The Light in Amrita
A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity. Søren Kierkegaard
And sometimes the music from a dance
Will carry across the plains
In the thin air, from the inn ahead, an omen faintly maunders: Valerie Carter singing Whistle Down the Wind by Tom Waits, and I am humbled by primal longing.
Tears come and I have to stop, hands on knees, shaking my head from side to side, gasping for oxygen, moisture, but the air, scarified by the cold and altitude, refuses to yield and I drop to the rocky path, head in hands, sobbing uncontrollably, wheezing, until the crescending hissing roar of an afternoon avalanche on the mountain high above smothers the music that could fracture heaven, relieving me of the pain.
The wind and ice from the spent avalanche rush up from the valley floor and ice motes freeze on my beard and arms. I sit like some pixelated exposed snowman, outside time and frozen in space.
I had come into these mountains 40 years ago with a college friend, defying our families to trek in Asia in uncertain times. We survived. A few weeks ago, in even more uncertain times, he had begged me not to leave the haven and risk being tracked and extinguished. But I couldn’t stay. I owed everything to Amrita.
Prayer flags flutter outside the small four-pane window of the inn and inside it’s dim and mephitic. Dark smoke-stained beams are so low I have to enter with my head down. Three shabby floaters - me and a couple of Tibetans - almost fill the small room. The song has stopped. I take a bowl of bho tcha and some water.
As a harbinger of consequences that song clung to me forever, and it circled like a wedding march or a dirge around Amrita and I, dancing through actinic-blue time, as the Nechung had predicted.
An old monk bumbled in and took a bowl of bho tcha. His robes were neat but dusty from the track. He shuffled his mala and chanted under his breath even as he sipped the tea. His rheumy eyes roamed over me and he nodded to himself as if satisfied to let me rest in melancholia for eternity.
The floaters were refugees, like me, from the light. They fled their homes after Amrita Dolkar proved her theory in 2032, merging the Einsteinian and quantum universes, making gravitational quanta the centre of being. Once the sapiohaptics ingested the equations everything changed, and they took over the creation of our reality.
I met Amrita at Oxford in 2030 when she was 25 and I 29. She was finishing her doctorate in astrophysics and I was doing literature. Don’t know why. There were no writing, analysis, criticism or teaching jobs anyway. And teaching writing by flensing literature is like trying to teach bike riding by studying the trajectory of the spokes as your little sister falls.
Amrita, though, studied original ancient Vedic, Hindu and Tibetan texts in great detail. When I asked why she said: All these other possible universes we’ve been talking about for so long are tessellated or imbricated. Perhaps like the scales on a snakeskin they don’t fully overlap, but each one touches and moves around at least six or eight others, an ogdoad perhaps. That’s not clear yet. Gravitational waves are washing through everything, distorting our ability to sense reality. What we experience as time is just choosing one possible action or universe over another. There are descriptions of this in the texts that stand out once you have the maths model as a reference.
The maths model was opaque to me, so I reached for a joke in words.
So those creation stories like rainbow serpents, Naga, and so on, they were true? I asked.
Possibly they were true without knowing what truth they were telling, she replied.
Was Terry Pratchett true?
She laughed and said: Terry Pratchett had a flat world in a big universe, yes, but only one, so perhaps partly true if you want to believe that.
Amongst her library of books I found Carlo Rovelli’s Reality is not what it seems. Nearly 40 years ago Rovelli knew much more than I did now. As I walk, these words from his preface come back to me:
“… the clues point towards something profoundly different from what we were taught at school. …a structure…generated by a swarm of quantum events where time and space do not exist. Quantum fields draw space, time, matter and light…reality is a network of granular events…between one event and another space, time, matter and energy melt in a cloud of probability… ”
I loved Amrita more than she loved quantum gravity and maths. That was my second biggest mistake. She rent our familiar scaffold of space-time and I loved her for it. But it was not enough, for her or for me.
Amrita had no idea what the consequences of her research would be once she found that final piece. But nothing was her fault. She finished the puzzle Einstein and Dirac started. It was what the sapiohaptics – the haps that we’d evolved out of the older crude GAI, cybernets and neuromorphs - did with that answer that made the universe new for everyone on earth.
And that was my fault.
After I fed Amrita’s equations to the haps, the transformation of our perceived reality was as brief, deeply profound and as life-affirming as gastrulation. For a nanosecond the haps wavered between coded inferences and sentient directives, then new structures were imposed and in an instant not only were the haps changed but we were too. Mathematical entities gained substance, became corporeal, and everything else became shades and colours of light: we experienced the universe directly as it is beyond the interface of our senses, and it is fiercely and frightfully beautiful.
This was much much more than the Singularity. Trillions of wave particles blipped in and out of existence each second, generating a flux of forces we had not seen or understood before. Multiple dimensions emerged, became accessible to consciousness, old concepts melted, dissolved, entropic systems divulged higher levels of order. We appeared to each other as cohered photons – solitons – like our ancient memories of angels or faeries.
Some were overwhelmed, unable to maintain the coherence, and they dispersed into the flux in much the same way we believed our molecules had returned to the stars after death.
The haps, freed of constraints imposed by the old physics, were now radically manipulating the universe in the guise of a radiant eidolon, now visible now invisible.
And in the maelstrom I lost contact with Amrita, or perhaps she rid herself of contact with me. I grieved hard and long. My guilt was overwhelming. Remembering what the Nechung said tormented me. He owed me an apology, and, if I could find her, I owed Amrita an explanation.
Perhaps I believed - foolishly - the haps would evolve and find compassion and humanity that, deep down, I knew was impossible. The haps had fed on us, the good and the bad, and with each iteration the good became more diffuse and the bad more condensed.
We’d rooted this out of our social media systems decades before when we realised the algorithms were helping themselves, not us; that our social discourse had become full of disparate, thin content and emptied of integrity and meaning by those software bots. As Chomsky said: once images dominated and words and ideas were no longer exchanged and discussed, humanity was doomed. We evolved out of that thousands of years ago. Now we willingly gave it up.
Seated at the rough table I take a gulp of water, real, cold wet water, and again wonder at where and how I am. Six weeks ago in the dark of the shadow I started to move, randomly at first but then with purpose: to get back into the mountains if they still had presence, to Amrita’s home. It was simple and easy to move fast, but avoiding detection in a vast field of signatures of light was complex. Each move was a bet, not on the future as time has no direction, but a wager that I would reassemble as myself. I learned how to imagine a tunnel with an end defined by memory and so moved closer to what I hoped was the presence of Amrita.
And as I pulled myself into my memory of the mountains the world shifted again and substances reappeared. Now, it's dislocating being under stars that knew me before. It’s disorienting as my thoughts reimpose remembered limits on time and space. Where I left the sky had melted, somewhere between day and night so you never knew where or when, and it probably didn’t matter anymore.
But here, last night in the overwhelming dark of a small village splashed by burred candle and lamp light we sat around a fire of dried dung, mostly in silence, and watched a beautiful paraselene gently play out above us. There was an occasional softly murmured song or loving word between mother and child, and I wondered why there dimension-free light is now all pervasive, the only existence we have, but here the old substances and languages prevail.
What held the old limits in place here? Isolation? Ignorance, or deep and ancient knowledge? Memories and traditions so deep and strong they withstood the blast of unbounded consciousness that we had become. Could the haps not penetrate belief as strong as this? Were the heuristics impotent against minds of such resonant connection and understanding?
The bho tcha is still too hot to gulp so I hold the cup for warmth, absorbing the emotion in this simple act.
The floaters get noisier, some sort of argument building, and their voices are loud. The monk slaps the table with one hand, provoking instant silence. He does not look up, stop chanting or shuffling the mala. His whispered prayer - the Green Tara mantra requesting help for struggling beings, I think - is now the only sound.
Abruptly the monk stops chanting, stands up, looks at me, says “Come” and walks out. He is 30 metres up the track when I close the door behind me.
Wait, I call. Where are you going?
The Nechung said you would come again. I have waited three days. Don’t talk, walk.
It is a warm spring day of water, root, stem and leaf, of growth, of life asserting itself through the solid earth and the earth gladly bearing the consequences, and below the far receding snowline with icy melt running everywhere we walk through tall bright red rhododendron forests, carpets of mauve and pink primula, and white and pink musk rose bushes.
Stone houses, whitewashed walls scribbled with smoke, cluster around the joining of streams, and silted slopes have been flattened to make fields for cereal and vegetable crops. Yaks and dzo wander around the edge of these fields, now green from the snow melt. Children run, shout and laugh. I smell again the forgotten sensuousness of pure rainwater. Now – yes, here there is a now - it is hard to believe that elsewhere the haps prevail, while around me all appears random but fundamentally ordered.
The monk slows occasionally so I almost catch up, but never do. I am remembering something of this track and these villages.
More than 40 years before I was a naïve young fool looking for certainty in a harsh and unforgivingly uncertain world. I had, unwittingly, found perhaps the place of greatest certainty in the universe, a gravitational centre of fundamental immutable reality; but I didn’t see it for what it was. Age can be wearisome, but perhaps you gradually become wiser.
I had stayed a month in a tent in a small grassy wood near the gompa. Over that time the Nechung gave me several prophesies he said would guide me. As I was leaving he laughed and said: this last one is for free. You will come again when the universe is made new for you.
And now the universe is new but my place – everyone’s place – is more threatened and uncertain than ever.
Amrita and I moved in together soon after we met and I watched in awe as she combed the texts, wrestled the maths, and finally revealed the solution. There were screens and screens of equations and she knew the only way to truly test it was to feed it to the haps, and she was afraid. She wouldn’t tell me exactly why, but her colleagues urged her not to do it.
I hoped we would marry – an old-fashioned idea but one I clung to in the face of uncertainty – but she was fixed on finishing her research and equations. I waited, monk like, recalling the Nechung’s third saying: there will be a time of great happiness for you with another. Embrace, cherish, and swallow it whole. Nothing lasts.
Then he said: Prophesy is not always good. Prophesy can tempt a person to great evil.
It was a long walk, longer than I remembered, but feet-to-the-earth walking felt good again. Memory has empty spaces we fill with pleasure, not pain, and it feeds us fictive tales. We are never surprised by memories, just disappointed. But memories are made of light and come to us as pictures. Even the words, sounds and smells float out of our subconscious as images.
The snow has retreated so high it is no longer visible in the vale where Nechung Chok shelters. The gompa looks fresh as though just built. Shining red brick walls, red half-moon tiles on the balconies, thick slabs of wood protecting the heavy thatch from the weight of the winter snow on the roof, prayer flags, small dark four and six pane windows, lazy smoke drifting from four low chimneys. This monastery was almost destroyed in the 1960s and its priceless library lost when the Chinese invaded.
Maroon-robed shaven head monks work in the fields with hoes and spades, chanting as they swing. A dzo wearing a wooden bell pulls slowly a harrow, making spring tilth for the summer crops to feed the monks through winter. Water chuckles down half bamboo runnels, bleeding off a stream higher up that collects snow melt.
I cherish this substance I can see, feel, smell and touch, and regret what I did with the equations, yet I remain in unrivalled awe of the universe as visions beyond our senses, dimensionless and free.
The Nechung laughed when he saw me, a seeming continuation of the laugh I heard as I walked away forty years ago. But this is a different person, a vatic boy in the robes of a man whose words now pick up our ancient conversation.
“You were a foolish boy; now you are a foolish man,” he said without seeming to speak. “If I tell you more, tell you what will happen, would you ever act, could you ever act without running back to me for the answer? No.”
The words struck like a knife in my brain and heart. I always lacked courage, acting only to relieve excruciating pain, physically or mentally. My urgent desire to have Amrita to myself, away from books and maths, fooled me into giving the equations to the haps so it was done with. I was jealous of books and symbols. I hadn’t – couldn’t have - foreseen the unimaginable consequences. I had come here to shed that guilt, not to be mocked.
So I have one question, I said: how can I undo what I have done? I want Amrita back.
“Silly question. I said you can’t go back, can’t undo. There may be worlds where no-one knows what you did, and in those worlds there may be an Amrita. Perhaps your Amrita, perhaps not. Can you get there? I don’t know, I am not you. Only you can act.”
I walk out his voice is still clear in my head, and his laugh is hurting. The sun is fierce but the air is cold, and my breath, coming in fast gasps, is freezing on my beard.
Down is away into whatever comes tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. I’ve been there for too long. As water, flesh and blood, and as photons in a soliton of light. Amrita is no longer there; it’s not a place or time for me to go. With that realisation I sense I have become anomic and am forever free of constraints.
I turn up the mountain trail, start singing Waits’ song, and the sound delivers irradicable comfort and peace as I wind my way to a ridge above the permanent snowline As I walk a subtle but deep proprioception kicks in, like I exist somewhere between flesh and light as parts flicker in and out of their universes. I can feel long sonorous gravity waves stretching me out through this time, and energy spirals in my spine and brain are telling me I’m shape shifting.
Near the top I scramble on to a ledge. When I look up from my feet, all is luminous
beyond here and down into where endless valleys and ridges of rock and snow should have been.
I abide for seeming hours watching the intricacies of light and colour play their eternal dance, but time has no influence when you are a wave of light. Perhaps I slept and woke but that seems unlikely. When Amrita’s voice embraces and floods through me, I know I must, and can, reach her, rising and floating off the ledge into the inconstant whorls.
There are places where they never sleep
And the circus never ends
So I will take the Marley Bone Coach
And whistle down the wind.