Part One

Slowly he manoeuvres himself over to the edge of the bed, then lowers his feet and legs into the footwear waiting below; effortfully hauling himself up and into vertical position, he eventually shuffles across the bedroom floor, and looks out of the window into the early morning.

"What's happening in the Matrix today?" he asks himself. Not a lot, he concludes. The bare and windswept tree in a neighbour's garden sways in its bare and windswept way, just as yesterday. The lights have come on in the houses of the early-risers: the social carer, and the guy who rides his bike to work early, and fails to acknowledge your presence, despite having lived four doors down for twenty years now.

The tree, an old silver birch, is enormous, dwarfing the houses all around. He wonders whether it sways in the wind happily as a reflection of its inner nature; or whether it does so reluctantly, simply because it has no choice. 

He prefers to call the world 'the Matrix'. It reminds him that it is not his own true home, but somewhere he has been dropped into, for whatever reason, to endure. He is a foreigner here, a stranger. It is not his home.

Gazing out the window, he knows there are many more humans, many more animals, plants, inanimate objects even, which are stuck in the same situation. 

When they begin to have that feeling 'I am not from here', people typically look to other planets, galaxies, whatever, to search for their true home. This is most likely a mistake, he has come to feel. These are still Matrix, if you like, aspects of an enormous set-up designed to appear as the real deal, while actually being counterfeit.  It is not a question of physical location, of time and space, both artificial constructs. It is a question of the very essence of consciousness. Our home lies outside all of this, in the undefiled purity of Totality of Infinite Consciousness. We are beings, truly, from far before the Fall....

Part Two

It is Friday. His mind drifts back to Friday a week ago. What a wonderful, carefree, far-off Friday that was! Bus into town, haircut; lunch with wife at friendly cafe, jacket potato and a too-big cake, the type they go in for hereabouts; a spot of supermarket shopping, then home.

The following morning, Saturday, he dressed, came downstairs as normal. It was in the living room that it hit him, a bolt from the blue - bang! No premonition, no warning signs. Before he knew what was going on, he was writhing on the floor, then crawling, before hauling himself onto the sofa and writhing around in agony. Pain unbearable: a full-blown sciatica/piriformis syndrome attack.

He had endured such before, in October, November, and December, but the last was a full ten weeks ago. He was hopeful that the worst of this stuff was gone. Not so, it seemed.

Downstairs being, aside from the small kitchen, open plan, he found himself uttering expletives just across the room from his wife who, having watched him with great consternation for a while and decided that he was probably going to live, was now sitting down to porridge. "Do you want some porridge?"

His wife considered the unpredicted attack to most likely be the result of his doing too much. Whether a haircut, a bite to eat, and a visit to the shops constitute 'doing too much' is a subjective affair, and includes a wide range of conditions. He, however, considered it due to a very different cause....

January 6th saw his first appointment with the chiropractor. It was quite a success. Amongst other things, he came away with a definitive diagnosis - piriformis syndrome, related to, yet distinct from, sciatica - and a couple of exercises to perform daily, which proved simple yet effective. 

Three weeks later it was follow-up time. Less satisfactory in his eyes. 'Add this couple of exercises to the ones you are doing.' Dutifully he did so, and after a couple of days experienced an unwelcome pain in the upper thighs when he went to bed. He stopped doing these new exercises.

He went back for another follow-up. 'We'll try these exercises instead' the chiropractor chimed enthusiastically, showing him another couple of things to be getting on with.

He incorporated these new moves. Two or three days later the mega-attack hit him. Coincidence? Maybe. Though there is no such thing really. And his thinking and his intuition both told him it was no such thing.

So no more chiropractic for him. The slow but steady improvements in health he had been experiencing for ten weeks now had been blown up in the air in one unbearable pre-porridge onslaught of pain. He supposed that he would get back to where he was before, but it was a bit of a road ahead....

Part Three

He looks out the window again. Rain has started up, gusting against the sides of the windows. The weak yellow pallor which lined the eastern horizon has disappeared, giving way to a dull and uniform characterless grey. 

His tendency is to think too many thoughts, use too many words; but this time he would keep things simple.

For two days following the attack, things were remarkably simple, and not too bad at all. Then on Tuesday morning he awoke, and he just knew: I won't be getting up today. Or on Wednesday. Or on Thursday. 

Come Friday morning, he knew that he just had to get up, even if only to get out of his pyjamas and to make the long pilgrimage downstairs. Why couldn't he even get up? Maybe the attack was just serious enough to suck all the available energy out of him. But he was mindful of the fact that this was not 'just' a physical illness, but part of a wider 'metaphysical sickness' that had descended on him, or so he believed.

Sometimes he would lie in his bed and the 'things of this world' would disappear, replaced by a kind of white light, not especially bright, but self-generating, casting no shadows: its own justification. He felt as if a space in his life, like a bardo as the Tibetans called it, was being conjured up, like it or not. Sometimes it was painful, painful, painful, pushing to the very limits of endurance.

Maybe he'd signed up for this. Maybe it was part of an unfolding programme, preordained and in which 'he' had little part to play, or at least to effect decisions. Maybe he simply had to undergo all of this as a matter of purification, of transformation, a process which the 'ego' would resist hard until the bitter end.

He felt it to be so, and felt how much of what he once considered to be 'me' seemed to have just gone, leaving him feeling unfamiliar and sometimes uncomfortable with who 'he' was becoming. This was the inner story accompanying the physical dramas and traumas. Or so it seemed.

The rain refused to relent. Not particularly heavy, but insistent, driving in from the south-east in semi-horizontal fashion. Nothing or nobody outdoors would escape its capacity to seep into every nook and cranny today.

He looked down from the bedroom into the garden, into the borders. He surveyed closely, trying to catch sight of the soggy light-blue crocuses he knew to be living there. He saw nothing......