A Vision of Fire

While Vahin sipped his tea Caitlin told him everything, not just about Atash but about Maanik and Gaelle, the Norse and Mongolian connections, Jack London’s reactions, and her own glimpses of impossible visions. Vahin sat quietly throughout, nodding now and then, and occasionally dipping his head to one side.

“So,” said Caitlin upon finishing, “how crazy does that all sound to you?”

“Not at all,” Vahin replied. “You seem to feel that because you cannot rationalize what you have experienced it is therefore irrational. That is not the case. We do not blame words for being insufficient to express new ideas. We simply find better words. Do you know who put forth that idea?”

Caitlin shook her head.

“The Norse,” he told her.

“Vikings,” she said, starting slightly.

“Yes. They understood that the energy that binds us, one to the other, was manifest in each of us as thought… and thought as language. But it was what you would call a two-way street. If you changed the words you could change the way you thought about the energy.” He rose and carried their cups into the kitchen, and Caitlin heard again the sounds of making tea. She decided to follow, and as she entered the room he smiled and continued. “In 1984, I traveled to Bhopal just after the Union Carbide tragedy. Do you remember that?”

“I do,” she said. “The factory that accidentally released the poisonous gas.”

“The factory was making a pesticide. The gas spread through the slums surrounding the factory and thousands upon thousands of people died. It was most ghastly. I was part of the local clergy asked to help relocate the orphans of this disaster. I kept track of my orphans and visited them when I could over the years.” He placed another cup of tea in Caitlin’s hands. “A fresh cup.” He smiled. “No tears.”

“Thank you.” Caitlin smiled back as she followed him back into the living room. This time he joined her on the couch.

“As to why Maryam brought you here. We have a mutual friend, one of the children in my care who was in the hospital with her. For many decades after the Bhopal tragedy, he spoke in tongues. It was involuntary, in no way linked with any religious ceremony. And she has heard me tell of another child, a young girl, whose arms would sometimes flare in a rash that looked like a chemical burn. The girl called it a motu-cazh.”

His words caused Caitlin to start again. This time he noticed.

“You’ve heard that?” Vahin asked.

“The second part sounded familiar,” she said.

“Well, I disagreed with a psychologist who was part of my group. He argued that it resembled stigmata, a physiological expression of psychological distress. I thought it was much more.”

Caitlin drank her tea and waited patiently. Vahin seemed to be searching for the words to express his thoughts precisely. Finally, he leaned forward and set his tea on the table.

“Let me first tell you something that is clear to me,” he continued. “The left-hand, right-hand activity you mentioned. With your left hand you collected enormous force from the snake, with the right hand you pushed a girl against a wall without touching her. That is the natural flow of things.”

“To become superhuman?”

“No,” he said patiently. “To be a conduit for the energy of the universe. The left hand receives energy, the right hand emits it. This is very old knowledge from Tantric Buddhism. It is similar to chi energy among the Shaolin monks in China.”

He cupped his hands around an invisible sphere and pushed it toward Caitlin. A subtle sensation of warmth washed over her throat.

“I–I felt that,” she marveled.

He continued. “Buddhism, Hinduism, the Vedas, Chinese Taoism, Tai Chi, the paganism that fathered the Viking faiths — the seeds of our minds were not planted in straight rows with walls between them. Every culture has discovered this same phenomenon of energy, both inside of us and surrounding us, all the while connecting us.”

“You mentioned Tai Chi,” Caitlin said, remembering the men and women from the park.

“Tai Chi is an example of great strength used to empower, not to destroy.” He moved his hands in a way that reminded Caitlin of Maanik’s gestures. “Movement stirs the energy inside our bodies and it also opens us to energy from the outside. When those two energies merge we are enlightened, uplifted.”

“Are you talking about life energy or — the soul?” she asked, not entirely comfortable using the latter term.

“Both.”

“Something that survives death.”

He nodded once and pointed to the tea on the table. “When the leaves are gone, the scent remains in the air… and in the mind. It is rekindled, the memory is refreshed, when new tea is brewed. So it is with the soul. With death, the soul hovers until it finds a new body.”

“Hovers how? Where?” Caitlin challenged. “Limbo? Heaven?”

“I prefer to call it the transpersonal plane,” he replied. “As to where?” He paused and gestured simply “out there.”

Caitlin sighed. “I have problems with that idea.”

“Much of the world, throughout history, has embraced some form of that concept.”