Sunya & Tithata III: The Web of Life

Sunya & Tithata III

THE WEB OF LIFE

The dizzying sticato flicker of the monitor screen was all that kept Sunya awake. Every time she drooped easfully into a luxurious state of semi conscioussness, it would yank her back violently into reality.

'Reality'. That was perhaps a misleading term.

She had gritted her teeth and relayed to her little and yet bewilderingly at once both mature and innocent sister the tale of last night's ill advised flirting with the grim reaper.

Of course, she had understood. She understood everything, that girl, without, it appeared, much effort.

She probably would have understood if Sunya had told her 'Sorry, Tath, but I held a wild party in your room with my drinking mates and they, er, dropped alcohol all over your philosophy books'.

She's most likely understand if she'd told her; 'Sorry, Tath, but I held a REALLY wild party in your room with my piromaniac friends and they, er, BURNT all your philosophy books.'

Hell, she'd even understand if she'd said: 'Sorry, Tath, but I held a REALLY, REALLY wild party with my paranoid delusional serial killer mates and we, er, decided to reinact a scene from the texas chainsaw massacre and, you know, you were in the room at the time; sorry about the blood and the... severed limbs and stuff..'

Sunya rubbed her eyes and scoulded herself for harbouring such black humour.

Existence itself is suffering, right? Then what's wrong with such humour?

Existence is a funny thing. Funny mainly in that it... doesn't really exist.

Actually, this was getting all too much for Sunya, and since barely twenty four hours had passed since her 'revelation', that was mabye a bad sign.

Tathata had leant her a book of Buddhist scripture, which, after many failed attempts to decifer the meaning of the opening few verses, Sunya had deemed a perfect headrest.

'Well, what is it the Zen masters say; when you've read the scriptures and its cold, use them for firewood, right?'

Sunya's comment would have been a fairer portrayal of the enlightened mind if she had indeed ventured to read the mammoth tome BEFORE condemning it to its current reincarnation as a particularly uncomfortable pillow.

At least Tathata wouldn't tell mum of her big, stupid sister's self destructive exploits.

Sunya had made her promise to keep it to herself, and Buddhists don't lie, right?

Sunya quickly skimmed through the book to a section on ethics which proved just as cryptic as the rest of the thing. Actually, she wasn't quite sure.

'Its all ten of that, sixty three of this, eighty seven of that.....' She felt like she was in a maths class. Which had reminded her; class.

She had homework to do, and to be honest Tathata's book, although the thinking behind its lending was nothing but compassionate, had made her APPRECIATIVE of the fact that she had other labourious things to do.

'If I read any more of THAT I'd probably end up killing myself.' The irony was entirely lost on her.

She scrambled around in her folder to retrive a crumpled collection of lecture notes and flicked on the modem with a weary hand.

What was the point of all this, anyway? OK, so it wasn't worth dying for, that was for sure; she'd established that.

But that didn't make all this... being alive make any more sense?

It was like, you live, you die. What's the point of doing HOMEWORK?

That said, the alternative was NOT doing homework and getting a bollocking from her tutor tommorow.....

'No..... ANOTHER alternative is killing myself like I was GOING to and not having to even SEE my tutor tommorow, or any other time...' But some deep, inner, gut wrenching, heart felt, completely purposeless motivation... um... PURPOSED her to stay alive, and, better still, awake to get this thing done.

'Driven by destiny, yeah, that's me.' Sunya's sarcasm was even more clumsily hidden that her irony.

So she'd got to a search engine, and gathered her notes into something at least RESEMBLING order.

Funny thing was, whenever she got this far, only one thought crossed her mind in the form of an old and admittedly slightly amended proverb; 'If you can't be bothered to suceed under your own devices; cheat.' And that meant study guides.

Sunya was supposed to be researching artistic symbolism in Franco Zapharelli's classic rendition of Romeo and Juliet. This was the bane of doing a film studies course.

The positive side was that lectures involved watching movies. They were free, it was dark, you could sleep if the film was bad.

The negative side? You had to REMEBER what you'd seen in vivid detail (DESPITE being deep in the land of nod throughout) and write rambling, complicated essays about it. Oh, and there was no popcorn.

'How the hell do you spell 'Zapharelli?' This was not a good sign. The first thing examiners tended to notice was if you'd spelt the essay time correctly. Sunya was staring at a big, fat 'fail' mark.

'Mabye I'll just search under 'Zaph' and see what we get.... 287 matches. I'm gonna need more coffee. OK, Zap, Zip... What's this?'

E-GROUP CONCENING THE SPIRITUAL ADVENTURES OF ZAPH: UNCOVERING THE IDEAS OF BUDDHISM FROM AN EASILY APPROACHABLE ANGLE, OPEN TO NOVICES AND ADEPTS ALIKE.

'Well, this isn't exactly my homework, but mabye if I read some of this stuff I'd understand where my sister's coming from....'

Sunya possesed both a heedless soul and a wandering mind, which didn't bode well when all through the world there are various metaphorical clifftops and perpetual spiritual darkness, but sometimes with a good measure of luck, potential lemmings become... well... learned lemmings.

She connected to the site and began reading people's posts. People like her. People not particularly 'religious' but deeply spiritual. People not grotesquely 'doctrinal' but unquestionably moral.

A lot of what she read reminded her of her, which brough about a strange feeling of no-self.

Both the homework and the scripture she used as arm rests, and concentrated intead on the screen. 'Better the middle path, Tathata always says'. Perhaps she was getting the hang of all this philosophical stuff.

One person's posts struck home more than others.

One other lost soul staggering around in the vastness of space, or should that be VIRTUAL space, searching for some philosophical concept to call his own. For some solace to label 'home'.

His: Zeph was his name: comments on the spiritual realizations of the e-group's main protagonist seemed uncannily similar to her own, perhaps only because neither he or Sunya had the faintest idea of what was going on here, and, futhermore, what weird and often forboding transformations were going on in their own psyches.

In his most recent post, Zeph just said:

I don't get it.

So I'm not me.

Who am I then?

Am I nobody?

That's not good, is it?

I mean, if there's no self, who am I?

Am I dreaming all this?

But wait: I can't even dream all this, because if there was someone dreaming, surely it would have to be me, and how can I be dreaming about me if I'm not me?

None of this makes sense.

Sunya concured, and the thought came to mind that if she wasn't she, and he not he, and the world a mere illusion, then the world was like a computer game.

You're just staring at the screen all the time, and all this stuff goes on and still these things happen, and really none of this happens at all.

It's all just happening on a screen that you're transfixed to and you're so caught up by it; so fooled by it, that you never once think to turn around away from the screen and take a loom at the real world.

Mabye that was what spiritual realization was about; turning around away from the screen and looking at the real world.

She swiftly typed all those wandering thoughts down as best she could, which admittedly was not very well, and sent them off via E-mail to Zeph.

Strange how quickly things can travel all the way around without even really moving. In fact, without really even EXISTING in any kind of real shape or form in the first place, and yet STILL there they appear on someone else's desktop on the other side of the globe in seconds and have a profound effect on their REAL, physical lives.

After that, Sunya turned off the computer quickly as if a dozey druid recognising a cursed chalice a little too late and swiftly disposing of the item before he came out in blotches and boils.

That computer metaphor hit home a bit too brutally. It caught the feel of that nihilistic philosophical direction Sunya had spurned many a time in the past; that idea that nothing truly 'exists'.

Being and nothingness: a phrase coined by Sartre: was quite apt here.

Alan Watts had said that 'In your fundemental existence you are the total energy of this universe playing the game of being you. The fundemental game of this world is the game of hide and seek.'

Sunya had spent a lifetime hiding. Mabye it was time to seek. Mabye it was time to turn away from the computer screen of life; to forget the 'game' for once and embrace the reality around her, if it was any more than unreality at all. Mabye it was time she give her brain a rest and get herself thinking straight again, or at least NORMALLY.

But that computer metaphor; the internet metaphor: was enough to convince her of something she really didn't want to know.

That everything of this world is intrinsically empty.

She wondered if Zeph thought the same.

On to Part Four

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