Archives for posts with tag: fantasy

Whoever said opening the third eye was enough to reach enlightenment was surely wrong. 

When our one human race bloomed at last, sprouting ascendant chakras like leaves unfurled toward the sun, we reentered the golden yuga. And like magic, the great things of yore slowly returned to the people. We had made it through our times of tribulations as a collective. And those that hadnt, well we would patiently wait upon their reincarnates to attain that same Buddhahood before all moving on as one.

It was readily apparent then that the wheel’s great turning was indeed just as the puranas of old had intimated. 

But as our consciousnesses expanded, so too did our abilities to see beyond this one plane. And with that we came to revisit the old words and their meanings. We saw that the cosmic order that held our universe together was only our own. Floating in the boundless causal Ocean, that frothing primordial abyss, were more bubbles, more universes like our own, all winking into existence then blinking out in accordance with their own circumstances, and each operating according to its own dharma.

That our cosmic order, our dharma, wasnt so absolute was a contentious revelation and a large contingent were left broken in spirit. But it livened my spirit, I must selfishly admit. To know there was a larger order to seek, a dharma of dharmas so to speak, meant there was more to ascend toward. More for us to learn and experience. More to be. 

Did the Boddhisatvas of old know of this? I imagined meeting one in another life and them smiling back at me in amazed wonder, or them simply nodding their aware affirmation: both possibilities excited me greatly and near-equally.

Worlds upon worlds. Planes upon planes. Bubbles upon bubbles. And at the spiralling lotus-centre of each bubble sat its own maha-deity responsible, we thought, for observing his or her own children and rearing them to maturation. A universe bringing itself to crescendo before blinking out in that ocean of chaos.

My third eye sees deeper now. In the abyss between worlds, before and after worlds, stirs Tiamat, the original chaos-construct, the alpha-omega maha-dragon that begat all, will beget all, will destroy all. It is fair in its creation and destruction. It plays no favourites.

Well the maha-deities would expand their domains infinitely were it up to them, such is their love for their own. But such actions would encroach upon other universes, would spill into and cannibalise its neighbours: so pure a love would consume all else.

Tiamat, detached and unthinking. Unfeeling and unbeing. It besets each deity against the others as ultimate deterrent. Only an all-consuming love can push back against another all-consuming love. Only love can assure a destruction so mutual as to ensure an enforceable security.

I see again the bubbles in the causal Ocean with even greater clarity. I note again their winking into existence, their blinking out at random and realise they extinguish at twice the rate they form. Far too many to attribute to the greater dharmic order that is natural chaos, or to Tiamat. No, these failures lay on the lotus-sitters. Maha-dieties either lacking in sufficient love to expand beyond their cosmic remit and thereby be pushed back by another in deadlock. Or, those with exceeding empathy towards neighbours with the sufficient will to love.

They call me a rat. Well I call them a circus of fools. I gnaw through rolls and rolls of their barbed wire with ease. My tools make short work of such stupid hindrances. It’s not long before I’ve left my mark on their idiot-rockets and am comfortably back in my warm little hole. I didnt damage anything, mind you. Not structurally anyway. Just a little defacing to show them what I think. A piece of my mind to take up there with them.

As if I’d ever go up there myself. Dont make me gag. All those idiot clowns convinced they’ll create some utopian colony out there in the stars. Whoever gave them such lofty notions? They couldnt make a utopia down here in this hole. I wonder how many of them will die in that metal rocket before they reach the closest dirt ball. Good luck without the freeze-pods.

Not that we’re any smarter than them down here. Us left-behind good-for-nothings. Seems escape is on everybody’s mind these days.

Some chase it in cables and servers. Is that still the same fool in there? I wouldnt know. All’s I know is he’s just as unhappy in a machine as in flesh and bone. There’s no escaping the skin, same as there’s no escaping here.

And those vampire fools as I call them are just as backwards. Faulty blood and tattered degenerates seeking eternity one fix at a time. There’s no escaping the now: not into some golden tomorrow, same as you can’t run back into your memories.

All we have is now. Here and now. And even an idiot rat like me in his little fool hole knows that much.

My father had always warned me of strange things in the forest. He was a wise man and forbade me from wandering after dark alone and from straying too far from our cabin when we holidayed there. I never doubted his words, but in turn he rarely indulged me any further details. He was a brave man and my rock besides, and I could see that even speaking this much on such matters bothered him. I would not press the issue.

Still a child is a child and liable to err from good advice as much by innocent neglect as by childish rebellion. And I was no rebel. Before I knew it, the air began to turn and I realised the river had led me farther from the cabin than I could make back by sunset. I stabbed my fishing spear into the mud, a signpost of the furthest I’d ever ventured, and made haste on my return.

A girl’s laugh carried through the winds and accompanied me on my panicked dash. It seemed close and quiet, like a whisper to my ears and persisted whichever way I turned my head and wherever I went. The laugh was joyful but undoubtedly cruel and inhuman. Did the forest itself delight in frightening a poor child? Was it merely a sylph or perhaps God herself? I just ran.

The years since then swam through my fingers like baby fish in the river. But that moment of helplessness stands still, forever etched in my heart. I retrieve my old fishing spear. Where once it had marked the furthest I’d been from home, in the years since it was as close as I’d get. The sight of it would fill me so many things. Fear, anger, loneliness. But disgust at myself, most of all. I used any and all emotion as dirty fuel.

My old spear once stood a head over my own, but now it barely cleared my chin. No more was I a helpless child, to be paralysed by the forest’s malicious nature. The sylph had invited me to return when I was ready, and ready I was at long last.

The cabin looked smaller than I remembered and its wood somehow duller than in my mind’s eye. But I could smell my father here, as though he had never died that day.

The sylph’s face burrowed out of the trees, and her body emerged from the soil to join as one. And that mocking cacophony, that whispering laugh from my old relived nightmares.

She had dared me to save my father once. ‘I’m scared’, I’d replied. I was just a helpless child. She had gloated that helplessness was irredeemably in my nature and not a part of my youth.

My father emerged now from the cabin, shocked to see his child so grown. He recognised me at once and I froze once more for I knew instantly  that I had been given more than I could endure. More than I’d been promised. Beside me, a smaller younger me also froze, oblivious to my presence. The sylph took much glee in our failure to act.

Again and again she brought me back to that moment, such that I populated about the cabin silent and still, much like the trees. And not once could I move to save my father.