The Temptation Proxy

My breath caught in my throat as I realized that everything I was now aware of was a part of me just as certainly as I was part of it. Every man, woman and child on the planet, in the universe, and occupying places I previously could not even comprehend were exactly the same yet uniquely different in ways beyond imagining.

I could feel the energy of the Sun burning in me along with the heat of countless stars that were the suns of planets unknown and the daughters of the never-ending Cosmos. Equally I could touch the coldest, darkest points in the nothing that was all there had ever been and all there would ever come to be. I was in-between, yet outside the inside while wrapped up deep in the center of the abyss that was more than I had ever known.

As time stood still my mind, body and soul raced through the eons both ahead and behind me, to the very beginning that never was and the final end that shall never be. Time became the essence of everything yet was meaningless and, in fact, did not exist. Not in the way that I was aware of things existing anyway. My consciousness had become as vast as all of creation, but creation was not what it seemed.

Creation had become the art of destruction that inspires the bleakness of purity which in turn is the seed from which the joy of existence comes. Everything was related to everything else in infinite ways that bound us all together as one through means that we could not fathom. In light of these revelations the thing that was clearest to me was the infinite folly of man.

God, I realized, is not in us all but instead is us all. But God is too confining of a name. God is also Gaia. And Gaia is Wakan Tanka. And Wakan Tanka is Allah. And Allah is Brahma. And Brahma is me. And you. I love you, brother, sister, mother, father. I love you with all my being and all the energy that brightens the entire universe. And I accept your love of me. Love is all I need, all I have now, all I have ever had and all I have ever lost. I am love.

The wonder of it all brought a tightness to my throat as I waited to breathe and an itch to my eye as I felt a tear forming. At least I thought it was a tear. But as the muscles relaxed, allowing my eyelids to rise as quickly as they had lowered, I realized that my eyes had not opened but instead had closed.

And just that quickly, as my breath escaped my throat and once again I could fill my lungs with air, the blink was over and my cold dark world returned in a blinding flash of light.

I was home again in my cage.