Heavenly Creatures

The house was empty. I walked from room to room like a ghost. I ate. It was only when I lay down on the bed my sister and mother had used that the tears began dripping down my face. I wept silently. The pain gnawed at my insides. I wept openly now, letting out gasping sobs. I curled into a ball, and I was suddenly transported back, through lifetimes of memories.

I was running through the forest, my brother running ahead of me, wolves behind. We collapsed in a clearing, unable to run further.

“Mother, father, help us!” I yelled, hoping that my voice would carry out of the forest and bring the adults running.

My older brother picked up a stick, tears cutting up his cheeks. “I’ll protect you, brother,” he gritted out. A wolf lunged at us, and he swung the stick, hitting the wolf away—but just barely. He was too small to do much damage.

“Brother!” I sobbed. My terror and helplessness nearly choked me. “Brother!”

When a wolf bit his leg, I cried harder. I screamed when another wolf lunged at his neck. I finally got up from behind my brother, took the stick from his hand, and tried to beat the wolf off of his neck.

A sharp pain shot up my side from the exertion. The two wolves let go of my brother. The entire pack had arrived. They advanced as I stumbled back, and with a growl, their teeth ripped into me, tearing me apart. I was transported into a darkness so complete, it looked like the inky blackness of space.

I had been running from this my whole life—being alone. What I had feared most was being alone. I was finally alone, alone, alone. My brother, my protector, my sister was gone. Sun was gone. Mother and father had left me long ago.

The pain seemed as dense as a black hole. I went in and in and in, the strength of the darkness squeezing my chest painfully. I huddled into a ball, as I had done in that Mongolian forest with Sun.

Gradually, the darkness cleared until I seemed to behold a light within it all—a ray of truth.

I seemed to see numerous images floating in the light: me, as a nameless knight, fighting and killing, losing my comrades and finally losing my life. A thought came to me: who is evil, the wolves or the knight? I suddenly had a clarity of understanding that I had not had before. Mother, the wolves, and I had all been acting from ignorance, which is what people called evil.

Heaven, hell, and the six realms suddenly collapsed into the light, which I could now see was the thought I called I. Because I was, everything existed. Hell existed here, in this moment. Heaven, too, existed here, in this moment. In this moment, I created and destroyed the six realms in my mind. The only thing that truly existed was right now.

I tried to puzzle it out as my attention shifted from the scenes and memories in my mind to the thing that beheld them. Try as I might, I couldn’t get a grasp on the I behind reality. I was like the light of the sun, too bright to look directly into. Sun had said that everything in him was also in me. I could see that now. All appearances were just that—surface level appearances. Anything another did, no matter how miraculous, could also be achieved by me.

I reached back through time, to the terrified little boy I had been, to explain to him that he had died. And that death and separation were actually nothing to fear. Wasn’t I here now? Death was not truly an ending, but a transformation of matter and energy. Who knew what I might become next?

The darkness dissipated slowly but unmistakably. Lifetimes of weight sloughed off me. My breathing evened out, and sleep and exhaustion overtook me.

In my exhaustion, I dreamt that I was standing in the middle of a vast desert. A ladder lay flat on the sand. I picked it up and stuck it straight up, directly into the sun. Sun watched me from the clouds in heaven, his smile filled with peace.

When I woke up, the apartment was peaceful and silent. It had changed to mimic the Buddhist temple, but there were no statues. All of the rooms except the one I’d been sleeping in had disappeared, and there was not a speck of dust in the entire place.

For a moment, I thought I was dead. I walked out of my room, noting that I had on white linen clothes. I yelped when I saw an old man with a long white beard sitting at the dining table.

“You scared me!” I said, sitting across from him and inspecting him.

The old man smiled. “Sun told me that it was time,” he said.

“Sun?” I asked. “Did he send you?”

“No,” the old man said. “But he watches over you still. He’s waiting for you to wake up.”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked, puzzled. “Am I dead?”

“No, you’re not dead. Sun is waiting for you to wake up spiritually,” the old man clarified. “Sun is a heavenly being, and he has his own curriculum. But he could tell as he got to know you that you, although human, might be joining him in the heavenly realms soon. I’m here to teach you so when the time comes to make a choice, you can make an educated one.”

“What choice?” I asked.

“The choice to remain as you are, or transform into something new,” the old man said.

“What would I transform into?” I asked.

“The tao that can be spoken is not the true tao,” the old man said, smiling mysteriously.

I laughed nervously. “So what will you teach me?”

The old man looked around the apartment, which was bigger than I remembered. I looked with him.

“You see how clean this place is?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Maintain this level of cleanliness. And don’t neglect your prayers!”

With that, the old man disappeared, leaving me sitting alone at the table in bemusement.