Padre Yama: The Channel Walker

      A man of science is obsessed for most of his life with recurring dreams and nightmares that become phantoms to haunt him.   He is unaware that those sleep episodes are actually OBE's — out of body experiences — during which he travels back into the past.

      On those trips, he repeatedly encounters certain individuals whose lives imbue his, becoming part of his memory banks.   Unlike the theory of reincarnation, they are not his own past lives that he remembers.   They are the psychically absorbed experiences of others.   Those "borrowed" lives, plus images from his own, coalesce into a new entity, inhabiting the backwaters of his psyche, evolving into an alter-ego of sorts that suddenly takes on a life of its own.  

      When the man, at age 65, is attacked by a street gang, a new being is given birth into the physical world as Padre Yama — part priest, part monk and part samurai warrior.   Padre Yama takes on the role of inter-dimensional vigilante, appearing first to strike back at the man's assailants, and then continuing on a rampage against other wrongdoers.   He appears and disappears, moving within a realm of multiple dimensions, between a substratum of human consciousness and physical manifestation, and striking at will.

      All the while, the man strives to come to grips with his phantoms — a task made more precarious by the backlash from the criminal elements that have targeted him.   What will be this man's fate?   And how will his outcome play against his mind-spawn, Padre Yama?

The Nature of Padre Yama

This is not a story of reincarnation… at least not in the way that most people think about reincarnation.   Although that subject is mentioned here, it is mainly a troubling concern in the mind of the protagonist, Dr. Donald Abelson.

While reincarnation is commonly conceived of as the evolution of souls through a succession of different lifetimes, the thesis here resembles more the Spiritualist idea of materialization.   Even in this, however, it is not the usual idea of materialization.   In a mediumistic séance, it is expected that communication will be made with a previously incarnated soul, an actual personage who has lived a human life.   Padre Yama, to the contrary, is a composite — a combination of pieces of the past… from lives lived, yes, but not as complete living souls from the past stepping into the present.   Rather, Padre Yama is more of a manufactured entity, comprised of snippets “borrowed” from a past that has remained the past in its own realm of reality.

So, Padre Yama is not a being with a soul per se, but considering that he was conceived in and sprang forth from a fertile, primordial soup of consciousness and time, he might yet evolve and grow into a viable psyche.   In the meantime, he is sustained by some source of energy.

What kind of energy would that be?   The universal urge to live might be enough, but it may be more pertinent to question Padre Yama’s connection to Donald Abelson.   It would seem that the victim himself might be the trigger that sparks this urge to live in the phantom avenger.   After all, he would have a personal interest in the affair due to his unwarranted attack.   While he was a fairly passive man by nature, it would be unlikely he would have no trace of indignation, even rage, over his situation.   The impetus to right the wrongs in the world many times has such roots.

BACK