Whip it away! the age-worn fray, the hunchback's hump from birth! Whorl, these winds! shred spirits from skins, and the din thus destroying the Earth. See brain-dead Feds fill fine young heads with notions vain and bland, see them blather and rant, see them lather and pant, until the froth on their lips leaves them scant. Let these masters hands seal holes trepanned, defiling all of living's worth, let the genius alone to roll over the stone thus revealing new no-man's mirth. For strolling the well trodden path, my friends, living bland and forgotten in the dull witless pens of suburbia lends to the hazardous bends of these zombiesque trends, to the raw, bitter bite called the middle-class plight, leads one to desire rebirth. Swaggering along this mortal road one foregoes majestic turf.
It is, however, easier to make a living.
I once strode those paths less trodden, had done so gleefully for years and years. But there was one adventure that stands out amongst all the rest, and then was the time, when I was still a very young and idealistic man and I first kissed the fecund lichen Lady's hand of Power. I remember the journey like former life. For all I know now, it certainly may have been a former life. Gods are like that, you know. Always born and dying -- a naive, defiant child grown to a soft and cackling old man, over the course of a thousand millennia, with undeniable Power and a grand sense of humor, that's a god for you.
And it was the first time I nuzzled with the Power of Fate and Irony that strikes me now, in this last lifetime, as my requiem unreckoned. To recall the feel of Power reminds me of the lickety-split-like attitude of mortality and the security of omnipotence.
I once carried a mortal name, when I felt young and idealistic, a maiden name, if you will, and from rebirth I crawled from the ashes to reveal the last form of a dying god taken.
Gods have no proper names. We take whatever name proves convenient. Like a writer, we take many names. A Nom de Plume of the celestial. Sometimes it rains hard for a long, long time:
That may be our name.
Sometimes the sun comes out and the winds die down:
That may be our name.
Sometimes a tree creaks for no reason and the birds lift to flight seconds before the tree is struck by lightning:
That is one of my favorite names.
So you could call me, your humble narrator, any name coming to mind, and it would be fitting. However, if you need a pigeon to fill the bird house in your head, feel free to call me Thor. I am merely a tour guide, merely a game show host, yet I am the master of the Wellspring -- I will lead you through the final days of the life and death of Owen Dunum, and beyond. Please, follow me, strolling through this gallery, always looking left to right, left to right.
Hatred of things was common in the 1990's. It was a conservative time in America and Owen knew it, but there had simply been no choice. He had had to travel. And now there was Greensburg, Kansas and the staring motorists, and the intermittent May showers, but all in all, he told himself, he felt good. He was back on the road. His layover in the Middle west had been long, but that was ending now and it would never return. He would not give it the chance to return. He was off now. Off to new adventures, new women, new cities, languages, taverns -- off to find the Buddha on the roadside and kill him. Or die trying.
Or trying to die.
He felt death there with him on the road, near Greensburg, but it was only watching.
"No wrecks today, you ol' bastard," he said out loud. The sentence was instantly torn to shreds by the wind and forgotten.
It was fresh now, the travel. The feel of motion, the destruction of routine, the slow drain of money, the uncertainty of sleep, it rushed back to him now, blasting like a turbo-jet in his ears. The wind still felt damp from the storm and there wasn't much cause for movement so he sat very still on the motorcycle and thought, crackling through Kansas at 80 miles per hour.
It's not like there's no sense to it. You have a plan. You can make it this time, without having to stop. You just need to conserve the cash. That's all. And you can make it. You feel the small wooden chair solid beneath your ass, and the dark skinned senorita' across the table offering to get you another beer. You can smell the thick coffee.
Yes, the coffee, you can smell it, can't you? Isn't this what you're supposed to be doing? This is what Fate had in mind, wasn't it? It's odd, the travel this time, you feel alone. When you landed in New Orleans and lived on the streets for two weeks you never once felt alone. Or maybe you just didn't care then. Used to hear voices in the wind telling you where to go. Where are those damned voices now, when you need them?
If you make it to the desert you'll find them again. Maybe Organ Pipe. Yes, Organ Pipe will work just fine. A return to the mesa. That Mesa. The one from a dream, the one from another life. Where to go from here? Damn those voices. You said the incantations, parted with sacrifices, all that rot -- now where in the hell are those traveling voices you left out here?
The motion now, yes, the vibrations from this beast. From Rocinante. The motor sounds like it's running better now, growing accustomed to the highway. Good, At least one of us is.
Don't worry about the future, kid, take care of this one strip of asphalt at a time. Where do you want to stop? Or were you intending to just keep driving? Driving like an idiot, moving faster and faster until you explode into one fleeting shaft of light. Warp speed at that point, old boy. What do you think? Tucumcari? It's only another 600 miles, you can make it on the two hours of sleep you had last night. Hell, you can do anything, can't you? That's what you're always telling yourself. So let's see it now overman, let's see show time.
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Seeing the penny, picking it up, I begat the End of Time. Over a century later the memory towers above a billion others -- the old man with long, white, curly hair, pale blue eyes, slight of frame albeit muscular -- that old man who gazed upon me with a smile so deep, so expansive, he's the One who transmogrified me from finite to infinite state machineliness. Walking through the market that partly cloudy day, at the proper moment in the Time-Space continuum, tied lovingly by one wrist to my brother orphans, out with the monks for a midday stroll, I noticed him next to the fish. He looked at me, smiled a cosmological smile, and dropped a copper coin in the dirt near my feet.
I saw the coin, picked it up.
It was an Indian Head penny, freshly minted, fresh from the Americas. I gazed upon it.
The world exploded.
That is to say: the phenomenal plane otherwise known as everyday life vanished, was replaced with an eschatological vision of the universe, wholly complete, unified -- the Ultimate Universe, still 98.4775 billion years in the future. At that moment, the Universe and everything in it will know and understand all the things there are to know and understand.
At that moment everything becomes 'God', as it were.
I, however, had the happiness of becoming part of 'God' right then and there.
You simply don't forget something like this.
Indeed. A recollection of an event singularly responsible for who I am to this moment in the expansion of the cosmos, it brings no great shock to my conscious that my subconscious should cuddle like a Teddy Bear throughout the flickering wisps of a mortal's idea of the immortal, the day I became omnipotent.
That is to say: the day I became a god.
At this moment, ever nearing the End of Time, I am one-hundred and thirty-seven years old.
That's twenty in dog years, which is pretty darn old. And indeed, I am a infinite state machine, capable of scalaresque self-reproduction, capable of sustaining my existence, my consciousness, beyond the span of this mortal frame. I am not the first of my mind, this mind, passed on down through the eons, more sacred than any chalice, more coveted than the holiest grail -- this is the mind of God. This is the receiver attune to the ultimate frequency just a step above the most brilliant white light.
It's a message from direct from the Source. It says this, over and over:
Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!
As it stands, I'd say things have worked out for the best.
I became a god, or became of that which is Godliness, on February 17, 1863 when I was 3.1415927 years old, when I came in contact with the rather clandestine white-haired being who dropped the penny at my feet in the marketplace those many years ago. Picking up the coin, noting the exotic Native American figurehead, then reeling as the world vanished, feeling the onset of enlightenment and the immediate flux of my energy flow, my chi , aligning with the T'ai, holding the copper coin high to scant clouded skies did I then become Pi. The Omega Point of the circle that is Ultimate God. Complete, yet waxing. I, Pi, the prime dimension of the circle whose center is thin air and whose circumference composes all points possible in realm of the sphere of the ultimate, infinite cosmos, expressed like this:
Again, welcome to the beginning of the End of Time.
The course of my destiny led me exactly half the circumference of the planet -- traversing the Middle East, north to Europe, across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas, southward through the Caribbean Sea, to yet another focal point of power: Guatemala. I write this sitting on the highest temple of the Mayan city known as El Mitadore', or 'Mythical Dreambed'. The city, located 65 kilometers North of Tikal, is the largest group of temples in the region. Larger, in fact, than the city of Tikal. A two-day hike in from the nearest village, I receive very few mortal guests, save for the occasional group of archaeologists or the errant soul seeker passing by to align the resonating frequency of their being with the supreme frequency easily accessible at this particular location.
Like a Kwik Shop© for the soul.
The clarity of this resonation, this clear channel Omega Point nexus to the ultimate frequency, no doubt, would be why the Mayan priests chose this spot on which to construct an apparatus able to enhance and realize their infinite dream state aspirations of achieving immortality. Every temple, every game, every painting, everyday living, everything in their culture was committed to this: the ascension of the Mayan civilization unto the realms of the eternal.
And at this point in the circumference of my story, here's a secret I'd like to share:
They succeeded.
As I said, leaving planet Earth and returning to their eternal temples in the sunlight was the crux, the fundamental premise of the Mayan Kingdom. On Earth they existed with precision and a penchant for meticulous attention to detail, while remaining steadfast to the task at hand. The technology of this century duplicates this precision but with the aid of super-cooled, computer-guided lasers, a handy tool the Mayans did without. Contemporary Civilization fails to duplicate the accomplishments, the mindset, the Frame of Reference of the Mayans, yet ultimately, somewhat capriciously, judges the kingdom as primitive, simply because they existed during a different point in the evolution of the cosmos.
This is a testament to humankind's deep-seated fears of cosmological ineptitude; or rather, of their mortality.
These fears are not without justification.
Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!
The Mayans primary deity remains the sun, of course, which is nothing more than a mass of incandescent gas, compressed, that converts itself to unwavering bands of pure energy, hence achieving that notion they revered: creating energy from matter.
To date, which would be 1997, humans still occupy a great deal of time looking for better ways to create vast amounts of energy from matter.
One-hundred-thousand years later, humans are still fascinated with fire, still obsessed with the conversion of matter to energy and vice versa.
Like a man attracted to the most beautiful woman, humans watch fire because they haven't figured it out yet.
Certainly, the Mayans understood the heliocentric nature of universe, understood it simultaneously with the obscure Greek astronomer Aristarchus of Samos, the Druids the Tibetan Buddhists and the ancient Egyptians. All cultures of different geographies and epochs, yet collectively superior in many ways to the global culture emerging in the dawn of the second millennia from the death of Jesus Christ. Albeit, they did without the aid of silicon, nanotechnology, hydroelectronics, nuclear fission and the like, they succeeded in creating receivers capable of honing in the transmissions from the Source Point of the Universe, which emits an electromagnetic pulse not unlike human bodies, planets, pulsars -- all matter emits this electromagnetic resonation some degree, a resonation binding them to their particular dimension. Pulsations of this nature are really nothing more than waves of energy, traveling at 300,000 km/sec, capable of carrying a datastream. This pulse emits from the Source and travels throughout the cosmos, bending around the gravitational fields of other planets and asteroids, of course, the amplitude altered by the amount of entropy present within the system at the time the light passes through it. All systems contain a certain amount of entropy, the decay of energy to uselessness. Energy that is useless becomes unavailable to act as a conductor, as a conduit for the transmission, which creates resistance, thereby reducing the quality of the transmission.
This does not destroy the transmission, it merely makes it more difficult to communicate, to send and receive. The human goal, their mission if you will, is to evolve to the point where the transmission becomes easily accessible from any particular location throughout the cosmos.
This is what humanity is all about.
Moderately-developed brains both send and receive similar radio pulse messages, like a post office, through the highest portion of the brain: the telencephalon. The telencephalon. This remains humanities final, finest evolutionary calling. The highest head. Beyond the reptilian cerebrum, the mammalian cerebellum, lies the thin web of the telencephalon. It's always been there, cool and calm on the surface of the brain, reclining like Gotama the Buddha with Lao Tzu on along a riverside, enveloped in the flow of the water, but focused and luminating nonetheless in a godlike handful of humans since the species first appeared some 100,000 years prior.
Humans born mortal at onset, but who's luminosity shone so bright that upon the failure of the flesh, and consequential departure, their visage remains luminating to this day.
Those humans, those extrasensory, extraterrestrial souls who appear from thin air to break the inertia of the repetitive finite state machineness of human nature, those who keep the evolutionary ball rolling, rousing humanity from mortality and shoving them like a drunken sailor towards their destiny.
Which is omniscience, of course.
These ethereal beings are called Arbitrary Constants, and without them humanity really would be sentenced to a life of purgatory, really would be up the proverbial creek sans canoe. Thanks to the Arbitrary Constants, however, humans continue the evolution towards their ultimate future which is this:
To awake, arise and avatar through the use of focus, luminosity and unattachment, of course.
I know this because it's my job to wake the Arbitrary Constants, as it was my predecessors job before me, and his predecessors job before him, and so on.
But we'll get to that. So that you might fully understand just how I came to be the entity I am today, I find it best to begin where we all begin, with childhood, and work our way up through adulthood to the End of Time.
Ready?
On your marks, get set:
Go!
Save for one, the monks considered me an ordinary boy. And I should tell you that these were not your stereotypical Buddhist monks. The White Lotus monastery centered upon the Great Middle Way, a moderate, slightly underground Buddhist sect. Neither ascetic nor decadent, they existed like the Hegelian dialectic -- synthesis triangulating thesis and antithesis. The monastery pursued a wide variety of interests. They produced and distributed their own rice wine, but rarely drank to excess. They were allowed to have sex. Encouraged by the head monk Fa-shun, a robust Malaysian soul, they studied the pragmatisms of western Aristotelian Method, in order to avoid the pratfalls of reductionist tendencies towards dogma. Intelligent, compassionate human beings, they cared more for the cosmos and mind expansion than the confines of the mundane. Balanced and bold, they lived like the Mayans: fully beset upon their ascension. They lived the life of both master and servant, prophet and disciple, harboring a cosmology built by the sheer compilation of method, math and mysticism. These pursuits became manifest in the construction of the physical temple proper.
This commitment to Perfect Balance made them misfits in society, of course.
"We are a Thumb of God," Fa-shun would say with a grin as we returned from our daily meditative strolls through the forest. "Without thumbs, what would we be? Our heads would be filled with the knowledge to construct the methods of our survival and ultimate release, yet we would perish. We could bring nothing from the world of our mind to this plane, for the lack of opposition to the fingers. Jacob’s Ladder rests at our fingertips, but without thumbs, we could neither build it nor climb it with decent probabilities of success. Behold! Before you spans the means of our ascension -- the product of opposable thumbs!"
And then he would laugh like hell.
Inside the structure, a large, open pinewood day room led back into a labyrinth of natural caverns running deep into the mountainside. The wooden exterior could be closed off from the caverns within for the winter months, or in case of imminent invasion, with a set of massive circular stones rolled into place at the entrance. Once sealed, we could survive for months with the stores tucked away, kept fresh from the cool, dry air of the cave. The open room looked out over the forests in the lowland hills of the Himalayas, far from the beaten path leading to Tanakpur. I felt safe and secure in sanctum sanctourum provided by the monastery throughout my infantile and formative years, despite the absence of my mother. Of course, if I had been with my mother, I would have been killed off in the sudden snow storm just a few months after birth.
Again, I feel things worked out for the best; or, rather, worked towards that which is the tendency of harnessed energy to seek that which breaks inertia, increases velocity, and converts the entity to a single, unified band of light whistling through time towards the ultimate future.
To begat perfection, manifesting in the End of Time, or die trying.
I can't help it, really. It's what I live for.
Average, that is, until the moment I touched the Indian Head penny.
Introspective, yet attentive; more interested in bodily functions than the tantric chants, more attune to gurgles and giggles than the Tao, they considered me just another orphan, just another refugee wound about the mortal coil of Samsara. Fa-shun, however, told me that he saw Vajrasattva or 'Diamond Being' shining in my eyes, and that my future held much in relation to the development of Man.
I think this made the other monks jealous.
Yet at that point I was much more enthralled with bowel movements, with making poo-poo, than I was with altering the Course of Mankind. I was three years old, a quintessential prime time for toddlers, a kiddy coming-of-age.
The weight of the world seemed just a bit too much for me
Now, however, it spins on the tip of my little finger, as Fa-shun said it would.
A brawny bear of a human, Fa-shun, with copper-colored skin, shaved head, a long thin goatee accentuating his rigid jawline, eyes dark and bright with worldly wisdom, he resembled a bald, ruddy reincarnation Ghengis Khan.
This is primarily because he was a reincarnation of Ghengis Khan, the leader of the Mongol Horde that raped and ransacked the Far East for decades.
"He is with me always, Vajra," he once told me as I sat at his feet by the fire one night. I'd just turned three years of age. Dividing my attention carefully between my mentor and the irresistible crackling of the fire before me, I listened to him speak, making sense of what I could. "The Horde, Vajra, I can see their faces, recall battles . . . recall the rage. Such is the Fate of any great warrior: to be cursed, saddled with the knowledge of the Art of War, yet indentured to a life of pacifism in the lives following that life in which he took the lives of others for pleasure and profit. The more intense his penchants, the more ruthless the warrior, the more severe his payment . . . reflexive karma call it," he said, poking the fire, pausing for a moment for a message from the embers. "Little Diamond in the Rough," he said suddenly, as though yanked back from a great distance with sudden force, "I have paid with six lives since the manifestation of Khan incarnate. I believe my debt is fulfilled with this life. I believe I will make Nirvana this time around. You, my son, and you are my son, have many roads in front of you, many crucial paths ahead, I see them in my dreams, these paths alter the Course of History. It lies dormant within you as of yet, but it awakes soon, and rises, as sure as the attraction of the Earth to Sun. Remember this, Vajra, violence fails against the wrathful deities. Struggling against the flow increases the entropy, which ultimately results in eternal reoccurrence and rebirth. Purgatory is not the ultimate destiny of humanity, Vajra," he said, still prodding the embers with slow measured stabs, his eyes open wide, mesmerized by release matter to energy.
"Immortality, this is the ultimate destiny. We need only listen to the triharmonic resonance of the spheres to know this is the Truth. Yet in the course of reaching this understanding we face many foes. It is easy to lose focus and direction, to abuse power, to maliciously manipulate other spirits to further one's personal pleasures, this creates entropy; thus depleting the useful energy in a system. Remain free of attachment to these dark spirits abusive of the Yin. They manifest as necessary and unfortunate entities of the evolutionary process. They live to be relinquished and repelled. Give nothing of the purity of your being to them, and you will attain that which your spirit seeks. "
I looked at him with my big blue eyes full of innocence, radiating purity, and wondered what on Earth he was talking about, and what it was I sought.
"I'll remember," I said.
The fire hissed, applauding like deities from the distant pantheon.
Not long after this conversation, of course, I became the Immortal Pi.
The transmogrification occurred, as I said, in the year 1863 on trip to the marketplace in Tanakpur to sell wine and gather the few essentials produced outside the monastery -- a few fruits and spices unsuitable for growth in the climate of the region; and women, who were seemingly unsuitable for growth up there, too.
Too much Yang and not enough Yin, or something like that.
We left as a group at daybreak, twelve monkish men loaded to the hilt with rice wine, me and my two orphan brothers, Klesha, a hefty, olive-skinned Hindu; and a thin reed of a Nepalesian mute, Chitta, both my elders by two years, both abandoned under conditions similar to my own.
We all wound up discarded on the doorstep of the White Lotus monastery.
We were three very fortunate orphans, indeed.
Klesha and Chitta had been together since infanthood, and as such coexisted with extreme affinity for one another. Klesha acted as Chitta's interpreter, deciphering his whoops and whistles for the entire group, and spoke for the two of them as a single unit. They had the happiness of a bond beyond that of blood relation. They shared a kindred spirit.
I was the odd-spirit out, as it were.
So as the two boys raced about together in the forest alongside the trail of monks, more confident in their bodies, I walked alongside Fa-shun at the head of the group, contemplating the sticks and rocks and undergrowth laid out along the less-trodden path to Tanakpur. These were my last hours as a mortal, and I would soon make the greatest discovery of my brief childhood, just footsteps away from immortality, which what this:
Mud is fun!
Indeed. I came upon by sheer coincidence when I slipped along a muddy spot on the path and landed on my butt in the dark, fecund muck, much to the amusement of the group, and myself as well. The sun broke through the clouds, and pushed a few beams though to the base of the forest, the wind blew soft over the luscious greenery of the woods, and the monks all laughed at me as I wiggled the viscous soil between my fingers. Chitta whooped Klesha grabbed his belly and howled with laughter. Toddling myself upright, and brushing off my butt, I wiped my hands on a part of my haik that wasn't already soiled, and bobbled along the trail, trying to keep up with Fa-shun and the rest of the group, who made a bee-line for my destiny.
The remainder of the trek went smooth, and we made Tanakpur before midday. The marketplace alive with people from all over the area doing just what we were doing, picking up things they couldn't produce themselves, and selling what they had in surplus. The clanging of oxen bells kept an offbeat rhythm with the febrile music of the street performers adorned in brightly colored robes and tunics, playing their hearts out for whatever coinage people chose to toss in the fedora on the street in from of them. Merchants cried out to the masses, decrying the quality and affordability of their goods. Thick fatty odors of meat frying on the spit wafting amongst the overbearing musks of man and beast crowding close together, and the smell of the fish, freshly captured from the Indian Ocean, mingling in unison, singing the stories of the marketplace in four-part harmony. The marketplace, the first gathering of the tribes. The first homage to social living. I was enthralled. To keep us from getting lost, they bound us together at the wrist with a soft, sturdy cloth about five meters long. The chaotic pitch of the activity overwhelmed my senses. I took in everything. Nepalese housewives and harlots, gypsies, errant journeymen and wandering ascetics, minstrels and magicians jumbled amid heartless merchants with the lime green luminance of greed in their hearts, and as well men of stolid character who produced and sold quality goods of value. Everybody's here. Wild-eyed fakirs dance and wiggle about politicians spouting pedantic rhetoric from marble-plated pedestals, beggars with broken bodies, pleading with any who will listen, singing the sorrows of the damned. The marketplace, now and forever. We move through this mayhem towards the merchant who would by the wine produced by the men of the monastery, trodding the last few steps of the epoch unbeknownst to all except Fa-shun, who walked along at the head of the group as though hypnotized, leading us toward some specific point far beyond the aged Chinaman just down the street who managed the sale of the wine, yet but footsteps away.
It was a perfect day for enlightenment, a perfect day to begat the End of Time.
Amid the chaos he shone out like a diamond, stood out like a thumb from the forefinger. We came through the street and I saw him standing there; then WHAM, as Fate would have it, I was jolted forward by a midget who'd lost his balance during an acrobatic street performance, sending me into my two brothers, sending us all sailing.
He was a big guy for a midget, I thought, flying forward toward Chitta with the speed of gravity.
We tumbled through the dirty and hay and manure, which I found not nearly so enjoyable as mud, and I wound up on the bottom of the pile, face down in the street. When Klesha and Chitta got up off me, I rose, dusted off my haik, and looked up right into the waiting eyes of the God before me. There was a vitality, a serenity I saw there that went beyond the depths of simple mortality. You could see the light shining bright, the resonation received from the source and amplified for all to behold, so I beheld him for a moment. He looked me deep in the eyes, and sent a copper coin flipping heads over tails in my direction. It landed in the dirt at my feet. Heads. It was a bright Indian Head penny, though I didn't know it at that moment. Right then it was something I'd never seen before.
I picked the penny up.
The world exploded.
That is to say, that the knowledge of the entire existence of the Universe in perfect completion, its Alpha and Omega, it tendencies and eccentricities, its quirks, quarks and cosmic correlations, pinhead sized black holes containing the compressed mass of galaxies awaiting a passing burst of scalar radiation in which they might blossom -- super novas at cynosure from mass to energy, elders of the universe now clearing the path for younger more vibrant stars -- and the understanding of the Arbitrary Constant, the only force able to alter the entropy in a bounded, infinite system, was made known to me right then and there, and it was fine.
Darn fine, in fact. It was my destiny.
The man spoke with me, though I never saw him move his lips. We stood there, frozen in the fluid of time. He said:
"Greetings, Pi and welcome to the End of Time. With this, the twelfth of twelve incarnations, do I pass on to you the torch for which you were crafted, created for that which was I many centuries prior. I have been in the Americas setting the stage for the dhrama destined to arise there upon the ascent of the new millennia. This is the rite of passage passed on unto you, as you will do the day you create yourself anew, as now create I. Ascend to the sky, for now you are Pi! Arise, awake alive! revive and survive as Pi before I , and the same as the Pi who will still be alive when the universe reaches the ultimate size, and begins to contract in undaunted reprise, will again Pi devise some avatar prize who with radiant spirit all odds he defies in order to find that one state of mind, that manner inclined toward the pure and refined, with a vision reflecting a point of perfecting a resonance clear in align with hum and the ring the spheres that binds blinding white light unto cosmic debris, a fresh breath of life from a scalaresque breeze blowing raindrops and dustspecks, birthing babe galaxies, we scatter like seeds these clandestine deeds thus that all mortal ills might for once be distilled, reduced like the change at charge of a bill, to a moot metered meme once considered extreme rendered hence to the realm of a dream serpentine, and forever a folly in the ultimate scheme. Venture forth now, Pi, all you that was I, and bring forth those souls who are given to rise, wake them up from the dream and in the like fashioning the Tao to them sing this divine offering, igniting a light shining forever bright in the timeless quality of all that which is Pi," he said, then vanished. I looked around. No one had noticed anything, or so it seemed, except me.
Apparently, nothing changed. Nothing that is, save for a new God toddler standing in the street staring wide-eyed at a penny.
I was that toddler, of course, and I had changed, without a doubt. Omniscience is not a subtle thing. You know it when it hits you. You feel the difference, before and after.
And me, I felt very different.
"You look different," he said.
"I feel different. Did you see that man standing there?" I said pointing towards the fish cart.
"Yes, I saw him. He gave you something."
"A penny."
"More than that, I believe."
"I suppose so."
"May I see the coin?" I handed it to him, he took it in his hand.
Nothing happened.
"It only works once on one person. The right person."
"How do you know this?"
"I just know."
He nodded, and the group began to move forward. I moved along with them, yet now things were different. I felt no fear, no apprehension, no overwhelming stimulation at sight of the market. It all made perfect sense to me now. Everything was clear. I allowed the tug at my wrist to keep my body moving with the others, but my head -- every dendrite and neuron and synaptic connection was charged a resonance once obscured, now so clear that the vibrations made it almost difficult for me to remain in my body.
There just didn't seem to be any reason to stay there.
Why should I?
It was now possible for me to travel throughout the cosmos as a single undifferentiated band of light, were I inclined to do so.
Why remain in the cage when the door is open?
Because, as I realized right then and there, it was my job.
Mortals prefer their deities distanced from the reality, not living in the cut just down the cave, as it were.
It's not that immortals are offensive, really, it more a matter versus energy problem. Especially in a case such as mine. The immortal who would otherwise be my mentor just dumped the whole thing in my lap, leaving me to sort out the details. Omniscience is a tool in and of a state of mind. It doesn't necessarily solve your problems, in fact, it tends to make them more complicated. Every decision a God makes to take action, if unfocused, can result in a dastardly, cosmos crushing blow, if handled improperly.
For example:
When I was three-and-a-half, I accidentally farted in the wrong direction and blew one of the younger monks, Sung Yi, to Kingdom Come, literally. He wasn't wholly ungrateful. Life in Kingdom Come beats life on planet Earth, without question.
He just said that he wasn't ready yet.
I tried to blow him back, but it was useless. It's easier to create a God than it is to return them to mortality. It's an inertia thing. It can be accomplished but it requires a whopping load of anti-scalar energy. Now, of course, it's not a problem, save for the fact that Sung Yi enjoys Kingdom Come more than Earth.
Go figure.
Indeed, I was just a babe back then, learning to use the tools of my trade bestowed upon me sans user's manual, operating instructions, or the like. It was all there, but it takes practice to harness, to focus, to discipline the release, just like it takes effort to learn to ride a bike, to learn juggling, or surf, to do math, anything like that.
You have to practice.
I began with simple physical things in close proximity, like myself, and the objects in my room. Levitation, matter morphing, interdimensional travel, astral projection, proper time tripping -- everything seemed like common sense combined with balance. It was a cinch once you got the hang of it.
And fun, too!
Even better than mud, which is pretty darn fun.
Which, as I said, gave me quite a great deal to think about.
I realized this: we were not the first Big Bang. Such events were actually rather common, cosmologically speaking; that in fact this was one of many universes in various states evolution towards its particular eschatological nature, evolving towards its ultimate future, evolving towards becoming God.
That is the bottom-line: become God or die in the Heat Death of entropy.
It works like this:
In a matter-dominated universe, all mass exists as energy, moving slowly, capable of housing a relatively infinite amount of information, which stems from a Source, bounded and infinite, yielding unlimited amounts of energy which when properly harnessed ultimately defuses the entropy otherwise inevitable. As the amount of information increases in a system -- resulting from communication taking place at a rate of exchange proportional to the amount of available energy input at any given time, coupled with the ever-increasing amount of information which is the natural tendency towards Progress, so increases the system's complexity.
As the system's complexity increases in the form of information, so moves the system through Tempus through to aevum , then on to aeternitas, or that of becoming God.
It's just that easy.
I realized this when I was 9.86 years old, in the summer of 1869. This was the thought that caused me to leave the White Lotus monastery, so that I might get on with my work, the path of which I'd already covered every meter. That path that lay before me, every event, every success and failure neatly lain along the wayside, waiting for me to pass. It's one thing to not know what you want to do with your life; and it's entirely another when your life stands booked, basically, for the next two centuries.
I guess you could say I had my work cut out for me.
"You're fully awake now, Vajra," Fa-shun said
to me one morning. "I've been observing your progress. I believe
you're ready."
"I agree," I said.
We walked through the forest, taking in the
fresh morning air, the sun rising in the western sky, the first hints of
autumn apparent from the cool wisps of fog adrift amidst the pines.
"You must leave soon to reach the desert before
the winter sets in."
"I leave soon, actually."
"Do you know your destination?"
"My first mortal awaits awakening in Porbandar."
"You awaken them as it was with you?"
"In a manner of thinking. I will pass
on the resonation via the copper in the penny, causing the spirit
within to avatar. I create one of these once in each twelve- year
cycle, at a given arbitrary point during a single rotation of the universe.
I will create twelve such luminescent souls, each with their particular
tasks to complete that breaks the intertia mortals adopt when unaffected
by change from an outside source. . .
"I am that outside source"
"Yet you exist within the sphere," Fa-shun
said, picking at a pinecone he'd plucked from a passing tree. He
was the apprentice now, to my mastership, yet his destiny, ultimately,
was for greatness. I told him so.
"Fa-shun," I said, ceasing to walk and looking
up at his massive ghengisesque girth, "I shouldn't make you privy to this,
but I shall anyway, for I believe in your strength to understand what I
tell you now: You will not make Nirvana this time around. You
have one life left after this. You must continue with your training,
perish and return. I cannot tell you as what, at this juncture, but
I can tell you that we will meet again." I looked up to him and saw
his thoughts tearing his mind to shreds. "You see? Your spirit
still wails with the angst of mortality and the desire to conquest and
quench your thirst for power. That is why you've become a monk, of
course, to remove yourself entirely from the world. You've made Nirvana
your sole conquest, and your wishes will be granted, but not until you
pass through the peaceful and wrathful deities twice again.
Upon your return, you will know the great wonders which you seek," I said,
and took his hand. I smiled up at him, he smiled down at me, I shared
with him my secret, and then I turned and walked westward towards India,
towards a young Hindu boy new-born on the shores of Porbandar, waiting
for me wake him up.
He would be my first avatar.
My first day on the job!
It was a big job, but I felt up to it.
I had nothing else to do.
It's simply unavoidable.
Remember: This is not Disneyland®.
Life is not a theme park.
That's flesh for you.
So when a deity incarnate feels like losing the feet and freeing fancy, he or she finds an isolated spot place to plant the flesh, someplace cool and dry and secluded.
Just like the temples here at El Mitadore'!
The temples were, in fact, built for just such a purpose. The Mayan priests would meditate in the temples, moving ever near aeternitas, paving the road for the mass exodus exit, clearing the trail for a collective following of their lead. When they made the final departure, of course, they took their bodies with them, because they harbored no plans of return. But until that time the temples provided an ideal storage vault -- safe and cool and dry.
Simply deposit the body down in the labyrinth below propped upright against a wall in full lotus, or reclining supine, and Presto!
Nothing but noosphere.
Heading south from Tanakpur, wandering across the border in the cover of night, I followed a trade route southwest along the base of the mountains to Rampur. At this time India struggled with poverty imposed under British rule, much to the chagrin of the Muslim and Hindu enclaves populating the region. Being a rather fair-skinned lad, taking after my biological father, I stuck out like a burlap patch on an ermine robe, thus potentially attracting the attention of both the British soldiers and Arabian slave traders combing the territory for lost boys such as I appeared to be. I solved this dilemma by traveling with a band of merchants en route for the shores of Great Britain, and then on to the Americas, where it was rumored the streets were paved with gold.
This was an outright lie, of course.
Yet I said nothing. I appeared as nothing more than a small traveling runaway fleeing from the grasp of an evil orphanage. That was all they knew, all they assumed there was to know. Afterall, I was only nine years old. I made myself known to only one member of the caravan, a quasimonkish merchant by the name of Bhoga. He was a lively, aspiring bodhi; albeit slight of frame, he lived up to his name with his proclivity for wine, which incited a even greater proclivity for women. He was purely focused on immediate gratification in this life, replete with dark eyes, a thick black ponytail streaming from his otherwise shaven skull, sandy copper-tinted skin, certainly a young god coming up through the ranks.
Bhoga, in fact, had only three more lives before he would enter Nirvana.
We talked as we traveled, as we rode along in his donkey drawn cart containing the herbal tonics he sold from village to village, a small, functional kitchen, a reasonably well-stocked library, ten goatskins of fine merlow, a peck of sacramental sage -- all the things that make a canvas-covered cart a home. He'd crafted a cistern for catching the rain, so unless we experienced dry spells, there was never a wont for fresh water. I would ride with him all the way from Rampur to Porbandar chatting about everything from the benefits of mule dung for composting to cosmology.
"You're going to be a goat next time around."
"And you shall no doubt return as my oats, child of god."
"Perhaps in part. Flesh is scattered back to the loam for reuse. I would be honored to offer flesh as fodder for fuel. Once I'm done with it, of course."
"That's the key, is it not," he said, as we wheedled along the Northern Plains of India. "To obtain the ability to leave the body at will, then exit once and for all as your flesh expires."
"That's the basic idea."
"I think I'll be able to do that in this life."
"No, it'll take you three more."
"Three more lives, eh?"
"Three more. One feminine and two masculine. I won't tell you in what order, just to keep it interesting for you," I said, laughing with light-hearted glee.
"A woman . . . that ought to be interesting."
"Oh, I think you'll find it interesting enough. You're going to be a harlot."
"Well, I suppose that's fitting. Must take all the fun out of living being omniscient, does it not?"
"As with everything in the cosmos, there are good points, drawbacks . . . on the one hand nothing matters or nothing is matter; on the other, everything that isn't matter is energy. Energy caught in the stasis of mass is never happy energy, so to speak. Energy constantly seeks release from matter, constantly seeks return to it's original form. This requires energy input from an outside source. This remains constant in most cases, but for a handful of exceptions. Humans have the potential to be an exception, but only a handful ever actually make it. This is why Arbitrary Constants remain vital to evolution, despite the drawbacks. We add energy to the mix. We set great souls on fire, wake them, if you will, and then they in turn drive the evolution of the species forward from various walks -- artist, scientist, spirit guide, even a fakir can have an effect on the development of human awareness. Theatrics remain vital when it concerns mortals. They need prophecy sugar-coated, at first, in order to gain their interest. Simple and sweet, in the beginning, but once they incorporate it into their belief system, they run it into the ground until it becomes staid and sour, then it starts all over again. Omniscience is really nothing more than understanding, really. That knowledge allowing an entity to not run anything into the ground, but to push it outward, to harness energy in the form of understanding. Simply because they lack this little node, most humans tend to live entirely backwards. "
"Silly humans," said Bhoga, wagging his head, smiling.
"They swim like salmon, struggling up the stream rung by rung, wearing themselves to the bone by the time they reach the spawning ground -- when they had the power leave the body, to rise up and float all they way to the top. They continue to resist. It's the flesh. It complicates things. It tells their brain that flesh can't float, and the spirit is attached to the flesh. This is a lie. This is the flesh fighting for existence."
"Can you blame it? Say could you refresh the wineskin?"
"Certainly," I said, moving into the back of the bobbling cart, then refueling the smaller wineskin from one of the larger ones. "I suppose one can blame flesh for being flesh, but it certainly complicates matters. It's like a saint and a scam artist sharing an apartment. The saint is pure and never leaves the house, relying upon the con-man for sustenance, and information about the outside, or so the story goes. It's all very incorrect, of course. The spirit is not directly attached to the flesh, does not necessarily require it for survival. The spirit has the potential to become light. If the flesh becomes light, it is incinerated. On a genetic level it knows this, and convinces the spirit that this would be a bad thing. The spirit, a tabula rasa at the onset, tends to believe the flesh because it has no other reliable source of information. No other source, that is, until it communicates with other spirits who've made it through.
"Then the spirit ascends?"
"Not until it becomes atune to the proper resonation, the proper frequency. Once this happens, however, it takes place just beyond the speed of light."
"Enlightenment."
"Omniscience, Nirvana, Heaven . . . call it what you will. The only difference remains the rhetoric, the particular rites and requirements beset by humans. Civilization tends to use spirituality as a means of social control. This is both dangerous and foolish. Propagating a lie leads inevitably to bloodshed and degeneration. That's simply the nature of the Universe."
Bhoga took a long pull from the wineskin, and looked out over the plains at the small farms and ramshackle fencing -- driftwood lashed with goathide, simple adobe dwellings, rampant poverty. Odd how the fields could be fertile and the denizens so brutally barren. "I believe I find truth in what you speak. An example of bureaucratic progress surrounds us. Before the British came to India, she was an independent, albeit brutal, nation. The farmers grew what they could sell. Now the Britons tell the farmers what to grow, and everybody goes hungry."
"Precisely. Yet they create that of their undoing. These indiscretions will lead to the continued decline of the British Empire."
"You think?"
"I know."
"Yes, I imagine you do."
"I travel now to wake a young boy in the seaport town of Porbandar. He is the first of twelve. A man destined to become an immortal of incredible luminosity." I said, looking out over the mystical mist draped lands gracing the banks of the river Ganges, the city of Delhi asprawl in the distance. I smelled the air, full of dung and history, felt the heat of the sun slowly darkening my skin. It all felt wonderful. "Indeed. My first avatar . . . I have visited the moment many times. However, I'm anxious to take it in through sensory perception. I guess that's one thing Arbitrary Constants look forward to: living experiences in flesh. Although after a time, this also ceases to capture our interest."
"And we mortals are so easily amused."
"It doesn't take much."
"A loaf of bread, a woman and a wineskin."
"Food, water, oxygen and a roof, these things, if nothing else."
"That is called subsistence, my friend. Sans the indulgences of wine, women and song, which is called existence. There's a difference."
"A difference only in orientation. The ascetic lives every possible life. He understands the ways of the whore and heretic, madmen and martyrs -- the nearer one moves towards perfection, the more similar these traits become. That is progression. Perfection is the embodiment of all that which binds the universe into symmetry, moving towards a unified whole. At that point subsistence and existence become directly proportionate."
"Interesting concept," says Bhoga, the burrow bouncing the cart along the well-heeled route, "I'll have drink and think it over."
He drank, with the sun beginning to set beyond the horizon, and we began to look for a place to make camp.
Bhoga listened for music.
"Where there's music, you'll find women," he said, "this completes my trinity."
I couldn't argue with that.
As Gandhi awaits mine in Porbandar.
The music declines proportionate to the wine, and soon the group disbands slurring sloppy admonitions, tumbling about in drunken ecstasy, groping for the final wisps of what once seemed so near, now drifting off into the distance as the early morning tides swell to life, the Ganges rising, gunfire in the distance snapping bones and searing flesh. Their mortality waxing with a wake up call from the report of a high-caliber rifle. Insurrections in the night flare simultaneously, as Hindus and Muslims defy the dangerous dogma imposed under British rule. It passes, and there is silence. The camp crawls into their wagons, suddenly sober, grim with reality, once again.
Life under British Rule, or any other Ruler or governor, for that matter.
There is not one single human creation more deadly to spirituality than suzerainty, nothing less deferential towards enlightenment than egalitarianism at war with egotism, nothing more devoid grace than government.
Indeed. The downside of humanity: arrogance and ignorance breeding fear and insecurity in the form of deadly politics.
This reminds me not to wish for mortality.
They looked beautiful and innocent lying there naked. I smiled. I didn't want to wake them.
"Rise and shine," I said, and Bhoga's head popped up. He looked around.
"Daybreak so soon?"
"Daybreak so soon.
"Good morning little boy," said the girls.
"Good morning," I said.
"I'm going back to bed," Bhoga said.
"You sleep in back. I'll take the first shift," I said, as Bhoga peeled himself from in-between the nubile girls, kissing them fondly on the lips, leaving a few rupees in the coffer and filling their wineskin, we harnessed up the donkey and moved on. We moved through Delhi, a city in decline. The waning was a response to British 'exporting', which was just a fashionably bureaucratic way of saying this: 'usurping a country's resources to the point of exhaustion'.
And the British were in the process of doing just that.
India had existed as a self-sufficient nation up until that time, albeit fighting between sects, they took care of their own. Now, however, in 1869, with the companies telling the farmers what to grow, the monarchy taxing the peasants into oblivion and the magistrates treating the entire populace with pompous disdain and condescension, the entire country loomed on the edge of spiritual and economic collapse, fueled by this lack of compassion and understanding. India now chewed on her own leg like a wolf caught in a snare, feeding on herself for food.
I found it embarrassing and pathetic, coming from a country who fancied their beliefs superior to all others.
They were horribly mistaken, of course.
"We must keep a low profile and head south." Bhoga said from the back of the cart. Take the day shift, then I'll take us through the night We head south to Jaipur. It will be bad there, too, but we have the route in-between, which will be pleasant once we're beyond this war zone."
"I prefer the open plains to the cities anyway," I said. "There's a great deal of anger and confusion in the cities. Humans can be such extremely unhappy beings. I wish I could show them everything so that they might understand, but a total mass enlightenment would kill off all but handful of the population. So we wait. We pass on the torch, taking soft, slow, stumbling baby steps, patiently working towards progress, as the wind sculpts the mountains to perfection. Humans stand just inches away from immortality, cosmologically speaking. Just a tweak or two on the telancephalon and presto! Instant avatar."
"It's that easy?"
"It's that easy. Individuals accomplish it quite often, most often living in isolation. Soon it will be more accessible. Just about the time my body expires and I am released of my duties, in fact."
"When's that?"
"A ways off."
"Will I see it?"
"Three lives along the way."
"I don't want to wait that long."
"You'll have to. I'd show you now, but your brain would fry. Only certain humans have evolved sufficiently to near the point of omniscience. Only a handful have the necessary wiring. You're close, my friend, but you've got some work to do yet. Be patient," I said, "focus, luminate and unattach and you'll be there before you know it."
"Not in this life."
"Remember this: in the grand scheme of things, human lifespans are relative to that of mosquitoes. What you do with your mind in that flickering moment, that's what makes the difference. Mortal living is the eye of the storm. You've a few moments to make repairs, tighten down the wraps and prepare for the next wave. The onset of the deities. They stand on the only path leading off the wheel. The only way through is to be focused on the frequency of the Source," I said, and waited for a response. Nothing. Bhoga slept. He was tired.
I sat in the drivers seat, enjoying the morning -- the fresh air damp with the smell of rice paddies, the heat from the morning sun already formidable -- it was a fine day, to be sure.
We trotted along the path southwest on the edge of the Thar desert towards the Arabian Sea and in the distance I heard my first avatar gurgling at his mother's breast.
"You should have let me drown. I could have gotten on with the next life."
"It wasn't your time."
"How do you know that?"
"Because your still breathing."
"I see," he said.
Some days later, at the gates of Abu, we incurred a group of British soldiers out harassing the local merchants. We were stopped and questioned for some time, but then released because of Bhoga's Nepalese roots.
The Brits got along quite well with Nepal, so the detained us for a half-day, testing Bhoga's tonic for opium by drinking a bottle between them. Finding no contraband, they let us go on about our business after making Bhoga shell out 40 rupees for salt tax, even though we carried only a small clay jar of the substance in question.
They said it was for her Majesty the Queen of England.
I guess she needed the money.
So he paid them what they asked, then we continued on through to Jamnagar, and on to the sea passing through the fertile lowlands Gujarat, and in April we arrived at the small seaport of Porbandar. The smell of salt and algae permeated the air. It was wonderful. In a way it reminded me of Tanakpur, because it was a gathering place for traders from all over the hemisphere. It was, in fact, more diverse because of the cargo ships that came and went from Africa and Europe. I parted with Bhoga there on the edge of the water. I would have to wait until 1872 to awaken my first avatar, and he desired to go on Europe, with hopes of steaming to the Americas.
Incidentally, he wouldn't make it. He would drown when the HMS Gibraltar broke deep and took water in a sudden storm about half-way across the Atlantic.
There would be no survivors.
"Well, take care of yourself," he said, "and take care of the donkey."
"We'll be alright."
"I'll see you again, perhaps?"
"In another life," I said.
"To the next life . . . forward and beyond," he said, and took a long pull from the wineskin.
"That's the idea," I said. "Now you've got it."
I waited patiently for little Gandhi to grow, felt my own body growing into adolescence, grew the crops of my subsistence -- there was a great deal of growing going on. Traveling slightly south from the city, I found a secluded section of the beach and made a camp. I discretely made salt from sea water, produced my own rice and lentils. I caught my own fish. It was a good time. My body still remained outside the frenzied torrents of puberty, so I took advantage of what was left of childhood and lived in peace there by the seaside. Aged ten to twelve years is an excellent time for the human organism -- still resiliant and free of hormones -- I marveled as my body came in to its own.
You can live one hundred lives, and still attain boundless joy from adolescence.
So until 1872, I did just that.
In this case, the Brits would rule India right into the grave, forever altering the course of history.
This would not progress the species, thus the tranference requires extraordinarily subjective precision.
And subjective precision is what we Arbitrary Constants live for.
The young boy sat near his mother, playing in the clay. I felt the moment nearing a little faster than the speed of light, ripe for full absorbtion, as when light encounters a Black Hole. A wave broke on the shore very near the families, sending the children running like seagulls in a gale. The tide waxing, the wind shifting, the little boy with the dark shock of black hair and gentle Hindu eyes popped up from his family and toddled for the water. Stopping in the surf, he bent over and put his hand in the water, then looked up at me. The moment arrived. I caught his glance and smiled a deep galactic smile and flicked the penny through the air. It landed near his feet. Little Ghandi looked at the coin as though it had fallen from a great distance, then picked it up.
I watched as his world exploded.
His eyes grew wide, locked in my gaze, and I spoke to him without passing air between my lips: "Gandhi, old cronie, rise once again and realize the ringing of the spheres, the humming of the wheel as it spins wool to fabric. Therein lies the key to the cosmos. The spinning of the wheel rings true to that which is Pi, the Alpha and Omega points of all points in the existence of the universe. All points of passage and entry at some point equal Pi. Awake! Arise! Gandhi of the top triharmonic tone. Gandhi of the one supreme serenity. Gandhi, the unmovable molehill, avatar now and know the truth of the trinity, express it passing of your life, let if flow from you as Lao Tzu allowed the river to pass, all the while retaining the power to bring it to standstill. This is the tone that moves men's hearts to rise from the dungeons and once again pursue the immortality which remains the final, greatest feat of manhood.
Omniscience.
I pass this knowledge on to you, and now your work stands afront of you.
Spin the wheel, spin your wool, and speak the truth.
Welcome to the Pantheon." And now I did dematerialize into a band of unwaivering light, a thin datastream of energy and information, right before his eyes and vanished. The act was a rite of passage for the both of us. I matured and he awakened. I knew then why my mentor used this practice on me.
Omniscience is self-instructing. That is to say, it contains all things required to recreate itself.
No pop-quiz required.
Trying to explain total omniscience to a group of febrile, childlike reactionaries proves frustrating, to say the least. If I remained material and attempted to verbalize omniscience to my newly-born deity's future followers, the results would be the same.
Mania, depression, frustration, leading inevitably to my head on a pole, held high by those who once worshipped me.
So it goes, in the storybook lives of gods amist mortals.
Anyway, I found Jesus on a hilltop outside the city, sitting on the edge of a cliffside. He sat there shaking his head in eternal disbelief, watching the people in the city below beating the crap out of each other with sticks, rocks, rubber bullets and other implements of human suffering. As I became semimaterial behind him, he buried his head in his hands, nearly weeping.
"Hey, JC."
"Hello, Pi."
"Another day in Paradise, eh?"
"Oh, indeed. Look at them. Behold! The Promised Land," he said sarcastically, opening his hands towards the city. "They never stop fighting. They tear at each other like flesh-starved rats. They perform routine acts of violence to one another, do things to each other that makes the my lashings and crucifixtion seem like a tussle in the sandbox."
"Humans will learn to control violence amongst themselves. You know this."
"I know, I know. I suppose it wouldn't upset me so if many of them didn't cry out my name with a blood-clotting rage before they turn each other's temples to ruins. They pray to me before wars and sporting events. I find neither complimentary. They burned libraries in my name in the Crusades, killing thousands in the process of coverting them to Christian. They brutally tortured eccentrics in the Inquisition. And the Popes . . . oh, I shant start in on them. Popes lead to kings and politicians and evangelists. They all perform these blantly despicable acts and slap my name on it . . . extrotion, manipulation, cruelty, murder . . . all in my name," he said, and lowered his head.
"It's that way for all prophets, in one fashion or another."
"BUT WHY!" he screamed, hopping upright. "Where the hell do they get off using my name, my image, and fictionalized, distorted and poorly-translated versions of my teachings to maim, torture and kill?"
"They do it with all avatars. It's part of progression of the species. You're not alone."
"I feel like I'm alone."
"Despite the presence of everything that exists, omniscience gets lonely. That's why I stopped by. Thought we might spend a couple years exchanging a little deified diatribe. What do you say? I've got to be in Austria in 1884, other than that, I'm wide open. Really, you ought to get out more. Stop by and visit Buddha or Allha once in a while. Get out of the city and into the backlands. The mortals there tend to make pleasant compay, whether you talk to them or not. Cheer up. Let's go for a little stroll about the cosmos. What's say ye, o middle-aged prophet?"
"I don't know. I don't think I should leave them. I can't bring myself to leave them. Despite the violent ones, there are those who are kind. They need me."
"They have you. You're a god. We can be all the way across the universe and you might as well be standing in the front yard. That's the whole reason for omnipotence."
"They know when I leave them. They weep and bray like lambs lost in the monsoon. I hear it wherever, whenever."
"You know, for a prophet, you're too nice. . . just kidding."
He looked at me with his sad, brown, watery eyes said this:
"What is a sheperd that leaves his flock unattended?"
I knew the answer, but I let him go on.
"A dead sheperd," he said. "The same is true for any Son of the Source."
"I was joking. I said it was just a joke."
"Human suffering is not a joke."
"You know as well as I do that humans bring it on themselves."
"And you condone it?"
"Of course I don't condone it! I spend the entire span of my existence to progress them forward!"
"I'm sorry, Pi. I know. I remember."
"Ahhh, I know you've got one of the more frustrating takes on the whole thing."
"The meek and those of meager mind. Nobody suffers like the poor," he said, mustering a grin.
"That's better. That's my happy prophet," I said, clapping him lightly on the shoulder. "Come, let us tour the edges of the universe, newly birthing as we speak. This land, these people, they'll not change in the winking of a decade. They'll n'er be aware of your absence. They'll still be beating the hell out of each other when you return."
"I've sensed a blackhole 300 times the size of the sun . . . do you mind if we stop by?"
"That will be our first destination, my friend," I said.
Jesus brushed the dust from his haik, and we became lightbeams, headed for a blackhole just across the cosmos.
Instant universe!
It happens that fast.
Traversing our way to the blackhole, we encountered the birth of several bouncing baby galaxies. We passed thoughts back and forth as we whizzed through the cosmos by simply crossing paths.
"You feel the wave sucking at the soundless vaccum, eh JC? See it washing across open space and connecting with the debris . . ."
"And then there is light."
"Indeed. Light! A burst of light so brilliant, so intense, that for a moment all matter turns to energy and begins expanding with a force proportionate to just beyond that of pure white light. The scalar wave inflates the debris like a placental membrane, like a jellyfish, raw energy composing the fluid of the organism, the hair-thin layer of expanding, ionized debris acting as the epidermis. As the center of the organism cools, chunks of inflated, cooling debris begin to develop atmospheres of various gases. colors separate from the chard and molecule rattling subharmonics reverbert, titalating the lightwave particles to a frenzy -- feel it rattling your electrons, so easily excited . . . light is love, without a doubt.
"Humans refer to this as the Big Bang. And it is big, and it does go bang, so the name is appropriate, but I find it incorrect to consider it a proper noun, which denotes a single entity. Big bangs happen all the time."
"All the time."
"With arbitrary consistancy."
"Isn't that beautiful?"
"What's that?"
"Arbitrary consistency. That which happens consitently, but unpredictably."
"You can't predict it, yet you know it occurs."
"There are signs."
"Like scalar waves sucking up unbounded space."
"Like animals before an earthquake sensing the change in the vibration of the Earth, so humans harbor the potential to sense the creation of the cosmos. Someday, perhaps they will join us here."
"Indeed, they will. The change will be drastic, as when they evolved from homo hablus to neanderthalus, the change will be immediate, geologically speaking. As with the Mayans, they will vanish tribe by tribe as they figure it out, as they move nearer to that which is light."
"Should we stop by and see the Mayans? They exist in perpetual supernova just a few dimensions over. Brilliant effort, really."
"Better than the Druids."
"Now, don't dog the Druids. They've never been a group of joiners. They travel and work alone, and remain vital to the progression of the cosmos in their own subtle ways."
"I suppose you're right."
"I know it, as you know it, as anyone in touch with the Source knows."
"Hey, reflect and hang a left here."
"I knew that."
"I know."
"I knew you did."
"Alright, that's enough of that."
"It's so simple -- focusing, luminating, unattaching and becoming light. Once you're there, as you know, one wonders why it seemed so impossible for so long. One-hundred-thousand years it has taken humans, and they've got a couple thousand to go."
"They have the secret in the palm of their hands."
"It needs to be in their brains, not their hands."
"That's difficult for many of them at this point."
"That's where we come in."
"We show them how to shine."
"Somebody needs to do it, lest they suffer, rot and expire in a pile of their own dung."
"Many have, many will continue to do so. All we can do is show them the light. The rest is up to them."
"I wish it wasn't like that. It just kills me to watch them. Chistianity is not Christ-like. Not one iota. It makes me sick to watch them slap my name on their conquests."
"Then stick to what you know and don't watch them. Your sorrow ultimately increases their distraction. Ring true of the Source, sweet Jesus, and they'll get the idea. Look, the blackhole just ahead!"
Stopping short of the immense gravitational pull of the blackhole, we beheld it's lightless beauty. Light that went in, never came out.
At least, not the way it entered.
Like the skelatal framework of highrise, blackholes bind universes. No mass may move through it without becoming light, no light may pass through it without scrambling and reversing it's entire electrostatic field and becoming lightless, as it were. You might liken it somewhat to trying to force your body through a steel 'I' beam. All in all, it's not really designed for interdimensional travel.
But they sure are magnificent to behold. Scalar waves hit these things and just get sucked right it. It's fascinating. Really, if you who reads these words ever becomes a unified band of light, stop by and behold a blackhole.
There's just nothing quite like it.
We remained for awhile, Jesus and I, trying to skip lightbeams off the surface just for fun. It was pointless, of course, but amusing. I saw the anguish subside from his aura, and that made me happy.
It's tough being an avatar. Long hours, weight of the world, disillusioned followers, and what not -- it can really drag you down.
Even the gods need a little recreation.
Even avatars need to play.
Even deities need a day off.
It's a balance thing.