“I finished rereading a book yesterday.” His excitement showed in his shifting in seat, the way he drew nearer to its end, leaning outward and across to her, and in eyes that fell in focus to the table as if the thoughts he wished to share were present, physical entities to be seen and given to her if only he knew the way to grasp and raise them from their place.
She sat further upright, straightening in discernment as she interpreted his posture and wanted to learn the shapings in his mind.
“It is all about man’s discernment and understanding of self, how of all we know in the Cosmos, we can remain so unaware of our own existence, meaning, and purpose. It talks of ways we escape from our immanent, what we do to feel and know that we exist: travel, drink, drugs, sex, pretend…be real, seek disasters…surrender to God. Some work better than others. That was the part that caught me the first time I read, but it was the ending I wanted more than that this time.
There are scientific voyages by man to seek planets and moons for colonization in our near-universe. With relativity, the years of the voyages in space are centuries back on Earth, and given the condition of the world, the voyages are either outward colonizations of Mankind in the universe, our Mankind’s last existence after destroying ourselves in our own home.
They are all little synopses, small stories to make you think, and the philosophy is presented as multiple choice answers to make it show as superficially shallow as the easy answers our world tries to feed us about the simplicity of ourselves. Maybe some of us are that simple. I don’t believe I am, nor you, nor any that I care for and wish enough to know. We are all that most remarkable of phenomena, an intact human self…
There is a vignette when the space exploration does in fact find intelligent life in the universe, a potential planet on which to land and seek harbor, but they are denied entry and held in orbit until the dominant beings of the planet understand better what we are. They do not care of our science, our biology, they want to know our souls. What kind of consciousness do we possess?
There are three states: C1, an awareness of self in part of eternal community, oneness and innocence like that of a child that raises and enrichens as a being matures and becomes more aware; C2, the self becomes self-aware, divorced from universe and surroundings and rather than live in the natural harmony of understanding place, purpose, and mutual existence in community-universe—that the C1 understands, he becomes lost, despaired, and arises the jealousies, hurts, disillusionments that befall man without discerned direction or meaningful design. Last are C3s, they are merely C2s, but with a difference. They understand they are a mess, but rather than fight and come to resolution within their own psychology and created explanations, they ask for help…pray…maybe. It doesn’t say exactly, but the multiple-choice answers leads one to believe—or understand the writer’s angle. In seeking, and receiving help, even its mess, the C3 is restored into a peace of place, purpose, a harmony even if its Oneness, place, and integration within the greater universe remains, to it, a mystery.
The dominant beings of the planet understand, and have interacted with beings of each consciousness, and in their experience have learned that it is the C2s that are the dangers. Before Man can enter from his orbit, the species must know that we are not C2s. To learn, they ask what is the nature of our planet…We speak of superpowers and past wars. They ask, if we are alone on our ship, why are we clothed, if we feel shame…We defend ourselves and say it is a custom we choose to continue. They ask what is the composition of our crew…We explain it began as, and then became, and when they ask of the condition of those that are remaining, we explain away our issues rather than accept ourselves as a mess…There is no planet to return to, and our prideful selves find no refuge…Mankind dies in the cold of orbit.
The final vignette hits me more: another crew, a different composition. Three women and a male, selected for the survival of the species (and as the captain is the son of the Governor of New York, perhaps the politics that always play in prideful and future-shaping minds). They again seek intelligent life, and refuge, in the Cosmos. A perceived message is discerned and the mission launched in search of its originators, but it turns out merely to be a near-message pattern of a quasar’s emitting pulse. For over eighteen years, the mission is gone, which relates to over 500 in Earth-time, unaffected by speed and relativity through space.
The world, again, is destroyed…or nearly so. There still remains a small population, but of it, sterility from compounded radiation in food chains, and solar radiation make every successive generation ever more sterile. Only those returning from the mission, to include children born in travel, retain their ability to perpetuate Mankind beyond the final living generation.
An Earthling of the present 500 years after believes, with the condition of the world, that Man may only continue by colonization of Europa, that our own world is doomed and only by seeking a brand new beginning in the universe might man survive.
There is another alternative. One of the three women from the mission, a Methodist and only Christian on the mission (selected partially for the mission as inclusion and representation of this vocal social minority—affirmative action still driving representative spreads of social allotments near the destruction of Mankind, rather than seeing individuals and abilities) wants to go home, a valley in the Blue Ridge of Tennessee, whose heavy dew days and low clouds shelter from the solar radiation that wrecks mankind elsewhere in the post-nuclear apocalypse. Scientific mapping of radiation fallout also shows the valley likely protected, but there is no guarantee, and such action must be taken on faith.
The woman is the only one of the three the Captain loves. He loves her because she is not like the others. He loves her for the faith the other two are too educated to possess. He loves her for her old ways, stubbornness, and denial of his advances until he admits secretly to marry her while on ship.
As the Captain, what course do you decide? Both are acts of faith. Is your faith in man to be his own Creator of a utopian future without God or the existence of our birth-world? Do we keep faith in a miracle, that the very valley where a single woman—chosen as a survivor of the species—calls home, is the sole refuge and protected place for man to begin again? Do we hold to home, and build again, in the wake of all our ruin, knowing we are still Man, and our follies, wreckage, and messes will all play again?
Truth, the nature of man will play in either world: in one as false-utopia ruled my Man-Gods held together by a totalitarianism that ostracizes/murders societal dissenters (we do this in our living world as well), and on earth—in the fuller spectrum of human messes left to seek with free will their own answers, with greater and lesser success, rather than surrender to single solution rule that is nothing more than the subjugation of human souls. Eliminate the soul, eliminate the mess…
What new beginning would you choose? Why?”
His words came to a close. His eyes looked up from the table, back to her, as if his understanding of how to grasp and raise his thoughts as forms had been discovered. He held, showed, and gave them then to her in communion between met eyes.
“It all just made me think,” he spoke on. “I know I’ve been a C2. Maybe I still am. Maybe I’ve risen to C3. I don’t think that I can know, only sense, but it is a pride of the C2 to believe we know more and better than we do. It is a cause to so many of our woes. I know I was a mess, in many ways still am, but I do not have the shame or hurt I once harbored. I do not feel it there as I once did. I sought help. I prayed for it, and I believe it came.
Maybe it is only a false-perception that permitted my own soul to heal and manifest an imagined purpose. Or maybe there is far more to it than science and quantitative metrics can confirm. If soul and spirit are not of matter, but composed of something else entirely, aside from sense in these two realms, what metric may we use?
If man is fallen, the epitome of C2 in pride, jealousy, despair from disillusionment in self and universe, how do we raise ourselves into a state of C3? Is it possible? Can it be collective or must it be the will and acceptance of each and every free will? Is it only by God or Faith in a Greater, that help will come, or might we rise by other means—means that science and self, divorced from unity with something Higher…transcendent will never give?
If we were to rebuild our lives, what future would we seek: a new land, or home?
I’ve rebuilt myself several times, always into the same restored self. I wouldn’t say I ever once, recreated who I was. I discovered who I am. Each time, I grew through different degrees of mess. I begin with nothing more than what is in me, and in the end, it’s the discovery and re-piecing of spirit that restores me to the same self. There comes a point, I struggle, I break, and I ask for help. Always, it’s came, in different signs and different ways, and the picture I couldn’t see becomes clear, and my pieces fall in place. Is that God’s hand coming as answer to the C2, raising into C3? If so, why do we sometimes fall back? Can we hold in Higher State, if we forget—or turn again—from God?
Of the futures we choose, I traveled all this world. I sought adventures, experience, discovery, and when all of it was through: I came home. Can Man have a place in the universe, if he never finds and makes a home? If we refuse to root and identify simply in a living place, how do we ever expect to find our place among the Cosmos? Do we not all need a home, whatever it is, wherever it may be?
My home: I need the quiet, the solitude in open space. Days in the sun to work and think and know my work will grow to a fruition in this world. I see it from seed to harvest, through the seasons of this world. I live in the light and darkness, in its heat and cold and storms, and in my simple place, I feel alive. I transcend from place through thoughts, but divorced from home, my thoughts are not the same.
I wondered how it is for you.”
She did not answer, and he was not bothered by the silence. It was a conversation all the same, like conversations with the Cosmos; a sharing of soul answered in starry silence that in time, as he had come to witness and believe, would manifest in sign.