The Exegesis

My brothers and sisters of The One Infinite Creator, I don’t mean to speak to you in riddles—and I apologize if these words might sound as though I am but I believe that it is time we discussed unpleasant things.  Here, on this continuum, consequence obliges us all to turn our eyes upon the ruin that those of our kind have made of this gift of life that bears a testament to Infinite Intelligence; our very presence upon this unique and strangely beautiful world. 

We are sanguine consciousness—the stuff of legends—a community of souls in possession of the knowledge and the memories of a thousand lifetimes—resilient; established as the children of hope.  Our attitude toward everything around us is that unseen thing; thoughts reconciled with senses to become an influence upon the course of causal events the consequences of which will not be known to us until we encounter their effects.   And, here we are now; poised at the threshold of oblivion—yes, you, me, “the other;” the flora, the fauna and the very earth beneath our feet!

It took the craftsmen of antiquity eons to mold our kind.  An aeon is an extremely long, indefinite period of time—tens of thousands of millennia; it is a geologic measurement of time to be sure.  Observations that reveal empirical evidence of such events require great forbearance. Such patience is apparent in the etiquette of rocks.  It is not an aptitude associated with many living things.    It is the standard of behavior through which all life evolves into something greater than the sum of everything we know.  Patience can only be revealed in time.  And, in the fullness of time, we die before we learn of its value.

We know this to be true; we’ve been alive for a very long time.  We know ourselves by that description which is our name and we have always been that for which this name forms the boundaries of our being; we are the “I Am” and we know this.  We were the I Am before any of us could remember what our mother’s face looked like. And, it seems as though we have always been so; before we forgot just who we were—that is, before the last time that we forgot our name. 

I have this feeling, deep within the contours of my mind, that once upon a time this person, we know ourselves to be, had a very important thing to do--and for a very important reason.  But, that’s all just speculation now I think—or maybe it is just my recollection enfeebled by the many repetitions of my presence upon this Third Density, three-dimensional plane of existence; I don’t really know for certain.  We have, for the longest time, thought of ourselves as something other than what we are and the reason escapes us to this day!  And so, we’ve lost track of our original objective—which was of course to live.  Such disturbing facts as these can have implications.

I have fantastic visions! Visions of epic proportions!  They come to me almost instantaneously—within a single heartbeat!  I can comprehend an entire sequence of life and death—of time and cosmic evolution; an epic, a saga, a countenance of Creation.  It just comes to me.  At times, it comforts me to know the future.  At times, it frightens me to think that I will, inevitably, witness all of it over-and-over-and-over again.  Time is a ring of circumstance and we seem to follow it as those blind from ignorance and want.  Are we? We all share this rationalization—a suggestion buried deep within the recesses of our consciousness.  It is a communal perspective our differences being only in the way our intellects attempt to reconcile each element of it.  We can never be certain can we?  No, I guess we can’t.

I was born on this planet a long time ago.  Men lived simpler lives when I was a child.  Technology seemed to confine itself to practical things fashioned to serve humanity.  Consumer goods were handmade and built to last forever.  I have retained some memories of those earlier years. My uncle was a farmer.  He taught me how to grow things.  His life wasn’t a very successful one by any standard of today. He died in obscurity.  I used to help my uncle tend his acreage.  I got quite good at it.  And when I had mastered the skill—that of being a good farmer—our government ordered me to war and so I was flung into service as were millions of my fellows and I was one of the lucky ones; I got to live.  I returned from that experience a critical thinker and I lost my faith in manifest destiny.  In the bowels of a huge machine plowing through the dark depths of the ocean, I had an epiphany—I learned then that I was one with everything around me—a context that I would eventually learn to define as “the other.”  And, in the fullness of time, I would learn that “the other” was just another “me.”  I learned that, in the context of life, “I Am” the other!

In the first Century of our gradual departure from human custom, there was this man—Jesus of Nazareth.  He came into the scope of the human condition and changed it in a most dramatic way.  He gave us the key to unlock the dreadful mindset of a drone.  It was an idea that woke us all up from the doldrums. Our lives haven’t been very romantic you see—mostly filled with hard work.  It is easy to become a drudge.  But this fellow, Jesus, made us see things…or…should I say: see through things. I don’t know.  Whatever!  He had a philosophy that put us in our comfort zones and it made us all feel good about being alive.  That is, if we could wrap our minds around the concept of it all.  And that’s what I remember the most about his words—how good they made us all feel about ourselves, our world—other people…things in general. 

That perspective on life endures but, eventually, without our commitment to it, the world began to push and shove and crush until it closed in upon all of us once again and all that happiness became just another dim memory.  The government put him to death for being a troublemaker; for giving the people hope of a life worth living. When he was gone, The One Infinite Creator sent us prophet after prophet.  Each having the same message—that we are one!  Each teacher, in time, found patience in the etiquette of rocks and forbearance in the earth that swallowed their remains.  We’ve got to keep moving; it’s what we are.    

***

In time, most were persecuted and murdered for just knowing him—this Jesus fellow.  We lost track of each other.  I went on living and living…and living.  Someone told me that Saul had immigrated to Iberia and settled in among his contemporaries working as a sail maker.  I never heard from him again; some say that he died in Rome—executed by order of one of their degenerate Emperors—I don’t know.  It’s a compact memory now.  Most of the memories from those days are tiny little bits of awareness inside my head and there aren’t many of them anymore.

I remember how the changes came: life was so consistent for the longest time and then, slowly at first, it began to change.  After a time the pace of life changed so rapidly you could hardly keep up.  It exhausted me.  I kept on forgetting the details.  My memories became compartmentalized, so-to-speak.  For instance, I can remember a time that later historians called the Renaissance.  I remember how people dressed, for example, or a few features of the culture like the fact that there were a lot of people preoccupied with art and religion and science but I can’t remember too much of the details of the era—you know what I mean?  It’s like a passage from a book now.  It’s just a reference point in my notion of Time.  Yet I know that I lived through it!  I must have been, oh, a thousand years old or so.  Good grief, I can’t remember!  That’s an aspect of long life that, I suppose, one can’t escape—losing pieces of your mind.

Around about the time of the first deep space transports, I got a ride out to Earth on the generation ship Montenegro.  I signed on as a nuclear engineer and I was good at my job too!  The Montenegro was a decent ship and it had a good Captain and crew. It wasn’t as big as the Tyrolia but it was a comfortable place to live and work for all that time.  I watched people come into that small world as little babies and grow into old people and, eventually, die.  No one seemed to notice me.  When you’ve lived as long as I have, you learn how to beat the system. You learn how to putz with the records—screw around with the data files—I got really good at that.  The ship was a big place so there were lots of places to hide.  They had their own version of vagabonds; I became one of them and then, one day, I just popped up as someone else.  By then, enough of the elders had died so that no one alive really knew of me.  I kept changing my identity but I always kept my name—Martin.

The Montenegro found a lush green place the people named Persepolis.  Persepolis was the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Empire. It was situated about 70 kilometers or so northeast of the modern city of Shiraz in the Fars Province of modern Iran. I can’t remember what the word meant. By then language had evolved into something new.  Translations were lost from the original lingual form; eventually, the original lingual form was lost to posterity.  We began colonization within a year of achieving low planetary orbit.  Once we had emptied the huge vessel of its inhabitants and scoured the bilges to make sure we hadn’t left anyone behind, the captain ordered it to be parked out in geo synchronous orbit and the engineering team took a shuttle to the planet’s surface.  For the longest time, I would finish the day by walking into a clearing somewhere and looking up at the night sky to see if I could figure out which of the bright pinpoints of light it might be.  I had lived aboard that ship for so long, I had become homesick but that too eventually passed.  Today, it rests on the dark side of this planet’s moon.  Modern day astronauts found it a few decades ago on one of their pathetic exploratory missions.  Everyone in the Shadow Government got all excited!  They thought they’d discovered an alien artifact; nonsense!  They never understood that it was that venerable old ship that had brought their forebears to this planet fifty thousand years ago.

We built a civilization out of the wilderness.  By then humans had become a great deal less prolific.  The population sort of reached an apogee at around one hundred twenty million and then stayed there for the longest of times.  So, you could see how the planet remained mostly wilderness and I had all the room in that world to hide as time progressed.  I kept popping up, now and then.  No one really noticed.  Sometimes I wanted to work at doing great things.  Once, I remember that I decided I was going to become a doctor and help the sick.  I got myself admitted to the competitive exams at the University and, of course, won a scholarship to the medical school.  I studied hard and worked my behind off to get my degree.  They sent me off to a hospital on the Isle of Man to complete my residency.  When I finally got my license, I quit my job at the hospital and joined the missionaries. That was the most enjoyable time of my entire long life.  I remember that feeling of contentment came back to me.  I felt good about myself again.   

In 1913 of the Common Era, the politicians brought evil on the lot of us.  They had gradually taken control of everything from the technocrats and had really screwed up our fledgling civilization.  They seemed to have a knack for promulgating bigotry and prejudice wherever they seized control.  Cultures became polarized; disputes became irreconcilable—hatred flourished.  That’s how these cretins maintained control, power, and influence.  I had forgotten how petty the human condition could become—all the arguing and greed.  Then we had the First World War.  What a waste of time!  What a colossal waste of limited resources!  What a revelation!  I figured out where I had come from.  It was the war; it cold-cocked me into connecting with my past and all the time that had elapsed. By then Old Earth had been lost to history and great empires had risen and fallen hundreds of times.  Our origin had become a legend and most people learned of it in the fairy tales their parents read to them at bedtime. 

Persepolis was nothing more than an archeological dig by this time, my God; death was levied upon life in staggering proportions!  I had survived all the killing because I was a doctor and was useful to the power brokers. Eventually I’d been captured and made a slave collecting copal in the Northwest.  The elite used the stuff in their ceremonies; they had been co-opted by the Orion Group by then and their ancestors had been genetically engineered to accommodate their roles as planetary administrators.  I was the camp physician.  When all of “this” started, there weren’t any rulers left alive nor were there enough overseers to keep us so the head man began letting us go a few each day until the lot of us were free again.  He was a decent fellow and he tried to care for us as best he could. Most of us settled in along the Leviton Valley near the Barnevald Tributary System and became farmers of one sort or another.  Food was important, you know.  I opened up a practice in Wyeth.  It was a satisfying occupation.  People—I mean, normal people—never stop getting sick, you know; it’s an aspect of our Third Density, three-dimensional, prescriptive reality.

There was some kind of a prophet among us then.  His name was Luffer Briest.  He went about reading from this ancient manuscript called the Apocalypse.  He kept quoting it all the time; pointing to all the destruction around us—raising his hand to the sky and pointing at that ugly thing that grew ever larger in our field of view with every passing month; The Dark Star.   We were trying to rebuild some kind of a culture so he was perceived by most of us as a kind of nuisance.  And, The Dark Star kept on coming dragging its planets and space debris along with it! There were meteor showers almost every day.  I remember one hot summer evening swilling down a cold brew in the village square with my friends.  There he was on the dais in the center of the park admonishing us to follow some kind of a path toward “righteousness.”  I thought to myself: what the hell is he talking about?  Humans can’t possibly follow any such path!  Righteousness!  What the hell was that?  And then, something snapped inside of my head and it all came rushing back to me.  It scared the hell out of me at first but I began to recall the scripture.  The more that Luffer talked about it, the more familiar it became to me until—bang!  I realized that I’d always known those ancient words.  I quietly remembered that I had written them down tens of thousands of years before! That experience sent me on my quest.

Over the next few decades, I studied human history using what literature I could find.  An entire century went by before I made it off world to Ganymede.  There I got a job as a maintenance man in the public library of the capital.  I’d changed my identity again.  For the next several years I probed the texts until I found the information that helped me decipher all of the riddles and mysteries associated with old Earth in the legends.  Around about that time the New Era began and I caught a star freighter out to Galapagos, as it was called back then.  The planet was a wild place—a real wilderness planet out on the periphery of the spiral but I knew its real name.  In time, I helped build a small community and filed a claim on the place with the colonial government.  Everyone began calling the place Cutter’s Claim—after me because I had been the first to file for incorporation.  I was home again and I was quite content with my small house in Pictfordsville and a medical practice.  I planted an orchard and kept a garden.  Those were really pleasant days.  Several women expressed an interest in me but an immortal really can’t go around marrying himself off.  It’s too painful to watch your wife and children grow old and die.  And then there’s the aspect of continually changing your identity so people won’t think you’re a freak of Nature.  Nowadays, I’ve waxed philosophical about my situation but it often comes to me at night—right here out on the porch as I sit in this old rocking chair—the idea of immortality; of living within a reality full of the cycle of life and death among the stars.  I say to myself: Jeshua, what the hell were you thinking?  The sophists tell us that we are a crude lot and I’ve always found their audacity repugnant because it was!