The First Day in Limbo

There are soft landings and hard landings; it depends on the manner of your death. Even when it comes to suicides, your exit from this place makes all the difference. For those not quite certain if they want to leave, remember, a noose is almost guaranteed. In my dreams, I talk to the dead, and suicides that used a rope felt immediate regret.

Under certain circumstances, the process can be excruciating and long drawn out, long enough that many have time to reconsider their actions before they even died. It’s a little different for me, I‘ve overdosed twice and on the second occasion I almost made it out of here.

I’d swallowed over a hundred aspirin, and fell into a brief coma at the hospital, and if it weren’t for my wife, the medical staff, and a hardy constitution, I almost certainly would have died.

Whilst I spent over a year in various institutions, some of the other patients tried to give me advice. Specifically which pills to take and to seal the deal, drown them down with booze. But that was all thirty years ago, and since then, I’ve fought my suicidal instincts every single day.

Those who pass over to the other side fall into several main categories. There are the deniers who won’t listen to a word from anyone, all utterly convinced that they are still alive. Almost none of them had died from suicide, perhaps a few from misadventure, then again, the bold generally take a more philosophical attitude. However, those who hang on to the bitter end, and finally die at a grand old age, gasping for air in a hospital bed, are some of the least prepared I’ve encountered.

Many of them loiter in the hospital. I’ve met a few lost and confused, wandering through the wards and corridors. Hospitals are like mazes, and some spirits will linger around for days or even weeks at a time. Eventually, they’ll come across others with a better perspective on death, and they’ll follow them outside where the sky seems too bright. Where the streets are empty, and there’s no traffic on the roads or planes flying up above. It feels similar to a lockdown, besides the absence of birdsong, the still, stale air, and the black hole sun in the sky.

Soft landings are like dreams, they make little sense, but there’s always something to do, someone to talk to, a narrative to keep you occupied, if only for a while. Eventually, you’ll accept the truth even if you don’t like it because Limbo doesn’t follow the rules on Earth. There’s only so many miraculous sights one can witness before they become suspicious. An abundance of flying people, floating cities, vivid colours that are almost psychedelic. The dream-like quality to every action, telepathic conversations, fantastical creatures of every description, loops and breaks in time, even teleportation.

Some accept the process quickly; others resist for as long as possible. Those who die violently, at their own or other’s hands, often find it difficult to accept the situation, and will most likely hang around on Earth, sometimes for days, sometimes for years, waiting for help that never comes.

Many years ago, during a manic phase of house hunting, my wife and I visited an old house nearby, a derelict rest home in need of a lot of care and attention. I walked alone on the top floor, inspecting one room after another. Just as the agent and my wife came up the stairs, I peeked into a tiny bathroom. There before me, in full colour, was an old lady sitting on a toilet. She was wearing a pink nightie and a dirty white dressing gown, and her body was so emaciated it almost made me cry. I stood in shock until the others came, and she slowly faded away. That’s what happens when you can’t accept your time is up, and you hang on here with all your might.

Hard landings are chaotic to the extreme. Some never finish what they were doing at the time of their violent death. There are lost spirits still fighting wars, car crash accidents, homeless addicts forever going through cold turkey. All of them waiting for the end that never comes. They cannot accept the awful truth, because their expectations are so low.

They cannot even tell when they’ve been pulled from the loop. This place of conscious life brims with confidence and arrogance, relying on tried and tested ideologies of society to ignore the intangibility of spiritual suffering. So many people slip through the cracks, and so many wish they could, and even some who say they love this place aren’t telling you the truth.

The hardest of all landings are ejected from this realm and immediately catapulted to a parallel purgatory. It’s like a service tunnel for the main passageway, a place just out of sync, yet still overlapping the fringes of our mortal realm. The most likely candidates will come across the Jinn, the ravenous spirits who feed off the light of lost souls.

If they fall for the ruse, hook, line, and sinker and believe the imposters are their family and friends, they’ll be led up the proverbial garden path. At some point, they’ll notice everything getting darker, more cramped, perhaps tunnels in a network of caves, or a labyrinthine building of some kind. The further they go the worse things get, the friendly faces morph into monstrous features, creatures so ruined by their history, they have to feed on another’s light to persist and exist in the afterlife.

I’m convinced that in my dreams I find lost souls and do what I can to help them. When I am asleep, I am glad to keep them company, walk and talk with them, and give them the energy to move on and find a new home on the other side. But those most in pain seem to follow me back here and carry on talking throughout the day.

There are times when I can cope and times when it only makes things worse. Even more troubling are the tricksters, the shadow people, the Jinn. Those creatures who know what I’m up to, spoiling their hunt and starving them of their supply of human spirit. I’m sure I’ve made a lot of enemies on the other side, but hopefully some of those I’ve helped will have my back.

I am a very old soul, and in my heart I ache for death. I almost feel unwelcome in this body, as if I have stretched its intellectual and emotional capacity beyond breaking point. This man of humble beginnings and means, would if it could, eject me, to continue with a life of simpler pleasures.

But for now we are entwined, and our conflict has reached stalemate. We must agree to disagree, my body wants to live, and I want to die. One of us wants to return to manual labour, factory work, anything where they can shut down and simply pass the time. The other only wants to write. I’ve tried my hand at many things, I’m quite good at art, I’ve even flipped a few properties in my time, but ironically the only thing that stops me from dwelling on suicide is writing about the darker side of reality.

Back to Limbo, and what I need to say, or rather, have been instructed to convey. When you die, all the things you rely on in this world soon fade away. You have no body, no senses, no brain, yet you still perceive, for your spark of consciousness, the inner light of your being, persists beyond the material plane. It’s rather like being born again, literally and not in any religious sense, for you have to learn to adapt, and see with your soul and touch with your spirit, and project instead of moving independently.

After that, things can become a little easier, although your temperament can make all the difference. If you lust for life, soon enough you’ll have to return. There are queues, and I’m not joking, although you can make deals with the Jinn. Those savvy enough not to fall for their games might negotiate for something better. But most of us are carted off like cattle to the slaughter, stripped of our experience and memories as we pass through the ‘grinder.’

There is no real name for it, although many have tried, it’s so difficult to bring back mental photographs from the other side. Whatever it is, it has teeth, and it revolves, and it sits at the end of the tunnel of light. That’s why I call it the grinder. I sometimes wonder if Marcel Duchamp had meant to convey a very different message in his works because his imagery suits that place so well.

We are processed, and we return, new and clean and for the most part, oblivious to our true origins. Although not always, sometimes there are those who for a few short years will talk about their time before. New lives, recounting the old, remembering their past lives, the nature of their death, all sorts of details and facts that leave the sceptics scratching their heads.

But in general, you only remember who you really are, your eternal Self, that person that plays you in your dreams and your nightmares. That’s where you get to meet the dead, although most never realise. They think the characters in their deepest sleep are their friends and family. They’re not, they are the Jinn. Only strangers desperate to communicate something pertinent, that can achieve a level of astounding clarity, are the true lost souls of Limbo. The interlopers who travel through the lucid visions of sleeping humans, hoping to cross the divide as refugees of the afterlife.

There are so many troubled people here on Earth, and individually, their suffering pains me, because I can tell exactly how they feel. It’s as if they glow brighter and darker depending on how close they are to suicide. Sometimes I can even see the rupture in the timeline and all the long-term consequences waiting in the sidelines. Not so much for the suicide as for all those that they leave behind. Which is why I’m practically a hermit, I can’t be held responsible for breaking so many hearts, for even one would be a crime.

Human behaviour is a strange animal, extremely frustrating and almost inescapable. When you spend decades doing the same things, it’s hard to break the habits of a lifetime. All that wasted time talking nonsense, making money, eating, walking running, keeping oneself occupied at all costs. When you die, you don’t need to do any of that; there are no bodies to look after, no laws, no rules, only harmony for harmony’s sake.

If you rule over others in this world, in any capacity, then you must understand you’ll have to pay. That’s how supernature works, the great balancer, for human laws don’t apply in the universe. You can’t be granted power of any form over any other. It’s simply a misnomer. Society can conspire and agree to turn a blind eye to the unnatural act of removing another’s liberty, because the price mortality weighs up the crime. Yet out there, in the Great Beyond, the principles of existence beyond mortality makes a mockery of human society.

For flesh is merely slow vibrational energy, and matter is light decelerated to almost stationary. Much like the speed of light, it’s very difficult to achieve absolute materialism. It takes an awful lot of power, the gravitational pull of the old sun, Saturn, which once reigned supreme over this world, is still great enough to weave its rings of time. Like a movie in a projector, frame by frame time passes by, and yet few of us perceive the gaps, the glitches, the missing moments in the global narrative.

Our eyes may be capable of processing up to 200 or more frames per second, perhaps far more, but the frame rate of reality is infinite, and so much can change in the blink of an eye. Dying, at that very last moment, is rather like being disconnected from a game, one so real that if you still had a body, it’d probably die of shock. For there is a limit to what matter can achieve, it is dense and thick and slow.

They say that when you die, the human body loses 21 grams in weight, and some believe that the data proves the existence of the human soul. If you’ve ever seen a convincing video of a random orb of light, not a reflection or an insect, but something that made you think twice, well I propose that’s all that remains of human consciousness when the body dies.

Light has no weight; it is free to go anywhere, energy cannot die, and neither can we, at least not in the way you might think. The only real way to end one’s existence is to curtail your human instincts to such an extent, that you’d gladly kill others for the sake of belief, or power or money or whatever it takes to turn somebody against their own race.

They are the sort of person who’d rather kill everybody else than themselves. An individual with a sense of superiority, one who believes they know best when it comes to the fate of all those around them. Those people are cowards, and when they find out what fate awaits them, they’ll do a deal with the Jinn, and pay the price. They’ll have to give up their humanity and any sense of self-identity. They live on repeat as programmed souls, high functioning automatons drawing from a limited pool of emotional gesture and human understanding.

The oldest bloodlines have been here since the start. They steer destiny and are granted great power and a phenomenal legacy. But they are empty inside, having given up their free will to an unseen influence. It might simply be an abstraction of negative energy, or something more tangible, existing just outside the borders of human consciousness. Whatever it is, it is trapped, caught somewhere that it cannot abide, and its only entertainment in its miserable existence is this world.

I don’t know how much longer the show can go on for, but when it ends and the curtains fall, all of this will be consumed in darkness and we will be dancing in Limbo.

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