The One Thing – January 7th, 1975

Calliope and Peter sat in a quiet corner of the akashic library, surrounded by towering shelves of ancient tomes and scrolls. The flickering candlelight cast long shadows, creating an atmosphere of introspection and revelation. Calliope, her quill ready, looked at Peter with an encouraging smile.

Peter spoke. “The Mythica is a story about magic. Or, more appropriately, about the range of awareness that includes the subtle layer of perception and which experiences a certain dimension of life. It is a teaching story, one that uses my tale to showcase the principles and expressions of story which define our lives and legends, and it starts in the village of Kensington, about twenty miles outside of the city of New York.”

“The journey into the Mythica starts in the territories of Long Island, just across the water from the island of Manhattan” said Peter as the scenery changed around them. “She’s a melody across the timeline of my story, with each note revealing another layer of the journey itself.”

“By building her out of the authentic moments of my story, and showing those things as they existed both within and without – in my subjective perception of objective events and how that defined my movement along the threads.”

It’s a journey. And as I come at last to share with you what I have discovered about the lands beneath the land that support our stories I’m led to open with what the journey is and why I created the Mythica.

First and foremost, Into the Mythica is a living story. What you read here is not simply a telling; she is a divination – a gazing into the vast and minute picture of what it means to be who we are, casting a web which reveals the web of our interconnected nature. As the Authors scrawl their tales they are in an act of sacred devotion, teasing out the threads of their mythos to reveal the collective and Divine consciousness that supports us all.

“There was a park near my house called Allenwood” said Peter, “and as a child I spent many hours there playing, connecting with the spirits of nature.”

Stories from the Holy Wood are true. Such is the essence of their power, and into the Mythica holds the power of a living myth, telling the true story of my journey along the heroic path in service to the Goddess of Story over twenty years.

Calliope’s quill paused as she looked at him with empathy. “Since this is a story about magic, it’s foundational to really look at what that is. At what the idea of willful change and manifestation is really about. It’s a deep dive into the nature of Nature, and into the substance of the ethers which hold the context for all things.”

Peter paused, a thoughtful expression on his face. “At the core of manifestation is the idea of the rabbit pulled from the hat.”

“Which means?” Calliope asked, leaning in.

“Something from nothing. A form emerging from a space too small to hold that form,” Peter explained.

“And is that the shape of magic?” she asked.

“Anything can be a magic if you put your focus into it,” Peter replied.

Calliope pulled back for a moment, feeling the shift in the space. “What do you mean by that?” she asked tentatively.

“Form comes from the formless. What matters is devotion. To the absolute focus on a thing that creates the gravity of form itself,” Peter explained, his voice firm.

“Tell me more.” she said, her quill scrawling the words out onto the page as he spoke.

“While my world was a constantly shifting wash of strange sensations and landscapes of color, there was an understanding that I had from the very beginning that related to the very core of the human ideas of devotion and manifestation. There was a gnosis in this. A Knowing, the deep realization that ANYTHING could be a portal to enlightenment and realization, that the outer form of the thing didn’t matter as much as one’s absolute attention,” Peter explained, his voice gaining strength.

“There was in this a deep gnosis, a visceral and sensual understanding that what we called our ‘self’ and our ‘mind’ was itself a shape, defined by a certain texture and sensation that I could perceive in the field within and without. Of course, given the constantly shifting chaos of my mind, it was a revelation that came and went, simultaneously lost and found in what was the turbulent jumble of heavy music and wet sounds that was my way of seeing the world,” Peter said, his voice carrying the weight of his journey.

“But when I saw it, when I could hold it, I saw it clear. Anything we focused on with absolute intensity gained a gravity. There was a power to devotion, to the commitment to something in an absolute way,” Peter concluded. “The problem was, I couldn’t hold it.”

He continued. “As far back as I can remember I have had a sense of the subtle energies of the worlds. My world was a thing of deep sensations, of gravities of meaning and the energies that moved between the people. It was an elemental, feral place of sharp gravity and heavy color, somehow real and grounded and sitting within everything. It was a place where thoughts and feelings were visceral things, where the movements and vibrations of the memories of a place still carried a song, and where the slightest intention was an etching of sound into the shape of the world. There was the sense that everything was a solid thing, sometimes very subtle, but solid, made from the substance that made up everything. For me, the mystical, magical world that lay beneath the surface of our story is made of this, from the substance of story herself.”

Calliope’s quill moved quickly, capturing his vivid descriptions. “Years later I would learn about the nature of awareness and consciousness and have words to put to it, but when I was a child it was just a knowing. A knowing that everything I was feeling was One thing, somehow rippling out across the substance of itself in pockets of gravity, places in a landscape of heavy colors which somehow bent the world. Things looked a certain way from a certain point of view, yet that changed… and with its change came another world, hanging like pearls in a vast gravity of rippling light.”

Peter paused, looking at Calliope. “Somehow I intrinsically knew that everything was one thing, that what I was looking at and what was washing across my senses all the time was just various aspects of the same underlying substance.”

“Can you explain that more deeply?” Calliope asked, her eyes wide with curiosity. “I feel like the readers will really want to know what that was like.”

“I’ll do my best. It’s difficult to describe. Remember, we’re talking about the beginning of my life, before I was hammered by the karmic impressions of this Age, before the trauma of childhood and the years upon years of coming to coherence,” Peter replied, his voice thoughtful.

“Do you think that’s what makes it challenging to describe? Many people have trauma in this time,” Calliope suggested, her quill poised.

“I know. It’s not that. It’s that… how do I explain… the way people perceive the world is dictated by something else, by the shape of the lens of what defines their sense of self, and I was having a perception-above-perception, if that makes any sense. There was a sense that I was looking at the very substance that made up the lens of perception, and seeing it in a wash of gravities and elements that was void of context while simultaneously being the very origin of context itself,” Peter explained, his hands gesturing as if trying to shape the intangible. “And it all orients around the self. Around the structure of the self on a subtle level.”

Calliope’s eyes sparkled with curiosity. “That was the thing though. I didn’t have that sense. I didn’t have the sense of a self. It was more like everything was just this glorious song of light and color, of gravities which bend the space around them and the whispering scents of Nature.”

“Yet while I knew this, while I felt this beneath the waves of the world, I could not hold it. Something about the gravity around my own self made it difficult. More often than not I would be lost in the waves of it, lost and overwhelmed, unable to make sense of the most basic parts of the world,” Peter continued, his voice tinged with the memory of those chaotic times.

“Sometimes this was beautiful. The world was full of shifting and changing colors, with elemental intelligences that spoke a language I could somehow understand. Other times, not so much. I was a rage of emotions, of discordant relations mixed with moments of majestic creativity,” Peter said, his eyes reflecting the tumult of those early years.

“My world was a thing of constant overwhelm, drowning in a chaos of shouting colors and melting songs. Life was a blend of incoherent and shifting forms, where my very sense of self, the very coherence required to establish a consistent anchoredness into being, was adrift,” Peter continued.

Peter’s voice grew more reflective. “Years later I would find some words to connect this to the world, realizing that I had a kind of kinetic, spatial synesthesia, a way of perceiving the world in a kind of spatial savant way, where the colors and impressions in the wake of the people’s movement formed a landscape, and our movement along our sacred journey was always a movement through space. Yet when I was young, it just a wash of shifting sensations that made no sense.”

“Yet sometimes, sometimes it was like I could pull those gravities through my thought and intention, like the very nature of my thoughts was made of that liquid-like substance, and that my very existence and the substance itself were somehow the same,” Peter explained, his hands shaping the air as if molding the intangible.

Calliope’s quill moved rapidly, capturing his every word. “Even then, perhaps especially then, there were so many layers to the world. So many ways in which I sensed and felt what was happening around me. It wasn’t just my emotions or the sensations I felt around me from other people, there was something deeper… many things that were deeper. Things made of those same dancing gravities, with images and concepts orbiting them in the space.”

“The sense of the energies was so visceral, so clarified into shapes and forms made of sculpted light. I could feel the substance of it, the dance between my consciousness and the softness of it, and would shape the subtle with my hands, making tools and objects that existed in that luminant space,” Peter continued, his voice soft and introspective.

“That sounds beautiful” said Calliope wistfully.

“It was. I mean, as much of it as I can remember now. Being in this world has heavied me. I don’t see things the way I once did. But I remember just enough to long for it.”

She sensed something deeper beneath his words. A pain; but said nothing.

The Shadow in the World

“And yet there was …. something else.” he said, his eyes thoughtful and heavy.

“Yes.” he replied sadly. “An incoherence equal to the clarity.”

“Can you explain?”

“Have you ever felt there was something wrong with the world?” he asked. “That the world we lived in was somehow broken? That all the anger, the judgment and distortions in our relationships was part of something larger?”

She paused her writing. He continued. “I have. In fact, I saw it. I saw the vibrational nature of it, a darkness infecting the people, distorting their view of what is. It occurred to me as a splintering of the world, like a picture broken into shards.”

“I’ve come to feel that there is a madness to seership, to one’s eyes being fixed from a distant star, and it’s one I’ve dealt with all my life. In so many ways it’s that thing, that intrinsic difficulty and the wondering about what and why it was happening that has defined the quest, to use the power of story to heal my own wounded sky,” Peter said, his voice carrying the weight of his experiences.

She paused, feeling the heaviness.

“I looked at the world” said Peter, “and what I saw was wrong, somehow. Things were not bright, they were not easeful or heavenly, but felt covered in some kind of a muck. A shadow which distorted the very shape of our hearts and minds.”

“Can you tell me more about that?”

“It’s like … things are .. fractured. Distorted. That there is a shadow that sits within our self that is shared by us all. A kind of … vibrational acidity bound up in our thoughts and our emotions, in the very substance of our being which prevents us from seeing the bright world. No one is free from it. It is a thing which defines the Shadow Age, what some traditions call the ‘Kali Yuga’ – the Age of Darkness.”

“That sounds … intense.” she replied.

“It blocks our magic.” he replied. “Covers up our view of ourselves and the world. It’s the stain within the story.”

“There’s an idea I’ve heard in the world that we choose our missions. That on some level of conscious agency we make a decision to take on a certain karmic pattern or devote ourselves to a cause, to something noble whose purposing lay far beyond what we encounter in one thread of life or another. It’s a powerful thing, this idea. The gravity of it,” Peter continued, his eyes meeting Calliope’s.