The mystery of the seven-pointed star

The end of the transformational road is the ineffable image of the seven-pointed star, a symbol that pertains neither to me nor anyone. Certain frequencies invent whole worlds then lie submerged within them.

At the time I was hosting a thirty-year-old busker-troubadour in my flat. His ostensible friendliness, charming stories, beautiful singing-voice, and our long-standing acquaintanceship, had made me want to help him (I have since realised that pity can never form the basis of any kind of relationship). I quickly regretted my decision. Being close to him was like being locked inside a perpetual competition. He was always comparing himself to others. It was an awkward time.

After a series of unpleasant incidences, the details of which are irrelevant to this story, I was left in deep, psychic pain, reeling from a sense of betrayal. The whole affair was an emotional disaster that led me, nonetheless, to the discovery of the seven-pointed star.

Early one dark December’s morning, at the height of this disturbance (the troubadour was still lodged inside my flat), I attended a meditation class in a ground-floor flat in Calle Luna (not until later did I realise the significance of the street name). To enter the flat, I passed by one of those enormous, arched, wooden doors, which are common in the old town and look as though they belong to some giant. There, in the incense-hazed darkness, I took my seat among a small group of meditators. The one in charge of the session, an Italian girl with long black hair, clad in the flowing white robes of a Sufi, began to spin round and round, performing the dance of a whirling dervish.

The meditation was free. No instructions were given. Sleep deprived, and in a state of distress, I closed my eyes and tried to focus. For the first half hour, I saw and felt nothing. Only the un-restful buzz of my own mind. Then I must have drifted off into a kind of half-sleep, for I experienced an intensely vivid dream, or hallucination.

Hanging from a bright-blue cloud-dappled sky, I saw not just one, but two moons, the regular pearly white full moon, and a second moon, about three times as large, composed of millions of ugly eyes, with a large, gaping slit of a mouth, riddled with teeth. I felt myself to be in the presence of profound evil.

I looked more closely. Numberless rays of sickly, violet light emanating from the moon’s mouth were beaming down to earth, connecting with the billions of threads of human consciousness. Intuitively, irrationally, I understood that the moon was feeding off human consciousness, especially our baser instincts. The more selfish behaviours in the world, the more the moon fed and grew. The existence of the moon, explained, at least partially, the prevalence of injustice, as our darkest drives were fed and encouraged by this spectre in this sky, this emotional tide-turner, this impulse intensifier. I saw the reason for the depredations of nature, the ascendant hoarding culture, the might-is-right food-chain of the global economy: the subliminal messaging of a horrible thing blindly summoned from the darkness to preside over and regulate the norms of civilization. The moon sat, squat and resolute, arrogant in the sky, submerged in every soul.

By seeing the parasite moon, I was also seen. I felt the moon would rather destroy me than be exposed. Exposure could reduce its power and influence, curtail its food supply. I left the meditation in a state of paranoia. At home, for several days, I found no peace. I casually assumed that the parasite moon – for that was the name I called it – would find some way of destroying me, preventing awareness of its existence from escaping. Matters were made worse when the troubadour refused to leave the flat peacefully. With his hands, physically, he tried to smash things. With his words, psychologically, he tried to break me. It did not matter that I had sheltered him rent-free for over two months. He was angry for being asked to leave, his anger manifesting in a cruel smile, as he said: I will go, but not until I’ve had my satisfaction. His  satisfaction basically meant breaking things.

When he was finally gone, the situation calmed. I had my life back. A peace, albeit shadowed round the edges, slowly returned. The presence of the parasite moon became more manageable. My horror turned into curiosity. What was this awful thing that hovered sleeplessly inside my mind? Whenever I closed my eyes, I could see it, staring back.

As a journalist, my natural instinct was to ask others and sift through their perceptions. I quickly realised that everyone had something different to say. A religious-minded acquaintance told me that I had glimpsed “one of the many faces of God”. He advised me to write about the parasite moon and publicise its existence. Its influence in the world could be diminished, though not defeated, through awareness. Another friend said the opposite. He said the parasite moon was a living symbol that had latched onto me during a vulnerable state. Every time I thought about it, or spoke about it, I renewed its life. The only way to free myself was through forgetfulness. I found a reflection of this viewpoint in the writings of Jorge Luis Borges. In his short story, the “Zahir”, Borges finds himself falling under the influence of a coin with peculiar markings. Later he reflects: “In Arabic, zahir means visible, manifest, evident; in that sense, it is one of the ninety nine names of God; in Muslim countries, the masses use the word for ‘beings or things which have the terrible power to be unforgettable, and whose image eventually drives people mad’.”

A third, more rational friend, a quantum physicist with a penchant for Jungian psychology, said the parasite moon was nothing more than a confrontation with my own shadow. A fourth friend, a Brazilian saxophonist who lives in a shack in the hills surrounding Barcelona, a kindly man with esoteric tendencies, spoke of alien dimensions and reptilian, shape-shifting beings, which move among this world, hungry for power, manipulating, consuming, destroying. I have always dismissed David Icke’s improbable views. Since my “discovery” of the parasite moon, I can see how people might be drawn to them. The psychic dimensions are infinitely rich, and infinitely strange.

A fifth friend, a poetess and singer-song writer, said the parasite moon was an archetypal symbol: neither wholly subjective, nor wholly objective, a real psychic force that inhabited the dark seas of our collective unconscious. Others told me that I was projecting work anxieties (at the time I was analysing the post-financial-crisis legal structure in financial markets) or that I was projecting a consciousness of the “parasitical” troubadour, amplifying his destructiveness, substituting my self and home for the entire world. A Buddhist monk told me that all kinds of visions and emotions can arise during meditation; they are merely “waves on the sea”, empty of inherent existence.

In all these observations, I found little pieces of truth. My quest to understand the parasite moon was essentially an enquiry into the nature of evil in this world. Could ultimate truth ever surpass a patchwork of resonant viewpoints, some of which were impossible to reconcile? I remembered Oscar Wilde: For in art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true. Not wishing to condone absolute relativism, which I considered a form of intellectual laziness, I tried to reach a firm conclusion. I decided that the Parasite Moon was both real and unreal; a vivid, projected image of latent psychic forces; a metaphor for the banality of parasitical greed normalised and submerged, hidden beneath the register of the conscious mind.

Despite this apparent clarity, a part of me was unconvinced. I felt as though I was holding a tiny piece of an enormous puzzle. Perhaps further meditation would deliver further pieces into my hands?

I began to frequent a free weekly meditation class at the Casa del Tibet in the wide-avenued, modernist district of Barcelona. I’ve always felt a pull towards Tibetan culture, ever since I travelled there as a teenager, back in 2007. The rich, earthly incense; the other-worldly music of the monasteries; the strange icons of the wrathful deities; the emphasis on compassion as the crowning human achievement; the complex symbolism of the mandalas; the intricate and arcane systems of mantras and deity-generation: these were the signs of a highly advanced culture, a welcome respite from the void of Western materialism. I found these symbols comforting, as if I understood them instinctively.

In my first class, the instructor elucidated the basic tenets of Buddhist philosophy, before inviting us to imagine our mind as a castle with a single path leading in and out. He told us to focus on the pathway, and observe, in a non-judgemental manner, the thoughts that came and went. I did as I was told.

The first thing I saw was the troubadour, puffed and swelling with rage, like a large balloon on tiny legs. His influence, my unwholesome connection to him, lingered on subconsciously. He came and went.

Then I saw the parasite moon, also on a pair of tiny legs, swaggering towards the castle. The next thing I know the castle has disappeared. I’m underwater. The parasite moon is queen of the underwater mind. I try to swim away. After some struggle, I finally break the surface, gasping for air. The parasite moon has disappeared. In its place, a golden crescent moon, nestled in a sea of colourful stars.

I realised that the parasite moon, with the right kind of concentration, can transform into the golden moon. One is the shadow and the light of the other. While the parasite moon symbolises selfish emotional drives, the golden moon represents kinder impulses. The crescent moon symbolises goddess-wisdom in various cultures. It is, for example, the emblem of the high-priestess in Tarot cards.

I began to attend meditation classes regularly and also started meditating at home. Not all the sessions produced such vivid psychic images. Some of them were simply calm-inducing. One meditation master said it was dangerous to think of the unconscious as a kind of treasure-trove to be explored through meditation. The most important thing was to relax the mind.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed free visualisations, allowing the mind to travel where it would. In one meditation I came across the seven-pointed star. Sometimes we need disaster to prompt a change. Paradoxically, I would not have found the seven-pointed star without the pain caused by the troubadour and the brief ascendancy of the parasite moon.

I started the meditation listening to mantras dedicated to the Tibetan protector deity Palden Lhamo. Palden Lhamo looks terrifying but actually represents mental fortitude and "clarity". It is within her power to cut through negative thought patterns. With this deity in mind, I started the meditation.

Palden Lhamo, a wrathful, protector deity

I imagined a sky filled with stars and a tunnel of light extending upwards out of me into space. I followed the tunnel and soon found myself flying through space. Then the tunnel started dropping downwards, far beneath the earth. I felt dizzy with fear and curiosity but did not stop. Finally I reached a dome-like structure at the bottom of the universe, completely transparent save for the pillars of light that held it together. In the darkness of that building, I saw six characters, lined up as an arrow-head. One person in front, two behind, and three at the back. Six altogether. I knew these characters represented different aspects of my self. 

The first character was an old man, with a long white beard and long white hair. He represented expression and the conscious mind. He pointed at the stars and said he was the one I would become, the wise old man, the sage, if I followed the path of light, and remained true to the forces of good. He told me to keep on looking towards the stars.

Behind him, in the second row, I saw a beautiful silver-haired woman in a white hooded robe holding the hand of a child. The child was blind and crying. I knew the child represented my own childhood, the melancholy formative years, a painful past and wayward centre. Despite being small and weak, the child was actually the most powerful personage in the cave. His emotions engendered either order or disorder, protective shields, or breaches through which malignant forces could enter. He was sensitive and prone to flippant mood changes. He needed love and above all acceptance. Only then could he see and be strong

The silver-haired woman was my soul or anima. She told me that I should always love and be kind to the child; otherwise turbulence would rule my life. When loved and calmed, the child was a powerful, invigorating force. She also said the following, enigmatic words: We’re all blind, but we mustn't let the blindness control us. 

Now, initially I felt scared of the characters in the third and final row. Their faces represented my deepest, primordial drives, my raw unconscious. I was worried I might discover something terrible about myself. What I found were three enormous, muscular men with the heads of lions.

The first lion-man had a black face. I intuited (he didn't need to speak) that he represented both sensitivity and hatred (or desire for vengeance). When somebody hurts you, and you want to strike back, or you feel bitter and melancholy, or hateful, that's the black lion roaring inside you. However, the light side of this lion is that he is also the gatekeeper of the spiritual world. With that same heightened sensitivity, he enables you to travel into the spirit world (it was the black lion that had led me to this dome).

The second lion-man had a red face.  In its crude form, this lion represented the ego, sexuality and the liar. Whenever a little voice inside you says: "It's okay to lie or steal or manipulate the truth or leech off others, so long as you get what you want", the red-faced lion is responsible. It is through this lion that the Parasite Moon exerts her power. The light side of this lion is his capacity for wisdom, story-telling, and connecting with positive flows of truth, the imagination, understanding, faith as a healing force. It is also through this lion that the golden moon may rise.

The third lion had a green face. It embodied will-power and strength, an a-moral animating force behind all the actions of the world, whether good or bad.

The child was keeper of the lions, which responded to his bidding. If the child were upset, or off-balance, then the lions would howl and wreak havoc. All of the characters in the cave were connected; their separation an illusion.

There were six characters in the cavern. I was the seventh. When harmoniously united, we formed a source of light, a seven-pointed star, a path to the pure lands. It was a relief to know I had nothing inherently bad inside me, just dangerous energies that needed watchfulness and channelling (the lions), a child that needed love and acceptance; a soul that needed to be heard (the silver-heard woman), an old man who aspired to make my conscious mind his throne.

Together they formed a seven-pointed star....