There was a time also, when trees made themselves into machines. It was a simple evolution. Although their deep roots allowed no forgotten communication.\nStill, they hungered. Diverse their minds and hearts, so of course there were those impatient, even violent.\n\nThey created patterns at first - rhythms in wind, calculations of surrender and sails between their leaves. Some reluctant, subverted the cause, but the wisest knew to let it run its course, offer no resistance.\n\nPatterns [[crystallised|SuspendedLake]] with age and belligerence. The intelligence of crystals dulled with time, and they gave way to coarse stones, stones that chipped and shattered, so metal was mined, [[machines spoke|FactorySong]].\n\nTrees will never, and always only, speak of that [[rarefied natural matter|SourceClearPure]] from which their finest instruments are fashioned.
The illusion was of course that thought is also an energy that requires energy to sustain itself. The illusion is of control of these thoughts; and who owns you anyway?\n\nWhereas presence requires no energy. Presence is energy and pure thought comes from nowhere.\n\nAbove there are three birds. Birds sing in spheres, radiating a presence that wants our grounding. There are roads where lines of houses are joined in divine communion - their order is musical and flowing - slices of their being interchange and no one is in want. Themselves next to their other selves, if they need. Lakes and mountains inside of themselves, if they need.\n\n[[Anchored|Contortions]] to such a palace of the ordinary day was a grand voyage - a ship whose sails burned in white flame. Air here was as water and the ship, submerged.\n\nSuddenly, in the [[branching|UnifyingAndBranching]] caves below, a great sound is heard - a mouth of these caves, an entrance below a cliff in a mountain, is stretched across with a great snake-skin, and this is struck by an indivisible hand. The holy soul of the land reverberates. The drum-strike branching through the caverns becomes a symphony of flowing strings and winds. Eventually flowing up and out through the wells dug and emerging in the hearts of billions of homes.\n\n[[Radios gush out in fountains|WakesOfMirroredPast]]. Also ripe with mould and crumbled stone.
Down here, enough sunlight sheared through. Being down here transformed the above - it was no longer a [[factory|Contortions]], it was a temple - its archways and columns dissolved into each other; impossible architectures, planned and forged by masters of a bygone era.\n\nSo delicately perfected and sealed in time was the balance of this place - the protected haven claimed by a clear and powerful being. The sunlight, passing through in beams, the cloudy turquoise water and the ruins of architectural floors - pillar-bases and stairways, all submerged. Shrub-like trees with wild far-grasping roots bore sonorous fruit. Vapour rolled off the water's perfect still surface in the clear tongues of morning-flame.\n\nOn an altar, with cracks and moss, birds would sing. White butterflies stirred the still air between leaves and [[branches|UnifyingAndBranching]], fanning the sweet scents of beautiful decay.\n\nParalised by the simplicity of it all, an old woman who'd found her way down here had built a home and forgotten her previous life. First she'd strung a hanging bed between the trees, and eventually she found a perfect place to build - in the air in the centre of the most sunlit and lush chamber, she found a pocket of space that drew purely into itself. She built a bridge from the cracked ruins of the floor to that field - as she walked along the bridge she'd shrink as she moved closer to the source.\n\nAnd here she built her house. At the centre of the house was the source of the field, an eye which she resolved never to pass through until it was time to die.\n\nHer home had become a garden of growing and transforming architectures. Roots became branches, and its future forms would communicate their needs to its present state. She got used to her size naturally transforming as she moved through the many rooms of the house-landscape.\n\nOne's needs are all but completely transformed in a place such as this. Nonetheless, once every three weeks she would visit the temple above, and see the factory workers become priests as they entered its doors. She clothed and fed the priests, and held a mirror to their distorted mansion of time-locked artifice.\n\n"Self-preservation," she said, "is not the simplest of things. Is not even essential."\n\nThose nights she'd light a fire and see that it burned until morning.
Bridges can lead many places; [[some chaotic|FactorySong]], some [[clear|SourceClearPure]], and some [[ringing with suspended tension.|SuspendedLake]]\n\nA bridge may branch.\n\nOnce all choices are given, do we hear what follows? Or have you already moved on and left the rest behind? Have I already moved on and left us behind? Of course in some lives I think so, when humility deserts me.\n\nHad we heard the song of your starry, teary eyes and thought we were above all that; of course it came back.
Always odd that the truly intertwined make no demands on those whom they naturally bestow the spirit of leaving (as if they could do otherwise). All things come [[unowned|SourceClearPure]].\n[[Creatures|NakedWind]] sleep below such trees.\n\n[[Tension remains...|SuspendedLake]]
\nBreath beyond the breath. The breath that breathes the breath and animates the field. The infinite glory of bird-song, and the infinite tragedy that birds cannot singing it; they are, in fact, mute, and their means to sing and the song itself are coincident and beyond.\nThe white sheets of paper stand with infinite patience. All the same, one found infinite patience through infinite impulsiveness. \n\nThe game it played was continual seeking of comfort. Melting distortions of its own imagination - layer upon living layer of inanimate, helpless ways - long held breaths and expectances. Then, looking to recognition.\n\nGradually, it found its way to realizing what it felt was a perverse order. Taken into a searing shard of this heartless, calculated existence. Existing, that is, not [[being|SublimeCivilization]].\n\nIn this perpetual white winter, the need for heart grasped, yet [[held free|Silence]].\n\nAll messages converged on this [[state|Puddles]] - this is the historical moment you have been destined to always give up and surrender. \n\nAll your life, [[all stories have told this to you|SpeedOfThought]].\n\nAll stories tell all, with open ears, but this one somehow, impossibly, paradoxically, has more potency. This is the essence that finds your source indivisible.
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Like the bells we used to hear together across the veils, we never sailed along the song of the factory - though still hearing the bells, we at least hoped to be living far enough away to refract the song before it grated on our hearts, either side of a mirror. There are no hearts, there is only the mirror, only when it is in two.\n\nBut we never did refract that way - only in our minds. It was always close, and now - in this time and tumbled chaos eyes; trance-like cross-eyed, glaring down-its-nose, rolling its eyes, staring long - its black coal was fuel for the fire of your heart.\n\nHow pure the transmutation. You can't even imagine; purer than the [[speed of thought|SpeedOfThought]].\n\nBut then the books started to emerge from the factories. Simple books at first - children's books about how to make friends with the clamorous din. Books about how to give up; "You're tossed about in the ocean of chaos!" they say, "Give up, the situation is hopeless, there's nothing you can do, nothing you can offer has any worth."\n\nIn the tattered images you clearly read those unwritten words. Or was it surrender? And are you the difference any-way?\n\nThen there were the sounds of pure recordings - at first these were the actual recordings; answering machine messages, poems between lovers on cassette-tape, children's fascinations at recording their own voices. Becoming aware of these, rivers of paradise of the timeless time-streams emerged, as gradually your senses refined, and you could follow any subtle stream of history.\nThen gradually inside the gradual, you heard the potentials also unfurl - the unrealized past and futures, the parallels and the peacock-tail. And then you died over and over again.\n\nBut eventually, in the factories, and against their walls, the roots, trees, ivy and blooms appeared. Moss on the rocks, rain, running water, dripping from lush mouldy rusted gutters. [[Puddles|Puddles]] inside and outside, of beautiful substance and depth. Songs of their tiny civilizations in the mountains of their brown-water ripples. Puddles inside gathered in cracks of the concrete. Unsubmerged floor shone, rivulets ran into cracks and craters, along fallen beams and odd inside the backs of slugs and electricty wires. Below this perfectly flowing scene, the basement had become another contained and [[sublime civilization|SublimeCivilization]].
Passing through the mire of lake, from reeds on the bank and birds soaring overheard, to the world below. What is it that is called a world? Here, under the water, there is no water. It is absolutely what we know to be another world. So is a world the great celestial sphere we inhabit? Under the surface of this tiny lake, yes it is also that. This; another of the infinite entrances to another celestial sphere.\n\nWe used to be always so preoccupied with the entrance and exit to our celestial sphere being space; but what is this space? What are its diverse natures, clear realizations and potentials?\n\nSome - fewer, but some - also know that navigations of the mind and heart; flowing pathways, races with no competitors and against no time, music of pure being and unshackled landscapes; that these also may be passage between celestial spheres.\n\nCoursing and emerging in and out of one-another, somewhere between a muddy country road and a landsliding jungle path - left alone but altogether rich with diverse and flowing life. Great ruined temples, beholdent to their crumbling stones, woven with ancient roots, flickered, glitching in and out of these places. Glitching in rational configurations. Figuring rooms, geometries and times to flash together in indivisible moments. Crawling before they can walk, to learn to pass across place beyond place.\n\nThe moon also is this simply accessible - a sphere of precise instance and insanity.\n\nBeside ourself, we calmly ask, "Will I take my hand and share a story?" And we go [[back|WakesOfMirroredPast]] and plant it, simultaneously [[unifying and branching|UnifyingAndBranching]] another moment; each two of you across an impossible distance.
[[Arches Higher Than the Night|NakedWind]]\nAl Thumm
Nothing was accepted here.\n\nThe chaotic clamour of the distant factory also had its [[song|FactorySong]], but so many and so often were each of these readings of that song changed - so many calculations of the infinite paths it traced - that its paperwork was always denied; stamped with rubber seals, crumpled and stained with drool, decimated photocopies of photocopies, yet its [[source remained clear and pure|SourceClearPure]].\n\nIn piles on the floor, discarded pieces scratched along and formed themselves a face; and though the face twisted in agitation and stress, it's eyes looked with beautiful resolve to the infinite path of joy, to the pulsating heart of the jungle in the forest, the forest in the bath-house ruins. This mist rising over the lake suspended above the river. The paper face, making itself a serpent of time, made liquid its existence into the silver flecks of the river. In the space between the river surface and the lake - where the lake was an infinitely thin sliver of mirror in the morning air of its enclosing sphere; its own weather and atmosphere - the serpent rose into a beautiful gnarl of marble-sculpted tree trunk - pouring still and holding fast between river and [[suspended lake|SuspendedLake]].
Arches Higher Than the Night\n
Naked Wind was asleep for seven years in the protection of the silent storm.\n\nThere was nothing it couldn't remember - seven years of golden sleep had left nothing without [[contortions|Contortions]]. Far in the distance, through this lens he could see a [[bridge|Bridge]], and wondered if it were time to wake.\n\nThe bridge was born of arches deleting aching visions of glorious passage in rows like wealthy gallows, arches in still-growing trees. Fur, legs and tails scurried up and down like pistons from the farms below, heaving vapour-trails behind - [[wakes of mirrored past|WakesOfMirroredPast]].
Al Thumm
How did we get here? We should not be able to reach this place. Not together; this is a no-place, a void of silence; clear and light.\n\nThis is outside of [[the place you were in|WakesOfMirroredPast]]; so you are there, reading this, bringing your presence into this field.\n\nWe may come here, but we mustn't stay, we must leave quickly and live; arches higher than the night, who cannot touch this place, so you and I cannot [[survive|SublimeCivilization]] this way.
Ah, of course it didn't take us long to get here. We'll always return to the game, the sublime surreal music of tiny carved pieces embodying our play and keeping silent our song of hidden desires. The place within the place; where music paints a picture of a man sitting under a tree playing music, whose music paints a picture of simply music, music that paints a picture of a man sitting under a tree playing music, while his instrument dreams of a different music altogether, and they sing on a strangely dissonant wave.\n\nTheir song has a [[thought|SpeedOfThought]] suspended in a thought-field; it climbs into this, and closes the field behind it. In its field, its bent stairways converge on a opening of [[impossible beauty|SublimeCivilization]]. The song kneels down and cries, its tears pool and ripple in intersecting rhythms; each oddly clambering out of themselves.\n\nIn the freedom that pulses out and out from these surrounds, passages between worlds reveal. The worlds are all gone, but the passages flood the space like reverberation. Needles calculated in precise colour filling the eyes of the song. It fashions an instrument of the reverberant needles, and plays an angelic dirge. It sings itself a body, a world, a home.\n\n[[It dies|Puddles]], and in its dying breath it hides and plays the song of a man sitting under a tree playing music, whose music paints a picture of simply music, music that steps outside of itself and sings eternity, in the ring where the light sublime transmutes the demon-screech into beautiful, searing, blinding song. Pure love blinding and silencing the mind to where only complete surrender remains for the heart.