My Aptitude Does Not Belong to Me

When I first opened my eyes, they thought my pupils were dilated. But it’s a rare mutation, aniridia. Not so rare here, though. We’ve all got it besides Jacob who’s got coloboma. His pupils leak into his irises like a cell failing to divide in two, stuck in telophase like some metamorphosed insect halfway out its chrysalis. If a chrysalis were an inkblot, that is. The Rorschach test. What do you see? It’s strange, eye contact with Jacob. To stare into the leakage, the oil spill.

He said looking at me was just the same. Like staring into two black beetles or the button eyes of a snowman. Funny how important an iris is – a seemingly trivial halo of colour, angelic somehow in its nothingness. An eye without a pupil would be just as odd, though. Boundless. And there’s something soulless about the infinite. Until you realise it’s just oneness, really. It’s you and it’s me.

Our conditions caused them to examine our pineal glands in childhood. Regular check-ups. Strawberry lollypops. Mine’s larger than a pea. Like an olive pit, they said. Haven’t been able to eat them since. Imagine my tongue curled around the entire universe, around pure consciousness. A mouthful. Well, this is what got me added to the list. Jacob, too. Everybody here, really. And I’m liking it thus far, six months in.

I remember first listening to the introductory Gateway tape, to the different frequencies in each ear. Then they were played simultaneously, and something undulated within. A purple wavering, white ripples through my mind. This, the tape said, was Hemi-Sync – the synchrony of the left and right hemispheres of the brain. I’d expected darkness behind my lids, but there was only a whitish transparency like lace curtains. No, a veil. And there was someone, a figure sitting cross-legged, for an instant. Only an instant. You’re here, too, I thought. Only thoughts aren’t thoughts, there. They’re more a light breeze. Something you feel. Something that brushes your skin and then is gone.

“That’s energy entrainment,” explained Ophelia, one of our instructors. “You were vibrating in homogeneity with another mind.”

“But only for an instant,” I said.

“And in that instant, you were a single energy continuum.”

“But who was it?”

She shrugged. “Another mind similarly tuned.”

I’ve since been working with her on biofeedback. We still use the tapes, of course, to induce Theta and Hemi-Sync, but now we’re harnessing the self-cognition of the left hemisphere to recognise the sensations and reproduce them. I will the purple wavering, I will the white ripples. I sometimes even lift the veil, its static and mesh-like quality, and see pure, pulsating light. Jacob says he sees it, too. Jacob says he saw me.

           Ophelia says my brainwave frequency now consistently shifts into Theta. I’m no longer unsettled by the white rooms here, of the EEG electrodes attached to my scalp, of Ophelia’s white lab coat and clinical detachment, standing rigid by the oscilloscope with a clipboard in hand. Bare fingernails, bare face. Bare. It’s the only way I can think to describe her. Ophelia is bare existence. Not that she doesn’t have a personality – she just doesn’t identify with it. Her humour comes from source. Her kindness, her patience. I’m a vessel, she explained. Everything I access, it doesn’t belong to me. A sad, knowing smile. Somehow mingled with contentedness, with acceptance. I mean, she’s human after all. But never before have I met anybody so detached from the ego. Not the other instructors, not the other trainees, not Jacob, not me. She is soul.

I understand. Before the training, I used to write. Still write, sometimes. When I do, something higher speaks through me. My words don’t belong to me. The stories don’t belong to me. I don’t know where they come from nor why, but I write them down. Often, I don’t even know what I’m writing until it’s written. In that sense, I’m also a vessel. Jacob said he gets it. Gives his money away like it’s cereal, even when he hasn’t got much. Very little attachment to money, he has. Doesn’t belong to me, he says. But you worked for it. But my circumstances, my aptitude – I didn’t work for those.

“You know the ‘teach a man to fish’ proverb?” he asked.

“And you feed him for a lifetime,” I said.

“Well, why is it that some of us were born knowing how to fish? The least we can do is feed someone for a day.”

“Or teach them how to fish,” I said. “But even then, not everybody’s equipped to learn. They haven’t the aptitude, the circumstances, the motivation, the mental health.”

“Exactly. But we do, and that isn’t an achievement. It’s luck. Even resilience. We celebrate ourselves when we persevere as though it’s of our own volition.”

“Doesn’t belong to us, either,” I said.

“No, it’s just another aptitude we inherited from somewhere, from something.”

Jacob is soul, too. His pupils leak into his irises like a cell failing to divide in two, stuck in telophase like some metamorphosed insect halfway out its chrysalis. If a chrysalis were an inkblot, that is. The Rorschach test. What do you see? I see myself. I like it here. There are people who understand me. People whom I understand.

Ophelia says we’ll eventually get around to holography, that it’ll make sense of all these feelings. When I’m ready, that is. I know the literature, that the part encodes the whole. The Gateway Process, compulsory reading. Visualise a bowl of water, three pebbles dropped in. Suddenly frozen, a ripple pattern preserved in ice. A laser illuminates the position of the pebbles suspended midair. Drop it on the floor. Shattered. ‘Each individual piece,’ it reads, ‘would create the entire holographic image all by itself.’ Holograms. I’m still yet to understand. Only sometimes. Instances. Glimpses. But if I’m not wrong, and if I know anything, I’m just a shard of that frozen hologram. And if you shine a light on me, you’ll see the very ripple pattern of the universe.