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(if you should learn to do this will your toys of knowing,
you will achieve a form of liberty more valuable than any other skill)

No more self — something else.

This was another sleep paralysis event, which began with a nightmare. I call it a nightmare because it had the general shape of one, however seemingly nonsensical its focus. In retrospect is seems like little more than a storyLike setup for the paralysis event; but this is perhaps merely because I do not recall the entire dream.

In the dream, a person known to me in real life (who was a best friend at one time) was with me, and we were walking up my hall toward my room. ‘G‘ entered the room first, and I heard him gasp, and begin literally gibbering in horror. I rushed in through the doorway to find him looking at three long crystals hanging from the ceiling, near my desk. The clear crystals were hanging from fishing line from the roof — and they were gyrating as though being yanked around in small circles by an invisible magnetic force. Their jerky travel was irregular, irrhythmic, and somewhat violent. The crystals darted around at the end of their strings like chaotic pendulums fighting with a circular gravity — or as if the each contained magnets that repelled its partners sometimes, and drew them closer at others.

I marvelled at the circumstance briefly — but I wasn’t frightened — instead feeling a sense that this was all perfectly normal. G, on the other hand was alternating rapidly between speechless horror (mouth covered with one hand, pointing with the other) and paralytic fear (hands and fingers spread, mouth wide open in a silent scream, unable to move). I quickly walked over to the crystals, which were hanging about at the level of my solar plexus, and made is if to demonstrate that the effect was actually harmless — by grabbing onto two of the ‘wires’ — the two on the left. “Oh, this is nothing to worry about, see?”...

At the moment I made physical contact with the wires, they leapt into furious action, swinging up and to my left to about my 11 o’clock position, and a bit higher than my shoulders. Some sort of energy was in the wires, and it was causing my entire body and my insides to vibrate. I felt a pulsating energy running into me through my arms and causing something in my body to change.

Over near the door, G went into further paroxysms of fear and I yielded as well — I was suddenly out of my mind with terror and starting to scream as the crystals leapt around madly at the ends of the wires, yanking my arms around in my struggle to maintain my grip.

The crystals — how they arc’d when I grabbed the lines. On the
right of the image is the room layout: the three small purple circles indicate
the location of the crystals. The direction they were pointing is generally North.

The dancing crystal session didn’t last long, but there was no preamble to the shift; the entire scene suddenly dissolved into a sleep paralysis event, and everything went utterly black. I knew I was prone, and paralyzed, and I felt that my eyes were open, but I could not see anything at all — not even what one sees in the darkness — the phosphene-like images that one might normally assemble and animate.

I could not move, or see, and I could not breathe. I had only experienced one event as severe as this — and I felt I was rapidly dying due to my inabilty to cause my lungs to function. I was not entirely unused to this sensation, having felt it a few times before — but this instance was far more severe.

The fear that I had felt in the dreamstate translated into a very rapid use of whatever oxygen I had left, and thus my circumstance was quite helpless, and I experienced the strong desire to respond with whatever herculean effort might be required to break the paralysis and actually awaken. I made a few attempts, and failed.

On the other hand, I had been secretly hoping for a chance to actually explore this terrain — the problem is that one cannot really prepare — especially if the events are infrequent and arrive unannounced as has been my experience.

I didn’t really have a lot of time to think, I merely sort of slipped into a very simple realization that I had a choice, which essentially amounted to fight or release. To release felt like certain death, but held the mystery of exploration. The fact of my failure to intervene with my will may have pressed me toward the more courageous choice in the end, I cannot say for certain. I remember that I actually sort of simultaneously ‘leapt’ and resigned myself. I decided, as an organism, to ‘let go and follow it’. This had immediate and vastly unexpected result.

The first thing that happened was that the enitrety of my identity and ‘knowledge’ and memory -vanished-. Instantly, there was ‘no more me’ at all. Nothing. No conscious content. No human concepts. Whatever I had been before, was transformed instantly into movement, and the sensorial and even emotional experience of that movement. My perspective became somehow one of moving energy, and all that I was rushed in upon itself and then exploded upward (later I would metaphy this as out through the top of my head), outward, and into — a being.

I no longer had anything that I can call a mind. What I had was instead a combination of a non-physical body, and a kind of emotive movement that was sublimely enjoyable — without being ecstatic. I was a sinuous thing, vast and eternal, and there was nothing in any universe that could oppose or obstruct me.

I did not marvel or consider what I was (or even that I was), except to experience it directly, and to express that experience directly in the movement I was. There was no sense but the powerful and joyful sense of my own motion, which was sinnuous, and incredibly vital — unstoppably immortal. The majesty of my motion was regal, and utterly sovereign. This was unceasing, but could not grow boring because the each instant was the reManifestation of the perfect motion of the last.

There was no ‘terrain’ or limit of any sort — and thus nowhere to ‘go’ except ‘going here’. There was no color. I was black — my ‘body’ was not made of anything but this movement, and all else was black. My movement was ocurring in the most elemental of possible terrains. I was an infinitely long and thick snake, swimming through its own coils within a sphere – but there was no limit to my body, and there was no separation between myself and the medium in which my movement was myself. There was no sphere but the one I described, and that was no sphere at all...

The entire experience was completely novel. In retrospect, I would say that I felt like I was the first god of motion. The exquisite quality of my being and activity was so novel that each instant of it (in reality precisely alike with the last) was entirely new.

I was a movement describing complexly folded figure-eights and knots at great speed, travelling no distance — and having no ‘destination’. This continued for what seemed like 10 minutes, or perhaps 15 — but could have been as little as a few seconds, and then there was a sort of reverse—rushing sensation, and I was sucked back into my personality, and my body, through the top of my head.

I immediately awoke, unparalyzed, and marveled at what I had just experienced. My first conscious response was from the part of myself we often refer to as ‘the little kid’ who spoke up instantly (and I remember this quite clearly) excitedly remarking: ‘Wow! You just turned into a monster!’.

There was a significant feeling of humor involved with the entire event. It was at once sacredly significant and humorous in a novel domain. I had heard the buddhist admonition that to be born as a human being is even better than being born a god, and this seemed absurd to me for a variety of reasons — but now I could see an aspect of how it might be true.

As what I had been, I would have been happy to simply continue being that one thing — movement – for thousands of years. In that state, there was neither need, desire (other than the essential inspiration to move) or goal. It was simply doing a single thing, and being that thing. Thousands of years could have passed without anything changing, and I doubt I could have become bored — I do not believe I would even have noticed.

Neither would I have changed in any way that I’d be able to discern. In fact, the only thing worth discerning in that state had been the only thing I was doing — movement. There was nothing else, essentially, except the unique and emotional song of myself moving .

So I began to experientially understand how it could actually be a lot more interesting to be human than to be a god — and how miraculous we are, these children who can be at once a god, and a human being — and something that is more than either of them alone...

I also found the idea that I had become a monster to be hilarious — and the ‘little highlight’ of the childlike voice within me magnified this significantly.

I did not believe that I had ‘had an out of body experience’, nor do I believe this now — even if there are similar reports from experiencers. I didn’t really know what had happened, but I didn’t feel the need to label it. I had been, for a moment, entirely without my human perceptions, perspectives, memories, and histories. I had been without place, form, or goal — and I’d also had an experience of an extremely profound, yet simple liberty. I had been a thing unto its own activity, unobscured and unobscurable. Something with(in) me had participated in the infinite.

I think the most surprising thing was to have been without identity — what a shockingly amazing thing it was to recall it. No personal content was present. I’d experienced a kind of consciousness, but it certainly didn’t seem anything like a human one. At all.

The experience left me with a very lighthearted and humorous feeling, as though someone was tickling a part of me very playfully, whenever I recalled the event. There was something quite illuminating in all that darkness after all, and it was of such a surprising form and content that it is a source of ceaseless intrigue and inspiration — even as a memory.

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