And what is that ancient path, that ancient road, traveled by the Rightly Self-awakened Ones of former times? Just this noble eightfold path:

1. Right view,

2. Aspiración correcta,

3. Discurso certo,

4. Right action,

5. Правильное действие,

6. सही प्रयास,

7. Pleine conscience, Richtige Konzentration.

ACHTUNG! ACHTUNG! GESTALTZERFALL!

Ahead of me is darkness. There is no way forward.

Behind me is darkness, too. There is no way back. There is a chain, on my neck, pulling right. I fall right, dragged on that chain across the ground. The ground is pebbles. The sky is red. The ground is glass. The sky is white. The ground is sand. The sky is gold. The ground is salt. The sky is gold. The ground is sky, lord sky’s carcass above, and I fall.

The ground is wet. The sky is blue.

I am still dragged along that first pebbled path in darkness but a halo of light, a spotlight’s shine on I, but water flows contrarian, and the chain around my neck weakens like paper. I scream with no mouth and then no sound. My head is jerked with my neck to face along the chain, it heads into the sky, an airship. I am an anchor. Others are dragged along on similar rinds of fruit. It is what I notice know. We are all on slices of rinds of blue-grey oranges.

That is the ancient path, the ancient road, traveled by the Rightly Self-awakened Ones of former times.

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I can do nothing but follow that path.

Along the way there are sights. My skin grows old and wrinkled, then young and fruitful, time in eddies, time a joke.

The arrow of time comes next, burning my heart in entropic flames, for they consume my flesh and heart and character without radiating to me the fire-heat-work of my soul that may be put to passion.

Then there is the end of it all. Two paths, oh Janus stands before me in his radiating black and white. The two places where time, th’are not. In the cube timeless and eternal, in the line and in the soul of the gods and in the Great Sea.

And then the path there.

A stair. Not quite. A series of peaks and troughs, peaks ever growing higher. A ball. Pushed out of the trough of the tallest, and down, down, down, to the hungry sun at the bottom of the pit.

The chain breaks. I scrabble, and I run. I scrabble, and I run, in the rinds. And I jump down the stairs light, like an astronaut, lower peak to lower peak. Or maybe higher to higher? The sun is above all, in the sky. Perhaps I am going up instead of down.

And I fall into the star, and it burns. And it falls into the sea, and it turns the water bitter. But there is a voice. If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. But because I have chosen you, I must show you the way into the world. And I have no hate for thee, only love. So this way that I shall show shall be a lie, without pain. But be afraid. There will be pain to come.

And then in the heart, I feel the burn and press of souls. A pattern of birth, a taste of clinging, a smell of craving, a proof of feeling, a hypothesis of contact, the sense of self, the most basic information from the heart of a black star pressed into near numbers. Then Beryl’s whims on a pole. Five faces I do not know, that yet I do know. Men of Halton. Then the end of consciousness. And the full way there, through the sand and the sea and the sky and stone and the salt, to that place. I do not follow that final path. It is beyond words, and beyond me. I am not ready.