(The price of music)

(The target)

There are times when the pain is so intense that it compares with kidney stone pain. Although not physical in nature, it is attacking the very basis of all existence: Consciousness itself. The very device that's responsible for the creation of this reality. Akin to the HIV virus attacking the immune system.

(The feeling)

It makes you want to do things, like gauge your eyes out, or shove screwdrivers in your temples. It forces you to bypass the very instinct of self-sustainance. It can make your heart beat at 140, and raise your blood pressure because of the FEAR. The damn FEAR.

It is not fear of death. Jesus, if it was that simple, it would end up quickly. It is a fear for something so much farther beyond... So much farther, that it paralyses your legs, your heart, your movements, your thoughts.

It is the cold, distinct realization that there is infinite horror lying beyond. And that infinite horror has been designed for you. Custom made. There is no way to hide from it. You can trick it, but it will find you everywhere you try to hide.

The fear is akin to having a cage of hungry rats, tied close to your eyes, and coming close to smell your fleshy fresh eyes, as they bang against the cage walls and bite each other, in an effort to come closer and taste the fresh meat. It is not the actual eating of your eyes, when they are released. It is the fear from having the cage near your eyes, while your face is still intact. At that time, you want to beg. You want to worship, to cry and ask for forgiveness any and all beings that are holding the cage and have you tied. You want to beg them to not do that.

(Simple dream)

A month ago, my cousin Nick had this dream: He was a happy hunter, and was roaming inside the woods, looking for boars. He was armed with an exceptional rifle, and he was whistling along his way, happy and unconcerned. Then, somewhere inside those same woods, he saw a small den, which was somebody's hunting warehouse. He walked in, and he saw in it, hanging from large metal hooks, all sorts of animals, boars, bears, huge pigs, elephants, giraffes, and some animals that were totally unknown. They looked like alien creatures, but he could not identify them. The dead pray was larger than any human could ever manage. All were skinned and partly dismembered. At that point, the realization that some other obscure hunter was close by, overwhelmed him. He never saw the actual hunter in his dream. But the fear is akin to the sensation of one realizing that there is, somewhere around, such a hunter. And God knows what, or who it is.

(Oster-Oratorium)

Listening to the Oster-Oratorium BWV 249, I am trying to collect my thoughts and describe the fear. Tears run down my eyes, from the beauty of the Aria, yet, even at the very crux of the music, the core of the music (or me?) is painful. The cold realization that the final frontier IS pain, infinite pain, and is totally unbearable. The very music soothes the sadness, yet, the pain wins. It will always win. It is the unapproachable, the ultimate, the boundary that God has set forth so we cannot step up to him and steal godhood.

(Necessity)

It is a mystery to me WHY pain is necessary. Pain twists consciousness so much. It alters it. It contorts it and permeates it. After prolonged application of pain, the human ceases to function correctly. It just reacts. Instinctively. It regresses. It wants to quit altogether.

(Coming here)

Imagine someone telling you that you incarnated because you wanted to escape that infinite pain. Imagine then the clock ticking against you, as soon as you were born. And worse yet, that you are going back THERE. Oh, the ultimate horror of it. One more time to go through with birth. One more time. And every time you come back, you are kicked on the face even more. Until you learn. Until you learn that you must learn to tolerate pain, because God IS pain. So if you want to go and sit next to the throne, by god you have to be one resilient motherfucker.

(Hope?)

Next you find yourself wanting to be attached to something. Anything that gives hope. Is there really anything out there that gives hope? I think we have eliminated most such things, haven't we?

You try religion. For a while it works. Then, the very essence of what you worship, turns against you. You hear the very voice of God condemning you and accusing you. You are searching for a cure, an offer if you will, to offer as a sacrifice, yet nothing will do. God is angry with you. He curses you continuously.

(Ridicule)

The ridicule is the worse. You are trying to sit quietly on the sofa of the boat with which you are taking a trip, and everybody on the lounge is laughing at you. Are you cooking up conspiracies? You don't know. Except that you HEAR everybody laughing at you. And every single word tears you apart. Every single word pierces you heart and forces the detachment of a small amount of life force from you. Gradually, slowly, until your soul reserves are depleted. Then, they stop. They will say something akin to: "He's had enough, leave him alone now". After that, the pain starts to subside. But the tiredness is so intense that you have to lie down.

So you try to lie down. And then the voices continue from afar. From out the street. They command: "Say your prayer!" Which prayer? What can ever work in this case? You find yourself praying to entities that people know nothing about. And those entities laugh at you, through the verbal emissions of the people out the street. Even the dogs bark at you and you can tell that they curse you.

The cursing, swearing and ridicule continues until you are numb. Your ego diminishes to zero. You become a null. Worthless, as somehow those voices know exactly all your faults. And they keep repeating them to you. Then at some point, they start threatening you that your heart will fail. At this point, you are so exhausted, that you wish that your heart stops. And then, the voices reverse their ploy and threaten you with never ending pain scenarios as to the likelihood of horror on the place that you most likely will go if you die. You reconsider for a moment, and wish that despite the pain and ridicule it is better to stay alive. Then they reverse their ploy again. The cycle never ends. There is no sense to it, no logic, no escape.

Then, their best tool. I call it the "probability of collapse". It is the conviction finally, that the probability of you dying any minute from the stress is 50/50. This is worse than death. The anticipation of a collapse, continuously, incessantly, 24 hours a day. Every single day becomes an adventure. Every morning you wake and say: "Dear God, I am alive. Thank God for my heart did not fail me..". And every night, the same words in your prayer: "If I don't make it back, I just wish there is a place for me to stay temporarily. I just wish..." Other times you simply wish for plain good old fashioned non-existence. This is my favorite prayer. When you hear someone wish non-existence, lie assured that they have finished what it is they were doing on this planet. Try to make their life easier.

(Kindness)

Occasionally there is some kind fellow out there, who tells you a compassionate word, and something nice. You feel like falling on their feet and thanking them, for they provide some proof that not all is malignant in your domain of reality. Then you wonder: Maybe this fellow has something that bothers them as well, yet, despite the pain, he is kind to me. What amazing strength!. The superhuman in action. The voices continue: "Do you see what you SHOULD be like? Like Him. No particular reference, just something to say. Nonsensical as always. Yet this little nonsensical bit, causes major fireworks in your brain. Who is HIM? What IS him? What am I? "You are a nothing" the voices continue.

(Regrets)

At some point, you start searching your past for mistakes and faults, hoping that if you find one, by understanding the fault and asking for forgiveness, you will be absolved. It is funny how we cling to hope, isn't it? We yearn and strive to correct ourselves, to recognize our faults, yet the correction is futile, because there IS no fault.

(Their argument against you)

You try banging your head on the wall. It eases the pain somewhat. You can escape from them only for a short time. Then, suddenly they will continue, by proving to you in a disgusting, insane way that you are the only God out there. Initially the proposition seems preposterous. But heck, everything the voices say is so fucking insane, yet when they say it,..they have a WAY of saying it, that makes you WANT to believe it.

(Make friend)

I always wanted a special friend. I never found him/her. The sad thing, is that I have created it. Whether it is the result of the disease, or whether it is some sort of insane demon out there, THIS is MY friend. You have to love it. You have to respect it, because if it feels you are abandoning it, it reminds its presence to you by pounding on your ears. And it finds the most prominent and profound way to grab your attention. Note the price you have to pay. If you gouge your eardrums out, you lose the music. The music you so love. You will be free from the voices, but you will lose the music. Do you love the music so much? Does it really mean so much to you? It is almost everything. So you decide to keep the music and tolerate the noise.

Sometimes, this special friend, will take the form of a man. Tall, slender, blond beard, and wonderful agile hands. A runner. A forever runner. A frontier runner. A runner in time and space. Then when you try to look at him face to face, he changes and becomes a dark haired murderer, with a thick hairy chest and a big sword on his hands, looking at you with the most evil eyesight ever, grinning and showing you his shinning teeth which are bright white from the chewing of fresh raw flesh. YOUR flesh.

Then it changes and becomes a woman. A wonderful alien woman, with blue eyes, like the Victory paintings of Giger. She has a snake tail, and her nails are poisonous. This woman is the Siren of the voices. Occasionally she asks you: "Do you love me?" If you love her, she gives you pain. If you don't love her, she gives you pain again.

Occasionally, she/it comes into your dreams and copulates with you. She can assume the form of a Succubus and she gives some of the best orgasms ever. But you never remember afterwards the FACE. Any back regresses that try to hunt the image of the face, are hidden deeply inside your subconscious. And when you try harder to remember, you can sometimes see flashes of what appears to be a familiar face. It IS a familiar face. It is the face of your mother. Utter disgust overwhelms you.

(Sympathies)

Then you talk to friends, and they usually say, "oh, come on, everybody has something, some people have diabetes, some cancer, some arthritis, some HIV, in short, all of us have something to bug us". Granted. But the thing that the voices are trying to convey to you, and the thing they MANAGE to convince you for, is the futility of your efforts to avoid the distorted reality and your position in it. On top of that, the horror of not being able to cope with this distorted reality. Because you can have no handle on it. Ever.

You cannot reason with the voices. Their reason is akin to an all knowing spirit. Is it your higher self? I don't know. Is it your lower self? I don't know. What DO you know? Nothing. You know nothing. NOT A THING.

(Diversion)

Soon you find yourself piercing yourself with needles and cutting yourself with sharp instruments to divert the pain from being mental/emotional to being physical. Watching the blood flow from your fingers, from your back and legs, is some relief. You look at the mirror, and want to wash your face in that blood. As if it may cleanse you in a way.

(Unknown sympathizers)

Then you take a stroll, with your ears stuffed with wax, and a stray dog approaches you. The sad look on its face says, "What about me, Master?" You could of course have been born a dog, so not all is so bad.

Oh, it could be even worse. You could have been a roach. Inside the sewers, examining the genetic rejects from the so called advanced humans. Ever wonder why they have dropped most of the bulk of their code? It EASES the pain. Either kill a roach quick, or don't kill it at all. Don't make it suffer. It must NOT suffer.

Occasionally they will allow you to taste from some sort of excrement from their bodies-you can never see them doing it, because it is disgusting-and you can wake up refreshed. At the end of the dream, a golden roach, a roach that has been electrolyzed with a gold electrode as one pole and its body as the other so as to show a bit more beautiful to you, will stand at a distance, and transmit its thoughts to you which say: "Dear beloved, forget now. Forget that you drank from the juice of the immortal worm. It is not meant for you to remember us.." They know they are not beautiful. And you know. So you must NOT see them. Even the roach body appears to be a symbol of unspecified disgust when you come to contact with them. They probably look much worse than roaches anyway.

Then you lean down and pick up one of your cats. Your beloved cats. They give you such a sense of belonging and love and affection when you pet Them. They try to comfort your soul by looking at you straight in the eyes. And they are lovely, truly lovely. I brought mine to Athens all the way from Chicago. I have never abused them. They love me to death. But you should see them killing a bird or a mouse. I have never seen so much aggression and desire to kill and torture. They will cut a mice in two, three, four pieces before they come content and show me their trophy. The female was bringing home all the time in Chicago those little black birds with the yellow beaks that jump on the grass. I would then release the birds. If the cats were hungry, there would be a reason to let them keep them. Otherwise, no reason to torture the poor things.

Maybe they know how it feels...

(Composers)

Ever wondered why the most beautiful musical pieces are the sad ones? The ones that tear your heart out with this warmth, this intense fire that burns the core of your chest, this ecstasy which comes when you wonder, "my God, how can something be so fucking beautiful in this world?" Some simple melody, which reminds you some sort of divine origin? Some sort of lost paradise...Far away. Which you never have a chance again to even approach. And then you wonder, "how is it possible for a human being in pain to transfer his/her soul so perfectly in those 40-50 notes?" You wonder about the actual contents of the musical piece, which are like a segment of the composer's psyche, forever alive, forever resonating in the universe, forever giving light, forever there for you. Doesn't it seem like that composer had so much to give? So much still, that he had some parts to spare? Parts that are floating in chaos and are picked up by us, and make us wonder.

(Conspiracy)

Then the conspiracy comes along. You think that they are all together in this, and guess what? YOU are excluded. It's thousands of them. They are not actually human, but some sort of alien beings, who manage to convince you about the integrity of this reality and prove to you that the fact that you don't see John for example, does not mean he does not exist.

After you pick 10-15 hints, you start looking for ways to make them your friends. Yet, after a couple of years, you will see it is impossible. They, operate based on a certain consensus, which is totally alien to you. They use you as an experiment. Or, rather, as a gauge to keep this reality's integrity intact.

It's as if your exclusion is decided just after your birth. They look at your genes, and they can tell in advance what kinds of diseases you will most likely have later on. Then, they "assign" you to a "father" and a "mother" who play the role of good parents to you. It's up to you to discover who your real parents are. And most likely, you will think that they are not even on this planet. Your parents, have been ousted out of this solar system.

Gradually you think that this planet's inhabitants are hostile to you. They have their own closed society, and their own rules. WHAT they are, you don't know.

(Brave fighter and Adventurer)

Before you incarnate, the Ancient Ones will ask you MANY times: "Do you REALLY want to go down there?" And you, a new and brave soul, retort will feelings of excitement and splendor: "Well, YES, it will be a heck of an experience! I will even try to improve the situation!" Oh, God, how wrong you are!

("This")

Gradually the realization of what lies out there overwhelms you as time passes. You know there is a space out there somewhere, beyond your ordinary universe, where all that is vile, disgusting, evil, putrid, insane, chaotic, sick, diseased, perverted and demonic, continuously copulates with itself and generates new disgust. THIS space, after some years, starts to permeate this reality. The Ancient ones are trying to limit its domain, and try to contain it. It's as if long time ago, you had been trusted with the keeping of some of the Seals that kept THIS contained. But you were curious, being a brave, new uncoerced fighter. At some point you broke some of those seals. The time of breakage, is the first onset of the disease. So now, this thing is approaching here. The door of your brain is knocked on often, and THIS wants to enter.

You have no idea what it really is: Maybe it is the unknown face of the Spirit. Maybe it is the part of God that God has rejected from Himself so that he could achieve Godhood. Whatever it is you are sure of one very certain thing, namely that it will bring again the age of darkness on this planet.

And then again, the moment you write about it, it reverses itself and changes its face. It is impossible to pinpoint it. It is impossible to describe it. You say, there is no force greater than the human being. God, how wrong you are!

There are "things" out there, which can make you beg not for your life, for nonexistence is pleasant. They can make you beg for your children and descendants. Your life will be so insignificant compared to the damage that will be done to humanity in toto.

It is a problem of chaotic turbulence approaching this planet. And when it hits, you want to run, as if it will make a difference.

It is akin to King's landoliars which destroy the past and munch on the excreted part of time and reality.

Images of a "ship" permeate your mind. It is a strange ship, composed of intricate mechanics and human flesh. Various tubes protrude from its main body, and are connected with it with vast complex biomechanical arrays of veins and tubules. There is a fluid that runs through the joined parts, and some of the parts have metallic probes in them that interface with the neurons of the decomposing flesh, making it again functional, as it is not really alive by itself.

It is a from time immemorial ship and it is beyond time. Its destination is Earth, but fortunately for you, the engineers have lost the coordinates of the destination. Actually they have not lost it, they were banned from knowing the actual coordinates by the Ancient Ones, long ago, when the first genetics experiments were performed. If this ship was around then, the first primordial DNA sequences would have had no chance. The ship's passengers would have sucked the life energy off those first amoebas in order to prolong their existence.

Yet, you know that even though they don't know the actual coordinates of Earth, they have managed to permeate the other side of this reality, through your mind. They are entering your dream world, and they download your memories into complex computers, trying to figure out where in THIS reality you are. It is a hunt of sorts. They are hunting you. They are hunting all of us basically. They are hunting our reality.

Gradually, the fine veil that separates the dream world from this reality starts to seep, as they manage to locate the coordinates of your body in the time space continuum. And they are the first ones who try to enter. Have you ever felt those malignant unknown presences near you when you are sleeping, when you WANT to move but you are unable to because something is preventing you from even moving your little finger? As soon as you wake, the disappear. As soon as you make a move to grab them, they retreat, but not for long.

They certainly dislike certain substances, like raw garlic and rust, as well as Carbon. They hate Carbon. Some of this knowledge has survived as plain old silly superstition. But sometimes it works.

(The well-ordered set of Fears)

For every fear, there is a greater one. For every pain, a stronger one. You battle all your life to dismantle your fears, and then one night, one day, it doesn't really matter, your encounter with the next fear ordinal takes place. It's like an ordered set. You can even request to examine it by kindly asking the committee of the 12. You can pray one night, and try this yourself. Ask them to show you your "next" fear down the line.

With a little persistence, they will show you. It usually involves breaking through this complex barrier that separates our reality from theirs. The first thing you see is the ship approaching towards you. When they sniff the slightest human presence, they immediately redirect the ship, because they can figure the coordinates almost instantly. They are excellent engineers.

You will hear the voices of the elders: "Are you still ok? Do you want us to pull you back?" You reply: "Just a little bit longer. Let me see what they are, let them get closer..."

Then  you will feel the rot, the decay and the smell of death approaching. You will feel them. Clearly, succinctly. Your location has already been recorded on their monitors, and their ship has assumed a course of intercepting you.

You see something huge approaching, which transforms continuously at a distance. It creates arms made out of joined limbs, legs, tubes, machinery and electronics, being created out of nowhere. The projected arms, approach even faster, as they have a speed relative to the very ship.

It keeps transforming, by reprogramming the very framework of its reality. See, the transformation of the ship and the change of its boundaries are not happening IN some other space. The ship IS that other space. The whole ship. Its boundaries ARE precisely the boundaries of this reality and its space IS the compliment of this reality.

They are at a distance of 1 billion kilometers and still approaching. Your cats zoom in front of you, trying to shield your psyche. One of your cats turns to you and asks: "Master, we can only hold for another two minutes. Then they will annihilate us. Don't let them approach more..." But on your first excursion you are curious and brave. Mostly curious. You want to try to dismantle the ship. So, you summon all your Manitous from all the things you know and love, and you project those thoughts forward. The creature momentarily pauses and looks at you from afar with increased curiosity. You can see its desire to consume you, yet it is slightly puzzled. It reformats itself, reprograms its arms, reloads its computer programs, the engineers get busy again restructuring it. Some arms and extensions are removed, others withdrawn, and you see some new ones emerging. Then, after one minute, it resumes full speed towards you.

In a moment's notice, it has annihilated all you believed in, it nullified all your hopes, it dismantled all your power reserves. You cat warns you again: "Master, you have to go back now. It is starting to be dangerous.." You exclaim: "Just a second more. Can we stall it still?" Not anymore. We have to bring more people from Earth and use their energy.

Your high school teacher pops in. "Hi. We can only stall it for 16 more seconds. Please examine it fast, we don't have much more time." Your community priest shows up: "Ioannis, make it snappy. We don't want to risk anything serious here..." The creature is stalled, and reprograms itself furiously. It examines the priest's and your teacher's mind contents. You can feel that it looks for something interesting. It is as if "it" is searching your mind's domain for something that is non-digestable. The priest is good. It cannot understand the leap of faith. It is severely puzzled, and the engineers are programming complex cosets in the internals of their machinery, trying to understand the priest's faith. You then see various members and arms from the ship vanishing into chaos, as useless. It starts diminishing in size. The ship's engineers are unable to solve the problem of faith. They are also trying to understand why your high school teacher had such a love for transmitting math knowledge to you. They cannot really fathom his devotion. So far so good.

The problem is, that the ship is depleting the reserves of your two helpers fast. They are already at 30%. They warn you one last time: "We think you have seen enough. Let us all go back now..." Suddenly, their reserves are gone. Your teacher and priest suddenly vanish from the other side of reality and they wake up on their beds from a bad nightmare. But YOU are still IN the nightmare. And the humongous ship is now 2-3 hundred kilometers away.

And now, it is your time to go down. A few seconds before the Ancient Ones bring you back into the three dimensional domain, you wonder if there can be anything that can stop this object/ship/creature, whatever it is.

There seems to be no solution. You have tried everything, and THIS causes your gradual decomposition. It is now in front of you. The moment it makes its final move to consume you, you hear a voice from down here: "Come back, it is not that time yet"

It seems to be the ONLY solution. You wake up tired, all sweaty and suddenly you realize that this IS the solution. To come back. By fuck! This always HAS been the solution! The return home. And where IS home? On the planet damned. But for how long will you be able to come back home? Have you wondered about THAT?

The very partitioning of reality INTO two sides, IS the solution to this creature not devouring all of us. This creature then, lives only 8 hours a day out of 24. It is the obscure THIRD PART of the Trinity. It is the consumer of worlds, it is Ariman, it is the Devil, it is the Spirit which completes the holy Trinity. It is the 1/3 out of the 2/3s.

It is the dreaded other side of YOU, which cannot be caged, yet it cannot be left roaming around in this reality, because it will consume everything and itself in the end. And then you understand...

You understand the cycles, you understand time, why people are two faced, why people curse you, why people are evil, why THIS side of reality is still functional. It is sheer numbers. It's as plain as that. It's 2/3's against 1/3. And the 2/3's win. For now.

(The Age of Darkness)

But then, also, another realization comes to you. That of the reversing of the poles. The great age of darkness. You feel it. And as you wake up from the nightmare, the Engineers of the ship transmit one final thought to your mind: "We will be waiting for you, when the age of darkness comes. When the middle-now white- third of the Trinity reverses its pole and joins the dark third."

Jesus, you think. What will happen then? Just before the Ancient Ones bring you back here, actually right before YOU decide to come back here, you realize that when the cycle of the wheel of Jehovah reverses itself, what is now functional reality, what is now order and life, what is now beautiful and alive, reverses itself, as the middle questionable third joins the dark third. Then, reality assumes the game of the consumer. Chaos, destruction and darkness rule. The two dark thirds, take over control and cleanse the universe of everything not worthy to remain. Is there ANYTHING worthy of remaining? THIS is the most brutal realization that overwhelms you. NOTHING is worthy. NOTHING remains.

The two dark thirds, assume control of this universe for an equal amount of years as the two light thirds had assumed, when you were alive.

Then, the creature expands and fills the universe. It consumes everything. And in the end, it assumes the size of the entire universe by spanning it.

"It is a fucking cycle!" You exclaim. Of course it is. What else would it be? Don't you see enough cycles around you to give you ten thousand clues? The system works by analogy. Always.

Next, time collapses. Future, present and past become one. You remember that you saw someone sitting on the control center of this obscure ship. Someone like a Head Engineer. You kinda remember the face, but not quite. You try harder. And then, the worse realization ever comes to you, as the person's face shows itself to you. It WAS you on the throne. It was a part of you. That part of you that is trying to devour itself. That part of you which has sided, heck it was always sided with the dark third.

THAT, is the final frontier for you. And why is it that you tell us, you ask? So that nobody deceives you. The dark third in you, will be against you for a long time, until the second third joins forces with it, when all will reverse engineer.

"But it has not been determined if Hubble's constant is less, greater or equal to 1/2" you say. I say, we have had enough clues to last us a lifetime.

The final frontier: The ultimate horror of knowing that YOU are God, and you cannot avoid your fate. Does this cause pain?

Oh, man, this is the very definition of horror for me.