Jan 12 2009
Here Is the Beyond
Here Is the Beyond
Once upon a time I died. Like almost everyone, it’s happened more than once, of course. In fact, I’ve died innumerable times – and been born one more time again. But once, in this life, I died for a few minutes. Which is to say that my body stopped circulating the air and fluids of life for a time. I, me, my self, kept on xperiencing though, in vivid five-dimensional colours. And yes, there was a tunnel.
I was standing when my heart stopped and as I looked down at the great, dark, lumpy deadness that suddenly was present in my chest I fell through it, turning inside out and becoming a tunnel, a tube, a vortex through which I was falling and flying.
It was made of all the memories that made up my life – not just ‘my’ life, but every human, fish, bird, animal, blood corpuscle that has ever lived was there with me, and even though every being dies alone - no matter if a multitude of witnesses is present - the moment of death itself is one great screaming orgasm experienced simultaneously by every one, every living thing, our mouths all agape. The tunnel was a living record of the past and future, all memories – but mine were displayed most prominently to me, myself, eye - just as the world we experience passes us by at the periphery of our sensorium, an ongoing tunnel vision, dead or alive. The strongest experiences, the most impressive ones, leaped out at me in high relief as I turned and twisted and fell and flew.
When you’re beyond the physical you are beyond time; as you approach the speed of light everything appears to be a tunnel, after all. When you’re beyond time, at that moment of the great primal rush that is the birth and death canal leading from one world to the next, everyone experiences the same thing at the same time. We all come and go together.
I was every fish that was caught in a current, every bird caught in a whirlwind, every animal diving for cover within a cloak of bushes, every blood corpuscle on the way to the heart. As I poured through the end of the world the tunnel twisted and whirled, always hiding the point of it all, the point of no return, the heart of the matter, and it became a thread in a vast woven image.
The tunnel is one thread in the great tapestry of life, and as one thread rises above another it is ‘conscious’ while the thread it occludes is ‘dreaming’. Turn the tapestry around and simultaneously the opposite becomes apparent.
The tapestry is vast, but I was able to follow one thread through the pattern and saw that the vast pattern of lives was as incomplete as the path of the single thread that was my experience. At the same timelessness I was approaching the plexus of light, which was glowing like a rising sun at the end of the tunnel and as I reached it, I encountered a net, a weblike sieve strung across its opening maw. And it caught me as a great, resounding BOUMMB filled the universe – the sound of one heartbeat, as loud as the sound that created the universe. Back to where plan net X marks the spot, where all things meet.
That’s why I’m here writing this to you ‘now’ - the same now that you are reading it, really. I and eye remember it all vividly, not as something to avoid in the mind’s eye, but as an ongoing experience that is with me now, dynamic, imprinted. As it is with you, when you close your eyes and open your memory, see through the waters of forgetfulness to the water of life.
Life and death, sensory wakefulness and supersensory dreaming are the same thing, appearing as the warp and weft of the reversible tapestry of existence. And everyone is the whole tapestry – everyone is everyone, and that’s about as close as third millennium Inglesh needs to get at this point – xcept for the most important thing. Every one you truly touch and are touched by, in every way, leaves the deepest and most prominent engravings in your heart, mind and soul. What we do unto others is what we do to ourselves - and other living beings are more than mere memory mirrors. That’s what draws us back for more, and more again.
Xciting, isn’t it?
By the way, this language needs more words beginning with X.
Further viewing – See the movies Donnie Darko, The Butterfly Effect, The Mothman Prophecies and Being John Malkovich for paradigms relevant to the nature of free will, destiny and the malleable multiverse. Or see them again.
- R.A.
To read what it’s like to die, see http://centraxis.blogspot.com/2008/03/to-infinity-and-beyond.html
Image - author’s
