"What else?"
"I can't feel my body any more. I'm numb.
I have the feeling that Charlie is close by.
My eyes are open—I'm sure of that—are they?"
"Yes, wide open."
"And yet I see a blue-white glow from the walls and the ceiling gathering into a shimmering ball. Now it's suspended in midair. Light… forcing itself into my eyes… and my brain… Everything in the room is aglow… I have the feeling of floating… or rather expanding up and out… and yet without looking down I know my body is still here on the couch…."
Is this a hallucination?
"Charlie, are you all right?"
Or the things described by the mystics?
I hear his voice but I don't want to answer him.
It annoys me that he is there.
I've got to ignore him.
Be passive and let this—whatever it is—fill me with the light and absorb me into itself.
"What do you see, Charlie?
What's the matter?"
Upward, moving, like a leaf in an upcurrent of warm air.
Speeding, the atoms of my body hurtling away from each other.
I grow lighter, less dense, and larger… larger… exploding outward into the sun.
I am an expanding universe swimming upward in a silent sea.
Small at first, encompassing with my body, the room, the building, the city, the country, until I know that if I look down I will see my shadow blotting out the earth. Light and unfeeling. Drifting and expanding through time and space. And then, as I know I am about to pierce the crust of existence, like a flying fish leaping out of the sea, I feel the pull from below.
It annoys me. I want to shake it off.
On the verge of blending with the universe I hear the whispers around the ridges of consciousness.
And that ever-so-slight tug holds me to the finite and mortal world below.
Slowly, as waves recede, my expanding spirit shrinks back into earthly dimensions—not voluntarily, because I would prefer to lose myself, but I am pulled from below, back to myself, into myself, so that for just one moment I am on the couch again, fitting the fingers of my awareness into the glove of my flesh.
And I know I can move this finger or wink that eye—if I want to.
But I don't want to move.
I will not move!
I wait, and leave myself open, passive, to whatever this experience means.
Charlie doesn't want me to pierce the upper curtain of the mind.
Charlie doesn't want to know what lies beyond.
Does he fear seeing God?
Or seeing nothing?
As I lie here waiting, the moment passes during which I am myself in myself, and again I lose all feeling of body or sensation. Charlie is drawing me down into myself.
I stare inward in the center of my unseeing eye at the red spot that transforms itself into a multipetaled flower—the shimmering, swirling, luminescent flower that lies deep in the core of my unconscious.
I am shrinking.
Not in the sense of the atoms of my body becoming closer and more dense, but a fusion—as the atoms of my-self merge into microcosm.
There will be great heat and unbearable light—the hell within hell—. but I dont look at the light, only at the flower, unmulti-plying,undividing itself back from the many toward one.
And for an instant the shimmering flower turns into the golden disk twirling on a string, and then to the bubble of swirling rainbows, and finally I am back in the cave where everything is quiet and dark and I swim the wet labyrinth searching for one to receive me… embrace me… absorb me… into itself.
That I may begin.
In the core I see the light again, an opening in the darkest of caves, now tiny and far away—through the wrong end of a telescope—brilliant, blinding, shimmering, and once again the multipetaled flower (swirling lotus—that floats near the entrance of the unconscious).
At the entrance of that cave I will find the answer, if I dare go back and plunge through it into the grotto of light beyond.
Not yet!
I am afraid.
Not of life, or death, or nothingness, but of wasting it as if I had never been.
And as I start through the opening, I feel the pressure around me, propelling me in violent wavelike motions toward the mouth of the cave.
It's too small!
I can't get through!
And suddenly I am hurled against the walls, again and again, and forced through the opening where the light threatens to burst my eyes.
Again, I know I will pierce the crust into that holy light.
More than I can bear.