I AM OUROBOROS

What does the desire to live forever say about a man? It's a very common wish. No one really wants to die—and yet no one's ever escaped their fate. There is a point in life wherein our own biology sits us down and sternly tells us—“Thus far shall ye go, and no further.” Yet, people still dream of the impossible.

My own physical difficulties had become great—almost too great too endure. The sixteenth verse of the Havamal had been staring me straight in the face for a very long time.

The coward thinks he will live forever

If only from fighting he flees;

But the ails and aches of old age dog him

Though spears have spared him.

I was born on Saturday, May 2^nd, 1953, at 9:47 P.M. I was one hundred and twenty years old. I had accumulated a quite substantial amount of esoteric, outrè, arcane—and even forbidden—lore. It is because of such ancient and alchemical knowledge that my life has lasted as long as it has.

By 2053, it was said they could now reconstruct damaged body parts through the application of nanotechnology.

There was talk that a man might have his brain surgically implanted in an indestructible android body. But while a blow involving several tons of force might not damage an indestructible skull—the shock of that energy, transferred through that skull would turn the brain to mush.

It was speculated that the electronic patterns of a human mind could be uploaded into an android's computer brain. But an organic mind reduced to digital binary code and pixels of RAM memory would lose its humanity. A round peg in a square hole is not a good fit.

There were rumors of clone banks. If your body parts wear out, you get replacement organs from your own clone. Genetically compatible, your body would never reject it. Of course, if the clones ever wake up to what you're really doing, then it's—“No, Massey—LET MY PEOPLE GO!”

I have heard they had even perfected an elixir of immortality. At several trillion dollars a pop you might get a single drink of that. Better start saving your pennies.

Even if these things were to work, you'd still have to live with all the mistakes of your life before you became immortal. You could change your future—but you could never change your past. What I wanted was a good future, based upon a good past. Why bother building a luxurious penthouse, when your cellar is all waterlogged, mildewed and rotten? The rats are running crap games in your basement, and the only reason you don't have cockroaches, is because they can't stand the smell of the bedbugs.

For all my painstaking care, I had no power to stop the increasing decrepitude of my body—the best I could do was slow it down. But my mind—that had been honed to razor sharpness.

For decades I had embarked on the rigid application of an outrè and esoteric spiritual discipline. That was my ace in the hole. Death was coming for me. I had led him on a merry chase. But I could see his approach. His black shroud concealed an arsenal of bayonets, daggers, krises, kukris and karambits.

But only a fool brings a knife to a gunfight!

Don't worry—I'm not a suicide. I'm talking about a different kind of gun. The one thing common to nearly all deaths is the fact that we have virtually no control over where our spirits go. We breathe our last and our spirit goes out with our final breath—to where? We do not know.

But I knew exactly where my spirit was going to go. I had decades of practice on a spiritual shooting range. My weapon was a Twelve Gauge Eisenkrieg Schwarz-Adler Gatling (I am partial to steampunk, after all). There was one bullet in its chamber—and that one bullet was me. My spirit, my mind, my soul. I raised that spiritual Gatling gun. I knew exactly where I was aiming myself. My afterlife was going to be exactly where, what and when I intended it to be. And as Death touched me, I pulled the trigger that belonged to no earthly gun. The year was 2073. I died at the age of one hundred and twenty.

I didn't regain consciousness for many months. I had expected to be fully integrated with my new body right from the start. But my new brain had to grow before it could fully host my consciousness. The greater portion of my spirit remained outside my body, like an observer.

But it had worked! I had reincarnated myself into a body that was entirely new. You can not imagine the incredible freedom of swimming in what seems like an infinite ocean. You don't eat or drink—yet you're nourished. Food goes directly to your stomach, eliminating the middle man.

As I grew, there was less and less room to move around in but that never seemed to bother me. I was more worried about the first real problem I knew I would have to face. The first time I'd been born I had a condition called asyncletism. This is where the baby's head positions itself at about a ninety degree angle to how it's supposed to pass through the birth canal. Mother had always said I was a stubborn child!

I struggled to position myself right. I had to fight, and fight hard to integrate just a little bit more of my spirit into that uncooperative little brat!

Ever wonder why you have no conscious memory of being in the womb? That's because birth is one of the most horrendous things you'll ever go through—so terrible you block it out—utterly!

Somehow I was successful at getting my head turned around and my birth was normal. No doctor needed to spank me to get my breathing going. I screamed and cried from the pure horror of being born. My screams of agony were louder than those of the most hardened sinner being thrown into a wood chipper, crying for God to save him!

But why was I worried about asyncletism when this was a completely new birth?

Because when I aimed that Twelve Gauge Eisenkrieg Schwarz-Adler Gatling of spirit, I had fired the bullet of my spirit, mind and soul into the past.

I had reincarnated myself.

As myself.

And today was Saturday, May 2^nd, 1953, 9:47 P.M.

Not exactly how Jesus meant it when he said “Ye must be born again.” But we don't always get what we want—not even Jesus Christ gets that.

By itself, reincarnation is a ludicrous concept. You're punished for something you did in your past life—something you can't even remember! What's more, any thing you've learned in that past life is completely stripped away from you and you have to start all over again from scratch. You're tabula rasa, a blank slate.

Reincarnation is the exception, not the rule. You must have done something so horrendous, so horrible, that it's set the universe severely out of balance and this is the only way to set it right. Unless you're a God or a Goddess, you end up in one of the multiple Heavens or Hells available in the After-Life.

On the other hand, you might just simply cease to exist.

Integrating my spirit with the mind and body of my child self was an excruciating task. The lion's share of myself remained unconnected as an observer, unable to affect what the child who was my younger self was doing. Nonetheless, my efforts to gain full control and integration were unrelenting.

1959. I was six years old. I was in the first grade. In my first life, some kid had lobbed a rock that hit me square in the head, hitting me just as I entered the school yard that morning.

Unless I could get control over this child self, the world of my second life would be an exact repeat of my first one. Knowing what was coming, I'd gotten into the habit of watching what was around me. Like it says in the first verse of the Havamal—

Have thy eyes about thee when thou enterest

Be wary always,

Be watchful always;

For one never knoweth when need will be

To meet hidden foe in the hall.

As I entered the gate, I saw the kid clearly. I saw him throw the stone. He wasn't even aiming at me. I'd just had the bad fortune to be in his direct line of fire. This time, I avoided getting hit—just barely! It had been extraordinarily hard—but I'd done it! I'd changed my life and changed my history! You can believe I had words with that kid! He didn't like being spoken to that way. He tried to fight me. The hardest thing for me was to take him down without teachers thinking I was the aggressor.

After that, there were further changes, but they were subtle and slow. It wasn't easy making those changes. There was a tremendous inertia I had to push against.

I really had no friends my own age—we're talking about a hundred and twenty year age difference. I was too much of a freak and got targeted by bullies. I never got beaten—forty years of martial arts training guaranteed that. The difficulty was in not revealing just how much I did know. I could have killed any of those kids with ease. Even force of numbers couldn't have taken me down.

It was a little easier to talk with grownups. But I still had to be exceptionally careful not to reveal what I was really capable of. Think about it. You see a six year old kid. You certainly don't expect him to be able to speak and write in more than a dozen languages—some of them dead ones.

As I got more and more integrated I enjoyed more highlights. I still grin when I think of what I did to Miss Reese.

1966. I was thirteen years old. Fifth Grade. Junior High. Miss Reese was a middle-aged old bat and was probably an old maid and a Jehovah's Witness. I'd said something to her that didn't agree with her Christian sensibilities. She'd responded in anger and astonishment—“Don't you even know the name of your God?”

Now first time around I had no idea how to reply to her. What she'd said made no sense to me. Mom had never raised me in the Christian Faith, though some of the family were Catholic.

We were not yet to the Summer of Love and much of the culture of 1966 was still meshed in the dregs of the repressive, conformist Nineteen Fifties. That was a time when children were taught to believe in the Christian God. Your family and church told you who your God was. That was not unconnected with the idea that America was supposed to be Christian country. Your God was chosen for you—you didn't get to choose it for yourself!

But this was my second time around and this time I did what I had long wished I had known what to do the first time. I stood up, my fists on my desk and said clearly, with the deep throated growl that might have come from deep in a hunting wolf's throat—“My God is Odin. Allfather. Master of Magick, Death, and Leader of the Wild Hunt.”

There was a real fear in her eyes. No one had ever called her on her bullshit before.

I wound up in the Principal's office. He harangued me, almost mocking me for believing in what everyone knew was a myth, a fairy tale. “I am true to the God of my ancestors,” I told him. He tried telling me how my ancestors had given up their superstitions and left them behind when they came to this country. I told him how Vikings came to America five hundred years before Catholic Columbus set foot on this land.

They called in my mother. He tried to shame her for not teaching me religious values. I said only that you didn't talk to my mother like that. I put the same fear in him that I'd put in Miss Reese—only this time it was the voice of a wounded grizzly bear!

It all ended in a court case. The school was found to be in violation of the First Amendment. The protection guaranteed in that amendment was not limited only to branches of the Christian Faith—it must apply even to ancient Pagan Faiths as well.

There were other highlights as well. I was sixteen and hitchhiked up to Bethel, New York in 1969. Got to attend the Woodstock Festival. First time around I hadn't come out of my shell until Earth Day, 1970.

Perhaps one of the things I'm proudest of was making sure I was in New York City on December 8, 1980. I had a murder to prevent. Gained two life long friends that evening. I still managed to keep a low profile. But it got to be difficult after that.

It had taken me thirty years to fully integrate my spirit and gain full control. By the time I came to the end of my second life, I had reached the age of one hundred twenty three. Inside I was two hundred forty-three years old. I died for the second time, in 2076. The world was even closer to falling into the Bottomless Pit than it had been in 2073. Once again I fired the Twelve Gauge Eisenkrieg Schwarz-Adler Gatling into the past. Once again it was Saturday, May 2^nd, 1953. 9:47 P.M.

The third time I was born was considerably easier than the second. This time, full control of my faculties was gained by the time I was thirteen. By then, I had experienced two hundred fifty-six years of life. It was time to expand my sphere of influence. I grew bolder implementing the needed changes. I had begun to “invent” things. Not too difficult when you thoroughly understand Twenty-First Century technology. And it's quite a perk to jump start the Information Age twenty years ahead of its time.

Each new life was an improvement on the last. If in my second life I had learned how to become vigilant, I did not have to relearn that lesson. If in my second life I had fully integrated at age thirty, in my third I had fully integrated at thirteen. I gasped when I thought of what my progress might be like in my fourth or even fifth lives!

Yet something kept nagging at me.

Hadn't there been times in my first life, when it seemed that something other than myself—or at least something outside of myself—had given me warnings and steered me away from danger?

In 1980 I had planned to take a bicycle trip down the coast. But two different times, when I was on the road, I got the strongest impression that I should not go to the coast. Both times the feeling was palpable. There was no mistaking it. Twice it gripped me, and twice I listened to it. Because I heeded that voice (but it was not a voice) I avoided a gigantic, ninety-mile-an-hour wind storm that hit the coast.

For a spirit to engraft itself onto a new born child, there is a tremendous inertia to overcome. One part of the spirit integrates with the body; the other remains the unintegrated observer, but constantly strives to unify the whole.

But the idea slowly dawned on me. What if there was a third part—that of the infantile self, the self that existed before I came from my own future to invade my own past? That child would not have understood this invader—it would have struck him as something foreign and alien—something to be resisted and fought against.

I was finding it very hard to breathe. Full realization crashed upon me like the tsunami that breaks down the obsidian cliff walls which have stood immovable since the Dawn of Time,

I'd been wrong. I had reincarnated untold number of times but I had never known it. In none of these lives had I successfully reintegrated with my younger self. But I had not been completely unaffected. It explained my rather freakish inability to interact very well with others. It would account for the reason I had always been something of a loner. It would be the reason I had always been something of an outcast.

I'd been at this longer than I suspected. It was a cycle—and each reincarnation was an improvement on the one before.

Each time I began again, it was Saturday, May 2^nd, 1953, at 9:47 P.M.

I was a phoenix. Eternally being reborn. Infinitely rising from the ashes of my own life—and each time finding my way back in. Would it ever end? Did it have to end? I couldn't say. All I knew was that I was going to live this life, over and over—remaking it anew, gaining more experience, gaining new sufferings, gaining new joys and glories.

The Midgard Serpent seizes its own tail in its unrelenting jaws. It bites down hard and holds it, unyieldingly.

My ending is my beginning. My beginning is my ending.

But there is no true beginning. Even as there is no true ending.

I am Ouroboros.

I am the serpent who takes his own ending—and makes of it his new beginning.

I am Ouroboros.