What if senses leave your body? What if no energy opposes your own?
Imagine a Wooden Room in wilderness. It’s night and it's humid. The windows are neatly shut, just as you had specifically asked. You entered the room with a request to seal yourself off from this world. You noticed raindrops slithering like snakes on a window, leaving their trails behind. As far as your faint memory goes, rain has been falling ever since. There is an oil-lamp dying on the table whose absence no one will mourn. By that lamp lies a book, The Book of Living & Dying. You weren't mentioned in the book. You weren't supposed to be here in this form. You realize you've been transformed from solid human body to a thin gossamer state after you've entered this room. Your human consciousness is still intact though.
Like a wisp in a storm, you fly around in the Cedar-Wood Room. You don’t have anything to hold on to. When you wished to be free you didn't vouch for being liberated from physical laws. You didn’t fathom the immenseness of friction in the functioning of everyday life. This is a different ball-game altogether now, and you are in this alone. You’ve always been alone and you know it very well. Whenever you’ve found yourself in situations like these, you’ve thought of a suitable audience; a worthy accomplice à la Dr. Watson or Lakshmana; or maybe a beautiful curious admirer who would gape in awe like a kid, whenever you return with your bag full of experiences to share. But all this seems wishful thinking now. You are eons beyond that world and that life now.
You had switched on the fan when you had entered the Great Cedar-Wood Room. You were skin and bones at that moment. Probably the switch of the fan triggered your transformation into this vaporous state. Nevertheless, the fan was switched on and you are nothing but gas. You are at the bad end of the deal as you notice the vortex created by the fan is ever so slowly pulling one of your loose ends towards itself. It sways hypnotically towards the vortex as if it’s dancing on some snake charmer’s tune. You try to resist, but in vain. Your body (or whatever that it now is) touches the blade of the fan. You watch helplessly like a mute spectator as the fan's silver blades engulf you completely and pierce through your being. But they don't annihilate you. Nothing gets annihilated. Not in this world; neither in the world of which you were once a connoisseur.
You diffuse into a billion pieces. Every cell in your body breaks free. As if the secret glue that held them together earlier has become powerless in this realm. You occupy the volume of the Great Cedar-Wood Room now. Your cells are everywhere. You can feel the room; every inch of it. But this feeling can’t be described through five senses that we adorn; it’s completely new. You also see little holes in everything that’s kept here. It’s something that can’t be seen through human eyes, its shape is far too complex for a simple instrument like an optical eye to recognize. What kind of a room is this? How could all this be possible! You wonder with great amazement when suddenly the words written on the signboard, which you saw in the front-yard on your way in, strike your head (metaphorically).
THE GREAT CEDAR-WOOD ROOM OF PURGATION
You realize why this room seems so familiar. Everything you once owned is kept here: Toys from your infant days to the toys of the days when you realized man’s infancy of knowledge in the vast cosmic space. You start to feel the experiences of every inanimate object that occupied this room; you started to experience its history. From the old tattered carpet on the wooden floor that was sewn on an ancient hill of Israel, to the bottle of wine made from crushed grapes a century ago in the Church-owned vineyard on a serene French countryside. You realize the holes you saw in every object were actually time-portals that took you to the very beginning of the creation of that particular object over which that hole was placed. You rejoice when you see how a villager in 15th century made the ancient mask on the highest peak of Bhutan using the skull of a male Takin. He had made it to ward off evil spirits and bad luck until you bought it off from his great great-great-great-great grandson who just wanted to swap it for some quick buck.
Every part of the room has a story of its own and its story conjoins itself to yours, when you had decided to adorn your life with them. This room is a collection of your memories and your personality. It’s what you owned, to help you see through the human world. You never paid attention to them before. Not until today, when your disjointed cells interacted with them.
But does it really matter? All this adoration of humankind for materialism; lust for commodities that tend to define us, make us who we are. In the end was it really feasible? Was it really worth running for our whole lives? The adulation towards ‘stuff’ that could make our lives convenient in its presence; our zeal to buy, trade, mortgage, lend time of our lives to build a room, apartment, duplex, home, penthouse, mansion and then trade even more to fill it with the objects of our desire. Does it make a difference in the grand scale of things? Did we really stop and admire the beauty of the world? While we were busy minting paper with imaginary value did we really appreciate the elegance with which everything came to being? Are we doing justice to million years of evolution? Are we really focusing on the real questions, the questions of our existence and our role in the universe? Or are we wasting our time, in buying or supporting the agents of Maya (illusion)?
There was no price on your head, there was no entry ticket, and it was just out of curiosity and intuition that you’ve reached here. ‘You asked the right questions’; someone had assured you before you entered this mysterious Room of Purgation. But now, when you are here, your head throbs with the flurry of questions that have suddenly popped all around you.
You spend almost an eternity pondering over these questions and hopping from one time portal to another until you grasp and consume every tiny particle that was kept there. You become so engrossed in this personal time-travel and deep introspections that you don’t even realize it’s not raining outside anymore. You only notice it when a bunch of fireflies glowing in the dark appeared outside your window. You love this post-rain weather- when the cold wind ruffles your hair and the smell of the earth makes a permanent home in your greedy nostrils; they would've stolen this fragrance from the world had it been capable of it. But you can't feel the wind right now, you can only see the dancing trees swaying with the tune of wind-flow. You feel trapped here; amongst your conscious and self. Your room is the barrier between here and the outside world. But it can't limit your imagination. You wish to go outside. You wish you could hold a firefly, in your eyes. In a silent prayer, you wish to see the world outside this room of your materialistic past. And lo! Your solemn prayer is accepted when the wind forces its way through your windows and carries your form to see the world outside.
But your cells disperse all over the world. Unfortunately, they are all too far away from each other to interact and therefore you can't fuse yourself together to be one whole again. You suddenly regret coming out of the sacred enclosure of your materialistic past. Whatever it was, it belonged to no one else but you. But what’s done can’t be undone, because you've become a part of wind now. You realize that wind is nothing but diffused cells of some unfortunate beings like you, running wildly across seven lands and four oceans to find their missing pieces. You calculate the impossibilities in kneading the whole of you in one form. It’s like finding trillions of needles in a vast haystack scattered all over the earth. You stop caring about going back to your tangible state, you anyway always wanted to be a wanderer. What initially seemed as a bad decision suddenly doesn’t seem all that bad.
You probably come upon this decision when a bit of you gets stuck in the alpine bushes of the Great Himalayan North. You remember this place; you had come here when you held normal physical conformity. You remember these Tibetan prayer flags; you remember the tranquil water of the moon-lake. You remembered a secret wish of spending a lifetime here. You remembered dreaming of being a wanderer back then. You don't regret this form now. For you know, a bit of you is in the Havelock Islands too and your consciousness can travel there whenever you desire. Moreover, some of your cells are in Machu Picchu; some in Easter Islands and some are flying towards Diomede Islands as we speak. You are free to glide with eagles up high and play with the dolphins near the most exotic isles. You know this feeling; this weird sensation of being omnipresent, it’s not as divine as you’d expected it to be. But you know whatever you’ve felt ever since you entered the Great Cedar-Wood Room of Purgation is beyond the understanding of the human mind and soul. You know that everything that you’ve experienced ever since is something a mortal life could possibly never attain. It was certainly a fair trade.
So you soar with the wind,
Across the oceans of the world
To witness life in it's prime.
You are nothing but consciousness,
Free from physical limitations.
Your home is Earth;
And You are Earth.
Would you crave for anything else anymore?
