Late one night, merely moments before the sky would become less dark, I was sitting at my dimly lit desk, half there. It was then, while slumped back in my thinly padded wooden chair, lost in a stare somewhere between the edge of an upright fainted yellow pencil and it’s faintly cast shadow that was projected on the white concrete wall against which it rested, that my mind sank and then faded into that hollow and empty null that is oblivion. There was nothing.
There was no thought; there was no feeling; there was no place; there was no time. Had a thought caressed my mind, and my mind stayed in oblivion, that thought could have only been that I, as I live, am surely not. If then, had that thought existing been capable of progression, my mind would have encountered the thought that I, as I live, am merely an illusion existing in another’s world, in another’s time, concealing the truth of I, as I am, in seclusion, until it too, becomes an illusion, perhaps of something forever gone. But, luckily, there was no thought; there was no progression. I remained in oblivion.
While in that mystic place, the silence protruding from the void soothed my soul. The body and mind’s attachment to the physical, life’s tumultuous feelings and emotions, the miscongruities of daily living, the unrest, the pain, the pressure – everything was gone, and in its place – silence. Had I, in that place, had feelings, I would have felt the relief of silence soothing my emotions as if turbulent waves were subsiding after a dozen year storm. In that place, however, there was no feeling, yet my soul was soothed.
That place was The Land of All That Is. Even the act of assigning words to that place, if it was a place, is almost blasphemous, if there was something to blaspheme. The Land of All That Is may very well have been the great expanse residing in, between, and around all that is, has been, and will be – an infinite void that is the beginning and end of all things, that Secret Place within our minds made pure, that eternal place or Realm of Spirits – the place of oneness - Enlightenment. On the contrary however, there was no place, only an illusion of place fabricated in retrospect – a vain attempt at conveying that which is oblivion. Oblivion has no place.
It was as if eternities passed while I was in oblivion, though that sense of time only exists in retrospect. Retrospect is all I have. The moment one realizes their presence in oblivion, they are cast from there and tossed back to that existence which is normal. One is left with an empty feeling as if they lost something they can never regain regardless of effort or strain. Oddly, one feels more together, more settled, and more refined following a trip to oblivion – as if there was something gained.
In oblivion, there is no time; there is no place; there is no feeling; there is no thought. Exactly what happened that one night sitting at my desk, where my mind went, I resolve to know I cannot know. All I do know, however, is that when I got away from that space between the pencil and its shadow, I noticed the bright sun lifted high in the sky signaling the start of my morning routine, and all was normal again.