East of the sun
The beyond, the next world, eternity
At a stroke, I was wide awake. Although I wanted to sleep after the long evening. Sure I fall asleep, after our concert, which had pleased me not much. Nevertheless, I had been excited, still had a little puffed, but was finally fallen asleep. Now, suddenly, in the middle of the night, it was about three o clock, wide awake. So alive, like never before in my life. I sat on the side of the bed.
The eyes wandered around the room, everything was very clear the walls, the desk, the chairs, the carpet, the rack jalopies, the old heavy safe. Everything so clear, so real, clearer as clear can be, more walled as wall can be wall – and in colour. The whole room, I saw at one glance, I realized it with all senses simultaneously, before me, behind me, beside me, everything coeval and what I did not look at directly, I saw anyway.
I wanted to sleep again, soon it would be dawn and I then tired. Again I laid down and tried to find sleep. But it did not work. I did have to get up again. I turned to the window and looked out into the garden. Everything was colourful, not bright, simply intensely coloured. Leaves green as green can be green only – more green than green.
Bricks red-brown, so brown and simultaneously red. And the children’s paintings on the wall of the cottage with the sun on it, red and yellow like the sun can only be yellow. If the neighbour could see this, she wouldn’t rebel any more, the cottage would take away the sun. So I could not sleep. I did have to leave, get out, experience the unprecedented alertness. I walked on ways, through soil and fields.
Light blasts moved the branches of the pines at the edge of the forest. A spectacle, like the undulating of waves at the Atlantic – but vertically. The motion I can still see today when I think of it. A play also of moving colours, of green, red, brown waving over the edge of the woods. Van Gogh must have seen those movies.
Gradually the sun rose, a disc constantly growing whiter, rising at the horizon. Something impelled me to look into this disc. Sure I remembered the warning, how harmful it might be. But the inspiration was stronger – the disc became glistening, glowing white as the surface of a lake under a full moon and absolute calm.
With this view the picture changed to the imagination of the vault of heaven under which we feel ourselves enclosed, sheltered and yet in a wide space. A silver white disc implying the finiteness of the vault. It reminded me of the middle ages vault of heaven. Spellbound, I watched the sun with the whole mystical scenery and so experienced for the first time the vault of heaven detached of all scientific ideas. The dome was finite, grand and without a doubt, the absolute reality.
Suddenly the sun changed: instead of the impenetrable white glowing metal disc, at once, there was a hole. It was not created or changed, but was there all of a sudden like self-evident, perfectly natural – a different equally valid sight: A firmament having at one place a hole, a through-sight to the other side. I was astonished (amazed), and yet I was fully aware of the truth of the vision.
Out of this hole or through this hole the vista into another sphere was possible. The hereafter (beyond the world). And from this hole, rays fall down back to me on the ground, as on a sunny, hazy day. But the radiation also leaded into the other direction, from the earth softly velvety, misty, becoming definite harder and straight guiding to the grand opening in the firmament.
The rays flew simultaneously to the one as in the other direction. I was surprised, because the mind informed me that it could not be possible. The totality of the senses, however, showed irrefutably that reality. And even more.
Even all later images which in my head showed circumstances hitherto excluding each other, these phenomena were new certitude: Rays go in both directions; a hole can be Nothing as well as an opaque disc and – in the afterlife is everything and nothing at once. Or, what I see, I see in front of me with the eyes, but with all senses I “see” as well what is behind me.
Following the Rays, I was suddenly within the dividing hole and saw me standing on the track across the fields. I found myself utterly clear in entire corporeality standing on the rocky road and was simultaneously up in the hole. Thus I felt fear.
How could it be possible, I cannot be above, having left my body and stand also below. The fear has been taken from me. I could be back on the bottom, viewing the glistening through-sight, persuade me that I was down – and look again from the top down to see me stand on the road between the post-office and the forest. Unbelieving I repeated the change innumerable times until I had the certainty that I at any time had the choice to be there or here. A new certitude! But also: a choice!
How I would decide myself, whether I would make up my mind, if I would have to decide, I did not know. First of all, I had the apodictic certainty of the two possibilities.
Then I looked into the next world: a reality rather not to be described. For there, beyond the world is nothing as well as everything. The space is infinite, and yet it is full. Filled with an interconnected void. Each section of this nothing is a being. These beings are all associated and are yet again areas that can separate from each other. There’s suddenly clear that the kind of understanding of the beings in this world is a crucky babble in comparison to that of the beings in the afterlife.
Why would it be necessary to talk to each other, if they all are inter-linked. How could I say something that in its narrowness of words is only half of the story, when the other creatures anyway know the whole truth. It remembers of moments in this world where you are capturing the other’s talk exactly and at the same time everything else of his being – the whole truth, even the self-deception, unable to explain it. Individual beings are both at one time a single all-embracing.
Each of these creatures can gather and leave the other side, why, it does not know, but it can. It does not know why it does it, only knows that it does, like others before and others after. Before or after? Again something that does not exist in the afterlife. Everything is simultaneous, and yet a sequence of events that can occur in both directions.
The individual is aware that its physical appearance is not better, more beautiful or more worthwhile than its mental, but the desire to leave the next world is there and the implementation always possible. There is, in a strong sense, no choice, or even spoiled for choice but a possibility existing and with sudden certainty is chosen. The physical appearance of a being can be done on earth, or into other worlds as well.
I stood on the ground and walked again. The wind rushed into the forest, the meadows were more green than green. The marl more yellowish beige than ever, the sky was blue whiter than clear and the sun brighter shining ……… I continued walking, home, still admiring the new reality, and finally went to sleep again.
The awakening was different. No longer that wakefulness and yet the certainty that the experience was no dream, no fantasy or hallucination, but the reality, no other but the One.
And yet I began to doubt. For a long time I told nothing and to nobody. Only years later, I became attentive to the books of Kübler-Ross and devoured them greedily. They tell of people having had experience of dying, but ultimately not passed from this world. Now only I was persuaded again of what I had experienced, it was no longer an individual knowledge of one way or another, but it fitted exactly these experiences. Always It had been repeatedly reported how the body is left, can be observed from the outside and (can be settled again) (in-turned into it again). This one certitude cannot be taken from me by anyone.
Pierre Mollet 1996