Torn between time and timelessness, I move in and out of dreams. Everything connects. A soft gray texture suffuses my inner vision. Conscious awareness asserts itself. It penetrates like a torch in a cave.
I comprehend this nebulous space by forming metaphors. A palpable emptiness engulfs the mind. It is as if layers of thought, anxiety, impulse, sensation and emotion are becoming more tenuous and transparent. They drop away and disappear as I dive more deeply within the softening darkness. I am suspended. I contact an inner sense of self – a place of peace.
Much later now, I can sense the brilliant warmth of the morning sun. I strain toward the light but I cannot open my eyes. I fear I will never again be able to awaken. I am lost in some ambiguous space. It hardens in response to my struggle to evade it. Succumbing softens it. I drift inward, toward the ether of dreams.
I hear my voice – “It felt like the last time we would ever talk. I hung up the phone, reached for the book and wrapped it in brown paper. I sent him my copy of “The Book of the Dead.” Then he died.
The bones of my skull seem to slide beneath the skin of my cheek. Fluid pressure pulses behind my eyelids. I can’t keep my mind focused. Consciousness ebbs and flows.
I recognize this as a state between living and dying. But that knowledge disappears as soon as thought takes form. My senses move back and forth like foam on the shoreline. Waves of awareness form a momentary frontal boundary. I cling for a while to the edge of specific thoughts or sensations only to be pulled back through the turbid tide.
Layers of quiet thought, like the enfolding petals of a dark flower, encircle and close one at a time around my conscious mind. I sense an opening, a deep tunnel turning downward. My awareness drifts there as if riding a descending wind.
Faster now, down through a shimmering well of images, I pass successive stages of awareness. I hear my mantra echoing through the chamber. It is soon replaced by the ancient Vedic vibration I recite silently and subconsciously.
I pass the brilliant floral gardens, smooth cobblestone steps and forest paths conjured up while moving through realms of imagination and self-guided visualization. The sound of heartbeats merges with rushing air in a synchronized choreography of blood and breath. I come ever closer to what I comprehend as the center – the space of non-duality and pure awareness.
Silence and emptiness devoid of attributes – devoid even of the attribute of emptiness. There is no thing. It is not opaque, not black. It is not transparent, not white. It is not experienced, it simply…is…and is not.
Unbounded thought expands and generates resonant frequencies. Ethereal reverberations multiply. Layers of vibration create being, harmony, tranquility, and illumination.
Energy increases at the boundaries of infinite and infinitesimal, forming rudimentary matter. A cosmic alphabet of elementary particles, thin plumes of hydrogen, specks of cosmic flotsam organize themselves into larger and larger phenomena along multi-dimensional paths and tidal lines of gravitational tension.
Eons pass. Stellar pyres and their aggregations of orbs spin seas of planetary protein into primeval life. Trees fall in forests. Sounds are heard. Countless births and deaths give rise to increasing instability, improbability, and complexity.
New minds form, minds adrift within the vast ocean of consciousness. Awareness expands to experience the overwhelming pulsations of the surrounding space as living heartbeats.
An angelic human, speaking about a secret language of signs, stops in mid-sentence and smiles at me. We have nothing to say.
In this moment, there are no distinctions between myself and my experience. The only identity I feel is the universe itself beating like a dark star-studded heart in an infinite empty void. And the pulsations I feel are those of my own heart beating. And I am born. I am a child again. I live a billion lives. I die a billion deaths. There is nothing but this moment. There is one consciousness we share. Its nature is our desire.
I know this now. And because you are here with me…you know it too.
I am going back…back inside…back to my body…back to life.
I am born to a new universe.
Insubstantial as an apparition, I arise from a deep sleep. Gazing downward, I glimpse my body. It is not breathing. I am aware of my incorporeal existence but unaware of what awaits me. I decide to allow this dream to unfold without intervention and to simply observe events as they occur.
Tullio DeSantis 