That night I realized that even one little closed room can become your whole universe and mean everything to you.
Like in the previous anecdote I wrote about, electricity was again gone. But this time I was not on the rooftop, simply because winters were picking up and it would be chilly up there.
My parents were in the kitchen, preparing dinner, and my sister somewhere near the main gate.
I lay on the bed, in a dark room. So dark, so black, that if you could see one thing, it was a shade of the door to the room, luminated slightly by the candle burning in the kitchen at some distance. Except that little glow, it was pure darkness.
For some reason, this darkness provided some warmth, as if more than simple absence of light, it was some sort of blanket. There is something about these colours: white colour seems to represent coolness, winters, and black seems to stand for warmth, heat and summers.
In such circumstances where you are enclosed in darkness, it makes really no difference whether you keep your eyes closed or open: either way, it is a black colour which you see. But even then, it is a different kind of pleasure to keep your eyes wide open and stare at the ceiling you cannot see.
And suddenly something starts to happen. All your senses seem to be thinking one same thing, which you are yet to figure out, and in this concentration, you are no longer in the room in which you lay on the bed. The ceiling is suddenly like the open arenas of outer space and you start to see planets, asteroids, black holes and galaxies hanging at little distance from you. So this is that big picture which God sees, you can’t help wondering. Looking at this like that should be boring, or that is what your mind thinks, but instead it’s calming and a pleasure of its own sort.
You want to enjoy this forever. You want to leave your body and become a silent part in this, like a little piece fits nicely in a jigsaw puzzle. It’s an ocean and you are a drop, enchanted by this all. It’s a magical experience, and you want to learn this magic too. For a split second, you want to become God who must be living somewhere around here, in a colony where you are but a visitor. Out of the blue, some word drops into your mouth and you start repeating it in a cycle. It’s akin to chewing something extraordinarily delicious.
Someone calls your name and you return back to your dark room. All the lights that the suns and moons had been giving, are out now and it’s complete darkness again, and it’s slightly haunting.
But you pledge to yourself that from tomorrow, you will not sleep. When every day all the family members would have slept, you would stay awake and wait for this experience to happen again. You would do this every night, and even in future, would prefer a dark room. This would be your nice little secret: that you didn’t sleep at night but instead went somewhere to a different realm. That would be something you would live your rest of life for!
But rare such experiences are, you do not take long to realise. But increasing frequency of such ecstatic, mystic experiences must be a sign of spirituality, experiences that fill every cell of your body with wonder.
One night – one night that was just, but I was mystified one night!
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