I took the leap.
Field Notes of Nobody’s Ghost - 20261108-S10
Taking another shape is nothing special out this far; the freedom belongs to the place. How to do it, and whether to make it dramatic, is a different story. Today the ghost decided to make an entrance.
The owl comes in to land; before he touches down, he is a man again. Which of the two does he rest in? Does the shape that lands remember the shape that flew, or only the task? He has never had to decide the timing; the change happens on contact and with intent. I know that contact from one night a long time ago, before any of this had a name.
I finally started Autobiography of a Yogi this week, after years of putting it off. I’m on chapter twelve. Yogananda’s Divine Mother is the most important aspect, and somewhere in there she pulled up a memory I have carried for eight or nine years and never written down. At the time I thought it was a vivid dream, I know better now.
It happened about ten years ago, sometime in 2016. I was extremely tired going to bed, like something pulling on me to hurry up and go to sleep. Very shortly after hitting the pillow, I became lucid standing in the nude on a mountain peak, no shame or fear. The sun was up above me, bright but not hot, its rays penetrating my body so I could feel the warmth expanding from within. A pleasant breeze moved over me. I could smell the entire environment, and when I looked down there was the mountain, then forest, then beach, then ocean with a distant horizon.
I looked to my left and then slowly I raised my gaze upward. A woman was standing next to me, tall, eight feet or more. She wore nothing but gold jewelry, which covered most of her fair skin and dark hair. A large crown went up and out to the sides and then down, trinkets and gems hanging from it on gold chains, jewels set all over it. Gold bangles, gold at the wrists, gold all over the body. I can still hear the trinkets chime and softly clang as she turned her head to meet my gaze.
She had no discernible dress; the gold was the clothing. She radiated so much peace and love that I looked at her like I had known her my entire existence. Her eyes were kind, lips relaxed in a warm smile. She smiled a little wider, swept her left arm out over the slope, the forest, the beach, and the ocean below us, and said, “Don’t be afraid, have no fear,” and then “Leap.”
And so I did. I went face-first down the mountain. It felt like proximity flying, well, I can only imagine since I have never done it in the physical: falling and flying at once, perfectly controlled. I sped down through the forest between the trees. To this day I still smell the pine and the dirt, clean and pure. I brushed my hands over treetops and branches, as if contesting how real all of this actually was.
I came at the ocean fast and slowed just before going in. The water was the perfect temperature, crystal clear, that teal blue which seems to only exist in clean and mostly untouched places, and warm, oh so pleasantly warm. I treaded water and felt it slosh under my feet and arms, forming my own personal current that wrapped around me.
Suddenly I noticed others splashing down in the water all around me. Everyone was full of joy and laughter; there was nothing but love all around. I didn’t want it to end; my chest was bursting with every good emotion I have ever felt, but it all ended nonetheless with a single thought, “What do I do now?”
This sequence was complete and immersive, and to this day it is one of the most mind-bending experiences I have had. “Realer than real” is the simplest way I can describe it; physical life was a disappointment upon waking. I was out of the body and somewhere deep, Locale 2 probably, the frequency past the one that copies the physical, and this was years before I started my practice.
What I felt in her presence read as Aztec or Mayan, an older culture to the south, and I took that at face value for years. Looking at it again this week, the setting was mine: a Californian’s mountain and ocean, the filter most useful for this occurrence. Her costume was another matter.
When I finally decided to research it, the closest match to that crown is on the women carved into the walls of Angkor Wat, the spires rising and the flanges falling to the sides; the dancers of the Cambodian royal ballet still wear it. This is a pattern with me: what I have no interest in, sometimes a low opinion of (not this case), eventually exposes itself as very important to my personal being… somehow, every time. I used to feel foolish about it, now it’s amusing to catch.
Overall, I’d say that the situation felt like an initiation in the mechanics of it. Nothing about it was random. I came to in position, a figure of obvious importance beside me, one instruction, and a ceremony with a single step. No dream led up to it, and the instruction was the method. No fear, then the leap.
Every attempt to get back since has been an ask, even when using my will and visualization while in trance. The way back is probably the way in, or simply there’s nothing to go back to. Perhaps that’s the exact sticking point of my own character: never reverse, never go back, only forward in every facet of my physical existence.
Who she was, I still want to know, who wouldn’t!? The Divine Mother kept tapping my mind all week, and the look makes more sense in that light than in any other. I’ll leave the name unanswered; what happened that night was a pebble that started an avalanche.