1991

I have been practising transcendental meditation for five months and once I fancied myself being an egg. I stared at an egg and wondered what the life inside it was like, if an egg can be called a form of life, even life will come out of it eventually when nature, temperature and time to be accurate, allows.

I looked, pondered and started to hate myself for not being an egg. I wished I could turn into an egg: I just liked the shape of eggs: they were perfectly round like the sun and the moon when look from the end, yet not so monotonous when looked from the side: it so often reminded me of the lovely cobbles I used to play with when I was a kid. And when I think about the cobbles, I always marvel what an effort our mother nature has made, by exerting the force of constantly moving water and irreversibly flowing time, to wear the rocks with varied points and edges into nearly uniformly shaped stones, that yet remain so diverse inside?

I contemplated, meditated, and I felt the transcendental power which I had been long expecting for descending and wrapping up my very existence: I balled up into the form of a chick, rolling into an empty egg-shell, and transforming into the yolk and white.

I felt comfortable, I heard no roaring of cars and zooming of aircraft, no Heavy Metals, no grumbling of fellow-workers and house-mates: the world had returned to its primordial stage, tranquil and peaceful, as was described in the ancient books. I saw light, nothing else but light. The light, after being filtered by the porous shell, was of an orange colour, warm, bright but not dazzling. I remembered colour like this. Yes, I had seen this colour in a painting, or a photograph, of a super nova.

Boom! Boom! Boom! While somewhere deep in the universe a celestial body which was much bigger, or you could say greater, than the earth, the sun or the whole solar system, was burning, expanding, rumbling, and most remarkable, evolving, I cocooned myself in a calcified membrane, trying to create a less chaotic world of my own. And I did feel being in harmony with myself for the first time in my life. It was at that moment I realized that I had never really been being with myself before, I had been overwhelmed by things happening around me or whatever happened to me, I hadn't even got a chance to look at my real self.

Then I felt I was gasping. Air, air, I need air! Then I remembered my father, who died from a heart attack, or a stroke, or both. I yelled but I couldn't hear a sound, just as if I was having a nightmare. But I knew it wasn't a nightmare, because when I yelled in my bad dreams, I always woke up to hear my heart throbbing, and the sound of my heart will bring me back to reality. Although I didn't hear my voice, I was sure that I was not only conscious, but also with a clearer than usual mind-- for I even wondered if that was how the deaf people feel the world.

I started feeling confused and all visions in my mind started to blur. I must have struggled a great deal, what I had done I can not recall now. It must be by a sheer chance that I tore open with my teeth the layer of a thin film which separate the air-cell and me. I felt a burst of fresh air soothing my aching throat, inflating my frustrated lungs and clearing my dizzy mind.

Then I felt the egg, or myself, was rolling. No, no! Don't roll off the table! I was afraid that the shell would be smashed; my mind would disintegrate then be reorganised and glued together with social conventions.

At the end, I didn't fall off the table, I stayed there, motionless, might be lifeless to someone else's eyes, for days, weeks or perhaps months and years. I felt the outside world was filled by light then taken over by darkness, simmered by heat waves then frozen by cold draught. I wait and wait, wait for a young lady's fingers to deliver a decisive knock, to crack open my dust-covered, hard yet fragile shell, to reveal the beauty of yellow and white or the ugliness of blue and black.