by Michael Priv
Why do we hate some people? Because they hurt us, or those people with whom we associate ourselves. Or they pose a hypothetical threat. They may simply fall into a category of people who are generally perceived as harmful or dangerous in some way. We may simply not understand them and consider them very different from us and a possible threat. We group ourselves together with those people whom we are not scared of. We are threatened or hurt by those other people, who scare the hell out of us. Therefore, we hate them. Was fear at the bottom of this?
Let ’s say I hated cottage cheese. Why? It made me want to puke—or it might have possibly caused a gag reaction. I didn’t want to experience that sensation. I hated it. Or I was afraid of it—same emotion, different words.
Without fear, there wouldn’t be any hate. So, at the root of hate is fear? What about a couple mid-divorce? Let’s take the husband. Let’s say he hates the wife. That’s hate. He isn’t afraid of her, right? Well, come to think of it, he is. In his mind, she is hurting him and, really, she is. He is afraid of being hurt. She is also the proof of his failure as a husband or even as a friend. He is afraid of that. But he fights back and hurts her, too. Wait, and he is also afraid of hurting her! Definitely. I knew the feeling. He is afraid of being hurt and of hurting her, causing her pain. That’s not hate. Why would he fear hurting her? He cares about her. Could it be that our true nature being love, even when hating someone, we still love them and want to protect them, even if from ourselves? And could it be that the fear to hurt them is at the root of us trying to leave them in the first place? Not really? A bit of a stretch? Spot-on? Anyway, he, the husband, feels fear and therefore, he hates her. His hate is a pretense, a masquerade, an attempt to look stronger. That’s all hate is, a pretense and an attempt to look stronger while being afraid.
Fear —hmm. Okay. But what is the root of fear? Where does it come from and how can fear have so many different levels, reaching deep down into complete insanity? Fear can be easily defined in terms of unconditional love. The root of fear is simply lack or absence of unconditional love! Why? Because you add unconditional love and fear dissipates.
Fear emerged as the common denominator for hate and anger. What about states like dejection, depression, grief? Easily enough, I traced all of them to fear—fear of pain, fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of others’ judgment, fear of not fitting in, fear of the unknown—in a word, FEAR .
I got it! The opposite of unconditional love was fear. What do you know?! Another earth-shattering realization. With the unconditional love being the top of the scale, all those other emotions, even good ones, like feeling interested and happy, were stages of fear. There were no other true emotions in the world, basically and fundamentally, except for unconditional love and the gradual departure from it—the ever-deepening states of fear. Another biggie—bam!
Complete unconditional love (full understanding) simply meant the absence of ALL fear. And a state of being utterly terrified was simply a condition of total absence of unconditional love and understanding. In terms of understanding, fear simply meant the absence of understanding. I let that sink in. Fear equals no understanding. Understanding equals no fear. Understanding equals unconditional love. Damn!
You increase unconditional love; you automatically reduce fear (and hate, grief, resentment, worries and so on) by the same amount. And vice-versa. More acceptance, more trust, love and understanding in life—automatically less fear, less worries, less losses, less unhappiness, more happiness.
After a good pat on the back and a nice talk, Grace gave me the next drill. “Now that you know what these things are, here is what I want you to do: breathe in the white, beautiful light of unconditional love, hold it inside you for a few moments, let it permeate your entire body, entire being, then breathe out black smoke of fear. Create an image in your mind of unconditional love flowing into the body when you breathe in. It saturates your entire body as a gentle white glow, dislodging fear, which leaves your body as black smoke, dissipating and completely vanishing high up in the stratosphere. Do this exercise till done.”
I was done in twenty minutes. I never felt so clean and happy in my life.
How much had I achieved in just—what? Three days? Four days? I lost track. I felt boundless gratitude and awe toward Brell. The Assistant insisted that I take the rest of the day off to enjoy my state of utter cleanliness and happiness. It turned out Linda was also flying high with her own achievements and had some time off. We spent the rest of the day dining and luxuriating together, surrounded by all these people we loved—our good friends, whom we barely knew at best, and for the most part, had never seen before. We loved them all. That was the life worth living!
Linda was ecstatically happy for me. She too was nearing the end of her program. She’d cleaned up many upsets and problems of this life and tackled the source of amnesia, the thought injection. She could now remember parts of many lifetimes and incidents from her past.
“Picky, is our entire past totally terrible, nothing but war and death? That’s what I keep remembering. Nothing good whatsoever.” Linda pouted.
“ Well, in my experience, yes, mostly wars, but a little bit of good stuff here and there, too. Good stuff is usually related to family life, friends, and creative endeavors. Everything else is unremarkable at best.”
“The good thing ab out all these never-ending wars is I regained experience, I know stuff, I feel ready, I feel competent,” Linda explained.
“Yup, gazillions of years of experience will hone it all down for you.” Next day turned out to be our last full day at the School. My last drill was to visualize forgiving each of the people who had done me wrong, starting with myself. That felt liberating when I finally mastered it. Letting go didn’t come easy at first.
Linda was beaming with happiness, having completed her program. She hung on my neck squealing, “I’m so happy-yy!” Turned out she remembered fourteen of our lifetimes together, while I only remembered twelve. One of them counted as my two to her one. So, effectively, I was three lifetimes short. The happy reconciliation of our memories took a couple of hours, punctuated by liberal smooching. One interesting peculiarity of our track together that I isolated in light of my newly acquired wisdom, was that I never blamed Linda for anything bad that ever happened to me personally. Something there to ponder.
“Do you know now what those Murabian creeps nailed you for?” I asked. “ Oh, yes, I know exactly what I’ve done to end up here.” Linda’s face hardened. “Protested against the forever-dead sentence, what else? We demanded to either abolish it or at least reform the law to include the rehabilitation and release for good behavior.”
She ’d said “we.” That immediately implied a conspiracy. I envisioned a host of criminal charges stemming from that alone. Crazy? Stupid? Careless? Brave? Decent? Noble? All of the above.
“That wasn’t very conformant of you, was it?”
“Not very, not at first, but then we started fighting for real.”
“No kidding? Literally fighting?” If they took up arms against the authorities, they’d be raking up a list of offenses about a mile long, most of them potent enough to land them here.
“Yes, we tried it nice and proper at first but didn’t get anywhere. Counselors talked to us, periods of rest at nice retreats, a couple of stints at animal shelters working with animals, then the house arrests, then mental institutions and mandatory drugs and hypnotic adjustments. Then one night we blew up a thought-injection station. The facility was supposed to be empty at night, but it wasn’t. Somebody was killed, somebody else got hurt. That was that.”
I’d never had the balls to fight the authorities. Linda did. I looked at her with new eyes—yet again. General Brell sent for us in the afternoon to let us know that we were done here. We thanked him. I didn’t know any words that would express the depth of gratitude I felt. How do you even begin to express that much gratitude?
“Be good.” He slapped me on the back in parting. “That’s your pay
ment to me. Do the right thing. You know how to distinguish right from wrong?”
“How?” “Exactly. Don’t pretend you don’t know. You know exactly what’s right and what’s wrong. Go with your knowing. Don’t compromise with yourself.” I nodded. “Another thing. Don’t sweat the small stuff. Be agreeable with people. They’re overwhelmed already. They are not brave or strong despite the appearances. You must really get it. You fighting them, stopping them, invading them, invalidating them makes them even weaker. Your support makes them stronger. The stronger they are, the better for everybody, remember that.”
43 The world outside assailed our ears with ecstatic shrieking of children, smiling faces, multilingual ambience of joyous chatter, honking of horns and the general din characteristic to a densely populated hub of happy humanity.
“Let’s walk,” Linda proposed, as we joined the throng of gawkers. “I feel so good.”
“Well, you found eternity. Damn huge!”
“Not just any eternity, Picky, ‘my’ eternity.” Linda was positively flying. “I know who I am. I know you. I know us. I am me.” The smile on my face and the joy I felt were positively unshakable as we walked down that cacophonous street in Cambodia, with Linda’s soft, warm hand in mine.
A van suddenly swung at us, brakes screeching. In an instant, we were surrounded by five armed, masked assailants, dressed in battle black, lovingly decorated with every lethal GI Joe bullshit dingdong under the sun. I felt my unshakable happiness being brutally stirred, shaken, and spilled out into the gutter. US Special Forces? Locals? Machine guns stared me in the face once again. I noticed the one closest to me was the Czech EVO-3 Scorpion, so these were possibly not US Special Forces. Mercs?
“Get into the van,” one of them commanded in perfectly good American English.
“What do you want from us?” I blurted out, warding the assailant off with a gesture. The switch from the recent sense of elation to the unfolding threat was so instantaneous that I failed to accept it at first. Not so with Linda. Before I had my moment to process what was happening, Linda was already in action. She kicked the assailant closest to her in the side of his knee, throwing him off balance, pulled out the safety pin from a grenade on his vest and pushed him hard toward the van. He tumbled inside headfirst, legs kicking.
“Grenade!” somebody yelled. The assailants scattered. We all hit the warm asphalt, as the grenade explosion sent pieces of Kevlar and body parts flying. Did my Linda just do that?
Several shots rang above my head, loud in the deafening aftersilence of the grenade explosion. Are we dead yet? No bullets hit my body. I ventured a peek at the surroundings and quickly wished I hadn’t. A couple of excessively beefy guys were casually holstering their guns, as they strolled to an idling car double-parked next to the van, stepping over our assailants’ dead bodies.
One of them beckoned to me, big guy, blond. That son of a bitch of the month! “ Listen,” I told Linda, who was getting up, shaking her head gingerly, probably trying to shake the ringing out of her ears. Good luck with that. “Hon, later we should probably have a talk about jumping five armed men, okay?” Linda nodded, very serious. “But not now. Look who’s here.” I pointed at Alesh.
Linda took one glance and froze. “Alesh,” she breathed out, grabbing my sleeve. “It was all a setup, wasn’t it?” Then a bit hysterical, louder, “I’m asking, was it all a setup?”
“Dunno. Let’s go ask,” I proposed, shrugging. No sense avoiding Alesh now.
“Small world, hah, Alesh?” I greeted him. “You girls come here often?”
“Get in, you bums,” Alesh grumbled, holding the back door for us. We complied. What else could I do, make a scene? Some other Tiny I’d never met was driving. Alesh gave me one of his long stares from the passenger’s seat, yet this time an oddly amicable one.
“ Meet Bruno. Bruno, Norman and Linda,” he finally said. “Hi,” said Linda.
“Pleasure,” I mumbled.
Bruno ignored the entire introduction.
Alesh kept staring at us. The amusement in his eyes was mixed with a tad of affection. “You guys are too much,” he finally uttered, shaking his head as if in disbelief. That chatterbox.
“ I know, Alesh, we love you too,” Linda assured him. “Wha-aat?” he sounded confused.
“Never mind. Did you set us up?” I asked.
“I saved your butts just now. You must’ve noticed,” Alesh replied, stretching lazily in his seat.
“And?”
“And, yeah… so that’s why they’re still attached to your ears,” Alesh explained. “Your butts, I mean.” Wow, a joke. I didn’t laugh . “What I’m referring to here is you let us escape in Manila, so we led you to Brell. That was the plan from the get-go, right?”
“ The mission was to find Brell,” Alesh explained patiently. “What for?” Linda asked.
Alesh didn ’t answer. I knew he wouldn’t. Data regarding an ongoing mission wouldn’t be given to those not privy to it—need-toknow basis. Supposedly, we didn’t need to know.
“ We do need to know, Alesh,” I insisted. “But you don’t have to tell me. I know already. You guys wanna do things by the book, right? That’s all you want.”
“What are you talking about?” Alesh turned to me, squinting suspiciously.
“What the old man’s saying is the convicts’ release contingency is built into your regulations, but you’re too dumb to read it right.” “And you’re not playing by the book, either,” Linda interrupted. “Are you even allowed to interfere with human affairs at all?” “What? How did we interfere?” Alesh turned around and stared at her now. “Stop asking ‘what’ all the time like an idiot. You heard me. You’re messing with us and Brell and his church. Are you legally allowed to do that?” Linda repeated coldly.
Alesh grumbled something about not messing with Brell at all and turned away.
Bruno stayed out of this conversation all together, scowling in morbid silence. “ Is it or is it not a part of our forever-dead sentence to have you, the Guards, actively interfering with the population? Actually preventing, yes, preventing our rehabilitation and release? Can you legally do that? Do you want me to tell you the right answer?” Linda was pissed now. I knew why. This was her fight. I could also see why Stan would want to find Brell, since he had everything to do with criminal rehabilitation and release—something Stan had no idea about.
We entered International Highway 6, heading west, toward Thailand. Alesh started muttering something in response to Linda ’s accusations but stopped abruptly at the sight of a large armored military truck bristling with antennas, rumbling past us back toward the city. It was closely followed by two school buses, painted in military green, stuffed with soldiers in green Kevlar.
My heart fell. We must’ve led not only Guards to Brell. Damn! “Stop the car!” I yelled to Alesh and smashed my fist into Bruno’s neck. “You turn around right now, Bruno!” To my surprise, Bruno complied. I wondered briefly what their orders were regarding Brell. Two meatheads exchanged a quick glance. Without a word, Bruno stopped the car on the side of the road next to a plowed field. Alesh went to the trunk and came back with an armful of automatic weapons. I got an AK, my favorite, and a spare clip. Linda got a MAC 10. We were eastbound in no time.
“I want my Nighthawk back,” I told Alesh. He handed me the nickel gun. I liked guns. Guns calmed me down. Oops! I caught myself. What about all the unconditional love training? Damn complicated.
At Brell ’s compound, the battle roared in full swing by the time we arrived. Gunfire and explosions from inside the building now dominated the docile tourist town morning. A dozen dead bodies littered the pavement outside the Buddhist Center entrance—civilians and soldiers. Three police cars blocked the traffic. Cops were sitting it out behind their cars with their M-16s ready. The armored C2, Command and Control, truck was parked in front of the building, its door open. Several Cambodian soldiers ran past us on their way to the building. The cops yelled at us to leave.
>
“Cambodian Special Forces. Paratroopers.” Alesh pointed. “See the insignia?”
Damn Priests. Without any warning —yet again—Linda opened fire at the soldiers only a few steps away. We were in the open. No cover. Later, notright now,I should probably have a talk with Linda about starting a shoot-outwilly-nilly witha vastly superior force ofheavily armed,
Kevlar-cladparatroopers Alesh and his friend opened up on the cops. I tore a couple of grenades off a dead soldier’s vest and ran toward the truck’s open door. A couple of bullets struck the armor near me. Here we go again. A Cambodian commando suddenly appeared in the door, reaching for the handle to slam the door shut. He should’ve thought about that earlier. Seeing me, he reached for his gun. I fired my Nighthawk straight into his forehead, tossed the two grenades inside and shut the armored door. The truck rocked with the explosions, smoke bellowing out of the small open windows.
Three additional police cars swung in with sirens blaring. Siem Reap, not a major metropolis, must have had their entire police force here—unfortunately for them. From the rooftop, cracking sniper fire briefly joined in the cacophony. The battle was over in a jiff, ushering the momentarily ear-splitting silence. A lot more dead bodies littered the street. The scene of carnage was augmented by a couple of burning police cars and the smoking C2 truck.
Fittingly, I ’d just gotten through learning to love all people unconditionally. Could I have loved them and killed them anyway? Bullshit. How would I stop fighting wars? How would I get off this wretched merry-go-round? This wasn’t the time to ponder the matter. Never time to ponder anything. I always leave pondering for later, but later never comes.
Meanwhile, I had an emergency to attend to, do some more killing as usual—the irony. We ran into the building through the Buddhist Center entrance, filled with acrid smoke, nearly colliding in the lobby with half a dozen paratroopers hurriedly scattering out of the building. Leaving so soon? Alesh and Bruno engaged most of them. Linda greeted one with a good, solid kick in the groin, which sent them both tumbling. The eyes of the one rushing me locked on mine. As if in slow motion, I saw his gun swinging into position and his finger tightening on the trigger. The gun came to life, just as I dove under it and slid toward him on the floor, feet first, kicking his feet from under him. The soldier lost his balance and hit the floor. The fight was brief. I cut his throat with his own knife.