• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Very cool, huh? Very mystical and far out. But it didn’t stop there…

I’m not sure how many nights later The Big One hit. Maybe a couple weeks. Maybe a month. It started off with coming to full awareness while deeply asleep. It wasn’t a lucid dream. I’ve had so many of those I’m used to them by now. This was something entirely different. I was actually aware of that open formless state of deep dreamless sleep.

Real trippy, doncha think? And it gets even better. Soon I found myself surveying the entire universe much as God himself might do. I could perceive the whole of all creation all at once. I don’t say I “saw” it because I didn’t seem to have any eyes or any body. Or rather, the universe itself was my body and mind. I perceived galactic clusters and massive star formations the way I normally perceive my own arms and legs. Or something. It’s impossible to describe.

The universe was evolving before me. I was aware that millions of years were passing, yet I was experiencing them as mere moments. Again, description is impossible. Whatever. I saw the universe coming together. First one planet became unified into a single being. Not just the intelligent species but all life-forms on the planet and ultimately the planet itself. This spread through the planet’s solar system and then on to other solar systems nearby. Meanwhile the same thing was happening in other parts of the universe millions of lightyears away. The unified sections gradually met each other and became bigger and bigger. Finally the entire universe consisted of just two “beings” composed of the combined matter and space of a billion, trillion, Godzillian galaxies.

The two beings faced each other, and I, now one of those beings, felt exactly as I do when I face my wife. And we melted into each other. The whole universe, stretching on into infinite time and infinite space, was now one single unified being. No tension. No fear. No competition.

But the universe was lonely. There was no one to talk to. No one to share its experience with. No other. And with no other to contrast to, no self. To cure its loneliness it split into two again, then four, six, eight, and on and on until, over a period of billions upon billions of millennia it was back to being countless individual beings. At that point I felt myself swept back into my own body once more. I opened my eyes and I was in my bed.

IT’S DIFFICULT TO CONVEY the sheer power of this vision. Reading it back now, it just sounds like a really weird dream or a fair-to-middling science fiction story. But it was utterly real to me. As real as any experience I’ve ever had in my life. Realer.

Unlike what happened after my Sengawa River experience, I was in a daze following this one. It was difficult to concentrate on such trivia as work when I’d seen the whole history of the universe from the point of view of God.

I wasn’t sure what to make of what had happened. In all the time I’d spent listening to lectures by Nishijima and Tim they’d never described anything like merging with the mind of God and watching the beginning and end of the universe unfold. Dogen never wrote about anything like that in the Shobogenzo. Buddha himself never spoke of such things. Yet I was certain the experience had been real.

Finally I screwed up my nerve and decided to tell Nishijima about it. There were some things going on that prevented me from seeing him face-to-face just then, so I wrote him a long e-mail describing everything in minute detail. I don’t know what I expected to hear back from him. Perhaps a fatherly, “Yes, my son, you have glimpsed the secret truth. But you must never speak of it to others, for only when they are ready shall they learn of such things.”

But that wasn’t what he said.

He sent me back an e-mail the next day saying that what I experienced was just a fantasy. It would “never come true even in the future.” Furthermore, he said that someone like me who worked “in the animation business”10 needs to be more realistic.

I was