In this remarkable spiritual memoir, written by one of the most astonishing and enigmatic mystics of the modern era, Nosirrah takes us through the arc of his life from his birth, which he claims never actually happened, to his own death, amazingly described by Nosirrah himself in great detail. He recounts the rollicking events that occurred as this spiritual genius encountered the unfolding of his life and his message for humankind. Scholars will no doubt study this tome to help explain the brilliant writings of a man who so transcended his own existence that he was unable to authorize his own autobiography.
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EXCERPT
I had to be enlightened early because I had a hard time following normal procedures, not because I was rebellious, but because I was often confused by the instructions that seem to keep coming at me. Like when I try to call into one of those big companies and the computer answering system says, “Do you want to talk to the billing department, say Yes or No” and I say “Yes or No” and the computer person says, “I didn’t understand, please say Yes or No” and so I say “Yes or No” and this goes on for hours without much progress. I learned after some experience to start out hitting 2 and then at least I could practice my Spanish. After a while I went for the hearing impaired option, but while I tried to be sensitive to the operator’s impairment, she kept saying, “Stop shouting!” I said to her, “Lady, you don’t have to shout at me, I’m not the one hard of hearing.” It turns out that hearing impaired number is for customers who are hard of hearing. I was just trying to be helpful and really this is the crux of the issue in my life. I am so convinced that I am not, that all that there is left to do is to help those who have the horrible fate of thinking that they exist. You could say I was born with this purpose, except what is not is not born, and come to think of it, purpose would be a gross exaggeration of Nosirrah’s non-existence.
You may wonder what I mean by non-existence, so let me explain. We exist only in our concept of our self; that concept is itself just a form of resistance to the vast nothingness that awaits the silence of the mind. We maintain our busy life of the mind as a kind of anxiety about our emptiness, and that anxiety is what we think of as our self. We say we want peace, but peace is the end of anxiety, and therefore the end of the self. So what we really want is to want peace, not to have it, because wanting peace is more anxiety and therefore more self. To end wanting peace and to simply be peace is to be nothing and that is a fearless state, or rather, a fearless non-state. Nosirrah has known this fearless state since birth. I was without fear and this seemed to make those around me quite fearful. I was taken to priests and rabbis, healers and psychics, psychiatrists and podiatrists, and all other forms of doctors. After much consultation and collaboration, I was not declared enlightened, rather I was declared to have a rare genetic disorder, Urbach-Wiethe disease. I had lesions on my amygdala, preventing me from experiencing any normal fear of terror-inducing hauntings and demons, ghosts and monsters, death threats, being attacked, snakes, spiders, none of these had any effect on me at all and since my childhood was full of all of these things, I had a pretty normal childhood.
But one thing in my childhood concerned me: if I had no fear, then how could I transcend fear and become enlightened? As a spiritual prodigy, at an early age I had read all the religious texts, The Bible, The Koran, The Bhagavad-Gita, Tao de Ching, and all the spiritual classics, over and over. I read in the original Latin and contemplated A.E. Walinbrucke’s Verum Nihilim, which makes all other books on human consciousness look like marginal postscripts, but I read on nonetheless, The Necronomicon, The Book of the Damned, Being One, Tales from the Crypt comics, and more. Later in life, I came upon the spawn of the New Age, books that told me to be in the now, then to be love, to be peaceful, to be mindful. But these books just brought one question to me over and over again: if I was supposed to be something other than what I was, what was I? I realized that this was a question that was neither present nor loving, peaceful nor mindful, in short, I realized that I was alive and was surrounded by the spiritual undead, zombies, spiritual zombies practicing zombie spirituality. You may ask how you can tell if you are alive or a zombie, let me explain.
Is there an emptiness in you that cannot be filled without endless, mindless feasting on the living? Do you have no purpose other than consumption, and yet there is no fulfilling the hunger? Do you stagger, grasping, clawing, irrespective of the damage it does to your own ravaged being, driven to feed, without knowing why, without even the question of why as a possibility? Is the drive to possess, to fill yourself all that you know? Are you a spiritual zombie?
Look around you. Do you see a shelf of books on spirituality and self-improvement? Does your credit card bill reflect enrollment in seminars, workshops, retreats or even on-line meditation groups? Do you feel that your understanding is not enough, that your stress level is too high, that there is something missing in your life, that happiness is available to everyone but you? Are you going to classes where you stretch your ligaments, work on your core strength or pretend to be boxing while jumping up and down? Do you use words from ancient languages, gestures from cultures and religions alien to your own, and read translations of ancient texts as if these are instructions directed towards you?
These are just some of the beginning signs of spiritual zombification, a kind of viral infection that is passed easily from the lurching zombie to you. At first you didn’t notice, a friend gave you an amazing book to read, or took you to see an insightful teacher, or convinced you to do a yoga weekend. This seemed innocent enough. But, soon the virus began to spread to your central nervous system, and the first symptoms began to appear almost unnoticed (one of which was that you began to refer to your central nervous system as your chakras). You began to believe that there was the possibility of enlightenment now, or enlightenment next, or enlightenment in a previous incarnation, but whatever that enlightenment thing was, you wanted it, you deserved it and you were going to get it. The zombie begins to have strange appetites. Sprout salad with a side of tofu begins to look like a tasty meal despite the intensive gas buildup in your third chakra (which is probably just a little energy movement). Books that were written for total morons begin to look profound. Even this book, which was written by a total madman, may seem weighty.
And speaking of weighty, the zombie not only reads spiritual books but also “understands,” although the zombie’s not always holding the books right side up, but for zombies these books make sense. They consist of an amalgam of all philosophies randomly cut and pasted into a chart of quadrants, levels, and fields, although all the fields are left fields (way out in left field) and published in immense volumes (see weighty) with the conclusionary tautology that if you understand and agree with the conclusion then you are at the highest state of consciousness and if you find the writings to be derivative ramblings that are unreadable, unintelligible and jargoned, then you are at a lower state of consciousness and cannot understand the conclusion anyway.
Think of it as astrology for the thinking zombie, or as a kind of technical stock trading system using charts and graphs – both result in a random success rate, but what we like to remember is the successes and what we like to forget are the failures. If you throw enough material in a book, even zombies will recognize something in that mass of information that resonates with their experience and the rest of the material just fades into the background. The trick is to make those books big, and then the zombie master has a career explaining it to his fellow automatons. Those who don’t get the teaching get eaten. Wait, don’t eat me, and then spit me out into the mouths of your followers like a mother robin feeding her young! Yuck.
One of these teachers can produce No Brain Activity at will and has a YouTube clip to show it. He does this while awake! No brain activity while awake – isn’t that great! And he did this with a special and rare form of meditation. It is everlasting awareness. Now that is marketing!
But, let us for just one minute engage our minds and remain awake, and I know this may be difficult for many of you (and no, you cannot turn on the television to keep your mind engaged). This will only take a minute. Engage your mind and follow this deductive reasoning:
All zombies have no brain activity and appear to be awake.
Human beings who are awake have brain activity and consider that quite acceptable, usually even desirable.
Human beings without brain activity are considered clinically dead.
A spiritual teacher has no brain activity when he is awake and has proudly placed video evidence of this on YouTube.
Therefore, the spiritual teacher is a zombie.
Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
For those of you who are not used to dealing with the kind of high level mathematical logic that I have just utilized to prove my point, let me say it in plain language: the teacher is awake but dead and he wants you to join his group of undead.
Inspired by this awesome demonstration of Sahaja Nirvikalpa Samadhi, I realized I have something to offer the world similar to this mind that doesn’t think. I have a flaccid body with virtually no muscle tone and barely the capacity to walk around the block. I did this by sitting around doing nothing. I would like to produce a YouTube video on this but have found a great deal of resistance to filming me with my shirt off , something to do with obscenity laws and local standards. My promise is that you, too, can have everlasting lack of muscle tone with my special meditation, found in my forthcoming book tentatively titled Sex, Ecology and More Sex: A Brief History of Everything Else Except That Too Complicated Integral Stuff . I put the word ecology in there because it is good to be green, although I am not really too ecologically aware myself, except I do collect aluminum cans when I am short on cash, which is pretty frequently, but if you aren’t really green then it is really good to pretend you are. It sells things to other people who are pretending that they are green. Real green people don’t buy things and that makes for lousy book sales.
I put the word sex in there twice because it is twice as important as any other word, even green people will buy something with sex attached to it and I am hoping some really stunning integral lady gets the hint that the word sex and everything it represents on all levels, all quadrants and all positions is important to me (except the position where I am bending over backwards touching my heels, that is a little hard on my back with Ms. Integral bouncing around) and even though I don’t have a cool loft apartment like the hip integralists, I would be OK in the back seat of my car, which is kind of like a loft, lots of glass and steel, good urban street view. I will have to move all my clothes and canned dog food out of the way (no, I don’t have a dog), but it is already set up with a sleeping bag.
But Nosirrah has one teensy, weensy insight, an insight that exists just at the outer edge of Everything, it is a known, so it is part of the Everything, but is paradoxically an unknown and so it is not part of anything. Here it is in summary: what is not known is infinitely more than what is known, and while it is impressive to endlessly rehash what is known, the true explorer heads for the unknown, where few go and the pay is not very good.
See also: Excerpt From “God Is an Atheist: A Novella for Those Who Have Run Out of Time”, by N. Nosirrah
Mitzi Szereto (mitziszereto.com) is an author and anthology editor of multi-genre fiction and non-fiction. She has her own blog Errant Ramblings: Mitzi Szereto’s Weblog (mitziszereto.com/blog), and a web TV channel Mitzi TV (mitziszereto.com/tv), which covers the “quirky” side of London. Her books include Love, Lust and Zombies; Darker Edge of Desire: Gothic Tales of Romance; The Wilde Passions of Dorian Gray; Normal for Norfolk (The Thelonious T. Bear Chronicles); Thrones of Desire: Erotic Tales of Swords, Mist and Fire; Pride and Prejudice: Hidden Lusts; Red Velvet and Absinthe: Paranormal Erotic Romance; In Sleeping Beauty’s Bed: Erotic Fairy Tales; Getting Even: Revenge Stories; Dying For It: Tales of Sex and Death; Wicked: Sexy Tales of Legendary Lovers; and Silk Sheets: Collected Stories of Mitzi Szereto.
Dragon My Feet 