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5. Harvey Lackawanna        

'Om Vajra Bhumi Ah Hum! Now let the ground be spotlessly pure. Om Vajra Rekhe Ah Hum! Now let an iron wall arise with Hum in the centre. To the east, south, west and north lie the four continents interspaced with four pairs of lesser continents, andalso the Mountain of Precious Substances, the Wishing Tree, the Wishing Cow, the Unploughed Harvest, the Precious Wheel, the Precious Jewel, the Precious Queen, the Precious Minister, the Precious Elephant, the Precious and Best of Horses and the Precious General. Also present, are the Great Treasure Vase, the Lady of Gestures, the Lady of Garlands, the Lady of Song, the Lady of Dance, the Lady of Flowers, the Lady of Incense, the Lady of Lights and the Lady of Perfume. There are besides the Sun and Moon, the Umbrella of Precious Substances and the Banner of Victory.'

'Om Vajra Bhumi Ah Hum! Om Vajra Rekhe Ah Hum!'

'I pray you out of your compassion to accept these offerings for the sake of all sentient beings. I pray you, having accepted them, graciously to bestow your blessings upon all.' (The Tantric Mysticism of Tibet, John Blofeld)

We are a river. We are a river of listening angels responsive to the least noticeable sound of joy or sorrow. We are a river of spirits sounding prayers into the depths of mystery. We are a river of smiling Buddhas forever sitting in compassionate peace under one billion stars which appear shining as the one great enraptured Bo tree. We are river... r?vers, splitters of all dualities into the multitudinous manifestations of human souls living, dying, suffering, delighting, bubbling into the ocean dream of the One, the singlemost point of connection among all the droplets of water. We are river.

"That Buddha's former vow was,
   'After my passage into extinction,
wherever I am, wherever I go,
   there may my purpose be to listen to dharma.'"

I have lived this life before. I have dreamed this dream before. Before time and before space the whorls of light began.

Uh. Hiya. Harvey Lackawanna here. I am the Buddha. Ha. Uh. Hiya. Sounds serious. All wrapped up within. Within earshot. Within crawling distance. Then there's Norman's MCI experience. It goes like this:

One of his projects during the summer of 1997 was the task of porting his Music: Imagination & Technique software from its DOS version into Windows 95. Most of the sound functions in Windows were easy to implement, but there were some obscurities in handling some of the more advanced digital audio calls. These were all associated with what Microsoft labels "Media Control Interface" - MCI, for short. For some strange reason, there was little readily accessible information about the advanced MCI functions. So he devoted a considerable amount of time to scouring the Internet and bookstores for any titbit of information that could shed light on using the MCI.

Sometime toward the middle of July, he went to his local Barnes & Noble in a last-ditch effort to find something, even though he'd been there several times earlier. He was in the store about an hour, and came across a couple books with some possibly useful information. But he was late for something else and had to leave.

When he got out to his van to unlock the passenger side door (the driver's side door had a broken lock - he couldn't unlock it with the key), there, on the parking lot pavement, staring blatantly up at him, was something that looked like a little advertisement sign, about 6" x 12", with the large block-print letters in glowing reflector orange: "MCI". He now has this object in his possession. It is a magnetized rubber panel that must have been on a truck or van, but wherever and whenever it came from, its appearance at that time, given his preoccupation with MCI, was nothing short of absurdly miraculous.

Um. So that's a true story. So they say. So I say. And regarding the numerology of MCI, I say that, as a Roman Numeral, MCI is 1101. 1101 devolves to 3. Or it could also be thought of as 13 in binary. 13 devolves to 4. M is the 13th letter. C is the 3rd. I is the 9th. Together these add up to 25. 25 devolves to 7. 7 plus 3 equals 10. 10 devolves to 1.    3... 7... 1...

Gate, gate,
Paragate
Parasamgate
Bhodi suaha

In the Tarot, 3 is the Empress, 7 is The Chariot, 1 is the Magician.

With regard to the Empress, "...until we learn to experience the outer world completely we cannot hope to transcend it. Therefore the first step to enlightenment is sensuality. Only through passion, can we sense, from deep inside rather than through intellectual argument, the spirit that fills all existence." (Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, A Book of Tarot by Rachel Pollack,  p. 42)

"A river flows from the trees behind her to disappear beneath her seat. This river is the force of life, running like a great current beneath all the separate forms of reality, and experienced most fully when we give ourselves to unrestrained passion. Deep in our selves we can sense the rhythm of a river, carrying us forward through experience until, with death, our individual lives
return to the sea of existence." (Ibid. p. 43)

"Certain experiences, especially mystical union with spirit, cannot be described. Language can only hint at them with metaphors and fables. People who rely totally on speech have even gone so far as to insist that non-verbal experiences, or experiences which cannot be measured by psychological tests, do not exist. This is simply because they cannot be scientifically described. Such dogmatism receives its perfect symbol in the charioteer's merging with his stone wagon." (Ibid, p. 62)
 

"The Magician emerges very directly from the Fool in the image of the trickster wizard.. For many people the Magician can become a strong personal symbol for the creative force throughout their lives." (Ibid,  pp. 29, 32)

I am, yes I am, Buddha. Ha! Bet you thought I couldn't come up with these ideas! Well, granted, they're not all mine. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Ione. And Rachel Pollack. And John Blofield. Among others.

Ha. Hiya. Harvey Lackawanna here. We are river.


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