Then she pulled the girl as close as she could without jostling little Aroon, kissed her on the brow, and held them both.

35
Dark and Light

Wednesday November 14th

Kade swam in an ocean of light. His body sat on the floor in Delhi, eyes closed, legs crossed, hands on knees, breathing deep, placid breaths. His heart beat slowly and surely. His mind was open, touching a thousand others, being enfolded in them, enmeshed with them, so that where he ended and they began, where I ended and we began, he could no longer say.

The greater self drew breath into a thousand sets of lungs, then slowly released that breath out of the same. Its thousand-fold heart contracted, expanded.

Thoughts arose in one corner of its web, rippled outward from human mind to human mind.

The greater self inhaled again, observed those ripples, those tiny human thoughts, and allowed them to pass, without attachment, without judgment, without grasping that would have created more chaos.

Bit by bit, the noise of monkey mind, the chattering of incessant chaotic thought, faded away.

All that remained was light.

Kade opened his eyes as the meditation ended.

That had been… something. Ananda and his monks had come a very long way in the past several months. He’d been blown away the first time he’d encountered dozens of monks, their minds linked, meditating as one. Now they’d folded in the technology he’d brought, linked monasteries together across thousands of miles, were folding in hundreds of monks at once, sometimes thousands. There had been monks in that session in Thailand, in Nepal, here in India, even a few in the US.

Bits of a thousand other men and women’s thoughts and memories, dreams and ideas, knowledge and experience, had flowed through him, and into him. And that was just incidental, as they’d allowed those thoughts to rise to the surface and clear, to make room for pure, uncluttered attention.

He leaned back against the wall, closed his eyes again, and he could feel a million minds out there. If he chose he could visualize them, a thin layer around the earth, denser in some areas, sparser in others. He had a flight of fancy, a thought of reaching out to them all, multiplexing a message to them, bringing all those minds together at once, into a union orders of magnitude greater than any yet. He’d had the same thought in that dance club in Saigon, high off the music and the dancing and the other joyous minds and Lotus’s amplifier-assisted mental feedback loop of the crowd’s ecstasy back onto itself. He’d wanted every mind in the world to be part of that, just as much as he wanted them all to feel the serenity of vipassana, the loving compassion of metta.

And now he had better tools to do it with. Shiva’s tools.

Memories swirled again. Architecture diagrams. Capability maps. Command parameters. Passwords.