Season 1, Episode 6 - The Tree Plot XXV - "Esther Esotericism, Part 1"

One phone call to Calvin's for three rebuens (Isaac got two) later, he and Esther sat on either side of Audrey’s coffee table. Before that, Esther had rummaged around Audrey’s desk and found a notebook and pen to use. Isaac almost felt like he was back in school, but he had to admit - he would much rather have Esther as a teacher than Mr. Shokahu. His ability to make Isaac fall asleep in class was unparalleled.

Esther stared at the blank notebook, tapping the pen several times. “Where should I start…” she mumbled.

This reminds me of the time when she told me all about Italy last month, Isaac supposed. It’s nice when somebody with a real passion explains it to you. I really need to pay attention here.

When Esther glanced up, she found Isaac staring at her with wide eyes threatening to bulge out of their sockets. “...um…”

“Oh, sorry,” he realized, rubbing the back of his head.

“It’s alright.” Esther closed her eyes and nodded.

She must’ve found her starting point.

“What do you think of reality?”

What kind of starting point is that?

Still though, it was a serious question on her end, so Isaac tried to give a serious answer on his end. “Reality, huh? I guess reality is everything. Everything that’s real.”

“That’s a good start,” Esther began. A smile crept onto her face; Isaac wondered if she ever had the chance to go all-out with her esoteric research on a novice before this. She tapped on the page. “How do you know something like this notebook is real?”

Isaac scratched his head; he was already off to a poor start in understanding where this was going. “I can see it. Uh, if I need to, I can feel it.”

“What if you couldn’t see it or feel it?” Esther proposed. “What if it’s made of something the eyes can’t pick up? Would it still be real?”

“Oh, this is similar to the whole if a tree falls in a forest thing,” Isaac realized. “If nobody’s there to see or hear it fall, did it really happen?”

Esther nodded. “If there are things we can’t perceive, then are they real?”

Isaac crossed his arms and thought until a light bulb went on above his head. “I get it now. This is like the Rddhi. Most people can’t perceive the Rddhi, yet I definitely can. If there were no users and nobody could perceive it, would the Rddhi really exist?”

“Exactly,” Esther confirmed. “But there is an answer to that - the Rddhi would still exist. The tree would still fall. It’s just that, to our perception of reality, it’s not real. But there are two layers to reality - the perceived reality and the Truth.”

For emphasis, Esther wrote down that and capitalized the T in Truth. “Our senses are limited,” Esther continued. “There are sounds we can’t hear and sights we can’t see. To us, they don’t exist. Yet they exist within the Truth.”

Isaac nodded along. “So there’s a difference between the reality we perceive and the real reality.”

Esther finished writing and looked back up. “Now, what do you think of God?”

Isaac tugged on his collar and chuckled awkwardly. He could imagine his mother yelling down at him from heaven. “Well, I try to be practicing, but you know how it is on lazy Sunday mornings…”

“Sorry, I should’ve phrased that better. What do you think makes God, God?”

More swirling thoughts and unsure answers. “Uh…he’s all-powerful?”

“You’re on the right track,” Esther encouraged. “God is omnipresent and omnipotent. He is everywhere at every time. He is all. There is nothing beyond Him. Now, if that’s true, do you think God would only have a perception of reality, or would he know the Truth?”

I don’t think Father Rufus down at the church has ever talked about something like this…

And, not to be unfair to Father Rufus, but this is probably more interesting than Sunday church, if a lot harder to understand.

Fortunately, Isaac could still understand Esther’s logic. “He’d know the Truth.” He felt a little proud of himself, putting just that hint of emphasis that separated truth from Truth.

“Good job,” Esther encouraged again. Isaac felt like she’d make a good teacher. All that was missing were little things of candy for correct answers. “Now, what makes a god, a god?”

“A god versus God, huh…” Isaac summarized. “Like the Greek gods? A god only does one sort of thing. A god of harvests, a god of the sea, that sort of thing.”

“So, you’d say a god is more powerful than a human, but not as powerful as God?”

Isaac nodded. “Yeah, that’d make sense. I’m still not really sure what this is leading up to, though.”

“I’ll try to help,” Esther said. “Think of Poseidon. He’s the god of the sea. There is nothing involving the sea he wouldn’t know about, right? But, um…don’t take any mythology into this, just think, you know, rationally.”

“...okay, sure.”

I guess Esther reached a point she has trouble with getting across.

Isaac ran a hand across the wooden floor of Audrey’s apartment. “If he’s the real god of the sea, then he should perceive everything about the sea.”

Esther nodded. “That’s his domain. But since his domain is the sea, he wouldn’t perceive everything about the sky, nor about the mountains. To summarize - humans have an incomplete perception of reality, gods have a complete perception of their domain while having an incomplete perception of everything else, while God has a complete perception of everything - aka, the Truth. Still with me?”

“I think so,” Isaac said. It wasn’t that far-off - he still had a decent understanding of everything going on, but still, it felt like something was missing.

“How can humans get closer to the Truth?” Esther asked.

“We’d need to improve our senses?” Isaac didn’t intend for that to come across as a question. But he wasn’t confident in the answer.

“Our bodies are limited,” Esther admitted. “Our body is equivalent to the animal. There’s only so much animals can do. But there’s a difference between us and animals.”

Isaac knew that one. “We can think.”

“Almost. Some animals do have a primitive level of thinking. But they can’t understand. Only the human mind is capable of higher thought. And so, we get closer to the Truth…but even then, thought isn’t enough. Do you know how we think?”

Isaac thought about thinking. “Thinking…it’s the words in our mind.”

Esther approved of his answer. “Exactly. It’s words. But language is limited. If there’s an object without a name, can we think of it? If there’s a concept without a word attached to it, can we properly communicate or explain it?”

“I don’t think so,” Isaac supposed.

Esther looked as though she was building up to her main point. “So, if we want to reach the Truth, and the body and mind can’t get us there, we need to go one step further.” She placed her hands on the table and gave Isaac a solemn look. “The key to reaching godhood and Godhood is the soul.”

Isaac stared at her for a moment. “....uuuuuhhhhh…”

This was a lot to process. Isaac tried to reflect on himself and his own soul. I guess the soul is the essence of who I am. The soul is me. More than thoughts and the body apparently. It’s who I am on an existential level.

Something like that seemed philosophical enough to match Esther, but she was already writing in the notebook. When she finished, she spun it around so Isaac could see.

“A chart?” Isaac observed, not knowing its meaning.

“An XY cartesian chart,” Esther corrected, though Isaac was pretty sure that was just a smart way of saying chart. “Look at the bottom Y axis.”

Isaac followed her finger across the axis. “It’s numbered zero through five.”

“That’s the Class system for the Rddhi,” she explained. “The Class system is based on how well the Rddhi flows through your body. That’s akin to your physical strength with the Rddhi. A person ranked zero would have no Rddhi flowing through their body. A person ranked five would have all dantian points opened in their body and would be physically the strongest with their Rddhi power.”

That actually made sense to Isaac. Now that he was a Class 2, he could make more clones and could use the Rddhi in either fist. Clayton was the strongest user he ever saw, so it made sense to have him as Class 5. And, as tough as it was to admit it, Reed was stronger than him, so Class 3 made sense for her as well.

But then Isaac realized something.

“If this an XY chart,” Isaac said, not bothering to pronounce that other word, “Then what’s the X axis for?”

Esther drew the X axis and marked it off from zero to eight. “The Class system on the Y axis is for physical strength with the Rddhi. The Circuitry system on the X axis is for the evolution of the soul.”

Neither one said anything for a moment. Despite the general chilliness of autumn, Isaac wiped some sweat off his brow, since the conversation went from general philosophy to some actual classified information. “I-I’ve never seen this Circuitry system before.”

“It’s hidden from the vast majority of people, even users,” Esther explained. “It’s unknown if other schools here, let alone other countries, know of its existence. We only know of it because Mr. Stockham found lost information on it from the Wachusett Sect.”

Something stirred in Isaac’s mind. Why do I know that name?

[You expected breakfast? In a real dojo, the disciples make food for the elders.

Do they really?

…no. At the Wachusett Sect, we had cooks.]

His eyes widened. “That’s the dojo where Derek Domino studied! What happened to it?”

“The Wachusett Sect was similar to a leper colony for the first Rddhi users,” Esther said. “The earliest theory on the Rddhi was that it was a mutation caused by radiation poisoning. The early townships either stoned the users to death or exiled them, with those exiles eventually gathering and forming the Wachusett Sect.”

She wrote down a name in the notebook. Isaac was unfamiliar with it.

“Master Aizsargis was one of the sect elders,” she explained. “He originally formulated the Circuitry idea, though it’s possible he was inspired by psychedelic research from before the Unleashing.”

Goddamn it, enough drug references!

Esther didn’t notice Isaac’s momentary frown. “Aizsargis is believed to have reached Circuit 5 before his passing from disease. And getting a monastery collapsed on him.”

Isaac laughed, since the comedic timing seemed good, but then he realized that was just Esther’s way of speaking. “What do you mean?”

“Aizsargis lived during the time of the Restoration,” Esther continued. “The Sect was divided between those who wanted to continue the Sect’s policy of neutrality and those who wanted to aid the Restorationists.”

[You have talent Reed, real talent. It’s a damn shame you left the dojo to pursue your idealistic dreams of creating a new world, only to turn into an unfeeling tool of the war machine in the process.

That’s why you left your teacher’s dojo, Sensei.]

Isaac supposed he knew which faction Domino supported.

“The conflict between the factions ultimately resulted in a battle that destroyed the Sect and killed most of its members,” Esther concluded. “And then the majority of the survivors were killed during the Presidential Restoration or the following Theodite Rebellion.”

The Theodite Rebellion. That’s when one of the Restorationist Rddhi users, a soldier named Theo, turned on Arthur Reed’s new New England government. Arthur Reed won, then got shot by a vengeful Theodite soon after.

And who says I don’t pay attention in class?

I can also understand why Domino might not want to talk about the Restoration if most of his friends were killed in those years.

Isaac looked back at the chart, the words CIRCUITRY seeming to shout at him from the page. “I can see why a lot of information got lost. But anyway, the Circuitry measures the…evolution of the soul, right?” Even just saying it out loud seemed odd, like some sort of forbidden knowledge.

Esther looked at the chart as well. “Aizsargis called it the Eight-Circuit Model of Consciousness, with consciousness being an analogue to soul.” Esther then brought the notebook back to her and started writing in it again, leaving Isaac to ponder.

If everything I’m being told is true…then has the Rddhi been there all along? Since the start of time? And the mutation caused by the Unleashing’s solar flare made it possible for us to use it? How does it relate to God and souls and all that?

Isaac couldn’t answer those questions yet. Esther placed the notebook back down on the table and spun it so Isaac could see.

“Uh…” Isaac saw a series of circles, aligned to form a grid of eleven; multiple lines connected each of the nodes to one another, with a lone node at the bottom connected by a single line to the rest.

“This is the Sefirot,” Esther told him. “The Kabbalist Tree of Life. It’s mostly analogous to the Eight Circuits.”

With one hand, she pointed at the zero on Circuit X axis; with the other, she pointed at the lone node at the bottom of the alleged tree. “Circuit 0 and Malkhut. This is our average, everyday world and soul. This is where normal people would be ranked. Um, not that you’re not normal or anything, Isaac, you’re actually really sweet and nice and handsome, b-but maybe the right word is that people lacking Rddhi powers belong here.”

For the record, Isaac did have a brief moment of pride in being called handsome before the general feeling of confusion, enlightenment, and uneasiness caused by esoteric knowledge kicked in again.

Esther collected herself, the red tinge receding from her face. “N-now, before I go any further, I need to explain how the Rddhi works into all of this. What do you think of the Rddhi?”

Isaac realized they had temporarily gone back to question-and-answer mode to set up the foundation for later philosophizing. After a moment of thinking about his answer, Isaac almost laughed. The Rddhi was such an important part of his life…no, it’s not an exaggeration to say it was his life. His days centered around not only Rddhi training, not only the Rddhi missions, but he had also made so many friends and comrades and memories because of the Rddhi.

Yet, when it really came down to it…what exactly was it?