LITMIR.BIZ

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be taken a step at a time. All else is madness.

      A crescendo of birds and beasts and wind and water fills every crevice of space around him. Still, his mind finds room to shelter a faint echo. A sound so slight it could be imaginary. A ghost who remains just out of sight, ready to disappear at the threat of being seen. The sound is the voice of a great waterfall. A bridge he must cross between worlds. He moves faithfully in the direction of its call.

      The difficulty of his journey cannot be overstated. And he knows it is useless to dwell on such things. He knows that holding a focus on hardship only exaggerates its pain, gives it more attention than it deserves. Always beauty must be held in the heart, his master’s memory reminds him. Filling the mind with trouble leaves no room for beauty there either. We think our world into being.

      Holding onto misery only brings more misery into focus. All possibilities exist. But the mind has only room for one thing at a time. He focuses on his gratitude for the shelter of the fog and the coolness of the rain.

      Though this journey is the reason for his incarnation, he travels not simply for his own transformation. When he gets to where he is going, he will unlock a door for others. He will create a passage through which all generations may step into a new age.

      ****

      He is interrupted gently by his master’s voice. What do you dream? His master asks. I dream the land and I are one, he answers. He finds a crack in the fog and holds the light that slips through it. For the moment, this splinter of light is his stillpoint. It is his foothold on this murky passage.

      9

      Praeda

      The red haired woman leads a young ox along the top of the high fortress wall in front of you. Like the other oxen on the wall, including the one you are leading, her ox is an illusion. The beast itself is real enough. As are the colors of paint on its sides, the rope she uses to lead it, and the wall itself. Still, these things are not what they seem.

      Your prosperous village is under siege from an ambitious rival. It is a desirable conquest because of its rich soil, abundant water, and thriving trade. By painting the oxen and parading them atop the fortress walls like this, the villagers show defiance to their attackers. The painted oxen say without speaking, You will not starve us out.

      As the battle wages on, though, the village’s abundance has begun to wane. With rations becoming exhausted and the numbers of oxen dwindling, the woman with red hair appears at the base of the wall and gestures you down. With a pail of water and a cloth, and without explanation, she begins scrubbing the paint off the sides of your ox. Then she pats it dry and starts to paint a new design on it, using different pigments.

      You continue to walk the remaining oxen along the high walls as before. But to hide their dwindling numbers, after each one is displayed, you and the other villagers quickly wash it, paint it with different colors, and parade it again. This has become a full time endeavor, as important as fighting the actual battle.

      Eventually, the illusion works, and the attacking army retreats in defeat, suffering starvation and unsustainable losses of its own. Things are often not what they seem. And then, sometimes they are. The trick is to learn what is real.

      10

      Charybdis

      Sometimes I have trouble telling my dreams from reality. The farther I travel from some experience, the more unsure I am that it actually happened. Just like a dream, the closer I am to it, the more sure I am that it’s real.

      Where is the line? How can I trust that my image of the world is not a trick of the brain? That the external world is certain and the internal is imaginary? What if it’s the other way around? What if the things I rely upon are actually made of air? Why is it that five people in a room witnessing the same event will have sometimes dramatically different accounts of what happened? Could there ever be such a thing as an objective truth?

      I read a news story before I left the States about a man who regained his sight after having lived without it for decades. What he discovered was that his brain had forgotten how to see. He had perfect vision, but his eyes didn’t work. Things he could do effortlessly when blind became frustrating and laborious. Familiar objects became foreign, as if he awoke one day with a profound form of amnesia. Simply picking up a cup of coffee from the table took an extraordinary effort.

      In a blind world, things like shape and texture are everything. So visual images meant almost nothing to him when he regained sight. In short, he was forced to create a whole new relationship between himself and every other object in his world. Maybe the rest of us could use this kind of radical perspective shift. Maybe it would help us see ourselves and the world more clearly. More and more I get the feeling that I really don’t know anything, that I’ve been sleep walking since I was a kid.

      I had an experience when I was in Europe a while back, it’s known as a kundalini awakening. I was in an ancient underground chapel, meditating, when these flashes of light shot up from the base of my spine towards my head. My whole body was filled with a surge of electricity. I know, it sounds crazy, but unlike some things, I’m pretty sure this happened. Anyway, around the same time, I started having these dreams.

      In one series of dreams, I am a lion. And I’m going about doing lion things. And when I wake up, I’m sometimes shocked to find myself in human form. For an instant, I think I’m dreaming. I think I’m a lion dreaming that I’m a man. Eventually, I get up and make coffee and brush my teeth and somewhere along the way I settle on a reality where I’m not a lion.

      I guess my point is, if I can have dreams that I believe are real, especially while I’m in them, how’s that any different than what is happening right now? How’s it any different from what I believe is reality?

      When I was a child, I secretly believed that the world I knew while I was asleep was the real world and that my waking life was really just a dream. I’ve set down that idea for long spaces at a time, but it always has a way of catching my attention again, of reminding me it’s still on the shelf, with the other forgotten distractions. I think it hangs around because I know there’s something to it. We dismiss and forget many of our childhood notions at our peril. The world is as big as our ideas of it.

      Despite the vividness of some of my dreams, it’s usually hard for me to remember them with any consistency. Even the ones I remember have gaps in them. Sometimes large ones. Sometimes they are mostly gaps. Given what little information I am able to collect about the dream world, how can I really know anything about it?

      Whatever some people might say, it seems to me that a world in which I can fly, bend space and time, and meet with people who have been dead for years, deserves more consideration than it gets. If I weigh the waking world on one side of the scale and the dream world on the other, which one is more substantial? Doesn’t a world of endless possibilities seem more likely to contain the whole of our lives than the fraction of the world that we call real?

      ****

      I wake up on the floor. So I must have slept. And I probably incorporated the screaming Hindi television shows into my dreams. But I don’t remember them.

      My friend from Down Under pulls himself upright and rests against his backpack. It is surprisingly peaceful in here. No television opera, no bustling crowds. Just the sleepy morning stretch of the slender light of dawn. Through the glass walls we see the city start to wake up. Hungry taxi wallahs are already lining up outside. Their scurrying about reminds me of watching an ant colony under glass. I watch our packs while the Aussie goes outside to find us a ride.

      I’m a pretty confident traveler, but he insists that I beware of thieves. Not the type you’d imagine, thugs lurking in alleyways or pickpockets. Apparently, there’s a whole sub-economy here based on scamming tourists. For instance, there are more than a few taxi drivers who are paid to take you only to certain hotels, no matter where you tell them you want to go. So make sure

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