Fragments
(winding down)
By © E. Antons
Benjamiņš, 2017
15. The Shebang
In past blogs, I have
written of my interest in out of body experiences, especially as these occur to
those who have had a near death experience (nde). While nde is worthy of
attention as an inter-mind (inside the head and body) phenomenon alone, it also
suggests that at the time of death the individual may be connecting with a
dream-and-mind-space that exists beyond our body container.
I have also written of my
interest in the mushroom called ‘Fly Agaric’ or Amanita muscaria,
especially in its use as described by John Allegro in his book “ The
Sacred Mushroom and The Cross”. Because the mushroom
grows within a short walking distance from my country home, I use the
opportunity and come mushroom season gather a bucket full. I then separate the
caps from the stems and dry the caps on the branches of a dried out sapling
tree. The latter is necessary, because the caps are very fragile, and when
strung on a string, the rope quickly cuts through the soft caps and they fall
to the ground.
In the Latvian language
the Amanita Muscaria is called ‘Mušmire’ (š=sh), which when translated into
English means ‘Fly death’ or, less literally, the mushroom that kills flies. I
remember from my childhood that the caps of the Fly Agaric were placed on a
flat dish in which was poured a small amount of denatured (purple) alcohol.
The purple was to distinguish the poisonous alcohol from drinkable alcoholic
spirits. After a few hours, the dish and table about was dotted with the bodies
of dead flies. To a child, the scene was something of a ‘killing field’ of
flies fooled by the bright red mushroom.
As I grew older, I put
aside childish things and began to think a little differently. For one, as I
have already pointed out, the consonants of L nd R are sometimes
interchangeable according who, when, or where the word that contains it is
spoken. Therefore, ‘mušmire’ (mire = death) may also be pronounced ‘mušmīLe’ (‘mīla’
in Latvijan=’love’ in English), which means the very opposite of ‘the killer of
flies’; in effect, a mere change of a consonant causes the word to change its meaning
to ‘lover of flies.’
As anyone who tries to dry
Amanitas will notice, the caps are prone not only to being brittle, but also to
quickly turning into gooey mush. And there is nothing that flies love more than
gooey mush.
Therefore, I concluded
that when the people of the wood were not brainwashed by secularized Christian preachers
(and they in turn by their baron masters), the mushroom was likely known as
‘the lover of flies’ or ‘mušmīle’. Incidentally, ‘muš(-a)’ or ‘house fly’
transliterates into English as ‘mush’. It is a sound that makes one think that
in the long ago the Latvian name ‘muš’ did not mean fly, but referred to the
mush or jellied soup that the cap of a fly agaric turns into a day or two when
left be.
After the caps dried, I
crushed them and rubbed them into a powder that resembled bread crumbs. I then
placed the crumbs of the mushroom into a coffee cup and poured hot water over
them, which I then mixed and let stand and seep for some twenty minutes or more.
A few hours before bedtime, I drank the brew, and waited to see the results.
During the first few times
after I drank the brew nothing much happened, exept proved (at least to me)
that the mushroom was not deadly poison to me. This allowed me to increase the
number of spoons of the dry powder that I added to my ‘mush tea’.
There then followed a
couple of dreams which distinguished themselves from my other dreams by presenting
themselves as a direct experience or what is sometimes called a lucid dream. In
one of the dreams, I was witness to a German soldier sans his rifle, running
down a country road. I was a sniper on a small hill trying to put the fleeing
man into my sights. My shot hit the man, but apparently only wounded him as he
kept running until he ran into a city. Somehow the dream let me know that the
name of the city was ‘Yelgava’, which is a city in Latvija about 41 km (25 mi)
south of Riga. Nowadays it is a bedroom suburb of Riga*. Next, I found myself
in a hospital, where the soldier had been placed. I was looking with a nurse through
his medical files. This is where the dream ended.
Yelgava (spelled ‘Jelgava’
in Latvian) was once also known by its German* name as Mitau. The origin of the
name is still being disputed. Some claim that the name of Jelgava derives from the
word jālgab (=jālgaV), meaning, as the link claims, "town on the
river”. Others say that the name comes from the German word ‘mittel’, that is to
say, a town of middle men. The latter appers
to compliment the name of Riga, which derives from ‘liga’ (=Riga),
meaning it was a member of a ligue of towns and cities. On the other hand,
Jelgava lies in the middle
of a plain that was once part of the Gulf of Riga, wherefore (before
the waters of the Baltic Sea retreated to its present location) the town was
likely located at the edge of the sea*. This makes it possible that originally
the town was called Litau (=German for Lithuania); and as the link informs, the
Lithuanians did not give up on their city until 1345, which date approximates
the time the German globalist (Catholic) invaders destroyed the Kingdom of
Jersika and Uppsala.
*A
similar change of topology is said to have occurred in Uppsala, Sweden. The three holy mounds
pictured in the link are said to have once been at the edge of the sea. The
rise of the land mass after the retreat of the glaciers about 12,000 BC was rapid,
which fact is hardly recognized by today’s historians or pressed by geologists.
Indeed (take a closer look at the topological link), Jersika, the capital of
the proto Latvian kingdom of Jersika, may once nave been a harbor city rather
than a city by the Daugava River.
Rememering our consonant
conversion formula (L=R;
V=B; V=D**; G=J), the name Litau may also refer to a city
of Livs. The
Livs*
were a Finno-Ukrainian people who had settled (as herders of livestock) in
Livonia before the Balts sought refuge there from the Viking marauders who were
victimizing the inhabitants of the Dniepra River basin.
*The
Germans occupied the territory of Livonia for about 700 years (1201-1918). **The Liv name for Daugava, the river that
cuts through Latvija, was Vaina, which makes for the possibility that its early
Latvian name was Daina, which I have translated elsewhere as ‘Jaunava’, but
perhaps should be read as ‘Dainava’ or ‘Donava’. ***Vaina translates into Latvian as the name
for scar or guilt.
All this pushing around of
letters, and topology, not to mention consonants, suggests yet other
possibilities for the origin of the name of ‘jārgab’ (=Jālgav or Ģērgav), for
example, lamb slaughterhouse or leather curing place.
Indeed, such a seemingly
far fetched interpretation of the topological map of the Baltics (surely
encouraged by Anatoly Fomenko’s groundbreaking theories about history), necessarily
blends with my theory that the (not so) ancient Kingdom of Jersika (=Jerusalem =
Jēruzeme) used to be a sister community of the ancient Kingdom of Langvedoc
(formerly Occitania)
in southern France, which just like Jersika and Uppsala was destroyed in the aftermath
of the Albigensian
Crusade. The Crusade was led by a pope (possibly a viking
expelled from Jerusalem/ Constantinople) from his regional residence in Avignon
in collaboraton with descendants of Vikings who had settled in northern France.
The one was after booty and property, the other after taxable land.
The amanita mush tea is
capable of loosing many subjective pathways not imaginable to orthodox
consciousness. Thus, on another occasion, I had just walked up the short flight
of stairs that lead from my kitchen to my bedroom, when I realized that I was
walking in a space of ‘empty air’. When I stopped to concentrate on the
experience, I realized that I stood in a cocoon of space that was different
from my usual experience of space. I felt outside of the latter. In fact, the
space felt so strange that for a moment, I entertained the thought that perhaps
I had died.
To prove to myself that I
was alive, I waved my hand in front of my eyes, but my hand appeared where it
ought to appear. I looked at the clock on the wall, and the dial of the second-hand
was moving as it normaly does. Yet I felt somehow separated and outside of the
time shown by the clock. It occurred to me that I had entered the ‘no space’ of
a mirror: An uncomfortable question came to mind: “Why did God bother to create
such a world?” Given the emptiness or Nothing I found myself in, it seemed like
a logical question. Since my bed was but a few feet away, I went to lay down;
and promptly fell into a dreamless sleep. Even so, the experience stayed with
me.
Some months later, when I
had made tea of what remained of my Aminita teapowder, I stayed up a few hours
(to let the brew enter my blood stream). Then I went to bed hoping for a dream
that would not be of the ordinary kind.
The dream brought me once
again into a space that was outside the sense of time. However, because I was in
a dream, I perceived the out-of-time space as a movement within a circle in
which two space-times moved about each other like the half-circles within the
circle of a
ying and a yang. I observed the movement as occurring far below
me. When the movements of the two spaces ceased, I found myself in a space like
that of an elevator shaft in which the elevator was a parachute descending.
Since I was located above the parachute and was looking downward, I was anxious
about falling into it and messing up the dream and my descent back into space-time.
Fortunately, nothing
ontoward happened, and I appeared to remain in control of the situation. At
some point of my descent the parachute disappeared, and I saw at the bottom of
the shaft waiting for me a taxi driver, but he was not sitting in a car on a
street, but in a canoe in water. I was then roved into a dark and barely lit
cave that contained a large lake, into which I then dived. As I swam, I became fearful
that I may drown. I then saw a large salmon colored piece of submerged flesh come
floating into sight. At that moment I awakened back in my body.
So? Why tell a subjective
dream from the location of orthodox space? For one, if those who have a near
death experience describe seeing their ghost rise into a shaft of light, ‘birth
into time’ (if that is what the end of my dream was about) had me descend a
birth canal presented as an elevator shaft.
Perhaps Einstein’s Theory
of Relativity regarding spacetime is not correct, and there is but a time that becomes ever
slower until it becomes a fata morgana within a mirror.
If this is so, then so
called ‘dream time’ is a misnomer, because it actually refers to dream space.
In effect, the ‘I’ of my nameless ghost lives in the space of a (my) body, which
manifests itself as anxious consciousness in the no-time space of dreams.Time
is the invention of an anxious mind that finds itsellf in a dead space. Though I cannot share with
others my body time, except perhaps through brief sexual contacts with my
beloved, the objects in my dream-space are interchangeable with others, as none
exist other than as images in a mirror, wherefore, as but a symbol.
In other words, much as I
may disbelieve it, the image in the mirror, when on its own, becomes a subject
(a photo image) that has no object. But for the discovery of the mirror and invention
of photography, the object would have no subject and would remain unknown to
himself. It is this image of the subject that Walter Benjamin (see EC573) perceives
as the fata morgana that city-zens (including Walter Benjamin himself)
misperceive as real. This real has no object but for the one that is itself: virtual,
(ultimately) fake,
and ever so destructive of the object* that is the reason of its being.
*Because
the ‘object’ is destined to become a mere phenomenon, its autonomous nervous system becomes critically
anxious and impaired. Indeed, the ‘exceptionalist government’ of the United States
of America perceives itself to be the heir of Catholic Rome, declares itself to
be representing the Court of a Secular God, and leaves God no alternative but
to resort to war that will return the ‘shebang’
to the wood.
