User:Yuanchosaan/A Life of Contemplation\Reflection/Five

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Third Station - Spell
The storm is beginning to grumble loudly by the time Noa finally makes it to the top. The glowering clouds loom, deep and threatening, clinging low to the mountain side, so dark that when Noa scrambles into the shrine, it seems hardly darker inside than out.

He takes three steps into the shrine. Stops. Waits.

No one goes to the third shrine, a cave of dust high in an otherwise featureless peak. The air here is a few degrees colder than the stormfront outside, a drop that feels sharper than it should. When Noa breathes in, the chill seeps in sluggishly into his lungs, as if the air itself is reluctant to move after years of stillness. It is perfectly clear, without a trace of mustiness; all the dust has long since settled to coat the floor in a soft blanket, smoothing out the features of all the objects abandoned here: an altar, scattered stones, a basin, an ancient broom.

He waits, lingering on the threshold for a welcome that the shrine no longer remembers how to give. There is no one here, no one who has called this cave a home or even a destination in years, if not decades, no one to greet a guest. There is an emptiness here that goes beyond mere human abandonment. Almost, he feels alone.

''Sometimes, you have to bring the light with you. You can make your own home.'' He thinks of Cleric Stern in his younger days, holding a torch aloft as he follows a barely trodden game path in the night, seeking some wild hamlet that may not even exist. ''Because someone may be waiting. Because He will be.''

Noa walks further. The air seems to part before him, uncertain, then sweeps around to enfold him with a sigh. The darkness lifts a little. It waits.

The broom is surprisingly solid despite its age, the ancient straw dried but not brittle. Noa hefts it experimentally, wipes the handle on his shirt. It leaves a grey streak behind. He puts it to one side for the moment to examine the altar. Gently, Noa blows, lifting off layers of dust in clouds. He sneezes, and the noise sounds oddly welcoming in the gloom.

What he thought were stones are revealed as candles: some mere stumps of wax with twisted wicks, others almost complete, though toppled on their sides. Noa rights each one, placing them in the same positions his father does on their own altar, every Sunday, without fail, without error. Even in this last year, Germain never fumbles as he lights them, not like Noa does now, his scraped palms floundering slightly with his flint in the dark, the sparks failing to wake candles stubbornly lightless for decades, his hands clumsy rather than tender.

Eventually, he manages to ignite one: the smallest, barely a stub. The others spring up warmly from it, forming a warm cocoon of light.

That’s the hardest part. Noa springs up, revitalised – there is something with him now; or, rather, he never really was alone – snatches the broom up and begins to sweep. With the kind of practical efficiency that Germain has taught him to admire, he brushes away the dust, the loneliness, the abandonment, all the debris neatly tucked into a pile that he can throw out into the open air. It’s a small cave and it doesn’t take him long to finish, and when he does, the shrine somehow feels less empty than more.

Last is the basin. With difficulty, Noa manages to dislodge it from its resting place; it is made of solid metal, so coated with grime that he cannot tell what kind. It would take him much more than a single shirt to clean. Huffing slightly, he lugs it towards the entrance of the cave.

And then, when he is standing on the threshold, the clouds finally break open. With a roar of triumph, the storm begins.

Noa can only watch, mouth open in wonder. It as if the seas have risen to the heavens to fall down to the earth. It is the Flood come again. Thunder chases lightning across the sky, and for a split-second the rain is a thousand thousand scintillating diamonds frozen in mid-air.

Without conscious thought, he lifts the basin like an offering to the storm. For a moment, the rain seems to split into streams, twining and embracing around his arms without touching the skin, and he thinks, for just that second, he can see the flow of water, he can reach out to touch it…

Lightning bursts again. The moment passes, and Noa is left standing soaked to the skin in the rain, gleaming silver immaculate in his hands. {|width="45%" align="right"
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Third Sutra - Anatta
''You keep thinking of meditation. What is it?''

It took Sonthi a moment to realise it was Se’ze’s voice. It was the first thing the Rorqual had said to him directly since the process had begun.

''Why do you ask? You could just take the memory from me''. The reply came easier now, half-soothed bitterness twining with the thoughts.

Remembering is not the same as understanding.

Within himself, Sonthi startled. Words that his father had once said to him. And yet Se’ze said them without emphasis, as if they came from itself.

Process, he thought to himself again, but the word was uttered into the space between them. For a moment, he swore he could see it, floating in the void, shimmering with other meanings – merging, fusion, evolution, gift, balance, evaluation, meditation.

''Meditation. I will show you'', he whispered.

First was the island of Saaremaa: frigid half the year, locked in ice, the stony dormitory of St John’s University perched upon its highest point, a marginally better decorated rock on top of a pile of rocks. He had meditated there more fervently than he had ever done back home, forcing his vision to go as blank as the swirling snowstorms outside. When he was made to spend the winters there, meditation was peace: a welcome emptiness to erase the cold of the climate and the rigorous, foreign curriculum, then thoughts of Siam to fill the void with warmth. Stone by stone, he would demolish the converted castle, the foundations, the island, until it was flat against the sea. Then he would build in its place Chakri Palace in all its red and gold splendour, windows open to the sky.

Even these two places are interconnected, he would tell himself. ''So long as I can meditate on Siam, it is not lost to me. So long as Siam exists, then I will still be me.''

He never dreamed that he would miss that school. And yet, there he was, flopped on a bed in some impersonal hotel in Canton, all luxury and restraint, not thinking about the reports that he was lying so carelessly on. He knew he should write down notes from the conversation he had just had with his mother – she always had pertinent criticisms for his speeches, no matter how much he polished them – and yet his thoughts kept drifting.

It was an act of discipline to bring himself to sit, to gather his thoughts into the focus of meditation. As he had a thousand times before, he summoned the island of Saaremaa, its ice, the university, the stones, all ready for him to calmly deconstruct – and hesitated.

It was peaceful in its own way. When had it become home?

His body was sitting on a bed in Canton, his self lost between Estonia and Siam. And yet, and yet…if he meditated, then he could be in all three. And perhaps that was who he was.

A third scene: another hotel room, high in the mountains of Tibet. Sonthi sat, staring at a blank laptop screen, his mind feeling equally vacant. It had been a gruelling three days – three days of nearly no sleep, two original presentations bridging Rorquals, science and culture, hours of polite conversation, diligently committing to memory every face and name, dinners steeped in etiquette and the buzz of too much alcohol.

In the emptiness of his exhausted mind, his father’s words repeated themselves endlessly. His brief video call had come as a surprise at the end of the conference – a surprise, it seemed, even to his father himself, who had worn an expression of mild consternation of his face.

''“You did very well. The pressure was immense.” A hesitation, and then: “You should be more proud of what you can achieve.”''

Pride had filled him at first, but now, staring at the screen where his father’s face had been, the words felt troubling, incomprehensible. He gathered himself again – easier now, more practiced; wouldn’t Somdej be proud? – and focused his meditation on his father’s message.

''It was praise, yes, but also – soaring horizons, behind the words. So much possibility I could achieve. This can be me.''

Things had seemed so easy, then. But now, on the Caesura, meditation seemed to have slipped away from him. There were always so many distractions, filling his head the way dust fills space, destroying its cleanliness – all the tasks he had to do, thoughts, worries, memories. There was the image of his father, the last time he had seen him: his hand, reaching out to grasp Sonthi’s, then hesitating and falling by his side.

Why didn’t you just tell me? he wanted to cry out. What did you mean? But what his father had said was, “All that you are is a gift.”

His mother was no better. Even though she was present on the ship, it always seemed that she was more interested in Se’ze than Sonthi himself. When she looked at him, he wanted to ask who she was seeing.

That, perhaps, was the crux of it. There was a Sonthi that his mother saw, a Sonthi that his father saw, and neither of them was really him. And the one that he himself saw? Who was he really, with Se’ze now bound to him?

And that is how the meditation breaks, he told Se’ze. How can I summon the emptiness of who I am not without knowing who I am?

What are we? Se’ze asked. Its voice sounded more like his now. Like his own questions, asked to himself.

Let us find out.

It was true, after all, that data was another kind of meditation. Finally, Sonthi allowed himself to let go. He had been clinging on so hard to the remnants of his old self, stubbornly and uselessly protecting it – such a human gesture. Better to flow into the everchanging stream that was data, that was Se’ze-and-Sonthi, letting himself shift with it.

In the spaces between us, we will find ourselves, one of them said.

And the other replied: In the space between, there is no self.
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