From Chapter 6 of 7, The First Noble Truth.

I hated myself so much. I stumbled down from where the lawn slipped over scree to the shore, slipped in under the boathouse, spiralled down to the hangar, stumbled, rolled. I needed to be on my own. I slid on the suit, climbed up in and lay down.

Half in a dream, in the centre of the fantastic hologram Ring of Time, hieroglyphs angel-scribed in flame, blazing up round me, divisioning off into twelves of sections, each section represented by an animal from the Chinese zodiac, each section subdivided into twelve sub sections. Recursion: again, again, again. And that was time, divided from moments to Aeons on a bar that could be clicked and spread with the fingers.

I scrolled through the Aeons, my hand a cat stabbing back into the first increment of the first increment; the world puckered in a scream beyond all terror, all pain, rushed in on me as I was torn back to the other side of beginning.

I had to account for every instant: sixty some in a moment, 6,400,099,180 moments in a day. I cannot give you the number of days that constitute eternity.

Little brothers in Christ, suppose that someone ground into ink powder all of the particles of soil in a three-thousand-great-thousandfold world, travelled across the lands in the Eastern quarter, and there put down one granule the size of a speck of dust. Suppose that person further passed through one thousand lands and set down one granule, and continued to repeat this process until the ink powder made from the soil was depleted. At this point eternity could not be said to have even begun. The true terror of eternity is forever puckered up in the duration of the moment; the moment encapsulates eternity: it is the vessel in which eternity is cradled.

I now need to speak about pain, and the way in which we are all of us crucified up on the Rood of Time.

I was pinned to the bed by the gravity of a black hole, splayed out like two dimensional spaghetti. The pod became an iron tube, a coffin I clawed at. At first there was no space to move, and then there was no strength with which to. A deadening ache sank into my joints, gnawed at them, clawed at my back. Metaphors do not suffice. This was not like meditation, I could not choose to stop. I was buffeted by waves of panic. I begged my heart to give up and let me die, but I was eternal and alone.

The hard thing about eternity is how you are forced to look at it through the small end, see how it could not even be said to be made up of moments, but is instead just this one big moment stretched out never-ending. Just now here me all alone, no leading into, no leading out of, no co-inter-dependent origination, just this shrieking point of consciousness, this lonely blip of agony forever in forever.

I lay there, unable to move, cascading back down through time to its very root. The Pod had become all Machines, with all around me Iron Grinding until I was made up of only Iron Grinding. It barked BAD BAD BAD for centuries, and then it started in knife-sharp on CUNT CUNT CUNT. I couldn’t take it but I had to. The Matrix of the Thus Come One unravelled, and there was much worse to come.

The balls were gone early on, after always just-kicked-in became a bloated dead dog I must hump about in a wheelbarrow in front for all to see. That was during days I could still register humiliation. Weakness and Immobility followed on. That Rampant Itch and the last bequeath of my fingers was to rip flesh from bone before they were gone from erosion too. And then all focus was set on the Sparklings and the Spangles running up and down spine, laying the right side out in ceaseless, tingling death by electrocuted nerves stretched out in a map. This whole body all broke down, dismantled down to molecules. Over Aeons Right Knee and Hip slowly crumbled, turned to sour stone and mud. My ass disappeared into the bones of my pelvis, dry leather stretched, Tollund Man. My eyes deflated, I choked down my tongue, and my nostrils became sharp bare bone; never never love a skull. Searing, Grinding Pain: to be always locked in with it, to be composed of Pain. Incurable. Forever. Horrible. And Alone.

I realised then that I was all along poor Aunty Dodie in that never ending hospital bed, seared to it, turned sometimes for bedsores but it is no use really as you all melt and become part of the bed, I was only Dodie and had always been, some‐ thing she had dreamed locked up in that pain, locked in that Vegetative Vehicle. That inheritance was mine! My life was glued into hers and we were one.

The long final pain circled on the recognition that it was all my fault, that I had serenaded Pain and Mother Death all my life, that I could have avoided this suffering, that there could have been another way. As the cognitive faculty dismantled, it forced on the prenatal Visual Faculty a spawning of creatures from Hieronymus Bosch, of guilty scissors stabbing up into assholes until at last

I was only a Floating Point.

And then you let go of everything.

Here was the pod, a lotus held up into light by a thousand giant hands of water imbued with merciful eyes and the luscious light was of that of a fat golden buddha, laughing down on it all from so fat and golden.

It might have been like that, but it wasn’t, it was just anything I wanted it to be, there were no words for it here at the beginning of it all, at the very first step along the Way. Every moment now was Holy, just Golden.

I was a long ago moment sitting at the very beginning or centre of time or what have you. That’s what the start of it all was like. You could sit there forever doing nothing. There was never the nagging feeling that you should be doing something else, only the pod and the luscious light, and merely me always in between.

I began to feel the breath at my nostrils again, and that is where time started up once more. At first it was only the distant slip of the sea breathing, the long, slow furling and unfurling. Then this breath created clean wind to stroke the five pines in my nostril holes as I opened up my holy eyes to let there be light. Clouds came up again out of some horizon, oh those soft perches, suffused in radiance. Everything and everyone was only me, and I was all the Buddha, and everything was so as it should be. I only needed to extend this Dazzling Enlightenment up through time, proceed along the Way. It was all so Simple now. Click does the trick: Perspective. Near / far. I began to add understanding to understanding, but now I worked in Wisdom and Compassion, so that the new delusions pumping the world up through my Solar Anus, click does the tricking this golden excrement into a world was wholly holy and pure. I was only an eye looking out on all the world awakening, sitting up on cloud tops trimmed in light and I was still all of us, everyone ever pressed together and as the source of all consciousness, predating matter, my duty was clear.

And then you just let go of everything, just love remains, Goodwill to Man, God bide with you. He is only golden, that words once and always making forever, pure light pouring into darkness.

And then I began to hear all around the world crying out to come up into being, and I knew it was mine to come back and lead others back to this Liberation from Suffering.

Which was why I opened once more the eyes of my body.

I had to travel up through forevers to get back again to here and now. It wasn’t so bad, because I was able to break it up in pieces. I was Silver Surfer on the Upsurge of Karma. I spoke the Dao. I rolled the dharma wheel in front of me.

I can’t tell you with much detail what I saw toward the very beginning, as I started to press away from the brilliant light at the centre of it all, as time and space assembled themselves, and started stuffing this and that outwards into the great of nothingness.

Words cannot describe such things. I think maybe the only things that existed at the start of time were the pod, me, and light, if those in fact were not the same thing, and that we were together a blank mirror standing upright in nothingness. I think that the universe we live in, and all the offshoot universes I have created with my meddling, have been created as a reflection of my consciousness, as kind of galaxies whirling out of me.

I started the long slog back to the present with cautious, and then increasingly curious hops. Before the start of life, it was just little asteroids growing into bigger asteroids and then lava, and then mountains and volcanoes every day, every which way. Life began very earlier after the earth was formed and starting to cool down. And it came just once and it was never quite totally wiped out again after that. It was always so quick to get back on its feet, as it were. Life would be exterminated down to a single slick at the edge of a rock, and then I would jump ahead and see the seas would after be teeming with new things, with apparitions of squid, with ascendancies of horseshoe crab. There were so many stabs at it before even dinosaurs.

There were miraculous beasts that were never dreamed of as things that were reality. There were seas full of singing pillows, but they are all gone now. The creatures we have seen in the Burgess shale really grew much larger than we could have imagined, as large as velodromes in fact or ten times as big as that on rare occasions. The roving balloons were immense and they lived in herds, or flocks, and developed a social structure. It seemed at times that they were developing a language. Their intelligence was at least at the level of monkeys, but they may also have been developing true psionic powers before they were all wiped out by spiders that jumped and clung to them dragging them down while filling them with venom.

It was always like this. In one life a man eats a sheep, in the next life he will be a sheep eaten by that sheep become man, and ever thus back and forth in a cycle of retribution. It is a pity, but there is a way out if it over a trillion incarnations. You can become a vegetarian for instance, and that is a good start.

At long last the mystery of what dinosaurs looked like is solved. They were rainbow coloured and with thick, bushy feathers, and they were extremely wise, and formal in their manners. Chinese style dragons did in fact live at that time, and they were like the kings, or wise men among the dinosaurs. After the comets, and the volcanoes, the years it took the courteous dinosaurs and the eldritch dragons to die out were heartbreaking. First the plants were gone, then the plant eaters, and then the meat eaters. After all the others were gone the cloud eaters cried themselves into extinction. I had to witness it all as I moved forward in time in my quest for the present. And then there was after when bones were scattered everywhere, and voles explored from cracks in the groynes of rocks, competing with cockroaches, seeking lizards littler than themselves to seize behind the necks, and vegetation began to return, impaling the world from up under.

It took years, or decades, I’m not certain, centuries of ceaseless little hops for me to get back to the time the tiny voles had grown all the way up into Australopithecus. I spent a long time trying to convince the Australopithecus, and then the Neanderthal, that we are all one. They had moral codes, and they did what they had to according to these, but they didn’t yet know how to sit in silence listening to their hearts. They had no inkling yet that the rules of the heart precede the rules of humanity, in issuing from a deeper telos.

She asked me “What will you do when you wake up?”