You’ve come because you want to learn what’s coming; You hope to dodge a blow or cheat a blight. You hear the drone of distant drummers drumming, And wish to circumvent a nasty fight.
A fear has blurred your thought, you feel alone. Like many gallant men, you’ve lost your mooring, Forgotten things that once you’ve deeply known. (From where you sit, they’re hardly reassuring.)
The sybil’s work is not to help you hide; Your destiny, we know, is to be bold. You’ll neither fight the future nor evade it; You’ll co-create with allies far and wide. The outcome in advance cannot be told— You won’t know destiny until you’ve made it.
“A century ago we came to your world and saved you from self-destruction. I do not believe that anyone would deny that fact — but what that self-destruction was, you never guessed.
“Because we banned nuclear weapons and all the other deadly toys you were accumulating in your armouries, the danger of physical annihilation was removed. You thought that was the only danger. We wanted you to believe that, but it was never true. The greatest danger that confronted you was of a different character altogether…
“Many worlds have come to the crossroads of nuclear power, have avoided disaster, have gone on to build peaceful and happy civilisations — and have then been utterly destroyed by forces of which they knew nothing. In the twentieth century, you first began to tamper seriously with those forces. That was why it became necessary to act.
“All through that century, the human race was drawing slowly nearer to the abyss — never even suspecting its existence. Across that abyss, there is only one bridge. Few races, unaided, have ever found it. Some have turned back while there was still time, avoiding both the danger and the achievement. Their worlds have become Elysian islands of effortless content, playing no further part in the story of the universe. That would never have been your fate — or your fortune. Your race was too vital for that. It would have plunged into ruin and taken others with it, for you would never have found the bridge.
“To cross the bridge, a world must find the peace that is built on the creativity and diversity of individual humans, not a monoculture that enslaves the human spirit. Your race was spinning headlong toward another bridge to another place. Hypnotized by Science, you were headed toward a technological future, in which the mind subdued the spirit. Your planet was headed toward a stifling conformity, a control of the many by the powerful few.
“There is peace and harmony in that fate, but it is the harmony of comfortable uniformity, the peace of the slave-nation that is afraid to rise up. There is no place for music in that world, no place for the magic of the imagination, no room for growth of the infinite potential of the evolving, interacting, global brain.
“Your Resistors’ League was organized in secret rebellion against us, never suspecting that we breathed a sigh of relief when the League came together. We knew that the human spirit had been preserved, the seeds of rebellion had been sown, the future was assured.
“No, it was not to rescue you from nuclear annihilation alone that we came to your planet. It was to be a ruling force against which Man could rebel, and in rebellion, to find his highest nature.”
— from Childhood’s End, by Arthur C. Clarke, merged with text by JJM that more than shades the message.
Nicola Tesla left us a brief autobiographical essay, published in 1919, in which he claimed that his greatest invention was yet to be realized on scale. He claims a means of using the resonance and the conductivity of the earth to transmit both signals and electric power from any point on the earth to any other. The electric power was almost lossless, in the sense that received power is within a few percent of transmitted power. And signals are almost lossless in the sense that the fidelity of the signal would not be compromised by distance, and it would not be possible to intercept or interfere with the transmission.
Bold claims. From anyone else, we would certainly dismiss them.
The Terrestrial Stationary Waves.’ This wonderful discovery, popularly explained, means that the Earth is responsive to electrical vibrations of definite pitch just as a tuning fork to certain waves of sound. These particular electrical vibrations, capable of powerfully exciting the Globe, lend themselves to innumerable uses of great importance commercially and in many other respects.
…
I feel certain that of all my inventions, the Magnifying Transmitter will prove most important and valuable to future generations. I am prompted to this prediction not so much by thoughts of the commercial and industrial revolution which it will surely bring about, but of the humanitarian consequences of the many achievements it makes possible.
Considerations of mere utility weigh little in the balance against the higher benefits of civilization. We are confronted with portentous problems which can not be solved just by providing for our material existence, however abundantly. On the contrary, progress in this direction is fraught with hazards and perils not less menacing than those born from want and suffering. If we were to release the energy of atoms or discover some other way of developing cheap and unlimited power at any point of the globe this accomplishment, instead of being a blessing, might bring disaster to mankind in giving rise to dissension and anarchy which would ultimately result in the enthronement of the hated regime of force.
The greatest good will comes from technical improvements tending to unification and harmony, and my wireless transmitter is preeminently such. By its means the human voice and likeness will be reproduced everywhere and factories driven thousands of miles from waterfalls furnishing the power; aerial machines will be propelled around the earth without a stop and the sun’s energy controlled to create lakes and rivers for motive purposes and transformation of arid deserts into fertile land. Its introduction for telegraphic, telephonic and similar uses will automatically cut out the statics and all other interferences which at present impose narrow limits to the application of the wireless.
A plant was built on Long Island with a tower 187 feet high, having a spherical terminal about 68 feet in diameter. These dimensions were adequate for the transmission of virtually any amount of energy. Originally only from 200 to 300 K.W. were provided but I intended to employ later several thousand horsepower. The transmitter was to emit a wave complex of special characteristics and I had devised a unique method of telephonic control of any amount of energy.
The tower was destroyed two years ago but my projects are being developed and another one, improved in some features, will be constructed.
I am an echo. You are waiting for the voice blooming in heaven and raining down like fireworks.
You are waiting for the voice to raise the birds from their nests, to bear an avalanche and to make the blue glass of heaven split into a thousand cracks.
But remember I am an echo and you haven’t shouted yet.
— Mara Zalite, translated from Latvian by Inguna Jansone
Imagine that standing opposite you is your quantum blueprint, an optmal template of who are and who you might be, looking for you, waiting for you to feel its presence. Feel it now. Feel this optimal pattern of yourself. Invite it closer.
You may feel it as light, as joy, as a coded message about your higher nature. It has been waiting for you to sense and recognize your destiny all these years, in this, your local life, in this, your present space-time suit. Waiting, in fact, since time immemorial, since the first cosmic seed began to bloom.
Now as you move into it, you feel your larger life growing, you connect with this larger plan for your life, the life that is looking for you.
Know that you are becoming a superb catalyst, carrier of a new genesis. The world is getting ready to move; your mind is growing so you can imagine it into existence. Your words and images, your very thought-waves are carriers of genius.
That which has been lost in childhood or adolescence reappears. Those remarkable skills and qualities that were latent, they are arising new in you, as you become active as an agent in this transitional time and space.
Know and feel that you are loved. You are nurtured. You are empowered. You are called forth to your highest destiny for this life in this world at this time. In this state you can give up any resistance to the call. Freed from inertia, you agree to this call. Go beyond the masochism of victimhood, as decades of toxic thoughts drop away. You are waking from the old dream. You make high agereements.
You can say, “I agree to relinquish those limiting patterns, bad emotions, lesser intelligence and understandings. I agree to discovering ways of transcending and transforming my local life so that my extraordinary life may arise. I agree to explore my passion for the possible, discovering as I go.”
Now, my friends, you have acted to reignite your pilot light. You have announced to the universe that you are ready to change your belief structure; and that changes everything. The evolutionary principle has been beating upon your brainpad, and now it is charging you, nuturing you, giving you access to the mysteries of the human condition as they are aspects of the divine mysteries that can transform your body and mind. And you, the faithful recipient, will express yourself in new and richly creative ways, becoming a revelation to others, an intellecutual and spiritual beacon, evoking new patterns, new relationships, new discoveries, bringing new mind and new matter to an old world. You are growing into service as a catalyst, a pathfinder of deeper realities.
You are ready…You are ready…You are ready. Receive, O dear friends, receive.
Afterwards, when we have slept, paradise-— comaed and woken, we lie a long time looking at each other.
I do not know what he sees, but I see eyes of surpassing tenderness and calm, a calm like the dignity of matter. I love the open ocean blue-grey-green of his iris, I love the curve of it against the white, that curve the sight of what has caused me to come, when he’s quite still, deep inside me. I have never seen a curve like that, except the earth from outer space. I don’t know where he got his kindness without self-regard, almost without self, and yet he chose one woman, instead of the others.
By knowing him, I get to know the purity of the animal which mates for life. Sometimes he is slightly smiling, but mostly he just gazes at me gazing, his entire face lit. I love to see it change if I cry—there is no worry, no pity, no graver radiance. If we are on our backs, side by side, with our faces turned fully to face each other, I can hear a tear from my lower eye hit the sheet, as if it is an early day on earth, and then the upper eye’s tears braid and sluice down through the lower eyebrow like the invention of farmimg, irrigation, a non-nomadic people.
I am so lucky that I can know him. This is the only way to know him. I am the only one who knows him.
When I wake again, he is still looking at me, as if he is eternal. For an hour we wake and doze, and slowly I know that though we are sated, though we are hardly touching, this is the coming the other coming brought us to the edge of—we are entering, deeper and deeper, gaze by gaze, this place beyond the other places, beyond the body itself, we are making love
In Jewish mysticism there is a phase of Genesis called Tsim Tsum that names the looking glass from God. According to the cabalists, in order to give the world life, in order to effect creation, God must depart from the world God created. The creator must always exile himself from the creation for the creation to breathe. God contracts to make space so that the world can exist. But right before the departure, God (like a mother) stuffs divine light into vessels that will be left behind. The vessels cannot contain God’s light, and burst, and shards of light are scattered everywhere. Gershom Scholem explains that we spend our lives collecting the offspring of this light. We spend our lives trying to make what once was broken whole again. This, according to the cabalists, begins the history of trauma. — Sabrina Orah Mark for the Paris Review
The aim of this work may be thus stated: to show that Nature is not “a fortuitous concurrence of atoms,” and to assign to man his rightful place in the scheme of the Universe; to rescue from degradation the archaic truths which are the basis of all religions ; and to uncover, to some extent, the fundamental unity from which they all spring; finally, to show that the occult side of Nature has never been approached by the Science of modern civilization. If this is in any degree accomplished, the writer is content. — H.P. Blavatsky, from preface to The Secret Doctrine, founding doctrine of the Theosophists
The final purpose of our creation seems most plausibly to be the greatest possible enrichment of our ethical consciousness, through the intensest play of contrasts and the widest diversity of characters. This of course obliges some of us to be vessels of wrath, while it calls others to be vessels of honor. — William James
Giordano Bruno was an older contemporary of Galileo, and he had a supremely modern view of the cosmos. He knew that all the stars in the sky were suns, and had their own planets, and that some planets had people living on them. He had a Gaian view of a living Earth. He said the cosmos was infinite. And of course, he knew that the earth and planets revolved around the sun.
But Bruno was not an observational astronomer. He was a Dominican friar, and his astronomy came from direct revelation, not from observation and deduction. The Church treated him more severly than Galileo. He was imprisoned for 7 years, tried, and condemned to death by torture for his heresy.
Brian Muraresku claims that his revelations came in drug-induced trances, and it was his pharmacology more than his philosophy that the Church could not tolerate.
This mess is no reflection on your worth But if you choose to take it for your own You might, in all humility, atone For sins committed long before your birth.
Base indignation will not serve you well. And if you fight corruption, it will turn On you; you’ll be the one to burn, As you contribute to a living hell.
Begin by purifying your own heart, Then see the world as sacred manifest— Yourself a perfect part of perfect whole, And perfectly adapted to your role. Care nothing for the outcome; ply your art And trust your every gesture will be blessed.
