The "Cusp of Forever"

“While we are looking for the antidote or the medicine to cure us, that is, the 'new', which can only be found by plunging deep into the Unknown, we have to go on exploring sex, books, and travel, although we know that they lead us to the abyss, which, as it happens, is the only place where the antidote can be found.”

-- Roberto Bolano (1953-2003), novelist, poet

When I googled "Cusp of Forever" to see if anyone else writes of it, low and behold, I find my own humble post as the first listing!  The only other listings I find seem to be two artists, Ashar and Price, and neither of them captures my view of the "Cusp" in their art nearly as well as what I have used before (shown above).  What they do capture is my vision of the abyss which I find at the Cusp and stare into often.  I'm not certain these artists aren't a tad confused by what they think they see at whatever location they chose for the "art" they produced, but I am not writing this to critique artistic talent or endeavor but, rather, to explain for several of my readers what I experience at the Cusp of Forever, and how it has changed my perception of reality.  First of all, I should try to explain my "self."

In my teens, I found I had the ability to feel "cold spots" in old Victorian houses.  I knew they were probably an anomaly caused by some force pulling the energy from a small area, like at the top of the stairs, and I was not one to ignore it as commonplace or excuse it as a draft which didn't exist.  My discovery of a ghost wandering the outside of our own house was verified by the daughter of the people who purchased it from my parents.  She would also hear the old man, the previous owner, on his nightly constitutional around the property.

Gestalt Prayer

I do my thing and you do yours.

I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, 

And you are not in this world to live up to mine.

You are you, and I am I,

And if by chance we find each other, then it is beautiful.

If not, it can't be helped.

-- Frederick Perls (1893-1970), psychiatrist

For two years, in the early 1970s, I emersed myself in Psychology.  I didn't read about it, hell I barely cracked a book and still managed a 3.2 GPA.  This was one subject I absorbed through my skin.  It fascinated me to a point where my professor was going to recommend me to Stanford upon graduation.  I think psychology was of such interest because it explained so much to me about who and why I was, especially my sensitivity to paranormal phenomena associated, or not, with the spirit world and my penchant for screwing with people's heads.  In particular of these studies was the extra-Freudian idea of "transactional analysis" as a  way of understanding behavior per concepts developed by psychiatrist Eric Bern which, in short order, led me to the Gestalt concepts of psychiatrist Fritz Perls.

Gestalt therapy is an existential/experiential form of psychotherapy that emphasizes personal responsibility, and that focuses upon the individual's experience in the present moment, the therapist–client relationship, the environmental and social contexts of a person's life, and the self-regulating adjustments people make as a result of their overall situation.

-- Wikipedia, "Gestalt therapy"

Studies in deviant behavior, psychoanalysis, transactional analysis, and Gestalt therapy, inevitably led me down a detour through meditation, self-hypnosis, and the Eastern philosophies of Zen and Taoism.  Self-hypnosis was training provided by a visiting professor from Stanford if memory serves, was in depth for several days, and was my wakeup call to another dimension and the reality of past life.  My discovery of the Marquis de Sade during studies in deviant behavior, however, is a post for another day.

“Put a man on the brink of the abyss and - in the unlikely event that she doesn't fall into it - he will become a mystic or a madman... Which is probably the same thing!”

-- Apostolos Doxiadis, mathemetician, author

During a self-induced hypnotic episode in 1974, I regressed to a memory as a young boy riding in the back of a buckboard, somewhere in an American desert in the late 1800s, handing ladles of water from a small wooden barrel to cavalry soldiers as they rode by.  I snapped out of the trance and could still smell the horses and taste the dust for several minutes afterward.  The reality of the experience was not in question for me.  I simply knew I had been there.  This was the beginning of many more trips into my peculiar head which would eventually lead me to the abyss and the Cusp of Forever.

Meditation and self-hypnosis eventually took me on my first journey to the edge of the abyss where I could spend a good portion of several hours in the span of a few minutes.  Years later, you begin to wonder if this is all there is, and then you look beyond the abyss and realize it is simply the edge, the cusp of forever, and you smile a smile which follows you back to this reality where you realize you've had an "Aha!" moment which has changed your life and the way you view reality.  You begin to laugh as life becomes so simple and crystal clear.  The sad fact it took 47 years for this fog to lift from me is offset by the knowledge that time is no longer relevant.

"Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this."

-- Thomas Huxley (1825-1895), biologist

People have their own "peculiarities, and I'm no different.  For instance, my dream states were always fuzzy until I fell asleep one night with my glasses on, believe it or not.  Since the creation of extended wear contacts, my dreams have become clear in more than just their meaning.  I've heard dreams are supposed to be colorless; black and white and shades of grey.  Really?  Then, I suppose the color I see is contrary to the bullshit I hear.  But, then, I am a bit strange.

I welcome my dreams for the mysteries they produce. In the early 1970s, I found myself engaged in dreamland firefights with weapons which launched small balls filled with colored "fluids." This before the first paintball game in 1981, and before most of us even knew what it was. My "paintballs" didn't just sting the target, they did real damage to any targeted biologic.

While in the military, again in the early 1970s, I asked a dental tech if everyone saw horizontal squiggly lines when the x-ray machine activated while taking pics their teeth.  I told him it was like the x-rays excited my optic nerve.  He thought I was pulling his leg, so I let it go.  I also opted to not ask the optometrist about the clarity of dreams while wearing your glasses while you sleep.  Since this time, I tend to keep my "strange" close to the vest, especially around strangers.

“Your greatest awakening comes, when you are aware about your infinite nature.”

-- Amit Ray, meditation, yoga and spiritual master, author

In the late 1970s, I began having feelings of foreboding, a heaviness which I couldn't shake, a feeling that something was going to happen which I couldn't identify, much less stop.  I would know what was going to occur until after it happened and the feeling would lift away.  Oh, and I think deja vu is real and should not be ignored by science, and coincidence is something to be viewed with a critical eye.  If one day you think of a song you haven't heard in years and the next day it plays, this may be a coincidence, but not if it happens to you all the time.  When your coincidences become commonplace, there is something more at work. 

Out of body experiences come and go, but the sense of motion became a focal point for most of my dreams, starting with a discovery that gravity could be overcome by mere thought, and bouncing ever higher resulted in an ability to fly from point to point.  My dreams, of late, center around being able to levitate inches off the ground and move as if riding a skateboard sans the board.  Canting the flat of your feet right or left, front or back, controls speed and direction.  I find it interesting that nobody else in the dream, myself included, finds this ability peculiar, as if we accept the ability as a norm.  I look forward to these "levitating" dreams as the ability feels so liberating and natural.  Again, I am a bit strange, and I freely admit it.

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

-- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), philosopher, poet

Night terrors have occasionally invaded my dreams over the last few years.  I have a feeling this has to do with knocking on the wrong doors at the abyss.  The darkness of a person's soul can do no harm unless it is invited in, yet you can't really understand the darkness within you unless you sit down and have a serious discussion with it.  Be careful the doors you open and the information you seek, for you might not like what you find.  And, those voices you hear?  Well, might not be reliable for righteously sage advice.

“Through silence you will hear the voice of three things: Your own inner voice, the voice of others and the voice of the universe!”

-- Mehmet Murat İldan, author, playwright

My voices come in the form of shouts, usually when I'm seriously focussed on reading or writing.  The shout is usually my name, and it is so clear that, early on, I actually got up and looked for the caller.  Less frequently, it will start as a whisper in my ear and roll into a shout in the span of a split second like a distant thunder grows in volume.  Now I just accept it as some communication I need to be more receptive to until I understand it more fully.  I don't think of it as evil as much as I do an attempt to reach out, perhaps a warning.

“The voices in my head are never meant to be silenced, they are always meant to be listened to, embraced and turned into something so fascinating such as poetry”

-- Samiha Totanji, writer

The voices are not as unsettling as the recent apparitions which also appear infrequently, caught in my peripheral vision.  I was weeding along the front walk of the yard in Olympia, a few years ago, when someone walked past on the way to the front door.  I only saw the legs.  I thought it was the mail carrier so I didn't look up.  When he walked back by I said to have a nice day, looked up, and no one was there.  I looked around and the person had simply vanished.  The house was at the end of a dead-end street; there was nowhere for the person to go.  Then there are the shadowy apparitions which appear momentarily.  As my vision seeks it out, the shadow rapidly leaves the room.

Not long after my current house was built, I installed "blackout" blinds on the bedroom windows.  One evening, as I was settling down in bed, I noticed a blue light, about the size of a baseball, traveling across the darkness of the north wall, across the east wall, then across the south wall where it slowly decreased to the size of a golfball and disappeared into the upper right corner of large cathedral etching mounted near corner adjoining the west wall; basically, it traversed around the room, from one side of the bed to the other, in about a minute.  Even if a light had penetrated the blinds it would not have been able to do this circuit.  I rolled over and went to sleep, and I later switched this etching for another Cathedral etching from the living room.  I embrace my peculiarities.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”

― William Blake (1757-1827), poet

Understanding the fact that I am self-admittedly strange, it explains a bit of why I go in search of answers in places like the abyss and the Cusp of Forever.  It is up to each seeker to define these places for themselves.  For me, the Cusp of Forever isn't anything inasmuch as it is everything.  It is the infinity you experience when you finally look up from the abyss which separates us, and our reality, from everything else.  One might ask why I even concern myself with the abyss if the reality of forever is at hand?  I think the abyss is like a key to understanding everything else.  It is a bottomless moat of dark nothingness which you must first learn to traverse in order to understand everything else and access infinity.

“Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in Eternal awareness or Pure consciousness without objectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude in infinity.”

-- Voltaire (1694-1778), historian, philosopher

The abyss is our self-created fear and our learned preconceptions.  It taunts theories stating that certain things are impossible.  On the other hand, it begs us to consider that "impossible" is, like time, a human construct which has little meaning.   The abyss is where we have the opportunity to learn to embrace the "impossible" as simply another challenge to be overcome as we move along our journey from the past and future into the "now" and prepare to take our first step off the edge into nothingness and onto the Cusp of Forever.  It is the great awakening, the difference between awareness and acceptance, faith and truth, it is the ultimate "Aha!" moment which propels us from this reality into the next, and from the next reality onto higher planes of existence and into infinity.

But, like I said, I am strange.

“But that can never be," said Milo, jumping to his feet."Don't be too sure," said the child patiently, "for one of the nicest things about mathematics, or anything else you might care to learn, is that many of the things which can never be, often are. You see," he went on, "it's very much like your trying to reach Infinity. You know that it's there, but you just don't know where — but just because you can never reach it doesn't mean that it's not worth looking for.”

-- Norton Juster, teacher, architect, writer, The Phantom Tollbooth

Editor's Note

(Re: disclaimer cum "get out of jail free" card)

Before you go getting your panties in a bunch, it is essential to understand that this is just an opinion site and, as such, can be subjected to scrutiny by anyone with a differing opinion. It doesn't make either opinion any more right or wrong than the other. An opinion, presented in this context, is a way of inciting others to think and, hopefully, to form opinions of their own, if they haven't already done so. This is also why, occasionally, I will present an "opinion" just to stir an emotional pot. Where it may sound like I agree with the statements made, I'm more interested in getting others to consider an alternate viewpoint. 

It is my fervent hope that we keep open and active minds when reading opinions and while engaging in peaceful and constructive discussion, in an arena of mutual respect, concerning those opinions put forth. After over twenty years with military intelligence, I have come to believe engaging each other in this manner and in this arena is the way we will learn tolerance and respect for differing beliefs, cultures, and viewpoints.

We all fall from grace, some more often than others; it is part of being human. God's test for us is what we learn from the experience, and what we do afterward.

Pastor Tony spent 22 years with United States Air Force Intelligence as a planner, analyst, briefer, instructor, and senior manager. He spent 17 years, following his service career, working with the premier, world renowned, Institutional Review Board helping to protect the rights of human subjects involved in pharmaceutical research. Ordained 1n 2013 as an "interfaith" minister, he founded the Congregation for Religious Tolerance in response to intolerance shown by Christians toward peaceful Islam. As the weapon for his war on intolerance he chose the pen, and wages his "battle" in the guise of the Congregation's official online blog, The Path, of which he is both author and editor. "The Path" offers a vehicle for commentary and guidance concerning one's own personal, spiritual, path toward peace and the final destination for us all. He currently resides in Pass Christian, Mississippi, where he volunteers as lead Chaplain and Chaplain Program Liaison, at the regional medical center.