The Intuitives(47)

Ammu moved on to more complex things, and still the images came to her. A blender. A transistor radio. An electric winch. As the machines grew more complex, the very nature of the diagrams transformed, becoming more symbolic than literal, representing connections and interactions, until all at once she began to see the underlying flows of energy and motion that signified each one.

Almost as though she were in a trance, they poured forth to her now, unbidden, forming in her mind without any effort at all. A dishwasher, a car engine, a solar panel, a gryphon.

What???

She blinked and jerked her head, startled, but Ammu was beaming at her, a drawing of a mythological creature lying on the table in front of him: a lion’s body with the head and wings of an eagle. For just a split second, she had seen…

“You saw it!” Ammu crowed. “For just a moment! I know it! I could see it in your eyes!”

He was right, she had seen something, but she had no idea what to make of it—a circle of complex runes and lines, glowing in the air before her with perfect clarity for just a moment, until the very shock of seeing it had caused it to disappear.





22


Ring



“Everything OK?” Mackenzie asked. She and Kaitlyn were sitting together for lunch, Sam having grabbed a sandwich and headed off to a table by herself.

“Huh? Oh, yeah. Fine,” Kaitlyn said, offering Mackenzie a quick smile and almost immediately looking lost in thought again.

“How’d it go with Ammu?” Mackenzie tried to keep her voice casual. As her own session loomed closer, she was starting to feel a bit nervous herself, even though she never would have admitted it.

“Good, I think?” Kaitlyn replied, her voice somewhat distant. “Kinda strange. I’m not sure I’m really supposed to talk about it.”

Mackenzie frowned, her eyes narrowing dangerously.

“He didn’t get handsy with you, did he?”

“What? No!” Kaitlyn blurted out. “Oh my gosh, no! Ammu would never!” At the very idea of it, Kaitlyn started laughing.

“OK,” Mackenzie said, mollified. “Just checking. You’re acting like you saw a ghost or something.”

“No. No, I…” Kaitlyn grinned wryly. “I just have an overactive imagination sometimes.”

“But nothing bad happened?” Mackenzie almost winced just hearing herself ask. She wanted to believe she was only looking out for Kaitlyn, but she knew there was more to it than that. She liked Ammu, but he seemed mysterious somehow, in a way Mackenzie couldn’t quite put her finger on, and as far as she was concerned that made him unpredictable.

“No,” Kaitlyn said, smiling now. “Definitely nothing bad. But what happened with you guys while I was gone? Why’s Sam so upset?”

“Who knows?” Mackenzie said, shrugging. “Does she even need a reason? I don’t think she likes the idea of having to work with anybody else. Like she thinks we’re beneath her or something.”

Kaitlyn pursed her lips as though she were thinking about it, but in the end she didn’t comment either way, taking another bite of her sandwich instead. Continuing to eat in silence, they both watched as Ammu came into the main hall, walked directly up to Sam, spoke with her for a brief moment, and then led her out toward the new classroom, just the two of them. Alone.

? ? ?

“Oh, now this… this will not do at all,” Ammu said as they walked into the classroom together. He looked back and forth between the chairs and the whiteboard with obvious disapproval. “Is this how you were sitting all morning?”

“Yeah,” Sam acknowledged, shrugging. “So?”

“No, no. This… this is how disconnected we have become from the unconscious mind,” he said. “Look! The seating has been arranged so the chairs have their backs to the door. If you sit here, you have to turn all the way around to see anyone coming in.” He sat in one of the two center chairs and turned his neck and shoulders far enough to face the door, demonstrating.

“You see?” he asked, but Sam just shrugged again.

“The unconscious mind hates this arrangement,” Ammu declared. “It allows the unknown to approach from behind.”

He got back up and began pulling the chairs over to one side of the room, one by one.

“The unconscious mind, you know, is actually very, very old,” he said as he worked. “It is only recently in our evolutionary history that the rational human mind has become so advanced. The unconscious mind has been a part of us for much, much longer, protecting us by watching for threats, and helping us by scanning the environment for food and other opportunities to enhance our chance of survival.”

Once he had moved all the chairs out of the way, Ammu wheeled the whiteboard over to one side of the space, placing it with its back to the temporary partition that had been drawn across the room to section it off from the rest of the large conference space.

“As modern human beings,” he continued, “we train our rational minds from birth to filter out many messages from the unconscious mind. When we are asked as children to enter a dark basement, we become frightened. The unconscious mind is signaling us to be cautious. We must tell ourselves, ‘There is nothing to be scared of. It is just a basement.’

“We learn to ignore these signals so completely as adults that we can walk into our basements without any hesitation, but try to walk into someone else’s dark basement, and hopefully you will find yourself on alert all over again.”