Moment Before

She sat on the velvet couch.  For its age, for the number of times it had been picked up and moved across the country, the shape of its cushions and arms had held up nicely, all of them still firm and plush but for a bit of fabric worn down on the edges of the armrest.  She remembered its position in each of her many houses and the particular walls over the years it had been pressed up against; its presence being one of the few constants in a life full of change. 
She sat on the velvet couch.  She was aware of her body and the constant tingling.  Unlike when her arms  fell asleep, the sensation now was lighter. It felt like she was being lifted, as though her body was slowly rising, winning the fight against gravity like a helium balloon. 
In direct contrast to this sensation, the parts of her which touched the couch, the back of her legs and back and butt, they all felt heavy and organic.  It was as though roots or thick curling vines had grown out of her and merged her body of flesh with the wooden legs of the couch and she had become part of the plaster walls and found a new home in the cracks. 
She was both floating and grounded, tasting salt on her lips and smelling sugar.
The tabletop lamp beside her was on and glowing, it seemed as bright as the sun. Even though there was no other source of illumination in the living room and the curtains were drawn against the night sky, she could see every color and shape that decorated the space.
She looked down at her lap and at the black a-line skirt which covered her ample white thighs.  She saw the tiny mesh of the material and the faint way it reflected the light like a moon.
She saw everything at once and in perfect detail. The pale pink walls trimmed with a golden wood along the edges, the narrow planks of the hardwood floor below the Persian area rug and all the tiny scratches on the ground. The glean of the coffee table just a foot from her knees and the few streaks left over from the last time she windexed the glass surface. 
It all shone in the light of the single lamp, all of it amplified by her intensified perception.  She sat with her hands on her upper thighs and noticed the sweat on her palms, smelling lightly of iron.  The tingling had gotten stronger, lifting her up and up and up and that sense of earthly groundedness kept her planted.
She sat on the velvet couch.  The dark blue curtains were mostly drawn, just a crack between the two panels was open in the center, perhaps just an inch wide.  The night outside seemed slightly pale and she wondered how close it was to the full moon. 
She sat there waiting as the clock in the kitchen ticked rhythmically, the ticking ringing against the walls in great booms and crashes, both lulling and jarring. The constant sound seemed to come quickly and yet an eternity would come and go between those ticks and tocks. She would notice the delicate trail of a cobweb in the far corner of the ceiling and remember a long ago birthday party of a long-lost friend and she would hear the songs of long ago, long evaporated from public memory. Then another tick would crash down, wrapping around the walls and pounding down on her flesh.
She sat on the velvet couch. Moments of her life flashed through her mind like a mashup of moving images and slides that moved at such a rapid pace she rarely noticed their presence until it was gone and she saw some other scene in her mind.
In the space of one tick of the clock she would see dozens of memories, perhaps more as they merged and shifted together, becoming new moments of recognition.  A bright blue car on a gravel driveway, her sister running down the carpeted hallway of their old home and falling at the edge of their bedroom door, a scene of herself in bed with her first love.
She saw words and old thoughts which had long since changed.  The fights and the kisses and long drives across the country with views of wheat and birds and landmarks never seen again.  The moons and road signs which she once noticed, the lines in books and magazines and the long steaming baths she once had every other day.
The room was glowing brightly, her body was shining, tingling, flying away, growing heavier and deeper and merging easily with the contents of the living room and flowing down into the foundation and then past all that cement and steel into the rocks and dark pungent earth that had supported her life.
She sat on the velvet couch knowing that soon he would come, she could hear his footsteps on the sidewalk, he would be there soon.

The Wanderer

He expects nothing of anyone.
He looks out into the dust of the world, scorching fallen bones to white stones.  Water is perhaps days away and he does not expect to find it.  The desert floor is scattered with the fallen, both man and beast have succumbed to their thirst in this vast yellow wasteland, all of them left there uncovered as food for the scavengers. 
He expects nothing and gives nothing.
He takes what he finds, what he needs. Men have died beside him and he has stepped sideways as they fell. It is by chance that bullets and arrows have all but missed the target. 
He continues on, his face cracked and blistered and burning, an unrelenting sun high above that has no mercy for the weak. Sucking on stones as he stumbles over the few patches of withered grass, he has not lost the desire to live, just the expectation that life somehow belongs to him. 
There is no god above to save his soul, to pluck him from this dry bed of dust and wind. There is nothing, no one beyond his own skin, nothing but the determination to keep moving and follow the stars. Perhaps he will stumble upon a watering hole. 
He does not pray for rescue or grace, does not hope to find some other man along the path with a full canteen and dried meat. There are no friends in this place, not in this desert or in any town he has ever been. There is no sweet smelling woman that does not hold her hand out for coin or gift, no act of mercy ever granted without expectation of consequence. 
The men out here come as vultures and thieves and even those he has ridden side by side with watch him with suspicion, as he does with them. 
He expects nothing of them and he gives them nothing. Each man rides until he is unable to do so any longer. Then he is left and forgotten, stripped and left to the sun and rain, to the vultures and time.
Scanning the ridges of far away mountains for signs of smoke and silhouette, for enemies and arrows and bullets aimed at his chest, he walks on, his mouth dry as the desert sand and cracked earth.
The wasteland is for the solitary drifter, each man experiencing the earth with eyes colored by his path and choice.

A Walk Through Eternity

“Eternity is here and now. Right now. As you read these words. It cannot be otherwise.
Eternity is not a very long time, longer than all your memories, longer than you could ever imagine. Eternity is not very slow, something much slower than what we could conceivably endure.
Eternity is not loving or unloving, not hateful or compassionate. Eternity is not reward or punishment.
Eternity is not and cannot be something that will happen someday, something that has happened already.
Eternity cannot happen for to happen something must have a past and a future and eternity can have neither.
Eternity is what is left when past and future are gone.
Eternity can hold no sequences and no trails of cause and effect.
Eternity is complete because it cannot be otherwise.
There is no time to be lost or gained, no time to fulfill lacks or to form wishes. Eternity is simply no time at all.”

I thought of the words on the old book as I stood on the border, looking in. This was not the first time I thought of them. It probably wouldn’t be the last. The words caressed me in ways I didn’t find fully pleasant, something about their implied meaning disturbed me, hurt me somehow, something rose up within me to defend my inherent right to events, my right to chains of causality, my right to the forward motion of time. The something that rose then stayed in my chest, having nowhere to go. And there it lingered and it could only grow as I replayed the words in my mind once again.
There was a great circular labyrinth in front of me and I stood on the edge, right where the narrow path of white stones began. Should I go in? I wondered. Is this the time? The right time? I asked myself in silence. Will there be another opportunity if I were to wait? Will this moment return or will there be another similar enough that it will make no difference?
My mind was clouded with thoughts, tinged with self conscious doubt and human concerns. As I whirled in the middle of pros and cons and other random waves of kinetic brain activity, I felt the moment closing. I felt it moving past me, rushing like a slow inexorable current, slow but definitely moving…drifting through my finger tips as I stood there debating inside my head. The moment was about to move past me like a cold little stream past a heavy rock, unafraid to leave me in its wake on its way to an unknowable destiny, some place where I would never be.
I could feel the three women behind me squirming slightly, their bodies preparing for departure, ready to move up the hill and begin our lunch. Something we had all been waiting for with impatient eagerness. This was not the time for distractions. This was not the time. It shouldn’t be. I felt it passing, all of it. A thread of nothingness on the black current of emptiness, drifting away from me while I stood still, trying to decide. I knew it was leaving now, maybe forever. Soon, even the decision would be gone.

“We may experience Eternity. But this experience won’t be in the past, it wasn’t in the future, it wouldn’t be in our memories of that perfect psychedelic trip into the infinite maelstrom, or that amazing moment of meditation when the walls disappeared and all the people turned transparent like new plastic bags, or that one instant when you and I fell in love and we both knew it as clearly as we knew where we were sitting, as clearly as we knew each other’s names. It won’t, it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be the sudden burst of direct Knowledge that came over you that one day, that one day that we can all vaguely remember. Yes, all of us. It has happened, will happen, would happen to all of us. Every single one of us.
It wouldn’t have been in the future, in that bright final day when I finally accomplished the Great Work and I fused with the True Self that I found standing behind the illusion. It didn’t come when I was finally Awake, fully and beyond mistake, or when I completed my spiritual progress through a thousand lifetimes of abnegation on my way to glorious liberation which came and went before I knew it was happening. It didn’t even come the days before my death, when I finally surrendered, fully and completely, when I finally started to Work. It couldn’t have. It didn’t. It won’t. It can’t.
Our experience of Eternity can only be Now. Now as you read this. Now as you hear this. Now as you think this. As you think it in the words that are here written.”

A small bird chirped at me from a nearby tree. A soft breeze blew wisps of hair across my forehead. Without another thought, without a clear sense of purpose, without a final bout with the constant plague of imagined consequences, my foot suddenly took a step forward. My first step into the labyrinth, my first step onto the path. And as my foot took that step, my mind was completely taken by surprise. It had been left out of the decision. It was being taken for a walk, like a small dog that suddenly realizes what is happening as the door closes behind him and the cold air hits its pudgy hairy face. "Oh, I guess I’m doing this.After all that thinking, I guess I’m just going to do it." I said it to myself where nobody could listen, inside the place where nobody could reach.
My mind was shocked, but willing to go. I looked down at the path directly in front of me, at the narrow bit of dirt outlined in gray stones. I remembered myself. I remembered what to do. My right foot touched lightly upon the path, I felt the soft dry earth beneath me, I felt the heel as it made contact with the ground. Each step slow, each movement deliberate and carefully noted.

“The experience will not be soon,
The experience will not come a moment from now,
Just as it didn’t happen a moment ago.
Just as it didn’t happen before you can remember.
NOW.”

Nearly thirty steps in, my mind started to dart around once again, a reinvigorated ping pong ball bouncing on a fully enclosed spherical table inside my skull. "Was this a good time for this? Will they be mad? Did I mess up the space? This is probably taking too much time! They are all waiting to eat. They are all so hungry. I’m hungry myself. This is the last thing they want just now. To be waiting for me while I slowly move through this little maze of rocks. And now I can’t even see them. I can’t even turn around to try to read the thoughts behind their faces."
And then, a calmer voice, another player in my secret private game of bouncing phrases and flying single words: "You’re doing it now, you can’t turn back, you’re in the middle, you made the decision, something made it, something inside of you…so do it as best as you can.And keep on going. There is no stopping now. There is no stopping."
My hands were swinging, the air drifted through my curled fingers like soft kisses in the momentary resting point of a long uncertain journey, deep in the middle of the night when it seems that such a journey can never end (but it always does.) My left knee bent as my whole body prepared for the next step that was surely about to come. I turned the corners carefully, slowly, watching the ground as the outlined path turned back upon itself, watching it curl back to what I had already left behind, to the path of pale which seemed already so distant.
"This just keeps going!" I thought. I put my attention back on my feet. I felt my arcs stretch with the forward movement of heel to toe. The breeze touched me again and tousled my hair. The path was still there. Curving away ahead of me. Ahead and behind and both at once, blurring into a confusing knot where the future and the past twisted themselves around each other.

“Our language, our imagination, our projections, our world of symbols… they have all conspired to give us an image of Eternity as a really long time, a time so long that it might as well be forever, a time where actions stretch forward into an insistent periodic repetition without friction or decay… Eternity as the white washed heaven of the Christians, the gardens and virgins of the Muslims, the complex Bardo chambers of the Tibetans, the rising cosmic steps of the Gnostics, the monstrous and heroic houses of the witches, the many colored visions of the shamans, the fiery dungeons of the ancient and secret God Pan. All of these may in fact be real (or real enough that we may have the pleasure and pain of experiencing them for a very long time) but they are not the experience of Eternity. If something is happening, then it will stop happening eventually. If something some day stops happening, it will eventually come back. As surely as these words will one day disappear. As surely as these words were always written, long before I seemingly made them appear from nothingness onto a blank white page.”

When I first started on my journey, I had heard the voices of the three women on the outside. I was able to imagine how they saw me, how they might see me, how I may have looked from the distant places that were outside. I imagined their thoughts even if they were only my own projections. They kept talking among themselves and I felt safe in their neglect.
But when I was focusing on my feet, somewhere along the way, their voices had dropped away into a kind of strange silence, their voices which were known and unknown, their voices which were real and imaginary. The space was now profoundly quiet, except for the rustling of nearby leaves and the occasional car tires swishing on the asphalt of the road below. It was me and the labyrinth. Me and the elements. Me and my effort. Me and the path.

“But Eternity cannot begin and cannot end. It is not an extension of time. It is itself outside of time. Time cannot reach out to swallow it. It overcomes time and envelops it like an infinite snake that has transcended all restrictions. We are, you and me, right now, in the midst of Eternity, projecting images of illusory lifetimes onto a never changing Clear Void. And the void itself remains the same, no matter how much the illusion changes.
The longing for the experience of Eternity is a struggle that can never be completed. As long as there is a struggle, the goal has not been reached. But if the goal has not been reached, the struggle cannot end. And so, like Achilles, our work will always be just a hair short of the Eternal Turtle that moves just slightly out of our grasp. Ever so close. Ever so far.”

The rings were getting smaller. I turned corners more and more often until I suddenly reached the center which was both more than and less than I had imagined. In the small round heart was a mosaic stepping stone that had small stones and beads upon it. Signs that others had been here, signs that they wished to be remembered even if I would never know their names or their secret agendas.
I closed my eyes. I saw small sparks of electricity playing on the canvas of my eyelids. I raised my hands out to the sides, opening them wide.I then lifted them high above my head and finally brought both hands together in front of my chest. As if prayer. As if there was something there that would listen.

“In the deepest void within you, behind you eyes, behind your thoughts, behind your emotions, behind your secret wishes and desires, behind your bright nightmares and dark dreams, behind the twisting and gyrating thing that you think of as you without ever thinking about it, behind it all you have Eternity. Right now. Your experience of it relies on your ability to maintain your attention steady, to look inside and not be instantly repelled by the frightfulness of pure untouched Nothingness.”

Oooooommmmmm, the sound was not as pure as it has been, not as pure as it could be. I noticed that fact objectively and I held my attention on the sound and my diaphragm, even as the sound cracked slightly. I pulled my stomach in as my rounded mouth continued with the elongated vibration. I stood in the center, feeling the soft breeze, feeling the sun, hearing the sound of birds, feeling quiet, yet electrified and alive. My ego had fallen and I was overcome with a sense of lightness.

“There is a reason why we are here, why we move through time, why we play our parts in this infinitely complex labyrinth of time and space. There is a reason why things happen, why "we" happen as we are happening right now.
The reason is entrenched in that elusive experience of Eternity. When you enter into the heart of the Labyrinth, the inner circle that never changes, the secret chamber that never started and never can end, where there is no past and no future and no semblance of either… there you will understand the reason. It will be as clear as it ever was, as clear as it ever will be.”

My body turned back. I took a step, I raised my leg firmly like a soldier, placing it firmly on the ground. I took another step, a very short one on the tips of my toes. I slowly walked back through the rings, sometimes emphasizing the movement of my hips like a supermodel, other times walking erect and with a sense of formality. Other steps, I glided loosely as if I was about to grow wings from my back. I alternated between movements, improvising each like a chaotic dance with my attention as the thread of consistency. And the more I played, the more alive I felt. My smile increased the more I played and I shed more of myself upon the soil.

“This has happened a million times before.
To you.
This will happen a million times again.
To you.
You have experienced Eternity. Directly. And now you are here, in time. And the part of you that recoiled, the part of you that fell, the part of you that opened that door but only slightly, that part that saw the primordial union that cannot be seen, felt or heard, and ran away, afraid that it might have seen too much, afraid that the precious object of desire would never give it the compassionate pleasure of coming to an eventual stop...”

There was nothing else. My past was a distant part of my imagination, the future was never coming. There was only each single step and the thousands of movements which seamlessly created it . The labyrinth and I were playing. We were lovers in union. Dancers intertwined. Actors upon a stage. Beings in a living void.

“…that part of you knows why we perceive Time and why we imagine that there is a past and there is a future.
At the heart, right now, within you and without you, everything is still, quiet and outside of Time, beyond Time, around Time. Here in the innermost chamber we can truly say without any hesitation:
Nothing ever has happened
Nothing ever will happen.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.”