The marble floor begets a tarnished brass candlestick. The candlestick begets a candle, which begets a flame. The flame begets a sphere of light, and the light begets darkness. The darkness is barren and, begetting nothing, perpetuates itself through extinction. That which it extinguishes then ossifies and becomes the marble floor, each separate bone a perfect hexagon. Once a pure white, countless shuffling feet have persuaded it to a dull grey, webbed with snaking cracks. A worn path to supposed redemption, both revealed and blocked by a patch of light.
All this is seen, and yet not seen, by the solitary figure sitting in a pew near the candle. If he had been thinking the thousand thoughts of normal consciousness, he would have missed the scene entirely. The light would have danced, but inside his head would have been a different dance: memories, hopes, plans for tomorrow, for next year, in endless, tangled sequences - half willed or quarter willed, mostly spinning by habit and distraction, dull-edged, blurred, partly colored or in black and white, incomplete, fragmented images and words, vague feelings. In short, his normal mind.
Instead, by an oft repeated and never sustained resolution, all this had been swept from the mind so that it might instead receive its surroundings in a vigil of attention. The most difficult of "tricks", usually attainable only for seconds, this time its initiation had induced a self-prolonging state of utmost receptivity. As a wood fire reaches a size where it now sustains itself, whereas only a moment before it was always on the verge of going out, so too his mind had become filled with the world to such an extent that it was not necessary to suppress thought or will attention: the world mearly sustained itself, and its stage of actualization included his mind no less than the surrounding space. In fact, there was no "surrounding" space, there was only *space*, and it was not that it was seen or experienced, it simply *was*.
It cannot be asked "how long" this state persisted, for there can be no talk of time here. It can only be fixed by reference to the time that may or may not have been noted after its subsiding. This would still tell nothing of its duration, only of the movements inside a clock's mechanism and the angle subtended by its hands. The clock could have moved not at all or could have disintigrated with the passing of the cosmos, neither of these states of affairs have anything to do with the "duration" of this consciousness.
All that may be said, in relation to the passing of this state, is that an ego came to be posited which was experienced as experiencing events, and itself, and that spelled the end of the world. Instead of an actualized world, there was instead an experiencing self and an experienced other.
The dance ended, a mind observed, "It's very dark in here", a foot itched, and a stomach demanded food. The figure rose, tucking in its shirt, adjusting its glasses, sliding towards the aisle. As it stepped out, it eyed the candle thoughtfully, "Who could have placed it here? For what purpose?" Looking about, there was clearly no one else in the church, so the decision was made to blow out the flame. Bending over, the dirty cracks in the cold floor were noticed more clearly, and then the breath was felt to enter the lungs in a large quantity, to be expelled through pursed lips at the flame. Heaving violently, the flame convulsed and threw its light towards the altar in one last gesture before disappearing into the darkness. Invisibly, a stream of black, sooty smoke rose fitfully into the still air and then up into the cold vaults of the silent space as a door opened and closed, and the figure went out into the din of the street.