Chapter Five

The change. What could make the change?

Longing toward attainment: the movement along the access of the Ego to Self. Personality moves along this access; slowly and determined, but it moves. If the minute and particulate Ego is able to yearn and open into that yearning, it will blossom into wave like attainment of everything. Ego becomes Self. This was the Alchemists Magnum Opus. John Aaron Tierney knew this.

Should a seller of books be able to know this about life? This is what Tierney did. He owned a small shop of books. He sold them, but he read them more.

The idea of taking one thing and making it another was not new. He had first run across the notion in his study of Diadochos of Photiki. Diadochos had postulated that one man could bear another man's burden. That is, a man could take on himself someone else's discomfort or struggle. One monk could make his relative peace turn into chaos by pulling the suffering right out of another monk. Diadochos was a monk.

It was a matter of finding the place of the change, or the agent of the change. What he found was that the place and the agent were really the same thing. Where did one go to change one thing into another? Whether it was suffering into peace, or anger in love, or seeking into finding it did not matter. Tierney had found the abode of the stone. The abode and the agent was the soul. And, he found where that was, too. 

The Tibetans had a vivid understanding of the removal and transmutation of suffering. Tonglen was the practice they passed on from generation to generation. Meditating on an individual, and consciously taking their suffering away from them and placing it on oneself was the first part of the practice. The second part of the practice was to meditate on the individual as receiving relief from suffering, joy, and peace from one's own heart. Take the pain away, and then replace it with comfort.

Of course it happened all the time in dreams. There was the dream of the serpent changing into the beloved. There was the dream of the elixir kept out of reach that turns from the elixir of life to the elixir of death without notice. There was the dream of the poison apple and the deathlike sleep, accompanied by the bard that turns into a fish. There were the billions and billions of "big-archetypal-dreams" and the benign "little-too-close-to-­bedtime-dreams."

The change always occurred in the soul. The change occurred with the use of great passion and will. The soul resided at the seat of the spine in the muladhara chakra. This was the seat of passion, longing, and desire. This was the seat of the soul. It was at the tailbone.

That was where the Rumi phrase fit. Longing is its own end. Longing or yearning for something is valuable in and of itself. It is so valuable, that when the longing is prolonged, the one longing becomes the longed for object. If you hunger toward the Divine, you will become the Divine. The seeker, the sought for, and the seeking were one — as all the traditions alluded.

The longing had to be sustained in order for the transmutation to occur. Even though Diadochos had not been a technical alchemist, he had unearthed the path and lived in the spirit of alchemy.

That kind of longing and passion for merger can only come from the base of the spine. Close to the genitals, the base of the spine houses the dark and misty ache for union. This place calls unto every other place in the world and hungers for union. Tierney knew this.

This had been the hardest thing to discover. The rest was purely academic. For the most part, he knew everything about the soul before he knew where. When he found the seat, he could go back and dismiss what needed dismissing. The seat was the key; it was the stone.

The nature of the change was one of substitution. "My life for yours", or "This for That", became the watchwords of this phase of his research. The notion went on in the works of Charles Williams who, for Tierney, became the greatest advocate for the trans-substantiation of your misery into my misery.

Your life could become mine with a simple desire of the will; a call to compassion and love would make the change. If you were in complete duress, I could remove it from you by willing it; desiring it in prayer.

All of the mystic Christian thinkers between Diadochos and Williams held to similar beliefs. All of the beliefs had their root in the nature of Christ's death on the cross - substitution. One man (Christ) bore the suffering of the whole world in his death. He longed so much for union and healing that he bore out the archetypal path of healing and union. He sustained his longing for union; sustained it over time, and it bore fruit.

One man in his resurrection brought the whole world alive again.

The ultimate desire and will was exerted in Gethsemane. Christ wrestled for change in the tumultuous scene in the Garden. Ultimately, He called out and then surrendered: "Not my will but Thine be done." He merged his desire with the cosmic desire and waited and wrestled in the stillness of passing time — and it came to be.

Base metal transmuted to gold; broken humanity transmuted to divinity.  The path was emblematic and iconic.

But, it went beyond taking away the suffering of others. It was also the seat for change within the individual. People had the power to mend, heal and grow within their own systems. Each person had the capacity to change and move on.

That is where it all began for Tierney. This is how it took root and changed his every thought, feeling, and desire. Add to that the Churches' various teachings on the bread and wine becoming the Savior, or oil becoming a healing balm, or prayers actually being answered. Somehow, once again, one thing became another. If it could happen with the fruit of the earth, it could happen with anything. Tierney was determined to find the link. When he found the link, he could make the change.

For many it was the words spoken over the elements that caused the change. Hocus Pocus as they say in Latin. For others it was the faith of those present.

Tierney believed the force to be stronger. He also believed that these things — the words spoken and the faith of those present - occurred in the heart and mind. It was the soul that held the power of the CHANGE. The soul, though closely tied and linked to the heart and mind, operated from a different place and a fuller energy than the heart and soul.

It was hard to see and he knew it. But, it did not make him stop, or even bother him much. He believed what he was looking for was hard enough to see anyway. He might as well enact the difficulty in his body. Besides, he had not really been reading steadily. He was lost in mystic chant and staring much of the time he was facing the texts.

The soul was the place that would hold the longing in the stillness and silence of timelessness — in that matrix change could then occur. The stillness of reflecting and sustaining desire had to be held out over time. Timelessness had to take time into itself to efficate the change.

It was this hunch that drew him to unearth the nature of the soul and its' desiring. It was this hunch that led him to the hell of paradise. It was this hunch that enabled him to realize the truth in Rumi when he heard it in his poem. It was this hunch that caused him to drool, that same night as the dream, endlessly repeating the mantra again and again.

Tierney sat at his desk, knees pressed on the underside, leaning into the surface of two books, cracked open, and the dim light shining almost everywhere but on the pages. He stopped his chanting and wiped his chin.

When he was reading, and felt the strain on his eyes, he would pause to sip from his tepid cup of tea. He had made it an hour ago - just after finishing the first cup. There was no urgency to finish the second cup. As a matter of fact, he did not even feel he had to. He could always drink it in the morning. He liked it cold, too. It was Red Rose. It was strong.

He closed the books - a volume of the Philokalia and of Rumi's poems - and raised the tea over his head. He had lost all desire to drink the tea as tea, but he called forth a yearning, from the pit of his soul — from his perineum and the tail of his spine. He felt the tingling grow into a whirling motion. The energy swirled around and around and around.

Tierney closed his eyes and called the energy up into his heart with a low moan — almost a chant "hhnnnnn." Again, they groan came up from his soul, into the heart. This time it went into the throat and up, over the back of the skull and crown of the head to the third eye. 

"Hhhnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn."

The vibration shook him to a shiver. The force ended between his eyes and wanted to draw his eyes inward toward the center and up, but he would not let them. He fought this off so he could feel the tension and anxiety of the presence.

He pulled that energy up. Up to the heart it went, around to the third eye, and back down to the base of the spine. It traveled this circle, over and over again; always called forth, and always willed with strong longing.

When he had sat there for a few minutes, slowly repeating the hum, he lowered his hands and he drank the tea. A drop of blood fell from his lips to the top of the desk. He wiped it off onto the side of his palm. His word had been made flesh, and it dwelt all about and within him.

Tierney put the mug down, reached over and turned off the light. In the dark, he stuffed a small note into the open pages of each book before he closed the covers. The one note read, "As above, so below"; the other one: "As inside, so outside."

This is where our story begins. I must leave the world of Tierney's ideas and tell you Tierney's story. He is quite an imposing figure. Look and you will see.

by, N. Thomas Johnson-Medland   © 2015 All Rights Reserved