Baboon
Tonight, before the sun sank down in Boston there were three seagulls squawking to each other in an upper alleyway where the old brick buildings juxtaposed themselves against the incandescent backdrop above. The seagulls seemed content, so I stopped and listened until the backdrop choked off and died into pencil lead. I started walking and noticed my socks felt like each fiber was dancing with radioactive cotton strands. I paid no mind at first.
Soon I was hovering an inch above the ground and was moving past like a conveyer-belt. I went unnoticed -- and was at last invisible. Time shuddered and the cars passing turned into streams of light and the streams became shafts of light filtering through leaves shaped like praying hands.
I was no longer on a conveyer-belt but was lounging upside down with my feet clasped around a tree limb -- observing the world -- as a baboon -- clear enough to me that it was myself further back along the helix of time and being, two forces wrapped around each other and threaded through the universe like a French-braid. I was taking in the world through my monkey brain in an upside down jungle, ground overhead and void below.
Another baboon with a meaty face and flared nostrils descended from a nearby branch and observed me affectionately. She presented me a mashed banana and I took a handful and licked my fingers clean.
Savoring the mashed fruit on my palate, I closed my baboon eyelids and nodded off into Samadhi -- formless once again, familiar like warm bread, the feeling of oneself -- before conception.
I emerged on the other side of infinity. No fur, no flesh, no instincts. Just consciousness in a vacuum of ten-thousand erupting suns -- heaven and hell seemed insignificant from this vantage, and were…just opposite ends of the same spectrum.
But this here was the whole damn spectrum and the place it occupied. Before, through the reduction valve of the homosapien mind, existence could only be conceived of as linear, as if watched through a keyhole, but then the keyholes became windows in which greater portions could be seen at once and it soon became apparent the lines were parts of large curves. Then, the windows became doors in which the last vapors of myself stepped through, and the large curves revealed themselves as portions of a greater, singular circle. A vast cirlce bound through all phenomena like a flaming crown. And no longer was I observing. The question of my existence was rendered irrelevant.
The circle was a tube of blue flames with a marshmallow center of creamy clear light – and the center was everywhere at once.
And then the creamy clearness was the headlights of cars flowing past me, as I stood on the sidewalk in the pencil lead of Boston at dusk. I could taste the marshmallow with my frontal lobes and could have sworn I tasted banana in my mouth.
Soon I was hovering an inch above the ground and was moving past like a conveyer-belt. I went unnoticed -- and was at last invisible. Time shuddered and the cars passing turned into streams of light and the streams became shafts of light filtering through leaves shaped like praying hands.
I was no longer on a conveyer-belt but was lounging upside down with my feet clasped around a tree limb -- observing the world -- as a baboon -- clear enough to me that it was myself further back along the helix of time and being, two forces wrapped around each other and threaded through the universe like a French-braid. I was taking in the world through my monkey brain in an upside down jungle, ground overhead and void below.
Another baboon with a meaty face and flared nostrils descended from a nearby branch and observed me affectionately. She presented me a mashed banana and I took a handful and licked my fingers clean.
Savoring the mashed fruit on my palate, I closed my baboon eyelids and nodded off into Samadhi -- formless once again, familiar like warm bread, the feeling of oneself -- before conception.
I emerged on the other side of infinity. No fur, no flesh, no instincts. Just consciousness in a vacuum of ten-thousand erupting suns -- heaven and hell seemed insignificant from this vantage, and were…just opposite ends of the same spectrum.
But this here was the whole damn spectrum and the place it occupied. Before, through the reduction valve of the homosapien mind, existence could only be conceived of as linear, as if watched through a keyhole, but then the keyholes became windows in which greater portions could be seen at once and it soon became apparent the lines were parts of large curves. Then, the windows became doors in which the last vapors of myself stepped through, and the large curves revealed themselves as portions of a greater, singular circle. A vast cirlce bound through all phenomena like a flaming crown. And no longer was I observing. The question of my existence was rendered irrelevant.
The circle was a tube of blue flames with a marshmallow center of creamy clear light – and the center was everywhere at once.
And then the creamy clearness was the headlights of cars flowing past me, as I stood on the sidewalk in the pencil lead of Boston at dusk. I could taste the marshmallow with my frontal lobes and could have sworn I tasted banana in my mouth.
This entry was posted by Ben Myers, on
Thursday, August 17, 2006.
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