The Ride Home – An Eternal Journey

Finding it difficult to stand up straight against the night sky, Gypsy stumbled across the frosty grass in an attempt to maintain his composure as the darkened hockey field spun around him, or more so, that he stood in the centre of whilst he spun. Locking eyes with his best friend, Gypsy slurred a mumbled “I’m wasted Sean, I feel so sick.”

The two teenagers had been smoking a particularly potent strain of weed, which Sean had gotten earlier in the day from some unknown source. Gypsy attempted to gather his thoughts as he handed Sean the pipe from which he had just taken a toke.

The hockey field was at the bottom of a steep hill, located at the end of the street which Sean lived upon in the suburb of Moorebank in Sydney’s southwest, yet it was a fair distance away from Gypsy’s home in Lansvale and it had now gotten late into the evening. Gypsy managed to streamline a collection of thoughts into one sentence, “Hey Dig, I’ve gotta get going, I’m gonna be sick, that’s chronic shit man,” and then bid farewell to Sean as he picked up his prized Redline BMX bike and began walking easterly toward the road which would take him home.

“Catch ya” Sean gave reply as he himself stumbled along the path which would make for his short stroll home.

The peddling and cold crisp air which rushed against Gypsy’s face brought a semblance of sobriety to his somewhat fazed headspace, which now felt as if his entire consciousness was being tumbled around within waves crashing onto the sandy shore of a beach. Ahead of him was a 10 kilometre ride, a mostly flat run once it got started and one that his 17 year old legs had completed many a dozen times before. The ride started typically enough but by the end of this particular ride, the way Gypsy would view the world, would never quite be the same and this is where the story really begins.

About 6 kilometres into the ride, Gypsy had peddled up a nice rhythm on his customised Redline with his heart beating fast and strong. The exhilarating sense of freedom that came from riding, as fast as he could through the night, enthralled Gypsy to no end. By now, any sense of sickness or muggy headedness had been left in his trail as he pumped the peddles in a sway of rhythmic motion. He felt at one with the bike sensing every bit of friction generated as he pushed the peddles that turned the chainwheel to engage the chain, spinning the back tyres over the road and propelling him closer and closer to home. However in just a few moments, he would experience a feeling of oneness that he could never had imagined in all of his wildest dreams.

The clear night sky caught Gypsy’s attention as he travelled down a lane of the trafficless Hume Highway, now just three hundred metres away from the sandstone bridge that crossed Cabramatta creek and passing by the Warwick Farm Raceway. He gazed at the stars and suddenly became fascinated by their existence. Looking to his left, an empty softball field lined with trees further enticed his imagination to contemplate the way in which all of those trees started out as seeds smaller than any one of his fingernails.

Looking back up into space, Gypsy contemplated how the earth he was on, orbits the Sun and how the Moon orbited the Earth and how all of this orbited the greater Galaxy. ‘Everything’ he thought to himself, ‘Everything in the whole universe needs to be doing what it’s doing, just for a tree to grow’.

At this point his fascination turned to pure awe as he looked up into the heavens, head shaking in disbelief as he struggled to intellectually perceive the tremendous weight of the interconnectivity required for just one tree to grow, or for that matter, anything at all to exist in the way that it does.

In a moment, which possessed emotions of pure open awe, intellectual curiosity and naive bewilderment, Gypsy spoke out at the universe, “How the fuck… does this all work?”

Before the question mark had a chance to end the question, Gypsy was no longer seated on his bike riding down the Hume Highway, he was now… everywhere, with a sense of complete connection to everything, whilst feeling at one with the entire universe. The question he had just posed was answered as he experience this expanded state of being, as knowledge of every matter, process and reason which underpinned the existence of reality, flowed instantaneously throughout his conscious awareness.

“Wooooah” was the first sound Gypsy loudly uttered before inhaling a deep breath as he found himself once again peddling, wind against his face, and now just one hundred metres from the sandstone bridge. “Holy fucking shit, I know everything,” he shouted into the wind and back at himself. All the knowledge he had just experienced was still within the scope of his awareness. However, the moment that he attempted to transcribe the knowledge into communicable language within his mind, it began to thin quickly and within three or four full peddle cycles, it had whisked away in much the same way memories of a dream quickly evaporate after one wakes up.

There was no doubting the experience he had just had. For the first time since birth, the stunned teenager had experienced reality well beyond that of his human senses and far beyond anything his mind had previously being able to comprehend.

It would be wrong to say Gypsy saw or felt the universe in its entirety, or to say that he contemplated its internal workings, no, what had occurred was something of far greater magnitude than any of that. This was an experience of complete conscious connection, not only with the reality he had grown accustomed to, but with the underlying conscious fabric which created and held that reality in place.

For Gypsy, although the knowledge of everything did not stay within his grasp, his understanding of reality itself, did expand that night. He was left with the knowing, that the knowledge of everything is known and that nothing in reality had been left to chance.

It also became clear to him, on that frosty cold winter night, that reality exists inside of consciousness itself. The idea that everything was connected at such a fundamental level had never entered Gypsy’s mind beforehand, yet now he had not only conceptualised such a notion but experienced it first hand, beyond any level of thought or intellectual discernment which had previously been available to him as an embodied spirit. To say that he had been totally blown away, would be the understatement of the century.

As he continued his ride home, ‘expand Into one’ was a quiet phrase that entered Gypsy’s mind, a phrase that perfectly summarised this most awesome of experiences just had and the phrase that would come to mean so much too him as he continued his journey through reality, the same reality that you are now within as you read of this most awesome of stories.

_{This story is dedicated, in part, to Sean Devlin. His sense of humour formed the basis of my own and his logical musings and sense of adventure have stayed with me, long after his soul passed from this world.}

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