The Spine of the Mind by Jack Cross

This is a difficult thing to explain, but it kind of reminds me of this observation of subatomic particles, where you cannot determine both WHERE and WHEN an event will occur, be-CAUSE, at the subatomic level, the observation of the observer appears to affect the results or expectation of where AND when. If that is so, and it disappears to be so, then what could be the implications of that p-HE-nom-enon? It’s a cur[e]-ious thing.

None of us perceive reality on the subatomic level, we need inSTrumentation for that, but I can tell you my own experience of “spontaneous” healing, a word related to time and event.

I had swallowed a small cup of Ayahuasca, way back in the day, when I lived with an ex-girlfriend, in an artist loft on San Mateo, in the Art District of Downtown Los Angeles. The loft was one large space and a bathroom and I was laying on the floor with my head tilted against the kitchen sink cabinet with my legs crossed. It was night time. Dark. As the Ayahuasca began to take effect, I could feel the pain in my back that I had lived with since I was seventeen, which I got from a body surfing accident in Manhattan Beach, almost half my lifetime ago. I adjusted my head and uncrossed my legs. I wasn’t thinking about healing myself or Shamanism or anything like that. I was taking Ayahuasca for what I considered “spiritual knowledge,” gnosis, the personal knowledge OF. As the effects came on, I felt into my back pain and I remember exactly the conversation I had with myself; My inner voice said “Oh, you have this back pain from your body surfing accident when you were seventeen,” and I visualized exactly what had happened. I remembered that day, who I was with, the water, the sun, the sand, my mind took me back there, I saw it, I felt it, being seventeen, and I said to myself, “Oh, what a sweet person you are, to think that by drinking this AWEfull tasting swill from the amazon, you could find God, you could have a religious experience, you could get inside yourself, that’s so sweet.” And I felt the warmth and goodness of me and the experience expanded and I was swallowed up by Geometry. That’s what happens with Ayahuasca, you swallow it, and IT swallows “you.” And I laid there, undefining what a YOU is, nauseous, in the dark, in the City of Angels, in the Golden State, and Sacrament-Oh!

A few days later, I noticed that my back didn’t hurt, and a few days after that I noticed again, and a week later, and a month, and I began to wonder, and I became suspicious and I started thinking about the definition of Shamanism being related to “healing and meaning.” I had come for the meaning. They tell you about “Set, Setting and Intention,” but my strange mind went to the Mathematical meaning of ‘MEAN,’ the ‘MIDDLE’ of the ‘T’ of ‘Ten’, of a cross, an in-T-ersection of vertical and horizontal coordinates, and ‘EN’ and ‘IN,’ a directive, to determine the ‘MEAN-IN-G,’ the ‘MIDDLE’ of the ‘TEN’ in EN-LIG-h-T-EN-MENT, the f-UL-L-ness of the ‘LIG’-h-T, of the ‘LIG’ morpheme, morphing in re-LIG-ion, ‘BINDING’ the two hemispheres of the ‘MENT,’ the ‘MIND,’ in a decimal system, ‘the completion of a cycle,’ ‘a revolution,’ a Serpent biting its tail/tale.

The ‘G’ of Geometry ‘fi-X’-ed my spine on a ‘cruci-,’ a Cross made of LI-G-h-T. I can’t e-X-plain it, but I suspect that there’s a relationship between good and God and broken spells. I remain suspicious of letters and ladders and fix-ate-d on the ‘J’ of Journey, the Spine of the Mind.