The Anatomy of Journey

A rain of darkness fell, a rain of photons; a rain of water, of ice, of leaves and of wind; a rain of clouds and mist; a rain of thunder fell, and of lightning; a rain of sin and a rain of redemption.

  They fell upon an inkling of thought. It all begins with an inkling.

  It begins with an inkling, with a turmoil that seeks expression, with a turmoil that seeks perfection. It begins in the same way all art begins – with a feeling of discontent and restlessness. Somewhere somehow a spark appears that questions the state of non-existence. It has no agenda, it has no need to do so, and it has no idea that it is doing so, until it feels an undercurrent of a strange vibration and a tiny noise that starts the slide.

  This noise begins to build up in an increasing crescendo. First vibration, then sound, and then light appear. At the end of an unending tunnel in this one-dimensional space, a slash of light rips through the darkness and begins to immediately attract. With these elements, concepts begin to appear in a vacuum of concepts, a state that needed none and wanted none - concepts of gravity, attraction, light, sound and vibration. They will disappear as soon as the light dies. But their shadows will remain, causing future sparks of inklings.

  A sudden lurch in a place that abhors abrupt movements makes the inkling take notice. The darkness is somehow moving, forming an indistinct shape. Time is asleep here; all of this may have happened in a second or in a million years. But slowly, the strange dark shapeless shapes begin to funnel into the light. Like a black hole sucking all the light, this light attracts and pulls towards itself all the darkness. The inkling begins to fall inescapably towards the light. As it falls, it begins to hear noises and sounds from a distant world. They are the sounds of a different universe, of a three-dimensional world. Falling quickly now the inkling is ripped and torn from the very fabric of the one-dimensional world of non-existence.

  This inkling is the soul.

  The first experience of the soul is curiosity, which gives way to a rush of pain. But it has no way yet to express this pain. Voiceless and ravaged, the soul seeks, with a knowledge that comes from an unknown source - perhaps from repetition - the light.

  But voices now, jumbled, muffled, confused, scared. The universe fills with light, mayhem and sound. All around the soul the dark, smoky clouds of non-existence are roiled and thrashed and whipped by the turmoil created by the gravity of light.

  At the meeting of darkness and light, the two universes collide. For one brief moment the soul exists simultaneously in two states. Shredded, empty, shuddering, it is forced to swallow without the benefit of the ability to express, the sudden knowledge of the terrifying beauty of all reality. Only in that moment of suspended animation, the soul knows everything there is to know. For that one eternal moment, it is privy to all wisdom and to all immensity.

  But another brief millennia passes or a second passes and the soul is sucked into the blinding white light and erupts suddenly into a world of solidity and noise and chaos and an uncomfortable lack of buoyancy, and at the shockwave of sudden, heavy existence, it gasps and breaths in a lungful of air and finally finding voice in its lungs I started to scream and I started to kick and I started to cry. And then I started to forget.

  I cried because I realized immediately, with a terrifying surety, that all the awareness of the past infinity were receding from me like a dream in the morning, disappearing fast into the mists of grey memory. I cried because this is what I had asked for, this is what I had always wanted – the ability to express the things infinite, but in the process of gaining this ability, I was losing the sacred knowledge. I cried because I wanted to express, to seek perfection in my expression after millions of years of non-expression, of mute imprisonment. I cried because this is the sadness of life – the unawareness of the awareness.

  Strangers looked down on me, smiling and laughing and crying. I stopped crying as the memories faded completely and I couldn’t recall what it was I was crying for. Someone turned me around to cut the umbilical cord that had wrapped itself around my neck, squeezing my throat and choking my breath, and my eyes fell on the green wall of the hospital and the clock and the second hand, and I saw once again the second hand ticking, one more second, one more second, one more second, and that triggered something in me and the memories rushed back in a great cyclic link between life and death and existence and non-existence and then re-birth.

  And I smiled.

  *

  Nights

  For the happiest life, days should be rigorously planned, nights left open to chance.

  Mignon McLaughlin.