saved my life time after time.”
“But . . . I’m not a sniper. What do you mean by ‘living in the moment’?”
“A hundred percent of all your six senses are focused on one thing. Nothing else exists, before or after or around you, except what you’re doing in that moment.” He pointed a thumb toward the donut boxes. “For example? I felt a shift of energy around you when you started choosing donuts. Your focus was on the donuts and only them. You had no awareness of your surroundings, what someone else was saying or who was in there. You were a hundred percent there with those donuts. Nothing else existed in that moment except you with them.”
“Oh,” she murmured, placing her hand against the column of her long neck, considering his definition. “My mother is Hawaiian. She taught me how to do that when I was very, very young. To be, what she called, present.”
“Zen Buddhists teach being in the moment, or present, as part of how to live our lives, too,” he noted. “They spend a lifetime trying to do it. Watching you? It comes naturally to you. There’s no effort. I felt a shift in you and saw you move into that space.”
“Really?” She became flustered. “What do you mean a shift, Chase?”
He grimaced. “You’ll probably laugh at me, but when I was a sniper, my instructor told me that as I hunted my quarry, and once I had him, I would automatically shift into this Zen-like state. Nothing existed outside of me and my quarry. My whole focus—body, heart, and soul—was enveloped in that moment. And as for the shift, my instructor told me everything is energy. Simply energy. Whether it’s seen or unseen, it’s still energy. When I lived in that moment, nothing else existed. My six senses were focused on him and only him.”
“Oh, dear . . . well . . . my mother taught me it was natural for all children to be one with the Hawaiian goddesses and gods; that it was the world they lived in, and that I could practice going there.”
“Interesting,” he murmured, turning onto the highway that would lead back to the ranch. “My instructor called it the fourth dimension, and it’s outside our third-dimensional reality. It’s outside our conscious awareness. He made me aware that the shift was going from our normal three-dimensional world where we live, into this other dimension, the fourth one. There, I was one with everything; colors became brighter and more intense, sounds were amplified and my hearing was extraordinary. He said that I had that 4D awareness, which a sniper needs so no one can sneak up on him or her when ready to take out the target.”
“Would another example of a fourth dimension be like geese that fly in formation but never crash into one another?”
“I think that’s third dimensional. Scientists called it murmuration. Have you heard the term?”
Shaking her head, she said, “No. What is it?”
“The ability for hundreds, even thousands of birds to move as one, never crash into one another, as though performing a dance that only they know and can perform in the sky. Scientists now think the magnetism in birds’ brains give them that extrasensory knowing about their space and location of their flock mates. That’s why they don’t collide with one another during flight. It’s as if they sense their closeness to one another and know how to stay a safe distance. And you know what is really interesting?”
“What?”
He tapped the back of his head. “Our instructors informed us that human brains have magnetite in them, especially in the brain stem and cerebellum, our old, ancient, first brain we had as humans. It’s part of the limbic system, which is, in my opinion, our original ‘animal’ brain. This is the one that uses all its six senses to survive, to suss out a shadow that’s really a predator stalking them, or a smell that’s different from the normal scents of an area, things like that.”
Her eyes widened. “That’s incredible. I didn’t know that.”
“In sniper school, they had us do months of training in the subtleties of what animals see when they’re out in fields, mountains, valleys, and pastures. We learned to refine our senses, hone them into being more animal than human. We were as much the hunted, as the hunter, just like every animal, unless you were the predator at the top. That predator doesn’t have to worry about being hunted, but the rest