Chapter 5

While meditating to bring themselves calm and intellectual confidence on the mat at the foot of the bed, SHE, Natty and Raul were not distracted as Jordan and Caleb, Jordan's lover and partner entered the garden room and began setting up the cameras around the bed, three 16mm movie cameras at eye level and one a foot above the high interior door on a triangular mantel built for it. Once in place, they were focused and marked, a couple needed later to film Natty's performance piece which moved throughout the house. Canisters of unused film were placed at each camera to switch the twenty minute long reels, a job Caleb volunteered to do, sacrificing his cosmic pleasure for his art, though the orgy two nights before with every initiate in Thunder Bay readying the event had an awesome climax which made him feel sated and not left out. The recording device with stereo microphones set up in covered spots on opposite sides near the bed was tested, Jordan wearing headphones as Caleb stepped carefully around Joseph singing in his remarkably agile and multiple octave voice an improvised test song, and once satisfied, Jordan marked the controls and moved the mics to the lectern. At the precise moment in which Jordan spoke into his walky talky to let Sarah know the room was ready, the cloud that had been interrupting the sun's light moved out of the way and a rich amber glow filled the room lighting up the precisely mounted mirrors focusing the light at the five large sexually explicit and beautifully symbolic canvases Candice had created for the room, painting them under an amber filter Natty had sent her in New York City, finishing them a couple weeks before, shipping them to Thunder Bay, arriving at the mansion when the paintings arrived, and when she, Karen, Natty and Andy finished installing them, the foursome consecrated the bed with a joyous orgy. The amber sunlight also illuminated Joseph, his pale naked body reflecting gold as he lay still in the middle of the huge bed, his legs and arms slightly spread, his penis resting small on his thigh, several red and blue wires like kinked rays emerging from his bald skull raised on a small pillow attached to a machine with a monitor and a sheaf of paper being scratched on by mechanical hands as it rolled from one pile to another while Kevin in his element observed the monitor while Tina kept her eyes on the machine wired to his chest. The members of the order began seating themselves on the tight but comfortable pile of the carpet and closer on the spongy mat that seemed to emerge out of the carpet, surrounding the softly rounded huge bed, their eyes sharing a similar travelling pattern, from Joseph, holding their gaze the longest, to the bed and its subtly carved elongated figures conjoined in ecstasy around the dark wood platform, to the walls and Candice's powerful paintings, entering the space in awe. Once settled and Andy secured the door, Raul stepped to the lectern and the day officially began.

"Welcome brothers and sisters to the first annual gathering of the Order of the Love Monk," Raul started, his voice steady and conversational, slightly high in tone. "Most of you don't know me since I haven't had a chance to meet you outside this room. My name is Dr. Schneider, Brother Raul to you. I am a neuroscientist, investigating the darkest frontiers, the brain and its processes and where these processes originate. It seems a strange place to begin this historic occasion celebrating a mystical philosophy with a joyous, rapturous cosmic experience as its central reason of existing, an experience all of us have shared and have been transformed by. There are two reasons I am here. The first is obvious, the extraordinary discoverer and progenitor and philosopher and communicator and author of our Order is unable to speak at this time. I will go into more detail later regarding his condition and the seemingly terrible timing of it. The second is, as far as Brother Joseph believes, the most significant. From the beginning of the Order, when Joseph realized his experience of cosmic enlightenment arriving through multiple simultaneous orgasms was shared and even reached beyond the orgy to others miles away, he wanted to spread the word, to share the experience with as many as were willing to experience it, to be a guide to this wondrous place, and to exercise the minds of his followers to intensify and elongate the experience. But he had one major fear. He didn't want to be a shepherd leading his flock. He wanted all initiates to have a sense of their uniqueness so that while our paths might converge into the shared experience of cosmic enlightenment, those paths must diverge in their own special and extraordinary way so that whatever benefit is found through following his philosophy and having our minds blown, each of us must embrace the variety of ways our minds may be enriched and improved. Personally, those few initiates I have met show to me Brother Joseph has nothing to worry about because they are the most gifted, creative, unique, powerful and beautiful people I have ever encountered, and to consider any of them anything like sheep would be ridiculous, and I have a feeling all of you share these attributes. Whether Joseph's concerns have been salved by his amazing followers, I don't know, though he probably has the concern stashed somewhere in his enlarged prefrontal cortex, here," Raul tapping his forehead. "But the extraordinary quality of his initiates has brought forth a new concern. In his first book, there are several mandalas expressing various aspects of his philosophy. If you have had the chance to explore his new book, "The Strength of the Soul: Extending the moment and the lifetime of the orgasmic initiate," you will notice a lack of unattached circles. Nearly every diagram is a complex of interconnected forms, circles and triangles and other multiple sided constructs weaving together. As the book develops, and especially at the end when he focuses on the strength of the Order, these interconnections become more complex until they need to be contemplated for hours or days to bring forth their purpose. But even the most rudimentary combination of forms makes clear Joseph's more recent overriding concern. Unlike a simple mandala radiating from a center point, there is no center to these graphics. In a nutshell, to use a gruesome cliché because Joseph would be the first to admit he's a nut or crazy, and right now he seems to be just a shell of a man, which, as I will explain shortly, he is not, but anyway, in a nutshell, Joseph is the center of the Order and he doesn't want to be. Continuing to develop and expand the Order is not the problem; he is already making notes for his third book which I am happy to say I am having some input. What is frustrating to him, and my enthusiastic assistance is easing it to some extent as has the assistance of Candice, Natalia, Jordan and Carol on the first book and the same people along with Sheila on the second, is that he feels like he is the only one working on expanding the philosophy and wonders why with so many of you brilliant people involved, no one has added his or her own view. That's why I'm here speaking. And that's why we are officially calling for papers by any of you, working independently from Joseph but in collaboration with whomever you may need, the subject of your choice to be submitted to Brother Andy here in Thunder Bay by September 1^st. Depending on the length of the project, we will either publish an anthology including your work or publish your work as a monograph. Okay? But believe me, if this comes to nothing, Brother Joseph believes the Order will fizzle away, and even if he won't stop his research and quest because he is an obsessed man, whatever he may share will inevitably be received by a more and more deaf world.

"Many of you will be thrilled to learn that lengthy introduction was longer than my actual presentation. When I first met Joseph, it was because of the phenomenon you are seeing. He had a spell and was rushed to the hospital and through the inadequacy of understanding many aspects of the mind, he bounced from specialist to specialist, hearing many theories or beliefs, all proving suspect to say the least. Out of this, a neurosurgeon alerted me to his unusually large prefrontal cortex. Upon meeting with him, I was fascinated by the man, and luckily he was fascinated by me. With the assistance of Tina here and Kevin, Joseph was given an extremely detailed tour of my research clinic. The reason I have a clinic and assistants of these two student's caliber is that I have written some fairly significant papers on the relationship between various sections of the brain, usually, as is the classic method in my field, examining deficiencies in specific parts and the effects these have on behavior, thinking, memory, motor activity and so forth. Slowly but surely, technology is advancing the measure of the electrical activity of these various parts to get closer and closer to specific areas and causations. What was interesting and important about Joseph was instead of deficiency, he was, so top speak, extraordinarily well endowed. Willing to play guinea pig, we began testing him. And because he was interested in the results as well as expanding the reach of the results, he collaborated with Kevin to brainstorm so to speak ways of broadening the measuring devices or tightening them or creating new phenomena to measure. For instance, the astral projection phenomenon in which an initiate experiences the pleasures of an orgy from a distance was tested via not only a mapping of electrical impulses of both the participant and the receiver, which by the way resulted in amazing similarities in brain activity in specific areas, but infrared photography, spectral analysis of the air and bodies, heightened electronic receivers and even barometric gauges, all of which have had interesting but overly subtle results and need fine tuning.