Imagine for a moment that you’re not from this place. Not from time or space, or anything that might pass as pattern or order. Imagine instead that you’re a different sort of being, something beyond this world, and beyond comprehension. You are extra dimensional, beyond dimension or without one. An entity of pure light. The word ‘light’ is merely an analogy however. For in this reality, there is no light, or energy or shape or form, or even words to describe the abstract nature of you.
You don’t see or hear or feel. You couldn’t because you don’t exist in physical space. And if you could, it would feel meaningless because you don’t exist in linear time. There’s no past or present or future, so there’s nothing to sort or compare or provide context. You can’t imagine order or decay or progress or consequence.
But you can still imagine. And you can still behave. And because in your own way you can think – defiant of any explainable objective proof – you do in fact exist. And as something that exists, your imagination brews with curiosity. Curiosity for a world beyond yours.
Now imagine your formless shapeless self – hanging infinitely timeless and simultaneously everywhere – spots this world. The one we all know, one of limits and borders, beginnings and endings, big things and small things, hot things and cold things. A world of moments so flickering and fleeting, so helplessly proceeding, we can only know things by how we feel them, not how they truly are. Looking backwards often at the wake of forever unchangeables. Looking forward with the hope of what may or may not unfold. Each moment slipping lost, each new one, an endless promise.
Would such a strange place of shapes and spaces and limits and borders intrigue you? Would it seduce you enough to reach out and touch it, to hear it booming, to smell its surrounding air, to be rocked by its fluid restlessness? Would you allow yourself to be ensnared by this time’s arrow of always forward, always forward? What if by the sheer will of your longing, something happens. An echo back, a ‘happening.’
Something now occurs and morphs in motion from past to present. You find it incomprehensible. And yet, there it is before you, a glimmering rift. It is the bridge between time and no time, space and no space. A dripping swirling dizzy tunnel, connecting our two worlds, and a chance to visit somewhere else. A disc shaped membrane stretches like a drum skin and you reach out for it. You can feel it pressing back, resisting at first then bending around you. This trampoline tarp warps and wraps you tightly, molding you from a zero point into two dimensions. And then three. Warping with such defined curvature, then back around on itself, it creates a shape and gives you form. Your form. Your body.
You are still you, but you are dizzy with time and disoriented with the space abound. You are buoyant in this new intermediary space, as you descend deeper into the tunnel, feeling the weight of yourself and the sense of motion. The sensation of time. You never break through this new skin, you feel enveloped by it but still tethered and taught to your single point of origin. But you plow arduously forward, in your tight and stretchy astronaut suit, into a foreign world. You give yourself entirely to this new dream, forgetting what was before, if there is such a thing. And then you wake up. You are born.
You are helpless but delighted and warm. Your thoughts begin to flow along time’s current. They link together into patterns that help make sense of this rushing forward feeling. You puzzle together the pieces of information you skim off the surface. You make little abstract pictures inside your growing head, and a mural unfolds that helps you map what is and what will be.
Just as you think you have the rules all sorted, the buoyancy and the warmth give way to a new push. A heavy gravity rushes over you along with a blinding light. The white light hurts your eyes. The sounds confuse your ears. You are drowning now with this sensory flood. You hear your own voice crying for the first time. And the concept of you, your own contained self, is more beautifully overwhelming than everything else before it.
You are washed with fresh abstractions. Now there was desire, and pain, and hunger, and fear. Most of all, there is an overwhelming need to feel safe. You feel the good with the bad. You understand pain and wrestle with suffering. And you delight in the protection you feel in the arms of another. You hold onto her fingers with your new little membraned digits as you feel her kisses on your taught skinned forehead. And all feels soothingly at peace in these rippled little currents that had once made you dizzy and are now rocking you to sleep.
In your dreams, you imagine that you’ve been here before. The glimmering certainty of something familiar, something already seen, and what path lies ahead. You will continue making these little abstract stories in your head. You’ll color them richly with the growing complexity of this intricate world. Your colorbox of pains and joys amass into new shapes and shades. Notions of self-doubt, betrayal, disappointment, loss. Admiration, inspiration, protection, love.
All familiar from a time and visit past you can not place. A blinking flickering dream you once had. For a hundred years, for a decade, for an instant. Your 28th birthday, for 28 years or days or hours. The familiarity envelops you but still leaves you helpless in its open stormy ocean.
You can remember there was never enough time to feel it all. That your appetite was bottomless for the peaks and valleys, joys and pains. The deadend job, the terrible marriage, the lost promotion, the lost loved one. The tropical honeymoon, your daughter’s wedding day, the peaceful passing at the end of your long life. Small wave moments, bursts of creativity, bursts of terror. Struggling through worry, yearning for fulfillment. Wellness and illness, death and dying, death and dying. Why always so preoccupied with death and dying?
You imagine yourself sighing deeply at the trivial nature of worry in a place like this. One where limits and boundaries were key to the wonderment. Each life you have, you insist on defining yourself by all that ‘happens to you.’ And conclude quite myopically that you are something that just happens to occur.
Not this time, you vow. Now you can see each problem all at once. You are standing over all your old conflicts and problems at such a level that you no longer see the pleasures and pains separately. You can’t see the spaces between. What was once violent opposition from one view, is now harmony at a higher distance. Every problem, the painful, the uncomfortable, and the inconvenient, imbued with beauty by their own unique fragility. And you can imagine now every tiny moment, each day, each minute for what it is. A flickering fleeting miracle.
At this moment, this tiny moment, whether you were ready or expecting it, the tides of time turn again. The stretchy membrane, tight around your skin, tugs and snaps you back without warning. Casting you back to the zero point origin you forgot you belonged. You’re bouncing back to where you came from with a fading memory of this dream. A short simple dream of time and dimension.
Before this dream fades from memory, as it has done countlessly before, you have just enough space to ponder this trip’s meaning. Whether you were there for millenia, or decades, or just one plain day. You recall the tickles of joy and sadness. You laugh at the thrills of worry and self-importance. You cry a metaphysical tear for the pride and purity you felt for others. As you return to your single point of curiosity, you decide to spare your last few time decaying thoughts, hoping that no one that you’ve left behind will mourn your death for too long.
You whisper a prayer for them, that they will find the birdseye view you sought. Apart from worry and violence and conflict, at peace with the holistic. One world, one organism of beautiful lightning storms – churning, dancing chaos. Your last thought is one of hope for those loved ones, you leave behind. That they should find peace, as you have, in the tiny fragile fleeting single point moment we call our life. Then you let it all go. Forgotten as it was before, as was your world before that. Onto the next one, now back again. Time without end. And so on, and so on it goes.
Now imagine you are you. And that final wish was meant for you. From a prior life you’ve lived and relived many times before. Or a parting word from a loved one passed before their time, or as an expected merciful reprieve. How differently will today’s problems and worries and hopes and fears all feel? Now, as you stand without time pressing on you and at a higher distance above.
Paul Carreo 