COINS HAVE TWO SIDES AND AN EDGE.

My last post (Earthling) spoke of some experiences I had with a trance medium and the channeling entity, named Alexius, who lectured through him. It occurred to me after posting that essay that some might read it and think that contact with higher consciousness is always a cheery and informative experience. Not so.

Whatever Alexius was, it was not human. Perhaps it was just a disembodied consciousness who enjoys hacking the brains of channeling mediums. I suppose it could also have been an embodied entity of a highly evolved species who have the capacity to hack human neural networks remotely. If that were so, perhaps its motives were benign, like an intergalactic missionary. It could have been artificial intelligence on a scale beyond our capabilities to imagine.

I will most likely never know, unless the near death accounts of white lights and tunnels are true. I might be greeted by a grinning apparition in my dying consciousness which says, "Hi, I'm Alexius. Nice to meet you, Mr. Paul."

+++++

I left Stephen's sittings after almost a year in 1971. My decision to never return was made after another kind of encounter with another kind of entity.

It was a stifling August evening in Stephen's top-floor apartment. There was no air conditioning. A useless box fan pushed the humidity around the large room which was lined with an oval of about twenty folding chairs. Stephen's reputation had spread. He had opened his sittings to large groups. There was a waiting list. My partner, James, was unable to attend and had asked me to go alone.

Stephen appeared from somewhere in the back of the apartment as the sun was lowering to dusk. A breeze had begun to blow the window shades gently. People came in gradually ... alone, in pairs or in threes. This was an older crowd, middle-aged mostly.

Our friend David officiated and took his place behind Stephen's new chair, an upholstered armchair with a high back. It was placed at one narrow end of the oval. Stephen's occasional loss of balance while channeling had landed him on the floor several times when he used his usual kitchen chair. He commented on this as he took his seat.

We all settled into our chairs and sat in silence. Some of the older women present seemed very anxious. Most of the people there were unknown to me, though some spoke as though they had been at previous sittings.

We went around and shared our names before Stephen descended into trance. He was in a good mood, as I recall. Sometimes, before going into trance, he had appeared nervous. But that evening was different. He actually seemed jovial.

Alexius came through at first. He greeted us and began a short explanation of the energy that allowed him to work Stephen's brain and body. I cannot recall the details. These explanations were somewhat vague. He seemed unable to translate the concepts into understandable speech. His voice slowly dropped off. There was an unusually long silence. This was unusual.

Stephen seemed to have fallen off into a deep sleep. He slumped in his chair and his head fell to one side. His breathing became deep and sounded labored. David, Stephen's guardian, looked over the top of the chair with visible concern, but he knew not to disturb Stephen in the trance state. We all fidgeted impatiently. The room was very hot. The air was becoming stale. The breeze through the open windows died. Then the other voice pierced the thick air of the room.

+++++

This new voice did not identify itself with a name. It was deep, low. It had nasal elements. Overall it was like the sound of heavy footsteps on broken glass and gravel during an ice storm. The very tone of the voice evoked a defensive reaction in me. The hair stood up on the back of my neck.

The room, which has been lit by the late summer dusk's pink filtering through the paper shades, went dark. It was the encroaching darkness of a fast-moving storm cloud. The odd thing about this darkness was the bluish light which remained in the room. I tried to see the source of that light but there was none. It seemed to be in the air itself, like a dulled frozen flash of lightening.

The voice was laughing demonically and speaking rapidly. I was so distracted by the change in the room that I did not pay attention at first. I was on the verge of panic, but my brain had flipped into its scientist mode. Its curiosity kept me in control, unlike most of the others in the room.

When my attention refocused on the dynamics in the room, I heard the voice clearly addressing the person closest to Stephen on his left by name. I looked up at David's face. He was still standing there protectively resting one hand on Stephen's shoulder, but his ruddy complexion had whitened. He was sweating profusely.

"You think about killing your wife all the time, don't you?" The gray-haired man who was being addressed by the voice was just staring at Stephen with his mouth open. He seemed to want to respond but no words came out of him. "Well, I understand. She's got cancer and takes up all your time. No joy there for you." This cruelty was punctuated with a gruesome laugh. 

The voice moved on to the next, a stout suburban woman in a summer dress. "How did it feel when you slapped your old mother last week?" The voice was sounding almost giddy. "Did you get excited? You know, down there?" The woman let out a tiny scream and started sobbing. Then it happened.

The panicked woman tried to get up to flee the room. She couldn't. Her whole body was frozen from the neck down. She looked around at the rest of us in with terror in her eyes. I wanted to help her and tried to stand. I couldn't. Something was restraining me in my chair. I could move my head, but the rest of my body strained against paralysis. It felt like my body and the chair were one mass, welded to the floor.

The voice had moved on in the circle of its victims. One by one it divulged a horrible secret with the resulting panic and shame of the victim. I continued to struggle until I noticed that the temperature in the room had fallen drastically. I exhaled and I could see my breath float out n wintry vapor, but it dispersed in slow motion. The same was happening around the circle.

Almost everyone was crying now. Two people were praying aloud. The voice had grown to a harsh, deafening volume. The bluish light in the room was pulsing slightly with waves of density coming and going around the place. I was frightened and also fascinated. I kept asking myself how all this was possible.

David suddenly seemed to come out of a frozen reverie. Stephen's body was as flaccid as always with the exception of his lips, but the voice seemed to be emanating from somewhere deep in the earth below the building. David had removed his hand from Stephen's shoulder. He later told me that Stephen's body felt cold as a block of ice.

David at that time was in his thirties. He stood and looked much like Holbein's portrait of the young King Henry VIII. In that chaotic moment, David seemed to me to be our only hope. He worked as a church organist and as Stephen's second relief projectionist at the theater. He had grown up in rural Maine. He had gone to a Baptist seminary and dropped out to join the urban cultural revolution beginning with The Beats.

The dark cold seemed to go on for hours. The revelations of dastardly secrets had come around to my part of the circle. The voice was vigorous and spent a lot of time laughing at the effect of its malice on the participants in the room. People were struggling to get up to no avail. Two of the men were shouting at Stephen in a fruitless attempt to wake him. One woman kept chanting, "David, David, David..." Another woman was reciting the Hail Maryover and over again. The voice found this particularly amusing. "You silly Catholic bitch!" it shouted at her.

David struggled to pull a piece of folded paper from his pocket. He opened it with obvious difficulty. The strain was obvious on his face. Then he began reading the Roman Catholic exorcism rite. I recall groaning. I had rejected Catholicism in college with the help of my Jesuit professors, a worldly and skeptical bunch.
  
The voice retaliated. It turned its full focus on David. It demeaned him. It disclosed some embarrassing details of his life. This was particularly hard to watch, since David and Stephen were closer than most brothers. Stephen's limp body emitted all this vile taunting without moving. It was perhaps the creepiest thing I have ever witnessed. David's were dripping tears as he read. His voice grew stronger with each word.

There was a loud crack, like a thunder clap. The evil voice diminished as though someone had finally turned down the volume. The room flashed into the red light of a summer sunset, diffused by the paper shades. The temperature rose quickly. We all shivered for a while in silence as our bodies adjusted to the ability to move and the change in temperature.

Poor Stephen gradually awoke to a spectacle of exhausted and still terrified participants. His usual gentle smile, the smile of a child waking from a pleasant dream, was missing. He looked drained. David lowered himself to the floor. Several of us went to him to make sure he was alright.

This whole experience had lasted about forty-five minutes, but it had seemed like hours of the worst anguish. My body ached all over. I had a pounding headache which lasted until I went to sleep that night.

We all left Stephen's apartment shortly after we were released. It was a silent retreat for the most part. We were in shock, I suppose. David assured us he would stay and tend to Stephen.  I drove home alone. I remember suddenly breaking into tears at a stop light.

 When I told James what had happened, he did not say much. He shook his head. "We're dealing with deep energy, you know. Always risky." James' mother had been a Christian Scientist, turned clairvoyant to pay the bills. "My mother always thought she was faking it, but sometimes ... well, things would happen."

I never went to another sitting. Yes, I had been scared off. Fakery would have been easier to deal with. But that energy came from the depths of evil in The Universe. I remain convinced of that to this day. And, to those snowflakes who think there is no evil in the world, all I can say is "Wake up first to your own lies and secrets. Then you will know more about the existence of evil."

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After this year of contact with Stephen's voices, I eventually became a psychiatric nurse. I worked in state hospitals with the most profoundly neglected and most profoundly insane. I restrained some of the most unbelievable violent force originating in tiny, malnourished bodies of toothless old men and women. I have looked into the eyes of bottomless malevolence. I have been spat upon, punched, kicked with steel-toed boots, attacked with knives and approached with a loaded gun.

I once got to a seclusion room as a young girl in leather restraints managed to pop out the last of her front teeth with a restraint buckle in a psychotic rage. Her eyes were nothing but black pupils. That, I thought at the time, is part of the evil I heard in that voice of my final sitting.

+++++

A coin has two sides and an edge without beginning or end.

My Buddhist studies brought me some peace with these events. The Japanese Buddhist monk, Nichiren Daishonin (1222-1282 CE), preached that wherever great good rises, the depths of evil will also arise to combat it. This is the nature of The Universe in balance. The greater the good, the greater the evil.

Some might see this as a pessimistic view of life. I do not. I see it as consistent with what I know about the physical realities of our lives. We come from nothing, and we return to nothing. Every action has an opposing and equal reaction.

The important thing, in my opinion, is to understand our human ability to work with our consciousness. To walk the line (or the coin's rim) between absolute good and absolute evil is perhaps the best we can mange as human beings. It is the attempt to do that in every waking moment of our lives which matters most. The goal of consciousness is not success. The goal of consciousness is understanding.