note: this whole piece has been re-done as of 10.16.05

The Universe Moved ..

reality ain’t what you think –

or is ..

How I learned the universe is made of mind-rubber . .<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /> 

 
   About 15 years ago I was washing windows one autumn afternoon. I was a self-employed window washer. It was a job. I was simply wide-awake, sober, unstoned, normal. The house was a one-story house two blocks from where I live now. I’d made an agreement with myself when I was 7-years-old to stay alert and pay deft attention to whatever happened. I was studying Jung and Freud and Plato and Aristotle that year, and I took my epistemology and metaphysics with the earnest seriousness of youth.
     You’ll need to stick with the details of this small, but universe-shaking story. What makes it so rocking and shocking is its ordinaryess. How entirely un-woo-woo it is.
     I had been studying dreams with no guidance and studying an expanded reality with a stubborn earnestness. So I wasn’t unaware that the universe is more facetted and layered than presented in your usual school.
    For those of you not from <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Northern California, there was this nifty item called a Berkeley Farms milk crate that most everyone had stolen at least one of from outside a market. A Berkeley Farms milk crate is a 5-sided blue heavy-plastic cube that they put ½ gallon cartons of milk in to deliver them uncrushed to the grocery stores. The sides were not solid – they were a diamond lattice in the plastic. In the good old days they had a strong metal bar bent around the top outside edge of the cube to strengthen it. People used them to build furniture, to store things in, to prop all manner of things up. I used mine as a light box I could put a towel and some sponges in and also use as a kind of quick stool to stand on. You need to stand somewhat cleverly on the edges of the crate so as not to bust its sides and to be balanced so as not to ankle-bustingly tip the crate over. I bopped up and down on the thing a hundred times a day, so was definitely milk-crate savvy to the max. I, by the way, was given mine by a Berkeley Farms driver and was the one person on the planet who had not stolen theirs.
    Another piece of equipment we need to understand for the story to be clear is the squeegee. A professional squeegee is not one of those plastic hunks of junk that people use at a gas station to wash their car windshield. A proper Ettore squeegee is a sturdy handle with a straight solid brass metal blade into the groove of which fits a rubber strip which can be changed out as its rubber edge dulls. Accept no substitutes.
    You need to know that, unlike amateurs, professional window washers never wash the inside and outside of the same window at the same time. It’s extremely annoying and distracting to have someone else fussing with the same pane of glass you’re cleaning.
     What else is up on this day when I’m about to step on a metaphysical landmine? Well, you need to understand window screens a little too. The usual window screen is a metal frame with a screen stretched across it. You can take off the screen and lean it against the wall. Oh, yeah, and there is what’s called a sash window. A more old-fashioned window now with a top half and a bottom half. The bottom half slides up.
    When you wash a window as a pro, there’s none of this water and vinegar and crumpled newspaper nonsense. You have a fabulous potion of chemicals – ‘wetners’ – designed by brilliant bald chemists named Howard who wear coke-bottle-bottom, owl-eyes glasses. You apply this sudless solution with a fake lambs-wool scrubber sleeve which also is on a t-shaped wand handle arrangement like your squeegee. After you wet and scrub the window, you stick the wooly scrubber handle back in a loop on the left leg of your denim overalls.
   You take, in this case, your 12″ stiff, solid brass squeegee, ‘cut’ or swipe with your tipped squeegee end an in inch of dry glass across the top edge of the window pane and draw your squeegee at just the correct firm pressure down the stiff smooth sheet of glass to sweep the water off.   
    Back in my window washing heyday, I used to charge $50 extra if I had to listen to gigastupid blusterer Rush Limbaugh but when this incident occurs, BlowHard Rush hasn’t been loosed upon us yet. This was in the era of charging $25 extra if someone played 3^rd rate rock & roll too loud for the several hours I was there, disturbing my intelligent musings and noticings.
   This day the jagged rock & roll was severe ear-drum-pain loud, blotting out all other sound – a full sound eclipse. I could have asked 'em to turn it down, but didn't.
   So we have the elements for the metaphysical drama about to unfold in the light of day. I was standing on my trusty milk crate. I’d deftly squeegeed hundreds of thousands of panes of glass before this late afternoon on the southwest side of the house #403 at the corner of Hope and California Streets. I drew my stiff squeegee down the stiff glass when suddenly the glass bulged out into a deep curve as my squeegee pushed against it, almost causing me to lose my balance on my trusty crate. “What the heck?!”
    The glass stayed transparent and smooth and shiny and the  same thickness. Its hard, shiny, transparent self just stretched into a deep curved valley of glass about 4″ deep – and not just the 12″ where the squeegee was pressing, but evenly across the 2 ½ feet of the pane. I was completely alice-in-wonderlandedly shocked .I held onto the squeegee’s swooping stroke into the half-pipe of the wave of glass. I steadied my balance.
     This was 2 seconds? It was very detectable & stunning & definite – clear like a thunderclap. I stood straight up on my crate, staring at the window. What the hell happened? This was hard apple-clunking-the-head fact. What everybody thinks is real and how it’s real — isn’t.
     OK. I sherlocked it. Here’s what happened. All sound cues were drowned out by the ear-blasting 3^rd rate rock & roll. I was looking up at the top edge of the window frame. Unbeknownst to me, my assistant who could have been anywhere on the outside of the house had unloosed the bottom of this window screen of a type which I had never heard of before. This particular kind of rare, old-fashioned screen had no stiff metal sides. It had a band of metal at topand bottom and was held taut by small lever fasteners at the bottom corners.
     When my assistant loosed the levers, with the tension released, the screening sprung into several deep waves or troughs of screening.
     My brain or reality-projector had no notion of screening-in-troughs in such a circumstance so to account for the visual troughing, it allowed or made the glass go into a trough shape. Of course very quickly, its reality-logic-earth-physics-scanners caught the error and the glass righted itself. 2 + 2 had = 5 for a few moments in the stern light of day.
     One isn’t supposed to see behind the stage-set – the damn flats are supposed to stay flat. The universe giggled, shrugged, said Whoops, and we both carried on.
     But I was never the same.
     I have had a bunch of fascinating standard-reality-defying experiences but never so simple, so stark in the stern light of plain ole day.
    I had, of course, as a serious, highly-trained metaphysician and epistemologist since I was 7-years-old, to re-consider every thing.
    I had incontrovertible experiential evidence of a brain-matter connection and collaboration that proper Science did not account for. It was a knowledge-quake, the universe moved.
    My 7-yr-old’s vow to stay alert and to not pre-deny any experience had been redeemed in 2 agogging seconds on a late afternoon at the corner of Hope & California.
    I was ‘in’ shock. When everything you’ve been told in school, by your parents and teachers may be wrong, you are in shock. This was the seed moment, the big bang of a totally new knowledge that would bloom like nebulae through the coming years, having been vouchsafed this spectacular nuclear dear grail moment of intimacy with the universe – entrusted really. I knew I’d been entrusted to handle it with beauty and glee. Because it so easily could have been wiped, amnesiaed, clouded with doubt or confusion.
     If I hadn’t been so not daily but hourly, minutely, universe-in-a-grain-of-sandily trained to stay unpredjudicedly alert, I would have missed it or discounted it. All of my life had led to those two grail seconds. What made them grail was not some even fabulous coalescence of insight — but the nexus, Aristotelian I suppose, of supposedly reliable matter and brain. I’ve had lots of insights which flowed and ebbed. This was an outsight which, like Galadriel’s vial, gave me tangible confidence in all the adventures to follow.
    I’ve always wanted to stay sane as an artist on the FarFar edges. You can glean a lot of interesting stuff as you go mad. But I was and am only interested in durable truth – though often not repeatable. But not just stuff that will strand people in cul-de-sacs of cold and wet madness.      
    I admire the rigor of Science, and the doggedness. But we alchemists who were your fathers and are your children have rigor and doggedness too. We just don’t exclude anything from our deft attention. We’re scientists doing the dishes or doing the Twist as well. One is always the butterfly on the wall, observing, considering, fondly.
    Notice that if the timing and the conditions hadn’t been exactly right, I would have missed the grail. The sound; where I was looking; stiff-hard squeegee, stiff-hard glass (no maybes about this experience); standing on the tippy milk crate so I would be unbalanced — all of it conspired to bolster the grail truth of the occurrence. You are being taught stuff every moment as you move through the holo-hieroglyphs of living experience, but the big fish of meaning will strike the hook at any moment. If you’re not always deftly intent, the major & minor magics will pass you by.
    In my experiences, those extra-vaganzas never happen in places prepared to capture them – churches, meditation. They are too mischievous. They thrive on surprise. Shyly expect surprise.  
  
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4 Jaguar . Ix . Ocelot . Panther . North . tzol 134  10.13.05 thur
7 Earth . Caban . Earthquake. Heron . East . tzol 137 10.16.05 sun 
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