I Look Into a Triangular Framed Mirror and See

4 July 2008

My back is peeled open as a clean incision is made down my spine and the skin folded back revealing the whitish undertissue. In rows flanking each side of my spine the astral surgeon implants dozens and dozens - and ultimately hundreds - of small dime-sized platinum batteries.

The Voice explains: “You will need both the positive and the negative ions.”

I look into a triangular framed mirror and see my ether-body, which is composed of countless lights shaped like small precious stones. Resembling a coat of mail, albeit of bright, luminous colors, my ether-body is not shaped like a human form but is a flowing cascade, like a waterfall, in the spectrum of the rainbow. There is no end to this ether-body: the more I look, the more there is of it to see - up and down, as well as within. I understand that this is the work being done this summer: the reconciliation of my current self-concept with the integrity of my formless essential being.

I ask the mirror what the karmic roots of the misfortune in my present life are. In response, the reflection in the mirror overwhelms my senses, and I am now enveloped in it.

I am a European explorer in the early colonial period in woodland North America. I am in fact a bounty hunter, clearing indigenous people from the land to make room for white settlers. My men and I flush a young Native man, a ‘brave’, out of the bush. It’s as if we were hunting pheasant, which strikes my heart hard as that part of myself which had asked the question watches the scene unfold. The young man, who could not have been more than 19 years old, makes a break for the river, dives in and submerges himself for as long as possible, letting the current carry him along underwater. I order my men to catch up and kill him. I order them to kill any other Native people they encounter along the way. “Make the message loud and clear: There is no more room for Indians in this territory.”

The scene becomes less literal. The red bark of the surrounding trees peels off and stands before my mind’s eye, my dream eye. The red bark is suspended in the air. 000

When I awake I think of the red bark as red skin, as in hunting “redskins” like beavers. There was the remnant memory of an aspiration: “How many redskin pelts will I bring back to the settlement this time? The pride of a perverse kind of heroism was in that aspiration.

The image of the red tree bark extends and becomes a metaphor for the destruction of not only Native people but of the forests, and then the planet´s integrity, its balance. Disease is to the human body what the destruction of Native peoples and global warming, etc., are to humanity and to the planet. The two go hand in hand. If I am not karmically the spiritual reincarnate soul of that bounty hunter, then perhaps I am in this body carrying the soul debt of the transgressions of some major ancestral actions. A thought.

Also, my own skin is red and in the dream it was being peeled back like the bark of the tree. In Costa Rica there’s a tree called the Indio Desnudo. The Naked Indian. It too has a beautiful deep copper bark.