Foundations of Meaning: Stories and Essays on Being in the Eternal Now

By John Likides

In MARGINS OF PHILOSOPHY, while discussing the challenge before phenomenology, Jacques Derrida speaks of the ground of signification and the pedestal of silence, but his two very apt phrases also apply to the ENTIRE human project of understanding ourselves and the multiversethe aim of THIS book. In other words, FOUNDATIONS OF MEANING expresses the ENTIRE range of human experience in the multiverse: dream-speak, stream-of-consciousness, dialog, storytelling, analysis, synthesis, meditation, music, and so onsynergized into a polyphony that resonates in frequencies that no one mode (from science to mysticism) can attain alone because all such modes reject one another and thus limit their effectiveness. In other words, as inclusive and multicultural societies are the most advanced and best-prepared for the future, so FOUNDATIONS OF MEANING heals the rifts separating the many human disciplines, synergizes the many human modes of expression, focuses our aims as a civilization whose inner ANGELS have been at war with our inner DEMONS, and shows how guarded optimism and free thought can empower humanity to mature and spread across this galaxy and then on to othersad infinitum.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 29, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483621104

John Likides

John Likides (MFA in English-Philosophy-Writing, City College of CUNY) is the author of God Is a Heartless Recluse: A Novel-Essay-Screenplay Synergy (2017), Foundations of Meaning (2013), Eros Triumphant (2010), Infinite Sustain (2007), and Out of the Labyrinth (2003). His work appeared in Confrontation, The Portable Lower East Side, and other journals. He works in threes: Writes hybrid books on the values necessary for humanity to mature into a spacefaring civ-ilization, composes soundtracks for his books, and paints the covers of his books and CDs. An atheist, he lives daily a spirituality that facilitates humanity’s perpetual improvement and system-atic expansion across the galaxy.

Book preview

FOUNDATIONS

OF MEANING

Stories and Essays on Being

in the Eternal Now

John Likides

Copyright © 2013 by John Likides.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Rev. date: 04/25/2013

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Contents

Prologue

Converging Realities

A Season of Life

An Adjacent Sandgrain

Signification’s Temporary Pedestal

Absent Lovers

Free Thinking

Over Crete

Burden of Proof

In Evergreen Gardens

A Love-Letter to the New-Age Movement

Vortex

Women’s Housework Mode of Production and Its Just Compensation

Torchbearers, Lost Souls

A Phenomenology of Evil

Fluttering Flies, Parallel Universes

Divine Excrement

The Tub

Binary Passions

Desire Is for Management—not Abandonment

Shifting Focus

A Salvage Operation

Life’s Depository of Timeless Inarticulables

Mindtraces, Bodies, Time

The Immortality of Everyday Life

Elysian Echoes

The Eternal Now

Fugue for A Feeding Frenzy

Juvenile Delinquency

Blind Spots and Memory Lapses

A Critique of Anarchism

Let’s Kill Thanatos

A Subjunctive Mood

Moonchild

Splitting the Cogito

Sunward

The Purpose of Education

Until Then

Improving the World: American Feminism in the 1920s and 1960s

Open-Air Cages

Women’s Role in Organizing Early Labor Unions in the US

Call Yo Mamma, Already

Toward A Comprehensive Energy Policy

Spyro the Patron Saint of Outsiders

The Topology of Truth

Cave Paintings

The Kaleidoscopic Nature of the Multiverse

For Four Hands

Usher in the Renewable-Energy Paradigm Shift Now

Lunar Life

Brown vs. Board of Education

Quintessence

Plato’s Theory of Forms in Phaedo

Loneliness Conquered: A Memoir

First Contact

Martian Life

Gravity-Free

Cybernauts

A Freethinking Deconstruction of God

Astral Woman

Humanity’s Inheritance

Epilogue

Works Cited

Also by John Likides

Eros Triumphant (2010)

Infinite Sustain (2007)

Out of the Labyrinth (2003)

Prologue

Philosophy is dead, according to Stephen Hawking and many other scientists pursuing a unified-field theory while they can’t account for ninety-six percent of the dark matter and dark energy that comprise this universe! In other words, while most academic philosophers embrace science and focus on language, scientists think they can compose a theory of everything while being able to detect only about four percent of all cosmic matter and energy. By definition, then, unified-field theories will pertain only to the four percent of detectable matter and energy because we don’t know the nature of dark matter and dark energy—only that they are unlike anything we have encountered. As a result, when humans do detect dark matter and dark energy, we will have to revise many fundamental conceptions, so the current pursuit of unified-field theories is futile because ninety-six percent of the universe eludes us!

In fact, fiction is an essential element of the computer models and other simulations that scientists create while trying to understand the nature of the multiverse. For example, the concept of branes (multidimensional membranes that allegedly create big bangs by coming into contact with one another) is a model for which no observational evidence is possible because the branes exist in realms outside spacetime. Hence, branes are essentially fictitious. Although mounting evidence and elementary logic dictate the certainty that our universe is one of countless others, in our current physical form, humans will never be able to witness anyone of the countless other universes that must exist. In essence, then, all those alien universes and the multiversal forces that cause them are metaphysical in nature—beyond spacetime in this universe, which physical bodies like ours can’t exit. However, while pursuing essentially metaphysical entities, most scientists are militant atheists who waste time and paper trying to disprove the existence of God while theists use logic and science to prove the existence of God. Hawking’s A Brief History of Time ends with the words the mind of God as the ultimate project of science to understand: a pursuit that all unified-field theorists are also engaged in by trying to describe the ultimate picture of reality—a metaphysical concept, by definition. In The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow propose the concept of model-dependent realism as their substitute for God, and they spend many pages discussing theosophical questions.

However, model-dependent realism commits the same logical fallacy that theism does, because they both impose at the outset a human construct on a timeless entity we can never know in its entirety. Freethinkers don’t use any model to understand the multiverse because all models are by definition inadequate because they are mortal beings’ projections on an immortal phenomenon, only a small fraction of which we can detect. For example, the Big Bang is essentially the Biblical creation model without a God. In other words, after removing God from the narrative, scientists imposed a stripped-down creationist version on the universe, but more and more theorists are embracing the cyclical model, according to which branes cause many big bangs. In the final analysis, being by definition in a perpetual state of self-revision, science is perpetually wrong about most of its current assertions! Model-dependent realism is the latest scientific concoction that is wrong also because of its neglect of a fundamental human property—philosophical idealism. In fact, realism (the assertion that reality takes place in the world) and idealism (the assertion that reality takes place in the mind) are philosophical principles that Hawking uses to demean philosophy. This prejudicial hubris is rampant among scientists who labor under the delusion that they gave us technology while philosophers brought us metaphysics.

However, like metaphysics and epistemology, logic is a branch of philosophy, and since scientists use logic throughout their process of inquiry, they are indebted to philosophy far more than they realize or admit. In fact, philosophy (the pursuit of wisdom through fallacy-free logic) is at the core of all human activities, trades, disciplines, and institutions. In other words, academic philosophy is only a small aspect of the pursuit of wisdom that all thinking beings engage in—daily: in our private and public lives. Therefore, dismissing philosophy as dead betrays an immature competitiveness that wastes time and effort in a foolish pursuit: establishing a hierarchy of human endeavors, with science on top and philosophy at the bottom—another useless model brought to us by renown model-peddlers like Hawking and his cohorts.

Being-in-the-cosmos is a profound and multidimensional phenomenon that language can’t express completely, for all kinds of reasons: Language is a human tool while being changes when we focus on it while the cosmos is a multidimensional kaleidoscope ninety-six percent of which scientists can’t detect. Models are necessary in creating practical applications and better tools, but models are useless epistemologically because analogies between mortal beings and immortal phenomena, such as the multiverse, are faulty. The notion of the cosmos as a multidimensional kaleidoscope isn’t a model but a literal description of a phenomenon with many dimensions of complex symmetries. Consequently, the best way to describe such a multidimensional kaleidoscope is via a combination of all tools available: philosophy, literature, science, mysticism, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, music, and so on—hence, this book, which combines many disciplines in order to reach depths that no discipline can reach alone.

Iris Murdoch once said that philosophy clarifies whereas literature mystifies, and this fact dramatizes the inadequacy of literature to capture reality. Weaving plots that merely assert mysteries amounts to confusing obscurity for profundity. Consequently, literature must illuminate mysteries by somehow including philosophy: in insightful observations, block paragraphs, characters’ exchanges, accompanying essays in the same book, or all of these and whatever other ways writers can create, including a soundtrack to the book. In fact, music affects people much faster and more pervasively than does text, which readers must read, first, and then interpret—unlike music, which enters the mind immediately and affects the body instantly. Moreover, music is free of the binary nature of language and math, so listeners can simply bask in melody, harmony, and rhythm instead of interpreting words, sentences, and works in search of motifs, subtexts, and the like. In other words, working within one discipline is no longer viable because it reduces reality’s multidimensional kaleidoscope into one dimension: science, philosophy, literature, psychology, sociology, and so on. On the contrary, increasingly more investigators in all disciplines profess the need for interdisciplinary approaches because the research shows that the individual is a complex entity: a whole whose biology, psychology, sociology, and other aspects are inextricable from one another—hence the necessity for holistic approaches.

In Margins of Philosophy, while discussing the challenge before phenomenology, Jacques Derrida speaks of the ground of signification and the pedestal of silence, but his two very apt phrases also apply to the entire human project of understanding ourselves and the multiverse—the aim of this book. In other words, Foundations of Meaning expresses the entire range of human experience in the multiverse: dream-speak, stream-of-consciousness, dialog, storytelling, analysis, synthesis, meditation, music, and so on—synergized into a polyphony that resonates in frequencies that no one mode (from science to mysticism) can attain alone because all such modes reject one another and thus limit their effectiveness. In other words, as inclusive and multicultural societies are the most advanced and best-prepared for the future, so Foundations of Meaning heals the rifts separating the many human disciplines, synergizes the many human modes of expression, focuses our aims as a civilization whose inner angels have been at war with our inner demons, and shows how guarded optimism and free thought can empower humanity to mature and spread across this galaxy and then on to others—ad infinitum.

Converging Realities

Light-headed at sea level, as if atop the highest summit, in hiking boots, at the water’s edge, ready to head into the steep ocean depths a few steps ahead, but the flood is receding in time-lapse, and the ocean drops while more seafloor turns to hillsides and canyons, the river’s delta plunging for miles of waterfall… . Swift evaporation and smooth seepage as infants turn to geezers and seas into deserts… . Beware of immortality—the loneliest trip ever. Death gives meaning to life, and Eros isn’t wise enough yet to kill Thanatos… . Focus, remember . . . . Only puddles remain, miles below, near the toes of the mountain on whose summit we stand, once at the beach, moments ago… . Billions of years just whooshed by, but my appetite for her persists despite the countless bodies we have both inhabited… . Where is she . . . ? Surface temperatures would roast our bodies, so here we are, in a deep chamber, inside each other—the labyrinth transformed, the Minotaur slain, ancient ruins baking in the Sun… . I don’t see her . . . . The children are carrying the blue sky underground… .

Remember this… . Once again… . Billions of years whooshing by: oceans evaporating down to shallow seas whose floor dries, cracks, then turns into a grid of concave lenses lighting the cities below, dolphins swimming under the thick glass… . Molten core… . Magnetic field… . Polarity reversals… . Streaming through the globe, out of the forests that now cover the poles, the ice melted or buried deep below… . Of course. Reverse the magnetic field’s polarity after the solar-flare storms, molten the core in rock, break away—closer, free… .

Bzzz . . . . Bzzz . . . . Bzzz . . . .

The train whistle startled him. Resisting the gravity of dreamtime, he opened his eyes, propped his elbows, sat up, looked around—certain that most of the job of rising had been accomplished and that the rest of it entailed little more than going through familiar motions. Child’s play, trust me. There they were his hands, reaching slowly for the window, confident of their imminent success, but when he tried to grasp, his fingers sailed through the handles’ dissolving like smoke, fading in the airstreams that his arms summoned—reality’s fabric being swept in all directions, free of gravity… . Holy shit . . . . What’s going on . . . ?

Sailing through darkness again, on course to intercept an event approaching fast, but the sway was amplifying the tugs of sleep. On its back, the body lay inert, as if on the ocean bottom, but his mind darted from stillness to many times light-speed, in a few seconds from the galactic periphery to the center, roving across spacetime and scanning the eons as if they were mere seconds, propelled by the collective wills of countless generations. Immortality without someone to share it with is USELESS, stud. His own will was more interested in witnessing the natural unfolding of primal memories than in taking initiative, but his body had to be somewhere, soon… . Where is she . . . ?

He thought that he sat up, that he was looking through the window: darkness outside and in, the train’s gentle sway, the elastic rhythm, the cold night air, the magnificent poise of stars. She’s coming . . . . A sustained wail punctuated by short pauses blew in his ears and forced his head to vibrate as if about to explode, but he didn’t feel the slightest sense of urgency. This too will come to pass, or our head will blow off, but freaking out won’t help, so be calm . . . . Only a train whistle… .

On his back, he tried again to wake up, to rise, to remember something about the timing of the reversal, molten the core in rock, magnetism notwithstanding, poles, ground levels, above, below… . Some whooshing of time: the equator turning into an open-air furnace, saltbeds creeping after the greenery retreating to the poles… . The ocean level dropping, the polar ice melting… . Lakes, grasses, and trees crawling toward the poles… . The planet’s morphology shifting… . Centuries passing by like moments… . Geological time . . . .

The train slowed down, stopped, but he was still on his back, his left arm hanging over the edge of the berth, fingers wiggling, feeling for water, trying to hold on to evaporating memory traces: some verbal, others visual, some both… . That’s it: eons, moments . . . . Water, air . . . . Where is she . . . ? I thought we had found each other . . . .

Someone walked in, a woman who turned on the light, kissed his ear softly, and whispered in it, We’re here, Luke. Wake up. Mountain air with a twist of evergreen, her fragrance felt good all over his body. He wanted to bury his face in her stomach, surrender unconditionally, ask for nothing but give everything—sunshine and laughter, adventure and domesticity, silly jokes and universal secrets… . Reversal of roles, the core throughout, sunshine in darkness—everything for her smile… . You pussy-whipped, fool . . . .

He sat up, rubbed his eyes. Open window: subtle sounds and faint images scented by millions of years of collective dreaming forever reaching into both the future and the past for the sheer joy of experience… . Remember . . . . What… ? Who… ? She… . Rise, already.

We better get off this train before it leaves the station, she said and led the way out of the compartment, into the narrow hallway, down the steel steps, on the gravel.

Thick darkness, low horizon, stars everywhere… . Distant starlight shooting through spacetime, from before Earth’s formation, from other star systems and far-away galaxies that may have long ago come to pass… . Starlight racing futureward from the past, toward all directions, forever… . Dark energy may weaken a trillion years from now and halt the expansion, funky spaceman, remember? Light-traces, memory lapses, void… . Perpetual cascades of light animating stars, planets, foliage, beings… . Light and darkness chasing each other around the planet… . Incandescent coolness nearby, far away, in between… .

Here, he thought, rubbed his eyes, and tried to understand the resulting bright patches issuing from the vast stretches of forgetfulness in his mind… . Watch out: Gas is rising from the collective unconscious! Cover your schnozzles, pilgrims . . . . What was it? The colors of magnetism, next to sunlight, across the gorgeous globe, breezy and watery, equipped with her own furnace, the plasma spring of life, a piece of the Sun inside the ground, this head, this heart… . We should open a methane factory one of these days . . . .

Instructive and inspiring, the dream-traces were evaporating, but wakefulness included more of Samantha’s ample graces. God bless that twat! Without it, none of us would exist. She scooped dirt from behind some bushes, walked under a light, and took great interest in the soil, sifted it, and looked for something. Methane does cause confusion . . . .

"Where’s your little sister . . . ? he asked and looked around. Where’s your mom . . . ?"

Wake up, Luke, she said and looked at him, a handful of soil in her left hand. "My sister is a grown woman, and my mom is dead, remember? What on Earth did you dream about?"

He rubbed his face with both hands, ran his hands over his hair, scratched his stubble, and looked around with a mad grin. Alright, he said. Where exactly are we? Where have you taken me, wild woman?

"To the wild, of course. What did you dream about?" she asked, smelled the soil, rubbed it with her fingers, and looked for something in it.

"The usual phantasmagoria… . What are you doing with that soil, pagan woman?"

Looking for evidence that this area was once underwater—a lake, maybe a river. Fifty million years ago, this place was swampy, much thicker with growth, with milder winters and hotter summers than today, much more humid. Isn’t that wild?

"Pure water… . Green everywhere… . No humans anywhere on the planet… . No large mammals… . Only small creatures scurrying about in the pristine bush, trying to avoid the dinosaurs… . It’s fantastic . . . ."

"It sure is, considering that the dinosaurs became extinct sixty-five million years ago."

"Plus or minus how many million years of margin of error, hey? No, don’t tell me. Let me guess. You had another revision of the numbers this week and decided that sixty-five is a better guess. You scientists—shifting the goalposts every chance you get."

"The goalposts? What in the world . . . ? Never mind. What did you dream about?"

The usual stuff: time-lapse sequences, shifting circumstances… . During one sequence, I was with three women: you, an older woman, and a girl about twelve… . You introduced them to me as your mother and your sister… . We were walking through a courtyard, empty ground-floor rooms, an indoor pool… .

Where were we going? she asked, approached him, and watched his eyes.

Trying to leave the area discreetly… .

Why?

Who knows? We should get going. We’re overdue. Your dad is waiting. You did tell him you’d bring along the man of your dreams, right?

"You mean, the man who censors his dreams for me?"

"That is sheer conjecture."

"Were we in some kind of danger?"

"Danger… ? I don’t… . Your little sister and I were teasing each other… ."

What about?

I don’t remember. How far is the site?

"I’m not sure. A couple of miles, maybe three. I was tired last time. I don’t remember exactly. Dad met me here, and we drove in a truck. It’s dirtroads all the way, northeast of the station, he said."

How about a cab?

"Cab? Luke. Wake up. We are no longer in New York City. There are no cabs around here. Besides, we need a four-wheel-drive kind of vehicle, particularly around the entrance to the caves. There are no roads around for miles—only trails. Dad’s students put up signs, though, so it’s easy to get there, once we find one of the signs."

"Walking, then?"

It may not be necessary. One of dad’s students may be inside, waiting for us. Let’s find out.

Too brightly lit, the waiting room was a hard place with uncomfortable seats, two payphones, and two vending machines, one of which dispensed hot coffee, Luke realized, walked toward it, and tried to remember an ultra-realistic dream sequence: life in the gutter in ancient Athens, another palace intrigue, soldiers after royals to execute, Samantha’s claim she was Princess Lydia of Crete, her little sister’s sarcasm to hide her fear and pride, the old woman’s astral smile… . Where’s Dr. Jung when you need ’im, eh . . . ?

While he was considering the milk and sugar options, Samantha looked for their driver—a funky male graduate student asleep in a seat, headphones on most likely, looking like a homeless person, she thought. Busy for a rural train station at 2:00 AM. Lines to the bathrooms, the payphones, the ticket windows. The storm must’ve closed the state’s airport hub, stranded people, and sent them scurrying for alternative modes of public transport to take them home for Thanksgiving… .

Sipping coffee, Luke sat down and thought about the dream sequence with the girl and the older woman, Samantha’s sister and mother, he was sure because he had seen photographs of both, although he’d never met either one, the sister now in her twenties or thirties and looking for older bones somewhere in Africa or the dead mother whose face was aging fast… . Some coincidences are MEANINGLESS, Mr. Pussywhipped. The four of them hurrying through royal corridors and empty rooms, looking for a way out of the labyrinth as inconspicuously as possible because the soldiers were on another rampage: an unfolding coup d’état—arrests, executions, corpses. Samantha’s close call… . What does it all mean? FOCUS, funk-man! Random associations? Bingo. Meaningful coincidence? Don’t go there, pilgrim. We have WORK to do. How can the sleeping self synthesize a fictional sequence that concrete? The mother is dead, the sister alive, and so are we, Sam and I, last time I checked. Is the sister in danger . . . ? Don’t dwell on it, stud. You may hex the poor woman. Focus on POSITIVE thoughts to help her navigate safely her adventures in the African bush . . . .

He looked around for a girl and a woman travelling together, sitting quietly out of the way or staring at him with wild eyes, maybe laughing, their heads back, seen and heard only by him… . Easy with that. Don’t invite any fucking psychic darkness. He scanned the room carefully, row after row. Most people were reading, dozing off, or sleeping. Nothing unusual. On the walls, framed photographs of wagons, buffalo, Indians, and stern frontier folks without the faintest trace of pretense in their eyes—sparse smiles, defiant spirits stirring inside people of wide-open spaces… . The BAD-old days, surely. Manifest Destiny was a crime against humanity.

Samantha sat next to him and asked about the coffee. He said it was okay for him but probably not up to her connoisseur standards—exotic beans, fancy grinder, and all that. She tried it, said it was alright, under the circumstances, and Luke volunteered to get her a cup. While the machine was dispensing the coffee, he looked back at her, feeling lucky for her attentions. Woof, woof, indeed. Shortly after they had met, she cut her hair, returned to jeans and T-shirts, and transformed herself once again, according to her own evaluation, from an outspoken academic eager for skirmishes with chauvinists of all persuasions, including the politically-correct crowd, to a much more relaxed woman with a sense of humor. Oral sex is a taste of heaven, according to Sappho. Yes, he could take some of the credit, she admitted, but the change had been long in coming because she had nothing to prove to others anymore unless they could think clearly and engage in civil debate.

He had been baffled on two occasions by people’s referring to Samantha as homely. Perspective is weird, indeed. True, she didn’t wear makeup or jewelry, and she did dress in comfortable rather than fashionable clothes, but why bother? She was a natural beauty with a womanly body—stacked in that glorious manner that only nature can endow, and he was blind to her imperfections. The word is PUSSY-WHIPPED, sir. To him, she looked good in anything and divine in nothing, and he thought that his duty was to exude in her presence all that is kind and generous in the human spirit. Can you name that word, sir? His money she did not want or need, for she was tenured and from a family of harmless eccentrics who owned many acres of real estate out in the great expanses of the American West. Let’s meet dad, already.

When he first met her, he knew immediately that she had been born and raised on a farm in Nebraska, Minnesota, Idaho, or some such state of vast spaces and few people, so strong was the aura of self-reliance she had acquired from the land. Born in New York City but raised in Europe, he found her exotic because before her, his lovers had been elegant women who never wore the same thing twice, it seemed, and who always were somehow in their Sunday best. He found the effort exhausting, the cost of the requisite wardrobe entirely unnecessary. Long live the funk. He felt much more at ease in Samantha’s company. She confessed he was the only man she knew who had graduated from existentialism with his sense of humor intact, an easy smile, and an active interest in redeeming himself in an indifferent universe. Although he had the credentials for an easy life of teaching in academia, he chose the freedom of nonaligned struggle—a lifestyle she admired. Pity the overeducated and underemployed fool. She appreciated his accessibility and generosity both emotionally as well as intellectually, and he cherished the combination of her dogma-free mind and her voluptuous body. Bless that hourglass figure, indeed. After many conversations about the correlation of domesticity to romance, they had agreed that to make their relationship last and remain exciting, they wouldn’t move in together but commit indefinitely and deepen their union. One of the best decisions we ever made.

Her short hair reminded Luke of the frequent haircuts his father forced on him, until Luke was well in his teenage years—that era of tyranny and torment, followed by the era of foolish rebellion and great luck, having survived motorcycle accidents and near-death trips, after which came the era of reevaluation. Besides sheer luck, his father had been his most generous and most dependable benefactor. Living with him and his religious wife (Luke’s mother) for seventeen years and five months was like being simultaneously in the army and in a monastery, but even that austere period had its considerable benefits, as life on the road was to demonstrate many times. Thank you, mom and dad, indeed. We didn’t do too badly, after all, considering our vast differences. Your strictness freed me from having to be strict with others myself, hence this laidback attitude that Samantha likes . . . .

No one was waiting for them. A ticket-window clerk told them that finding a driver would be difficult before dawn, unless they had an emergency. Because of the storm, the nearby motels had no vacancies, so the best thing was to hike to the caves, two miles of dirtroads away. Samantha’s father’s students walked to town all the time. In fact, one of them had waited for hours for Samantha and Luke. He was on foot, too, said the clerk. Go ahead. There’s no danger. I know of no serial killer roaming about this week… .

They put their duffel bags in a locker, kept their shoulder bags, and left the station, both in a mood for what lay ahead: sustained walking, a common pleasure they cherished, especially when the open terrain, the cool autumn weather, the leisure time at their disposal, and the important objective were in alignment. Her paleoanthropologist father had located an early Indian settlement and was doing a preliminary survey of what sounded to Luke like a multileveled labyrinth, but most of the research students were going home for Thanksgiving, so the doctor needed help because work was the only home he had left after his beloved wife’s death.

The eastern sky was troubled, the western serene. Silent flashes of lightning lit up the troubled horizon in the east, but above them and to the west the stars scoffed at the distant storm moving northward. The full Moon lighting their way, they reached a lake featuring a light on the farthest shore. A cool breeze blew across the water and stirred the reeds. The quiet ambiance was exciting and somewhat ominous for Luke, who had never hiked at night before, but Samantha was sure they had nothing to fear. Luke suggested they keep moving before any deer ticks had a chance to jump on them and give them Lyme disease. They followed the trail around the lake, in and out of the forest’s edge, through pungent smells and varying degrees of darkness.

What did you think about Nora’s boyfriend? Samantha asked.

Jim? A space cadet.

Look who’s taking.

"Who, me? I’m a paragon of civility, compared to Jim, who in my humble estimation participated in only about 5.7 percent of our conversation. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s from another planet. At first, I thought he had no social skills. Then, I thought he was on drugs. Then, I realized that he was interacting nonverbally with the little girl, who never acknowledged me or anyone else in the room except him and her mom. Didn’t you say the girl was autistic?"

"Mildly. You have to work to get her attention. It takes several visits before she trusts you enough to look at you and respond. She’s improving, though."

Jim was focused the girl. He hardly said a word to anyone. What does he do?

He plays drums.

"A musician . . . . That’s why he and the girl get along so well. They communicate with sound . . . . The girl’s toys were mostly musical . . . . They were jamming while we were talking, weren’t they?"

"You noticed. Good. There’s hope for you."

"And you thought I was a mere space cadet. Well, now we know otherwise, don’t we? I did mention before that I have a talent for fathering, and I have expressed a keen interest in it, so what you say, love? Interested in mothering? I’m sure we’ll do great. What are you doing later?"

What did you think about Nora?

"Couldn’t you tell? She and I monopolized the conversation. Were you consumed by jealousy, love?"

"Oh, yea. Isn’t that stuff about the thrusters wild?"

"Primo space-cadet material. She’s out there. No wonder she’s a librarian. Working in a library does that to you. All those free books! Once you find your reading pleasure-spot, you’re gone. You get rid of that television, and you just take off for eras and realms farther and farther away. Thrusters to propel Earth through space? That’s out there, way out there—billions of years in the future."

"The idea is to propel Earth on a safer orbit when the Sun swells and threatens to incinerate our planet," she said.

"Provided that we could build such thrusters miles in diameter, the heat generated from firing them would be a big problem, wouldn’t it?"

"Not if we build them in a desert."

"A desert . . . ?"

The planet’s surface will be mostly desert by the time we fire the thrusters.

I guess so, he replied. "What will we burn for thrust?"

"Whatever we have available at that time. We don’t have to do this tomorrow, you know."

"Won’t the firing disrupt the atmosphere?"

"Most of the atmosphere will be gone by then, she said. We’ll be living in subterranean cities, or we won’t be, at all. The thrusters won’t be built until the global consensus realizes their necessity, and I’m afraid it will take several cataclysms for us to realize that the Sun is slowly baking the Earth. There will be some cooling periods, short ice ages, as the swelling Sun causes continent-wide fires whose smoke will block most of the sunlight for years and thus cause surface temperatures on Earth to fall. Continent-wide fires may take years to control."

Okay, he replied. "I’ll join your space-lunatics club. Where do I sign? Can I have the hologram of a phoenix with flapping wings on my membership card?"

We’re not up to that yet. You can start by attending our monthly meetings. We do need a writing expert.

"You surely do. That essay Nora showed me had several comma splices, not to mention that she sometimes uses subject pronouns after prepositions and that some of her modifiers dangle dangerously. Wild ideas, okay organization and development, but careless grammar. I’ll be your editor and your secretary, make the coffee and suffer through your sexual advances . . . ."

Dream on, guy.

"What do I get if I am good, I mean, really good?"

"You mean also helping us with the research?"

Yea… .

She stopped, turned around, raised her arms, licked her lips, and gyrated her hips. Like a soul eager for immersion in the godhead, he embraced her, breathing deeply and feeling blessed because she was an extraordinary woman not only of world-class intellect but also of sacred sensuality. Her arms around his head, his around her waist, they fused into one, the timeless feeling passing between them in both directions simultaneously, back and forth, each surge rising higher, deeper, faster. He unbuttoned her shirt, and she rubbed against his erection, as they tried to find the appropriate position, but the trail was narrow, cold, and hard. They stopped, looked at each other, excited, serious, breathing deeply, near the point of no return. Laughter overtook them as they raised their hands to cool down… .

A train whistle in the distance prompted them to keep moving, and their steps grew lighter through the bush. Pine and oak wafts, he thought, soil and decaying leaves. Spirit echoes emanating from the foliage, branches, trunks, and roots living the wisdom that humans seek in verbiage, as we stumble down the centuries, in quagmires of negativity, with memories of loss, trying to make a living and to survive another day, another night. Let’s hope our good luck holds . . . .

They found a student wrapped in a blanket, dozing off in a portable chair while keeping watch by the fire in front of the caves. He said that he had waited for them at the station, assumed they had missed their train, and planned to return at dawn. The doctor was still up probably, in the green room, one of the deep caves. They had found an intact specimen in green quartz—a fully-preserved male standing inside a boulder of green glass. Just follow the green neon markers. They’ll take you there. You can’t miss it. Here, you can use this flashlight.

On one side of the wide cave entrance was a portable table with a lamp on it. Scribbled all around the lampshade, flocks of squiggles—silhouettes of divers, some headed for the bottom, others for the surface. Next to the lamp, a smiling blue toy dolphin, nose and tail arched up, rocking when tapped on the nose. Next to the dolphin, several books about the geology of the region and the local Indian tribes.

Nice dolphin, said Luke. "I wonder if I can borrow it for a year or so."

Go ahead, Samantha replied and examined the books.

I didn’t know you played with dolphins.

It’s dad’s. He’s a dolphin fan. He has all kinds of dolphin paraphernalia. He always gives people gifts with dolphin themes.

"I like him already. Dolphins are great. I wish I could fly through water the way they do."

Moans attracted their attention to two stuffed sleeping bags off to the side.

Samantha kept one of the books, handed the dolphin to Luke, and they walked quietly into the tunnel with the green neon markers. The deeper they went, the narrower the tunnel became. At times they had to lean forward because of the low ceiling, sometimes even crawl through low openings. Tired but excited, they pressed on, eager to find the great man who had devoted his life to field research and had inspired his younger daughter to do the same in the heart of Africa, while in her twenties. The fact that he would never meet the Amazon queen who had given birth to Samantha and her sister didn’t sadden Luke because he had already met a few Amazon queens, including Samantha herself, and because he knew that countless more were in his future reincarnations, courtesy of the law of energy conservation. He welcomed the notion that after death loved ones meet on the shores of eternity, but his focus was this life—the zeitgeist, history, progress, and the bodhisattva gig in the service of Lord Vishnu the protector of worlds. Whenever back-to-godheaders extolled nirvana, he smiled and asked, "What’s the big rush? God and nirvana will always exist whereas humanity may not—unless its brightest children help the less fortunate."

They reached a spherical cave about twenty feet in diameter. The smooth roundness puzzled them. At the center of the room was a circle of heavy stones around a pile of ashes and directly above, at the dome’s apex, an opening. They felt as if standing in an abandoned temple, whose ambiance even the most devout atheists must respect because countless generations of humans came together in peace to overcome adversity, sustain hope, and seek transcendence, whatever their religion or culture.

Samantha noticed a five-foot-wide band of what at first looked like cracks all around the concave wall, at eye level. However, after closer inspection, they realized that the cracks were really a mural: sheer underwater cliffs and stick figures around and inside leviathans—some ascending, others descending. The drawings were as graceful as intricate root-like cracks, as if natural erosion in all its dispassionate mastery had chanced upon imagery that humans understood. The mural’s depiction of an ancient myth could be studied and analyzed later in a more appropriate environment. A very different mode of communication was currently in order. They sat down to listen to the stillness, adjust to the environment of another culture, open up to Manitou’s positive forces, and detect its negative ones in order to avoid them.

After a while they felt the air streaming through the room, heard the hum of silence and the trickling of water deep in the rock. Samantha’s father was convinced that the first Americans crossed over from Siberia to Alaska and then down to the Americas, at least 15,000 years ago—four millennia before the Clovis culture, although some probably canoed their way here. The oldest Hindu sacred texts, Vedas, were written around 1,000 BC, Luke remembered, but their oral origins are surely in prehistory, so the first Asians who came to the Americas brought with them the seeds of Oriental mysticism—a treasure-trove of ideas about the evolution of human consciousness, according to Carl Jung, whom we admire and love even though we don’t share his exuberant theism.

Samantha moved slowly into the circle of stones and motioned Luke to do the same. Seated cross-legged in front of each other, fingers hooked and dovetailing into each other’s, they listened. Are we there yet? She closed her eyes, and he did the same, breathing slowly, in unison, the flashlight half-buried in the ashes between them, pointing at the ceiling… . Calling Manitou! Come in, please . . . . The things we do for love, eh?

Faint distant voices reached them, processional chanting and drumming. Across the flashlight beam, dust-streams of ultra-fine ashes rose in slow motion, then fell, responding to the lovers’ breathing. Did they imagine or actually feel the traces of old fires under them? Did they really hear murmurs coming from the murals? Were the murals circling slowly around the flashlight beam? What about the deep-water imagery? They were over a thousand miles away from the Pacific Ocean, yet they felt that they were under miles of saltwater, in a bubble that was rising through the crushing depths so slowly that they felt still… .

Some time later, they rose silently and left the room—eager to interact with an ancient culture, show respect, and disseminate its core values across mainstream culture: respect for nature and focus on community. Greed, materialism, and anarchy are terminal diseases. The future belongs to enlightened capitalists—generous and community-focused individuals focused on generating wealth for everyone, eradicating poverty, and empowering the masses to become lifelong independent learners who reject the pitches of snake-oil salespeople and dim-witted politicians running on ambition. Some of us atheists aspire to a rigorous spirituality devoted to the perpetual improvement of this world… .

They found Doctor Jalon in a cavern about fifteen by thirty feet, the ceiling at least twenty feet high. The farthest side was a wall of polished green quartz, and in it, two feet from the floor, stood an Eskimo-looking man in a hooded animal hide, his eyes closed, no stress on his leathery face, buried in a cavity that fitted him like a mold, less than a foot in the glass. Holy moly, a prehistoric Mongolian in a Stone-Age vitrine . . . !

At the center of the room, seated in a portable chair, Dr. Jalon was observing and making notes. Next to him was a wooden wine crate upside down, and on it, among some personal items, a boombox playing a Native-American ceremonial chant. In a tight embrace, clutching on to each other as if their life depended on it, loneliness and greatness emanated from Samantha’s father—one of the 1960s’ best and brightest children who lived their ideals. Do NOT kiss his hand or butt, please! He greeted them with a nod, then gestured toward the corpse, and let them take in the sight for a few minutes. He remained seated and made a note of the time of their arrival.

Samantha introduced Luke to the doctor, who looked like he hadn’t slept recently, unshaven, preoccupied, his white hair in a pony tail. She put her hand on his shoulder, kissed his temple, and suggested that he sleep for a few hours. He resumed writing and didn’t reply.

Come on, dad, she insisted and kneeled beside him. "The stiff isn’t going anywhere. Let’s get some sleep."

"If you go to sleep, you’ll miss the show."

"What show?"

"When the Sun rose yesterday, the quartz lit up and flooded this room with a bright greenish light… . Never seen anything like it… ."

Samantha stood up, looked at Luke, at the quartz, and then she asked her father, "The quartz extends to the summit?"

"Along the eastern side, most of it inaccessible. You realize the implication?"

"That piece of quartz is rather large."

"Sunlight reaches this room before the Sun clears the eastern mountains, so the quartz must extend all the way to the summit because sunlight reaches the summit first, then the lower parts of the mountainside. In other words, this mountain is a piece of quartz covered with soil, rock, and greenery, and there’s a prehistoric cemetery in the quartz. I’m sure we’ll find more specimens. We must find an entrance. There are probably several, but they’re well-hidden. Finding them won’t be easy. It may even be dangerous. We must be careful. There may be traps near the entrances… ."

How old is that specimen? asked Luke.

According to my preliminary analysis, the doctor said, that individual died ten to fifteen thousand years ago, maybe even earlier. If we had a small piece of that hide, we could date him to within a few hundred years.

Can you tell about how old he was when he died? Luke asked.

"Thirty to thirty-five, I’m guessing. A piece of his clothing would tell us volumes . . . ."

"They came from Asia, right?" Luke asked. No, they came from Orion. Why ask questions whose answers you know?

"Definitely. We may be looking at one of the ancestors of most Indian tribes in the Americas. That guy’s grandparents were one of the nomadic tribes that followed the great herds of animals that migrated from Asia to Alaska, Canada, and North America. They were pleasantly surprised by the mild weather and all that uninhabited land—the open spaces, the large herds of animals across the horizon… ."

"Were they happier than we are today, dad? Samantha asked. Was life more fulfilling then?"

"I have no idea, love. If we make certain assumptions, we can draw some conclusions, but we don’t know if our assumptions apply to cultures that predate ours by fifteen millennia. For example, if we assume alienation to originate from the modern impersonal workplace and our world wars, we can conclude that these people were probably better-adjusted in their culture than we are in ours, so they were probably happier than those of us who haven’t worked through our personal alienation. However, making a living was considerably harsher then. Despite their great skills and the abundance of animals, hunting was a dangerous business. Animal stampedes killed many hunters, I’m sure, not to mention the large cats and other predators that had a taste for humans. Moreover, simple viral infections wiped out entire tribes."

What’s that stuff inside his clothes? asked Luke.

"Straw," the doctor replied. For thermal protection mostly, maybe as part of the burial ceremony.

"Short fellow," Luke observed.

Limited diet, without the chemicals we put into our food, the doctor said. "Even children had that adult look. Pedomorphism is a recent phenomenon."

"What kind of language did they have?"

"Mostly nouns and verbs about hunting and gathering, I guess. Moreover, they communicated about absent entities, and they thought about the afterlife."

Dad thinks that music, art, religion, philosophy, and science are ultimately attempts to understand the afterlife, Samantha said.

By virtue of reaching for immortality, the doctor explained. "Survival was a daily struggle, but the afterlife was almost equally important because it defeated death. In a world full of mostly dangers and a few delights but ultimately defeated by death, the afterlife was conjured as a way out, thanks mostly to dreaming."

"Sleeping is a kind of temporary death, Luke agreed, and dreaming is very suggestive. I perceive no boundaries between dreaming and wakefulness, past and future. I perceive only a continuum of actualities and possibilities. In some respects, that dead Indian lives in us. Some of his ancestors, instead of migrating eastward to the Americas, went the other way—westward, across northern Asia, to Europe, where they developed into some of the European tribes: our own ancestors. Time and environment account for all differences between us and that man’s tribe, and all our differences are morphological. We share the same genes, the same archetypes, the same myths—the same collective unconscious. In some respects, immortality is a fact because the multiverse has always existed and will continue to exist forever. The energy of beings and civilizations simply becomes transformed and continues to exist in other realms. Death is a passage to whatever we, at our most primal depths, believe happens posthumously, bad faith notwithstanding." Easy, pard.

"What do you believe you’ll find, Luke?" the doctor asked, rose, lowered the volume of the ceremonial chants playing on the boombox, handed them plastic cups, and poured coffee from a thermos.

"I’m not sure, but I’m working on it. My dreams are becoming more lucid, and I’m learning how to change them. The most important thing is to prevent the memory loss that follows death. Posthumous survival begins as a buoy anchored in this world. For me, the electromagnetic fields around pylons located in rural areas are the best anchors for stabilizing a posthumous focus. I love cities, but they are filled with energy bursts and sinks that can annihilate a nascent posthumous self. The vivid dream sequences accompanying death may be able to maintain some focus and float along an electromagnetic field—like a buoy anchored on something that provides the basis for some inkling of disembodied consciousness to persist. The natural tendency is to forget. Unless the self can sustain its will to survive, the near-death dream-sequences sink back into the collective unconscious. That’s what happens to most people. However, I intuit possibilities, so I try to turn them into actualities with the help of people like Carl Jung, Sam, my sister Lucia, and others." LECTURING again, mon amour? This father and daughter have doctorates whereas you don’t. What gives?

What kinds of actualities? asked the father. "Assuming you can stabilize posthumously your disembodied consciousness, what then?"

Rove about and inspect the terrain, replied Luke. Become mobile, learn to navigate magnetic fields and gravity as if they were rivers and seas. Summon my favorite dreamscapes, look for Sam, Lucia, and my other kindred spirits.

"Why? What’s your ultimate motivation?"

"Exploring, learning, improving, and perceiving in increasingly-deeper modes. The life-force in me demands these things, and I am happy to comply. From the most primal depths of all healthy individuals, spring universal echoes that are strongly attracted to green-and-watery realms where muck evolves into flora, fauna, and civilization. The ultimate motivation isn’t mine. It’s a universal actuality: Life proliferates. I’m only one of its spring shoots aspiring to enlightenment in the eternal multiverse." Easy.

What about the Big Bang?

"I am sure the Big Bang wasn’t the first or the only one. It was a seasonal phenomenon on a multiversal scale—probably an imploding black hole in another universe, exploding as a white hole and creating this spacetime. Human consciousness can not conceive of the multiverse in its totality. We are inside a tiny bubble, looking out, and we are shortsighted. Like our planet, our solar system, and our galaxy, this universe is one of countless others extending into times and realms greater than we can ever imagine because we are a young and primitive civilization. I’m also sure there are ultra-advanced alien civilizations capable of frequent movement among solar systems, galaxies, and universes. However, even such ultra-advanced aliens can’t survey all the universes because the multiverse is infinite and immortal—a multidimensional kaleidoscope. The more of it we detect, the more there is to explore, and the more possibilities arise for profounder understandings. The microscopic, the macroscopic, and the cosmic extend forever to realms we can not currently imagine. In fact, most of them we will never experience unless we mature as a civilization by synergizing wisdom and technology." Quit lecturing, already.

Given the necessary time, Samantha said, "we can become gods. In fact, God is the human reflection on the mirror of possibility."

Hear, hear, said Luke and raised his cup. "Let’s send this woman to the White House, already."

Glad to see you two aren’t just fucking all the time, the doctor said and turned around. He picked up his flashlight, approached the quartz, and tried to see past the corpse. "See how convex the quartz is? he asked. Like a bathyscaph . . . . So far I see two possibilities: One, this thing was exclusively a cemetery with tunnels dug into it, each tunnel with many offshoots, each one ending in a tomb like this one. Two, this thing once housed not only a cemetery but an entire community trying to survive an ice age."

"Smart people, said Luke. Living in a slab of quartz that extends to the summit and disseminates sunlight throughout the mountain’s bowels. I wouldn’t be surprised if they grew plants in there. There was plenty of water outside, right?"

Oh, yea, replied the doctor. "They ate a lot of seafood. We found layers upon layers of sea shells. These people may have had fisheries in there. If that’s true, if they grew plants and kept fisheries in there, they were self-sustained."

"If they lived in there, said Luke, there must be several floors of settlements spanning hundreds or maybe thousands of years, right?"

"Well, they lived in these caves for at least three thousand years. We have evidence of that, but we don’t know how much of that time they spent in the quartz. However, the amount of work it took to carve out a molded tomb like this one, slide in the corpse, then seal the mold’s back without any visible seams, indicates that they achieved a sophisticated degree of operation in there. I can’t yet imagine how they did it. It’s an ingenious model that can be immensely useful in the poles, in deserts, underwater, on the Moon, on Mars—in any type of hostile environment. Building underground is much easier than above ground, for obvious structural reasons. Before the Sun swells to a red giant and incinerates the Earth’s surface, there will be another ice age—several, most likely. Either way, regardless of whether the surface is ice-covered or scorched, sooner or later we will have to retreat at least partly underground. We better be prepared."

There may not be another major ice age, said Samantha. "Human activity generates so much heat and pollution that we are turning the Earth into a greenhouse with steadily-increasing temperatures. The polar ice caps will shrink across the millennia, melt, raise sea level, and flood coastal cities. The ever-increasing heat and the carbon oxides in the atmosphere will cause orgiastic growth across the planet. After all the ice melts, sea levels will fall slowly for millions of years and expose more and more ground, which the by-then-hotter Sun will turn into slowly-creeping deserts that will make the tropics uninhabitable. While this is going on, the poles will be covered with forests, which the heat and the sand will eventually choke and turn the Earth into a sandy wasteland with mile-deep canyons and no atmosphere. By that time, the Sun will be a huge yellow disk slowly turning orange, then red. We better be underground and comfortable, or we will not be, at all."

One day, the doctor said with pride, we will undertake the task of building immense subterranean geothermal plants near Earth’s molten core so that we may use its energy efficiently and stabilize the tectonic plates that interfere with our plans. Tapping the Earth’s core will allow us to lay rock by simply cooling magma into molds positioned where we want to build. We will begin by tapping volcanoes and using them as energy sources.

Samantha raised her cup and said, To our descendants and ancestors.

"Sleeping in the quartz may amplify the lucidity of dreams, said Luke. You’re sleeping inside a lens that does all kinds of things to light and other radiation. If we could see the Earth’s magnetic field over this area, there would be a disruption caused by this glass, I bet."

Two graduate assistants came in with video cameras. The doctor looked at his watch, turned off the boombox, and asked Luke and Samantha to stand behind the two assistants because the quartz would light up in a few minutes. He turned off the only lamp in the room and asked everyone to relax. The cameras’ LED lights acquired a profound significance in the cave’s quiet darkness.

What are we looking for, dad? asked Samantha.

You tell me.

In different depths, the quartz refracted the LED camera lights, amplified them, and emitted a dark-green glow. Dust floated in the air and streamed around the two assistants as they checked for the best camera angles. Luke was shaking his head up and down, his hands tapping uptempo time against his thighs while an approaching cluster of epiphanies orbited the farthest reaches of his consciousness.

A light snapped on in the upper part of the quartz. Damn storm, thought Luke because he knew that the show would be considerably brighter if the eastern sky were clear. The green light grew stronger in irregular bursts and highlighted the fine dust floating in front of the cameras. The quartz was turning on like a gigantic lightbulb that took a while to reach its peak luminosity. Subtle impurities and air bubbles inside released color patterns that shifted and moved through one another, disappeared, and reemerged along the grain, against it, and across it, revealing delicate veins and offshoots—nature’s majesty unfolding out of nothingness… .

A green sheen fleshed out the dead Indian’s features, softened his leathery face, and made him look younger with every light burst. The dust streams and the changing angles of light seemed liquid, as if the convex quartz were a deep-sea probe, plankton floating across the probe’s headlights, the dead Indian keeping guard. Reflected into the quartz, the LED camera lights resembled built-in electronics… .

While tapping on his thighs, Luke felt something in his pocket. Staring at the quartz, he took out the toy dolphin, raised it between his eyes and the quartz, and tried to remember something important… . A letter from his father: scuba diving, a freak storm, an ancient statue that had sunk to the bottom… . Schools of exuberant dolphins around the island, summer vacations, childhood’s happiest days… .

As green light flooded the cave, the quartz resembled a plasma field, and the dead Indian suspended in the air. Pale outlines of a duct about two feet in diameter, from the Indian’s upper back, upward in a gentle curve, disappearing under swirls of prehistoric air trapped forever in the quartz and looking like visual distortions. At irregular intervals, the light snapped to lower volumes of luminosity, turned off for a few moments, then turned on again, as the Sun and the storm jammed with each other in the east. The Indian had definitely been buried into a mold at the bottom of a chute—a foot-thick sealing-plug against his upper back, as if he were a sentinel at the outpost of another dimension.

In Luke’s head, symphonic eruptions alternated with drum bursts and synthesizer swells, surged back and forth from his chest to his head, and flooded his consciousness with an anthem to the magnificence of eternal recurrence. Violins, horns, pianos, guitars, tablas, tom toms, and voices had once again managed to resolve their differences, tune into the universal majesty, and speak in tongues—beyond justification, causality, and meaning. Impressive ensemble agility: rock, swing, pause, shimmer, rise, fall, crackle, whisper, thunder… . More instruments came in while others dropped out—a synergy of symphonic power, rock energy, free jazz, and world fusion with a fierce backbeat and an exuberant swing that knew exactly when to play behind, on, or ahead of the beat—always in the pocket. Beautiful melodies and bold improvisations morphed into one another like a unity that spoke clearly: THIS is how body and mind are ONE . . . . He was riding the successive waves of inspiration when he noticed that the Indian had been buried without any hunting weapons and that feathers adorned not only his head but also his arms and feet… .

Before he was conscious of his own realization, Luke whispered to Samantha, "He’s a shaman!"

Surprised, she glanced at Luke, then back at the Indian. Jumbled memories flooded her consciousness: Soaring above the clouds… . Her mother, the Aegean, Crete, the exuberance of Minoan culture—her mother’s favorite… . Part memory and part dream, the sequences felt as if they were taking place right now, on the shores of eternity—a place that her mother considered far more real than death. Her own inability to believe troubled Samantha more than her mother’s death, because the mother was convinced that they would all meet again in a realm without corruption, decay, or death… . Death can’t touch the denizens of the Eternal Now, Luke said whenever she mentioned her mother, as if he’d known her well although she had died several years before Samantha and Luke met… .

"The feathers, Luke whispered to her. Look at those feathers . . . ."

She turned to Luke. The green light, his wide-open eyes, his heaving chest, and his infectious joy were overwhelming and made her slightly uneasy… . She felt like both a dam and a deluge, wanting simultaneously to resist as well as to breach, stimulated beyond control, fluttering in powerful gusts not at all threatening… . She wouldn’t be surprised if her mother suddenly appeared, smiled, kissed everyone, treated Luke like an old friend, and joined them in their scrutiny of the Indian shaman… . She looked at the entrance and longed for a miracle . . . .

"He knows we’re here, whispered Luke. They know we’re here… . At last . . . ."

Disappointed that her mother didn’t appear, Samantha approached her father and whispered to him Luke’s claim.

The doctor shook his head in agreement, smiled at Luke, and gave him the thumbs-up.

*

A Season of Life

Suffering from doubt, dread, and fear, people without wisdom are haunted by unanswerable questions: Why do we live for such a short time? Why must we die? However, wisdom empowers us to articulate increasingly more accurate questions and to answer them. If we lived several centuries instead of decades, we would be able to