black and white

I wept when I first experienced infinity. The sense of beauty was too much for me to contain and it overflowed in tears of joy. Ah… Just recalling that timeless moment is enough for words to melt away... 

I don’t tend to see colours and light much when using reiki, nor when working with other methods. For me, the magic is usually perceived purely as sensations in the body – energy sensations for want of a better word.

There are exceptions though. I remember well one occasion when, sitting silently “meditating,” I was suddenly filled with a golden light, pouring in through my crown chakra. For a few hours afterwards a buddha walked in my place. Ah... 

On another occasion, when my brother died, suddenly, I was thrust into acquaintance with death. A few days after the event I was giving myself a reiki treatment and there was Death, standing face-to-face with me, as black as black can be. But there was no point in running away; my brother was dead; so there we stood, Death and I, neither of us going anywhere. I don’t know how long I lay there. I guess it was rather a long self-treatment: hours of staring into the black abyss of death, without any movement, without any urge to escape, nor to change it. Then suddenly, without warning, the blackness exploded into whiteness and I was shaken to the core. Since then I have felt no fear of death. Ah... 

Then there was the time, a timeless time, whilst tenderly kissing a lover, when wild flashes of yellow and red and orange burst through me. Ah... 

But these beautiful experiences, along with the little bird which is flying to and fro from its nest outside my window, all of these manifestations come from that infinity, that great space, that immense silence which is the unmanifest. And to me that great stillness, so full of potential that it, too, is endlessly overflowing, that source of all that is, has no colour. But if the no-colour has to be labelled then we would call it black. So let us not value white more than black; For our very essence, that which we yearn to once more know as our home, has the black of colourlessness.

(June 2007)