she had gone back to her apartment across the street to sleep. Maybe she would wake up in the morning and feel better. Maybe she would forgive me.
At least the communication was open with Raven. That was the most important thing now.
I decided to go back and see Raven, at least explain what had happened with her mom. I walked back to her room and passed the nurse’s stand. The nurse called out, “Excuse me you are not allowed in there.”
“Yes I am, my name is on the list.” I replied and kept walking.
“Excuse me Scott! Your name has been crossed off.” She said showing me the list with a black strike through my name.
I was only ten feet outside Raven’s door. “Can’t I just go in for a second and say goodnight?”
“No I am afraid I am not allowed to let you do that.”
“Please just for a minute?”
“I am sorry, No.”
“What an epic!” I thought as I wandered back out in the lobby. “Should I just bail and walkout of here right now?” No, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t leave Raven now. I didn’t care if I ever saw her again when she was healed, but I had to give her my unconditional love and support.
I sat out in the lobby and passed the night in meditation. I tried once more to go in and see Raven, but the morning nurse wouldn’t let me by either. I went back out and waited for Suzi. I prayed that she would have had a change of heart.
I felt her presence moments before she came storming up the hallway. I stood up to greet her. “Hello Suzi”
“What are you doing here?” she demanded.
“You asked me to be here, remember?”
The muscles in her face tightened, her lips quivered and she said, “No I didn’t, Now please leave before I call the police.”
“Suzi…” I pleaded, “I can help her.”
Her eyes narrowed and glared at me, “Scott I believe in chi and all that bullshit that you do. But you cannot regenerate bone! You can not regenerate bone!”
I gasped. There was nothing that I could say. She was right. I knew it was possible, someone could do it, I was sure. But not I. I had helped people with all kind of injuries but I had no clue how to regenerate bone. The words echoed through my skull a thousand times.
“We have decided to have the operation.” She said. “I talked with Ravens Dad this morning and we have decided to go ahead with it.”
“No!!!!” I screamed feeling the anguish, seeing images of Raven unable to bend, unable to dance with her sublime eloquence and perfection.
“Yes! She is going to have the operation, period. Now please leave.”
My universe collapsed, my heart sank. I hung my head low and turned to walk out. I took several steps and turned back around, “May I at least say good bye to Raven.”
Suziko’s whole body trembled for a moment and she said, “Would you please just leave.”
So I left.
I collapsed on my bed at home, and cried myself to sleep. I was way too immersed in the drama to see the cosmic joke. When I awoke I prayed for Raven, and prayed for her mom. Even if I was forever banned from the hospital, I had to keep sending her love. No matter what decision they made, I had to give unconditionally.
That evening at school my classmates were concerned about me. They circled around me after the anatomy lecture and Gregory asked, “Dude, what has been going on? You look like you have been through a war? How is your friend Raven?”
I looked back at them. I had always been the warrior in the class. They had elected me representative. While they were all experiencing the throes of healing as each new modality uncovered layer upon layer of emotional traumas, I had stood strong and offered love and healing. Now I looked at them from the brink of exhaustion, on the verge of emotional collapse.
What could I say, I couldn’t drag
them into the karmic drama that I had dove into heart first and was now deeply
mired in. “I’m OK. She’s doing better. She is going to have and operation on
her spine to allow her to walk again.”
“You’ve been living there by her side, haven’t you?” asked Joanne.
This almost brought me to tears. “Yes…No… Well I have been ordered to leave.”
“Again?”
“It’s a long story.”
That sat and stared at me for a while.
“I think its time you get some loving.” My closest friend Gretchen said and guided me to one of the tables. And for the next couple hours they all poured their hearts into my empty vessel through various forms of touch, massage and energetic healing.
I loved my classmates. We truly had become a sangha.
By the end of class I felt loved and was again filled with vital energy.
After class I went over to visit Jose.
As soon as I got there, he looked at me and said, “They invited you back to the hospital, didn’t they?”
“Yes and no.” I responded and laughed. For a brief moment I was beginning to see the cosmos at play.
“OK OK tell me the story.” He said.
“Its crazy Jose. Raven finally opens up, embraces me and the idea of self-healing and I begin to share with her. I walk out of her room and give her mom a hug and she snaps. Our hearts met and just as the love started to flow she recalls some trauma she had with her mom 30 years ago and starts screaming at me. This morning she ordered me to leave and threatened to call the cops on me.”
“No attachments.” Reiterated Jose.
“Yeah no kidding.” I said.
He asked me a few more questions about the hospital drama and then we both sat in silence for a moment. And then I said, “Oh Yeah, I almost forgot. The strangest thing happened to me on the way to the hospital last night.”
Jose’s ears perked up and he asked, “What was that?”
“I went up into the foothills like I always do to harness chi before going into the hospital. And then when I was walking down, this strange force started pulling me over to the west. I followed it and it led me to this large abandoned building somewhere up in the Aves.
“Yeah?” he said gaining interest.
“It led me to this one spot and started turning me in circles, then this warm air rushed up around me, but only around my lower body. Then it started pulling me towards this building.”
“Did you go in?”
“No”
“Why not?”
“When I noticed that the warmth was only around my legs, this frigid cloak wrapped around my upper body. It felt really dark and evil. I wasn’t scared, but I definitely didn’t feel like letting it draw me into that building.”
“Can you find it again?”
“What?”
“The building.”
“I don’t know maybe.”
“Come on, let’s go!”
“No, I don’t want to.”
“Scott! Come on.”
“Alright lets go.”
We jumped in his little Honda civic and headed across town to the Avenues. I shut my eyes, entered a meditation and brought my awareness to my hands. The tingling sensation of the state of heightened awareness came quickly. I relaxed and asked to be guided to the building.
Jose said, “OK we are in the Avenues. Which way?”
“Just keep going straight.” I said and a few seconds later the unseen force pulled my hands to the right. “Turn right” I wondered whether the force would be as strong today. I decided to keep my eyes shut the whole ride and see if it would guide me back to the same place.
We cruised up the hill for a while and my hands suddenly were drawn to the left.
“Turn left.” And then a few streets further, “Turn right.” Then my hands landed on my lap. “OK park”
We were half a block up the street from the same exact building.
“I’ve never seen this building before.” Said Jose.
“Yeah me neither.”
The force was present but definitely not as strong as the night before. I followed the guidance down to the same exact spot and again it started spinning me in circles. Jose walked right by me and headed down to the building. He walked up to the first window and tried to open it. But it wouldn’t budge. Then he went to the next, and the next. He tried all ten windows and a door on the ground floor facing east. They were all locked. Then he disappeared around the south side.
I was playing with the energy vortex at that spot, allowing it to sway my body and again it started tugging me towards a certain second story window. Again the reflections in that window seemed to dance around.
I slowly walked down the hill and felt the energy along the east wall of the building. It was really weak. Jose came walking back and shrugged, “I checked all the windows and doors, they are all locked. Do you still feel any energy?”
“I did, up there, but down here there’s not so much.”
“Huh, I don’t know.” He said.
We walked around for a few more minutes and he said, “Let’s go, its freezing out here.”
“OK” I responded and started to walk back. I looked back over my shoulder as we reached the hill and saw that same window. “Oh what the Hell.” I said to myself. “I gotta try it.” I ran back down, scaled the building and touched the windowpane.
It opened almost by itself.
I looked down at Jose and said, “I am going in.” And without another thought crawled into the building. Stacked up against the wall were a dozen bed frames. I crawled over them and gently lowered myself onto the floor.
It was pitch black inside, my heart was pounding but I was fearless. I had complete trust that Jose was right behind me. We were simply on another adventure, not a big wall, but a spiritual climb breaking through our own walls of perception.
When my feet touched the ground. I centered, held out my hands and voiced, “If there is any being, energy or spirit present that needs me, a being of pure light, I am here.”
Barely had the words escaped my mouth, when I felt a physical tug on the pinky and ring finger of my right hand. It pulled me into and down the hallway. The darkness got even darker. I walked cautiously, testing each footstep lest I fall through some crater. About thirty feet down the hall I heard Jose clambering over the bed frames and then he called my name.
“Down here.” I said and heard his footsteps coming after us.
Another fifty feet down the hall I was pulled into a room on the right side of the hall. Then the force started turning me in a circle. Around and round we went to the right with my hands rising and falling slightly with each rotation.
Then in a burst of excitement, it pulled me back out into the hall and back in the direction we had come. We passed Jose in the hall and stopped somewhere in the middle. Again we danced around in a circle. And then I noticed that my right hand had a green light cast on it. It was a beautiful light green, the color of young spring leaves on a tree. I stopped spinning and tried to discover where the light was coming from. I circled my hand completely, but there was no light shining on it.
“Jose…”
“Yeah your hand is green.” He said in the most casual voice imaginable.
As soon as he spoke, the being tugged me through a door and up the stairs. At first we went slowly and then we started bounding up five flights of stairs. Jose was right behind me. Whereas I was the sensitive, he was the ground. Together we were spiritual explorers.
On the fifth floor, the being guided me into a room with windows and a little bit of light revealed signs of squatters. The room was a mess, with clothes and cardboard strewn across the floor. One wall had a hole in the plasterboard and a bunch of electrical wires had been pulled out.
“What was I supposed to see? Were there signs of conflict? How was I supposed to help?” I had no way of knowing so all I could do was follow. I followed the force out another door and back out into the hallway. As we walked I sensed the presence of another energy up ahead. It had the same intensity as the original force I felt the night before. I swallowed a lump in my throat and kept going.
We approached a side hall going to the right where the second force seemed to be emanating from. As we turned the corner I saw a door at the end of the hall with an orange white light radiating out of the center of it. The image was so biblical, I couldn’t believe it. As we walked towards the door, the energy got stronger and stronger. I had this funny feeling we were going to meet the creator.
When we got to the door, I braved myself to look directly into the light.
“Phew!” I gasped.
“What?” asked Jose still right behind us.
“It’s just the roof lights shining in through the window.”
“What did you think it was?”
“Never mind”
Then the being pulled me into a room on the left side of the door. We entered, spun in a couple circles and then exited. We crossed back in front of the door and entered a room on the right side. Again we spun in circles, but this time my hands were lifted up and placed across my chest on the shoulders. First the right hand and then the left hand.
The spinning stopped and I became very conscious of my breath. I inhaled deeply and felt the love from my heart expand around me. I exhaled and took another deep breath. As I inhaled I felt like a helium balloon being blown up and slowly starting to lift off the ground by whatever I was cradling in my arms. Another breath and my feet were weightless. I exhaled and took one more breath expecting at any moment to lift off the ground. And then Foosh!
The bubble burst. I landed back on the ground with my full weight and the energy was gone. Vanished! I felt all around me and there was nothing, just Jose and I standing in an abandoned building.
“It’s gone.” I said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah” I said feeling all around us.
“OK let’s leave.” He said and we began the journey back down the hall, down the stairs, down another hall, over the beds, out the window and down the side of the building. The entire descent we made in silence. It reminded me of hiking back down to earth after doing a big wall. A time for silent contemplation, when all the thoughts and reflections of the climb are sifted, sorted and released.
But rather than the blissful post climb peace, my mind was going a mile a minute asking questions. “What just happened? Was I just energetically robbed?”
I bounced a dozen answers around and none of them made sense. I kept feeling the energy on the way down, searching for any traces of spiritual presence, but there was none left.
Jose reached the ground before I did and waited for me. As soon as I touched down we walked up the hill and stopped in front of and old sign partly covered by overgrown bushes.
“Primary Children’s Hospital”
We looked at each other for a moment and kept walking. Seconds after we reached the sidewalk a police car with a spotlight on the hospital drove by. It slowed down when it saw us, but I just waved and acted as if we were just out on a brisk evening stroll.
“Good thing we didn’t park in front of the building.” I thought.
We got back in the car and I turned to Jose, “So what do you make of all that?”
“Oh it seems pretty clear to me. There was some being that died there, maybe a child. When it died it didn’t have the necessary energy to leave. So it was stuck there. When it saw you doing energy work up on the mountain, it called you over to help it. You came and gave it the energy it needed to return to the light. And now it has left.”
“So that’s it? Like that kind of thing happens every day?” I protested.
“I’m hungry. Let’s go get a pizza.” He said moving on to the next moment.
We drove around Salt Lake and of course nothing was open except the grocery store. So we settled for frozen pizza.
Over the next week, my life returned to normal. I taught classes at Snowbird in the mornings, went to school at night and focused my free time on Boulders in the Park. I had found a graphic designer to help me put together a flashy brochure describing Boulders in the Park to the conservative non-climber. We met one day in the coffee shop to discuss the final layout and while we were there, Mani appeared. I hadn’t seen her since the last episode of the epic in the hospital. When she saw me, she shot me and evil glare and I felt like crying. Lord only knows what version of the story she had been heard. I put my head down and tried to focus on the boulders project.
A few minutes later, she came up behind me and said, “Raven’s having her operation tomorrow.”
I looked up at her and we held each other’s gaze for a while. Then she said, “I gotta go.”
My designer waited for a while to let the moment pass and then said, “OK meet me over at my house tonight and we’ll create the final version.”
“Alright, I’ll see you at 10 p.m”
As I walked out of the coffee shop, I ran into the mystical lady who a few weeks earlier had turned me onto the power of the ascended masters. I told her about the operation and asked her, “Could you please focus healing energy on raven tonight?”
“Yes, I will start at midnight tonight.” She said as she looked into my eyes. My gaze spun dizzily out of control as I looked into her eyes with the depth and calm of the ocean. She pulled me out dripping wet with humility as she said, “Spirits that are among us…some choose to stay, some are free to leave, and others need our help in order to make it home.”
She knew about the children’s hospital. How?
“You will know their journey is complete when you see the shooting star.” She said.
“What shooting star? What are you talking about? I asked.
“You will soon see.” She said as she turned around and walked off.”
Why does everyone keep saying that to me?
I walked around the park grappling with her words for a while. “She surely picked up on the experience Jose and I had at the children’s hospital. But I didn’t see any shooting star. Of course we were inside. Why did she tell me this?”
As afternoon approached I began to think about Raven. I wanted to help her as much as possible without going to the hospital. I decided to call all of the healers that I knew and ask them all to meditate, pray, and send healing energy to her together. I suggested we all start at midnight.
That evening after class I visited my designer and we printed out the final version of the Boulders in the Park brochure. We finished at 11:45 p.m. I thanked her and went out to my car. I reached in the glove box to pick out a cassette to listen to while driving up into the Avenues. I pulled out the first tape my hand landed on.
“Oh my God!” I gasped as I stared at the ghostly image in my hand. I was holding the twisted medley of chaotic love songs that Raven had made for me right before she split. It was the exact same TDK cassette with her handwriting scribbled on the label.
“It can’t be. I saw this tape explode into a million bits last summer.” What?… How?…Is this some kind of a sick joke?” I looked around my car for signs of tampering.
“There’s no way!” And then the thought occurred to me. Put it in. Play it. If it’s the same tape you’ll know immediately. I paused. My hand trembled as I put it in. Tears streamed down my cheek as I heard Trent Resnor of Nine Inch Nails bite into an agonized fury of __________.
I was breathless, lost. How could this be? My boundaries had been pushed so far in the past few months, my perceptions had expanded so that I was now living in a multi-dimensional world that only a couple of years ago I didn’t know existed. I had come to accept a reality I previously didn’t even want to believe in. But an audio cassette physically manifesting out of thin air – No Way! I wasn’t ready for that.
As I sat there shaking my head in disbelief, I noticed a presence sitting in the passenger seat of my car. It picked up my hand, guided it in small circles and pressed it up against its non-physical self as if it was crying out, “Look here I am!”
The tape erratically switched gears into Roxanne, by Duran Duran.
How I wished I could see. I had been blessed with heightened kinesthetic intuition. I could feel energies, but my third eye was for the most part closed. Who was the being sitting next to me? Was it Raven’s spirit that had come and danced with me at my house weeks ago when I had first been banned from the hospital? Or was it the little spirit being to whom I had offered love at the primary children’s hospital a week ago? Or was it yet another disembodied being?
The spirit lifted my hand and motioned it forward. I started the car and followed where it guided me. With clear directions it led me to another unknown area of the Avenues where the street dead-ended below a forested area. I stopped the car and saw a two deer bolt up the hill. The spirit guided me out of the car. And there on the street, listening to the tunes from what seemed like life times ago, we danced.
We became the music, living it as waves drifting endlessly into the open sea - blue water white sky. The city disappeared. Our beings spiraled off together, guided by common wavelengths and subtle inflections in the rhythms of timelessness. We each exploded in moments of blind desire, surged through traumatic upheavals and fell, leaving scars that slowly illuminate the mind as we heal.
No longer did I question the nature of this spirit. It was Raven. The Raven I once loved and danced with creating such sublime metamorphic fusion. Who else but Raven herself could have resurrected the musical score for one last dance.
And from the perfect stillness, I slowly came out of the trance. As graceful as the descent of a downy feather onto crystalline snow, I landed back in the three dimensional reality of frigid darkness. But I wasn’t cold. I was glowing with the internal radiance of unconditional love, of connecting soul to soul, physical being to pure spirit, heart chakras wide open.
I turned in a slow circle and for a moment felt alone, and thought her spirit had vanished. But then she returned, lifted my hand and guided me back to the car. I drove as she directed, while my rational mind processed. “If this is clearly Raven’s spirit, and she is here with me, then is her spirit also still with her body in the hospital bed? If not, then who is? The fleeting thought of Raven’s schizophrenic nature entered my head. Could she really have two spirits? Could the fall…No, definitely not. She must be asleep and her spirit is simply free to leave as she wanders around dream time.”
We drove further up into the Avenues, past the children’s hospital to a grassy area overlooking both the children’s hospital and the LDS hospital where Raven was. I parked the car, but left the music playing. She guided me to get out of the car and sit on top of the hood.
The night sky was crystal clear and again the stars seemed really close. I knew the time must be after midnight and decided to start collecting chi to send down to Raven’s physical form. Her spirit danced around me as I tuned into the collective energy of the network of healers that at that precise time were concentrating all of their love on her.
From below us two deer wandered slowly up the hill, poking their noses into the snow and uncovering buried nuggets. They looked exactly like the two deer I had seen as we pulled up to stop a few minutes earlier.
“How strange.” I thought and continued my meditation.
A few minutes later five other deer joined the two deer and together they approached the car.
“Surely they must be here to help us send love to Raven.” I thought.
Moments later they all surrounded the car. Ravens spirit danced her way into their midst. Meanwhile I sat in silence, pouring all of my love, my energy and my focus into the intention of Raven’s healing for her benefit and the benefit of all sentient beings.
Gradually the deer stopped foraging and one by one looked up into the air. As they looked up I felt my chest expand and my heart open, giving, giving, giving all that I could give. And then I felt a surge of energy and the last deer looked straight up into the sky. Its movement was so sudden it startled me. I looked up just in time to see a shooting star streak across the sky. As soon as it faded away all the deer bolted off into the woods leaving me sitting alone on my car.
“What on earth?” I asked myself completely dumbfounded. Where was Jose when I needed him. “Think rationally.” I told myself. “What would he say… Oh no! The words from the mysterious lady came back to me dreadfully clear.”
“Some spirits need our help. You will know their journey is complete when you see the shooting star.”
I felt elation and grief in the same moment. “Does that mean that Raven’s spirit… left, returned, went home? No that can’t be. She is still down there in the hospital.”
The tape ended.
“No!” I screamed. I was frantic. I didn’t know what to think. I eliminated the thought that she had died. They hadn’t even started the surgery yet. “Then what happened?”
The tape flipped sides and started again, “You haven’t got what it takes to love me.”
The words filled me with passion. I grasped for actions, reactions “What was I supposed to do now? Just go home and say that was cool. No! I was led here for a reason, Raven’s tape magically appeared for a reason.”
The thought that a part of her spirit left kept haunting me.
“No it is up to me to bring it back to her. Yes bring it back. The tape! It appeared for me to give it back to her. If she hears it..." My thoughts were becoming irrational, but I had to do something.
I got back in the car to drive down to the hospital. The screech of an owl froze me.
Wisdom – “Don’t do it.”
Passion – “Go”
I went.
“I just have to play it for her.” I said to myself.
I entered the main entrance and walked up stairs. It had been over a week since I was there. If the nurse guard had changed, maybe, just maybe I could get in.
“Yes it was a different nurse.”
I walked up confidently and nodded at her. I held up the tape and casually said, “Raven requested it.”
She smiled and waved me on.
“Yes”
I walked into her room and saw her peacefully asleep listening to some tranquil meta-music. I relaxed, took a few long breaths and told myself “This is your last chance to bail.“
I walked over to the tape recorder, turned down the volume slowly until it was silent. I ejected the tape, slid in the resurrected one, turned the volume up just a fraction and backed away.
Barely had the first words of INXS’s song _________ been uttered and Ravens eyes flew open.. She looked right at me on the other side of the room and screamed, “What are you doing here? What is this music?”
Before I even had a chance to reply, she reached over, ripped the tape out of the player and hurled it at me.
“I don’t want you or your stupid music around here ever again. Now get…”
“Its your tape. The one…” What could I say? I couldn’t tell her that it had magically appeared in my car tonight after being destroyed six months ago. “The one you gave me. I thought you might like…”
“I don’t care what tape it is. I don’t want to hear it or see you. Now get out of here. If my mom finds out you were here….”
“I know. I’m sorry for bothering you.”
“Leave!”
“Ok, I wish you all the best on your…”
“I don’t want any of your wishes or any of your love.” She said with the hurt of her mother included.
“Bye Raven.” I said as I walked out and smiled at the nurse. Thank goodness for sound proof doors.
Jose just smiled as I told him the story. In the end I asked him what he made of it all and he simply said, “attachment is one of the hardest human emotions to overcome.”
The Christmas holidays approached and despite our amazing proposals, we never received any grant money to fund our anticipated return to Venezuela to climb Autana. Instead we spent our winter back-country skiing together. Jose on telemark skis and me on a split board. Far away from the chaos of the city, we cleansed our souls in the deep powder of the Wasatch.
Over New Years I went to visit my Sister in Sacramento. The last time I had seen them was after Halloween over a year ago when I first came out of the closet as an enegetic being. That seemed like lifetimes ago.
Much had changed in their lives as well. Their son Kieren, who I had met as an infant had been diagnosed with Cerebral Palsy and wasn’t developing at the same rate as other children. She told me that he wasn’t able to sit up, or even hold his head upright and he rarely made eye contact with anybody. Instead he would look, almost purposefully, to the side and thrash his arms about in a frenzy.
The realization that her baby was less than perfect was most difficult for my sister, and as a pediatrician, her husband began investigating all kinds of medical solutions to help his son. I hadn’t talked much with them about my spiritual adventures, but I silently wondered what effect the healing energy of Elongar Qigong might have on him.
The first few days of my visit I observed Kieran and listened to my sister’s stories and experiences. Then one afternoon I went outside and practiced Elongar with the intention of gathering energy to share with Kieran. My sister was out of the room when I returned and I found Kieran lying in his crib with Sasha their golden retriever lying next to him. I was guided to go pick Kieran up and hold him like a new-born baby, whose head still needed to be supported. Carrying him with one had on his back and one on his head, I began moving with him as part of me. He giggled as I very slowly spun him around. Slowly the energy rushing through us increased and for a long moment he looked me right in the eye to say hello.
This encouraged me and I intensified the visualization. I slid my hand from his back to his tail bone to support him more upright. I willed more and more energy through his being, called upon the assistance of the ascended masters and gracefully danced Kieran through the spiral vortex of ascending chi. Sasha, the dog, watched our every movement.
Kieren laughed and waved his arms ecstatically. Again he looked at me, I removed my hand from his head and he sat up on his own, spine erect and alert. The moment lingered long enough for my sister to walk back into the kitchen to see her son sitting up on the palm of my hand. She gasped and watched silently as I gently laid him back down on the crib.
My sister and I didn’t speak about that magical moment until years later when we were both in a state of acceptance that we could honor it for what it was.
One day in mid February I received a letter from Polar Tech. We hadn’t heard a word from them and they were supposed to have awarded the Polar tech Challenge Grant in November. The letter was thin and I expected another dejection.
My eyes almost popped out of my head when I read “we are honored to inform you that your team has been chosen to receive $4,000 to support your expedition to climb Autana.”
“Yahoo!”
Soon Jose arrived and we were on the phone with John Burcham who was down in Flagstaff, Arizona. We had originally planned to go around the winter solstice during the Venezuelan dry season. We missed that, so the next opportunity was April-May. That suited me because the season at Snowbird would be completing. I would have to miss a month of school. But what’s a month of school?
We decided to leave on April 5th. Jose would go down a few weeks early to arrange our transportation to and from Autana, which lies at the southern border of Venezuela near Brazil, almost twice as far from Caracas as Angel Falls. And then John and I would meet him in Caracas.
“And Lefty, no funny business with the taxi drivers on the way to Caracas.” Cautioned Jose sarcastically.
So wow! Time to get in climbing mode again. In the last six months I had probably climbed less than I had in any six month period in the last 11 years. It was the dead of winter in Utah, so I ended up training on plastic at the Wasatch Front. Not a bad place to be.
My psyche rose and fell over the next couple of weeks. “What’s wrong?” I asked myself.
“You’ve got a full ride to go on an expedition to Venezuela. You have been dreaming of this your whole climbing career, at least the last couple years of it.”
That was true, but there was this new voice in me that was saying, “Hey another big wall climbing adventure? Haven’t you done enough of those? Man you have moved on to a new phase of life, and it is just beginning. You have just begun to excel at teaching Elongar, you are three quarters of the way through your alternative healing school program, and Boulders in the Park is finally gaining momentum. No attachments, don’t let the lure of another adventure distract you from your new path.”
As I heard this new voice my mind started to sway, “Yeah, maybe I shouldn’t go on this…” And then I went outside, choked on the smog in Salt Lake City and remembered the endless sea of green in the jungles of Venezuela. I shook my head and snapped out of it real quick. I am going to Autana.
More trips to the gym. Time to get fit!
Squeezed into my schedule I still had time to go up into the mountains and do chi gong.
Raven had her surgery and it was successful. She was still a resident of the hospital, but her condition was much less critical. Although I included her in my meditations, I severed the karmic cord between us and never saw her again.
Without Raven to focus all of my energy on, I decided to experiment with different situations. Recalling Master Huang’s description of helping spirits in graveyards, I decided to try it out. Up in the Avenues there is a large old cemetery that I always walked by on my way up the mountain. One night I walked into it, just to have a look around. For a while I meditated, harnessed chi, and entered a state of heightened awareness.
Master Huang had never told me how he identified spirits, or chose which ones to help out, or what he actually did for them. But somehow I knew I could figure it out.
Once I felt ready I opened myself up to reception mode, feeling. In my mind I kept a steadfast intention, “If there are any spirits here who would like to ascend, return to the source of all life and infinite creation, to allow yourself the opportunity to reincarnat and continue your path of evolution… I am here to give you the love, the energy to do that.”
Walking around that graveyard, I saw thousands of graves, many with extravagant tombstones and ornate gardens. I imagined there must have been plenty of lost souls who had been afraid, or too attached to their lives, loved ones or possessions to want to leave at the time of their death.
And I was right. Barely fifteen minutes after I began the conscious meditation, I was approached by a young soul. Its movements were similar to the child we had helped at the children’s hospital, yet different. After grabbing onto my hands it flung me around in an ecstatic dance. We spun sufi style and I was awarded glimpses of this beings tormented existence. I saw the child subjected to unfathomable abuses and his spirit shrivel up inside before his body was finally laid to rest. Our dance became the emotional healing, with individual contorted movements that gradually merged to reach a synchronized resonance, evoking distant memories of a tribal dance that unifies the spirits of strife ridden souls.
Our movements peaked and I began to feel the same lifting feeling that I had in the children’s hospital and then Whoosh! It was gone. I looked up just in time to see a shooting star streak across the sky and I smiled. Before leaving the cemetery I completed my meditation, bringing all of my energies back within me and reestablished my connection between earth and sky.
Jose was gone for most of the winter, so I was forced to go solo on these new adventures. Every once in a while I was lured into the city. The music scene in Salt Lake was shifting. I was beginning to hear less aggressive, anger driven music and more synthesized techno, jungle and ambient grooves that seemed intentionally designed to facilitate energetic dancing. I had met some of the local DJ’s and they connected me with descent venues and music from the renaissance movement that was happening somewhere else on the planet, but not in Salt Lake City.
Each time I went out in the salt city, I went out with high hopes. “Imagine what it would be like, if this club or rave was full of people dancing with their hearts open, intentionally creating white light.”
But I never found an atmosphere like I was dreaming of. Instead the clubs were crawling with people trapped in their lower chakras. I often had to skirt around entire sections of the floor that were consumed with ravenous sexual beasts that rode the pounding bass with the single motion of thrusting hips as they tried to mount one another. Surrounding them were the masses of throbbing bodies in the meat market.
I usually found myself drawn towards the outer fringe of dancers where I found space to move. There, between roving bands of boot-stomping angry thugs, the sultry gothic clans and trendy rave kids, I found kinesthetic freedom. I let myself roll into trance with the lyrical overlapping poly-rhythms of renaissance music. Many of the raver kids around me were trancing out as well, but we were all inside our own isolated bubbles. The music was calling for us to unify, to come together and experience the oneness of universal love. But every time I raised my energy up to my heart and allowed it to expand out to make contact with the souls around me, I received dejection, rejection, disbelief, fear and even anger in return.
I often persisted sending out waves of white light and inevitably I would feel, usually in the back of my head, the negative energy of some evil glare. Without even looking I could feel someone trying to zap my energy. I equated it with an energetic vampire who had to try to drain the life force of another for their own power. And there were a lot of vampire energies in the salty city.
I experimented with various methods to deal with the vampire energies that I encountered. My first reaction was to to turn and visually confront the culprit. Once identified, they would usually spin around and target some other victim. I was also able to create an energetic shield around me that would reflect their energy. And then there was the blast them with love option. If it was energy that they wanted, then let em have it. As soon I became aware of someone sucking my energy I would turn up my own volume, dance into a frenzy and channel all my love into the stream of energy they were sucking out of me. At first I heard them chuckle as they thought they were receiving a free lunch. But the power of love is the power of God. And every time I tried this method, the unsuspecting vampire would inevitably get saturated and eventually begin to drown in the sea of love. Vampires cannot swim, so they sail away. Hopefully with a spark of light guiding them towards discovering the source of their own internal light.
Each journey out into the club and dance scene, I returned home alone wondering, “Where are the other beings like me?” I knew somewhere out there were people who were all love. I imagined a town or a city filled with harmonious people who weren’t afraid to open their hearts and let love flow freely between them. I saw them dancing and playing music together, creating brilliant spirals of white light. Love so powerful they healed and nourished one another with it.
“Have you ever been lost and didn’t even know you were lost? Have you ever been swimming in a river but realized you had to spend all of your energy just to stay still?”
I was just beginning to see that I was trapped in duality. I knew only dysfunctional society and the perfection of the wilderness. My spirit yearned to be back in the garden of eden, but I didn’t even know it existed.
Craving human connection, I threw myself out time and again into the urban jungle to dance with the hopes of fostering an atmosphere of love to be shared with like-minded souls. Many times my spirit rose and then fell as my eyes mistook kinesthetic grace for awareness of universal love, which contrary to my initial beliefs, has little to do with talent or ability to dance. Often I saw crazy break dancers and ravers that moved energy like the wind. But they were often in their egos, not in their hearts. Their energy was always competition, “Yo check this out!” like rappers slamming each other with the power of rhymes.
“Why can’t we all just love one another?”
Some nights the clubs were full of aggressive and vampire energies and it was best just to leave. It was on one such night that I left the club early and headed up onto the mountain. I longed for the presence and unconditional love of the ascended masters. As I drove by the cemetery, I saw a peculiar flash of light and I decided to stop and check it out. I walked around for a while, then ventured into a new area and was guided to begin my meditation. Energized from dancing , I quickly cultivated the chi and connected myself between the earth and sky. Then I honored the four directions and began to open my heart with the conscious intention to help any…
Barely had I uttered my intention when I saw a dark cloud racing towards me from the northwest. Heading east along the northern border of the graveyard, it funneled down to a denser form about the size of a bowling ball. When it was due north of me, it turned a sharp ninety degree angle and came straight at my chest. By the time it hit me it was the size of a baseball.
I resisted any temptation to run, hide or defend myself and I opened my heart as wide as I could, letting the love stream through me. The force was amazing. It physically almost pushed me over backwards and I had to lean into it to regain my balance. I had no idea who or what the force was, but I knew it was menacing. I could feel it sucking the love out of me.
So I gave… and gave… and gave… and the more I gave the more it sucked out of me. I reached the point of giving where all of the physical energy suckers I had dealt with had abandoned, but this force kept on sucking. I renewed my connection between earth and sky, I consciously cleared all of the energy channels running through my body. And still this ravenous force was sucking me dry.
I heard a most sinister laughter which seemed to echo from all directions and suddenly I began to have doubts.
I contemplated moving, but I couldn’t. My body seemed paralyzed, suspended off the ground while the life was getting sucked out of me.
Again I heard the sick laughter.
And then I heard very softly as if very far away, the words of Master Huang. “The power of love is always stronger than the power of darkness. If you are aligned with the light, then you are tapped into an infinite source which can never be vanquished.”
Hearing his words renewed my conviction and I held strong ever realigning myself with the purest, truest, highest form of divine love.
For over 15 minutes I stood there engaged in a silent battle with an unseen foe. Then finally it disengaged, pulled back and flew off exactly where it had come from. Somehow I didn’t get the impression that it was drowning in the love, but that it had just had its’s fill and then left. I fell down on the ground exhausted, then slowly made my way back home and then slept for the next 15 hours.
But the voice didn’t go away. Every time I thought about leaving to go on this expedition, I heard it. I had to make up my mind fast. February was almost over and I had to get my tickets by March 5. Finally I decided to go with my intuition. Jose was already in Caracas. Hopefully he would have time to find another partner for the expedition.
I called him up and told him my decision.
“That’s OK.” He said, “you gotta go with your flow.”
I was psyched that he wasn’t upset.
Having made the decision, I slept a whole lot better. I fell into a deep dreamy slumber and woke up in dreamland…
I had decided to go to Venezuela. We flew down there. Out in the jungle I meet a shaman. He starts teaching me how to heal people using a drum and chanting inaudible sounds.
I woke up startled. “Phew!!” And went back to sleep
In the morning still remembered the dream. “Typical dream world, waits until after I make the decision and then taunts me. Tuff! I’m sticking with my decision.
And then the next night I had the same dream.
And then the third night I had it again, this time we were sitting around a fire and he was showing me sacred herbs to heal. Someone was hurt.”
I woke up the third time. Eyes wide. I got out of bed to call Jose. It was already morning in Caracas.
“Hello Jose. Did you find anyone to go on the expedition yet?”
“No”
“Good. Stop looking. I am going to come.”
“That’s great, what made you change your mind?”
“I had this dream where I decided to go to Venezuela and I met a Shaman in the jungle and studied with him. The first night I wrote if off as a karma dream from having made my decision. But then I had it again, and I just had it a third time. Clear as a bell.”
“Wow. That’s amazing. Who knows maybe our mission isn’t to climb Autana, maybe it is to meet this shaman. You never know what is going to happen in Venezuela.”
Those words echoed through my mind recalling the first time I went down there.
The next day I bought my ticket to Caracas, leaving April 5th. March flew by as I prepared for the trip. The ski season was tapering off at Snowbird, and Boulders in the Park was still moving ahead at the speed of a glacier, so I had no problem leaving either of those projects for a month. Most of the staff at the Awakening Spirit was mystified by and supportive of my trip. I could catch up on the course work but, they made it clear that I had to complete my 200 hours of clinic, where the students gave full hour treatments to the public for discounted rates. So I doubled up my clinic hours in March. I really enjoyed working on people as I was finally able to flow with my intuition instead of following the rules of each of the different styles of body work that we were learning.
About a week before my departure, I was in clinic giving a treatment to this man who was visiting Salt Lake from Seattle. He was suffering from all kinds of body aches and tension in his right shoulder and back. He was stiff as a board, so in addition to massaging him, I showed him movements that he could do to initiate his own healing. He felt tremendous relief from the movement therapy, which was completely foreign to him. Afterwards he thanked me and told me he was clairvoyant -- able to see into people’s future.
Clairvoyancy seemed to me to be the ultimate gift of spiritual development, and I was baffled how someone who already had that ability could be so stiff and unconscious of their physical body and unable to heal themselves. When I asked him about it, he laughed and said there were many things he was still unaware of, but since early in his life he had been gifted with his ability to see into other people’s futures even more than in his own.
Before he left, he offered to do a reading for me. He sat still for a moment and starting telling me this tale about a Russian farmer who lived in a village where a strange illness had infected many people. One day decided to hike into the mountains and collect medicinal herbs. While up in the mountains, he looked down and saw smoke rising from above his village. Upon closer analysis, he realized it had been attacked by a horde of vandals. The farmer cursed himself for leaving the village instead of being able to help defend it. He thought about running back down and then decided to gather help at a nearby alpine village. When they returned, they found the entire village in ruins and not a soul survivor.”
“What a dreadful story.” I interrupted him confused, and then I asked, “So what does that have to do with me?”
“You are soon going on an adventure where you are going to meet a great teacher. You are not going to complete the program here at Awakening Spirit.”
“What? How did you come up with that from that story?” I said as I silently recalled the three successive dreams that I had of meeting a shaman.
“You are like the farmer, who goes on a journey seeking wisdom.”
“Well you are right. I am going on a journey. I am going down to Venezuela on a climbing expedition. Is Salt Lake gonna get torched while I am gone?”
“No, the village represents your world view. It will experience a metaphorical death in order to be reborn. That is the process of transformation.”
I looked at him for a long moment and told about the dreams I had of meeting a shaman. When I finished, I added, “But I am only staying for four weeks, then I am coming to back to finish the last three months of school.”
He looked up into the air above my head and then quietly said, “No I don’t believe you will. There is nothing more for you to learn at this school.”
“But I always finish things that I start. And besides it’s only three more months.”
“That is all I can tell you.” He concluded.
My plane arrived in Caracas during the light of day and I saw Jose’s smiling face waiting for me as I pushed my bags through customs. We had much less equipment for this trip than we did for the ascent of Angle Falls, but we were also only a team of three instead of nine. Our intention was to do the first ascent of the north face of Autana, climbing alpine style, light and fast. Instead of hauling thousands of feet of static rope to fix on the rock, we only had three, two for climbing and one for hauling. Once we left the ground we would become a self supportive capsule, sleeping on portaledges up on the face of the 2,000 foot virgin wall.
Our photographer, John Burcham landed a few hours after me and within minutes of his arrival we were out on the freeway heading for Caracas. We all laughed as we passed the exit for Macuta, where my ill-fated taxi adventure had climaxed a little more than a year prior. I still had the taxi driver Alberto’s phone number he had given me, but I resisted the urge to call him.
Soon the fragrant smells of the jungle filled the air as we headed across the mountain range that separates Caracas from the ocean.
Jose broke a moment’s silence as he simply said, “Caracas is Caracas… the rest is jungle.”
“Yes indeed.” I agreed.
Then he added, “In the jungle you never know what is going to happen, we might never even get to the base of the cliff.”
Those were the exact phrases with which we had opened up our Angel Falls slide show tour. I glanced over at him, saw he had a devilish grin on his face and knew something was up.
“Jose! What are you trying to say?”
“Well… We might not be going to Autana.”
“What?”
“There is an indigenous uprising in the area right now and that whole part of the country has been closed down to foreign travelers.”
“But WE are not foreign, you are from here.”
He looked at me and simply shook his head. “I have been here for a month now and checked every possibility. The abstract simply does not want us to go down there right now.”
I held up the post card of Autana that I had carried around since our Angel Falls trip. I stared at it for a while, and said, “Fare thee well Autana, we shall meet again another day.”
“Luckily there are 115 other tepuis out there, and less than a dozen have been climbed.” Jose said and pulled out a sheet of slides, “Say hello to Acopan.”
John and I held the sheet up to the light and looked in wonder at one of the most beautiful walls we had ever seen. Rather than a free standing tower like Autana, Acopan is a majestic buttress that extends for miles, coming to a prominent prow 2,200 feet over the jungle below. Extending for miles out from the base of the cliff was semi-arid grasslands of the grand savannah. Rather than lush jungle covered walls, the sandstone of Acopan looked dry and clean.
“I dare say it looks a bit more hospitable of an environment than Autana.” John offered.
“It looks like eden.” I said.
“And it has never been climbed.” Jose said. “It’s a hundred miles from Santa Helena and the nearest road and there is no river, but there is a Pemon Indian village called Wakunek 10 miles from the base with an air strip. I believe I can get a pilot to fly us there.”
“So instead of a three day slosh through the jungle, our approach is 10 miles through the grassy savannah… Looks good to me.” John confirmed.
“It looks like eden.” I said still mesmerized by the picture. “I want to move there.”
“Then Acopan it is.” Jose exclaimed.
So within a half day of landing in Venezuela, our plans had changed and we geared up for Acopan. That evening we picked up our fourth team member, Andreas Vancampenhound, an ambitious Venezuelan bigwall climber and veteran of many Yosemite test pieces.
We had a week in Caracas to buy food, secure supplies and fall in love with Venezuelan goddesses Krishna, Kela and Daniela. We had breakfast at Daniela’s house one morning and there I saw a flyer for a workshop entitled – “Crystal Healing and Quantum Physics” with Christina.
Intrigued, I asked Daniela about it.
“Oh it’s some workshop my mom is going to.” She said with little interest.
“It sounds amazing.” I said and we never spoke of it again.
Jose arranged two small planes to fly us to Wakunek and the day before we were supposed to leave one of the planes broke down and we scrambled for a new plan. John, Andreas and I jumped on a bus with most of the gear and headed 27 hours to San Ignazio, an urbanized Indian village on the edge of the grand savannah. We hoped we could shuttle gear in to Wakunek from there with the one plane.
We arrived in San Ignazio in the middle of the night and were drawn to set up camp under a thatched roof in the middle of the village. It was a little creepy shuttling loads through the misty night air into the center of this village, but it just seemed the right thing to do. All through the night, people were up and walking back and forth, often quite near our camp but nobody seemed to notice us.
I stayed up late into the morning practicing Elongar to erase all of the aches from sitting in the bus all day. Barely had I started moving when I noticed the subtle energy was incredibly strong. The earth, like our bodies, has an energetic profile. Some areas are more sensitive than others, like meridian lines. Exactly what I was feeling I could not tell, but the experience was powerful. Afterwards I slept soundly.
The next morning people were busy everywhere, and again walked very near our camp. But still no one seemed to even notice us until a troupe of little kids came by. They skirted around our camp with heads hung low. Just as they were leaving one of them muttered in awkward English, “Hello, How are you?”
Without hesitation I muttered back in the same frequency, “I am fine, how are you?”
The whole troupe stopped in their tracks and spun around. Within seconds they were huddled around our camp looking at all the gear and listening as we tried to explain what everything was used for.
There were five of them, and other than a few memorized phrases of English, they spoke a dialect of the Pemon language that included many words of the Pemon Indian language. Sap, the first one who had spoken was the leader of the pack, but he wasn’t always the first one to understand what we were trying to say. Some of the others were more receptive to the sign language we created.
A few hours later we were all lying around starting to get bored so I asked, “What do you do for fun?”
“Futball!! El Rio!!!” They screamed in chorus.
Within seconds we were all headed down to the river for a swim. John started snapping pictures and and the kids turned into animated superheroes, jumping off high banks and swinging off tree tops into the water. Sapo discovered a tree stump on the beach that made a great launching pad for kung fu spin kicks and back flips.
· the plane ride to Acopan,
· meeting the villagers,
· opeing up to the towers and asking for the biggest lesson I am able to receive
· drinking the red water
· touching the base of the cliff with the natives
·
There was no going back the way I had come. Since splitting up with Jose, I had soloed up a 200 foot jungle-covered waterfall, traversed the base of the Tepui above precarious jungle cliffs, and machete-whacked my way through a quarter mile of the densest jungle I had ever seen. I was sitting up in a tree at the base of the route looking up at 2,000 feet of pristine overhanging quartzite. The silence was perfect. Jose’s shouts were faint and far away. He had tried to cut a trail beneath the cliffs but had gotten bogged down in the thicket.
For a moment time stopped. After dozens of first ascents in far away places, I still felt the magic of being somewhere no human had ever been. And at the base of Acopan, I was hundreds of miles from the nearest town, ten miles from the closest Pumon Indian village and a mile beyond the furthest point the Indian chief had guided us to the day before. And then the shadows started to grow.
I shouted to Jose and descended along the edge of the jungle cliffs to the flatter jungle below. It gets dark fast in the jungle. I was playing a game, running through old growth jungle, jumping between half buried boulders, clinging to moss covered logs and making good time. We had left our packs and our lights at a stash a few hundred meters before splitting up. Only about 600 meters separated us and I could hear his occasional shouts to guide me home. While most other expedition teams had started using walkie talkies to communicate, it wasn’t our way.
Without a pack on to slow me down, I was confident that I could make it back to him before darkness settled on the jungle floor. Although thousands of miles away, the Venezuelan flora reminded me intimately of the scrubby rhododendron forest of the Smokey Mountains of my childhood. Racing against the night was a game I had played many times before.
I had traversed under most of the jungle cliffs when I encountered a dense thicket that was almost impenetrable. Without hesitation I took to the scrubby trees above, scrambling from one to the next, occasionally launching my body onto the matt of bushes below. Although fun, my progress was too slow. Darkness was closing in and I decided to aim down mountain to get back under the giant trees I could see only a hundred feet below me.
Nearing the edge of the thicket, I crawled into a tree to peer beyond. Ten feet below me I saw a vegetated ledge and bare ground leading where I had to go. On the down hill side of the ledge rose a small tree that was just out of reach. My first instinct was, “Jump to the tree, its only five feet away.”
Then reason entered, “No, be safe and lower yourself to the ledge below. What is you slip and twist an ankle.”
I lowered myself from the limb I was standing on and out of nowhere a monkey appeared right in front of me, jabbering away in some monkey language, “wabla ya labla ya laba da do! wabla ya labla ya laba da do!”
“What are you screaming about monkey man?” I inquired. We made eye contact
but I couldn’t understand his tongue and didn’t have the time to hang around. “Gotta go monkey man.” I said and lowered myself down, my feet less than a foot above the thick scrub below. I let go and softened to absorb the impact. There was none. I fell through the greenery, and then stopped, leaves and branches smashed up against my face and my feet dangling free in space. A pencil thick vine clamped by two fingers of my right hand is all that held me up.
Above me I could still hear the monkey chattering away, and suddenly I understood his tongue, “Wabla ya labla ya laba da do! I wouldn’t be doing that if I was you!”
Just then the vine broke and I began to fall.
Reason entered for a moment, “Relax! That small tree couldn’t have come from more than a 10 feet below. Just absorb the impact.”
I relaxed and waited. Nothing happened. I relaxed again. Still nothing happened. I remembered someone once telling me about a three scream fall. This was it!
I went out of body just before the impact and woke up in the thrall of death, witnessing darkness, chaos, and infinite destruction. It was more turbulent than I had imagined. And then Wham! Something hit me on the arm. “That’s definitely not death. Life support systems on!” As I reactivated my physical senses I realized that I was still tumbling down some kind of a hill with a cloud of decaying leaves, hummus and a few good sized boulders.
Thud. I came to a stop and allowed the debris to settle. I found myself sitting upright with my knees in front of me, leaning against a large log that must have halted my tumble.
“Life support systems, check!”
I brought my hands to my head and was relieved to feel my skull intact.
“Neck” With miniscule movements and tender prodding I checked each vertebrae. “All good.”
“Back” I was sure I must have broken my back, but after a thorough investigation of bending, twisting and prodding it seemed in perfect condition.
I continued my bodily survey. I felt my hips and pubic bones, my femurs and my knees. When my knees checked out OK, I voiced to myself, “It’s a miracle, I am going to walk out of this.”
As my head started lifting up to survey the surroundings, I slid my hands down my calves to my ankles. “Uhh Oh!” As my right hand ran into a bone that was sticking out of my leg, I glanced down and saw the lateral side of my heel sticking out in front of me where my toes should have been. “Not good.” I pulled my hand up and it was drenched in blood. I looked at the other leg. It was broken too, but no bones sticking out.
Without moving I looked around me to get a lay of the land. I was sitting at the bottom a a 40 foot hill with a clear path of destruction showing where I had tumbled. Above the hill was a 70 foot cliff that rose up to meet the foliage of the giant trees above me.
“Where am I?” I asked myself. For a moment I thought I must have fallen through one of those energetic portals that I had heard rumors about… into another dimension.”
I thought back and remembered the sequence of events, “I was hanging from a scrubby tree above a vegetated…” and then I saw it, way at the top of the cliff, a hanging garden spanned twenty feet across a small dihedral. And below it, sticking right out of the side of the cliff, Dr. Suess style, was the little tree that I had seen.
“I should have jumped to the tree!” I blamed myself.
My eyes traced the distance down the cliff and to the top of the hill and then down the path of destruction I had left behind. A shudder of fear ran down my body.
“I better check myself again. I can’t believe I didn’t hurt anything else.”
I inspected my whole body again and except for two broken legs below the knees, I didn’t have a scratch on me. When I got to my grotesquely disfigured right foot, I reached down and pulled it around the right way. Immediately intense pain rocketed up my leg as the nerves were shocked into sensitivity. The tibia was inside, but the upper portion of the fibula was overlapping the lower portion by about and inch. I tried to pull the foot to bring the bone back inside, but I couldn’t get enough leverage.
A wave of darkness descended on me and I suddenly remembered where I was and what time it was. In the far far distance I heard Jose’s shouts.
I screamed, “Jose!! I broke my legs!!”
“What? You lost your way!” came his response
“No! HELLLPPP ME!”
“What? You can’t see. Of course you can’t see, it’s dark outside.”
“No! I broke my fucking Legs!”
“What? I can’t hear you. Follow my voice. I am heading back to camp.”
Another wave of darkness settled over the jungle.
Instantly my mind floated back four years earlier when I found my previous climbing partner Cameron at the base of the 300 foot sandstone tower Moses in Canyonlands, Utah with dual tib-fib breaks, but not compound fractures and no blood loss. I happened to see his light at midnight and hiked up to the base of the tower where he had been lying for three hours. I will never forget his response when he saw me, “Boy am I glad to see you.” We survived a bitter cold night and in the morning a helicopter flew him off to a hospital. But it was an epic.
I compared the two situations. “Here I have a worse injury, I am loosing blood, and ain’t nobody gonna find me if I stay here. Worse yet I will be eaten alive by these ants!”
As if on cue, a team of half inch long read ants appeared on my leg and I saw myself being eaten from the inside out as they invaded me through the hole in my leg.
I swatted them off and screamed, “Jose!!” in final desperation.
“Follow my voice!!”
Was he joking with me or was it really possible that I could hear his every syllable and he couldn’t hear me at all. I looked around and realized that I was lying in a deep canyon and that cliff was blocking my sound.
“If he leaves me here, I am dead.” I looked around to see how I could get out of there. The only passage was by descending a few hundred more feet and then traversing and then climbing back up the hill on the other side to hopefully intercept him as he made his way down from the base of the cliff back to the main trail.
The first obstacle on my path was the big log that had stopped my tumble. I rolled over towards the log. The moment I moved, pain rifled through me and I screamed. My right foot literally hung behind me as I turned. There was only tendons and skin holding it to the rest of me.
I clawed my way up onto the log and pulled my legs up after me. With each movement I could hear the broken bone chunks clanking. Below me the hill was relatively free of obstacles and with a burst of energy I cradled my right foot in my arms, rolled off the log and tumbled down the hill.
The pain was too intense to scream. At the bottom of the hill I pulled my foot straight again and started dragging myself on my arms in the direction of Jose’s occasional shouts. Drawing energy from some unknown reserve, I crossed several gullies strewn with broken trees and bramble. A few times my right leg got stuck dangling over some branch and I had to reverse flow and pull it along behind me.
Finally I came to the base of the long hill that I had to climb up to get out of the canyon. I looked up it and sighed. How it reminded me of climbing out of the inferno in Dante’s divine comedy. Each step with elbow or hand pulled me forward but the top of the hill seemed infinitely far away. Midway up that hill I paused for a breath, only to be spurred yet on again by the biting teeth of the vicious ants. So onward I plodded until at last almost defeated, I reached the top. From there I heard once more Jose’s shout that now sounded near.
“Jose! I screamed with my last wind.
“Hello! Follow my voice.”
“Jose!! I broke my legs!!”
“What? Are you hurt?”
“Yes!” I sighed with relief.
“Hold on I’ll be right there.”
But in those moments it took him to navigate his way to where I was, the last bits of light crept out of the jungle. While waiting for him, I found a few straight pieces of
wood to fashion splints for my legs. By the time he reached me we could barely see each other.
“Boy am I glad to see you.” I returned Cameron’s thanks from years before.
“How bad is it?” he asked.
“Its real bad. Both bones on the right leg and it’s compound.”
“And the left one?”
“Yeah it’s broken too, but I think only the fibula.”
‘How did it happen?” He asked while he inspected my legs.
“The tree! I should have jumped to the tree. So stupid! And the monkey even…”
“Be quiet!” he snapped at me, “This is no time for self pity. We have to focus on your survival. Now tell me what to do. I don’t know the first thing about broken bones.”
While I slapped ants and gave instructions, Jose fashioned a damn fine splint out of his socks, a shirt and the sticks. He tried to carry me but it was so dark you couldn’t even see your nose. We fell over a couple of times and each time we had to straighten my leg out. After the second fall, I told him I couldn’t do it again so we decided to crawl into the pitch darkness. First he moved forward a few yards to make sure there were no big obstacles and then I followed after him. Without lights, we only had the angle of the slope to guide us. Again I was drawn back to Dante’s Divine Comedy, “forward I trudged so that the right foot was always higher.”
We crawled together in this manner for several hours. Occasionally we rested for a brief moment until the savage ants attacked and we moved on again. We were two miles away from our base camp on the outskirts of the jungle and the prospects of making it seemed really slight.
Finally we heard screams from up ahead and replied. Moments later Andreas showed up with a light. He lifted me onto his back and off we went to meet John who had stayed on the trail to guide us there. Luckily Jose and I had paralleled the trail a mere 50 meters down hill of it. Had we been further away, we might not have heard their screams.
With three headlamps and a machete we made pretty good time through the jungle. Andreas carried me the entire way with occasional rests and only a few falls. John led the way and Jose cut vines out of the way, because sometimes my right foot would catch on them and spin all the way around so that the toes were pointing backwards and send me shrieking in pain.
A few hours into the journey I began to loose all feeling in my arms which were draped around Andre’s neck. As I started to slide off of him, he whispered, “Remember your yoga, use your breath to focus the energy back into your arms. We have to get out of this jungle.”
And with my own words reflected back at me, I focused on altering my breath from short gasps of air to long powerful abdominal breaths to build up the chi. But I have to admit I was skeptical. Already four hours had elapsed since my fall and I felt there might not be any strength left. But sure enough, once I regained my conscious breath, the feeling returned to my arms and I was able to hang on for the next two hours.
Despite our steady pace, we barely made it to our gear stashed at the Guanoco before the headlamps died. There we rested and I fought a loosing battle with a colony of black ants while the others put together the single portaledge which we used as a stretcher. Our progress quickened with two people carrying me, and shortly after midnight we emerged out into the starlight of the beautiful savannah.
They placed my portaledge/stretcher down on some stones to keep me off the ground and Andreas got to work cleaning my wound which already smelled rank. He remembered the foul odor from a similar epic he had experienced two years earlier when he had suffered a compound fracture on his leg while attempting to establish a new route up Kukanan Tepui.
My fibula was still protruding, and due to the swelling it pressed up against the skin of the ankle and was causing tremendous pain. Andreas attempted to pull my foot again to set the bone but he gave up after a few minutes of my intense shrieking. I took a couple of Ibuprofens and wished I had brought better drugs. At one point he pulled off a little chunk of flesh that was hanging by a thread and held it up to show me, “I guess you won’t be needing this anymore and he hucked it off into the night.
We all ate some soup John had made hours before and we contemplated how I was going to get out of the thick jungle before my leg got infected and we were going to have to cut it off. The situation was definitely grim, we were still ten miles away from the Pemon Indian village, a hundred miles from the nearest town, our plane wasn’t due to return for another two weeks, and our aviation radio only worked if a plane was flying directly overhead.
But no matter what happened, we all shivered at the thought of me having to spend the night, crippled in the jungle, alone with the ants and whatever else might have been roaming around out there. On the edge of the savannah, all we had to deal with were a few pesky mosquitoes (or so we thought).
Our conversations drifted through the night, as they each took turns dozing to get some rest for the big day ahead of us. I was too terrified to sleep. I didn’t know how much blood I had lost, but the image of me drifting off to sleep and never awakening kept me very focused on my meditation. I practiced whole body breathing to ease the pain and harness chi. If I was lucky, all of my work for the past two years, developing Elongar – Movement Energy Transformation, learning qi gong, and cultivating my healing powers, might be enough to help me survive the next couple days.
A few hours later I emerged from a deep trance. The almost full moon slipped from behind the clouds and a ray of light beamed down from it and focused on my face. I felt drawn towards it. Then the most horrifying shriek I ever heard in my whole life erupted from up near the Tepui. It sounded like all the water of Niagra Falls being thrust through a man-hole sized orifice. Then an energetic beam of light created a triangle between the moon, the noise and me. I felt electrified. Both my arms and my legs started undulating in slow waves and then my extremities began tingling. The sensation was intense but not painful. It progressed from my extremities towards my center and I felt like a reptile shedding a layer of skin.
Over the next five minutes the process continued until the skin peeling sensations formed a concentrated ball in my stomach. I felt nothing in the rest of my body. After a few moments the direction reversed and the energy started creeping back out towards my extremities. The whole time the piercing screech from up on the rock reverberated through the air and the energetic triangle between the screech, the moon and me remained fixed.
I had no idea what was going on. And then I realized that no one else had woken up. “Oh my God,” I muttered to myself, “I must be hallucinating.”
And then John woke up.
“What the fuck? What is that screaming!”
“Shhhh… It’s the Tepui.” I said.
“What? Oh my God, look at you. Your whole body is squirming.”
“Shhhh...”
“What have you done? You opened up the gates of Hell!!” and he covered his face back up with his sleeping bag.
The process continued for a few more minutes as the energy came out to my finger tips. It ended with a divinely painful pulse of electricity that rifled through my body, like shock wave. And then there was silence. Clouds covered the moon, the scream faded away and my body was completely still… without a trace of pain.
As I laid there, my thoughts drifted back to the three dreams I had of meeting a shaman who taught me how to heal. Obviously the part I missed in the dream was that I would learn to heal myself. “But maybe this experience was the healing. Maybe I am healed and will walk out of this.”
I didn’t feel any pain in my legs. I envisioned them as being completely healed and lifted my head up off the stretcher to gain a look at them. The right leg was definitely still crooked and severely swollen.
Throughout the remainder of the night I lay in meditation and often wondered what I had just experienced.
John woke up an hour before sunrise and woke up the others. “I can’t believe you slept through that noise last night.”
“Huh? What noise?” Jose asked.
“That screech!! ”
“What screech? What are you talking about?”
“The Tepui! It was screaming like a banshee for over ten minutes. The whole time Scott was groaning and waving his limbs all over the place. It was the freakiest thing ever.”
“Why didn’t you wake me up?” asked Jose.
“Scott told me to be quiet like he was communicating with it or something.”
Jose looked at me and I shook my head, “I have no idea what it was, but it was the most intense experience in my whole life. These beams of light triangulated between the moon, the noise and me, and then this tingling sensation crept in from my extremities to my center, and then crept back out. Afterward all the pain was gone from my leg.”
Jose looked bewildered for a moment and then said, “The noise was probably the monkeys. They can be pretty loud sometime.”
“Monkeys!?!” John stammered, “Maybe King Kong or some monkey demons from Hell, but no monkey made that noise.”
Jose and Andreas looked at each other. Andreas hadn’t heard anything either.
We ended the discussion and formulated a plan to get me to a hospital.
At 5 a.m. Jose and Andreas started hiking back to Wakunek. With them they took the aviation radio to try to contact a plane. It was our only hope.
After they left, John and I wondered when or if I would see them again.
Around noon as the scorching sun started to beat down, John constructed a shabby lean two out of sticks and a few Thermorest sleeping pads for me. Moments later a few natives hiked up to our camp on their way to harvest Yucca from a clearing they had made in the jungle. The women gasped at my leg and shook their heads gravely. A man laughed at John’s pitiful lean two and without speaking a word, disappeared into the jungle. He quickly returned bearing long saplings, palm fronds, and some vines. He made several trips to gather supplies and within 15 minutes he had constructed a sturdy palm leaf hut under which I was able to chill in the shade instead of bake in the sun. To thank him I gave him a file for his machete and he cried as he accepted it.
The day lasted forever. Where were Jose and Andreas? I passed the time drinking lots of fluids and peeing into bottles. All kinds of swarming insects were attracted to the foul stench of my rotting flesh, so we wrapped my leg in layers of clothing to keep them off it.
During the silence that lingered, my thoughts returned to my dreams of meeting a shaman. “Of course,” I mused optimistically, “Wakunek must have a Shaman. He will come, help me heal my leg and I will stay here and study with him.”
Late that afternoon Jose returned with Leonardo, the village chief. I completely expected to see an ancient medicine man trailing behind them, but they were alone. I asked Leonardo, about their Shaman. He looked at my leg, shook his head and admitted they no longer had a Shaman. He said a the Shaman disappeared not long after the catholic missionary had come, years ago while he was a young child. Now they too rely on the meager supply of western medicine that the missionaries give them.
I was baffled, “What about my dreams. Surely I am to meet a Shaman.”
Reality check – “What about the plane? Jose, did you make contact?”
“No, but Andreas hiked to a catholic mission with a native and they should be there by tonight.”
“How far away is it?” I asked.
“Thirty five miles.”
The thought of spending another night there didn’t thrill me, but at least there was hope. Noticing my concern, Jose shifted the conversation, “So it wasn’t monkeys that you heard last night.” And he began to tell me what happened to him and Andreas on the way down to the village that morning.
They started hiking down under a under a breathtaking predawn sky with a thin veil of clouds overhead. The jungle was alive with all kinds of noises. Magic was in the air. Far away to the south a circular array of lights rose up into the sky. They watched it for a while, thinking it might be a UFO, but it didn’t move. Further down the trail Jose noticed two bright planets on the eastern horizon that the cloud layer somehow magnified.
He told Andreas, “That one planet is really bright.”
“It is too big.” Responded Andreas.
At that precise moment a horrifying roar erupted in the jungle near them and the larger “planet” started moving back and forth and proceeded to get even larger.
They were both shocked, but Jose told Andreas, “Don’t be afraid. Open yourself to it.”
The planet swung left then right, getting closer and closer until it seemed to be right on the edge of the earth’s atmosphere. The roar intensified to a shrill pitch. Then they both felt ripples of energy flow down their bodies.
“Something very powerful was going on.” He said.
The experience lasted for several long minutes and then the clouds slowly dissipated, the moving light became a still planet again, and the insane roar ceased. They looked at each other and in awe and filled with energy, they raced down to the village.
“So what was the roar?” I demanded.
Jose looked at Leonardo who said, “El Leon.”
“Lion!” I gasped. “I didn’t even know there were lions in South America.”
“Oh Si!” said Leonardo,. “Grande.”
Again I shuddered at the vision of me lying helpless out in the jungle alone with a lion roaming around.
Leonardo said they are very rare. And he had only once in his life even heard the lion’s roar. And then he presented me with a tooth of a lion that his father had given him. “The energy of the lion will help you heal.”
The second night was endless. I started getting feverish and couldn’t sleep at all. Jose stayed up with me and we talked through most of the night. I brought up my dreams of meeting a shaman and he said, “Maybe you are the shaman and you have to heal yourself.”
But I wasn’t healing myself, I was loosing energy and slowly my faith. Who knows what happened to Andreas? Maybe the radio was out at the mission, or he never got there. I knew what I would have to do. If the infection started creeping up my veins, I would have to tie a tourniquet around my leg, ask Leonardo heat up his machete in the fire, chop off my leg below the knee and cauterize it. Not a pretty vision, but I began to accept my fate.
The last hours before dawn were the worst. My fever intensified and a blazing heat started radiating up from my leg. Jose stoke the fire and made a rattle out of a can and some pebbles and started shaking it. At first he was joking, pretending to be a shaman. And then he focused on my leg and started dancing around the fire like a madman, screaming and shaking that pathetic rattle. He worked himself up into climaxes of intensity and then zeroed in on my foot and began muttering all kinds of inaudible expressions. I laughed at first, but then I truly began to feel a cooling effect. I told him and it gave him more power. He carried on that way for an hour until the sun began to rise and I finally drifted off into dreamland.
I awoke around 8 a.m. feeling much better, and we scanned the sky. If Andreas had made it to the mission and contacted an airport. A plane should have been there by mid morning. At 9 a.m. we heard a plane in the distance and our hopes soared until we saw it fly away. The sun climbed higher, my leg started to rot. It wasn’t going to make it another night. I decided 6 p.m. was the latest we could wait. I told Jose, “If a plane doesn’t show up before then I will have Leonardo cut off my leg.”
He grimaced and then agreed.
All day I contemplated life without a leg. My life as a climber and a yoga teacher would both be ruined. But at least I would be alive. I shut my eyes and resigned to reality. Just as I began to dream I heard a far off drone.
“The plane…the plane…the plane.” It was Tatoo from Fantasy Island.
No it was Jose. A plane circled above us and within minutes a helicopter landed. Andreas jumped out like a super hero and helped carry me on board. I screamed in agony as they lifted my off of the stretcher and my unsupported feet dangled beneath my legs. The whole time we were waiting we neglected to make another splint.
I laid in the back of the helicopter, Andreas jumped in and then we were in the air. First we flew to the air strip just beyond Wakunek, and they transported me into an airplane. Then we were off again, heading to Caniama, near Angel Falls. On the way Andreas shared his adventure. He and a native ran 35 miles, crossing ten rivers to get to the Catholic mission. At one point they came across a seven foot Bushmaster, one of the most deadly snakes in the jungle. Andreas said he jumped over the snake and it took off chased by the native who was trying to grab its tail.
In Canaima, we found a one room medical clinic with a single nurse on duty. She shuddered as she saw my leg and didn’t really know what to do. Again Andreas took command and started cleaning my leg. After a few moments the nurse looked at me and said, “We do have morphine. Would you like some?”
Just as she was about to inject the needle I looked up into her eyes and asked her, “What is your name?”
“Raven” she responded and plunged the needle into my arm instantly sending me into bliss. As the cool waves of ecstasy cruised through my veins, I softly repeated her name “Raven…Raven…Raven” and floated off on a dreamy journey.
Suddenly I remembered dancing with Raven’s spirit, falling, absorbing her impact. Then her Mom’s face came into view, “You can’t regenerate bone, you can’t regenerate bone”. I remembered my helpless expression as I realized I didn’t know how to regenerate bone. Oh Raven… my heart swelled up I as relived the sweet ecstasy of our love and then I felt it slam shut as I saw myself walking dejected and alone through the frigid streets of Salt Lake City.
“Scott.. Scott… Come on, we gotta go.” It was Andreas waking me up to catch our plane to Caracas. Because he had had a similar accident two years earlier, he had already called Dr. Reuben Jaen, Venezuela’s premier orthopedic surgeon who was waiting for my arrival. On the commercial flight to Caracas I was given a first class seat on the first row. My leg reeked of exposed bone marrow, and throughout the entire flight disgusted passengers came up to complain to the stewardess. She simply pointed to me and they all gasped in horror.
Once at the hospital, I was whisked off for x-rays and cat scans. The report showed I had broken both fibulas and crushed the entire bottom end of my right tibia. They immediately rushed me off to surgery because the severe swelling was creating compartment syndrome in my lower leg. “A few more hours,” Dr. Jaen said, “and you would have lost all the muscles below the knee.
I thought about where I was, just a few hours ago and I became so thankful that I had made it out of thick jungle. But my journey back to wholeness had only just begun.
Before they could even attempt to bolt my leg back together, they had to flush the wound for several days to insure that all infection was gone.
I woke up after the first cleansing surgery in the middle of the night. I was in a bed in a dark room with both feet hung up in the air. “What a mess.” I moaned to myself. “Here I am again, broken up in little pieces and totally dependent on western medicine to heal me. Some healer I am.”
Again I heard Raven’s mother, “You can’t regenerate bone.”
“And what about my dream, there is no way I am going to meet a Shaman now.” After having remained optimistic during the entire rescue, I was beginning to feel really down. I stared at the ceiling and then drifted back off to sleep. I woke up in a lucid dream. I saw myself lying on the bed, and standing over me were two beautiful angels with glowing hands of light reaching deep into my being. Around them flew this smaller being who I immediately recognized as the child that Jose and I had helped leave the Primary Children’s hospital in Salt Lake. I smiled and felt truly blessed.
I woke up and saw a strange woman standing at the foot of my bed. She had penetrating eyes that peered deep into my soul. I tried to meet her gaze and I got lost in them. To her gaze, I felt, naked, transparent, exposed.
She broke the silence. “You are a healer, aren’t you.”
“Oh yeah, I am a great healer, watch.” I responded drenched in helpless sarcasm as I raised my hands up in the air and waved them over my legs as I muttered impotent magic words.
Ignoring my response, she peered deeper within and said, “You have the power to heal yourself…”
“Yeah I told you, watch.” I responded and repeated the same hokey performance.
“You DO have the power to heal yourself, but…” She paused and looked as if she was squinting to read the fine print on my owner’s manual. “But you have a hole in your heart. Why don’t you love yourself?”
Now it was my turn to stare. Flutters of mixed anger and sorrow welled up inside me, but I had nothing to stand on. Finally I muttered back, “I love myself fine lady, but…”
“But…” she responded to keep my momentum flowing.
“But I am lying here with two broken legs, in a foreign country, I have no money, I can barely speak the language and…”
“Ah ha. That’s It! You need to learn to love yourself no matter who you are, or where you are. Not just when you are some famous rock climber.”
Tears welled up in my eyes and fire spit forth from my mouth. I swallowed a mouthful of profanities and finally demanded, “Who are you? What are you doing here?”
“My name is Christina. I have been sent here to help you.”
“By who?”
“My guides.”
After a period of silence she politely asked me, “Now where did that hole in your heart come from?”
“What hole? What are you talking about?” I protested as my last line of defense.
“You can’t hide from me, I can see.”
Something about the way she said See sent a quiver through my whole body.
“You have the power to heal yourself, but first you must heal that hole in your heart.” She said with pure love and encouragement.
By then I could tell she knew where the hole came from but she just wanted me to voice it. So I did. “There was this girl…”
“UmHmmmm” she said loving me forward.
“She was a dancer…” And then I reflected, “They were all dancers, but this one…” I looked up into the strange lady’s eyes as she embraced me with total compassion. I burst out into tears and shared the love Raven and I had and how I allowed my heart to be ripped open, torn out and stomped on.
When I finished she came to the side of the bed and put her hand on my heart. “Your pain is her pain. As you forgive her, you forgive yourself. As you love her, you love yourself.” And she lifted her hand from my heart and with it I felt this immense relief flood through my being.
“The healing of the heart takes time, I can help you but ultimately you must heal yourself.”
As she stepped back away from my bed, Andreas and Daniela walked in the room. “So I see you have already met Christina.” Daniela said with a radiant grin.
“You guys know each other?” I asked.
They all three looked at each other and smiled.
“Daniela is one of my guides who brought me here.” Christina said.
I was confused.
Daniela shared the sequence of events with me. “Andreas called me early this morning and told me what happened to you. Right in front of me was the flyer from Christina’s Crystal Healing and Quantum Mechanics workshop that you were interested in. And I am not sure why, but I just decided to call her and tell her about you.”
Christina continued. “Last night one of my Pliedian friends came to visit me in a dream and told me that I was to be called upon to help a very special individual who was to become my student. The moment I woke up and received Daniela’s call, I knew it was you.”
“What kind of friend told you?” I asked somewhat confused.
“Christina is from the Pliedies.” Daniela offered. “And there are other light beings from there that have not chosen to take on a physical form.”
At that moment Dr. Jaen walked in with a team of specialists and the results from all of my tests. Christina and the others backed silently away to make room.
“Well hello Mr. Scott. How are we feeling today.” His presence radiated and commanded more than the room.
“Very special” I said still glowing.
“You must have some very special angels working with you or you are just a very lucky man.” He said as he held up my x-ray “Fifty two hours it took you to get here from the jungle with the bone sticking out the whole time. I would say if it had been fifty four hours, you would have lost your leg to compartment syndrome. And it is a miracle the bacteria didn’t invade your body.”
“Was there bacteria in it?” I asked naively? “Andreas cleaned it out real well.”
The whole team of doctors laughed and the Pathologist responded, “Bone infection is one of the most serious forms of infection because it can spread through your blood and kill you very quickly. Usually we use the term ‘dirty” to describe a bone that has been infected. But your bone was actually ‘dirty.’ It had soil crushed into the bone marrow. We found eight different forms of bacteria and two of them we haven’t even identified yet.”
“Was it a clean break,” I asked hoping they might be able to set the bone and insure me a speedy recovery.
Dr. Jaen responded, “Scott have you ever seen a window that was hit by a bullet that left a cone of destruction expanding out the back side? Well that is what your talus bone did to the tibia.” And he pointed to a large shaded conical area extending up from the bottom of the bone. “This whole area, about six cubic centimeters was pulverized. And all the bone fragments had been exposed to the air, so we had to remove them.”
“So now what is there, a hole in my bone?”
“More like a cave.” He said holding up an open fist to show me the size. “And the fibula we had to grind the bottom centimeter off to get rid of the ‘dirt.’
“So what do we do about that?” I asked.
He responded solemnly. We have several options, but first we have to get rid of all the infection. You will need a couple more flushes that we do in the operating room and we will start you on some antibiotics to kill the bacteria. Then we can decide what option we want to take to repair the bones.”
With that they all left and Christina approached me. “Sounds like we have some work to do. Are you ready to get rid of the bacteria.”
“Umm… I looked at Andreas and Daniela for support.
Daniela smiled and said, “We’ll leave you two for a while.” As she gave me a kiss and walked out with Andreas.
For the next several hours Christina guided me through an inner journey using a drum, several crystals and her angelic voice. After focusing inward and traveling through passages, down into caves and meeting a number of beings I came face to face with a ferocious white lion. Christina instructed me to request it’s permission and it gave me the passage into my own body. I explored different parts and eventually found myself in my broken leg observing the a multitude of colors and shapes in the destruction area. Chrisitina asked me to describe everything I saw. When I finally found several black clots she told me to get rid of them. I told her I didn’t know how and she commanded me, “Of course you know how to get rid of them, chase them away!”
And I did, I chased them out of my leg, into the ambient atmosphere and kept chasing them into the blue/black of universal night. Then she brought me back into the leg and we repeated the process many times until finally there were none left. Then she brought me back and told me I was clean.
Although I had seen it with my own inner vision, I wasn’t sure how clean I really was. But I was exhausted. As she left, I fell fast asleep.
In the evening my parents called, obviously very concerned about me being in a third world country with an infected compound fracture. They had alerted Life Flight, an emergency evacuation service that brings US citizens back into from foreign countries. And they advised that I fly home for the surgery as soon as the infection was subdued. My x-rays they requested be sent to an orthopedic surgeon in San Francisco who was a friend of the family.
Later I was brought into the surgery room again for more flushing and for a second pathology test. The next morning, Christina returned, said hello and then asked, “Do you love yourself yet?”
I dug deep into my heart, felt the warmth and glow of self love and proudly exclaimed. “Yes I do love myself.”
She peered into me for a while and finally said, “Nope, you still to not love yourself.”
Shortly thereafter Dr. Jaen and the pathologist entered the room. This time Dr. Jaen greeted Christina warmly. “There seems to have been a mistake in the pathology test, so we are going to have to perform another one.”
“What happened?” I inquired.
He looked over to the Pathologist who squirmishly said, “It came out negative. And that is impossible so we must not have gotten a representative sample.”
Christina and I gave each other a quick glance. The magic had begun.
Over the next several days Christina continued to work with me each morning. Jose and John returned from the jungle and Jose gifted me a giant quartz crystal to aid my healing. “So you found your Shaman after all.” He said.
“Yeah, a woman urban shaman who was guided to help me heal myself, instead of an indigenous male shaman who teaches me to heal others.”
“You’ll have plenty of time to heal others.” he said.
On the other end, my parents had arranged for my x-rays to be emailed to an orthopedic surgeon in San Francisco, and the people from Life Flight were anticipating the day when I would be flown back to the States.
I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I was beginning to feel like I was in good hands, but I definitely wanted to make the right choice for my legs.
On the third day, I received the report from the Doctor in San Francisco. He recommended that my talus bone be fused to the tibia to restore stability in my leg.
“What?” I exclaimed, “This is 1998, people don’t fuse broken bones together anymore. That is absurd.”
The next morning Christina came in and I shared the ugly news with her. She frowned at the idea. Before she had a chance to respond, Dr. Jaen stepped into my room with an exceptionally radiant smile. He looked at me and he looked at Christina, and shook his head for a moment.
“Oh no.” I grimaced to myself as I feared Dr. Jaen was going to pull a white man control trip and ask Christina to leave.
But to my surprise, he said, “I don’t know what you two are doing… but don’t stop. I have been practicing medicine for 25 years. And in all that time I have never seen healing like I have seen in you.”
I sighed a big emotional release.
He continued to describe the observations he had made. “ Every two days we have to flush your leg to be completely sure that there is no infection. On the first day I made and incision, and each time I go back to flush it again, the incision from the previous day has already healed up.”
Again he looked deeply in to both Christina’s and my eyes, “I know that healing is 90% in the mind. And if you can do this, there is a chance that we can save your leg. It is not a good chance, but there is a chance.”
He took out a drawing he had made of my shattered bone. “If we can get these pieces below the cave to come back together, then we can use an external fixator to hold the foot in the proper position while we fill in the cave with a bone fusion.”
“That sounds better than fusing it.” I said holding up the report from the American surgeon.
“Fusing it is more secure, although you will not be able to bend it, you will at least be able to stand on your foot again.”
“And your method?”
“If it works, you should regain full mobility. But if it doesn’t then you may never be able to put weight on it again.”
“And the fibula?” I asked.
“We don’t worry about it for now. If… If you can ever bare weight on the foot then at some point in the future you can get a bone graft done one the fibula.
I looked at Christina. Her frown had blossomed into a peaceful smile. Just then the phone rang. The people from Life Flight said they had gotten clearance for me to leave the country and that a plane was waiting for me at the airport. I glanced back at my team of doctors and I confidently said, “No thank you, I have decided to stay.”
“Are you crazy? We have the best medical care in the whole world in America. You are putting your life in danger. Do you realize you are in a third world country?”
“Yes I am aware of that, and I have decided to stay here.” I said as I hung up the phone.
“Well Doctors, I am now completely in your care.”
The next phase of the book is truly the climax of the first story. I stopped writing here because this is the part of the book that ties into my early history and depending on how I structure the book, i.e. how much pre history the reader has, will alter the way that this section is written.
Below is a chronological listing of the key events that happened broken into possible chapter headings
A week later my father flew down to assist me. I was both amazed and grateful that my father came down. In the fourteen years I had been away from home he had never visited me unless it coincided with a business trip or was a stopover for a final destination. Neither of us had a clue as to the significance and impact of his presence there
· the tibia in my right leg was so badly broken and infected that after the first three surgeries, they were able to pin the lower portion of the articular surface together, but unable to attach it to the rest of the tibia, Dr Jaens plan was that if those lower pieces formed together correctly then 6 weeks later I could come in for a bone graft to fill in the 6 cub cm hole. During this time Daniela offered me to live in the abandoned house of her grandmother who recently died.
· Together my father and I move into this abandoned art deco house in the center of caracas, no lights, or electricity, but the servants house behind the main house was still occupied and they helped take care of us.
· Over the weeks my father and I rebounded, until I “got off track” in 1987 we had been really close, and with each successive deviation from the path he expected me to take, our relationship had faded until it was almost completely extinguished.
· I had requested he bring a mini library (trubrary) of books on energetic healing and together we read them. He reads extrememly fast and within a few wekks he had finished them all and began the slow process of opening to the concept of life beyond the physical realm.
· I also had him bring me herbs to make my bone grow faster including comfrey, seaweed and silica powder. Within 4 weeks my left leg was strong and I was able to walk with crutches.
· I spent 16-18 hours a day practicing qigong, crystal healing, and visualizing the bone fragments aligning properly to recreate a smooth articular surface, weekly we went in for xrays and at first they showed the bones setting crooked which would have left me with arthritis, but with intense meditations the bones straightened up. My dad saw this!
· In the next few weeks a number of remarkable events occurred that began to really shake him out of his belief system
o He had been suffering from severe arthritis for years, and it was o bad that he could barely walk, but in caracas his waks got longer and longer until he was climbing to the top of Mt Avela every couple days, free of pain
o He began hearing my thoughts and responding to them. One day while he was gone walking ,I came out of meditation and suddenly felt the thirst for a beer, which I hadn’t since before the expedition, then a half hour later he comes walking in with one, unable to explain why he bought me a beer, but just knew I wanted one
o The spirit of daniels grandmother, still resided at the house and she came to visit my dad often startling him in the middle of the night, one night she even tried to crawl into bed with him.
o Etc..
· Christina visited me every few days and each time she came she looked at me and told me that I still didn’t love myself. Between each visit I meditated on self love and thought surely I love myself, but nope , she came in and saw that I didn’t, whenever I protested she told me, “You can not fool me with performance scott, I can see.”
· Within
· My Dad stayed until my fourth surgery, when they grafted the bones together. The night after the surgery I was in tremendous pain, but still not wanting to use the morphine, I sank deep into meditation and tried to clear the pain but was unable to. I fell into an agonizing slumber and my father appeared in my dream and came and took my pain away from me. Afterward I slept peacefully. In the morninghe appeared in my room and told me he had the strangest dream, that he came over to my room, saw that I was in pain, took pain away and then woke up in the morning with a tremendous pain in his right ankle.
· With my father gone, I had to become more independent, which meant not having someone to wheel me out to the park to get some fresh air each day. One day my friend Andres came by and took me to the park, to go see a lion. We were both skeptical about the south American lion being able to make the kind of noise that we heard . I expected a mountain lion, but was then shocked to see a mountain lion body with the giant head and mane of an African lion. Whoa! We agreed it could make any noise it wanted to. To pay respect for the Lion Andres swore he was going to catch a scraggly street dog and give it to the lion. I pleaded that it was not necessary but, I feel he probably ended up doing it without telling me.
· After a few days cooped up in the house, I ventured forth on my own, and saw what an obstacle course my Dad had easily navigated. With some effort I made it to the park and then realized there was no sloped way in. I wheeled across the street, contemplated almost got hit by a whirl of cars that sped by and then finally, slipped out of the chair, crawled up onto the curb,pulled the chair after me, and then climbed back up into it. Exhausted, but feeling accomplished I relaxed back in the chair, and felt swept up in a surge of appreciation for everything around me, I noticed the birds singing in the trees every leaf sparkled with light. I breathed deeply and felt the deepest sense of peace I had ever felt.
· The next day, Christina came in, looked at me and said simply, “Now you love yourself. Now you truly have the power to heal.”
The time period following my emergence into self love was very solo, very meditative and my dreaming became quite lucid. During this time I had my first glimpses of my cosmic family and realized that we (cosmic family and I ) were watching the drama of life unfold on planet earth. It was through a series of lucid dreams over a number of nights that I finally put together the synchronistic progression of all the epics, injuries, and stages of spiritual growth that I had experienced on earth. I saw how my body had always been giving my signs when I wasn’t awake enough to see them myself, that these body signs progressed until I pulled myself out of the repetitive drama.
(here would be one place to insert (or recap some of the earlier life stories)
From our meeting with Raysol, we each cleared our doubts about his authenticity, except Christina still had doubts to his healing abilities and questioned whether he was ready to be directing the Ray Sol Healing and Anti-Stress center. Over the next few weeks we decided to check out some of the other previously considered hokey healing modalities.
This chapter describes encounters with
With the sensitivity and condition of my leg, I was able to sense which healers were real and which were frauds.
In July my external fixator was removed, the graft was a complete success, but my foot had ossified onto my leg with zero flexibility, I was still months away from bearing weight, but was more mobile on crutches. I kept in touch with ray Sol, and witnessed him gain quite a following. When I came back from the beach, I heard from Christina, that she had organized a cosmic peer review or initiation for Ray Sol with all of her teachers and peers. On the morning of that day Ray Sol had come to a park in Caracas to give a public demonstration to several hundred people. I met him there.
Immediately I sensed a shift about his energy, his dress and his words. Before he was simply adorned in casual clothes, now he was wearing a slick Nike sweat top, too cool shades, and flashy pants. I listened closely to what he told the crowd. When I first accompanied him to such events I always heard him speaking universal truths, encouraging them to meditate, to visualize themselves as whole, to offer loving service to those who need it, to help him feed the poor.
I heard him telling the people “follow me, follow me! There is not enough time for to meditate, you must now leave with me, to help me feed the poor. Instead of meditating I will anoint you with this holy water and you will be healed. I gave him a questioning look and he ignored me, then over and over again I heard him using theatrics and urgency to draw the people to follow him. As he created a space to anoint people with the holy water I hobbled over to a spot in the crowd where I was directly in his line of eyesight and I met his gaze with a loving reflection of truth.
He focused me right out and continued to ignore me.
He then took people and led them off in a symbolic pilgrimage of feeding the poor. I thought I had lost him completely and then decided it was worth one more attempt, I sped crutched up to the front of the ensemble and brought myself as near as possible to Ray Sol where he could hear me even if he wouldn’t look at me.
I told him lovingly that he was misleading the people, that they do need to meditate, that he was …
He shot a wicked glare to me as if to tell me to shut up and I received it absorbing all his anger ,and reflected back only loving truth. This he noticed , and his expression changed briefly. Seeing the opening I offered, “Ray Sol something else you need to learn about being human, we have egos, sometimes EGOS and left unchecked they will drive us from our path, beware of your Ego and lead your people from a space of love!
As I said these words I slowed down and let them sink into his field while the troupe walked away.
That night I caught a bus over to Christina’s, and felt the energy before even entering.
Her house was filled with 0ver 30 healers, jungle and urban shamans, astrologers, walk-ins, UFO experts, seemingly every being of spiritual expertise in the whole country.
Welcome, she said these are my teachers.
Whoa!!
Suddenly I felt so small,
The entire gathering was on behalf of Ray Sol, who was being welcomed into the spiritual community. I melted into the corner to watch how the night unfolded. Christina introduced her main teachers, one of whom looked like java the hut, another not so happy looking guy she exclaimed had the ability to see into the body.
Soon RS came proudly into the room followed by two of his escorts and they sat on a couch facing the semi circle of healers.
Detailed description of the ceremony – how ray sol introduced himself, kept his poise, and then responded elegantly to each of them as they took turns addressing him, and then several of them started firing absurd requests, how he handled those, my shock and amazement, RS quote to me at the end of the ceremony.
Scott of all these giants, you are the most powerful of all, because you are all love, and I thank you for bringing me back on my path
The night ends with some astrologer and I locking into a deep stare for 10 minutes, then turning around and someone asking me what we are looking at when we do that, and me answering, “I have no idea!” (this being forshadow for book two or part two where I am initiated in the tantric practice of gazing.)
Final interaction with the seer shaman, I ask him how my leg is going to be, he glances at it says it will be fine, then I get specific and say, check out the fibula, they left a half inch gap to be fixed if I can ever bear weight again, do I need another surgery (my insurance had run out completely, and I had been meditating all summer to regenerate the bone.
He looks again and says no, it will be fine, take your time bearing weight on it, but no surgery needed, and then coldly walks away.
“They come in all disguises”
Back in SLC the hole in my ankle is still open and puss is still coming out, I try herbal healing and nothing works, I continue to soak it in hot salt water several times daily, finally I apply for medical aid, get it, go for an xray, and sure enough the fibula is healed without a gap, Dr is astounded, then they notice a small pin sliding around in there, causing irritation, schedule outpatient surgery to pull it out, pussing stops, hole heals in a day or two.
Offered position todirect yoga program at spa, create the MET Movement Energy and Transformation program….
Meditating in Liberty Park in SLC, remembering Boulders in the Park, feeling and listening to the trees, remembering eden is on mother earth, connecting with my galactic family and then asking, hey where is my family down here? Coming out of the meditation with the intuition to walk down the hill, start crutching down and crutches stick in the mud, and I am thrust forward walking down the hill all by my self.
Tears gushing, joy, walking again “on my way to find the galactic family of love and light on earth.
The Art of Union begins with me living in SLC, directing the Movement Energy and transformation Program at the Spa, growing healing, searching for my galactic family down here on earth, embracing kundalini yoga, and pranayama, wondering what does it mean, the seventh race, la septima rassa??
Meeting my next teacher, Mandala, a tabby kitten that is placed in my lap while sitting in meditation in the park.
Getting free gear from Patagonia for photos – backpack and vison of standing on side of road at night with this pack, barefoot, and a drum. I don’t even have a drum???
Describes focused practices Jose and I used to open our intuition, including experiments with plant medicines, falling in love, with Erin a traditionally trained Buddhist yogini, complementary styles, partner yoga, tantric explorations, sacred geometry yoga, experimenting with time machines,
Lessons from Mandala and Erin, my first colon cleanse!!! Birth of food yoga – the art of increasing awareness and energy from Sunlight into the earthsuit, the liver cleanse
creation of a small group of students, me helping them see they don’t need exstacy to open their hearts, being warned of the need for sobriety when working with sexual energy, testing the boundaries of sensual tantra,
Jose and my last trip to Yosemite, little did we know we would never see each other again, almost…
Meeting Sumpuran, my galactic brother who came to show bring me to the family, discovering the dijeridoo, intergalactic pranayama,
Continuation of Boulders in the Park, my focus on building community in SLC, running into more walls,
More Mandala lessons
Vivid dreams beginning to play a role in my life path
Merging with the Buddhist family, holding onto rock climbing community to preserve ancient wisdom,
about ending one phase of my journey, seeing the parting of the ways with my Buddhist girlfriend,
epic dream of escaping through long tunnel with two Buddhist friends being chased by machines, come to end of previously traveled path, they remain behind, I climb up and pierce through in to the light, escape only to me grabbed by walking giants who carry me , futile to struggle, relax, the place me down in a garden with kale and arugala
growth of the MET program, silk robes, TV gigs, etc, me realizing I am not half the yogi I am pretending to be, feeling urge to wander to discover advanced practices, to be a yogi, not just a yoga teacher
invitation to Peyote ceremony- the awakening Christ and healing sounds, drawn to pursue the power of the medicine, but clearly guided away by spirit
dream of meeting a chi gung teaher off the free way in LA
Spoon telling me I need to leave SLC to explore to connect with family, me being attached to MET Program and BITP, synchronistic cataclysism of both of these worlds, I am drop kicked out of SLC and off to Baja, searching for family and community and
Spoon and I in Baja…
Me ending up in Laguna Beach, eye of the hurricame, meeting Master John Bracy, Senior Kung Fu training Camp, Finding table rock Beach, tapping into and tracing the roots of consciousness, brotherhood of love and light, being sent on my way by Master Bracy,
Meeting the legendary John Peck, his story, his teachings, his love
Teaching yoga on the beach, working at The Stand, meeting Ron Schneider, from Canada, learning some of the many lies that we in America have been told about nutrition, about health, about hemp!!! He seems so familiar…
Quickly becoming a professional yogi again, cell phone, privates on the beach, full schedule, paying for beautiful house, agh!!
Democratic Convention in LA, moontribe in the park, applying the qi gong to my healing dance, angry youth, I saw God in your eyes!
President Bush steals the election, time to leave, with Ron to Canada, to a place called mount Elfinstone???
Arriving in Mt elfinstone at the beginning of Winter, crazy??, new years eve celebration, stunned at the display of wizardry, elfin magic and empowered goddess energy, feeling again very small, realizing my ego “proffi yogi” knows nothing, getting th download on harmonic time, and mayan calendars….
Introduction to the lost goddess culture, that is alive in certain areas of the planet
Exposing fear- of keeping rhythm
Goddess encouragement of singing my heart song
Seeing lotus flower unfolding
First visit to Mt elfinstone, mt talks, lala’s teepee and guarding forest, mt tells me to come back again, come back when loggers are present , confront logger, with love and wisdom, puts down saw, news reporter flashes front page pic, forest tells me to come, I build dome, replace lala, mandala and tenasi on elfinstone, silence darkness, dreams, chop wood cary water, frozen toes, yogic practices to overcome cold, more goddess teachings,
Living in the waking dream, no more spirits, but waking dream characters in the field, idea of creating eco-village, supplies start appearing magically, tapped into collective consciousness, harmony
Meeting Dustin Stonehouse – Destino
Other dream characters appear galactic family is gathering
Loggers threaten,
Spoon visits, voice in the night “Tenasi” journey to the summit, magical encounters and guides, sacred cedar tree, heres the story….
>>On May 13th, Cosmic Dog, Mothers day 2001, the yogi known as Scotty
>>Lazar was reborn as Tenasi Rama Singh. Here is a story...
>>
>>Last January Scotty Lazar was guided up to the Sunshine Coast of
>>British Columbia from Laguna Beach California. He headed up
>>there with Ronny Hemp Seed with the vision of creating an
>>eco-village, a place where yoga permeates ever aspect of life in
>>balance, in community, in permaculture. A key to this vision was
>>learning the truth about the nutrtional properties within the seed
>>of the sacred herb cannabis sativa. This seed of life contains more
>>essential fatty acids and amino acids that humans need than any
>>other plant. Oops, the Seed of Life is another story, now we'll get
>>back to Tenasi's story.
>>Shortly after arriving on the Sunshine Coast of BC, just north of
>>Vancouver, Scotty went to visit a magical forest on Mount
>>Elphinstone about an hours hike above the Community of Roberts
>>Creek. The forest was in danger of being cut down and radical
>>Penny Lalo had established a camp up on the mountain to protect it.
>>During that first visit, Scotty received guidance to "come back to
>>that forest." So he did and following a confrontation with the
>>loggers on Jan 15, Scotty built a dome house out of cedar boughs
>>and the meditation camp on the mountain was born. For the next
>>four months, Scotty and his cat Mandala live on mount elphinstone
>>in the meditation hut, practicing the daily yoga of chop wood carry
>>water.
>>In May Scottys friend and teacher Sumpuran Singh Khalsa (Spoon)came
>>up from the states to visit and together they decided to make a
>>journey to the summit of Mount Elphinstone.
>>On the eve of their departure Scotty was sitting up late at night
>>in meditation when he heard a voice outside (or above) his camp
>>shout "Hey Tenasi!"
>>He waited, expecting someone to come in, but there was no body
>>there, so he drifted off to sleep.
>>In the morning they took off on their journey. They decided to
>>approch the mountain from the steep south east side and followed a
>>steep creek. Their journey was guided by angelic sing-song bells
>>and magical eagles and ravens. They were guided directly to an
>>enormous cedar tree with four trunks coming right out of the bare
>>rock. Within the four trunks, there was a cavity with one opening
>>just large enough to crawl inside. Imagine two women lying on their
>>backs with their buts touching and thier legs sticking straight up
>>into the sky. This tree is the womb of the earth. Scotty crawled
>>inside, sat down in lotus and instantly fell into a deep meditation
>>during which he felt his heart spill open and he experienced a
>>flood compassion for a myriad of scenes he had experienced
>>throughout his life. He started crying uncontrolably as pictures
>>of people and events he hadn't seen for years passed before his
>>eyes. After some time, maybe an hour, maybe more, Spoon crawled in
>>and they sat together in the womb of the earth.
>>Spoon pointed out that another opening between two of the trunks
>>was just big enough to squeeze head and shoulders through. As
>>Scotty started to squeeze his body through the opening he heard
>>again "Hey Tenasi!" He stopped, turned to Spoon and said, "Hey
>>Spoon, when I climb through this hole, I am no longer Scotty, I am
>>Tenasi."
>>Spoon replied by saying "Hey Scotty" and waving good bye.
>>As Scotty wriggled his way through the opening, Spoon ran around to
>>the other side and welcomed Tenasi into the world.
>>Elphinstone where we found a large boulder perched next to an
>>ancient tree stump that contains the sacred symbol of the Hu Nab
>>Ku, mayan hand shake, a direct connection between heaven and earth.
> >After exploring the summit we found ourselves just below the snow
>line at darkness and decided to make camp under neath three
>(somewhat) sheltering cedar trees. We made a fire just before the
>rain came. So we made the fire bigger and sat through the night
>warm and wet. The next morning we climbed down, and headed to
>Cortez Island for a couple week retreat at Spoons moms house. On
>Cortez, Tenasi's full name Tenai Rama Singh came into being.
>>Tenasi is now back on the Sunshine coast working on the the yoga of
>>Elphinstone Eco-village and Seed of Life sprouted hemp seed milk
>>project.
>>much love to all
>>tenasi
Visiting a permaculture garden and having flashback of dream of escape from tunnels and being dropped off…
More logger threats
Eco-village forms
Mandala tells me when he disappears it is time for me to journey
He disappears on summer solstice…
Meeting the family
Yogic wisdom – ketchari mudra
Synchronicities
Dolphin dreams – costa rica
Form community
Clearing the sky with love and intention
Intentional ceremonies dance
Caravan of Angels
Epic journey to Costa Rica
Mayan temples
Gods rising out of Lake Atilan
Car burning to the ground
Left with $100 barefoot backpack and drum
Fulfilling prophetic vision
Amazing boat ride with fisherman across bay of nicaraugua
Being escorted in by dolphin dakinis
Costa rica rainbow gathering
Putting circle on map
Crazy messenger points to my circle and says that’s where it is
Santo Christo
Vision quest
Lead to dolphin quest
Finally in the space to do the work
28 day fast
7 days no food no water
ascenscion illumination
verification of need for enlightened community
given tests of faith and trust
all night in the jungle sitting naked
mosquito deva
mastery of kechari mudra
Creating the moon retreats of the Art of Union
More cleansing
More tests
Diamante Verde !!!!
Vision of the Rainbow Corridor
Early challenges – religious right
Thinking its time to either forget my past… family as did Jesus or…
Mother calls and invites me home for thanksgiving
Three years had passed since I had last seen Jose. Just as spirit had drawn us together, it had guided us on separate journeys. While I parted from the climbing world to pursue my spiritual path, Jose continued to climb harder, stronger and faster than he ever had before. At the same time, his spiritual exploration with shamanic medicinals intensified and his recognition as a teacher echoed throughout the international climbing community. He and Yosemite legend Chongo Chuck had written and published a revolutionary book, “A Homeless Person’s Quantum Physics.” Wherever I bumped into fellow climbers in my travels I heard musings over the intriguing book and the jungle messiah.
In December 2002, I found myself back in the States at my parents house in South Carolina with an open agenda and I felt the time had come to reconnect with Jose. Although out of touch for over a year, I felt certain he would be down in northern Mexico, climbing at El Portrero Chico for the winter. I sent off an email to him and the next day I received a surprise phone call from Zoe, who had been out of contact living in a cave in Spain for the last two years. Ironically she arrived back in the States the same day I did. She confirmed Jose was down in Mexico.
My finger tips stirred at the idea of climbing again. It had been three years since I had touched the rock. The next day I bumped into an old climbing buddy, Robert Williams. He had miraculously recovered from a motor cycle accident in 1995 that left him more mangled than my fall had left me, and was working as a climbing guide. He suggested I reinitiate myself with a stroll up the 600 foot Original Route on Whitesides in Cashiers, NC.
By 9 a.m. the next day, I was straddled in a dihedral on the crux pitch, with a three inch camming unit in my hand that didn’t even come close to fitting into the four inch wide slot I was staring into. The oversized, delaminating resoled climbing shoes Robert had leant me were slipping on the smooth granite and I was looking at a 15 foot fall onto the ledge he had luxuriously reclined on to belay me.
As he saw my hesitation, he offered his apologies, “Aww… is that slot too big for that cam? I’m sorry I thought for sure it was only a three inch slot.”
“Sand bagged” Welcome back to climbing.
The pitch was only 5.9, although I grunted through the reachy boulder move off the ledge. Five feet above me I saw a large hand hold and a bolt. But my whole body was quivering. “Breath… Come on, you know the routine. Relax.”
I looked up, rehearsed the moves in my head, and with a groan inched up the dihedral. The hand hold was big enough to rest a coffee cup on, and by the time I reached for it, my strength was totally sapped. With tears in my eyes, I clumsily switched hands back and forth trying to get the blood flowing enough so I could pull the rope up and clip the bolt.
“All for the ego.” I muttered to myself as I finally clipped and regained composure.
A hundred feet up at the next belay ledge I calmly pulled down my pants and let fly a steamy lump of feces. It had been a long time since I scared the shit out myself.
At the summit I broached Robert on the idea of a winter road trip to El Portrero Chico, the big wall sport climbing paradise in Mexico, and within a week we were on our way. We left South Carolina as an ice storm closed in on the South East, and arrived into the Portrero on Winter Solstice under the light of a full moon. Entering the Portrero we drove through a narrow passage shadowed on either side by 2,000 foot looming limestone spires. Inside the canyon opened up to an enormous forested bowl surrounded on all sides by sheer cliffs and pyramid shaped peaks.
Robert parked in a spot that felt like the energetic center of the portrero, and we got out and wandered around in awe. The moonlight reflecting off of the limestone looked magical. As I envisioned how the portrero must have been formed, I felt a strong possibility that in addition to finding Jose, I might also finally find the cave I had been searching for the last two years.
I first heard about darkness meditations from the book Living with the Himalayan Masters, by Swami Rama. He had lived for 11 months in a cave only drinking goat milk as his final process of self realization. At the time it seemed pretty ‘out there’ to me.
The idea came a bit closer to home after my Buddhist friend Carl Rabke in Salt Lake City sat for a 48 hour darkness retreat in his closet.
Since then the historical relevance of darkness retreats throughout the world’s mystery schools kept piling up. Darkness retreats played a crucial role in the Left Eye of Horus initiation training of the Egyptian Mystery schools. Graduating initiates were given the ultimate challenge to crawl into the absolute darkness of the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid where they faced their greatest fears.
Within indigenous tribes of Columbia, South America, future shamans are identified while still infants and taken into complete darkness for a period of nine years as to first develop their ability to navigate in the spiritual world before even learning what the physical world looks like.
And then to top it off I recently heard that Taoist Master, Mantok Chia, had opened up a five star darkness retreat center in Thailand. His website outlined the physiology of darkness. After five days the pineal gland thinks that the body has died and begins to excrete excessive amounts of melotonin which transforms over the next couple of days through a series of chemical reactions to Di-Methyltryptamine, DMT, the psycho-active ingredient of Soma from India and the Ayahuasca vine from Peru.
There was more information, but that was enough for me to decide I was ready to enter the darkness. Ever since leaving the meditation hut up on Mount Elphinstone, I had been putting out the energy to manifest a cave well suited to use for a retreat. Throughout all my travels from Canada to Costa Rica, I searched hillsides and canyons, looking for a suitable cave, only to be discouraged by damp, moldy, insect ridden, poorly ventilated caves. Somehow I knew El Portrero Chico would be the place.
After eating a hearty dinner, I took out my didjeri-doo and walked out into the night. I played for a few minutes to sink into a deep trance, focused all of my intention on the vision I had for a perfect cave and asked the great spirit to guide me. A few minutes later I heard a cow bell off in the distance. I stopped playing and heard it clang again.
“That is my cue.” I said aloud to bolster my confidence about walking into the night following the sound of a cow bell. I hiked up the river bed for a while, then stopped and sank back into a didjeri-doo meditation, the sound waves connecting my roots to the crystal core center of the earth, and my wings to the celestial bodies in the heavens above. Focus on the vision.
Sure enough, I heard the cow bell in the same direction but further away. It was leading me somewhere, hopefully to a cave. I walked a mile up to where the river bed narrowed and was strewn with boulders. It seemed improbable that the cow went further up the river bed. So I played again and a number of cows just up ahead answered almost instantly. I scrambled up the river bed, well impressed by the agility of the cows and suddenly came face to face with a massive horned bull. We peered into each other’s eyes for a moment and then it broke the silence - Mooooo!
I responded with a guttural tuvan throat chant, “Meueueueueueueu…”
Eye to eye, I and I, bull human, one love, one being.
He broke the silence that lasted after our greeting with a snort, then turned and bolted up into the forest above the river. The entire herd fleet footed in pursuit.
“Mexican cows have soul.” I exclaimed as I wandered up river to find increasingly steep walls and many possible cave locations. I searched up stream and found a spring, but no caves. I decided to come back in the light and do a thorough search.
In the morning Robert, who’s been a spelunker longer than a climber, was keen to help look. We headed up the river bed, past where I had met the cows and covered a couple miles up into the foothills. Robert had a nose for caves like a hound for foxes. He found over a dozen sink holes and mini caves, some that would have worked, but nothing like I had envisioned. As the noon day sun rose overhead, we aimed home.
“Not bad for our first morning.” He noted.
“Yeah, not bad.” I said although I had truly believed the cows had led me to the perfect cave. I stopped at the spring to fill up a jug while Robert kept walking down the river bed.
“Hey check this out!” I heard him yell from down below. He was standing right where I met the first cow and tucked under a sandstone overhang was a cave with a large domed ceiling and a sandy bottom. The cave was big enough for four or five people and only required a small wall to be built to make it completely dark. It was perfect for the retreat. It even had a 15 boulder problem on the roof.
When we walked out into the light I thanked Robert, the cows and great spirit for guiding me to the cave.
When we arrived back at the car we met Don Jesinto, the 84 year old ex-police chief of the town of Hidalgo, whose land we happened to land on the night before. Rather than kick us off as we suspected he would, he graciously invited us to stay and gave us a tour of his primitive, yet elegant garden with beautiful giant cactuses, a few fruit trees and a clean water source.
The place was beautiful. We called it “El Corazon del Portrero” and began making it our home. Before he left us, Don Jesinto said, “Remember to always shut the gate.” Over the next few days we climbed a little, hiked a lot and met climbers from all around the world, most notably a mystic, named Memo from Monterrey, who joined us in “El Corozon.” But no Jose.
Christmas came and went and still no Jose. We were joined at our camp by several more high spirited climbers and the Heart of the Portrero was quickly beginning to feel like a healing sanctuary. Several days later I got an email from Jose saying he was at El Portrero Chico and he was wondering where I was. Although the Portrero was large, there were only a few campgrounds and one internet café. It seemed highly unlikely that we could miss each other. But we did.
For an entire week we were both in the tiny town of Hidalgo, climbing and hanging out in the same places, but unable to see one another. On New Years eve, I checked my email, and he had emailed me from the same terminal only 15 minutes before.
I was confounded. Jose and I had journeyed to together throughout the physical and higher dimensional realms, he had carried me out of the jungle, we had entered each others dreams, we were spiritual partners and now we can’t even connect in this speck of a town.
In his email he said there would be a rave at Homero’s campground for New Year’s and I could meet him there. That afternoon, I started getting mysterious flu symptoms and barely had the energy to hike down to Homero’s. Half the night passed and still no Jose.
Then finally while dancing, trying to push the mysterious illness out of my body, I saw him. He walked right by me as if I wasn’t there. I followed him and said “Jose Louis!” as heard his mother called for him in Venezuela.
“Scott?” He said as he turned around and we stared into each other’s eyes.
Three years had transformed us both. While I had lost muscle mass, and acquired a beard and dread locks, his former lythe, relaxed body was now bulging with muscles and very tense. His eyes, still infinitely deep, seemed shadowed and I felt an immediate motherly concern for him.
He asked me how my ankles were. When I told him “like new,” a huge smile broke out on his face and I saw peace radiate out through him like an angel who had just accomplished a task it had been sent down here to see through.
We spoke briefly about his book. He turned academic and lost me in twisted, obtuse reasoning.
“How’s your heart Jose?” I asked, and he paused from his monolog on quantum physics to look up at me. But before he could answer, he became distracted with negotiations and helping to organize the rave. As I watched his interactions with people, I again felt anxious that he was surrounding himself with beings whose intentions were impure.
“Am I being overly nurturing or protective of him?” I asked myself, but I continued to see him obscured by a shadow, and I felt compelled to “take him out of here.”
As the night progressed I invited him to come with us up to our sanctuary in the Portrero, but he insisted he needed to stay with the DJs. He said he would join us the next day.
My flu symptoms worsened and when my companions decided to leave, I agreed to go. Jose and I embraced and as our hearts met, I felt a river of healing love flow into him.
Afterwards he looked up at me and said, “I love you too, Tenasi.”
That was the last time I ever saw my friend, my teacher, my spiritual partner Jose Louis Pererya in his physical body. We missed each other again and again over the next three days, and on the fourth, the first new moon after winter solstice, he fell to his death while attempting to do the first free ascent of a notoriously dangerous route “Las Auras” up the 3,000 foot face of El Toro.
For five months northern Mexico had suffered draught. The day after Jose’s fall it stormed, and continued to storm for the next 12 days. The campgrounds that had been maxed-out a week ago were now empty. Jose’s parents and sister flew in for his transcendence ceremony joined by over a hundred climbers and locals. Jose’s presense spread its wings and flew across the mystical mountains of the Haustecca, home to the Huichal gods as his sister cast his ashes up into the sky.
“No one being has had such an impact on my spiritual development as Jose Louis Pererya.” I told his mother, who had helped nurse me back to health in Caracas after my fall five years earlier.
I was crushed by Jose’s sudden departure. There was so much that I wanted to share with him – the truths I had learned, yogic practices, purifications techniques, and my connection with the rainbow family of love and light.
In all the wisdom that he had shared with me, there was a certain code of living – keep searching, stay free, don’t have children… He never said anything about dying.
Also I felt a strong sense of guilt. Had I not seen the darkness around him? Why hadn’t I been insistent or stayed with him? “Maybe if I … Maybe… Maybe everything is perfect and is meant to be the way it is.”
I heard Jose’s words, my words, the words of universal consciousness transcending time. We are children of the Universe, we have been here before and we will be here again. Soul immortal, body energetic, we are eternal beings of light. In the evolution of the human spirit, the countdown to the end of the great cycle December 21, 2012 winter solstice at 11:11 a.m. continues. The earth is the universal stage for the approaching shift. Beings from all over the galaxy are peering in, the lucky ones stepping into these human earthsuits, some prenatal, others like my friend Ray Sol walk-ins.
Maybe Jose didn’t fall, he jumped… Why? Jose the nagual, shaman, shapeshifter. Every word he spoke was a lesson, every action with a purpose. I remembered the words of his climbing partner who broke through waves of teary emotions and said, “I saw a smile on his face as he flew by.”
I walked down the river bed and passed the spot where I met the bull the first night in the Portrero. My mind wandered… Jose astrological sign Taurus, instead of seeing him, I meet a bull, then he falls off the mountain called “El Torro”… the cave! It is time for me to enter the heart of darkness. There I will contact Jose.
With storms bombarding the Portrero daily, my friends Robert, Robert, Tim, and Heath all set there sites back in the States. That left Tenasi and Memo, stalwarts to remain.
Those blessed angels of the Heart of the Portrero, they left us with such beautiful gifts. The canvas tent that held our library and craft studio for making drums and didjeridoos, a cooler to keep the ants and cows out of our precious sprouting grains. Climbing shoes, a harness, and a pyramid tent for this nomad yogi. And plenty of food. Memo had not a dime to his name and I was down to my last twenty dollars. But I planned on fasting in the cave. Money will appear when it is needed.
I sent them off with dijeridoos and then Heath surprised me by leaving his beautiful Shiko drum. Give and you shall receive. Before leaving Costa Rica, I gave my friend Ishmael my djembe, and with it he earned his daily bread. Now a rhythm maker was given to me. Ahh jah works in mysterious ways.
I set to work immediately, digging out the bottom of the cave so it would be deep enough to stand in. The cave I chose was an old mind shaft that Heath had spotted a mere 50 feet from the dome shaped cave. The shaft went straight in for a few feet then angled down about 15 feet then it turned to the left, dipped down another step and then went back for another 50 feet. When I found it the entire back section had been half-filled with mud and only had a clearance of two and a half feet.
Memo joined me to help dig. A couple candles flickered around us.
“There’s a draft down here.” Memo noticed, “that’s good.”
We were lucky, the weather was frigid outside and wet. The cave was already feeling like home. We dug a space big enough for me to lie down and make a snow angel. With a clearance of less than five feet, we hit rock and stopped digging. “That will have to do.”
For the next few days, I built a series of adobe walls at the entrance to block out all light from entering the cave. Wood is scarce in the desert, but Memo found a patch of bamboo only a few miles away and we carried bundles up to the cave. Next came the adobe. Basically the entire floor of the Portrero is adobe waiting to be mixed with cow poop, ash, sand from the river bed and a little water. I few days later I finished up by building candle holders outside of the entrance and scripting a plaque in honor of Jose.
I didn’t know how long I was going to stay in the cave. I hope to be finished preparing by full moon so I could stay in for half a moon cycle. Preparations took me a couple days longer, but everything was perfect.
On the full moon, Memo showed up with a handful of irie Quebecaus. We blazed a fire and played music long into the night. I stayed up through the dawn, entranced in mantra
“Jai Santo Shi Ma… Jah santosh y ma...”
Venus the morning star burned high in the heavens and I held it as my bindu or point of focus. Chant the name of God Goddess and hold steady your gaze, not wavering…
And you shall see.
I decided to continue my mantra meditation until I could no longer see the planet. After sunrise, with the sky already very blue, Venus started spinning, then releasing waves of white light sparks and rays. An hour later I was still focused and it began to pulsate and expand like a disc. From within appeared an angelic figure who spiraled through the heavens and disappeared over the northwest horizon and shortly thereafter, returned to Venus.
Such a beautiful vision. What possibly could it mean?
Around nine a.m. shortly before the sun peaked into the Portrero Venus finally slipped back into the invisible heavens and I allowed my mantra to rest. With a fresh blast of sunlight to warm me up, I hiked up to finish the final modifications of the cave. The next afternoon, I called home to let my sister and parents know that I was going into an extended meditation.
First I reached my sister and she tells me my grandmother passed away earlier that morning in Sacramento, California. I recalled the angel descending to the north west. Then my mother informs me that a brush fire swept up the mountain they live on, and barely missed torching their house because of the valiant efforts of my father, who intuitively flew home from Sacramento the day before the fire.
An auspicious day to enter the cave.
As a final luxury I hacked off some palm leaves from La Pagoda Inn to put on the floor of the cave. I stocked myself with three gallons of water, a bucket to pee in and a half dozen limon dulces, sweet lemons, from a tree down the street. I planned to fast for the duration of my retreat, but in hopes of avoiding the sudden desire to eat upon exiting from the cave, I brought kamut and rye seeds to start sprouting a few days before I planned to leave.
Memo volunteered to make the half hour trek up to the cave and check on me every few days, bring me water and take out my pee bucket.
With that I said my final blessings to the sun, moon and celestial bodies that I would be separated from for the longest time of my life.
With me I took my drum and didjeri-doo and I entered the cave. Two days after the first winter full moon in year 2003, Mayan date Rhythmic Hand, knows accomplishment, organize balance with equality.
The first night went by instantly as I fell sound asleep, exhausted from running loads up to the cave and feeling the warmth and comfort of the womb of the earth. Some time the next morning I awoke and was surprised to see subtle rays of light bending around the baffles, down the mine shaft, around the corner and into my space.
Also my skin itched. I hadn’t bathed after all the adobe construction. I must be clean to enter the temple of darkness. Without hesitation, I emerged back out of the cave into the brilliant sunlight, ran back to camp built a fire, heated my bath water, searched out a suitable blanket to hang between the baffled walls and block the remaining hint of light. The wind was howling and the skies still menacing so I bathed in our canvas tent library. With the dwindling coals of the fire I brewed a large jar of herbal tea to take with me. On the way back up to the cave I snagged a few more limon dulces.
Now I was ready to enter the Temple of Darkness.
I entered the cave without expectations, but I definitely had goals. During my first hours in the cave I verbalized my intentions.
“First of all, I respect the power of darkness and set my intentions on allowing this power to cleanse “WITH EASE AND GRACE” in “MANAGEABLE DOSES” whatever impurities of mind, body or spirit might still be lurking within the folds of my subconscious being.”
Very familiar was I with the symbolism of the Medussa. The woman with snakes coming out of her head. These snakes represent the fears unleashed by the power of darkness in the initiates of the ancient mystery schools.
I prayed, “That I have the strength and courage to face whatever the darkness might reveal, so as to aid the evolution of my human spirit, so that I be able to obtain complete liberation within this lifetime, so that I may most effectively carry on the universal work of God/Goddess.
I had one major goal in the physical plane. For three years I had been learning the art of drumming, slowly progressing along the evolution of my rhythmic body that had been accidently executed by the off-hand comments of an elementary school teacher years ago. “Having mastered a few basic rhythms, I will focus in the cave on developing the skills to play 6:8 rhythms where the left and right hands each follow different patterns.”
I first began meditating in 1989, since 1998 I had been meditating daily and in that time I had witnessed subtle degrees of inner awakening. My dreams had become consistently lucid, the chattering of my monkey mind periodically silenced, and union with my own inner light consistent. Both my visual and aural intuitions, however, were awakening slowly. Only rarely, usually coinciding with long fasts, silent retreats, intense sessions of powerful breathwork, or psycho-active plant medicines, was I able to tune into my fifth dimensional light body and begin to navigate the celestial world and hear the voices of my ancestors calling me.
“During my darkness retreat I focus on awakening my ajna chakra, third eye, center of intuition and telepathy. I further place intention on being able to master basic galactic navigation and conscious soul travel within the fifth dimensional world. With that ability I aspire to connect to other highly evolved incarnated beings, the ascended masters, as well as Jose and my deceased grandmother.”
These were my primary objectives in the cave, but I had a few additional goals. Along the yogic path of union, I have witnessed a constant self-evolution towards liberation. Initially liberation from suffering and drama. Then liberation from vices, habits, dependencies, expectations, desires. Then as I began internal cleansing I experienced liberation from hunger and sleep. As I developed manipura, the third chakra, I experienced degrees of liberation from temperature variation.
“In this darkness retreat, I open myself to the possibility of further developing a few yogic sidhis. I believe the liberated, Christ-like yogi in his/her truly divine form must be liberated from all human needs. So why do I always carry a headlamp and a lighter to make fire? Both the ability to shine as the saints of old and the power to ignite fire are our divine gifts that we need only to reclaim.”
The timing of my darkness retreat was crucial. Before I entered, the United States was preparing itself for yet another Bush War, this time to oust Saddam Hussien from power in Iraq. All the free world cried out in protest, the United Nations did not support the war, yet the lone super power, and its cohort Britain, decided they didn’t need the world’s approval in this New World Order. The September 11th attack on America gave President Bush and 88 percent approval rating by the American masses and a blank check for continuing the War on Terror. To continue playing on American fear, the Bush team conjured up rumors that despite ten years of economic sanctions and investigations by an international team of inspectors, Saddam Hussein was hording weapons of mass destruction and further more that he was allied with his “buddy” Asama Bin Laden and the Al Quaida network of terrorists.
With the real reasons for the war hidden deep in the quagmire of power, control, greed and fear, hundreds of thousands of Americans took to the streets to march for Peace. Many of these peace promoters were physically assaulted, tear gassed and arrested by well organized storm trooper’esque police squads. Under the new Federal Emergency Measures Act (FEMA), American’s had lost their basic rights of freedom of speech. Anyone speaking out against the war could be accused as an enemy of the State and arrested as a terrorist.
While the major media banned coverage of the peace marches and outcries from the compassionate beings within the United States and around the world, the internet offered the truth as radio free Europe had during the second world war.
Although tempted to join my brothers and sisters protesting the war in the major population centers before entering the cave, I committed myself to working for peace on the higher dimensional planes. Shortly before entering the cave I was informed about a world wide meditation for peace being organized by light workers Greg Braden and Erick Tilden. The day of the meditation was to happen on day 16 of my darkness retreat.
“I aspire to be galactically awake enough at that time to consciously participate in the meditation from the cave.”
My first three days in the cave melted into an extended dreamy slumber, interrupted by brief periods of meditation, the sacred peeling and eating of sweet lemons, and the quieting of my busy mind. Curled up into my little nest of blankets, I felt warm and secure. True to Memo’s observation the cave was well ventilated, I could even feel a slight draft when the winds howled outside. I slept soundly until I woke up to the sound of foot steps approaching… not from outside but from within the cave. Big footsteps.
A flood of fear swept over me. I had “kind of” explored the back of the cave, but not completely. What manner of beast was now descending upon me for a snack as I lay, blinded and helpless.
The foot steps grew louder. Dun Dun… Dun Dun…Dun Dun
The hair on the back of my neck bristled and I brought my hands up onto my chest.
Dun Dun… Dun Dun…Dun Dun
I could feel the vibration of the beast’s footsteps in my chest. And then a hint of clarity, my heartbeat, Dun Dun… Dun Dun…Dun Dun. It was so loud it was echoing off the walls of the cave. I released a big sigh. And then my monkey mind spoke out in defense, “See I knew there wasn’t anything back there. I checked for tracks on the sand.”
For the rest of my retreat I had to focus out the sound of my own heartbeat to hear the subtler sounds of silence.
My sense of time quickly took on its own shift. As I had no idea whether it was day or night outside, time had no meaning. I slept for a while, meditated for a while and wondered if a day had passed, or only a few hours.
The dreams I had during this period were exceedingly clear. I went searching for my grandmother, and arrived at the nursing home where she spent her final days. The receptionist told me she had already passed away so I decided to give my regards to the other residents. As I made my rounds I found her room, peeked my head inside and saw her corpse lying on the bed. Instantly she sat straight up in bed and said hello to me.
“Hello Baba” I said “They told me you had already passed away.”
“No, don’t be silly.” She answered, “I just pretended so that you mother and sister would stop worrying about me.”
For the next several sleep sessions I visited her, and each time she sat right up and greeted me, although the appearance of her physical body deteriorated rapidly. On my fourth visit, she sat up out of her ashes. I presumed she had been cremated that day.
I paid my father several visits and saw him vividly setting up fans to clear the lingering smoke from the long hallways in their house.
Then again I was woken up to the sound of approaching footsteps. This time they were clearly coming from outside the cave. I few moments later, I heard Memo shuffling his way down the dark passage. He brought with him a gift from some locals in town who knew I was in the cave – dried fruit and a few pecan halves.
I knew better than to refuse such a precious gift. I savored each morsel over the next several sleep/meditation cycles. During this next phase of the retreat, roughly days three to five, my meditation periods became longer and longer. I realized that achieving completely focused meditation was what the cave experience was all about. When in normal life does one have the silence, the time, the darkness and the absolute focus to sink into deep meditation?
Jose approached me several times in dreamland during these days. The first time I heard his voice but I was unable to spot him. The second time I looked around through the dreamscape and found a rectangular ice chest. He was in it, and he said he had to remain hidden.
These were probably the toughest days of the retreat, as during waking hours I was truly sitting in the darkness. I didn’t see much, just occasional flashes of light and colored orbs floating by. Whenever I attempted to tune into my fifth dimensional energy body, I saw the hazy blue body being but was unable to bring it into focus.
To fill the long expanses of time and to rapidly clean my energetic body, I practiced hours of Pranayama, exercised my bandhas and mudras, connected my microcosmic orbit with the earth, sun and celestial bodies. I began vocal toning, throat chanting, and explored the harmonics of the cave at different resonant frequencies. I recited the Gaia yoga vowel sounds, Mantak Chia’s organ sounds and worked towards mastery of circular toning.
As the muscles in my throat wore out, I remembered I had my dijeri-doo.
So I played, and played and played, passing hours or lifetimes whichever came first. Dijeri-doo is one of the most powerful (and enjoyable) forms of Pranayama and meditation. It was while playing the didjeri-doo on the beach in California, under a starry sky with a small fire, that I first began to feel my energetic nadis flow and connect with mother earth, father sun and the archetypl energies of god/goddess. Since then, the didjeri-doo has became an essential self-healing tool whenever I feel energetically stagnated or drained.
So it came to no surprise to me in the depths of the cave, once I had settled into a deep trance with the rolling drone of the didjeri-doo, that I would also forge an energetic connection with the celestial bodies that were hidden from my view.
I began to feel an abundance of physical energy from spending so much time sitting so I began a regiment of asana yoga and physical exercises including push-ups, sit-ups, leg lifts, hand standpush-ups and dips. With my skeletal muscles flowing with blood , I brought out my new drum and slowly began tapping out the awkward 6:8 rhythm that I had memorized before entering the cave.
Memo returned frequently during these days and once even brought a small group of curious climbers who all squeezed into the chamber. I cherished the time with my guests. Although not yet visible to my inner eye, I could feel the energy of their enthusiasm and support they offered me.
The next day Memo returned again, completely disheveled and distressed. I sensed it in his being before he descended into the chamber. Exasperated, he told me, “Tenasi something very terrible has happened. I am so sorry.”
I wondered what horror had now struck the Portrero.
“I made a big mistake,” he said. “So stupid… I left the gate open and the cows, those pincho cows, came in and destroyed Don Jesinto’s garden. They ate everything, the baby fruit trees the giant cactuses, and they stampeded the garden you planted. “
The vision he painted was horrible yet somehow comical. “It’s OK Memo, you made a mistake, we can replant the garden…”
“No it’s not OK!” He wailed, “Don Jesinto saw it and he broke down in tears. Then he erupted in anger and kicked me, you, all of us, out of El Corozon. I don’t know what do do. All of our stuff, the work we have done. We need to move it all out right away.”
“El Corozon del Portrero” I said, and saw the vision we had for the beautiful sustainable retreat center collapse. Could the vision possibly be over in an instant? Can we restore the garden and restore Don Jesinto’s trust in us? Is this a sign that I should get out of the cave and help restore harmony, or is it a distraction from maya to tempt me out of the cave.
“What should we do?” asked Memo again.
“Right now why don’t you rest for a while.” I offered and he soon fell asleep.
While he was asleep I meditated on the situation and decided that I would stay in the cave. When he awoke we decided that he should find new wild cactuses to transplant in the garden, and offer to help repair all damage. If Don Jesinto still wanted us out, then he would try to find a place for our gear until I came out of the cave.
I didn’t know it at the time, but when he left, I wasn’t to see another human being for eight days, during which time I experienced the most accelerated spiritual evolution of my life.
I sat and stared out into the darkness and observed. I experimented with different forms of breathwork to see which ones affected my inner vision. As lights started to emerge out of the darkness, I set myself to the scientific task of learning to focus my third eye. I practiced shifting perspectives, from left to right, above and below. I drew visions closer and let them drift away. I opened my two physical eyes and closed them to notice slight differences in what I saw. I began to feel subtle shifts in the center of my forehead which reminded me of the sensations I felt while learning to reconnect severed nerves in my leg after my fall. I remembered that I was trying to reawaken a vital human organ that has been paralyzed, asleep, unused for generations.
By day seven I became cosmically aware. My fifth dimensional light body became visible and I was able to focus on an energy (or light being) and locate it in the terrestrial realm. I began by attempting to connect with my brother Destino, who I knew to be up in British Columbia living near Mount Elphinstone. As soon as I focused on his energy, I was brought down to earth and saw him lumbering across barren landscape on the back of some prehistoric looking beast. He was too focused on his journey to notice me.
I then shifted my focus to Jah Key, an awakened Goddess sister from Vancouver who had taught me a beautiful song which I had lost in the fire before I had a chance to commit it to memory. I visualized her being and guessed a location of B.C. I saw a cluster of bright lights twinkle and then I saw an image of her. I asked her about the song, waited, and then saw a wave of orange energy, rolling along a two dimensional surface and sail my way. As it reached me I saw that it was flattened text of the first verse of the song.
The more that I give
The more I got to give
And the way that I live
Is what I am living for
A satisfied grin spread over my face as I sang the words in proper melody. I repeated it a few times and asked for the second verse. The same procedure repeated.
Deep inside my heart
I got this everlasting light
It’s shining like the sun
It radiates on everyone
“Sweet blessings sister Jah Key.” I said and saw a twinkle flash from her eye.
For the next few days I sought out friends and family, people whose energy was familiar to me, who I could easily focus on. I visited my mother and saw her holding a poster board sign with “WE LOVE YOU” printed on it.
I entered my sisters house in Sacramento and found her whole family spending a lazy morning in bed. I approached the bed and came up to the level of the mattress to observe.
To my surprise, her three year old daughter Morgan, looked directly at me and exclaimed, “Look its Uncle Nasi!”
By day 10 in the cave, I gained the ability to instantly locate my helper, my fifth dimensional higher self. Sometimes this light body took on the appearance of me sitting in meditation and sometimes it floated above me very similar to Aladin’s genie. I realized that this genie was the amorphous swirling of lights that I saw unfocused in my meditation for years. In the cave I learned how to focus my third eye and shift the perspective that I viewed out of it from the left to the right side.
I soon learned to communicate with my genie self and found that it would answer questions if they were presented in proper form.
I asked to view within my own body to explore my ascending colon where nagging parasites had lodged themselves in me while living in Costa Rica. The genie transformed into the inside of my stomach, and from there I slid through the long winding tube of my small intestine before emerging into the larger diameter ascending colon. In front of me I saw large worms burrowed into the walls of my intestine. Their heads were exposed loomed ominously.
Before I even asked for help, a team of wolves appeared and devoured the worms. As they licked up the remnants, they began howling triumphantly.
I asked to go down to my ankle, and saw the matrix of healed bone fragments, but I noticed a few black holes remaining. I focused healing regenerative light there and felt my ankle grow warm.
As I gained confidence in my ability to navigate on the terrestrial and internal planes, I became curious about other parts of the cosmos and projected myself out beyond the earth’s atmosphere. Floating in space I ran into all types of beings. At first all being that I saw appeared translucent. Loving beings were identified by a beating heart of exaggerated proportion. More sinister beings just looked menacing. Many other beings seemed lost and suffering.
I aligned myself with God/Goddess energy of the sun and earth, and ventured forth to offer pure love to any beings who seemed to be suffering. After sharing with a great number of beings, I noticed several large floating docks of people sitting in front of computer or TV screens. A few of these people were not engaged and were free to see me floating by. Most of them, however, had their heads buried into the screen. As they engaged in the computer, I saw a yellow arm come out of the screen and swallow the head of the person using it. I asked what this meant and I was shown a close-up of several people whose life force was being sucked out of them.
I pulled back away from the dock and I saw platform after platform, some small with 10 people on them and others larger with hundreds of people. Each platform was being monitored by one non-human looking being with a long neck, a horse-like head and reptilian jaw. As I flew over each platform the monitor made frantic gestures to send me on my way. I floated back even further and I saw an endless wave of these platforms with humans plugged into them.
I approached one of the smaller platforms and sent out a wave of love in the conscious form of a message, “Hello children of God. Are you aware of your energy? Are you applying yourself in balance with love, truth and wisdom for the benefit of all sentient beings. Are you directly in the light and love of God/Goddess? If not, you are free to choose your path.”
I witnessed different reactions from my message. Some people pulled their head out briefly and then plugged back in. Others pulled out, looked around, shook their heads as if coming out of a daze, and then jumped off the platform. And still others never even pulled away form their screens.
I flew from platform to platform, sharing my message. And each time a group jumped ship. The monitors became furious at me and began to hiss and snarl at me. I remained connected with the love and power of God/Goddess and knew that I was protected. After some time, several similar looking reptile beings floated out from behind a large platform. They flew directly at me and attacked me with unknown weapons. But my alignment with God/Goddess remained strong. I knew I was acting as a being of light, for the good and service of all of God’s children. And their repeated attacks had no effect on me.
After sharing my message with many platforms and witnessing many people disengage, I felt drawn to explore other parts of the cosmos. The lessons I learned from the experience remained with me. In the seven long years since my first encounter with spirit down in Torres del Paine, I had learned to place my complete faith in the power of divine spirit. Over time, as I acquired wisdom and sacred teachings, the nature of divine spirit evolved in my consciousness to include both the masculine and feminine, God and Goddess archetypal deities. I had learned to sink my roots to the crystal core center of mother earth to connect with her infinite compassion. I had learned to feel the solar power of our father the sun, the rhythm of sister moon, and the heart centered connection with the universal family of love and light. But somewhere lurking deep in the shadows of my being, was the lingering fear that there might be some other power, some force that was greater than our earthly God/Goddess. This experience with the reptilian beings on the computer platforms strengthened my resolve and faith that there truly is no greater force.
Cruising through the near-earth cosmos, I encountered all types of non-human beings, most of whom were aware of my presence, but didn’t seem to care. The few that did, turned towards me, exposed their hearts and we shared pure unconditional love. Each interaction seemed to leave each of us brighter.
Then flying through a more remote area, I encountered a woman wearing some sort of a tribal tunic. She seemed interested in me and flew past me several times. Her motion was peculiar, almost mechanical. I didn’t see her heart, but wondered if it wasn’t just obscured by the tunic. I turned towards her and instead of reciprocating, she crouched and released a slow moving dart towards me.
“Silly sister.” I said, “What are you trying to do? Your darts cannot harm me, I am connected with the love of…”
And before I could even finish the sentence, the little dart pierced my bodies, both my fifth dimensional energy body and my physical body.
She laughed menacingly and raced off.
“A sorcerer!” I said and came out of meditation.
The pin prick was lodged in my chest, above my heart, and I could feel it as if it was stuck between my ribs. I had experienced the same feeling in Costa Rica when I opened myself up unwittingly to a powerful rainbow brother tainted with black magic. Such sorcery is characteristic of shamans still trapped in duality. Not yet able to completely align themselves with the love of God/Goddess, they remain dependent on acquiring their power by stealing it from other people. Many such shamans are amazingly evolved beings who have yet to make the last steps to complete union.
How sorcerors are able to produce these enegetic darts, I do not no. Nor do I know how the darts are able to pierce the light body aligned with the power of God/Goddess. What I have learned is how to avoid them and how to remove the darts if they do manage to sink into your being. To avoid them use Tai Chi, whether the sorcerer be in the physical or the energetic plane. The key is to be highly aware when you are around such sly beings and it is best to distill the energy from them before the dart is even released – Qigong.
How to dislodge a dart that has entered your being? There are many ways. The best would be to return into the loving care of elfin or goddess healing energy. However until the rainbow corridor, or global network of harmonious eco/healing villages is established, such a luxury is not always available to the light worker/warrior in the depths of Babylon.
For me, alone in the cave, the cure was yoga. I used Pranayama to increase my energy field, asana to locate the exact location of the dart, visualization and acu-pressure to ease it out. Such self-healing is not easy, but it is possible.
Never forget to give thanks and praise
Give Thanks Give Thanks
Give Thanks and Praise
Many days had passed since I last saw my friend Memo. I wondered what might have befallen him. I tried to tap into his energy to see what was going on, but I was unable to in meditation. In the next sleep cycle, however I had a dream where I saw him, sitting outside a ran-shacked house next to a river with a refrigerator full of eggs and ham.
When I awoke I surveyed my own supplies. I was down to my last half gallon of water, so I started drinking more of my urine. After 12 days fasting, it was really pure and tasted fine. I knew if need be, I could sustain myself on it indefinitely.
Around day 13, seven days since Memo had last visited me, an interesting phenomenon occurred. A luminoius light appeared from behind my head casting a shimmering blue tint on the walls of the cave. I turned around to see where it was coming from and as soon as I did so the light faded. A few moments later it returned and I began to see the various objects in the cave – my drum and didjeridoo, the water bottles.
The inside of my cave started to look like space ship. However I found out “Things are not always as they seem.”
The boundaries of the space ship didn’t always match up with the physical boundaries. I found this out the hard way by bumping my head and stubbing my fingers a few times as I went to grab something. The energetic interior of the cave wavered as if underwater and it took time to learn to physically navigate within it.
I experimented with my ability to see in this manner, and soon noticed that it didn’t matter if my eyes were open or closed. I also noticed that my perception of the cave interior changed slightly if I looked predominantly out the left or right side of my inner eye. Shifting my perspective back and forth became an effective focusing tool.
Inspired by my ability to see, I decided to try to create fire. I reached up onto the shelf, pulled down a candle, and placed it on the floor in front of me. I wasn’t really sure how to go about creating fire without rubbing sticks together, but I had seen it done by an martial artist. First he generated lots of chi and then, rubbing his hands together, let forth an energetic discharge that set a newspaper on fire. So I began to stir my inner fire, opening the gates, energizing, bringing the energy down to my hands and visualized the candle wick catching fire, and, just as I swung my hands down to the candle, the force redirected them over to the side and my hand banged into the drum.
I looked to my genie for support. I received a muted response of raised eye brows, encouraging and compassionate, yet at the same time curious.
I repeated my performance over and over for hours trying to discharge the chi in the form of fire, and a couple more times my hands were drawn over to my drum. Finally I looked at my genie and said, “Genie, I don’t want to play my drum right now, I want to learn to make fire.”
My genie blinked eyes and very calmly said, “You must learn to walk before you can run. Maybe better, learn to play drum first.”
For a fleeting instant my monkey mind dared protest, but quickly I conceded to the simple truths. “Yes I must master first the elements of being human, polish all the facets of my jeweled lotus flower.”
There’s a jewel of the lotus flower unfolding deep within our soul
To be the jewel of the lotus flower unfolding, is the highest goal
Hare
Om Mani Padme Hung
Om Mani
Om Mani Padme Hung
After singing a few verses, I picked up my drum and once again set out to master the new rhythm. As soon as my hands hit the drum, I lost track of the proper word order and melody of the beautiful rainbow chant. A smile broke out on my face, as I realized , “Yes there is still very much to learn about being human.”
My meditations were becoming clearer and clearer. At some point, the cosmos crystallized. It didn’t matter whether my eyes were open or closed, my galactic eye was awakened. Time was nearing for the worldwide meditation for peace. I set my sights on the boundary between love and evil. I headed for the frontier to see what was going on. Galactic navigation is sometimes too simple. When I got there, I had no idea where I was, but I knew I was out in deep space, far removed from mother earth. It was light where I was, but in the near distance I saw the wave surface of darkness. The boundary remained still in some areas and in others it pulsated, swallowing up covering vast expanses of light.
I pulled my perspective back and saw myself floating out in deep space like a child swimming in the deep dark sea. I was soon approached by a being of white light, heart visible, riding in some compact little vehicle. The look on his face was of astonishment, as if asking simultaneously, “How did you get here? What are you doing here? Do you even know where you are?”
I felt like a novice surfer who had somehow managed to paddle out past the break of a really big surf. And the other surfers know that I don’t belong out there. This jedi was more compassionate than most surfers, but his silent message was equally clear, “Dude, what are you doing out here, without even a spaceship or any type of protection. Do you even know what you are doing.”
I aligned myself with the power of God/Goddess, turned square to him, sent him a blast of earthly love, and said, “Yo brother! Tenasi here ready to help spread the love.”
He smiled at my bravery, gave me a thumbs up and flashed his heart back at me.
Just then a thunderous wave of darkness crashed down around us. The warrior reacted instantly spinning his ship and emitting a light so bright that it diffused the darkness.
A chain of implosions occurred almost simultaneously along our light horizon and the jedi raced off in that direction, once again leaving me alone in space, but no longer even near the darkness. The effect of his actions was immediate, the frontier of darkness retreated out of sight.
“I am body surfing out in the sea of killer waves.” I admitted, “I need a long board.”
Barely had I uttered the words when I saw myself inside a sporty spherical space ship.
I thanked the Jedi, played around in my new ship, and soon realized it amplified everything, my ability to shine, my speed to move through space.
After a while I tried to come back into my physical body, three-D land. I opened my eyes, and nothing changed. I was still sitting in my space ship. I came out of my sitting position and started exercising, push-ups, sit-ups. Nothing seemed to pull me back into the material world. I tried drumming and playing didjeridoo. The rhythms carried me through the cosmos, where I met numerous beings that harmonized with the particular vibrations. Playing the didjeridoo created long strands in space that stretched between dimensions,
merging white light with realities still separated from the infinite source of divine light.
There is a woman who weaves the night sky
See how she moves see her fingers fly
She is the needle and we are the thread
She is the weaver and we are the web
I sang, played music and traveled through the cosmos. I reckoned it had been eight days since Memo had last visited me. My body was empty, intestines clean, no physical distractions to pull me back. The time neared for the payer of universal peace, so I set my intention, please once again send me to the grenze, the frontier of light and dark, where the warriors of peace are shining light into the deepest realms of darkness.
And within a moment, I was back on the scene, seeing giants at play in the art of war. No jedis of light present, just super powers juggling nuclear bombs, masters of destruction threatening the fate of the three dimensional world.
But I choose not to play the game.
For I am a universal child of God/Goddess!
Lights on!
Radiant glow activated.
Connection to mother earth
From the navel down, a mountain sinking, melting
Heartfelt compassion and nurturing
Goddess Energy
From the crystal core center
Of gaia,
Opening
Wings of Heavenly love
Extending out from the heart
Unconditional love, Christ energy
To father sun, sister moon,
And the stars above,
Radiating out from the solar plexus
A universal connection with the beings of white light
Conscious connected awakening spirits
Ascended masters, and those on the path
My brothers and my sisters
Of ascension
It was kind of like jedi action with a light sabor, except being the light savior,
Shining life, love, birth, creation,
Holding the single minded purpose
Focus focus focus
The seed of Life must grow
Because the action, the thought, the rhythm
Must all be in line
With the will of God/Goddess
Maintaining the vision of recreating Eden
Filled with children of God/Goddess
Living in abundance and harmony
With the elementals, the nature spirits, the
Fairies, honey bees,
Can you see
Truthfully into these eyes
And recognize your true identity?
And the brilliant white light of all creation spread out from my little orb. But it wasn’t my light, it was the light God/Goddess, the light of the universal brother/sisterhood of beings of white (rainbow, all the colors of the spectrum) light. I had become a portal, through which beings of all types were free to move towards the light.
More sensitive energetic beings were drawn to me at first. Many gladly stepped through the window of opportunity to enter the light.
And again my conviction was reassured that even in the far reaches of the universe, the love of God, the divine light of God/Goddess is all powerful.
I met other light workers, our web of white light grew stronger and alchemized the heavy dense leaden energies of beings shrouded in darkness. Within the web of light workers, we were free to move about, come and go. As we parted from one another, we sang.
Merry we meet
Merry we part and
Merry we meet again
Time elapsed in the transformation of the human and non-human spirits
As they each embarked on the path of becoming the light
cleansing the doors of perception, releasing the burden of fear,
changing old ways and shedding new tears, as the ego dies a thousand deaths,
allowing the soul to be born anew
then passing through the rings of fire
to release desire, greed lust, hunger, anger, hate, selfishness, attachment
and confusion on the path to
at-one-ment.
And all was well for Tenasi in the cave retreat.
Between spells of light work I zipped back into the physical body without ever leaving the galactic world:
many times sitting up and lifting legs
flexing muscles to keep the blood pumping.
Both drumming and dideridoo
Became tools of transformation
Between dimensions
Hammering out lost rhythms
Reconnecting synapses
And then suddenly feeling the 6:8 rhythm
Do Gun Do Go Dun Gun Do Go Do Gun Dun Go
With the rhythm as fuel my space ship ignited
Blasting off in synchronistic gyration
And then I looked to my right and there was my friend Jose
Riding by my side
On a giant turtle
Spiritual warriors once again
The viel of separation lifted
The brotherhood gifted
By synergistic mystics
One heart, one mind, one love for the fulfillment of the divine plan
What an honor
I gave thanks to God/Goddess
For reuniting me with my friend and
I kept playing that rhythm
And the more I played the brighter grew the cave
The luminous love light of the one
Radiating out eternally
I still slept during this time but barely, when I did my dreams closely paralleled the events in my waking meditation. I surfed thru my solo time in the cave, equally divided between the tasks of striving towards my own self-mastery and the selfless giving and sharing of unconditional love and sacred wisdom…
And then this voluminous creature with a gaping jaw appeared before me
I breathed in complete compassion
Saw myself in its eyes
And breathed out love
“Yeah Yeah… Keep pumpin out the good stuff!” It said, it opened its mouth and started sucking in all of my love.
I reconnected to the earth Goddess mother and father sun God, solidified myself in the Christ consciousness web, and I spoke, “Greetings being! May you drink eternally from the life cup of God/Goddess.”
Like a volcanic eruption, laughter broke forth from its throat and caused a vacuum that I myself felt pulled into.
Again I attempted to reassert my divine connection to God/Goddess and as if reading my thoughts, the being grunted, “God? There are millions of Gods, who cares about your measly God, earthling.”
And with those words all of my roots were uplifted and I was once again thrust into chaos and infinite destruction, the spaceship tumbled and turned. A gigantic arm came out of this being who I began to realize was no individual being but merely a personified form of the wave of darkness. The dark hand engulfed me, sucking out my life force, extinguishing the lights in my space ship. All power stripped from my being.
Just as I had once momentarily left my physical body to avoid the impact of my fall in Venezuela, I was then shocked out of my fifth dimensional body. Just as my higher spirit must have looked down with compassion as my physical body tumbled down the hill into a heap of broken bones, I now watched my higher dimensional being, my blue body, my galactic self be swallowed by darkness.
My light continued to fade until it was so dim that I could barely see it in the darkness. But I knew what to do, “I have the tools, I can pump up the volume.”
I immediately began yogic exercises to strengthen my magnetic field. Slowly, very slowly I saw my energetic being begin to glow.
“Ah saved by the spiritual sciences.” I said and doubled my focus.
Just as I began to feel the luminous light appearing from within my being, the dark being laughed and from within it came another wave of darkness that splashed over me once again draining my life force.
Seeing only a brief battle lost I renewed my efforts.
I charged my inner fire, with manipura exercises: series of udiyana bandha contractions, nauli, hammer breath. After much time I felt my energy gates opening up. Again I saw my higher self begin to shine and again the arm of darkness reached out and engulfed me. My efforts were in vain.
Time and again I reached into my yogic bag of tricks, in an attempt to ignite my life light. But it was all for naught. I was caught in the rip tide of darkness and all my attempts to slip out of the current were failing. And then I remembered the drum.
I reached across the cave, grabbed it like a life vest and sent out the heartbeat to all tribal peoples, ancestors. And almost immediately I felt my power restored and I navigated through the darkness.
As I approached the actual border where I could sense being close to the light, the being again swatted at me sent me hurtling back into the depths. I shifted rhythms and intensified the tempo. Again I approached the edge and this time I saw the arm coming and yielded to its force, breathing in to then exert the same force to escape. And nearly had my tai-chi succeeded when jaws of darker death clamped down over both my own energetic body and the entire body of the enormous being that I was struggling to free myself from. Instantly I was enveloped deep into the realms of darkness again.
But with the drum in my hand, I was far from giving up. I switched rhythms to my newly mastered 6:8 rhythm and exploded in a frenzy of hand slapping. As the rhythm resonated through my cave, I looked up to my right to see if Jose was around, but he was no where to be found. I was deep in the black canyon, climbing solo up Stratosphere through bands of deadly pegmatite.
Too many years of higher education, twelve years of extreme climbing, fifteen years of yoga, three years of drumming, it had all been to prepare me for this moment to
Focus! Focus! Focus!
For the longest time, nothing happened. Deep in the shadows of darkness, I saw my dim orb of light fading, fading. Then I added breathwork to the drumming and a slight glimmer appeared.
“Yes there is still a chance.”
Hardly had I spoken the word chance when I again heard that soulless laughter and all light was sucked out of my being.
From the breathwork I allowed my voice to evolve into ecstatic chants and overtones. I called on my ancesters, the shakti power of the Goddess, I reached out to other light workers, but I was all alone. A saltless sweat beaded on my brow and then dripped down my face. Soon I was drenched in sweat beginning to feel despair. My efforts were not working, somehow I needed to slip through dimensions, a wrinkle in time.
“The Didj!”
Without missing but a few beats on the drum I grabbed my didjeridoo, braced it up against my lips so my hands were free and played accompaniment with the drum. The coordination was lacking at first, but slowly I was able to merge powerful rhythms with spiraling didj tones. The drumming boosted my power and the didj opened the portals.
As soon as I felt my energy strong enough to make the jump, I slid into one of the strands of space time, and…
“Yes! I am out of there.”
I looked around and saw I was in an unfamiliar part of the galaxy, but around me were other beings of mixed light. I had made it out of the darkness. But somehow I didn’t feel like I had made it out of danger. I felt haunted by my past, as moving to a new city to create a new life only offers a reprieve until that past catches up to you. I navigated over to an area where I saw the brightest concentration of light beings. How I longed to be surrounded by my loving rainbow family.
As I approached one of the smaller beings turned to greet me, and as she saw me a ghastly expression appeared on her face.
“No, don’t be afraid. I am a being of…”
And before I even had a chance to utter the word light, I felt/heard the emptiness of the implosion. I turned just in time see the tidal wave vortex of death literally suck the life force out of the entire new reality I had escaped to. Within a milli-second every being of life that I had just seen was gone, as if a nuclear bomb had just landed and evaporated the entire city. Without their physical bodies, I saw the strands of their spirit beings, our spirit beings drawn into the void.
“Oh no! My attempted escape from the darkness has now lead to even further destruction.”
Although in the darkness, I was still conscious. Were the other beings still conscious too? Did they have the wisdom of the spiritual sciences to help regenerate life. A sudden wave of guilt spread over me. Then insecurity. Do I even have the power to escape this darkness? I feared to use my spiritual tools, the drum and didjeridoo as any attempted escape might simply lead to another entire civilization being eradicated.
The didjeridoo quivered in my hand. “I have to try.”
My rational mind was in engineering mode. “Somehow the darkness had followed me through the portal. How can I pass through unnoticed?”
A vague idea came into my head. What if I slip through several portals and between each one I will shift my identity. If I can create enough energy with the drum, I can regain the power of manifestation, then switch rhythms and pass through another portal. It was worth a try.
I quietly beat out a heartbeat on the drum and slowly brought the didjeridoo into action. I visualized a separate reality, a planet with no life, but able to sustain life for my first destination. I couldn’t risk endangering other life forms by my idiocy. What an idiot I was. What was I doing out there? Who did I think I was? Barely had I learned to navigate the celestial cosmos, and there I go jumping into action like some kind of superstar, shining my light, playing with the power of God. And now look at me.
“You have to learn to walk before you can run” I heard the voice of my helper. Where was my helper now? Where was Jose? I searched and asked in vain for assistance, but none came.
I realized I had gotten myself into this mess and it was up to me to get out. I focused on the music and raising my energy level. I played until my fingers began to blister and my lungs burned and nothing happened. I saw my depleted self floating deeper and deeper into the darkness. “No!” I screamed into my didj and played with the frenzy of trapped wild animal. “The power of God is within me now!”
And slightly, ever so slightly my orb of light began to glow. Slowly I began to see the strands of trans-dimensional space seep into view. I waited, kept my intention focused and then when the time was right, I slipped through space time.
I emerged… It does not matter where, shift the rhythm, shape-shift, jump through another portal, aim back into the realm of life of light of love. I morphed into countless realities, but wherever I was I felt the imminent presence of the darkness close on my heels. I had to make it back to home base, Yahoo Falls of the Cherokee nation where all disputes melted into the compassion of mother earth. But if I go there am I just leading the white men, the strong arm of death into the sacred heart center, where they will be massacred just as our ancestors were only a few generations ago. No I cannot. No I will not. I made a mistake, I cannot sacrifice the light of others.
I stopped my fleeing, and within moments felt the now familiar sensation of being sucked into the vacuum of darkness. As it imploded I heard the voice of death, “Now you are doomed!”
The shock knocked me out of meditation, I felt my entire physical body jolt and I found myself back in the cave, staring into the darkness. I rubbed my hands over my face and chest. Yes I was still there. It was only a dream. No, a meditation. It can’t effect me here, whatever I do out there? I was asking, because I did not know.
I was tempted to get out of the cave and simply walk away, go climbing, escape my reality. But a greater sense of knowing told me to stay and face my fears.
I mulled around in the cave for a while, groping in the darkness. I shook out my blankets, organized my empty water bottles. I busied myself with the mundane reality and hoped that everything was the same as it was before.
But it wasn’t. For the first time in days, I was cold. I wrapped myself up in my blanket and tried to go to sleep. My body felt heavy and sleep came quickly. I awoke into a dream…
I was down on earth walking through some city with long aqueducts. No I wasn’t walking, I has being herded by a pack of ruthless Australian skin heads. I had no chains, no restrictions, just this pack of hateful kids on either side of me.
As soon as I was fully lucid in the dream, I manifested a way out of the situation. I jumped out of the pack and took off down a side street. Wham! Before I was even gone, they were there, pounding me.
“Dumb ass! You can’t escape.” one of them taunted.
I woke up and found myself back in the cave, still in utter darkness and cold. I started my routine of calisthenics to warm up and get the blood pumping through my body. And soon I felt energized and refreshed. I pulled out the last lemon dulce that I had been saving. I peeled it and without swallowing the pulp, I sucked on and savored each wedge, feeling the sweet nectar drip down my throat. The energy circulated through my body and renewed my spirits.
Although both my meditation and dream realities were plagued with darkness, at least I was still free in my physical body. I envisioned my connection with my brothers and sister of love and light, and began to sing songs of the heart.
Children of the earth tribe - rise up
Children of the earth tribe – rise up now
Some say namaste, some say omatakease
Some say om, others shalom
We all call mother earth our home
Protect her, respect her
Give her love don’t neglect her
It felt good to be earthly again feel my connection to the place I call home. As I sang my energy rose and rose. I chanted sacred songs from all over the world to connect with the essence of divine spirit. Eventually the inside of the cave started to shimmer again, and I felt the radiant glow appear from behind my head.
Om Mata Om Kali
Durga devi nama hey nama ho
Shakti Kundalini
Jagad ambe mata
As the walls of the cave gained illumination, I saw that they were still the walls of my space ship, except there was now a large hole on one side where I could peer out into the darkness of space. I didn’t want anything to do with space. I was happy to be back on mother earth connected and whole. I felt the vital energy flowing through my limbs…
And then I heard the sinister voice, “Now we have found you.”
Like a meteor descending from space, something hit the earth only a few hundred meters away and the shock waves knocked debris down from the roof of the cave. I picked up one of the clods of dirt that landed on my lap. I felt a cool chill sweep through my body. My hands were frigid. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it had come for me.
“Well I ain’t no floating baby out in deep space down here. I am on the mother ship.”
As I launched into a series of clearing meditations and breathwork to energize my being, I felt the dark eerie essence creep through the earth towards my cave. I sank my roots way down deep, connected with the forces of nature, the ocean, the trees, the mountains and the stars above.
As it neared I felt fully activated and strong. The shadow of darkness, moving like a plague, closed in on the cave and crept in through the energetic hole. I started pounding out a rhythm and verbalizing my connection to the power of God/Goddess and telling it that it wasn’t allowed here. But my words held no power and the darkness soon filled the entire window. Then it began creeping around the sides of the cave. Defiantly I focused all of my will to push it out, but all to no avail.
The darkness seeped in, eventually working its way behind me to the source of my own illumination and extinguishing my flame. Gradually I saw the internal lights of the cave disappear and then finally go out so that I was again staring into the darkness.
Beyond that it kept draining my life force. Soon I felt achy and congested.
I tried to shake it out, but nothing seemed to help.
Finally I gave up and shriveled into a frigid heap on the floor. I pulled the blankets around me and tried to make it all go away.
Soon I awoke in dreamland, again being hounded my the thuggish Australians.
“So you want to make it to the council of the federation.” One of them laughed.
“There is no more council” another one added.
“There is liberation though!” I hissed back at them and dove into an aqueduct that we were passing. I swam with the speed of a dolphin, dashing through and around bridge pillars and rocks.
And then Bam! One of them swatted me and grabbed me by the neck.
“Oh so you like the water.” He said and began dunking my head and then slamming it against one of the concrete pillars.”
“Hey look the neophyte likes water!” He screamed to his laughing comrades.
Battered and bleeding he flung me back up onto the street, where I looked into the menacing faces around me.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked
“Where are you taking us?” One of them sneered.
“Shhh!” Snapped another, “We are taking you where you want to go. You are looking for the council hall of the federation of light beings. Right?”
“Isn’t that where you want to go?” Demanded another.
I nodded and they all broke out in laughter. Half dragging, half tossing me between one another like a rag doll, they carried me through the city. The whole time they laughed and taunted me.
“So you think you are a Jedi, huh?” said one as he slammed me into the gound.
“Ooh the council of the federation is gonna meditate together on universal peace.”
“Yawn.”
I woke up and found myself still wrapped up in my blanket. I was shivering, both nostrils were congested and a sharp pain creeped up my neck. I barely had the energy to sit up. I tried exercising, but was weak and my body felt like lead. I tried some breath exercises while laying down. I Felt a glimmer of energy return, but almost instantly felt it being sucked out of me.
I drifted back into dream time. I was inside the council hall of the federation. The hall was enormous, circular rows of seats extended up from a central stage. There was room for thousands of light beings, but it was almost empty. Clustered in the first few rows were a couple dozen illuminated beings who had gathered for the council.
I saw several elderly women, a grandmother rainbow figure, a few oriental women. I saw my friend Alisa and a few sisters that I recognized from Canada. Along the back rows were a number of young male warriors.
“Where are the other elders?” I asked the rainbow grandmother.
She shook her head and said, “There are not many of us left.”
There was no one heading the council, the members all seemed distracted and the atmosphere was heavy. I had that familiar feeling that darkness was hovering just outside.
I grasped for a way to help.
“Incense” I exclaimed. “We need incense to clear the energy.”
“Yes” Grandma rainbow agreed and she pulled out a beautiful shell to burn incense on. Several other people offered incense to burn. But we had no fire. A wave of embarrassment flooded over me, as I remembered my attempts in the cave to create fire. Some jedi I am.
“Does anyone have a lighter?” I finally asked amid laughter from the back rows.
My friend Alisa spoke, “Here I have one.”
I went over to her and she tried to light the incense but her lighter was out of fluid.
“Yo, I got fire.” This young warrior from the back row offered and he held up his right arm with a terminator style device affixed to the end of it that emitted a large flame.
Even as I was lighting the incense, there was much laughter amongst them.
As I stood up with the shell in my hand, another one of the young warriors sneered, “Get that shit out of here.” He waved his arm through the air emitting blast of chi that blew the shell right out of my grasp and scattered the burning incense across the floor.
One of the elderly Goddess beings came over to help me scoop the incense back into the shell. We looked at each others eyes as we finished and shared the seriousness of the situation. The darkness is all about, and now even within the sacred chambers of the federation council, there are beings tainted by evil.
I woke up again in my cave. Haunted by nightmares and ailing physically. I began to sink into despair. I needed help, but there was none. I thought about what had gone wrong. How was this darkness able to severe my connection with the divine light of God/Goddess? I prayed for help. I asked for the loving advice of the ascended masters. I sought out my friend Luke from Canada, the first true Jedi wizard I had met who had thrown fake punches and bear hugs at me to help bring awareness to aspects of my being that I had neglected.
But all of my requests simply fizzled out in the darkness around me. I felt doomed. I sat for hours, maybe even days in that comatosed, faded state. I pleaded to the Goddess and just then this little whisper of an idea floated through the cave. Like a thread of a spiders web broken off from the main part of the web, it drifted by me. Too weak to physically grab it, I seized it mentally and caught but an instantaneous glimpse of what it had to share with me.
In it I saw the light, the love of creation, the universal energy of life connecting the crystal core center of the earth with the sun and stars. And from the sun, the thread of light continued to the central sun of the galaxy, and from the central sun of the galaxy to the central sun of the universe where all the light of all the universe came together.
The verse of a rainbow song popped into my head
We all come from the one
And to one we shall return
Like a ray of light
Reaching for eternity
Could it possibly be that simple, could my definition of God/Goddess simply been to terrestrial based? Life is life. And the power of God is the power of the one God, the source of all life. Not just here on earth but throughout the entire universe.
Maybe it was true, but I was too tired to try again. I felt like a dying person who beholds the glory of God just before taking his last breath of air.
I started to dose off into slumber, but something smacked me in the cheek and I looked up and saw my friend Jose race by on his turtle. A smile spread across my lips as I thought about joining him.
Again I started to drift off to sleep and again I was awakened by a bang. This time the entire cave shook and more debris from the ceiling landed on me.
I sat straight up for a moment and waited. Nothing happened and slowly the heavy tired feeling crept back into me and I laid back down.
Again the cave shook, releasing a pile of debris on my face to wake me up. There in front of me was Jose, staring deep into my eyes, “Do Not Fall Asleep!”
He glanced behind him and sped off. Jose? I called. Was he really here. How had he found me. Had he chased me into the darkness?
I heard the echo of his words, “Do Not Fall Asleep!”
I shook my head, my neck was stiff, my whole body hurt. But I began the meditation focusing on my connection with the light, the love and the power of the Universal source of all creation. So exhausted and defeated, I barely had the concentration to align my energetic body. It felt like none of my chakras were spinning. All I had was faith.
I began with long deep abdominal breaths through my mouth since my nose was all stuffed up. At first my exhales were sighs, then I began rasping breath qigong cleansing techniques. It felt like I was a big ball of mucous and I started coughing up phlegm.
I looked out into the darkness and found my fifth dimensional being, barely visible in a broken down space ship.
With each inhale I breathed life into my being. As I started to glow the wave of darkness splashed over me, and I was surprised to see my light continue to shine. Encouraged by this I increased my efforts until I felt my the luminous love light of the one radiate out from my core being. How to fix my space ship? I had almost forgotten, “The power of God/Goddess is within me Now.”
I have the power to repair my space ship. And instantly it was repaired.
As the menacing faces of darkness hovered over me, I spoke, “I am a being of Universal God/Goddess, a conduit of light from the crystal core center of the earth to the sun, to the central sun of the galaxy to the center of all creation in the universe. Within this being of pure white light there is no space for darkness, there is no space for death. The forces of darkness have no power here.”
And they truly didn’t. Despite the wrath of evil, erupting all about me. I held my course, no longer fleeing from the heart of darkness, but on a pilgrimage shining brightly within it. Several times Jose whisked by me on his turtle. As the light pierced the shadows, individual beings appeared that once blended into the darkness. As I passed them by, I opened the invitation for them to choose to join the light, to come with me out of the deep jungle of darkness back to the loving sanctuary of God/Goddess.
From all directions fragile beings clung to my ship. Before I even reached the frontier, I realized I needed a bigger ship. Instant manifestation. I was now captaining a larger ship with enough room for all of the passengers.
As we left the realm of darkness, thunderous waves attempted to crash down on us and suck us back into the depths. Nuclear implosions sounded near, but our path was now truly the divine path and the forces of darkness were powerless.
We paralleled the edge of darkness for a long time, allowing many beings to join. And then came the question, “Where are we going?”
I felt the pull of my heart for a moment and said, “To join with the sacred universal rainbow family of illuminated beings, to reclaim our indigenous lands, to establish the rainbow corridor of harmonious eco villages. We are returning to recreate Eden on earth.”
As I spoke those words, I looked up and saw the space ship had once again morphed into a galactic cruiser.
Sky dancer, dance into the night
We give our whole being to open up our sight
So we may see the visionary landscape unfurl
So we can dance through the cracks between the worlds
This chapter describes my first weeks out of the cave when I am immediately given the assignment to help a Mexican family come to terms with the death of their angelic daughter, instill love into a rowdy Mexican party, apply the powers learned in the cave to open poertals and allow cosmic friends to inspire transformation, and then finally to give the spirit of the young girl the opportunity to return to source, and then getting a flood of spirits wanting but being fearful of going home to, an epic night of being the door keeper.
This concluding chapter brings it all together as the cosmic family is revisited, and the sacred lands in costa rica, being instilled with evolution and family and turning into our HOME (Heaven on Mother Earth) in Costa Rica,
(this is the parallel cosmic storyline that I developed with the intention of presenting both side by side but later extracted because people said it fictionalized an otherwise amazing true story, but I would love to somehow weave it in even as a dream reality)
Naturally, the story doesn’t start with me, but long ago with a conversation between mother earth and father sun as they watch the evolution of the human spirit being played out on the terrestrial theater.
“Father, is it time to send them down yet?”
“No Mother, not yet.”
“But Father, the people, they are suffering so.”
“The star seeds have been planted.” Father says.
And they watch as the Patriarchial Christian Church wrestles control over the people of Europe. They initiate a reign of terror during which millions of women, some high priestesses and initiates in the Sacred Mystery Schools, are burned and tortured by powerless, evil men in the name of Christ. Without connection to the Goddess, the communities fall out of harmony. They loose their connection to the elemental beings, the fairies, the nomes, the elves and the dwarfs. Trapped in a world of fear they forget who they are and become disconnected with their sacred families, mal nourished and persecuted for practicing the spiritual sciences. Then they are lured from their once sustainable, agricultural, rural communities into the cities and are fed lies from a sacred text that has been edited over and over to suit the current controllers. Life after life, the shining spirits are scarred by traumatic wounds..
Then enter ascended masters, Jahweh and Baba Gi.
Jahwey is the first to speak, “Starseeds? Is that the term you are using to describe us now?”
“I like it.” adds Baba Gi “ We planted the seeds of light, and now they are growing.”
“Yeah there is strength in numbers.” Jahweh adds, “Your garden, India, with bountiful star seeds, the faith there is yet strong, and the sacred science is still practiced.” Jahweh observes.
And you my dear brother, says Baba Gi, “brought the truths home to the west all alone, and they… ”
He pauses as Jahwey continues for him, “Have completely twisted the teachings as I downloaded them. They have purposefully erased all of the important truths and replaced them with rules and beliefs that actually dis-empower the people. They go to war constantly in my name.”
“At least their belief is strong.” Says Baba Gi.
“Their belief in “ME” who they now idolize instead of applying the teachings which will set them free.”
“They are humans” voices Baba Gi, “still dominated by their lower chakras.”
“And its all perfect… Ommmmm” breathes Father Sun.
A tribe of higher angels flies into the scene. And watch as monstrous cathedrals and synagogs are being constructed in the name of Christ. Thousands of peasants are pulled from their farmlands and brought into slavery of serfdom to accomplish the task, while the noble few, dine and glutton themselves in abundance.
“Wow, they sure have stepped far out of the garden of Eden.” Says Carmen “I wonder why they don’t all love each other anymore.”
“When was the last time you were down there?” Asks Chaitanya, and then answering himself as they share one mind, “Oh yeah, a high priestess in the early Egyptian dynasties. Dear sister, the energy has dropped a lot lower down there in the last couple thousand years.”
“But don’t they realize that they are God/Goddess beings?” Carmen asks.
Chaitanya looks around and receives help from sister MoGlow, short for Morning Glory. “Carmen has been on an extended mission in the Pliedies. She hasn’t experienced any of the brute ‘fallen from grace’ human energy.”
Carmen peers down and exclaims, “Where is all the shakti energy?”
“In the recycling bin.” Answers Destino, “Those gutless men in the name of our enlightened brother Jahweh are killing the women with such ruthlessness.”
“Only because they know they are powerless against the power of the Goddess.” She looks around at the other Goddess angels and asks, “When do we get to go down there and restore harmony?”
“What? You want to go back down there?” Destino asks.
“Look at all the suffering Destino.” We must help our brothers and our sisters.”
“Yeah that’s what we are doing up here in the inter-dimensional airways, tying strings of synchronicity together.” Destino returns. “And believe me sister, you don’t want to be down there right now, its all guts and blood.”
“Not everywhere Destino,” Moglow interjects, “You know the balance of yin and yang on the earth is always in balance, although there is much darkness where you are focusing your attention, there are ‘always’ places on earth that remain in harmony.”
Well it sure is getting crowded down there.” Dubs the angel Destino
“And it will be even more so soon.” Says Father Sun, ”They will be trampling all over Mama’s back.”
“Load em up, I’m a tough girl.” Mama Earth says.
“Well, I sure am glad I served my humanness already.” Destino sighs.
Father sun and Mother earth pass casual glances at one another.
“Well you sure have progressed far along the human path Destino.” Father acknowledges.
“Far?” Destino expands, “I am a fully engaged galactic being, warrior of the light and explorer of far reaches of the galaxy…”
“All true Destino,” Mother adds compassionately, “but you know there are still facets of humanness which you have yet to polish completely. One day you may also be called upon to return to the flesh.”
Destino looks down and sees the relentless battles raging through Europe and says, “Well if I do go back down, please let me go back to India instead of in that patriarchal frying pan.