In 1961, at the age of eight, I saw Jeffrey Hunter, play Jesus in the movie King of Kings The next day, I built a large cross with lumber that I found in the back yard. I went to the edge of the block where I lived and wearing a sheet, which I draped around my body, I walked with cross upon shoulder, all the way down the street, to my backyard and leaned it against a clothes line pole, and proceeded to climb up the the cross, and re-experienced the agony and the ecstasy. I can remember people watching me but no one mocked me. I guess they thought I was a queer child as indeed I was.
Decades later, during the AIDS epidemic, I had a series of de-stabilizing visions. One of them was a dream about the dreaming process and the fluid nature of the Imaginal Body. In the dreamstate I was in my backyard again as a young person. I heard a voice talk to me about the Isis and Osiris myth…and then I started to lift off the ground and became fully lucid. As I floated upwards, I looked down upon the suburb, the City, the State, the Nation, the Continent and then the Planet Earth as I moved towards a giant cloud of golden light. I was at the boundary of the golden light and the Imaginal Body.
The Body became a conduit through which a tremendous ecstatic force poured through me. The energy used my body as a conduit to refresh all Earth-Bodies.Then I descended back down slowly, floating, taking the shape of a young person again and ended upon a Cross. I called out." Mama! Mama! I had a vision!" My mother appeared at the kitchen door, wiping her hands on a towel. “It wasn’t just imagination. It was like a vision that ancient mystics have had through out the ages.” While I tried to speak I was overwhelmed by ecstasy. She looked stressed out.
" That sounds awful." She said, with disdain." Now it’s time for you to come inside and do your homework." I slowly awoke to my physical body in bed in my thirty something adult body, holding an awareness of all of these mystic rivers that flow through my sensorium at many different versions of Self, some old , some young, and some quite ancient.
The Imaginal Body has been an obsession of mine since an early age and it wasn’t until fairly recently that I have been able to articulate what this obsession comes from. The Journal published this story, which explores the strange loops, parodoxes and impasses of modern story tellers and mythmakers.