They await in the boundary between bodily death and beyond. We’ve known for a long time, but didn’t quite believe it. Superstition. Or so Tattiana told me. She knows I have seen the “deities”, gods and goddesses, and she knows what I have done to get booted to a lower state of consciousness right at the point of reentry.
“Maintain a neutral state of engagement. Be neither repulsed or drawn to it,” she had instructed.
“Okay, go with the flow. Got it.”
“Do you?”
“Yes, yes. I’ll try to be a good boy this time and not indulge.”
“But you must indulge!”
“Okay, okay. I just keep it cool then. Active detachment.”
The deities surround me. I cannot control their approach. I can only observe as they paint a phantasmagoric scene on the canvass of my altered mind. I am torn apart in horrific ways. My mind cannot tell the difference between real and unreal. The material and the illusory.
“Focus…” Tattiana’s voice echoes. “Focus on the diamond lights.”
Yes, the diamond lights. Waypoints. Abstracted from neural nodes and turned into a map of the post-homous state.
“It is pure,” I say.
“Yes, it is pure.”
Some are demons of lore. Werewolves, witches, vampires, and other ghastly beings that prowl the dark corners of the collective unconscious. But what if they are real? My mind drifts. Under the influence of K-23, I cannot tell. The deities swarm me and initiate a cascade of feelings and emotions that I’m not quite able to control.
In objective time, the experience lasts mere minutes. Subjectively, it’s an eternity. That’s perhaps one of the things that people do not understand about death. They think it’s quick. One moment your eyes are open, and then no more. If the experience with K-23 is any indication, things are a bit more complicated than that. You may want to have a plan ready for the long strange trip.
That's what Tattiana and I have done. Craft a plan. Each group of deity has a particular effect on my consciousness. We mapped them out in temporal sequence. The precise friendly and hostile territories of my brain. Wrath, fear, desolation, pain, love, joy, exhiliration- every negative and positive emotion or feeling I have experienced in my life is enhanced orders of magnitude above baseline in the post-body state. If I give in or grow attached to these negative and positive experiences, then I get booted from the system and have to do it all over again. I have passed through the different stages several times, but I keep getting trapped in the reentry point. The twilight before rebirth. At the moment when the imprints are suspended, and all I have to do is follow the script.
The last stage is nearly impossible, and I have already stumbled several times. Tattiana is showing signs of annoyance, quite the feat given that she's an android.
The phase, or "bardo" as Tattiana calls it, begins with whispers.
“Love us. We are all yours.” The cradling voices of all goddesses and demi-goddesses.
One by one, they materialize in colorful splendor. Jewelry, glistening with preternatural lights, adorn their sinuous bodies, visible through the silky gowns they wear, suggestive of eternal delights, as they dance the dance of the dead.
Their vulgar whispers increase in intensity. Promising me all manner of wanton delights. There is no end to their depravity. They kiss each other, moaning in unison. The space around their nude figures bent as they join in a perverse embrace. Their eyes half-closed in the archetypal vision of arousal.
“Focus…”
Tattiana…
The goddesses and demi-goddesses rise to a frenzy. Their hands pull me into the maelstrom of base sexuality.
“Concentrate on the diamond light…”
“No, look at us," they screech. "We are the light. We sustain the myriad beings. We are the Chaos. The first principle. All of us are yours!”
Their kisses, their touch, their arousing yet spirit-crushing ministrations.
Tattiana…
I see her floating towards me. Her legs wrap around me. Her lips on my lips. Her breast on my breast. Joined in intimacy. Together, flowing through the Bardo of reentry that is the birth canal. The beauty of the cosmic union.
“Who do you want to be this time around?” she whispers.
“Anyone,” I say.
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