Prince of Centraxis: Surfing the Cosm

Surfing the Cosm

Shaman of Centraxis 2

With the grunting ruffians only a few strides behind him, the fleeing youth rips the foiled metal from his pouch and hastily unwraps the vanishingly slim contents. The transubstantive substance is embossed with the image of a resplendent emerald green dragon – a magnanimously mythic creature that could ferry a hundred humans to an alternate universe.

His pursuers are closing on him with every stride, cursing and swearing as they puff and wheeze. They breathlessly brandish chains and weapons in their determined pursuit of the young magician, but aren’t desperate enough to discharge their firearms in the well-populated salubrious suburb - so far.

Their fleet quarry grows desperate as his stores of energy dwindle; he doesn’t dare turn around to see how close the cutthroats are. They can’t catch me with this – they can’t have it... Ram’yana crumples the parchment and throws the green dragon into his mouth without breaking his stride. He consumes the bitter-tasting dried potion in a single gulp and a sudden bust of adrenalised energy gives wings to his fear, sending him flying up over a high wooden fence in a rushing bound.

He lands crouched on a miniature greensward and his eyes dart around the enclosed courtyard in search of escape. A pair of middle-aged Patricians sits staring at him with stunned expressions on their faces as he interrupts their feast. They’re seated at a circular wrought iron table and the balding husband spills a glass of wine down his floral shirt as Ram’yana smiles and nods to him. Then the young barefoot hippie rushes across the lawn toward another fence while outraged shouts follow him across the yard.

He scrambles up another staked boundary and vaults onto a high stone wall, deftly tightrope-walking his way along the broken top. He ducks beneath palm fronds and flails at a small swarm of flying insects, tottering on the brink of a precipitous fall into another backyard full of broken jagged stone blocks.

At first his bold escapade appears to leave the brigands floundering in his wake, but the gasping, cursing men persevere and come crawling along after him on all fours. They manage to keep him in sight as he flees through an urban labyrinth of byways, parks, foot tracks and yards. The day steams toward noon in a glaze of torpid summer heat and a sweltering humidity chokes the vitality from the burning air; the hunters and their prey struggle to pump the foetid morass into their frantic lungs.

Ram’yana has mapped many of the twisting, unmarked paths-less-traveled in his urban jungle home; he prefers to meander along shortcuts and winding laneways, rather than undergo the barrage of cluttered false smiles and dour countenances in the fence-lined avenues and mercantile boulevards. He prefers unkempt, weed-flowered wastelands to the foul smells of toxic combustion and the endlessly streaming juggernauts screaming along high-octane circuit board streetscapes.

He dives through holes behind screening oleander bushes, sprints along private driveways, ducks beneath overgrown arches of grape and passionfruit vines and short-circuits his way across blocks of suburban houses and bungalows.

He vaults over a series of eight and ten foot high stone walls in surprisingly athletic scrambling leaps, propelled by the unbound rush of adrenaline - and a stupendously heavy dose of the rare alchemical compound already coursing through his seventeen-year old bloodstream; a compound so potent it’s dosage is measured out in millionths of a gram.

Perspiration streams down his face and into his eyes as he thrills to the breath of the wind streaming past his cotton-clad body, making his long hair stream out behind him like an auburn pennant. The cool breeze of his passage is the palpably supportive and uplifting caress of Mother Nature, soothing and smoothing the way for her prodigal son in his flight beneath the harsh regard of the blinding southern sun.

The young magician sees his optimal path outlined before him, glowing in the landscape of his mind’s eye; he divines its presence all around his body, filling him with energy and altering the microclimate to favour him with a cool breath from its secret subterranean stream. When he follows the winding pattern of the weave closely enough, time itself stretches around the skein of his passage. As he stays on the shifting narrow track of least resistance and greatest support, his movements become effortless and he accelerates without strain. After a little while he knows his pursuers are out of sight without needing to turn and look – and realises he’s completely lost. Successfully lost, he exults, slowing his pace.

Ram’yana presses his spine against the face of a rough sandstone wall, doing his best to quiet his ragged breath and calm the pounding of his brain’s distended veins, while he listens for the footfalls and cries of his nemeses – and is surprised to find himself in a familiar courtyard. He recognises the unkempt garden of weeds and vegetables, the weird glazed ceramic fetish dolls and kitsch painted plaster Aboriginals, the outdoor table setting impaled by the staff of a flaccid, rainbow-striped beach umbrella. He’s somehow made his way to a familiar backyard – and, extraordinarily, he stands looking through the rear doorway of the home of a fellow Centraxian, a sister of the tribe. Rare odds, he muses thankfully. How unexpected. The design inscribed on the leylines of the convoluted landscape – that he’d forgotten he was following - has delivered him to a safe haven, the latest dwelling of an occasional lover.

A deep sigh of relief escapes through his slowing gasps. He wipes the sheen of perspiration from his face as a wave of dizziness breaks and swirls through him while the world turns, twists and warps. He bends over and supports himself with hands on his aching, bending knees as a dizzying wave of emotions and sensations threatens to overwhelm him. A drumming pressure builds behind his sealed eyelids as he hears someone approach, and a familiar voice says, “Oh – ‘tis thee,” in the faux-medieval argot used among members of the Centraxian court.

Ram’yana reels upward to find he’s standing before two members of his tribe, friends and lovers who are emerging from the rear of a familiar tiled cottage. Surprised to see him appear in the sealed courtyard, Lady Titania and the poet Li Po are a welcome sight; he watches their puzzled expressions while his breath returns.

Ram’yana smiles thinly, waiting for breath, and then hails them using the Centraxian greeting. “Awa Ken!” Though he stands erect, his body is convinced it’s leaning to one side and the angles of the building seem subtly wrong. His pulse is magnified by the strange energies and images pouring through his suddenly relaxed defenses and his feet begin to shift and dance, gently pounding out a beat that causes the walls and atmosphere to reverberate and waver.

The golden poet Li Po turns his lute to face the wall as he replies ritually; “Awa Ken, Mon Ken,” he says, stepping forward to close the gap between them. He greets Ram’yana with a bear hug, uncaring of the escapee’s perspiration-soaked cotton shirt as his arms wrap round his good friend and ally. “I didn’t expect to see thee here.”

“Nor I.”

“Wouldst thou like a drink?” Titania asks, the puzzled expression on her deeply tanned Sabra face framed by scrolling cascades of kohl-dark curls. “Or this?” Bluish smoke unwinds in twinned Moebius scrolls from the loosely twisted cylinder betwixt her blue-nailed fingers. The couturier courtier’s other hand holds a crystal goblet filled with white wine. “You look like you could use something.”

“Fire and water from the Deva’s daughter…” The phrase erupts unbidden from Ram’yana’s lips as a dollop of perspiration threads down his cheek. He watches the young woman’s eyes crinkle and her cheeks dimple as her amused puzzlement increases, until he relieves her anxiety with a decision. “Both, thanks.” He takes the smoke and kisses her on a ripely full cheek, stepping back to sanctify the sacrament.

While Titania serenely observes the ritual she rearranges her latest creation – she can’t quite decide how to twine the loose serpentine windings of lace and satin around her feminine curves. Li Po recovers a lute from the doorway and immerses himself in retuning the slipping strings.

All the world is tinged with a pulsating aura that grows in amplitude while the young shaman falls into the liquid depths of the dressmaker’s darkling eyes. Lady Titania’s pupils expand and contract in time with the pulse of the world and Ram’yana’s senses expand to encompass the surrounding treetops. His awareness spreads beyond the sandstone walls and clay tiled roofs, passing through the unknowing inhabitants of the timeworn, close-huddled buildings. A hemisphere of mindfulness expands around him, tracing the contours and cliffs of the hilly landscape to encompass it within his expanding purview.

He detects a trace of rage and anxiety swiftly fading in the near distance, trailing behind two dimly receding balls of growling, red-slashed grey - and he sighs, finally relaxing enough to inhale from the depths of his diaphragm.

He follows his friends into a cool sunken lounge room, where Titania hands him a crystal goblet filled with chilled white wine. The interior walls of the cottage have been removed, creating a long split-level hall where Art Deco fittings mingle with Edwardian timber furniture and a profusion of African and West Asian artefacts. Ram’yana swaps the drink for the smoke and sanctifies the fluid in the chalice; then he raises the goblet a second time.

“To good friends and freedom.” The others join him in the toast, clinking their goblets against his. The thirsty fugitive drains the refreshingly chill nectar in a single draught.

Li Po retreats to a long lounge covered with an Afghani rug and strums a slow arpeggio, cautious curiosity shining from beneath the knife-edge fringe of his glossy jet hair. Titania smiles coquettishly and strokes Ram’s body with the long-lashed pools of her eyes as she refills his goblet. “You’re all out of breath, darling,” the slightly older woman observes. “So good to see thee here for a change; what brings thee to mine humble new abode?” The artist’s arms sweep around to indicate the current incarnation of her interior decoration. Ram’yana swallows a mouthful of chilled wine before he replies, the words flipping suddenly from his mouth without conscious decision or effort of will.

“Rushing to keep up with the White Rabbit. And right on time,” he hears himself say; he remembers the young woman was born in the Year of the Rabbit at the same moment he notices she’s swathed in translucent white cloth.

Titania’s instant response is characteristically quirky; “Welcome to the bunny hole.” Ram’yana can’t decide whether her words are rising from somewhere within a hidden wellspring that pours through them both – or whether the young woman is preternaturally sharp, a perpetual flirt or simply telepathic. Telepathy covers a multitude of mysteries, he ruminates, and explains nothing – and Titania is all those things and more.

“What do you think? I made it myself,” the dressmaker says cheerily, swirling around to show him the curving filigree layers of her artistically slashed lacework. The virgin white garment offers tantalising glimpses of her tanned waist and voluptuous hips, flashes of the oval depression of her budding navel and views of the graceful brown arcs of her thighs.

“Subtle and gracious, salaciously torn, it breathes as it follows thy willowy form.” The judgment arises unbidden and Ram’yana goes with the flow, enthralled by the artful simulacrum of poetic wit that spills from his lips. The words appear without forethought, as if another being speaks through him in a deeply penetrative baritone of insightful, adroitly-formed verbiage. Some manipulative external puppeteer with a perspective gained from some remote vantage, or my true self writ large? He can’t quite decide; the being that inhabits the shaman when he invokes his higher identity, his Role within the tribe of Centraxis, is fundamentally unfathomable to his ‘normal’ four-dimensional personality.

The thoughts expand to echo through the crackling canyons of his mind as he ponders the wisdom of blithely acceding to the muse and allowing it to use him as its instrument, whatever its origin or purpose. By applying his warping mind to the task, he notes certain arcane recognition signals and symbols and affirms the provenance of the artful words.

Coming to understand that the higher-order personality of his tribal Role is indeed descending upon him, the youth opens his body and mind to the immortal archetype of the Centraxian Hierophant in a well-entrained internal surrender. He enters into a now-familiar symbiosis - not parasitic possession, but a far more profound melding with his deeper, higher self.

“Timely for a Tri-aan,” the muse within him observes, and the coded words emerge in a resonant tone that alerts his companions to the immanence of their own psychic melding. The phrase evokes a mini-summit, a conscious flow of thought-forms and archetypes that emerges within and between the magical trio, or ‘Tri-Aan’. Li Po pauses in his careful tuning of the sensitive instrument and Lady Titania raises a pink palm towards each of them, inaugurating a flow within their tripartite mind.

They become the basic functioning unit of the tribe of Centraxis, drawn from half of the symbol of the Centrax; a glyph comprised of two interlaced triangles balanced around a central sun, sometimes seen as an all-seeing eye.

Ram’yana notes that their bodies are already positioned at the points of a triangle and recognises the same awareness dawning in the others, when their inner eyes begin to glow upon their brows; the Centraxians assume their Roles. An arcane luminescence is kindled behind their outer eyes as each feels the mantle of higher perception draping across their mortality. They become living archetypes, as individual and eternally omnipresent as cards in a living Tarot deck, Li Po and Titania forming an eternal triangle of Court cards aligned with the Fifth Trump – Ramses Ayana, the tribal High Priest.

Their wills are crisply transparent to the shaman’s crystalline perceptions and their thoughts echo in his mind as the slim Asian bard and the full-hipped hippie designer settle on convenient piles of embroidered sequined cushions. The customary jostling and jousting of egos and libidos fades before the rising tide of deeper concerns.

Ram’yana watches their flow of intermingling energies begin to circulate, twisting through a sublime vortex to create a three dimensional sphere of protection and harmony that rises about them. In three short breaths they’re all fully In Role as members of the Court of Centraxis, ready to conduct a discourse as Shaman, Bard and Weaver.

“Ready?” the shaman asks to ritually mark the beginning of their higher-order discourse, and the others nod in a simultaneous motion. Waves of colour and scintillating flickerings of transient, multihued light swarm through the room as Ram’yana describes the violent raid on Kha-Aan’s manse and his own desperate, labyrinthine escape. He listens to the well-chosen words frothing from his mouth and wonders from whence they originate. Is it me, simply my own thought processes magnified by the Dragon’s lens - or truly the immortal Prince within my blood and genes, communing from a plane possessed of higher perspectives?

Possessed… the idea sidles through his mind, slipping around the edges of his discourse. Symbiosis… Their conversation is a shorthand code of phrases and words that would be largely indecipherable to an untrained observer. Their words are merely carrier-signals of more a far more potent and detailed telepathic discourse; the Tri-Aan communicates as fully as lovers who have been together for decades, completing each others’ sentences and effortlessly reading the subtle signals of eye and body. The surrender of their mundane egos to a superior level of individuality has rendered them utterly open to each other’s minds and wills.

“I’m riding the Dragon now,” he concludes, “not chasing it, so pray pardon if my words wander; and sorry about the stash.” His breath expands to fill the room, swirling around to resonate within their sphere of protection. Each inhalation is part of a flow passing through the room, warping the rectilinear architecture of the renovated cottage and the living landform in which it stands rooted. The flowing tide turns on his breath and reverses direction while his fingers join in a circular sealing mudra, as Li Po strums his first chord; at the same instant Titania leans backward to place her empty glass on a tiled table. The motions are part of the same movement flowing through the plasma of the world.

His breath approaches its nadir and the tide retreats toward the horizon as Titania’s husky voice sweeps after it; “Shall we see if they’re all right?” She looks over her shoulder, deep brown eyes focusing through the transparing material barriers, which stand like temporarily frozen waves between where she sits enthroned on her cushions and the lord Kha-Aan’s hilltop abode. “If there’s anything…”

Ram’yana’s words escape with the last of his breath; “T’would not be wise as yet.” The shaman inhales and the tide swings back toward them, a slow pressure building in the atmosphere and swelling in the Cosm. The first inklings of an electric haze and the scent of ozone surrounds them, presaging a storm - and a rapping tarantella strums on the front door of the cottage as the flux washes through them.

“Pardon me.” The wave sweeps Titania to her feet as the Bard raises the lute into his arms. Li Po’s concern meets the prince’s dilated stare as the lace-striped feline female pads to the door. The Bard leans forward as the tide goes out and confides with a sheepish conspiratorial grin, “I’m tripping, too.” His dexterous fingers pluck at the strings, a glissando following the receding wave to deep dissonant frequencies.

The shaman nods. “It’s shining in your eyes – all of them.”

“Are you all right?” the handsome Asian whispers. “Did you really…” Ram’yana nods solemnly, eyes twinkling as laughter fills the room from the open door. He feels a backwash approaching in the fabric of reality, the same flux returning from whence it departed, just as Lady Titania sweeps back into the room with her arm wrapped round her lifelong friend Anna - a diminutive Wiccan pixie with close-cropped hair; Ram’yana suddenly remembers her as a much younger girl.

A vision of pine trees lining the cold beaches of the Southern Ocean is starkly illumined in his forebrain, a landscape skewed around Anna’s miniature pubescent form as she emerged from the cold, tiny waves with her long tresses pasted to her snow-white skin. Her serious expression burned itself into his mind as she noticed him scanning her goose-pimpled flesh, and she returned his gaze with a brazen, angrily challenging stare. He recalls his surprise at his lack of embarrassment, the way he held her glaring regard until she glanced away.

The scene from his childhood - returned to him from a memorable youth camp halfway across the continent and a handful of summers hence - fades back into the veil of years as Ram’yana returns to the gift of the present, where a full-grown and beautiful (but still diminutive)Anna is speaking to him; “…that you’d be here. Still up to your tricks?” She wears the same expression, he sees, still enmeshed in the challenging moment that’s leapfrogged the years. They resume their psychosexual tourney as though no time had elapsed and the years between one sentence and the next were illusions.

“Not in the face of enchantment.” Anna’s gaze is bright as a knife. Her lapis lazuli irises bore into his smile, pinning his fluttering soul to the moment. The wave passes through them as Anna flops to the floor, and its wake lifts the wine bottle in Tania’s hand as Li Po repositions himself in perfect counterpoint to its inexorable rhythm. Fascinating, ruminates the awed shaman. “Dost thou doss in the Emerald City, now?”

“I’m not sure…” Anna replies with a puzzled slant to her brows.

With each transit of their bodies, the wave of energy displaces the still repose of the human circle seated on the sandstone hill, impelling them into motion for a shared moment at the nadir of the breath-wave’s disappearance, at the distant turning of the tide. A subtle change passes through them all simultaneously, synchronously, impelling them to actions that momentarily alter their smooth self-possession with flushes of apparently random preening gestures, as the wave turns to return. A similar cycle occurs as the wave approaches, passes and departs, but the amplitude of their motions and emotions increases at this zenith of maximal effect; they laugh, they drink, or eat or squirm on the pillowed piles and tribal rugs.

Beginning to get the feel of the flow, Ram’yana senses the pattern of the world moving through and beyond him, resonating in time with his internal tempo. A swelling well of fluid energy rises within him as the warping breath passes, and lowers as the weft sails off through the flexible macrocosm.

The world is breathing, flowing in and out, back and forth - and his deeper and usually unacknowledged native rhythms cycle in time to its eternal beat. As he senses the wave return across the surface of the globe and feels the subtle pressure of its passage through his flexing mortal coil, all things shift and waver at his mental touch.

Li Po lifts the lute and inhales while Tania inclines her head and Anna lifts her eyes to the ceiling. A moment of stillness precedes the returning rush of energy; between its recurring peaks the humans remain relatively motionless - then their postures shift to the rhythm of the slow spasm as it passes through their bioplasm. The synchronicity isn’t a reflex triggered by instinctive animal reactions, not simply movements triggered by the motions of others, Ram’yana decides as the flux returns. It’s the pulse of the World –a simultaneous shared glimpse of a higher reality...

He feels his body swivel to face Anna as her hand rises to brush across the dark bristly buzz-cut of her hair as Titania touches the wine bottle to a tinkling glass as Li Po strums the first note of another melody and begins to sing his version of Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush.

“Well I dreamed I saw the knights in armor coming

Saying something about a Queen…

There were peasants singing and drummers drumming

And the archer split the tree…”

Ram’yana’s mind chatters incessantly. Can its rhythms be altered by the timing of my breath? he wonders, tentatively extending his will into the heart of the wave. Is the flow directing us or is it the rhythm of our co-creation?

A vast pressure begins to rise through the young shaman, pouring up his spine and fountaining out around him in a pulsing spout, to arc downward in a vesica piscis of eggshell curves and return to the base of his seated spine. He feels the breath slowly go out of him as the wave departs, feels its distant reversal as the air begins to fill the depths of his diaphragm.

He draws the wave back with the Prana-laden air and watches the sudden communal pause and surge of activity as the force approaches through their shared reality and the bone-rigged, spine-masted fluid sacks of their bodies. The subtle force arrives with the fulsome filling of his lungs and the energy streams from his crown as the wave passes, circulating around the room as it twists out and around with the slow outflow of his breath.

He can feel the forms and textures of his companions and experience them from within their bodies at the climax of each surge. His consciousness is distributed about their circle in a multidimensional fugue, erupting through the localised lenses, pores and other orifices of their perceptions. He tastes the flavours of their personalities and quivers with the tenor of their thoughts.

“There was a fanfare blowing to the sun

That floated on the breeze

“Look at Mother Nature on the run in the nineteen seventies…”

Pressure builds as the young man’s attention is entirely eclipsed by this fundamental cycle flowing through all the world, through all life – a flow alternatively mediating and mediated by his mindful breath. Ram’yana alters the timing by slowing his breathing and waits like an orchestra conductor for the crescendo of the musical pulse to resonate through the room and Lip Po skips to the last verse.

“Well I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships flying

In the yellow haze of the sun

There were children crying and colours flying

All around the chosen ones…”

The Centraxians and Anna are the instruments and players of a sacred, secret symphony, whose score they rewrite with each passing moment - and with each crescendo of the worldsong ululating through their veins and senses they take another step in the eternal dance of living. The shaman becomes aware that his fingers are waving slowly in time with the flow, marking the nuances of its undulant back and forth tempo; Wand or baton? he considers, Magician or musician – or muse?

“All in a dream, all in a dream

The loading had begun

Flying Mother Nature’s silver seed

To a new home in the sun

Flying Mother Nature’s silver seed to a new home…”

Ram’yana is a flowering tree rooted in the sandstone, pulsing with life and pumping the evanescent fluid of eternity through his trunk and limbs to feed and invigorate the living cosmos around him. Flowering buds of consciousness erupt through the scintillating nerves and tissues of Li Po, Titania, Anna and all the self-aware levels of life growing unrecognised all around them.

He’s a sparkling fountain that renews itself, a living cathedral of harmonies attuned to the music of the spheres - Or the Sephiroth of Malkuth, he decides – the basal Kabalistic chakra of the Kingdom; Ram’yana prefers the term ‘Realm’. On one level, the sphere’s multifaceted four-fold reality is expressed as the Realm of planet Earth. On another level of enfoldment Malkuth is the living consciousness of Metatron, the Living Word and the World Redeemer, that some call an Archangel and others a Messiah.

“Adonai Ha-Aretz.” The shaman intones the god-name of the highest order of the lowest sphere; ‘Lord of the Earth’. The modern word ‘earth’ and the Latin term ‘terra’ resonate within the Hebrew title of the planar net of Earth - ‘Aretz’; in modern Hebrew, ‘eretz’.

This rush is the Ruach flowing through the Nephesh, he hears, the living breath of the spirit moving through Goddess Earth… He’s unsure where the words are coming from as they boom through the echo chamber of his mind, accompanied by perpetually shifting multicoloured thought forms.

The living word is heard by all things and the living world hangs poised on the edge of immanence in an ever-unfolding moment; the eternal wordless message breaks upon us all and we are the foam and the wave, the current and the riptide, shaping and shaped by the endless ebb and flow.

The signals of the cosmos are carried and transduced by Gaia within the rhythmic shapes of vast peaks and troughs, breaking past the somnolent veil of matter as unplanned events and causeless happenings. The universe amuses itself with muses of artful grace and innocence, bursting through the crusty buds of our mysterious sleepwalking, dreaming and waking lives.

The shaman prince feels the pulse of inspiration animate his companions in an intricate, effortlessly integrated ballet of wills, emotions, motions and sounds, all waxing and waning in an indivisibly invisible harmony of indescribable complexity.

All things are one thing dancing with itself. As the tautological thought flashes by in an infinite instant, he realises he can feel the world as an extension of himself, and can affect the manifestations of the flow with subtle movements and postures of his body-temple. His fingers alter the motions of the lifeforms around him, just as Li Po’s fingers strum variations of infinitely enthralling melodies on the tight-strung entrails and wide-bellied, white fretted throat of the lute.

Each of them attunes their senses to the flow and plies their Art to the rhyme of the muse. The Bard’s smiling almond eyes meet Ram’yana’s hazel-hued stare, and the prince sees that his fellow explorer of the inner front tier is aware of the synchronicity of events occurring in resonance with their musical magics. He watches the complicit quizzicality in Li Po’s raised eyebrow and the uptilted corner of his mouth, as the Bard watches the Shaman orchestrate their living theatre on the backdrop of Lady Titania’s stage.

“Don’t swim out too far,” says the wise young man. “We’re in deep waters now, well over our heads. Let’s get some air.”

A True Story

Continues… - R.A.