Today was supposed to be a day of rest, but Attum had arisen wanting to do nothing more than go for a hike on a mountain trail that led off of LATA property and eventually down off the mountain into a small and rustic town. She'd pounded on Neve's door until he capitulated and opened it a crack, clearly just awakened a moment before, "rudely," he pointed out.
Part of her questioned that she was going against the recommendations of the Guru to just rest and nothing else, while part of her was motivated by sheer inexhaustible joy. She just plain wanted to experience the mountain today. The sun was shining, the air was bright and clear, and it was time to...I don't know what it's time to do! But it's time to do it! And I'm excited out of my mind for whatever it is!
Now they found themselves cresting the highest point of the trail, a few hundred feet above the timberline, and the forested valley stretched out below in all directions with craggy rock escarpments thrusting up through the forested lushness. She was feeling everything, her senses all on high gain. She was so filled with love it was almost absurd. Looking out over the valley, everything was heart-breakingly, achingly beautiful. Everything in the world. Everybody. Nobody, no thing, was exempt from the Truth of Beauty that lies within. The beauty was so all-pervasive it was almost preposterous, sitting exactly no distance at all right in front of our noses. The energy was so big there was no way to contain it, only to flow it, and she could easily see why people who had had just glimpses of it could fear it. Qualified in the wrong way, it would fire up the adrenals and be misinterpreted as anxiety.
She wanted to run through the world, through the streets, proclaiming this immense power inside her to be what all had sought all their lives. She felt like giggling at all times. All she had to do was open her mouth and let it out and she would laugh, like she was being tickled, until she was delirious. She knew beyond any question whatsoever that she wanted to live in this way of being every moment of every day forever. It was pure ecstasy.
"OK," she sighed. "Neve, I love you so much! I just had to say it! I can't not say it! It's so...it's so...!"
Neve: "I know. I know what you mean. Come here."
And they hugged, the contact wonderful, increasing the sensitivity of their senses. Neve was feeling the same power, only a bit more subdued. In him the power was quieter; it was indeed ecstasy - but it was like being a mountain, immovable, majestic, awe-inspiring, wise and ancient, there since the beginningless beginning.
They started down the trail leading towards the town, and Neve said, "I have to tell you what the Guru told me. In the course of your experience in the cave there were one-hundred-thirty-four autonomous, intelligent beings involved. There were portal openers, portal maintainers. There were sentinels with shields and swords to protect the space from the influx of dark intelligences that would give eyeteeth to take advantage of the portal and the energy. There were four Ascended Masters present to cause the presence of the Ray each is in charge of. There were beings present to see to the smooth and unblocked flow of energy through your chakras. Seashella was there, of course, and on her side of the equation there were another sixty-four beings involved in each of their areas of specialty. There were angels. There was the golden dragon you said you were seeing, which is embodied by that liquid and powder we were using. The portal itself was a thinking and autonomous being. The diamond, a thinking autonomous being. The crystal skull was on the scene, making certain 'she' is in your timeline and plucking that particular chord in your system. There were beings present for each of the healings that were taking place in you simultaneously. Twenty-seven, twenty-seven, of your alternate selves, so-called past lives, were there to be integrated. We are never NOT dealing with Intelligent Life, but for some reason, in my own unfolding, I thought we were always dealing with pretty much nothing but undifferentiated intelligent life, Potentia, but from Potentia arises an intelligent and autonomous being that knows its purpose because its birth was caused by the necessity of its being. It's not that a few trillion particles of Potentia militate to solve something, it's that those particles form into nested hierarchies of organization, forming a self-aware being with a purpose. That's wild, don't you think?"
Attum: "Wow, that is an eye-opener. Do you suppose that what it comes down to when one is in full mastery is knowing the True Names of those beings? That knowing their True Names is what puts them at our command?"
Neve: "I think that's where this is going, yes, but doesn't command seem an almost out of place word when what we're talking about is cooperative action?"
Attum: "Hmmm. I can see why one would think that, but isn't the dilemma solved by acknowledging the fact that the being doesn't have to cooperate?"
Neve: "Guess it does. But if it doesn't have to cooperate, what is the only qualification? What is the thing that it cannot deny? Wait a second...I hear Seashella's voice. She's telling me that I'm silly pretending to not know this."
Attum: "What's she saying?"
Neve: "It's Love, what she would call noself. Any command motivated by Love must be obeyed." He was staring at a rock, almost as though text were streaming across it like a news teleprompter. "The only question that is left is the optimal here-now for its inevitability to become fact in our continuum."
Attum: "But doesn't noself imply then that you are wanting, and therefore commanding, on behalf of someone else?"
Neve: "I don't think that's the point. I think the point is that in the present context whatever it is is a gift. You are engifting yourself, and on top of that is the fact that you're in one fell swoop admitting that you yourself are not the power - noself. Love is the power."
Attum: "I have to admit that I feel so much love I feel I could do absolutely anything with it. It's very powerful. And gratitude - that might be the most potent force I've ever felt, and it just comes from the realization of Love."
They came to a point where they had to scramble through and over some chest-high boulders and then down several stairs that had been chopped into the rock by some enterprising government type wearing khaki green. The area leveled off where there was a kind of natural veranda complete with natural rock furnishings for picnics and the like, and an overhang with ferns and a water seepage making a perfect little grotto.
They were surprised by the presence of an early teenaged boy and a woman that was possibly in her forties. The boy bolted to his feet, elation, joy, surprise and wonderment etched all over his features, crying, "Mama! Mama! It is she! She is here!" He spoke with an accent they couldn't quite place.
The woman stirred from her reverie, and said, "Deus do elogio," and started to weep, her shoulders heaving.
Attum smiled, but was so stunned by this scene that she didn't know what to say. Neve was feeling something that was a prescience for an astoundingly powerful event, but could think of nothing to say. The more he studied the woman, however, the more a realization was cohesively forming. She's blind, he thought. The woman is blind. She literally has no eyes behind those sunglasses.
Attum: "Do you know me?" she asked the boy.
The boy: "Sim, sister! Yes, but no. We were told about you. A mystical man...a...a shaman in Brazil told us about you. We were to travel from Brazil to be here on this day to meet you. It has taken three years for us to make enough money and to get what we needed to make this journey. I learned English for this journey, and here you are! An angel sent from God!" The boy also started to cry.
Attum: "What did the mystical man tell you?"
Neve's attention faded away from those present. He saw that the woman's husband had literally gouged her eyes out in a drunken rage while the boy watched. He was punishing them both, the boy because he believed he was "in" on it. Had she had an extramarital affair? That seems like it. Oh, more than that, though, the husband also had had an affair, only in his world that was acceptable while it was not for women. Hey, it was how they were raised! No? The boy's dedication, the innocent, unstoppable, invincible love he had for his mother entered Neve like a lightning bolt, and he was so humbled by it he sank to his knees, bowing before the unspeakable innocent power that was the boy. No power in all of existence could have caused that boy to waver for even one second to keep him from doing what he must do. Neve felt that as palpably as anything he'd ever felt, and yes, he was humbled by it.
Attum: "What are you doing?" She could see that tears formed in Neve's eyes, but the look on his face was the perfect cross between absolute amazement and unbelievable strength. Tearing her gaze away from Neve, she asked the boy, "What can I do for you?"
The boy: "You are the angel who will give my mother her sight back. My mother is blind."
Attum didn't know where to even begin to think about that one. "Neve," she said, walking away, "can I talk to you?"
At the boy, Neve made an OK sign with his thumb and index finger, winked, stood and followed her.
When they were safely away, Attum whispered, "I don't know if I can do this."
Neve: "You're right, Attum, you can't, but Omnipotent Love within you can. You just have to step aside - no self - and let Omnipotent Love express through you. Be your OmniBeing. That is a decision! Be the unfaceted diamond! Let the Infinite express through the finite in this moment. It's a simple letting go."
Just then Attum saw Seashella's features rise into Neve's face as he continued, but she heard only Seashella's voice. "My dear, this is your birth. This is the birth of your new being. You are the only being in all of existence through whom that which is to be manifested is One with its purpose in this moment. The inevitability of the thing is about to realize its here-now, I AM, here-now. I AM, here-now, the perfect sight in this woman. The present moment is the only possible point at which it can take place. The being you are leaving behind is the One being that has within it a woman who believes she is sightless, and accepting your birth into the One being that now has within it a woman who sees. Let it happen, and make us proud. You are no longer you."
Suddenly, without her volition, she felt herself letting go all that she believed she was. Ten-thousand faces, all hers, flashed holographically through her vision in an instant, converging into a single point, the stillpoint, the zeropoint, the impossibly small and absolutely motionless point at which all potential has its being in all now moments, the One Mind. Those pieces of her were egos with beliefs - what was overtaking her was a deep and abiding knowingness that had no use whatsoever for belief. Ego is the only part of us that can experience doubt, and doubt is the only obstacle to perfection. What arose in her was something that could only be given away. That was the trick: she was giving IT a way. I AM the way, engifting myself, existence, with a refreshed world that includes a woman with sight.
Time stopped, and in stopping so did the contextual history of Attum. Without time, without contextual history, there was nothing with which the ego could identify. She was not she because she now existed apart from the realm of time. She became the unfaceted diamond; pure, simple, existing for one purpose, and without those faces, the facets, there was nothing left in the gestalt of her that believed in limitation. Sheer unfettered joy arose in her with the power of a supernova, and she knew that the joy was there because what must be done was already accomplished. Otherwise how could the feeling of joy exist? Joy is the physical manifestation of the orgasm of creation. Joy is present because it is already accomplished. It is done. Be joyful for that!
Looking at Neve-Seashella, in Portuguese she said very matter-of-factly, with no emotion at all, "It's already accomplished." Walking towards the woman, still in Portuguese, she said, "My dear little sister, blindness is blind only to itself. This is already accomplished, this great and good thing. I AM Love, and Love knows only perfection." She reached where the woman was sitting on a rock. She raised her sunglasses and situated them in the woman's hair, then positioned her palms over her voided eye sockets. "Perfection is always present, lying in wait just below the surface. Perfection wishes to be invited forth, here, now. Be thou perfect, even as I AM perfection." She spoke some words in no recognizable tongue, and then finished in English. "Alas, my dear little sister, you can see! It is your gift to the world!" And she stepped backwards, her hands revealing the woman's eyes.
Neve took two stagger steps backwards and crumpled to the ground in a cloud of rock dust, a silly smile on his face, his eyes spinning in circles. The boy went bonkers, bouncing around the rocks like a pinball, screaming, "An angel from Heaven! An angel from Heaven! Mother can see! Look! She can see!"
The Brazilian woman stood and locked big beautiful brown eyes with Attum's, an understanding passing between them that no words could ever retouch and therefore adulterate. They smiled at each other as only sisters can, and then embraced, both letting quiet tears of happiness trace down their cheeks.
"Thank you," she whispered in English.
"I'm not the one to be thanked. I am nothing. It is the Intelligent Life of Creation that did this beautiful work today, and the world is now blessed with a beautiful woman who can see. You and I simply cooperated with the Universe to give birth to your new eyes, I the Midwife, you the Mother. Your faith brought you to here today - without your faith this would not have happened. But I do have you to thank for what you allowed me to experience today, and I will forever be grateful for this opportunity." They embraced again, and Attum, holding her at arm's length, shouted, "Hey, everybody! Let's go have lunch together in town! Wouldn't that be fun?"
And holding hands and chattering away in Portuguese like two birds in the jungle, the women started down the trail together while the boys skipped along behind.


CHAPTER 12

In the cave of IsNess, there hangs an old tapestry.

Over the door of the Conference Room hangs a plaque.