"Lucky unlucky." A policeman used this phrase
to describe me, when he
was sitting outside of my cell, a few days after I had
shot a man.
We were discussing the strange
quirks of destiny. How disaster can strike
in the midst of a picnic on a sunny afternoon,
and how light can shine and purify and save us
out of the depths of tragic depravity.
There's no point in being simplistic
about good and evil. What mortal among us can
presume to know how the warp and the woof
of the weaving goes? As Shakespeare says,"Nothing
is good or evil, but thinking makes it so."
The only wisdom and good I know
begins with humility and compassion.
"And to get to the point of compassion;
We have to take an awful thrashing."
As Blind Jimmy says.
My father became sick with M.S, when I was five
years old, and he was told by a highly-reputable clinic
that he'd be dead within a year.
So he sold his companies and the next thing
I knew I was running along the deserted coral and sands
of the north coast of Jamaica along the shore land
of what is now called Mammee Bay.
It had no name at all when I first got there.
It was owned by Teddy Pratt, and he'd come home
after dark one evening to step on the body of
his favourite son. His wife bumped her foot on his head
which was thirty feet away in the dark.
Alma was never the same after that and
neither was Teddy. Teddy stared shooting trespassers
he found on his lands. If someone came to steal
coconuts from his plantation, Teddy shot that man
out of the trees.
He did this many times, and since his
family had been given a huge tract of the north coast
by Charles I of England, he had extensive
plantations.
So this wasn't so good a deal for
a lot of the Jamaican people, I suppose,
but it ended up leaving me with a long empty
coastline to explore every day.
My school started at seven A.M., when
my mother handed me my exercise books.
And school was out by seven-thirty A.M., then I'd
go running off down the beach, or, more likely,
across the sharp coral extending off to the West
towards Drax Hall and St Ann's Bay.
I'm told that in Tibet, messengers are trained
to do night running - a runner runs in such a way
that he never really looks at the ground, he knows
unconsciously where every rock is, so he just
runs and doesn't look.
I learned to do this at the age of six. I'd
run across miles of sharp coral at the ocean's edge.
I remember looking down but not really focusing.
I imagine many children can do this and they
don't know it's any kind of training.
Jamaica wasn't very developed way back
then in the mid 1950's, so Teddy wasn't really
keeping that many people away... The Jamaican
people are irrepressible, anyway...so no one
person is going to keep everyone away from
miles of coastline. No, and no one was keeping
me away, either!
This is how history works.... good
and evil work together, and weave a tapestry,
a 'weaveworld' *(as in the book)
of endless colours and circumstance...
Certain people and facts emerge out
of this reality woven by many threads of
silver and gold divine illumination. And dark green,
and shadow, and black night weave the tapestry
also, and the red-eyed rolling calf the
Jamaican's talk about... a red eyed
conscious bull that visits their properties
late at night, a beast that means evil and ill
to the living.... all of these build the tapestry.
If I hadn't spent those six years more
or less by myself staring into the sea
pools and running without conscious
thought across the razor sharp points of
the two feet high coral...
If I hadn't met the Rastamen at
five A.M. at that point along the beach
where they launched their dug-out canoes
to go fishing across the tides...
If I hadn't constantly fed the John
Crows over on the next property
called the "salt flats" and if these
vultures hadn't followed me hopping
down the beach along before the dawn...
The Rastaman never would have taken an
interest in me.
If my heart and soul had not been
hollowed out by that constant solitude,
as I was always alone in my mind,
and almost always alone by the sea...
and if I hadn't been constantly
blessed by the dawn...if I hadn't been
seared within by an endless exposure
in solitude in the sun and the sea,
I never could have worked
on the Gospels of the Nag Hammadi,
without that hollowing out -
without becoming an empty vessel.
I never could have confronted these
ancient Gospels newly discovered by
the shores of the upper Nile.
Actually. if I hadn't turned into
something, of a sociopath... if
it hadn't become impossible for me
to work a normal job... if all of this hadn't
happened, I never could have undertaken
this endeavour.
I thought I was writing a New
Testament of the Lord of Hosts.
I'm not sure, to this day,
that I was not...
How many people
would even begin to entertain such
a thought?
This is the point I am making.
I see the hand of destiny in this.
Only a child who was raised
the way I was...by a wealthy family, and
lifted out of the north, and dipped deeply
in a southern sea, by an island where
people really do think in Biblical terms...
And if the gospels hadn't been
discovered just as I was maturing in the
study of literature, religion and law...
none of this would have happened.
People say, "Aw, it's all
co-incidence." But I don't believe
this. I see the hand of destiny in this,
and destiny is woven from a Conscious
Source. I don't think I'm that special.
I think the hand of fate is in all our lives.
We just don't tend to live long enough to see
the pattern.
If I hadn't been rendered incapable
of working a normal job, if in my psyche
I hadn't become such a solitary...
If I had already had the tendency
to become the hermit that I am today,
I never would have built a hut on a cliff
or lived in it long enough.... to concentrate
on the discovered library and the
resulting manuscript.
It wasn't me who had written
the origins of the manuscript
...after all, the discovered
materials were Gospels. But some of
the passages were jagged and unreadable,
and it was in my attempts decipher the abstruse
meanings and make the words flow, that
the miraculous sometimes occurred, and
as I was in a trance state of total
concentration I can't comment on exactly
what happened, but I can give examples
of the results.
One example is the verse marked **
below.
I had to be reminded of this fact
repeatedly: "It's not about you!"
What I am trying to say is: "No one's
above and no one's below."
We are all made out of the many threads
of the tapestry that is being woven, not by
we mortals, but maybe it is the
job of the bodhisattvas and saints
whose united consciousness surrounds us, like a
further atmosphere around the globe. (Maybe
this is the beginning of the "noosphere" which Teilhard
de Chardin wrote about in "The Phenomenon of Man")
These are the the ones who can read the Akashic
Record, (the ones we used to call the Fates who
were imagined to weave the threads
of human destiny) The communal Consciousness.... of the saints and bodhisattvas somehow exists, and it seems
we can interact with them, they will answer us and give
us their support... these beings all of whom are one with
the Lord of Hosts, the Lord of the Meeting Rivers,
the Lord of Israel, of the Americas, of Albion
of India and Palestine.... the Lord who
is the Tao, and the Tao out of whom
the Buddha arises... the Lord the Sufis
know... the One Who Is Creating Us
Who has more names than any of us can recite
or remember....JAH! The Lord of Love, man,
and the Lord of destruction and darkness -
out of which love is born.
The Lord who weaves human destiny
with shining threads of divinity and dark earthy
threads of the equally divine. The Lord of
light and darkness, the Great One
who speaks to us out of the vortex of
the swirling, weaving stormclouds of the
skies, with an Eye of Light piercing down
into the thrashing waters.
This is the Holy One who is writing
this.The One who guides
the clouds, who rains down upon his
sunlight upon us... As He chooses,
so it shall be.
He is the one who has been the
underlying intention in this, and some of the
verses He has written literally, many of the verses.
And damned if I know which parts!
I'm just talikng out loud in retrospect...
I no longer have much of a memory.
And I thank God I'm not the one who
is going to have to sort this situation out...
Maybe no one will sort this out... Maybe
these pages will meld into obscurity like so
many rotten autumn leaves.
But I don't feel that will occur.
I thought I was writing this for the
salvation of our nations, so that we may
be born again through the Mind of the True One.
So that our heart and soul, the core of the psyche
of our country may be renewed... and
I was writing for this reason - that the Truth,
which had been buried for so long,
should live.
But what I didn't know was -
my own salvation is dependent upon this
endeavour, as well.
So I had better get on with it. None of us
know how much time any of us have got left...
although I'm quite sure all of us have more than
one kick at the can...
(If you looked at me right now, you'd think I'm
pretty much finished. Hell, that's what I think
when I look in the mirror.
I ran into a bishop last night and he
looked like a self-satisfied young
judge of a a preliminary criminal court...
a judge who knows nothing about
the suffering of the people before him and
who cares even less.
He asked me: "Are you all right?"
I was surprised by his question,
because of course I'm all right; and then
I thought, oh yes, it's because of all this
hair I have, because Miss Gwendolyn
Dickens - the woman who raised me
in Jamaica - she taught me that a man's strength
is in his hair, and that in the Bible
the prophets never run a comb
through their hair...
I believed her, and I still do, and so
people judge me for having this hair.)
I suppose I was judging this man
just as much as I assumed he was judging me.
Maybe he was being more understanding
than I was. I certainly hope so.You just never
know.
"No one's above and no one's below."
Jesus said: "Why did you come here,
to see a reed shaken by the wind?
And to see a man clothed in soft garments?
See, your kings and great ones are
those who are clothed in soft garments
and they shall not be able to know
the Truth."
"Do you seek for the treasure
which fails not, which endures,
there where no moth comes near
to devour and where no worm
destroys. Then come out in the desert
and see Me. I am the Light that is
above them all, I am the All, the All
came forth from Me and the All attained
to Me. Cleave a piece of wood: I am there.
Lift up a stone and you will
find Me there."
"Find that one Pearl of true
Wealth, and sell all else."
"Solitary are the ones
who will enter the Bridal Chamber."
** One must receive the Gift before one
can give in love; and one man must give in love
in order to receive the Gift; and the Gift
existed before men were to give; and men
received the Gift that they might live. And
bless He who is before he was or shall be.
As the Gift is before the world was.
The above verse is the one I was talking about.
It is one of many that came through
my highly concentrated state...
You be the judge.
(C)2013 by William G. Milne,
All rights reserved.
All proceeds to build a
bell on the hill.
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