Turn of the Kaleidoscope

The Alchemist

I was alone to my thoughts one evening. I walked through the fog that eerily crept along the bank of the Willamette river. I went often to what I considered a sacred place to clear my head. It was a strange irony that I should walk into a fog bank. My mind was in a similar state. And how odd I normally love the fog. It gives you the feeling of being hidden from the rest of the world whose eyes always watching.

I generally preferred my own company. The sun I observed was beginning to fall towards the horizon. Twilight was my favorite part of the twenty-four hour cycle. It was a strange and symbolic time for me, that time in-between two worlds, night and day.

With both the cloak of the coming night and the fog I quickly found myself shrouded in the river bank. I slipped on a wet log and hit my head against a rock. I fell into darkness and all became cold and empty. I had to fight to stay warm. Then it happened...

I found myself standing in the fog and without the headache from my fall.

I walked along the rivers edge until I came upon a bridge that I had not seen before. It too was engulfed in the mist and all I could see was the shadows made by the halos of lanterns lining the bridge. I heard the river. But it sounded odd, so did the wind and the feeling of the ground at the bottom of my feet. Once I realized it seemed the bridge began to dematerialize beneath me but gravity had no affect.

Then a realization manifested in me. I found that I was dying and I was finding difficulty letting go. My subconscious mind had fervently held onto ancient symbols of the collective unconscious. The bridge was a crossing from the physical world into a realm of non-existence. Somehow I knew it wasn't an afterlife. It was my mind projecting images to deny that I was going to die. But I didn't feel afraid, at least I didn't think so. I didn't feel anything at all actually.

The less I resisted the more I left the material world. My mind was now separating from my body and that corporeal form was now fading away. I saw without eyes a different world around me. I saw the wave and particles that made light, the sun's energy made visible to me. Cosmic rays and other types of radiation could be seen. A bright conflagration of lights and colors.

My vision grew with intensity as I could see individual atoms that made all the carbon based life forms around me. Thousands more times magnified I could see subatomic particles dancing all around me. But not just "see" them, I could sense they had a life force of their own. All alive with voices of their own. An orchestra of life was all around me. How sublime.

Gravity again was denied me as I was propelled out of the atmosphere into what I thought was the vaccum of space. But that notion too was denied me. I saw forces and particles at play. Science's instruments could not detect nor witness its effect. The universe wasn't empty at all but was instead a botanical garden of energies that was far beyond the human imagination.

The earth seemed but as just another planet, no great purpose or destiny. The father star in his brilliance burned amongst the other celestial spheres. I was hurled into the sun where I saw the process of nuclear fusion. Hydrogen nuclei collided to create helium. I could see all six hundred and fifty billion nuclei being fused every second. But I having no body to interact with the stimuli was unable to feel anything. I found myself not even caring.

I was cast out of the galaxy passing the gas giants and into a whole other system. I saw the destruction of a star and the formation of a stellar nursery. Stars were being born and they cried their first light. And all the while I was forgetting who I was. It was irrelevant now without a body and it was then I found myself at a crossroad, a fork in the cosmic journey. I still hadn't let go, even though I was dead I had the desire to feel death of my mind. And in that moment I died to myself and my consciousness like my body faded away into the cosmos where I became one with the living universe.

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