AFTERLIFE

CHAPTER ONE

The suffocation of my body was extremely long and painful; my mind was unbelievably slow, weak and lost; vision was blurry and dark, every inch of my body felt like hundreds of needles were sticking into it. My head felt very heavy and dizzy as if the ground were spinning around it. My entire body seemed frail and feeble with not enough strength to lift a finger. All the normal senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching were slowly but irretrievably dying. As a result, the end seemed to be approaching quickly. The sense of being alive and all the aspects of self-existence were slipping away. Self-consciousness that has always helped remind us of our very existence was acting like it was playing a game of hide and seek – there at one moment and gone at another.

At the same time, I was conscious of feeling very lonely, abandoned and extremely scared as nobody was around. Suddenly everything was moving very slowly! I felt like I was riding a spinning wheel: the whole process of winding down—feeling dizzy, feeble and prickly, with blurred vision—would start to repeat again and again until it became just unbearable. I wanted to cry out and beg the process to stop but I didn't know how to; I wanted to look for my loved ones for help and support, but couldn't find them anywhere. I desperately wanted to move, talk, walk or even disappear, but I couldn't even blink my eyes.

My positive and negative worldly feelings and desires had disappeared, and I no longer felt love, hatred, compassion or apathy, greed or benevolence, envy or forgiveness, anger or patience, kindness or cruelty. The only feelings left were emptiness, loneliness and delusion, and they were almost all gone by now. Suddenly, there was a shock, a jolt of electric volts concurrently shaking my whole body from head to toe. Everything went blank and there was total darkness and nothing else. I knew it was a call from some sort of divine power, and I felt a sudden urge for a benign start of a nascent beginning. I found myself already on my way before I even realized it. The new journey had started.

The lonely journey in utter darkness was inevitably very long and extremely difficult. I felt like I was walking through a very long dark tunnel without any help or company, and it seemed like the walking would never end. Nonetheless, I didn't worry or care since I knew it had nothing to do with me whatsoever. I wasn't even able to move a single hair of my small toe. Unlike the other times, I didn't feel tired – instead, my brain was repeatedly trying to remind me of everything that was ahead of me on this new journey.

My sense of weakness or fatigue was simply not there. As a result, I would feel tired one moment and not the next moment. All in all, it was a weird, ambivalent and even self-contradictory feeling, but at the same time, a feeling of something very special, sacred and otherworldly. The presence and effect of this particular feeling was so immense that I couldn't help but take notice and knew immediately that this special and sacrosanct feeling was nothing less than a miracle – not possible in the mortal world. Nevertheless, the journey never seemed to end.

As the walking in the utter dark incessantly continued, I couldn't possibly know for how long I was walking as there was no possibility whatsoever of keeping any record of time. Unlike the many devices we have here on earth: such as watches, mobiles, car radio, TVs, computer and even clock towers, which are always taken for granted but never appreciated, nothing seemed to be available where I was. The familiar feel of morning, midday, afternoon, evening or nighttime are common on earth, but I had to keep walking in the dark, and there was absolutely nothing that I could see, smell, touch or feel. Nevertheless, I knew intuitively, or based on my previous experiences, that I must have been walking for at least a few days, if not weeks.

Intriguingly, although I could not see, hear or touch them physically, I was pretty sure I was not alone on this mysterious trip. There were definitely a lot of lonely souls just like me, perhaps, walking along with me. I wasn't able to explain why or how I got to know that but somehow I was made aware of the fact very clearly. It felt like we were all tirelessly walking towards the same destination and by virtue of being on the same route at the same time, the others automatically became fellow travelers, thus known to each other, although they had never met before. It was destiny that brought us together. We hadn't seen each other in this lifetime just finished, when we were still alive, when we would have befriended them. This journey, which was not normal earthly life, was an exception; we wouldn't talk with them or care about them. Amazingly, I had no feelings of wanting to connect with them at all. I was aware of their presence along the way and nothing more. As in a vast empty space, the feelings and emotions just weren't there. Nevertheless, somewhere in my mind, as a whiff of the very light air, consciously or unconsciously, I knew those poor souls were there. With that tiny piece of consciousness at the back of my head, I felt a bit more confident as well as comfortable and at the end that helped make my journey a little easier.