I found myself in seated meditation in a temple with oppressive tropical heat carried on the breeze through the hall. A sent of curry and fish oil carried on the same breeze. The rounded script recording the sutras on dried banana leaves, carved such so as to not destroy the medium gave away the language. I was in Burma, and my saffron robes give away my station. I am a monk, seated in meditation, searching for freedom from suffering.
I sat and I chanted. Breath in. Breath out. My pronunciation of the ancient words in a continuous and ever complexifying rhythum indicated a mastery of the practices of my sect. I strove to detach. Thought. No thought. Focus. No focus. Mind. No mind.
I had walked this path before. I had walked it for many years at this point. The final objective known for what I believed, but not for anything here to fore experienced or seen. And then a trance. And then a vision.
I was transported into another state of awareness. Perhaps not elevated, but perception none the less altered. Perhaps relaxed to see what was already there, and what had always been there. The distractions of physical samsara faded. I saw instead what lay beyond them, and it was yet even more suffering. The desert of gray below and in the sky stretched to the horizon. If anything, the view was more troubling in the absence of the physical attachments I had strived so long to detach from. In something so close to a void, it had always been assumed one would reach freedom from attachment. But here more than anything I was made aware of my own attachment to mortality. Even beyond the physical I was still bound to death and rebirth. Or perhaps I was simply bound to death in this place so bland and between light and dark, so devoid and yet so vivid as to call into question the deepest fundamentals of what we believed about extinguishing the flame. About Nirvana.
Perhaps I was in this trance forever. Perhaps only a few moments. The shift was as extreme as a flame being extinguished, only in revers. A light had appeared on the horizon. Or maybe it was the horizon. So massive the thing as to transcend the notions of time and space so normally visible in the physical samsara. It was as if it transcended ages, not only worlds. It was a ship, a vessel I knew in one look from the third eye could hold all below Nirvana. Perhaps it could hold that too. I would have fled, had I not forgotten my own body and had I not felt some very distant, yet very deep memory triggered by the vision.
The ship sat on the clouds above, which did not seem so gray anymore in the shadow of something so radiant. And then a voice. "See and understand. I have brought a ship great enough to hold the worlds. And so it shall for all below shall be raised above to Golden City beyond samsara. Beyond Nirvana. Beyond all comprehension. " And then I saw before me what I had only understood before to be an instrument of death. A cross of wood. And before it, a river of blood. I heard again, "all things in the worlds must die to be raised to life again. The cycle of death and rebirth you know well. I have died so that all the worlds my rise forever to the Golden City. Come and bathe in my blood, which will flow through all the worlds." I waded into the river, and I heard again, "I am the one you have heard about. The one you have been waiting for. The one the Buddhas spoke of. I am the Mesia."
At this I descended into the river, and all went dark. I awoke to find myself thrashing about at my desk, the sound of the highway outside, and my alarm clock about to go off.
