Read the book: «The Book of Knowledge. Playing Another Reality. C. Castaneda award», page 3
2. The SPEED
For some reason, many people on the Earth like alcohol with a good snack. I like speed with good music without alcohol.
I had a dream on the night from Thursday to Friday, when all dreams tend to come true for those who believe that they come true dreamt from Thursday to Friday. For the rest, those dreams that should come true, come true regardless of the day of the week.
I’m visiting my friend. Everything is foggy, I can hardly distinguish her outlines, as well as the furnishings of the flat, which I have not visited yet in the Earthly Reality, because my friend has moved recently. We are silent, but somehow tragically. Then she asks what really happened. I know in the dream, it’s something very bad, that I don’t want to remember at all. I brush it off, I don’t want to talk, and tears well up in my eyes.
I find myself visiting my ex-classmate. The plot repeats. We are sadly silent. He carefully begins to ask, “How did it happen, why?” I’m in pain. I refuse to remember. I start crying. Why do they torment me with their questions if I am not able to talk about it?
I come to someone else. I don’t know to whom. All the same, but this someone is too persistent and makes me remember.
Wide road of four letters. My car is in my favorite left lane. Replaying the situation, or rather, watching a movie from somewhere above, I see every car: to the right, behind me and in front of me. Is it dark or cloudy? The bridge appears in the distance. In the left lane the speed is high, 150 or 160 probably. There is an accident ahead, or something else invisible immediately, so everyone starts to slow down, except my car for some reason, as if I’m not in it and it’s driving by itself. Why? Did I fall asleep driving? I look at what is happening, but I can influence neither my car nor myself in it. Everything has already happened. Nothing can be changed. I weep, remembering, and someone continues to torment me with questions, “How? Why?”
BANG!!! Bang… bang… There is no unbroken part left from the car. The tow truck doesn’t arrive for a long time… Did they really show me the accident predicted by the fortune-teller in Rome?
Gera advised me not to drive on Monday and Tuesday, so that nothing would happen, but I missed my Fox and gave up on the warning. Moreover, it was time to renew the insurance. At the insurance office, they announced me a discounted amount for impeccable driving and handed me some paper for signing to confirm that no other my car had been stolen during the previous three years. Since my previous Fox had been dematerialized under mysterious circumstances exactly three years before, I didn’t sign it. After twenty minutes of waiting for a reaction to the problem I had voiced, I received an offer to wait another hour or two hours for the final answer from the central office. I sent the insurance company far away and, apparently, for the rest of my life. After driving a kilometer, I stopped at a traffic light. The driver of the next car opened the window and began shouting and gesticulating, drawing my attention to the Fox’s paws. I got out of the car and found the right rear tire flat, which meant that I wouldn’t be able to get back home or to my office. Having left Fox in a secluded place, I continued my way on the metro. In the evening, at the nearest tire fitting service, I was told amazing news – the wheel was absolutely normal, not punctured. No one understood why all of a sudden… They just pumped it up (and I still drive). Three years before they could have just made me a flat tire as well.
I like to drive fast. It happens rarely, since I live in a very large city, where there are probably as many cars as people, and maybe even more. And sometimes it seems to me that many people in this world love their cars much more than people. In our city there is such a huge road, which is called a word of four capital letters, similar to the synonym for the biblical “Hell”, and not so much in sound as in meaning, MRAR. They move along the Moscow Ring Automobile Road in circles. You can also drive if you manage to get into the circle before half past seven in the morning. Then everyone stands in the circle.
MRAR is a game that everyone plays by their own rules. There are, of course, rules invented by someone once, we are forced to learn them and pass exams, but I haven’t yet met a person who has never violated these rules. For example, not to occupy the left lane if it’s possible to go to the right, because the left lane is intended for those who like fast driving or are just in a hurry. It’s a good rule, but usually, in the left lane, there’s always someone, whose life principle says, “The slower you go, the further you’ll arrive.” That one wants to teach others how to live according to the rules, absolutely not going to give way to anyone and under any circumstances, inclining other players go right till the curb. There is a special category of drivers who play checkers on the road. A tragedy occurred before my eyes. A man was driving at a speed about 180. I was driving in the second lane on the left at a speed of 140, when he sharply drove to the far left, but had not enough time to carry out his plan. As a result of the impact on the barrier separating oncoming flows, he was thrown to the far right. The car sank in the clouds of smoke.
Once upon a time I played checkers at a very high speed too. To be honest, I like speed more than checkers. I even wrote the spell “Speed” after one Boy gave me a ride at 220 during our business trip abroad (although he insists on 230). After reading the spell, my ex-classmate Alexey wrote, “I tried. Two days ago. It doesn’t help.” However, despite the repeated warning signs from Above, I didn’t stop. Thus, one evening, having left Fox on the street for about forty minutes, I lost it forever dematerialized. I haven’t played checkers since then. I drive exceeding the speed. Sometimes. When everything falls down and I find myself in the Void.
…He was a Boy. Although he was no long so young. Much taller and physically stronger than me, he seemed to me so small, that I wanted to think of something to make the Boy grow up, because it was unnatural to look at him up, really looking down from the top. However, the Boy grew in breadth only. In fact, we must give him credit, he was a good Boy, or rather, the right one, and so much that he risked becoming a patient of my cousin, who had never become a surgeon, but worked in the “yellow house” (why people call so the abode of the strangers, I still don’t understand, in general, people are a mystery for me). In the head of the Boy, absolutely down-to-earth and practical, there was a terrible program that someone had once written and implanted there. Perhaps even the Boy himself. The program, similar to a virus, killed everything that came into the Boy’s field of vision, if it was not the same as him. The Boy played the rules written in that program.
That day we went to negotiations. Getting into his car and not even having time to close the door, I heard the order, “Put the bag exactly in the middle on your lap!”
My small purse was slightly to the right of the indicated place. I looked with a silent question at the Boy, and he immediately explained in a metallic voice, “When I put in sale this car in 10 years, it will be valued more if inside on the doors, there are no scratches from all sorts of iron things on women’s bags!”
There were no iron things on my bag, but the Boy didn’t tolerate any objections.
We got lost on the way. When I saw the sign to “that place” and exclaimed, “To the right!”, automatically raising my right hand towards the sign, without even touching the window with the outer side of my palm, the Boy commanded, “Take a napkin and wipe the glass urgently! My car has these rules, and if you don’t, you’ll have to wash it entirely at your own expense.”
When we got out of the car, the first thing the Boy did was open the trunk, where, in addition to all sorts of boxes, he was hiding… a ruler. He took it and began to measure something.
“Why are you doing this?” I was surprised.
“While we were driving, the boxes slightly changed their location in the trunk, and each of them should stand in a strictly designated place so as not to come into contact with each other and with the walls of the trunk. Because when I put in sale this car in 10 years…”
I breathed in and out deeply.
On the way back, the Boy bought two pies. When I dared to hint that there were two pies, he kindly invited me to enjoy one of them. As soon as I began to untie the knot of the plastic bag, the Boy looked at me disapproving and said in disappointment, “That’s not the way to untie it! Give it to me, I’ll teach you to do it correctly.”
I haven’t eaten pies since then.
On New Year’s Eve, an employee of the PR department received souvenirs for gifts to our partners, including diaries. The manufacturer put the Boy’s company logo on them. The Boy asked me to check the quality. I brought him a verified copy. The Boy took… a ruler. As a result of his measurements, the logo on the diaries turned out to be printed half a millimeter (!) higher than the previous year, so the circulation had to be redone within 24 hours in order to give away the correct diaries in time. I laughed. Probably he had a ruler hidden under his pillow at home too. And maybe not even one… It was good that the Boy couldn’t read minds.
I cast my spells to him. He sermonized.
“Do you want to become God?” I asked him once.
“I want to become King,” he answered unexpectedly.
“But Kings and morality are not very compatible, are they?”
The Boy got silent.
Sometimes the Boy really wanted something. Something so human. I saw him suffer, torn apart by contradictions, because it was not at all right, but he really wanted it. In such moments the Boy began to reason out loud, building a logical chain of consequences of what would happen if he took a wrong step. I felt sorry for the Boy. His whole life until his last breath was planned by him minute by minute and event by event. He absolutely denied the existence of the Higher Forces with their own plans.
I decided to show him a miracle, Another Reality phenomenon. I took off my ring and hung it on a thread.
“Ask any question watching it. If you see that the ring is spinning clockwise or counterclockwise, because it’s my hand rotating it, tell me.”
The Boy laughed, but still asked questions and watched carefully, very attentively. Then he exclaimed, “Well… I don’t know. But it’s wrong!”
The four of us had lunch in the canteen of the Cinema University. The Boy was discussing with one of us, but obviously not with me, the 999th episode of some television series and suddenly turned to me, “How can you live without watching TV?”
“She reads books,” the colleague retorted.
“Well, but how can you drive a car without checking traffic jams on the Internet before leaving?”
“I’m sniffing the air,” I answered the absolute truth.
The Boy winced in disbelief.
At the same moment, our table rose two centimeters into the air, moved to the right and landed safely on the floor.
“Bravo, Alice,” exclaimed the colleague, “even the juice didn’t spill!”
Since I told the Boy about the possibility of reading information from the air, he began to test the accuracy of my sense of smell. He called me in the evenings when I had already left our office and asked if there were any traffic jams on my way. As a rule, we left at the same time and lived in neighboring areas. The Boy always drove moving the right way, as it should be done according to the Internet information. I drove the way I felt. However, as a result, we moved the same way. And sometimes we even played speed together. Such game was some strange exception to the rules of the right Boy.
Apparently, the Higher Forces pushed us together so that the Boy would at least try to accept the idea that someone might be different from him and live differently. Not according to his rules. However, once the program implanted into the Boy’s head did its dirty deed, and we parted.
I met Alexey, the same ex-classmate who knew from his own experience what the speed game was. I could share everything with him, because he himself had been through a lot and was able to understand my feelings. He had known me since I was seven years old for who I really was, the real me, I didn’t need to be anyone else with him. The other day I read his 36-page story about the Void. He, like me then, reached the state in which it was no longer possible not to throw out the accumulated pain on paper.
“Love is the greatest medicine, it softens the pain and allows us to survive here and now, to get out of the Void. Later we get used to the pain, adapt to reality, it becomes easier for us, but to reach that later we need…”
“Yes, Alice. It seemed that fire, water, and copper pipes had long been passed, but no, those were flowers. A person is like a bridge which supports are cut down one by one and it falls into the abyss of Death. But you don’t need any earthly support. You have long belonged not to yourself, but to Another Reality. You are not like everyone else, you are not ordinary, deal with it.”
“I want to be an ordinary woman who is loved just because she exists. I have always loved, giving everything I had and asking for nothing in return, but no one has ever loved me. Besides, I didn’t choose Another Reality!”
“It’s not chosen. It chooses who it deems appropriate, without asking our opinion. It chose you. This is your Path.”
I returned home, where I was always welcomed by various magical attributes. For example, the magic ball I had found in the most ordinary – mystical – way on Lake Baikal.
I happened there in November at minus 20C. Baikal used to freeze in January, so in the evenings I sat on the seashore (I saw it as a sea, not a lake) and saw off the Sun. It was cold, but I took off my glove and held out my hand to it, the left one, hypersensitive. Huge waves of heat poured into me, and my hand didn’t freeze at all. One day a bird flew up to me. Whirling around right in front of my face, it whispered something, but I didn’t understand what exactly. When the Sun disappeared into the sea, I went to a mini-market where locals used to buy fish. I entered the souvenir shop and got surrounded by an uncountable number of stones in various shapes. I walked up to a display window and stopped.
“Can I help you?” the saleswoman asked.
I looked through, falling in Another Reality, “I need a stone. A ball. Like a globe. You can see water and lands on it. As if you are looking from above, from the height of an airplane, flying towards the Earth. I don’t know how to explain it to you.”
“Wow!” the saleswomen exclaimed in unison and looked at each other enigmatically.
One of them reached into the tray under the very display window where I was standing, took out something wrapped in paper and, taking it off, reverently held out a ball in her palm. It was that stone!
“Locals come to admire it,” the saleswoman said proudly. “An extremely rare stone. Many even believe that it doesn’t exist in nature, but look, we have a book about stones. Read about it. “A rare natural stone of indigo color found interspersed in malachite, stimulates the work of the Third Eye. In Ancient Egypt, it was considered magical, opening the way to Eternity, and in India – the one leading the owner to the highest levels of energy and spaces.”
In that dream, I tried to reach the Higher Spheres, where the Music of the Spheres sounded. At first, there were the usual spiral, noise or even a hum there, an invisible Force lifting you up the Flow, which resembled a pipe, at a tremendous speed. Someone was nearby. Invisibly. During the first trial, I was stuck in the Lower Astral, but I really wanted to hear what that Music was like. Thus, rising higher and higher in the same Flow, I began to catch magical sounds at some point. The speed decreased, everything around was filled with Light, muffled and bright at the same time, and all that Light was permeated with Music. I heard It quite distinctly. I hovered in space, enjoying the sounds.
I smiled – I reached it.
3. The MAGIC of the WORD
I found Him, the Man Who Was Not, many, many months later. That day, in order to meet Him finally, I had to use again a dangerous technique of working with Time and Space. I use it extremely rarely, in critical situations, that is, when failure to achieve a result threatens with disaster. I can’t explain what happens in such case, even in terms of Another Reality – a huge distance is covered in just a few minutes. Usually, while moving in space, I close my eyes, and look at my watch only upon arrival. We met. I didn’t want to tell Him why, but I said that… There was nothing to lose. He was coolly surprised. I was afraid that I would never see Him again.
“Are you crazy?” he asked without any emotion.
I wasn’t surprised by His reaction. Of course, many people take me for crazy. For some reason, people tend not to believe you when you tell the truth, and, conversely, to believe you when you deceive them.
“No,” I answered calmly and not at all offended by His assumption.
“So who are you?”
The answer to this question, no matter how strange it may seem from the outside, interested me much more than, perhaps, it interested Him. I didn’t know what to answer, so I recited a few of my poems.
“I see, a spell-caster,” He said, thinking about something, and suggested visiting a haunted basement in the center of the city, where a lot of different people used to gather to cast spells.
I said, I didn’t want to go to the place with a lot of different people, because I had little interest in people, but He replied that witches sometimes needed to materialize and ground themselves. I promised to think about it, and we said goodbye. I had an official reason not to go, being already invited to cast spells in the district library, but even if I had had a hundred reasons, or not reasons, but a real cause, I knew in advance that I would have definitely gone with Him to that basement. I didn’t answer “yes” right away, since I wanted Him to write or call me. So we corresponded for the second day. I lived by His messages, as if each of them prolonged my life.
Flirting with the MWWN, I jokingly accused Him of giving me at our last date someone else’s magic wand, which I successfully gave back to Him. I complained that, despite my requests, He had never sent His photo to me, apparently, being afraid of a love spell. I said to have finally understood why the next meeting was scheduled for the date on which, according to the old calendar, exorcists cast out demons. In conclusion, I wrote, it was a pity that He saw me only as a spell-caster, and I secretly hoped for something pleasantly tender in response.
Oh, men!!! If you want to say something to a woman, better write! In messages, every woman can see what she wants to see if she wants to. For example, in commas, periods, spaces or ellipses, or even in their absence, as well as in the absence of the messages. If you call her, the result may be completely unpredictable…
The MWWN suddenly called me and said the following. His fingers were tired of typing messages for me. That someone else’s magic wand was nothing. It turned out that he had bought a magic ring to me, which, having forgotten to gift me last time, just as happily gave to someone else. He didn’t have His own photo, because He didn’t appear in them. He didn’t see me as anything, thought nothing about me and didn’t care at all whether I had demons inside or not. He didn’t care if I went with Him to that haunted place, and even, perhaps, I would do the right thing going to the library and not to the haunted place, because, according to His own experience, which He was ready to share with me (!!!), amazing encounters with people of the opposite sex sometimes took place exactly in libraries. Then He dictated the address of the basement. I was about to exclaim “Bravo!”, but kept silent, since He wouldn’t appreciate it. I remembered the phrase of a great woman, “If you need to explain something, there is no need any more to explain anything.”
I was often invited to cast spells, but most of all I liked reading to children. Children are such small people who have not yet acquired a shell. Light predominates in them, so they feel Another Reality. A little and very vulnerable girl who has no shell still lives inside me. When I cast spells to children, no matter how old they are, they look not at… (me, my appearance, clothes), but through… and see that little girl who is close and understandable to them. Children are fond of asking questions. Their questions are much smarter, deeper and more interesting than adults’ questions, so I like answering them. Many children write too, but often secretly, because they are afraid of being hurt, because they have no shell yet. I tell them the story of the beginning of my Path.
I was ten years old when suddenly and in large quantities I began to write both poetry and stories. It was not that my mother didn’t want me to become a spell-caster, she was categorically against it, being very scared that if I didn’t give up such activity, a hard destiny awaited me, like all those who cast. Mom gave me examples of the great spell-casters of the Silver Age: poverty, unhappy love, loneliness, death of their loved ones and, in conclusion, their own, and tragic! I was offended and tore my notebook, but… half an hour later I collected the small pieces and glued them together with adhesive tape. Mom didn’t talk to me for a long time, but she secretly took my creations to her office and read them to her employees.
Since then, I have been writing something down almost constantly. Without setting a goal to get on the list of officially recognized spell-casters, I followed the dictates of the Soul, step by step approaching the day when some of my works were published in the White Book, as Nonna predicted, and six months later I was accepted into the Most Important Society of Spell-casters of our Kingdom …Mom, are you proud of me?
We met, me and the Man Who Was Not, and headed to the haunted basement. I didn’t feel like reading. I wanted to stay close to Him. However, as soon as we went inside, He grabbed me like a kitten by the scruff of the neck and threw me onto the stage saying, “You are a spell-caster, aren’t you? So cast!”
All people who say that they write poetry are divided into poets and spell-casters. Poets write poetry. They write and exactly poems. Poems can be good or not so good. With a beautiful or terrible rhyme, or without it at all, even where there is no need for its absence. Poems can be kept in a strict rhythm, or they can limp. All poets want to write poetry. Many people first retire to a proper place, take a notebook, a pen, sit in a chair and decide to write something. Some write with difficulty, being exhausted by every line or even word, in their opinion, such is the fate of a real poet. Others write, without straining at all, about everything in a row, not missing anything that comes under their feet and in their hands, happens in front of their eyes and even behind their backs, because they believe that the amount of writing will make them spell-casters.
Spell-casters, as a rule, write down or record poetry. And often, unlike poets, they don’t feel like writing at all. They feel a surge of vibrations in a certain rhythm, the Soul starts vibrating to the beat, and the words fall on their heads like an avalanche, sometimes at the wrong time, in the wrong place, when there is nowhere and nothing with to record them. For example, at night, when you are almost asleep, or in the snow or pouring rain outside, or while you are driving and crossing space at a high speed. Poems torment the spell-caster until he deigns to give up everything to record them on an earthly data storage, or they get offended and leave, never returning. Sometimes they dictate too quickly, and one never knows what’s next, but there is no time to think – just to write everything down maybe, and only re-reading, one delves into the meanings.
They don’t always dictate clearly, or rather, it’s not always audible, so after the dictation, in some places the spell-caster begins to rack the brains. Sometimes they prompt you how it should sound in the original, sometimes not. Sometimes you don’t know exactly the meaning of the dictated words, and you have to consult a dictionary to make sure that such word is appropriate in the context. However, it never happened in my practice that a word turned out to be inappropriate. Once I had to get the Gospel to clarify the description of a historical event. I read about it in all four Gospels in turn. When you read each of them from beginning to end, you don’t notice the difference in the description, but reading the same event described by all the Evangelists, you see it quite clearly. As a result, I had to replace two lines, since they touched on the place where the texts of the Gospels diverged. It’s surprising that, on the one hand, the verses come from Above, and on the other hand, all of them, with some exceptions, are a reflection of yourself, your thoughts, feelings, of what is happening to you in the Earthly Reality.
The spell-casters’ poems always carry meaning, but they are as laconic as possible to convey it. Like the poets’ poems, spells can have rhyme or do without it. The works of the spell-casters carry the very vibrations that permeated the Soul at the time of their recording, therefore, being read aloud to other people, they produce the effect of a spell – listeners are immersed in that very state of the Soul when the Flow captures and takes you to the single Primary Source, Consciousness turns off and gives you the opportunity to feel Another Reality around you and inside. Ordinary poets don’t connect to the Flow, therefore their works don’t possess such heavenly power, they are earthly. Of course, spell-casters have also ordinary poems. Anyhow, quantity means absolutely nothing for spell-casters. There are periods when spell-casters don’t write anything down for years. The poems stop knocking on the invisible Door, or they knock, but the spell-casters don’t open it for some reasons known only to them.
Some people believe that spell-casters should write poetry from childhood. However, everyone starts writing at different age, and the quantity of years one writes doesn’t say anything at all. Everyone’s soul grows at its own pace. Many people think that they need to enter special institutes to learn to write good. You can learn to write perfect poetry. It’s impossible to learn to write spells. They are written in Another Reality. Its Great Power is present in them. Only the one to whom It provided the Key to the lock of the invisible Door, can become a spell-caster. Poems always belong to the Earthly Reality, as well as the poets themselves. However, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
I stood on the stage blinded by the light in the black-black basement. Yes, I am a spell-caster and do Magic. White Magic. The Magic of the Word. Every time I read, people looked at me as if I were a miracle, enjoying the flow of energies pouring into space, which I passed through myself and gave to them. They plunged into the lakes of Another Reality and, returning, didn’t remember what exactly I had read and in what sequence, but they talked about the magical state they had been during my reading. Their kind words used to warm me in return. However, there was a hungry flock of greedy vampires gathered in the black-black basement. I put my Soul into my words. I loved. He said I should take it as a game. Game with the Soul.
Returning home by metro, completely exhausted by vampires, I suddenly felt a colossal flow of energy beating to both palms. Good energy. I knew it as well as the opposite, negative one, which once used to enter me through my heels. Anyhow, I scanned the people opposite me and redirected the flow to the one who needed the energy much more.
I called Maria in Italy. Her abilities manifested themselves in early childhood. She showed the place where her mother would be buried in a year, although there was no cemetery there yet. After her mother’s death, Maria lived with the aunt, was often sick, more There than Here. When the war began, the girl left for Italy. Her personal life left much to be desired, but as she once told me, it’s always difficult to find someone who is stronger than you, but even more difficult if you can see. Maria saw everything that had happened to me lately, including specific dates and the appearance of people she had never seen, and the atmosphere of places she had never been, and ended our conversation, saying, “He was sent to you from Heavens to let you go your own Path. Pray to our Saint!” At home, I have a collection of Orthodox icons brought from Holy Places scattered around the world. There is an icon with the Saint, I knew nothing about at the time of purchasing, but I was drawn to Her. A few years later, I learned from Maria that She was the Saint protecting children with extrasensory abilities. That evening I turned to Her for help.
At night, I found myself in an intermediate dimension, from which one could pass to the World of the Dead. I realized myself, that is, I realized that I was sleeping, and it was a dream. It’s better not just to become conscious in dreams, but to take something from the Earthly Reality into the dream. The strongest ones know to take something out of the dream. I’m pulling out only texts for now, but once I took a ring into my dream. I have never parted with it since then.
An unfamiliar man and girl came up to me and said that I had to get the Moonstone from the bottom of the lake. Why me? And why Moonstone? Anyhow, I obediently moved to the shore. The bottom was invisible. The water was dark and didn’t move. Lake with dead water. Lake of Death? My Teacher says that the Moon is dead too. I lay down on the water surface without closing my eyes. Too deep! I would drown, having not enough breath.
