Inner Legacy (8 page)

Inside the Cone

I have slept after a fashion and now I must make a stab at describing what happened. It is the middle of the night and pain has kept me from further sleep, I hope to have the strength in the quietness of the night to write through to at last dawn as I must get this written before I am too weak. I know my handwriting is getting worse and I make mistakes now Adam but I hope you can decipher things properly. I am sorry to have written this in code but you will understand I think by now why this cannot be seen by other eyes. I have written this way since I was a child when I first learned about codes and over the decades it has become as easy for me to write and read as though it were in English. I know decoding it all will be a frustrating and time consuming business for you. The only plus side for you is that perhaps you will ponder slowly over each section without rushing on as my story needs to be digested and I hope that I have left enough clues in the text itself for you to see beyond just these words to the greater truth I am describing. If you do not see the clues or understand them then I fear this will be lost to you and you will remain blind to the real truth within these words. I pray that will not be the case. It would cause me enormous pain, far worse than the pain of my  cancer, to think that you would not understand the nature of my tale or, worse, be so far from it that you reject it all. What I have shared with you is a great truth. I know if you are this far along you are either driven simply by curiosity and think this a fanciful tale or else you will already have picked up the references and clues hidden within the text for this is a truth locked inside a puzzle and written in numbers.

I am rambling a little, forgive me. I am wasting time in speculation that doesn't concern me in reality your path is your own and I cannot choose it for you or make you live your life in way that will shed light on this text you are translating from my numbers.

Yet I sense you will understand.

I entered the cone, how I cannot tell you whenever I try to think about it my imagination is filling in the holes in my memory and I cannot see or remember clearly how I came to be within the cone which was once inside not only hollow but was a protective shield keeping the presence of what was within from my eyes, mind and senses.Try this. A large multi-faceted teardrop shaped pendant diamond or glass chandelier fitment was inside the cone. It sparkled with light that came from within giving off flashes and streams of fire. Enormous and yet intimately small in my  perception. I should try to explain that it filled every corner of available space that I was aware of and yet looked and felt to be as small as a metre in height and felt intimate rather terrifying. Sigh...that doesn't do it justice. Let me simply say it was as it was and I was being drawn around it in a circular motion.

My companion at this point seemed to detach from me and went towards the shall we for sake of ease call it a diamond. The being that had been my companion seemed to go forward to the diamond shape and not only touch it but enter into a deep communion with this amazing object. Colours of every hue could be seen within and I was drawn inexorably into the dancing lights and streams of fire. I was becoming at one with this object, this presence, and it was strange beyond knowing. I was in a trance-like state of being fascinated by it all. Like a child before a Christmas tree.

My companion came back for me and indicated that I should now go forward and also touch the surface.

I drew close and it filled not only my eyes but my mind and senses. I have no recollection of reaching the point where I touched it but something most wonderful happened. Every molecule of my body which had already undergone profound changes was touched and I was aware of every part of myself. I was searched, examined and drawn to become part of this living apparition for I had come to realise that this was not an object at all but a manifestation of life itself. It wasn't an it at all but was a living entity.

I felt things being drawn from me, extracted, altered, cast aside. And all the time there seemed to be a soothing song whispered in my ear.

I was in a form of union in this experience not of equals, far from it, but in that intimate union with this presence I was being remade atom by atom and at every sub-atomic level.

My eyes closed I fell in to a dream-like place where patterns and ideas and thoughts were reshaped and renewed and in this state it felt as though my companion had also joined me and we were all in a dance of union and exchange. I was known and I knew. Oh how I knew. Even now writing down these words my body feels the echo of that experience and tingles as I recall the intertwining wonder of it all. Imagine the purest form of love making and if you had the ability to completely unite body and soul with your partner rather than just on a crude physical level? Is that too much to ask, probably.  As the smoke from two fires may mingle into one so I ceased to exist as I became one with my, dare I say it, two companions and yet I have never been more truly myself and had never known myself as I did now. I  was being transformed and in that transformation and union with this light I was becoming something else.

In this dream-like state I saw many things which I dare not speak of, I experienced that which I cannot share. There was blood and pain and love. Suffering and redemption. How can I describe all of this and the love I felt enveloping every part of me.

I saw something then with my eyes closed for I found I no longer needed my eyes to see.

I cannot say it. I will not say it, for it is not my place to say it, but you Adam ought to be able to guess and know what I saw. If you can't then my heart weeps for you even as I write this.

I saw it. Do you understand?

And then in my experience I ceased to be and was lost inside it all for I don't know how long. I ceased to exist as I knew and my ability to think or even rationalise was gone. I was in another place and reality. I came to know things beyond my knowledge. I saw with clarity the point and purpose of everything I had gone through since the experience had begun. I was astounded. I saw the reality of the blackness and what it meant. More than that was revealed, so much more was revealed in that slowly spinning vortex of light. I came to know. It was amazing beyond my limited ability to put into words. Amazing I have written - I should score that out, what a pathetically weak word to describe it all. Yet there are no words in my vocabulary and no talent within me to describe what happened and I feel frustrated by that. I now realise many have tried to describe similar experiences in the past and their works and locked to our minds because we do not know that of which we speak. I have the language ability of a frog trying to explain the solar system.

It was an experience without words, words cannot even begin to encompass it. Yet dare I say it, it was word. Word in a sense I had only imagined.

There were sounds suddenly all around me of the most beautiful I have ever heard. I span and swam and luxuriated in my newness.

I was fed.

Silence

And then there was silence. Not just silence but silence of the eyes as well. I was there hanging in darkness and unafraid. All other sights, sounds and presence had gone. In the blink of an eyelid I was alone, suspended and in silence.

Silence is something I have struggled with as a concept all my life. It has been an important concept in all of my life one I have struggled to even comprehend fully. I know I long for and like silence but how do you define that state of being that is silence. The obvious place to define by negatives, silence is the absence of sound, the absence of thoughts. Others try to define it as the space where thoughts might exist or that place where sound can exist. The more you try to think about it and even try and define it the harder it becomes.

I have felt the awfulness of the oppressive nature of the absence of sound in my home when the only sound is the rushing of blood in your ears and the silence is so noisy it is oppressive and and threatens to suffocate. That is not the kind of silence to which I am referring. Nor the kind used as a commemoration of some event when a group of people stand in silence. That is never silent in reality, voices may fall away but sounds still persist.

Silence in the sense I want to try and capture here is about stillness. Some call it the act of centring the mind although I have never been very sure what they mean by that. All I can say is that it is possible mainly by trying hard and repeating the exercise to reach a point of silence that is stillness where you exist in harmony with yourself and experience the nothingness of the now. Some even call it darkness. It is a place where you feel most alive and past and future no longer exist and you are only in the now and in that state you are in silence. It cannot be defined in the negative since this state with practice can be achieved without the absence of sound. Thoughts cease apart from the marvelling at the now. It is a state you can slip in to at will and which removes you from where you currently are to a better place.

I have been using it to good effect as I approach the end of my life on earth. It is blessed state to try and achieve and to have accessible. The only thing I have found that prevents me arriving at this place of silence is emotion. Emotions which are not for the most part real events but some kind of conditioned response to an event or a by product of some bodily action out of our control, they can overwhelm the mind even in its most rational state and flood it so that it cannot function never mind reach a state of silence and stillness. I have talked to the odd group and the occasional open mind about this idea of silence usually to be met with silence of the unhelpful kind, the lack of any recognised light of understanding. So I keep to myself these ideas or have done for many years. Now I have little time left and here I am reaching across the void trying to let you in to this secret world.

I make no claims for myself but in every religion in the world there have been those who sought the way of silence, the Sufis, Buddhists and Christians and others. Read about it yourself. In some each individual involved has gone beyond any outward forms to reach into the place of stillness and silence.

Silence is another world to experience, being still within and unaware of that which surrounds you so that you are caught and held in the now of being.

Yes I have tried and probably failed to let you in to this last little secret of my life which is not in my memoirs and of which you will have never heard me speak. I pass it on to you now only to hope you might reach for this place yourself for it is a good place of understanding where things become clear. I hope you will achieve at least some knowledge of the way of silence in order to help you understand that the silence in which I was now suspended was in no way frightful but a richness of blessing and it seemed the very pinnacle of existence but then I had no idea what was to come afterwards.

This silence bore little relation to that which I experienced in my earthly trips into this world in the way a grainy black and white photograph has no relation to a living experience of the same place.

I feel inadequate. I have not explained this to you very well. In no sense was I in a state of sensory deprivation. Rather I was in state where everything was boldly beautiful. The more I struggle towards the end of my tale the more I find myself lost for adequate words. I am growing not only rapidly physically weaker but my mind seems to be slipping away. Words are harder to find and I feel rushed up against time unable to think things through. I have written papers in the past on the nature of silence but there is no time now either to find them or to rethink them in the light of what I have experienced. Perhaps you may find them among my papers  and perhaps not and even then will you understand? Do I talk of something that while experienced and achieved by many people in the past may in fact be such a personal experience that it is not possible for one description to fit all. I think I am confusing myself. I am being urged to stay in bed now and I resist for my tale is nearly over. I know I have been given the time to finish this and I trust the words given to me are adequate for the job and may convey to you what I need you to understand.

I have digressed in order to try and explain what I mean when I say "And then there was silence".

It was so many degrees more than anything I had experienced before. How do I give you any taste of the wonder of being in stillness and silence and suspended in for want of  better words a darkness, a void.

I can say it was beautiful. I might liken it to being warm and cosy. Christmas Day as a child. A warm bath. The thrill of love. The wonder of a mountain view. The relief of a good cry. The smile of child. The moment of sleep. Yet none of these do it the slightest justice in its intensity but might give you a flavour of it. In no way was it oppressive but rather my heart began to sing out in joy, joy became the defining experience in the end. Pure and unadulterated joy.

The pleasure of "and then there was silence" was found in joy indescribable.

How long I was in this silence I cannot tell you for time and even the vaguest sense of time had long since departed. It had been ripped away from me the way a plaster might be ripped from a wounded knee and I had woken up to the unreality that we call time which doesn't as far as I was able to understand it exist except as a subjective experience as the human mind tries to make sense of its limited knowledge of the confines of the material world. We are like flies trapped in amber unable to make sense of anything that is truly real.

I had in this place which was not a place but a state of being begun the final casting off of all that I had been and known and thought. The renewing process was almost complete and I was becoming not something different but new, a pot being shaped out of rough clay into a beautifully glazed and fired vase.

Essentially I remained the same. I had been rebuilt. Refined. Made new. Made whole.

              "In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in a clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness. Our life is a long and arduous quest after Truth." Gandhi  

I love that quote from Gandhi. It speaks in a way that resonates deeply in my soul. I understand what he means and although our paths and experience are quite different yet I think my experience resonates not just across cultures but across the boundaries of history and the illusion of time, for if time is an illusion then is there really history? Has not man always been the same? The same drives and lusts and motivations? In no sense are those people from the 'past'  less evolved than we are today. Of course our technology may be different and we may smile at their understanding of the world and of medicine but one day soon our now will be a distant "past" and people will smile at our feeble attempts to understand the world and of our brutal medical practises. The basic human spirit , soul if you like, is as it has always been, exactly the same.

Many revelations came my way in the time that I hung in silence, in the void. These last thoughts are not of that calibre but merely an expression of long held opinions of mine here on earth. But my experience that I am relating to you is not of this world or universe but is of otherness and because it speaks of an otherness there are no ways to adequately describe it except by drawing reference to this world and its myths. Did I meet a real dragon-like creature? Of course I didn't. This was just a manifestation in my imagination of something much deeper that was being undergone. But how else could I make sense of the otherness of the experience except by trying to find a suitable reference in my own mind? Have I made up as I go along these descriptors of the experience? Such a thought I must emphatically deny! Not in any sense have I added to or subtracted from the experience as it happened to me. I saw the dragon in that valley and so I have described it as such. Do I think that was real? Of course not. Do I think the cave magically disappeared? I think not - these were just the way my mind attempted to make sense of what I experienced. So like Gandhi I can simply say that what was elusive and deceptive resolved itself into crystal clearness. That process began as I was joined with the diamond, the crystal, the light. Was my companion real? Indeed of that I have no doubt for I knew his name. Was he as described? I doubt it. How does one describe the wind when it is invisible to the eye? We cannot, we can only describe it by its effects on other solid and visible objects. Imagine however you could see the wind but not the objects it touches and try and describe it, if you will, and you will see the problems I have had in relating this tale to you. That is true I have not the slightest shadow of doubt, the fact that I resorted to the realms of fantasy characters to describe it, is partly my fault and my failings in my skill  at conveying the truth and perhaps had I felt able to talk about this out loud it might have helped crystallise the experience into a clearer form of words. It is only now as I run out of time and my end draws near do I have serious doubts about my ability to truly relate to you what happened and what it means. At least what it meant to me, what I think it was about. Now I confuse myself and I no longer can hold the train of thought as once I could. My mind is growing weaker like my body and my concentration starts to fail. I am not long for this world now Adam and I will shed no tears for its passing from my life. I know now what awaits me for I have seen it and I rejoice.

However since time is short I am devoting all my energies when I am alone, which is seldom now, to finishing these writings. Not only must I finish them but also hide them in the place where you uncovered them and do so before I am too weak to finish although I know that I will finish these notebooks and that I will be able to hide them. The fact that I know this is part of the proof I will give you at the end of this tale so that you might perhaps go back over my writing with a less sceptical eye and look for the clues I have hidden in the text for you to find and then understand. I am assuming you are taking this all with a sceptical eye and aren't of such a gullible and easily led nature as to take this all at face value. I will be disappointed if you have taken it all in without questioning it. You need to question. You need to seek out the truth within this tale. That is my true legacy to you, Adam. Be brave enough to ask if I am/was mad as hatter. Be strong enough to ask is this all a fiction or is it something more? Shred it to pieces in your mind and do not take what I have written as literal truth. True it is but not in that sense. I have struggled here to try and reach out to talk to you about this but I am no longer sure if my logic and train of thought can remain constant and I fear I may have wandered into dead ends or left thoughts unfinished and I am aware I have not yet finished my tale and the necessity to do so is pressing upon me. Yet today I have felt it necessary to try and offer some guidance as to how to read this tale and to seek reassurance for myself that in speaking freely of this to you, you will not doubt the sincerity of my intentions. While such little commentary as I am able to achieve is added with reluctance to this tale have no doubt that when I am relating the tale I am doing what I would call a clear memory dump onto paper. I just wish like everything else in my life that I had started on this project earlier and I would have had longer to move over the words with care, to shape them into what they ought to be instead of this babble for that's what it is that floods these pages. A mind fart.

Silence is not for the faint hearted for in silence you come face to face with truth.

I must rest.

Can I ask one favour of you my dear dear Grandson? Do not tamper with my words. Add what you like to them if you share this tale but leave the content of my notebooks as they are, do not feel the need to edit or to clarify or even to protect my memory. Let it be as it is. If you ever do anything with these notebooks I am thinking here of you showing them to others or whatever or adding to the words - do not feel the need to try and explain what I describe for what you perceive may not be what I intended and what others see may not be what you see. I hope this at least will be honoured.