Trying to calm my excited mind meant that a conflict was going on in my head. That burned up essential energy I needed in order to communicate telepathically with Dad. So then maybe I had to stop concentrating, but how did I achieve a quiet mind without concentrating?

First of all, instead of sitting cross-legged, I stood up and leaned against a tree like James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. Then I listened not to my breathing, as Anouk advised, but to the noises around me. I didn’t close my eyes either. I opened them wide.

I was observing the wet, shaggy trees in the late-afternoon sunlight without concentrating. I made my mind astonishingly alert. I didn’t just observe my breath, either, but kept an eye on my thoughts. They fell down like a shower of sparks. I watched them for a long time. I pursued them, not where they went but where they came from, back into the past. I could see how they held me together. I could see how they put me together, these thoughts- the true ingredients of the Jasper broth.

I started walking and the silence of my mind went with me, though it was not the absence-of-sound kind of silence. It was a huge, deafening, visual silence. No one had ever told me about this kind of silence. It was really loud. And as I walked through the jungle, I managed without effort to maintain this clarity.

Then my mind became quiet. Really, really quiet. It happened instantaneously. I was suddenly free of inner friction. Free of fear. That freedom somehow helped all my spineless impediments to melt away. I thought: The world is swelling, it is here, it is bursting in my mouth, it is running down my throat, it is filling up my eyes. Strangely, this big thing had entered me, though I was not bigger for it. I was smaller. It felt good to be small. Look, I know how this sounds, but take it from me, this was not a mystical experience. And I’m not kidding myself, either. I’m not a saint. Not for all the breasts in California would I, like Francis of Assisi, purify the lesions of lepers with my tongue, certainly not, but- and this is where I’m heading- I felt something I’d never experienced in my life before: love. I know this sounds crazy, but I think I actually loved my enemies: Eddie, my family, the murdering mob en route to slaughter my family, even the virulence of the recent outburst of hate by the Australian people. Now, let’s not get carried away; I didn’t adore my enemies, and while I loved them, I was not in love with them. But still, my instinctive revulsion toward them had evaporated somehow. This excess of feeling frightened me a little- this frenzy of love that tore through the butter of my hate. So then it seemed Anouk was wrong; the real fruit of meditation wasn’t inner peace but love. In fact, when you see life in its totality for the first time and you feel genuine love for that totality, inner peace seems like a kind of small, petty goal.

As nice as all this was, I realized I was not communicating with my father. I almost gave up and started wondering where that furious mob had gotten to when suddenly, without even trying, I conjured up Dad’s face. Then I saw his hunched body. He was in his room, bending over his desk. I looked closer. He was writing a letter to one of the Sydney newspapers. I could make out only the salutation at the beginning of the letter. “Dear cunts” was crossed out and replaced with “My dear cunts.” I was convinced this was not my imagination but a real image of Dad right now, in the present. I thought: Dad! Dad! It’s me! A riotous mob is coming to murder Eddie and everyone in the house! Get out! Get everyone out! I tried to send him an image of the rioting mob so he’d know what they looked like when they turned up. I sent him an image of the mob as one common body closing in on the house, armed with Old World farming implements. They had scythes, for God’s sake!

Without my permission, the vision faded away. I opened my eyes. It was a clouded-over black night, so dark I could have been underground. All around me the jungle was making formidable groaning sounds. How long had I been here? I had no way of knowing.

I started walking again, pushing branches out of my way, my eyes still full of visions, my nose filled with out-of-place odors (cinnamon and maple syrup), my tongue with out-of-place tastes (toothpaste and Vegemite). I had the sensation of being in the world as never before.

As I walked, I wondered, would they find the house empty? Had Dad heard my warning? Or had I just given up trying to save my family’s lives? I walked without knowing where I was going. I let my instinct guide me through the jungle, stomping on luscious plants that gave off a sweet, heady odor. I paused to drink the cold, delicious water of a small waterfall. Then I moved on again, stumbling over hills and through the dense foliage.

I felt no fear. I felt such a part of the jungle that it seemed it would have been rude of the animals to venture out to eat me. Then I moved into a clearing that ran down a long hill where I could see the moon rising. All the eyes of the flowers and the mouths of the trees and the chins of strange rock formations seemed to be telling me I was going in the right direction. That was a relief, because there were no tracks. Somehow the silent mass of vengeful people had left everything undisturbed, as if they had been floating through the jungle like some formless ancient substance.

When I finally found Eddie’s place, the lights were blazing inside. The wind was violently knocking at the windows and the doors. The sight of the house made my state of oneness vanish instantaneously. The world was hopelessly fragmented again; the absolute connectedness between me and all living things was gone. Now I felt indifferent to all living things. I couldn’t care less about them. The divisions between us were as thick as columns of bone and cartilage. There was me and there was them. Any fool could see it.

Hiding behind a tree, I felt the blood cells racing through my heart. I remembered something Dad had once promised to teach me: how to make yourself unappetizing when the hordes turn up to eat you. I hoped he actually knew this essential skill.

Of course I was too late. The door was wide open, and the mob was already leaving one by one, armed with scythes and hammers and pitchforks. There would be no point facing the mob or its decrystallized form, because presumably it had already done what it came to do. There was nothing to be gained in getting hacked to pieces myself.

Blood covered the hands and the faces of the mob. Their clothes were so stained, they would just have to be thrown away. I waited until the last intruder left and then waited a few moments longer. I watched the house and tried to feel no fear. Even after all Dad had taught me, I was not prepared for such a moment. Nothing had prepared me for walking into a place where my family had been butchered. I struggled to recall any nugget of wisdom from my early childhood that might offer me advice on how to proceed, but I couldn’t, so I went forward into the house, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually defenseless. Of course I had many times imagined them already dead (as soon as I feel an emotional attachment to someone, I imagine his death, so as not to be disappointed later on), but in my mind they were always relatively clean corpses, quite neat in fact, and until now it had not occurred to me to prepare myself by imagining my loved ones’ brains splattered against a wall, their bodies lying sprawled in a pool of blood/shit/guts, et cetera.

The first body I saw was Eddie’s. He looked as if he’d been run over a thousand times by a champion ice-skater. His face was so cut up I could barely make out it was him, except for his eyes, which had that frozen look of surprise characteristic of Botox and sudden death, staring up at the earthenware pots with his parents’ spirits in them, the ones who had purportedly been watching over him. It was easy to see the look of reproach in his eyes. Goodbye and good riddance, Eddie. You took your crumminess to its limit and it collapsed on top of you. Tough luck.