NOEMAYA

Strolling down the philosophy lane this one summer night, I fell and slipped through the invisible sliding doors.

I landed on a new ground, in a wonderland. But I lost all my possessions through this passage. It’s such a thin and sharp entrance that no one’s belongings survive. Everything is scraped off of the entrees.

Those who have too much belongings can’t make it past this slit of a portal.

I was both baffled by the new sight and strangely familiar with it, a deja vu feeling, as if I knew this place from before, maybe from the womb or another life.

The seeing in this land was of a higher kind. I could see in all directions and all expanses without turning around or moving the eyes. Oh no, there were no eyes anymore. I was seeing with another light.

Seeing in all directions and all places at once, I noticed this can’t be an embodied experience. And I couldn’t find my body anymore. I guess that too was left behind the sliding doors.

I also couldn’t find myself anymore, my history, my identity, humanness, and even my existence. The world, the whole universe, had disappeared, like my body. As if the body and the world were inseparable parts of one and the same suit to be left behind the sliding doors.

Existence was gone too! I didn’t know that even my existence was a belonging to be left behind. In this land, one can enter only fully, and I mean fully, naked.

Oh time! Like space, time too was very strange in this land: the present moment had no before and after. There was no sense of coming from or going to. There was no temporal duration in this place, like there was no spatial extension.

This land is nowhere but it includes everywhere. It has no time but it has within it all times. It is both infinite and eternal, but all of that is inside a point that has no dimensions.

Everything was here and now. “Everywhere and everywhen is concentrated in this dimensionless point,” Dante knew!

Otherness! There was no otherness anymore. I was all things and all people, as if when I was thrown in that land, all existence was also thrown in there with me, and thrown into me.

It was as if we had all returned to the origin together. But no! It was more like we had never left that origin, but we thought we did; we simply forgot that we were still home. Like a man who loses sight of the moment and no more sees what’s in front of him when he is absorbed in a fantasy and a day dream.

I wish I could tell you how long it lasted, but I know “lasting” didn’t apply to it: That which is eternal is beyond duration.

Now that I’m back, by the loud cry of my belongings, I have no grief; I have no worries about the worries of this world, of death or what’s beyond. I now know that all the worries of this world and the next are the day dreams of my Self siting in that Origin.

And I know the sliding doors are always swinging with invitation. Though invisible and hard to find, they’re right here and now. To cross this razor-thin slit between them, all I need is to become razor-thin in my belongings, to drop the incessant doing.

To cross to the other side of the sliding doors, all I need is to drop everything, including myself. But I don’t even have the desire to do so anymore, for I know very well that I’m already there. Being in this world and crossing back, too, are notions in the day dreams of my Original, eternal Self.