Coincidence

A few years later came the first Trimurti — an eco-festival named after the Hindu triad Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva (creation, preservation, destruction — three functions of one system). The location was announced ten days before the start, and each year it was a different one, like a nomadic city; that time the location turned out to be a forest outside Smolensk.

There were four of us. The decision to go arose the way all right decisions arise — suddenly and without grounds. Someone said, “Let’s go,” two hours later we were in the car. I hadn’t really managed to pack — no tent, no sleeping bag, no proper clothes. With me only my passport, my phone, and the conviction that this was enough. (In your twenty-somethings such a kit really is enough; by thirty, no longer; by forty, enough again, only for different reasons.)

Four hours on the night highway, then a dirt road, then forest — and you step out of the car already in another world. The smell of pine, of campfire, and of something sweet — incense? tea? — mixed with the night damp. A distant bass from a sound system, not yet music but a pulse. Trees lit with ultraviolet. People drifting between the trees like characters from somebody else’s dream.

It’s night, and at that moment I’m waiting for tea, the way people who still have many hours till dawn wait for it.

The tea house stands in the forest — a wooden tent, candles, the smell of pu-erh and sage, a quiet ambient from somewhere in a corner. And a bookshelf. (If you’ve never been to a psychedelic festival, believe me, that’s normal; a tea house with a bookshelf in the middle of a forest is also normal. Everything there is normal except normality itself.)

While the tea is steeping, I take a book from the shelf at random, open to a random page, and start reading.

On the page is a description of an NDE, a near-death experience: tunnel, light, the sensation of the “I” dissolving, panoramic life review, encounter with something bigger.

I read, and I get cold — not from fear but from recognition: the description on the page exactly matches the state I’m in right now, standing in a tea house in the middle of a forest with a cup in my hand.

The text from this page describes my current state word for word. The words “similar” and “reminds me of” are too soft here — this is a literal match. A book that turned out to be an instruction manual for what was happening lay on a shelf in a tea house in a forest and fell into my hands when it was needed.

Coincidence?