Motel Nirvana. Melanie McGrath
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eyelids begin an inexorable downward progress. Half an hour or so later I’m woken by the voice of the woman next to me, who is explaining to the assembly how she was psychically attacked in a dream the previous night and woke up to discover red welts all over her body, and Chris Griscom is congratulating her on fending off the psychic invader and mentioning the undeniable increase in the number of aliens feeding on human energies in the region and pointing out that this is happening to test our strength and make us more whole. I wonder vaguely if the hungry alien argument was part of the reason for Shirley Maclaine’s conversion to the New Age. I think I’m beginning to grasp Griscom’s vision thing. It goes like this: we are all here for a purpose, we’re entitled to constant bliss, we don’t need to feel pain, we are in the inevitable process of evolution, we can be free of our bodies and inhabit the universe. That’s about it, simply put.
And all those hungry souls, with their unsatisfying, slipaway lives, the souls of the ones who are not Shirley Maclaine and never will be, all the ordinary ones, can rest reassured by a simple weekly payment of $15 to the Light Institute of Galisteo that there is a higher reason for it all. Whereas, of course, there may well not be.
The way I see it, a pile of money goes round in circles in the little community of Santa Fe, and every time it comes round to the Light Institute of Galisteo, a bit more drops off.
DAY TEN
A queue winds down from the ticket booth at the Whole Life Expo in the town centre, across West Marcy Street towards the public library. From up ahead comes the sound of drumming. A printed programme available at the door details the lectures and workshops for the day:
* ‘Is there an Alien-Multinational Connection?’
* ‘Learn how bone-headed misinformants are placed in UFO conferences as speakers to baffle and confuse you’
* ‘The Vampire and the Psychic Gatekeeper,’ talk given by Helaine Harris, creator of Psychoshamanism™
* ‘The Virtual Reality of MetaNeurological Genesis’
* ‘The Properties of Extraterrestrial Science and Tibetan-Andromedan Intervention in World Affairs during 1993’
* ‘Soul Triggering of the Brain’s Joy Center – Super Conscious Self-Technics to Save Us From Extinction’, by Orayna Orr, empath
The list continues: workshops on angels, astral projection, colonic irrigation, past lives, auric massage and discovering the wild woman within. It’s going to be a busy day.
From among the vendors of extremely low-frequency headsets, magic wands, colonic irrigation suppositories, copper pyramids and high energy gloves I select the Kirilian photography booth. A Kirilian photograph can produce an image of the aura. Now the existence of auras seems pretty plausible to me. How else could a person sense when another enters the room, without seeing or hearing them? What other explanation can there be for the ability to detect a mood or tension in the air? It doesn’t matter to me whether the aura is electromagnetic energy, sixth sense, sophisticated heat detector, lifeforce, or anything else, only that it exists. To be able to have physical evidence of it would be an assurance that some things are beyond the reaches of science. It would be a sign that mysteries still exist. I have a hunch that, once I know all there is to know about my aura, I’ll feel more attuned to the New Age altogether.
While we’re standing in line, a woman in an outsized orange beret solicits my opinion of the Mississippi floods. Pictures of broken levees and devastated homes are being shown on every news programme on the TV, and occupy the front pages of much of the printed press too. I say I think they’re terrible.
‘No they’re not,’ replies the orange beret.
‘Really?’
‘Of course not, they’re all part of the earth changes.’
Haven’t I heard? The planet is on the brink of an apocalyptic phase, during which storms and floods and earthquakes and all kinds of natural disasters will kill most of the world’s population – especially the unspiritual ones – leading those remaining to a new era of peace and higher consciousness.
‘The Age of Aquarius,’ she says, ‘you must have heard.’
‘Is that the same thing as the New Age?’
‘Aquarius,’ repeats the orange beret, sounding confused.
A Kirilian photograph looks very much like a regular polaroid, as it turns out, but at $15 a shot it has to be different. In any case, Kirilian photographs are taken by a highly complex Kirilian mechanism, requiring the subject to place his or her palm on a metal plate and visualize the auric field while the booth assistant shouts instructions from beneath a piece of black cloth. There then follows a soft popping preceded by an intense white light, and the aura photograph spools from a flap in the side of the machine. Mine is a chemical green, with two livid haloes floating above it like aerial ringworm sores.
‘Oh my,’ says the booth assistant, ‘this is interesting. See that green? That’s healing. And the red is passion.’ Passion and healing, I’m thinking, not bad.
‘You have a young soul, not too many lifetimes here, full of energy, adventuresomeness, you’re highly active physically, probably travel a good deal, veerrry creative. I’d guess you make your living by your wits. You’re fascinated by what goes on in the world, are you in the news? Something like that, I’m only guessing.’
And she’s on to the next in line, orange beret. I indulge my ego in a small self-congratulatory moment. Young soul, fascinated, adventuresome. Hotdamn! My aura is telling me I’m the person I always wanted to be.
‘Oh my.’ The booth assistant is speaking to orange beret now, holding the beret’s aura image, ‘this is interesting. See that green? A young soul. Veery creative.’
I call Fergus collect to let him know first that my aura is green for healing, red for passion and second that the earth is about to implode. He seems unimpressed, but then he is a New Yorker. As I’m leaving the phone booth someone presses a flyer into my hands and invites me to a lecture at 4pm given by a Princess Sharula Dux who will be demonstrating the tools and format to bring the planet into the Aquarian Age as prescribed by the Melchizedek Temple of Telos. Topics covered will include passing through the astrological doorway of 12:12, and the restructuring of the Melchizedek Priesthood, the spiritual warriors and world leaders of the Golden Age. Pretty comprehensive.
At some point in my lost week I read about Princess Sharula and her theories. The Princess Dux I read about is a 267 year-old Ambassador from a subterranean city called Telos which is in turn part of the ancient underground kingdom of Lemuria, sister civilization to Atlantis and Mu.
At four sharp she arrives at lecture theatre number three, blinking at the crowd, an immensity in a marine-theme catsuit, and makes her way to the front of the room with that rolling gait peculiar to the corpulent, closely followed by a young outdoors type with long hair tied back in a ponytail, who introduces himself as Shield Dux and asks us to give a big hand to Her Excellency the Princess Sharula Dux, his beloved wife and distinguished Ambassador from the court of Telos.
Sharula wants her public to understand that the world is in disarray, convulsed by greed, natural disasters, cancer, urban violence, tax evasion and cruelty to animals. She wants us to know that we are standing at a crossroads in the 1990s. A crossroads, every generation needs to hear it. In the 1890s our great-grandparents were standing at a crossroads. We were standing at a crossroads when Martin Luther King took the fatal bullet, when Reaganomics was in vogue. We have always, I fear, been standing at a crossroads.
In Princess Dux’s opinion the New Age is coming pretty soon now, about as soon as it takes for the gargantuan crystal matrix computers of the universe to receive a cosmic refurbishment. There’s good news for Americans, says Dux; the United States of America is programmed to become the world’s first crystal matrix paradise because it is in America that the current global cauldron of ills is bubbling away the hardest.
Eventually,