Saturday, February 26, 2011

Phenomenal Experience (2011)

“Phenomenal Experience”



Now I’m called from beyond the grave, with a question. It's a query that, since the days Newton wondered how it is color appears to the mind at all, we’ve yet to answer.
For, how does anything appear in the mind, for that matter? How does one even ask?

It appears to me, for example, Abbie, my sister, according to a message from her husband, my best friend, Nate, experienced brain death at 6:06 am California time. My next call, then, goes to him.

Soon, we’ll be calling her. Calling her to come back....or at least, stake out for us where she’s gone. I suppose initiating the Phenomenal Experience Program mediates the physical reaction of shock. It’s the beginning of nothing, however. Is there a place where nothing begins---and what is its relationship to existing, sentient beings?

This one action sets into motion our lives’ work: to discover oneself, not only here, but outside what we accept as life---another word we struggle to ...precisely define. Like death.

Finding the genie; it’s true, as T. H. Huxley put it, Aladdin’s lamp is no less amazing than cogito, ergo sum!

“How one gathers a mind,” is an answer now about to emerge from its gray being. What's hidden? How do we survive in the velocity of awareness? What is our location in No Thought? Grief. Shock. Rambling. “Looks like I picked a bad day to quit smoking.”

**

As I processed this, Life's continued happening since. Each message, unknowingly in my context, holds more, a reality free to contain our own reality. My part as observer was truly written by choice a lifetime ago.

We’re never guaranteed tomorrow; we’ve saved what we know and theorized how we know, and all we’ve got must be enough for Abbie.
Earth, water, fire and air. Where my friend are you now?

How did it happen for you years ago, Uncle Anton? Clinically, Grandpa was dead for twenty minutes and without medicine, without science, you...brought him...back to life. What happened over the last will and testament is hilarious to this day.

Aunt Anelle was right. It’s like those people that had the car accident right outside the gates of your home saw the plaque with your name and said, “let’s have it right here: this doctor, I hear, can raise the dead!”
It’s an honor to be the one person to share the greatest and most personal of secrets. How does one recognize a person in the dark? How great can the challenge of visibility be, when we talk about the imaginative limits that must ever expand and leap empty handed into the unknown?

We wouldn’t be doing an experiment if we knew. It’d be called an operation or something. I’ve got to go pee.

I’ve been up for...hahaha! Whew, deep breath, Janaka, old son; you’re due at the airport in Hong Kong. I told the fewest people who need to know, so I can disappear to my life’s work--- a regular enough occurrence, without sharing... about Abbie.

Don’t know if the shock’s offset by sheer preparation; we’re five years ahead of our time, but oh if we could’ve been here, five years before when they married.

My confederates, I trust to do their part; my detractors, theirs. Already, they fell into the fringes of my abandoned normal life the moment I heard the words “brain dead.”

I am not brain dead. Servants drive me with backroad blinding speed to the airport, my mind on mini vacations, to simply soak in deep breaths of solace, committed beyond exhaustion to reach Nate. I am reaching out to the familiar place in my mind where both live every day, united in purpose: pioneering the human consciousness, in ways that make Columbus seem like a spirited boy playing at the edge of the backyard, where he’s been asked to stay for safety’s sake.

I run a habitual diagnostic of my physical being, suitable to my very public side, founding the primary software design firm in the islands of the Indian Ocean, intellectually universal if still modestly funded.

Why not forget the odds against contacting my sister’s mind with nothing short of a state-of-the-art ouija board, or we’ll bring some Cthullian horror back in her place? I refuse to stake certainty upon an end that common sense tells me I must accept.

I accept it all only in a Schrodinger-approved paradox, that’s allowed me and all of us to be dead in my imagination, as well as simultaneously elsewhere alive. I figured incorporate death into the possibilities, and when all else fails, be stubborn as possible!

Part two next!

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