"Tabula Rasa" – February 22, 1983

The question of why things were the way they were for me would define me. It was if I was new to the world, unaware of it’s patterns and personas, a blank slate unsculpted by the impressions of sound and substance that gave rise to community and culture. Over time, I would hear it described as being a “tabula rasa”, which meant the ‘blank slate’, the idea of which clarified my sense of the threads of subtle reality I felt constantly hammering at me in the space.

“It was the whole idea of self-identity.” said Peter. “Over time, i’d come to realize that it was this thing that lay at the very center of every human experience, that all incarnate beings were bound and defined by the grip they had on who they-thought-they-were.”

“Fascinating” said Calliope, taking more notes. “Was this something you inherently understood then, like the One Thing?”

“Not at all. Like all the other overwhelming sensations that defined my experience, it was something I felt, something that flickered in and out of the kinetic gravities and colors that underlay concepts and meaning in the human condition.”

“Okay, so how did it play out for you at that time?”

He considered this, looking over the moments from his past. After a time he spoke. “I had no resonance with the things that defined the people.” he said. “Most of the time I was dealing with all kinds of emotional upheavals, feeling bouts of tremendous anger and elation in a rollercoaster of shifting tones. I didn’t like the scent of the people, the way their thoughts and emotions scraped across my nervous system.”

“That’s interesting.” said Calliope. “So you had … no understanding of the systems of the world? Can you expand on that?”

He thought for a moment, then a moment more, as if listening to something far, far away.

“I …. remember being in my home in Kensington looking at a book on biology and on mathematics. I’d gotten them from the library …” “Of course” Calliope interrupted with a smile, and he smiled back before continuing.

“It was like the most basic assumptions about human experience were gone, or had never been there, or had flickered in and out of coherence like a mirror made of water. Because the library was a place of sanctuary for me, i’d gathered a few books and resolved myself to figure out how these things worked. Math was incomprehensible to me, yet I felt it related to order in a way that would serve me, though I couldn’t define why. Accordingly, I got the book on mathematics and copied out basic formulas, just repeating the problems over and over to try to get a sense of the dynamics, of how things were ordered in this place.”

“It was deeper than that. I had no sense of the physics which define the earth plane. The most basic aspects of life were intermittently ungraspable for me, as if I was unable to understand or digest what mortal life was all about in a grounded way.”

“Do you think this was because of your karmic architecture? Of being so expansive in the crown and so incoherent in the root?”

“Absolutely. But that was a revelation that would take decades to achieve.”

Future Tense

“And did that change for you?” she asked kindly.

“There was a moment in Kenmore Square, Boston a few years later, where all of a sudden a fugue of information poured into me regarding the various systems of the world and how they interfaced with each other — “