Jann Burner

Mind trust

December 14, 2007 | Comment icon

3 comments

Image Credit: sxc.hu

The following is a true story, or rather it is a true experience from the story of my life. Some say that just because something happens doesn't really make it "true". I was sitting in a doorway on Haight Street in San Francisco back in The Day watching the human parade pass by and feeling mildly depressed. Suddenly a lanky, middle aged drunken stranger sort of half stumbled on the stairs and seated himself about ten feet away from me. At the time I noted that although he appeared to be drunk he gave off no smell and when he spoke his words were utterly clear. I was surprised in that I felt his voice or rather his whisper, rather than heard it.

"Now, now my friend, there's no need to fret about a thing…"

I turned and looked directly at him. He was staring straight ahead at the people passing by on the street. Maybe I was mistaken. As I looked closer I could see that he was old, at least fifty, but he looked tough. He was a survivor of life's more interesting adventures. I looked closer and although he was looking partially away, I could definitely see the corner of his left eyeball flickering! At this moment time begin to distort slightly. There was a definite feeling of deja-vu. Something very important was just about to happen. This guy was, what was the word…evolved.

No sooner had my mind formed the image than my new found companion turned and looked directly into my eyes and said quite clearly, "But aren't we all my friend?" And his lips never moved. Incredible strangeness on a summer day. The slight time distortion that I had felt begin to fade as his lips parted and he said, in a normal everyday voice, "Do you smoke my friend?"

I quickly ran my attention through the memory traces of my mind searching for a deeper meaning to his rather pedantic question. His eyes were clear and honest, he obviously wanted a straight forward answer.

"Sure, sometimes…" I replied.

"Would you like to come with me for a little while and smoke at my place?"

Now, any other time I would have simply laughed at the invitation but on this day…for some reason I simply said. "Sure".

It was summer in San Francisco. I was sitting in a strange car on a non-descript street, parked at the curb. I was looking out the side window watching rust form on a street sign and wondering what the hell I was doing, sitting in a stranger's car parked on a nameless street.

"We're here." He said.

I almost jumped in surprise at the sound and then I realized that it wasn't the sound that had surprised me but the fact that although I heard him quite clearly, there had been no sound. The sound that I had almost heard had been in my own mind but it had been his voice.

Inside the room I was struck with the distinct feeling of being completely and absolutely alone. We were sitting on either side of a round oak table in the Bay window of a run down hotel in the Filmore district. Except for the bed, chest of drawers and the oak table, the room was vacant. There was just me…and this stranger and his small black suitcase standing beside the door. There was no sign that he had spent any time in the room. It was strange to suggest that this was where he lived. He hadn't said a word. There was a large "Do Not Disturb" sign hanging about his head like a halo.

I found that if I just turned my head slightly until his physical form was outside of my line of sight--I was alone! The feeling of alone-ness was so strong that when I turned my head again back towards him, I would jump slightly in surprise upon finding another person in this room. A very curious feeling. I became fascinated with this bit of strangeness and would look away and then back, time and time again and each time the feeling of surprise would catch me. He was so into what he was doing that he put out absolutely no vibration. I was about to ask him about his life when he lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply and said, "Let me tell you a little about myself."

Physically he was non-descript. He had gray hair arranged in a crew cut, almost military. He was clean shaven and he wore a short sleeved white shirt, open at the neck with gray slacks. He had no jewelry, watch or identifying symbol. Obviously, I thought, here was a man trying to avoid attention. It turned out that he had just been released from prison two weeks previously after having spent eight years of an eleven year sentence in solitary confinement. He had been spending his time, since his release, sitting in this room and walking the streets…looking.

Whenever my mind would phrase a question he would verbalize it and answer it as if it were a rhetorical question singling the next part of his monologue. My mind would say, (what would a person do in solitary for eight years!) And he would say aloud, "What would a person do in solitary for eight years! At first he would get very lonely, then he would get very bored. After that he would begin to explore every square centimeter of his environment…slowly. This will occupy a person for approximately six months. In the process of examining his environment he discovered a most incredible thing! He discovered the mirror and through the mirror…his mind!"

He had the habit of speaking about himself in the third person. As he told me of the incredible travels he had undergone through the looking glass, I became more and more fascinated. He was no mere closet, sex-queen, serial killer, he was deep! His voice droned on and on continually referring to himself in the third person, a habit he picked up in solitary. As we looked directly and deeply into one another's eyes, he would mention words like trust and mind quite frequently until it became obvious, between passing the joint back and forth, that he was hypnotizing me. I could not talk. I could not move, although I was perfectly aware of all that was going on. I was aware that though his prison rap was probably true, it's purpose was to interest and fascinate the conscious level of my brain so that the deeper recesses of my mind would be more easily accessible.

I was also aware that a 1959 Ford hardtop convertible (color blue and white), had just skidded around the corner, inscribed a 360 degree circle in the street in front of the hotel and had gracefully, but quite suddenly entered the lobby by way of the big picture window directly beneath the table at which I was sitting. A major accident had taken place before my eyes. The crowds were rushing across the street. My attention never wavered and his voice droned on and on and his physical appearance began to change.

Quite gradually at first and then with an ever increasing dramatic flair, his face took on the characteristics of an early American pioneer. He had been a trapper, the only surviving member of a twenty man party that had left Missouri four years before. They had made it as far as Colorado territory with only minor casualties when the Indians attacked in force one night, taking four years worth of accumulated pelts and leaving them all for dead. Just before the scalping had begin he had managed to roll down a shallow ravine where he lay throughout the night listening to the screams of his half dead partner's. He lay in the fold of the earth for days until the infection from the arrow wound in his left leg became so bad he thought he would go insane.

We were sitting in a small bar at Sutter's Mill in what was to later become Sacramento. His left leg had been amputated three weeks before. He had had to do it himself and then steal a horse (after shooting the owner) in order to survive. The impression was so real that I actually reached for the bottle to pour him another drink before I realized that his whole demeanor had changed again and he was now a French gentleman of dubious connection (but obviously a gentleman). It was sometime just before the French revolution and we were casual friends. With astonishing rapidity we were traveling back through time, his eyes and mine were now locked in mirror reflection of things and places and people. These were things we had shared, places we had lived and visited and individuals we had been, were still and always would be. Apparently we not only knew one another, we had known one another for a very long time.

From France it was just a skip and a jump to England in the early Middle Ages. We were alchemists sharing profound secrets…back and further back until he begin to take on the shape and form of a mythological Satyr and I slowly became a large brown Centaur! The place, I could not quite recognize at first, but then as he grinned at me through the aeons and aeons of time, I remembered.

"So now you remember!" He smiled.

Emotion bubbled through my intestines like some vile fluid threatening to make me sick.

"There is no time", he said, "Time is a parade, it takes only as long to pass as it takes and you are at one and the same time the curb side observer, the drum major, the general pompously standing high atop the reviewing stand and the last street sweeper who picks up the last bit of rubbish on the following day.

"You are now part of The Mind Trust. You, who were present at the beginning, will be present in the end."

Suddenly the focus of attention begin to fall directly on me and I was not sure if I enjoyed it or not. I snorted and pawed the ground nervously while he, perched grinning atop a small rock laid down his Pan pipe and from somewhere pulled out a deck of cards. The obvious humor of a Satyr playing cards with a Centaur did not enter my consciousness. It seemed the most natural event imaginable. He looked over at me and I stepped closer. I trusted him more than I trusted myself. Any thoughts of fear, harm or even death were less than relevant. He shuffled the cards and one fell to the table like rock. I could not immediately tell whether the card was face up or face down because I had no recollection of ever having seen cards like these before. On the side facing upward there was a very simple geometric design in black against a white background and in the center of the design was the numeral "1". He turned the card over. On the reverse side was a color photograph. I looked at him and he looked back grinning. I felt tears at the corners of my eyes. There was a strange tree behind his head and when he looked at me grinning, the relative position of his body and the tree was exactly the same as the photograph of the Satyr and the Centaur on the card laying on the table like rock, in the earliest days of the Earth when Ego-Consciousness first entered the physical plane of existence.

I heard the ambulance sirens as they arrived for the victims of the automobile accident below. I also noticed, slightly to my surprise, that the initial cigarette had not even reached the finger burning stage yet.

I nudged my hoof against the rock upon which the card sat as if to express my impatience. If we were going to exist in two places simultaneously then why not three, or four? With each successive card I felt a growing anxiety. On the initial part of this incredible journey it was I that had been observer and he that had been the focus. Now it became incredibly obvious that for the remainder of the journey it would be my mind and flash frames from the movie of my total existence on earth that would be the point of focus.

He begin to drop cards faster and faster, some one on top of the other and some in patterns across the surface of the flat rock. I saw myself flying over an ocean in a strange machine. I saw myself as a stone cutter sitting in the shade of the ancient Sphinx waiting with the others for night to fall so that we might put the finishing touches to the newly constructed pyramid. I was a fisherman watching Jesus approaching over the water; an English King: a French poet. He would look at me and grin because up until the actual moment he had no idea exactly who I had been in these other times and other places. He was pleased, he was delighted. I was shaken by a strange sort of self consciousness. For some reason I didn't want to know.

"Enough!" I finally cried aloud and the trance was immediately broken.

"Of course", he said. There was compassion in his eyes. "We are moving too fast, please excuse my impatience. When I was in solitary I could sit in front of my mirror by the hour and gaze into my own eyes and…travel. I could go places I had never imagined! But since I came out of prison the mirror doesn't work for me any more. Now I have to find the special person and look into their eyes and have them look into mine. Then…Magic happens!

Suddenly his mood mellowed and became intensely personal. "Imagine the mind as a brackish pond, stagnant around the edges and murky in the middle. Into this rather obscure, bleak pool fall all sorts of things and experiences. At worst these experiences enter the pond rather suddenly and unexpectedly and are neither acknowledged nor integrated. Like a broken stick tossed from afar, these life experiences make a small splash and end up caught, along with other bits and pieces along the congealing edge and with each additional bit of experience, the pond is one step closer to total stagnation. Like a slowly healing scab, most of us pass through the days of our lives until death at which point the wound of consciousness appears to have satisfactorily healed…only to be broken open anew upon the moment of our next incarnation."

I felt myself being drawn back and still a vague sense of apprehension seemed to accompany me. I could tell that he too was aware of my anxiety. He laughed and continued.

"But enough for now. You are becoming nervous and the surface of your pool is becoming turbulent. Have no fear for you are rising quickly to the surface and shortly you are to encounter a special project of your own that will enable you to learn much and progress fast. Take these cards for they are now yours and use them and distribute them to people in the form of a--Game. It should be a family game. You might want to call it the Mind Trust Game and the rules of this game are to be of your own invention.

"We will meet again my friend. May Jesus, who became the Christ, bless and protect you."

As he handed me the deck of cards he touched my forehead and I left the empty room. Descending the stairs to the lobby I was surprised to see the 1959 Ford still sitting in the place normally occupied by the aging residents of this rather questionable hotel. It had apparently entered through the window and there was glass and broken furniture scattered about the lobby. As I stepped through the rubbish and onto the street a tow truck began the process of retrieving the Ford. As I watched the operator of the tow truck begin his ritual, my eyes noticed a large neon clock above a liquor store next to the hotel. Exactly one hour before I had been sitting in a doorway in the middle of the block between Despondence and Despair, about two miles from Success and two blocks from Suicide Ave, when this middle aged drunken form of a man plopped himself down uncomfortably close to me and whispered with perfect diction into the right side of my mind…"Now, now, my friend, there's no need to fret about a thing…"

If you enjoy Jann Burner's columns, check out his new book on Amazon - "The Claire Letters" - a spiritual love story between a San Francisco taxi driver and an elderly retired teacher from Texas. Very inspirational. Comments (3)

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