“Michael? Hello?” Sounds. Configurations of sounds that could have been buzzes or light switches flipping up and down furiously. I saw. Ellie, but that was just a word. Words were hard to come by and I would have preferred if they had passed by without bothering to touch me. I blinked and saw a smile, a thousand smiles, perhaps infinite smiles. “Your eyes are open.” Yes, yes they were. More than they ever had been. Everything trembled. Everything, everywhere. Such … beauty of feeling. Astonishing. It was all so much, too much without being too much. Tears, liquid joy. Sobs, shaking gratitude. “I’m so blessed. So blessed.” Weeping, so much love, more than the earth could hold.
“You crossed over.” That voice, one of care, welcoming me home. This wasn’t home, though. I had been home, but I was slowly drifting back to here. “Where is this?” Ellie, the being of light with me, said, “I understand the question. There is no answer.” She made sense. “I’m happy you’re with me. I’m sorry we’re in different bodies, though.” A hand on my chest, over my heart. Warmth. “Thank you.” I saw the smile. Smiles were beautiful, perhaps the most beautiful, but that couldn't be true even if it was true. Liberation from this world made returning to the three-dimensional cage sorrowful, in a joyful way.
“You don’t have to say anything, Michael. Close your eyes and rest if you want.” I knew what that meant, but it wasn’t necessary. I tried it, anyway, but eyes closed wasn't much different than eyes open. I said, “I’m not there. But maybe I am.” Laughter. “Michael, I understand. I do.” I was arriving in shifts, shifts of energy, shifts of time. Phases. Channels. Not one of the words made sense. Words distorted everything. How could I say anything and mean any of it when none of it meant anything? Ellie knew, though, but I knew it was because she had been there, been somewhere or everywhere that I had been … for how long? Time didn’t make sense. How long was I “there”? How long was I “gone”? How long have I been “back”? Ridiculous, but the closest I could come to communicating something that couldn’t be communicated.
“Ellie?” Sweetness filled my eyes. “Yes?” The sound of fluttering. “I don’t know how to use words. They’re wrong. But I want to … touch you in the way I could have. All or everything, those words say something but without meaning what they say. How can I ask an unreal question and receive anything but an unreal answer? That’s not what I mean, either. You know?” El placed her other hand on my head, bent down, and kissed my cheek then my lips. She was helping me become whole in the place I was. I didn’t want to come back all the way, but I could tell I needed to come back. I wasn’t supposed to be “there” any more.
“This sounds silly in my head—and I can hear it there—but how long was I everywhere else?” Ellie pulled her hand away from my head and put it to her mouth. She failed to stifle her giggles and that unleashed a flurry of fluttering butterflies from my chest. I chortled and gasped until I could barely breathe and my face felt like it would explode. Ellie bent over, kissed me again, and I laughed into her mouth. Somewhere above me an idea emerged; she was sucking in laughter whippits from my mouth. I might be kidnapped by a drug cartel and forced to breathe nitrous into balloons. The idea just made me laugh harder.
No, I wanted to go back, to revel in the elsewhere I was and perhaps still was and am and will be. All the words I thought, every one of them was a lie, jokes, absurd sounds that shrunk perception of the infinite to focus on a pebble of inconsequentialism. Ellie pulled away from my lips. “Your experience—or whatever you want or don’t want to call it—lasted about five minutes.” Five minutes? Five minutes?! “That can’t be right.” Ellie shrugged. “I know. But in this time you were unreachable for only five minutes. Not quite five.”
“I see. Yeah, in this time. There was no time elsewhere, at least in the way I think of time. Elsewhere is the only word I have for where was.” El climbed onto the couch, on top of me, and rested her head on my shoulder and chest. “That’s as good a word as any.” Yes, it was ... and just as meaningless as the others. We laid together silently for some time before I shifted to move her beside me. Our faces were inches apart. I looked into Ellie’s dark brown eyes. I felt relieved by being connected through her eyes and she through mine. There was nothing sexual between us; I was all too aware that she was a being and that I was as well. I was mystified, awed that she existed simultaneously.
“Ellie?” Her look changed, like she was pulling out of my eyes, more exclusively within the body that carried her awareness. “Yes?” I gasped, overcome with emotion again. “I feel … love. I don’t know what else to call it. But I feel love. Not that I love outward or that love is coming inward, but love, like the cycle is complete, that it’s so full there is nowhere for it to move other than within itself.” El simply said, “Beautiful.” Her mouth was open in a genuinely joyous grin. I couldn’t tell what my mouth was doing, but my entire being felt like a smile.
A burst of ebullience wrapped my arms around Ellie, underneath her and over her, and I pulled her as close to me as I could. “I want to squeeze my entire being inside of you.” She nuzzled her face against my neck and cheek. “I can feel you inside.” I closed my eyes again and images of elsewhere zipped around in my head. I wanted to share the experience with Ellie, but there was no reason for it. She knew it. That was evident.
When I went under, I lost contact with being human, with the world I had known. A kaleidoscope of fractals consumed me. I thought, briefly, of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but that thought disappeared quickly as I could no longer think. The vision wasn’t nearly so technological but was advanced in design beyond anything I had ever witnessed. It wasn't biological, either, but it was alive. Everything I was thinking was a lie, every thought about what had occurred, because the experience was beyond such pallid descriptions. I had felt as much as I saw, the colors reaching far beyond the spectrum of anything I had known or had been capable of imagining. There had been a wind, wind beyond light years, colors becoming me, droning sounds, humming, waveform vibrations, electrical impulses, sounds and feelings fused into an experience I didn't understand.
Screaming, my own, not of terror but of speed, advancement, hurtling, directional … without moving. Whatever the tunnel of colors and forms and designs, they passed me, through me as much as around me. Again, an interpretation after the fact. Perhaps before all that happened, or it may have been after or even during, a yellow-red sphere spun incessantly in front of me, twirling but never turning orange from the speed of the rotation. I thought I would pass through it but as it came closer it receded and eventually gave way to whiteness, bright light, blinding, all-encompassing, and I exploded, the transition complete, now a being of light within the light, now longer blinding even though it had lost no radiance. I could see everything and yet everything was light; no separation, no form, no differentiation, and yet all those things were. It makes no sense as a five-sense being, but there was clarity as a being of light.
Try as I might, I couldn’t be that being of light, not while being human. I couldn’t tell if it was something within me or if I had a vision of what I might become over trillions of years of evolution … or if I was that now and couldn’t perceive because of my sensory limitations, my pitifully thin imagination. I felt boxed and as I felt the sensation I remembered seeing a box somewhere in the infinity, neither before nor after the light, but within the elsewhere. I watched myself inside it. There were pinprick holes and I looked out from inside the box to see myself surrounding and I watched from the outside looking inside the pinprick holes to see myself in the darkness.
A panther, like a cartoon, walked across blades of steel, its eyes larger than its face, and I remembered feeling amused. I didn’t know what it was or why it was, but it kept walking past me and around me. I had the choice, though, to remain or be elsewhere. Sometimes I went elsewhere else—which makes no sense because elsewhere else was always right there and right there was always elsewhere else. I became within a cathedral, not Christian or even religious, but vast, huge, ever-enlarging.Pebbles floated and zipped, some twirling while others swirled. They were alive was everything right there and elsewhere else. Inanimate objects did not exist as inanimate objects did not exist in any way that I had thought of objects as a human.
The more I thought about these things, the more confused I became. My confusion tickled me, though. I laughed uncontrollably, almost shaking El off the couch as I let go of her, not purposefully, just because I couldn’t hold onto her any more. She grabbed me and lifted her head, looking at me with shock, but then she laughed hard as well. She slowed down, smiling incandescently, and that settled me. “I can only imagine where you are right now.” I was beaming, waved within awe. “Images pour through, but I can’t keep track. I feel bountiful, awkwardly jingling. Effervescence pulsates.” She pulled back, shook her head, and said, “I think I know where you are. It’s hard not to try to understand it, but you can’t. You might not be able to do stop trying--not right now--but you can let it be. It won't go anywhere, believe me.”
I didn’t even know what the hell she meant. “That doesn’t mean anything, Ellie.” Her head flung back and she cackled madly. “No, I don’t imagine it would to you. You probably don’t remember, but I told you you’d change.” What did that mean? I vaguely remembered her saying something like that, but she said it to a place in my body that wasn’t there any more. That must be what change means. Different. But … change makes no sense. I haven’t changed because that person doesn’t exist anymore. I felt that way and it seemed true. None of my thoughts lined up as they had. My feelings weren’t feelings any more. They were orbs that swirled about me and vibrations that told me who I was in a way I couldn't fathom.
“There is no way to make sense of anything as it is from this body.” Ellie got off the couch, kneeled next to it, her attention rapt. “Go on, Michael.” How? It took so long to figure out anything worth saying or that could be said in a way that said something that might be even though it couldn’t. “I don’t know how.” El took a deep breath. “Then don't. You'll release what you need to release. You want to share, but you don't know how. Don’t worry about the words being perfect. There's no way to do it. What happened is indescribable, not of this world. You're sharing with me just by being here, but I could tell you about some of my experiences. Would you like that?”
I nodded. She proceeded to describe her kaleidoscope entry. That made sense. The kaleidoscope was a transitional phase, an acceleration. She used different words and had a different interpretation, but I knew what she was talking about. She mentioned the light as an arrival. That made sense, too, though I hadn’t thought of it that way. She talked about cats, about being in a video game, about a two-dimensional world that, when she chose, became four-dimensional. “The fourth dimension is a confluence, a symmetry; time and space become something else while being exactly what they are. In a way, it’s five dimensions.” I interjected. “The dimensions are endless.” She gasped, “Yes! That is true, too. It’s all true and yet none of what we’re saying is how it is.” Agreed.
“There was a box, Ellie. Did you have a box experience?” She shook her head no. “I was in a box looking out of pinholes and looking in the box from outside. I saw myself from inside and outside, not mirrored, but certainly me in both cases. Only it wasn’t both because I was looking out the top, bottom, and four sides at me on the outside and from the outside I was looking at me on the inside through the top, bottom, and four sides. We were all curious about one another. The outside me worried about the inside me, but the inside me passed on the essence of okayness; it was okay for me to be inside the box because I was also outside. Inside me turned outside me’s attention toward the outside of the outside me and outside me realized I was in a larger box and inside me seemed to know he was within a box within a box. An outside-outside me thought for all of us that the boxes continued outward indefinitely. This was consciousness, the expansion of it, but with each expansion there were layers within that were inaccessible to each layer beyond. I realized it went the other direction as well, like the peeling of an onion. The me that was furthest inside knew more than the me who was furthest outside … and yet more meant nothing because knowing meant nothing. Meaning was a problem that didn’t exist there. It’s only a problem now that I’m trying to attach meanings to elsewhere.”
Ellie listened and seemed to contemplate. As she did I continued, “A universe, from the quantum to the cosmological. I can’t say “that is me; I am the universe” but I can’t say it isn’t. I am not a replica nor am I an original. These concepts have no coherency. The best word to describe elsewhere from this realm is madness. But, of course, it isn’t. It’s only madness because there’s no access point to what is from here.” Ellie plunked her head against the couch and wheezed laughter. She looked up again, grinning from ear to ear. I asked her if she was ready to smoke. Her eyes lit up even more and she said yes.
She put a fresh bud in the bowl and sprinkled a heavy dose of powder onto the bud. I got up off the couch so she could have it for herself after she smoked. She picked up the Zippo and took a hit followed by two more. She rolled back on the couch and by the time her head rested on the cushion her eyes were closed. I watched her while standing as time passed. She was mostly still, but occasionally her face radiated bliss or tendered into a heartfelt love as she crossed her arms over her chest, hugging herself.
While she was in Never-Never Land, I slowly regained solidity within the world I inhabited. I was overcome with flashes of my experiences once again, but with a greater ease thinking in language even though it didn’t adequately match anything I experienced. There was an absurdity between the narrative that formed and the reality of the visions. I was less troubled by the mismatches, though.
I first saw a bubble of liquid that floated in a forest with chittering zips of laser beings darting in and out of trees. I was one of the lasers that raced through the forest, but the orb of translucency held steady above and to the left of the apex of the laser that shredded the spaces between the trees. It laughed incessantly, leaving me quilling between marmalade drippings. I came out of the forest in the cathedral, the panther eyes reappearing, dancing throughout the space around me while doubling and doubling and doubling until I could only see through yellow sapphire eyes. Everything I saw was everything that was except that none of it was separate from me and I shot through the roof of the cathedral into the underground sky that crumbled and avalanched all around me while still being me.
The vibrations caused earthquakes of sound that multiplied into an ever greater smell of ether until I swallowed quartz and became seaborgium sinking into a lava pit, expanding into an evermore radioactive fire-breathing until an exhalation cleared the red heat that had become making way for sky blue weightlessness, a peaceful floating through clouds of gleaming light giving way again and again to the azure sky, floating upward into abstractions of heaven singing in harmonics, tribbles, and garnaches becoming a single decibel that grew into the Sound of Earth hovering as an emotive eminince, a scent of Gaia loving me for living, the Surface of Earth surrounded by invisible presences that emanated wisdom, filling me with secrets of all-time.
I bowed in spirit, understanding the presences as Elders communicating on a wavelength that could be understood only elsewhere else. The Elders existed throughout the cosmos visiting life everywhen which was everywhere because nothing that existed wasn’t living. All spaces at once they were, but their connectivity made a singularity that was simultaneously an endless multiplicity. There was no truth but paradox and nothing could be understood as anything but confusion and chaos which was precisely what allowed synthesis. Symbiosis passed between fingertips, but without being tended consciously; consciousness caused disconnection. Overconsciousness was the only means of connecting.
I understood that modern humanity had fucked itself by believing only in consciousness and subconsciousness. It was overconsciousness that allowed and created universal interconnectivity. Overconsciousness could no more be experienced consciously than subconsciousness could. The wisdom, though, was in understanding that binary thought was a mistake; tripartite understandings matched reality, below ground sub, the sky and above over, and the center of perspective consciousness. Elevating perspective as most important was the ultimate mistake. Ego was a mistaken identity, an error in judgment. Belief in ego created a boxed-in consciousness that became and persisted in static inwardness. The abandonment of the belief in this center? Dissipation, but completely possible only elsewhere; the tininess of the world as experienced as human insisted on a measure of the error of ego as a mechanism to retain sameness indefinitely.
I left the presence of the Elders, overwhelmed and overawed, dropping into a cartoon world, one filled with giant red apples with smiling faces walking on tiny stick legs, teetering and tottering down lanes of purplish grapes bordered on either side by hopping yellow squash. One of the apples waved me forward and I followed, myself a pomegranate as well as a disembodied formlessness watching the landscape, including my pomegranate being. When I looked up from below ground the view was dusty. Pomegranate me was ecstatically happy, though, playing Ring Around the Rosy with apples and oranges and pears. My formlessly infinite views layered upon themselves to create images that shifted the cartoon world into a dimensionless hysteria that juggled itself into other dimensions for the entertainment of kings and queens living within the jester juggling, the dimensionless within each orb forever afraid of becoming. This created jocularity among the jugglers who made up the Eternal Jester playing the cosmic joke of elsewhere.
The Jester slapped the ideas of universes and multiverses from existence, the ideas merely remnants of consciousness that had no place in the all of over-under that surrounded perspectives mistakenly looking outside as if there were such things as outsides and insides. The Jester sent God to me and splintered the concept into nothingness, communicating the absence of any possibility of a thing as feeble as God, another trifling conception that trapped perspective into the habit of outward. The Eternal Jester booted me into hilarity and I scaled ribbons of spirals, gobbling replications as nutrients digested and circulated as originals. I spun between the sub-over until there was no differentiation between the two: darkness, stillness. Time as a multitude of dimensions ceased until a pinhole of light reluctantly penetrated darkness, a cosmic birthing of the rotational over-under exploding into an ever-brightening light slowing to reveal a color wheel that fractalized differentiation exponentially until the shards of color shattered into asymmetrical chaos. I was impaled by a hateful love and saved by a loving hatred before settling into a grateful neutrality. Somewhen after that I reemerged in my body in the world that once had been familiar. I felt love, peace, and bewilderment.
Ellie was stirring, her eyes opening, bliss vapors rising from her body. She quivered and when she looked at me I saw a mixture of excitement, surprise, and horror. Her mouth opened but instead of words she shrieked, long and ever-louder. I covered my ears and knelt on the floor, burying my face against her stomach. She put her hands on my head and I felt tremors of energy, my head tottering as she lifted and turned it so that I was looking at her face, into her eyes which were now wholly filled with fierce affection. “I crossed paths with your DMT experience.” Her eyes widened as if having a revelation. “We were with the Elders.”
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