caledonia

As I stared into the mirror, for a brief moment, for an eternity nearly too quick to notice, but too intense to ignore, I was what always was and what always will be.

I wonder now why it is that I spend so much time looking in mirrors, and why, so often, I think and write about them. The mirror holds a separated reality, a hyper-reality where not only has everything translated to the place where it should be, but the center of that translation, the center of that universe, is me myself. In the mirror, I see the strangest image of all, the image that will always escape me otherwise, the one thing that my eyes will never by themselves see, myself.

But that is not what I saw that day, when, unbidden, I experienced Oblivion. For a moment then, I saw nothing, felt nothing, heard nothing, knew nothing. For a moment, I was No-thing. For free and without trying (much less wanting) it, I got what every serious student of meditation, drugs, religion, and pornography is looking for: a sneak peek at the next life. And like a good American, I let it change me not one whit. Though for the tiniest of intervals I experienced perhaps the greatest terror of my life, the total absence of all things, including myself, it passed quickly enough that I was not forced to confront it. In passing, it was easily put aside, and I chose, in my own sly nod to free will, to ignore it until later.

In the mirror, I can see all that I know. Everything not shown is hearsay. I lock eyes with myself, and we can agree that I exist. I can reach no such consensus elsewhere. Yet even this is false.

For several weeks after my experience, I had recurrences, sometimes within sight of a mirror, and sometimes not. Each time it happened, I was quick to put the universe, in its fullness without me, out of my mind. I am convinced of little, held to even fewer convictions, but stand bound by the conclusion that of all things that are a waste of time to ponder, nothing tops speculations of what lies beyond this life.