Once again, I fell interminably through a scintillating tunnel of light. By now, it was starting to seem like old hat. It is truly amazing how something can start out as so threatening and surreal but within a couple of repetitions end up like another mundane day at the office.
When my vision resolved, I found myself in darkness. I couldn’t see anything, but felt as if I were sitting upright with my legs crossed on a thin cushion. I could feel the regular firmness of hard-surface flooring beneath me. The air was suffused with an exotic smell, some sort of pungent incense. I could hear wind whistling outside and from time to time a particularly strong gust would stir against my skin. And then my body opened its eyes and I could see again.
I was sitting in a small stone room, maybe eight feet wide and of slightly greater length. The only furnishings in the room were a low wooden cot and a small table with an incense burner, a wooden pitcher and a chipped stone wash basin. On the wall was a small window without a frame, a couple of hands-breadth wide but significantly taller. Hanging from a hook on the wall was a threadbare set of brown roughspun robes. As the wind gusted, I could feel the breeze from the window on my face. The sky outside the window glimmered with the pale light of the false dawn.
In my last vision, the cabin that I had seen seemed warm and comfortable and inviting. This room, on the other hand, reminded me more of my time in the county jail. It was very spare and ascetic. I wondered if I had spawned into the body of a prisoner.
My body stood and bowed towards the window, in the direction the rising sun. Then, it walked over and retrieved the robes from the hook. Donning them, I immediately felt warmer. The scratchiness of the fiber made my skin itch. I really needed to scratch my back because the itch was driving me crazy but, of course, I couldn’t control my body so I was forced to accept the torture.
After donning the robes, my body washed its face with water from the basin. The water was not warm, the cleansing uncomfortable. Then, spinning around, I could see the other side of the room. On the wall was a narrow wooden door. We walked to the door and reached down, opening it. Stepping through the door, I found myself in a worked stone hallway. On the opposite side of the hallway was another similar door. Turning to the right, I noticed that the hallway continued for a couple of dozen yards and ended in an open passage. On each side of the hallway were a large number of similar doors. The hallway was lit intermittently with a series of what I assumed to be oil lanterns, the stench from the rendered fat permeating the air.
Down the hall towards the opening at the end we went. As we approached, I was able to see that the open passage was actually a set of stairs that led both upward and downward. Taking the stairs down, I soon found myself under a low portico adjoining a large open space. Other buildings surrounded the yard, which appeared to be set up for some sort of training. All of the buildings were made of a dark gray smoothly worked stone.
There were other people already in the area. I spied several other figures moving about or seated on thin cushions in a rock garden, apparently meditating. They all appeared to be human men and women, and they were all dressed in similar robes. A couple of the people were running laps around the yard, which was square in shape and approximately one hundred yards long on each side. Others were performing some sort of stretching routine, apparently limbering up for imminent exercise of some sort. Each of them demonstrated a substantial degree of flexibility. We walked over to join them.
Slowly, my body began to perform stretches. I could feel aches and pains in my back and my knees, but soon enough those started to fade as my muscles, ligaments and tendons warmed up. My center of balance felt quite a bit different from what I was accustomed to, as if my pelvic angle had changed. I assumed that I was in the body of a woman, specifically the woman that I had seen in my dreams. Change in center of gravity or not, I could tell that this body possessed impeccable balance, strength and coordination. Moving from stretching exercises, my body began performing strength training. One leg squats with the other leg parallel to the ground in front of me were no problem. Neither were a variety of pushups, explosive burpees, and the like. Every exercise seemed easy, as if they posed little challenge and barely strained this body.
As the exercises continued, many more people had arrived at the training yard. The crowd grew from the fifty or so that were there when I had arrived to several hundred. After a few more minutes, the air was split by the basso rumble of a large gong being struck three times. As the sound of the gong faded, the people in the yard, myself included, scurried to form up in a series of well-spaced rows. The row that we lined up in was at the very front, and from what I could see of the people around me most of them appeared to be middle-aged or older. A old man stepped from the ranks next to me and then slowly walked to the front of the assembly. Spinning around, he bowed towards us and in turn everyone, myself included, returned his bow.
Coming to rest for a couple of beats, he turned his back to the crowd and then started to move, everyone else mirroring his movements. I had spent enough time doing martial arts to recognize the start of a kata, a fighting form. This one was performed slowly, almost like tai chi, but some of the moves seemed too extreme to perform at this languid speed. After every series of movements, the final technique was held for several seconds, and some of those maneuvers included a side kick held a foot over the head, a dip into forward splits, and a deep lunging punch. At times, the orientation of the lines would change as we spun or moved from side to side. I could see that nobody in my immediate vicinity had any trouble with the routine, but when I faced away from my original orientation I could tell that some people in the back couple of rows were struggling.
The form continued for quite awhile, perhaps half an hour or more, until finally the man leading the exercise returned to his original position. Turning back towards us, he once again bowed, receiving a bow in return. Then the gong thundered out again and the group started to disperse.
The woman directly to my right turned to me.
“I thought you were injured on your trip,” she said. “You should have rested for a few days before resuming training. You don’t want to permanently injure yourself.”
The voice from my dream, pleasant but roughened by the ravages of time, replied. “I haven’t missed a day of training in thirty years. Why would I start today?”
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My training partner snorted in amusement, her lips twitching up into a half smile. Then, without another word, she turned and headed out of the yard to go about her business.
We just stood there for a moment as activity bustled around us. The group was breaking up to perform a variety of different tasks. Some people stayed in the yard and were headed to combat training, with or without weapons. Others were performing a variety of chores to maintain the grounds, sweeping, raking, trimming and the like. Finally, we turned and began heading across the square from where we had entered, our destination the largest building adjoining the training yard. It looked like a cross between a cathedral and the administration building of a large university. Flanked by two symmetrical wings that were each two stories high, the center area rose twice as tall and was capped by a tall, roofed tower with an open area on the top. When we glanced upwards, I could see that the tower’s platform held a bronze gong that was a dozen feet across.
Continuing into one of the wings of the building, we arrived at a hallway that appeared to contain classrooms. After walking down the passage past several rooms, some that already contained groups of people receiving instruction, we turned and entered a chamber. The room held rows of low cushions, and on the cushions were a variety of younger men and women. Most looked like they were in their late teens. Unlike the robe that my body had donned earlier, theirs appeared less tattered and threadbare, as if they were new and had recently been issued. As we entered the room, the gentle murmur of quiet conversation cut off and all eyes turned to us expectantly.
Striding to the front of the room, we turned to face the class. My eyes briefly moved from person to person, studying each for moment. Then, with a clearing of her throat, my host began speaking.
“So, you want to learn magic. Hopefully, your desire springs from an intent to strengthen your own intrinsic natures, and you are not here merely to grasp at power. I can tell you that until you fully understand yourself, realize what your affinities are and carry the strength of those convictions, you will nothing to show for your efforts.”
Pausing for a few seconds to study the reactions of the students, her voice continued.
“What you are defines the feats you are able to perform. Meditation is the tool we use to know ourselves, to reflect on the world around us and our place in it. To determine how we fit in. To glimpse the world above us. And make no mistake, there is a world above ours. One not of things but of ideas, of concepts. When we sufficiently align ourselves with those concepts, whatever they may be, only then can we manifest the power of those concepts in our world. That is what we call magic.”
Reaching into the pocket of her robe, my host drew out an orange fruit of some sort.
“What is this?” she asked the class.
One of the students near the back of the room, a young man with a haughty expression on his face, tried to stifle a laugh as he replied. “That is the fruit of the Parsing tree. Are you telling me that there is magic in that?”
“How do you know what a fruit is, or what a Parsing tree is?” my body replied.
I thought I could see where this was going. I had studied enough philosophy to have been exposed to the idea of forms or archetypes. Platonic metaphysics relied on the idea of logos, of forms. The forms existed on a plane removed from our mundane reality, the perfect representation of their type of object or idea. Plato posited that we were able to identify and categorize things based upon their resemblance to and their participation in those forms. Thus, for example, we were able to identify our imperfectly manifested chairs because each of those chairs participated in the form of the chair that existed on this plane of absolute and unchangeable ideas and concepts. Other philosophers had taken the ball and run with it. Karl Jung, for example, applied a similar theory to psychology. He thought that there were archetypes that are the bedrock of human behavior that could be seen across many different unrelated cultures.
The young man was apparently not a believer though. He replied to the question, even though I believe it was meant to be rhetorical.
“I know what a fruit is, what a type of tree is, because my parents told me that is what they were when I was learning to talk.”
“And where did they receive that knowledge?” my host replied.
“From their parents, going back to the first person to name the thing, I assume,” the boy responded.
“So, are you an adherent to the idea that magic comes from naming?” my voice replied.
“I don’t know where magic comes from, that’s what you are here to teach us,” he replied with a hint of derision in his voice.
“Perhaps a practical demonstration is in order. I have spent many years thinking about the qualities that make me who I am,” my voice replied. “One thing I have determined is that I am steadfast. If I do not choose to be moved I will not be. Please approach.”
The boy stood and walked to the front of the class. He hulked over me with the well-muscled vigor of youth. I felt a low power pulsing through my body, starting in the center of my chest and spreading downward into my feet.
“You look to be a strong young man, and I am nothing but a scrawny old woman,” my host said, looking him in the eye. “Certainly, it should be no problem for you to move me from this spot on the floor.
“It won’t be a problem,” the boy replied. “I am sorry if I cause you harm.”
He then placed his hands on my hips and attempted to shove us backwards. I could hear his feet slipping on the floor as he tried to find traction but my body was undisturbed and had not moved even a fraction of an inch.
“Surely that’s not the best you can do,” my body intoned. “Why not get a running start?”
So, the boy stepped back several feet and lowered his shoulder. Charging forward, he attempted a tackle that would make an American football player proud, powering into my body’s midsection with his shoulder. Instead of moving us from the spot in front of the class, he bounced off, crumpling to the ground with a groan of pain.
The next several minutes of the class were spent with various combinations of students attempting, individually and together, to move my body off of this spot on the floor. They grew more and more frustrated, attempting a variety of tactics. No matter what they attempted, none of them succeeded. Finally, before things could get too out of control, my host called the exercise to a halt.
“When you know yourself, the very essence of what defines you, then you can manifest that essence in our world. That essence can be related to a virtue, a force of nature, an animal, an object. When you know yourself, you can do many wonderful and marvelous things, tapping into a power that transcends and bends our reality. Until you do, though, you are nothing but a shadow, living a half life. Let us begin.”
Then abruptly the vision ended, and I found myself back in the thicket, the powdered remains of the essence crystal pouring from my hand. Night had fallen and I was deeply exhausted, so I crawled into my bedroll and went to sleep.