VISOKO

I went down into the tunnels beneath Visoko with no expectations. The first time I felt the energy strongly but could not meditate — there was too much of everything down there. I came back when I could be alone, three hundred and sixty-five metres inside the hill. The vibration began in my feet and rose; when it reached my head the whole thing burst and I was outside. I was looking through passages that are still buried, and I had no body to do it with. I was not alone. Something found me — not a person, and by the feel of it, nothing good. And it was not passing through. I could feel it in that form of me that was not physical: I felt it break into a run toward me, and I felt its hunger. For a moment I knew that if I did not return to my body it would reach me even like this. I returned. And I was drenched in sweat. That word deserves to be read slowly. It is cold in those tunnels all year round and the others walked them in jackets and long trousers. I alone was in short sleeves and hot the whole time — I kept going to cool off in ice-cold water, because I was burning. And there, the one person who was never cold, I stood soaked in sweat with the hair on my arms standing to attention. For a long time afterwards I could feel it searching for a way through the collapse. In the passage marked no entry, the lights went out. I left and did not go back. I will not pretend to a courage I did not have — I was afraid, and I am afraid still. On the last night I dreamt something was climbing onto my balcony that had no business being there; I woke and saw it in front of me, and then I woke for real. The balcony was open. I closed it and fell asleep with a fear I have not felt since. I do not write this as a warning and I am talking no one out of going. The place did me no harm — I walked into it alone and unprepared, and that is mine to own, not its. I write it because it happened, and because since then the border between worlds is not a figure of speech to me.

On the same journey I went for an energy massage — work with the lymph and with whatever the body is holding without knowing it. At first there was only resistance: energy forcing its way up from my feet, heavily, as though through a jammed door. Then came a pain under the ribs that no muscle makes. And I was in the womb. My sister was beside me, still alive. We spoke without words and we were well together. Then came a grief that cannot be carried, I heard her say it would be all right and that I should not be afraid — and I was alone. Later my wife appeared, and later still my daughter; my sister changed form into her as it happened, as if to show me that the same love goes on in another body. I did not stop the tears; there was nothing to stop them with. That was when I finally named the thing I had carried all my life without knowing it: guilt that I survived and she did not. Why me. I asked that question so long that it stopped being a question and became a habit. This is not a story about being healed. It is a story about it being nameable — and naming is half the work. Since that day the energy moves through me almost without resistance.

I was there with people I had not known before. And over those days the same thing kept happening: someone would sit down beside me and start speaking about something they had long spoken of to no one. I did not ask, and I led no one to it; it simply happened. None of it is here and none of it ever will be — it is not mine to tell. And if any of them should read these lines: there is nothing here about you. There is only what it did to me. I did not experience the place the way the others did. Most of the time I had the sense that the group was feeling one thing and I something else entirely — and now and then I landed exactly on what the person beside me was carrying. And there were moments when their emotions could not be told apart from mine; I could not say what belonged to whom. That is precisely what this site means when it speaks of open centres. And that was when it struck me that what I read in people is neither a gift nor chance. It is mechanics. And mechanics can be written down. That is where the idea of Human Design came to me, and out of that idea Astroláb eventually grew. Around the pyramids there was a calm I cannot explain. Once, during meditation, a wind rose and moved the trees, though the air was still and the heat was such that the sun was unbearable. As we drew away toward the Croatian border it faded. Ordinary worries came back, and the connection to what other people feel stopped being heightened. I offer none of this as proof. I do not know exactly what was happening there — only what I felt and when it stopped. But I know exactly what remained: the certainty that a person can be described without prophecy. Astroláb is that certainty written out in numbers. The experience stays mine. What is yours is the computation — and you can check it without taking my word for anything.

The Sun, ascendant, Moon, Human Design, life path, Chinese sign and Mayan kin are all computed. Recompute them here and you will get the same answer — that is what this site is for. Bhairava, Osiris, Thoth and the tarot cards are not computed. That is the language I use to name my own experience, and nothing more. This distinction is what the whole of Astroláb rests on, so I would rather say it out loud than leave it unsaid.