One Great Year (20 page)

Sit quietly and empty your mind. Do it as many times as it takes. It is a skill and it takes practice to get good at it. Once you become proficient, meditation can become an adventure all its own. An adventure filled with images, sensations, lucid dreams, and answers. The answers to any questions you could ever ask are within you. Tap in and listen to your inner voice!

The ultimate road to enlightenment is through compassion, humility, introspection, and most importantly, love. It is by embracing these virtues and by seeking consciousness that one can find purpose, fulfillment, and spiritual enlightenment. As humans we are imperfect, though as the great philosopher Plato loved to say, “Perfection should be our goal.”

Embrace and respect nature and seek to do right by others, and your path will be blessed. Karma counts! As the Dalai Lama says, “If you can't do good, then seek to do no harm.”
⁹

Materialism, money, ego, fear of change, and self-interest above the greater good are traps. They are the lead shoes that keep people from climbing up the pyramid out of the Darkness and into the Light.

Enlightenment is a process, a journey. I cannot carry you … you must travel your own path, and the path is lit as never before.

Yours humbly, The Emissary.

Quinn knew that his customer would be arriving soon; he got dressed quickly and returned to his desk nestled among the debris of his life as the reply postings started coming in.

Anchorage411
: There is no empirical evidence that synchronicity exists. It is a totally unprovable concept, though many have tried.

Goodman567
: I've always called it my Spidey-senses. Nice to know that there is actually a name for it and other people do it too. I'm not into the whimsical crap, but I know when something rings true, and for me, synchronicity absolutely does.

Anderson88
: There's no empirical evidence it doesn't exist. There are plenty of peoples who believe in synchronicity and communing with the natural universe: The native people of North America, the Mongolians, the Hindus, the Chinese, and the Inuit, to name a few. I love the symbolism of the pyramids, the arrow to the cosmos: both ascending and descending in equal balance. Did you know the blocks in the pyramid at Giza range in shape and size, despite its perfect proportions? That means that no two paths up, or down, are the same. Mirrors life, doesn't it?

hansonrocks
: I've been reading that the Giza pyramid might have been a power plant. According to Chris Dunn's book
¹⁰
the pyramid is more than just a symbol.

savetibet911
: I think Dunn's work misses the mark a bit, but there is some evidence that the pyramid had some purpose that can't be understood in our current understanding of things. To understand the ancients, you have to think like an ancient.

Musicman
: There's evidence that the pyramids resonate energy and sound.

Msnd5687
: If we are talking about enlightenment, how do we get together and find people like ourselves without getting trapped in the religion thing, or ending up with a bunch of nut jobs?

Anderson88
: You are already coming to the right place. The World Wide Web is connective tissue. It is a grid by no mistake; it is a mirror image of the great energy matrix that links us all! Travel the Grid, your little zap of energy across the globe in a nanosecond! MIRACULOUS! And not by coincidence!! The answers are all at your fingertips. You are a part of something bigger than yourself just by reading and far more by writing.

Macdaddy1243
: People are too quick to discount religion.

Quinn loved the banter. There were some regular readers offering intelligent opinions but, judging by the number of visitors to his blog, most of the faithful signed in and never sounded off. The perfunctory demands of life called. Quinn logged off.

Quinn sat at the kitchen table surrounded by laptops and towers plagued by worms and viruses. There was so much work to be done and he had put it off too long already. He was about to get down to it when he saw the corner of an old binder buried under a stack of books. He pulled it out, toppling the pile.

He flipped through a collection of photos—his memories from Greece and Turkey, the Acropolis, the Parthenon—and bits of ancient pottery and artwork. He thought of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. They felt like old friends, a comfortable sweater, and as he turned the pages Quinn was transported. His mind was miles away in another time, smiling, laughing, and living, his face lifted to the sun, the sound of seabirds calling in his ears.

418 BC, Ancient Greece

Aristocles's father died when he was five years old. His mother, Perictione, according to custom, married her maternal uncle. Aristocles missed his beloved father but grew to love his stepfather. A child of wealth and privilege, he spent his sun-filled afternoons in lessons or at leisure.
¹¹

Aristocles's life changed forever when he was eleven. It was a sticky-hot day and he found himself unwisely wandering the docks of Athens, smelling the sour sea air. Commerce and hustle flowed all around him. Haggard fishermen lugged their heavy, rank loads by cart or over their stooped shoulders. It was a hard, dirty place that smelled of rotting fish and cat urine; he found it exhilarating. His fine leather sandals were little protection from the foulness of the place. Everywhere, servants haggled for their master's dinners and sellers scowled at being coerced down.

The boy noticed a quiet alcove cooled at least ten degrees by the shade of a nearby vessel. Tired and hot from walking, he ignored the filth and sat to rest. He opened his satchel and withdrew a scroll: the story of
Pyramus and Thisbe
.
¹²
In this tale, a beautiful girl and her true love are kept apart by their families. When the lad mistakenly believes that his love is eaten by a lion on the eve of their elopement, he kills himself. His intended bride, upon discovering him dead, kills herself.

Aristocles had carefully written out his favorite tale onto a parchment and had read it many times. He had only just begun rereading the story when the scroll was torn from his unsuspecting grasp. Startled, he looked up into the glare of the sun and made out the outline of three boys, slightly older but significantly larger than he, staring down at him with contempt.

“What here, little bull?” the tallest, thickest boy snarled as he waved the curling page in Aristocles' stunned face. He tried to get up but was pushed back to the ground, where he landed with a painful thump.

“Give it back!” Aristocles demanded futilely, still planted by a forceful palm to the hard earth beneath him.

“The pudgy
emperor
thinks we're his slaves,” the leader crowed. “You don't rule here boy, this is our territory,” he said, tossing Aristocles's document into the foul pool of seawater below. Aristocles was helpless to stop them and was now more concerned for his own safety than for his belongings. The boys laughed uproariously and squared off, legs bent, prepared to wrestle. Aristocles ignored the challenge and feebly covered his head with his arms in anticipation of their blows, helpless to stop them.

“Aih there!” a stern voice called out, intervening. Aristocles opened his eyes and looked past the three miscreants to see a wide, thick man swaggering toward them. “Bullies and bastards!” the man boomed, shaking a fist in the air as he approached. “To intimidate a boy and steal his belongings is play?” he barked, coming nose to nose with the nervous leader. In one swift motion, the rumpled man lifted the bully by the throat and dangled him like noodles over a pot, shocking all of them with his easy strength.

“How dare you laugh when your purpose is cruelty? In you go,” he said, dropping the struggling boy into the filth below. By this time the troublemaker's two accomplices had run off. Aristocles watched gleefully as his would-be assailant splashed frantically toward the edge.

“Get that scroll and return it,” the older man demanded, blocking the boy from climbing out. When the document was soggily ashore, the boy again tried to climb out. “Swim around to the pier and get out of my sight, or I'll let that putrid water bloat you like a discarded carp.”

The breathless youngster began making his way to shore. Aristocles stood beside the unusual man, studying him, as they watched the swimmer struggle. He had the sense that the surly stranger would have jumped in for rescue at the first sign of the boy being in distress, but his theory went untested. The bully successfully pulled himself out of the water a few minutes later.

Aristocles guessed that the man was somewhere around his uncle's age of forty-five, but he had obviously lived a difficult life. His ugly face was a mess of scars and lines framed by sagebrush whiskers at his brow and chin. His eyelids had white polyps and bumps on them, and his nose was a twisted lump stranded just left of center. His hairline receded well behind his ears, and the strands that he did have were stringy and long. When the protector opened his mouth to speak, his teeth and tongue were purple from wine.

“Ha! A lesson taught is worth its time!” he said, clapping Aristocles on the back, unintentionally sending the young boy stumbling toward the water's edge. “Take care! My best effort to spare you will be wasted if you cannot hold your footing and you end up in that rancid soup.”

“I owe you my great thanks. They would have left me in a heap,” Aristocles said, holding his sopping parchment and grateful that his only injury was a dull ache where he had been thumped jubilantly on the back.

“What is it you are reading?” the older man asked. He looked carefully at the rotund boy. He was not an adolescent that one would typically see at the docks alone. Obviously a son of privilege, he was an oddity. He must be inquisitive, curious, and fearless, or possibly an imbecile.

“
Pyramus and Thisbe
,” Aristocles answered condescendingly. He doubted that this unsightly commoner could read at all.

“They meet a tragic end,” the man said simply, still sizing him up. Aristocles rudely rolled his eyes without realizing it. No longer in danger, his confidence and unwarranted sense of self-importance were restored.

“Yes, I am aware,” he replied.

“It doesn't make for very enlightened reading,” the man said critically.

“It says a great deal about the power of perception,” Aristocles argued impressively.

“Well answered,” the man said, pausing. “If you want to challenge your intellect, you should come find me at my school at the painted stoa,” he said.

“The painted stoa? I have heard of you,” the boy replied with the nonchalance of an adolescent too inexperienced to be properly impressed. “You must be Socrates. You were a teacher to my uncles.”

“Aaaach! Never a teacher! A teacher seeks to impart only his limited knowledge … to pour from their own jug and fill the cups of others. I would rather learn what you know, and challenge each thought and its process … that is, if you are prepared to set aside your romantic drivel for more serious mental matters,” Socrates said, amused and unperturbed by the boy's insolence. The older man preferred the genuineness of the interaction compared to the phony, fawning, backstabbing adults that he so often had to endure.

This boy was exactly the reason Socrates had opened his school; he was a white light and still a secret to himself. Socrates imagined an untapped well of thought and contemplation within Aristocles. Just the night before, Socrates had dreamed that such a student would come to him. He suspected that it was not chance that had placed them in one another's path that day. The squat, ugly man began striding away and Aristocles called after him cynically.

“What's your fee, old man?”

“The conversation is free, for the love of knowledge, but leave your condescension with your wet nurse,” Socrates answered with a crooked grin and was gone.

Aristocles walked home distractedly, contemplating Socrates. He had never met such a fascinating character. He could not imagine his uncles dangling a fishing line, let alone a boy, over the filthy dockside. And this was the renowned philosopher and educator; how could it be so?

Within the week, curiosity and a desire to learn delivered him to the door of his new mentor, who expectantly greeted him by saying, “What took you so long?” His education began immediately.

Aristocles had been a playful, carefree child, but as early as eight years old he had grown contemplative, as though waiting for something. He had begun to feel ill at ease, and he was inexplicably in a constant state of “should be elsewhere.” Aristocles had felt that he was different and that he was destined to do something great, but to others he seemed an oddity, an old man in children's clothing.

Aristocles discovered gradually, as he aged, that he had an internal voice, a daemonion,
¹³
that eventually became known to him as Marcus. Afraid of ridicule, the boy told no one about Marcus but grew to trust the voice implicitly. It was a part of him, a clever and ancient part of him that had many stories and much wisdom to share.