A word of explication:
This piece is fiction, in that it is imagined and not an experience that caught me up in a different all-enveloping ‘reality”. But, not for the first time, I felt that I was exploring a possibility that is at least as real as when I am repeating old patterns without being aware that I am running on automatic.
I can identify two influences that were in effect. One is a book I am reading on Near Death Experiences (NDE’s); I incorporated several features commonly present in the experiences as reported by people who have died and lived to tell the story (and since I died when I was two-years-old, I am interested in the recollected experiences of adults who have died, at a later point in their lives when they were able to make sense of what they had experienced).
The other more surprising influence—surprising because I had no awareness of it until after I had written this “flight of fancy”—was the exploration in Rinpoche’s “Challenging Journey, Creative Journey” of the words “Lung” and “Sems”. In particular, I am very intrigued by the idea that Lung is like the music and Sems the musical performance; and that together they are the fundamental energy in life.
I don’t think I was consciously exploring Lung & Sems in this piece. But the images that arose about sound without wind seems, in retrospect, to be a kind of thought experiment of what it might be like if there was no wind blowing through this world, but the communications, interactions, and changes so fundamental to life continued. Perhaps that would feel like death, when we can only hope that the music will keep playing on another channel.