Chapter 13: Gor

I believe that we have learned as much from darkness as we have from light. Living, as we have been, in a polarity-based universe there is no alternative. Knowing this means facing the reality that, somewhere in all of our thousands of lifetimes in this universe, we have embodied evil ourselves in order to learn from it.

Understanding this, that we are not perfect, and that all of us have embodied evil at one time or another, is a very important lesson for anyone who chooses a career in the healing arts. Without this knowledge, it is all too easy to find ourselves in the position of judging our clients for what we see as the evils that they have committed. Seeing the darkest side of ourselves, is part of the process of fully accepting our humanity. I know this now, and I owe this knowledge to an extraordinary session I had when I was a student of Bill Baldwin's.

I lay back in a chair in Bill Baldwin's classroom. We were there to try to divine the truth of the crystal that I had nearly died trying to take to Blue Lake. In my quest for this truth, I would find myself reliving a lifetime in which I had been someone or something more evil that I would have ever previously imagined. Bill carefully led me into an altered state. The room was filled with my fellow students who were arrayed on pillows. They had come to watch my session as I had watched so many of theirs. A video camera on a tripod recorded everything, without judgment. The day was November 1, 1987, All Saints Day. Soon, I forgot all about the classroom, the camera, and the people watching me. I was in another world.

I was a twelve year old boy living in a pre-industrial society in Turkey. My parents were poor and cursed my very existence for the bread that I took from their mouths. Only the tattered remnants of their religious beliefs stopped them from killing me. Instead they beat me, and starved me, in the hope that I would die of more natural causes. I limped around the village in rags, my legs bowed from rickets. Other children laughed and stoned me. I decided that I wouldn't give anyone the satisfaction of seeing me die. Instead, I ran away one night to the acrid hills that overlooked the town. I had no intention other than escape, and no food or water beyond what little I carried in my stomach. Within two days, the sun had nearly driven all of the life out of me. I didn't care. Anything was better than the existence I had been living. I hated my parents for what they'd done to me, and hated the entire village for not helping me.

I stumbled from rock to rock like a drunken man, dizzy and delirious from dehydration. I kept moving higher rather than lower, wanting to die as far away from the village as I could. A black shape loomed ahead of me like a painted shadow. As I approached I could feel a seductive cool breeze. Then the blackness swallowed me completely.

I awoke on the cool stone floor of a cave the next morning feeling strangely refreshed, as though I'd taken a step backwards from the brink of death. The pounding headache and dizziness that were the signatures of my dehydration were both gone. Instead, I felt curiously lightheaded and clear. Behind me I could see the sun pounding down on the overexposed rocks like a blacksmith's hammer. I turned inward, toward the cave's dimly
lit interior.

Something glowed faintly in the cavern ahead of me, with a dim gray-green phosphorescence that seemed to go right through me, like radiation. My heart quickened as I drew closer. There, lying on the ground in front of me was a crystal, the same smoky mountain quartz crystal that one day in another lifetime I would nearly die trying to take to Blue Lake. I reached for it greedily, feeling a strange roaring sound between my ears. The crystal was small enough to hold in my hands, and as I held it, I felt the energy, the radiation coursing through my nervous system, jumping from synapse to synapse until I felt like I was vibrating. At that moment the crystal and I became each other, and at that moment I realized my destiny, as surely as if I had just pulled a sword from a stone. I had made a bargain.

I grew stronger every day, nourished by the energy inside the crystal, and as I grew stronger I thought of revenge against the people of my village. I thought of my father, who had whipped and beaten me like a dog, and my mother, who had let him. I thought of the other children who stoned me whenever they saw me outside of my hovel. I thought of all of the people who could have helped me and didn't. I hated them all, and the more I hated the stronger the crystal's vibration seemed to become, the energy cycling back and forth between us until I realized that my hate was now becoming power. With the power came a new name: Gor.

I decided to stop the rain. They would learn the pain of slow starvation firsthand, just as they had taught it to me. Although I never left the cave, I could see everything. I watched the crops in the fields shrivel up and die, saw the wind carry the precious soil away, and when everything else was gone I saw the farmers fall upon their precious oxen like wolves.

After a while, manipulating the weather wasn't enough for me. The cave was gone, replaced by an immense dark castle that the crystal had helped me to make real. The more power I had, the more energy I seemed to need. I decided that I wanted to destroy everything. I took the vibration of hate and fear that people were sending me, condensed it, and inserted it into the body of a flea. The flea would reproduce, the rats would carry the fleas into the houses and then all would be devastation. Knowing all of these things, I sent the rat into the city and sat down in my castle to wait. I had created the black plague.

As bubonic plague spread across Europe, borne on the backs of rats, the energy of death and pain came back to me in waves. Each wave lifted me higher, raising my energy level. The sensation was very pleasurable. I sat in a chair in my castle, drinking in the energy of pain and suffering, like a satyr. I set up a kind of oscillation, pushing each wave out so that it would come back harder and faster. The more people that died, the better that I felt. Toward the end, when hundreds of thousands of people were dying every day, it was like that feeling that you get on a swing as a child, when you think you're going to vault clear over the crossbar.

Then, as calculating as I was, I somehow lost control. I felt the energy coming in toward me like a tidal wave. There was no way I could push it back out again. Before I could even open my mouth to scream, it hit me. I felt myself imploding, falling into myself like a black hole, into nothingness.

The next thing that I knew, I was an enormous barnacled whale swimming in an immense blue ocean. I was on another planet, one completely covered by water. It was my home, where I'd come from before I had ever been human in the first place. The calmness I felt was almost indescribable. Everything was oneness. I could sense no boundaries, no differences between me and any other thing. The water was as much as part of me as my skin, as were the barnacles, and all of the other whales. We were all one. Whatever I thought, encompassed me. My thoughts weren't just inside my head like they are when you're in human form. As a whale, every thought that I had, instantly became part of the whale consciousness, part of my reality, part of me, part of everything.