The Valhalla Covenant

As they got out of the car, Reimas could see that Sasha was tired but alight with curiosity about the place. Forest Lane Bower was a hidden estate that had been the final project of a rich but eccentric old man, to whom good taste, imagination and privacy meant much.

Although most of the buildings including the main house had been built relatively recently, they were constructed from long accumulated vintage items and materials that gave the estate the impression of considerable age.

When the large old timber door swung in, solid iron hinges creaked eerily. Reimas hesitated a moment but Sasha did not know that it was only in appreciation of the place and its memories, and the need to find a lighter, rather than because of any doubt or fear.

He led the way in and lit a candelabra placed on a stand near the door, which revealed a wide staircase looming out of the darkness at the far end of a large vestibule. Lighting more candles and oil lamps as he went, he told her that he never used electric power on the first night of his visits there.

As the place lit up, the rich natural light revealed a warm red glow of timber panelling and floors. The old furniture in the main lounge had elegant flowing lines, and another generous staircase with carved banisters led appealingly upwards.

Sasha was close to swooning at the thought of a comfortable bed but she was also very hungry, as Reimas soon guessed. He found a tin of pumpkin soup in the pantry and set about heating it with the gas stove.

Sasha was near driven mad by the smell of it cooking and decided to look around the lounge room while she waited. Fortunately she discovered a large music collection on old optical discs to distract her. She was pleased to find that much of it was classical and she was tempted to play some before recalling that there was no electric power.

“Could I look at your sketches now?” Reimas asked when he came in with the steaming cups. Already, his focus had returned to what he was looking for — something within him that was close but still elusive. He had a hunch that Sasha’s art might be the key.

Yet now something made her hold back.

“I’m not sure either of us would be able to do justice to anything cerebral right now,” she replied. “I can’t believe how tired I feel.”

“Of course.”

“I’d really rather find out more about you, in any case.”

“What can I say?”

“Your music collection’s big,” she said. “I’ve never seen so many optical discs in one place before. How many do you have?”

Reimas recognized the dodge. She was tired and was maybe even having misgivings. On the run for days, perhaps even weeks, she had steeled herself for a last act of defiance without any real hope of survival. Now that she’d come through it all safely against every reasonable expectation, the guard had to go up again, not the least because sleep would already be pounding at the door.

“A couple of thousand, maybe.”

“Pity we can’t play some.”

He let his surprise show.

“What, now?”

“Yes, I’m tired but I don’t think I could sleep.”

“I could go outside and turn on the power, but you might like these instead.”

He pulled open a large chest and within was an original HMV gramophone, horn and all. Next to it were fifty or so black discs — 78’s.

“No,” she marvelled. “They couldn’t be.”

“Oh yes they could. My grandfather’s collection. Even in his time, they were old.”

Reimas lifted the machine out and placed it on the main dining table. After winding it carefully, he selected a set of three records of Beethoven’s ‘Apassionata’ and placed the first on the spindle. The sound quality was scratchy and crude, but some intangible spirit stirred the soul. This medium was, after all, the first widely used means of preserving great performances, and the fragile black discs brought to life the expression of a piano virtuoso who had lived and played in a past that was now well beyond living memory.

“That was amazing,” she said when the set was finished.

Feeling a lot better after listening to the music, she decided to show him the drawings after all, and pulled out a slim leather folio from a large inner pocket.

Carefully extracting the first, she slipped it out of its plastic sleeve and handed it to him laid face up on the palm of her hand. As soon as he saw it he understood the particular manner in which she handled it. It was detailed and painstaking, even to his largely untrained eye — much more than a mere sketch. She clearly wished it to remain unmarked and pristine.

Portraying a traditional dance scene and focusing on just one couple, it was powerful and evocative. It stirred his soul just to look at it.

Sasha pointed out critical elements of it then showed him several more in succession when she perceived the depth of the impression it made. After showing him the fourth, she asked him what he thought and listened to his remarks about each.

Reimas was aware that it was a strategy by which she might learn more about him but saw no harm in letting it roll. He was also learning much.

From her art and her attitude, it was clear that she yearned for the manifestation of a wider, more inclusive social fabric, a main tenet of the Little River Revolution. It was a worthy aim. Too many valuable individuals had fallen by the wayside because society had become alienating and materialistic.

“Inspiration has come to me from all over the place lately,” he said. “I can’t quite believe it. After a long drought, it seems like the cosmos has allowed me limited access to a wider sphere.”

Sasha smiled, softly.

“I’m flattered that you think of my input in those terms. Naturally, I’d like to inspire with what I do but, really, you’re the key to it all. You can’t see without looking.”

“I hear you. It’s hard. I can’t quite get a grip on the exact thing I’m after, but it seems so close, as if I was blind and could reach out and touch it if I only knew the exact direction.”

“You’re trying to project yourself into a significantly broader state of consciousness,” she replied. “It’s no simple undertaking — like being in the water and trying to get up on top of a large plastic ball.”

“Just when it seems like you’re up there, back into the water you go.”

“That’s pretty much it.”

“All the same, I do feel as if something is clicking — a sense of comfort, perhaps even patience. I recall something an old Yaqui Indian tribesman had to say in one of Carlos Castaneda’s books. It was that you can’t assume you’ll automatically remain at the peak of spiritual attainment simply because you arrive there once.”

“Yes,” Sasha agreed. “Art’s like that — music too. You have to find the groove but it isn’t permanent, and you need to keep finding your way back.”

Reimas nodded.

“And every time you do, the confidence you gain makes it just a little easier, until the succession of choices to keep on diving into disciplined thought become a ... no, just a part of life.”

“You were going to say, a habit.”

“Yes, but no conscious choice can be a habit, can it, and how can anyone become more conscious except by conscious choice? Certainly, there’s more effort involved and to be more graphic, it’s like a range of peaks along which you travel rather than one isolated Everest to conquer.”

“As far as it goes,” Sasha agreed, “but to tap into greater consciousness, you might also have to give up some part of yourself — perhaps even relinquish control in some way.”

“You think so? Personally, I don’t have much time for the idea that you have to give things up — that whole sacrifice thing is only a twisted vestige of religion gone all wrong.”

“I get that. It’s construed so often from a flawed premise, but there’s more to it than you think.”

“Ah, discovering flawed premises. That sounds like fun.”

She looked hard at him.

“Are you teasing me?”

“No. Really, I’m not. Did it sound condescending?”

“No, I guess not. I’m just very tired. Even so, I think I’ve got a valid point to make with this and it might be me that seems condescending in the end.”

“You think?”

“Well, you clearly don’t know the true and the only good reason for making sacrifices. It should never be arbitrary like — you know, because some guru says you should give up something or other. You only give up what you need to for a particular purpose.

“It isn’t that there’s any fundamental requirement to endure the pain of relinquishing things. Only a pressing need to make room for new potentials.”

Reimas raised an eyebrow before saying;

“I can see what you’re getting at and it does make surprising sense, but making that sort of room kind of automatically comes from all the unusual things I have to deal with.”

“Well you’ve obviously already made all sorts of sacrifices,” she replied, “and I can see how that would be ongoing. For starters, in this sort of game you’d have to constantly prioritise where you focus your energies and how you spend your time.”

“True.”

“Even so, most of those sorts of sacrifices are fairly mundane. Also, as you said, the process would be more automatic than is ideal, and that’s the point.”

She moved in a little closer towards him.

“It’s clear that you’re aiming high with all this, and if it all leads where I think it’s going to, you’re actually going to have a greater need than most to make room for new potentials. To do that, you’re going to need to find a more dependable, conscious way of doing it.”

“You make it sound like there’s some major pitfall out there, but I can’t see it yet.”

“There might well be more than one,” she replied. “Concepts that you hold dear but haven’t yet properly analysed or processed might limit the ways your mind can move in, or it might simply be that something valid in one context may not be so constructive in the new one you wish to occupy.”

“So in the absence of clearing the house as effectively as I might, how come I seem to be coping okay so far?” he asked.

Sasha thought for a moment before replying.

“We let our passions guide us more often than you might think, as long as we’re still able to feel them — and that’s a good thing. If it was all simply mechanical — about effort and all that, we’d only do things because we thought they were the right things to do.”

Reimas began to wonder if she really had anything. He couldn’t see the problem with doing things because they were the right things to do, but he held his tongue for the time being.

“If we only ever did things because it seemed like the right thing to do,” she continued, “people would soon lose their interest in life and everything would grind to a halt, but the fact is, we generally do things because we feel strongly about them, and for the most part, that’s how it should be.”

Reimas was surprised. As soon as she’d spoken he could see the value in the idea, but she had more.

“When our feelings are in the right place — right out front that is — we can clearly see the desired goal ahead and willingly, even enthusiastically, make all the sacrifices needed to make room for the new things that serve the goal — the same way you probably do when you’ve got some crucial mission to execute.”

“Sounds fair.”

“The only caveat is that you’ll be dealing with things that are a lot more subtle and difficult than ever before, and you’ll need to give a lot more conscious effort to the analysis of what should be given up.

“You said yourself that no conscious choice can be a habit, but the thing is I don’t think you really believe it — by which I mean to say you don’t really live the pursuit of consciousness, and maybe the reason for that is because you’re looking too hard for tangible and material solutions but not looking for the feelings.”

The concept was complex but compelling, even though it felt somehow incomplete, perhaps because he still associated consciousness primarily with intellect, and because of that, he didn’t like the inference that his heart might be ruling his head because of his attachment to material solutions. The final few words she’d said about feelings simply hadn’t sunk in initially, but then they came back to him.

“I’ve always believed that our heads should hold sway over our hearts,” he said, attempting to find some solid ground.

“Oh god no,” she responded, aghast. “That’s not what I mean. Don’t you see, what point would there be to our existence if we didn’t celebrate what we feel? We are our feelings, and the only point there can be in putting a brake on them, temporarily at most, is to learn how to focus our minds more effectively in serving them.”

“We are our feelings?”

“What else is there?”

“Creativity, invention, discovery.”

“All of which are products of feelings. Each requires a drive, a motive force. People are inspired by desire. What else can that be but emotion?”

“But what about these products? Surely, they must be important, of themselves?”

Sasha looked up at him and smiled.

“You wonder then, if emotion serves simply to bring about the creative process in order to make some material thing of great worth — but have you considered that the created object might be nothing more than a low level reflection of a supremely pure emotional experience? Isn’t the primary purpose of any great creation to remind us of and guide us towards the emotional pinnacle that inspired it?”

“It might be one of the main purposes, I suppose,” he said slowly, pondering the idea. “Emotions, however wonderful, can be difficult to recall, especially in their full glory. On the other side, though, apart from the beauty of the experience, what merit do these supreme emotions have? How do they serve?”

“I don’t know how you can ask that,” she said. “Apart from the obvious reward of the experience itself, at the very least, emotions help to reinforce the memory of valuable concepts that we might otherwise forget. The main point, though, is that when your feelings are out front the intellect will serve them faithfully, but when your intellect is out front in the absence of emotion, you’re already lost. Intellect cannot choose a worthy destination for itself.”

“No, I disagree,” said Reimas. “The intellect guides us and lets us know how to get there.”

“Of course — how to get there, but only once it has been told what the destination is. Where else should you go but where you wish to?”

“And what is a wish, but a desire, which is in fact a feeling?” he admitted.

“Desire,” Sasha sighed. “How wonderful it is. What an incredible power, so long as you don’t mess it up.”

Tired and worn down though she was by the fear she had so long endured, her vital enthusiasm for life had returned, and it was infectious.

Quite suddenly, something in Reimas succumbed to it. A hard point of resistance melted away in an instant of realization and he fell captive at last to the recollection of a particularly powerful emotional experience that had long been locked up.

“I do love what I feel,” he said, after a long silence, his whole being now as one. “Some sort of realization about this has been just below the surface of my mind lately, but desire’s the most positive expression of feelings, isn’t it?”

Sasha smiled but said nothing.

“A lot of the great thinkers say it should be conquered,” he continued, beginning to face the world changing ramifications of his realization, “which is basic Buddhist philosophy — but you know, deep down I’ve always thought that the issue is more about how you go about pursuing something.”

How few had come even so far with her? To the very edge, this one, in one short evening, which boded well. Clearly he had been on the wrong track in certain respects, but once set right …

“In essence, yes. There’s nothing wrong with desire, but there’s always a range of reasons or motivations for doing something, and it’s important to know that they can be both positive and negative.”

“Of course.”

“Yes, but you still don’t quite get it. The positive reasons — the leap in and grab it ones that generally work the best — are the ones we get from our honest desire. Intellect then mediates in achieving it. That’s why desire, far from being conquered, should be consciously explored — but never forced.”

“You can force it?”

“Oh, yes. There’s a great power in desire, so it’s addictive. The thing is, it’s part of a living process of fulfilment, and if any one part, such as the initial sweet urge, is dwelt upon beyond its proper measure, the balance is upset and the process stalls.”

“Wouldn’t that be more likely if you only had one desire up your sleeve — you know, like you were obsessing on it?”

Sasha eyes lit up with delight. “Totally. The more desires you have the better off you’ll be. You should have many. The more time you spend being aware of what they are, the freer you’ll be, and you won’t feel the need to force through any one of them.”

“Well, isn’t that process simply positive thinking?”

“Maybe, depending on what you mean by that, but if you mean what most people do, you’d be falling well short of the mark. As I said before, it mainly involves being yourself, willingly, enthusiastically and knowing exactly what it is you most wish for at any given time.”

Reimas was impressed by her clarity and the energy that seemed to spring from it, and he began to wonder just how far she could go.

“Can you do that?”

“Sure, but there are times when anxiety hinders me. It fouls the water and I do battle with it like a sworn enemy.”

“Well there you are. Your very own range of peaks and vales of tribulation on your path through life.”

“It wasn’t the imagery I had a problem with,” she replied, “so much as the idea that it’s only a sequence of effort-driven thoughts that gets you up to the state of consciousness you’d like to have.”

“The artistic insight versus the intellectual and ordered?”

It was a tease, but he didn’t smile.

“Just remember that artistic insight is the product of feeling,” Sasha replied, happy to take the bait, “and you have to kind of aim at it to find it.”

“Just look for your feelings?”

“Well, yes, and I know that can be hard, but it does get easier as you go along because you understand your feelings better and have a greater respect for them. In one sense, developing that relationship is about openness and trust, like how if you said to a girl ‘I want you’ it would be so much more appealing than if you said ‘do you want me?’ The trust is direct, and has heart, as it says you’re whole enough in yourself to be ultimately unconcerned about the outcome.”

Reimas looked at her with new admiration and respect.

“That sounds a little fatalistic, like we’re meant to just go along for the ride, but I do understand what you’ve been saying. Destiny is after all only a potential, and you’re talking about the best way to achieve it. I’m glad I put that little teaser in your way. The reply was better than I thought it could be.”

“I don’t care if you’re goading me,” she laughed happily. “I just love this sort of thing.”

Serious though he was about focusing as directly as he could on his current objectives, Reimas had enjoyed it too, and found much of what he sought in the process.

“The vast difference between a statement and a question in that romantic context seemed so clear to you,” he observed, “but I’d never thought of it before. Where does that come from?”

Sasha looked pensive.

“It’s the positive alternative isn’t it,” she said after a while, “but also what is said honestly is usually said with feeling, and a statement is generally said with much more feeling than a question. Plus, I’ve always tried to face my feelings. You can’t be a channel for truth unless you’re honest with yourself first, and the hardest thing to be honest about is emotions.”

Reimas knew, then, the substance of what he sought from her. She had just said it in so many words — honesty and passion. It had only been up to him to ask the right question and to hear the answer.

As I came to him, he felt a sudden new flow of adrenalin; but the candles were guttering and he knew that Sasha must be tired. He glanced outside and saw the sickle moon disappearing behind the treetops. Little else was visible now in the darkness far from any glow of town lights.

“Would you like me to show you to your room?” he said after a long silence.

She intended no reaction but, both as a past writer of film scripts and as a key agent for a covert alliance of activists, Reimas saw meaning in many things — subtle body language not the least. There was something in hers that hinted at words left unsaid, but he let it slide.

Later, as he lay down in the darkness to prepare himself to sleep, it entered his mind that her thoughts might have touched on sex.

Reimas had at times spoken of lines of thought to a select few people but none before had fully appreciated what he meant. Most seemed not to have considered how valuable a sustained train of thought could be, and that once interrupted could easily be lost altogether.

Sasha, however, had a subtle way of expressing herself that went well beyond simple politeness. She listened and responded carefully, and clearly respected lines of thought, even though she maintained that true enlightenment went beyond the intellectual.

As for the sex thing, he mused, it was completely natural for anyone to touch upon such thoughts without necessarily acting on them. Turning over, he put aside further speculation and set his mind to relaxing as fully as possible.

As he sank into a deep calm he recalled what Sasha had said about desire and began to focus on the complex matter of exploring his own. After considering a number of possibilities, it became clear to him that you could not know what you most wished for without first knowing where you were in terms both material and spiritual. Any desire essentially involved moving from one place, spiritual or material, to another.

The awareness of that helped a lot. He went from considering current circumstances to shedding light on what he truly wished for — to move beyond his current limitations, very rapidly. Awareness of his desire also brought clarity about why he wished it.

Until recently, he had lost track of the gentleman philosopher in himself, but after this evening’s exchange was conscious that this loss might have been much more important than he’d previously thought. No one could find the capacity to discover, or to lead, if they knew not where they were going.

Simple, unequivocal abhorrence of the violence that was now so much part of his life drove his new interest with extraordinary momentum. His past methods might have seemed justified in the old context but they could not continue. There had to be a more refined, workable vision of the future, and if only one key player had it, only one could see it through.

Along the way, he had never flinched from initiating harsh action against those who were responsible for serious corporate negligence. Rigorous pursuit of those who demonstrated no respect for the lives of others had been easy to justify and, similarly, he felt no conscience at all about relieving large sums from those who showed greater regard for the money than for people’s lives, but now it all seemed futile — merely an endless merry-go-round parodying life.

Sasha’s insights into life and mind had been the specific catalyst he’d needed. It occurred to him that in many respects, her understanding was more advanced than his. As soon as he thought it, the admission cut away another shell of resistance and he relaxed even more deeply, becoming aware of the soft noises around him; the gentle hoot of an owl, the rustling of leaves outside on the cold stone patio and the creaking of timbers in the old roof above him.

The owl hooted again and he immediately saw it, wide eyed, in his mind’s eye, as clear as if it were right before him — every feather, the beak, the eyes, the ripple of grey and fawn. Whether through spontaneous fancy or through some intuitive impulse, he imagined the bird flit away out the window, up the track over the hill behind the house, then down again into the spring lake hollow to finally alight on a rock at its edge.

An aura of peace enveloped him, and he breathed deep and slow, focusing wholly on the sound of his breath. Before long, it seemed that it had a sort of musical cadence.

Soon a gentle sensation of sinking downwards, not scary or claustrophobic, but pleasant as if sinking slowly into the deep, dark waters of an ocean-like womb, came upon him. Deeper and deeper, it became warmer and more comfortable, but sensing a gradual loss of clear consciousness, he tried to remain aware of his selfhood in simple iconic terms.

Freedom fighter, wordsmith, strategist, agent of justice, lover of life, of old things and new women — these things were his being.

Satisfied that he had sufficiently re-established self-awareness, he began to focus instead on imagining specific places very clearly in his mind’s eye. Every successive image became clearer and more vivid.

Although, in the process, his consciousness had relaxed so much that it came very near to sleep, he did manage to hold on loosely to the idea that he could explore beyond current boundaries whether they were of earth, of space or of the mind.

A persistent humming began to intrude on his awareness — a current that welled from lower down in his spine. The sensation developed, growing louder and more insistent, then exploded into a surging dynamo of fierce radiance.

Reimas was not the fearful type but the transition to this new state was too sudden. Cold fear washed over him as the energy accelerated into a new blinding pitch. It wasn’t painful as such but certainly powerful enough to be paralysing — tearing away the fabric of everything he knew to leave him stripped bare in an all-pervasive brilliant light.

Blind to whom or what he was now, the internal maelstrom tore away his outer being — the habits, the mannerisms, the various preferences of life and the emotional strength of self that coped with all the normal everyday demands and challenges. He tried to move and to speak but could not. Everything was frozen, like a will held captive within a rock.

The more he struggled the less of himself there seemed to be, until in the end he gave up all effort, giving himself over to absolute inertia in the face of what could only be described as a ‘white’ state.

Then, with unexpected calmness came insight. All this was much like something one of his friends had once described to him. Despite the fact that he’d forgotten it until now, every word was clear in his mind. Lachlan had passed on more than ten years ago.

At the time, after hearing a detailed description of the experience, he’d laughed in a way that, on reflection, must have seemed condescending. Rightly so. It had sounded completely over the top even for the ethereal Lochie, and now it was the same.

Despite his earlier fear, the experience seemed somehow absurd. It brought to mind an early sci-fi movie representation of molecular transportation and in that melodramatic context was difficult to take seriously.

All those lights and searing vibrations seemed unnecessary, as if they were intended to shock and inspire awe rather than simply being part of a natural process. But what process was it and where was it leading?

Melodrama or no, however, the context reassured him and in so doing served the key element of emotional release. Sensing a lock that could be turned deeper within, he slid into a level of his being far beyond anything he’d consciously felt before. In the light of that deepest flux, he began to think he was coming close to what he had aimed at all along.

Yet a strange smorgasbord of negative thoughts began to intrude, and he lay virtually powerless in the face of numerous memories of regrettable experiences in the field, until the old house around him began to feel like a living grave.

Death was an ever-freshening fear deep in the human psyche and to be trapped within a paralysed body tended to raise that spectre. In time, however, he could not help noticing that he still existed, despite his fears, and that in some strange sense his existential awareness was more intense and attuned than ever before.

With that knowledge, the keen edge of panic diminished and he became more and more certain that he was near the sort of release he had been seeking. Even with the benefit of Lochie’s insights, however, he was not entirely prepared for what happened next.

Lying still, he’d barely begun to remember what Lochie had said about the later sequence of events when he felt a strange click, like something being unlocked. An astonishing sensation of lift followed; ever so slow at first but then accelerating.

Fully aware, now, of moving upwards through the strangely cosy and reassuring darkness, he realized that he was free of his body and, in fact, was floating right through the solid substance of the roof.

At first, he noticed little of what was around him except the sheer elation of the sensation of unaided flight and of being totally awake, but that soon changed and an astonishingly clear awareness of mundane and solid things like roof beams brought home the reality of what was happening.

Then he knew he was outside. Initially, although his vision was strangely obscured, he barely noticed the deficiency; so all consuming was his pleasure in experiencing a completely weightless state.

As time went by, the mist began to clear, as if it were being scattered by a gentle breeze, and he saw that he was floating several metres above the top of the large blue spruce tree outside his bedroom window. Almost motionless, as though floating on a cloud, his vision adjusted to the night and the spectacular view.

A brilliant panoply of stars shone upon what was in every detail a truly astonishing world. In the midst of such an amazing high, he would never have chosen for it to end, but because the experience was entirely new and he had not the slightest idea of the practical techniques required to maintain it, things began to change.

Looking down eventually towards where his body was lying in the house, he felt a tugging sensation and before he could find the means to negate it, was drawn back into the flesh.

An intense moment of regret preceded any recollection of the earlier traumatic parts of the experience, but then his regret became relief. After all, he was safely back in touch with everything he knew.

With his heart still racing, he began the analysis of what had happened. This was certainly different from any sort of dream he had ever had — even the powerful experiences in Laurence’s lab.

It was in fact what Laurence preferred to call remote viewing, but if there was one thing suddenly clear in its wake it was that much more than mere spying would be possible in this dimension.

It was an astonishing realm, far beyond what he’d conceived before as a mere alternate plane — a new reality for him and for all in this world that must have enormous consequence.