“The Pyramids” a short story
It was an experience that must be like seeing a U.F.O. I have never witnessed a U.F.O., but I know some very rational people who have and the experience challenges their understanding of the world considerably. Any happening that presents feelings, visions, or knowledge not shared in the mind-stream of mass culture always presents difficulty for those who have the experience. I have a friend who walked and talked with Jesus and, even though it was the most significant moment in his adult life, he is remiss to share it, even with other believers. The concern with having had a divine or extra-mundane experience is who you might comfortably share the event with, and what impression the telling will make. For my friend who spent a morning with Christ, telling his bible study group is out of the question for fear they might think he is too far-out. The irony is that the whole of Christianity is based on believing in such a far-out possibility. For me, as suggested by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience, the lasting effect and change in perception caused by an extra-mundane event determines its validity. My experience I must value as real for its life changing effect.
The event wasn’t singular, but was strewn out over a two month period, with reinforcing contemplation and a string of curiosities that contributed to the majesty of the whole event. It has been some time now since the latest occurrence so I must assume the event is complete. The symbolic nature of the experience is unavoidable and I strive for an understanding. I have consulted various mystics from different disciplines and have gained some insight though a full understanding is elusive.
The response is always similar. There is a robust enjoyment of the story followed by a few clues which reveal a greater understanding, yet there is always a hesitation to lay it all out for me. I suppose, in a way similar to modern psychology, they are hoping to allow my mind to process the information with my own points of reference and not pare out knowledge that I might not be ready for, or that might prejudice my growth in a harmful way.
I have always actively sought out the divine and have found that it occurs with its own timing and rarely arrives when expected. There is also an element of willingness in seeing the subtlety that makes a moment divine, and a confidence to follow the course through to conclusion. Many times our first response is to shut out miracles, divine lessons, and magical intrusions for fear of losing our grasp of a perceived reality or fear of social castigation. It is strange to think of admitting, “Hi honey, work was normal but on my way home I saw a U.F.O.” Our friends and relations are sure to see it as a sign of a loosening grip on reality. As for myself, I choose to believe. It puts me in the loosened grip category, but it has allowed me some beautiful moments when the zest of life and the effervescence of consciousness perfumed the air and allowed me to escape the veil of accepted reality.
The visuals in this experience are easy enough to write off as hallucinatory or tricks of light, but the feelings that accompanied my vision are undeniable. Did I choose to see this? No. Do I have images in my mind, that could be described as archetypal, which resemble what I saw? Sure. Was there a basis for the elevated state of consciousness in my understanding of the world? Absolutely. The elements separately don’t make mine a divine experience, it is the whole, the timing, and the feeling associated with it that makes it exist outside normal understanding and propelled me to deeper insights into the nature of the cosmos.
The house I was living in was a log cabin that sat at the end of a dirt road surrounded by woods, with the nearest house far off in the distance. I was sitting at my desk looking out a second story window that overlooks a tree-filled front yard which falls away on a gentle slope. The circular drive is lined by low, dry-stacked stone walls and, though there has been some effort directed at taming the landscape, a wildness pervades the view. It was a bright spring morning around 10:30 and brilliant shafts of sunlight poured through the playful branches of the thick trees. A gentle breeze moved through the limbs causing the spots of sunlight to dance joyously on the ground. I had been distracted from some household accounting by the kaleidoscopic beauty of the ever-changing scene and gazed dreamily out the window. The screen fluttered in the wind and, catching the sunlight, obscured my vision in a hypnotic manner which contributed to the mesmerizing effect of the resplendent dance of the sunspots.
In my light-induced, trance-like state, about twelve feet off the ground and fifty feet away as if hanging in a tree, I saw a large golden pyramid. It consisted only of the outline whose lines glowed like neon. The center of the pyramid was at eye level and its size was such that I could have stood upright in its center. Refusing my contemplative mind’s need to rationalize, I relaxed and indulged the phenomena. Staring into its geometric center I felt a tug at my consciousness as I developed tunnel vision to this point. Relaxing further I felt a sensation similar to the way traveling faster than the speed of light is presented in science fiction movies. I guess I left my body because all of a sudden I felt myself to be in the pyramid, formless. It was strange, even though I had no sense of my body I was sure I was in a lotus position and had my eyes closed. This contradiction was not apparent at the time, yet thinking back it strikes me as odd that I could leave my body and feel that I was formless while at the same time have an image of me sitting cross-legged with eyes closed in the pyramid.
While in this transcended state I perceived the universe only as thought, and no physical entities existed. My mind was quiet and only one thought, the thought of consciousness, played like a symphony of creation across my mind. I say my mind, but there was no my or I in that state, only mind. God existed in a holistic way that encompassed the universe. I was filled with knowledge of everything, not in microcosm for there was no separateness, but in macro, and all the forces or themes of the symphony that could manifest into physicality and individual consciousness were apparent to, in fact part of this one mind.
Only fifteen minutes had passed for my body when I returned from what was a journey through lifetimes or ages for my soul. I didn’t immediately set about assimilating this experience. I figured it would be best to process it slowly with the less analytical parts of my mind so I didn’t think much about it. Over the next few weeks I used the imagery and feeling during meditation to take me to deeper states of awareness. I did want to stand under the spot where I had perceived the pyramid, but other than that I kept it from my conscious mind until further developments of this experience transpired.
I was working daily on a distant part of the property and twice a day I walked past the spot where the pyramid had been. My forgetfulness was amazing. It was as if there was some potent magic that kept me from standing in the spot. Every morning as I opened the door I was mindful of my desire, but continually found myself hundreds of feet past the spot when I realized that I had forgotten again. The same was true in the evening. As I approached the spot I would slip into some mind warp and find myself washed inside without pausing. It became a challenge, and even weeks later I had been unable to stand in the spot.
A couple of weeks went by without incident, or me thinking much about it, when I found myself sitting at my desk contemplating the pyramid. I squinted my eyes to blur my vision and tried focusing on different depths in an attempt to recreate the vision. Even though I couldn’t see it, I could feel the pyramid was there. Closing my eyes I focused my attention on the spot where the center of the pyramid had been and felt a pulling sensation on my mind. I was again transported into the pyramid, and even without visual support I could sense it around me. The sensation was very similar to the first time, and I was more convinced that there was something special about this spot. With renewed vigor I tried to remember to stand in the spot the next time I passed it, but still the forgetfulness persisted. Once I even got up specifically to go outside directly to the spot, and was interceded by a barrage of distractions. It was somewhat humorous and I accepted it as part of the mystery.
One of the problems with extraordinary phenomena is its consuming nature. Now that a second incident had come to pass it wasn’t easy for me to file away. I found myself daydreaming at times, overcome with wonder and introspection of the event. I was still functional in public, but at my desk my mind wandered as I scanned the view for further evidence. Seeing the pyramid was strange but I could not write it off as a hallucination because the feeling seemed quite real. The second trip to the heart of the pyramid lacked visual stimulus, but the similarity to the first time reinforced the belief that I had actually seen a golden pyramid hanging from a tree in my front yard. I pondered it for weeks and was close to shutting it out of my mind when the third incident occurred.
I was looking through the window, not sure whether I wanted to forget the whole thing or have a continuation of this strange procession. Reflecting, I thought of the difference between the first two journeys and contemplated them as phases of the same spiritual discourse. The visual majesty of the glowing pyramid had been inviting in the way the architecture, ritual, and incense of developed religious institutions seduce the novitiate into deeper spiritual feelings. The geometrically defined space and the historical, occult role of the pyramid had suggested a transcendental quality. The second event occurred without the visual stimulus, but manifested itself in the same way with my mind still perceiving the unseen pyramid. Perhaps I didn’t need cognitive stimulation to enter the state after the first time. I felt I needed to encompass the two events into a common understanding so I could deduce the lesson and move on. It was from the depths of this search for revelation that I was yanked by the appearance of a third pyramid.
It was much smaller than the original pyramid and was situated about a hundred feet to the left. Again it was suspended in the air and glowed with a brilliance that was unworldly. I sat looking at it wondering what this new twist would reveal. It was much too small for me to fit in and I pondered if spatial construct applied to transcendental phenomena. I realized that it wasn’t my body that needed to fit and figured that my spirit might just as easily inhabit this smaller space. As the thought crossed my mind I felt a tug that was becoming familiar, and found myself inside the pyramid. This time was a very different experience. Firstly, I felt like I filled the entire space. Not that it was a squeeze to get in, but I had forgotten all ideas about body and form and their confines. It was as if I were the pyramid. Secondly, I had sight and was aware of the essence of all physical bodies. I was able to see the energy surrounding every object, and how these energies interacted. I wasn’t seeing with my eyes, though I remember a reddish tint, and wasn’t sure what kind of energy I was perceiving. It wasn’t physical, like magnetic or electric, it seemed more what I can only describe as essential energy, the essence of all objects that interacts on a cosmological level. It is one of the forces at work in the universe that will probably always defy language and science to qualify and quantify it, yet can be understood in our deepest levels of thought.
More conscious than in the first two incidents, I tried to correlate some of the knowledge. Directing my visual perception toward the original pyramid’s location I hoped to gain some insight into the experience as a whole. When focused on the spot that would have been the center, the small pyramid expanded to include the space of the larger. At the same time the consciousness expanded and filled this new space, which was larger than the house. As with the first two journeys I had a sense of the knowledge of everything, but this time it included insight into the fractal division of the one essence into many forms. Again I use ‘I’ but the witness of this knowledge was not the I that myself or anyone else would recognize as the me that inhabits a body.
After rejoining my body I thought about the perceptions experienced whilst transcended. The lens I looked through while in the pyramid had allowed me to see the subtle-body interactions between objects—both sentient and not—and view the interconnectedness of everything. I wondered about the reddish tint that pervaded my perception and the ability to expand the pyramid and consciousness to its larger proportions. The only sense I could make of it was that wherever we turn our sacred perception we will see the sacredness of the world. This notion was carried further in the fourth and final incident of this experience.
It had been roughly two weeks between scenes in this intrusion into my concept of normal reality and on schedule I was again transported. This time there was no visual representation of the pyramid and also no conceptual understanding of its existence. I was sitting at my desk, and when I felt the tug I relaxed and wondered what new information would be revealed as I hyper-spaced out of my body. As I reached the point where the pyramid should have been I noticed there was no reddish lens filtering my perception, and realized that there was no limit to the sacred space that my consciousness, the consciousness, was expanding in. There was no pause at the perimeters of the pyramid and the energy kept expanding in all directions until I felt a doubling back, almost like the surf at the beach. It was as if the consciousness, that I was a part of, reached the end of the universe and refracted back through itself and washed back into my body.
I found myself quite invigorated looking out the window at the front yard as someone might gaze at the sky after a meteor shower. There could have been a cartoon dialogue bubble over my head saying, “More!” But I didn’t expect more. Somehow I knew that the progression of revelation had run its course, leaving me to try and make sense of it.