“Sri Bhagavan, mind if I ask you something? I have an issue with my weapon.”, Shiva started. “Sure, Mahesh. What is it?”, Vishnu replied. “When I aim my trident at an enemy, they usually feel they are being targetted and start teleporting around Creation like crazy, trying to save themselves. I track them as quickly, but the problem is, there’s always that slight delay between identifying them well enough to lock on, and actually deploying the weapon, which would of course instantly kill anything at any distance, but by that time the enemy is already elsewhere. You are using a sudarshana chakra, which seems to track an enemy after the initial lock. Is that working better for you?”
“Yes, to a point. It tracks, but my enemies teleport wildly as well. The chakra maintains the lock on the soul itself, but needs to re-establish the location after each teleportation, the same way you’re doing it yourself, but my weapon has this functionality built into its design. We seem to be having the same problem, only my weapon launches and then tracks, while you track and launch only after you have the target pinned. Both essentially hit in same conditions, when the target runs out of ideas or has a sufficient delay in teleportation”, Vishnu mused. “I wish we could figure out some form of tracking that binds the target in some way that inhibits their ability to run, or something.”
“That’s unfortunate. Sure, we could always do it the way our girls do it – curse them and watch them wither and die, without lifting a finger, but that would be unmanly”, Shiva grinned, and Vishnu fist-bumped him. “Speaking about the girls, here they come; it seems they are finished with whatever girly business they had in mind. And speaking of which, wow”, Vishnu spoke with amazement. “Ladies, if one asked me before, I would have said that your beauty is legendary, supreme and impossible to improve, but you apparently did something that leaves me wordless”.
“Oh, we’ve been playing dress-up”, Lady Lakshmi answered, curtsying to the Lords and glowing at her husband. “We created dresses and ornaments for each other, using our own power to enhance the other one’s beauty, and it gave us a lot of pleasure”.
“Lakshmi made a tiara of supreme wealth, dignity and fortune for me, that is powered by my own soul but creates light through her blessings, and I created a dress for her that boosts her own spiritual attributes with the blessing of my power”, Shakti added, curtsying to Lord Vishnu and looking adoringly into her husband’s eyes. “We also talked about some stuff that we found interesting”.
“What kind of stuff?”, asked Shiva, bowing to Lakshmi and looking at his wife. “Oh, mathematics, as a matter of fact. I noticed how mathematics appears as an emergent property of Creation, but only when the principle of Order prevails, an in direct proportion to it. The more things are static, the more they can be modelled in ways of mathematics, which quantifies entities, phenomena and interactions. However, when Chaos is introduced, and things either lose their static and predictable nature, or free will of beings introduces new elements or alters existing ones, the deterministic and predictable quality of the Relative is lost.”, answered his Goddess.
“That is quite interesting”, Vishnu scratched his chin. “What do you think about the implications of this? Is Chaos disturbing the good quality of Order, thus breaking mathematical models and ruining something of value, or is it somehow for the good, if it is allowed to happen?” Shiva nodded in assent and looked questioningly at the women.
“We also wondered about this, and here is our preliminary analysis. It seems that neither Chaos nor Order manifest the will of the Absolute on their own and by themselves. Order would result in rigid laws that would negate all possibility of surprise, creativity or anything new, which is not the point. Also, Chaos on its own would break all good things, as well as the evil ones, indiscriminately. So, Chaos needs to disrupt just enough of Order to make things alive and fluid, while Order needs to guide Chaos in order to make it a force of creative disruption rather than pointless destruction. In both cases, mathematics breaks”, Shakti answered. “It is my hypothesis that this, in fact, is why we exist, and by ‘we’ I mean the four of us in particular. We are powerful enough to disrupt, and yet holy enough to do so in ways that actually make things better, rather than leaving a wasteland and injury. We are all different enough to have different approaches to things and different views on reality, and yet we are similar enough that neither of us would do something that would be seen by others as actually wrong. It’s always some kind of a good idea, even if it comes with initial drawbacks and issues, and we all trust each other’s judgment and cooperate. Any fight between us would be so incredibly destructive, that the entirety of Absolute’s manifestation and plan would instantly be destroyed, but that never happens, because it is not in our nature to oppose each other, but to assist”, Shakti finished.
“So, that’s what you were doing with the dress-up?”, Shiva smiled. “It looks like a very apt illustration of your argument, as you both managed something I would have deemed impossible – you made each other even more wonderful, and it’s not just appearance, because your blessings seem to have interacted synergically with each other’s souls, giving it tools and means of manifestation while in no way interfering with its nature, which was obviously the will of God. When I think of it, when Lord Vishnu interferes to save me from the consequences of some of my inopportune blessings, he is essentially manifesting a high-order dharma to cover for my error, but with implicit assumption that my undeserved gifts are something that disrupts staticity of lower-order dharma, and apparently you can’t disrupt it without occasionally getting it wrong, so my blessings are essentially brahman disrupting the order of justice with the chaotic introduction of mercy, and Sri Bhagavan’s intervention to save me is essentially brahman disrupting the undesired consequence of that with his own free will, that is a blessing of its own kind. And you ladies are definitely brahman introducing wisdom in order to teach us about our own nature, and in such a lovely and charming way”, he bowed deeply, as the girls blushed, not knowing where to look, because the Great Lord turned what started as an impersonal exercise in logical analysis into a very personal compliment, whose blessing made their very souls tingle with power of rightness, because Lord Shiva doesn’t use words idly.
Seeing their embarrassment, Vishnu wielded his power to create a distraction and introduce some levity, making a space for them to sit and have coffee, in the atmosphere of music and light. “So, what have you esteemed Lords been doing while we were gone?”, asked Lakshmi, sitting in Vishnu’s lap. “Oh, we talked about the weapons we use for fighting demonic enemies.”, he smiled. “We established that they both share the same drawbacks but manifest them in a different manner”. “So, why don’t you just use us instead of weapons? I can curse an evil soul and make it lose blessings that make existence possible. Shakti can curse them and make them lose all power. It would happen instantly and regardless of what the evil soul does”, she countered.
Vishnu and Shiva looked at each other. “That wouldn’t be fair to our poor enemies”, Shiva offered. “You Ladies are too powerful and formidable, and if you got involved, the poor demons would stand no chance, and we would have no fun hunting them down”, Vishnu nodded almost seriously, while Shakti poured them more coffee, spicing it up with some starlight.