PHOTONIC MANIFESTO

PHOTONIC MANIFESTO

A work in progress

by Yeshe Dorje

Tony Peru

There is something to what he says about the sun. I’ve been in town for a few weeks now, it’s my first trip to Arizona, and the sun shines every day here. So you notice the sun, the way it creates this beautiful light. The state is full of people who come for the sun, but few of them think about the sun the way Tony Peru does. After listening to him, I have to admit I have begun to notice that there are some interesting things going on with the sun.

Tony Peru joined us at our table one day. Elaine introduced us, and when I asked him what he does, he hesitated, considering the question rather than simply telling me what he does. He likes to think he wanders in utter confusion with complete confidence. At least that’s what he said in answer to my question. I can see both his bewilderment and the strength of his convictions and this is what drew me in, his spooky ideas and his smile.

Tony Peru fills his head with strange ideas from esoteric texts and obscure websites because he’s got a lot of time on his hands, because he’s curious and compelled to seek and because he thinks we’re living in radical times. When I asked him about work, in the usual way that people do as they first meet, he described his growing confusion about what he does for money; everything he did in Canada he can’t do here, or what he used to do has changed so that apparently he can no longer do what he once did. He just doesn’t know what to do with himself. He’s become disillusioned with work. He himself has changed, from what I have gathered he’s been going through some remarkable changes and this is more to the point, he’s in a state of flux. He says that the sun is changing every thing, every mind, the entire solar system. To speak with him you’d think that all of his thoughts begin with the sun. But what is most remarkable about Tony Peru is that he is convinced capitalism fails us, you don’t meet many people who would say or think it, and so he’s writing a revolutionary manifesto. He has many reasons for not being able to find work, but it seems to me that he has an aversion to capital itself, as if he’s a holdover from the anti-establishment ‘70’s. He has dedicated his life to meditation here in the vivid deserts of Arizona, Buddhist meditation and the writing of this revolutionary manifesto that brought us all together.

I asked him what he used to do before, before I met him here in the Epic Café.

"I was a reluctant agent of capitalism, a cog in the wheel of economic development, attracting corporations to where they don’t belong, here in this beautiful desert."

For the past couple of years he had been flying on business across the continent from San Francisco to New York City and many points between the seas, meeting with what he calls the ‘merchants of the emerging photonic technology revolution’. He had recently gone to Europe, and spent time walking upon the ancient cobblestones and granite gravestones of London wooing the businessmen selling biotechnology and methods of sustainable development. During his weeks in the UK, he took a side trip to the continent, and he said his mind was completely transformed during the Kalachakra for World Peace initiation in Graz Austria as the sun exploded in coronal mass ejections. Now he just seems a little lost.

As a result of our conversations, it has become obvious to me that Tony Peru observes ripples in reality that no one else can see. He seems excessively preoccupied with what he described as the transformation of the solar system by mysterious energies. Though he seemed kind of lost and strange and has that ebbing of self-confidence brought on by unemployment, I have grown to like him. So I now find myself drawn to his table when I go to the Epic Café in the mornings before rehearsal.

I’m in town from San Francisco directing Elaine’s new play, Barrio Hollywood. We’d come into the Café to discuss a re-write and finish our response to the call for manifestos for the new theatre. Because we were working on our manifesto, Elaine had called Tony Peru over explaining that he was writing some sort of Buddhist revolutionary manifesto. He told me that it was during his recent travels for his last job that visions and voices began streaming into his consciousness as a series of revelations and he was now writing the ‘Photonic Manifesto’.

Now we meet at the Epic nearly every day and as we’ve become more familiar, Tony Peru has begun to speak insanely of deep things, of the unhappiness of the world, and its causes. Apparently he has recurring dreams with a few themes, one of a cocktail party in the New York Public Library with various revolutionary luminaries speaking to him. He says that after these dreams began, he realized he had always truly hated capitalism. You meet people like this here at the Epic Café in Tucson, it’s got a border town boho kind of feel. He spoke forcefully of his disgust with what he calls the Moloch, and this aversion apparently extends to money itself, as I often buy the coffees.

During his long morning sojourns in the Epic Café, he believes a new clarity is emerging due to the circumstances of his increasingly beat life. Surely this lifelong struggle against betraying his socialist ideals, surely it is this that explained his lack of a job and his lurching towards the fringes of life in this southwestern city. So many unexpected events had recently transpired transforming his life; he said in all his jobs he ended up tortured by some inhumane human or he felt as if he were a silver ball hanging as an ornament on the desk of capital, being repeatedly struck by other silver balls in perpetual confusion yet conforming to the straight life, and all of the activity ultimately pointless.

Now here he is, wandering in the desert after leaving a sweet job in the mountains to the north, truly beat, realizing that his life purpose is to pull out the roots of all suffering, and this means an end to capitalism. If anything is possible, and everything is impermanent, then surely the age of imperialist capitalism was coming to its painful conclusion with this war in Iraq! Surely people would wake up and see the true causes of the war and the evil within men like Richard Perle! The fat man who closes the devil’s deals. What became alarming is that Tony Peru explained he had ceased to be concerned with his own death, he has lost any fear of death believing it is imminent for many. He believes he has become a photonic revolutionary and is guided by the voices and visions in his dreams to create a guide for the perplexed.

When we met, Tony Peru had been spending much of his time surfing the net, and says he has begun to see clearly that this is a time of false prophets and misguided new age revolutionaries. He said repeatedly that he could no longer ignore what these times truly mean to the future of humanity. He speaks with passion. Here is an opportunity for a great leap forward! An end to the violence and bloodshed created by our alienation from our true human nature!

Out of his own confusion and befuddlement, his time in the small prisons of his mind and contemplating three thousand years of human revolutions and revolutionaries and the voices of his dreams, came the Photonic Manifesto. From his table in the Epic Café, Tony Peru began to observe the revolution of physical reality and he would sit down and tell me all about it.

He could no longer refuse the guidance of his dreams, so the time has come to form the revolutionary vanguard, and he has asked me to go with him into the American frontier to find them. He says he’s guided by a spiritual band of historical figures, the Truth and Reconciliation Committee.

This morning we met up at the Epic and after I asked him about this Committee, he began this rant, which I share with you now.

"Their goal is total liberation of all beings from the enslavement to the illusion. The capitalist illusion creates a spiritual malaise and this is the root of all alienation!"

"If you are to take up the Manifesto, you are committed to the truth of your conscience."

"You know the war isn’t going as well as they might have thought, and I swear the Southern Baptists would agree with me that this storm that’s slowing things down is an act of God. Christ I was reading in the Times where some officer was describing the conditions as if they were on another planet! They started the war right after two X-class solar flares, it’s like the sun anticipated the war and the sun and earth are trying to prevent it from happening. You know I’m a Canadian, so I can’t vote. I’ve marched against the war and read all kinds of different stories about the real reasons for this evil like Richard Perle. It’s capital and it fails us!… I guess that makes me a terrorist sitting here in the Epic, but you know they’re marching on Babylon and all I can hear are the songs of the women and children. We’re in a country that attacks women and children for profit! Lenin was right man, imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism… God I’m glad the Buddha taught us about impermanence. I was thinking that all revolutionaries believe they can change the world, and they take advantage of impermanence, you know? Somehow we will overcome the evil that takes the souls of boys so they live the lives of empty tortured men like the Vietnam vets you meet in here."

He looks at me with this intensity that makes me uncomfortable, but I’m thinking I can use this in my play and so I encourage him.

"Yeah Tony, but what do you really think?"

"What do I really think, well what I really want to tell you now that the troops are on their way to Babylon is that I feel as if I am on the front lines of some kind of earth shattering transition. I watch the SOHO space satellite reports on the solar weather and the shifts in the electromagnetic forces here and for some reason, some holy inspiration keeps me thinking all of this means the end of capitalism is near. I know this could make me sound a fool, or perhaps its wishful thinking when it seems the imperialist forces are making more progress than ever, but you know I am compelled to tell the truth, so here it is… Lately everyone wants to know what I do, you know how people ask what it is that you do? Christ I even ask what it is I’m supposed to do when I’m talking to the Truth and Reconciliation Committee in my dreams. Rhonda from the Epic came up to me the other day and asked what it is that I do. She wonders, and you know, so do I. The war begins and all I have is a pen and a notebook, a little money running out as I sit between jobs while the economy tanks, and I couldn’t begin to tell you what it is I could do for a job but I can talk all day about how I want to poke so many holes in this illusion that everyone begins to see the other side."

This guy is a wild man, what does he mean, the other side, other side of what?

"The other side, what do you mean?" I ask.

"Well last Friday I had this breakthrough in my meditation and I realized that the other side is really another dimension or dimensions I like to call the second whirled, you know because you have to be present in the moment, make a present of your presence or prescience… Anyway I have been so preoccupied with what I do and it seems like I need to write all this down, you know, and so I was wondering if you could take a look at it…

it’s as if all I am allowed to do right now is write and write, I have pages and pages of this Guide to the Perplexed and the Photonic Manifesto… The Universe asks me to speak but I am so far out I’m too far in… you know it’s hard to explain to someone else, I sit and watch as tears go by you know… and while I’m watching the basketball game Dan Rather breaks in with reports from the Front and I feel like I live in this surreal world and see what needs to fall apart, what must fall apart and its all of the hanging on we do that keeps it going and if we could all just let go, or enough of us really… Its like some of America has lost its heart, but not the people of the Epic Café, not Rhonda or the cute counter women nor Alison… you know she’s still not returning my calls, she told me she’s busy but why bother to give me her number. She is the new American goddess man, getting ready to go to Colorado and do a yoga and meditation retreat."

He pauses and takes a breath, thinking of what he really wants to say.

"She asks me to remember what I cannot forget. I am born to love and wander in the American frontier trying to find it. You know when Alison asked me what I do, I just went blank, couldn’t think of what to say, that’s how little I know about what it is that I do, or at least what I’m willing to say. You think maybe that’s why she hasn’t called?"

I feel for him, he seems lonely, but after everything he’s been telling me I can understand why now might not be the best time to be asking anyone out.

"You know Tony, maybe you should get your act together some before you try and ask anybody out. Maybe she’s busy like she said."

"But why would she give me her number?"

"I don’t know, what did you say when she asked you what you do?"

"I said I’m between jobs, you know, and that maybe I might get work looking after developmentally challenged adults. But you know I keep thinking about men walking out into the desert to set themselves on fire. This is what I do…"

"Come on Tony, what do you do, really?"

"I spend my time trying to let go of what I do."

He pauses and smiles and then continues.

"You know I was thinking, if she asked me again I would say I live for love. Or… I nurture the revolution of minds. Yeah, I’m a mental revolutionary. Or I re-conceptualize the Universe. I purify my negative karma and cultivate loving kindness. I wander in utter confusion with great confidence. I make fridge doors look good. You should come over sometime and see my refrigerator man, I cut out all these pictures and put them on the fridge door with magnets. I’ve got this great picture of a painting of Patrice Lumumba, and on it I wrote ‘Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid.’"

Tony Peru then stops and reaches into his briefcase, he brings this with him into the Epic every day, its covered in some kind of Buddhist images. He pulls out a thick handful of paper and shoves it across the table at me.

"Here, I want you to read this."

Dear Mr. Pointdexter:

I am responding to your request for compliance with the Total Information Awareness Department’s new policy: "It’s Someone We Know". As discussed with your office in my recent telephone conversation, I am releasing our files and documents related to Tony Peru, former employee of OpDiSys Optical Display Systems Corporation, Flagstaff Arizona.

Due to the sensitive nature of this information, I am releasing it directly to your agents rather than the local authorities, as your staff requested. Mr. Peru is a former employee who seems to have had prior knowledge of terrorist events such as the airline pilots on TV in England, and the Shuttle tragedy among other things.

Mr. Peru worked for our company for six months, in international business development selling OpDiSys display systems. In light of recent events it now seems noteworthy that in a brief period, Mr. Peru was on the road a great deal, traveling to: London (England), Graz (Austria), Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, Los Angeles, New York, San Jose, San Diego, Laughlin, Reno, Las Vegas, Orlando, Ft. Worth, and San Francisco. With the exception of Las Vegas, Mr. Peru decided which clients he would call upon and what trade conferences he would attend etc. His supervisor approved travel destinations, after submission of travel requests for each destination. We have all of this documentation for your review.

As I mentioned in my call to your office, we performed a background check on Mr. Peru after he arrived in Laughlin, Nevada for a staff retreat. He looked unkempt, had no money (asking to borrow some from me personally), and without accounting for existing expenses, proceeded to obtain $2147.33 in credit card cash advances during an unplanned weekend in Las Vegas and then on a planned conference in Reno, Nevada. As part of our background check, in contacting former employers and his educational institutions, we learned that he has ties to socialist organizations. I can assure you that had we known this information and done a more thorough job of checking his background, we would never have hired this man.

It turns out Mr. Peru was a labor negotiator in Canada and we have been told that he was an expert in creating dissension, while working for both sides, management and labor unions. We also learned that he studied Marxism while at university in Canada and England, a fact that he did not share with his colleagues here, but that explains a great deal in light of recent events. After discussing some of his activities and his references and comments pertaining to certain newsworthy events, we here in the office think it is distinctly possible that Mr. Peru was secretly working for a terrorist organization.

One of our staff was assigned to clear out Mr. Peru’s office and found a fairly large rock he had left behind. I believe it is noteworthy that this rock had obviously been tampered with for some reason and as you will see, it had been split in two, and some very old documents written in some kind of foreign language that none of us are familiar with were found in this rock. It looks as though he retrieved secret information, similar to that famous pumpkin in the ‘50’s, which is why I bring it to your attention.

When you review his documents, as you can see from his notes taken during meetings, he met with people that inspired him to views we should consider hostile to the United Sates of America. We think these old documents have something to do with his secret activities.

When we recruited and hired Mr. Peru, he seemed like a nice enough person for the first few months, but my staff all agree they noticed a change in him after he returned from his trip to Europe in October. From that point his behavior deteriorated, until I forced his resignation. Your agent asked me to think about any unusual behavior. I want to mention now that I have had time to think about it, we had a bizarre conversation in which he very calmly said some extraordinary things. (It might be useful to know that he was unusually quiet and calm compared to most people in this business, and I found this somewhat unnerving but he was very good at persuasion and an excellent salesman.) During this conversation he said he felt he must "cease being an agent of capital and selling out light" or something very close to this, to this day I am uncertain what he meant, then he began arguing for an hour or more that we should change our product line into what he called ‘sustainable lighting’, where electricity would come directly from the ground! He kept mentioning a man with a foreign name, Hesla I believe.

This idea was based upon a completely unconventional use of technology that in my opinion would not work, but if it worked the way he suggested then this would reduce jobs and therefore be unpatriotic in these difficult times. Mr. Peru claimed that these ideas would provide free energy and light from organic compounds, and he kept repeating a statement that as best I recall went something like this: "we set the truth free so the display will never need money and all work will come to an end", but I want to assure you that he had no scientific basis to prove these ideas, and our research and development department says it cannot be done. I have instructed them to provide your representative with all the information they have on this subject, as it seems Mr. Peru was using our research facilities and was not authorized to do so.

This behavior led to his incredibility within the company. I told him this behavior was unacceptable as we here at OpDiSys have a reputation within the industry for innovation and development based upon sound scientific principles. After his unusual behavior disrupted the culture of our organization, I appeared in his office accompanied by legal counsel and offered him a choice of resigning or dismissal for cause. Mr. Peru resigned, signed all documents ignoring his right to counsel, and accepted one month of compensation ($3,825.58) as settlement of the matter. As he seemed surprised by this meeting and was quite genial in his departure of the premises, and due to the fact that we insisted he leave the offices immediately, he left behind some of the documents we are sending to you now.

I assure you continued complete cooperation from OpDiSys Corporation. We will provide all computer equipment used by Mr. Peru to Total Information Awareness Department representatives. I also enclose copies of emails and other documents found among Mr. Peru’s computer files including one he named "The Photonic Manifesto".

Please note, that as it appears Mr. Peru had prior knowledge of terrorist events and was involved in matters of national security, we wish to cooperate with the Department and do our part during these difficult times.

Best Regards and Good Luck,

Terry Goodwin

President and CEO OpDiSys Corporation

Kent, I have this idea for a manifesto where the hero is on the run from the Total Information Awareness agents, and he is worshipping a revolutionary goddess who will be born soon and grow up to lead all the people of the planet out of the suffering and into the light. I had this dream recently and woke up and wrote this:

Amrita

"There is a Void, outside of Existence, which if enterd into

Englobes itself & becomes a Womb" Jerusalem frontispiece 1804, William Blake

Thus have I heard at one time, the child begins with a wave in the sky, between many worlds. She is our friend sky walking, seeing vast distances with the vision of a goddess so that she might find a palace. For this is that rare occasion when the princess chooses her new home. She is the Great Saviouress and Shining One, Amrita. She sits wise on the floor of a sunlit sky room remembering birth is the root of all suffering. Revealing, she rubs charcoal on parchment pressing the patterns of the floor’s wood grain. After some time, her rubbing creates the impressions of a bird’s eye, which opens into a star system with eyes revolving around the central star. When she looks into the eyes she feels this planet and thinks it is a terrifying bird.

The sun streams brightly in, filling the space around her. Gazing up from her rubbings into the light she recognizes the stream of nectar flowing. The tree of refuge appears and thus blessings flow from the lineage. The voices of her teachers lead into the darkness and after some time she sees her parents making love in their bed inside the eye of the great black bird. Instantly she falls in love with her father, and flows as nectar into his union with her mother.

She looks down at the parchment then gently rolls it in her tiny hands, places it inside her heart and enters the patterns she has drawn in the eye. As it takes on the quality of waves in the growing storm, the consciousness and the tide begins its journey, in the darkness off the coast of Sri Lanka. The Goddess Amrita allows herself to fall to earth on the wings of African birds.

The highest tides in the world begin halfway across the planet in the Indian Ocean. Our friend is now life on earth and she ebbs and flows with the dance of the celestial luminaries, she moves within her mother, she moves within the Sun and she dances in the sky. She is glistening now in the salt water of Serendip and crashes with the waves against the eastern shores of Zanzibar, flowing south faster, quickening around the Horn. She arises swirling vast deep fluid masses of the earth sea teeming with life, flowing north now up through the Atlantic carried by the highest tide in the world. She is the gift of truth awaiting her incarnation, following the voice of the moon sliding silent and unnoticed up the coast of the great white empire into the crimson Fundy and the narrows of Chignecto, Minas Basin and the Southern Bight.

Amrita stops briefly at the base of Cape Split…

"My grandfather I have just come to your door… I need your help…"

Grandfather Glooscap gives Amrita a brief teaching on the four thoughts that turn the mind and then introduces her mind to the nature of reality. He then gives the pointing out instruction.

"You have followed the Eastern Sacred Stream to the merging of all streams, to this place of the split rock. Look and you will see this is where one becomes two, and two becomes three and thus the illusion of duality emerges on this planet. It is here the elements are transformed from their true nature into hope and fear, and all phenomena begin decaying into states of ever increasing disorder."

"Why am I here?"

"You have come to this time and place to bring peace amidst the growing chaos. In this realm, everyone has the responsibility to shape the future of humanity, but much wisdom has been lost or hidden and they are no longer taught how the heart uses the body to ride the waves of grace."

"What is happening here?"

"The Spirit has been lost in the forms that bind the heart from the mind. In the western lands, the Sun Dagger no longer measures time. The trees are dying from the tops down. Soon the earth will shake and will tumble down and people will say ‘oh my God, oh my God’, but in their hearts they will be saying ‘all my gold, all my gold’. So many here have not seen the light that it brings a flood of tears from the heavens, and we despair as so many have hearts of darkness. They are strangers who come in the night and take what they want from the land, they are the tricksters within the coyote clan. Amrita, you are born to change the destiny of those who open their hearts to you. The condition of the planet requires an extraordinary physician as it emerges into a new frequency of light. The people will recognize you as the mother of all the light that shines."

"Grandfather, I know I am the physician. Birth and death are the two great events of human life. In this life the first and last experience is sound. I know the last sound I will hear while on this planet is the voice of the moon reciting the Dharma. Just as the first beats of my heart, are the words of my perfect teacher"

Amrita looked with concern into her grandfather’s eyes.

"When will I be ready to guide others?"

"One day you will have an extraordinarily clear vision of the nature of your mind, quite different from the one you have now, and free of any kind of doubt. At that time, in a way that is not at all ordinary, you will perceive me, your old father, as a real Buddha, and you will inevitably feel natural love and compassion for all beings. In this degenerate age, life is too short to rely upon extensive methods and magic, now is the time to reduce them to their essence. When you can do this, that is when you should start to teach."

"How does one reduce the methods to their essence?"

"Atisha taught me that one begins by training in Bodhicitta with love and compassion for all living creatures throughout space. By making strenuous efforts in the two accumulations for the benefit of those beings. By dedicating all the sources of future good thus created to the future enlightenment of each and every being. And finally, by recognizing that all these things are empty by nature, like dreams… If you do not know how to reduce any practice to its essence, no amount of information, knowledge and intellectual understanding will be of any use to you."

"I know when I open my heart, this essence is filled with the light of love." As she said this, Amrita briefly became a glowing white bird flitting about Glooscap’s head. She then returned to her form as a young woman and rested while sitting in his lap as he finished his teaching.

What one does with the teachings is the true Dharma

Practice diligently so that you become the Dharma
By cultivating motivation
And maintaining unwavering faith
We subdue the five poisons.
When one experiences spontaneous compassion
For the suffering of all beings
One becomes the Sangha
By genuinely cultivating Bodhicitta
One becomes more pure
And makes fewer mistakes
As you navigate your karma
Soon everything one says
Becomes the Bodhisattva’s speech

On this planet you create karma every moment

There is no Buddha outside
The Buddha is within
The cause of your suffering
Is your ego clinging
Always recall Chenrezig is one’s own heart
The manifestation of your own compassion

As you go into this life recall
No matter how much you long for your friends and family
Each person is heading towards their own destination
All which comes together also falls apart
This is the true nature of impermanence
Have faith in the Triple Gem
Development of compassion creates glimpses of Bodhicitta

Recall these glimpses without attachment
Each glimpse is the light
That guides you through the darkness of ignorance

Have no fear of afflictive emotions
For even these are impermanent
Refuse to be a slave to your afflictive emotions
And know some beings come to this planet to enslave
And to feed from the energy of afflictive emotions

You come to this planet to free all beings from this slavery

As you suffer in your effort to free yourself
Recall that you learn from misfortune
And allow your misfortune to reduce your arrogance and pride

Recall this prayer:
May my small suffering be enough
To purify the suffering of all sentient beings
Use your own suffering as meditation practice

Suffering is the Great Awakening of Wisdom
You have this wisdom
Your wisdom creates a wonderful opportunity for freedom

Amrita my daughter you will encounter great difficulty
You will become angry
Recall that anger destroys loving kindness
So that everything you see will become
A reflection of anger
Transform these faults into wisdom
Transform negative emotions into creative energy
Apply the six perfections in difficult situations

When you struggle take heart
It is in difficult situations that one develops wisdom

The essence of this wisdom is
There is nothing more important that Bodhicitta

They paused for a time to listen to the voice of the moon. Amrita embraced her grandfather with her tears of gratitude, and they were bathed in a blue aura.

Our friend now leaves all of her hopes and aspirations, all of her desire and all of her ancient wisdom as an offering upon the rocks of Cape Split. She swims with the tide and the three stones taken for luck from Glooscap, and she is carried into the land of Emelline and her shores of amethyst, jasper and chalcedony.

Amrita is born a heroine in a long line of heroines. In this motherland three hundred years ago, the English Governor issued an ultimatum to the Acadians to swear allegiance to the British Crown and forsake their faith or be exiled. The people of this land refused to live a lie, and so were forced to leave behind everything in a mass exodus. The soldiers put the people on the ships without any regard to family ties and so many beings lost their way without their loved ones to guide them. Bodhisattva Warriors fight to make a choice, to live a life of Truth. This is why Amrita chose to be born in this land near Cape Split. She is born into the legend of loss where her ancestors Emelline and Balthazar were separated on their wedding day during the Acadian exodus from Nova Scotia. They were separated by the great Lie, the fear it engenders and the expulsion of their brothers and sisters from the scent of the sea and red clay of Blomidon’s sleeping lion. From that day of severance, Emelline tirelessly sought her betrothed as if he was the embodiment of the truth, and their story became an ideal of the love we all seek, passed lovingly from generation to generation. This is the story from our grandmothers.

No one comes to this planet unless they’re looking for love, and some of us seek the truth with the same passion. It is here that the tide carried Amrita, to her mother and the legends of the Acadians. She is born to seek lost treasures and her true love Balthazar in the wilderness of the American frontier. She has returned to set us free.

Balthazar

Balthazar sits on Cow Hill, the little boy lost in the lonely fen, and stares out over the Tantramar Marsh. It is a quiet afternoon quite still with occasional gentle birdsong and he feels the warm sun falling on the bristle where the blueberries have come and gone. There is nothing for our friend to do but sit here and stare out over the flatland and wonder what it is there, in the sky, glinting in the light a few hundred feet above the golden reeds and shadowy canals north of town. The small boy is sitting silently, his eyes wide taking in the entirety of the sky and its mystery, watching the silver light shining as a day star hovering in the air a mile or two away, unmoving and not menacing… just there.

Balthazar lives in a small village on an isthmus reaching into the north Atlantic between the Bay of Fundy and the Northumberland Straight, unaware of any 1965 ideas of what this light in the sky might be. In this moment he has no idea whatsoever. He is innocent and far removed from your thoughts now of his role as witness. He is a boy alone on a hill a long time ago apprehended by an incomprehensible moment, a moment that expands undiminished into his thoughts for the rest of his life. It is a mnemonic created by his guardians to remind him that he must reveal treasures he will never understand. Thus have I heard, the truth is beyond conceptual thought.

It was not long after that day, perhaps the early fall when Balthazar had returned to Acadia street school and the teacher he would always call the Rubber Grandmother (after reading Hans Arp, because of the way the flesh on her arms hung and wobbled as she wrote on the blackboard. It was the Rubber Grandmother that put him behind the piano of death for hours during those long winter days, as she played Scottish songs for the class.) It was most likely then as a young lad that the headaches began and he screamed with the pain. As if his mind could no longer fit and he would cry to his mother to cut off his head. The spooky voices of disembodied men would accompany the pain, and their strangeness created the onset of panic and then terror. He would lay frightened for long afternoons in his bed, dreading their appearance and then once he heard them he would be incapable of moving as he would try to understand what it was the voices were repeatedly saying, these unfamiliar words were so incessant he felt that his head would explode. He would beg his mother again and again to take off his head, as if it were a viable proposition and he was the only boy in Amherst with exchangeable heads.

Despite the fact that this was a disturbing request made by an innocent child, the village doctor could make little of it and was inclined to dismiss this malady as a small boy’s means of knowing the love of his mother. (As if he had forgotten this love and had created the pain to insist she remind him. But the doctor found this a convenient reason for afternoon visits to pursue the object of his desire.) In all other respects Balthazar was an intelligent and well mannered boy, quite normal if you were to overlook the evening he blindfolded his brother and spun him around at the top of a third floor staircase. He watched as little Billy stumbled forward, fell, bounced and tumbled down twenty-nine wooden steps. And though Billy kept his head, he never really liked his big brother much after that.

And I tell you these stories of his childhood in Nova Scotia, I speak gently in your ear of the visions and voices and the harm he caused his brother, because my brothers and sisters these events were sentinels in his mind as he began to awaken, remembering the gifts he had left, and the words of his beloved grandfather. So like all of you, he sought the truth and longed for answers to the great questions of life that manifest as daily events: ‘what is this I am seeing… it is a door’ and ‘what does it mean? It means open the door…’ in rapid succession, so that he became a master of pattern recognition opening invisible doors into unseen worlds. He developed such sensitivity to subtle variations of the feelings in his gut, that for many of those beings he spent time with, he became gradually less reliable for comprehending ‘reality’. He experiences the world with a different set of senses. In meeting people, the initial energy rising in his body is often a very strong emotional stimulus and so this initial feeling would be processed by his mind as his entry into another world. Others would perceive him as a child whose mind wanders. Thus this "other world" of sensations unusually preoccupied his mind and in all outward appearances to those who watched, his life unfolded in elaborate displays of emotional events that were beyond reasonable explanation.

These feelings and strange events came unbidden and with such regularity that they have always been familiar to Balthazar as a tightening of his chest and dull pain beneath his heart. For like you my sisters and brothers, he became a seeker of truth and these mysterious events formed a pattern in the great revealing that could not be erased, it is written within his body. What was it he saw that afternoon glinting in the sun? What was the cause of the headaches and whose voices hovered there above his bed bouncing off the long afternoon ceilings into his head? How is it that he is capable of such thoughtless cruelty and yet loves his brother so much that his heart is cracked by the hammers of memory?

He had asked for help on his journey, and he was deeply influenced by his maternal grandfather with whom he shared his unusual name. The elder Balthazar was a German coal miner who came with his family to Canada as a young boy in 1900. He had lived in Amherst for much of his life after his internment there during the First World War. In 1967 when Balthazar first told his grandson about the days in the camp, he sold life insurance and enjoyed taking his grandson on his visits to clients.

Little Balthazar would watch the dust rise up through the vents in the floor of the Imperial Rambler as they sped along the country roads. He stared at the floorboards and the sunlight would create patterns so that Balthazar would see stories and small beings dancing in the dust. Our friend especially loved his grandfather because they would chase fire engines as soon as they heard the village siren, and this would be the excitement of smiles and joy and adventure together as grandfather would say "let’s ascertain the cause of that alarm", running into the kitchen to get his keys. They would stand and watch the flames in the house, and Balthazar would think that eventually everything burns down. They spent quiet afternoons on the front porch with smells of oils and turpentine while grandfather painted fishing boats and the view from the Lookoff that would one day hang in Balthazar’s rooms long after his grandfather had gone. Balthazar would stare for long periods of time into the small globes of color that became trees and birds and all the creatures in the sea.

It was during these quiet boyhood afternoons that grandfather would tell him stories about the Valley of Light and the shining people and Balthazar’s favorite story about the friend his grandfather had while he was in the camp fifty years before.

"The most important thing my little friend is to find the truth, this is what Leon taught me, to find the truth and help your brothers and sisters by setting the truth free. And always remember the words of Nat King Cole: ‘The greatest thing you’ll ever learn, is just to love and be loved in return’…"

So you see my brothers and sisters, the quest for truth begins in the most unlikely places, for our hero is swept along by unseen forces into a seemingly unremarkable small village in Nova Scotia to receive the teachings of Leon Trotsky, who spent a month with Balthazar Babinsky in 1917. It would seem the product of a dream that Leon Trotsky would spend a month in the town that I grew up in fifty years later. He was there just before returning to the rest of the Revolution. Though this is the Truth, you needn’t know this necessarily, but discern its essence. I speak because the dream is compelling me to facilitate its telling, and this may reveal some hidden wisdom, we never know. And of course the prevailing thought throughout these pages is to help you my brothers and sisters, to provide you with a crazy wisdom guide to discovering the Dharma.

Continued