January 21, 2021
Today, when I meditated, the first thing I saw in my mind was a lemon. I stayed with the image and gradually realized the lemon was on a lemon tree. I was standing on the second floor of a villa facing a pair of French windows that were ajar. Before me was a balcony and the branches of the lemon tree were overhanging the balcony, so overgrown that the branches were pushing through the open windows. The lemon I was seeing was hanging on a branch in front of me.
I looked around and realized I was standing inside a moonlit bedroom. The villa was old and quite grand with marble floors. There was a bed nearby and at first I believed the bed was empty, than realized there was a form on it. There was something weird about the form, though, like it was made out of marble. A sheet lay over the sleeping form that was more statue than person. I crept forward and looking down at it, realizing the stonelike form belonged to a middle-aged woman. Her body might be grey and heavy like marble but there were very real tears streaming down her face.
Curious, I sat down beside her and tried to rouse her but she would not wake. I realized that she was not the soul I had been sent there to help, although she was related in some way to the lost one. I stood and walked back over to the window and looked out over the garden. It was quite overgrown with grass and weeds. I could tell that in its day it had been a lovely place but now was in ruins. There were various marble statues in the garden but something that wasn’t a statue caught my eye. It was pitch black and small, a very tiny soul that was standing at the edge of the garden looking up at me. I debated whether to take the stairs down but decided to simply jump off the balcony into the garden.
After descending, I walked over to the black spirit and asked it who it was. It revealed itself to be a little boy. I had no idea how he died, only that he kept apologizing, saying, “It was all my fault.” I told him that he was mistaken; it wasn’t his fault whatever had happened and there was someone inside the villa who missed him greatly.
The blackness disappeared and I was looking down at the body of a small child. I knelt and took him up in my arms and walked back into the villa, this time through the downstairs garden entrance. I climbed a curving staircase up to the second floor and carried the boy into the bedroom where the stone woman was lying.
I placed the boy on the bed next to the woman and coaxed her to open her eyes. She did so, crying out with joy when she beheld the little boy. When she sat up, she was no longer middle-aged but a woman in her mid to late twenties. She took the boy up in her arms and hugged him. Both were crying. After their reunion, they turned and headed out the bedroom door, hand in hand.
I was curiously unaffected by this reunion. I guess sometimes I feel more resonance with the souls that I help and other times I’m just there as a catalyst. It’s fine, though; I was happy to help them out.
***
Sci-Fi in the Bardo
Things got seriously weird after this. I was standing on the balcony, gazing down at the lemon tree and the garden when one of the statues came alive. I recognized it as a statue of Athena. She bade me to come down and I did so, being instantly carried off by her. She took me to a high mountain valley where a strange metal box sat over a shallow hole in the ground.
I stared at it, surprised. It was very modern compared to everything else I had encountered in the Bardo. It didn’t even seem to be made by humans. The material was like something from another world. I looked over at the goddess and she nodded, urging me toward the box. I approached and overturned it, revealing the form contained within.
It was a weird-looking thing. It looked like it was encased in some kind of plastic-like material, almost like a human body had been shrink-wrapped. But the contours of the body weren’t quite human; they were too irregular, too bloated, too weird. I entered the crater and knelt down beside the body, realizing that there was a woman inside the plastic casing. I cut through it and her body oozed out. I say oozed because it was slimy and limp. It was almost like her bones had mostly dissolved and she was just an oozing, gelatinous mass of flesh.
As soon as her body poured out of the casing, she opened her eyes and said something like, “I’m contaminated! Don’t touch me!”
“Don’t worry,” I reassured, reaching down to gather up her limp body in my arms, “We’re safe here. There is no disease and no contamination.”
She seemed to relax but then tried to sit up and look around. Without any real bones, though, this proved to be impossible and she finally gave up. Offering to help, Iasked her what she was looking for.
“My friends,” she said. “They should be here.”
And sure enough when I looked up, I saw we were surrounded by five sentinels. They were geometric shapes, sort of like obelisks but, far from mere stone, they were obviously some sort of technology. When I looked back down at her, I realized her brain and skull were filled with implants. These implants allowed her to communicate with the beings contained within the obelisks.
At this point, I started questioning everything, including my sanity. What the fuck was going on? I’ve never encountered anything like this in the Bardo. Up until now, everything I’d met there had been from the past or maybe present, nothing from the future and certainly nothing from an alien world.
I gathered that this woman was some sort of a hybrid species, perhaps born human but mutated in some way. She may never have even set foot on Planet Earth for all I know. Somehow, she had become part alien.
This was new territory for me. I didn’t know what to do but guessed that I wouldn’t have been sent here to walk away. Clearly, I was intended to help in some way. I lay the woman’s gelatinous body back down and approached the five sentinels, inviting them to reveal themselves. I could tell that their outer forms were containment suits or some kind that allowed them to get around in an earthlike world.
When they emerged from the obelisks, it was obvious that they were an alien species. They were unlike anything I’ve ever seen and I all I can say is that they lacked both an exoskeleton and an internal skeleton. They were soft and squishy and slimy. I don’t even know if they had eyes or gender. Clearly, these were creatures who did not come from Earth...or, if they did, they came from Earth millions of years in the future. Who knows?
The creatures emerged from their structures and slithered over the ground to the woman. She was unafraid of them. Far from it! She was delighted to be reunited with them and thought of them as her people. She was like a bridge between our two species, human enough to be in the Bardo but also not quite human.
Somehow I knew these aliens had knowledge of the Bardo, although I’m sure their experience of it was different from mine and other humans. I got the sense they were here as part of an experiment and they were collecting information. I wondered whether I had done the right thing by inviting them in. Was I a traitor to humanity? Had I somehow just ensured our eventual demise or takeover? Or maybe this was part of a way for our two species to communicate? This last thing--an avenue for communication--would make sense because clearly we were two species who could not survive on each other’s worlds; the spiritual realm would be one place we could meet and get to know one another.
Or maybe I’m just going crazy. I don’t know.
The woman and her alien friends set off to explore the Bardo together, slithering along as best they could. It was a surreal sight and I shook my head. I was turning to go when I noticed one of the aliens had stayed behind. “He” (I have no idea what his gender is or even if he has one) was curious about me and wanted to explore my mind. I debated whether to let him - was this wise? Still, I didn’t detect any malicious intent, only curiosity. And I was curious about him as well.
I sat down on a little hillside overlooking the crater where I’d found the woman’s body and he slithered over to me. We sat side by side, musing over this strange situation. I could feel into him and my senses were scrambled. There wasn’t anything in there that I recognized as familiar beyond the fact that we were both creatures of True Nature. I would be lying if I said there wasn’t something appealing about him. (What can I say? I’ve always had a thing for slimy tentacle creatures.) I was drawn to his alien-ness, his strangeness, his complete different-ness. And I daresay he was attracted to me for the same reason.
He was cautious at first but I could tell he wanted something from me. I told him just to ask, more than likely the answer would be yes. He replied that he wanted to find out what it was like to occupy my body. He wanted to explore my world and soul and, by opening to him, he could experience humanity with full contact, no need to wear a special suit.
I shrugged. What the hell! Why not? I invited him into my soul. He didn’t need to be asked twice and soon had slid right inside of me. It was a weird and disorienting experience because our bodies and senses are so different. It took our souls a while to get used to this new way of being but souls are nothing if not adaptable and soon it was like I’d always been a host to an alien consciousness.
I was surprised by how he was both completely fluid and very strong at the same time. There is a robust confidence to his presence that I like. At the same time, his senses and internal feeling are so fluid that I almost feel motion sick at times. I can feel him inside me, intensely curious about what he’s seeing. He is taking notes, making me into a research subject. I still feel weird about inviting him in, wondering if I’ve inadvertently set something in motion that I shouldn’t have. But then I realize either 1) I’m making all this up, or 2) I’m too attached to my identity as a human. Who am I to say what is supposed to happen? True Nature isn’t limited to human experience. Clearly, there are other sentient beings who are just as ‘human’ as we are.
***
