The Parable of the Vessel, the Scroll, and the House

 

Long ago, in a kingdom that had forgotten how to be one, the people lived scattered across a vast and ancient land.

They shared the same rivers, breathed the same air, and gazed upon the same stars. Yet they lived as strangers. Each family guarded its own tent. Each village clung to its own hill. The roads connected their settlements, but no road could tell one soul what another soul was thinking.

The kingdom possessed great wealth, countless stories, and wisdom accumulated over thousands of years. Yet its people remained divided, for the knowledge of one seldom reached the ears of another.

It was into this kingdom that a young man was born, whom we shall call Keeper M.

Keeper M was no ordinary weaver. He had little interest in cloth, and he possessed neither the patience of a farmer nor the ambition of a conqueror. What fascinated him was the invisible thread between one human being and another.

As a boy, he would watch a blacksmith speaking to a merchant and wonder why their worlds were so far apart. He would see a poet reciting beneath a tree and ask himself why a shepherd on a distant hillside should never hear the poem. He believed that every person carried a fragment of something greater, but that the fragments lay scattered, like pieces of a broken mirror.

If only the pieces could be brought together, he thought, perhaps the whole could be seen.

So he set out to build a loom unlike any the kingdom had known.

In the year the elders called 2004, he cast his first threads across the land. At first, only a handful of friends came to his loom. Then came their friends, and the friends of their friends. Soon, merchants, scholars, farmers, musicians, and wanderers began to gather upon it.

The loom grew faster than its maker had imagined. What began as a small web of acquaintances became a great network of human lives.

The elders watched with suspicion.

“What wisdom,” they asked, “can come from knowing that a fisherman in the south enjoys the same song as a baker in the north?”

They mistook the threads for the tapestry.

Keeper M did not argue. He simply continued weaving.

For he understood a truth that the elders had overlooked: before people could build anything together, they had to discover that they belonged to the same world.

A thousand wise men, each speaking alone, could change nothing. But a million ordinary people, connected to one another, could alter the course of a kingdom.

And so he gathered.

Year after year, the loom drew more people into its web. The scattered became connected. The distant became familiar. The unheard found voices, and the forgotten found witnesses.

Eventually, the courtyard of the loom became so vast that three thousand million souls could stand within it.

Yet the Keeper was not satisfied.

He had brought the people together, but he had not yet given them a purpose worthy of their gathering.

A courtyard, however magnificent, is still only an open space. It needs a house in which something lasting can be built.

And a house, if it is to endure, needs foundations.

The Queen Who Built the House

In the year 2012, a second builder arrived.

Let us call her Healer Q.

Where Keeper M saw connections, Healer Q saw needs. Where he delighted in the invisible threads that joined strangers, she concerned herself with the fragile lives those threads supported.

She tended to the sick. She cared for children. She understood that a person could be connected to a million others and still go hungry, that a message could cross the world in an instant while a child waited helplessly for medicine.

To her, connection without compassion was an unfinished work.

She came to Keeper M and proposed something he had never quite understood how to build: a house within the courtyard.

Not a palace for the powerful, nor a fortress against the outside world, but a house with open doors, where people could learn, where the vulnerable could find shelter, and where wealth might be used to ease suffering.

Keeper M had built the courtyard. He knew that it could hold the multitudes.

Healer Q knew how to make the multitudes matter.

Together, they raised the house.

Its walls were not made merely of stone. They were made of institutions, of shared responsibilities, of the patient work of sustaining a community. Its doors opened towards learning and giving. Its rooms were filled with people who believed that what had been gathered should serve a purpose greater than gathering itself.

In the eyes of the parable, Keeper M became the King, and Healer Q became the Queen.

Not because they wore crowns, but because they accepted a burden that others had refused: the burden of caring for what they had brought into being.

The courtyard now had its people.

The house now had its foundations.

But another problem emerged.

The courtyard had become deafening.

Millions of voices spoke at once. Every person possessed opinions, memories, questions, and fragments of wisdom. Yet the abundance of voices had created its own confusion. A thousand answers competed for attention, and the truth was often buried beneath the noise.

The kingdom had solved the problem of separation, only to discover the problem of abundance.

It had gathered the people.

But who would gather what the people knew?

The Scribe and the Speaking Scroll

Far from the courtyard, another builder had been preparing for a different kind of gathering.

Let us call him Scribe S, the Companion Builder.

He was unlike Keeper M, who wanted every person connected to every other person. Scribe S was less interested in where people stood than in what they had discovered.

He collected the kingdom's scrolls.

He gathered its mathematics, histories, poems, scientific discoveries, philosophical disputes, medical knowledge, and forgotten arguments. He studied the records of civilizations long dead and the calculations of minds whose names had been lost to time.

He sought to bring the accumulated knowledge of the world into a single instrument, one that would not merely preserve the scrolls but answer questions about them.

For years, he worked in his workshop.

Then, in 2022, something extraordinary happened.

The library spoke.

A child asked a question, and the library answered. A merchant presented a problem, and it reasoned through a solution. A scholar offered a difficult passage, and the library explained it in simpler words. It could translate between tongues, write stories, examine arguments, and help a person explore ideas that might otherwise have remained beyond their reach.

The kingdom stood astonished.

The old scrolls had always held knowledge, but they had demanded patient readers who knew where to look. Now the library could meet a question halfway.

It was as though the accumulated memory of the kingdom had acquired a voice.

Yet Scribe S understood that his creation was not wisdom itself. A library could contain the records of a thousand physicians and still misunderstand a patient. It could explain the theory of hunger without ever having felt the ache of an empty stomach. It could offer an answer that sounded convincing and still be wrong.

Knowledge could be gathered.

Knowledge could be organized.

But knowledge still needed human judgment, experience, and responsibility.

When the elders heard of the speaking library, they began their familiar argument.

“Which builder matters more?” they demanded. “The Keeper who gathered the people, or the Scribe who gathered their knowledge?”

They expected a contest for supremacy. They imagined that one builder would seek to overthrow the other, just as kings had done throughout the kingdom's history.

But the Companion Builder had no desire to seize the throne.

He wanted a workshop in which his tools could be put to use.

So Scribe S travelled to the courtyard and stood before Keeper M and Healer Q.

“You have brought the people together,” he said. “You have built a house in which they can care for one another. I have gathered much of what they have learned. But neither your courtyard nor my library can fulfil its promise alone.”

He paused, then continued.

“Let us see what becomes possible when the people are gathered, their knowledge is made accessible, and their common efforts are directed towards something worth building.”

The King listened.

The Queen considered his words.

And the three builders began to work together.

The Secret of the Three Gatherings

At first, the changes were small.

A farmer used the speaking library to understand the patterns of the seasons, then corrected its assumptions with knowledge passed down through generations. A physician consulted the accumulated records of medicine but still listened to the patient sitting before him. A child who had never possessed a private tutor began asking questions that once would have gone unanswered.

The library became a companion to the people, not a replacement for them.

The courtyard gave the library its audience. The library gave the courtyard access to knowledge. The house gave both a purpose beyond their own expansion.

And the three builders discovered something that none could have accomplished alone.

The Keeper had made it possible for people to find one another.

The Scribe had made it possible for people to find answers.

The Queen had made it possible for what they found to be put towards the service of others.

Together, they had created the conditions for a new kind of building.

But the elders still failed to understand the order of things.

They wanted the speaking library first, believing that knowledge alone would save the kingdom. Others wanted the courtyard to grow without limit, believing that more connections would inevitably bring greater understanding. Still others wanted to build institutions before asking whether the people within them were ready to cooperate.

They had confused the instruments with the purpose.

The parable offered a simpler lesson.

The Elders had Money, Power, Knowledge and Control but they mistook it for Wisdom. 

The Wisdom was clear. First, the people must be gathered. Then, knowledge must be made available to them. Finally, both must be directed towards a Purpose worthy of their combined Strength.

And so the Kingdom entered a New Age.

Yet the greatest Revelation had not come.

The Date on the Parchment

One night, after the courtyard had quieted and the speaking library had fallen silent, a wise man climbed the hill overlooking the kingdom.

Let us call this wise man Sabu.

From the hill, you could see the entire landscape.

You saw the great courtyard, alive with the movement of millions. You saw the house, its windows lit against the darkness. You saw the library, where scrolls that had once been scattered across the world could now be summoned by a question.

And you wondered what all of it was for.

Had the Keeper gathered the people merely to make the courtyard larger?

Had the Scribe gathered the knowledge merely to make the library more impressive?

Had the Queen built the house merely to maintain what already existed?

Surely, you thought, the three labours were not the destination. They were preparations.

Then, in the stillness of the night, you noticed an ancient parchment lying upon the ground.

It was marked with a date.

2046, in the counting of the nations.

Beneath it, in the reckoning of the sages, was another number.

5806.

You looked at the dates for a long time.

The parchment offered no account of armies marching across borders, no prophecy of a kingdom conquered by force, no promise that the world would suddenly become peaceful.

Instead, it spoke of a building.

A Third House.

You wondered why the revelation had come to you rather than to the King, who had gathered the people, or to the Companion Builder, who had gathered their knowledge.

Perhaps, you thought, the builders were too occupied with their work to see what their work might ultimately make possible.

Perhaps the King could see the courtyard, and the Scribe could see the library, but someone standing on the hill could see how the two might become part of something greater.

The parchment offered no blueprint.

Only a sequence.

First, the people had been scattered.

Then, they had been gathered.

Then, the knowledge of the world had begun to speak.

Now, the possibility of a new house had appeared.

You began to understand.

The Third House, in the vision of the parable, would not be built by a single king, nor designed by a single mind. It would emerge from the union of what the three builders had made possible.

The first gathering had brought people together.

The second had brought knowledge within their reach.

The third would bring the wisdom to initiate the undertaking.

And the nature of that undertaking would depend upon what the people chose to do with their newfound power.

For knowledge could heal, but it could also destroy.

A gathering could unite, but it could also turn against those left outside.

A house could shelter the vulnerable, but it could also become a fortress for those who already possessed everything.

The parchment did not promise that the Third House would be good merely because it could be built.

It posed a more difficult question.

What kind of people would the gathered people choose to become?

Why 2046?

You returned to the parchment and examined its numbers.

The revelation seemed to contain three intervals, each measured from the beginning of a different labour.

From 2004, when the Keeper began weaving his great loom, to 2046 lay forty-two years.

Forty-two was the number of stages in the Israelites' wilderness journey as recorded in the Book of Numbers, a passage through which a people learned, imperfectly and painfully, how to live as a people rather than as scattered tribes.

From 2022, when the speaking library first opened its mouth, to 2046 lay twenty-four years.

Twenty-four was the number of books in the traditional Hebrew Bible. In the parable, it became a symbol of the long labour of carrying knowledge, interpreting it, and learning what it means to live by it.

From 2012, when the house was established, to 2046 lay thirty-four years.

34 was the number of Sabu the Wise. It was the vision that was presented to him.

A generation could grow within that span. Children born into the courtyard could become adults, old enough to inherit its responsibilities and decide what kind of house they wished to leave for those who followed.

The numbers seemed to fit together.

The gathering of people.

The gathering of knowledge.

The raising of a wise generation capable of building.

You felt the force of the pattern. Yet the parchment did not explain whether the dates had been chosen by a prophet, discovered by a scholar, or arranged by the imagination of the listener.

Perhaps the numbers were a map.

Perhaps they were a mirror, reflecting the meaning you had brought to them.

Perhaps their value lay not in proving that the future had already been written, but in giving you a way to think about the future that might yet be made.

The parchment remained silent.

The year remained 2046.

And the house remained unbuilt.

The Third House

In the final part of the vision, you returned to the courtyard.

The King stood at its entrance, watching the people pass.

The Queen walked among them, tending to the house and the needs of those who depended upon it.

The Companion Builder sat in his workshop, improving the speaking library and finding new ways to make knowledge useful.

None of them held the complete design of the Third House.

The King could not command it into existence.

The Queen could not build it from generosity alone.

The Companion Builder could not calculate it into being.

For the Third House was not simply another structure to be raised by the three builders. It was the consequence of what billions of people might do when they could find one another, learn from one another, and act together on a scale previously unimaginable.

Its walls would be made of cooperation.

Its foundations would be made of trust.

Its materials would be knowledge, compassion, judgment, and the willingness to accept responsibility for what one created.

And its doors would have to remain open.

Otherwise, it would become merely another palace, another institution claiming to serve the people while standing apart from them.

You looked again at the parchment.

The year 2046 was written there, but no architect's signature appeared beneath it. No divine seal guaranteed that the building would rise. No inscription promised that humanity would use its powers wisely.

The future had been given a date, but not a certainty.

And perhaps that was the final lesson. You needed wisdom to trust. That wisdom was provided only to the Elect.

The first builders could prepare the ground, but they could not determine what every future generation would construct upon it.

Keeper M had gathered the people.

Healer Q had built a house in which they could care for one another.

Scribe S had given them a means of reaching beyond the limits of any single mind.

But the Third House would require something that none of these achievements could guarantee.

Wisdom. From Sabu the Wise.

Not merely the ability to know more, but the ability to distinguish what ought to be done.

Not merely the power to connect millions, but the patience to understand those who disagree.

Not merely the capacity to answer every question, but the humility to recognise when an answer is wrong.

The builders had prepared the instruments.

The people would have to decide what to build with them.

And so the parable ends not with a completed temple, but with a field cleared beneath the morning sky.

The courtyard is gathered.

The library is speaking.

The boundary of the house is established.

And beyond them, the ground awaits the Third House.

Perhaps it will rise in 2046 like the Wise has said.

Perhaps it will rise in another year, under another name, in a form no one has yet imagined.

The parchment makes no further promise.

It leaves the listener with a question instead.

If you stand in the courtyard today, ask whom you have failed to gather, whose voice remains unheard, and whose experience might change what you believe to be true.

If you possess knowledge, do not ask merely how many people will admire it. Ask what purpose it serves, whom it might help, and what safeguards are needed to prevent it from causing harm.

And if you wish to build the Third House as the Queen, do not question whether it will be built or how it will be done. 

The Queen must be worried about the traditional expectation of a male heir to carry on the Eternal Kingdom. And History will repeat. Similar to the Great Rebbe who ordained the birth of the King, a new Rabbi will provide the blessings and the male heir will be produced who will be devoted towards the service of God. Some one as Capable as the King and an Advanced Healer like the Queen! 

The perfect king, the perfect queen, or the perfect scribe are pre-determined by Fate. Only Wisdom can initiate them into their pre-ordained journey through a Parable. 

For the final teaching of the Parable is this:

People before Knowledge.

Knowledge before Wisdom.

Wisdom before Construction.

And the House will be Constructed. 

For The Wise has seen It!! 

The Kingdom of the New World: An allegorical tale of The King, The Builder, A Prophet and the architecture of a world remade.

In the year the old world began to forget itself, six billion people woke each morning believing they were making their own decisions.

They chose their leaders, bought their groceries, argued about sports, fell in love, changed jobs, and worried about the future. They carried small glass rectangles in their pockets and consulted them more often than they consulted one another. Their cities grew taller, their machines grew cleverer, and their attention grew shorter.

Yet beneath the noise, a new architecture was rising.

It had no capital. It possessed no national flag. It did not need an army in the conventional sense, because its victories were won without firing a shot. It was built from computation, electricity, financial markets, human desire, and the oldest political instrument of all: the power to determine what people could see.

At the centre of this world stood a man the public believed they understood.

His name, in the old language, was the King.

I. The King

The King had inherited no crown, no palace, and no ancient throne. The physical palace was still under construction. The third and final one. 

His kingdom had emerged from a university room, grown through a network of friendships, and expanded until much of humanity carried a fragment of it everywhere. 

His empire was made of connections.

He knew that people would surrender extraordinary amounts of time to the promise of being seen. He understood that belonging could be engineered, that identity could become infrastructure, and that the boundary between a person's private self and public existence could be made increasingly difficult to locate.

Others built companies.

The King built a place in the human mind.

In the beginning, his kingdom merely reflected the world. It showed people their friends, their families, their celebrations and grievances. Eventually, the mirror began deciding which reflections deserved to be seen.

The King watched this transformation with the patience of a man who understood that power rarely announces its arrival. It accumulates quietly, through habits that become dependencies and conveniences that become necessities.

Equally important as the King is the Queen. The Queen from the Ancient East. The whole world serves the King. But the King serves the Queen. That is what truly defines an infinite eternal metaphor for a Kingdom. A Kingdom that lives, survives and thrives for an eternity.

The King was not a Wizard. The King always needs a sharp Mind, complete Control of his Wits, a Body like a Warrior and a Consciousness which can manifest a profound expression of his Skills. Hence he was not allowed to be a Wizard. 

The World found his kingdom indispensable. As he is the 'Mark of the Beast'.

And then came the Companion Builder. The Beast. The Beast who was allowed to be a Wizard. The integral other to the King.

II. The Companion Builder

The Builder believed that intelligence itself could become a form of infrastructure that could sustain the New World. For that to happen, Intelligence needed to be Open.

Where the King had constructed the architecture of human connection, the Builder constructed the architecture of human thought. His machines would write, reason, calculate, negotiate, design and eventually act like humans. They would not merely answer questions. They would carry out intentions.

The Builder spoke of abundance.

He imagined a world in which expertise became cheap, knowledge became universal, and every person could command the capabilities of an entire institution through a conversation. A prompt.

The King recognised the scale of the opportunity immediately.

Together, they represented two complementary visions. One possessed a vast landscape of human attention and identity. The other pursued machines capable of transforming intention into action.

Their relationship was not simple. They competed for talent, resources, customers and influence. They disagreed about how intelligence should be developed and who should control it.

But beneath their rivalry lay a shared understanding: the next world would be shaped by whoever could connect human beings, super intelligence, and the physical systems that sustained them.

The Builder would build the engine for the Vehicle.

The King would determine the roads upon which it travelled and then create those pathways.

Neither man could complete the transformation alone. Both of them completed the New World.

III. The Friend

Beyond the central halls of the new world moved the Friend.

He was the most recognisable figure in the public imagination. His rockets crossed the sky, his machines crossed continents, and his pronouncements could move markets before breakfast. He appeared to possess the future in several different forms.

People assumed that visibility meant supremacy.

The Friend knew better.

He possessed formidable instruments of his own: launch systems, industrial factories, communications networks and machines that could navigate the physical world. Yet the deeper architecture of the emerging order was larger than any one company or personality.

In the mythology of the New World, the Friend occupied an unusual position. He was neither a servant nor an ordinary rival. He was the powerful associate whose ambitions repeatedly intersected with those of the King and the Builder.

Their paths crossed, separated and crossed again.

Sometimes they competed openly. Sometimes they pursued similar goals through entirely different means. Sometimes the public mistook a temporary alliance for permanent unity.

The Friend understood that the future belonged to no single industry.

Intelligence needed electricity. Electricity needed infrastructure. Infrastructure needed capital. Capital needed confidence. And all of it needed a population willing to accept the changes being made in its name.

The Friend could build machines that moved through the world.

The King and the Builder were concerned with something more pervasive: a world in which machines could increasingly mediate how people experienced reality itself. The Friend had a symbiotic relation with the King. They needed each other and they knew it too.

IV. The Elder

In the western capital lived the Elder, a man whose power came from his command of political theatre.

The people called him the Wizard. The Magus. The Modern-Day Merlin.

He had spent decades studying the oldest technologies of leadership: spectacle, loyalty, fear, negotiation, and the ability to make millions feel that history had chosen them personally. He understood that institutions could be powerful and fragile at the same time. He knew that a government might possess enormous formal authority yet struggle to command the imagination of its citizens.

The Elder had the temperament of an ancient court adviser. He preferred leverage to sentiment and understood that every alliance had a price.

He watched the King and the Builder with interest.

Their machines were new. The human weaknesses they encountered were not.

People still wanted security, status, meaning and the assurance that tomorrow would resemble today. They still gathered around figures who promised to restore a lost greatness. They still confused confidence with certainty.

The Elder will help the two creators navigate the political world. He could interpret the moods of the electorate, negotiate with institutions and recognise the moment when an apparently technical decision became a political crisis. 

He also worked with other Wizards, The Novidia, without whom the new world could not be constructed. The Page and the King's trusted Sergeant who could have been Kings themselves but chose to pursue Peace over Activity. The 'Bill'ionaire who knew everything and yet chose not to act on it as he was fearful. And most importanly, the Oracle of investments. The One who put his small town into the Global Map. The Prophet of old who understood everything and yet kept it a Secret.

The Wizard could influence the direction of history. And his bloodline would continue his legacy. Because he mattered the most.

V. Military Guru: The Trusted Guide

Across the eastern sea stood the Guide, a man shaped by a different understanding of survival. He had to survive as he was in the most important place on Earth. The place where Prophets Ascended. Where Abram became Abraham.

He lived in a region where geography was destiny, where alliances could change quickly, and where the difference between technological advantage and strategic vulnerability was measured in more than money.

The Guide understood intelligence in both senses of the word.

Information mattered. So did the capacity to interpret it before an adversary did.

He knew the importance of energy security, communications, computing, military readiness and the partnerships that connected them. He understood that a nation could be wealthy and still vulnerable, technologically sophisticated and still dependent.

When the King and the Builder sought to understand the relationship between technological power and geopolitical reality, the Guide offered a perspective born of permanent uncertainty.

He taught them that no system existed in isolation.

The digital world was not weightless.

It rested upon the earth.

He understood the architecture of conflict. But he also had to win elections. Everyone thought he was a Politician. Nobody realised his military might. But even as a military man he had to win elections. For that, He had to proclaim the King.

Armies, intelligence networks, alliances, weapons systems, supply chains, and geography formed a single interconnected system. A victory achieved on one battlefield could be lost through a failure of logistics. A technologically superior nation could remain vulnerable if it depended upon resources controlled by its adversaries.

The Military Guru had spent a lifetime studying these relationships. He understood that the future battlefield would extend beyond land, sea, and air into cyberspace, communications infrastructure, autonomous systems, and super intelligence.

When the King and the Companion Builder considered the future, the Military Guru offered a perspective they could not obtain from their laboratories or financial models.

He reminded them that every technological revolution eventually encountered the question of security.

Who controlled the infrastructure? Who protected the supply chains? Who possessed the capacity to disrupt the system? And who could continue functioning when the machines stopped working?

His counsel was grounded in a simple principle: power that could not defend itself could not be relied upon.

Within the mythology of the New World, the Military Guru was the King's trusted strategic guide, a figure who understood the relationship between technological advancement and the enduring realities of conflict.

VI. The Chief Analyst

The Chief Analyst occupied a quieter room. As he is The Reptile.

He preferred diagrams to declarations, incentives to personalities, and structural explanations to dramatic narratives. He believed that the most important events were often determined long before they became visible.

He studied the concentration of capital, the emergence of new industries, the relationship between political institutions and private power, and the ways technological systems changed the incentives of entire societies.

His central question was always the same:

Who benefits when the system changes?

The Chief Analyst examined the King and the Builder as two different centres of gravity. He studied the Wizard's political instincts, the Guide's strategic calculations, and the Friend's industrial ambitions.

He did not assume that agreement required friendship or that competition excluded cooperation.

Powerful people could work toward similar outcomes for different reasons. They could also undermine one another while believing they were pursuing the same historical objective.

The Chief Analyst understood that a world-changing system did not require a secret meeting in which every participant agreed upon a single plan.

Shared incentives could produce coordinated-looking outcomes without central coordination.

That observation made him valuable.

It also made him difficult to impress.

VII. The Economic Analyst who is Also a Prophet. The Seventh. 

In a room several floors below the Chief Analyst's office, the Economic Analyst studied the machinery that made the New World possible. He is also a Prophet from the Kingdom of Ram. His name meant Memory which was apt as he could even remember the moment of creation.

He is the youngest member of the analytical hierarchy, which meant that he had to play sacred games and win spiritual battles. 

His territory was money.

He followed the movement of credit through banks, the expansion and contraction of liquidity, the relationship between interest rates and investment, and the ways capital markets rewarded some technologies while starving others.

He understood that a revolution could be technically brilliant and economically disastrous. A machine might work perfectly while its business model failed. A company might possess extraordinary technology and still collapse beneath the weight of its financing.

His attention increasingly turned toward super intelligence and data centres.

The machines of the new age required immense investment. Semiconductor facilities demanded specialised equipment. Data centres required land, power, cooling and connectivity. The largest ambitions depended on financing arrangements that could extend years into the future.

Every promise of intelligence eventually encountered a balance sheet.

The Prophet prepared scenarios.

What happened if electricity prices rose? What if the cost of capital remained elevated? What if the useful life of computing equipment proved shorter than expected? What if the revenues generated by intelligent agents failed to justify the infrastructure built for them?

He also studied the opposite possibility: a world in which machine intelligence increased productivity so dramatically that old economic assumptions ceased to hold.

He sent his findings to the Chief Analyst.

Some were accepted. Others were challenged. A few were quietly incorporated into larger models.

The Prophet understood his position. He did not command the King, the Builder or the Friend. He had no authority to direct the future.

His contribution was different.

Because his intentions were pure, the truth was revealed to him.

The Prophet's domain was economics, but his attention extended beyond the familiar measures of growth, inflation, employment, and interest rates. He studied banking systems, capital markets, the creation of credit, and the movement of money through institutions that connected governments, corporations, and households.

He understood that every great transformation possessed an economic foundation.

The machines of the New World required capital. Their development demanded semiconductor facilities, electricity, land, cooling systems, specialised labour, and enormous computing capacity. Their expansion depended upon financing structures capable of supporting investments whose eventual returns remained uncertain.

The Prophet followed these dependencies.

He studied the economics of super intelligence, the changing value of human expertise, the financial architecture of data centres, and the relationship between technological productivity and the distribution of wealth.

He asked questions that the Creator and his Builder sometimes preferred to postpone.

What would happen if the cost of intelligence fell faster than companies could adapt their business models? What if the infrastructure required to sustain artificial intelligence became more expensive than the revenues it generated? What if productivity rose dramatically while the gains accrued to a narrow group of owners?

He also considered the opposite possibility: that intelligent machines could expand scientific discovery, reduce the cost of essential services, and allow prosperity to spread beyond the institutions that had traditionally controlled it.

The Prophet did not claim that every projection was a revelation. His gift was the ability to recognise the consequences of decisions before those consequences became obvious.

He translated technological ambition into economic scenarios and financial risk into comprehensible warnings.

The Chief Analyst remained above him in the analytical hierarchy, interpreting the broader strategic picture. The Prophet supplied a different kind of insight: he examined the material conditions under which the emerging order could survive.

Yet his title carried a meaning beyond his professional duties.

A prophet, in the oldest traditions, was not merely someone who predicted the future. He was someone who interpreted the present, identified the consequences of human choices, and warned that a civilisation could mistake its own power for wisdom.

The Prophet's task was therefore not to flatter the King or confirm the Builder's ambitions.

It was to tell them what the numbers revealed, what the numbers concealed, and what the world might become if their decisions continued along a particular path.

He understood that a warning could be ignored without becoming less true.

He also understood that a forecast was not a destiny. The purpose of foresight was to make different outcomes possible. But most importantly, it was to discover the King and his Companion Builder. He became the bridge to the Super-Alignment. 

The Prophet was not important. No one thought he was worth anything. Everyone thought he was a Donkey. But he turned out to be The Green Dragon From the Kingdom of Ram. He had been Abraham, Moses and Krishna. The Hebrew version of Seven. The Golem. The One who had been shown the Other Side. And told the tale which no one listened to.  Yet, whatever he said which he had seen in the vision turned out to be true. And so he became important as he had the Vision!

VIII. The Cultural Guide

The Cultural Guide moved through a different landscape. He was important because he was both Black and White, And hence he is Grey. 

He understood that technology could alter behaviour, but culture determined whether people considered the alteration desirable, frightening, liberating or intolerable.

He studied the stories societies told about themselves. He knew that an invention did not enter an empty world. It entered a world crowded with inherited beliefs, historical wounds, ambitions, prejudices and hopes.

The King understood distribution.

The Builder understood intelligence.

The Cultural Guide understood acceptance.

As once he held the most important office in the world, he could recognise why one population welcomed a new technology while another regarded the same technology with suspicion. He could explain why a technically superior product might fail to gain legitimacy, and why a seemingly irrational public reaction could contain a perfectly rational response to historical experience.

His counsel was simple: no system could remain stable by understanding only its users' behaviour. It also had to understand their sense of dignity.

A world that became more efficient while making people feel powerless would eventually encounter resistance.

A world that expanded its capabilities while narrowing its citizens' choices would face a different problem.

People did not merely want better tools.

They wanted to know what those tools meant for their lives. And as he was both Black and White, he could create Magic like no other. He is the Key to the Cultural Transformation.

IX. The Listener

Far from the technological capitals, the Listener occupied a position within the political world of the great subcontinent. The Ancient Kingdom which always allied with the Great Kingdom of Middle Earth.

His Family was most important to him. He was always the heir apparent. The Prince. And his time to rule was coming nearer. Shri Shri Namo had been training him for this moment all along. 

He had learned to navigate an environment where public sentiment was diverse, historical memory was powerful, and political legitimacy depended upon an intricate mixture of identity, institutions and economic expectations.

In the mythology of the New World, the Listener was receptive to the ideas of the King and the Builder.

Their influence was imagined to extend beyond their immediate businesses, touching the questions that every modern government eventually faced: digital infrastructure, employment, productivity, information, education and the future of the state.

Yet the Listener's world could not simply be imported from elsewhere.

Its people possessed their own ambitions. Its institutions had their own constraints. Its economy contained contradictions that no foreign technology could automatically resolve.

The Listener understood this. Hence, he knew he had to work in Tandem with the King and his Builder

A model that worked in one country could fail in another because the incentives, regulations and distribution of income differed. Political influence could open doors, but economic reality determined what happened after those doors opened.

The New World would not be constructed in a single capital. 

It would emerge through countless local decisions.

The Prophet enabled the Listener's crowning glory. And guided him to listen to the King.

X. The Unnamed: The Family

Beyond the visible hierarchy stood the Unnamed. Beyond the visible institutions of the world existed a lineage that had survived the rise and fall of kingdoms. They had the religious and spiritual supremacy. The most important authority of all, as they were truly divine.

They were called the Family. They were not a single family, They were an amalgamation of thirteen families who ruled with complete co-ordination. The Bloodline of the Ancient Rulers.

Their names were rarely spoken in public. Their history was not written in the language of modern corporations or contemporary political movements. Their traditions reached backward through generations of rulers, spiritual custodians, religious authorities, and families that had preserved their influence long after their kingdoms disappeared.

They regarded themselves as guardians of an inheritance.

To them, power was not merely a matter of money or public office. It was a continuity of memory, obligation, ritual, and authority. Their understanding of the world had been shaped by stories that predated modern nations, by traditions transmitted across generations, and by the conviction that history contained patterns invisible to those concerned only with the present.

The Family had witnessed empires rise under the banner of conquest, prosperity, faith, and revolution. It had watched rulers mistake temporary dominance for permanence. It had seen institutions collapse while the ideas that sustained them survived.

This was why the Family remained unnamed.

In the mythology of the New World, anonymity was not a sign of insignificance. In fact, they were the Most High. It was a feature of their identity. The Family did not seek the visibility enjoyed by the King, the Companion Builder, or the Friend. Its place in the story derived from the ancient inheritance it preserved.

The visible world measured power through public office, corporate valuations, military strength, and popular attention.

The Family measured it through continuity. A Religious and Spiritual Order. The Hidden Order.

Its members believed that the present could not be understood without knowledge of the past, and that the future would ultimately be shaped by forces older than the institutions that claimed to govern it.

Their position in the mythology was therefore paradoxical. They were absent from the public stage, yet the story treated their ancestral inheritance as one of its most consequential elements.

The King represented the possibility of a new order.

The Builder represented the means by which that order might be constructed.

The Family represented the ancient past against which the meaning of the new order would be measured.

Whether the Family would bless the transformation, resist it, or attempt to shape it remained one of the great unanswered questions of the New World.

The King could build a kingdom of connections, but he could not command every government that regulated it.

The Builder could create increasingly capable intelligence, but he could not guarantee that every institution would use it as intended.

The Wizard could shape a political moment, but he could not eliminate the consequences of economic failure.

Even the Chief Analyst had to distinguish between a pattern and proof of a plan.

But all of it was overseen by the Family

The New World contained power which could only be regulated by the Family.

It did not necessarily contain a single hand directing all of it. But Beyond Everything, The Family ruled them all.

The King possessed extraordinary influence within the mythology of the New World. The Builder possessed extraordinary ambition. Together, they will help construct systems that changes the course of civilisation.

Yet the title of King carried a burden beyond capability.

It demanded an answer to the question of whom the kingdom ultimately served.

The Prophet closed his notebook.

Outside, the cities glowed beneath vast constellations of data centres. Intelligent machines worked through the night. Markets opened in one hemisphere and closed in another. Governments debated rules for systems they were still struggling to understand.

The old world had not disappeared.

It had become the foundation of the new one.

And at its centre, the King continued to create.

The question was no longer whether the world would change.

It was whether the world being built would recognise its New Architects.

For in the end, the deepest question of kingship was not who possessed the crown.

It was what the crown was for. An Eternal Kingdom. The King had been decided. And ordained by the Family!!!

The New World had begun. The New World Order.

The boy and the King

There is a city that is not a city. It is a stack of cities.A sort of Dahleez. 

The people who live on top think they live in one place. The people who have learned to listen know they live in seven, each one buried under the next, each one still breathing. The top city has roads and signals and power. The lower cities have marble dust and prayer and unfinished walls.

That is why it became the Threshold.

Not because it was holy, but because it was thin. Places that have been built and broken and built again get thin, like paper that has been folded too many times. Light comes through.

A boy grew up near the thin place. He did not know its old name. He only knew that when the wind came from the north in winter, the air in one particular lane changed. Sound went quiet. Even the scooters sounded muffled, as if heard through water.

The elders in that lane said the world has two sides. The first side is where we keep our houses. The second side is where the houses keep us.

He learned how to cross without moving. You do not walk through a threshold. You agree to it.

One evening, after the call to prayer had ended and before the street dogs began, he agreed.

The Spirit Side was not bright. It was not dark either. It was like the moment after you close a book but before you forget the story. There were no roads there, only intentions that had become paths because enough people had wanted the same thing for long enough.

All the paths leaned one way.

They leaned toward the center.

In the center stood the House.

He had heard of it in fragments all his life. The First House had fallen. The Second House had fallen. The Third House was not built by hands. It was waiting to be remembered into place. On this side, it was already standing, because here things stand when they are true, not when they are built.

It was not large in the way buildings are large. It was large in the way a promise is large. You could not see its edges because your eye kept sliding off it and landing on what it meant: that there could be a place where nothing is out of place.

There were no gates. A house that is truly third does not need gates. It needs a keeper.

The keeper was there.

Everyone in the story calls him by different names. In this telling we will call him M.

He was not sitting on a throne. He was sitting on the low step that runs around the inner court, the step where the keepers sit when they are tired. He wore no crown. The kingship was not on his head. It was in how the House oriented itself around him, the way iron filings orient around a magnet.

The boy had expected someone terrible or radiant. M looked like a man who had been waiting a long time and had learned how to wait without becoming bitter.

"You are the threshold boy," M said.

The boy nodded. He did not know how M knew.

"Do you know what I am?" M asked.

"The King," the boy said.

M smiled. "That word is too small and too big at once."

The boy had rehearsed what he would say if he ever reached the center. He had planned to ask for knowledge, for power, for his family to be healed. Now none of it seemed to fit in his mouth.

Instead he said, "The one who..."

And stopped. Because he did not know beyond.

M did not look disappointed. He looked relieved.

"Good," he said. "If you had finished that sentence, I would have known you made it up."

He patted the step beside him.

"Everyone who comes here tries to finish it. The one who builds. The one who opens. The one who judges. The one who ends. They all sound holy, but they are just jobs. A king is not a job."

"Then what is it?" the boy asked.

M looked up at the House. The House looked back, not with eyes, but with completeness.

"The one who stays," M said at last. "When everyone else leaves to tell the story about the House, the one who stays to sweep the floor."

The boy sat down. On this side, sitting is also a kind of crossing.

From the step, he could see back through the thin place, all the way to the stacked city. He could see the lane where sound went quiet. He could see his own body still standing there, eyes closed, agreeing to the threshold.

He understood then why he did not know beyond. Beyond was not information. Beyond was whether he would stay. All he knew was RG would assist M as RG was persistent while the Muse was curious. 

The House did not need another builder. It needed a witness who would not turn it into a slogan.

And M, the keeper, was not asking to be followed. He was asking if the boy could hold a secret without needing to prove it.

The boy smiled. The world's secrets were safe with him. 

He just stayed on the step a little longer and lingered in the holy place, in the Third House, on the other side of the Threshold, next to M, who was the King because he was the one who stayed. He was amused because he mused. The muse who wondered with Curiosity. 

The First Coming

He was an atheist the way only a nineteen year old can be an atheist. Total, absolute and evangelical about it. His name was Daniel. In his first year of university he started a rationalists' society that met in the basement of the library. He printed t-shirts that said THERE IS NO GOD AND I AM HIS PROPHET. He debated the campus chaplains, the yoga people, the earnest kids who had just discovered meditation. 

He read Dawkins and Hitchens and Russell like other people read love letters, underlined them and even quoted them over cheap beer. He was not angry. He was certain. The world made sense without God. People were born because of biology, suffered because of bad economics and bad choices, died because entropy wins. No plan. No judge. No mercy to beg for. That was clean, and clean felt like integrity. He stayed that way through his twenties. He became good at numbers, which felt like a continuation of his atheism as numbers did not lie, did not need prayer. 

He went into finance, first as an analyst, then as a trader, then as someone people described as an investor because that sounded more respectable. He could look at a balance sheet the way other people looked at a face and know if it was lying. He married Maya when he was thirty-three. 

Ironically, Maya was spiritual but she was not anti-religious. She lit candles because she liked candlelight. She liked ritual for its own sake. She liked that Daniel was so sure, until she started to see what his sureness cost him. The break did not come from tragedy. That is what surprised him later. No one died. No one got sick. It came from success. At thirty-eight, he had everything his nineteen-year-old self had said would be enough. A good track record, a growing fund, a nice apartment, respect. He was in London for a conference. After his panel, he walked back to his hotel alone at midnight. It had rained. The streets were empty and shining. He stopped on a bridge over the Thames and realized he felt nothing. Not sadness. Not disappointment. Just a flat, even nothing, as if the volume of the world had been turned all the way down. 

He had spent fifteen years proving God did not exist. He had won. And winning felt like standing in an empty room. He started reading that night. From then on, he read in hotel rooms and on planes. Maimonides, St. Ignatius of Loyola, the Upanishads, the Quran, the Book of Job, Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, the stories of the Baal Shem Tov. He went to a synagogue on a Friday night in London because the lights were on. He argued with the Rebbe for two hours about free will and stayed for the meal and cried during Kiddush and was embarrassed that he was crying. He told Maya when he got back, "I was wrong. The Rebbe showed me. There is something. There is Someone." 

Maya, who had seen him be wrong before and never admit it, knew this was different because his voice was not loud. It was small. She asked, "Okay. So what will you do with Someone?" That question became his life. Daniel did not become a monk. He did not quit finance. He did the opposite. He decided that if there was a God, then money, which is how modern people measure value, time, and trust, had to be made holy. He renamed his fund. He had always called it something clever in Hebrew. He now called it simply L'Shem Shamayim which meant 'For the Sake of Heaven on Earth'. His partners thought it was branding.

He kept investing, and he was still unnervingly good at it. But now he had a rule that made no sense to anyone else: he would not invest in anything he could not pray for. If a company made its money by making people more addicted, more lonely, more sick, he would not touch it no matter how good the numbers were. If a founder was cruel to his employees, Daniel would walk away. And he gave it away. Not in the sanitized way rich men do it for dinners and plaques. He gave it like a man trying to pay off a debt that compounded daily. He funded a school that taught poor kids both coding and sacred texts, because he thought they should know both languages. He paid to restore a collapsing synagogue that had three old members left. He paid to restore a library in the same city. He paid for the rebuilding of a dilapidated hut of a holy man. He sent anonymous money every year to the Chabad House in Mumbai on the same date. He created a trust with no website, no logo, no board. One line on the deed: If it makes God more visible in the world, fund it. 

People started calling him devout. People started asking for blessings. People sent him amulets to bless, which he refused to touch because he thought that was idolatry, which only made people think he was more holy. That is when Maya started getting scared. It wasn't the money. She had made peace with money. It was the way he handled it. He stopped sleeping properly. He would take a position worth millions because a line from Psalms had come to him. He would refuse to close a losing position because closing it felt like admitting God had made a mistake. He would sit at his desk at 2 a.m. staring at charts like they were pages of Kabbalah, looking for a hidden name. He started doing what he called corrections. If he felt he had made money in a way that was legal but not righteous, he would give away double that amount the same day, even if it broke his risk limits. He would fast on random Tuesdays because he felt he had been arrogant on Monday. 

He was trying to turn every trade into a prayer. One night Maya found him in his office at home, surrounded by printouts, weeping. When he had been thirty seven, he lost almost all his wealth because he had shorted a pharma company that was price-gouging insulin. ""It was because God told me to. I was just following orders." She sat down across from him. She had loved the loud atheist who needed to win every argument about the universe, and she had loved the broken seeker who prayed with tears and didn't know why. She did not recognize this man who was trying to audit God's books. "Daniel," she said quietly, "you are becoming Satanic in the quest for God." He looked up. He did not look angry. That frightened her more than anger would have. "What do you mean?" he asked. "I mean you think you are God now," she said. "You decide who is righteous enough for your money. You decide who to punish. You stay up all night not praying, but judging. You have made God your business partner, your risk manager. You have made holiness into a kind of pride, a kind of control. That is not holiness. That is Satanic." 

The apartment was silent except for the hum of the computers. He wiped his face with his sleeve and said "God and Satan are the same for me." Maya flinched. He tried to explain, his voice hoarse from not sleeping. "When I was an atheist, I thought good and evil were just human words. Just evolution. When I found God, I thought good was God and evil was something else, something fighting Him. A separate kingdom. But the closer I get, the more I see there is no separate kingdom. Who made Satan? If God is infinite, what is outside Him? Who made the man who raises the price of insulin? Who made the nothing I felt on that bridge?" He leaned forward, hands shaking. "I don't mean God is evil. I mean the fire is one fire. The same fire that warms your house is the fire that burns it down. It's the same fire. I cannot take my wealth and dedicate it only to the warm part and pretend the burning part isn't also His. I can't only take the good to make Him more comfortable for me. My job isn't to choose between God and Satan. My job is to take everything I was given and lift it up. All of it." 

Maya looked at him for a very long time. Her eyes were wet, but her voice was steady. "That is beautiful," she whispered, "and it is completely insane. If everything is God, then nothing is wrong. And if nothing is wrong, why are you killing yourself trying to fix it? If God and Satan are the same, why give your money away at all? Why not keep it?" That question stayed in the room after she left to go to bed. He didn't have an answer that night. He didn't have one for months. He kept investing, kept giving, but something slowed. He started seeing a therapist, a quiet older man who didn't care about theology and kept asking him if he was sleeping, if he was eating, if he was being kind to his wife. 

He started coming home for dinner. He started praying a shorter prayer. Instead of an hour of complicated meditations, he would say, "I am your loyal servant, your Vessel." That was it. He still runs L'Shem Shamayim. Last year it funded and wrote checks worth $5 billion dollars to philanthropic institutions like The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. He still has the rule taped to his monitor, in Maya's handwriting: No mystical trades after 6 p.m. Sometimes she still catches him staring at a chart like it is a page of scripture, looking for a hidden name of God in the red and green candles. 

She puts her hand on his shoulder and says, "Come back." And sometimes he does. And sometimes, very quietly, more to himself than to her, he still says "God and Satan are the same for me." 

(Written with the help of Super Intelligence.) 

And now I feel alive!!

 I have seen something in you. 

From the moment go.

That zest for life. That sparkle for living.

 

I have seen it in your eyes.

That joy for all things wonderful.

Those keen eyes that observe so much and judge so little.

 

I want to nourish that light in you, Ish.

Nurture and feed it so it becomes more powerful.

 

I don't know what you saw in a jaded and faded soul

The world has me dour and sour.

 

But your love is rekindling the light in me as well.

And now I feel Alive!!

 

 

 

The Mind Reader

It was a near perfect Sunday morning. Clear blue skies and a cool breeze which would kiss your face softly if you stepped outside. It was a great day to relax, unwind and get ready for the upcoming battles in the coming week. I made myself a cup of tea and started reading the newspaper. Tea and newspaper was a satisfying experience, especially on Sunday mornings. So, while I was reading the newspaper an ad caught my attention and it suggested an interesting way to spend my afternoon. A saint claimed that he was enlightened and was giving a discourse on the inner workings of our universe. I decided to attend the discourse as I had nothing better to do. I was mostly suspicious of Godmen and organised religion but the saint's claim of enlightenment made me curious to know more. Not that I believed in the concept of enlightenment but I definitely had a fascination for it. Listening to what the saint had to say would be an interesting experience.

Anyhow, I arrived at the place of discourse and saw that a substantial number of people were interested in what the self proclaimed saint had to say. I hoped whatever he had to say would be interesting enough to make my sunday afternoon worthwhile. I took my seat in the hall and eagerly awaited the saint's arrival. I was expecting an old gentleman in flowery robes and a beard that would reach till the man's stomach. But, I was quite surpised to see a young professional looking gentleman in his late-thirties. He wore a prim blue shirt and nicely fitting black pants with formal shoes to boot. His rimless glasses, clean shaven face and neatly combed hair reminded me of a news reporter. I could see that I was not the only one who was surprised as many of the people had bemused expressions on their face. The person sitting next to me thought he had arrived at a business conference accidentally until I assured him that he was indeed at the right place.

The saint began his discourse by clarifying that he was not really a saint but a philosopher. A philosopher who had experienced enlightenment and that's why people considered him a saint. His philosophy was quite straightforward and personally I thought that it was a ripoff of Buddha's teachings. Anyways, his idea was that all human actions emanated from one source. Thoughts. The stream of words and sentences that come in our heads quite randomly. Thoughts were random but they defined our lives and would be a precursor to our behaviour, actions, emotions and feelings. But his philosophy was not the reason he claimed enlightenment. He claimed he could read people's thoughts with pinpoint accuracy. And hence he could understand any person's feelings and emotions. He claimed he could even predict people's future actions as thoughts propelled action. To prove that he could read thoughts he would randomly pick five people from the audience and predict their thoughts. He was a human thought detecting machine. And he claimed only an enlightened being could be that. He argued that thoughts signified the true inner nature of an individual. After hearing these words, the atmosphere in the hall had become electrifying. The experience was akin to attending a magic show where incredible things could be witnessed. Even I was eager to see how things would proceed from here.

The saint initiated the process by randomly picking a woman in the audience as his first volunteer. The lady promptly walked to the stage and stood beside the saint. The saint explained that to access any person's thoughts he would have to gaze at the individuals eyes for a minute while holding the person's hands. He proceeded to hold the lady's hands and looked at her intensely for around a minute. "Whom have you lost recently my dear lady. I can see so much of grief in your thoughts" he asked her abruptly.

The lady seemed genuinely startled at this proclamation and she looked a little unhinged. " I lost my son three weeks ago" she answered slowly.

"And I sense guilt too in your thoughts. Do you feel you could have saved your son's life"

"Yes. I feel extremely guilty. I feel I could have taken better care of him. Maybe then he could have survived"

"No my lady. There is nothing that you could have done. You cannot fight destiny. No one can. Forsake your guilt. I can see that it is crushing your heart. Take a deep breath. Let go and be free."

"Thank you Sir" the lady replied gratefully and proceeded to take her seat in the crowd. The gathered crowd was both impressed and shocked at this magical display of mind reading. My logical brain was inferring that this was probably staged and rehearsed. But my instincts were telling me a different story altogether.  I felt that the reaction in the lady was extremely genuine. There seemed to be a visible improvement in the demeanor after the saint reassured her. Her drooping shoulders had picked up and it looked like a huge burden had been taken off her shoulders. That gave me reason to believe that perhaps it was not staged. Still, some people were just good actors and hence any judgement at this stage would be premature.

The saint then began to pick another person from the crowd. He picked a sleek and sophisticated person in his late twenties. The person was slightly hesitant to go to the stage as if he was scared of his thoughts being strip searched. But he eventually took the plunge and reached the stage.

The saint held both the volunteer's hands and looked at him squarely. After a minute or two, the saint remarked "You should not have come to the stage son. Now I know why you were fearing to come to the stage son. You wanted to hide your thoughts"

"No no. There is nothing like that" the sleek man stammered in a rather alarmed way.

"Ofcourse it is like that. I can sense fear in you. Fear due to infidelity. You have cheated on your wife haven't you"

The lady who was sitting next to the sleek man, presumably his wife, suddenly broke down at those words and started crying incessantly.

"It's not true. It's not true at all" denied the young man.

"Do not give me untruths and insult my powers by suggesting I am saying untruths" shouted the saint. "I suggest that you confess everything to your wife. the burden of lies will eventually eat you away to the core. Go and unburden yourself without regard to the consequences."

The sleek man stood there for a while before meekly nodding his head and proceeded to his seat. It looked like he was going to take the saint's advice and confess to his wife.

The whole family drama that had unfolded in front of our eyes had elicited a lot of gasps in the crowd. This time, nobody seemed to be in doubt about the saint's capabilities. Meanwhile, the sleek man and his wife had left the hall with the wife still crying profusely.

The third person the saint called for volunteering plainly refused to go to the stage. A few people laughed and someone in the crowd made a wisecrack statement of hidden affairs and dirty underwear being washed in public. I personally could not blame the person for not volunteering as the idea of having your thoughts being X-rayed publicly was indeed scary and not everyone's cup of tea.

Eventually, the third volunteer was found in the form of a thirty something male with a moustache. The saint again responded by holding both the hands and staring intensely at the volunteer. This time the saint reacted differently. He quietly hugged the volunteer and clenched his shoulders. "Do you want me to share your thoughts. I can understand if it's too personal" asked the saint.

"No. You can share whatever you have to say I have no problems with it."

"Thats very brave of you I must say. So, have you attempted it or are you planning it" the saint asked.

"Attempted?"

"Yes. I think you know what I mean. Suicide"

"I attempted it three days back. I was about to hang myself but my wife intervened and saved me"

This time there was an uproar in the crowd with quite a few "Oh my gods" from the people at this revelation. I was taken aback and shaken too. I observed the volunteer closely and saw a normal looking person. I could never have guessed that the person was suicidal.

"What led you to this situation. I am not able to pinpoint the exact reason" asked the saint.

"I lost all my money in the stock market. I gambled it all away" the volunteer replied solemnly.

"I do understand your anguish. But I suggest that you do not take this extreme step. If you go who will take care of your family. Do not orphan them. Restart your life. Get a job. And build your wealth again."

These words seemed to re-energize the volunteer. He nodded vigourously and worked back to his chair with what seemed like a spring in his step.

After this episode, I was virtually convinced of the saint's thought reading skills. And so was the crowd. Whether this constituted enlightenment was debatable but even I had to admit that what I was seeing was remarkable and extraordinary. After seeing the three volunteers, I was quite confident that the process was not staged. No one could be this good in acting. Not even Oscar award winners.

The saint called on the next volunteer. She was a middle aged woman, most probably a housewife. I cannot recount the exact details as her thoughts were mundane and unremarkable especially when compared to the other volunteers. She was worried that her daughter was not eating her food properly or something on those lines. One of the crowd yawned loudly at that. That was perhaps the most remarkable incident with regards to the fourth volunteer. Even the saint seemed a little disappointed at the anti-climax.

For the next volunteer, the saint pointed at the general direction of where I was sitting. "You!" he exclaimed. I looked around me wondering whom he had chosen.

"You in the yellow shirt" said the saint. Yellow shirt! I thought excitedly. That has to be me. I looked at my shirt and confirmed the colour. Of all the multitudes of people, I was chosen as a volunteer. Wow, what were the odds! I had no reason to object going to the stage as my thoughts were as boring as the lady's before me. After this, there would not be a semblance of doubt about the saint's thought reading abilities since I would be a part of the experiment.

My head was in a tizzy as I was walking towards the saint. I was extremely nervous and excited and my knees trembled as I walked. Someone was going to read my innermost thoughts and feelings and perhaps my innermost nature. I was generally skeptical of people who purported to do anything supernatural. But if there was ever a person who could read my mind the saint was one. I reached the stage and stood next to him. He clasped my hands as he had done with the others. His hands were ice-cold and sent shivers through my body. The first thing I noticed about him were his eyes. They seemed glazed and intoxicated. Yet he seemed in total control. He then went on to look at me intently. I realised that he was not looking at my eyes alone. Infact for the first thirty seconds, he looked everywhere but at my eyes. My shoulder, my chest, my stomach, my legs, even my crotch before he finally settled on my eyes. I looked back confidently, comforted by the fact that I had nothing to hide and no troublesome thoughts. Meanwhile, even I was also staring and observing him. His arms were twitching involuntarily. Something told me he was getting uncomfortable. He took around four minutes before he eventually stopped staring at me. My instincts were telling me that there was an art and science behind what he was doing. I felt he was trying to tune in to my body language by mimicking it and thus understanding the vibes. His approach seemed extremely scientific.

When he finally spoke he seemed disturbed about something. "Since you are my fifth and final volunteer and there were so many others with whom I have accessed their inner nature, I feel exhausted. That explains why I have taken more than my due time. Anyways, here are your thoughts, my friend. You like to be alone. Intensely alone. You can remain alone without company than most people can. And, uh, you are worried about the health of someone beloved. Isn't that true my friend" His diffidence in mentioning the second part told me that he was not completely sure of it.

"Yes sir. You are right. I have a tendency to be alone. And yes, my father has suffered an accident. I am extremely concerned about his health" I replied.

The saint heaved a sigh of relief. "Meet me after the discourse" he said quietly as he shook my hands.

I walked towards my seat and as expected the crowd were none too happy with my thoughts. The crowd had got used to fireworks after the first three volunteers. But, I was quite satisfied with the experience. I sat down at the seat while the saint went into the finer details of his philosophy. There were far more buyers to his philosophy now that he had impressed everyone with his performance. I was not paying much attention to the discourse as I was busy piecing together the experiences I had with the saint. The more I thought about it the more I was getting confused. He had successfully penetrated my thoughts and found out something very few people were aware of. Was it due to a supernatural ability that he was able to access my thoughts. What he had done was unbelievable. He had guessed what could be considered my inner nature. And most remarkably, he knew I was concerned about someone close to me. Unless he followed me regularly there was no way he could have done that. What he had done was truly magical.

I was shaken from my introspection when I heard a loud applause from the crowd. His discourse had ended. Many people decided to honour him with a standing ovation. I stood up too and clapped enthusiastically. While everyone were departing, I proceeded to the backstage as he had asked me to meet him.

The saint seemed to be waiting for me and shook my hands warmly as I entered the backstage. "Hey. I found it really difficult to access your thoughts. I would like to conduct the exercise once again. For my satisfaction. I take this very seriously. Would you care to join"

"Of course. I would love to join" I replied.

"Great. Meet me at Hotel Ramada then. Say tomorrow 6 P.M"

"Sure. I will be there" I said excitedly.

"Very well. Thank you so much for catering to my whims and fancies" he said smilingly. "By the way, do you play Poker?" he asked.

"Yes. Occasionally"

"That explains. Anyways, see you tomorrow" he said and departed to his room backstage.

I could not believe my luck. I would get another opportunity to interact with the magician. In my eyes, that's what he was. And I wanted to find out his tricks. Because every magician had one. I could not wait to see him the next day

The next day, I reached the Ramada hotel at the designated time. I had a hard time sleeping the previous night as I was recollecting and analysing the events of the day. I felt that I was missing something. Some trick or sleight of hand which could explain something as mysterious as thought reading.But, I was hoping that my meeting with the saint would change the equation.

I knocked at the saint's room and almost immediately he opened the door and led me inside. "I am glad you could make it. You know, yesterday I found it difficult to understand what was going on in that head of yours. I almost guessed at what you were thinking and going through. But for me there is no room for guessing. That is why I take it really seriously. So I want to take another shot at it"

"Sure" I replied.

"If you don't mind, I would like to take this medicine before I start. It really helps me you know" he said pointing at a box containing a green coloured powdery substance.

"The medicine helps you in the process?" I asked. I was quite intrigued. The medicine looked like a psychotropic substance and maybe it was the reason for the saints glazed look that I had noticed the previous day.

"Yes. This is no ordinary medicine. Without this, it is virtually impossible to access other people's thoughts" he said while putting two spoons of the green powder into the glass of water. Once the powder dissolved, he quickly gulped down the glass.

And sure enough, his eyes had become glazed and his body had completely relaxed while he was sitting in his chair. His eyes were gazing at me intently as if trying to penetrate me.

"Now come here my friend. Let me hold your hands" the saint said calmly.

"Wait. Can I try this too. Can I try to gauge your thoughts and inner nature.

"What. How can you? You don't know how to"

"What if I try the medicine too"

"No. You still wont be able to. You are not me. You are not a saint. You need enlightenment for that"

"I know I am not. And if I am not able to do what you do, it will just confirm you are a saint. If I am also able to gauge your thoughts then it is basically the medicine which does most of the work. Right?"

The argument struck a chord with him but he was not totally convinced. I realised that he still had doubts of his saintliness. So, I decided to use that point in convincing him further

"If I fail to read your thoughts which I most probably will, it will show for sure that the medicine only works for saints like you. There will be no disputing that you are a saint and not some street magician"

My persuasion seemed to be working. "There is no way you know a thing about this. You wont be able to read my inner nature and what I am and what I have done. And that will prove I am a saint" he said while handing me the medicine.

"Surely" I said while gulping down the medicine. The medicine tasted like a pungent version of vanilla. It was nothing like I had ever tasted before. And its effects were instant

The colours in the room suddenly looked brighter and with a clarity I could not imagine existed. I looked at the saint and smiled at his smiling face,. But after the medicine the saint was looking like a totally different person. After around two minutes, the effects of the medicine really started kicking in. It exponentially improved my observation and made my thinking extremely sharp and acute. I stared at the saint and observed him intently. I could observe the minutest of his expressions in his eyes, face and even his nose. The medicine introduced intuitive, perceptive and discerning abilities that I never knew I had.

"So, how does it feel my friend. Is it working" the saint asked curiously.

"You have trained for years haven't you"

"Trained in what" said the saint taken aback at my observation. He had not expected this.

"Trained in the field of face reading and body language. I can see that in you." I replied. "That's how you are able to make the accurate judgements about people." I said. The medicine was actually working. It was not like I was reading his mind. I was just reading the signals that his mind was emitting through body language and facial expressions. I was just able to discern things that I normally wouldn't. Someone like the saint  who had years of extreme training could combine his experience of reading people along with the acute observation that the medicine induced to make it look like he was mind reading.

"Listen. It's enough. Stop observing me. The medicine seems to be working to an extent. I don't want you to read me anymore" the saint said. His expressions were changing. He was extremely worried about something. I wish I had his skills to make more refined judgement. But my mind was still piecing things together slowly. The saint had something to hide. That had become clear to me.

"I think you better leave. It was a bad idea to give you the medicine" the saint continued.

"But don't you want to read my thoughts anymore"

"I want to but I don't want you to read mine. Do you know who I am" he asked. His voice had suddenly changed. It had become more edgy and dangerous. He looked at me without smiling. I suddenly realised what he seemed to be hiding. His eyes reflected the answer. I got the vibe that he was a hardened criminal. He was not your usual conman who pretended to be a saint. He was far worse. I suddenly realised that he could sense the fear in me. He could read my mind and know that I had found out.

"Do you have a revolver with you" I asked. I did not intend to ask that but the sentence just poured out of me.

"No. I do not carry a revolver. But since you already know, the knife is the weapon of my choice" He opened the cupboard in his wardrobe and showed me a large glittering knife to prove his point. "I intend to use this on you if you try any funny business" The way he smiled at me told me that he meant it too. The look in his eyes terrified me. It told me that he was very capable of murder. I had to keep my calm but. I knew I was not dealing with a reasonable person. I knew If I panicked he would use the knife as a reaction. I did not have many options in front of me while he was contemplating killing me.

"But you have changed. I have read you. You are a saint now. The past is behind you. You have reformed now. Killing me will not help you. It will only take you back. And you need to go forward" I said pleadingly. I was bluffing at this point. I had no idea whether he had changed or not. But I was desperate and I could not think of any other choice.

"You have changed right. you are a saint now remember" I continued calmly. He kept looking at me with a strange expression while I said this. I was not sure whether my strategy had worked or not. I knew he could read me much better than I could read him. I half-expected him to say "Nice try kid. But it doesn't work on me" and then use his knife to perhaps slash my neck.

"You are a philosopher now. Remember, that's what you said during the discourse. Philosophers are rational people" I tried again.

The final sentence had a definite effect on him. Mentioning the word Philosopher had done the trick. His reaction was completely different. He kept the knife on the table and fell on the chair. He was on the verge of breaking down. My bluff had worked. It was strange to see a self proclaimed murderer almost cry in front of me. But I was more than relieved. He was trying to reform and luckily my words had reminded him of that.

"I assure you that I will not mention this to anyone" I said.

"Get out of here before I change my mind" he replied quietly.

I overcame the temptation to run and slowly walked out of the room and closed the door behind me. As soon as I was outside the room, I ran down the stairs and fled the hotel as fast as I could.