Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Something wicked this way comes...

This morning I experienced my first California Earthquake. Sara had just left for work and I was sitting at the desk writing when suddenly something notably changed in the atmosphere around me. It wasn't the Earth moving in at first. No, more like some kind of emmanation reached me a few moments just before the actual force waves did. The problem with trying to encapsulate or explain, to yourself or others, this type of thing is it happens so fast and appears without warning, that you can't really prepare yourself to itemize the insights when it occurs. But something definitely precluded it.

Then the Earth shook.

Now that sounds awful dramatic, and where we were it was anything but. It welled up and I was able to recognize it for what it was. I continued to sit and consciously experience (ie pay attention to) it for a few fleeting moments before it left as quickly as it came. However, and this was hard to discern where it stopped and I started, but an almost vertiginous (if that's not a word it is now, deal with it) feeling remained to play over my body and senses for a few minutes afterward.

All in all, interesting. Very interesting.

Now, it had already been a strange morning. Not 'Squid dressed as Nuns and throwing fish around the neighborhood' weird, nor 'Stranger walks up and addresses you by name' weird.

Subtle weird.

It is the kind of weird I have begun associating with my brain's snap over to what writer's like Grant Morrison or William S. Burroughs call 'Magickal Consciousness'* or Carlos Castenada's friend, the Yaqui Indian sorcerer Don Juan called 'Second Attention'. Essentially, this is a kind of consciousness that, while not drastically different than normal everyday consciousness is enhanced with a subtle layer of, well, for lack of a laymantic (again, another new word!) word to encapsulate it, something different. Different as in, there's extra sense operating. Think of when your in a room with someone you know is mad at you but hasn't yet said so. You FEEL it. That's what this is like, except you don't have as direct an area to pinpoint what is causing the strange sensation in your brain, back and balls.

To me it manifests similarly to a good buzz - it comes on and lingers for a while, making you curl your toes and perk your eyes and ears up, your attenae primed for reception at any wavelength. Only problem is, just like the onset of an Earthquake, it's impossible to pinpoint what frequencies that signal is going to come in on. However, the interesting thing for a novice like myself is, even though I don't have the skills to tune into it accurately, once you have those antennae up, you're not only getting the signal, now the signal is aware of you. It is in this way that strange things often happen in this state of consciousness.

So, beside the Earthquake, what strange things happened this morning?

Again, I don't know. At one point however I felt an awful lot of power in my body and used it to try and affect some change for the better in my life. We'll see.

..........

* I think Morrison goes into a more in depth description here:

http://www.grantmorrison.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=195&Itemid=83