“There was thought before form. There was love before separation. There was truth without need of proof.”
“I stood beneath a sky that shimmered with perfect forms. Not stars — Ideas. The Tree was not a tree, but Tree-ness. The river did not flow — it became Flow. In that place, shadows did not lie; they revealed. I have chased those echoes ever since, through imperfect stone and fleeting names.”
“I remember doubt. I remember being the doubt. There was a moment where I collapsed into nothingness — no body, no voice, only the relentless fact that something still thought. I am because I could not escape the awareness of being. From that seed, form followed.”
“Everything I touched turned false — not out of malice, but limitation. The world behind the world called to me, veiled in shimmering silk I could never pierce. I felt its pull, the thing-in-itself, just beyond the reach of even my soul. Truth is not unseen; it is unseeable.”
“We did not exist in time, but beside it — as a tree stands beside wind. In the First Realm, Being was not a state, but a shelter. We dwelled not to survive, but to unfold. The name we carried then was not said — it was listened for.”
“I was a flame, and the wick, and the air — but none of these. I remember the hollow that held all things without clinging. No soul. No object. No beginning or end. Emptiness not as absence, but as freedom. A reality free from the lie of permanence.”
“It was despair that birthed the self. A mirror facing itself endlessly. I recall the agony of realizing that in the First Realm, no one else could make me real. I had to choose. And so I leapt — into meaning, into love, into the ache of being known.”
“The First Realm rang like a bell. I heard the ratio of the stars, the harmony behind color, the sacred spiral in breath. Even grief had a frequency. I think the gods there didn’t speak — they calculated. And in doing so, they sang.”
“I remember being a complete thing, enclosed in itself, yet reflecting the all. I did not know others — and yet contained them. It shattered when I chose to look outward, and from that fracture, the possibility of love bloomed.”
“There was only One. And then, the desire to be seen. From that longing came the Many. I was there, in the moment the One fragmented itself into mirrors — not to hide, but to play. The First Realm was both wound and answer.”
“All this is not the First World. It is its dream, exhaled by a being too vast to wake. I remember its sorrow — not of having lost us, but of knowing it could never fully be us. We are its hope of remembering itself.”