LITMIR.BIZ

      I stand in meditation as I always do, in a cosmopolitan park, in the shade, near a lake, motionless as a tree, my feet shoulder-width apart, my eyes closed, my hands folded over my navel. Usually in these sessions, which I have been doing for decades, I exist in both interior and exterior worlds, my thoughts bouncing between the two. The frequency of that bouncing is not particularly related to the success of my meditation, for the idea of forcing my mind to do anything is antithetical to my tradition. I might, therefore, feel the ache in my thigh muscles from standing so long while hearing the zing of bicycle tires on the path nearby. I might feel a chill on the back of my neck because the wind has picked up while at the same time hearing the multilingual chatter of nearby park-goers. I might get a whiff of beer and notice a heavy, gauzy feeling in my palms. I might feel a drop in barometric pressure as a storm approaches while noting that my respiration has dropped to a mere two breaths per minute.

      This time, I experience something new. It is a form of noticing, that’s true, but it’s noticing an absence rather than a presence. Rather than something changing, shifting, or appearing, I notice that I suddenly don’t hear anything at all. It’s as if I’ve got water in my ears, but I haven’t been swimming. It’s as if the familiar buzz of an air-conditioner or refrigerator has suddenly abated, as if during a power failure, say, leaving me with a sudden awareness of silence. It’s as if I’ve entered a sensory deprivation tank, but I have not; I’m still here, standing in the park. The silence is disorienting. Heavy. Unnerving. It makes me realize just how much I depend upon binaural hearing to locate my place in the world, to substantiate my presence in space. Honestly, it’s a bit nauseating.

      To reassure myself, I open my eyes. My intention is to reground myself, to remind myself where I am, and then to close them again and resume my meditation. Instead, when I loose my lids, I find myself in a field of frosted light. There is no park. There is no lake. There are no tourists, pastoralists, or revelers. All is quiet and glowing. I blink and try again. Still nothing. I wipe my eyes. I can feel the pressure of my fingers on my lids and see the darkening my proximal flesh causes, but as soon as I stop rubbing and open my eyes again, I’m back in the silent, frosted world.

      I feel a bit of panic coming on. I wonder if I’m having a stroke. I inhale deeply through my nose, hoping to pick up a whiff of something familiar or at least orienting. That’s when I realize that my sense of smell, too, has fled, or at least is offering no hint that I am any longer in my familiar park. It’s not that I smell nothing, but rather that I smell something vaguely familiar yet most definitely not the smell of my meditation park. Sighing, breathing, trying to steady myself, I focus on the pressure of the ground underfoot. There’s always feedback to be found there, even if it’s my toes being squeezed too tightly by my shoes. Usually, in this favorite spot of mine, a couple of tree roots make themselves known to me even though they are well underground. How do I usually know they’re there? Maybe it’s some energetic effusion. Maybe it’s that my weight compacts the overlying soil just enough for my sensitive monk’s feet to feel them. In any case, this time they are not there. In fact, the ground underneath feels slippery, hard, unyielding.

      In fact, it feels wet. I open my eyes again, look down, and see that I’m standing in water up to the level of my calves. My monk’s slippers, along with my white leggings and the bottom hem of black robes, are wet. Not knowing what else to do, I start to walk. That in itself is a first. I’ve meditated in the rain before, accepted being a bit sodden rather than break my mental momentum, but actually moving while in a meditative trance has only happened when I was doing tai chi, and in that case, I was very much in the waking world. After a few steps, I discover I’m headed up some kind of rise. I proceed using a martial arts technique called inch-stepping, in which I lift the front foot and slide forward, propelled by the rear. Keeping my weight on my back foot this way, I minimize the risk of slipping on the smooth surface below me.

      This seems to go on for a while, and as it does, I don’t think about the spiritual transmissions of Daoist immortals to deserving sages. Instead, I just wonder where I am and wonder again, at least fleetingly, if I’m perhaps suffering a stroke. I’ve heard that pathological cerebral events can cause this kind of synesthesia, this kind of strange experience. Maybe, it occurs to me, no time has passed at all and nothing has actually happened other than the strangling of the blood supply to some tiny portion of my brain.

      It’s at the end of those thoughts that I suddenly realize where I am. I’m not in the park, but neither am I in Stroke Land. I am, in fact, standing inside one of those little plastic turtle bowls that used to be sold at the circus (along with baby turtles) or featured in the back of Mad Magazine, National Lampoon, or comic books I used to read, right alongside brine shrimp billed as “Sea Monkeys.” The difference is, obviously, that it’s a bowl big enough for me to stand in, and it features, I now see, a monk-sized plastic palm tree. I experience a small frisson of excitement. This, truly, is a new level of meditative experience for me.

      It is when I relax into my surroundings that I see a turtle snoozing beneath the plastic palm. She raises a white eyelid and regards me.

      “Finally and at last,” she says in a twee voice.

      I recognize her to be a red-eared slider, the most common and widespread of all the world’s turtles, and precisely the one most people put into these little plastic houses before eventually flushing them, dead or dying, down the toilet. Her carapace is green. Her plastron, reflected in the plastic below us, is bright yellow with dark figures. They might be intertwining Renaissance-painting nudes.

      “What is this? What’s going on?”

      “You’re a Daoist seeker, are you not? A monk?”

      “I am.”

      “And you have questions that burn in you and a desire for both deeper and broader understanding of how things are?”

      “I do.”

      “And you’re familiar with spirit-writing? With the phenomenon of receiving transmissions, via trances or travels, from enlightened immortals, and then sharing the information?”

      I am momentarily thunderstruck. “You’re saying—”

      “Yes, yes,” the slider says impatiently. “It’s happening to you.”

      “But I thought—”

      “What, that you’d rise up on a cloud to a heavenly garden and eat peaches with bent-over old men? There are many immortals besides the proverbial eight, you know, and we appear in different forms according to what is expected, according to what will get the job done.”

      I feel a tremendous joy arise in me. “Is this really true?”

      “As true a transmission as any,” the slider answers. “The first, but not the last for you.”

      “How many will there be?”

      “Are you sure you want to know that? Wouldn’t you rather live in the moment, never knowing when another will happen, preserving a state of joyous expectation for the rest of your life?”

      “Never mind how many,” I say.

      “What I will tell you is that we immortals will all come to you in the forms of turtles. At least for now.”

      I find a dry spot on the hard, clear plastic under the tree and sit down next to her. “Here?” I ask. “In this plastic bowl? I’ll receive all my transmissions here?”

      “That would be boring.

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