The Sage sat on the mountain top, his heart wide open from years of meditation. He had always sat there and always would. He no longer knew where his heart stopped and the sky began. His mind blended with space and travelled through all of space and time.

He saw all things and his heart wept. A mother in Gaza sobs hysterically over the dead body of her child, killed by Israeli mortar fire; a child stares numbly at the burnt out ruins of his home in Australia, hoping his parents escaped the blaze; in India, a husband and wife cling to the roof of a car as floodwaters rush past them; a group of villagers in the Ukraine rush from their homes with a few belongings, wondering where they can go to escape the tanks and guns coming their way. They did not ask for this. They want only to live their lives in peace.

He embraces them all, and every other disaster known to beings, be they large or small—birth, old age, sickness and death, change and the underlying dissatisfaction of those who constantly seek more. He gathers every suffering being into his heart and dissolves their pain in the pulsing formless jewel at its centre.

The earth burns. Its forests and sacred spaces are desecrated, its population too vast for its resources. Hunger increases. Reoccurring floods, giant storms, and earthquakes tear at the fabric of civilisation. Years before, politicians waver or ignore the warnings, thinking only of lining their pockets. Voters vote to safeguard their livelihood only to cast their children’s children into starvation. Men fight over land that neither own, and others stone their wives in the street because another man raped her. She is twice cursed. But the sage brings her into his embrace. He brings them all, perpetrator and victim. We are all perpetrators. We are all victims.

He dissolves their suffering into a space vaster than them all, endless in time, existing but never born. The universe clasps its children to its breast, heals their wounds and returns them refreshed and healed to the result of their joint karma. One day they must learn, or be chained forever to the wheel of existence.

A Sage sits on a mountain top. He has always sat there and always will. His heart and the sky are the same; his mind one with space and time.

I wrote this this piece of metaphysical fiction this morning after my meditation. It will probably find a place in World Within Worlds.