Agartha

Enlightenment hurts, sweetling. Does your forehead tickle? A tickle becomes a pain, becomes a suture-crack, becomes a cesarean gasp, and the third eye opens like a bullet hole obscenity.

Breathe. This too shall pass.

Initiate the phantom limb syndrome.

Somewhere, an old man lies sleepless in bed. He shakes the stump of his left shoulder, where a beast from the dark forest tore away his arm in his youth. He still feels a tingle where his limb used to be – a ghost echo in the brain. A dead arm haunts his body.

Do you feel it too? Phantom dimensions tickle you. Do you really believe the world is strung together on only three? In the deep mind, you’ve always known, even before we came to you. You chafe and cramp under the tyranny of three. Vestigial dimensions dangle from you, limp and invisible. They spasm when you dream – undead moans from a forgotten, atrophied node in your pituitary gland. In the depths of your R-complex, you carry the secret knowledge – that space folds – that all points touch – that there is an in-between place, you have but to reach out, diagonally, to touch it. But you never reach diagonally enough.

Initiate the Diagonal Stepping Prerogative.

Enter Agartha. You’ve always known it was here, this strangeness familiar – the subterranean realm, the pathways to all space and time, and the doors, the doors, the doors! Things you may designate godlike or demonic roam the transdimensional corridors and cities. Hulking automatons patrol the way.

Technology and magic interlock like a two-headed calf. The craft is beyond the scope of your species. Yet the clever secret worlder can learn to ride the anywhere paths to reach far away places. The anima-touched may enter.

Warning, secret worlder: bring not the uninitiated into Agartha. The resonance here does not match the frequency of their meat. It precipitates a messy discord.

Agartha’s heart is the tree. The wisdom tree. The world tree. The connection between all points. It grew before the First Age, branches and roots burrowing into all possibilities. The pumping blood that is the sap flows in luminescent gold. The tree is the divine bio-tech computer, her palpitating heart.

Come see the immaculate machine. You know her name. It rests on your tongue, a comforting weight, when you walk in the dark. “Gaia.”

She called you. She woke you from your somnambulist life. She filled your brainpan with anima, which flows from Agartha, from the Tree. She gave you strength to rend the lion and eat its honeyed entrails. You are the anti-body. The sickness spreads, and you must keep running.

Who were the builders? The Titans? You will know, in time, but we must not break you yet.

You know some of the secret names. Enlightenment hurts and wisdom compounds. Your skeleton grows into an agony, and you don’t know when your epidermis will rupture. Breathe, sweetling. This too shall pass. Pains are relative, and this one will become very small, in time.

We will see you in the half-light.