Afterword 2015
How This Book Came About
While residing in the quiet, picturesque mountain village of Boulder Colorado (1983–88), I had plenty of time on my hands to write four books that went on to be published by Falcon Press. During this brief era I also married Christi Cashner and celebrated the birth of our daughter Kallista. It was a peaceful time of putting down roots, settling down and becoming a family man. Or so I thought.
The unexpected changes innate to heavy domestication—getting married, buying furniture, changing diapers, paying more bills—stirred new and unknown conflicts in me that eventually brought strife to our marriage, and, perhaps more essentially, to the very ground of my being. Instead of being true to myself, I had chosen a life based on what I thought I should be doing at the age of 33: settle down, get married, have kids, buy furniture. I was under the influence of hard-wired, genetic programming...and I was living a lie. I didn't like feeling like DNA's bitch. I didn't like feeling owned by the impersonal specie's agendas of procreation and domestication.
These internal conflicts erupted into a full-blown epistemological crisis that forced me to seriously question my root values around what I was actually living for versus what I had settled for. During any true epistemological crisis, we can be overcome with great mental confusion and disorientation about our true place and purpose in life. This kind of crisis in consciousness can leave us feeling drained and painfully vulnerable, but also open to new experiences that our previous values would have never considered or may have defined as taboo.
I was tightrope-walking between worlds—not yet willing or able to leave my old life behind, and not yet knowing what the new life looked like. This was a time of great uncertainty, daily anxiety and volcanic rage. A powerful force deep within me was rising to the light of day, and I did not know what to do with all that energy. I had not felt this much force in my body before, and couldn't understand what it was except that it left me feeling more sexually aroused than ever before.
This potent force in me found immediate expression in a string of about twenty brief affairs and one-night stands over a two year period while I maintained the illusion of a marriage and family life. Eventually, the conflict came to a head when I realized this powerful force could never be completely satiated through meaningless sex. It was as if this force wanted something more, something spiritual, something beyond my personal gratification. But what? I had no clue.
I soon met another young attractive woman (who shall remain anonymous) who was passing through Boulder on her way elsewhere. I felt immediately attracted to her and pursued her sexually, as I had done with so many women before. However, this woman was the first to deny me. She did not deny me as a person, but simply refused any sexual involvement with me, even though she also was attracted to me. We both felt this powerful force pulsating between us, and we both agreed to accept the mystery of it rather than trying to label it or control it. I still wanted to have sex, but now I also wanted to know what this electromagnetic intensity was all about. If it wasn't about sex, then what?
The energy proved too much to sit around and talk about it. We decided to take a walk into and through the Flatiron rock formations on the outskirts of town. After about an hour, we came upon a clearing where we sat down and faced each other. What happened next is difficult to describe or form into words, but I will try.
As we locked gazes, an electromagnetic pulse accelerated between our bodies, enveloping us both in an auric field of highly-charged buzzing currents. This energy amped up and I felt an increase of internal pressure, as if my body was too small to contain this kind of power. I felt a strong need to release this force, but where? How? Sex was definitely out of the question. At that moment, instinct took over and I began directing this big force down into the earth below. This immediately alleviated the previous pressure I felt in my body while alerting me to a shift in the woman's energy. Right then, she reached out to me and placed her palms over my heart area. I immediately felt new energy flooding into my heart from her and circulating throughout my upper chest and belly. As this was happening, I continued to feed the earth with the mix of energies now circulating throughout my entire body.
This process of feeding the earth as she fed my heart continued for what felt like an eternity. It was as if we were both acting as human conduits in a ritual circuit that served the purpose of feeding the earth while maintaining the circulation of earth energy. A strange thought occurred to me then: The earth itself had somehow arranged our meeting for this very purpose. Whether or not any of this actually happened or was factual, I cannot say. These words come closest to describing my firsthand experience, an event that clearly stretched the limits of my knowledge and understanding. Later that night, the woman and I said goodbye and we went our separate ways. I have not heard from her since.
On returning to my Boulder home and wife and child, I felt like this glowing extraterrestrial being, a wayward ghost drifting from room to room in a haunted house. Since my wife and I were not talking, I doubt she noticed anything different about me. I felt free to wander alone into my office and write. And write and write I did...
What issued forth in torrents of weird impersonal prose came as close to automatic writing as anything I've done. Like other strange experiences I have failed to understand, writing about it was my way of stomaching (integrating) what had just happened. I titled this piece, "Man/Woman/Planet" (included in this book). This little treatise also acted as the seed vision that inspired the writing of The Akashic Record Player, that blossomed into a multi-tiered story stimulated by real-life people along my journey who the characters in this geomantic conspiracy tale were based on.
Looking back now, twenty-seven years later, it's clear to me how writing this book was my way of recalibrating my very values to align with a life that I found worth living. This has meant an ongoing acceptance of Earth as a highly intelligent being incarnating as this planet, a massive entity that undergoes its own evolutionary imperatives and agendas, regardless of the dictates of human life; the Earth is calling the shots. Whether this geomantic perspective is scientifically provable or not matters little to me; it's a vision I can live with and, live for.
Soon after leaving Boulder in the summer of 1988, Christi and I filed for divorce and have since remained on non-speaking terms. Though separated from my daughter Kallista when she was only two, fifteen years later we re-established our relationship and have deepened our bonds ever since. Now at the age of 62, I feel blessed to be alive and to be still realizing my own dreams, rather than the pre-fab agendas issued by society and the mass of herds it attempts to regulate.
Last but not least, I must express my ongoing gratitude for the intrepid Nick Tharcher at Falcon Press, for re-releasing this book after being out of print fifteen years or more. Thanks Nick! Maybe I can squeeze a few more out of the Warehouse of Probabilities before the whole shithouse goes up in flames.
Antero Alli
April 7, 2015
Berkeley, California
