The Silence Beyond the Silence

By Mark Haberstroh

The Silence Beyond the Silence contains the literary results of long-time consciousness research through meditative experience. The short stories and poems are crafted, for the most part, out of direct experience. The imaginative element is sourced in what is real, which, like a seed, sprouts and grows into a living plant. And, so grows or unfolds the plot, characters, and cadence of the story or poem out of that core experience. The intent is to draw the reader into thoughts and feelings that feel deeper, stronger, and less separate … something closer to a merging or union with movement and meaning … a stronger and more vital connection to nature, to all of life, to our life. The Silence Beyond the Silence is a place, a place where we have walked through a door, closed it behind us, and turned around to observe what lies before us. Most of us in special moments can achieve silence inside ourselves. At this moment a door appears before us, which may be opened if we only have the key. This key is a knowing that we must remain awake after we turn off our senses. When we no longer see, hear, or feel, but remain completely awake and alert, new perceptions can and do approach us from interior worlds. Here time stops and adventure begins, if one is willing to explore the new frontier, for that is what it is … the new frontier.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098303310

Book preview

© 2019 Mark R. Haberstroh

All Rights Reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the author.

First printed by Mark R. Haberstroh

Marin County, California

Print ISBN: 978-1-09830-330-3

eBook ISBN: 978-1-09830-331-0

This book is dedicated to my dear friends Martha Keltz,

Thomas Sharpe, and the late James Gillen.

To know, we experience. To experience, we open. To open, we summon our courage. Why not open the door, come what may? James Allen wrote a truth, ‘As the heart, so is the life.’

Table of Contents

Introduction

Short Stories

Once Upon a Time

Bees

The Dream of Sadie Gwynn

Vector Force

The Haunting (sequel to Vector Force)

Enlightenment

The Sick Bed

The Knife

The Tunnel

Testing Room (The Whore of Babylon)

A Monk’s Heart

Bus Ride

Visitor

Neighbors

Carved Wood*

Dark Dance

Life at Thirty

The Physician (a Karmic Tale)*

Intercession (A Redemption Tale)

Dark Matter (A Whitsun Tale)

The Turning (A Tale of the Double)

The Rebuke

The Rose of Brooklyn

The Puddle – An Atlantean Reverie

Inspired Thoughts

The Pond

Approaching Morning

My Backyard

A Brief Description of a Moment

Reverie

The Bee

Steppingstones

The Artist

The Egyptian

Everyone has a Story – An autobiographical note

Maya

One-Minute Drama

The Renewal of Substance

Gold and Crystal

Image

The Temple – An American Altar

Poems

Cross of Light

Center

Thought

Hope

Angel

Pentagram

Embrace (a love poem)

Moon

Sun

Ahriman

A New Beauty

Flower

Honey Prayer

Michael

Midnight

Just So

Monday

Spark of Knowing

The Manichean Imperative

The Comforter

Other Stories

The Group

The Shoemaker

Florence – Travel Notes

The Four Temperaments

Theo and Bill

Essays

Perspective

Art and the Idea

Art and the Eye

Unfolding Thoughts

A Wall

Time is Short

Vigilance

Interval Thought

Meaning

Epilogue

Introduction

The content of this book conveys spiritual experience that has found artistic expression through a story, poem, or short essay. Each impression has matured over time and worked its way creatively into life. The endeavor is made to create artistically from a core objective spiritual or super-sensory content that acts as a kernel out of which grows the story, poem, or inspired thought. It is hoped that others will take heart and begin to communicate, describe, and endeavor to understand and interpret such experience. This dawning of new vistas of perception occurring in so many human beings today can lead to the rediscovery of those archetypal spiritual impressions and relationships out of which the myths and sagas of old were born.

Many are those who have experienced strange and marvelous occurrences of a super-sensory or mystical nature but are reluctant … and rightly so for the most part … to cast such sensitive feelings and intimate perceptions before a harsh world. However, given an attentive, listening audience, a time has come to place spiritual content in full view, albeit cautiously. In this way, people can aid one another along a path replete with pitfalls, a path that requires extensive preparation. Certainly, there are many things that ought to remain silent, being questions that have not quite found their answers. However, there are also mature impressions carried within for a long time that would prove fruitful for others. We may also not deny the possibility of those experiences that emerge fully formed and ready to be communicated. It is always a matter of individual choice and judgment.

In a culture that inherently dissipates the soul’s energies in so many ways, a counter-balance may be provided through groups of like-minded people openly and sincerely discussing all aspects of the journey from one mode of cognizing into another, a journey whose purpose is, at the outset, to concentrate and focus the soul’s energies. This book presupposes the reader’s quest along a path that, knowing or not, leads the seeker toward the cognitive metamorphosis that manifests in what is called the thinking of the heart.

The stories and poems contained within direct us to transformative experience. They are about changing darkness into light, evil into good, immorality into morality, hate into love, what is unhealthy into something healthy. They uplift the heart toward a perception of Beauty and Goodness with the mind leading the way to Truth. There occurs an incremental change from the mode of consciousness given us by nature into another mode acquired through conscious effort; one where experience of the surface on things translates into perceiving the inside of things and the energies between things. It is like being able to talk to a bee or a flower and have them answer or to lay down the head in sleep only to fly away into the clouds beneath a shining night moon or move without obstruction through the interior of the earth. The vehicle for travel becomes the Self and nothing else. Technology is not needed.

As this book finds its sources in conscious mystical experience, posit that the spiritual aspect of the human being is, in fact, a vehicle for travel. The heart grows into planetary spheres, expanding into the stars. The individual spirit soars. Small becomes big in an interpenetrating feeling of oneness in Wonder and Love, where we unite ourselves with the Everything. It is a flowing in a cosmic stream of now, then, and forever. This is the hope, the path, and the goal. Every moment becomes a universe, every universe a moment. The truth becomes verifiable that states As above, so below.

MH

Short

Stories

Once Upon a Time

A young man sits quietly in his small room, reading. He has been sorely tested in his short life and so reads with silent desperation and a certain voraciousness. What he longs to find are new experiences that might guide him toward a better life and through his present hard circumstances. So, he searches. As he proceeds through the stories in the pages, he begins to forget himself and his troubles, and soon has the distinct feeling that the distance between him and the book is narrowing. A penetration into the print on the page, and the ideas in that print, and the life in those ideas is occurring.

He reads a book entitled The High History of the Holy Grail, from the works of Robert de Boron, about a time long ago. In the blink of an eye a feeling descends upon him. It is soft, like a warm, enveloping cloud, and he senses that he was part of and connected to the people in the story, that he somehow played a part in the doings of this small group of souls. Before long a picture arises within him, a picture showing a celebratory event in a field one bright sunny day. The place is a rather large glade set in the woods with throngs of people gathering around the King and Queen upon the dais. It is a tournament, with jousting and fighting and what not. At some point in the afternoon’s entertainment comes the moment for all able-bodied knights to take the field on horse to battle with wooden shields and swords. The last knight seated a-horse becomes the victor. Anticipation of this great fun is high, but no one ever expects what happens next. Into the field of battle rides a burly man with a great red-brown beard. He wields only a cudgel. What shocks everyone is his proclamation, spoken loudly in front of the King and Queen, that he will defeat all the knights to claim victory. To the immeasurable amusement of all he endures the jeers, criticisms, and adulation from different groups, while many in the crowd chant Lancelot, Lancelot, Lancelot! For the big man, with all his boast and effrontery, is riding a donkey. And to the delight of all, he does exactly what he said he would do. He decimates the entire field and emerges victorious. The crowd howls in uproarious laughter while the defeated knights stand and stare in wonder, delight, and respect.

And so, the young man’s Imagination ends, leaving him with questions.

Who was I? Was I in the crowd? Was I the victor or one of the other knights? Was I watching from above in the spirit?

Oh, how he wishes he had been the man riding the donkey, for being someone great in the past would help him feel as if he had meaning and value in his painful present. But he is reluctant to make that assumption, thinking that some verification is needed.

As an older man, he has learned that answering the young man’s questions was not necessary, as everyone that one was incorporates or metamorphoses into everything that one is; that the present life, with its manifold circumstances and events, holds within it what has come before, both good and bad, great and small, and is a picture of ones being and ones participation in Being. This present life is the book he endeavors to read now.

Bees

It was the bees, of course, the honeybees. After removing their hive from residence in his home, the afterimage of their swarming around him remained very much alive in his mind for days. He brought the humming of the hive into his sleep and the sweet, pungent odor of honeycomb would never again release him. Millions of speeding, swirling light streamers were intersecting fast, so fast, and the mind an orb of light born of their busy, ceaseless circling. It was as if the Kyriotetes had just illuminated Old Sun, with those first glimmerings or flashes of life overarching the dark sphere suddenly igniting into light, brilliant light overall, and ‘life was the light of men.’ And all those buzzing bees seemed as perfect mini spheres of light speeding by, each with a little ‘e’ for electron inscribed on its round and devoted body. He had to be calm as he was now the stationary axis around which bee activity centered. Calm was also necessary as one sting could inflict harm. But Love overruled fear, and the bees sensed this, as Love is their basic life-substance, the atmosphere within which they work and live. He merely remained still and let them work their way through his hair down to the scalp and then back until they flew away, having made their descent into his darkness, and released themselves again. All was well, as it could not otherwise be with honeybees.

The Dream of Sadie Gwynn

The darkness was profound. It enveloped and intruded with long, sharp fingers that pressed and extended inwards, wrapping ‘round and compressing the organs, especially her heart. Such was the violation that could not be thwarted with clawing response, fists, screams, or any weapon. She was in a new land now, a land where other capacities were needed to survive. In fact, it was an abyss. What Sadie did have was awareness, a being awake and conscious in her helplessness. Somehow, she felt that it was in this consciousness, this self-aware knowing, that a defense might be found.

Suddenly her perception shifted into a feeling of great spaces, like valleys, deserts, crevasses, and ravines, all still impenetrably dark. She did not sense the dark as an absence or a nothing, but as a substance pregnant with intelligence, potent with intent to annihilate. Dread walked beside her as fear surged upward from below, met by her fierce and desperate resolve to hold it at bay, to press it down. She felt an urgent need to sit up and breathe deeply but was too weak. A responding force from her heart began to take root and expand in hopeful strength, like a young seedling in the rock’s moist crevice. More she could not do, and felt that even this was not enough, that she would, indeed, succumb.

Gradually there appeared in the stillness before her a glistening of linear silver wafting in a subtle and unfelt breeze, a vertically appearing wave with no visible top or bottom. Its light emanated enough force to illuminate that most near but lacked strength to truly penetrate the dark. Sadie at once knew this line or cord to be her possession, her creation, and her lifeline. She somehow knew in a spiritually visceral sense that it must be protected with all her might, as its breaking or severing might end her life. She then began to perceive and understand the reason for the relentless attack by demons, bred for and by the dark, being only slightly visible in the soft light. Again, and again they made their forays against her silver cord while she, with cold sweat and gritted teeth, summoned all her will to maintain its integrity. She could no longer hold.

At this moment, she was propelled into the timeless space where all traverse at that moment of death when the final release of one’s iron grip on life yields to and, with a gasp, mixes with new-found wonder at the gradual arrival and impending inundation of spirit light. There are no words ... But she was young and willful and did not want to let go. She refused to succumb to the ripping and tearing of her soul by those creatures of the dark. She did not want to abandon a life not yet lived, not yet shaped and made fruitful. Her profound desire, which now became clear focus, was to help, to contribute, to create, to give and, especially to love. The awe-filled simplicity in this burgeoning desire drew her gaze again into the abyss, where new and startling things began to occur.

Far away there appeared a smallest spark of light she recognized as vital to her, somehow connected to the pit of her stomach. The distances were vast yet confusing. It was as if she saw both sides of everything. In her stubborn refusal to die she seized and ignited that spark gifted to her, gifted from where or from whom she did not know. Sadie’s soul catalyzed as the dark caught fire! Through wondrous change the dark became fuel for the fire’s flame, for its own imminent and precipitate transformation into light. The ensuing conflagration intensified into a scintillating and color-filled irradiating of a bright new world.

It was a dawning, an arising, and a flowering for Sadie Gwynn. She could do nothing but open like a blossom to the splendor which now freed her soul as greatly as the Dark had oppressed it. She was flowing in a light that carried her on its wave-stream. Descending from on high in the resplendent firmament to greet