When I was around ten or eleven-years-old — during an accident that could have cost me my life — I realized that I had been living in a haze.

We were on a family holiday at the seaside of Vendée on the French Atlantic coast. My sister and I were playing in the shallows when, roughhousing, I was shoved into a German shepherd that we hadn't noticed. The animal pounced on me: bit me first on the head and then on the arm. I tried to flee but, panicked, I began to swim out to sea rather than head toward the beach. The beast rushed after me. I could hear his heavy breathing behind me and I felt his claws tearing at my calves. I went deeper until I could no longer feel the sand. I was soon exhausted.

I later learned that this drama lasted only a minute or so: the time it took my father, who had been alerted by my sister, to rush to my aid. But in my panic, it had lasted much longer — to the point where I knew that my last hour had come.

Time suspended and an odd mechanism turned on. I saw my short life like an open book, inexorably moving backward in time from the present to my more distant past. In that moment I saw everything that I had been through in startling detail. I was transported to an unknown region of my consciousness where my perspective instantly reversed. I discovered a harmony to my life that I had never known.

When my father grabbed me, freeing me from the jaws of the animal, the phenomenon abruptly stopped. It only remained a memory of an experience, one that I hardly dared to describe to my family: it was too unique and too profound to relate. I could only resume the normal course of my existence.

The normal life... I have long wondered what that is. Only many years later, after receiving Knowledge and beginning to taste the pleasure of going inside, has that puzzle finally begun to fit together. There is an intrinsic coherence to our existence. Oh, nothing magical or predestined — just a consistency of life itself, like the overall order within nature despite its fluctuations.

Normal life is ultimately only that: the consistency of that power, that breath, that gives order to all things in this world — including my own humble existence.

With this in mind, I can finally put a different perspective on the events that characterize my life. Then I can understand that everything is well, everything has always been for the better, and I have no reason to worry. What I had glimpsed as a child, abandoned in a moment in the mist of the waves, was not a dream. I just needed to discover the user manual for this wonderful tool that is human consciousness.

Illustration by Sara Shaffer.