Small Man Chapter 4. Big Black Box

Whispers of a reality slipped through my fingers like grains of sand. Time lost its meaning, space folded upon itself, and I was adrift in a sea of chaos.

The room transformed into a microcosm of arcane information, its walls, floor, and ceiling adorned with cryptic diagrams, mathematical scrawls, and indecipherable formulas. Papers were scattered across every surface like fragments of a shattered philosopher’s stone, each one promising a hint of the alchemical gold that seemed forever just beyond my reach.

Circles symbolizing wholeness danced with triangles that spoke of transformation; numbers sacred to Pythagoras crashed into esoteric symbols borrowed from ancient scrolls. It was a frenetic blend of alchemy and metaphysics, a crucible where base elements sought transformation into something divine. I glimpsed the sacred geometry, the celestial equations–this was my Magnum Opus, the calculus of the very universe. The walls pulsated with sacred shapes, spinning mandalas that hinted at a wisdom as old as time yet as immediate as a thought.

With feverish intensity, I scribbled and drew, my hands directed by some inner daemon. Lines intersected and fused, creating new shapes, suggesting hidden truths. Equations morphed, coiling and uncoiling like the Ouroboros, that ancient symbol of eternity devouring its own tail. I felt I was on the cusp of the Quintessence, that elusive fifth element that would bring balance and meaning to my chaotic world.

However, the more I reached out to grasp these ethereal truths, the more they seemed to mock me. The sacred circles became twisted loops of uncertainty, the triangles distorted into incongruous shapes that defied logic, the formulas spiralled into nonsensical enigmas. It was as if the ancient gods of alchemy – Hermes Trismegistus, Nicolas Flamel, Paracelsus – were laughing at my audacity to seek the Philosopher’s Stone in this sanctum of madness.

In the background, the quantum fields hummed a dissonant tune, a cosmic dirge. Time elongated and contracted, morphing into a malleable fabric that no longer obeyed any laws. Space folded in on itself until all that remained was a singularity of incomprehensible confusion.

Hermes Trismegistus, Nicolas Flamel, Paracelsus
Hermes Trismegistus, Nicolas Flamel, Paracelsus

And then the room, my universe of infinite possibilities, closed in on itself, becoming a big black box–a hermetically sealed chamber, an alchemist’s nightmare. The universe shrunk into a single, blinding point of paradox where I was both the supreme deity and the hapless fool, the alchemist and the charlatan, lost in my own labyrinthine delusions. I had become both the lead and the gold in my futile Magnum Opus, forever imprisoned in this self-constructed purgatory. I continued to scribble feverishly, as if the very act could save me, knowing that I was spiralling further into an abyss of my own making, shrinking, ever shrinking, until I became an infinitesimal dot in the vast, uncaring cosmos. And then – I was gone.

Buddhist Sketchbook - Alchemy
Buddhist Sketchbook - Alchemy
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Small Man • Chapters

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