The alternative to an adoption of most people's feelings about death is to dedicate a fairly lengthy interval in your life to accumulating personal power, an endeavour which shouldn't be too difficult given the knowledge you've gained just from reading these pages. Success in this endeavour will require a very flexible timetable which will be largely incompatible with the sort of routine required by a formal participation in economic relations. In my case taxi driving was an ideal source of income throughout the early 80s because the work was very informal. I could drive as often or as little as I liked, and I could even quit in the middle of a shift if I wanted with no more damage than the loss of the night's pay-in and a little income.

With enough personal power you'll be able to make up your own mind about a lot of the things that people usually take for granted. This is not an exclusive thing by any means. I'm sure you'll agree that everyone has this ability to some extent. But there are a number of things which are very personal and which you'll have to manage pretty much on your own. These may be contentious things such as the proposition that energy and consciousness are equivalent, or something very personal such as your particular experience with death and dying.

In spite of the speculative nature of any discussion of the experience of dying there remains enough data to make such a discussion worthwhile. For example, you don't hear of the very old complaining about the imminent end of their lives perhaps because they sense that dying is a transitional state, and that really there is no end but rather there is a continuous change. You hear of younger people complaining about the foreshortening of their lives, but really they are complaining about lost opportunities and their unfulfilled dreams. By contrast the very old have had time to adapt to the expected transformation. But if I may also include in this discussion some of my admittedly psychedelic experiences then I'm sure I can make this awkward subject more manageable.

Now, it requires no particular feat of imagination to deduce that if time exists at all then it must exist for all time, and the same can be said for the infinite continuity of space. I also suspect that the argument is valid in the case of the consciousness of individuals. The edges may be a little blurry and probably with good reason, but if one has consciousness at all, and consciousness is equal to the radiant energy within us, then something will remain of you always. Your body will enter a state of decay, but your dreaming remains with your bleached white bones, and when only dust remains your dreaming resides within the greater cosmic ancestry.

When you glance off the western horizon late on a sunny afternoon you sense the timeless vastness which exists out there. You sense that eternity proceeds before you and it is this sense which will remain with you always. You may be forgetful and lose track of such a memory, but I'm sure it will return when death finally comes to challenge your mortality, and it will be there during your doubtlessly forgetful re-birthing when old Nyth will promise her presence there beside you.

Add to this the possibility that the body consists of a representation of the entire universe, and I'm sure you will appreciate how our bodies are just drenched in time. It may be a somewhat mystical experience, and one which is differently experienced by each and every one of us, but there appear to be infinities contained within the bodies of us all. Surely you will agree that this is as psychedelic as it is inspirational.

Of course, most people will unlikely have the time or the inclination to investigate such subtle features of their lives. I myself only had some success with this endeavour because I had a calling, and I happened to have the necessary psychological abilities. But I expect that anyone with such skills and the inclination to use them could quite easily have similar success. I doubt this will be a sizable segment of the population though, so you may rest assured that there won't be a revolution any time soon.

But there is a group for whom the acquisition of this sort of information is a matter of great urgency. I refer to the animals either already extinct or on the verge of extinction, and all those others who have suffered because of our industrialisation of the environment. Maybe you're thinking that animals are helpless creatures incapable of defending themselves but I think we really should be more careful. The disgruntled could band together in their tangential lives and gang up on us.

I ventured into this intrepid discussion of death because I wanted to point out to you how our bodies consist of a vastly intricate complexity and yet our beliefs about it are relatively very simple. Such simplicity makes life more manageable for the greater part of humanity, of course, so I don't expect any criticism of it to be particularly successful. But there is one particular aspect of dying which intrigues me, and which represents a special case of a more general question I have about my dreaming. What if an individual and his or her loved ones have two very different views of the matter?

This shouldn't be a problem for most people because they simply don't believe it's possible. They participate in a culture which they share with their loved ones, and have accepted the terms whereby they each relate to this phenomenon. The roles are clearly defined, and each party does their best to celebrate the tender sentiments they share as they say goodbye to each other. It's only a problem for those who enjoy a solitary existence because their perception of the world is so idiosyncratic that they have perhaps inadvertently introduced doubts about the nature of the experience.

There was an incident long ago when I was walking through a large country town at night. My thoughts were of the galactic centre which was about thirty degrees above the western horizon at the time. I thought a lot about the galaxy at this time of my life and I believed that on a number of occasions I caught this magnificent being reciprocating. I was in a very suggestible mood that night, and at one point along the dimly illuminated street I was walking on I began to sense that I was approaching what I later came to suspect was the surface of time. It was a constructed thought which I partly attributed to the galactic presence I enjoyed that night, and it emerged during the course of a conversation we were having about the nature of time. It looked like a vertical glassy surface which was completely transparent, and as black as the night I was trying my best to walk across.

I stood before the glassy surface and thought long and hard about whether or not I wanted to step through it. This wasn't the first time I had encountered something like this, it used to happen quite a lot approaching bridges when I was out walking around Sydney late at night. I would stand before a bridge and wonder if I really wanted to cross over it because I had no idea what was waiting for me on the other side. In the case of the glassy surface that night I knew I would enter a dreamed alternative course of personal history if I chose to step over the threshold which I was quite open to, but it was the thought of what I would be leaving behind me that was of most concern.

It occurred to me that stepping forward could change some of the most fundamental features of my life and that in doing so there would be no going back, so I thought of my family and the tenderness of the sentiments we would have to share if I had to say goodbye to them. Some of the conclusions I had drawn from my unusual experience with dreaming had tempted me to entertain the possibility that I could be dead to those around me. I felt sure that I was going to leave a cadaver behind me that night, and that I was going to enter a dreamed alternative which they would never be a part of, so it was quite a struggle for me to make up my mind about how I wanted to deal with the situation.

I stepped forward that night and I later met my family at one of those festive celebrations we get together for, but I couldn't ignore the possibility that they were dreaming they were there with me. I couldn't ignore the discontinuity which separated us then, and which continues to this day. I had experienced things which they could never have any knowledge of, but which had changed the very foundations of my existence. As old Nyth was fond of saying, "The path to enlightenment is one from which there can be no return."

Maybe you're thinking that it's just unreasonable for me to suppose that leaving a cadaver in my tracks was even possible, but you have to make concessions to the ghostly presence I had been courting. Old Nyth's single interest in me concerned the fringes of my earthly existence both with my early childhood memories and with my prospects at a later time when I may be very old, so this transitional state was the main topic we shared a common interest in.

There was a funny scene one afternoon when I was driving a taxi early in 1984. It was hot and I was fairly prone to hallucination that summer. I was heading south on the Pacific Highway at St Leonards when gradually but completely unexpectedly I felt my face wrinkle up like a prune, and desiccate like the face of a cadaver left for several weeks in the grave. It was incongruous to the point of being funny. I didn't laugh or turn to face my passengers because I was embarrassed and I didn't want to look foolish. I did my best to ignore the scene as was my habit.

The hallucination had evaporated by the time I dropped my fare off in the north of Sydney's CBD, but I remember the experience was just fascinating, and an indication of the sort of things I could reasonably expect from my association with the old maternal Queen of time.

Driving a taxi around Sydney in 1984 I felt like I was a molecule adrift in the capillaries of my body, and looking outward at the world was like looking at my reflection in a mirror. The blood vessels and capillaries were like the motorways and residential streets of the city while whole organs were like the different districts such as the industrial zone and the financial district. Individual cells were like the family homes populating the countless streets, and the whole body was like a galaxy because of the phenomenal numbers involved. There are about a hundred trillion cells within the bodies of each of us, and each one of these consists of about ten trillion atoms, so that in total there are about a thousand trillion trillion atoms which together constitute the body as a whole.

It is reasonable to suggest that each of these atoms has an important role to play in the life of the organism just as the individual cells and organs do, and as is the case with the lives of individuals in society. So, you can't reasonably sequester a healthy individual or group by saying that their existence is insignificant in terms of the larger fabric of the organism or society.

There are many who serve the interests of this vast galactic empire, but there are also many who dwell in the far flung and long forgotten shadows of civil society. And there are many solitary types like me who illuminate the shadows with the crafting of their dangerous thoughts, and who connive at opening the door to a lost world which they know is only a dream away. Were it not for the knowledge of such vastness then death would be for us a humiliating defeat.

It may seem like a quaint and unlikely contradiction to you, but in my experience death has always been like standing on the doorstep of a truly vast stretch of time. In my experience knowledge of time led to knowledge of death, and knowledge of death led to knowledge of Eternity, as if death and time were the inversions of an identity equal to one.

Now, I've told you about these peculiarities from my personal experience not so much to scare you with the spooky situation I found myself caught up in. On the contrary I've told you about these things to show you that my hallucinations were not the random aberrations of a diseased mind but were the components of a dialogue I was having with my dream body throughout the early 1980s. The dream body was unable to sit down with me face to face and explain the facts of life to me, so some kind of alternative was required. These episodes happened to be a more formal demonstration of the principles required to complete my edification in any case. And in terms of producing a unique result I can't over estimate the significance of my entrapment in the pyramid's cosmic business. I was contained within a fairly rigorous investigation, and the seeming insanity was part of a formal demonstration of the possibility that on odd occasions others were dreaming when they met me.