In the Mind of a Prophet.

by Allan Webber

Copyright: Dec 2014

001

Why should I feel so disappointed? He was a stranger who kindly shared his dreams then left. It is only now I feel I should have left a hook, a memory, a connection that either he or I could follow. But at the time the moment was complete and such trails seemed unnecessary.

I was sitting as I often do reflecting on what I had achieved, where I wanted my work to go and what was needed before the next stage could start. 

The tree was shady as it needed to be for the sun beat down from a bright blue sky lacking cloud or gentle shine. The drying wind gusted softly enough but it sang within the needles near my ears. My senses sated by nature knew the world of ease.

It isn't possible he said.

I hadn't met him but already it was as though he knew my doubts.

His dog was black, close at his heels, its eyes consumed with fidelity.

You can't be in my mind.  This sky is mine, the clouds you see surely they can't be the same.

I hadn't meant to intrude or challenge the unity of this man but he was here; his hurt was mine his violation his alone.

Brown eyes, loyal eyes ached with him, a wagging tail ceased its welcome replaced by an inner protective growl.

But what about my sky? Was it mine or was it his? If I closed my eyes what would I see?

He cannot help me for I feel his increasing fear of me. He wants me gone but the choice is no longer mine. I feel his presence and the tension of his dog. They shape me now and my world is enlarged by that.

I ache and long for more. Denial yearns within me.  I want redemption. I want to be more than one, to share two worlds set apart by birth.

002

How can one sense loss for something one has never had? Surely it was that brush with feelings denied that stirs me to try again. I close my eyes and seek that state that first I felt when he appeared. The voices come like whispering wind softly blown against  my ear.

You know its wrong. Leave us alone.

Who are you?  my searching soul decries ignoring pleas that have no place nor flesh to make them real.

Eyes closed. Eyes unseeing but the familiar patterns flicker on. The ghosting white that shifts in shape as it pulses on my lids becomes an eye into whose depths I peer. Brown, loyal eye that stays in place when all else is nowhere seen, I went through here I felt you pierce my mind.

What do you fear of me? I mean no harm. I am tired of loneliness when there are so many things to share.

Then was the ache felt once more.  Pain and fear dressed as anger holding me there on the rim of sleep and isolation. A pulsing fear felt solely by emotions, not clear nor sharp but certain in its own defence it scorched within my brain, I don't trust people and what they say.

I bear the pain with just a whisp of hope that now I may go on. But no the response scalds away that hope as blasts in their defence shatter defended regions of my own. No one knows and I did not tell of acts and thoughts that I know were wrong. Beaten, battered back from the brim of entry I in turn defend.

Robbed of choice by autonomes fired without control I wound and shatter to deny him entry.

But he is here within me taking more than I from him. Shamed, condemned by ever present guilt I am exposed, naked in my false claim of friend.

003

Why am I drawn to such trials? The glow is warm from that first touch of minds but how can it be enough to drive me to this? I know so little but it is like a drug I cannot shake its hold.

He knows me where I would not be known and I in turn know what to dread in him. Youth's mistaken follies of first love torn by guilt of loved ones betrayed. My ills of lust of many kinds balance his but in our anger we aren't equally matched. His greed, my turmoil which is worse? Time has ravaged him by its endurance and I too am prised away from what I used to be.  The tides of choice and unchoice, his and mine, have ebbed and flowed through both of us yet neither he nor I have always chosen well. But he has his dog, his loyal dog who unlike me sees no fault in him.

You know so little, I heard him say. Dismissive as this was meant to be I sensed his meaning,  he knew more than me. But what we knew was dross upon this molten lake whose depths we had not entered.

You miss the point, growled his dog, firmly braced across my path. You miss the point. You miss the point. A savage chant whose aim was plain, Go away, leave us alone.

But I was sure I hadn't missed the point that mattered, there was another way.

I had felt the ease of contact from the first but seen the barriers drop in place with each step I took to draw near. It was evident there were bigger barriers that had not yet been reached and they lay on paths I should not try. This I knew because for all he claimed he knew of me he had not learnt my worst. And there has to be another way, a way of trust that lets a dog stand faithfully by a flawed man.

A molten shield burns those who seek and the smoke, the cloud are shadows of its reason. In triumph I gasped at the thought that now embraced me, I see you, I know you by our mutual ease, the softer emotions filtered free of our internal fears.

IV.

But he has gone, him and his dog. I waited but he didn't return. I had no chance to show what I had learned from him and now I am left wondering what do I do? How do I proceed?

Why did they come seeping into my mind raising feelings of hope for potential friends?

It felt different. But why? I have outside friends, family and enemies as well.  And I am lucky for I have felt that internalised relation of human love. Wife, sons and daughter all stir this but that is not the answer to my isolation since it is a substitute for being part of them.

I and they are human, our brains do not unite as one. And although I seem to have a past I know it is not real, it is a reflection of chemistry in my mind. Only this instance is mine while all the rest is what evolution gave to everyone with sound mind. And this is itself a rare gift so is it possible for there to be more? If so I don't think it yet exists in man? And surely not in trees or ants. Memory with both strengths and weaknesses is there in many thing but not as I know it, not as something linked to the time since life began.

Will I get another chance to share, to sense what it is like for two or more who live alone with separate memories to become a greater whole.

But why did I feel all the power held by that slight contact? How did we come as close as we did? Throughout time men have sought that feeling and believed it possible to achieve. Was it as the ancients thought, a product of the alignment of the stars or something much more basic? Was it the brightness of that day, my sitting in that divine spot, with that specific strength of wind combined with those particular trees? I suspect not since it has been like that on many days and they didn't come.

Could it be that if I sit and do the same things, shifting my thoughts along the same patterns they will come again?

But is it all pointless? To what extent does it depend on them as well as me? Does he have to be about to sleep or must he sit as I now sit waiting with open mind?

And where is he? Where was he? When was he there? How did they lock on to me in time and place? Was he a man of my own time? From my family perhaps? I wish I knew for then I might better know how to proceed.

But I feel myself upon the edge of sleep once more. I must keep note because I know I can succeed. I must keep notes. I must keep notes. I must remember this when my mind returns.

V.

Beloved students, do not fear the x z line; words said without any shape some time just before the dawn. A scrap of paper alongside my bed helped me get them right for they slipped away between the time of hearing and rising from my bed. There were other words written in my notes which said, I  come m'lud.

The words repeated in my head and I could hear them once again, a male voice but a new man like none I had never met, stating calmly, Beloved students, do not fear the x z line. How do I know how they were said? It is because their tune lay in my mind. I could feel their presence without displeasure or any feeling whatsoever. Increasingly I learn that it is the feeling more than the substance that shapes my memory and to replay its tune recalls it as it was when it first occurred. The second part was from some one else, a child like voice that tumbled through its words in eagerness to please. But the m'lud I wrote may not be true it carries an uncertain aura. My lettering of this person's words awakes the feeling of 'perhaps' not of something actually heard.

So I feel these words shake out their story and  in between they awaken shapes and tones. There was a bowl, small and almost filled with slopping water that held the voices apart.

I must have fetched a bowl for when I woke there was one upon the window-sill much like the one I had seen. And placed across it pointing outwards at an angle was a pencil. I don't remember doing it but it had to be me, just as the voice and all its sounds mirrored things from me. It made some kind of sense as something I would do to note the time and place of my unawakened state.

As I play these things across my mind the art of memory strikes the chords. There were people waiting for a plane and we laughed at their folly when they accepted they would be in Scotland within an hour. Yes there is a we, me and someone else, perhaps a woman or a girl but I didn't see who she was but it seemed we always had belonged and this was something that the two of us often did.

Then another group of people hurried by heading for a plane. We followed and as we walked another person joined the two of us, a male in leather jacket. The plane we boarded was very old and we unlike the other passengers entered at the back and huddled concealed between the seats and a funny throne-like chair installed in an alcove which had cracked and broken wood around its edge.

We knew right through that journey that this was wrong, these people weren't our friends.

The plane flew for a short time perhaps forty minutes more or less and as it landed from my dreams came a solid picture. We were near the sea and strips of low coastal dunes separated us from the rural airport.

Stumbling down by unremembered means we came across a man working on another plane. You're in northern England, he replied when asked. The sun shone down, the wind whistled through the rigging of the plane and all my subtle senses told me I had never been here before.

VI

I have no understanding of what 'do not fear the x z line' means nor do I know whose voice I heard. That voice started with 'Welcome students' which implies a starting point and a particular relationship. But I saw no-one that filled the role of instructor. I suspect he may be me, a deeper part of me, echoing the resonances of my past.

Of course I wonder what the 'x z line' is but the only elements that resonate with such a theme are my thoughts of ease and unease. These are two clumsy terms but there are none better that I can call to mind. Already I know that what I feel is not the same as on TV it is more like the sensations felt in reading a book. It is like the ghost of memory that helps recall to happen when interrupted in a thought. Every experience I have of this tells me it is a means that everyday words do not cover but there are some that can help me in shaping how I must proceed.

That ghost, the sprite of memory that aids recall of lost mental streams relies on the warmth or shadow it invokes; the happiness or sadness felt;  the pride or shame it roused. By such ephemeral things I have often picked out the nuggets of my thoughts and around them rebuilt the mental world where I was.

If I am to learn the art of united minds I must surely use similar means. Those intrusive voices and the images they invoke will bear their own emotional tones and it is to them I must turn my efforts.

And who better to approach than those who were on that plane with me, those male and female forms who I now feel were my fellow students.  And of the two it was the female form in whom I held most hope for I had the feeling that we had met before.

VII

My mystery companion returned to me last night and it was Anna who brought her back. There were the slimmest of traces that I had grasped from that time before but it turned out to be enough. Two nights had passed without success and then on the third at a time late in the night I sensed her presence once again.  Again the bowl of water with its pencil were in the place on the sill when I awoke but the alignment of one to the other differed slightly.

To get there I had patched her aura to that of Anna, my wife, the person whose emotional essence most permeates my meaning. I chose the sensations of Anna, whose arts define my love of womankind since it seemed to me they held the richest most complex harmonies of my life.

This act alone sent shivers through my mind as I waited while searching for the tone that would signal the strangers return. But these actions are a most potent drug that mimic the settings of sleep and so often they will delay my ultimate aim. There is pleasure and benefit in the ease with which I fall asleep when so absorbed but it means the quest cannot advance except when re-awoken by the calls of night or the coming dawn.

The signal was weak when it arrived but she was there together with a renewed sighting of that plane and land. I could see little of her reality just as on that earlier flight but I knew it didn't matter, not yet and maybe never. But what I was aware of from the start was that she lacked the charisma of Anna. There wasn't the disturbance factor that kept my mind alert. Humour was almost absent and lacked the wry, unexpectedness generated by my partner of over forty years. In both there is intelligence but in this ethereal acquaintance it was haunted by the presence of ongoing stress.

Even as I interacted with this thread of mine I felt her patterns probing me. A sense of disappointment stirred around talents I had not pursued but more than that it was an assessment of what could have been loosely tinged with scorn. But when I turned my mind back to her it lit up  with the pride of things she'd done well. And then a hint of my anger at her lack of independent goals shimmered through my mind. Like sparks lit by cinders our minds rang back and forth while we defined each other against the measures of ourselves.

Take care for this isn't what I meant to do,  I thought to myself and felt it register and echo back.  Yes, take care and I must care for you.  I lost her then but I am confident we will meet again.

VIII

Why? hung like a riff throughout my waking day. Not the why that seeks reason, nor that which asks 'Why you?' The comfort of her tug upon my mind assured that all these other things she already knew.

It had been almost twenty eight days since we last united in my mind yet the thought of 'why?' remained. It was there as we parted and lay as memories do, gnawing at my roots. It was her question as much as mine, Why are we a chosen pair?

But now this question mellowed. We knew it was not a question of choice nor of selection, it was a connection that was natural, inescapable, pre-built into the fabric of our lives. We were different and our ways of interaction with the world had until now often been diametrically oriented. The paths to understanding slowly blossomed as the rareness of our new condition settled below the chain of emotions we now suffered and enjoyed.

We were no longer alone but we were a few, not many. And all of us were alone each in our time. We were not of a single moment or place but scattered over a pocket of human existence. The sensations of oneness-with-others are most strange for they flow like a sweet essence into the recesses of my mind and they trigger things I and they had forgotten as well as those we wish we could disown.

Tossed in the maelstrom of the personal experience of others, energy sapping heat seared my body along with scars of fear from death threats lingering in the skies. Unsteadied by the crush of these I had no time to enjoy the undertow of their family or personal pleasures before the changing energy levels of their worlds consumed me once again. This was not anything that any one of us had felt alone but a collage  unleashed through the collective memory of all. A tidal wave of emotions that left me shaking, shivering like in a violent sea crashing on a shore, tearing at the insecure stance of my human legs striving to deny nature of its fury.

My increasingly anxious mind awash with the chaotic deluge of swirling raw emotions signalled I wasn't ready for this. In dismay I retreated from their presence yet I knew I would return.

IX

Thirty more days passed before she returned. Once more the pencil and the bowl were there when I awoke. The pencil's alignment had changed once more and it seemed to me to be a regular shift around the basin's edge, like the movement of the night sky.

Our mutual quest was softer than the last, it was the search for who. The softness came from both of us through the more respectful tone of our questions and the responses raised were then more informative and less alarming. We learnt, both of us, turn by turn, to enjoy our gift of being in another's mind.

She was a gentle witch beloved by her neighbours. She had sisters but they were no longer there, three were dead, another still-born and two had married and moved far off. She had felt alone since her mother died, more so because of what her mind could do. It was only now at the crisis point of her life that she had dared to venture beyond the realm in which she must survive.

I call her gentle witch because that is what gave her pride. She had been known by that term to those around her ever since she was young. they thought she saw the better things in their minds and they turned to her for healing of their mental wounds. Long ago she had learnt that which I had also learned which was to hide the gift away from those who would see it as unnatural. She, like I, didn't see into the minds of those close to her, she drew from the past and future to ask the questions that seemed prescient to those seeking answers. She had known she had a source not available to others but only over time had she dared to understand its breadth and origins. Everyday survival had taught her to be circumspect.

I knew what she meant and as I was to learn it was commonplace amongst our kind. Yes, enjoy the fruits of praise that come from being considered wise but never let it challenge the tolerance of those who love or might mistrust you. And never come to the attention of those who set the code by which people choose who will live and die.

She was more graceful than I, more tolerant of the ignorance of man whereas in me it showed as a reluctant acceptance of the unchangeable. True, I like her, admired the good that came out of many men and women, but to me it was the dark recesses in the minds of the silent majority that tipped the scales of judgement away from an enlightened race to one of self-serving, short-lived destroyers of us all.

She had no fear of death unlike those around her. It would come but unlike the rest of the world she knew her presence was already held within an eternal strand. Her emotions were now mine, triggered by our mutual understanding of the people's fear and all that it spawns. Ego, ambition, power and unreason are all products of a terminal life but she reads these acts with tolerance, as drivers of the good, while I see them as the core of what we know will come through man, the inevitable flaws of birth from which there is no long-term escape.

The slowly changing nature of our meeting had taken a measured, pleasurable path and neither of us had felt the need to withdraw as precipitously as we had done before and to my delight our meeting ended in a more personal realm of our lives.

It began when her thoughts touched upon her daughters and her sons and I felt her richest glow of pride. Although they would not have her gift they had her presence and she basked in this more than any other thing upon which our minds had dwelled. They were close to her, part of her, carriers of our gift but they would never enjoy it as we do, unlike the beings that from their hidden genes would come.

Her children though would never meet descendants of mine and this saddened me a lot. It would not be our family unions from which the new man would arise.

X

Once again I felt pleased. The man from the flight had come alone.

We both had sought this encounter but it had needed individual contact with the gentle witch to be absorbed by both of us before it would make sense.

I had returned to the images surrounding him, the plane, the airport, his jacket and that weird journey across the English sky.

But now that he had chosen to come I felt that the visions I had seen before lacked truth.

Curious to understand this enigma I settled down allowing the coloured blurs in my mind to take on meaning.

Dark roofed hangars lay around the runway where we landed. The planes on which men worked were smaller and more sinister than the one in which we had flown. He was at ease in this place for it was primarily images from his mind that had lain the physical framework of my earlier vision.

But he was older now, much older.

How could I tell when the images of him were all mine? Because they weren't, of this I was sure. It was resonance of our minds that drove what I felt about my visitors, not the images that those around them might see, but my own creations responding to the depth and breadth of their memories.

He was older and a survivor of tragic horrors that explained why all three of us had united here. His was the strongest pattern and it dominated the shaping of our united visions. That which each of us had viewed was true within this setting but not so in relation to places he had been.

Each of us played our part in shaping that experience and his started with the physicality we perceived.

It was the gentle witch whose mind had sent us on that journey with her strong desire for the discovery of peace from war. It was her emotions that provided the gateway for our union.

And I was the initiator, the one who ached to learn the secrets of those wisps of sharing eternally present in my mind. The shaping of the questions began with me. The motivation of the quest came from me.



XI

Last night I had a vision of a dog jumping clumsily down from an open carriage. Ears back, head turned, tail awag, waiting for his master.

But his master also had to wait. Legs swollen by means not understood by his doctors he relies on strength from those within his line. Debilitating as this illness is, it will pass provided he can keep his doctors at bay but now he waits as the short term remedy builds within his mind.

His companions wait until he has the strength then take him by the hands to guide his fragile, hesitant, stumbling steps towards the ground.

His jacket had that long-worn smell taken on by well-treated leather which held his identity as much as his aged flesh. After all it had been with him though battles and had kept him alive. And it had stayed with him as life had slipped from being his future to this untimely state of treasured memories that now elude recall.

He was still with us and it was from his mind that the rectifier came. In truth beset by continuous mixing his simple strategies were essential filters.

I knew he was the man that flew on that earlier journey. The same man who now gratefully reached the ground. The same man that had rejected me but the dog, though just as faithful, was not the same.

His mind had changed with each setting in which I had encountered him. Rejected, aloof and now dependent it was the same mind and by my choice of stimulus I could feel them all.

### MORE TO COME

With thanks to Michel de Nostradame whose writings give insight into the prophetic process;

Centuries.1 Quatrain.1
Original Verse in English and French (Benoit Ed.)

Sitting alone at night in secret study;
it is placed on the brass tripod.
A slight flame comes out of the emptiness
makes successful that which should not be believed in vain

Estant a$sis de nuict $ecret e$tude
Seul repose $ur la $elle d'aerain
Flambe exigue fortant de $olitude
Fait p$perer q'ne$t a croire vain.

Centuries.1 Quatrain.2
Original Verse in English and French (Benoit Ed.)

The wand in the hand is placed in the middle of the branches
With water he sprinkles the hem of his garments
A voice, fear: he trembles in his robes.
Divine splendor; the God sits nearby.

La verge en main mi$e au milieu de BRANCHES
De l'onde il moulle & le limbe & le pied
Vn peur & voix fremi$$ent par les manches
Splendeur diuine. Le diuin pres s'a$sied.

 Letter to Cesar (1555)...(PCE3): And by the Prophets and by means of immortal God and the good angels I have received the spirit of vaticination [Lat: prophecy] by which is seen distant things and I have come to predict future events. However nothing can be perfect without him whose power is so great and the goodness to his subjects [is such] and while the spirit remains in them it always affects other subjects since the similarity of the cause of their good genius gives the seer's heat and power approaching us as that of the rays thrown out by the Sun , thereby influencing bodies that are elementary and not elementary.

Letter to Cesar (1555)...(PCE4)

The Prophet of today was once called a seer because my son a Prophet is properly one who sees things beyond the natural cognizance of every creature. And in the event that the Prophet through the perfect light of prophecy clearly appears to be divine as well as human, then it can't be, since the effects of future prediction extend very far.

For the incomprehensible secrets of God and their efficient virtue depends on the long expansion of natural knowledge, deriving their origin from free will. They bring about the appearance of causes which of themselves could not attract enough attention to be known, neither by human augury, nor by any other hidden knowledge or virtue comprised under the concavity of heaven, even from the present fact of all eternity, which comes in itself to embrace all time. But through some indivisible eternity and by means of Hiraclienne agitation the causes are made known alongside the celestial movement.