Daygo's Fury

by John F. O' Sullivan

  They were infertile, and they were all unusually healthy. Through the histories of the Walolang de Kgotia that Raba recited to Niisa, almost all died of old age.

  “I remember you,” Namuso said one night as he sat down beside Niisa, after the rest had turned to bed. Niisa sat, as usual, gazing into the night sky. “At the gathering. Only vaguely. I had to think back for some time when you arrived, to try to place you. You were … a little different to the rest of us.” Niisa turned his head to Namuso, and Namuso paused. “I guess, I was a kid myself when you arrived. And Raba forbade talking or thinking about our old tribe and our family. When I saw how well you achieved this … it only made me feel I was failing even worse. So … so I never asked.” He turned his eyes up from the cave’s entrance and looked at Niisa. “How were my family, Niisa, at the last gathering you were at? How was my tribe?”

  “A girl called Emeka spoke of you,” he said after a moment. “She called you a friend. She spoke of the testing, of how you were chosen. She told me this.”

  Namuso’s face lit up in surprise as he looked back at Niisa, and he smiled. “Was she well? Had she found a betrothed?”

  “I was to be betrothed to her.”

  He laughed. “You? Really? What chance. How funny. And then you were chosen.” His smile turned a little sad. “I hope she is not too disappointed.” He paused and they sat in silence for a little while, Niisa staring up at the moon, Namuso at the hill and the cave mouth, neither really seeing what their gaze lingered on. “I miss her,” he said to nothing and no one.

  “You had a sister,” he asked finally, “and a family. Do you miss them?”

  Niisa looked to the sky. “My sister, sometimes. We used have a morning ritual, we would rise and clasp each other’s hands and dance, stretch the morning from our limbs, much like we do here each day. But there was something more to what we shared. Something different to what we achieve here.” He silenced for a while, wondering on it as he often had in the past. “I feel it must be something. It must touch on … could it be … the caring … the … what is called love? Of another being?” He shook his head. “I think … I don’t know … perhaps it has something to do with this … perhaps it is a base thing within us to crave or to … feel its loss, upon its passing. It is just a small thing but it does cause me to wonder. There seemed something more … connected, to what we did.”

  He paused in thought, and turned to Namuso. “Are you consumed by such things?”

  Namuso looked at him. “By love? Does not everyone know love, and loss? Of course I am consumed by such things.”

  “Describe them to me.”

  “Describe love? What do you mean? When you care for someone …”

  “Yes. Describe it to me. Tell me what it is.”

  Niisa continued to look into the blackness of the sky, the blackness sparkled with light. He could feel Namuso’s confused gaze upon him; but he knew that, eventually, as Namuso always did, he would do what he was told. Namuso shook his head and looked to the ground.

  “How to describe such a thing? When you like someone. When they have supported you in times of need. When you needed company or a friendly ear, when you needed … to feel cared for … to feel loved … to feel as though you are a good person, someone that other people can like, that person has offered that support, that comfort, that … stability to fall back on. Perhaps the person is just a lot of fun to be around, they make you laugh, they make you happy. You love them in return. Your parents are you parents, you love them as they love you.”

  “But what is it? What exactly is it? Make me understand it.”

  “It is what you feel. It is attachment. It is … more than that, you would do anything for this person. It doesn’t even matter what they have done for you, after a point. They are in your heart. Without them … you would be on your own.”

  Niisa smiled, and turned his attention back to the sky. “The fear of isolation. Is that all?” He laughed shortly and quietly. “It always seems to come down to that. What silly creatures fill up the world. It can be hard to fathom Daygo’s wisdom.”

  After some time, Namuso stood and left. Niisa barely noticed.

  ******

  There were three known stages to the commune. The first stage was the stage of transition, as when an animal died; when Daygo flowed from a singular stream to many. As in the test, when an animal was butchered alive, Daygo transitioned from the separate flow of the animal to the million different flows within the dead carcass. In the moment of this occurrence, if extreme focus and concentration was held at the exact point of change, communion, a sense of Daygo, could be achieved without reaching Samadhi state. The level of concentration and focus required on this specific point could be achieved artificially by the eating of pacroot, or by long hours of practice over months. And so the priests could decipher quite easily on their annual visits to the tribes if an adolescent child was worthy and in need of a lifetime’s practice and study.

  Part of their weekly routine was to spend hours meditating on one object until it lost all association as a separate thing. It became something of everything. It became Daygo, life, in all of its forms. It was a part of Niisa, just as he was a part of it. There was no separation between the two.

  The second stage was regarded as full communion with Daygo; when sense of Daygo in the air surrounding the practitioner was achieved. All of the priests reached this level daily in the caves.

  The third stage was communion with those already in commune. As they had opened themselves up to communion with the air all around them, so they, too, became accessible to those in a very advanced stage of commune. There were seven members in the history of the Walolang de Kgotia who claimed to have reached this stage and made a lifetime’s study of it. What could be sensed was described by Raba as a person’s aura, and it was vastly more complex than the connection with the air around them.

  No one had ever reached a fourth stage of commune, according to Raba’s histories. Where it might go, what was next, was only guessed at.

  ******

  They spent the sixth day of every week in silence. They did not commune, they did not stretch or work the body. They sat and they ate and they drank and they considered all things. Sometimes Niisa would sit looking at a drop of water on a leaf for hours on end, watching its life pass by, or he would watch a flower from early morning until night, as it slowly budded and opened up to sunlight and insects, until it was fully flowered, and then, as the day waned, it slowly closed its petals once more. There was something immeasurably beautiful and stilling to watch the slow process of life in such a way. He had once thought the flower moved slowly, almost too slowly to see, but after watching it thus on occasional days he realised the incredible speed of its change, the fleeting glimpse of its life cycle, the change of Daygo, the immeasurable expanse of time before and after this tiny moment that was a day. How small and short they were living as their own singular entity, living within a separate life they had fabricated and confused into existence. The ignorance that consumed them. The blindness to the Earth and Daygo and true life; something so far greater and larger and blissful that they were a miniscule action within, like a lice or an insect or something on his palm that he could not even see that was a million times smaller than either.

  There was an incredible peace, serenity and joy in those days sitting as a silent observer of life. Sometimes he wished he could live out the rest of his days so, as many priests had done before him. But he was consumed with divine purpose that he had always felt and had known to be true that first day he felt the red moon’s pull. He still had to divine what it was, and to do so, he needed more knowledge. On the long nights that he watched the red moon in the sky, he sensed its evil, its distortion towards Daygo, he sensed its threat. It was hard to think something as small as he might make a difference, but he believed in his destiny to do so. He believed in the wisdom of the Daygo stream, and he would follow its wisdom until the threat of the moon was eliminated.

&nb
sp; He came upon the third stage slowly.

  As the others tried to maintain Samadhi, Niisa allowed it to leave, he allowed a complete return to the self, he watched with open eyes while the rest had theirs closed. He sensed as Niisa, while the rest strived to lose that attachment. Samadhi was indeed blissful and insightful, but Niisa had too much to learn, Niisa had a purpose to be defined. Samadhi state could be reached as he died, or as an old man. It was not what he sought now. Only through retention of the ambitions of the self could he seek out these answers, could he further his learning from a human standpoint. While the rest were slaves to their emotions and susceptible to the increased energy of the commune, Niisa felt none, he was flat, he sought with intelligent calm. Piece by piece, he ingested the connection to everything; he studied it and felt it. He tentatively reached for more.

  As time passed, he started to sense more than just the mesh of air. He started to see the connective tissue of the mesh touch and reach into his fellow priests. They had achieved communion, connection, with the air, as had he. He stretched his consciousness towards that connection.

  Months passed in practice, until one day, like a foetus pressing, then bursting forth from the womb of a woman into the fresh air of the outside world, he pressed inwards, against an unseen resistance, bending it before him until he, too, burst forth, softly and slowly into the soul of another man. And as it broke before him he became suddenly blinded, consumed by something like light.

  Expanding before him were wheels of energy circling within Uksit too fast to dissect or separate. It was a roaring in the ears devoid of sound, a light too bright to see, a pressure consuming his whole being that he could not feel. He felt miniscule and lost, assaulted by information far greater than he. And yet there were the vestiges of understanding within it. Like a long forgotten memory, there was something familiar, and he had a small sense to try to remember, to know, to find a path through the maze to understanding. But the vague sense was fleeting and became lost, until all thought of attention and awareness melted away into simple awe for what was unfolding before him, but not before him, unfolding as part of him. He became small, he reverted to Samadhi. He dropped to nothing and lost all distinction and self. He simply was of the present, of the furious flowing tides of Daygo.

  He woke out on the grass, with the blue sky turning purple above him. Were it not for that sign of passed time, he could not have said how long he had retained communion. Time had become meaningless without the human understanding attached to it. He had become simply present, charged within the movement of life, of Daygo, in simplicity and peace.

  “You collapsed,” said Uksit above him. Niisa turned his eyes and saw the face looking down upon him. He watched him silently. Tentatively, he reached out a hand and touched the man’s ankle. Slowly, he passed his fingers around it until he held it softly, encased, solid within his fist.

  Uksit looked down at his hand curiously. “Are you well?” he asked.

  Niisa passed his gaze from the man’s leg back up to his face. His eyes were lost in the shadow of the evening. “I am well,” he said softly, releasing the man’s ankle.

  Uksit gave a small nod. “You must be careful,” he said. “What you did was dangerous.”

  Niisa smiled. “Thank you,” he whispered, but he did not move. After a moment, Uksit nodded and walked away.

  Did he feel me invade his soul?

  ******

  Over the following months, Uksit showed no sign that he was conscious of Niisa’s presence within him. During his time outside the commune, Niisa considered what he had been taught by Raba, what had been learned by his seven predecessors in the Walolang de Kgotia who had achieved the third stage before him. He tried to match this to what he sensed, and to discern from the mass of information the collaborating evidence, to make sense of his expanded consciousness.

  It seemed an impossible task, were it not for that vague familiarity that persisted; for there was no sense he knew to use, no sight or touch or smell or taste that could decipher what was a separate plane of existence newly opened to him. A higher plane that he had only before touched on in communion with the air in their small cave.

  The life that was all around him, the life that was in the world.

  Months passed, and then a year, then two. He questioned Raba and the others constantly, trying to glean some further insight, some further knowledge from them, but they were ignorant, with no personal experience to speak of; all they could achieve was to recycle words once spoken to them.

  But he did progress. After a time, he seemed to develop a sense to his expanded consciousness, a sense to Uksit’s aura. As though somehow, subconsciously, his mind recognised the pulsing flow within Uksit, perhaps interpreting it through the knowledge of the internal flow within his own body. Perhaps the familiarity stemmed from there.

  He started to associate colours and heat and emotion to the flow of Daygo within Uksit. He visualised faint areas of shifting colour. He felt heat, cold or hot. He sensed emotion. He first knew that this held meaning when Uksit withdrew from their morning practice, citing an injury to his foot, several days after Niisa had felt a corresponding heat signature emanating from that area.

  As time passed, he was slowly able to match what he sensed to what he had been taught by Raba.

  Where the air was a mesh, the body was thick with energy in every pore. There were thousands of energy channels that ran through the body, interweaving, separating and intertwining through areas of convergence where they were funnelled through what he had been taught were locks within the body. These locks regulated and shaped the flow of Daygo, like a thousand, thousand knots tied in string until the resulting shape formed a body, a being that was Uksit. He could identify the seven main wheels of energy within the body, formed by hundreds, thousands of channels and locks, but the display was so complex and furious that Niisa often became lost within it.

  He learned to appreciate fully the complexity of the flow that was needed to form a full being of a human’s size and intelligence. Through his study there always seemed more what ifs, more hope for learning.

  Niisa began to recognise shifts within these wheels of energy. He saw it change with every inhalation and exhalation of breath, every shift of the body, every twitch of an eyelid. It took some time before he realised that many of these changes preceded the breath or the movement. It was unfathomably complex, constantly shifting and changing. Most times it was impossible to decipher which shift came first, which caused the reactions and which were reactions of others. He realised that what he watched was the never-stopping flow of Daygo, within what consisted a singular life. All Daygo was moving since the dawn of existence and had been moving since without one small filament of it ever ceasing to move. Movement was life. Every small shift of energy, every small change in the flow of Daygo, in the pace of its movement, was caused by a preceding shift. Each one led to another in a process that had never stopped since the dawn of time, of life, to the end of it; since that first movement, that first action, that set the universe underway.

  What started it? Could there be a start? How could movement originate from anything other than movement? But movement could still end, it could stop, the end of time, the end of existence.

  Was every single signature, every single action predestined since that first one? Each leading to the next, in never-ending time, to a final point? Was there an overarching intelligence? Or was it simply motion set loose that could not stop? That only reacted as it would always react, again and again and again, changing, shifting, until its end? Was everything Niisa chose to do now inevitable? Whether he continued with his plan or not? Was he changing the future, or was he just of it? He smiled inwardly at the thought, he saw no difference.

  Where might the study of aura end? If he could sense weakness in their body, could he not too sense it in their mind? In their emotions? As he grew to know their bodies intimately, might he learn their thoughts? Was anything restricted? As Daygo’s chosen child, would
all fall within reach of his touch?

  Each day he watched his fellow priests closely, using all his five senses to analyse everything about them. He watched their behaviour, their interactions, the barest of their movements, the way they walked and ate and drank. He matched all they did with the auras that he studied in the cave each evening. And slowly, it started to knit together; slowly, every faint flicker of expression or reaction during the day started to correspond to some change in the flow of their auras that evening.

  He called to Daygo, and it spoke back to him. He learned that the flow of Daygo slowed as the priests aged, that this in turn weakened the locks through which the channels passed through. He believed that this would eventually reach a final point where the flow slowed so much that the locks unravelled, relinquishing the current form within which Daygo flowed, into the thousands that followed.

  Through the commune, the priests were more open even than the air surrounding them. The air retained its structure, retained its independence, but through the priests’ practice they had cultivated an opening up, a surrendering of their independence. This left them exposed, open to an almost unnatural vulnerability. He felt as though he might reach out and alter them through some transcendent body that existed within the connective tissue of Daygo. Could he impose his will in some way, to enact change on another as they did unconsciously with their own bodies? Was there a fourth stage to the commune, one of manipulation?

  ******

  He delved into Uksit’s aura. He brought his attention to the command centre of the body, the wheel of energy that circled on the crown of his head. Here he found what he had come to recognise as the subconscious mind, the command system that ran almost all of the body’s behaviours. He sensed the stillness of Uksit’s mind and waited until Samadhi started to slip. Once it had, he committed himself totally to Uksit, he became him. He draped his consciousness over Uksit’s until his body was his own, until Niisa was convinced and knew it to be absolutely true. Now, knowing his new body as he now did, after years of study, he instructed. He brought his mind to the one lock that he knew was there. He told it to close. He focused completely on its closure. A minute passed. Then a twitch. Niisa suddenly abandoned his convictions. He returned to the observer. He watched as Uksit’s aura sparked, as hundreds of reactions laced through his being. For a moment he thought his system would fall into flux, but slowly it righted itself once more and returned to its natural state.