I won’t be meditating again for a while. It can mess up your grasp on things.

It seemed so clear during the trance. But, now? I don’t know. Having no meditation guru, and knowing no technique, I simply sit in the lotus posture, close my eyes, touch the index finger to the thumb and hope for the best. The mind wanders aimlessly and I follow its deft manoeuvers with fascination.

This once, it was late at night and I wasn’t being able to sleep. In exasperation, I sat on the bed and started to meditate. Within half-a-minute, I was in another world. It was a captivating journey, all the more because it happened in near-DVD quality.

First, I felt another being around me. It had no shape or form or smell or colour, but I could sense its presence. “This is eerie,” I thought.

“It is, isn’t it? Your first time around here?” said the Being to me.

Strangely, I knew who it was, as soon the words were uttered.

“It can’t be! Are we speaking in English?” I said incredulously.

“We’re just exchanging thoughts – the purest form of conversation,” the Being said to me.

That was true. There was no sound, no words, no accents, and surprisingly, no language. No formal, identifiable language, at least. We just seemed to be exchanging ideas. It was new to me and very beautiful.

“Where are you?” I said.

“No idea. But you stop caring after a while when you understand that that isn’t important at all.”

“If you are who I think you are, how can you not know?”

“Don’t let my reputation cloud your thinking. Eventually, we’re all the same: lost in the same space, breathing the same air, tasting the same things and celebrating our differences in similar ways. And we all get used to things pretty quickly. Notice, it’s been less than three sentences and you’re already talking to me as if things are normal.”

“Yes, it’s strange but it feels normal. Is this a dream?” I asked.

“In some ways. But it’s foolish to separate dreams and reality entirely. One feeds into the other.”

“Why isn’t anyone else around here?” I asked.

“This space is strange. One just happens to be where one is. One can’t navigate by using any tools, but one can control thoughts to get to…well, experiences. Like I am experiencing you now.”

“Amazing! But you must’ve been around for the longest time. Doesn’t it get boring?” I inquired.

“Not really. Since there is no time here, there’s no boredom either,” the Being explained indulgently. He was right. With nothing to see but empty blankness, no motion of the earth, or the sun, everything seemed still and timeless.

“But is there anything new that keeps you interested?” I asked.

“Every moment has been worth it. Especially to witness what I wrote come true by and by,” said the Being.

“Come true! But you wrote about our past!” I said, a little shocked.

“I don’t know how to explain this, but that’s not the case. You see, I wrote what I did during a trance. I just described the things I saw in that trance. I myself didn’t understand everything I saw. Now it’s fascinating to see what I wrote being made possible. It’s obvious to me that my story is about the future and not the past.”

I was dumbfounded. “You mean the Mahabharata hasn’t happened yet?” I asked.

“No. But it will,” assured Ved Vyasa. “Many of the technologies I have described have already come true. The things I wrote about were just not possible around that time. It will someday become a record of the past, but right now, it hasn’t happened.”

“But that’s preposterous!”

“See, ideas aren’t anything but ideas,” said Ved Vyasa. “They have a life of their own and follow a time dimension of their own. They can leak into minds years before something has happened, or be reincarnated years later in a different world. All of us were being freaked by the ideas that were storming our heads.”

“All of who?”

“The whole writer’s club we had: Pannini…Valmiki…Brighu…Charak. We had discovered the dhatūrā and it was doing things to us.”

“Dhatūrā ? You mean the Mahabharata and all the other texts are a result of drugs?” I was flabbergasted.

“Firstly, that’s not as bad as you think. Secondly, only the visions we had were a result of the dhatūrā,” explained Ved Vyasa. “It helped us plug into something true and beautiful. So, only the writing of the Mahabharata is thanks to dhatūrā . But then, that’s true of the whole lot – Vedas, yoga, ayurveda were all inspired by dhatūrā . You know, you must try dhatūrā sometime. But be careful, the dose-response curve of dhatūrā is very steep. I remember once I was incapacitated for seven whole days and couldn’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy, but that’s the hallmark of dhatūrā. I don’t remember exactly, but I think just after that I wrote the chapter on the Geeta.”

“This is sacrilege!” I was freaking out. Not only the Mahabharata hadn’t happened yet, it was a drug-induced fantasy. Too much!

“Look child, when you’re dealing with pure thought there is nothing that is sacrilegious. You need to read these things again before you say that. Is it possible to write an epic without being high?”

“Perhaps not. But high on knowledge…on wisdom, one would imagine. Not on dhatūrā.” I said. “Our culture is based on these stories!” I remonstrated.

Ved Vyasa continued: “Don’t you see? Cultures that don’t have great histories don’t have a great future, and those that don’t have a future often have their histories erased. So I was trying to give us a great history to have a great future. It’s paying off.”

“This doesn’t make any sense!”

“That it doesn’t. But it works. Keep coming here and we can chat some more. It’s great to see history unfolding, especially if you have written it.”

“But what about reality, if it’s all mixed up.”

“See, reality is elastic and beyond a point it breaks. Then you get pockets of reality. It’s a useful tool for certain things, but in others it’s a hindrance. It’s the same with meaning. It’s a product of human contexts and semantics that can change. If meaning of something can change as its context changes, I wouldn’t put all my bets on meaning. And that leads to an important and simple concept we had coined.”

“What’s that?”

“Maya. That’s why we coined that term. Because everything is Yes as well as No, that’s the power of illusion.”

“But if everything is unreal and meaningless what keeps you going?”

“I’m waiting to see if I win my bet with Valmiki -- whether the apes evolve into speaking beings as he had written or the Great War happens first. Listen to this…”

 

Just then the light was switched on. My wife had returned from her late night news shift and the trance broke. I got up from the meditation and quickly wrote the poem that Ved Vyasa had recited. It’s a rough translation from pure thought language, so excuse the clunkiness, but here it is: