NOWHERE-NOW HERE, HECTOR CASTELLS TRAVEL JOURNAL – NEPALESE CAPSULES: EPISODE VI | PART I
MILAREPA OR HOW MEDITATION GOT AWAY WITH MURDER
“Meditation represents the foundation of the universe to which all returns, as in the stillness of the dead of night, the stillness between tides and winds, the stillness of the instant before Creation. In this “void,” this dynamic state of rest, without impediments, lies ultimate reality, and here one’s own true nature is reborn, in a return from what Buddhists speak of as “great death.” This is the Truth of which Milarepa speaks.” —Peter Matthiessen. “The Snow Leopard.”
Now here —Somewhere between Tibet and Nepal (December, 1067)
Before becoming the founder of Tibetan meditation and yoga, and the most acclaimed poet ever born in his country, Jetsun Milarepa (1052-1133) had been an underage terrorist and mass-murderer.
He was the first and last remote serial killer, and he had the best accomplice an underage assassin could ever wish for: his dear mother.
POSH KIDZ
Like the Buddha himself, Milarepa was born in a very fancy household, but unlike Siddhartha he lost his tycoon pop when he was a kid.
It was then when his life took an evil turn.
After the death of the father, Milarepa’s uncle and auntie robbed the inheritance, and turned the orphan kid and his widowed mother, Nyangtsa Kargyen, into their domestic slaves.
“Our food was food for dogs, our work was work for donkeys… Forced to toil without rest, our limbs became cracked and raw. With only poor food and clothing, we became pale and emaciated,” remembered the assassin years later.
When Milarepa turned fifteen, Kargyen sent her emaciated teenage son to a school of Black Magic, a proper Dark Hogwarts for future spiritual criminals. There he devoted his entire fury to refine his outlandish talent for the occult, until he devised his first terror attack, an outstanding telepathic operation (orchestrated with dear Darth Mother), which would claim thirty-five lives.
PARAGLIDING
My dearest croaked two days ago. Her name was Ash. She rang me last week. We hadn’t spoken in ages. She asked where I was. I said Nepal. She sighed and sobbed, and said that it was the best country she had ever been to. She asked if I was close to the Himalayas. “You are always close to them when you are in Nepal.”
She laughed and said: “Try paragliding then.”
I didn’t know what paragliding was. She explained. I said, “Just because you are dying doesn’t mean that you can sentence other people to death.”
She burst out laughing.
“I’m craving a life sentence for murder. Just for the sake of feeling alive.”
I felt emotional.
“I’d be happy to be killed,” I said.
The reception was bad. I was laughing. She thought I was crying.
I said I wasn’t, but she couldn’t hear me.
We were getting blurred at a steadfast pace.
EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE EVERYTHING
“Don’t worry, everything is going to be alright,” she said.
I realised that she was alone. Usually, when someone is dying, a loved or unloved relative or parent grabs the hand of the morbid and says that.
NOWHERE. Everything is going to be alright.
Somehow, I found it maddening and unfair: she wasn’t supposed to say that.
“Everything is going to be everything,” I said.
“Are you still fleeing Interpol?” she asked.
“Do deadly people see the future?”
“You only need to look at the past to see it, deadly or not. You have been on the run since I met you.”
I felt emotional. It was a pattern. She thought I was laughing, our favourite pattern.
“Have you ever read about Milarepa,” I asked.
“Holy Fuck. I was reading about him today,” she said.
“So do you think he was a serial killer before inventing Bikram Yoga?”
“I think Bikram Yoga is a weapon of massive, stinking destruction, but he was a decent poet.”
“I would paraglide for you,” I said.
First Yoga Terror Attack
Now Here, Gungtangh (1068)
During his time in the Hogwarts of Tibetan Black Magic, the young and fearless Milarepa discussed extensively the plan to execute uncle and auntie with his dear Darth Mother.
BIO-ILOGICAL
In the first days of August 1067, the pair had been checking the reach of their mental power. It was fucking mental, indeed.
Milarepa decided to do a test-run on a hill not far away from the house of pain and slavery.
Darth Mother travelled to the location and emptied her mind as planned. Milarepa and her were 2000 kilometres apart when they proceeded to recite the same mantra, precisely at 13:13 pm:
“We are the stillness of the dead of night, the stillness between tides and winds, the stillness of the instant before Creation, THIS VOID.”
As soon as they uttered the words the hill started shaking like a Pokemon on cardiac arrest. Next thing, it imploded from within.
“It felt like an inner earthquake. The walls of the rock started cracking, and in a matter of seconds the entire massif had collapsed into an enormous pile of dust and dirt. My son has powers that are alien to this world, but I believe we are on track to something great,” wrote Darth Mother shortly after witnessing it.
Milarepa didn’t hear about the explosive success until one week later. By then, mother and son were ready to test their power of telepathy on humans.
NOW HERE: WILLIAM AND JOAN, NEW YORK, 1946
On their first night together, a sweltering evening of June 1946, Joan Vollmer and future husband and psychic writer Burroughs drank two bottles of gin, emptied two tubes of Benzedrine, never went to bed or made love, and spent the following morning reading a book Joan was obsessed with: The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa.
Burroughs had read about the Yogi devilish saint in the Bardo Thodol, also known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, but he only became infatuated with his philosophical rhymes and apologetic writing once Joan started reciting his verses.
Joan thought Milarepa was the most thrilling and divisive character of the murderous history of religion: an underage serial killer turned the Highest Poet of his country, and, overall, “a Telepathic Prophet.”
THE HUMOUR BRAT
“In Tibet he is like Dante or Milton, but unlike them he could destroy people with his mind. Can you believe it?”
“That is exactly what I want to do to my editor,” said Burroughs.
Joan said it was doable: they only needed practice and a good idea.
“If Milarepa and his mother could do it using their wrath, we might be able to do it with a little sense of humour.”
Many would say that Joan was the most brilliant, inflammatory member of the Beat Generation, an acclaimed Bard amongst her peers that would never publish a single line.
Beat that if you are a Beat.
Joan became the muse, icon and the closest to an individual brave enough to look daggers at all of them. Allen Ginsberg wrote Howl, the greatest selling poem of the last 200 years inspired by the many voices and killing glances he saw “in Joan’s many souls, a lashing rain of fractals.”
Allen completed the poem after Bill shot Joan dead while playing William Tell with a handgun. They had tested their telepathy force before and it had worked many times.
Joan was outspoken and fearless when talking about her own death. She thought that she was immortal like most young, wild romantic poets.
Joan and Bill had been playing the Milarepa Game since they had met. They used to imagine targets they wanted to destroy and then they sat down at opposite ends of their kitchen table, and William would send telepathic images to Joan, and she would crack them all up.
Upon Joan’s death, Allen’s writing became unleashed, he fed on her corpse like an insatiable vulture, and his power would never be greater.
Allen mourned Joan in classic funeral style, and tried to blow and fuck her widower, the insatiable Bill, in all the parlours of bereavement, which during those years were endless.
Joan skidded Allen’s dreams for years like an Apocalypse horsewoman splashing the gods with dirt.
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterically naked…”
Praying emoji.
Now Here: BLOOD WEDDING (Tibet, September the 6th, 1067)
On the morning of September 6th 1067, Milarepa and Darth Mother’s eyes were sparkling. Their evil thirst would have put the wrath of God in dehydrated shambles.
They had agreed to go along with the terror attack and do it whenever they could inflict more damage. It would be a sick butchery.
As it turned out, the youngest daughter of the slaveholders was getting married on the said September date, and the family had decided to throw a big wedding party in the house of pain.
Darth Mother had been working for days in the preparations of the banquet, and gathered all the critical intel. The ceremony was to start at 3pm in the downstairs living room. Mother and son decided to program the attack for 3:33pm.
BOOM BOOM
Milarepa stayed in Dark Hogwarts, from where he had blown the hill. At 3:30pm, with the entire guests already inside the house, Darth Mother walked away from the property and looked for shelter in the outside barn.
At 3:32pm she closed her eyes, held the coat of arms of the family tightly around her fingers, emptied her mind and recited the mantra.
The blast was deafening enough to claim her left eardrum and the lives of thirty-five guests.
The married couple was dead before the bow exchange, so were their sisters and cousins. Everyone died except auntie and uncle, who inevitably became zombies.
Darth Mother thought of it as poetic justice: uncle and auntie had witnessed the horror and now they had to live with it. It was bad, but not EVIL enough: she was still missing the cherry on the cake.
(TBC on Tuesday…)