I discovered Steve Erickson’s publication, The Emshock Letter, about a year ago. (“Do you know this guy?” Ram Dass wrote me. “He puts out a newsletter that is a delight.”) I promptly subscribed, thus becoming one of a mere seventeen readers who, at irregular intervals, get to ponder Erickson’s irregular musings about life.
Subscriptions to the nine-year-old letter are free — but, until now, hardly anyone has heard of the thirty-five-year-old Idaho pharmacist, who writes late at night, with coffee and cigarettes at his side, if he’s not, ahem, travelling to other dimensions or otherwise journeying beyond space and time.
Reading The Emshock Letter is a little like doing LSD or, perhaps, having a sudden out-of-body experience yourself. Don’t ask me to explain why. I’m not even sure who Emshock is — he’s the “space poet” whom Erickson seems to credit with writing these things, but not really. . . . As Emshock himself would maintain, my “physically-restricted space-time-fixated perceptual awareness” keeps me from understanding it any better than that.
The writing ranges from down-to-earth, poignant, wise observations about dreams, love, suffering, and the ups and downs of the spiritual path to far-flung adventure tales. (In one, Erickson falls in love with a neutron star, who at first appears as a beautiful woman; their love-making culminates in a supernova explosion, for by then he too has become a star. . . .)
It’s certainly not for everyone. In places, the writing is frustratingly obtuse, and some of the letters are too wordy. But so what? The Emshock Letter is a trip — a mind-expanding journey to places you haven’t been and may not even have known existed, and a rediscovery of familiar places as well. “Isn’t it strange?” Steve Erickson asks. “I mean, things we perceive through our senses and collectively come to define as reality? Isn’t it incredible? The stuff we think of as the normal content of life? Who could ever think up things like galaxies and suns and planets and complex endoskeletal vehicles in which to confine a conscious entity for a transient period of time? I mean, isn’t the whole affair so completely far-out that we could never even begin to imagine what it would actually be like to go into one of these structured physical complexes and do a birth-to-death lifetime? Yet here we are doing one. What I think when these thoughts occur is, ‘Wow! God sure has a fantastic imagination!’ ”
The Emshock Letter is available by writing Steve Erickson, P.O. Box 411, Troy, Idaho, 83871. Our thanks to Steve for permission to reprint these excerpts.
— Ed.
In Ram Dass’ work to become “nobody special,” he has become “very special” to so many people. I think he will finish this work — he will become nothing special, but in a very special way. Of all the spiritual “teachers,” Ram Dass is the greatest on the scene today. This is not only because he is the best student, but because he is honest. He has the ability to listen, the intuitive wisdom to see where he’s caught, the honesty to admit it, the humor to laugh at himself, and the power and will to get on with it. More and more it seems to me that the folly of his life is under control.
Life hurts. There is no way around it. It hurts to be born, it generally hurts to die, and everything that happens in between hurts in some way. Suffering is inherent in the human condition. Buddha is right, of course. It’s all suffering. Gurdjieff is also right: “Only conscious suffering has any sense.” Gurdjieff also says, “One of the best means for arousing the wish to work on yourself (which as we know is the only work any of us can really do) is to realize that you may die at any moment. But first you must learn how to keep it in mind.” And: “Remember you come here having already understood the necessity of struggling with yourself — only with yourself. Therefore, thank everyone who gives you the opportunity.” Most people are unconscious nearly all the time, and so most suffering has little sense. This letter gets Gurdjieffian at times, as it seems there is a certain connection there. Gurdjieff now is perhaps in some astral realm, or maybe he’s back here. I really don’t know.
I am quite easily influenced by several teachers, and by the masters who have journeyed to the physical plane across aeons of time, because the truth behind the words, the power of the statements on non-verbal levels, touches a place deep within me. For me, John Lennon was a great teacher. His life was a beautiful statement — what he said, his music, his art, all of it.
There is a certain type of very advanced and intricate meditation that I do from time to time. It involves going out into the forest. Once in the forest I cut down the cellulose skeletons of dead but yet standing trees with a Stihl 045 chain saw. I then cut the logs into small sections which I load into a three-quarter-ton Chevrolet and take them all here. This I call “chain saw meditation.” It also keeps us warm throughout the cold North Idaho Winters.
Disengage yourself from the influence of matter. Separate yourself from the hypnotic belief that matter is what you are. You have found manifestation through material substance, but the substance is not you. Your consciousness has found expression within mass extended through dimensions of space and time, but the mass is not what you are any more than the dimensions through which it is extended define your true home.
Lost in the definitions you have created of who you are through matter, you become lost as to who you really are, which has nothing to do with matter. “Have no other Gods before me” simply means do not place the material above the spirit which animates it. “Lay not up your treasures. . . .” This was the message of Christ — still is. Pure and simple; but we worship the messenger and disregard the message. We suck the finger pointing the way to a new reality, a promised land, the kingdom of heaven, rather than to follow where it points.
How does one disengage oneself from the influences of matter when matter is comprising the perceived reality of waking daily life? Emshock says, “Take nothing seriously, not even not being serious.” It’s all temporary anyway, and anything that’s not going to last (which is every material thing) cannot, by any real definition, be too important. Anything that will perish, which includes all places and things you know, along with every definition you have ever had of who it is you are, is not worth any conscious energy you would need to invest in it to elevate it to a state of importance.
No matter how intelligent you are, or consider yourself to be, your linear, rational mind wi1l never figure it all out. It cannot. Defining yourself within the limits of this mind restricts your consciousness to the boundaries of definition. This is something that none of us vast, multidimensional beings were ever meant to do, yet it is something all of us have done. This is “original sin” and we all do it daily, hourly, every minute and every second.
Everything you have ever defined yourself to be is an illusion, just as the permanence of space-time is an illusion. Everything you have, you are surely going to lose, and everything you know will soon be gone. Why do you take it seriously? Why do you cling to it? Why are you so afraid?
You have nothing to lose that will not soon be gone anyway, so why do you fear its loss so much? And why do you grieve when you lose the things you know you’re going to lose? Why do you feel guilt in relation to things which lie in the past? Why do you worry about the future when the present moment is all you have? It’s all you’ve ever had, and all you ever will.
Why not accept the present moment for what it is? Why not rejoice in it? Why not drop all linear, rational definitions you have of yourself and the world within which you manifest and allow what you really are to come through? Why not abandon guilt, worry and fear and allow yourself a vision unclouded by these things? Why not look through eyes unclouded by longing? Why not set your thoughts aside and allow what you are to be? What have you got to lose?
You don’t need to die to go consciously to several astral planes — heavens no! I’m living proof to myself of that. I usually can do it quite easily each time I lie down to take a short nap at a time I don’t normally sleep. Since what we call “normal waking awareness” is present and at least partly functional in primary levels of twilight sleep, simply pay attention and abandon any fear. The only reason that some of you presently cannot do this is that you haven’t learned how to pay attention, or perhaps you’ve too much fear. I’ve learned to pay attention, and to let go of my fear. When vibrations begin, which they will if you pay attention, allow the frequency to increase — to increase to the point where they’re indistinguishable from warmth. Here, if you will pay attention, you will notice that your astral form (similar in most respects to your physical form, but devoid of imperfections and only limited by your thoughts and conventions) no longer tightly clings to your physical form, but defines the same space as if held in place by magnets which aren’t very strong. Simply will yourself to rise up in your astral form and travel wherever you will. Simple as that.
That I can do and have done this so many times is living proof to me that you can do it too. Though you may or may not have any desire to perform this simple maneuver, the choice is there for you. Only two things to remember: you have to pay attention and to let go of your fear.
As you look at yourself through your astral eyes, you’ll find it’s easy to love yourself and appreciate what you’re going through from a far greater point of view. You’ll instantly know without any doubt you can live without your body, and your body is not you. There is no ego destruction in death (it simply does not apply), and no such thing as eternal rest (and there is no pie in the sky). God, guru and self are all the same. You will see within everything including you. And there’s nothing on Earth that does not shine with love and light and truth; it’s just that we get great illusions confused in our rational, linear minds. There are so many beings in the astral realms, some beautiful beings, some radiant beings — most of them loving, all of them kind — no different than you and me. If this may seem a paradox, just look for yourself and see.
The time is Saturday, August 11, 1979. Great and small things are in the making, though of course they always are. There is nothing that is particularly unusual, and the setting is not strange. The frame of mind I am in is nowhere near that which I would define as creative, as I sit here in the study. I reach for a book of matches by the typewriter on the desk, rip off the second to the last match, turn the cover over, strike it and light a cigarette. The disposable butane lighter ran empty a couple of days ago. On the way to the bathroom, I open the door to the stove which has not been in use for months, and toss in my cigarette. The red robe I remove and drape over the ironing board in the washroom. I walk into the bathroom and turn on the light. As I look at myself in the mirror, I can see my face looks oily and my eyes are bloodshot. I shouldn’t stay up so late as to become as tired as this, I think as I squeeze some toothpaste out on the bristles and begin to brush my teeth. After urinating and flushing the toilet, I turn off the light and walk naked into the bedroom where I walk around to the right side of the waterbed and ease between the sheets. Dianna is sound asleep. As I lie on my back I feel the cool, Autumn air falling into the well and down through the half-opened window to dry my yet damp face. Dry grass has a fresh country smell as it starts to take on moisture from the cool, Autumn evening air. This thought seems to linger and spread so that no new thoughts arise. I turn and pull the blankets up over my right shoulder as I feel Dianna’s warm skin press against my back and legs to cuddle up so close to me and soon we are both asleep. . . . Between the wall and the right side of the bed I stood in the confused state of having no memory of getting out of bed. The room was completely dark but for a faint illumination through the crack in the bedroom door. In the bed were the forms of two bodies as I realized the condition where the mind leaves the body behind. I walked through the door without opening it, into the next room, and floated up through the curtains and window out into the yard. Though I was not cold in the slightest, the ground was covered with snow. The intensity of light was as on a bright day, although it was diffused. It was snowing hard and blowing. It was a blizzard full-blown, it seemed, for I could barely make out the posts of the fence not more than ten feet away. I found this strange, for there was no fence, though it seemed that one should be there. I also knew quite well it was August, and that there was no snow. The force of the blizzard increased to the extent that I saw nothing other than white. In less than the smallest imaginable fraction of an instant I was sitting in my old green bedroom on the left-hand side of the couch, wearing the same robe I wore before going to bed, which now was completely white, with the thoughts of a snowy blizzard still fresh in my mind.
I arose from the couch and took five steps in normal fashion toward the window, where the closed curtains brightly glowed, flooding the room with more green. I parted the curtains in the middle and opened the wooden-framed window on the right. The wood felt solid and the windowpane cold. It appeared to be Springtime, confirmed by the fresh, wet smell of early morning and the sun somewhere in the sky that could not be seen between the houses, and the blue sky contained few clouds. I stuck my head out the window to have a look around. The grass below me was wet, as was the sidewalk and the street in the distance to the right. It must have rained quite recently. As I inhaled, the unmistakable cool-fresh smell of Spring filled my lungs. Things were growing, budding, blooming, and the occasional buzz of a fly or bee could be heard on this calm, Spring morning which was peaceful as can be. I thought about breathing and hearing and feeling as I noticed that all my senses seemed intact and exceptionally keen. This was not the way an astral experience usually went for me, and it seemed I had normal weight and great attention to detail. “This is not normal at all,” I thought as I backed away from the window where the curtains fell back together, and I sat on the padded cushion of the oak chair by the desk. The red light on the handle of the percolator glowed the way I remembered on those mornings long ago. I looked up at the wall behind the couch and noticed the massive brass knights in place, the old green carpet which didn’t quite cover the floor, both removed and replaced long ago. The empty, china cup sat on the left front corner of the desk. I leaned over the desk and saw the brownish spot in the bottom of the cup where the last drops of a previous day’s coffee had evaporated. I slapped my right hand on the side of my right leg, felt the solidity, and the warm, tingling sting of flesh slapping flesh. “This is all far too real,” I thought, as I picked up the china cup, scooted the chair over toward the corner and poured the coffee to fill half the cup. Steam arose from the surface, and the color and smell told me the coffee was fresh. I took a small sip and immediately recognized the taste of fresh Yuban, which I drank throughout the late Sixties. “Perhaps I have died, or maybe I have actually been displaced in space and time. This is every bit as real as anything I’ve known to be the way that reality is to me. Maybe I will go downstairs and see if my mother or brother or sister, or my dad who died in ’79, is here. But maybe I’d better not do that. . . .” I set the half-full, steaming cup back on the desk and left the chair to sit on the couch. I took a deep breath and let out a sigh, thinking, “Where do I go from here?”
Watching television and drinking smuggled beer until the stations went off the air; the parties and the girls and the evening-long heart-to-heart talks; the long, drawn-out periods of solitude, and the journeys through vast inner space — all seemed so recent in memory as I sat upon the old green couch in a place and time I couldn’t be though it seemed so real and alive.
There was a pack of Winstons under the fluorescent desk lamp. The lamp was not on. I hadn’t smoked Winstons for more than ten years. I left the couch, grabbed the pack and shook one out, stuck the filter between my lips, struck a match and lit it, grabbed the ashtray off the telephone stand, placed it on the coffee table and sat back down on the couch. I took a drag and inhaled. The stale-wet, heavy tobacco feel of a Winston went down my throat and into my lungs. I coughed, “My God! What in the name of hell is going on? All of this stuff is real!” I felt lost — really lost, in another space and time in which I did not belong. “There’s a way out of every situation, but where is the way out of this? Is something or someone controlling this? I rarely if ever travel like this at night. I was pulled out of my body this time; I had nothing to do with the process. This kind of thing just doesn’t happen. The strange snowstorm, and the wind and the light. This red robe I am wearing is my red robe, but it’s white. This robe, the cloth it is made of, even the fibers in the cloth, did not exist in the space and time where I am. Why am I wearing this robe? And why is its color now white?”
I had been in situations before where there was nothing I could do to predict the next sequence of events or in any way influence what was or was not going on. As I extinguished the Winston, which had burned nearly to the filter, I noticed a long, fallen ash resting on my white robe. I brushed the robe with the back of my hand and the ashes hit the floor. “Take nothing seriously. . . . Be calm in cool observation of the drama. . . .” The phrases passed through my mind.
The closet door slowly swung open. I could see my reflection as I sat there on the couch in the full-length mirror on the inside of the door. Leaning forward and to the right, I saw what looked like a gray mist roll off the inner wall, as if it were made of dry ice, and spread out over the floor in the room. A faint image of a human form was materializing on the wall. Getting more clear and closer, but remaining the same distance away. It was a young woman running in what seemed to be slow motion. Finally, reaching the closet door, as if through a hole in another dimension, she came into the room.
“There is no time to be sitting here fooling around. What are you doing back here, anyway?” she asked. I could hear her voice as plain as day, but noticed her mouth did not open. Her hair was a soft, radiant brown that looked as if it had been bleached out a bit by the sun. It was parted in the middle and hung about her shoulders where it almost touched her breasts. She wore a long-sleeved, white peasant robe. Her feet and ankles were bare, exposed six inches from the floor. “Would you please come now? We have to go.” She beckoned to me with an outstretched arm.
I noticed in an instant frozen in time how the wide sleeves of her robe drooped from her outstretched arm. I recognized her. I had seen her in the astral realms before, had journeyed through hills and mountains and vast open spaces with her by my side. I had communicated with her, had held her, had loved her, had watched her change in form, and seemed to remember having been very close to her for an eternity of time. “I will go with you as I always have before. Though I see no need to rush, for I’m certainly not in a hurry as I don’t know why I am here. Maybe you know what is going on, and I wish you’d sit down and explain.”
“I would explain, and you know I would, but now there is no time. Please come now.”
I arose from the couch to find that suddenly my body was as light as could be and had no weight at all. I seemed to float slowly up over the coffee table and reached for her hand.
She pulled me through the mist into the closet, and then through the inner wall. In normal reality we would have been out of doors between two houses, one yellow and one white, roughly seventeen feet off the lawn. This was definitely not where we were. A large circular tunnel, what I would guess to be twenty or thirty feet in diameter, stretched infinitely into the distance before us. Her hand held mine, and a not uncomfortable wind seemed to blow at our faces and through our robes which caused them to ruffle and flap. I had the sensation of tremendous velocity, as the walls of the lumpy and somewhat corrugated circular tunnel seemed to grow thin. I saw points of light appear and then fade in the distance which I recognized as deep space. The points of light were stars. There was little doubt in my mind. I felt good with her, and I trusted her, though I had no idea where we were going.
“Hold me close now,” she said as the points of light became a blur. The walls of the tunnel — black, then gray, then a mist which slowly cleared — faded beyond perception.
We stood in a large open space upon the surface of wind-worn ground. There was sand and dust and some dried-up clumps of grass, along with scattered patches of sagebrush. Her arms were still wrapped around me. She loosened her grip and I took her hand once again as we began to walk. The steps were nearly effortless, and we seemed to glide nearly five for every one we took. We were approaching what seemed to be a large wooden building that seemed to be half a mile away. As we came closer, I noticed that while the structure was sound and well-defined, it was in a state of decay. The were two large wooden doors, suspended an inch off the ground by small metal wheels on the rusting nails at least twice my height overhead. The doors were ajar about one outstretched arm’s length, and we easily walked inside.
“What is this place?” I started to say without words.
“Shhhhh!” She held her finger to her lips as if my projected thought was broadcast a little too loudly. We drifted to the center of a large and gloom-drenched room. The floor, beneath a layer of fine dust, was worn and soaked with oil and various solvents in ages long since passed. Regularly spaced holes and impressions in the wood marked the locations where devices had at one time been bolted to the floor. This was some kind of machine shop, stripped of its tools and machines and abandoned long ago. I could imagine a time when the place was busy with men working on gears, pistons, crankshafts, wheels, building or repairing engines and other sorts of machinery. A faint smell of petroleum yet lingered in the musty air. There was no breeze at all.
Long, braided, double strands of cloth-insulated wire, randomly spaced throughout the interior, hung down at least ten feet from the dust-covered rafters and beams. At the end of each wire was a socket that held a hundred-watt Sylvania bulb. A short pull-chain, to which was attached a piece of bailing twine, string or wire, came out from a few of the sockets within reach of someone on the floor. Every bulb was on, projecting its glare a definable non-overlapping distance and illuminating a circular area on the dust-covered, worn, wood floor. I reached up and pulled the wire to the light above us. Though I felt and we heard the familiar click at the socket, the light did not go out. The switch worked perfectly, but did not turn off the light. As I released the wire, dust fell off the electric cord from the socket to the rafter, each particle harshly illuminated in its slow fall to the floor. We walked over to an area near a wall which had once been glassed off. The glass had been removed so that only the forms remained. It looked like the panes had been carefully dislodged. There was no broken glass on the floor. We passed through a door frame and I noticed holes in the chiseled grooves where the hinges had been removed. We sat on a rectangular table, constructed of a sheet of plywood with two-by-four legs. It was nailed to the floor. This was where the office must have been. The door and window frames, the elevated platform floor and the false plaster ceiling were either worthless or too difficult to remove. From a hole in the cracked, yellowed plaster came another double-braided, cloth-insulated wire suspending a socket which held another illuminated hundred-watt bulb. It was just a bit in front of us, a foot above our heads.
“What is this place, and what are we doing in it?” I questioned her.
“Shhhhh!” She gestured again, and then seemed to whisper. “I don’t remember,” she spoke from a place out of time, “but we have to remain here. Do not make any noise . . . be still, calm our minds, think no thoughts, have no feelings . . . silence. Complete and total silence. . . .”
She spoke as if to instruct, herself as well as me. I momentarily glanced at her. From the look on her face, contrasted oddly by the single bare bulb, I was not at all at ease. Our robed knees and legs hung over the edge of the table as we faced the frame of the door and the windows that were no more to separate here from the big, empty interior of the building. I looked around the place for a time. There were numerous windows spaced somewhat evenly along the exterior walls. Huge windows, composed of six-by-twelve inch panes of glass set in frames of wood. They numbered several high and several across within the large outer frames. The glass was all intact. Not one was missing, broken or even cracked. Coated with their films of oil, dust and age, the light coming through them from a dim and overcast day seemed much more than what came from the various bulbs.
“Silence,” she repeated to scatter the flow of thoughts in my observing and wondering mind. “Here. Take my hand.”
I did, and we sat there in silence for what seemed a very long time.
What seemed like time passing became like time leaving. It took a long eternity to measure no time at all, as the process went on as usual although devoid of a sense of time. Intensity of light through exterior windows continuously diminished to zero, leaving only the bare, glowing bulbs lighting random areas of rafters, beams, space and floor with a sickly yellow hue. Dull, oil-scum reflections radiated the eerie incandescent gleam from rectangular panes of glass. Except for our presence, the deserted machine shop was as desolate as a structure could ever be. No dead bees or flies in the windowsills, no rodent tracks or remains, no footprints or nocturnal insects.
The silence was complete. There were no sounds of birds or crickets chirping, no sound of wind or creaking of wood; there was no sound at all.
An icy cold began to penetrate me. It was not a physical temperature cold, but a terrible, chilling cold within. A draining deprival of anything warm that could even resemble life. Along with the cold came a shrinking and shriveled, dim slowing of light where the hundred-watt bulbs beamed no more than fifteen. As the sound of the silence (the resonance projected in space by the pace and rhythm of the setting — neutral background against which events may take place) seemed gradually to lower itself all of seven octaves in scale to the eighth full tone below any given note, a feeling of density within me grew steadily, making me feel as confined as mass on a neutron star.
Through heavy-lidded eyes, in slow-time awareness, I observed the simultaneous shattering of every single pane of glass in the exterior window frames. The first sound in what seemed like centuries was the screaming, horrifying noise of thousands of pieces of broken glass crashing to the floor. It was a terrifying sound, a heart-stopping sound, a colder-than-death sound that echoed and bounced off the bare wooden walls, the rafters, beams and floor. As it ever so gradually began to fade, footsteps could be heard.
Two distinct sets of steps could be discerned — faint and hollow as if their creation was originating from another realm of space and time. One was more solid sounding, made perhaps by hobnailed boots, the other a little softer, though still quite well defined. Near the middle of the floor, some fifty feet away from where we sat, beneath a bare Sylvania bulb, two hazy figures were materializing. In the vague obscurity of outline, it was plain to see the figures were humanoid and walking at a slow and steady pace. Although the fuzzy figures flowed with the regular motions of a walking gait, they seemed to span no distance. They remained in a fixed location there below the bulb. The bitter inner cold and sense of density, which I would have imagined to be at the greatest extreme, increased and intensified even more as the figures took on clarity and at last were in the structured setting on our level in this frame.
One was a rather tall man, with thick and curly coal-black hair and beard. His complexion was rough and dark. The other was a good head shorter, complexion deathly white, and wearing a red flannel hunting hat. He was carrying a shotgun. As they walked towards us, I watched and felt no fear. The recent events and subjective feelings had pushed me far beyond the point where the feelings and concepts of fear were even remotely functional.
They came to a stop as they reached the doorless frame. The big man with the black hair and beard stepped up onto the elevated platform and walked inside. He leaned over close to her, then to me, as if to examine us with his menacing, beady, brown eyes. After a few short moments he stepped down from the platform floor and braced his large left hand near the top of the open door frame. The other then entered and stood directly in front of me about a foot away. He didn’t seem to notice or pay any attention to my companion. He removed the flannel hat and looked into my eyes.
His head was completely bald. His complexion was a dreadful shade of white. His eyebrows were narrow with smooth, black hair, and his eyes were completely black. They had no whites at all. It was not an ordinary, contained blackness that filled the entire sockets, but a colder, deeper, more horrible black than I had ever seen.
The quality and depth of the exchange between us was near the deepest, most basic level of my being. Before me stood a being in which existed, in a universal sense, the most extreme opposite to everything I had known or defined as light, happiness, pleasure, tenderness, compassion, love, goodness and well-being. The moment went on forever. The moment was intense beyond concept, as the communication was deep beyond thought. Though I lacked the power to wish, had I wished to break eye contact or move, it would have been impossible to comply. The power of the moment was awesome. He penetrated every level of my being in every imaginable way. He saw all of me that there is to see from a limitless point of view. As the moment went on, I knew there was nothing that this being wanted from me or wanted to do to me. All intent was in and of the moment. The moment was pure. The moment was complete. No thoughts, no emotions were present. Only total awareness, only total being. He took a step backwards, and the moment was broken and gone. We were once again in the former time. He reached into the pocket of his red flannel shirt and produced a Pall Mall. He placed it between his lips and raised an index finger to within a few inches of the exposed end. It instantly ignited. He blew out a cloud of smoke, removed the red flannel cap from beneath his left arm and placed it back on his head. With his shotgun under his right arm, he turned his back to us and stepped down through the doorframe, beneath the big man’s arm. They began to walk away from us toward the center of the floor.
As they reached the location where they had materialized, beneath the burning bulb, they turned to the right and entered the space-time from which they had arrived. They continued walking, but covered no distance, as their forms lost clarity and faded to a misty and diffused outline. After the hazy outlines vanished, the unreal footsteps gradually faded away.
Time ran in reverse, as every fragment of shattered glass drew in sound and kinetic energy to reassemble the panes in hundreds of open frames. The feeling of density began to lighten as the tones of silence climbed the scale of octaves to resume their former state.
The now normal-looking, deserted machine shop grew lighter all the time. I noticed the electric incandescent bulbs had somehow been turned off, and through the rows of windows came bright sunlight — not from one direction, but equally from all four long, exterior walls.
We drifted, hand in hand, out through the empty door frame and up towards the beams and rafters in the center of the floor. We continued rising up and finally out through the roof, high into the air.
While we continued to rise, we attained greater speed. Our trajectory was perpendicular to the surface of the ground. I saw the machine shop roof grow smaller and smaller, then disappear altogether as the planet took on a curvature and soon became a ball. The deeper in space we were, the faster we seemed to go. The starfield began to curve around us until we reached a level in motion and space where everything became light. We became light, and merged with all the light there was or it seemed could ever be. Though at once present in all the light in the whole of all creation, we continued simultaneously to be our individual selves. Radiant beings we were, in a realm that seemed more real than I had imagined a realm could be.
It was a golden-white light. It was a living, bright light. It was a warm, loving, radiant light far beyond what we normally see. We were the light. We are the light. We forever will be the light. I was eternally present in complete awareness wherever the light existed, which was everywhere there is. Though we were the light completely, there was infinitely more to the light than one being could ever be. I remembered always having been here, which is everywhere there is to be, beyond all but including space and time on a thousand levels; this was a level above them all. Yet somehow I knew very well there was something beyond even this. Even in my state of radiance and vast awareness, I could not begin to grasp in the slightest what this something was. What and where I was, which was endless and beautiful beyond conceptualization, was somehow an idea of the something I could not know.
It was not a rapid transition as I began to notice thought forms arising and passing through what I recognized as my mind. The being who took me through the wall somehow remained in and of the light. I was returning, though the fall was not at all hard. Thoughts of velocity and space and machine shops and star-lit tunnels and green bedrooms and snowstorms raced through my mind as I returned to my physical form. . . .
I take a deep breath of fresh morning air, then stretch and open my eyes. Dianna is still sound asleep. As I pass through the washroom into the bathroom to urinate, I notice my red robe draped over the ironing board where I left it the night before. On the way back to bed, I briefly enter the study and notice a pack of Tareytons sitting by the typewriter. I think of how soggy and stale a Winston would taste as the image of a Pall Mall spontaneously igniting in the proximity of an index finger crosses my mind in a flash of awareness. The red LED on the G.E. digital alarm clock radio glows a 6:30 at me as I leave the study and enter the bedroom. I get back in the waterbed and, though I’m not tired, soon fall fast asleep.
