Lafayette showed up one morning as I was walking my dog. My dog ignored him except for a low growl as the dog busily smelled by the grass and trees around us. Lafayette seemed nervous.
"I've got something to tell you, but......" he said nervously. He usually showed reluctance about providing me with information as a ploy to get me to bargain with him. I had learned to ignore that tactic. He tried to get me to acknowledge him by surrounding me saying, "I'm here, I'm here." I continued to ignore him until he calmed down and stood quietly next to me. He tried his humble stance, but I was used to that also. This time I said, "OK, Lafayette, what can I do for you."
Happy to be in conversation, he walked with me and the dog chatting enthusiastically. "I've seen some action around the hospital. The new head honcho out there is attracting the attention of the incorporatives."
This was a new term for me, but I acted like I knew what he was talking about. "How can you tell?" I asked. He responded, "They have been showing up in their best suits and outfits wandering the corridors of St. Petes. I think they want to take over the hospital. Whenever the new CEO goes and talks to a staff member or a medical professional, an incorporate soon comes by to harass the person he talked to. The incorporate pushes at that person's perception pushing the pressure of the hospital's corporation power, agitating to make the person feel the need to accept what the CEO wants."
"So, the incorporates are tied to...." I started to say.
"....to the Corporate Soul," he finished my thought.
The Corporate Sole or was it Soul. Hearing that my mind flashed back to the face of power the angel had showed me. Reluctantly I had to give Lafayette the upper hand by acknowledging I didn't know what that was.
He puffed up and eagerly feeling he had something to bargain with said, "Oh that is too bad. The Big Corporate S is working hard, very hard," avoiding any specific details to reel me in. I countered with a question.
"With your experience as the head of your own religion, you probably have hung out with..." I bluffed, "with Corporate S."
He sputtered, "Yes, I worked with the Big S and what did I get. I was a figurehead. Sure I wrote the words, the whole thing was my idea, but the Big Shi.i.i," he faltered before he finished the vulgarity, "tricked me. I got to move around and pose and say profound things, but the Corporate Soul owned me. I...." He became so agitated that he began to fade. The more self absorbed he became, the less I could see of him. Like many times in the past that gave me an opportunity to think over what he said before he came back into my perception. I knew he would be back because he wanted a relationship with me that he could only have if he wasn't absorbed in himself. He was deeply afraid of being so caught up in his anger and jealousy and self loathing that he would disappear altogether. He once told me that he has seen that too often, quoting T.S. Eliot, dying "not with a bang, but with a whimper."
This conversation answered an important question. I thought I now knew the identity of threatening force I had seen in my vision from the angel...a person, persons who were the human face of the Corporate Soul. I also understood that the incorporates were physical and spirituality entities that serve the Big Corporate S....and they were everywhere. I had run into them often not recognizing that they were representatives of this powerful force that Lafayette seemed to be very familiar, his Big S. I'd have some things to ask if he came back from his self absorption.