Notes: Near-Death Experiences

Near-death experiences may result in an ai having a unique relationship with sefai—by having the powerful connection of a bodiless ai, but with attachment to the physical world. These ai can serve as portals into Aiur. Sefai can use this portal to act through the individual, and the individual may be able to use sefai in return.

These portals often allow other ai in that individual’s ‘chain’ or ‘thread’ to connect directly. Rather than recollecting faint memories or having interesting dreams, they progress to sharing sensations, witnessing one another’s pure memories, and even communicating directly. Eventually, an ai may inhabit the body of one of their other selves—two ai in one form. An even more powerful ai may be able to use sefai to construct a new, physical body of their own. This results in more than one ai from the same branch walking alongside one another in a single lifetime.

The use of sefai became one of the earliest known forms of ‘magic,’ though it was poorly understood. These unique ‘touched’ ai were not only able to manipulate sefai, but with discipline, could prevent it from manipulating them in turn. ‘Manipulating sefai’ refers to the ability to draw on their own ai, and the ai of others. Just like sefai cocooned itself in a body before the dawn of time, these ‘touched’ are able to manipulate the matter around them.

Materials like sand, water, or their own blood, were easiest to manipulate at first, but a skilled user could eventually influence even the most massive of objects, tearing them apart on a molecular level. This is how Saio and her many incarnations have disassembled the world, and it is the same method Aru’s incarnations used to build it anew.

Notes: The Soul, Ego, and Mask

All individual ai are connected to sefai, the origin soul. Connections may be weakened, or even broken, but can always be ‘repaired,’ in a sense. A person’s ai, or soul, is their true self, the one they have always been and will always be. Their connection to sefai, and all other ai, is innate—though this connection can be forgotten or even ignored during an ai’s many lives. Those with a strong attachment to sefai feel connected not only to their true, inner self, but to all others.

Conversely, some have been distanced from their ai, others’ ai, and sefai. These individuals are guided by only their ego—a changing, temporary identity that exists in only one life. They often find it difficult, if not impossible, to feel their primal connection with others, and ultimately, the whole. The most unfortunate of these individuals are completely severed from their ai, and suffer greatly in their loneliness.

Masks are identities that an individual wears—extensions of the ego. They are, oftentimes, used to disguise their ego in the presence of others. Most people craft many masks for themselves, and have even had masks placed on them by others. But it is believed the less masks one wears, the closer that individual is to sefai.

Notes: Soulstreams

Upon death, an individual ai feels a great pull to sefai. Across the world, there are pathways, commonly referred to as ‘soulstreams,’ that lead the ai toward one of two main wells, or openings, into Aiur. These pathways, or this ‘pull,’ is often visualized as a physical guide by the ‘newborn’ ai—a friend, a family member, an animal. Newborn ai are ones that have recently branched from their main thread—much like a new species branches from their evolutionary tree.

The more connected an ai is to all other ai and to sefai, the ‘larger’ Aiur appears to them upon their body’s death. Ai that share weak connections may feel lost, unable to locate the soulstreams, and unable to wander ‘home’ to sefai without great effort. Then there are those that are completely severed, and remain stagnant and unmoving.

Notes: Souls and Time

Time is a tunnel through which we view the greater whole. Because the soul exists outside of time and space, because it exists in another, separate realm (Aiur), the soul of an individual is in fact connected to every life it has ever experienced, all at once, as far back as the origin soul (sefai).

Individuals are more easily connected to their adjoining lives—lives that come either directly after, or directly before, an ai’s path on the web of time. But they are most connected to those of their lives with commonalities. Lives that have experienced similar events, been through similar ordeals, or shared similar sufferings. The well known déjà vu is an example of how these connections may be recognized in a waking individual’s life.

Dreams, however, make those connections on a deeper level. Without interference from the conscious mind, one’s consciousness can even travel into Aiur—the soul realm—with the body acting as a tether to the physical realm. With training, a consciousness can visit Aiur even while awake.

If an individual ai is somehow struck from existence, it can be seen as a missing link in a chain, or a torn thread in a web. The chain of ai, now broken, will find it phenomenally difficult to reconnect with its whole. These gaps can, however, be potentially bridged.

Notes: Sefai

Before time, an anomaly was born—the first soul, or ai, from which all others would descend. In its loneliness, the ai split into two halves: Saio and Aru, the void and the spark. Then they cocooned together, shaping a body within which they could multiply.

‘For every physical, there exists an astral. In each body, a soul.’

The physical, the very cosmos that surrounds us, is that body. And the first ai, and subsequently, our own individual ai, form its soul.