The room seemed to swirl with the incense smoke, tilting and turning in ways that she found relaxing rather than unsettling.
“Let your spirit rise and expand, Dana,” said Sunlight.
When she’d started coming to Beyond Beyond with Melissa, this sort of thing would have made her laugh, or at the very least feel incredibly self-conscious. But the visions and the deaths, and the horrors in Frank Hale’s sheriff’s department files, changed something in her. The new age stuff no longer felt like some kind of benign pretend magic. This wasn’t healing crystals, faerie pocket charms, or chant music. This felt real.
As Sunlight spoke, Dana could actually feel herself changing in some deep and fundamental way. It was as if her body was a box wrapped with chains and locks and metal bands, and with every moment those locks were clicking open, the chains breaking and falling away, the bands snapping. She took a deeper breath, and there was a snap, as if a tether holding her inside her body broke, and then Dana moved upward, drifting like a helium balloon. It was soft, without pain. Without hesitation, either. It felt right. It felt more right than anything else she had ever done.
She could feel her body as two separate things. There was the physical form sitting there, slightly slumped as if muscle and bone, blood and skin slumbered. It was her shell, her cocoon, but it was not who she was. Dana understood that now. Her true self emerged like a butterfly from that shell, rose above it as intangible as smoke but with definite form. She could still feel her arms and hands, legs and feet, heart and breath and everything, except it all felt light, ghostlike, charged with a strange energy that hummed like electricity.
“Open the eyes of your soul,” said Sunlight, and now his voice sounded like it came from the heavens above, deep and soft as thunder from a distant storm. Powerful but in no way threatening. “Open your third eye and allow it to see the truth about what is and what will be.”
As impossible as that seemed as a concept, Dana felt as if suddenly something did happen, that her mind and perception opened in a way she had never before experienced. The room became very bright, but not in a glaring way. No, this was like she could simply see everything with ten thousand times more clarity, and with great insight into what she saw. The closest candles were no longer merely wax and flame. They had each become so much more, because she could see their components and differences. There was a swirl of things making up the wax of each one. She could see and identify every element, every component, no matter how subtle. Beeswax and tallow from animal fat, chemicals from the Coccus pella insect, boiled fruit from a cinnamon tree, extracts of tree nuts. Blended together to exacting specifications. She suddenly knew that the candles were insoluble in water, had low reactivity, low toxicity, and changed from solid to liquid because of thermoplasticity. She knew this, but Dana was positive she had never been told that nor had she read about it. However, those facts, and so much more, were there in her head. As if they were obvious, as if she should know such things. She went a level deeper, and when she turned to look at a paraffin wax candle closer to where Sunlight sat, she abruptly knew that it contained the hydrocarbon signature, CnH2n+2.
When she inhaled the incense, she could actually see the sage and cedar plants from which that stick of incense got its form. She could see components of makko from the Persea thunbergii tree, and Xiangnan pi, made from the bark of the Phoebe nanmu tree, and jigit, a resin-based binder used in India. And more. Microscopic components, molecular structures, chemical signatures. All of it. The information flooded into her mind and was recorded there. She knew—absolutely knew—that she would retain that information forever. Somehow. Impossibly, but definitely.
“Accept the truths your mind’s eye perceives,” said Sunlight. “Absorb it and be it. The organic brain has limits, but the soul-mind is capable of infinite awareness and infinite retention. Be the infinite, Dana. Allow no limitations. In the world of spiritual source energy, there are no restrictions, no boundaries. We all want to eclipse the limited view of what the world thinks we are and reveal who we truly are. Understand that and be that truth, Dana. All truth is yours to own, to share. Swim in it, Dana.”
And so she swam.