The Televisionary Oracle (17 page)

The spectacle culminated in the early evening of the winter solstice. While the teenage daughters of the Pomegranate Grail’s fully initiated members took care of the young children, I was surrounded by ninety women from age twenty-five to eighty-six, each of whom was redolent with musky sulfur and dressed in a red silk gown. Their collected faces would have been shockingly tonic to behold even in a profane setting; each was the most poignantly weathered, soulfully crafted face I’d ever seen. Even the familiar visages in the crowd were streaming forth a flood of fresh revelations about the experiences that had gone into creating them. I was awash in what sometimes felt like a cacophony and other times an intricately coordinated beehive of telepathic impressions.

“May she know the power of those who bleed but do not die.” For a long time, that mantra cycled continuously, often in an almost inaudible murmur, periodically in a singing shout. All the while the women spun around me in the spiral dance, each rotating slowly while also flowing as a group in a choreography designed to mimic the ovum in its journey from ovary to fallopian tube to womb to expulsion.

At one point, the assembled magicians’ purr rose to a full-throated singing sound, and harmonies began to sprout into the blend. I felt the hairs standing up on the back of my neck and arms, and a zigzag chill whirled from the right side of the front of my neck all the way down to a spot below and to the right of my navel. Then, out of the shimmering cries, I found Vimala’s husky alto risking a dissonant harmony a fourth above the root of the chord. In the next moment, I felt a tiny explosion in that place inside my belly where the chill had landed. I gasped. I felt a nauseatingly sweet rupture of pleasure, and yet in the next moment it was eclipsed by waves of a strange longing radiating out from the tiny explosion. There was no doubt about what this was. I knew that for the first time in my life I had ovulated.

Thirteen days later, I was sitting in my classroom with Vimala and Cecily on the first morning of school after the holiday break. At about 10:30, as we discussed the tragic bifurcation of science and magic four hundred years ago, I felt another burst. This time I was prepared. The sanctified linen pad was in place to collect my first offering of blood.

I interrupted Cecily in mid-sentence and told her and Vimala the news. They shrieked with joy and hugged me as if I had just been born. School was dismissed for the day. That night my guardians gathered around me in a ritual of celebration. At age sixteen years and almost eight months, I finally had my menarche.

H
i, beauty and truth fans, and welcome to Drivetime University, coming to you LIVE from Persephone’s Rehabilitation Center
for the Ecstatically Challenged, where we eternally strive to keep you in touch with the birth of your grandmother’s grandmother, thereby flushing away any narcissistic self-doubt that might be threatening your ability to feel erotically aroused by silk, tigers, rainbows, umbrellas—and even the moon itself!

We’re your naive and crafty hosts for Drivetime University—the slippery angels serving as temporary surrogates for your higher self—and we’re proud to announce that this is a perfect moment. This is a perfect moment because the world is fresh, your soul is ingenious, and something very good is going to happen to you if you’ll only tell us what you want.

So. What
do
you want?

What?

You want to know more about the Drivetime?

Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to convey to you the nature of the Drivetime unless you’re already inhabiting the Drivetime.

Which might prompt you to ask, “How am I ever going to sojourn in the Drivetime if I don’t know what it is or how to get there?” Excellent question.

Another way to formulate the riddle might be to imagine trying to construct a sensitive antenna with the help of the very same airwaves that can’t be detected without that sensitive antenna.

But don’t worry. We’re not about to retreat into elitist secrecy or convoluted expertise. We won’t imitate some know-it-all guru or careerist scientist eager to protect the power conferred on him by his specialized knowledge. That would be against our religion.

So let us take a stab at explaining. Without, we hope, becoming so literal that we emasculate the magic.

The Drivetime, please recall, is neither the Waketime nor the Dreamtime, but rather both at the same time. It’s the place where you feel as if you’re dreaming, but also wide awake.

OK, so then what exactly are the Dreamtime and the Waketime?

“Well,” Nobel Prize-winning biologist Francis Crick might harumph at this point, “what you call Dreamtime consists of nothing more than the hallucinations conjured up during sleep as the brain flushes out metabolic wastes.”

And Waketime? “Well,” this macho thinker might pontificate, “what
you call Waketime is the objective material realm we perceive with our five senses and measure with our instruments, or in other words THE ONLY REALITY THERE EVER WAS OR WILL BE, THE WHOLE TRUTH AND NOTHING BUT, ALL ELSE IS ILLUSION AND WISHFUL THINKING, DON’T TALK TO ME ABOUT YOUR FATUOUS INFANTILE NOTIONS OF SOUL AND ASTRAL PLANE AND LIFE AFTER DEATH!!!!!!”

The derisive curse “asshole” is not sufficient, we feel, to respond to this idiocy. Therefore, permit us to reach higher.

Ass-soul
.

Don’t misunderstand us, beauty and truth fans. We love science. We wouldn’t want to have to live without antibiotics and computers and airplanes and velcro. We also love scientists, by which we mean the humble, curious, lucid, judicious seekers of objective knowledge who are eager to explore the possibility that there may be phenomena outside the reach of their theories.

But the ass-souls we’re talking about, like Francis Crick, are not practitioners of science. They are priests of
scientism
.

Scientism
is an intricate ideology supporting the disguised religion of fundamentalist materialism; an arrogant assertion that the scientific method is the sole arbiter of the ultimate truth; an absolute certainty that the metaphors of science deserve to trump all other metaphors.
Scientism
is an obsessive emotional investment in results that can only be perceived with the “five” senses, or repeated within tightly controlled experiments, or measured with instruments that have already been invented.

At least Judaism and Christianity have ten commandments. The zealots of scientism have just one:
Thou shalt have no other realities but the One True Consensual Hallucination known as Habitual Waking Consciousness
.

This shriveled dogma is now pandemic, though the shills for the cult of scientism would have us believe otherwise. They’re fond of promoting the idea that ours is a scientifically illiterate society. And it may be true that the flock is laughably uninformed about the chapter and verse of the creed. Many can’t name the planets of the solar system or say how many chromosomes constitute a human gene. But even the most simple-minded cult members cling with a fanatical fervor to
scientism’s core article of faith:
If you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist. If you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist. If you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist. If you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist. If you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist
.

Yes, there are infidels who
hope
that there’s a heaven, and who nurture a yearning for the existence of angels or auras or UFOs. There are dissidents who ache to achieve confident belief in the healing power of prayer. But even these would-be apostates have so deeply internalized the canon of fundamentalist materialism that they literally can’t muster a direct perception of the more ephemeral realities they long to contact, let alone carry on a lively communion with them.

Is it any great mystery that most people can summon no motivation to retrieve the adventures they have every night while asleep? According to Francis Crick and his fellow masters of reality, dreams have no inherent function or use, but are merely byproducts of metabolism. The events of the day, in this insane theory, are solid, substantial, and genuine, while night’s experiences are entirely derivative.

The average victim of fundamentalist materialism doesn’t ever have these conscious thoughts, of course. He doesn’t need to. It’s the ground of his being.

It’s no coincidence that during the same week, both
Scientific American
and the
National Enquirer
published articles which came to the same conclusion:
Dreams mean nothing!
In one majestic synchronicity, gross tabloid superstition and brilliantly rationalized ignorance converged.

Woe is us. Our sadness in the face of this travesty is boundless. Not that we’re going to challenge Francis Crick to a mudwrestle any time soon. We long ago gave up arguing with the enforcers of the One True Consensual Hallucination. Most of ’em are too damn fanatical and emotionally invested and, well,
unscientific
.

The science of the Televisionary Oracle reveals the coverup of the ages: that the Dreamtime is an actual place where you’ve lived most of your life as an eternal soul. It’s the primal realm where you find sanctuary between every one of your deaths and rebirths—and to whose outer precincts you migrate every night when you sleep.

Isn’t it curious to contemplate the fact that coming into this physical world is a kind of death? Whenever you materialize as a fetus in a new mother’s womb, you begin your exile from your more ultimate
home. When the alarm clock rings every morning, you recapitulate that death with less intensity, casting off your extra dimension as you shrink to fit this tunnelvisionary world.

In the face of our assertions, scientism’s enforcers might sneer, “Prove it to us with concrete evidence. Either bring us back a broken tailpipe from a dream car, or don’t bother us again.” And even aspiring televisionaries might be forgiven if they mourn, “But how could we not vividly recall our return to the ground of our being? Why does the rich hyper-reality of our nightly swims in the four-dimensional bath seem so tenuous, flimsy, unreal?”

To which we reply: for the same reason you don’t remember your birth, or your time in the womb, or the first two years of your life. Unless harnessed by arduous training that goes against the grain of everything you’ve been programmed to believe about the nature of reality since you were born, your conscious awareness doesn’t have the conceptual framework to translate Dreamtime adventures into the language of the Waketime. You can’t perceive what you can’t conceive.

But here’s the punch line, beauty and truth fans. You no longer have the luxury of forgetting where you come from. The Dreamtime isn’t in trouble—how could it be?—but our
relationship
with the Dreamtime is. And that’s a secret reason why the human race stands poised on the brink of collective suicide. We’re all desperately lonely for our home. If we don’t start rebuilding our access to it, we’ll end up killing ourselves to get there. For the sake of all of us, then, beauty and truth fans, you need to recover your intimacy with the Dreamtime.

On the other hand, you can’t afford to allow your love of the other side of the veil make you ineffectual in daily life. The point of the Drivetime revolution is certainly not a kneejerk reversal, overvaluing the Dreamtime at the expense of the Waketime. We seek to love and honor both realms, to fight for their reintegration.

To pull this off, Drivetime activists need to be as smart about the laws of the Waketime as the scientists are. And that’s most difficult. If you’ve been cut off from contact with the other side of the veil, as most of us have been trained to be since birth, you’re not prepared to deal with the consequences once the link is restored. Many new converts to the intoxicating attractions of the Dreamtime are tempted to lose themselves there. Widespread drug abuse can ultimately be traced
to a lack of more measured approaches to spirit.

The high priests of fundamentalist materialism like it that way. It allows them to keep their con game going. They’re eager to sell the fear that there’s no way to function effectively in the Waketime if you have an intimate connection with the Dreamtime. Delusion and irrationality lie that way, they assert. They practically forbid the propagation of role models who both commune with the great beyond and maintain a robustly logical relationship with the here and now.