The Party Line

That night, at the appointed time, when all was quiet in my parents’ home, I entered the aethereal realm yet again and sought out Sage. In trying to contact Sage, I was not too sure what I was literally looking for or what to expect if I succeeded.
I found myself sitting in an open and airy one-room teahouse constructed mostly of bamboo and cedar wood. I was seated cross-legged upon a mat woven of split palm fronds on the floor across a short table from what was presented to me as a very old person. This person had long gray hair pulled back in a ponytail. It was Sage. For being so old, Sage appeared quite healthy, verging upon a robust skinniness. I could not tell if the visualization of Sage was male or female; it did not seem to matter. Percy was seated cross-legged to my right at the table, to Sage’s left.
“Ah,” said Sage in a very pleasant voice when it first noticed my presence before it, “I was wondering when you would pay me a visit.” Sage looked to his left and said, “And you too? Interesting.” Sage sat quietly for a moment and then elegantly and very formally poured us all scalding hot tea from a small teapot into tiny, rough clay teacups with no handles. The three open cups were steaming profusely with the hot tea. Sage sipped that scalding tea and asked me, “But did you not have a question for me?”
I was still trying to become adjusted to my new surroundings and did not have the wherewithal to venture an immediate answer to its question. It went on. “Oh yes, I remember the question you originally posed to that local yachtsman. You began to discuss that question with Resident Teacher as well, and then he referred you to me. You wanted to know what this is all about. Wasn’t that your question—‘What is this all about?’” It produced a small chuckle. Percy gave me a look of wonder, surprised at the revelation of my utter naïveté in having asked such an inane question.
I coughed, picked up my cup, and felt the hot tea through the thin clay sides. I decided not to scald my mouth and set the cup back down again. I looked at Percy with some embarrassment, turned to Sage, and said, “Uh … I’m hoping I’ve refined my question a bit. I’m finding that things are, uh, more complicated than I first imagined. So, if you don’t mind, I’d like to ask some other questions … if you don’t mind.”
“What?” said Sage, raising its right bushy eyebrow with what I took to be mock surprise. “I think your original question is a perfectly fine question: ‘What is it all about?’ And you’ll be happy to know that I can give you a very simple answer to that very complex question.”
Sage smiled broadly and took another sip of its tea, watching me over its cup and causing hot steam to waft up its nose. It lowered the cup and blew the steam back out of its nose while I tried to take in what it had just told me. After a polite pause, I asked somewhat skeptically, “You can answer that question?”
“Sure,” said Sage. “The answer to the question of what this is all about is … nothing.”
I sat in amazement. Looking around me, I wondered if I was in the right place. I felt that maybe, upon entering the hidden realm, I had found some quack instead of Sage. But Percy was there too, so I knew this must be the real Sage. In fact, Percy was staring at me as if it were now my turn to say something profound. I shook my head and blurted out, “You mean all of this is not about anything at all?”
Sage sat very quietly, looked me straight in the eyes, and said, “I didn’t say that. I said that it is all about nothing.” Sage smiled again and waited for my reply.
I was not sure how to take this paradoxical statement from Sage. I was beginning to feel that, as with Resident Teacher, I was again wasting precious time. Sage gave no indication that it was reading my mind. It sat patiently and turned to give Percy a warm smile. Percy returned a somewhat hesitant and bewildered smile to that ancient and venerable soul and then resumed staring straight before her.
I took the bait. “Well then, if this is all about nothing, then what are we doing? Why all the suffering, evil, violence, killing, and all? Surely that is anything but nothing!”
“Oh,” said Sage, “I couldn’t agree more with you on that. Suffering definitely is real. But suffering really is all about nothing.”
“But if suffering is real, then how can you say this is all about nothing?” I demanded.
“Let me illustrate with a simple picture, if you don’t mind indulging an old umbra like myself,” said Sage while it took a hefty pinch of dry deep orange pigment from its calligraphy tray and spread it evenly over a large portion of the elegant black-lacquered tea table. With its right index finger, Sage drew two squares in the orange dust, one on top of the other, offset by about half the length of one side of the squares. It then connected the corners of the squares with straight lines.