Rams posts about all things interesting will be sorely missed. I was shocked he left at this time. We did need so many souls like his here to effect the aggregate. However he has a higher job to do now. Fly free my friend.
To Infinity and Beyond:
This Is the Afterlife
~ Ram Ayana~,
November 14, 2012
Turning inside out, the young shaman falls though a long swirling
tunnel formed of his inverted self, his unbodied mouth and eyes agape in
a primal rush toward extinction.
He accelerates through a
tightly wound vortex that shifts and bends to accommodate his course,
always centred in the swirling tube which never touches his falling,
disembodied perspective. The tunnel is made of light, and of his own
bloodstream, and of all the memories and unremembered details of
materiality and personality that made up his life – yet not merely ‘his’
life.
Every human, fish, bird, animal, insect, cell and blood
corpuscle that has ever lived is there with him, all at once – the dying
shaman can feel their bright fear and ecstasy pouring through him as
they all rush toward an unseen destination around the curving,
translucent bends of the primal vortex. Even though every being dies
alone – no matter if a multitude of witnesses is present – the moment of
death itself is one great screaming orgasm experienced simultaneously
by every one, every single thing that has ever lived – all our eyes and
mouths and ganglia agape at the same simultaneous culmination of our
material existence.
The tunnel is an eternally vivid living
record of past events and future dreams, all memories and visions
embroidered into the seamless fabric of its swirl – and Ram’yana’s
private past and the panoply of his personal memories are displayed most
prominently to him, brightly livid episodes which emerge from the
tubular walls as he passes. His strongest experiences – the most
impressive ones, that imprinted themselves most brightly into the
palimpsest of his being – leap out at him in high relief as he turns and
twists and falls and flies, a singular eye of consciousness
accelerating toward the endless end of the convoluted time tunnel that’s
leading him home.
As the world we experience slips past us at
the periphery of our sensoria, an ongoing tunnel vision moves with us at
the extremity of our perceptions, whether dying, dead or alive.
Journeying out of the physical plane, outside the material matrix of the
world, Ram’yana is beyond time and the ken of time-bound beings; as he
leaves four dimensional Timespace and approaches the speed of light
everything twists into a tunnel which lengthens fore and aft.
He
sees his grandfather and grandmother, Mickey Mouse and Pluto, all the
dogs and cats and mice and goldfish that shared his boyhood years, the
smells of his houses and the flavours of his lovers. He hears the
laughter of his kindergarten friends, their bright faces visible all
around him singing ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’, while pretty little
Abigail jumps over a spinning rope twirled by Gina and Hannah, her long
blonde pink-ribboned pigtails rotating around the sides of her head.
He holds his mother’s huge hand, grasping her finger through the wooden
bars of his bassinet while she sings to him in the sultry evening air.
He witnesses the expression of semi-resigned shock on his father’s face
during the Cuban missile crisis and again when Kennedy was shot, sees
the squashed remains of mosquitoes on the wall above his crib, watches
the strange lights moving in the sky while all the neighbours point and
speculate, sinks again with a collapsing sandbank on Bondi Beach, swept
away with hundreds of panicking faces being pulled out to the deep sea
along with him, while hundreds of man-eating sharks are driven off by
the beating, splashing oars of desperate lifesavers.
He sees his
mother’s eyes for the first time all over again and screams at the hard
slap on his bottom as he hangs before Doctor Traub’s thick-lensed
glasses in the bright, antiseptic birth theatre. His paternal
grandmother smiles at him as she leans over and obscures his view of the
magnificent giant yellow flowers of the magnolia tree while she wheels
him in his pram; he can still smell the cloying fragrance of the
flowers. His mother’s mother screams as he holds a dingo puppy up for
her inspection and she tumbles over backward in her bedroom, breaking
her hip while his eight year old eyes wash the scene away with tears
that burn through the illusory years.
The Cat in the Hat and the
Mighty Thor; the smell and Hungarian accent of alcoholic Uncle Tony,
putting him off beer for years with his first taste of bitter ale at the
age of six, and the bright laughing face of his babysitter Wendy by the
blazing wood fire; the spray of blood when he cut his wrist falling
onto a broken bottle at the age of three and the dizzying view from the
emergency surgeon’s high private balcony; the first time he kissed a
girl and the first time he dreamed of kissing a girl, all bound up
together; flying through the sky in a propeller-driven passenger plane,
watching circular rainbows following him in the clouds below.
White sulphur-crested cockatoos and sparrows circle his yard while
kookaburras laugh in the gum trees; the first terrifying time his father
holds him up high in the air to place him in the fork of a tree; his
first night after he ran away from home, reclining on a beanbag in a
Kings Cross commune reading Philip Jose Farmer’s pertinent To Your
Scattered Bodies Go – everything is there, each scene and sensation
embedded within and revealing a multitude of others. Everything. His
dying mind seeks out everything he’s ever experienced, seeking a way
back into the womb of living as he falls through something else
entirely, riding a rollercoaster beyond the imagination of the most
topologically tormented tycoon.
As Ram’yana falls he flashes
before the eyes of his whole life – as others fall with him, many
others, all others, sharing the time tunnel with his self-judging
awareness. In the eternity of the Fall everything hidden or repressed is
exposed in the Divine Light of clear sight and each being is their own
Judge, emerging from the blindfold of their material existence to weigh
their own soul on the ineradicable scales of justice and mercy.
Conscience is the soul and the soul is immortally, inescapably honest
with itself when released from the fetters of self-deceit and delusion.
Beyond time, at the singular moment of the great primal rush that is
the birth and death canal leading from one world to the next, everyone
experiences the same thingat the same time. We all come and go together
in a mind-blowing orgasm; dreaming or screaming, laughing or crying, all
emotion quails and pales before the rush of unstoppable motion that
dwarfs any and every trivial concern.
No thought of gods or
devils, life or death in the primal scream toward the Light at the end
of the tunnel – the only thing that matters is holding onto your
headless hat and the wordless regrets felt toward all the people,
animals and conscious entities you ever knew deeply, or ever loved – and
still love, deeply, tenderly, with a perspective of forgiveness,
understanding and compassion never vouchsafed to your flesh-bound,
in-coiled, emotion-embroiled mortal personality.
Ram is every
human who ever lived and died, every fish ever caught in a current to
swirl down into lightless depths beyond its control, every bird caught
in a whirlwind that flings it to flinders, every animal diving for cover
into cloaking vegetation from an inescapable predator, every individual
blood corpuscle flinging itself on the way to the crushing pressure at
the heart of its warm, pulsating cosmos. As he pours through the end of
the world the tunnel twists and whirls, always hiding the point of it
all, the point of no return, the heart of the matter, the source of
every thing and being – and his mind expands to simultaneously see his
spiraling course as a single thread in a vast interwoven image.
The tunnel is one thread among myriad drab and colourful strands in a
great uncharitable tapestry, an inextricable part of its intricate
pattern. The dying shaman follows the course of his life along its
undulating strand and sees that his thread rises and falls above and
beneath uncountable other interlocking threads, a spectrum of hues and
textures in the enormously unfathomable tapestry. As his thread rises
above another he is ‘conscious’, while the thread it occludes is
‘dreaming’; where his strand is covered by another thread, his mortal
body sleeps and dreams while the other strand lives their waking life.
Everyone and everything is there, all at once, simultaneously, lain out
and displayed before him with no need for the flow of time to elucidate
the infinite multiplicity of being.
Turn the tapestry around. The
thought comes unbidden and the cloth reverses itself around him in a
loopy topological twist; the implicately shared complementary nature of
consciousness becomes apparent to his blown mind as he sees himself
dreaming the lives of others, and others dreaming through his waking
eyes and flesh. The intermingling pathways wind around the curving
delineaments of their divine co-creation, which turns into itself like a
Moebius strip until the beginning of one thread seamlessly winds into
the end of another. The falcon is the hunter is the arrow is the feather
is the truth. All is alive and whole; nothing is partial or frayed.
The tapestry is vast, but he’s able to follow his individuated thread
through the colourful patterns and sees that the enormous conglomeration
of dreams and lives is incomplete – not completed by the path of the
single thread that is his experience of existence, rising from the
tapestry to enter him as him. At the same timeless moment, Ram’yana
approaches the plexus of light that is the destiny of all nations, women
and men – the future and past of all that are born to fall along with
him, minds blown in the blinding light of the immortal portal.
An
immaculate blazing white-hot sun glows at the end of the tunnel. He can
see it ever more clearly through the transparing walls of the vortex,
thinning and fading in the face of the overwhelmingly brilliant source
and core of existence. Ram sees the arcs of a trans-finite net spreading
outward from the source, sees an infinitude of other vortices
approaching its plexus from more angles than he can wrap his bodiless
head around. They pass through each other in ways that defy and tease
his mortal three-dimensionally entrained mind – but the arrangement
makes subtle sense to a higher form of his being, trembling on the edge
of an unchartable metamorphosis into something so much greater as to be
intrinsically unimaginable. Simultaneously, on another level, the
individual personality of the shaman approaches its ultimate rebirth and
transformation in his flight toward the blinding light of the central
sun.
The source of all is the hot, bright core and central axis
of the centreless multiverse, the eternal end of every tunnel; the maw
of a transdimensional creature about to swallow him up, the Infinite
Light of God and his own silent heart gently glowing in timeless repose.
He flies around a final bend in the dissolving tunnel, surging toward
the arcane net that veils the core – which flares into him as the tunnel
widens, opening into the final straight.
Ram’yana flashes toward
the weave that’s flung to the ends of the cosmos, spreading himself to
embrace the Light – and as he reaches it, he encounters the safety net. A
web-like sieve is strung across the open maw of All, and as Ram’yana
passes though it a great, resounding BOUMMB fills the boundless universe
– the sound of one heartbeat, as loud as the boom that eternally
creates the unborn, ever-living universe; the sound of Shiva’s eye
opening and of one hand clapping.
Before your time, he hears and
feels, not ready, not yet – unfinished – and he feels himself shrinking
toward an infinitesimally small spot in the multitude of multiverses –
back into the weave, where plan net X marks the spot where all things
meet in his current-bound primate life.
Boumb… Boom…. Boom!
"That’s why I’m here, writing this to you ‘now’ – the same ‘now’ that
you are reading it in, really. I and eye remember it all vividly, not as
something to slowly forget or avoid in the unfocused mind’s eye, but as
an ongoing experience that is with me now, always, dynamically
imprinted. It is with me as it is with you, when you close your eyes and
open your memory to see truly through the waters of forgetfulness, to
the infinite waters of eternal life.
Life and death, sensory
wakefulness and super sensory dreaming are the same thing, appearing as
the warp and weft of the reversible tapestry of existence. And everyone,
each of us, is the whole tapestry, inextricably interwoven – everyone
is everyone, and that’s about as close as this constraining corsetry of
early third millennium Inglesh needs to get at this point in infinite
time – xcept, perhaps, for the most important thing of all -
Every one you truly touch and are touched by, in every way, leaves the
deepest and most prominent engravings in your heart, mind and soul. What
we do unto others is what we do to ourselves – and other living beings
are more than mere memory mirrors or handy usable tools. That’s what
draws us back for more, and more again – the need to do better by our
selves – over and over, until we do it right. Then we get another choice
– or another chance to ride the carousel Wheel of Fortune again, if we
so choose.
The multiple layers of ascendant consciousness are a
self-filtering system of co-evolution – a system of slowly developing
focus and perspective that leads our awareness to other dimensions,
already inextricably interwoven with the relatively ‘familiar’ bounds of
our largely unknown but ever-present reality. There’s no dim-witted
hierarchy of order-givers or sword-wielding guardians barring the doors
of higher perception – the gateway to Heaven on Earth. There’s just you –
and me, and all of us, together. We all have our time to shine, and
that time is always now.
Yet Death is not Dying. In the Bardo
spaces between thy flowering carnations of existence, all the bright
religious hopes and turgid superstitious terrors await the untrained
monkey mind in its ongoing fall toward dissolution or reintegration. The
Bardo Realms are entire worlds or pocket universes as apparently solid
as the full-blown reality ye imagine around thee, right where thou art
sitting, right now. How do ye know thou art alive, not dreaming this
experience, right here and now? Do ye think that’s air you’re breathing?