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Friday 14 September 2012

Part One - The Initiation


Part One

The Initiation


“Welcome to the Phase. We’ve been waiting for you. Patiently, because we knew you would soon arrive. Now that you are here, what shall you do with endless possibility?”
“Anything I desire, of course.”
“Well of course.”
“Yet, where do I begin?”
“I am your guide; I will show you direction if you allow me.”
“I trust you.”
“Good. That means you trust yourself and this means you are ready. Let’s walk.”

So we walked and the obscurity around us began to assume shapes and forms. Soon I found myself strolling down a beach; stretching endlessly into the smudgy distance. The ocean seemed far away yet sounded near; I could smell its salty fragrance, a blue line on the horizon where the somber glowing sun seemed to perch. The sand was soft beneath my feet and pushed up between my toes. A snaking line of footprints I left moulded in my wake. Curiously my Guide had no such impression on the scenery. We walked on silently. I spared an expectant glance at the face of my Guide, he returned the glance with a warm smile – his eyes shone with an enigmatic wisdom I found myself eager to discern.

“Where are we going?”
“Where ever you wish, it is your will that structures the Phase. We stroll on the Endless Beach because you brought us here.”
“You are my guide?”
“That’s what you summoned me hither for, I believe.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Because you have forgotten. You have been in hibernation, asleep until now.”
“Am I dreaming?”
“Yes.”
“This isn’t real?”
“Does it not seem realistic?”
“It does…”
“Then it is real.”
“But if I am dreaming…?”
“You are always dreaming, friend – You are one of the dreamers.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
“Hardly,” he chuckled at this, “To dream would mean you desire to awaken.”
“So I am not asleep, but I dream still?”
“What is your perception of reality but a preconceived dream built upon a foundation of hereditary belief systems?”
I Stopped. “Am I real? Do I exist?”

My Guide stops at this, his hands clasped behind his back, his mystical eyes seemed to continue strolling down the beach into the distance, “You think, therefore you must be,” he said as he turned to face me.

“Am I just the imagination of myself?” an introspective uncertainty I asked out aloud.

At this point a thick fog seemed to roll in around us from apparently no where. My surroundings ingested by the gluttonous doubt that took the form of the fog. My Guide had disappeared too. Despite myself an unreasonable fear began to grip me – like a blanket of pressure it enveloped me, threatening to smother me. I began to choke and a static pitch filled my ears; the fog assumed a will of its own and became the very apparition of my trepidation. I fell to my knees, paralyzed with apprehension, the soft sand was no longer beneath me. My vision blurred and I was fading into darkness.

A sensation… A hand, on my shoulder? Yes, I feel a determined grip and then almost immediately an impression of rotation; as though I spun on an axis. Then everything seized and there was calm again – I could breathe again.

“Where did you go?”
My vision tentatively reassembled and before me I could make out the vague figure of my Guide. “I don’t know,” I said honestly.
“You allowed your fear to carry you away.”
“I am ashamed.”
“Do not be, you are stronger then you give yourself credit for.”
“Yet I am, if it were not for you I might have been lost.”
“You see! That is the purpose you have designated for me since I am your guide, I will not allow you to wonder or stray.”
And he was right, now I saw – as the realization occurred to me so did my full spectrum of awareness. My inquisitive eyes took in the scenery around me. It had altered again.

“Why does everything keep changing?”
“It is the nature of the Phase and the reflection of the creative will of the Universe that you subsist within.”
“Is this my Universe?”
“Yes, but you share it with everyone else’s Universe.”
“Everything is connected.”
“Yes.”
“Intertwined and spliced from the same genesis to the same conclusion.”
“Yes.”
“What is imagination and what is real?”
“Reality is what you imagine it to be.”
“So essentially I am the Imagination of myself? I create my own reality?”
“Yes,” he said with that warm smile, “Look around you. Tell me what you see.”

“I see… I see a vast expanse of verdant undulating plains atop the vantage point of a plateau… Everything is so vivid, so… beautiful. I’ve never witnessed anything so viscerally realistic, even in my waking conscience! ...So beautiful. ”
“It is isn’t it?” a rhetorical question with a knowing smile. “Look above you, the welkin is still a blank canvass you must paint.”
I didn’t notice until then, so I glanced up. “Wow. Seven luminous moons?”
“It is numerically significant.”
“In what manner?”
“The one in which is relative to you, friend.”
“Twilight; two suns setting – submerging below the horizon. I never knew such beauty could exist!”
“It exists all around you all the time. You must desire to see it before you can recognize it.”
“I am imagining this?”
“Your imagination is the driving force that constructs the Phase into the Universe you aspire.”
“What else could I possibly create?”
“Show me.”

I looked up again to the sky; a palette of scarlet, violet and indigo. The stars began to emerge from their idle slumber; awaking to a novel night. One star in particular ensnared my interest like a firefly captured in a nylon net. It appeared to me as a curious and enigmatic thing – the brightest star in the sky. Then suddenly, with a spontaneous motion, I felt myself drawn to this star as though through a tunnel. Before I knew it, I was looking down at an immense nebulous cloud reflecting the radiance of a super nova event. Struck with awe I did not notice my Guide materialize beside me.

“Can you find the words to describe it?”
I was brought back to circumstance, “No, I feel inept before its inspiring vision that no words I could possibly fathom in this Universe could justly describe. Language is still a crude and primitive method of conveying such experiences. Only my emotion may accurately allude to this.”
“Why then do you limit yourself to only a substandard view?”
“The Universe can be hostile.”
“No, the Universe is benign, only your fear makes it seem that way. Do not let self-limiting beliefs hinder you. In the Phase you cannot die, you will never cease to exist. Pain is just an illusion. Even now you defy the physics of the world you left behind.”

At this I realized how foolish I can be. I look around me and surely the laws of physics no longer seem comparative to me. It cannot hold me. My confidence reassured I desired to infiltrate the cosmic cloud to peer beneath its veil.

Immediately I found myself teleported upon the very surface of a neon blue neutron star within the cloud. There I stood where no carbon based life form could possibly exist. I felt no discomfort only a sensation of an intense energy. My Guide was there, faithfully beside me as usual. He bent and scooped up within his hand a piece of the star. He gestured and I emulated his action. I was pleasantly surprised; it seemed to take on the characteristics of a thick plasma liquid that felt warm yet peculiarly heavy in my hand. I open my palm, the plasma slid out between my fingers and was immediately sucked back within the star.

“There is no end to the possibilities here, friend.”

“I see.” My mind; unhinged by its generic constraints, was now like that of a child – inquisitive, intrepid and eager. I plunged into the star, burst out the other side in an iridescent solar flare. My body took on the form of a pure and wholesome energy and with the speed of light I soared through the infinite expanse of space and time. Never before have I known such freedom, never before.

-From the journal of a Phase Drifter

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