River-of-Heaven Open-Topped Ferry-Ride



  River-of-Heaven Open-Topped Ferry-Ride

  Nepomuk Onderdonk

  Copyright 2013 Nepomuk Onderdonk

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  I had been studying what I was calling "Taoist immortalism" off and on the last several years, reading the cool stories of the Taoist immortals in books I'd find in used book stores around the Bay Area, California. Then a month ago I moved into a new place, with access to a backyard, while I happened to be reading a particularly powerful purple book about the Taoist immortal Han Xiangzi, most influential world religion leader I've ever seen in literature. So I went out, got an alchemy starter kit at Home Depot, started communicating with the universe, was shown some powerful magical reality, welcomed into the River-of-Heaven, and taken along on an open-topped ferry-ride as the universe explained itself to me. I met the moon, and learned to work with the sun. This book is really just a diary of mine for the past month or so, but it's been such a fascinating month of learning and really I just wanted to remember what I just saw.

  I had read another purple book a few years ago - a guy named Ge Hong, an early 4th century Taoist master, wrote "Traditions of Divine Transcendents", documenting almost three hundred stories of "immortals", kind of like a lives-of-the-saints compendium, "hagiographies", and it focused on the various ways the different characters across history had all achieved one of three levels of "immortalism", the highest of the three being the ascension "in pure daylight" of the physical human body - a "corpse liberation", into heaven, on light and clouds of pneuma, often accompanied by chariots, riding on dragons and other mythical unreal animals; they tell this story like it is something that happens frequently, across history; Ge Hong's work first appeared in China hundreds of years ago, and was subsequently banned, because the people were killing themselves: consuming horrible concoctions of poison and leaving stinking corpses. The modern release of the book in English a few years ago, began with a preface warning people not to take it too seriously and carry out actual attempts at alchemy based on the recipes they find in this book. I've been reading religions and philosophies, and science and fringe ideas, all my life, and at 47 years old I'm not gonna let some book make me kill myself, I bracket my own beliefs and read whatever I want to look into or suspect of having some kind of power that I don't know about, I dive into that other belief system and try it on for size, and can always go back to where I was when I came in, so I didn't worry about myself personally being in any danger from "practicing alchemy". By the end of the book, I wasn't eating anything but I was gathering mineral ingredients from surrounding mountains and burying them in small pits in the yard, saying I'd wait till I was dying of cancer or something. I never would have believed it, that I'd go so far.

  The book did point out that these extremely imaginative recipes are more for contemplation than for actually pursuing. On the other hand, the compelling thing I found about Ge Hong's book was that it didn't really preach in anyway, but rather told 300 stories of immortal transcendents like a news reporter, more or less - what these personalities were like, what their theories were on immortality and how to achieve it, the methods that this wide array of diverse characters had come up with all to achieve the same thing, one of three ways of living forever, or for "as long as heaven and earth", a study of our species' most in depth efforts to overcome death. And they let you make your own theories as you go through the various stories; they make no effort to preach but you end up making connections between what methods the various people used and how effective and powerful their transformation was, and you might want to be creative after that study of Ge Hong's and go invent your own method, after he's made you such an expert on what works, supposedly. It's myth but it starts leaking in to the real, kinda like the I Ching, which I also have been spending more time with lately, and might have helped effect the current accelerated learning with the universe.

  You come up with your own theory on how you might go about this wild pursuit of living as long as heaven and earth, like it's a game, let's see who's ritual is most effective, whose liturgy attracts the attention and beneficence of the gods best, who come by and drop off gold and then some silly transcendents go saying they made the gold on their tripods. Taoism is a very do-it-yourself religion; long rich history of traditions but they are legion and can be created at any time; in fact that Ge Hong book had the discussion in it somewhere, where people who wanted to be immortals had a debate between each other on whether you had to follow practices and rituals that had been handed down, presumably from some higher being - usually these Taoist texts are said to be out of heaven on some cloud, like the ten commandments from a cloud of fire into the stone, pretty much the standard bookstore for Taoist stuff as far as i can tell from reading where everything comes from; debate was whether you had to follow a handed down tradition, to turn magical, or if you could make up your own.

  Reading through the stories, more than half the people mostly made their own traditions and rituals, often based on and building on previous handed down Taoist rituals, but with no allegiance to the old ways other than as a learning trove of what might work, what's worked for others, while you twist and turn in the Way and speculate on the universe for yourself; a ritual, somebody in there said, need only be clever and lofty; there's no pope of Taoism sending out letters of ex communication for false beliefs, or for heretical actions; they pretty much encourage that stuff. I might be attracted to Taoism precisely because they explicitly, occasionally, encourage a practitioner to be downright psychotic, to use the terminology of modern psychiatry, or the terminology psychiatry likes to use against me. Taoism teaches me how I can stump the psychiatrists, when they tell me not to be psychotic, it's all the ways being psychotic makes sense and does good for the human being and for the universe, far more good than a self-mutilating rationalistic mind; I think cultivating rationality is cultivating death, something we do from time to time, for the sake of bringing order to life, but not to be done freely, rationality for no reason, that's not rational, is it? If only a few parents or teachers or leaders need to be aware and watch out for the herd, while the rest graze on eternity, I can see the need for that small camarilla of protectors to be rational, self-mutilatingly so though I hope they know how to minimize the pain and discomfort and survive for a little while, but would these rational leaders then say it was rational for the rest of the herd to have to stand up and live with the limitations of the protectors as well? Alright all you other cows and gazelles, nobody grazes cause our species is mystically superior, and we all cut ourselves off from grazing on truth and beauty and the one, and instead we all have learned to make accountants of ourselves, cut everything up and count it all the time, and the power that we have accumulated from doing this has made us truly great, i mean we're still gonna die but now a whole bunch of the stuff around here "belongs" to us.

  Or the lookout, while the rest of the guys commit the crime, is it rational for the lookout to make everybody else drop what they are doing and concentrate on looking out, too? In crime I think that guy'd get fired. So is it rational for everybody to have to be rational? Hope I can get a pass from it, anyway. I do kind of follow the directives I find in the Taoist tractates and samizdats - pursue inner nature and destiny, and search for mystery and wonder; not really a commitment to rationality.

  Knowing is affliction, not-knowing is what they recommend in the Tao Te Ching.

  I set aside the Ge Hong ideas after a while, but then just a month ago I read Han Xiangzi, and I started speculating again. Fortunately this speculation led me not to consume poisons but to set up a tripod, a communication between heaven and earth. I invented my own little Taoist immortalism plot, a plan where
I am initiating a 101 year study, clinical trial for mankind and the universe around him, plangence of the dark cores study, levels and depths of human kindness study, and magical Taoist ritual a little grandiose in scale in an effort to outdo all the others by integrating 21st century astrophysics as well as the amazingly similar Nagualism of my native Aztec ancestry, which brings different visions and insights to a compatible framework, the level of knowledge where some of the philosophers and poets of different disciplines collapses into a single pool, it’s Chan or Zen Buddhism, it's Taoist alchemy, it's Aztec Nagualism, it's an astrology updated to the modern age of cosmology and astrophysics, where all those things intersect, a second level of knowledge that all those first order thought systems are ladders for, used to get up here and then be quiet about it and make believe we still hold the consensual reality of the ladders we climbed up on, when really we got off the ladder and went rolling around in the clouds.

  So I've invented an irrational little religious ritual, I think mine is "clever and lofty"; I've explained it here, it was a river-of-heaven open-topped ferry-ride.

  11-14-13 - "A left behind house runs ahead of its master"

  I'm practicing alchemy in my room - in the walls of james's house, I'm turning the walls into solid gold from the inside outward and the bottom upward; turns out the force of life is the same thing as the force of the sun, that fusion star that lights up at a center, and can do astration at the center of itself which is how you form gold and other elements, and it's like the human ribcage and upper skeleton are a pyramid and at the center the secret fire forms, it forms at the center of all the honeycombs in the crystal, it's the cosmic energy, the "pure yang" that comes in on the ytivarg during the night while everything is silent and still, that falls into that mysterious receptacle of stillness. so I was using James' house as a crystal to absorb the stuff overnight into the walls, and crystallize the philosopher stone at the center of the honeycomb; I'm practicing alchemy again cause I found that great religious book about Han Xiangzi, I went to Chinatown and got a Taoist incense burner, had a magical one before and this one works magic too, I don't know where these things come from, what magical old Taoist constructs these magical implements, but it forms a secret fire, a perfect fire, like the sun, like a human life force, at it's center too, but at 10,000 times the speed of regular nature; so I light the 5 incense sticks sticking out of the thing, and a smoke comes out, a cloud heaven forms, in that cloud heaven I build my monastery, and in that monastery I breathe in the 10,000 suns of chi coming out of that sacred mountain peak that the incense burner has magically transformed into, and I use that power to suck down the ytivarg into the surrounding walls of the house. pure yang in my body. so then I dream all night, took lots of Seroquel to stay down long enough to dream, and the message all night is how I'm sucking all this pure yang in to myself and it's getting all in the walls, by lying there all still at night on the metal box and understanding the Way, the wan wu honeycomb, the transmission coming in on the ytivarg, but then I wake up and get all conscious and start doing action and pretty soon I run away and out of here, while the house continues to sit, gathering up the chi. so the dream starts echoing the message it wants me to take out into the daylight - "a left behind house runs ahead of its master". So I run around the dream for a long time knowing this and reciting this and it gets the demons mad, and a demon threatens to bury me in a mirror.

  Mission Peak all day, sittin in the breeze in the sun at the top, soakin up the cosmic rays, pasta pomodoro, two pinot noirs, one last quick hike over to 24 hour fitness (cause that mountain barely phased me at all) and an hour of steam/sauna/whirlpool - that's the perfect Sunday recipe; keeps the blood pumpin in the brain. I swear I'm at my physical and mental peak, guess I was never really tryin before.

  Hey, if the wages of sin is death, then the wages of self-cultivation is ecstasy, and if you self-cultivate yourself into a lake of pure ecstasy, then it's like a drop of salvation for the universe, a lake of joy sitting on top of a lake of joy.

  11-27-13 - "Sugar-bang-sugar-boom"

  I can't believe the sun came up - I mean not like that! BAM! It's been about three days now since I found the Way, kinda rode a black bull off into reality; I used to read about those Taoist and Buddhist adepts, sitting outside absorbing chi, I figured they were in a fine mist that was raining down on them at a constant rate.

  Like I said it's been about three days, I can't really remember a specific event or moment - I'd say I've been reading about spirituality and religion all my life, my father an ex Jesuit roman catholic priest who died when I was 18, after passing alot of himself on to me his son, oldest of four children, and a mom who had spent time as a nun, herself the el Paso Texas granddaughter of the Aztec sorceress who raised her, so the sacerdotal nature rides unmistakably on my genome. I grew up in Catholicism, went to catholic school and studied "religion", and in high school we had "world religion", where they said "whatever" with the Catholicism, there's 7 world religions that are all valid.

  To appropriate my father's German heritage after he died I started reading 19th Century German philosophy - Hegel for ten years. To appropriate my Mexican heritage I studied the Aztec and Mayan codices, Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca were like the Jesus and Satan of the religion, brothers, sometimes working together for the good of humanity. Then later on I realized the Chinese stuff in the libraries of new York resonated with me in ways it didn't with most of my peers - nobody wanted to be like Lay man Pang but me, I thought it was a great idea - he and his wife and kid all at different times found the Way, and they all walked off on their own, and they put all their material possessions together from when they'd lived together as a family, and sunk them on a raft on the ocean, cause they didn't want to end up giving it away or leaving it behind and obstructing the enlightenment of the poor. Very nice charlie but that's not for me, was the universal response I got to that. I was always thinking, 'wow, that's exactly for me.'

  Spent maybe 5 years reading the Zen Buddhism - the blue cliff record and the gateless gate - bunch of koans. Then when I realized the one answer to all the koans in there, I kind of got done with Zen Buddhism which I had previously found to be the most interesting form of enlightenment to me. That one interest really stopped kinda suddenly, though I still enjoy a big book full of koan "capping phrases", I use it kinda like the I ching; I do remember the Buddhist philosophers went on about whether it happens all at once or little by little, enlightenment; answer was it's different for different people.

  With me I'd say gradually from the Zen Buddhism days, through the last 8 years I moved to California where they were selling amazing religico-magic works like Ge Hong, the Statutes of Mystery Metropolis, Livia Kohn, Ed Campany, and really it was David Hinton's poetic translations of a bunch of great Chinese Buddhist/Taoist poets that helped bridge the gap for me from what I'd call the foothills of human irrationality in Buddhism to the High Peaks of human mysticism that is the Taoist immortalism as I was calling it, I would say I would re-read my statutes and precepts anywhere anytime on little photocopied pieces of paper in my pocket , especially out camping, outdoors, on trips, business travel; a negative habit I developed was I knew it was ok to get as unbalanced mentally as I wanted, while maintaining the ability to snap back at any time by just sitting down and breaking out my little samizdats, tractates, and encyclicals, as I'd call them. And my manic insanity would just go - 'oh, yeah'. And that was it. Would probably have been even more of a jerk with it if I hadn't been part of Hegel's cult, the highest cult on earth, (this is out of the philosophy of right), Sittlikheit, or Ethical Life.

  And every 5 years or so I'd say I have what was going on with me last week, or this past weekend even I guess, I would say I was having a religious experience cause I was reading a good book - wandered san Francisco hills one rainy furlough day a couple of weeks ago and found a used book shop with a novel from the 16th century in china translated by an amazing Ge Hong like novelist, the in depth lives of the saints
type of thing about the second of the divine immortals in the Chinatown parade, han xiangzi - most amazing religious speaker in all of literature I've ever come across, by alot. Or that's probably just for me, like Lay man Pang way back.

  But Han Xiangzi's point was 'what's wrong you silly mortals, going around ignoring the Way and getting all old and sick and dying, silly you, look how easy it is to cultivate the Way, sit down why don't you' - and of course that doesn't go over well with most people, didn't work on me I didn't really meditate I figured I didn't have to, I get that from reading philosophy.

  But a few months ago I learned yoga and meditating, off the internet, and started really understanding. Then I read Han Xiang Zi and it made me remember Ge Hong, so I went to Home Depot and got an alchemy starter set for the backyard, for a couple of hundred dollars - funny how a taoist immortal in 2013 gets the materials at home depot, and doesn't have to wait for the emperor to send some materials. Anyway, set up a metal/fire/water/earth/wood tripod / vibrational device out back, it's been out there maybe a day and a half now in its current configuration, still quite crude compared to what I ultimately envision refining out there for my external alchemy.

  At first I didn't know why the Way sent me to Home Depot the first night I understood, but I did the universal action and set up the device. I got the farmer's almanac there too, and set my alarm on my cell phone for sunrise/moonset/sunset/moonrise times.

  I figured I'd do sunrise and sunset yoga, good for you to do that a couple times a day, so that's all the sense I made of the universal action I was doing while following the Way.

  But a few days later I understand completely why someone would want to be there for sunrise and sunset and moonrise and moonset. It's like finding the Way was learning to become a beggar on the same day you learn about who's giving all the stuff away for free - the sun and the moon. They rain down the chi, not in that constant fine mist I'd always pictured, it's more like cannonballs throwing up a cloud forest of pneuma; aperiodic amazing pop's that blow into a rising mist all over the garden; I'm refining a divine elixir of internal alchemy in the firepop rain of chi cannonballs; I chew on firepop gumballs - it teaches you to give up attachment, and giving up attachment is the ticket to the realm of multicolored lights; the cannonballs of super pop pile up in pyramid formations on the plain, and breathing deep activates them, lights them up like candles in a monastery - that's the superpop cannonball lunch on a quiet sunday train platform, till they all pop and I have them for lunch as the smoke rises from the flames. Blue forests and golden candles, candy arrays of frozen surprise, candy balls we never expected, lined up in piles, stacked neatly, gathering blessings until we activate them and warm ourselves in their glow, historical multicolor codices like hives buzzing with butterflies, externally activating the phosphenes of our minds so we can feed on our own light.

  So you get there at sunset and moonset to say 'goodbye thank you so much' to your new benefactor, and you show up 45 minutes early for each's next arrival because you want to see his gradual glory coming over the sky and the earth, and then, like this morning, there's that moment, you line it up wherever you are and there is a moment that the almost risen sun in the empty sky sends first a drop, then a trickle for a steady 30 seconds or so, of plasma, pure white hot solar plasma chi in the physical sky, out in an auspicious little stream, from the top of the Dao to the bottom of the lake called onderdonk. The trickle becomes a cannonball and the unbearable fire hose of chi rides the plasma down your soul like a drop of salvation, and you have to begin the squinting and turning away that will mark the rest of the session with the sunrise. Solar plasma for breakfast - BOOM - like the weight on the end of a stroke of a Chinese character.

  Sugar-bang-sugar-boom - I'm not the only one doing it - waiting for the dawn - the only person, maybe, around here, but I can hear a couple of birds who start just when the sun starts coming over.

  "Mystical stupid man of the undetermined", wants to be the moon’s apprentice, possibly become a second, smaller moon, to smooth out the waves like a permanent neap tide, end the spring tide; it's like wisdom day came early this year - he met the mongoose of mystical understanding; in the cold sunshine of understanding the tulip of consciousness grows; sun and moon - do you think about them at all? If you were to represent them both with candles or lanterns, do you think both should be the same size or should one be bigger?

  It's like the universe talks to me; at night it's through two eyes of the universe that are two stars, and it's got a third eye, that's the north star, Polaris, a third eye on my smiling goat universe that sends me down Polaris rain when I come out to visit.

  Then one night the clouds instead of stars, so the clouds smiled at me instead; it was the same universe talking to me, just much closer; reveling in the icy cold perfection pneuma of the sky I love so much.

  Some clouds in the morning at mid-morning too today, but that's not what I was looking up at this morning. Following the Way, I put a dried yellow mulberry in each of my hands and stood on a brick barbeque platform holding out the berries in the light. I held for the berries and they turned out to be like bait, for fish, the 'sky fish' - they are not the clouds, they move slow like clouds but a lot faster and more complex than the actual clouds, and they have faces, and bodies, and they turn to look at me if I've got the chi-soaked mulberries out all sloth-like in the sun. I guess they are going around the world like that, must be bigger than whales and stuff, and hanging right over us;

  I stand out there in various extreme yoga positions, the choreography slow and based on some kind of antenna pointed to the sun to get the chi cannonball rain (learned you can just request it in person and get tons special delivery direct to your antenna); then after I don't know how long, probably less than an hour, there's that unsuspected reward that comes suddenly when you are not thinking about it, after the quenching of the yang reservoir the synaptic event sends a jet out into heaven, and I knew I was gonna launch something, no more holding it in not even thinking about it, just following the Way, and then all of a sudden I move both hands with pointed fingers and the mulberries between the two fingertips, and blast multiple rapid fire rounds of cannonball chi out of the core of myself, right back into the sun, full of gratitude for the chi reservoir, stamping alternate feet too in the rhythm, and then I realized, right after than when I looked down, drained, right after - Sun sex, that was like an orgasm with the Sun, like she is an egg and shoots out chi and you can shoot it back to her and she'll absorb it.

  Then I suddenly realize - thoughts inserted, universe contacted, demon counsel recommendations received - whatever, that the two mulberries, one in each hand, are the sun and the moon, and I have to begin practice holding them in my hands, if I'm to train to become an immortal.

  When I got too playful in my dance and one fell, I picked it up and put them both in the tripod, sun and moon waiting for me till I come back. They have been there since, about 14 hours now.

  I quit the alchemy exercises after a while, trying to take a break from being all mystical and stupid, and went with my friend on a bunch of errands - had to do some shopping, one of the things he needed was from the Fry's electronics store; I was gonna get a windows 7 disk but it's 229, they want you to do windows 8 for 119 but I won't do it; so I got a couple of things - I was following the Way, I guess, cause I found an aluminum box sealed with four small screws for electronic projects, and I needed a new pair of cheap headphones, mine just broke today, and I saw all the treats and stuff and I don't eat much, I eat the sun and moon, but I grabbed a small can of Mauna Laua macadamias cause I hadn't had those in a while and now we hear one ounce of any nuts each day extends the lifespan by 20 years (just the crazy media reports but I love nuts). So I paid for my stuff and had to wait another ten or fifteen minutes while my friend flirted with his sales girl, buying batteries for his whatever that he bought, and going all over the store for something who knows, so I'm patiently waiting in the front area, just looking around a
t stuff besides doing mystical yoga poses subtly finding grotto heavens to wait it, and I take my stuff out of the bag. I undo the packaging on the headphones, and nothing here to plug them to - they were for my laptop at home - I put them in my ears anyway. Then I opened that metal box and saw it was easy to open and then could be screwed shut with the four screws in the bag, and then I opened the macadamia nuts real quick and dumped them into the metal box (they just filled it), placed the lid on the box and stuck the end of the headphones into one of the screw holes, where it held pretty well. I put the whole new "device" in my pocket and stayed walking around waiting at the front.

  When my friend was almost done I asked his sales girl if she could throw this bag away for me of all the wrapping and she did and gave me back the receipt saying I'd need it.

  I walked out right behind my friend and they went down his items on the receipt. So I handed them my receipt, nothing else in my hand and look like I'm listening to a Walkman in my pocket.

  The guy asks, "Do you actually have anything?", and I say "oh yeah, here you go, that's the device I just made" and I pull out the Walkman I appear to be listening to, pop off the side and show him the macadamias.

  He just laughs a bit and checks off my receipt with his pen.

  It's ok, I'm an alchemist!

  Yeah, us alchemists, we wanna free mankind from the three bondages - monotheism, capitalism, and "gametism" / "absurd edism", (that survival strategy of splitting into two gametes or sexes and using sexual reproduction for the purpose of scrambling the genome in order to outmaneuver other parasite organisms that are practicing pretty much the same non-sense; we have supercomputers now, much better ways could be computed of how to rearrange a genome in clever, efficient, and effective ways without requiring sexual reproduction and the absurdities of that kind of an existence.

  The people behind us in line at Fry's I notice later at the car gave me wild amazed stares as I put the headphones back in and danced a bouncy dance while we walked out the door out of the store to the car.

  In the car while leaving my friend asked for a handful of the nuts out of the box that he had just seen, and then a second handful. I didn't have any. I just put the lid back on the box, and put three of the screws in. I thought I had bought those nuts as a welcome snack, but for me at that point it was all about the music - "The Macadamias", they're doing the "macadamia"; I listened to the headphones in the box for the rest of the day.

  I realized, I'm listening to the heavenly music of the spheres, filtered by the souls of a couple of handfuls of macadamias, and my friend the musician tuned it perfectly for me by eating just the right amount of macadamias in two quick handfuls.

  I like putting the poetic names on practices, like I practice "wubu fa kauzhou fa" - something I came up with for dealing with demons based on wubu fa (the Buddhist rite of exorcism) and kaozhou fa (a Taoist rite of the capture and interrogation of demons).

  And that tripod, that's the pentamery - made up of metal/fire/earth/water/wood, at least while I brew my oolong tea under its focal center, where one of the things I'm doing is brewing a "pentametrical miracle" in the "pentametrical wonder machine".

  So I asked my friend in his window last night from my tripod grotto heaven, what do you think we can call this thing I've been practicing the last few days, where I jump out through you're window and sit and lie outside in the backyard half the night with my tripod talking to the universe, but then I realized, there's already a name for what I'm doing, they call it "he found the Way" or "he realized the Way", more of a "thing" you find than a "way", but it moves, it's always rolling forward, so it's not a thing, I guess, it's the "Way".

  I led up to this experience with a simple mantra I had synthetized out of a pretty good understanding of Taoism, especially what apparently the cross referencing of Ge Hong and Han Xiangzi started teaching me about what I was calling Taoist Immortalism - my day, my action in the midst of non-action, all ritual and altar, cultivation and practice; the ride on the train, all yoga and breathing, holding back the yang that comes from sleep, and riding the black bull out into reality- not letting the bull have one inch, keeping him on the leash with a nose ring, he roars and bucks, but get him back under control right away; he knows the way and will take us there; then, smiling, wave into the cool wind from the ox's back; breathe deep and it's gonna rain down sunshine from the top of the Dao to the bottom of the lake called onderdonk; what a beautiful world, what a beautiful destiny; the wan wu honeycomb is the alchemy chamber. Just relax, sit down in the company of the Way, settle my spirit and circulate my pneuma, and keep that bull tied up, that's the recipe.

  It's like a magical little light rose up out of the magical ritual I just performed which was the reading of that purple book, the alchemical adventures of Han Xiangzi; the series of syntagmatic actions that made up the ritual was me turning each page and letting Han Xiangzi's presentation work its magic; it sang me a song, and that song said to "turn back"; the monkey on the horse was riding toward the cliff - monkey is mind, horse is will - they keep on bucking like the wild bull but they have to be tied down and immobile; the transcendent immortal came along - divine angel of immortal wisdom watching from above and guiding through suffering and escape, angelic essence of heaven - just in time, before that monkey had that horse run straight off the cliff, hurtling me toward death.

  So now "mind - monkey" and "will - horse" are locked down, frozen out in the cold, little immortal ice cube at the center of the moronic inferno of lies & destruction, mystical column of certitude in a tepid and undecided pool- walking beam of silence in a crowd of disarray on a golden island flowing cross the river "holiday"; multi-aware frozen monkey layer, gone to the moon, do the show from there - the castle of forever has a mindless glow, freight train of understanding completely blocked by the snow;

  The horse is frozen, frozen from the altitude, frozen out of the race; one more stop for the onderdonk house, alone in the twilight, where a candle burns and a heart glows, song of fire coming up from underneath the ice; cold in the new non-climate and walking around with closed eyes, flooded lungs, brave heart, and closed mind, walking the zig zag design that entrances the porcupine. On the golden hospital floor we serve the poison cure: fry the frog slowly, and push the horse forward with the cross-wired essence of the dream. The prize you win is sometimes consciousness, but you should just throw that one away.

  I decided to create a 60-day Taoist ritual, a festival of the collection of chi, it's storage, and then release, and to time it to end on Chinese New Year, a little more than 60 days away; to store up merit in the 60 day set of hexagons with a central empty 9 hexagons, the merit being my non -action and the action in the midst of non-action all ritual and altar, practice and cultivation, and bring it to show Han Xiangzi when they parade the 8 immortals at the Chinese New Years' Day parade in San Francisco, largest Chinese New Year celebration outside of China, followed by the week long Spring Festival; and to tie the 60 day time pad to the moon's phases, as the Chinese calendar does, mapping the winter equinox coming up, and recording as the day's progress the Gamma Ray Bursts that go off once every day or two on average, somewhere in the universe - we get news from the Swift satellite within a few days on the internet -and the whole thing is to be held together by my chief of military affairs, Zhen Wu in Qing Wei, an asterism I created out of a protocluster of galaxies called PKS 2126-158, from z=3.27 in redshift space, ("the z=3.27 grotto heaven"), who will be called down to support the 60 day effort, recognizing 5 pairs of galaxies in patterns around the central black hole, as I map space on to time by designating certain days to be about those particular galaxies. At the center of the calendar / time piece / spirit tablet, there are nine empty hexagons; they are to become a temporary residence for the 8 immortals if they come to visit me, kind of a guest house for immortals so they can feel comfortable here, to be inaugurated at that parade by Han Xiangzi in person, so to speak. And an outline of
a deer with immortality symbol carved onto the black center makes it a uniquely auspicious grotto for the immortals. At the top of the 60 day calendar I place a special bird, the Itzam Ye of the Mayans, who sits atop to electrify the house into a world of sorcery and dreams; as days fall into the Past, they become time-sealed Lincoln logs of candy brightness, spirit in a timeframe, template behind the looking glass; and the bird at the top can go back and visit and look in and perfect and make magical some of our mistakes of the past, a record of merit made richer and more perfect after the fact - time traveling to brighten the radiance of meritorious deeds - so that by the time the thing is presented to the immortals it is a shining, auspicious, and pristine temple of spiritual behavior and light, with a grotto heaven of hexagons clean enough for the immortals to take up residence in and a central hexagon to remain empty, cause I understand the feeding needs of immortals, gotta have some emptiness, and if they choose they can then also visit these 60 days of the Past, out through the lines between the hexagons, in between the midnights, in a timequake of miracle immortalism.

  5 pairs of galaxies around Zhen Wu in Qing Wei are at the same redshift and are stretched out across the field; this is a feature of several protocluster fields that astrophysics has studied, and there is no explanation of the reason for the apparent "structure" of these pairs, at different red shifts and paired with each other.