THE BATTLE WITHIN US
Оригиналът на български виж ТУК.
Essay by Kamen Bnkov, included in the publication
‘Bright Sparks in the Aura of Bulgaria’
Translation: Neil Scarth
(Download pdf of the book for free)
‘CLUB 27’ – I’d heard of it. Several people I knew had told me how Jimi Hendrix had announced that he’d be the founder of it. But it obviously wasn’t the standard concept of a club that he’d had in mind. His death marked the beginning of a mysterious phenomenon in which something more than normal coincidences or deliberate human intervention is to be seen. It’s also as if this has to do with more than just the music industry. So who was the latest to join the club? Amy Winehouse? No, it’s more like it was that funny actor from Star Trek with the Eastern European accent: Anton Yelchin. Actually there are a lot of them whichever way you look at it. A whole host of renowned figures (including the sorely-missed Kurt Cobain), whose life was cut short in the bloom of their youth, thus depriving their exultant audiences quite unjustly of their artistic presence. Maybe there is something too ominous in this story. Or is it that we have simply not understood the meaning which lies within it well enough? And is the enigma of the figure 27 just something which applies to famous personages or could it be a sign of significance in anyone’s existence?
Yes, the number 27 has turned out to be a guiding principle in our life, and by ‘our’ I mean myself and my two friends, Zhivko and Vasil, the trio from secondary school. I ought to mention that our little group tends in any case to be distinctly characterised by a series of signs, starting with our dates of birth. Apart from that, the three of us are artistic types by nature, with our interests directed towards various spheres of art. My particular interests are directed more towards literature and the humanities + the visual arts; Vasko is a musician and artist; Zhivko for his part has an affinity both for words and music. Notice how distinctively our interests are grouped two by two.
And so it happened that Zhivko had been talking to me about this number – 27 – for quite some time. He claimed that it pursued him everywhere, that it found him in all manner of contexts. ‘Are you sure that you’re not just being influenced by Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison?’ At first, I wasn’t really much inclined to believe that there was a connection although I did know that he was not only a fan of Jim Morrison but felt a particular spiritual affinity with him, and that was actually from quite a while before he’d found out about the above-mentioned Club 27. In any case, in 2015 all three of us reached the ‘fateful’ age of this club safe and sound.
One September day Nadya, a Russian lady we knew and who, in common with quite a few people in our circle of friends, pursued a particular interest in the sphere of the esoteric, happened to be travelling to Bourgas and we arranged to go to a patisserie together, where she could also read my fortune in my coffee grounds (just for fun, not because some kind of misfortune was looming in my life). On the whole I’m not a great fan of coffee, but in cases like this I nevertheless subject myself to the tortuous procedure. Sip by sip, distancing myself mentally from the bitter taste and the bits of residue which stuck to my teeth, I managed to get the level of the drink down almost right to the bottom. We turned the cup upside down and waited a little. The grounds, along with the remaining liquid, had spread themselves out over the surface of the saucer. In the cup itself patches forming the outlines of distinct figures had also formed. But before I could have a proper look at anything at all, my attention was instantly riveted by a shape right near the rim. It wasn’t just a blurry patch open to all kinds of interpretations depending on your mood, but an utterly clear symbol. ‘Look here, a Latin ‘V’ (the sign of victory). But it wasn’t just a letter, it was rather something exactly like a coat-of-arms, to be precise like an ancient imperial emblem showing a bird of prey spreading its wings. This motif is woven in one way or another into the national emblems of all imperial nations. The winged creature soars high, above all others – its abode is manifested as the peak of Creation, and thus it is assigned the highest power. Its eyes observe all that happens in the whole wide world, for its gaze there are no obstacles and no inaccessible places. So, this figure struck me as highly surprising. There wasn’t even any need for interpretation of the shapes: they were perfectly evident.
The letter/bird/angel (I don’t know what exactly to call it, it’s as if all three words fit here) circled over a fearsome battlefield. After the chaos of explosions and haze of smoke, two military vehicles emerged clearly outlined. A tank and a helicopter. From the tank’s gun-barrel, through tongues of fire, a shell flew out. Even its path as it zoomed by could be seen, it was enshrouded in a light ‘halo’ (the colour of the coffee-cup) against the background of the coffee grounds. Neither the rotor nor the body of the helicopter was something that could be simply shoved into the category of smudged blotches.
Several elliptical lines charted its trajectory. A little off to the side, a great explosion loomed ominously, with its characteristic ‘mushroom’ and ‘stalk’ (resembling a brain as well).
The interesting aspects didn’t stop here. I looked at what was in the saucer. The heaped up residue and leftover liquid formed some kind of harmonious reciprocal relationship, almost like the Yin-and-Yang symbol. Along the line where the ‘light’ and ‘dark’ came into contact, there were three or four layers of residue which had managed to arrange themselves in such a way as to form a terraced pyramid with a rectangular base. Yes, that was it exactly – a pyramid amidst a kind of Zen-garden. Of course a combination like this was in total opposition to the ‘murals’ on the inside of the coffee cup. What could it mean? Harmony and war as two sides of the same coin? I gazed at the image almost as if bewitched. I can’t put into words exactly what my conversation partner made of it all, but a personal notion of it definitely took shape in me and filled me with energy. For the first time, though, I regretted not being in the modern habit of taking pictures. It wasn’t until I was at home on my doorstep that it occurred to me that I’d missed the chance. My telephone is of the older type anyway (I only use it for talking), I don’t know how the photo would have turned out in the circumstances, but it would still have been better if I had had something I could show people.
Illustration by Kamen Bankov
What does this all have to do with the topic: Club 27? Well, it was actually after this that the number 27 stormed into my life. I’d like to mention that before this I had consciously looked out for its appearance, but without success. Now it lay in wait for me at every corner of the city. Crossing the road, I passed different variations of car registrations including 27. I caught snatches of conversations pertaining to 27. I saw it on all kinds of printed material. The online situation was the same. I regularly turned out to be the 27-th person to ‘like’ a post. Vasil also started to come across the number. It was clearly a new and insistent phenomenon. The question remained as to what exactly it meant. From the very beginning I was somehow convinced that it didn’t presage a fatal demise as in the global Club 27 for any of us. Maybe that’s it exactly: different codes and every code is relevant to a particular group of people or a specific individual. Someone I know, for example, encounters 13s, for others it is 11s and so on. When needed, the figures turn into a message and point the way for you just like road signs. ‘60 km to the municipality of Rezovo’… ‘30 km to the municipality of Rezovo’… ‘Welcome to the municipality of Rezovo’. If there aren’t any signs, you’d start to feel uneasy about what’s the right direction. You’d wonder whether you hadn’t missed a turn somewhere back there or, even worse, whether you’ve not ended up on an unpaved dirt track. That’s why the numbers come like some kind of guarantee. The powers of the upper hierarchies whisper subtly to you: ‘Go on, straight ahead! You’re on the right track, there’s no reason to worry…’
To be honest, all of us – and here I mean my group of friends, were in need of this kind of a spur to action. It’s as if we had lost the thread a bit and we couldn’t see exactly how to act in terms of realizing our potential in future. We thought of what to do in theory but had trouble putting it into practice. For each one of us, 27 has been a momentous age. We took stock of the past in order to move on successfully into the future and invest our vital energy in more effective ways in terms of our goals. For the moment, it is hardly possible to establish or prove with 100% accuracy just what these kinds of phenomenon represent.
The problem is with the imperfection of our knowledge: science at present does not have a tool at its disposal which can clearly distinguish a purposeful event from a so-called ‘matter of chance’. Once again it’s by means of our personal perceptions, via our innate intuition that we understand that something greater than chance and the chaotic movement of objects is at work in our lives. There is some kind of plan, some kind of purpose, which always emerges in a veiled manner, as if to keep our imaginations active. Today the term ‘synchronicity’ has become popular and it does seem to express the essence most precisely. What we’re talking about is that almost miraculous alignment of people, events and circumstances which each one of us has experienced in one form or another.
I can give a rather interesting example. A friend of mine was getting ready for an exam. (She’s a law graduate). On the table there was a sheet of paper with the topics for the exam. She lifted a cup of coffee as a result of which two drops spilled out and fell on the page, thus marking out two of the topics. Those two topics were the very ones that came up in the exam later. So there you go: that’s Synchronicity. This, it seems, is also the driving force behind the enigma of 27 for us. In every case the link between the two things is unbreakable.
To conclude, I’d like to say a few words of Zhivko’s which he got me to write. For him, 27 is the age which is followed by spiritual illumination. A person ascends to a peak, concluding a cycle of maturation (in numerological terms, 27 can be reduced to 9, which is ‘a ripe fruit’, ‘ripe karma’, ‘completion’ – editor’s note) and attains a new level of awareness, but also receives a powerful emotional charge which he doesn’t always manage to cope with and to use for its prescribed purpose. This is exactly what happens with the representatives of Club 27. They had the opportunity to continue creating but they didn’t manage to realise the potential embedded in them properly – in each one of them there is a certain dose of emotional destructiveness and lack of control in their lives. Perhaps, if they had remained in this world, they would have started the revolution of the New Era, but the weight of the old order got the better of them… or perhaps the time was not actually ripe for this to happen earlier and that’s why it is coming today…
As for me, mysticism continues to follow me. When I reached the age of 28 in October 2016, it was as if the number 27 had disappeared from my field of vision for a month or two but lo and behold: on the 6th of December, the Day of St. Nicholas (interestingly, the name of the saintly one comes from the Greek word for ‘victory’ – editor’s note), it suddenly appeared once again. It was a lovely sunny afternoon and I went on a stroll around the town. On a pedestrian crossing a car with the registration 2727 stopped in front of me. Right then I looked at the time: 14:27. (Here it can be seen that the ultimate figure obtained through addition and reduction is 5, and 5 is interpreted numerologically as ‘friendship which has overcome separation’, ’freedom, expansion’ and may indicate VICTORY OVER DIVISION, thus marking the end of the old evolutionary stage, i.e. VICTORY OVER THE EGO, when the maturity of the Fifth Root-Race emerges so it can pass on to the Sixth? – editor’s note)
I constantly recall those shapes in the coffee cup. My conversation partner interpreted them for me along romantic lines, but the whisper of my intuition decrees something else. These signs foretell something of significance to all of humanity. The image of my life’s mission and that of many other people alongside me. The fearful battlefield, where the war of the New Era is being waged. The tanks and helicopters are merely a metaphor for higher powers. Here it is not a question of a physical confrontation. This is a battle on a whole other level. The battle for consciousness. The new civilization is taking form in the indistinct silhouette on the horizon and is trying to clear a way through the deliberately incited barbarism, massive financial interests and political machinations. Slowly but surely, the fight for resistance is being transferred to a new sphere where firearms lose their power and like a Herald Angel, the ‘V’ circles above the battlefield to signal victory and the founding of a new empire. ‘Empire’ is no longer a word imbued with epochal negativity. The Empire of the Spirit… it will reign over a world without violence and destruction and will turn it into a garden of paradise. The thought of it fills me with energy. All of my premonitions are being confirmed. The universe resonates with me and speaks to me. And the battle – the one within us – calls!
Author: KAMEN BANKOV
