The magic of this reality, synchronicities and signs and answered prayers, is good medicine for a time, but after awhile, you no longer need it. Once, whenever I would look at the moon, I would look for a sign. Some shape or symbol, like a rainbow halo, to tell me that liberation was lurking somewhere, that behind the veil of the material world was something mysterious that would ultimately unravel my existential sadness and reunite me with the divine.
Sitting on the terrace Wednesday night watching the silver lake undulate hypnotically, I looked up at the moon, strangely fixated, and realized that such longings have disappeared.
The moon is enough. The moon is the magic. The magic is the moon.
I woke up for a long while by the water. The moon was surrounded by a bright, warm, misty glow and highlighted the interference patterns of waves in the water. I sank into my own awareness and discovered everything there.
The moment we become truly alone–with no representations or fantasies about what others are experiencing–we see that we are that which once appeared on the outside, and we are not alone at all. When you are your own awareness and no one else’s, which is to say, you cease to create some sense within yourself of another person’s awareness, you touch existence directly. There is no other. No one with whom to carry on imaginary conversations… even that conversation compelled by the urge to share the experience of being awake. You stop concerning yourself with what others think. You wake up not only from the illusion of self but from the illusion of other. Union is signless. Nothing gives evidence of it, and you cannot point to it. It has no substance.
You become truly alone, or all your own, and suddenly there it is… the moon.
An hour later, I saw my dear Buddhist friend again, precisely three months after my prescient moon dream. We were brought together quite unexpectedly by the crisis of a mutual friend that reached its pinnacle soon after I left the lake. All the love that filled us before was still there, as if it had never left. It was neither mine nor his but rather the medium into which we dissolve when we wake up, if even for a moment, which is to say, we would have been just as one had we not entered the same room.
He was not afraid of holding my hand, and I was not afraid of losing him.
As it turns out, the artifact from Hesperia did come into play. It was a laptop, an exchange of kindhearted emails that reopened the portal to the core of light. Looking back at the short story I wrote two weeks ago, All Good Things, the descriptions seem obvious now.
