Caterpillar

By Max Dariush Baker

As he turned to walk away from the porch of the Kodo household all those years ago, Orlan's mother had ordered him to stay with the family, enabling the support of his pregnant sister with a fatherless child. 

When the argument began to escalate his father stepped off the porch, light

• Language: English
• Publisher: Max Dariush Baker
• Release date: Jan 26, 2024
• ISBN: 9781916981867

Book preview

The Unfamilar Welcome of a Foreign Breath

Every time the heart breaks a little it grows a little.  Insecurity is part of the heart; a ventricle, and the tricuspid valve emulates the push and pull of cognition.

Tathagata Buddha kept no secrets.  The parchment of his gentle smile showing every inch of his peaceful solitude.  Eventually, the avenue ventral to awakening and dorsal to a firm foundation to a new spiritual intuition – every thought will have to be accounted for.  The many junctions of emotive understanding claim all philosophies – most often not decipitate, for the edicts of false religion may stifle the spontaneity of lived experience.

What wizardry, Zeus witnessed – sitting and smoking on the rings of Saturn, blowing his smoke into the sails of a solar ship; the surrounded spirit of the broken worlds in the single mind of a boy.  The cruelty that would take hold of unknowing; take the magnification of simple instinct and endeavour to implant the seat of hatred.  The boy survived and thrived.  The Gold Caterpillar issuing forth from his meditation after years of expelling effluent.  Beyond where there is no beyond, as taught by the septuagenarian nun – she said:

Fill the emptiness with anything you wish.

The secret of Buddhism imparted by an unexpected teacher sitting to his right – at least unexpected to a wide-eyed boy, brimming over with excitement as disciplined wisdom with death defying honesty seeping through the pores of the expected teacher seated full lotus before him.

But enlightenment remains, and an incongruent truth. That the root cause of all psychological disposition is existential depression.  The crushing truth that all good people reflect upon and can hardly breath a word of what their Love has seen.  Starch and nerve gas.  The children.

Orlo then untied his laces and slid off his shoes.  He walked slowly to the ocean’s edge and screamed:

Hades, I summon you!  Be the Gods we need!  Shebu needs your courage.  She can hardly recognise the tumult at her core, let alone for the lamentation for the desolate lonely death of her child.

He stared deep into the wine-dark blackness.  And there, looking back at him were the ten-thousand armies, each, ten-thousand strong.  Merciless warriors.

Orlo thought:

‘I will tame this phalanx.  I am one with darkness.  They cannot kill what they cannot see.  I am immaterial.  They cannot kill what they cannot touch’.

‘Those bastards that violated me, still following my every thought’.

‘I will outsmart them.  If I am evil and only express kindness it will undo their magic.  I need this army to find enlightenment.  To wake up.  I was taught once, at the Wat in Chiang Mai, about the kindness of a mosquito.  That it leaves behind an oddly pleasant itchy-scratch as a thank you.  This is the way of Life.  Life responds to Love.  Even a scorpion.  Solitary hunter that follows its nature to sting.  But as the ages wield and unfold there will be waiting for me, my philosophy, that will make sense of a scorpion’s destiny’.

Orlo addressed them once more:

Just as the darkness your death, just as the darkness follow me into the Light.  I split you now into three armies.  One for the Orchard Paradise and for the soul; One for rebirth and non-self.  And the third of Deterministic Nihilism.  The third, you are luckiest of all.  Just follow your nature like a scorpion, and in hedonism that craves no grave, sting if I order you to sting.  Hear the truth of these words.  I know you.  I have lived and died many times by your side as an unseen friend.  You are keen with the apparition of human truth – so, do you see a falsehood amongst me?

Then Hades answered back from the bleak black.

Yes.  Truth.  At last.  We follow.  Even if it must mean light.

A butterfly, dazzled by the arcade lights, landed on Orlo’s forearm.  Terrified of hurting a living creature and little three voices returned out of the tumultuous missing sky:

It will Live again.

Its nature is everlasting.

Its sorrows will cease one day.

Then in chorus:

These three reasons not to kill a living thing without just cause!

But what is just?  Orlo requested.

Wisdom will teach you.  A new path.  A human path, never to reach enlightenment.  The endless Boddhisatva.  Lead us.  Lead us beyond infinity.

Constancy of the remembering Soul reflected upon what he could not forget.  The vicious reprimand of reckless volitional thought and action.  He wanted the short path, desperately. He vied for forgiveness, of what he felt for the first time in centuries, now that Deterministic Nihilism gave him existence and little room for his thoughts to breath.  He addressed Orlo.

Teach me this path.

"Call on the armies of Hades to assist you and every door will close to you.  Even the one that opens, and behind that door is yet another prison, and in that prison only your fears.  Nothing but fear will be your closest friend, and you’ll have no choice but to learn from it.  This is the long path.  The short path is much easier.  Let go of your desires to cure the world.  Just be aware of phenomena as they arise.  Pay essential attention to your