The Clay Head Benediction Read online

The Clay Head Benediction

  Marty Rafter

  Copyright 2012 Marty Rafter

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  I used to put on those earmuffs when I would mediate, the big heavy plastic ones, like the ones that people use at shooting ranges. As far as I am concerned, sensory deprivation is key to a proper meditation practice. I don’t go for the whole lotus position thing, or any of that other stuff, incense, candles, prayer beads, anything like that. I meditate lying down. That way I can hear the voices. There is probably a rationalist explanation for all of it, the voices. Most logically, it is my brain, devising little entertainments for itself as I fall asleep. That is the whole deal with the lotus position by the way, to keep from falling asleep. Normally the voices are conversations…banal ones about shopping, or gossip about people I don’t know. It is kind of like in the early days of cordless phones when the phone would be on the wrong channel, and you would hear little snippets of your neighbor’s conversations. When I was young, my parents moved into a house where the phone would ring without cause at all times of the day. We would pick it up, and no one would be there. Two hundred miles away, there was probably some fool putting on his shooting earmuffs and dialing in, messing around in places where he had no business, and playing with things he did not understand.

  For any normal rational person who understands that homeopathy is a fraud, and auras and the spirit world are all bullshit invented underachieving vegetarian baby boomers, this all seems incredibly stupid. I get that. It is stupid, but it is true. In fact, this whole thing is true. There is a whole body of literature, or more accurately writing, about people traveling around and seeing things in meditative states. In fact, if one were to spend a little time on the internet forums reading about meditation, he would find that the newbie questions about strange sights and experiences are pretty common.

  There is also this other thing, the machine elves. On the psychedelic drug DMT, a whole bunch of users report seeing the same thing, beings of light with the same message… “Create”. Amazonian shamans have been ingesting DMT in the form of Ayahuasca for millennia, and for them, it provides insight into the cosmos and the nature of consciousness, and all those other things that hippies like to talk about. Celebrities and dreamers in the West take it too, but like anything, you can only start where you begin. A shaman, who has a full time relationship with the nature of life to begin with, probably goes a lot farther than some guy with a backpack padding around city in overpriced sandals. I don’t know. That is not really my type of thing. I would however, like to note that it is incredibly odd, that there exists a drug that makes unrelated users the world over “see” tiny people bearing a message…And that, my friend, is a bona fide mystery.

  There are lots of mysteries, and modern people hate the hell out of mysteries. Fundamentally, that is what distinguishes modern people from the ancients. After their basic needs were satisfied, early people sought to find things that they did not understand. They did not really want the answer; they wanted to find what they could not answer. That is why their answers suck, and why it is so easy to dismiss primitive answers as illogical superstition. For example, do you believe, that a guy could build a boat that could accommodate two of every single animal on the entire earth, every one, and a whole bunch of food, and survive for forty days without the snakes eating the mice, and lion eating the guy, the two elephants didn’t get sea sick? There is a little display next to the elephant exhibit at the zoo that shows what one adult African elephant eats in a day, the food for two African elephants for one day wouldn’t fit in the back of a full sized pickup truck. See? Bad answer. But if the motivation of our early ancestors was to create more questions than they answered, it is a wonderful answer. One of early mans’ greatest impulses was to do something illogical for someone else to figure out. Particularly, because those who were able to accomplish the greatest mysteries were held in the highest esteem. I’m certain that Moses was a competent navigator, but if you ask the average person, they will probably mention the thing about the Red Sea.

  The existence of the illogical is foundational to the progress of humanity. Reason does not create, it retroactively explains the mechanics of what was already created, or fulfills the promise of imagination. Alone, reason is only a tool. Anyway, the point is, that I am part of a proud tradition that includes the Pharaohs and Moses, and unsurprisingly, lots of penniless men shuffling around on the cuffs of their pants in cities across the country, but like all of them, I have a message, and it is this: Your ancestors didn’t invent Santa Claus because it was fun to trick kids. They did it because at one point, it was necessary to open a tiny window of possibility in the mind. And in a rare person, that window would grow into a door, and then into a tunnel. Because, there is also a war… two or three types of war, really. I’ll probably get into it more later, but suffice to say now, that each side has allies that don’t even have the window cracked, and each side has leaders who have the tunnel wide open. And each side is so thick with double agents and spies that sometimes the leaders can’t recognize each other and a whole bunch of leaders are probably spies to, and you’re also part of it too, or at least you fill in carrying water to the front. In the Age of Aquarius, comrade, everyone carries water somewhere. But don’t worry; this isn’t some crazy story about lizard people or the secret bunker under the Denver airport. It is something else entirely.

  First I should tell you this. One day, when I was mediating as usual, I fell into a kind of lucid sleep. But the sleep only lasted a few seconds, and when I woke up, I was standing in the hallway of someone’s house, not some weird symbolic hallway, but a genuine normal hallway…one leading from the garage to the kitchen. There were cabinets on the sides of the hallway, and a couple of small unexamined paintings, and a low counter with keys on top of it and a handful of forgotten bills. The light in the hallway was off, but I could see clearly into the kitchen where a tall attractive woman of the anxious idle sort that is common in the nicer suburbs was talking on the telephone. She was really animated, and I just stood there for a few minutes, frozen… watching her. Her back was towards me, and then, she spun around, still chattering into the phone, and looked directly at me. I froze, but she didn’t seem to acknowledge my presence, and continued to chatter at the telephone. Then, I waited a few more seconds and walked into the kitchen. I stood there for a moment, and for a second time she looked directly at me, but did not acknowledge me, so I realized that she must have thought that I was someone there to work on the house. So, I walked out of the kitchen and into a nicely appointed television room.

  In that room, was a chubby teenage boy reclining on a beige overstuffed couch. His eyes were glued to the television. I greeted him, but he didn’t respond. So I repeated myself again, this time a little bit louder. He still didn’t say anything or look at me, so I walked over and positioned myself in front of him. Again, he did not acknowledge me, or even seem disturbed that I was blocking his view of the television. Then, very slowly, it occurred to me that he couldn’t see me. I walked closer to him, and waved my hand in front of his face. Nothing. Then I shouted. …Still nothing. No response from him. A rush of excitement coursed through me. I was invisible. Actually invisible. In a space where I had never been… and I could explore with total freedom.

  So, I walked through the house. It was huge, and new, and beautiful, tastefully decorated without a book in sight, except for the giant ones s
tacked on the coffee table in the main living room. Then I followed a wide staircase upstairs to the second floor. I glanced in each room, and in one of the larger bedrooms, sat a very old woman in a chair gazing idly out one of the windows. She was thin and frail with an uncomfortable expression on her face. I walked into the room, and again tested to see if I was visible. I got very close to the woman, and looked into her face. Her eyes had the vacant confused look associated with some kind of dementia, and I realized that even if she could see me, she was probably unlikely to be able to tell anybody. So, I decided to test my powers a little bit…very gently, I reached out and touched her arm. It was dry, and slightly cold, but she did not respond. So, then I put my whole hand on her arm, and very gently allowed myself to lightly grip onto her. I could feel the slight involuntary muscle response from underneath her skin, but still her face showed no recognition at all. Then I kneeled in front of her and