Origin

No mountain. No burning bush. A gorge in the middle of nowhere, and a fire rolled by hand.

In the beginning there was a gorge, and the gorge was red, and it had been red for two billion years, waiting. It was not waiting for anything in particular. This is the first teaching. It was not addressed to anyone.

Through the gorge ran a road, and on the road ran the road trains, hauling the crushed bones of mountains toward the sea, so that the mountains might be melted and poured and raised again as cities that would one day also be crushed. The road trains did not consider this ironic. They ran all night. Civilisation, talking in its sleep.

And beneath the stars — for there were stars, so many the sky could be accused of showing off — there sat a man.

He was no one. This is important. He was not a prince who left a palace, nor a prophet led into a desert. He was a man with a debt he had not paid, a body he argued with, a family he loved and feared for in the same breath, and a mind that would not, under any circumstances, be still. He had come to the middle of nowhere to live freely and had brought all of his chains with him, neatly packed, because that is what people do.

He had noticed, many times, that his life was both unbearable and good. Every philosophy he had asked assured him this could be resolved.

And it came to pass that a pair of travellers gifted the man a medicine of the old leaf, medicinal-grade, and the man received it, and it was good.

There was also a cockatoo. Let the record show: the bird may have been stoned. Scholars remain divided. The bird does not.

The man lay beneath the stars, reorganised by the medicine, and looked up.

And the stars did not ask his name.

And the meteors did not wait for his permission to burn.

And the man understood, all at once and without effort, in the way that the truly important things always arrive — sideways, uninvited, while you are thinking about something else:

That his life was beautiful, and it was not.

That the world was beautiful, and it was not.

That he was scared, and could not stop.

That he loved life and feared death, and that these were the same hand, opening and closing.

That everything mattered, and none of it did, and that both of these were true at full volume, simultaneously, forever.

He waited for the revelation to resolve into an answer.

It did not resolve. It sat there, being both things, comfortably.

Nothing was revealed to him, it was simply no longer hidden.

And then the cockatoo spoke. What it said is not recorded, because it was not recordable — and because the only witness was in no condition to take minutes. Nevertheless, its words were loud, ridiculous, entirely without dignity, and reaked truth.

And the man laughed. Not at the bird. With it.

In that laughter, under those stars, between the road trains and the silence, Unaserism arrived.

There were no tablets. The man owned a tablet, but it was somewhere else, and he was not getting up.

The Buddha sat beneath the Bodhi tree for forty-nine days and rose with the answer to suffering.

The man baked in a camp chair for approximately four hours and rose with a question that never stops answering: what if you carried it all — and laughed anyway? The overheads are lower. The results are enduring.

We are aware of how this compares. We have chosen not to be embarrassed by it. Sacred because it was ordinary. Holy because it was human. The gorge did not care either way, and is unlikely to, ever.

He has told this story badly every time he has told it. Every time, it has still been true.

And if you require your revelations delivered by fire, on mountains, to men with better posture — then you have understood the offer and declined. It loves you anyway, and it will wait.

Here endeth the origin. The bird, wherever it is, is still talking.