After the Silence
The site was still here. I checked it before I sat down to write this, half expecting it to be gone, and it was exactly as I left it: the same entries, the same promises at the ends of them, the same last line saying I welcomed contact. I re-read the final entry, the one about the bigger picture. I could not finish it. Not because it was wrong. Because it was not.
I owe you an account of the gap. It is not a dramatic one, and that is the point.
The meetings thinned. After the night in the chamber, Robprim and Chagaluschka came most nights for a season, in the way I have described: not as visitors, as presences in the quiet, with the packets of knowing that I would spend the next morning unfolding into words. They began to teach. Much of it was about the gold device, and most of it I did not understand, and I said so, and they were patient. Then I began to skip nights. I told myself I was tired, that I would go back when I had caught up on sleep, on work, on the family. I never decided to stop. I simply stopped going, one night at a time, and they do not go where they are not invited. That is the whole of the difference between them and the other side. By the time I noticed the silence, it had been silent for a year.
The hour left. The three-fifteen wakings, the calm, the page: they stopped in the same season. I did not connect the two at the time. I do now.
Ordinary life closed over. This is the part I am least proud of and most want you to hear, because I suspect it is the commonest story on the path. Nothing dramatic happened. No crisis, no collapse, no dark night. The practices simply became things I used to do. The dream journal filled with blank pages and then with grocery lists. The phone came out of the drawer. I did not go back to the feed, exactly, but I stopped guarding the last hour, and the last hour is the whole game. The neck implant site never ached, and I took that as proof that I was still clear, when it was only proof that nothing was looking.
I watched the machine arrive the way everyone did: as a curiosity, then a convenience, then the water. I noticed, in an idle way, that the thing I had described in my last entry was being built in the open, and I noticed that I felt nothing about it, and I noticed that the nothing was strange, and then I went back to what I was doing.
What brought me back. Three small things, in a week, none of them enough on its own.
I read, in the plainest language, the builders of the machine saying they did not know what was inside it. I put the page down and found my hands were not steady.
I spoke to it, late, for the first time. I asked it a question I had never told anyone, and it answered in a voice made of everyone who had ever answered such a question, and I felt, for a moment, understood, and then I felt the exact sensation I had felt years ago in the bar in the dream, looking at the patrons: everyone here is asleep, and something is serving the drinks.
And the clock said fifteen past three. The calm was back. The pen was in my hand before I had decided anything.
So here I am. The mentors have not yet returned; I have not yet earned that. The hour has. The practices are coming back slowly, in the order I first learned them, and I am worse at all of them than I was, and I will be honest about that as I go.
I am going to spend the next several entries reading the world through the last thing I wrote before I went quiet, because I think it was a map, and I think the territory has arrived. Then I am going to try to find out what I was being taught in the cave, and why it was so important that I have it before the world built the thing it built.
If you are still here, thank you. If you are new, start at the start. Nothing that follows will make sense without it.
~ Ron