Author’s note: The following story is written for the sky; if anyone other than the sky reads it, that is also fine. Contrarily, this author’s note is written to provide the reader’s required context; such clarification is required because it has been requested by a reader.
An allegory is a story where characters and elements serve as literal and symbolic pointers of how the world operates through the lens of the human experience. The following story is true without allegorical expression, however unbelievable that may seem to be.
Everything that follows is precisely how things were, at least the way I remember them to be. Please keep in mind that the reader’s validation is unnecessary as reality does not require verification. Many things that seem impossible are merely eternal qualities of existence beyond the restricted mind’s shallow structures. In other words, please keep in mind while reading this piece that the only hindrance to your understanding is the mind itself. Likewise, any questions for specifics beyond the story’s context are entirely unnecessary as this story is merely a recounting of events as they unfolded in a particular space in time.
If there are any further criticisms of this writing, it would be best to offer them to the intended reader, the sky. If you enjoy the piece, it is also better to tell the sky rather than the writer, who is merely a scribe for the events as they were and as they appear in the memory of the world.
“I heard you coming,” Doctor Popof said as he slowly opened his eyes and turned his gaze in my direction. He sat on the bench of a park table near the basketball courts. A smile began to grow on my face as I walked up to him. The doctor gazed into my eyes, and I into his. I blinked softly and broke our gaze, and moved my eyes around the prison yard.
“This is it.” I proposed a question in the form of a statement. But Alex, as Doctor Popof was also called, understood the message for what it was.
“This is where we find ourselves, all of ourselves. There is no problem with this place or any place. Just a bunch of us here doing time no matter where we are.” He stopped and looked at me.
“Are we the only ones in here like this?” I asked him.
“They are content at the level they operate on, and it’s okay. There’s not a problem with that. They are where they are, and we are where we are. But really, we’re all at the same place.”
He paused and looked at an inmate jumping rope. I watched the inmate as he repeated the lyrics to a rap song on his headset between jump rope sets. Sasha, as Doctor Popof was also called, slowly stood up. “Okay, would you like to try?” as he motioned to the bench where he sat a moment before.
I sat down without a word. “Okay,” he said, “it’s best to put your hands facing down, feet flat on the ground.” I obeyed and observed his voice. “You will see your vibrating state of being in the mind’s eye.” I saw what he described. The waves of existence danced, ebbed and flowed right in front of my eye. “If you follow this and turn inward,” he said, “you will help to cultivate the essence of your soul in this world.”
Before his words ended, the vibrations in my mind’s eye picked up speed at a constant rate, becoming more increasingly frantic as the moment expanded into the past and future simultaneously. With swelling agitation, the visual sensations moved from many strands into one. The crashing of waves appeared in the ear of the mind. The waves sounded off at a constant rate, not fading in or out but one with the vision in the mind’s eye. As the waves both visually and audibly fell inward, I was transported to another place and time.
I opened my eyes in the body of my younger self, staring at a closet door. I sat in my room perplexed at how such a thing could happen. I looked at my hands, and they were there down by my knees. As the hands turned palm up, the vibrations glitched subtly in the space surrounding the flesh of my body. A jolt of excitement shot through my youthful body. I stood up and rushed out of the door to my parent’s room, shoving open the door. As I entered, my mother was shocked, and my father rolled off the top of her. I began to laugh with the wisdom of a grown man in a child’s body because I knew what grown people do when they’re in the place and positions my parents were in. The energetic intensity of my laughter forced me back through the child form of myself, into the mind’s eye, and back into the person’s body on the prison yard. The man with many names took a half of a step backward. “What happened…?” Doctor Popof inquired. For as aware as he was, he was shocked by the phenomena he witnessed and felt.
I paused a second and allowed the youthful energy of my past self to integrate into the form I was in at that moment. “I…closed my eyes and went into my mind and saw the waves that sustain us and after a few moments, I went back into the body of my younger self…” slowly I described what unfolded.
With controlled excitement, the Russian heart doctor half twisted his wrist and pointed his finger down. “Maybe you should try again…since you experienced something like this.”
A slow smile grew on my face, and I said,” I…think I need to walk around…”
“Do what you feel you need to,” he said.
I stood up from the place I was sitting and started walking towards the track. Each step became lighter, and I felt as if I was lifting higher and higher off the ground. My senses increased equally and consistently as I continued on my intuitive trajectory. The colors grew increasingly saturated and vivid; the sounds became more vibrant and easily discernible; the air felt crisper on my skin.
I went beyond the sense of self and personal identity. In transcending attachment to the personality, I realized I was the only thing that existed, always, forever, and no matter what happened or did not happen, I would still be the I am. At that moment, beyond the confines of time, I remembered the reason that I wrote the ancient scriptures: to remind myself of who I am, every time in everybody that I find myself in. I continued to walk, nay glide, around the track on the prison yard. There was no fear, no pain, no suffering, no longing, no anything but what was happening. I was possessed by myself, and I was finally free of the bondage of the mind, the deepest and most overlooked form of human slavery.
I sat down next to a man on a bench, looking out at the ocean through the fence. “What’s up, man?!” I asked him in a triumphant tone. He didn’t respond. A thought appeared: Oh, it’s just like Doctor Popof said; they’re at the level they want to be at, and that’s fine. So I sat with a speechless and nameless friend in the illusion of separation on a bench in prison overlooking the harbor in the form of the Buddha that I am.
