The Eight Days

Ebusus, where the serpent cannot live, and from whose soil the creature flees as from poison.

Rendered from Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book III.¹

Long before any voice was reported on the island in the winter of 1987, Ibiza had been understood as a place where something was said to dwell. The Phoenicians who settled it in the seventh century BCE knew it under a name later rendered Ibossim, read in one long-established interpretation as the island given over to a god.² The Carthaginians who followed made it something more particular: a sanctuary of Tanit, the moon-and-mother goddess, consort of Baal Hammon, to whom fertility, the dead, and the turning of the year were given.³

The evidence is not literary but physical. In the north of the island, in a cave at Es Culleram above the Cala de Sant Vicent, excavators recovered hundreds of terracotta figures of the goddess, votive offerings left across the centuries of Punic worship.⁴ The cave was not a temple raised to be seen. It was a hollow in the rock, entered, where the goddess was addressed and, in the manner of such places, was held to answer.

What the island was thought to keep, then, was a voice that belonged to no person, attached to the ground rather than to any speaker, female in every surviving figure, and credited to a goddess whose worship outlasted the empire that brought her. The detail is worth holding only because of what would later be claimed there, and by whom.⁵

He told the story rarely, and never as proof. By his own account, given years afterward in a recorded talk, the thing that happened to him on Ibiza in the first weeks of 1987 was best understood as a story about madness, because it was not normal, not even by the standards of how revelation is supposed to arrive. The history of revelation, he said, is full of a certain sweetness; his own experience had none of it. His natural skepticism had made it easy, for years, to say nothing. There was no evidence, only the telling. He asked that it be taken that way, as a story and nothing more. What follows is that story as he told it, rendered in the third person and reported strictly as his account, not as a verified event.⁶

By the time it began he was, on his own description, already living wild and already, by any ordinary measure, mad. He had walked away from his life in Canada in 1983, the advertising man and his family and his enterprise left behind in a single morning, and had drifted to the island and then to its margins. He was alone in a process he did not try to understand. He had assumed he was simply losing his mind at midlife, and the surprising thing, he said, was that madness was entertaining, the most interesting thing that had ever happened to him: a breaking-down, a deconstruction, a stepping-away from everything he had been.

He was living in a ruin. The house was perhaps three hundred years old, built over a cistern, over a well, over the water source, and its main rooms had collapsed long before when the water ran out, because where the water fails no one stays. He had first rented the intact house below, around 1984; above it stood the ruin, and the one part of it that still had a roof and walls had been made into a spare room by the people who owned the land. A great wooden door closed it, opened by a single heavy iron key of the nineteenth-century kind. Years earlier, before he had ever heard of Ibiza, he had doodled that key compulsively, drawing it over and over in the margins of everything, and now he held it in his hand and lived in the room it opened.

It was January the third, and the dark had come early, near half past five. He had walked up from the road along a path his own feet had worn into the hillside, returning from a rare free meal; he was, in those days, mostly muscle and bone, and ate seldom. His dog, a half-wild creature he called Barley, caught his scent and came running down to meet him, and the two of them climbed toward the ruin together. The room was small, a few meters by a few meters: a sleeping platform, a desk that was a board laid over bricks, and one wall of shelves, books on the left and jars of herbs on the right, all of it belonging to the man whose room it was, a poet and herbalist and maker of painted butterflies. A kerosene lantern hung over the platform, but it was bone dry, and there was neither money for fuel nor a way to fetch it; he kept the hours of the sun, and he was climbing the hill to sleep.

There was a light under the door. He had the only key. The room was locked, there was no other way in, and no one he knew would have come; he was the local madman, and people kept their distance. The night was black and full of stars. He called out, “Who’s there?”, which he later remembered as his first taste of irony, and no one answered. He put the key in the lock, turned it, and pushed the door inward.

The lantern that could not be lit was lit, and it was spinning. At the same instant the dog crossed the threshold and dropped, by his description, like a creature shotgunned at close range, and a voice spoke. It was not a pleasant voice; he imagined it, he said, as belonging to a cigar-smoking woman of a hundred and fifty-five. As the lantern turned and the dog fell and the voice came, his body broke open with water, water running from his head and his arms and his legs until there was a pool of it on the floor, and the fast loss of it was pain. Out of the pain the voice asked a thing that was not really a question. “Are you ready to work?” Then it told him to move the dog out of the way, and he dragged the animal under the desk, where it would lie for eight days without moving and without seeming to breathe, and he closed the door.

He noted the strangeness of his own obedience. He was, in the terms of the system he would later teach, a Manifestor, a man who would ignore anyone who told him what to do; and here he was, doing as he was told, like a frightened and obedient dog. The pain was intense but bearable. His skin had gone numb, as a limb goes when it sleeps. The voice gave instructions and he followed them. He lit the small butane stove, and as the flame caught, the hair rose on his neck and a hovering neon-blue light, about the size of a fist, appeared in the middle of the room. “Follow the light,” it said.

What followed, by his telling, was a ritual he did not design and did not understand. He put on a Buddha shroud that hung on the wall. The light moved to the shelves and singled out three books, a King James New Testament, the Bhagavad Gita, and a Stanford biology textbook, and he laid them on the platform with a leather chessboard and a coil of copper wire. He burned herbs from the jars on the stove until the small room filled with smoke, and he put on a cracked mask, a commedia dell’arte face split across the nose, so that the scene was complete in its madness: a man cross-legged in a shroud and a broken mask, in the smoke, the books inside the coil before him. The light rose to the top of the bookcase, to what looked like an orange crate, and he climbed onto the desk to reach it; inside were half-finished butterfly wings, and beneath them, as bedding, a newspaper. It was the Mallorca Daily Bulletin, and its front page carried the story of the December earthquake in Mexico: a man named Israel Diaz digging his pregnant wife from the rubble where she had been trapped for eight days, and saving her, and the child. He noticed the anagram folded into the name, IS-RA-EL, and he set the page at the foot of the bed.

The voice told him to put a particular chart, belonging to a man he knew, onto the burning herbs, and the paper sat in the flame and did not burn. He heard voices in the room, Spanish among them, that he could not make out. He was given a phrase to repeat, and when he had repeated it the paper went up at once and was gone, and he fell back exhausted, feeling that he was levitating, unable to feel his body touch the platform at all. Then the voice began to teach, and while it taught there was no pain. It told him, he said, the story of the beginning, a cosmology, the mechanics of things, the crystals of consciousness, the nature of being, and he had never heard anything like it and had never known himself so silent. It rained through the night, pouring rain, and he floated in it, neither awake nor asleep, without hunger and without thirst.

In the morning the voice told him there was someone at the door. An Englishman stood there with his girlfriend from India; it was the Englishman’s chart that had burned in the fire. The two had been on their way to France, had already crossed on the ferry, and had felt compelled, without knowing why, to turn back. The voice told him to let them in, and to repeat to the man exactly what he was told. He spoke to him of the crystals of consciousness, and then told him, as instructed, that he could give him the crystal that belonged to him, and to return that evening. When they had gone he drew, for the first time, a BodyGraph, the chart at the center of the system, the voice describing how to make it, where everything went and what the numbers were, while he held a pencil he could not feel.

That evening they came back. He gathered the same objects, put on the shroud and gave the man the second mask, burned the herbs, and sat across from him in the smoke, with no idea, he said, of what would happen. As he felt the man’s tension, a small, vibrating, three-dimensional white light came out of the man’s right ear, rose into the air, passed over his own head and into it, and the moment it entered him the man began to vomit, not gagging but a river of it. The voice told him to send them away. The woman went; the man would not move, and he dragged him out by the bedcover and put him out into the puddle in the courtyard and shut the door. Years later, he said, the man would claim that his Ajna Center had been stolen from him, and would tell him so, and would by then have spent time institutionalized. Asked once by a mutual friend what had happened, he answered not with an explanation but with a poem, which he called “Chase the Laughter,” and read it aloud at a village gathering because he had no other way to say it. Its lines circled the same impossibility the rest of the account does: “Mule, what he bore he never knew, and what he lost he could never see, and what he has left is up to me.”

The name came in those days. When he had entered the ruin, by his account, his name was Ra; after the encounter he was Ra Uru Hu, which he understood as a title, the uru being the white light he said he had seen ever since, a thing that moved and that he could, in a limited way, communicate with.

When the visitors were gone the process turned serious. Sitting with his back to the wall, his head was snapped back, far back, and three lives, as he called them, went into his body, into his chest, with a pain he compared to being shot, so that he could not breathe. Afterward he floated again and watched the thing inside him, and found that it answered, yes and no, up and down. On the third day, the hardest day, he woke to find himself, by his description, without skin, covered in scales, his genitals gone, a reptilian horror that lasted hours and then passed. That night the voice took him into the courtyard to a piece of cracked mirror and showed him, in smoky white faces, what it said were his past lives, hundreds of them across many thousands of years, until he found the procession boring. The centers of the BodyGraph began to speak to him from inside his own body, many voices, young and old, talking over one another. When he asked where the knowledge came from, the voice answered, “from the book of letters.” A decade later, on tour, a woman would tell him of a man who had gone mad that same January of 1987 and remained institutionalized, and whose last written words, in a journal, had been those same ones, from the book of letters.

The ruin, he came to believe, sat over an empty cavern, the dry cistern, and it was into that emptiness that what he called the design crystal bundle had come; he had been close to the source, taking it in through the neutrino stream, through the contact of the aura, as close as a man could be.

On the eighth day the voice told him to climb the mountain above the ruin. It was near midday. The voice said that it was leaving, and then it told him to stare into the sun, and gave him a mantra, and told him that the sun was his dog. He opened his eyes to the full sun and let the light burn down through them, and stayed there, and at some point he rose and started down the hill, and racing up to meet him came Barley, after eight days without moving or breathing or eating or drinking, wagging his tail, alive. And it was over.

He was not relieved. What came instead was the only depression he said he ever knew, the return to the mundane plane, the body with its weight and its hunger, the world full of fools, and a man with nothing but a vast and unusable knowledge and no way to speak of it. For about nine months he floated, sedated by it, trying not to be Ra Uru Hu. He tried to be rid of it. He burned everything he could and it would not leave him, neither the thing inside his body nor the changes outside it. His own mother, he said, did not recognize him, did not know his eyes; the texture of his skin had changed, and his voice, and his laugh, and those who had known him before and after could see it. He had been smart before, he said, and never a genius, and what came after was nothing but genius, and that, he insisted, was not him.

He told the story, in the end, only because the knowledge had taken root in the world, and he could not ignore where it had come from, however mad the circumstances. He cared, he said, about the knowledge and not about himself; the cult of personality was a dangerous thing, and people would do with the story what people do, making it holy or making it the devil’s work or making it nothing at all. He called himself a door closer, not the kind that keeps people out of a club but the kind that brings a cycle to an end. This was not beginning knowledge, he said, but end knowledge, the kind that comes at the close of a cycle and offers, for whatever time remained, a chance: to see how things work, to step out of the suffering of the not-self, and to find, at the last, the laughter. The story of how that knowledge arrived is the subject of this book. The man who said it was given to him in eight days spent the rest of his life building it into the world, and it is the building, more than the eight days, that the record can follow.