Downloadable WORD document February 14, 2025
Dream memory – Dateless Memory
Epic – Epoch
2462 California, Street San Francisco 1972
Caithlin Ni Houlihan
Let us continue our journey now from another perspective in nomenclature – and refer to Dream Memory and Epic as mirror images of Dateless Memory and the evolutionary Epoch of humanity and the Earth.
A dateless memory is the sparkle in recognition of a distant non-individuated recall within a waking perception that renders it individuated. Such a memory rises like a bubble from the stream of the collective dreams of humanity and is then submerged once again.
Andrei Tarkovsky
When sleep overcomes waking consciousness during the nighttime hours, we fall into the collective breathing of humanity; there is no more identity.
The heroic epic role is the voyage of a single breath in transformation upon the sphere of the dream-world of humanity. Each epic role spirals downwards into the human individuated soul to become a tiny flake of recognition within instantaneity, like a twinkle in the eye.
Thomas Fenn
I attempt to remain fluid as I hear your sublime words. The word dream makes me think of texture and flight and discovery and magic carpets. The word epic makes me think of a mystical chalice filled with dream memories that we call stories. My sensibility prefers epic to story-narrative and dream-memory to dateless memory.
Caithlin Ni Houlihan
Indeed, they lie on different sides of the same curtain. The epic is a counterpoint to the epoch which hosts the evolution of humanity during terrible and magnificent cosmic shifts in the solar system and beyond, whilst a dream memory is a pinpoint of perception within the soul – an instantaneous deja-vu through a dateless memory that may resonate from the source of the ancient mysteries.
Antoine Artaud
Here, within the current epoch, the fifth epoch, as we have indicated, we must encounter Ahriman in possession of the dragon and Lucifer, whose objective is to imprison humanity in a hermetically sealed cube suspended over a frozen image of the solar system.
Caithlin Ni Houlihan
The sixth epoch heralds the transformation of the collective psyche of humanity through a great shift within the solar system. We shall speak about the engineering of this event as we journey forward. Suffice it to say that the transposition of the fifth epoch onto the sixth epoch represents the theme and the heartbeat of this epic. And it is our task thereby to recite the theme and live the epic.
Caithlin Ni Houlihan
Let us summarize in parcels of history and myth.:
The first epoch aligns with ancient India and the Mahabharata; the second epoch aligns with Persia and the epic of Rostam; the third epoch aligns with Babylonian-Assyrian-Chaldaic-Egypt and the epic mythology of Ra, Osiris and Horus, as well as Gilgamesh. The fourth epoch aligns with Greco-Romano and the voyage of Odysseus, and the fifth epoch, our own, is aligned with the Divine Comedy and is transformed beyond.
We shall understand this imagistic knowledge more deeply as we follow the path of your journey through your decades, Thomas.
Let us return now to San Francisco, California, in the year 1972
Thomas Fenn
Thank you. I am most grateful. May I express and thereby reiterate my wish to meet your intention? As time passes, I feel more and more held in your confidence and entrusted to lend my life to your instructions, poetry, and music, which I have done over these decades and will continue to do as a testimony to your vision.
Caithlin Ni Houlihan
Thank you, Thomas. Your intention is met with our own. Please do continue.
Thomas Fenn
Thank you.
And so, I departed for California in January, 1972. I had no doubt I was to pursue poetry. This realization came to me in an instant. There was no question, choice, or necessity for contemplation. I was living in a world of expression rather than identity, and I was mysteriously free and focused,
We left as a small group and drove across the country. It was late fall. Our sails were billowing with the breath of possibility as we shifted from the saturated porous brick buildings of Boston to the strange geology of San Francisco, with her streets that looked like curly ribbons painted on top of the buckling and tectonic plates shifting beneath the cement and ground cover.
An apartment had already been acquired. It was situated at the corner of California and Steiner; the exact address was 2462 California Street. The neighbourhood was called California-Fillmore, and it was the home of artists, especially painters, writers and dancers, many of whom were older than myself and, therefore, participated in the atmosphere of San Francisco as far back as the 1930s.
I became the child of the neighbourhood, and my work began to circulate within the environs of California-Fillmore. We often met in the wee hours of the night at the twenty-four hour Donut Shop located at the corner of California and Fillmore Street, drank coffee, and ate jelly doughnuts.
I remember one painter who invited me to his apartment as he wanted to share a painting he had completed. I was gazing at the painting, globular drops of paint all connecting into streaks and wild movement and fire. My eyes burned as I looked at the painting, and copious tears fell down my cheeks – not because the image entered into my heart but because the colours entered my physical eyes like little fire pebbles. I could not understand what I was experiencing. The man asked me if I had smoked marijuana, which I hadn’t, and when I left his apartment, I realized my capability in perception was extraordinary as I could enter the colour and become, if I may, the soul of the colour.
Caithlin Ni Houlihan
We guide you to this memory, Thomas, and in so doing, we shall underline a principle that will help you navigate behind your closed eyes in your voyage through the unconscious.
When you close your eyes, you perceive after-images in opaque white of the just-perceived physical object projected against a black backdrop. The black backdrop is a curtain through which one may pass to the astrality of colours whose living nature lies in the transformed impression. It is as though we breathe the impression of the colour through our eyes; this is very different than perceiving the colour as wavelets or calculable frequencies upon the texture of the atmosphere; instead, each primary colour is a living entity whose governing principle is distinct from that colour as the sentient body is distinct from the physical. as the astral body is distinct from the etheric
Similar tendencies in human beings characterise these governing principles: red being active, blue being receptive, green being contained, and yellow being solitary. One may surmise with poetic license that the characteristic of the colour is the expression of the soul of that colour.
And so it is that all primary colours are tuned to a threshold of vibrancy, after which the colour sparkles into lustrous shades of sister colours as when one looks into a headlight through a drop of rain at the instant the sunray touches the drop.
Astral Beings manifest within this radiant lustre and can communicate great mysteries through their splendour into the primary colour. This process involves the study of Hermetics and the development of clairvoyant vision, on which we will focus as we voyage.
Let us continue then, Thomas.
Thomas Fenn
Thank you, Sir. I shall withhold my impatience to understand more of what you say. Admittedly, I do not remember a specific sensibility to colour other than through the imagery of expression. I would never have entertained becoming a painter, for example, but I remember listening to music with eyes closed and feeling beneath a sheen of rainbow colours just out of focus.
Caithlin Ni Houlihan
That is entirely accurate, Thomas. I am pleased. We shall pursue this experience in depth when we speak about the relationship between phonetics, music, and colour; all decomposed into commensurable and interchangeable tonalities.
Please then do continue.
Thomas Fenn
Thank you!
However, if I may, at this point I would like to stand back for a moment and return to my adolescence in order to introduce another thread into the weaving of this tapestry.
Caithlin Ni Houlihan
You may, Thomas
Thomas Fenn
Again, thank you
I am carried to the years between 1966 and 1969. During that time, I was in high school and I had a best friend whose name was Neil. He was quite striking in countenance like a Renaissance Painting. He was close with Dixie; perhaps they were lovers, but this was unimportant to me as I knew that they should belong together in this physical world. They were both so beautiful.
Neil was attracted to men as well as women. I remember an incident when he and another close friend spent one night together. Later, my other friend told me about the incident in such a way that it appeared strange and unnatural. This upset me, but I never betrayed Neil’s secret within the strict environment of the private high school. Notwithstanding, we often spoke about human love, mystical love and the beloved. He was respectful of my heart and never questioned me for my sensitivity.
In the late summer of 1971, we were in Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the coast of Cape Cod, walking along a road that traced the ocean shore. It was the middle of the night. We were both immersed in the swish of the ocean waves quietly beating on the sandy beach just beyond the dunes as the orange sunrise began to appear over the horizon and the clock moved from 4:00 A.M. to 5:00 A.M.
I shall never forget the transition to dawn as the green-yellow of the ocean-side fauna came into focus. It was my first intuition that one could climb over the walls of time and then walk forever along an endless road.
During our last year in high school, Neil began studying a hidden esoteric Teaching, to which we refer as the Work. Although he was quite young, he became part of a study group under the tutelage of an authentic teacher. He began sharing his experiences and recommended that I find these books. I was most intrigued, although I was not cognizant that I had, in reality, arrived to the crossroad of this journey just at that moment.
When I arrived in San Francisco, I knew I had to find this book. The necessity I felt was in equal measure to the necessity to pursue poetics and writing.
Over thirty years later, Neil and I met at a gathering commemorating the lifetime of my father, who had passed away some months before. I stayed in Boston for a few more days to spend time with him. I remember he had just received a letter from Dixie, who was living in Ireland, and that she had asked about me. I was stunned that he should receive that letter in the mail just before we met. It was the first time he had heard from her in the thirty years that had passed.
Andrei Tarkovsky
A deep friendship sheds light on the mystical being born from the friendship whose existence is independent of the friendship. This persona is invisible and indivisible, even when the external friendship dissolves.
Caithlin Ni Houlihan
You may continue now, Thomas, San Francisco, 1972.
Thomas Fenn
Thank you.
And so I became immersed in the occult in the form of super-imposed images from my unconscious, shadowy opacities in the form of human figures and spaces arising from the surrealistic atmosphere of bygone days, especially the 1920s to the 1940s. As such my perceptions of California-Fillmore became quite embellished rendering it a kind of Shangrila, a magical setting for the creative spirit.
Antoine Artaud
Your fascination with the occult stems from early childhood, Thomas. When you were eight years old, you were gifted with atavistic clairvoyance during a medical operation to remove your tonsils.
Thomas Fenn
Please forgive me, but I do not understand or remember this event nor do I understand what you mean by atavistic clairvoyance.
Caithlin Ni Houlihan
The word atavistic refers to a previous iteration of race in humanity, the Atlanteans. The Atlantean civilization preceded the first epoch. The human race at that time was gifted with perceptual clairvoyance albeit uneducated. They were tuned, so to speak, to the undertones of existence. This natural or atavistic clairvoyance was rescinded as humanity descended into empirical mind-set and materialism that we finally witness during the fifth epoch.
In this regard, you were gifted with this otherworldly perceptual talent during this medical procedure through the medium of ether. Do you begin to decipher this incident through dream memory, Thomas?
Thomas Fenn
Yes, indeed. I am brought back to this event. I remember the doctor putting a mask over my face and telling me to breathe. He told me it would smell like liquorice. Instead, I experienced a suffocating glue-like odour and then terrifying disorientation as if I were falling, falling into high pitched whirling sounds and even voices. After that, I perceived a great spinning vortex that hummed like a hive of bees. I recall the bottom of the vortex as the tiniest opening through which one might squeeze. Later, I awoke and realized that it was my eighth birthday. I was looking at a label on the back of my pyjamas, and in stark realization, I said: ‘How strange, I am actually eight years old.’
Antoine Artaud
It was during this intervention that you were carried through the portal of death for the first time. You were brought into the reflective dimension of another age encompassing your time and space. And there, you were instilled with a nascent tendency towards clairvoyance that began manifesting during this period in San Francisco.
Thomas Fenn
I may not be able to absorb the surface meaning in the words and terminologies that you impart. But I do know they enter my blood.
May I continue, then?.
Caithlin Ni Houlihan
You may
Thomas Fenn
I would often visit the City Lights bookstore in North Beach amidst the bustling Italian cafes, burlesque shows, and jumbling tourism. The bookstore seemed to bob atop the time waters of another age as a study hall for poets.
When I entered the bookstore, I would feel to be passing through a curtain into the poetic magic of the 1950’s. I would sit there unperturbed and write in my notebook, or else I would walk like a cat over the wooden floor that would otherwise squeak like the boom of the sail being pushed by the winds, or I would simply listen to the conversation between the poets as they rocked on the creaking wooden chairs smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee.
One day, I was in the City Lights bookstore. There were books being displayed in a small corner of the bookstore unrelated to poetry, and there, by the hand of destiny, lay the book that Neil had discovered on the Work.
I was instantly transported. It appeared as though the mystical and the poetic were enjoining. I remember purchasing the book, and it became both a portal and a map that I would carry into the abyss that lay just over the edge of the horizon. My childhood was over.