• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2288 0

my intense desire to be a success at doing something and at being something, and thereby also activated my body as it moved within this world, just as all bodies are likewise activated. And what I experienced through direct sensory channels—the spectacle of the shadow inside of everything, the all-moving darkness—was so appalling that I was sure I would cease to exist. In some way, because of the manner in which my senses were now functioning, especially my aural and visual senses, I did in fact cease to exist as I had existed before that night. Without the interference of my mind and my imagination, all that nonsensical dreaming about my soul and my self, I was forced to see all things under the aspect of the shadow inside them, the darkness which activated them. And it was wholly appalling, more so than my words could possibly tell you.”

Nevertheless, Grossvogel went on to explain in detail, to those of us who paid the exorbitant price to see his stageshow exhibit, the appalling way in which he was now forced to see the world around him, including his own body in its gastrointestinal distress, and how convinced he was that this vision of things would soon be the cause of his death, despite the measures taken to save him during his hospital sojourn. It was Grossvogel’s contention that his only hope of survival was for him to perish completely, in the sense that the person, or the mind or self that had once been Grossvogel, would actually cease to exist. This necessary condition for survival, he maintained, prompted his physical body to undergo a “metamorphic recovery.” Within a matter of hours, Grossvogel told us, he no longer suffered from the symptoms of acute abdominal pains which had initiated his crisis, and furthermore he was now able to tolerate the way in which he was permanently forced to see things, as he put it, “under the aspect of the shadow inside them, the darkness which activated them.” Since the person who had been Grossvogel had perished, as Grossvogel explained to us, the body of Grossvogel was able to continue as a successful organism untroubled by the imaginary torments that had once been inflicted upon him by his fabricated mind and his false and unreal self. As he articulated the matter in his own words, “I am no longer occupied with my self or my mind.” What we in the audience now saw before us, he said, was Grossvogel’s body speaking with Grossvogel’s voice and using Grossvogel’s neurological circuitry but without the “imaginary character” known as Grossvogel; all of his words and actions, he said, now emanated directly from that same force which activates every one of us if we could only realize it in the way he was compelled to in order to keep his body alive. The artist emphasized in his own terribly calm way that in no sense did he choose his unique course of recovery. No one would willingly choose such a thing, he contended. Everyone prefers to continue their existence as a mind and a self, no matter what pain it causes them, no matter how false and unreal they might be, than to face the quite obvious reality of being only a body set in motion by this mindless, soulless, and selfless force which he designed as the shadow, the darkness. Nonetheless, Grossvogel disclosed to us, this is exactly the reality that he needed to admit into his system if his body was to continue its existence and to succeed as an organism. “It was purely a matter of physical survival,” he said. “Everybody should be able to understand that. Anyone would do the same.” Moreover, the famous metamorphic recovery in which Grossvogel the person died and Grossvogel the body survived was so successful, he informed his stageshow audience, that he immediately embarked upon a strenuous period of travel, mostly by means of inexpensive buslines that took him great distances across and around the entire country, so that he could look at various people and places while exercising his new faculty of being able to see the shadow that pervaded them, the all-moving darkness that activated them, since he was no longer subject to the misconceptions