Awakening: An odyssey to salvation (Chapter 1)

Who was he? Where was he and why? Where did he come from and where was he to go? Was he a silent lamb or a howling wolf? A wandering bird or a flying arrow? A festering wound or a honed sword? A green forest or a thirsty desert? A silent, static mountain or a restless, raging river? A priceless jewel or a shiny dewdrop? glowing lamp or a raging fire, one or zero? Was he anything at all, or was he everything at once?

A stray comet, floating in the darkness of infinite cosmos, unaware of its own reality, or a lifeless raindrop descending from the mighty heavens, with no knowledge of where it would fall? A tintless fragment of a grand mosaic, created to replace the broken ones? The conflagrant sun, ordained to burn and illuminate, or the gray moon, doomed to be an eternal captive for its frosty glow? Was he an inadvertent anomaly, a glitch in the source code of macrocosms, or a deliberately revamped set of peculiar encryptions? Was he a marble sculpture or was he the chisel that shaped it? Clayware or a kiln? Why was he sculpted and by whom? To be an exhibit until he cracked and a new one replaced him? What was he?

Surrounded by many, yet here he was, alone, lost in the obfuscating labyrinth of his own reality, struggling and failing to unyoke the agglomeration of discombobulating illusions, battering his entire being, tattering his essence beyond recognition to slowly and surely fade into nonexistence. Was there no liberation from the confines of the gallows, containing him in his entirety, defining his whole existence?

Was there no redemption; escape from the valley of perfect silence, blaring with echoes of unstringing screams, slowly but surely shredding mighty boulders to chaff? Was he to be forever trapped in this accursed confinement of horrors, his own consciousness, forsaken to vanish?

Was he the only one troubled by questions unanswered, mysteries that challenged his entire existence? Could he ever know? Was there anything to quench his thirst, to extinguish the flames that flared inside him, burning him like crackling timber in a hearth?

He was not inanimate, no, neither marble nor clay, not a wandering comet nor a lifeless raindrop. He was something else, something vibrant, something entirely different. Something clear as the day yet obscure as a dark night, something visible to the eye and yet hidden from sight, something glittering like a jewel yet worthless as a dewdrop, something blazing like the mighty sun yet cold as the frosty moon, something gushing like a raging river and yet standing still like a silent lofty mountain, something screaming like a deafening thunderstorm yet silent as a grave, something sharp as a sword pulled out of its sheath yet delicate as a feathery bird, something wild as a voracious wolf chasing its prey yet pacific as a lamb, something deadly as a bleeding wound yet remedial as an elixir, something frightening as a wildfire yet soothing as a cool breeze, something funereal as separation yet ecstatic as union, something submerged yet afloat, something simple yet incomprehensible, something melancholic yet elating, everything yet nothing - a thought.