Chapter Six

John Aaron Tierney was a medium sized man. He stood about five foot ten and weighed 200 pounds. He loved the idea of sleeping late, but rarely slept in past 6:00 AM. His meals were simple but plentiful. He loved his tea.

I don't know how else to tell you about him. Perhaps I will start with his earliest memory.

Tierney remembers back to the kindergarten. He insists he can remember learning to write his name during a game of Candyland. Why he was writing during a Candyland game is not a part of his memory. But, he does remember his sisters showing him how to write his name on the backside of a double blue card. He copied it right next to their example.

The color blue played a major role in his development of mystic theory, as did the repeated appearance of a counter clockwise turning, swirling tunnel in interior visions during meditation. He said he first saw the tunnel while lying in bed as a child. The blue seems to him to be the same as in the Candyland cards.

As a child — he remembers — he would stare at the light in the hall while he lay drifting off to sleep. He would stare at the hall light until he became tired. The image that was burned into his retina was that of a silver-yellow half moon. It would churn counter clockwise into itself. As he drifted into sleep, the color would shift from this silver-yellow to a deep iridescent blue. It would churn and churn and churn until it began to transform from this blue to a molten form of liquid gold.

He later realized that the images in his meditation were the same as his childhood sleep-time. The transformation from one thing into another: silver-yellow to iridescent blue to molten gold was the form and shape of change in his life — a visible form of the philosopher's stone. His meditations always reverted to this same image of a half-moon transforming from one color to the next; always churning and always counter-clockwise.

This is where dreaming fits in. The dream of Rumi that would one day rock his world view, had begun its work on him in the earlier days of his life when he was learning to bridge the childhood images on his retina, with meditation in later life, and ultimately to his seeing the value and consistency of states that dreams presented.

"It had started out as a big dream. There were vivid colors. There were still life cameos. There was a hidden sense of innuendo or larger meaning." He wrote on in his journal, "I could not believe the vividness of the content. I stood in the stark kitchen at my farmhouse apartment. The room was as it is in wakeful life. A yellow refrigerator stood in the black and white room, next to the shaker table I had built.

"I was deeply compelled to open the refrigerator, which itself and its contents were the only thing of color in the room - vivid, very vivid. There were three shelves in the refrigerator; the bottom two were empty.

"There was a yellow light in the back wall of the unit, pulsating with a silvery half-moon in its center — the one I saw in childhood while staring at the hallway light. It was the same half-moon I see in my daily meditations. It was the same half-moon that would churn into its center and blend into an iridescent blue and then a molten gold liquid. It looked like a tunnel of moving, deep, rich color.

"On the top shelf, just to the left of center stood three clear plastic

containers. They were the kind of containers you would buy two pounds of coleslaw or potato salad in at the corner deli. One was full of a clear green liquid. Another was full of a clear yellow liquid. The third was full of a thick opaque silver liquid. Each filled to within an inch of the rim around the top.

"They all appeared to be some type of "forbidden, uncongealed Jell-O" that I was not supposed to eat. Fully aware that there had been some clear-cut order not to partake of them, I picked up the container of sliver liquid and drank it all — in one smooth gulp.

"With it all gone, I realized I had ingested the mercurial potion of deep and abiding change in my life. Some new stage was about to begin, and it was the result of my choosing to drink the elixir. My will had sprung out of a deep desire and I drank the formula.

"I instantly realized I had taken into my body the shifting energy of the hallway light, the meditation tunnel, and the pulsating source of inner light for the refrigerator. The dream ended with a deep satisfaction and a knowledge that I had done the one thing that my whole life had brought to this moment to do."

"This dream was the encapsulation of many paths taken. And, it was the beginning of a new path. The warmth and accuracy of the childhood sleep images, was the same as the adult meditation images, and was now being likened to and connected with the discovery that dreams were in the same ilk. I must now include dreaming in the paths of travel. Dreams are to be trusted."

He loved the water, too. He loved to lay his head over the edge of the warm river rocks that absorbed the suns heat. He would lay there, exposed to the sun - in swim trunks - listening to the deafening sound of water crossing the rocks and falling into the shallow pools below.

The sound would deftly take him into the land that had become his refuge from childhood, through adulthood. He would enter the place of stillness, the abiding cave of the heart that held the lights, held the peace, held the dreams.

Occasionally he would arise, lower himself into the pools and emerge again, taking his place on the warming stones. In and out of these spaces of consciousness he would move and comb and amble throughout the day. He would become immersed in the home of his soul. All of this was grist for the mill that would someday produce the flour that he would form and shape into a loaf of understanding. His earlier practices and gifts would one day become the food and staple of his journey through time.

He loved the wind rushing through the trees. And, although he had not learned their language, he knew they were talking to him and trying to tell him all about what he was experiencing. He knew, but could not perceive. This was ok with him. He had learned to trust that this would emerge, as did the comfort of the dream-world, when it was time.

He loved walking along the river. He would do it for exercise. But, he also walked just to be out in the world, out among the water and the trees and the air he so loved. His walking was prayer for him. It held him together in many ways. It reunited him with what he held to be dear and vital. Without walking, he often found it hard to find his core — to find his center.

There had been many findings in the world around him. They were small sightings of infinitesimal beings or things from the woods that would open him up — reveal a deeper, hidden, or mystic truth. He loved these findings and held them dear. He called them good-medicine.

Often he would return with pieces of the woods that had become good-medicine relics. These relics sat about until they would emerge — in his own mind - as the perfect gift for so and so, or the necessary garden adornment, or the item for the ritual fire and ash ceremony.

All of these emblems, above all, held the place of honor in him as devices or fulcrums of change. Tierney was convinced of the Talmudic Dictum that, "The smallest of hands could hide greatest of mountains, if the hands were placed in front of the eyes." He joined the Talmud's sentiments with the ideals of Heschel and he came forward as a man that held awe, wonder and radical amazement as the crest jewels in mankind's' crown.

Tierney believed that these small tokens worked the opposing magic that blinding hands could work. These tokens revealed a larger view, whereas the hands hid that view from sight. Alchemy. These little trinkets endorsed the notions of alchemy. One thing could become another.

Dreams, books, tea, the sun and rocks, the wind in the trees: these were the stuff of Tierney's life. Simple pleasures that held grandeur in their sway:

this was Tierney's grist. Tierney's very existence was the fear and awe in a handful of dust.

There were constant reminders of the inseparability of all things in Tierney's life. He tried to live slowly and attentively, but that was not always possible. But, when he was able to live as he hoped he could, in a way that he longed to sustain, he would seek to uncover everything that hid the interconnectedness; he would unveil everything that was cloaked. Nothing exists separately. Tierney sought to discover how everything floated in unity.

The good-medicine he found on his outings was a clear reminder of the connection of all things. The world was a big web of clues and interactions. It was vital to learn to read the clues. The owl feather at the foot of the old oak tree told a thousand tales about waiting and waiting and watching until a kill could be struck. The pellets next to the feather filled in the blanks about what the kill was made up of.

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