Grab a Roadful of Demon, Part II

…When trying to pinpoint, or pigeonhole, the exact process of how the inner meets the outer, gives rise to it actually, but that’s a bit far afield from this present story, you’re only going to be able to come up with a working model, not what’s precisely happening. Something’s going on with us we can’t figure, but we can still try, because to understand something is to have it partly in hand. The ancients called the state I was in, a place between waking and sleeping, the crack between the worlds, as it’s a place of event, where, I learned in my ‘school days’ I could navigate to and from lucid dream, and, if the body’s curtain were open, I could induce a cataleptic trance, or sleep paralysis it’s called nowadays, and go out of the body. I call the state twilight, and there are many degrees of it, very find degrees, why it’s so easy to experience something in twilight and be dead sure you were wide awake at the time, and that it ‘happened’ on the material plane, or in broad daylight, to try to figure an event that happens in the outer world as opposed to an inner event. Here the two were mixed.

And it’s precisely here what my yoga calls the Hostile Powers mess with us, they being what the West calls demons and in India are called by many names, Asura and Raksasha to name a couple. Dream and twilight is their stomping ground, where they stomp on us figuratively speaking. I’ve mentioned elsewhere that the phenomenon of alien abduction would fit very precisely in this twilight state, on what Sri Aurobindo calls a subtle physical plane, ones so close to the material plane it’s easy to be fooled and think it happened in the outer world, and ones so close to broad daylight the physical body can be adversely affected, something I didn’t yet appreciate but would presently.

We tend to give reality only to things, beings, and events that are in the outer world, happen on the material plane, and assign mere fantasy to such in our inner world, but although much there is fantasy, not all is, not by a long shot. Many things there are as real as anything in the material world. Take demons for instance.

Although the presence standing there in the darkness loomed over me, menacing me with spectral suggestions of its evil intent, I wasn’t afraid. It would take a book to explain why, but suffice it to say, in all that inner exploration in my school days, I’d come face to face with these creatures, eye to eye even, and I knew their games, or thought I did. I rested assured in the knowledge it couldn’t touch a hair on my head. On this night, however, I learned something new about them, something a bit more scary.

Seeing I was awake and aware of it, it began to speak. It was a language composed of words, and I’d been a Classical Greek scholar in the university and so knew a bit more about language and its composition than either English or Spanish could tell me, but this language, these words, were the most horrible sounds a being could utter, and if a being can utter more horrid sounds, I think they’d kill you. They were tinged with fire and pointed daggers to you, were so steeped in hate, bile, scorn, and rage, your ears could not bear them, and I wanted to cover mine. I didn’t understand the words, not back then anyway, but it was obvious what it was saying just by the those hideous, ghastly sounds. I really don’t think our human language can gauge the depth of the hateful meaning of that speech, but you get the picture.

Then it stopped speaking, and the presence withdrew, and I breathed a sigh of relief, knowing, though, that it could do me no physical harm, like I said, as it was a non-material creature, and that I was secure being wide awake in the material kingdom, where I was safe from it. I felt a bit of pride at my relative lack of fear and ability to just take this in stride, at all the knowledge I had of these creatures and of things in general, and then suddenly a gushing flood of water came from around the corner of the barn and poured right onto my sleeping bag, and then it just as suddenly stopped. My first thought was that I didn’t know as much about them as I thought I did, as this one had just breeched the walls of the material kingdom. I was so surprised. I got up to look around that corner, and there was no trench or anything that would’ve made the water naturally come into my sleeping space, and it was only sprinkling, not raining, although I could see that it’d come a downpour while I was sleeping. My bag was not drenched, and I myself was only a little wet, but I had to crawl back into a semi-wet down sleeping bag and try and go back to sleep after a devil had just walked right into my living room, and I was cold as all hell if the devil wasn’t enough. You might imagine I was fit to be tied.

I took comfort in the fact the demon had done as much as it could to hurt me, and all it could do was make me wet and uncomfortable. Still, I didn’t know they could do even that, act on the material plane that is, without the use of a human or animal actor, and this new insight made for a headful of thought not conducive to getting back to sleep very quickly let me tell you, and with the damp bag I had, unable now to cover me from the cold, the sleep that did come was a fitful one. The next morning I was out of there at first light, and instead of going to the road and sticking my thumb out, I walked out of there like a bat out of hell, got as much distance between me and that place as I could.

I can still see it in my mind’s eye, that dry countryside and that long bend in the road with the police checkpoint sitting on it, the farmhouse and barn and those damn goats, whose atmosphere I might guess gave the demon more play, but what brought it there to me, now that’s the question to answer. Was it a devil of the place, the devil that haunts those lands, as they roam our earth like it’s their turf, or was it my own personal demon that rides my life trying to suck as much poison from me as it can, loosh the inner explorer Robert Monroe called it, poison it’s had a lot to do with getting me to emit, what it mounted my life for in the first place. Don’t get on your high horse and look down on me. Each and every one of us have a personal demon attached to the back of us, below our feet whispering horrible things, warping us to feed them, but that’s a story too broad for the sanity of most to handle and will have to wait for a more mature race. I’m just saying. To answer the question though; to have the power to shoot through the grivlen, meaning to cross from the inner into the outer and manifest something on the material plane, I suppose they teamed up, a roadside devil with the one always trying to get its hooks in me. The devil you say. Better the devil you know.