Where to now? This is not some offhand question, but the undying riddle pervading my consciousness. I have gone into some sort of shutdown. Like I'm dying. All I care about and all I have lived for is something I have stripped bare to a point of nothingness, the point at its very core. No longer has it a body to touch, or even an image to walk towards. So how am I to move? I imagine thought can make me walk again, yet it is the deepest possible thought which brought me here. But where am I? Where is "here"? Here is a place where illusion ends and death begins. The mind has led the body, for it found nothingness first and now the body is dying too. Dis-ease is not the human body out of balance; it is the human body in balance with nothingness. For nothingness could never give a person "ease." Ease is what a person feels when distracted, when sheltered from nothingness. But once this shelter is removed, ease is disrupted and sickness sets in -- the body itself begins to approach nothing. Do we ever really emerge from the shelter of the womb? Only finally in death. Humans survive birth by building new wombs of their own. Social, technological and ideological habitats which ensure the continued shelter of infancy. We are not born into the shapeless light of reality, because from the moment we leave the womb we are building a new house, a new structure of protection: truth. This is the structure I defied, and because I defied it, it expelled me. I emerged from its darkness and felt the shapeless light eat into my body, overtake me. Outside the house of truth, there is no separation of things, only unity. A person outside the house therefore cannot exist but only merge with this unity. I had begun to disappear. This is now where I stand: a place of half-existence, looking away from life itself. Self-preservation will only come from a regression, a painful retreat back into illusion. Yet this will no longer be the same illusion—obtrusive and concealing. It can only be an illusion of transparency now, a faded structure behind which the shapeless light remains visible, remains primary. I will see the same shapes, the same "truths" as before, but no longer will they encase me, no longer will they cloud my vision of the ultimate light. For I will see they are in this light and this light is in them. This will be the lasting revelation of my momentary death: that the shaped and the shapeless are one.