A tiny, mad idea

There is no end to eternity, to the great perfection. And nothing is keeping me from it but a thought - a tiny, mad idea. And in this moment that idea is as small as it’s ever been, shrinking like plastic in an oven. One tiny, mad idea disrupted my peace in eternity, but only for an instant.

I wonder whether I’ll even remember hell when eternity is all? Will it be a lesson, a memory, or a blink of an eye? Will I be able to conceive separation at all, or will the tiny, mad idea recur again and again and again? Will it matter? Could it ever have mattered?

It came to me once that nothing does matter, and the universe opened up like a bubble popped. It appeared before me as an answer to a crazy question, and nothing that appeared to happen was excluded from the answer. The answer being: what a crazy question! The question I had heard before: what would happen if I was separate from eternity? But the answer was a revelation of the greatest hilarity. It is impossible to do wrong when in the middle of an answer like, ‘what a crazy question!’ The crazier the better really, for there’s integrity in craziness: it is closer to the truth than what the world would call sanity. The world does not even acknowledge the question, so disdains the answer.

When the universe was pricked, I saw why the Buddha laughed so much.