The Secret
Created on 09/24/2008The Secret
Hi Everybody!
With this blog entry I am going to complete a cycle, which I called “Breaking The Walls”.
If you're visiting this blog for the first time, please take a moment and read through previous entries, at least briefly, before you proceed. The following will make different sense for you if you do it this way.
It was November of 2006 when I first found Cliffhouse in the small village of Manitou Springs near Colorado Springs.
Compared to California, where I lived at the time, Colorado felt more frozen than Siberia. The air was stiffly freezing, and the altitude gave me invisible punches; even the simplest physical efforts left me short of breath. The sky was grey and low, and seemed soaked with electricity and ready to explode in a stream of lightening at any moment. I recalled Tesla and his experiments with electricity in this place 107 years ago. He chose this place for its unusual electrical activity. It seems not much has changed since then. I didn’t plan to conduct any experiments in this place. It was a personal trip, quite unplanned. I came there to spend my birthday with friends, to visit a new place, somewhere not too far away from home in California.
I know from having grown up in Siberia, how my mood and my state of mind can make me comfortable and warm even in the middle of the coldest weather and how it can equally turn it into an unbearable nightmare being outside in the cold when my mood was not into it. The moment I sensed Colorado’s cold air, my mind rebelled and I had a feeling that this trip would be a waste of time, full of frustration and unnecessary flashbacks to a bunch of uncomfortable memories I was trying to forget. And of course, as is usually the case with expectations, reality obeyed and gave me plenty of little things to feed my frustration with. The food was bad, the hotel was full of some sport convention guys, all dressed in identical Addidas suits, with loud voices and never-ending beer drinking; they occupied every corner of the hotel and took away any hope I had of a private, reclusive weekend. The electricity was irritating too, it was impossible to touch any door knob or any metal surface for that matter without being shocked. “Happy fucking birthday,” I said to myself and felt rage boiling inside as I tried to remember to use my left hand to open the doors so the glove I wear after the accident would protect me from another electrical shock.
“I want to go home,” I started hearing this little voice in myself, a familiar little girl’s whining I used since being a child to get away from uncomfortable feelings. “Or get a drink in a bar or something,” an older part of me barked. “Whatever… I just want it to be over…” And as I caught myself in the middle of this inner dialogue fueled by my built up anger, I didn’t have a choice but to admit to myself for the first time since Africa, that the true frustration was caused by my final realization that no more miracles would ever happen to me in this life, and that it was over for good. It was time to get over it and just stop hoping. That’s probably why I hadn’t travel much since March of 2005, not because of post-accident fear or anxiety but because deep down I accepted the fact that there were going to be no more miracles for me and waiting for a miracle had always been the main drive behind all my travels in the past. And life never disappointed. It gave me a chance to have extraordinary experiences in so many exotic places, to meet strangers who became transformers in my life and to have dreams I never had dreamt of having. So that’s why Colorado seemed so frustrating at first sight, because secretly I hoped that it would become one the mystical places for me, like New Mexico or Uzbekistan had been… Yet, it was nothing but cold biting electricity and a bunch of drunk athletes. Damn.
There were still the tourist activities to accomplish, or at least so my friends said. “You have to visit the Garden of Gods. Don’t make this face please. You think it’s corny, don’t you? But you may actually like it... Well, there are a couple of historical museums, just for your information. And yes, everybody who visits Colorado Springs should go to Pikes Peak.”
“Everybody?” I wasn’t even trying to be sarcastic. I just wanted to go home and to be away from this cold and unfriendly place.
“You for sure should go. You used to like the mountains, didn’t you?”
“I guess I’ll go.”
The train was surprisingly long, and the small station at the bottom of Pikes Peak Mountain was full of people waiting to board, most of them gathering inside a small shop to stay warm. So when the train opened its doors, the seats in all the cars were filled quite quickly and I wondered where all these people had come from. Nobody was talking much, people were just looking outside, waiting for the train to start climbing. And for the next forty minutes or so, it did. The railroad was going up quite steeply, the speed was very slow and the guy with a microphone who was making the same jokes for the thousandth time, still managed to keep our attention. It was like gradually and slowly going into some sort of trance, the rhythmic iron sound of the train’s wheels, the slight shaking of the car on its way up, the isolated beauty of mountain life outside the window, changing from last year’s brown grass on the dirt sides next to the railroad to bright, white-blue primordial snow and then into fantastic figures of brilliant ice as the train was marching its way up to the top.
I forgot my irritation. The mountain took me in. The life on it, even though invisible to the travelers behind the train windows was so present, omnipotent and independent from humans, that it was easy to let go of my preoccupations and just be there, being lifted to the top of the mountain as if by some miracle.
And then I got it. The truth is whenever we are looking for extraordinary experiences, miracles, enlightenment, transformation, etc, we are looking to feel a certain way. We are traveling to faraway lands to find our own feelings. But they are always inside like any other feelings, mystical or not.
When we think that we are looking for extraordinary experiences (our own or described by others such as in my books), we are looking for powerful triggers to initiate the magical mystical core of our existence. The reason we are looking for it is because we have all had it. As children. Some of us remember it clearly, some don't, just the longing for what once felt like perfect understanding of one's purpose and connection to life and everything in it. So we keep looking, traveling, searching.
The colorfulness of the situation we find ourselves in (like being in Samarkand, for example) dresses the mystical feeling into a multitude of associated sensations (the taste of bread in the bazaar, the warmth of wind touching my face, the exotic yet familiar sound of a tambourine). The mystical feeling is primal and is remembered from childhood. The new environment is just another stage for remote memory to get activated and to enter our awareness.
That is what I was thinking as I stepped out of the train onto the icy ground at the top of Pikes Peak. The lightheadedness from the lack of oxygen was making things around spin slightly and the freezing cold didn’t matter any more. The Sun looked so close, closer than I have ever seen it, and it made all the difference in my mood and seemed to do the same for everyone around. People were laughing, everybody appeared happy, yet a little bewildered. We could see 360 degrees around with a majestic panorama open in all four directions below. I looked at the silhouette of the mountain ridge going all the way to my beloved New Mexico. Far away on the horizon, I saw shapes fading away and there was almost no distinction between where the earth ended and the sky began. And then I looked at the sky. For the first time since Africa, I saw that it was not dead and empty, was not just a beautiful, mechanical decoration in my external reality, but was full of miracles and open and I could feel it again.
I had a cup of hot chocolate in a little café at the top of the mountain which somehow made my lightheadedness pass and soon we were all back in our seats as the train began to crawl cautiously downhill.
There were two middle-aged people sitting in front of me, who were holding hands and whispering to each other on the way up, avoiding any eye contact with me by staring out the window. That was fine with me since I wanted to keep my privacy too. Yet, on the way back things changed completely and these two strangers started talking non-stop as if they had received some invisible order to not stop talking until the train had stopped. And they started talking to me. They felt compelled to tell me the story of how they met over the internet and fell in love and how their story was full of significant signs and they were meant to be together and how happy they were. I was polite and listened, they didn’t bother me, they were quite cute, even though something seemed indescribably odd about this couple. I tried to identify something in their manner and appearance that was causing the strange feeling in me, but I couldn’t point it out. I finally decided that they looked like two aliens who were trying to appear human, but who didn't have enough time to learn all the details of this pretence so some little things were profoundly off and they were not even aware of it. This notion seemed funny to me, so I just kept listening to the details of their romance and honeymoon, without paying too much attention when the woman said:
“That’s why we decided to marry on the same day as our birthday.”
“Our?”
“We both have birthdays on the same day, November 17th, that’s how we knew we were supposed to meet when we started writing to each other,” the man said. His long, wool scarf was hanging loosely around his long, white neck and half of his jacket was unbuttoned with only a light t-shirt underneath, yet the cold seemed to not bother him at all.
“Today is our first anniversary and we came back to the Cliffhouse to celebrate.” The woman was staring at me intently as she said this. Her stare was not intimidating or impolite, it was just plain off. I couldn’t believe what I had just heard.
“You're kidding, right?” My reaction didn’t seem unusual or confusing to them. They just kept looking at me, not even asking what surprised me so much.
“November 17th is my birthday. It is my birthday today, I can’t believe what you just said…”
They didn’t look surprised at all.
“Oh good, then you should just go and visit the Cliffhouse too.” The woman was Caucasian and had no accent, was in her mid-fifties and dressed casually; nothing in her appearance stood out, however, I wouldn’t be able to place her in any culture, almost as if she had no history.
“Doesn’t it seem strange to you that of all the people on this train, more than a hundred probably, I am sitting in front of two people who not only share my birthday, but who have their wedding anniversary on the same day and it happens to be today?”
They laughed nervously and held each other's hands tightly.
“It is strange, isn’t it?” That’s all they said with no particular expression and then immediately they started telling me about the Cliffhouse.
“You have to see it. This place has an amazing history, it feels like nothing else. The rooms are so unique, and the atmosphere is full of mystery. I bet a lot of things happened in those rooms, some may never be known. But the Cliffhouse is a jewel.”
As I was deciding what to ask them first – to show me their IDs with their DOB or to ask them if they were part of some weird PR campaign for local hotels, the train made a final jerk and everybody started moving toward the exit. The couple disappeared, as if they had dissolved into the thin, cold air, leaving just a little trace of steam behind. I could almost hear them laughing lightly, as they re-shaped themselves into something more familiar. Or maybe they just hurried back to celebrating their anniversary. Odd things happen after all, I knew that much by now. I just smiled and walked back to my car.
Even though I hadn't been to this place before, I didn’t have to ask anyone for directions to the Cliffhouse. It was just a few blocks away on the side street, and somehow in my gut I knew exactly which turn to take to get here. It was almost instinctual when I followed this magnetic pull that led me toward an old building that looked so familiar it almost brought tears to my eyes. It was full of love and full of history and as I walked toward its doors for the first time and entered the warm, traditionally furnished hall with paintings on the wall and light music playing in the background, I knew it was a place for change. And I knew that my recognition of this place, so strong and unpredictable without ever seeing it before, came mostly from the future and not from the past. That’s how I knew that this place had a different relation to time. I remembered Tesla and his electricity. I wondered if he had ever visited this place? As I left the Cliffhouse that day and walked around, every little street seemed so familiar, and the whole town of Manitou Springs was alive and full of joy that evening. There were small Christmas lights decorating shops and restaurants. Little beautiful dolls were looking at me through the windows and the air was full of such a charm that it felt like a newly found celebration of life. And before it became dark and the stars came out to watch over this magical place, I looked up at the sky one more time and though it was grey on this cold evening, it was still alive, still full of electricity and I could feel it and all the walls in my memory starting to go down and I knew that this was a safe place to heal.
I saw the sky there in this way every time I went back to the Cliffhouse, last time just a few weeks ago. Every visit there has been more than an experience of physical space. I would enter a stream of transformation, where nothing was easy but everything was real and where the crossroads to healing became available for me every time I went back. I don’t know how, but Tesla’s electricity worked in that place. It’s almost like the invisible lightning he was trying to tame became the strings that connected my grounded, everyday physical survival with invisible spheres that were actually determining my fate. Or at least this was the way it felt.
I started contemplating the Cliffhouse and in some strange way felt that the future Cliffhouse was contemplating me, its space was approaching and defining itself as my state of mind.
That is how the idea for this website originally emerged.
And now before I say good night, I want to invite you to the Cliffhouse. I invite you to follow my words as you continue reading, so my words become a key to your own unique room inside the Cliffhouse which is made only for you and which will be there whenever you are ready to visit it. It doesn’t have to be today. You can just stop reading and turn the page and go somewhere else. Or you can stay focused on taking this key to your room in the Cliffhouse that I offer you now and you can start opening the door.
Welcome.
Everything happens here with no sense of time, it’s a house made of another substance, the rules here are different and those rules are more yours than any other rules you encounter in any other place, because you are creating them now.
You are inside the room and it is not an exercise in visualization, it is not an external image, it is a tapping into the space that is always there, in you, part of you, and we call this space your room in the Cliffhouse and you are welcome here.
You can stop any time. And you can continue entering the space if you choose so now. It doesn’t matter how destructive your environment can be as you’re reading, as long as you’re reading, your room in the Cliffhouse is taking shape, more so as you read along. You may see some pictures on the wall, you may notice the window and it is probably somewhat dark outside, you can find a place to sit - in the chair, in the loveseat, on the corner of the bed, or you can choose to keep standing and look around. The external doesn’t matter. Your state of mind does. And everything I wrote for you so far serves to facilitate you entering a state of mind from where miracles can start happening. I leave it up to you to fill this space with the furniture of your choice, with pictures of your choice, with memorabilia of your choice. I let you choose the sounds that you would like to hear in your room unless you want to keep your silence. Whenever you choose to come back to your room in the house you will always have a choice to rearrange it in a way that is best for the moment. So you have it. And now I am going to tell you the secret. I know that there is a protective mechanism inside our minds that will help you to use and understand the information only in the way that is beneficial and safe for you. The secret is that you are not alone. Even in this most remote corner of your psyche, where you travel away from destruction of external reality, even in the midst of the most subjective fabric of your imagination, here, inside your mind, in this room, you are not alone. And you are not the only one responsible for your life and its direction. There is another one inside of you. The one who knows about you all the way and the one that you never knew about before. I call him a Memorymaker. The secret is that there’s more than just one storyline of your life where you can apply your intention and make changes the way you believe you would like to. It hardly happens this way. You are a multitude of narratives. The complexity is not in the storyline of the narrative you think you are living at this point. The complexity is in the way the stories of your life intertwine with each other and in their invisible hierarchy that defines your life direction. The Memorymaker creates this web of stories and knows the entire pattern of your life before it starts. When you want to make a change outside the box you have to go back to the Memorymaker and ask for the transformation. And the Memorymaker is a child. And our life is his playground. You can resent it, you can try to change it, most often you forget about it, or you can find a way to play with your Memorymaker and to become the co-creator of your life. That is why I am helping you create your room in the Cliffhouse so it can become easier for you to enter a space where you can face your Memorymaker and initiate the transformation you want. Welcome. And when you leave the Cliffhouse today, at some point I want you to look at the sky and remember what we were talking about in regard to inner space and its walls, and I want you to feel how your feelings have expanded and how your space inside mirrors the sky after you visit your room in the Cliffhouse. I want you to get ready, if you choose so, to start experiencing the Memorymaker of your life, who can bring any changes to you and who can do it easily and safely. And I will be inviting you in the future to your own unique room in the Cliffhouse that you already visited today so you can continue this experience.
Have sweet dreams,
Love,
Olga
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