I/Tulpa: the Seven Year Girl

chapter 18

"Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker."

"You seem particularly unfocussed today," SusAli said.

Jon was holding a book he had pulled from the shelf, "Terminal Lucidity," a term coined by Doctor Michael Nahm who studied the surprising and baffling phenomena of folks dying of a variety of brain conditions, who literally and measurably had no functional brain remaining, and yet inexplicably a number of patients had a sudden resurgence of their full conscious faculty. Their memories fully intact, they shared quiet, loving conversations with family before they died. He wondered if they had ruled out the fact that other organs can think and hold memories, which explains thought transference when organs are donated, and so, in a time of crisis, like impending death, all the organs my step up in one last synced ditched effort to save the person, or minimize suffering by giving a delusion of something better. He put it back on the shelf, fascinated by the topic, wondering if his own increased lucidity at profound times of extreme stress were similar, minus the whole not having a brain thing. He also had a lament: he had full functioning brain but rarely seemed to eve reach peak. If he could have that tumor or stroke that turned him into a genius, wouldn't that be nice? His luck, he would get the common tumor or stroke, the one that robbed him of speech and left him drooling.

But he couldn't deny having had transpersonal experiences. Maybe random epiphanies wasn't the same thing as terminal lucidity. Even people that were about to experience a catastrophe have sometimes reported having a jump in lucidity; those who survived the catastrophe. Some people just report 'a knowing;' I knew I would survive. It didn't really matter what this thing about humans was called per say, or if it were the same, but rather, people could have these wondrous magical moments; he had these, and he wanted more. He had too numerous experiences where he had suddenly experienced a widening of consciousness, many of them around moments of trauma, some of them on the threat of approaching perceived trauma, to simply dismiss as non-real event. There were even scientist who would support the idea that the events occur, though they would define the events within a materialistic framework to take away the magic. It was just a hallucinations. Per the materialists, though, even consciousness is just an illusion. Which means, from their perspectives, we don't exist, which is a totally different thing than when a Buddhist says, 'we don't exhist.'

"I feel like I am on the verge of traveling," Jon said. "But I am stuck right on the tipping point and can't go."

He found his feet in his eyes, trying to sort a pathway out of the pattern on the carpet, he thought he heard a finger snap. When he realized he was in an enclosed shape, he fell through the floor and arrived in the Great Forest of the Night. His brain wanted him to believe there was no forest like this anywhere else in the entire Universe. The planet was tidally locked. The trees defined a ring that encircled the planet of fire and ice. The forest separated the sandy desserts from the snowy desserts. The tallest of the trees were in the center. The wildest of all the creatures were in the center. The most dangerous time to be on the ground was during the 'darkness' that directly followed the 'brightness.' One would almost have to experience it to understand. On this world, there was neither day nor night, it was 'only' and always day or night on the extreme sides, except in the between: fringe world where the Forest of the Night was in perpetual twilight. The 'brightness' was a prolonged, periodic, but regularly, reoccurring intervals in which the magnetic field became so saturated with energy that it fluoresced the entire upper atmosphere of the entire planet; it glowed so brightly that the myriad of rainbow colors obscured the stars. It was like sparking a gas grill several times before it caught, and when it caught, it was sustained anywhere from two to four hours. And when it went out, the sky was darker than normal for about thirty minutes. Sometime the black snowflakes fell after the event, but the black storms were too irregular to predict.