Blissed the F@*% Out!

I feel on top of the world today.

I got this aura of bliss surrounding me, and I am therefore suspicious. I can't help but feel that this newfound grace will in time congeal into a solidifying cube, as if some demon entymologist has sprung a trap, snagging me in amber. Exhibit A:

Homo Sapiens in Suspended State of Bliss, Convinced of its Perpetuity

Have you ever been the victim of grace and felt the urge to look over your shoulder to see if there's a camera hidden somewhere, looking to document the naivete of how you handle the newfound burden of bliss, as if you're being set up to see if you're worthy, as if you're being punk'd by God? We are all punk'd by God, by the way. And since we are all God, we have been punking ourselves since the get-go.

If only we could nail down the evaporation-condensation cycle of misery and ecstasy—we would all sign up for such a thing. Were you to know that the current happiness would be the payoff of yesterday's existential fugue state, and have your middle and index fingers on such a cycle's pulse, you would welcome it for all time. But the Great Watchmaker has wound His contraptions in a most mysterious way, and karma operates on an unknown time signature. I suppose that even God buffers.

But we should seek to be above such a loathsome thing as our own happiness. How selfish and animalistic, this constant pleasure-seeking we engage in. I was at a busy intersection, snagged inside my designer death-trap, when I looked to my left and saw a gentleman in a Tesla take a sip from a water bottle, his neck craned enough to suggest gluttony, evincing this craven need to hydrate, and therefore also a mawkish desire to stay alive.

If only you could smile through a bout of excruciating pain, and snicker against the visage of Death. You should like to hold a gilt frame around a portrait of despair, and weave lines of lace across a slaughterhouse window.

I want to snap off some of this bliss I'm feeling right now and pocket it for later, like a piece of a KitKat bar, or medieval currency. I want to upload this into the Paraclete's cloud storage and download it later for when I feel extra-suicidal.

I realize that I'm sabotaging it all by analyzing it. But if I keep chomping down on this condensed light, I fear there won't be enough left for the universe. I don't need so much right now. I can afford to tithe some out to the future.

Reading as a way to Satori

This all occurred on the wings of reading four books about a concept known as the subtle body. First was Gregory Shaw's excellent Hellenic Tantra, which concerns the Neoplatonic idea of theurgy, which itself concerns the concept and methods of drawing down God to one's own sphere of experience. In other words, it's the active principle of searching for divinity, or grace. Hunting down God with a spear in hand and warpaint bedecking my visage appeals to me. Plato and subsequent thinkers, Iamblichus in particular, held varying opinions on how this is done and what the vehicle for accomplishing it looks like. Theories abound, but as ye olde reliable Buddhist may say, Who cares how the fire started? Get outta the damn house!

Then I read Simon Cox's The Subtle Body: A Genealogy. This chonology of the subtle body started from Pythagoras and made its way through the Neoplatonists, the medieval Alchemists, the Cambridge Platonists, the Theosophists, the Rosicrucians, the Thelemites, with interesting stopovers at Sufi Islam and Taoism, which led me to read Henri Corbin's marvelous Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth and and an anonymous Taoist's The Secret of the Golden Flower, a small yet delightful powerhouse on meditation.

With twelve-hundred or so pages on the subtle body, I was now ready to commandeer one and fire it up for a test run. Had I known that the last twenty-five years of reading metafiction/magic realism authors would only bring existential angst, I would have swapped them out for these new chaps some time ago. That's okay, because as Eliphas Levi kind of wrote, We only have all Eternity.

So:

T-minus Eternity

My subtle body lay on the operating table. My hospital gown is bedecked with the fixed stars. I don't know which Aeon in aquamarine scrubs hovers over me, one of those Nag Hammadi dudes, eclipsing the overhead light, manufacturing a halo that bathes the rest of those present. He and the other celestial beings, also in aquamarine scrubs, go to work.

Why has the speculum ripped open my chest? I guess they have to go in through the front. Training wings, like training wheels, are meant to ease one into the Great Undertaking. I tried to scale Montsalvat in a single bound and ate shit.

Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth by Henri Corbin. This book shuttled me into the imaginal realm, where one of my feet has been firmly planted since birth. Zoroastrian/Muslim angels see to it that you go not blindly up Mount Qaf on your way to the magical city of Hurqalya. Facilitating my assimilation of this imaginal cartography of the additional mystical cities of Jabalqa and Jabarsa were my love for the music of Secret Chiefs 3—a mystical surf rock band with death metal guitars and Middle Eastern instrumentations—and my Arabian cyberpunk novel Angels With Engine Failure, which features the same cartography.

When I come to, I feel incredibly light-headed, not knowing if I'm meant to die, live forever, or am merely iron-deficient.

Someone once told me angelhood is conferred upon you only when you are willing to take flight for the sake of others. Silly me, I exploit my new appendages by doing loop-de-loops that satisfy my own base needs.

A flywheel between my ears spins and spins, back and forth gyroscopic, flirting into becoming a headache while slurring promises of ecstasy.

Then there is an alliance of knives. Reality begins to flake away. The patchwork before my eyes comes undone, the stitches of consensual reality loosening, tired from the commitment . . . sections detach from each other like segments of a sectional sofa, and between the segments, something inexplicable. Whatever I grasp is there, sure enough, but it belongs to its own window of editing software. There is no baseline background. The three-dimensional space before me corruscates like a flight of Escher stairs.

I always meant to take the red pill. Alas, my whimpy throat has always struggled with horse tranquilizer-sized capsules, so I smash said red pill with a hammer and snort enlightenment like a whore desperate for truth. There's the slight chance that the Aeons lace their red pills with fentanyl.

I've got every existing molecule on my side. Potential enemies try to swim against my current but get yanked into my centripetal pull, signing alliances against their will. Those intending to crucify me end up hoisting themselves up onto crosses, going to work with the nails on themselves, the final nail well nigh impossible when the only remaining limb is that which is meant to be nailed.

I singlehandedly invalidate the throwing of I-Ching hexagrams, the reading of tea leaves, the perusal of entrails, and the formations of birds. Divination is only for those who possess resistance.

Mercury, also called quicksilver, asks for my permission to disperse and help others. With a nonchalant wave of the hand, I allow it. Who am I to hoard all the grace?

The Secret of the Golden Flower provides tips on how to construct a diamond body in order to render everything good—in other words, how to make blossom the titular Golden Flower. Lengthy exegesis by Jung. I've tried ceremonial magick. I've drawn pentagrams in the air and circumambulated damn near everything. But novelist that I am, I prefer to go inward, being a visual person. Yes, visualization and meditation are it. At least for me. Golden Flower it is.

Turns out you can store bliss for future use

Quantum-currency is to crypto-currency what crypto-currency is to currency. Entangled assets assert ecstatic purchasing power, ensuring halos appreciate in all markets, bear and bull (and Leviathan and Behemoth), block-chained gains garnering grace against gratuitous granularity.

The Quantum-currency portfolio gets stuffed with assets mined by all the social-media boycotts, all the reading, the two-day fasts, the twenty-minute meditations, the cooking of one's self inside the alchemical furnace that is the jiu-jitsu room, all the reading, the anti-gossip marathons, the four-hour vows of silence, the three-minute stretches of chastity, the cutting-out of high fructose corn syrup, the shutting off of Netflix, the poo-pooing of politics, the negation of the ego, the prioritization of others, the selection of keto hamburger buns, all the reading, the emulation of George Costanza—

Rejoice, Bradley Vee, for the Philosopher’s Stone is the size of a boulder, and it's the very thing you and Hercules and everyone else get to haul up the hill for all time, if only you could stop complaining about it as if it were a curse and not a blessing.

Training wings off.

Thank you for reading Third-Eye LASIK.

Crushed Trachea Blues is a fun, literary murder mystery featuring suicide by jiu-jitsu, an AI Charles Manson, and lots of tacos. It is available in ebook and paperback.