What is Middle Kingdom? Is it a hidden region in Australia, a state of mind for the whole planet, or an ancient Buddhist concept of personal illumination? How could I find it?
Of all the messages Uncle Frank had played in my hands during the chase for his inheritance, this one has proven to be the toughest yet.
“West of Uluru
Lies Middle Kingdom”
Quite possibly, I had misconstrued the message.
In contrast to previous instructions, this riddle might be a metaphor instead of a geographic clue.
Uluru might be an exotic princess, a hero of a forgotten novel, or a flowering shrub I didn’t know. The era of kingdoms was big in historical social order, and may come to an end.
Middle Kingdom may be Kabballah’s mildness, middle column of a mystical path.
The Buddha had talked about the ‘Middle Path’ to guide the self in life.
So Middle Kingdom might be a spiritual concept to discipline the mind.
The farther I roamed through the desert, the more likely this last explanation.
Then I recalled the words of Christ who had said that ‘the Kingdom of God is within’, and I remembered that revered Eastern Gurus had hinted that ‘divinity is within yourself’.
Several times in the preceding days I had been ready to turn around and make it back to Uluru, or one of the settlements west from Alice Springs.
For if Middle Kingdom is but a state of mind, surely, I had found it by now.
To me that frame of consciousness would be a purposeful fixing of one’s awareness on the essentials only, but without becoming a fanatic, swayed by self-righteous instincts.
To take only what is really needed. Be a discerning minimalist with a clear mind.
To tread lightly, and taste from the delights of the world without going overboard, living the Essene Gospel of Peace in current context. Happiness is not in having, but in love.
To manage desires by choosing a path of restraint.
But when I rose in the morning there were no longer any uncertainties.
With those first rays of deep red light flirting with stretches of cloud in the sky, and illuminating the silent hills around me in bio-plasmic radiation, my doubting self departed. The Earth, nature, is truly magic. Wild, but in undefined ways, orderly and cosy too.
Unknown birds landed close by, searching for food perhaps. The early worm?
South-West of me I could distinguish the landforms that contained the ‘castle’ formation, revealingly pointed out by intersecting ley-lines.
Middle Kingdom was to be found in that direction.
Twittering birds, frozen lizards staring ahead, a mouse feasting on an insect. I heard and saw a mosquito cruising past in search of nectar.
It is busy alright.
After a while, I was ready to start the trek to Castle Rock, a mountain formation I’d seen in my dream last night.
It would take a day, at least.
Up to now I hiked as the moods saw fit.
Like a butterfly in motion, in spurts, but determined.
Hanging around good waterholes to rest and mentally prepare for the next stretch. Not caring too much about the exactness of direction, or the making of ground, but instead focussing on the Land, like a gypsy moth.
Tasting leaves from new shrubs, looking for pleasant night time hide-outs, and always sniffing for water.
Forever wondering why.
Now, my hedonist darting gave way to concentrated moves.
Compulsive still, of course: when evolution or Great Spirits created humans and other lifeforms, compulsion was part of planning. Everything is related, yet also unfolding.
Goal directed, yet correlated. The whole idea of humans being a separate species is old fashioned nonsense. Special yes, separate no.
So, I walked across the sandy flats like Stanley must have walked when he was fairly certain of Livingstone’s whereabouts.
It is high desert in these parts. Hot in the day, cool at night.
Untouched Land; over and again you see rocks and bushes that few eyes have ever seen before.
And the rocks know it, and the bushes know it.
They try their best to win your attention.
It’s a psychic landscape.
You can cut the Mana like London fog.
I still wonder what Middle Kingdom is.
A huge underground Labyrinth steering world events, like in my dream last night?
Something in the fashion of an H.P. Lovecraft’s story, a story about giant underground cities in the Australian desert and under the Nullarbor.
Lovecraft was an American writer of ghost stories, and his underground cities were peopled with tall, frightening otherworldly beings.
Not the sort of Middle Kingdom I’d like to contact.
Perhaps it will turn out to be a space-age glass and concrete United Nations Base.
It turned out to be none of those things.
I arrived at the Castle Rock at mid-dusk.
There was an abundance of chirp’s, twitters and hoots, hums, whistles, presumably birds gossiping about nests and having neighbourly fights over territory, delightful love songs and mass odes to the departing sun.
Insect sounds droned in the background, a constant buzz with regular peaks and troughs. I had to tune in to them to become aware of their almighty presence, a blanket of sound.
The Castle Rock formation rose from the sparse vegetation against purple-yellow heavens. The steep hill looked as if put together casually by someone capable of placing huge blocks in a pile.
From up close it looked like many a granite hill, solid and almost squared.
In Pacific Islands cultures it is recognised that some landforms are supercharged with Mana.
Some are so strong that only the wisest of people may approach it.
And a few places may not be touched, on peril of grave misfortune. Even death.
I had the distinct impression that this Castle Rock was such a place.
Possibly it had been a temple in eons gone past, when this inland desert was covered by rainforests, and traversed by megafauna and Ancients.
At this time, I was not more than three stone-throws removed from the rock formation, standing in a shadow.
I decided to press on, maybe explore the other side of the hill, after all, the noise had an entrancing quality.
The atmosphere was hyper charged by now, partly by my heightened expectation, and partly by the extraordinary confluence of events.
My world flowed by in slow motion, or perhaps my sense of speed had changed.
I seemed to be in an altogether different space. One soaked in aether, like at the time I scaled down the side of Wollumbin in the Northern Rivers.
The law of gravity had no effect in this area, since the length of my steps increased easily to three metres per stride, as if I was running in slow motion, sliding through the air like a ballet dancer.
When I rounded the foot of the rock formation, the sky took all my attention, the blood-red disc of the sun, almost ready to set its lower rim on the horizon.
Again, I had the distinct feeling of stepping into a different dimension.
Was this perhaps dreamtime?
Was dreamtime possibly related to actual places, like a geographic storehouse of Mana, enthralling its environment with magic, where a mere traveller like me would be pushed into a dream world.
A world of aether, where the soul faces the Almighty Principle without the intervening illusion of the body? After all, according to physics, humans and all matter, are frozen in place vibrations, and largely empty space.
In a cave-like opening through the rockface I spotted a strange strobing light source.
Initially that didn’t disturb me. It just gave me the feeling I was hallucinating from all the excitement.
But upon approaching the cave the effect became stronger.
Twenty paces away from the entrance I stopped, completely disoriented.
It was an experience not so much frightening, as totally displacing.
Realities being shredded around me.
Every once and a while I saw the cave amidst all other visions, and the strobe light could be used as a sort of lead to the entrance.
I must have crawled those last few yards.
Had to find the cause.
The moment I entered the cave on all fours, something remarkable happened.
Relatively tempered light. The kind of light you’d expect in a cave at dusk.
My immediate reaction, upon entering, was to withdraw again, to examine the cacophony of sense impressions just outside.
No sooner had I stretched my head outside the entrance, and it all began again.
The cave encased more surprises.
There was a deep well in the back, full of sweet-smelling water.
Towards the rear of the cave was a donut-shaped ring, seemingly carved out of the rock wall, held in front of a cavity by a few connecting rods of rock.
The ring, the well, the cave entrance and the setting sun all appear to lay in a straight line.
And what is more, the cave was shaped like an ovum, remarkably smooth.
A few minutes later the sun disappeared, and I fell asleep like a lamb.
Totally oblivious to any further development.
I remained several days in that cave.
Except for the smoothness and the total absence of animal and plant life, the place gave the impression of the type of cave you might expect to find way out here.
Inside the cave you’d become aware of a thickening of the aether, a ‘starting up’ of Mana.
The invisible barrier at the entrance suddenly comes into being. As if a glass wall drops down.
Outside the cave sounds commence.
Somehow the cave and the sun are in harmony, creating psychic energy together. Pairing up for a stunning cosmic dance.
It must be a case of resonance, the cave amplifying accelerating intensities of sun generated etheric vibrations.
I spend my days discovering new meditative states.
I have sat right in front of the cave, and quite a way back from it, as well as inside the cave, during the phenomenon.
It makes the universe infinite.
It makes me very small.
I like it best inside the cave.
In the cave I found a map of Australia I have never seen before.
It shows thirty-three different ‘regions’. Islands generally fall under one central administration, but Norfolk Island is now part of New Zealand. States known as Queensland and New South Wales have disappeared. Each area cut up in several smaller ones.
Most, seemingly, of indigenous origin, but cities and townships were listed in their English names.
In the middle of the map, stretching from Kata Juta to the beginnings of the Pilbara lies a large region called Middle Kingdom
I have no idea what it means.
Secretly, I had hoped to find a big buried treasure here.
Twenty million gold bars or so, either in the wall, or under the sand of the cave floor. I’ve dug, but no result.
It may have to do with doors of perception, the 200-million-year-old continent of Pangea, dreamtime, Mana, the star Sirius, old cultures that drift in a close to infinite universe.
It tells something of how to balance yourself in the search for meaning, and something about power objects like the large smoky crystal in my pocket.
But then, I only sense these things.
Perhaps I’m wrong, or just imagining these.
One clear message however is carved on the stick towards the handle.
It read:
“Follow your heart
To where the Starry Cross calls
Go with the flow
To where the shadow falls”
It appeared I still had a way to go.
React
