(Originally written in 2013)
From Laenif: Book 1, chapter 13: "The Bodhisattva" depicts an individual struggling with a messiah complex that is slowly consuming them. The Bodhisattva can only look on with compassionate confusion...
Candles flickered dim light across ancient mountain walls. I was sitting with my legs crossed; third eye open above my other two, which were shut. Silence echoed around the beating of hearts through the electricity of minds to softly illuminated stone walls. Time dripped from eternity to flood empty heads. Moments escaped through the quiet stillness of an infinite vibration. And then all three eyes were open. I turned towards Michael. “What are you thinking about?” I asked.
He, too, shed his eyelids. “Life,” he answered. His head was carpeted with blonde fuzz stretching through recently shaved skin. A pale tired face pervaded from creases within cheeks.
I met the bodhisattva at a Buddhist agricultural commune in North India. Michael and I were magnetically drawn to each other, stimulated by powerful galactic energies stirring between our neurons. The two of us, upon first meeting, discussed our different paths to enlightenment. Michael explained that in select teachings of both Buddhism and Hinduism, attaining full absolvent into nirvana requires absolute disintegration of both meat and mind. When both are dismantled, the soul becomes one with the eternal Buddha. But for those who reach such sublimation, a choice must be consciously made to either fade away into eternity or return to the prison of the brain and its bones. The souls that deny complete transcendence to return to their existences within the realms of desire are commonly transformed into bodhisattvas. Whether they become aware of it or not, a bodhisattva’s only duty within the physical plane is to teach the path towards enlightenment for individuals who are willing to learn it.
Michael’s lungs seized a deep breath and went on, “More in particular though, I am thinking of the things you said yesterday.”
“What things?”
He gazed into a candle’s flame. “The aliens,” Michael said. “I’ve been thinking about the little green men with three eyes…”
Freddy and I had been in India for about twenty days when my companion declared that he was in love. She was an attractive girl who knew a little English so I let lovers do their loving and I wandered off into the countryside. Soon stumbling upon the bodhisattva, who went on to explain that Michael Kenyan was once his name but that he was now, in all truth, nameless. He taught that in nirvana, there are no names or faces. All facades of Earth drop away. But he was European or American for sure and I never learned why exactly he was in India, and I wasn’t entirely sure I knew why I was there either. We were just there together, in some hole in the ground, with no need for reasons or explanations.
“I’ve been thinking about the logic of it,” he told me. “About the reality of you living in a personal relationship with an alien. And I’ve been thinking about you, Marsle, and pondering whether or not you are insane or simply a victim of some phenomenon not even you fully understand.”
I smirked, staring off into thick swirling shadows that spun around granite walls enclosing our minds in a world where only the two of us were real. “I am a manifestation of some consciousness that stretches far beyond any capacity of my own understanding. And now all I know for sure is that my heart is beating and I am alive and Ghoid’s consciousness from Laenif has manifested itself inside this human form. We have coalesced into a new beautiful mind that brings me constantly to my knees, causing a sweet surrender of self to almighty powers of this unexplainable beauty flowing ceaselessly all around, throughout, and from some holy cavern within.”
The bodhisattva was draped in a red robe with a white stretch of cloth tied around the waist. He maintained patient focus on the candle’s flickering. “Who were you before this alien changed you?”
“I don’t really know now and I didn’t even know at the time.” I exhaled, observing the smooth motion of the chest deflating as murky air fled from the ribcage. “I have some vague idea which represents itself as a shell of a person who left their family when their mother died to live a lonely life in which the true self lay dormant. Deteriorated from erosion caused by trite routines, the remnants of this diminishing self drudged, day after day, through mindless mundane activities. I worked, I went to church, and I shopped in a dull bland ignorance that consumed my head for numerous years until one day, out of the blue, I found a little green man with three eyes by the edge of a forest.”
”And how long did you live with him?” Kenyan questioned.
I sighed lightly. “Maybe a year.”
His head shook in disbelief. “Did the alien eat? Did it shit? Sleep? How did you talk to it?”
“He ate, he went to the bathroom, and he slept,” I said. “Talking was weird. We just knew what the other one was saying somehow. It was a magic mystery. Neither of us really understood it, but I don’t believe he was speaking English.” I choked on a laugh. “Those were small details that whizzed by unnoticed almost. There was a throbbing, intense love between us- beyond romance or kinship. A distinct cosmic compassion left an impression on me that surpassed any other dimensions of our relationship.”
Michael sat still silent for a small moment, staring deep into the nothingness surrounding us. His tiring pupils then roamed heavily about my facial expression. “So how did it end? How did he become a part of you and disappear?”
I shut my eyes when his questions wrapped around nerves. A breath filled me before escaping lungs softly. Observing the bodhisattva’s presence, I said, “It started one evening when the sun began to sink. We were talking at a table by a window in my small home. And then our conversation intensified, as they occasionally did…” I stopped briefly as visual receptors absorbed a flame’s emanations and shadows. Dim reflections danced across the cave’s walls. “I don’t know how it happened,” I declared, “but Ghoid slipped inside me. Everything suddenly went black. The sun set and the world disappeared and there was nothing. During our conservation, he weakly tried to explain what was going to happen, but most of his words drowned in the pounding of my heart.
“And I remember feeling as though the world had vanished, the sun but a victim to evaporation. Of all the things he tried to tell me before this moment, I remember Ghoid saying that we were going to see and feel everything to ever be in the entire history of the atoms that composed all the Earth; even my bones, my brain, and my blood.” I shifted my weight around to peek at Kenyan, who was listening attentively with wide sagging eyes. “But it was so much more than that.”
The shadows of his red robe crashed into the candle’s fire. “What did you see?”
“I saw an explosion,” I answered. “The darkness that introduced this elucidation was erased by a bright, soul-numbing explosion of life. Bright pure white energy quickly became suns that spun until they too popped in their own explosions. From their death came clouds and soon more suns spun into existence and then there was Earth.”
Kenyan exposed his grin. “So you were slowly zooming in from the cold ancient night of a dark empty universe into the perception you manifested as here on this rock orbiting around a sun within grand clusters of energy that we once decided to call galaxies.”
“Yeah.” I smiled briefly. “As I saw the Earth form itself into a lifeless abyss of rock and mist, I feared the beginning of our planet’s celestial life. I could feel it approaching. I could feel its birth brewing in the growing oceans to flood and cool exploding volcanic rocks, which saturated the world’s childhood.”
“Through what eyes did you witness the evolution of all of Earth’s life?”
“I cannot say.” I stretched my legs to loosen the tension growing in muscles. “In truth, the flashes that composed this dream were too convoluted at these deepest parts of the vision to drag up any comprehendible memory of those moments now. By the time I could see the life, there were too many of my senses getting stimulated to make any tangible sense of it. There were too many images and sounds and colors and… emotions.” My arms shook as I contemplated the memory further.
“I could feel the evolution of human emotion and it troubled me deeply. It was love, anger, suffering, ecstasy, curiosity, and fear squished together into some confusing cocktail that I drank in one gulp. It knocked me off my ass and I have been unable to salvage any certain clarity from these last seconds of my experience. And still, when I awoke from the dream, I was unimaginably humble. I was content with every atom in the vast holy orchestra of our universe. Reality became clearer and alive and new. Everything felt different with three eyes.”
There was then a lucid hum buzzing amongst a pocket of silence that contained an unspeakable truth. The reality of the moment had become drenched in paralyzing peace. The beauty of the universe; a calm so strong it would not allow our tongues to move any longer.
Until the bodhisattva said, “My enlightenment is not as easy as yours.” Startling dark shrouds hung atop the shoulders of these words. “I did not have a companion to hold my hand and whisper the truth in my ear. I had to fight for every crumb of truth I realized; for every drop of divinity I have witnessed. I had to squeeze it from myself, and from the world around me, like juicing blood out of a rock.
“And maintaining this state of mind is even harder than it was to attain it. Some days I feel as though it was all a cruel joke my psyche played on itself. I have no proof of higher consciousness gazing atop my forehead like you. I have no otherworldly mystic energy orbiting my heart. I have had to submit myself to isolation, stubborn dedication, endless self-examination, self-destruction, re-construction, and a tireless fight against petty temptations to maintain my awakening states.” His voice smelled dark like a black widow’s legs tangled in its web. “How lucky you are, Marsle.”
“This is not luck,” I snapped. “This eye is a cruel scar ceaselessly reminding me of impossible endeavors. This eye is the eye of the fates and I have lost my fellow sisters. Humanity has abandoned me…”
From Toronto to Arlington to Memphis to Santa Fe to San Diego onward into the vast empty Pacific Ocean toward Honolulu to Okinawa to Guanling off further my blood flowed to Kolkata to this cave in Sontalai, and all the while, all of humanity felt identical in all of these places. From the Natives in caves of Arizona to the reclusive fishermen floating towards Japan to even the bodhisattva sitting beside me, all humans seemed to be struggling to live lives of some construed morality. Yet despite this, all of mankind’s cumulative natural endeavors appeared thwarted by some corruption in their minds, in maybe Earth’s whole mind. A persistent belligerence and resentment swam amidst the world’s souls; through my soul still. It was inescapable. The coils of this snake encompass all.
I arose to enclose the flame burning, darkening the cave. Dim morning daylight could be seen sliding underneath dark yellow curtains. I stared into the bodhisattva’s cold shaded face. “There is no sanity to be found in the human mind,” I grumbled. “The visions of this blessed eye are useless when viewed alone. Truth is too cold alone. My fellow brothers and sisters appear unable to hear peace’s siren as she urges our legs to stop running toward destruction.”
The room grew hot while an uncomfortable, but oddly familiar, hostility itched in the veins and made my forehead sting. I felt suddenly and irrationally like I had been wrong about everything. If no matter where on Earth I crawled to, I was unsuccessful at inspiring some miscellaneous change in the hearts of men, then I must have been doing something irrevocably wrong.
I had found many intelligent people, many peaceful people, and many very friendly people, but I, myself, was not able to spread the love others had found to those who had not found it. I should’ve listened to Victor Roberts. He was right all along. The truth has to be found within an individual by the very same individual, and there was nothing I could do other than accept this truth. Therefore, alas!- the only logical action to take anymore was to go be alone. The only way to appease my failure and suffering was to absolve my own mind to itself. For I had done nothing but chase the sun around this planet to find it was all the same. So maybe, I thought, if I surrendered my body to the absolute truth of the universe- whatever it may be- then that one Godly truth would be able to wash over the eyes of men and let them see the sun, in its true magnificence, for the first time. Brighter than Buddha.
“I mean…” I started gravitating toward those dark yellow curtains cloaking us away from the world. “…if large populations of people were willing to sacrifice themselves toward collectively designing a new culture of human existence, then a necessary change could be implemented within our nature that would allow us to evolve to higher states of consciousness…”
“Well then what would come next?” Mike questioned, emerging from his silence. “What do we do then?
“About what more is to come…” I let the sun flow in by opening a drape. “I can only dream…”
“Where are you going?” He protested, “Wait!”
I peeked one last time into his eyes. “What?”
“I have a son.” His voice spoke in a hushed tone as if it were a confession. “And it is a fact that I will never see him again, but I know he exists. The desire to hold him once more cannot be purged from my veins. I know he’s out there somewhere. I miss him so much that it eats me constantly. It gnaws at me from inside my chest. And so total peace is impossible for me because this suffering will endure inside my soul for as long as this body and memory persist.” He hid his eyes. “How can you bring peace to the world if peace is impossible for some of our hearts?”
“I’m not trying to end all suffering on Earth,” I said. “It’s becoming apparent to me now that peace will have to mean something else.” I then left that dark space to leave this small town in India, never saying goodbye to Mike, and never seeing Freddy again.
Written by BW Derge, All Rights Reserved 2024
© USA
This was an excerpt from Laenif: Book One (2013), chapter thirteen: The Bodhisattva
