Free Demons by John Shirley Page A

couple of feet higher than Mendel’s. “Israel—Professor Paymenz—spoke of an organization. I take it you both belong to it. I took it to be a political organization. Progressive organization of some kind, but— You both seem to be involved in something, um . . . esoteric? I mean in the sense of the three circles—exoteric, mesoteric, esoteric.” I thought I saw Mendel suppress a smile and I added hastily, “I don’t mean that I know these things deeply. But I have some sense of them. I helped the professor edit his book at one point, and I worked at, well, it’s just a magazine, but—”—
    “No, the magazine Visions was sometimes on the right track,” Mendel said. “I occasionally contributed to it under a pen name.”
    “Which name?” I asked in surprise.
    He shook his head, smiling. “Some things you know . . . I will tell you this much more, which will be some things you have guessed and heard and maybe a little more, but, if you trust me, this will serve as a confirmation: In ancient times, well before the birth of Christ, certain people struggled to became conscious —conscious, and not identified with what the Buddhists call samsara, with the false self, the shadows on the wall of the cave . . . and a few became truly conscious, more or less at the same time. Some were in what we now call Egypt, some in India, some in China, some in what is now Nepal, some in Africa, one in North America—a few others. You’ve studied enough to know there are degrees of consciousness, of being awake and mindful, of being aware of oneself and the subtler aspects of one’s surroundings and of being aware of the cosmos itself. You have felt a little of this awareness yourself—almost anyone has had the feeling of being much more awake at some times than at others: things being more vivid, life lived more in the moment, some greater sense of connectedness. It passes quickly for most people, and they forget it. But there are those who know it can be cultivated and sustained and refined and taken to a very high level. When a certain degree of competence is achieved in this practice, one passes a threshold and becomes truly conscious—as much as one can be as a mortal person, embodied—and when that happens one becomes psychically aware of other truly conscious people, though they may be thousands of miles away. Aware of one another, they came together and formed a . . . what people call a secret society or secret lodge. One name for it is the Conscious Circle of Humanity.”
    “Mendel,” Nyerza interrupted. “Are you sure? He has earned no such initiation.”
    “True, but it is only words, dear colleague, and in these extreme circumstances, perhaps everyone with a fertile soul must be initiated to the degree they can be. We need all the help we can get. And there are indications, do not forget, about these two young people . . . and he is a friend to the Urn . . .”
    “Yes, true, true, go on then, please.”
    “So, the Conscious Circle continued in various forms. Sometimes its members were murdered by enemies, diabolic forces in various guises. But we continued as best we could. And we evolved a—a sort of plan, an overall scheme. We formed sublodges, lesser lodges, which not every member of the sublodge understood. For example, we created the original Masonic lodge and the Knights Templar and the original Rosicrucians and certain circles in the East . . . but few of the members of those lodges—even their highest initiates—were aware of the Conscious Circle or the real reason for the formation of those lodges. The real secret lodge was a circle that kept the other, better-known lodges as satellites of a sort. And these lodges were used to promote, for example, the Magna Carta, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the development of the idea of the republic. The work of Lao-tzu. The Buddha was one of ours. Christ was, yes, the incarnation of God. But his teaching was of course co-opted and muddied.