I am traveling this world with a brochure in my hand for this reality called Unity.  The paper has become old and wrinkled, now, and its so soft I can hardly feel it in my back pocket.  Its edges are slowly eroding, like the boundary of a warming glacier, the words fading through years of exposure and wear.  I can’t even remember where I found it.

Each day is like a recognition game.  I encounter a circumstance.  A feeling arises.  I compare this feeling to my brochure…

Nope.  Keep moving…

Wait.  Maybe…

…

Nope…

This reality called Unity they talk about in the brochure has taken on a special place in my heart.  It’s my top priority, (while I still have them).  I’m like a modern day Don Quixote- at least on the inside.  Outside I just look like an accountant, the emcee of a traveling circus, or a barista in training.  I’m a burning inevitability walking around inside a smoldering persona.  If I had to give up everything, and I could only keep one thing, I’d keep the Idea this brochure gave me.  That Idea is my dearest possession.  It’s funny I say that, because I’m pretty sure it can’t be possessed.  How could anything like that ever be contained?  When I put the Idea in my mind, it’s like I step outside of time for just a wink, like I’ve stepped out from behind a shadow to start a relationship with the sun.  But then it’s gone (whatever “it” was).

If you step out into the sun and don’t dissolve, you’ll burn up for sure.

I’ve never felt anything more real than that Idea, but it flickers between worlds like its busy being everywhere at once.  It’s like the wings of a hummingbird, or the on-off twinkle of a quantum.  I’m too localized to participate.  I’m like a baboon on a tricycle chasing an anodized aluminum rocket car across the salt flats: I just see a flash periodically as it whizzes past.  Just when I get turned around pedaling in that general direction, it scoots past going the other direction at close to the speed of sound.  I never tire of it, though.  I’m past the point of no return.  One day that flash of light will hit me at 675 mph, and the only thing left in that desert will be laughter.

I’ll be at least two other places when that happens, and I’ll be living inside of everyone.

The brochure says this reality can’t be found by looking, because what it’s talking about is me- me emptied of all my other ideas that aren’t quite right- so this should be a short journey.  But it’s not.  I’ve been stalking myself for years.  I know my habits the way a desert knows sunlight.  I know where I’ll be, what I’ll be thinking, what I’ll be wearing, but when I get there, I’m gone and it’s just me again.  Standing there in dungarees trying to remember what question I just answered.  There’s just this husk I’m trying to fill up with my Self.  It’s like a mirage.  Every time you get up to it, you see it somewhere else.

The brochure talks about that.  It says, “Until you are what you have learned, you leave room for the ego’s machinations.  Once you are what you have learned, there is no room in which the ego can exist and, banished from the home you made for it, it slowly dies.”

I don’t know what this means- to be what I have learned.  I have an idea, though.  I think it means something like this: when we sit at the press conference afterwards, and the microphones are bristling in a bouquet in front of us, and the lamps are burning overhead so loud we can hear their buzzing, and the room quiets and the first question is thrown our way, we pause a moment, then smile and apologize, for try as we may, we cannot imagine or comprehend what the questions mean.