Sai's Transcendence

by Vu, Frank

  Hitting isn’t exactly forbidden. We just try not to lash out in anger and to only do things that help us grow closer to the Source. Rules are just a shortcut to guide beings in their training. Is torture occurring now?

  Yes! Other children are running and playing, and I am here in this freezing water! The Verdants never do this crazy stuff either! How can you be comfortable in this water?

  Emotions are a boat that travels in the river. We are the river, not the boat because we are more than our emotions; we are the witness to our emotions and in that way are not controlled by them. The same mindset that the Verdants employ to be comfortable will eventually pervade the entire planet. It is our job to provide some balance to that mindset. Would you believe that in the future, people will be able to survive while only laying around and looking at moving pictures, performing no actual useful work or service for anyone else? But for now, consider this: Are any of the older children uncomfortable in the cold?

  Well . . .

  Reach out now and listen for complaints.

  Okay, hang on.

  Dhruva relaxed his body and muscles even more, breathing in slowly and deeply. His entire society was now in this frigid area, having traveled here to train the students before returning to a warmer climate where they would not burn so much unnecessary food energy. He waited patiently for Aadya to respond.

  Strange . . . They all feel the cold, but it’s just something happening around them.

  Yes—cold, nervous, awkward, angry, these are all similar. We’re not doing this water exercise because we want there to be discomfort. We’re doing this because we don’t want a lack of comfort to stop us from doing what needs to be done.

  But it’s . . . terrible!

  The most important resource we have is time, and we prefer to use it to grow closer to the Source. Discomfort is just information, and we get to choose how to interpret that information. Now—remove vision and let there be no thoughts. Breathe the warmth of the sun in and exhale it into your fingers and toes.

  What about the rest of my body?

  The rest of your body is along the path to your fingers and toes, so there is no need to concentrate there.

  Dhruva continued breathing deeply, completely relaxed, and waited.

  Hey, it’s working! Aadya’s face brightened as she smiled for a brief moment before becoming pale again. Oh, wait, now it isn’t!

  Celebration can disrupt concentration. Without continuous training, it is difficult to achieve the concentration needed, especially if one is rarely exposed to discomfort, as in the Verdant society. Perpetually avoiding discomfort is very tempting, as you have seen and felt. Continue as instructed.

  Aadya visibly relaxed and breathed in.

  Dhruva could feel the Source growing stronger in him as the snowflakes around them danced just a bit more than before. Dhruva breathed out and returned the favor.

  Hey, the sun is shining, and so are we!

  Hahahaha! Yes!

  Dhruva then grinned as he watched Aadya smile, starting to enjoy herself. He looked out across the frigid water, watching the snowflakes and Aadya dancing together. Then he brought his concentration inward and relaxed again, seeing images and impressions from a time far in the future.

  A TRIP REMEMBERED

  “Alcohol is necessary for a man so that he can have a good opinion of himself, undisturbed by the facts.”—Finley Dunne

  2017 AD, North America

  As evening embraced Frank’s pristine and completely un-knocked apartment door, Carah called out from behind it, “Knock, knock, motherfucker!”

  Rolling his eyes, Frank silently padded across the carpeted floor to let in his old friend and previous colleague. “Come on in, Carah. I didn’t realize you were there.”

  “Once you notice me, I’m always there.” She stepped through the door in a white tank top, her blonde hair accented with pink and green highlights. Frank regarded her with all the tattoos on her arms, which she usually kept covered up at work. They were an homage to Alice in Wonderland: flowers with baby faces, rocking horse flies, a huge Cheshire Cat, and even a hookah-smoking caterpillar in case anyone was confused about what was going on. She paused, noticing Frank’s downcast demeanor, and peered at him over her translucent-framed eyeglasses. “Aw, why’s the little cupcake so blue? Just because you got laid off from a job you didn’t really like in the first place?”

  “Yeah. I know I was talking about quitting and all, but it still stings a little when you’re the one that gets downsized and other people stay. Like I’m expendable.”

  Carah guffawed. “Damn, you sound like a straight guy that’s upset a gay guy isn’t attracted to him. It just wasn’t meant to be, killer. Whoa, been drinking a bit?”

  Frank’s eyes wandered towards the collection of beer bottles on the coffee table, contemplating their meaning and chuckling to himself. “Yeah, yeah, I’ll get you one. Pull up a chair and stay a while. Friendships founded in laughter are always fortuitous, or so I hear,” he said, grabbing two beers from the refrigerator in the kitchen and plopping down on the sofa with Carah. Next to the beer bottles, Carah noticed a photograph of a fountain. Light streamed through the fountain from the setting sun, which shined through nearby trees.

  “That’s some photograph you took there.”

  “Taking a photo isn’t about the taking. It’s about the seeing.”

  “Touché,” Carah said as she propped herself in the corner of the couch, facing Frank. “Hey, do you want to grab some pho?”

  “Do you think it’s funny to ask me that all the time or something? I’m part Vietnamese; deal with it.”

  “Damn, relax. I just like pho. Listen, I think you need a little vision quest so you can figure out what to do with yourself.” As if prospecting for gold, Carah rustled a hand in her pocket and removed a small plastic bag. “Here, have these mushrooms. Take all of them and call me in the morning. You need to learn what the trees already know; there are always highs and lows.”

  “I appreciate it. I don’t think this is the time, but thanks.”

  “Okay, I’ll just leave them here in case you change your mind.” Carah’s wide eyes looked at Frank meaningfully. “You’re going to change your mind.”

  “Yeah, maybe this week sometime. You know, the last time I took those is when I decided I didn’t want to work in a cubicle at the observatory anymore. I heard a voice talking to me—I don’t know what the hell it was—saying things I don’t think I could have come up with. Maybe taking those again isn’t such a great idea.”

  Now it was Carah’s turn to roll her eyes. “Or maybe it’s a great idea because it exposed something to you that you were hiding from yourself. Maybe it made you realize you only have one life. And spending your entire day doing something you don’t like so you can come home and drink yourself into oblivion to get over it isn’t the best way to spend your limited time on this amazing planet.”

  Frank put his hands on his belly, grimacing. “Or maybe mushrooms just upset my stomach, and you have a stomach that can crush and recycle a beer can. It’s confusing, though.” Frank nodded. “Because I agree with you, but I also feel like I need to be a normal person. But I don’t feel like a normal person anymore. I’ve been following my intuition lately and seeing all these weird coincidences and synchronicities. Maybe it’s all just random chance and me trying to make something out of nothing. But I actually feel like it’s real and that more of it means I’m on the right path, even though I have no evidence, and I can see how I’d look like an idiot to anyone else. I can’t really explain why I feel this way, but this way is continuing to feel me so I feel obliged to return the favor.”

  “I think you’re doing fine.” Carah smiled. “You’ll figure it out.”

  She reached for the remote on the coffee table and turned the TV on. A documentary just happened to be playing on that channel at that time, which was probably only a coincidence. The narrator’s smooth British accent paralyzed their channel-changing fingers, co
nvincing them to listen for a while.

  “The archeological dig for Gobekli Tepe, in Turkey, has uncovered the world’s oldest known megalith, even though only five percent of the site has been excavated. And here we see the ‘tell’ of Gobekli Tepe rising almost fifteen meters above the horizon.”

  Carah squinted and said, “Tell? What is this, a poker game?”

  The narrator continued, answering Carah’s question politely, “The ‘tell’ is the accumulated remnants of people living on the same site for thousands of years, living and rebuilding on the same spot. The mud bricks used for construction disintegrate rapidly and become the hill, or ‘tell,’ over time. Moving closer, here we see an unearthed column with a carved relief image of a man carrying a small bag and staring towards the sky.”

  Carah stretched, stood, and walked over towards the door.

  “Okay, buddy, I just wanted to make sure you were doing okay. You aren’t over here watching romantic comedies and having a good cry, so I’m going to assume you are doing great. Feel free to come by the observatory and hang out anytime you like, you feel me?”

  Frank stood and fist-bumped Carah, saying, “Thanks, girl, see you later.” Frank then wandered back towards the couch and the pleasing British tones emanating from the television like a song. Wow. Gobekli Tepe had apparently been built before agriculture and major civilization were introduced to the wonderful blue-and-green planet called Earth. Maybe advanced civilizations existed earlier than people thought. Archeologists estimated that it would take more than five hundred people to quarry and then move the huge stones to where they had been for more than thirteen thousand years. Frank wondered how people who were forced to hunt and gather food every day could find the time, technology, and motivation to move stone pillars weighing twenty tons. And why? What could have been their motivation? Did somebody direct them to do that?

  While Frank was doing his best to ponder this mystery, he flipped through the channels. He stopped flipping momentarily for a beer commercial with scantily clad women, which distracted him from his philosophical ponderings and awakened in him, at least in one part of his body, the possibility of contact with other humans. His attention was then carried northward when the commercial ended and a showing of the movie The Matrix began. He casually watched a child actor bend a spoon with his mind, which seemed to thoroughly impress the movie’s main character.

  He began to wonder if he, too, could bend a spoon with his mind. He hadn’t ever tried it, so how could he know if he was able to or not? What if it was within his power to do so, but he had never tried?

  Turning off the television, he procured one of his many “mostly clean” spoons from the kitchen and set it on the table in front of him. Sitting down, he rubbed his hands together and prepared himself for how his life would change if this actually worked. It was crazy to even try, right? Well, nobody is looking, so let’s get crazy. He wasn’t sure about the exact technique to use, so he decided to follow the movie’s advice and clear his mind of all thoughts. All he had to do was realize the truth: It was not the spoon bending, but him.

  He closed his eyes, cleared his mind, and imagined that the spoon did not exist—it was just information in his mind that he could manipulate at will. Then, he imagined his spoon-self bending, his head and body bending to the side. That should work, right? He slowly opened his eyes to look at the spoon, considering the excitement he would feel if it were actually bent—but, of course, it was not.

  Though he felt the deep sorrow of a thousand disappointed dreamers, he also had much experience being under the influence. So, he fully understood that a future version of himself may be able to solve a problem that he, at present, could not. He leaned the spoon on its edge as a reminder to his future self that he should try this experiment again, next time using varying techniques. Then, cursing himself as a fool for even trying, he staggered into his bedroom and collapsed onto the bed. He hit shuffle on his phone’s music player, and the first song that played was an REM song, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.”

  As the music played in the background, he started to drift off. Nearly asleep, he couldn’t help but think that he was important and that someone was watching him at that exact moment. Even if he wasn’t exactly important now, he wondered if his thoughts—or perhaps his consciousness—somehow made a mark on reality or space-time. Maybe, in other times or dimensions, lessons could be learned about his thoughts and actions?

  As he lay there thinking, an idea entered his head: Something called the Source inhabited the four dimensions of time and space that he was aware of, but it also existed in many other dimensions. Could it be the case that consciousness existed independent of time and space, and that the reality he knew was just one manifestation of it? Would it be possible for a highly advanced being to somehow know or affect his thoughts right now? What if reality, as he and most people knew it, was simply a training ground for some other place? What if all the ecstasies of life, such as how great he felt when he was in love or drank alcohol, were just devices that encouraged him to grow closer to the Source? Where did these ideas even come from?

  But then his mind drifted back to the beer commercial, and he allowed the sweet, soft sheets to caress him into sleep and remove most of his recollection of the evening. He snored softly into the night.

  THE EXPERIMENT

  “If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”—Friedrich Nietzsche

  2065 AD, Sanaka’s Lab, Japan

  Sanaka licked his lips as he attached electrodes to the liver-spotted flesh of the aging skull before him. Vu’s wrinkled skin was putting up mild resistance to the sticky pads of the electrodes. This was unusual, though the electrodes had worked with much younger and smoother skin in Sanaka’s previous experiments. The face underneath the electrodes usually squirmed and mewled like a newborn, so Sanaka was at least grateful to not have to contend with that. Vu’s orange robes billowed loosely over the reclining chair, the straps on his ankles and wrists firmly secured. The ankles and wrists themselves were as relaxed as a sunbathing cat, though significantly less furry.

  Sanaka furrowed his brow and asked Vu, “How are you just sitting there so patiently when you know that I have killed before and will probably kill again?”

  Vu serenely stared into Sanaka’s eyes, completely calm and ready for anything. “I have spent many years observing pain and discomfort without identifying with it. While pain and discomfort certainly exist, I am not these feelings, or at least not only these feelings. There is always something besides my feelings that watches my feelings. So I can never be completely in pain. In fact, I’ve spent so many years sitting quietly on hard floors that much of my body is more comfortable now than it has been in a very long time!”

  “You’re going to make a very interesting subject,” Sanaka replied.

  He turned away from Vu to look at the large translucent display projected beside him in the air. Behind it was a small half sphere held in the air by a skinny clear rod. The half sphere was very similar to the implant in his wrist but much larger, capable of both displaying a screen and recording what was happening. Sanaka looked at it and called out his commands.

  “Aurelia, initialize the etherbots, prep the latest treatment regimen, and ready them both for intravenous delivery.”

  Vu heard a soft chime, and a pleasing female voice replied, “Etherbots initialized and prepared for delivery. The treatment regimen is also ready for delivery. Please confirm your authorization, as this procedure has historically induced stroke, heart attack, and death.”

  “Confirmed.”

  Sanaka was annoyed that he still had to deal with those silly confirmations. He hadn’t bothered to take the time to remove them. He’d had enough to deal with while planning the monk’s extraction from Tibet, having been careful to avoid undue attention from the United Nations Ethics Enforcement Agency, which had been hounding him for years. Sanaka daydreamed about a time fifty years ago when there had be
en no UNEEA. The European Union, a smaller initiative at the time, had failed, so how had the UN ever succeeded in uniting the world when the EU could not even unite Europe? He figured the UN achieved this by creeping in one rule at a time, slowly getting to where it was now, instead of asking people to accept its dominance all at once.

  It certainly didn’t hurt that China had continually strengthened the UN in an attempt to subvert US dominance. It also hadn’t hurt that multiple US elections had favored celebrities who’d made poor foreign policy decisions, and that the US had continued to draw its gaze inward. Though China’s strategy had initially worked, it ultimately backfired, as now the UN had more control than any one country. As a final insult, the US had succeeded in taking over many key UN positions and now ran much of the world beyond its borders. Be careful what you wish for.

  The UN had almost unlimited funds with which to pursue its pet projects, but it was constrained by the world’s impressions of these projects upon their discovery. Sanaka had the opposite problem: He could do whatever he wanted as long as he didn’t get caught, but he was also responsible for financing his projects. So he had been self-funding his work by streaming live video of his subjects’ final moments on the dark web, receiving Bitcoin microtransaction payments per second of viewing time from his anonymous benefactors. Very rarely would any of them stop the video stream until Sanaka turned it off on his end. This arrangement solved two problems at once: He received his required financing, and he didn’t have to worry about dealing with the antiquated, government-backed financial systems and the roving eyes that came with them.

  Sanaka was also able to procure a very important ingredient from the dark web: highly potent liquid psychedelic mushrooms brewed in an obscure lab in Central America. The supply listing for these mushrooms advertised a wide variety of their ethereal and mystical effects, but that was just hippie nonsense as far as he was concerned. For all Sanaka knew, his supplier could actually be one of his live stream viewers, though he was pretty sure different personalities were required for each of those roles. In the end, he didn’t really care as long as he got what he needed to do his research.