Inner Legacy (5 page)

Free Flying

Alone on the valley floor I rested with my back against the tree. I watched the river glinting in the sun as it flowed gently passed. The grass was soft and sweet, the leaves rustled overhead in the gentle breeze. Birds sang in the distance and sun warmed my body and I was at peace.

It was more than peace. I felt clean and whole and a lightness of being that cannot fully be described. I held my head up to the sun and  closed my eyes and felt myself floating happily in these idyllic surroundings. It was like sitting on the softest of feather beds, like being on a cushion of air. Nothing could be more perfect than this moment or so I thought at the time. I had no idea of the sweetness to come. Beyond my imagination even at this point in my experience, my journey, my quest.

Opening my eyes I noticed that my perspective had changed. For a moment I was puzzled and then I realised I was actually floating above the ground. Not far but above the ground nevertheless and I struggled thinking I was dreaming while at the same time feeling and knowing I had always been able to do this. As I struggled with this thought I hit the ground with a thump and felt heavy again.

I stood up confused and metaphorically scratched my head. Confusion poured over me along with the strongest sense of deja vu. Had I not dreamt so often throughout my life of being able to float above the ground and move with only my mind to guide me? I was convinced by this dream that had haunted me all my life that this was something I could do, ought to be able to do and yet when awake it was impossible to achieve that lightness of being that allowed me to lift my body just a little off the ground and move forward. The dream in my life was strong. I had often tried to step off the bottom of the stairs and not hit the ground. No matter how I tried I could not access this ability.

Eventually I had to convince myself it was just a very vivid dream. And yet now here I was experiencing the strangest of things and yet had no doubt no matter how bizarre the experience this was far more than a dream, far from a hallucination, I was in a reality and grounded in it as surely as the sun warms the earth. Yet even so a doubt remained that I was dreaming and yet this was no dream. No fakery here, this was all for real. Every weird and bizarre bit of the experience was real.

Like a little cloud above my head the doubt grew to cast a shadow over my being. I was perplexed and puzzled, the more the doubt grew and the more I wrestled with thoughts about dreams and reality the heavier I seemed to become the more grounded by gravity. I wondered if I had dreamt the floating.

I sat down beneath the tree and struggled with doubt and confusion until I grew thirsty and hungry.

I squatted beside the river and scooped up water until my thirst was quenched and then looked around for food. There had to be something edible. I scanned the river bank and my surroundings and saw nothing. I couldn't identify the trees that were scattered thinly on either side of the river, none seemed to hold any fruit.

Darkness began to fall and I huddled against the tree my hunger only partly sated by the water I had drunk. I fell into a fitful sleep gnawed at by hunger and doubt.

I woke with the first rays of the sun and decided I must explore the valley to try and find food of some sort. I was disappointed to be honest that there was none lying there as there had been so often in the days gone past. My doubts grew and as I trekked away from the rising sun across the river towards the mountainside in the distance my body seemed to grow heavier under the weight of doubt and confusion. I had a half baked plan to get to the side of the valley and begin to walk all the way round it seeking both food and a way out of the place.

I stumbled and fell many times as I headed towards the mountainside which rose out of the verdant green of the plain like a rock wall.

Towards noon with what seemed like miles and miles to go I sat down. I tried hard to move my mind back to that wonderful sense of wholeness and lightness of being I had known just over twenty hours earlier. Back to the place I had been in mentally before confusion and doubt had taken hold of my being and cast me down into this heaviness. Even the sun seemed to shine less brightly than it had done and the colours seemed to have a tendency to fade to grey in my peripheral vision.

I gave myself a physical slap on the face in a vain attempt to knock some sense into my being. I looked around me and saw an idyll. A paradise. Yet I was burdened and unable to see properly what was around me. I shook myself mentally and physically trying to shake off this growing darkness around my soul. I doubted, oh how I doubted everything. There would be no food, no help, no floating, no future, I was alone in madness on this soft green grass where now I laid my head in despair.

As the day wore on I gave myself over to self pity and doubt and darkness. Fear was gone but I was being swallowed by blackness. I lay down to die.

All was lost, I was without hope. Abandoned and alone. I had no will left and lay there asking to die. I gave up and waited to die.

And night came and curled its own darkness around my prone body and I longed for sleep. At some point I fell into the arms of sleep.

I dreamed a dream.

I fought in my dream and a great shadowy figure as strong  a man as ever I have wrestled. His name was doubt and we fought throughout the night. We wrestled and struggled until I grew weak neither of us able to overcome the other. Towards dawn he grew extremely black in form and that seemed to give him renewed strength over me and I felt myself begin to lose the battle of the night. He started to push me backwards and I felt my strength begin to ebb and fade. I was lost. I would lose this battle against this mighty foe whose only words had been grunts or whispers in my ear about his victory and the hopelessness of my struggle. Just when all was lost I felt the first light of the sun begin to disperse the gloom and warm my back and caress my head and this seemed to give me an extra strength and I was able to push this shadowy figure towards the river. I was winning slowly but surely and after much effort we were on the very bank of the river itself. I gave a mighty push and I saw and felt him begin to slip from the banking into the river and as his great feet plunged into the water his feet began to disperse caught in the water and flowing away like spilled ash. He grew smaller his head coming equal with mine at last and I was able to get a good grip on his shoulders and with all my strengthening might I was able to push him down into the water and watch him disintegrate and flow away like sewage. It was with a great sense of satisfaction that I pushed his head under water and watched it disperse.

The night was long and I had struggled with him for many hours and I was exhausted and lay down in my dream to sleep.

At this moment I awoke and felt the full force of the dream in wakened state. I felt elated to be free from the doubt and the darkness that had crushed me with such force the night before. Convinced as I was that I had had a dream I found when I tried to move that every muscle ached and when I tried to stand I found myself to be very wobbly and unsteady on my legs.

I was thirsty as well and only then did I realise that I was back beside the river not far from where I had strode out the day before for the side of the valley, while confused by this I was glad and drank deeply from the water until I felt refreshed. Around me I noticed little mushroom type growths that had grown during the night and tentatively  I tasted one and found it to be sweet  on the tongue and melting easily. I ate my fill and felt my strength return.

My body still ached and I decided to rest where I was beside the river for the remainder of the day.

I felt a great need to think and ponder and to try and get to grips with what I was experiencing and make sense of the reality in which I found myself.

I realised that reality only exists in our minds. For example the world has no colour it is only what our eyes make of the light that enters them that gives us colour and only with two eyes do we see depth or think we do. Other creatures see the world and shapes quite differently. There is no definitive thing called red but only something we are able to call that by common experience. I had made the shadowy figure into that of a man but was it? Was it just my mind making sense out the reality.

I expected grass to be green and trees to be trees and water to flow and so around me that was what I made out, but was it real or just my brain making some kind of sense out of something else. I recalled being able to float and then doubting it because of course gravity made such an idea impossible, I looked at the ground and assumed that I must be tied to it by the force I knew as gravity. What if that was not the case at all?

As I tried to make sense of all these thoughts I noticed that I had begun to rise slowly above the ground and I struggled with this idea but refused to doubt what I was experiencing. I tried to trust what I was experiencing as being part of the this new reality. I looked at the tree and longed for the shade it was casting, a shade I hadn't noticed before, was I creating the shadow out of my need for there to be shadows in my world and as I got lost in that thought so I found myself slowly and gently moving across the river towards the tree. I tried hard not to fight or doubt the experience and I found very quickly that I was at rest beneath the tree and wished myself to be in contact with the green grass and so I settled as gently as a falling feather to the ground and there I rested throughout the afternoon and in to  the evening. As the sun began to set I made my way on foot to the river to drink and to eat of the sweet food that was growing on the bank and then with a simple act of will a lightness of being filled my body and I floated gently back to the tree, my feet only a few centimetres above the ground. I needed to make no walking motion I simply moved freely through the air. I was exhilarated by this experience and the reality of that which I had always dreamed of doing. I had known I could do this and was glad finally to experience it while awake. It wasn't flying, I could simply move my body by an act of will and so it moved and glided.

I sat down and prepared for nightfall

Exploring

In the morning I felt like a toddler who has suddenly found his feet and wants to run everywhere while often crashing and falling. As I explored the possibilities of movement without the restraint of gravity I made many errors particularly when I tried to rise in height or when I sent myself going forward too fast and ended up tumbling and rolling half off the ground and often bouncing on the ground.

I was free of earthly tethers and I realised that many of the negative emotions that had plagued me seemed to have disappeared almost entirely, indeed it was hard to even recall what they had felt like. Although I still had the words for the emotions they no longer called up identifiable echoes in my mind. My past seemed to be slipping from me and I had a feeling of being new born, a new creation, a lamb gambolling in the fields in spring time.

I spent the day trying to master my new ability and by the time darkness drew in again I felt I had got the hang of the basics. As I mused under the tree I realised that I did not ache and could have gone on much longer.

I lay floating just above the ground, my hands behind my head watching the stars in the sky. Each night there seemed to be more of them burning ever more brightly. I felt no heat or cold and my sleep was that of child, deep and untroubled.

Sleep was an instant event now, no longer a case of tossing and turning and waiting but rather my mind switched off and then on again  as I awoke. There was no sense of grogginess or the need to yawn and stretch. I was changing and I barely noticed this happening until several days later as I bent down to take water I saw my reflection in the water and for a long time failed to recognise myself. I find it hard to describe but somehow this new lightness of being was reflected in the water. I seemed to be more like light than anything else but that is woefully inadequate. In fact at first glance I felt there must be someone behind me and I looked round to find no one of course.

I lost count of the number of days I spent in this idyll. I mastered the art of moving without gravity and I explored the valley with great ease discovering the source of the river on the side of the far off mountain cliff and discovered that it disappeared under ground at the other end of the valley. The valley itself was enclosed and there was no way in or out. The sheer cliffs and mountains that surrounded the valley proved too high even for my body to rise up to and I discovered that I was limited to a certain height above the ground and then I could rise no further. I don't know whether or not I hit a physical or mental barrier but barrier there was to prevent me from going further. I had never been comfortable with heights but now I had no fear of falling. I was able to enjoy the view from above and felt the effortless freedom of the birds that float on rising air currents and move in lazy circles.

I had no desire to top the mountains or to even wonder what lay beyond. I was happy to be here in this wonderful still valley. My bodily needs were few and satisfied with the water and and sweet growths that appeared fresh each morning. Occasionally it occurred to me that I was alone and yet I felt no sense of loss or need for companionship. I was content and at peace and found myself slipping happily into life in the valley. I was aware of changes taking place in [my] mind. I was so at peace with where I was that I no longer found the need to sit under a tree and dwell on what was happening or to try and work it out. My days of trying to reason seemed to be over and yet as each day passed I felt I knew more than I had ever known before but the knowledge is beyond my ability to express here for it wasn't knowledge about things but about a growing awareness of reality as it actually was.

I lost count of the days at this time and there was no indication in the  valley of any passing of seasons it seemed that it was early summer and it seemed to stay that way. I may have been in the valley like this for months perhaps even years for I was beginning to become aware that I was no longer aware of time. Yes I could experience the start and end of a day and yet it caused me no sensation of time passing. Rather it was as though I was in the now, that place you can never quite be in because as soon as you think of it it is passed and gone and we can no more be in the now that we can be in the future. At least to be fair that is the way our brains process the information but our brains trick us daily and see the world as our brains decode it rather than as it actually is and the world we live in is not that of other animals for whom reality is something quite different. Imagine if we had the eyes of a cat and nose of a dog what a different world we would experience. That is the  closest I think I can get to describing what happened during that period in the valley which I hoped would never end and where I would have rested and played for all time had I been allowed to stay there.

There came a day when I awoke and the valley was different. Quite different in fact. There was a whisper in the wind that began to blow and it called my name.