Contemplating Opposites
Michael
It seems to make sense to me that Mitch has regularly visited Master Jiyu since moving full-time to the mountain over the winter. Perhaps the kids from the St.-Germain School ("terrible name, Matthew," Master Jiyu might have said, "but I understand why you had to do it") have been here to be instructed in meditation and Zen by Master Jiyu over the past few months. Whatever the case, spring and summer are the abbey's busiest times, with visitors from down the city coming up for week-long retreats run by Jiyu's team of senior Zen teachers.
Every time Mitch visits, Jiyu's liver looks healthier and her body stronger. Mitch suspects she still hasn't cut out the treats food-wise—her weight has remained stubbornly high—but her overall health is orders of magnitude better than when Mitch healed her at the end of URIEL's August '73 visit. The past nine months have been good to her, and to the Abbey by extension.
Given enough notice she can carve out a few hours on a May afternoon to meet with Matthew/Mitch and one of the many teammates and comrades Jiyu has never formally met (the whole team came to the Abbey in August but Jiyu was too out of it to really consciously register anyone in URIEL). In preparation Jiyu has laid out traditional tea ceremony places for the three of them.
Upon meeting Jocasta, Jiyu enthusiastically and formally welcomes her to the Abbey and to her inner office. "The work and practice never stops. We've been so busy here the past few months, it's a shame we haven't had the chance to just sit and talk a while," Jiyu says to Mitch after introductions go around. "My heart's so full from the industry here. And at your school, Matthew!" Jiyu seems stuck with Mitch's cover name sometimes, she ends up using it nearly interchangeably with "Mitch"; after all, she's used to people around her having different names from the ones they were born with. "And you, Jocasta," Jiyu says turning to Jo, "what brings you to this doorstep this afternoon?"
Leonard
"Matt...Mitch speaks so highly of you," Jocasta replies. "Anyone he respects that much is someone I should know."
Jeff
"Seemed like y'all ought to meet." Mitch had, I imagine, greeted Jiyu with a brief embrace, so he steps back and lowers himself down to the mats for tea. "Jo has been dealing with some stuff," he adds, awkwardly enough that both Jocasta and Jiyu can probably perceive he's slightly anxious about this meeting and wants to deescalate any possible tension, which is of course making him slightly tense.
Leonard
Jocasta looks askance at Mitch for a brief second at 'dealing with some stuff', but decides not to pursue it. "Anyway, I'm happy to meet you. I have to confess, as much time as I have spent around Mitch, and Marshall, and Alan for that matter, I'm really not that well-versed in Zen. I was raised in the Eastern church, and now...I mean, I practice meditation, but I have seen so many paths, so many manifestations of the spirit, I guess I've become pretty agnostic around anything grounded in a specific belief system." She seems taken aback by her own oddly confessional statement. "Wow! I'm talking a lot!"
Michael
Master Jiyu smiles indulgently. "Must be the matcha. A better truth serum even than scotch whisky." Jiyu winks at Mitch, a conspiratorial "I'm off the sauce and can actually finally joke about it" gesture.
"Jocasta, I will tell you that my spiritual journey started within the most staid and restrictive dogma of the high Church of England. Was it cold, impersonal... patriarchal? Oh, of course. And this is not to say I did not encounter the very same things in Japan when I started my Zen discipleship! It may have even been worse! The word 'religion,' remember, connotes a binding, a stricture, a mantle we place over our own heads, like a horse in the bridle. But the choosing makes all the difference, you see."
"What is the point of all this discipline, then: to mortify ourselves before God, to show our submission and faith? Well, that's what the mediaeval flagellants or their descendants in the churches today might have you believe."
"The Buddha, as you might expect, is instructive in this case. He spent much time in His adulthood actively pursuing clarity, enlightenment, even offering Himself up to ordeals: the flaming coals, starving Himself, torments we cannot imagine. And He was not one step closer to clearing His mind and achieving enlightenment. But one day He remembered... the moment in His childhood when He sat under a tree and meditated and found understanding, and said: 'These torments do nothing for me except feed me illusions, neither did sensual indulgence aid my path. I will just accept a bath, a meal, and I will just sit.' And in that moment, He found the child within. He found the sudden enlightenment He had had as a child."
"We Zen teachers have the reputation of strictness, of beating our students with fans or bamboo sticks." Jiyu chuckles. "Discipline really can only come from within, and the concept of 'correction' is only useful insofar as it rescues a disciple from straying from their Middle Way."
"I understand being dubious about specificity, about choosing, Jocasta. But I tell you that all human straining for enlightenment, in all forms, is a reaching for the Lord of the House, the Godhead, the Monad, God, Allah, the Eternal and Unborn. Names do not matter; we know what It is when we see It."
Leonard
Jocasta is uncharacteristically struggling with what she wants to say. After so much time among true believers she finds herself struggling in the face of this holy woman's openness and ease.
"I...," she starts, haltingly, "I dream sometimes, of places that I don't know, but seem real to me. The drugs help me get to those places sometimes, but lately, they arrive more easily on their own. Places I've never seen, but that are home to the most fantastic and alien of spirits. Places where the world seems to have passed on, or just been suffused with a new way of living. I feel things there, and I can't really say what these feelings are, because I have never experienced them before. Maybe no one has."
She looks at Jiyu, but not right at her: above her, beyond her, at somewhere she may have opened the path to long ago. "It makes me think that if I can see these places, and understand these spirits, and feel the way I feel...maybe anyone can. But I don't know how to make them see."
Michael
"I could give you the usual lecture about māyā, Jocasta," Jiyu sighs, "about rejecting the illusions that a turbulent mind conjures up. But I'd be a rank hypocrite on that count. Matthew can tell you about a letter I wrote him last year during my convalescence that was full of the bloody things."
"I'm still trying to approach the symbols I witnessed and sensations I felt in that moment with placidity and lovingkindness. But in that endless moment between worlds, with Matthew's hands upon me, I did have something profound strike me. The suffering of my past lives, the constant cycling of this energy I now call Jiyu through saṃsāra, their suffering and loss begging for compassion. In the light of the Master of the House, at that time, all I had was awe; all I could do is report back and in the moment be blinded by the glory. But now I know I was meant to simply love those past lives. The red ribbon of compassion, dharma transmission. And the confusion and hubbub of that vision was meant as a lesson: for me to simplify, to grow, to understand, to learn, to direct towards emptiness. Life and death spin over and over; each is its own journey."
"Eliminate the illusion and desire; retain the love. Do you hoard these places that you see, Jocasta, like a miser? Do you greedily desire these worlds for yourself? Meditate. Examine what you have told me with mindfulness, with compassion, towards self and everything. Face your attachments with courage, rightness, light."
Jiyu invites Matthew silently with a gesture to join her and Jocasta in meditation.
Jeff
I mean, sure, right?
Meditation-17
>> CRITICAL SUCCESS
Leonard
Meditation-18
>> CRITICAL FAILURE (18)
Ha ha ha ha ha
This is going to be the most embarrassing critical failure of all time
Brant
lol i’m trying to conceive of what a crit fail on a meditation would be
Jeff
Anxiety attack?
Leonard
Yeah I'd almost say she should have to do a Fright Check or something
This is going to do wonders for her self-image
If a critical fail is the opposite of a critical success she does the opposite of meditating. Like, she gets really distracted by a pigeon outside and is so excited to see it she walks into a screen door
Michael
You may not be surprised to hear that Master Jiyu's own teachings use this exact example.
(I actually feel really bad for Jocasta right now. My conception of this—and Leonard, you tell me if this works for you—is that Jo usually meditates in a counterintuitive way: i.e. with the acid she's constantly soaking in, it gives her that certain express elevator to cosmic awareness that she's used successfully many times with or without her psychic abilities. Or she meditates in the way Reinhardt and the Natural Guard trained her: to a specific, mission-related end. Jo's very talented at that type of meditation, and it's worked for her up to this point. Jiyu, on the other hand, is offering classic, archetypal Zen emptiness here, an annihilation of self, as a method of meeting the Lord of the House and Jocasta's subconscious just cannot accept it. The way Jo approached this even foreshadows this kind of failure, talking about how the drugs let her see the spirits and new worlds. Jiyu tried to talk her down from that by mentioning her own visionary experience, Jo couldn't do it.
Now, where that leaves Jo is the bit I'm having trouble with. But let me narrate Mitch's critical success and we can go from there and see how Jiyu and Mitch might help her, because that's what this scene is meant to be: a teaching opportunity, and Mitch's crit will allow him to bring his teaching skill to bear on this... so Jeff, feel free to pivot off of this, and let's see if we can't give Jo another shot.)
As Mitch slips effortlessly into a meditative theta state, he finds himself needing to bat away a single fleeting intrusive thought as he sneaks a peek at Jo's uncharacteristic uncomfortable body language and turbulent aura: "Regardless of the score you are rolling against, a roll of 3 or 4 is always a success, while a roll of 17 or 18 is always a failure." Mitch envisions a bell curve-shaped wave for a split second and then his mind empties at the sound of Master Jiyu's voice. It's stern, but motherly; the voice of a mother who has watched her daughter stray too close to a boiling pot.
"You are contemplating opposites." Jiyu does not use Jo's name but Jo knows she's speaking to her. "Release this; it has nothing for you. There is no difference; there is only the Totality. You are not separate from Matthew and me. This karma that you inherited... where is it taking this splinter of the Cosmic Buddha? Why does it wander away from the other members of the flock? Are you a wolf? No, silly girl! Sweep out your stable. Do what the Buddha-mind has envisioned you for. Confront this karma."
Jeff
Regardless of the score you are rolling against, a roll of 3 or 4 is always a success, while a roll of 17 or 18 is always a failure. As true now as when it was first written.
Leonard
Jocasta, having put on a mask of serenity, tries to empty her mind only to discover that she’s distracted in a million ways and in no way able to let the mind of no-mind take over.
She bites hard into her lower lip and utters a breathy, angry “Fffffuh”. Jiyu and Mitch both could see where it was heading even if they couldn’t predict it almost ended with her driving a frustrated knuckle right into her own temple.
Just before she loses it - just as she’s about to bolt from the room, humiliated - she hears a voice. It’s Charley’s voice, which she misses so badly. “Remember what I made for you, Jo,” says the young girl in that radio-crystal voice. And suddenly she does. She remembers, and, her body sinking down into its dan-t’ien, she tries to find it: the place inside where only she can go.
Michael
Jocasta's consciousness sinks (rises?) into the Inner Astral, into the bolthole that Charley showed her in their last shared dream: the beach at Half Moon Bay. It's not an illusion, it's not māyā, it's real, as real as Rōshi's office and currently in fact coterminous with it: fully part of the imagination of the Buddha-mind and the vast wholeness of the Unborn and Undying, a place of serenity and more importantly benevolence, representative of a planet and ocean willing to share its bounty with other reflections of the Buddha-nature freely, without expectation of reciprocation but instead with the cyclical flow of mutual benevolence of nature for man, of universe for mind. Of mother for daughter.
And yes, this place is meant for Jocasta alone after Charley led her here, but on a certain level Jocasta is not alone, because here, deep deep inside the universal imagination that encompasses all dreams, all ideas, all reflections of the many-petaled lotus of universe-mind, the no-place that Charley used to call the Inner Astral Plane, all is ultimately the Same.
Jo remembers a passage from Genevieve's latest book, a bit Jo missed at WesterCon because she was too busy wrestling Andrew Krane into submission in a van headed back to Livermore, but read later when Viv got back from her tour:
"[O]ur Samsarah, the earth game, this repetition of karmic cycles to gradually heal the soul and escape maya? That’s just what the monad you are attached to is doing with you, it’s not even the total portion of their objective in the earth game, as that is all the parts of you, entering and reentering yourselves and each other, to achieve some sort of end. And that total earth game is a tiny way this cosmic larva makes its way across the universe, its spirit trails etched in matter across galaxies."
In the blue daylight sky above, Jocasta can somehow, as in dreams, paradoxically see the long broken strip of the Milky Way. The spilled milk of Mother Hera, after Heracles ripped himself violently from her bosom, holding the mesh of reality together.
Are you a wolf? Jiyu's words echo. No, silly girl! Sweep out your stable.
On the beach across from her, Jocasta can see Anthony Reinhardt. What is he doing here, I'm supposed to be safe here! Jo can hear an urgent voice of fear scream in her mind.
But Jo's calm, reset meditative mind, her close support from Mitch and Jiyu, assures her that Reinhardt here is just another reflection of "the earth game," a representation of all the violent acts she's been forced to commit, all the times the game narrative forced her into places where her karma burned red hot with the lower world's demons, the awfulness, the Chöd-ways she'd been diverted into. In some sense, Jo is safe because she knows she's talking to herself here, or perhaps two members of the C Suite are, in an effort to "confront her karma," as Jiyu said.
"Well, soldier," Reinhardt says, wearing his undercover "hipster occult publisher" costume of a Tahitian shirt, bucket hat, khakis, and Italian loafers, "you invited me here to your sanctum sanctorum. What do you got to say?" (edited)
In the office, Mitch notes Jocasta's aura, after Jiyu's words, gets to a meditative state, but also that she is doing what Charley used to do: Astral Travel. Not in the same way as Charley, though; Mitch feels like she's found a space in the Astral plane and spontaneously gone to it, rather than gone for a walkabout. In essence, Jo is still here in the office, but just deeper in existence than she was a moment ago when she was being violent with herself. Jiyu calmly watches Jocasta make as if to strike herself and then get into the meditative space she intended to, and then goes quiet, her half-open eyes heavy-lidded as she sits quietly in her own meditative state.
Jeff
It's a shame that Charley is no longer with us. Events spur us on and things happen that we can't control. In this case, the creation of a void where once there was presence, and everyone adjusting. Either shifting to partially fill the space, or shoring up against what had once been a secure flank.
Brant
At this same time, somewhere on the Mission grounds, Marshall delivers a lecture to an assembled group of former yippies, burnt out ad execs, depressed house wives, and runaways: "Now the thing to understand about object relations theory is that the 'objects' we are talking about are so fundamental to the unconscious psyche that they practically are woven into it. And the reason why conventional therapy fails so often is because even if one can become consciously aware that an 'object' is the root cause of your suffering -- and then manages to remove that 'object' -- the form of the object remains. An empty space where once there was a 'thing.' The object was the plug we used as infants to stop up the hole. You can remove it, but like an arrow in the chest, that doesn't mean you're cured."
Leonard
"I didn't invite you here, Tony. You just have a bad habit of showing up where you're not wanted," Jocasta responds, in this strange little pocket inside of her that she didn't create (or did she?). She wanders over to him, letting the warm sand fill up the spaces between her toes and the waters of the vast Pacific washing it away. She studies him without fear, without even curiosity: just a passing interest, like a certain rare bug had crawled across the sidewalk.
In the physical world, in the office with Jiyu and Mitch, Jocasta sits muktasana, but her arms are raised above her head, her lithe muscles fluttering under the skin, as if positioned for a blow but incapable of delivering it, or like a puppet left dangling by its strings by a puppeteer who has left the room.
"I used to think about you all the time, you know," she says to Reinhardt, his memory, his ghost, his influence. "When I loved you for saving me, I thought about what you had done for me, how I could better learn what you taught me, what I could do to repay you. And when I hated you for using me, I thought about you even more: Why did he lie to me? What did he want from me? How long had he been manipulating me? What did he do to me when I didn't even know he was there? Even after I took your head off, I thought about you, about whether I'd ever learn the truth about you, whether you'd ever come back."
Back in the world, her arms, trembling, lower and spread in front of her, as if she is about to swim in the blue, perfect waters of the Pacific. But again they freeze and do not move.
"The funny thing, though, is since I buried you, since I fed you to Mishipeshu, I haven't thought about you even once. Not even to wonder how you felt as he devoured your soul," she says. "What do I have to say to you? Nothing. Nothing more than I would have to say to a cancer cell, or to a smallpox virus, or to the embers of a forest fire. Why would I say anything to a disaster, a mistake? It needs only getting rid of, not speaking to."
Jocasta's mouth does not move, her lips do not even twitch. Her eyes remain as shut as if the lids were carved from stone. But Mitch can hear her, and Jiyu can hear her. Maybe Marshall can hear her too. "I am not a wolf. I am cleaning out my stable, but not only my own. I am cleansing it of destructive flukes of nature. Someday soon it will not only be me who opens the doors, the doors that you led me through and others as well. It will be others. Men, women, children all over the world. Doors you could never imagine, doors even I did not dream of. And I will have already been there to make sure that when they do open those doors, they will not find the likes of you behind them."
At that, Jocasta Menos goes out like a light bulb in a house where the power has failed. She moves directly from her lotus throne to a heap of rags on the floor, slack, spent, and completely unconscious.
Michael
(that is quite the statement of karmic intent)
Mitch sees Jo's soul return to her body astrally maybe a mere 2 or 3 seconds after she departed. His Aura Sight sees her body fall prey to intense fatigue instantly and fall unconscious. She has no astral parasites, no foreign souls attached to her body; she's just been through an intense expenditure of mental (and emotional: Mitch saw at least a dozen different kinds of emotion swirling in that 2 or 3 seconds—pride, anger, strength, courage, dismissiveness, determination, all the feelings she brought to that confrontation with "Reinhardt") energy, perhaps as part of her manifesting a new application or expression within her suite of psychic abilities as a way to help herself in the aftermath of that failed attempt to meditate. She's safe, she's not in danger of dying, but of course Master Jiyu is concerned and gets out of prayer position to come to Jo's side.
Jeff
"Is there anything specific you'd like me to do, Leonard?"
Mitch rouses himself, only mildly concerned for Jo's well-being, under the circumstances, and joins Jiyu, hanging slightly back.
Michael
That old Royal Navy medic training aka First Aid-12:
>> SUCCESS by 1
Jeff
Mitch can assist when he sees what Jiyu is doing
Michael
She'll be assisting you by the numbers, I think, you can make a First-Aid-19 roll then (15+1 from Jiyu and +3 from Aura Sight)
Jeff
Mitch is explicitly letting Jiyu take point.
>>SUCCESS by 9
Michael
Jiyu sees Jo's respiration and heart beat are elevated but within normal for a woman of Jo's age and tremendous fitness. She speaks softly to her, cradling her. "Jocasta. Jocasta, can you hear me?" Jiyu's patrician British accent loses its crispness, its slight martinet quality as Jiyu softly pleads for Jo to come 'round, patting her on the cheek to try to wake her up.
(I figure going down to 0 FP as a result of the 18 on the Meditation check/using your new psychic power to help mitigate it is a fair result of the crit fail. Jo can be easily come out of the Astral bolthole if she wants, and 10 minutes of rest will get you up to 1 FP, 2 FP if you finish your green tea.)
(I think I also know now how to write that power up for your xp, Leonard. I'll send you something this week.)
Leonard
Jocasta slowly comes around, her eyes fluttering and opening as if she'd just nodded off in front of the TV (When was the last time I watched an episode of Ransom Roundup?, she briefly wonders), then focuses directly into Jiyu's eyes.
"I'm...I'm fine, Rōshi," she stammers as she adjusts her consciousness back to this flavor of 'reality'. "How embarrassing! To lose my head like that right after your kind guidance, and then, boom, I fall right on my ass. I am so sorry. But...it helped more than you know. I am so glad to be here with you - I promise to return when I am less, uh, on the verge of going comatose."
She turns to Mitch. "Sorry, man. Last time you introduce me to one of your friends, I bet. You don't need to do anything - you've already done so much. I was gonna say that in Danbe but there's not an online translator." She rises to her feet, still pretty wobbly. "I think I should go back to my cabin and get some sleep. It's been a tough week. But let's grab a beer at Mike & Tony's tomorrow night -- I'm heading back to L.A. soon and there's some things we should talk over."
Jeff
Mitch nods as he gives her space. "Sure, man, whatever you want." Mitch and Jocasta would have shared a car from the school, I'm sure, so Mitch will thank Jiyu for her time, indicating he'll leave with Jo.