The Ethereal Journey To Nothingness: Peaking Into The Beyond

By Vincent Leuzy

Life, with all its challenges, continues to beckon, urging us to embrace its stunning revelations. My humble beginnings trace back to an old piggery, where the rhythmic echoes of my father's hammer against an anvil filled the air. Amidst quieter moments, the delicate tracing of his diamond-headed rod travelled upon coloured glass sheets in his lead window workshop. The backyard of our home, a sanctuary of hope and exploration, was where my sisters and I embarked on whimsical adventures. We captured crickets and grasshoppers, relishing the simple joys of life. Nourished by the figs hanging from the neighbour's tree, we lay on the grass, gazing at the shifting clouds above. Yet unbeknownst to us, this idyllic existence was exhausting itself through an invisible hourglass, dissipating its blissful essence. Our family life shattered abruptly, weighed down by the unfathomable tragedy of my father's suicide. In the aftermath, my existence morphed into a silent struggle, as if confined within the depths of my being. During this time, a mysterious voice made its presence known, alerting me to life-and-death moments in the making and guiding me with unwavering force. In the twilight of my forties, within the familiar confines of the old piggery, the voice, resolute as ever, summoned me to sit by the water on our garden dock, where an awe-inspiring spectacle took place. Months later, it led me to another extraordinary encounter as I surrendered myself to its assertive guidance. Whence came this mysterious voice? Whose words did it carry? What mysteries did its possessor hold, hidden from my grasp? How did its ethereal whispers reach the depths of my mind? Come, join me as I peer beyond the boundaries of our earthly plane, aiming to decipher the enigma of existence. The end of life is not what it seems, nor is it the final destination of our journey. Instead, it is but a horizon concealing the vast realm of nothingness that awaits our exploration.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Nov 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9781779414861

Vincent Leuzy

VINCENT LEUZY, residing by the enchanting Lachine Canal in Montreal, Quebec, is a vibrant and resilient individual brimming with passion and cheerfulness. From the tender age of eleven, his life was confronted with devastating turmoil as the tapestry of his family unravelled, leaving him stranded amidst a desolate emotional landscape. A few years later, Vincent embarked on a journey away from his birthplace of France, encountering a peculiar presence that intertwined with his trials and tribulations. This ethereal voice emerged, traversing from one enigmatic phenomenon to the next, beckoning him to acknowledge a captivating reality beyond the confines of ordinary dimensions. Driven by his inherent inclination for privacy, Vincent resolved to divulge fragments of these profound experiences, inviting the reader to embark on an enthralling odyssey of perception and wonder.

Book preview

The

Ethereal

Journey

To

Nothingness

Peeking Into The Beyond

Vincent Leuzy

Illustrator: Jacques Leuzy

The Ethereal Journey To Nothingness

Copyright © 2023 by Vincent Leuzy

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Tellwell Talent

www.tellwell.ca

ISBN

978-1-77941-487-8 (Hardcover)

978-1-77941-485-4 (Paperback)

978-1-77941-486-1 (eBook)

Table of Contents

Prologue

PART I

MAKING SENSE OF MY WORLD

The attic of my mind

My inner child’s return

Encounter with Derrick

An arresting interview

Entering the maze

My upside-down world

PART II

LIFE’S CAROUSEL

An answer from Donna

Ascott Manor

The whip

Lilet’s estate

The old farm

A bittersweet journey

PART III

THE LONG-HELD SECRET

Mouffetard Street

Forging new tools

The summer of ’63

An unexpected phone call

Recurring thoughts

The passing of time

PART IV

THE VOICE FROM NOTHINGNESS

Closing an old loop

A golden twig

Dinner by the river

Close calls

The way of the cross

Revelations

PART V

A REMARKABLE ENIGMA

Nothingness and beyond

Epilogue

I dedicate this book to Ingrid, my little Pilgrim of so many years, and to our children and grandchildren. To Judith, the silent inspiration in my life. To Janet, with gratitude, my word fairy who toiled on so many of these pages. To my parents and their respective solitude; my father, in particular, whose ethereal voice I finally identified. To my grandparents, whom I wish I knew better. And to my publisher’s team for their guidance and support on this challenging journey.

To every family who has experienced the trauma of a suicide and the people who have contemplated it in their darkest hours.

If you don’t make peace with your past, it will keep showing up in your present.

Al Anon

Prologue

Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them.

George Eliot

It took a final singular event for me to finally comprehend and identify the strange presence that had entered my inner life resonance a few times over the years before I realized it was genuine, not just brain chatter.

Although I knew not where it came from initially, the way I found out upended my existence and confirmed that matter is no longer the answer to all our questions, as science has long suggested.

Something more significant was in my space: a vibrant inhabitant whose source resided outside my senses and knew things I did not know. It invited me to approach the edge of Nothingness, where it demonstrated having cognizance that was beyond comprehension.

A long-lost presence finally revealed itself at the edge of this ethereal reality, giving way to a story that rose to life in the most old-fashioned way.

Once upon a time, a lone voice, having established itself beyond the shores of its cosmic expanse, returned to its former boundaries and approached a white swan living by a willow.

I was hoping you could be my envoy and deliver a message to a faraway man, stated the voice. He lives in a former piggery which has a back garden that faces east, along a bucolic wall-curtain, the kingdom of muskrats and fowl, kingfish and egrets, zander and perch by the plenty. Its slow-moving waters are diverted upstream from the river and travel through a long-abandoned mill, meandering amid reeds and lily pads before re-entering the river and passing under the bridge leading to town, hardly two hundred yards downstream from his back garden. Once on-site, this is what I need you to do …

At first just a white dot in the fading night sky, the swan, arriving from the north, knew which of the two rivers to ply at their confluence. With only a few markers left to home in on, it sensed its destination fast approaching as it navigated the hilly landscape that was sequined with patches of vineyards and orchards already nurturing new promises. The wind under its wings lofted a subtle fragrance of corn and wheat rising from the ploughed earth along the riverbanks.

Shorn clay hills revealed a scarred landscape behind the brick factory, its tall chimney belching steam as the swan passed over it. Perfectly aligned like thick twines lying on the ground as if waiting to be braided into a thicker rope, the railway, main road, canal and river pointed at the sleepy town straight ahead.

There, still in the distance, linking tiled roofs on both shores, stood the bridge the swan was looking for, its nine arches hopping across the Tarn waters.

Pressing ahead, aiming its sight at the most western one tucked against the embankment and crowned by an ancient toll gate, the swan spotted the mouth of the abeyant water channel gently flowing through the time-worn flour mill upstream.

Swooping over the bridge parapet, arching its wings along a steep descent, the ambassador landed in a spray of water amid dormant lilies that adorned the edge of the old piggery back-garden slope and waited.

A crimson dawn, blood-soaking the hilltops overlooking the river, would soon unfurl the day in a flood of sun rays as the swan waited patiently for a man who might come and sit on a dock nearby.

I shall invite him but cannot force him to come down and sit on the dock. You will sense his presence if he does, the voice added before fading away.

I am the man the swan awaited. I was asleep in the attic and unaware of the swan’s arrival, of the voice’s intentions. It was the same voice that manifested itself several times in the past, whose provenance and belonging, a mystery for so long, was about to reveal itself.

My mother gave birth to me on an early August morning in the bedroom overseeing the front garden of the old piggery. My grandfather had ceded this place to his son, my father, an ironsmith and a lead window maker, who refurbished it following World War II.

Sunday bells were about to ring my arrival; my soon-to-be godmother was attending my mother’s labour. Miles away, on the other side of the English Channel, Fred Hoyle, the English astronomer, had just coined the term Big Bang, an event that would take an unusual resonance later in my life. It was 1950.

Years trickled in, season after season. The back garden where my sisters and I caught crickets and grasshoppers was a land of hope and discoveries. We ate figs from the neighbour’s tree that hung over the fence at the end of summer and invented kid games to pass the time.

We often laid in the grass to read the clouds that lingered by, ran into the house to announce a hedgehog family had established its prickly residence under a clump of hydrangeas, or showed up with a bouquet of pansies and buttercups to brighten the kitchen table.

Unbeknownst to us children, this carefree existence was exhausting itself through an invisible hourglass, its bliss was about to vanish, and life was about to crush us.

The anvil sang in my father’s workshop; crisp diamond-head hammers traced and detached forms from coloured glass sheets.

The story, now in play, is a kaleidoscope of moments with no sequential or chronological order. For each one recounted here, many more will remain untold. They colour my journey and lie along my path like Little Thumb’s white stones in Charles Perrault’s folk tale.

Underlying them all is this out-of-the-ordinary story, shunned superlatives aside, that might draw you to look up to the stars and beyond and further reflect upon existentialist issues you may already be pondering.

The numinous moment I experienced at the old piggery in my mid-forties took me to the edge of Nothingness and convinced me that beyond death, one reaches a new plateau of existence, albeit under a different form, as I peeked into this beyond.

With its two-fold episode, the last account crowns all other encounters and delivers a mystifying physical clue, a linchpin tying parts of this incredible and mind-boggling story which began in my childhood.

The chronology’s unfolding offers a path to reflect upon the existence of a greater consciousness of which we are very much a part. I reside in this living tale that continues to raise endless questions in my head and might in yours once I am through recounting it.

The old piggery has been sold; I buried some of its most brutal past deep in the Courtine’s silt. The dock where the voice invited me to go and sit that day is no more; a mighty flood tore it off its mooring. Only the story remains, pointing to a mysterious light source.

Some see fortune as a blessing from God, and misfortune, when it strikes, as equally of God’s doing. I do not see it that way, but not for lack of having been in the right places to talk to God and reflect upon its existence.

I endured pain, dealt with adversity and visited hell several times. However, I remained genuinely open to what life invited me to gain in these circumstances until, as I responded to this voice, its cosmic quintessence unfolded its horizon before me.

My life is in flow and at peace, my awareness tied to a greater consciousness of no might, just ability, elegance and resolve. I looked for coincidences in what happened to me and found none that compare to this lone voice’s presence, its resonance preceding each of the phenomena I experienced over time.

PART I

MAKING SENSE OF MY WORLD

The attic of my mind

"An old Cherokee told his grandson, ‘My son, there is a battle between two wolves inside us all. One is evil. It is anger, jealousy, greed, resentment, inferiority, lies and ego. The other is good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, humility, kindness, empathy and truth.’ The boy thought about it and asked, ‘Grandfather, which wolf wins?’ The old man quietly replied, ‘The one you feed.’

Author Unknown

A few months ago, I fired the unsolicited voice acting in my mind by permanently eliminating my TV services, shedding what had become an addictive distraction. I realized I was spending more time and money muting this organized, ruthless and systematic assault on the mind, a relentless and costly brainwashing, than watching its content, as the advertisers’ modus operandi is always the same. They play on our fears and desires to drive us to buy unsolicited products and services, often originating from scams.

As Alan Watts put it, I had joined the universal club of Watchers, glued most evenings to something on the screen to relax and tune out, but the tuning out time rarely happened as expected, so bombarded by ads I was. I would zap incessantly from one channel to the next to avoid the onslaught of ad flies, throwing tuning out moments into frantic escapes.

Something was not right. What was I tuning out from in the first place, and why did I need something other than what is to do so? The TV screen was the temporary fix that relieved me from anguish, providing an escape from smouldering emotional grounds. I kicked the proverbial can down the road, aware of an invisible force that pushed personal stories, experiences and wounds long suppressed into the open.

This numinous moment dislodged my craving for tuning out time, so I went from wasting precious time on more productive activities to addressing my newly-found reality.

Needing an extended vacation, I headed to Nova Scotia and went back to writing my story, aware that my knowledge of the world was limited by my nervous system and the language I knew. I had to remind myself that I had no direct access to reality, that the most I could attain was filtered through my brain’s dealings with it, and that what I was writing had more in it than what I meant initially. Reality has its objective existence.

Standing at the bay window overlooking the cove, I watched the first sun rays sprinkle the rising tide of a million sparks. Morning drew its curtain, revealing wild vegetation bouncing over a rocky shore against a brilliantly-coloured banner that heralded the day’s advance. Surveying choppy waters, a bunch of squawking seagulls flapped their wings in an endless ballet. Nearby, a man in a wide boat who was holding a large rake was harvesting kelp.

I was sipping a cup of freshly-brewed coffee, scanning the invisible side of my surrounding reality. I slowly returned in my mind to the previous evening’s magic moments when, standing at the edge of this secluded cove, I gazed at the Milky Way’s spellbinding display, crisp and close enough to touch.

Mesmerized by the billions of stars gently bathing in its ethereal cloth, my mind searched a path to find the invisible entrance to the Nothingness I once sensed in front of me. I closed my eyes for a while and held my breath so I could walk back and reach the origin of the universe, imagining its singularity suspended in Nothingness before it even formed the complete thought exercise of being; could every awareness source exist in its absence before its presence takes flight?

An undefinable feeling had been flowing through my body, part of the initial Nothingness that led to the appearance of the universe. I resumed breathing and looked back into the night, mesmerized by such beauty. I was churning these thoughts in my mind when, unannounced, memories of my early childhood surfaced from the deep.

Probably awakened by the crashing of waves