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dangerous ones. Then you must sit, empty yourself, open yourself and wait for it to find you again. This is the search, it is what they have always said, all over the world, all of the seekers. These are the rules.
    Once, everybody knew this, and they respected it. The hermits and the saints would arm themselves for battle and they would head out into the wild to meet the foe, and anything of themselves that they needed to strip away, they would do it to ensure victory. No-one believes that stuff anymore. They’re all filling their pockets and their mouths, they’re all naming the parts, they’re all frantic with their unhappiness and their opinions, there is nothing you can tell them. They won’t let you leave, now. And if you leave, they won’t let you come back.
    I never asked for any of this, so I cannot be held responsible. It is not my fault, I just followed it. I knew there would be damage. I remember what she said when she realised that this time, so late, I was finally going through with it. Are you looking for God or looking for yourself? she said. Can you even tell the difference anymore? She was clever like that. It’s easy to be clever when you’ve always had everything, easy to be clever when it’s all been laid out for you. Nothing was ever laid out for me, nobody ever showed me anything and I told her that. Six years, she said, it’s been six years, and you leave now, at the worst time there could be, and for nothing. It’s not for nothing, I said, I have tried to tell you. You are a child, she said, you always have been, and now I have two children. Yes, I said, I am a child, I can still see the world afresh, look at it, look! My whole life I have been sitting in silence, I have been sitting in the corner for thirty years and not speaking, now something has been shown to me, now it has all fallen away and look at me here, at last I am standing up, at last I have the guts to walk away, to walk towards what I could be. Would you stop me from being what I could be?
    You do know, she said, that it is not all about you anymore? You do know that? What about her? She isbarely born, she’s too young to know anything, she gets no kind of say, she doesn’t even get a memory. Just to walk out on her. Is this the kind of man you are?
    What kind of man am I? I wonder what I think about that now that I have spent a year here, watching the layers peel off, stripping myself back. You peel and peel and peel but there is always another one underneath. Does the work ever end, is there a centre, and if so what do you find down there? Some promise, some jewel, some answer? When I came, I thought that if I could spend enough years away from all of it and all of them, then the thing that was in me, the colour that had descended, the song that was singing, the thing that I could still become might emerge like a butterfly in summer, testing its dusty wings and dreaming of the sun.
    That was what I thought then. I wonder what I think now. I used to know everything when I was young. Now that I’m older, I don’t know anything at all. Now the mystery is the thing. There are sadhus in the temples and mendicants in the mountains, all of them struggling through in search of the mystery, in search of the white light in the grey. There are fires burning on distant hills, men standing on the prows of small boats roaring across the Java Sea, tiny people in giantcanopy forests hacking through to unseen clearings while the monkeys hoot around them. We built a world of altars because we could never put the mystery into words. We tried to make the mystery human, we tried to lock it into shape, we made sacrifices to it, we sang its poetry and then we left the buildings empty and walked away. We don’t talk about the mystery anymore, not where I come from, but nothing has changed in the world except us.
    Come to a place like this, though, and you can still hear it sing. I can tell you that from experience. Come to a place like this,