I’m not sure which to tell you about first.

There were the people – other agents, non-agents, relatives and friends. Then there were the selected objects, all on the various levels of the cabinet. The cabinet itself, with its shelves, drawer, lower shelves with their wooden door, all laid out in a hierarchy of value. Or the place where I lived while doing this mission – a nondescript suburban house with no garden and a build-in garage (Talk about deep cover!)

I’m touching on all of this. Also there are my own feelings and breakthroughs, realizations and inner growth. So meaningful to me that I am able to take all of this in and process it. Then there is the mission itself. Is it real or is it simply a metaphor for this process I am going into. A mystical process of growth and transformation, the inner initiations that Inayat Khan spoke of long ago. For all the clunky coarse and darkened metaphor, the realization of truth is the actual outcome of both the mission and the book itself.

Flawed people are everywhere, undermining the true purpose of the mission. But who are these flawed people? Just aspects of myself enacting their part in the theatre of my life at this time. I’m zooming way out, past the meta look at the mission, the Wunderkabinett, HQ, my own cabinet, the objects selected, my accounts, my deep cover. All of it becomes a tiny compressed speck when viewed from space. A beeping pulse of faintest light only visible with the most specialized equipment. Visible to William Burroughs in his satellite orbit. Visible to Shamcher when his comet nears earth. Our lives are beeps of a message: we are here.

In that spirit I gather it all up together so I can finish everything needed. I had to tidy up the last of it before I could select the objects. I wrote up my document for HQ, then called on the archivist. She sounded thrilled to know I was coming into the heart of the mission.

She’d known I was coming, and had laid out a great coffee cake with her lovely butterfly cups and the Arabian-motif carafe.

“Congratulations,” she enthused. “Don’t worry, the coffee isn’t spiked. I have to tell you what happened that first day you came over. I could tell you were very agitated – so disturbed that your vibration was repelling all helpful energies I’d gathered up for you before the visit. I felt it was time for you to become an archivist, if you wanted to. It is a special designation in the work that can give you unique access to material and information very helpful to your project, and future work. But your agitation was so very great I couldn’t connect with you clearly enough to even begin. All your attention had been drawn to the surface details and the big picture had been distorted in your view, replaced by paranoid thoughts and conspiracy theories. So I put a little something in your coffee to calm you the fuck down, then began the induction. I called on my downstairs neighbour, also an archivist. Do you remember him?”

At her words I dimly recalled a man who stood beside her waving his hands at odd angles, making gestures that looked Egyptian or else just spooky.

“How had I forgotten him?”

“Easy,” she replied. “I willed you to forget just before you fell asleep.”

“But that just wasn’t fair. It isn’t ever right to do that. I have to have my free will activated or none of my research is valid. It will be immediately rejected by HQ. What on earth were you thinking?” It was a terrible violation.

I genuinely liked her, but she was definitely renegade, and this intrusion was unforgivable. Yet why was I still there? Was it the mission or had I been hypnotized?

We went into the process of reconciliation – each telling the other what had happened, crying, she asking for forgiveness. She apologized, I accepted, we began on new terms. I met the neighbour. He apologized too. We stood in her living room holding hands together, the three of us. For an instant I felt as if we had lifted from the floor ever so slightly.

“We still have so much to learn,” he said, as they apologized again. “We let the ideals be greater than our own day to day life and we began to erase our human everyday selves in favour of an idealized form of being that hadn’t even manifested yet.”

“What we didn’t know was that it would never manifest for us, until we stepped down from the lofty tower and let ourselves return to our bodies, hearts and minds.”

“Your time with us showed us that. We were appalled at how easy it had been to step into the dark side of our work, and how we justified it to ourselves as if it were important in and of itself.”

“Just like the cabinet – it is an empty shell filled with lifeless objects unless a human being is present enough to activate it. Presence is important. We weren’t actually present to ourselves but instead we were in our idealized state. It is beautiful but separated from the humans by a golden web.”

“That was how we came to see the folly and danger of what we’d got up to. You see, when you get to these stages of the work even more vigilance is necessary. At any time you can find yourself becoming monstrous from what we call the inner ego hidden behind the ideal. The ideal is necessary and paradoxically can be a negative influence – for it stifles the human in the name of training. That can be good, but at some point your human self returns, claims its experience, all of it, and from that grows and evolves. Even the Buddha said his teachings were to be abandoned.”

“We’ll tell you everything that happened so you have no gaps in experience, like you would if you had been given anesthetic for dental surgery.”

“But different. We didn’t perform surgery!”

“But we did remove a small mass that was putting pressure on your brain. We also gave you an infusion of deep awareness, information and ideas that we implanted in the place of that dull mass.”

“What? What!?? What the hell???”

“Wait, there’s more. We know you thought you were here for the afternoon, but we were together for three months.”

WHAT?