Eyes of the Centaur

I wasn’t originally going to write publicly about this subject. It concerns some very painful memories over which I’m very sensitive. However after reading Ellis’ new book Dogged Days (which I review here http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2009/01/dogged-days-by-ellis-taylor.html) I found the matter I discuss below rearing its head with even more significance than before and the time has come to address it, to express it and to open it to “peer review” by HPANWO readers. In my review of Ellis’s book I refer to an incident which happened to me as a child in Green College. "Dogged Days had an effect on me that no other book has in that it triggered a forgotten, and possibly suppressed, memory of something very significant that happened to me at Green College, Oxford when I was 10 years old.” What that incident was occurred in about 1981 or 1982 when I was around 10 years old. Now that the memory of it has returned it’s reasonably vivid. I was at a wedding reception in the college hall and a friend of mine tried to commit suicide.

Green Templeton College is famous for its tower which used to be an 18th Century observatory. It is some 130 feet high and 30 to 40 feet across. Today it contains a viewing gallery accessed by a spiral staircase that runs around the walls. It has a hexagonal plan and is based on the Tower of the Winds in Athens. Here’s the college’s official site: http://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/postgraduate_courses/college_guide/green_templeton.html . The dinner was over, the cake had been cut and the adults congressed round the bar while we kids ran about the place playing. We climbed up the stairs to the top of the tower and that’s when it happened. The boy involved had been acting perfectly normally up to that point. He was somebody I knew quite well and played with a lot. We were at the top of the stairs by the gallery when he suddenly went silent, stopped what he was doing, walked over to the banisters at the top of the staircase and climbed onto them. He threw one leg over as if he was about to jump off; as I said the tower is about 130 feet high! If someone did that today I would grab him and try to stop him, but I was too young to understand what was happening. Then someone, I think it was my dad, spotted what he was doing and shouted at him from the ground floor "GET OFF THERE!" or words to that effect. My friend seemed to snap out of it and climbed back down onto the gallery floor. When I asked him why he'd done that he got very irritable and said "Fuckin' shut up!" and wouldn't talk about it. I’d totally forgotten about the whole affair until Ellis’ book dug up the memory. Ellis says at the start of the book that Green College is “reputed to be an entrance to the Underworld”. This in itself is very significant in relation to the event which took place that day; what in my view is even more significant is the wedding that was being celebrated, especially the groom.

I can’t remember how Centaur (not his real name) came into the life of my family. But I remember him from a very young age. He seemed to be forever at our house. He always used to walk in without knocking or ringing the doorbell, the only person outside the family who’s ever done that. He had thick light-brown hair and always wore a bush-green woolen jumper. He was a keen musician and played the piano and recorder with my mum and dad. He was there all the time, every evening of every day, all day at weekends. He really had his feet under the table! He eventually got married and his was the wedding we went to at Green College. After that I thankfully saw less of him, but he was still on the scene. He and his new wife moved into a house just a few hundred yards away from ours. You see Centaur was abusing me. I can’t remember a lot of the time we were alone together, but I do recall feeling terrified like I’ve never felt before or since. I don’t know how serious the abuse was, but I remember him hitting me around the face, shouting and swearing at me. There was one incident where he did this in front of my parents and some of their friends. My parents just stood there like sheep and did nothing to stop him. Afterwards when we were alone they came to me and told me that Centaur regretted doing it, but I had been misbehaving and needed to be controlled. Yes, I had been misbehaving, but the way they used this to mitigate and almost justify Centaur’s actions baffles and disgusts me to this day. If anyone did to my own daughter what Centaur did to me… it would be the last thing they ever did, and I wouldn't give a damn if she’d spat on his head. It took me most of the next two decades to forgive my mum and dad for that. But forgive them I did; you see Centaur had some kind of psychological hold over them both. As far as they were concerned, he was God. What I saw as my parents’ weakness, their cognitive dissonance, their denial, was in fact something far worse. Centaur had them under a hypnotic spell! It reminds me very much of Stewart Swerdlow’s description of when he was being controlled by “Rosie 2” in his book Blue Blood, True Blood. My mum and dad were his puppets. I found out many years later that my dad had had a fling with Centaur’s girlfriend, the one he was with before his wife, but that cannot explain their devotion and obedience to him. Today I feel no anger for my parents, only pity. I see them in the same way I see Swerdlow. I just feel anger for Centaur. A few years ago I confided in a close friend about all this and he said: “Ben, do you want to sort him out? If you do I’ll help you. We’ll drive to where he lives and give him some of what he gave you.” I’m pleased to say I resisted the temptation. If I took revenge on Centaur I’d end up in jail, away from my own child, maybe for many years. I’d be cutting off my nose to spite my face. Also by taking revenge on him I’d be giving him the message that he still had power over me, the power to make me hate him and to act on that hate. It would be very empowering for him indeed. The greatest insult I can give to him is to not take revenge and to get on with my life irrespective of him. Making him irrelevant in my thoughts and in my life is a far worse kick in the teeth than a literal one would be!... Centaur? Centaur who?

I never saw Centaur for years until my mum’s funeral in December 2006. He turned up with his wife and kids, but he’s no longer a danger to me now; he’s in his mid 50’s and I’m bigger than he is now! What’s more even if I wasn’t, I’ve got dignity and nothing can take that from me. I never spoke to him or even looked at him. However I caught a brief glimpse of him at my mum’s graveside. As soon as the burial was over, of all the people who were there, my dad went straight over to Centaur and started talking to him sycophantically. My dad still takes on a strange ecstatic look in his eyes whenever he talks about Centaur or someone mentions his name. It seems Centaur’s power over my parents is still there. Nevertheless I’m glad to say that he now lives a long way away and I don’t think he has been to my dad’s house since the funeral. I still worry about my dad though and would be very concerned in Centaur ever tried to worm his way back into my dad’s life.

The one thing which I’ve never forgotten about Centaur was his eyes. There’s a saying that the eyes are the window of the soul. Well Centaur’s eyes were windows to nothing. They were electric blue and were blank, dead, like a corpse’s eyes or even a doll’s; no depth, no life, no consciousness. They looked like they were painted onto his face. It still makes me shudder when I think of it. When he smiled he looked like a robot smiling. He was a very charming and intelligent man, well-spoken. He was educated, a teacher of mathematics and music and my parents arranged for him to tutor me and my brother privately; one more foothold he had in our family’s life. He was also a computer expert and helped me set up my first PC, an old Sinclair ZX Spectrum. These so called “helping hands” he gave us were just one more exercise in his power over our family. He was popular and had a wide circle of friends; he was the centre of attention at every party. But he was emotionally very calm and even cold; nothing seemed to ruffle him. But, as I found out only too well, all that charm and sophistication hid a domineering, deeply violent and sadistic heart. This once again caught on my mind as I read Ellis’ book. In Chapter 4 of Dogged Days Ellis describes a visit to the Castle Hotel in Tintagel, Cornwall. The place has a peculiar atmosphere and Ellis’ meets a rather strange art-dealer. But the most interesting part is his description of the hotel staff. One of them has a “shadow-eyed but smiling mouth visage”. There was also a waitress in the cafeteria who is said to be “dead-eyed”. This really rings a bell with my own observations of Centaur.

Several different researchers have been talking and writing recently about people who are “not people”. Paola Harris and others speak of humanoid extraterrestrials, beings from other worlds who live among us without us knowing, but Paola’s description is of beings very like us in terms of thoughts, feelings and spirit. These aliens she talks about may be real and live among us, but I strongly suspect that the “not-people” are a different phenomenon altogether. Different researchers give them different names. David Icke uses the term “red dress” in reference to the woman in the red dress, a computer simulation of a human from The Matrix. Amitakh Stanford calls them “organic portals”; Ted Twietmeyer calls them “black-eyed beings”. They are all describing the same thing in my view. The central theme of these not-people (the term I shall use, for want of a better one) is that they are human in physical form, but do not have what is commonly referred to as “human consciousness”. And this leads to the question of what that means anyway. People like Richard Dawkins and others are constantly referring to human consciousness as a singular object, as if it is unique, ubiquitous and indistinguishable in all human beings. Maybe not all humans have the same kind of consciousness and that the term itself covers a multitude of different states of mind. The consciousness of the not-people is described in various ways, but the phrase “they have no soul” is a recurring one. Well, I don’t pretend to know what a “soul” is; nobody does. Philosophers have been debating that since Socrates and today even neuroscientists have drawn a blank. But for practical purposes the statement is still clear and simple: not-people have no feeling of “I-ness”, self-awareness or Cartesian being. What are they if they have no human soul? I don’t think any honest person can claim to know. I’m reminded of Matthew Delooze’s theory about an intelligence from a dimension beyond our own sucking energy out of this one (See links column, and: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/10/breaking-serpents-spell-matthew-delooze.html) Beings from other dimensions may be able to take physical forms in the same way beings native to this one do; this idea is explored in the film The Mist (http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/11/mist.html).

The research pages into the “black-eyed kids” usually talk of feelings of great repulsion and fear in folk who encounter these beings. It could be that the not-people are the Reptilians David Icke and others talk about. I met a woman last year who claimed to have known one of these beings and has written a book about her experiences (http://www.hiddenmysteries.com/xcart/product.php?productid=17312&cat=387&bestseller=Y). I’ll have to read it. If these phenomena are all the same thing then it’s obvious they appear differently to different people. Some can’t see anything amiss at all, others see them shape-shift into grotesque Reptilian humanoid creatures, some see people with eyes which are totally black (This is what David Icke claims to have seen when he met the former British Prime Minister, Edward Heath), some see Reptilians but only see the eyes change into snake-like eyes. But the most common aspect that people tell me personally is what Ellis’ reports: people with “dead eyes”. Eyes that look anatomically normal, but they lack some etheric quality that makes them “alive”. Science will tell you what eyes are literally; sense organs that have evolved to pick up electromagnetic radiation, and the frequency they can perceive is what we call “light”. But like many other body organs the eyes’ biological function is not their whole essence, which is clear when we hear catchphrases like “window of the soul” or “he died of a broken heart” or “lily-livered” or “she’s got guts, that one!”. I'm also fascinated by the concept of "Eye of Sauron" in Lord of the Rings as this all-seeing, overriding beacon of darkness. It could be that sometimes we achieve the psychic ability to see through the “window of the soul” into the house of the mind… and realize that there’s nobody home.

Along with fear and repulsion, witnesses also report that not-people with dead eyes tend to be very cold and emotionally dispassionate; they also commonly exhibit very antisocial and aggressive behavior. Paradoxically though, at the same time they are often described as people with a bizarre kind of attractiveness or magnetism, an ability to enthrall and enchant others. All this fits into what I felt during my relationship with Centaur. I’ve known one other person in my life with those kinds of eyes and she too exhibited these very same character traits. It’s not my intention here to demonize anyone who has these traits, nor would I advocate prejudging someone like that either, but I have a right to comment frankly on how another person’s behavior affects me.

When Ellis nominates Green College as an “entrance to the underworld” I’m not sure whether he means a physical underworld, in the form of Oxford’s many secret tunnels and catacombs, or an extra-dimensional underworld in the form of a stargate to another lower frequency Lovecraftian meta-hell. I’ll have to ask him when I see him. Is there a connection here between this alleged underworld entrance, Centaur and his bride choosing that location for their wedding reception and my little friend’s attempt to throw himself off the tower gallery? I’ve checked the archives of the local newspapers and there’s no evidence that Green College is a “suicide hot-spot”, but I’ve asked a friend of mine who works there as a butler (always an occupation adept at transmitting and receiving gossip!) to look into the matter privately and let me know if he hears any rumours.