Samati

Until a decade ago, I had a habit of every so often deleting (as unworthy or in preparation for offing myself) my collected attempts at writing, which mostly just amounted to undeveloped ideas or scraps of description, exposition and dramatic speeches divorced from any coherent context. Yet every so often I run across an old tidbit "temporarily" copied between folders or to a thumb drive for transfer or editing. I can't say from which stage of development this "Samati" version hails. Originally it spun off from a fantasy story idea. I had envisioned a prehistoric character named "Tianti" who first discovers magic, and one notion of such discovery involved self-projection upon the external environment coupling physical to metaphysical forces by speaking oneself into the world. Grokking unto transference, if you will. I'm sure that sort of thing has endless terms attached by the priesthood of every fairy tale. Then I realized I liked this as a simple, brief vignette:

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“Samati” spoke the boy against the granite wall as the last flecks of sunlight danced upon it.

“Samati” spoke the boy again between the rays of the next day’s sunset, and crawled out over the icy stream to rejoin his tribe.

“Samati” whispered he through the rainy season after the day’s hunt.

“Samati” echoed he the rustling of the dry savanna grasses during the season when the game was far away in jungles which his people dared not enter.

What his tribesmen could not fathom, the fear against which their shaman raised gods, ghosts and ancestors, was the setting of the sun. And so, Samati climbed into the narrow cave each day and faced the nameless, the lack and absence, armed with his name against the unnameable, and the eternal granite as his ally in the face of oblivion.

Life began and ended but Samati never forgot, a disenchanted child, a sullen youth, a dreary man, a pile of bones. At the end of every day, as long as his body had carried him, he had voiced himself against the end of self. Samati in the rocks, Samati on the breeze, inscribed in light upon the hillside, echoed from the depths of the cave along the weak trickle of water.

It was only a short while after by the hill’s reckoning that it too grew old. The yawning chasm cut through it by the river undermined its foundations and the weakened edifice began to settle into itself. The scorching sun had long ago burned away almost all vegetation about the spot, and what little was left would soon die off as water ceased to flow. In the face of absence without new beginning, the cave still echoed, as it had for millennia, the name of self against the unnameable lack of self, the single desperate cry of self-awareness: “Samati”.

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Now for the weird part.

It took a few years after writing the above for me to randomly link-surf my way to the Wikipedia page for Samadhi which, albeit not the most precise match (also note my version runs counter to reincarnation) can also incorporate meditative hyperfocus upon an external construct.

While I may conceivably have run across the term at some point in my early life and reproduced it subconsciously, I've never been into Eastern Mysticism any more than the Western variety. I don't meditate, I don't go yogging, I don't Pali-vous Hin thee Sans crits.

So, no, I doubt I dredged up an offhand reference from anywhere in my subconscious. The term for this is dumb luck. Mundane stochasticity. Randomness. A funny flub, but a flub nonetheless. Spew a few thousand pages of pretentious babble and the monkey clan in your brain will re-type at least a one-liner from the works of Shakespeare.

 

But it's the sort of happenstance from which religious conversions are made. Were I fully human, I would be expected to interpret this unexpected convergence as a sign from above and dive into Hindu mythology, seeking social validation for my brain fart happening to blow the same way as the winds of chance. From the million daily events which can line up randomly with an apparent correlation (and don't) superstitious backbirths latch on to the one single positive accident as proof of supernatural influence, then seek nothing but confirming evidence for their idiotic superstition, and call it God.