After he left I went immediately to bed. I was exhausted, moribund. I had not slept in several days. Inside myself I felt a darkness accelerating, as if a black smoke gathered itself in my chest and torso. I felt this way for many days. Inexplicably, (given my victory over my own hate and rage ) a great fear held me.
In that darkness I was unsure of myself. Anxious and despairing. I could not think. I could not act. I felt helpless. Hopeless. Untouchable and unclean.
As the days went by the darkness seemed to tighten itself into a clenched fist in my chest. I don't know how I managed to live through this. The fear was great. That I survived it makes me believe there is help for us. The word I have heard for this help is “Grace.”
In the end I could only wait and hope for deliverance, not knowing if it would come, or, if it did, what it would look like. I spoke every day to the nothing that surrounded me and cried every night as I lost myself in sleep. It was only years later I was able to realize that this process and the fear it brought was the very help I was crying out for.
Perhaps two months after this process began, I felt a surge of dark power streaming out of my chest, and I saw, floating in the air in front of me, a monster of hideous visage and shape. For three days it hovered there, staring at me with burning eyes. For a time it spoke, but what it said I will not repeat.
When it left I fell backwards into exhaustion and watched as the fear slowly drained away until there was only a throbbing memory of it my body inhabited. My relationship to the world had changed utterly in those moments. I had survived that most horrific of sights, then found myself alive inside a kind of emptiness, with no anchor inside and no anchor outside.
When I could, I went to visit Tong. He told me I seemed different, but he could not say how. I asked him to speak of what he knew of evil, and this is what he told me:
Evil is the result of an impulse out of place-either it comes too soon or its time has past. In this way it accelerates us beyond our ability to properly take it in. or else it is spoiled, its life force darkened, and so it spoils everything it touches. As when sentimentality for a long gone age fuels politics, or a torrent of technology drowns out silence and hope. Such things lead to the personal acts we all know as evil, as well as to global conflicts in which all sense of decency disappears. . . .This I learned in my study of history.
But there is another evil that is more deeply hidden. It is everything low and fearful within us, untouched by consciousness and untransformed.
I asked him how he knew of this last kind of evil. He said it came to him in a dream the night before, that he had no inkling of it until that moment.
We continued our walk on the beach that day. I caught two fish and gave him one. He smiled and thanked me, saying:
“You have no idea how much your being here has helped me. You came into my life at exactly the right time.”
I replied that this was true for me also.