Thus-
Imagine: a rope is would around your body at the waist, the rope is pulled and you begin spinning with indescribable speed. In ever widening circles you fly head down, back forward. You will fly off into measureless immensities of the universe, overcoming spaces while becoming spaces.
You are caught up by such a hurricane when the body is cast out as unnessary ballast.
Just imagine: a point of the body experiences the urge to expand without measure, to expand to a horrible extent (and to occupy a space equal in diameter to the orbit of Saturn). Imagine that you consciously sense not only one point, but all the points. They have all swollen up and have rarefied into a gaseous state. The planets have begun to circulate freely in the voids of your body's molecules. The centripetal sensation has been lost; we are blown to bits; and only the consciousness of shattered sensation remains whole.
What would we then sense?
We would sense that the detached organs are separated from one another by horrible billions of miles. But consciousness knits together a blatant and hideous monstrosity which at the same time lacks wholeness. We feel the seething of Saturn's masses in the spine. The stars of constellations eat their way into the brain. In the center of the seething heart we feel the diseased joltings of the entire heart. The solar streams of fire, thrown off from the sun had moved into this fiery, senselessly beating center.
Were we able to imagine this, before us would rise up the first stages of the life of the soul, which as cast off the body from itself.
Andrei Bely - Petersburg
