In chapter 3 of the first book of Laenif, Ghoid recounts to Marsle about the romantic escapade he shared with a female Indopi named Aetheticia and how the experience led to enlightenment.
Chapter 3: Ghoid's Cave
When Ghoid was a kid on Laenif, he appeared as delusional as everyone else who had two eyes there. But deep down in his psyche, he knew there was more to life than what he had experienced so far. Some distinct part of him knew that there was a beautiful love somewhere that made all of life’s drama and hardship obsolete.
Back then, Ghoid’s days consisted of attempting to locate a direction to grow towards. It was as though he was a seed now sprouting and searching for a sun to stretch for. He would drift through the forest, running around to hopefully find other kids like him to play with. And they would chase each other, sing, and draw shapes in dirt.
But eventually, as it happens to us all, he noticed his childhood fleeting. His gleeful freedom became trite, neither stimulating nor satisfying him the way he was accustomed. And one day as he continued to drift along, he caught sight of another youngling. A beautiful girl with a magnificent red flower at her hips.
Ghoid walked over to her as soon as he saw her. “Hey. What’s your name?”
She giggled and scanned him. She judged him and pondered on what to do with him. “What do you want to know, again?”
Ghoid smiled. A shine escaped his eyes. “I’ve no clue. My name is Ghoid.”
“I’m Aetheticia.”
Ghoid at the time loved the name. It held so much meaning somehow. He felt laughter inside of himself as he gaped at her beautiful red bloom. The way its colorful shades reached out for beauty allowed them to penetrate Ghoid’s inner-emotion and mold it into whatever she wanted.
. This desire and attachment that Ghoid carelessly held for Aetheticia was something he should have been more cautious about diving into. How was he supposed to trust Aetheticia to guide him safely with his emotion? Did her flower make her worthy of such a responsibility?
The first time Ghoid told me about her, I could feel his reluctance to reminisce on the topic. “Were you in love with her?” I asked.
He groaned. “Love like that love is all pain. It’s like those roses you showed me, with their thorns. Even if both sides do respect and in all respects love the other, and something gorgeous grows, there will still be a discomfort, an uneasiness…”
“Fear?”
“Oh, love is so tangled with fear. As true as with life and death… They polarize each other and they feed off of each other.”
Ghoid followed Aetheticia deep into parts of the woods he had never treaded before. “So what were you doing earlier today?” she wondered.
His grin glimmered in awe for her flower as he drowned in the pleasure of acceptance. He suffocated blissfully in euphoric states, sprouting from the sensation of sharing a moment with her flower
“I was trying to find something,” he answered her as he fell more seduced by her subtle movements.
“Did you find it?” she asked.
“I think… I’m not sure yet, though.”
He wanted to know if she could feel the same connection between them that he felt. “Could it have been that illusion of a connection that separated you from the rest of the world?” I speculated once.
Ghoid said back to me, “I still hope it wasn’t just an illusion. Had I not, even slightly, rendered her subconscious? Had I not touched her soul?”
“Why would you have? Because she touched yours? If she wasn’t changed in any way by you then that means it’s possible for one soul to change another and be completely oblivious to what has been inflicted onto that other soul. Now do you think that’s possible?” When I asked him that, I don’t suppose he had a reply…
Aetheticia led him deeper and deeper into clearings and rivers that Ghoid had never even realized existed. He was enjoying a glimpse of life that allowed him to believe he was in love. He was lost in a dream.
She sat down on a rock besides a small waterfall. “I love my flower.”
He sat down beside her to comment, “I like it, too.” Her two eyes held the world to his two, causing him to shun away from recognizing his third. Her orchid made his insides bleed with lust.
“You can smell it if you like…” It smelled better than anything Ghoid had ever tasted. “You can feel it, if you’d like…” It felt smooth and pure and better than anything Ghoid had ever felt. The two swallowed each other’s mouths in a sudden eruption of wet kisses.
She stopped and peeked into his eyes. “Am I worth giving it all away to? Everything?”
“Was she?” I wondered at one point.
To Aetheticia he said, “Yes. Take it. Take it all. You are all that I will ever need. You are the intoxicating juice of life. I swear to you, I will sacrifice anything to never let go of you…”
To me he replied, “No. I have learned now that the only flower worth everything is a one built on personal intuition. A loving intuition that allows the self and the soul to evolve its own blossom; a flower of knowledge and experience. But Aetheticia’s bloom, that is a force I still crave to hold, but such craving tends to eat away at other aspects of the soul. Never to happen anyway, though, as she has others to choose, and I… well I gave up everything and came to Earth… Hmm.”
“I’ll be right back,” she told Ghoid with a departing kiss to his cheek.
“Okay,” he said. And then she left and he was alone with nothing but his mind, body, and soul on a rock by a river he had no clue how to get home from.
“How did you let her lead you there?” I questioned.
He answered, “I don’t know. But I never thought she wouldn’t return before it was time for me to retreat back to my family’s village.”
“When did you realize she wasn’t coming back?”
“After the sun had set twice,” he responded. “That’s when I figured it was time to leave that rock.”
Ravenous with hunger, Ghoid was then propelled into night’s darkness. He sorely lacked a guide, or a frame of reference able to lead him someplace safe. Aetheticia had abandoned him. He could still sense her, but physically there was nothing left. He held no certain way of returning to where he was when he met her, because she wasn’t around to lead him back. What he did discover was a cave.
“Here I can find out what I am meant for,” Ghoid whispered to himself upon entering the hole’s opening. After almost surrendering his very existence to the temptation of a flower, he was frightened about how much control he really maintained over the direction and stability of his life.
“How long were you in there?” I asked.
“In many ways I never left,” he replied. “All I remember is one night down there, I fell asleep, and when I woke up, I was in a straw hut in an unknown village, and I had my third eye.” He then smiled and turned over on his side as he was lying down on my sofa.
I was in my chair flipping through an old magazine. “What did you do while you were down in it? I can’t imagine what would pry open your third eye in the depths of a cavern…”
“I think I figured out that even as we orbit the sun, particles of space still spiral through and all around us, connecting us all,” he affirmed.
“So does the third eye bring that knowledge?” I glanced up into his green face. “Or does that knowledge bring the third eye?”
“I can’t really answer that, Marsle. I think patience and understanding beckons the third eye, but basic knowledge? At this level it’s basically irrelevant.” Ghoid explained, “The third eye is beyond knowledge. The third eye is an experience. What it does is rip away your personality and your ego. Without the restrictions of a limited self, your perception and comprehension of experiences get lifted to a whole new level. Therefore, the third eye is in a constant state of satisfaction, purity, and understanding. So one must achieve a consistently calm emotional state before opening the blessed eye…”
“How did you find calmness in the emptiness of a cave?”
“I stayed there and meditated. I let go of Aetheticia and I found my true self again,” he said. “I discovered, in killing the love she gave, that life could arise from its death, and I harnessed a great energy from it… I was able to create something more beautiful inside of myself. I was free.”
One evening in the depths of his cave, the collapsing Laenif sun shone waves of slanted light downward on Ghoid. Seated on the ground with crossed legs and an upright back, he serenely continued his meditation. He absorbed peace as air sifted about quiet stones. With eyes closed, he didn’t notice when the sun’s glimmer got eaten by a form standing in the opening of his cave.
“Ghoid!” a voice yelled. “Ghoid, is that you down there?!”
He turned around to look up at Aetheticia peering down the cavern’s mouth. The silhouette she made standing in the sun confused Ghoid. He didn’t know why she was here or how she found him. “What do you want?” he finally spoke.
“What were you hoping she would respond?” I inquired.
“I wanted to hear that she had changed for me. I wanted to hear that she still wanted me. I wanted her to say she was sorry for deserting me…”
“I’m mad at you!” she yelled back.
“For what?” He shouted up.
“You didn’t wait for me,” she cried. “I came back and you weren’t there.”
Ghoid then grunted in aggravation, trying to take a hold of the situation. He wanted to feel sorry enough to succumb to her irrationality, to apologize and say he still wanted her, but he figured she was no longer worth his soul’s surrender. “I loved you, Aetheticia,” he yelled instead. “I loved your flower, for sure. But I’m better off without you. I’m better off without the pain your insanity brings me.”
“Okay?” She then laughed.
“She laughed?” I asked.
Ghoid nodded. “She laughed.”
“And then what?”
“Then she ran away and I never saw her again.” He stopped himself for a little to reflect and then chuckled. “It would be weird if she was nothing but a dream I slept through. Nothing but a storm that shaped my life. Nothing else. And in the end, the only memories I have to comfort me about her are the ones in which I am caressing her petals.”
I watched Ghoid struggle to understand what had happened between him and this girl on Laenif. “Was it really that beautiful?”
He shook his head, remaining in a reflective daze. “It was at the time,” he told me. “When I thought her bloom was mine and that it had chosen me. It was only beautiful when I falsely believed that it accepted and loved me as much as I accepted and loved it. I was delusional. I know that now. She hardly cared about who I was. And I probably cared excessively for her. But back then I was living under a delusional presumption that one’s love for an individual came from an equivalent love inside that individual. I thought she was feeling the same things for me as I was for her. I was so happy. But I was wrong…”
He paused for a quick second. “And yet she only made me happy in those few hours I had with her because when I was with her, I thought I was something I wanted to be.”
“And what was that?”
“…meaningful…” he uttered before drifting away.
There was then a long stinging silence between us. Staring off into space and thinking about his past, I had forgotten about the magazine resting in my lap. From the corner of my sight I suspected to see tears in his eyes, but I felt unreasonably compelled to abstain from looking over to discover if there were any or not.
“What about you?” he soon wondered. “Didn’t you say you found yourself in love once?”
I glanced down at the magazine cover and sighed.
“Ghoid, I’ve been wondering something…”
He snapped out of his reminiscent hypnosis. “What’s that?”
“There have been many occasions since you’ve arrived where you’ve grown angry with humanity…”
“Well you all have so much clutter in your consciousness,” he defended. “And you refuse to release it!”
“But you’ve only met me, Ghoid. That’s my point.” The volume of my voice was gradually rising. “How do you know so much about the human race if the only human you’ve ever met is me?”
“What are you suggesting?”
“Well, if I’m the only human you’ve ever met, how do you know so much?” The blood swimming through my neck burned and itched again. My leg started bouncing and the muscles in my back were tensing. “What if your third eye is only picking up my cluttered perception? What if all of your rants have only been manifestations of my own individual ignorance?”
Ghoid had been with me over three months by this point, but time felt different ever since I had been with him. These three months in retrospect felt like ten years sometimes… and at other times, my memory of those same three months would feel as a short as a day. Everything I knew was melting and beginning to turn.
“Well you know more about humans than me,” Ghoid responded. “I know their violent ways banished my kind from Earth, but that’s it. It was you who chose to hide me from everyone else. I agreed because the Earth makes my thoughts break and my stomach knot. But I wouldn’t have stayed here like this if you hadn’t said it was the best thing to do right now.”
I looked into his third eye. “What if I made the wrong decision?”
“You’re a beautiful and amazing entity of the universe, Marsle.” He smiled at me. “It’s not like I regret this time I’ve spent with you.”
“I know,” I stated. “But what if I shouldn’t have hid you from all other people? I mean, how can you save humanity’s consciousness if the only human you ever know is me?”
“You don’t have any family or friends I could meet, do you?”
“No,” I stated.
“Well.” Ghoid squinted his lower two eyes, thinking hard. “What would have happened if you hadn’t taken me in? Or what if I stopped hiding?”
“I don’t know.” I pitifully shrugged. “I have no idea how other humans will respond to you. That’s why I hid you. When I first saw you, I knew you were special. I knew you were important. And humans can be great, but they can also be brutally evil.” I stared vulnerably into his focused expression. “I just don’t want anything malevolent to happen to you, but mostly I don’t want the government to come and take you.”
“Okay.” He seemed puzzled. “What’s this government thing?”
“Institutions that control the land, I guess.” I shook my head. “You don’t have governments on Laenif?”
Ghoid giggled. “No we do not. It sounds almost as preposterous as your concept of religions.”
“What keeps you all so in tune with the cosmos?” I urged. “Is everything ruled by science or something?”
He laughed again. “I don’t know what science is.”
I was absolutely stunned. “It’s the exploration for objective truth in our universe. It’s the pursuit for analytical reality.”
“Sounds pretentious and unnecessary,” Ghoid replied. “It seems like all of these concepts are flawed and dangerously apprehensive. I don’t get how you humans create these ambitious organizations so virally and impulsively. What became of patience here on Earth? Wasn’t it ever enough to sit back in nature’s halo and enjoy life for what it is?”
“And what is it?”
“Beautiful.”
“What about art, then?” I questioned. “And artists?”
Despite enlightenment, Ghoid had been ignorant indeed, but this ignorance was my own fault. His perception of humans had been skewed for I had forgotten to show him the places where mankind’s divinity had escaped and prevailed… true art.
“What’s that?” he asked.
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Laenif Book One - Ghoid's Cave - Aetheticia's Flower - Enlightenment - Spiritual Science Fiction