EPISODE XXVII
“- ¿What did you think of?
- I thought of dying, I thought of how cumbersome it would me for my mental structure to process such a heap of information flooding into my expanded conscience.
Quid: it describes the mistake of getting persons, things and cases mixed up.
During the flight Cali-Rosario, Argentina, January 31sr 2018
It looked as if Balou had run away from Colombia to Argentina, but things are oftentimes not what it seems to be. He could have challenged the restriction order imposed over him to approach Valentina, whenever he wished to. However, less restrictive matters took him, for a limited period of time, back to his native country. At boarding the plane with destination Rosario (accompanied by Isis and the sure-fire winner Titan), Balou believed to have a clear understanding on the events and happenings around Valentina. The reason why she came into his life was, nevertheless, still to be elucidated. In order to get this answer, he had to dig into his past, he had to check his life-path thoroughly from the very beginning, visit people and places, recollect memories of facts and meaningful moments (at least, the range of them which affected his peacefulness over the years) that ultimately would explain the distortion of his fate in direction to Valentina. To delve into the past obliged him to get back to his homeland, to his hometown.
Every time before he boards a plane, the senses of Balou get sharpened, his conscious mind suddenly becomes capable of setting links between facts and inner states at an exceptional speed. As if the aircraft managed to transmit in advance its future speed, to the speed of his thoughts. Once on board, as he contemplated on the sky through the window, Balou captured a coincidence together with a memory: seventeen days before the encounter with Valentina (she was seventeen years old by the time they both met), namely, the twelfth of November two thousand seventeen, Balou had emailed Isis a message, which is transcribed hereunder:
November twelve and a new relapse. A downfall which helped me realize that the mind is a mere mechanism, an execution venue of measures previously taken at a higher level: the conscience. If by chance the mechanism is misused as a decision-making center, we shall be conferring [to the mind] unappropriated faculties which, by the way, are absent in it by its intrinsic nature; when so happens we slip into duality, we may incur in error, we shall become doubtful. It is as though a printer (a mechanism deprived of self-will) were asked to feed the paper loader on its own, there is no possibility to do so by itself, it´s up to the user of the printer to place, from outside, sheets onto the paper loader or not. It is not because of its fondness for combustion that a car engine can be started up by its own will, it is the driver, when he refuels the tank, who allows the engine to be turned on. In this sense, unfed headless mechanisms, having no inputs, are only likely to show an existing capacity. Once the engine receives nourishment at the driver´s will, viz, the tank filled up with petrol (the input), only then the engine will pick up the necessary impulse to be started up. The art of leading a healthy life consists of learning to use the mind as a receptor of fuel and inputs, whereas the wise consciousness will be in the back line acting as a decision-making organ, the provider of nutriments. Therefore, any decision made by the conscience will eventually have –although it may not be apparent at first sight– a correct impact on the person and his immediate surrounding, because the conscience has a peculiar feature: it is non-dual, whichever thing emerging from it is bound to hit the mark, for it is of such a nature that provides no ground for errors. The former non-religious meaning of the verb “to miss” had nothing to do with committing a mistake or to be overpowered by feelings of guilt, it only depicted the failure to attain the goal. While the mind is a prism, which by definition projects its inputs-data and later produces, for example, the seven colors of the rainbow when pierced by a light beam. It is to be known that the mind can divide, can project seven imprints like in the rainbow, it can break up anything except what it is determined by the conscience. It is impossible for the mind neither to divide –nor to twist– whatever indication left, like an arrow, from superior planes, it´s incapable because the prism (the mind) has limited faculties: it can only project what it comes from outside, the inputs received from the outer world, in the same way as the photocopier can only produce (project) a copy of the sheet introduced into the paper loader. The implementation organ´s task is then to carry out a decision taken at a higher level in the corporate ladder; hence it will harbor no concerns for the future outcome. The struggle comes up when he who implements has to decide but doesn´t have the authority that emanates from a decision-making center; when so happens, the mechanism gets concerned. A preoccupied mind is, then, one which has been constrained to make decisions without having inherent powers to proceed that way. While the maker-conscience exists and proceeds unworriedly: why does it have to worry, taking into account that its arrows always reach the target? Whoever is longing for a healthy and untroubled life, will have to first learn the difference between the execution venue and the decision-making center, he shall then confine the mechanism to its inherent functions, while the plain of consciousness shall be in charge of making decisions exempt of doubts.
In the email message, Balou assured to Isis, half joking, that these remarks on the mind capacities and restrictions might become the prologue of a spirituality book in case he decided, someday, to write one.
In a profound sense, Balou also considered this email as a preparation for the Loser Titan for the events to come. There was a fact that is incontestable: Valentina´s physical and non-physical attributes enabled the Loser Titan, for the first time in life, to break away from the duality of his mind. His mind somehow renounced to its dual functioning in order for his conscience to take command of its inborn function as a decision-maker center. It recovered the throne lost in the battle during which society-programming declared victory. And it was this fresh cloudless consciousness the responsible for Valentina being tested. He fired off this email to Isis with the primary object of –Balou came to the following conclusion lounged around his seat as the hostess served him a whiskey– bringing forward the universal direction his life should take, right in tune with Rudolf Steiner´s verses: to stay clear of Valentina´s life, a resolve which, as a matter of fact, was aligned with the wishes of his stepson, the sure-fire winner Titan. It was the first time that the passenger Adolfo Sammartino –at the highest realms represented by Balou– could affirm he had made, and further executed, a decision exclusively of his own. Only those adopted by the higher-self should be regarded as your own decisions. If the ordinary mind is in charge of the decision-making process, they will be the external inputs flowing in combined with the external influences (which managed to come in through the prism of mind) accountable for its resolves. It is like if you wanted to claim credit for your summer suntan, when you know pretty well that the sunrays have done the job, it was the sun´s influence, over which man has no control, that produced the tanning-effect on your body. Before landing at Fisherton´s international airport in Rosario, Balou brought a conclusion down to earth: people live under the illusion of making their own decisions; they ignore that no sovereign decision shall be called so inasmuch as the mind is in charge, at most what we denominate decisions would be seen as a mere set of accidents boosted by the incorporation of external data to the mind, given that the latter will have selected some sensed impressions which accounts for the decisions supposedly made by ourselves. Thus, you never make your choices, you cannot say that you decide for yourself, you cannot thereby say that you do something, it´s rather a series of accidents falling upon your life that you mistakenly take for your own choices. It was now time for the conscience of Balou to determine how to cope with long-term effects associated with the apparition of Valentina into his life. The time of the universe forced him to turn the page.
On arrival, Balou was supposed to book an appointment with Lucas who, besides being a renowned psychiatrist, was also a seeker of the truth with broad experience in theoretical analysis of mind´s abilities as well as with handling altered states of consciousness.
Lucas Iráizoz gave him an appointment as soon as he spotted a gap in his agenda. In the interim, Balou had a week off, which he used to continue the decoding process of the imprints left by the Colombian happenings. It was very difficult for Balou´s birth family members to understand what was going on, since they had in front of them a manic floating in the waves of delirium. They feared he might end up schizophrenic like their mother. Too much talk they got from Balou yet nothing really substantial in the end, because he purposely hid the essential: that his present condition was due to a random encounter with a seventeen years old teenager. Which in Rosario would have meant to be a cougar, a perverted bordering on pederasty. With that in mind, he concisely told his relatives that the profusion of euphoria had been caused by the demission as financial manager of Bio-Rasta.
- So that´s why you wanted to borrow ten thousand dollars from me? To go smash Mister Houdet´s face? If I had lent them to you, you would have taken out all your anger on him for having worked two years without getting paid, in passing. Wouldn´t you? –Balou´s younger brother inferred–. Thanks God I refused, otherwise I would have turned both accomplice and sponsor of a massacre.
- You are right.
- You must visit the psychiatrist –Juan sounded imperative enough–. Get a treatment aimed at quickly fixing your lousy condition. Slagging off your ex-boss is not the proper way to leave any job. It would be of no wonder to receive a claim for defamation and libel against you, from that Marc.
- Don´t worry, I´ve just booked an appointment with the psychiatrist –Balou said this to appease his brother.
Balou´s two sisters were weeping next to him, because they had never seen their brother in so poor a mental state, so out of touch with reality. Isis tried to comfort the younger sister of Balou, the psychologist, while recounting the events taken place in Cali, at least those she had witnessed.
- Do you mean that you filmed Adolfo jumping over a two-meters high fence early in the morning?
Isis picked his cell phone and showed her the evidence.
- I can´t believe it. ¡Damn, Adolfo has gone crazy! –Betina held her head in lament.
- Your brother is back in his teenage years as far as his physical condition is concerned –Isis pointed out firmly–. During January he has been running an average of eight kilometres per day without becoming weary at all. I guess he was urged to blow off the excess of energy he had accumulated. As incredible as it may seem, Betina, that´s how the story goes.
- Count on us, brother, to go to the psychiatrist with you –Alejandrina, Adolfo Sammartino´s elder sister, decided on her own accord–. We want to know what´s happening to you, and also to listen to the doctor´s advice.
The corporate spirit of the family Sammartino succeeded in finding an outlet. Corporate spirits see families as minds fed by external traditions, they are boards which set up the “we” by suppressing individual opinions (the “we” being the outcome that results of dissipating individual opinions when passing them through the prism of the family mind) in order to give shelter –and consequently to subdue– its members to supposedly self-made decisions. Balou, currently lead and inspired by a unified will, whose higher-self had already dismissed external influences as well as any participation in corporate institutions, stood firm to reject his elder sister´s idea making a superhuman effort not to yell at her.
- Thanks, but no. I´ve brought Isis and Juan José along so they could come with me to the psychiatrist, because it will be their future task, not yours, to follow-up my recovery in Colombia. This topic deserves no further discussion.
Balou, with the sponsorship of his official spokesman Adolfo Sammartino, used simple words for the sake of his brother´s understanding. He referred to Lucas Iráizoz as his “psychiatrist”, although he was more than that, he was an enlightened man, an ascended master back to earth among us, to whom the cosmos entrusted the promotion and spreading of esoteric healing.
Balou preferred to conceal that the very reason of his declination lied in his brothers´ ignorance of who he is, accordingly, he shut his mouth so not to offend susceptibilities. Even more, he was sure they had no suspicions of being interacting with a higher version of Adolfo Sammartino. And as for this, they were at the same level of ignorance with Isis.
For logistical reasons, Balou lodged in downtown, in a flat located at the corner of Laprida street and Córdoba, a short ride away from the Paraná River. A childhood friend let him use it during his stay in Rosario. The flat had no wi-fi connection, as he thought it to be the only way his stepson won´t be attached to the cell-phone so they can talk at length. They went to Lucas Iráizoz´s office on foot, as the flat was close by.
Lucas Iraízoz´s office completely diverged from that of Galvis Moscoso in Cali. The differences were evident at first sight: while Moscoso was the main shareholder and funding partner of the clinic, the psychiatrist from Rosario rented his office setting and regarded himself as a channel for healing, unconcerned on the money he made in return for the services rendered. Coffee region´s materialism versus gaucho´s bohemian spirituality. Iraízoz, apart from being a psychiatrist, was also a writer who produced madness-related paintings, being most of them hung on the walls of the Perpetuum Mobile clinic he worked at. He was assigned office number four, kind of aseptic place with no other decoration than a professional library full of eastern books on spirituality, intermingled with Freud´s, Lacan´s and Rudolf Steiner´s. The east and the west come together at office number four. What does the desk look like? Definitely, crystal clean, likewise his tidily cut beard.
Isis, Balou and his stepson walked into the psychiatrist bunker like a whirlwind. Taking into account the forty-minutes maximum duration of therapy sessions, Balou spared no time and directly began –as soon as binational hugs and same old polite introductions were over– to pour out one by one the sequence of natural and supranatural events occurred in Cali from the twelfth of November 2017 onwards, till January thirty first 2018, keeping chronological order, no matter whether he had been the protagonist or the victim.
During the flight Isis, heard from Balou the content of the letter he had written and kept for himself until then, wherein he announced he was going to abandon her from December first two thousand seventeen onwards. The account, caustic and surrealistic equally, left her utterly astounded. However, even though Isis covered her head because she felt hurt by his literary cruelty, she started to make the pieces of the puzzle fit together.
Lucas Iráizoz rubbed his chin faintly. And he grinned. As he cared not to interrupt the detailed stumbling speech of his patient, the first question to be posed was being cooked up.
- You´ve just mentioned a happening that occurred to you in Cali airport, Adolfo: could you please shed more light on it? Would it be possible for you to embellish the story by sharing the psychological burdens of the experience with me?
- Of course, I can. In fact, I was waiting for that question to be thrown, Lucas. When I bumped into Valentina at the airport, a violent electrical shake seized me and expelled me from the unreality where I had been attached during the last fifty years of my life, to the unified reality. My will power somehow returned, while the inhibition of my soul reverted in the twinkling of an eye. From a holistic standpoint, it´s fair to remark the conclusion of a neutral-effect agreement: on one hand, was the restriction order in force as to approach Valentina; on the other hand, the lift of the siege that burdened my soul. The divine justice moves its pieces righteously in order to restore balance to our mortal lives.
- Are you telling me that your soul was sieged? Adolfo: Do you mean you lacked a soul before meeting Valentina?
- That´s what I mean –Balou replied steadfastly–. Gurdjieff, a mystic from Armenia…
- I know who Gurdjieff is and his conditions for soul development –Lucas interrupted to made his expertise on the matter clear–.
- Correct, Gurdjieff argued that unless we tread a long path first, we may not claim for a soul to be born. Only creatures which are owners of their own decisions, in possession of a higher-self, are entitled to boast about having a soul. The fact is that I didn´t claim anything, Lucas. Valentina gave birth to my will power and, simultaneously, created the necessary atmosphere to bring my soul into existence, thus making the inhibition ineffective. This is a long-standing tale.
- Long-standing? –Isis jumped off her seat.
- Yes, it started long time ago. You, Isis, paved the way forward for Valentina to come into my life. I ought to be with you first, it was kind of a train stop where I had to get off and stay overnight before going on to the final destination. The overnight stay lasted four and a half years until you kicked me out. The longest length of stay ever, probably a Guinness record. As you should know well, nobody ends up living in a train stop, we have to carry on, get on the next convoy. In my case, Valentina seems to be the end of the line, my abode. The significance of the letter of abandonment I handed down to you is almost impossible to grasp for an ordinary mind, for it came from the bowels of my unified self hence, no authorship must be attributed to Adolfo Sammartino. This “I” which may be called Higher Self, gave me specific, definite and indubitable instructions with regards to Valentina and what I must do with her. My will eventually complied with the Higher Self guidance and this one, in turn, followed decisions made on planes far beyond human mind´s comprehension, viz, the rulers of the Universe.
Adofo Sammartino restrained himself just in time and kept from saying that the letter of abandonment of Isis had been written by Balou. Isis should never know this, but with respects to Lucas, he might update him on the existence of Balou in a second appointment, once Isis and Juan Jose will be back in Colombia.
Lucas scribbled on a notepad several perfect designs of a geometric nature, in doing so he felt sympathy for the secondary role Isis played in Balou´s emotional life (confined to be just a simple train stop), so he cut off the never-ending song and dance about abandonment and rectified the direction that the conversation was taking.
- Adolfo, what are you doing next?
- Get back to normal, Lucas. And ask for forgiveness. During the three-week mind-altered state I went through, I got much more information than my brain could normally assimilate. I deciphered many of them, most of the happenings are clear to me but still, some transcendent things are not easy for me to figure out. If my goal is to stabilise, only a deep inquiry will be of help.
- But I am too going to confess you what my first thought was, upon meeting Valentina.
- What did you think of?
- I thought of dying, I thought of how cumbersome it would be for my mental structure to process such a heap of information flooding into my expanded conscience. As Valentina pierced me through with her insolent stare –in sync with the instant and in entropy with the universe– I began to die for myself, you had me there standing in wait for the bitter end to come when I said loudly to the mirror in front of me: “I got back home”. At grassroot level this pronouncement could simply refer to a place of residence, to an arrival at a certain address, but as to my Higher-Self this statement had an altogether different connotation, much loftier actually. In terms of my physical life Valentina is the final destination, but the door I almost knocked on was closed nonetheless. Because it couldn´t be opened Valentina kindly showed to me, by means of her insolent stare, the impossibility to get to know each other and, at the same ceremony, gave me the keys of my celestial abode. She was telling me that my energy should be led towards that abode. Due to all this, I thought of dying, Lucas. What does an inoperable key (on earth) serve for? To leave the physical body in order to occupy the celestial abode –taking into account that I was now in possession of its keys– sounded better than staying alive. But you can never tell, so completely! I´ve had the gut feeling that these keys slots into the time locks only.
- You are getting mystical –Juan José punctuated, then added: And mystifying us.
- Whatever I be, Juan José, I respect your opinion. I would like to say that I´ve lived fifty years unfocussed and now the focus is back thanks to Valentina. What price did I have to pay to stop living unfocussed? It was obviously not for free, I paid it with madness. The challenge now is not to lose the keys she has given to me.
- Madness and sanity are relative terms about normality. Who dare say “I am normal” by affirming that he is capable to tell apart his normality from others´ abnormality? Nobody –the psychiatrist answered to himself–. There has been a revolt in your mind, Adolfo, as a consequence of which you were thrown out and beyond your mind. Your neurotransmitters have lost their ways, the information you are conveying does not come from external perceptions but from an internal memory bank, it´s this database what you call the higher self. But beware: these records are being interpreted by a rebellious mind. You almost went haywire but hopefully you weren´t, you are in shock actually. It´s undeniable, though, that nobody knows what happened to you and the reasons underlying. Do not be deluded. Fumbling may only cause the theories you read on metaphysic and paranormal to fit in artificially with the airport happenings around Valentina. Dreams must be dismantled once and for all. You´ve conducted a survey at rationalising with your intellect the imprints you´ve received, so don´t regard the ongoing process as a major step forward for the phenomenal comprehension but as a starting point from which things are likely to be clarified. Come to a halt here and now.
“By the way, you noted something which is paramount for any possible elucidation: the unusual acquaintance you felt toward Valentina in the airport”. Your expanded conscience, by means of the aforementioned rebellious mind, is likely to have associated Valentina with some person that walked through your life in the last fifty years. Proceed as follows: every night you go to bed, please go mentally backwards in time, build up an inner environment of retrospective continuity, do it smoothly since this “here and now” back to the moment of your birth. Try to remember without haste but at a steady pace. Do not burn your head in between. For example, in the first night try to bring back to mind the chain of events concerning the last two years, the things you´ve seen, the people you´ve met with and so on until your conscience, much more perceptive nowadays than ever before, stumbles with the person which reminds you of Valentina. If it happens this person to exist, your consciousness will catch her, sooner or later, from the lake of your subconscious wherein the totality of our memories dwell in wait to be screened –so to later bring them to light. In cases like yours, of sudden remembrance, this procedure is advisable. Once the objective is accomplished come see me to continue to unravel this intriguing episode.
- You are staying in Rosario for quite a long time, until your full recovery, are you?
- That´s the idea, yes –Balou lied to Lucas.
- The therapy I recommended you is called Rebirthing –Lucas remarked–, you will derive benefit from it as that which keeps you separated from the ordinary mind will be driven away. Thus, enabling to connect you again with what you grasp with the non-altered mind. If the goal is to bring you back to balance, it is needful to get reduced the distance between the visions you´ve had during the altered state of conscience and what you see during vigil normal state, okey?
- Okey.
Isis and Lucas got out of the office, while Balou and his stepson stayed there exhausted and pensive. Never did Balou know what Isis talked with Lucas, he only acknowledged that the therapy session was over.
