More Than Allegory

by Bernardo Kastrup

  ‘I get it!’ I exclaimed. ‘The mystery of death is the change of perspective from observing the universe to being the universe!’

  ‘That and more,’ the Other added, ‘for there are countless universes, realms, realities being simultaneously imagined by mind-at-large.’

  ‘Does death imply transcending time as well?’ I asked.

  ‘Both time and space are elements of the dream. When experienced from the reverse side, time and space, too, aren’t what they seem to be from within the dream. So yes, death restores the “dying” segment of mind-at-large to its original, timeless context.’

  ‘I guess I have a lot to process and integrate in the coming days and weeks,’ I said, hinting at my intention to end our session for the day.

  ‘You now have a fairly complete understanding of what’s going on, at least from an analytical perspective.’ He stressed this last part by slowing down his speech.

  ‘Clearly you think there are other perspectives to grasp.’

  ‘The truth is like a diamond with many facets. When you come back next time, if you give me the chance, I will try to give you a glimpse of a different one; a facet your analytical proclivities prevent you from even imagining.’

  Chapter 12

  Another facet of the truth

  The next few days were of quiet contemplation. There was beautiful countryside surrounding the Club’s premises so I took the opportunity to go for long walks in the woods, often accompanied by Sophie or other visiting Explorers. As advised by my Trilobite psychoanalyst—assigned to me since my earlier mishap—I avoided engaging my intellect too much. The idea was to give space to my unconscious mind—the Other would have called it ‘obfuscated mind’ instead—to integrate everything I had experienced. To this day, years later, I still remember and cherish that brief period. It somehow cemented in me a renewed appreciation for communing with nature, which I felt as a child but had somehow lost along the way.

  My visits to the Dome were changing not only my ideas and views, but my very way of being. They were allowing my truest, most authentic values and predispositions to shine unfiltered through the fog of cultural conditioning. I felt lighter, more rooted in the present and the Earth, more at peace with myself and the world. Things that used to bother me no longer did. Many of my worldly ambitions and goals somehow lost their grip on me, opening space for an embrace of the natural flow of life, wherever it would take me.

  Despite this generally serene mindset, I was still apprehensive about what the Other had promised at the closing of my previous visit. What could this new facet of the truth be? How could I relate to something I couldn’t grasp analytically? To avoid raising any kind of alarm that could jeopardize my next chance to trip, I kept that final detail to myself. Even Sophie and my psychoanalyst were in the dark about it. As a result, I had to face my anxiety alone. Little did I know what was just ahead of me…

  Meditating in the Dome

  ‘Are you ready for it?’ the Other asked.

  ‘No, but carry on.’

  ‘This time you will need to actively cooperate,’ he said. ‘The current Recipe setup prevents me from taking you deeper on my own.’

  ‘I cannot manipulate the Recipe from here,’ I remarked, immediately noticing the idiocy of my comment.

  ‘You don’t need to. Do you think journeys into transcendence can only be done with your expensive toys? People have been coming here since time immemorial. Your Recipe is a very useful option for difficult cases—hardheaded, relatively closed-minded people like you, caught up in circular intellectual models and dissociated from their own felt intuitions—but it’s not the only game in town.’

  ‘Right, what do I need to do then?’ I was anxious enough not to notice the passing jab he took at me.

  He paused, as if to give me time to settle down a bit. When he finally continued, he did so slowly, with a gentle but firm voice:

  ‘You are home. This is the ground of your being, the place where you were before you were born. Here you are absolutely safe. Nothing bad can happen to you.’

  Instantly I relaxed, as if entranced.

  ‘Close your eyes,’ he instructed me, ‘and project all your thoughts and feelings onto the back of your eyelids.’

  Naturally, my physical eyes were somewhere else. But in the Dome I had other eyes; symbolic eyes implied by the particular perspective I had within it. By following the Other’s instructions in my imagination, I experienced my thoughts and feelings as if they were all unfolding right in front of me, slightly separated from me. This visualization subtly put me in the position of witness of my thoughts and feelings, instead of their hostage.

  ‘They unfold like a movie on a screen in front of you,’ he continued, ‘which you witness as audience…’

  A pause of several seconds ensued.

  ‘Focus sharply on a point right in the center of the screen. If your attention deviates from the center, gently bring it back. You can do it as many times as you need. Everything else outside this tiny central point can now only be witnessed with your peripheral vision, becoming vague and blurred…’

  That was indeed the effect. Only my most pressing thoughts and feelings were still in focus, in the center. Everything else faded away in a haze, though still vaguely discernible in the periphery of my visual field.

  ‘Now, move this focal point slowly forward, away from you, as if you were trying to see something behind and beyond the screen…’

  As I so did, the entire screen went out of focus. All my thoughts and feelings became remote and abstract. I could still experience them, but in a detached manner. What was most extraordinary was that, by means of the visualization the Other had just guided me through, I could hold on to this detached state at will. It wasn’t elusive or slippery at all, but quite robust.

  Only much later did I understand what the Other was doing here: under the new Recipe setup, the Light Show was no longer inhibiting the residual neural activity that prevented me from drifting deeper into transcendent space. Instead, the Other achieved the same inhibition through a form of guided meditation within the Dome! Why hadn’t I thought of it myself?

  ‘Keep focusing beyond the screen… Stay alert for what might come into focus in that deeper layer of your cognition…’ These were the last words he said that I still heard more or less clearly.

  The magician

  Slowly, behind the now blurred thoughts and feelings on the screen in front of me, some elusive images began to form in the distance. It was as though another screen had appeared there, far behind the first one. Curiosity made me try to focus intensely on it. The images seemed to be entirely autonomous, which heightened my interest even more. What were those mysterious forms? Did they come from another reality? What did they mean?

  Eventually, I could discern a seemingly human figure. He appeared to be dressed like a nineteenth-century stage magician, complete with tailcoat, black top hat, bow tie, magic stick and all. A thin, twisted moustache provided the final touch to his bizarre looks. The grin on his face evoked a mixture of affection and mistrust at the same time: a trickster for sure, but somehow affable. He was staring straight at me, in an implicit invitation for me to come closer. Mesmerized by his countenance and unable to resist my curiosity, I soon found myself standing right in front of him.

  This wasn’t the familiar Dome anymore. The place was uncanny and had an altogether different ‘vibe,’ more electrical, more charged, as if something huge were on the brink of transpiring. I thought if I touched anything I’d get a shock. The colors of the walls were sharper, brighter, the angles more pronounced. The light had a subtle but unsettling stroboscopic effect. A low buzzing sound, like that of a beehive, filled the air. My curiosity mixed with apprehension and anticipation, reaching an overwhelming level. The magician offered no words and neither did I. Words seemed superfluous in this place. Somehow I knew that he was going to demonstrate a trick for me and that was the reason I was there. Nothing needed to be said.

&nbs
p; I also knew—through wordless, intuitive recognition—that I was now in deep cognitive layers of mind-at-large, where universal belief systems formed; layers supercharged with emotional energy to the brink of bursting at the seams. Indeed, I was inside a self-referential loop about to explode into a tangle. The feverish cognitive activity there was being presented to me in symbolic form—How else? The Other had succeed in inhibiting enough of my egoic mentation to bring these incredibly deep cognitive layers out of obfuscation. He’d done it so I could experience their activity symbolically, as opposed to merely understanding their role at a detached, analytical level. I understood at once that this was the new facet he had promised to show me.

  With no warning, the magician shook his stick and turned it into a semitransparent veil, made of silk voile or similar fabric, about one square meter in size. He then took a step forward, coming within half an arm’s length of me. My apprehension level skyrocketed. Now that his face was so close to mine, I noticed that there was something strangely familiar about him, though I couldn’t really put my finger on it. Slowly, as if not to startle me, he reached around my head with both his arms—one on each side of my neck—and stretched out the veil behind my back. His grin became accentuated, as though he were very proud of what he was about to do. Then, rather suddenly, he pulled the veil over my head in one swift movement. The speed of the movement made the fabric float up in the air for a moment, slowly coming down over my face. As it did, my vision became blurred. Once again, everything became hazy, remote, abstract… Looking through the veil, I could still see the magician blink an eye at me in a sign of complicity. The last thing I remember was that the walls of that place, covered in bright hues, began to vibrate like a loudspeaker and eventually broke apart into thousands of small bricks.

  Brick world

  Life meant hard work, I thought, especially when it came to metamorphosis. My years as a walker were over and it was time for me to finally turn myself into a roller. Laborious business that was: I had removed almost all the colorful bricks making up my left leg and reassembled them into a half sphere, but the cycle was almost over and I still had the entire other leg to go. As things stood, I could neither walk—missing a leg—nor roll—missing the other half of the sphere. And if I couldn’t drag myself to the other side of the time boundary before the cycle reset, time would reverse and I would find myself a walker again. That would mean wasting all the effort I had already invested in reconfiguring my bricks.

  Other rollers were mocking me as they dashed towards the safety of the boundary. Oh, wouldn’t they love to see me having to walk around again… Rollers seem to derive great pleasure from the sluggishness and misery of walkers, especially ripe walkers like me, who still hadn’t managed to make the transition after several cycles. Maybe this was my lot in life…

  But wait… What the heck? I looked down again and saw one limb made of bright, colorful little bricks and another mostly eaten away. The rest of my body was also made of little bricks. As a matter of fact, so was the ground where I was sitting and everything around. ‘A brick world, huh?!’ I exclaimed to myself. ‘How plausible is that?!’ I had been taking this world for granted, uncritically, as if it were the most self-evident and natural thing imaginable.

  ‘This is absurd!’ I finally concluded. The moment I started asking myself critical questions about my circumstances, the spell began to break. Yes, this was indeed a spell! I could vaguely remember a magician putting me into some kind of trance. He had made me believe and expect things that were completely senseless! He was responsible for this travesty! How could I have fallen for it so easily?

  I had been tricked into believing in this outrageous brick world. Despite its dynamics being internally consistent, it had no grounding in reality. It wasn’t autonomous or standalone, but conjured up by the magician. As soon as I withdrew my belief in it, it lost its coherence and began falling apart brick by brick. ‘Yes, I figured it out you darned trickster!’ I shouted out loud. ‘I can see through your silly trick now! You can’t fool me anymore!’ Proudly and confidently, the brick world now lying in ruins before me, I got out of the spell and came round in reality at last. The magician would never manage to deceive me again, I thought.

  Another world

  Sure enough, I opened my eyes and saw my real world again: the beautiful round shapes of illuminated cloud buildings, miles high on the western horizon, soothed my heart. Yes, this was familiar and reassuring territory. I was safe at home. The unnerving experience with the magician had, of course, made me cold. I needed to boost my body temperature and so flew east, towards the boundary of the day-hemisphere, to catch some direct sun light. I confess the flight was tiring, despite its short distance. That trickster had sapped my energy somehow. How could I have fallen victim to his deception?

  ‘Oh, of course,’ it occurred to me, ‘my girlfriend brought me to that rain-reader to see if we were a good physiological match. That’s how I got into this mess. The rain-reader put a spell on me, I’m sure. Those insects are reckless and dishonest, I should have known better.’

  Yes, it made sense. Properly warmed up and with my metabolism normalized after a few minutes under the blazing sun, I flew across the boundary back to the safety of the night-hemisphere. Life returned to normalcy and I quickly forgot this strange incident.

  A couple of years later, my girlfriend finally accepted to merge with me physiologically. We moved to a pretty little cloud cottage quite close to the boundary, low in the sky to avoid overheating. It was so low, in fact, that we could hear the crawlers on the ground every morning. It was wonderful, bucolic, idyllic. Our life was wholesome, close to nature. We ate mostly crawlers from our own yard, instead of processed stuff. And yes, we had hundreds of offspring. A third of our time was spent working on the floating light-collectors close-by. During the rest, we enjoyed flying around for no reason and teaching our offspring everything our culture knew about life and the universe. We were very happy.

  One day, when our merger was already a few hundred years old and—tired and ill—we were approaching death, the sound of a strange male voice in our mind woke us up:

  ‘Don’t you see it?’ he asked rather angrily. ‘The most powerful deception is that which uses your own critical skepticism against you.’

  Startled, we jumped out of our sleeping cell.

  ‘Who is this?!’ we asked, looking around for the source of that sound, but to no avail.

  ‘An old friend,’ the disembodied voice replied.

  A strange feeling of familiarity and safety overtook us. Somehow we knew exactly what to do next, even though we couldn’t articulate why. Without wasting time, we went back into the cell, seeking refuge in its darkness and quiet.

  ‘This isn’t really real,’ the thought came to us. ‘Our life hasn’t been really real in the way we think of it. What is reality? What are we? Where have we come from? What are we doing here?’

  ‘Wake up, my friend, it’s time to wake up,’ the voice said reassuringly.

  When I opened my eyes, a strange creature was in front of me. He had no wings and only two arms. He also had two funny extra limbs, which looked like stronger but deformed arms, to touch the ground with. Somehow he was able to hold some kind of stick with one arm alone! Only his face, weird as it was with two tiny eyes and a ridiculous line of facial hair, looked strangely familiar. There was something interfering with my sight, some kind of semitransparent veil covering my eyes. With a strange but uncannily reassuring contortion of his facial muscles, the creature pulled the veil off of my head.

  ‘Oh my…’ I mumbled stunned, everything coming back to me in a flash.

  ‘Yes, yes, you’re back to the magician’s place,’ said the Other, his invisible presence as tangible as ever. ‘Settle down, the transition can be very disorienting.’

  I tried to, but the magician kept on staring at me in silence (I actually don’t think he could speak). Sometimes he tilted his head sideways, as dogs and owls do when they are cur
ious about something. This kind of behavior, even in such an utterly incongruous place, was annoying.

  It occurred to me then that some of my egoic mentation must have been returning. After all, not only was I feeling annoyed by entirely inconsequential things, I could even think self-reflectively again. This probably meant that my time with the magician was about to end. Before it did, however, I couldn’t resist remarking:

  ‘This has been extraordinary! I’ve just spent an intensely believable lifetime as some kind of intelligent insect… Not once have I doubted the reality of it!’

  ‘You’ve been tricked, huh?’ commented the Other.

  ‘Wow, have I! It’s extraordinary to finally see through it now.’

  And then he dropped the bomb:

  ‘But you haven’t seen through the trick yet…’

  The mother of all tricks

  I was speechless for a moment. When finally managing to articulate something, I could only produce the stupid obvious:

  ‘What trick?’

  ‘The mother of all tricks,’ the Other answered. ‘The trick in comparison to which everything you’ve undergone here was child’s play. Quick, look carefully at the magician in front of you.’

  I had already been looking at the magician. There was this aura of familiarity about him that I couldn’t make sense of…

  ‘Focus!’ the Other rushed me. ‘You don’t have much time. Ask yourself: Who is the magician?’

  I looked straight into the magician’s eyes. His permanent grin was something out of Alice in Wonderland. How ironically appropriate, since I did feel as lost as Alice. Who the heck was this uncanny figure? As soon as I asked the question, I knew I had to allow myself to drift into the magician’s eyes so to peek at his soul…

  ‘Oh my God!’ I shouted. Right there, in front of me, was myself! I was wearing a black top hat, bow tie and holding a stupid magic stick. And I was grinning at me, feeling delighted with the whole charade!