The Last to Know

Tanjin quickly made his way through the darkening wood toward his weekly session with Adviser Kujat. He’d been instructed to be at the cliff before sundown, but "before" was quickly becoming "sundown" and he was afraid his elder was already waiting. He noticed that some of the blooms on the glowvines that bordered the trail were already beginning to light the way with their sweet-smelling, soft-green glow. "I must be later than i thought," he thought, and quickened his already hurried pace. Not long after, he rounded the final turn and saw his adviser calmly arriving from the other direction. The young scholar slowed and breathed a sigh of relief.

The two men bowed slightly to each other, climbed up on a large rock near the edge of the cliff and sat down in silence. The cliff faced west, giving them a clear view of the quickly setting sun. The trees grew thick to the edge, surrounding them with arms and hands, seeing the sun off on its nightly journey, wishing it a safe voyage. Just beyond the rock where they sat, the cliff dropped hundreds of feet to the slope of rubble at its base and the rolling plain below.

Kujat produced a small pouch and unhurriedly rolled and lit a smoke. Tanjin took some slow, deep breaths and practiced settling into the moment… the weight of his butt and legs against the warm rock, the weight of his hands and arms on his legs, the golden light of the sun’s farewell bathing their faces and the world around them, the little towns spread out on the plain below, the almost-black boughs that framed their view, the twilight birds quietly swooping, the stillness rising like a slow tide around them, the presence of the forest night-spirit waking behind them.

"I’m sorry I was late." Tanjin eventually began.

"And yet we arrived at the same time." added Kujat.

"I know. I got here as fast as I could."

"That’s very kind of you, but if you hadn’t rushed we still would’ve arrived at the same time."

Tanjin puzzled over that as the sun sank below the horizon. Lights began to appear out on the plain, one by one, as in the sky above. "That doesn’t make sense. How could that happen?"

Kujat puffed on his smoke before answering. "I don’t know how it happens. You think things should make sense?" Smoke lazily curled away in the still, twilight air.

Tanjin wished his adviser would just give him a straight answer. "Well, of course. Don’t we all?"

"Do we?"

"Isn’t that what science, technology and medicine… isn’t that what our whole civilization is based on?" Tanjin paused, thinking. Kujat waited, knowing his student wasn’t finished. "And what about each of us? We need some way of navigating through the world… to live our lives, pursue our dreams, avoid pitfalls and disasters. How can we do any of that if we can’t make sense of things?"

"I give up. How?"

"No, I’m asking you."

"I know. And i’m asking you."

"Why won’t you just answer me?"

"Give a man a fish…"

Tanjin groaned. Kujat chuckled. "I know, i’m a smart ass. Okay, i’ll put it this way: the World News Network may see itself as the global hub and distributor of information, but it’s still just a repetitive broadcast of an evolving collection of stories about a small number of distant events that’s edited and presented in a way that’s simple and easy to understand."

"Uh-huh." Tanjin muttered, not at all following.

"Conscious awareness is no different." finished Kujat, then he flicked the ashes from his smoke and took another puff as he watched the sky fading into ever-deepening blue. The air around them became tangibly pregnant, waiting for Tanjin’s inevitable question.

"Wait. What are you saying?"

Kujat paused before continuing. "The vast majority of information that your being receives about the state of reality gets filtered out before reaching your conscious mind, right?"

"Um, right."

"Being at the end of that filtering and abstracting process, your conscious mind is the last part of you to know what’s happening, inside and out – and it only gets spotty, biased information at that." Kujat absentmindedly flicked his ashes. Tanjin absentmindedly fidgeted. "It can be easy for the conscious mind to see itself as being at the center, when it’s actually more like the shell of an egg. It’s not the egg. It doesn’t manage the development of the egg. It’s not the reason the egg exists. It probably doesn’t even look like the egg. It’s just a hard, thin structure that covers the egg."

Tanjin both tried and tried not to wrap his head around all that as the darkness grew around them. Kujat finished his smoke, pressed it out on the stone beside him and pocketed the remains. They sat for a while longer, one in stillness, one running in circles, until Kujat looked at the young man and nodded. They rose and bowed to each other. "Next week we’ll meet at the swimming hole behind Grander’s farm at mid-afternoon," said the Adviser. Then he turned and headed back the way he’d come.

"Mid-afternoon." thought Tanjin, as he turned the other way. "Great. And how will I know when that is?" The disturbed student made his way home along the softly-lit paths that crisscrossed the sentient forest. The night-spirit kept pace with him, watching from the darkness behind the shadows; almost indifferent, almost curious, almost protective. The air was warm, the starflies were somewhere in the middle of their nightly ritual dance and the forest hummed with the silence of night, but the young man didn’t notice. He was captivated by the tangle of thoughts that twisted this way and that around his head. "Okay. I’m me but i’m just a shell covering the me that’s the real me, which i will never know except through the news reports that make me the me that’s not me? What?!" He wasn’t sure he liked where this was going.