I am a point of consciousness without form, suspended several feet above the floor. I am at one end of a long rectangular room. Along the walls on either side of me perhaps a dozen monks in saffron robes are seated, chanting: OM MANE PADME HUM, in the guttural double-throated chant of the Tibetan religion. Slowly I move forward through the length of the room towards an altar. It is perfectly black with a smooth top, slick like black oil.
As I contemplate the surface of the altar I realize that the surface is in fact liquid. In it geometric structures appear and disappear, and I realize that these are the underlying architectonics of the universal becoming, and that the structures that appear to be like geometric forms are in fact what we perceive in ordinary reality as stars, nebula, planets, objects, etc., or perhaps their abstract analogues. The appearance of these structures is paradoxical, because I see them clearly and yet they are as black as the background in which they appear. They are like geometric stresses in the black oil, appearing and disappearing in the surface. It occurs to me that I am observing the flux of change itself, the fundamental reality of existence.
At that moment a figure emerges before me out of the oil, her sleek female form coated in a thin veneer of shiny black film, which then slips away to reveal a brilliant burgundy goddess figure. I do not recognize her, nor would I for several years, until a Tibetan lama directed my attention to her thangka with the words, “This is for you.” A serpent coils about her right arm. I raise my left hand in greeting, palm forward, in response to which she touches the center of my palm with the tip of her right forefinger. Immediately a vesica-shaped wound appears in the palm of my left hand, and the serpent unwinds itself from her arm and enters my body through the wound.
I can feel the point of origin of the ecstasy in my left frontal lobe. I sense it spread, like a wave, through my brain, as every synapse and neuron of my brain fires simultaneously. The ecstasy is unlike anything I have ever experienced or will experience again. It is centered in the brain, and a million times greater than any merely erotic sensation. This is not an hallucination. My mind is ecstatic, lucid, and clear. The experience is clear, detailed, and vivid. I remember it still, more than 20 years later, with perfect clarity.
As a result of this experience I no longer believe, but KNOW, that the brain posseses an innnate visionary potential that is not psychotic but ecstatic. Nor is it a throwback to a more primitive state, but a superior state of consciousness, and therefore a characteristic .of the future evolution of the brain itself, the realization of an innate potentiality or intelligence. Since that day my life course has been set: this experience, my gift now to the posterity of the world.
Dharmata 