Ancient Visions

Ancient visions are what disappears if you open your eyes too soon.

At the edges — the red world: skulls, spiders, faces of scarlet stone, ornament over chaos. Everything there is what is commonly called the external. At the center — an axis. Grey. Quiet. She sits upon it: symmetrical, with a lotus on her chest, with a pattern that grows from the body.

Around her — a halo of barbed wire. Several concentric hoops, growing tighter. The crown of thorns here is architecture, not a sentence. Inside it, light becomes a butterfly.

Above — a skull: teacher without a face, only truth. Below — a beast with an open maw, in a ring of wire. Between them — silence. Or its absence.

The beast below — the foundation. The amygdala falls silent first in meditation. The default mode network of the brain unfolds inward — like a spiral that has found its center.

Ancient visions are a signal from the latent field: a pattern recorded before words, before language, before names.

Red and grey remain. The border — the length of one breath.