'Our gardens are so prim, so angular, in comparison to yours,' I remarked. 'In fact, I do remember reading somewhere that our gardens were originally a reaction to nature, rather than a complement to nature. We were afraid of nature, at least those of us living in towns or urban environments.'
'Why?' she asked.
'Nature was the unknown, it was wild, something we had to tame, shape, order, domesticate. Even now, I have to mow the lawn whether I want to or not. Neighbours.'
'The neighbours tell you to mow your grass?'
'No!' I laughed. 'That wouldn't be very polite. But they wouldn't feel at ease if we didn't mow the lawn, especially when theirs looks like a carpet.'
We spoke about ancient monumental buildings
around the world. These, he said, were constructed by their Lemurian ancestors under the guidance of beings from our
own Galaxy and even further afield.
'ET's! Why would they have been
interested in our welfare? Do you think they looked like us?''It is we who look like them, not the other way round. After all, our origin is in distant planets you have never heard of. Yes, of course they are interested in our welfare. They too are part of the hologram.'
'So why did they build all those great monuments?'
'We invited them to do so. The ancient Pyramids, for example, acted as receivers and transmitters of energy, in harmony with Earth's electromagnetic field. The monuments act as a grid of energy, circulating the Earth.'
'Like our Temples,' said Solari. 'As they hold the highest frequency, our Temples are amplifiers that radiate energy everywhere through the water and the oceans that circulate around Lemuria. That's why we visit the Temples, to reconnect with this energy, which is connected to source energy. The water is charged beneath the Temple. It acts like your heart does with your blood. It pumps the water under the streets of the cities.'
I glanced at our vehicle and noticed for the first time that it wasn't touching the ground. It was slightly suspended in the air without bending a single blade a grass. Solari was smiling.
'Kids in Lemuria refer to you tourists as wheelies because you still use the wheel!' she laughed.
'Well, yes, we still need the wheel. We haven't reinvented it yet!' I responded. 'What's wrong with the wheel?'
'The wheel was a beautiful invention in its time,' explained Xendo. 'Your bicycles and carts may be practical but your motorised vehicles which have led to the evisceration of the earth, not to mention your never-ending, ever-expanding roads, the destruction of nature by pollution leading to the extinction of species.'
'We have to keep a close eye on your society, Jordan,' interjected Solari, apologetically. 'Oh, by the way, Xendo and I don't mind interrupting one another from time to time, do we, Xendo? Ha-ha! But we are all living on the same planet, Jordan. It is incomprehensible to us that you would continue to destroy the very organism that sustains you. Our planet is a living, breathing organism. Just like you and I.'
'Can you not help us to open our eyes?'
'It would be an intervention, Jordan. We don't intervene.'
'But as you yourself say, we're fellow beings! On the same planet! We're neighbours! That's not intervention! Is it?'
'Even if we could intervene, would you land in the middle of an insane asylum, knowing that all the inmates were armed?'
'Come on Xendo, we're not that bad!'
'It is true what you say, Jordan,' said Solari. 'We're neighbours. We're all fellow-beings. But that's true also of everywhere else in our Galaxy and for that matter, the whole of the Universe. The geography doesn't change anything. We may be just around the corner from you, but nevertheless, the Prime Directive applies.'
'But if we keep going the way we are, we'll destroy the planet! Plain and simple. We'll commit mass suicide and bring everybody and everything down with us, like some deranged suicide-bomber!'
Xendo and Solari appraised the moment as if they were debating whether they should tell me something or not. They'd obviously locked their thoughts from me, as I wasn't picking up a word.
Two dolphins leapt playfully into the air, splashed onto the surface of the water and plummeted into the crystal clear depths of the lake below us. Solari grabbed my hand and the three of us ran like children, laughing all the way down the mossy path of the lush embankment to the lakeshore.
The water was so pure, you could see to the bottom of the lake. She dipped her cupped hands into the lake and offered me a drink, as the sunlight flashed across the surface of the water in her hands. It was like sipping liquid light.
Our eyes met as I lapped up the water from her cupped hands. She didn't look away. I could have melted into her, but had to remind myself that I was a married man. Apart altogether from that, Solari was far too young - far too old, even! - and besides, what a cad I was, carrying on like that, with her boyfriend Xendo sitting right there beside us, pretending not to notice...Oops! No!...Nooooh!...Not again!...Forgot to block my thoughts!...
Solari giggled coyly into her water-cupped hands. Xendo stared away at the horse disingenuously, pursing his lips, trying hard not to smile.
'I'm told that some of the women in your society sell their bodies in return for sexual gratification,' she remarked, provocatively. 'Why do they have to sell their bodies for sex?'
'Men too!' added Xendo, his eyes fixed on the landscape.
'Well,' I tried to explain discreetly, 'it's actually not for sexual gratification... it's for money. The person who pays is supposed to receive the sexual gratification.'
'And then you have those men who use children for their own sexual gratification. Are they insane?'
'Yes,' I replied. 'You could say that.'
'It's hard for us to imagine such depravity,' added Xendo. 'You say they are insane. I say they are deeply unhappy and out of alignment. Why are these people so unhappy? Why do they continue to generate such unhappiness around them? Do they have no desire to re-align themselves and be healed?'
'You've just asked one of the most intriguing questions in our society, Xendo. What is it about us, what is it about sick and unhappy people that they have no true desire to be healed? Even those who know that they are sick, or those who live in misery. It's true. One can't help arriving at the conclusion that they have no desire to be healed.'
'Delve a little more deeply, Jordan, and you'll find yourself asking why so many people in your society choose to be sick to begin with? Why do they choose to die?'
'But surely it's not a matter of choice, Xendo, is it?'
'Are you sure?'
'It's counter-intuitive, it makes no sense to me whatsoever that people would choose to get sick or to die!'
'Exactly, Jordan,' concurred Solari. 'That's what we Lemurians said of ourselves, many, many years ago. That's why we have no hospitals here any more. That's why we live longer.'
'But what about us? What would anyone choose death?'
'Because, deep down, you believe it is easier to die than to live.'
'What do you believe happens when we die, Solari?'
'There is no death, Jordan. We simply return from form to formlessness, or as some of your scientists call it, from the explicate order to the implicate order, from locality to non-locality. You are in one place at any one moment, then in another present moment you are in no place and in every place at the same time.'
'We understand,' added Xendo,' that your physicists are still, even today, puzzled by the non-locality of subatomic particles. Isn't it truly beautiful how everything comes and goes the way it does? We lose and renew our cells every micro-moment. Even at the subatomic level, in the quantum vacuum, particles appear out of nowhere; everything is constantly flickering in and out of existence.'
'Yes. Quantum theory. Still a bit too surreal for me, to be honest. Chemistry always made more sense. At least you could see what was happening.'
'Your physicists will never find what they are looking for,' Xendo suggested, 'because you are what you seek. You are an integral part of what you are looking for.'
'You say we choose to die. But why do we choose to get sick?'
'Why do you choose to be a victim?' asked Xendo. 'If you are open to infection, you may feel unloved. Or you may not love yourself sufficiently to avoid it.'
'Really? Is it really that simple?'
'You may have allowed yourself to be overworked,' he went on, 'overstressed, undernourished. Why do you not love yourselves? Why do you feel unloved? You become a victim, you seek attention and crave love because you feel separate and alone.'
'So if we felt loved or if we loved ourselves more, we wouldn't choose to die either, right?'
'The choice is unconscious, of course,' Xendo responded. 'Few of you will choose to die consciously. If the illness is terminal, you have chosen to get off a treadmill you have created for yourself. From the outset, you have been conditioned to see life as a competition, a struggle. Achievement is always something difficult for you. So day after day, you do things you don't want to do, you say things you don't want to say, you become the person you don't want to become and you attract the people and the circumstances that match the person you have become. The strain becomes too much after a while. You tire of it. You tire of the person you have become.'
'So, what if you die as a result of an accident?'
'Same thing. There are no accidents.'
'You mean to say, we orchestrate our own accidents?!'
'I'm afraid so.'
'But...why? Why do we do that?'
'Why do you have accidents or get sick or old or die before you even reach a hundred?
Because you don't listen to your body. You don't listen to your heart. You believe that all the answers are out there somewhere, where your struggle is. If I get enough money, if I find the right partner, and so on. Then, one day, you realise that out there was an illusion all the time and that the struggle to achieve whatever it was you wanted to achieve was in vain. And so you give up. You become sick, or have an accident, or die.'
'But what about nature? What about all the struggle that goes on in nature?'
'Nature should be your model, but you ignore it,' Solari cautioned. 'You may, indeed, see survival in Nature as a struggle, but Nature herself doesn't. Struggle is resistance. People suffer because they resist pain instead of accepting it. If you accept pain as your friend instead of seeing it as your enemy, you won't suffer. If you stop seeing your life as a struggle, it will stop being a struggle. Then you will not attract sickness and death as easily as you do.'
'You make it all sound so simple. But what about the predators and their prey in Nature? Surely, the victim will view its life as a struggle to avoid sudden death?'
'You could say the same about the predator. They too wish to stay alive and feed their children. Neither predator nor prey sees life as a struggle. And why? Because they live life in the present moment, which is the point of power.'
'Nevertheless, killing takes place in nature. Violence. Why are there predators and prey to begin with at all?'
'We believe that in ancient times, all animals received their nutrition directly from source, from the earth. An extinction event, as you call it, caused a food-chain collapse. Many animals were driven to eating flesh as a last resort. And so, a very long time ago, we in Lemuria started one of our most ambitious programmes, which was to encourage our predators away from killing. We devised an artificial alternative, albeit a highly nutritious one. You can imagine how challenging that must have been. You see, any perception of actual interference in the lives of other species would have scuppered the whole experiment.'
'A neighbour of ours back home is a vegetarian. She's trying to encourage her dog to go off meat. But aren't the bodies of these animals, their digestive systems, carnivorous?'
'It is true that the bodies, habitats and lifestyles of both predators and prey have evolved over long periods of time to match their diet and behaviours, but nevertheless, our ancestors saw the experiment as an effort to assist them to return, over many, many generations, to their original nature. Today, our animals are finally beginning to adapt, as our ancestors did, to a primary source diet that comes directly from the earth.'
'Ha-ha, I can appreciate what you mean about the struggle. Stress is a big problem back home. Costs us a fortune in absenteeism and hospital care. At the QSA we ran an advertising campaign recently to encourage the workforce to smile more.'
'Really?' she smiled, surprised.
'To smile sincerely, of course, not gratuitously, not to flatter or whatever. The advert tried to explain the biological feedback loop of endorphin production in the body to make you feel better about yourself and about life. Yeah, I know how important a good attitude to life is, people would say, but I still have to get up on a cold, wet Monday morning and go to work, whether I like it or not, whether I feel like it or not. That's the reality back home, Solari.'
'Why do you say whether you like it or not? How does one find oneself in such a situation?'
'Necessity, not choice! We have to pay the rent, the bills, we have families to support.'
'Most of the working hours in your society are unnecessary,' said Xendo. 'Eighty per-cent, I believe. A bit like your schooling. A shocking waste of the springtime of your life. Imagine if your weekend were five days instead of two. Five days a week to live, to enjoy the very idea of being alive, not just to work in order to stay alive and pay the bills. But I believe most of your population would be horrified at the very thought of it. They wouldn't know what to do with themselves, given all that free time. To enable a necessary leap in evolutionary consciousness, Jordan, your notion of work has to be abandoned.'
'Wouldn't that be nice! On the other hand, most of us work to buy time, don't we? Free time. We all want to be free.'
'Free time. For what? Holidays?'
'Well, yes. I guess so.'
'So you spend most of your precious time working in the hope you'll have some money to spend on free time? Or some of you may even look forward to the free time of your so-called golden years, the few years you have left after you retire, in the hope that will be healthy enough to enjoy them? Is that a happy arrangement your society has designed for you?'
'Well, I wouldn't go that far. You make society sound like some devious conspiracy.'
'And is it not so? The best way of controlling people is to get them to sign up to it willingly! ' he laughed. 'And the most effective prison of all is the one without walls. The question remains, however: who benefits from this conspiracy?'
'Who benefits?'
'The correct answer is: either everybody or the very few. What do you think?'
'Ha-ha, if they heard me speaking like that at home, they'd say I was a communist!'
'But the conspiracy is to keep everybody working. Nobody should have to work all the time. Surely communism, with its emphasis on labour and what you call the working classes, is the very opposite of what we are suggesting?'
'It's all very well for you to talk. You have your robots.'
'Even before the robots, Jordan, we examined our values and put them into practice. Work was not one of them. Nature was our model.'
'But what would people do all day if work was only a two-day week?'
'People would be, Jordan, not do.'
'Oh, yes. I remember now. Ha-ha! Our host at the Welcome Hotel told us that the Lemurians prided themselves on being human beings, not human doings!'
# 12 next week! Catch up on: gregoryrosenstock.blogspot.com
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