By the time he was almost at the cave, halfway between the sea and the top of the islet, the sky was deep in darkness, a totally moonless night, and the path was narrow and the drop to his right a vertical cliff.
He stood in front of the opening and again stared out. From here, Es Vedrà seemed quiet to every sense. The sound of the sea was too far below to be heard. Nothing. Just the peace of God.
But then he saw something, far below.
It was a light again. Exactly like the one he had seen fall into the ocean. This light seemed to be emanating from deep below the surface, closer to Es Vedrà than it was to the beach at Cala d’Hort.
A kind of brilliant glowing transparent phosphorescence. Tonight it was almost the ultramarine-blue of the Virgin Mother’s shawl but glowing, moving, pulsing, like a giant shapeshifting impossibly beautiful jellyfish.
The priest was struck with awe, mesmerised. The sunset had been one thing, but this was something else entirely. He remembered John 1:5 and whispered it, hardly thinking.
‘The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.’
And he realised the lizards were heading towards it.
Francisco felt a strange but blissful dissolving, as though he was no longer Francisco Palau, no longer the priest and former friar and occasional hermit, no longer the founder of the School of Virtue in Barcelona, no longer a person, or exile, or a self in time, or an identity with memories of his fellow friars burning to death in a monastery at the hands of the Spanish army. He was, in that ecstatic instant, beyond himself. There was no line between the man and the universe, between flesh and infinity.
He was the past, the present and the future.
He was, simply, life itself.
But then something happened. He lost his footing on the thin path. And then he fell, tumbling roughly down the limestone on his fall, with a pain and force so intense he lost consciousness before he splashed into the water, and the sea itself filled entirely with light from Ibiza to Es Vedrà. And when his consciousness returned he was in that ocean amid the light, winded and stunned but alive. Strangely no longer in pain. In front of him was the sphere-cloud and he swam straight towards it, imagining it was God or salvation. And then when he reached it the sphere held its form and expanded and a hole appeared in it, and he swam through until he was suddenly somewhere else entirely. He was on a beach with orange sand and a forest full of trees with white leaves and beside a different sea, one whose luminescence never faded, and he breathed in that sweet air, and he saw creatures, of flesh and of vapour, the likes of which he had never seen before, including one who came to him and communicated a message.
You are safe here. You will be forever protected.
And, with every atom and fibre of his being, he knew those words to be true. He cried with gratitude and warmth and stepped towards those creatures – angels, he was sure – ready for salvation.
The View from the Church Floor
I woke up on the church tiles. I felt weak. Mildly delirious. My head was aching. And I stared up to see Alberto’s face, contorted with intense emotion, crying.
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’m fine. It’s just a potential head wound.’
‘Oh, don’t worry. I’m not crying for you.’
‘Of course not. Thank you. Then why are you crying?’
And the tears were now accompanied by a smile as open as his shirt. ‘Because Christina was right. It’s not just a presence. It’s a portal.’
‘A portal?’
He nodded like an eager cockerel. ‘Yes. It’s a portal back to where it came from. To Salacia. And you know what that means, don’t you?’
‘I very much don’t, actually.’
‘It means that she made it!’
‘Made it?’
And then he laughed and cried some more, right there with the altar and a painted Jesus descending from the cross.
‘She didn’t die!’ His exclamation echoed through the church like a reverberating bell. ‘She got where she wanted to go! She made it to Salacia!’
An Equation Without a Solution
Now, I have no doubt you are as confused by all this as I was. Don’t worry, confusion has its uses.
Indeed, the willingness to be confused, I now realise, is a prerequisite for a good life. Wanting things to be simple can become a kind of prison, it really can, because you end up staying trapped inside how you want things to be rather than embracing how they could be. You end up closed. You end up shutting doors to so many possibilities. I was drawn to mathematics because of its certainties, because I wanted closed doors, and simplicity, but life isn’t like that. And nor, in fact, is mathematics. You can’t ever fully unweave the rainbow, because mathematics and science and essential truth aren’t deprived of magic and mystery. They are magic and mystery. So don’t think that I was on some journey away from mathematics towards the mystical. Because that is not the journey I was on. I wasn’t abandoning mathematical truth, I was discovering it at a deeper level.
As you know, in conventional mathematics, there is a tendency to simplify. We formulate algorithms and patterns and formulas based on everything else staying fixed; a more intricate mathematics understands that, in an ever-changing universe, very little is fixed or simple.
You may be aware of ‘complexity science’. That hybrid of science and mathematics that tries to tackle the tricky stuff. Not rocket science. Rocket science is pretty straightforward, which is why conventional mathematics is enough for most engineering problems. No, complexity science involves understanding – for instance – the mathematics of nature, the intricacy of organisms as they grow, of predicting the course of climate change, of how atoms interact. And there is a concept within complexity science that is literally called ‘universality’, which tells us that even within the complexity of life there are universal similarities and patterns across different systems. And so the real magic is a mathematical one. It is the one that doesn’t posit simplicity and complexity against each other, but one which finds the truer order within the complexity. Within the mess. The beautiful, spiralling, entropic mess we call life.
Wanting to look over life as if it is a test paper, and wanting a narrow neatness, order, cleanliness and control, is the basis for mental despair. Because it is a delusion. We are in this world. We are the test paper. We are a moving agent in an unfixed world in an ever-expanding cosmos.
It seems to me that if you want truth, if you want to lead a full and aware life, you should head towards possibility, towards mystery and movement, towards travel or change, because when you find the universality within that, you find yourself. Your ever-moving self. You arrive in the act of leaving. Of staying open, always, to the possibility that the simple things we tell ourselves may all be wrong.
So I am going to give you some answers here that are of a different kind. Answers that are also questions. I will tell you everything I learned after I lifted myself off those cold church tiles. And again: you don’t have to believe any of this, if you choose not to do so. Being open to possibility is being open to pain, failure, disappointment, so the temptation is to curl ourselves up like armadillos. And it is perfectly understandable. Sometimes it is easier to press our metaphorical noses into our metaphorical backsides than to look out into the universe. To be human is to be scared of our own innate ridiculousness, so we do anything to reduce that ridicule. We clothe our bodies, we procreate behind closed doors, we hide every bodily function, we don’t cry in the post office, or sing in the street, and we try to keep our own ideas in line with what we are told we should think.
But life is mess and confusion and full of awkward, shameful realities.
Of course, we all make our own beliefs in this world and sometimes to shift them is a frightening thing. If you really want to make wonderful discoveries, as any good armadillo knows, you eventually have to remove your head from your bottom and look out at the bright, confusing day. Into the hidden glory, into the deeper mathematics, into the ultimate reality. Into life.
Wormhole
We were back in the car. Windows open. Not actually driving.
‘The theory,’ said Alberto, slowly, as if I was seven, ‘is that La Presencia is a very real presence full of powerful photons but also a wormhole. A wormhole is a connection between two places in the spacetime fabric. In my research for La Presencia I heard from relatives of Joan Bonanova. The fisherman who was saved by La Presencia. He told his daughter that he was going away, to another world, and he wouldn’t be able to come back. He saw his own future in Salacia. And he disappeared one night, when he was old and ill, and he headed down towards La Presencia and he never came back. So, as far as we know, you can go through La Presencia but not back. And if Christina has gone to Salacia, it was via a one-way ticket.’
