The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography Read Online Free PDF Page B

full from the mines. They came from the mountains, ran along the beach, and disappeared between other mountains. I saw a pebble fall from one of them, half gray and half coppery.
     
    “Where do they come from? Where are they going?”
     
    “I don’t know, Theosophist.”
     
    “There, you don’t know where they come from or where they are going, but you can pick up one of their stones and keep it like a treasure. You see, boy, I know what mine they come from and what mill they are going to, but what good would it do to tell you? The numbers of those sites will mean nothing to you because you have never seen them. It’s the same for the soul that is transported by the body: we do not know where it comes from or where it is going, but now, here, we want to keep it and do not want to lose it; it is a treasure. A mysterious consciousness, infinitely more vast than our own, knows the origin and the end but cannot reveal it to us because we do not have a sufficiently developed brain to comprehend it.”
     
    The gringo put his freckled hand into a pocket and extracted four gold-plated medals. On one was Christ, on the second were two interlaced triangles, on the third a half-moon containing a star, and on the fourth were two drops, one black and one white, nested together forming a circle. “Take these, they are for you. They represent Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, and Taoism. They believe that they symbolize different truths, but if you put them in a little oven and melt them, they will form a single grain of the same metal. The soul is a drop in the divine ocean for which we are, for a very brief time, the humble vessel. It comes from God and travels to return and dissolve into God, which is eternal joy. Take this cord, my young friend, and make yourself a necklace with the four medals. Wear it always to remind yourself that a single thread, immortal consciousness, unites everything.”
     
    I returned proudly to Casa Ukrania, showing off my necklace. Jaime, more Stalin than ever, trembled with rage. “That idiot Theosophist, appeasing the fear of death with illusions! Come with me to the bathroom!” He seized the medals from me. One by one he threw them into the toilet. “God does not exist, God does not exist, God does not exist, God does not exist! You die and you rot! After that there is nothing!” And he pulled the chain. The rush of water bore the medals away, and with them my illusions. “Papa never lies! Who do you believe, me or that loony?” Which one was I to choose, I who longed so for my father’s admiration? Jaime smiled for a second, then looked at me with his customary severity. “I’m tired of your long hair; you’re not a girl!”
     
    Sara’s father had died before she was born. Her mother, Jashe, had fallen in love with a Russian dancer—not Jewish, a goy—with a handsome build and golden locks. When she was eight months pregnant, he climbed on top of a barrel full of alcohol to light a lamp. The lid broke, he fell into the flammable liquid, and it began to burn. The family legend was that he ran down the street, enveloped in flames, leaping up in the air as much as two meters high, and died dancing. When I was born I emerged with a full head of curly hair, as abundant and blond as the late idolized dancer. Sara never cuddled me, but she spent hours combing my hair, giving me ringlets, refusing to cut it. I was her father reincarnated. In those days no boys ever had long hair; thus, I was incessantly called “queer boy.”
     
    My father, seizing the moment while Sara was napping, brought me to the barber. His name was Osamu, and he was Japanese. In a few minutes, reciting several times over, “Gate, Gate, Paragate, Parasamgate, Bodhi Svaha,” *2 he cut my hair short and impassively swept away the golden curls. Immediately, I was no longer the burned dead man; I was myself. I could not help shedding a few tears, which brought my father’s contempt down on me with renewed force. “You