18

Snowboarding to Nirvana

Master Fwap and the Oracle awakened me at dawn.

“Well,” said the Oracle with a slight chuckle, “this is your big day. Today you will either overcome the obstacle or you won’t.”

“What is the obstacle, Master Oracle?” I asked, still rubbing the sleep out of my eyes.

“The obstacle is simple—you have to snowboard to nirvana. Fwap and I will help you. It’s similar to what we were doing the other day, when we were surfing the dimensions with you. The only difference is you must surf beyond the dimensions until you reach what we refer to as the obstacle. If you manage to cross it, then you will reach nirvana, which lies just beyond it. While Fwap and I will help you to get started by opening up the missing dimensions for you so you can enter into them, we will not be able to join you on your expedition. We will be watching, though.”

“Master Oracle,” I inquired in a sleepy voice, “if I snowboard successfully to nirvana, does that mean I will have become enlightened?”

“No, I’m afraid not!” he said, laughing crazily.

The way he laughed made me feel as if I had told him a very funny Buddhist joke. I asked him about it. He replied as follows: “Yes, you have just unwittingly told one of the funniest Buddhist jokes I have heard in a long time.”

“What was the punch line? I don’t get my own joke,” I asked, a little embarrassed, and frustrated as well.

You are the punch line!” he said with more laughter, “but don’t worry about it now. You won’t understand until you become enlightened. And as you know by now, when you become enlightened, you won’t understand anything at all!

“But it is all right,” he resumed, once he got his laughter under control. “After you become enlightened, you may not understand the joke, but at least you’ll ‘know’ why it is funny. Let’s return to your original question. You wanted to know if overcoming the obstacle and reaching nirvana will make you enlightened, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“No, you won’t become enlightened. But you will have entered into samadhi for the first time. There are three primary types of samadhi: salvikalpa, nirvakalpa, and sahaja,” he continued to explain to me.

Salvikalpa samadhi is a very advanced meditative state in which you will have a brief glimpse of nirvana; it’s an epiphany on a grand scale.

“Later, when you can attain nirvakalpa samadhi at will, then you will have become enlightened.

Sahaja samadhi is fully integrated enlightenment. That is the stateless state of enlightenment that Fwap and I exist in. In Sanskrit, we refer to it as the dharmakaya, or freely translated, the ‘clear light of reality.’

“In sahaja samadhi, Fwap and I don’t have to close our eyes, as one does in nirvakalpa samadhi or salvikalpa samadhi, in order to experience nirvana. In sahaja samadhi we are always immersed in nirvana, whether our eyes are open or shut, or whether we are awake or asleep.

“No, today you will have to be satisfied with a brief glimpse of nirvana. You will get this when you overcome the obstacle. Then we will know that your power is keen enough to tackle the secret of the missing dimensions tomorrow.”

“So the secret of the missing dimensions is not that they are missing, is that right?”

“Precisely,” he replied. “To say that they are missing, as Fwap explained to you before, is just our way of talking about them. They are not really missing, they haven’t been lost, misplaced, or stolen. To say that they are missing is our way of explaining why they are so hard to see. As Fwap has told you, there are simply too many people on the earth now, and the combined effects of all of their auras is like an eclipse of the sun.

“During an eclipse, the sun is still there, but the moon comes between the earth and the sun, so the sun can’t be seen. The dimensions simply cannot be seen, found, or opened now, because there are vibrating fields of human auras on our planet. We have passed the five billion person mark and are on our way toward ten or fifteen billion.

“The secret of the missing dimensions lies within them. You have to enter them and experience them to learn what their secret is. With our combined power, Fwap and I can still perceive and open the dimensions, something you would find impossible to do. We can get you in, but once you are there, it is your job on your own, without our help, to solve their riddle.

“Today you will have our help and guidance. The closest I can come to explaining what we will be doing for you today, once you are inside of the dimensions, is that we will be empowering your aura to make your passage to the shores of nirvana possible. On your own, you don’t have enough power yet either to find and open the missing dimensions or to attain salvikalpa samadhi.

“Remember,” the Oracle cautioned me, “I am describing nirvana as if it were a physical location that you have to travel to, and the obstacle as if it were a physical boundary you have to jump over. In reality, the obstacle and nirvana are both within your own mind. I use physical analogies because I don’t have any other way to explain any of this to the logical portion of your mind.

“What you are really aiming your sights on today,” he continued, “is spiritual realization, a knowing, an experience, something that cannot be known or explained through words, comparisons, analogies, or similes here in dimensional space. Are you ready to begin?”

“Sure, I guess so,” I answered with some slight hesitation and trepidation.

“Good. First we will all drink some tea and you can wash up, then we will begin!”

After washing up with melted snow water, and drinking tea in silence with Master Fwap and the Oracle, I knew the time had come. I could feel the power inside of the cave increasing; it felt like waves of static electricity were passing through the cave of enlightenment and entering into my body; each wave felt stronger than its predecessor.

Master Fwap then spoke to me in his formal Buddhist master’s voice: “The three of us will sit in meditation, as we did two days ago. You will use your astral snowboard to surf the dimensions, and if it is your karma, today you will snowboard to nirvana.”

The three of us sat together as we had two days before, with the Oracle sitting in a cross-legged position on my right side and Master Fwap sitting on my left. I closed my eyes and started to use the “Blue Sky” meditation technique. After a few minutes, my thoughts began to slow down, and then, quite abruptly, they stopped.

I found myself in the blue astral sky again. Only this time I was on my short snowboard. In the distance ahead of me I saw the red fog bank that I had seen on my last interdimensional skyboarding expedition, and I immediately headed right for it.

Passing into it, I entered the neon red dimension again. I then in rapid succession passed into and through each dimension that Master Fwap, the Oracle, and I had experienced two days before, until I saw something up ahead of me that I hadn’t seen before.

What lay ahead of me appeared to be a series of phosphorescent circles. Their circumferences seemed to be continually expanding. I aimed for the center of the first one and was about to enter into it when I was all of a sudden overcome with fear. I suddenly felt frozen with terror, as I had the day before out on the peak.

I was so scared I stopped my board. I have never been so afraid of anything before or since.

I wanted immediately to board away from the soft white phosphorescent circles of light. It was a totally irrational fear, but it was real for me nevertheless.

Then without knowing how I understood, I simply knew what the obstacle was. It was my own fear of the unknown. Hanging there in interdimensional space, on my astral snowboard, I started mentally to repeat the snowboarder’s mantra, “No guts, no glory,” over and over again, until my fear started to subside.

After getting my fears under control, I took aim at the phosphorescent circles of light and shot through the first one. Then I went through the second, third, and fourth.

I boarded through hundreds of circles of light until, without knowing how, I lost myself somewhere in the middle of nowhere. I didn’t exist anymore.

I had a vague awareness of a kind that I cannot put into words, an awareness of the entire universe. All that I can express in words is that time ceased to exist for me, motion ceased to exist for me, and any awareness of both my individuality or of the rest of the universe as being either separate from myself or a part of myself ceased.

I cannot describe what it was like, because there is nothing that I have ever experienced before in the physical or astral dimensions to compare it to.

I remained as that timeless awareness forever. Changes occurred yet didn’t occur; it was like floating in space, except I wasn’t there and space wasn’t space. There is simply no way to express to you what I experienced as nirvana or to find any analogies to express what it was like.

After experiencing infinity—or whatever it was—without experiencing it, I found myself opening my eyes. Both Master Fwap and the Oracle had their eyes open and were keenly observing me.

I couldn’t even talk at first. No thoughts or words would come. I felt like I wanted to say something to them, to thank them for sharing a view of life that was light-years beyond the power of understanding and experience.

Master Fwap and the Oracle continued looking at me, and without knowing how I knew, I was sure they understood. The peace in their eyes and the gentle smiles on their faces explained everything.

“I didn’t know, Master Fwap and Master Oracle. I have had some beautiful meditations before with you, but this was so far beyond anything … I don’t know what to say. How long have I been meditating?”

“Oh, about four hours,” Master Fwap replied.

“Four hours!” I exclaimed. “Master Fwap, it seemed like about forty minutes at most.”

“There is no way to explain any of this, nor should you try,” counseled the Oracle. “The best thing for us to do right now is to take a hike and go view the beauty of the Annapurnas while it is still daylight. Their beauty will do all of the talking for us.”

The three of us rose. I put on my coat, boots, and gloves, and we left the cave. Outside the sunlight reflecting off the Himalayan snow was blindingly bright. I instinctively reached inside of my coat pocket, retrieved and put on my sunglasses.

We walked for several hours. Then the three of us returned to the cave just before sunset. Standing outside of the cave we watched the most beautiful Himalayan sunset I had ever seen.

It was like a laser light show at a Pink Floyd concert, but better. I saw every possible color in the clouds in the sky filtering down and filling the passes between the Annapurna Himalayas, with a degree of clarity I had never possessed before. It was even better than the “Blue Flash” at Malibu.

After the sun had set we entered the cave. Removing my gear, I sat down in front of the fire Master Fwap had started. The Oracle was busily making tea.

“So, you have had your first meditative experience of samadhi,” the Oracle remarked. “It was only a slight experience, but it will change your karma forever. You will never again see life in quite the same way as you did before today.

“You are definitely ready now!” he continued with great enthusiasm. “Tomorrow you will try, on your own, to solve the riddle of the missing dimensions. Master Fwap and I will help you enter into those dimensions, but you must, under your own power, solve their riddle and then find your way back out to the ‘just right’ location.

“That is the riddle,” he said, as a large smile broadened across his face. “If you exit the missing dimensions at the karmically correct location, you will have solved the riddle of the missing dimensions!”

After that, the Oracle, Master Fwap, and I had tea and later a hot meal. We spent the remainder of the evening in silence, listening to the Himalayan winds swirling fresh snow around the entrance to the cave of enlightenment.