Adam Cadmos began his search for enlightenment just two months after he lost his wife and two children in a car accident. They had been on a weekend trip to Cornwall. Adam, who had had a very busy week at work and a friend’s leaving do the night before, had fallen asleep on the M5 somewhere between Bristol and Exeter. The car ploughed across a ditch, up the other side and into a motorway signpost. Adam’s wife’s head was severed. He sat with it in his lap for some twenty minutes while the emergency services arrived. He was fully conscious the whole time and stroked his wife’s matted hair distractedly while he whispered comforting nonsense.
He was waking comatose for a fortnight. After that he considered suicide for a number of weeks. Every night he would walk to the local suspension bridge that lifted a footpath over the chine. He would sit and swing his legs and wonder about the sensation of hitting tarmac. In the bath he would plug in his wife’s hair dryer and dangle it by the lead over the water. One time he span it around his index finger like a basketball. Heads death, tails life. But it didn’t drop.
After six weeks he decided he wasn’t going to kill himself. Death wasn’t final enough.
He went out and bought a book on Buddhist meditation. He read it in the bath each night and stayed up into the early hours practising the lessons and techniques. In the morning he went to work as normal and everyone commented on how well he was doing. He didn’t sleep more than an hour a night. He didn’t seem to need to and in any case he couldn’t. He always dreamt that he was back in the car with his wife’s severed head in his lap, trapped in that car for eternity.
He began at the the beginning. He would sit cross-legged in the dining room next to the bookcase, his back against the cool wall and count his breathing. One, two, three, four, five; One, two, three, four, five; counting the beat on every breath in. At first he tried to count higher than five but found that it was too easy to get distracted so he went back to five – the simpler the better. It was indeed the simplest thing in the world and yet at other times the hardest. He wondered about this and how something so simple could be so easy one day and so hard the next. He wondered which sessions did him more good: the easy ones or the hard.
When he felt he had sufficient mastery of the counting technique he moved on to simple breath awareness, dropping the counting and focusing on the sensation of the air as it flowed through his nostrils: the cool air coming in and the warm air flowing out. Again it was difficult. Sometimes he almost wanted to scream with frustration, boredom, sudden uncontrollable feelings of anger. At other times he would drop off to sleep and wake with a start, feeling his wife’s blood-choked hair beneath his fingers. He would be racked with tickles and itches, sudden unaccountable fears and dreadful headaches. But he persevered. The books told him that perseverance was the key to progress and he believed in his books. They were all he had to hold on to.
After about a year he started to feel he was making progress. Sometimes during a meditation he would feel like he was puffing up, expanding and becoming lighter like he was being filled with air. At other times he felt like he was rocking on some vast, limitless ocean of peace and well-being. The ocean cradled and rocked him and at the same time he was the ocean cradling and rocking its infinite constituent parts.
These experiences were beautiful and encouraging and he began to try to regain them as often as possible. It was at this point that he realised he had to switch his methods. His books told him that any distraction from concentration was bad, even good experiences. In fact the good experiences were more dangerous than the bad ones because they tempted one away from the path of concentration, which was the only path to true enlightenment. However much Adam loved the feelings of peace and well-being that his meditations sometimes gifted him, that was not what he was after. Adam was after one thing and one thing only: he wanted what the Buddha had attained – enlightenment, freedom from the cycle of life, death and rebirth, eternal escape from the suffering caused by attachment to things and to people.
Adam switched to other meditational techniques and one by one mastered them all. He fasted. he flagellated himself. He went without sleep for days at a time. He prayed, sang and chanted. He had visions of angels and was tempted by devils. He saw the future. At one time he was visited by a little blue man who told him, to the exact detail, everything that would happen to him the next day. But none of these things distracted Adam Cadmos. He had his eyes firmly fixed on the only goal that interested him.
Finally, after five years of constant meditation, he felt the time was approaching. He gave in his notice at work, saw out his final month then retired to his house, never to leave again. He had long been wondering how the breakthrough would come, where it would be, but in the middle of a particularly successful meditation it had come to him.
After his final day at work he went home, sat down next to the bookcase in the dining room with his back against the cool wall and began to count his breaths: one, two, three, four, five; one, two, three, four, five…
He stayed like this for nine days without eating or drinking, without moving so much as one finger on his body. For nine days his concentration didn’t waver, he didn’t miss a beat, and on the ninth day he had a sudden realisation that this was it. He was on the threshold. He could feel himself spiralling away like a leaf on a storm, spiralling toward oblivion. He was filled with a brilliant white light and he knew with utter certainty that he was about to be set free forever from the cycle of suffering, of death and rebirth, that finally he had found the goal he had been seeking – enlightenment, the final, eternal release of non-being.
He moved through the gate, across the threshold and the blinding white light grew to a crescendo before suddenly subsiding. As Adam waited for the blessed oblivion of his self, he was aware suddenly of a voice, strangely amplified saying, ‘ADAM CADMOS, YOU HAVE BEEN EVICTED. CONGRATULATIONS, YOU ARE LEAVING THE UNIVERSE.’
***
He looked around him, puzzled. The bright lights flashed again and when they died away he saw that they were coming from all around him, held by some kind of strange beings. He felt a tug on his arm and he was pulled somewhere away from the lights. A voice was in his ear. ‘Here put these on. You are in a place with more dimensions than you are used to. They will help you to adjust.’ He looked stupidly at the object in his hands. ‘Here,’ the voice said, ‘like this.’ He felt something being attached to his eyes and suddenly he could make out everything around him.
He was in some kind of strange room. Outside there was a great noise like thousands of people shouting and many flashing lights. The voice next to him was a being of some multi-dimensional nature that he couldn’t begin to describe but he could somehow perceive thanks to the object over his eyes.
‘Ok,’ the multi-dimensional being said, ‘I know this must be very disorientating for you at the moment but just try to get through the next couple of hours and then we’ll try to explain everything. You’ll need to do an interview with Naveeena and then there will be a small party with the press and other evictees. After that you will be taken to a hotel where you will be able to relax and take it all in. For now all you need to know is that you have successfully found the loop hole in our great reality show “The Universe” and as such have been what we light-heartedly like to term “evicted”. Very few contestants ever manage this, in fact the last one was some two thousand five hundred Universe-years ago. You really should be very proud of yourself. Anyway, you’ll love it here. We have so much stuff to keep you entertained, it’s to die for. You’ll have centuries of fun just catching up on all the gossip.’ The multi-dimensional being made a sound that Adam could only interpret as a long, rather silly giggle.
The strange, giggly noise was interrupted by a sudden increase in the sound of shouting coming from outside the room. The flashes of light began to break out again. ‘Oh,’ said the multi-dimensional being, ‘Naveeena is ready for you now. You’ll need to follow me. Here have this. It will help with the nerves.’The multi-dimensional being pointed to an object impossible to describe but which the device on Adam’s eyes interpreted as a glass.
With a sigh of anguished acceptance Adam reached down and picked up the flute of multi-dimensional champagne and followed the being outside.
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