14



If I wasn’t such a nice fellow, I’d blame John Vincent Atanasoff for the mess I’m in. In case you didn’t know, he created the first electronic digital computer. And we all know what happened next.

Remember that aura I said surrounded me? It was basically an electronic digital computer, only so advanced, it was close to a living being itself. It was the only device I was equipped with but what a device! It made me cool in the summer and warm in the winter. It kept wild beasts and predators of all kinds at bay. It deflected anything from a BB to a high-powered bullet to a grenade. It kept me from starving and dying of thirst. And so on. But one thing it didn’t do. It didn’t think. That was all up to me.

That’s why I was worried. Celestial beings didn’t need artificial devices to protect them. Their power came from the same place a star’s power comes from: the fusion of hydrogen and helium.

But they weren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer. If spoken to correctly, they could be convinced that visiting Alpha Centauri or Sirius would be nice this time of year.

I was on the outskirts of Baltimore near the Chesapeake Bay when I felt the urge to try some crab cakes. The waitress was named Sally and the owner of the restaurant went by Captain Bob. It was lunch time and the place was buzzing. I asked Captain Bob if business was always this good.

He replied, “Even since I hired Ahab, the folks can’t get enough of Captain Bob’s Crab Cakes.”
“Ahab? That’s an interesting name.”
“He was named for his great-great-grandfather. Captain of a whaling ship, I believe, back in the 19th century. He died somewhere in the South Pacific. But they said he died happy.”
“Why was that?”
“He always wanted to become one with the sea. He got his wish.”

We incorporate our failings into the complexity of our being. The failings don’t go away, but they are sublimated to the whole concept of who we are.

All through the ages, a simple belief in God has been disruptive by an uninhibited growth of weeds.

The most disturbing about life is being alive and knowing it. How do we get back to the source? And if we do, will the source welcome us with open arms?

My next stop is Kitty Hawk where man discovered he could fly like the birds. A modern jet plane is fast, but it can’t even begin to compare to the speed of a celestial being.

In one sense, a celestial being is nothing more than a beam of light. But in another sense, it is more than a beam of light because it has intelligence, but it’s not an intelligence enriched by human experience. It has never known and never will know what it is to suffer because of hunger, thirst or pain (physical, mental and emotional). Human intelligence is what it is because of suffering. It rises to the occasion, whatever the occasion is.

Even though the celestial beings are beams of light, they travel much faster than light itself travels. This sounds oxymoronic, and it is. The only explanation is because they can focus their intelligence without distractions of any kind, they are able to accelerate their natural rate of motion (which is the speed of light) and travel anywhere in the "near" universe almost instantaneously. For us to see them in the atmosphere, it has to be a very dark night, and they have to slow their speeds precipitately.

They are coruscations. But you’ve probably already figured that out.

From Kitty Hawk, I go inland about fifty miles where tobacco is being harvested and put in heated barns for curing. Work is work so I spend a few days helping a small farmer named Menelaus harvest his three acres of tobacco. Menelaus lives in a three-room house (I’m being polite not to call it a shack) with his wife and three kids. Menelaus doesn’t have much but what he does he have he takes good care of. Menelaus says he can’t pay me anything, but I say I’m all looking for is a little food and water. I sleep in the barn with the two cows and the mule. Neither the cows nor the mule can talk so I my only conversation is with myself during the wee hours of the night.

We start the day off with chicory coffee, fatback and grits. The kids are 15, 12 and 10. Everyone goes to work in the field picking tobacco. It’s already hot by 9 AM. Around 10 we take some long gulps of cool water at the well. Everybody seems to be holding up pretty well. At noon, we go back to the house for lunch.

Menelaus says after lunch, “We’re going to take it easy until mid-afternoon. You want to nap in here?
I reply, “No thanks, I saw a big oak tree at the head of your driveway. I think I’ll rest there. Just holler when you’re ready to start back working,”

The tree was a good one. The limbs were packed with green leaves offering a luxuriant shade to wallow in. This was natural air conditioner at its finest.

As I look upward I see tiny shafts of light of streaming downward through equally tiny openings in the leaves. For the rest of my journey, I’ll be wondering if light is only light.
Around 3 PM Menelaus shouts, “We’re starting back!” I get up and stroll leisurely back to the tobacco field.

Menelaus says, “I think we have enough tobacco picked for the day. Now we need to string it up and put it in the barn.”

He meant we would take several leaves and tie them together with a string at the top, then hang them over a five-foot stick. We would then fill the stick up with leaves leaving a few inches empty at each end of the stick (so the stick could hang on boards that traversed the width of the barn; there would be several vertical layers of the boards spaced in a way that permitted the barn to be filled as tightly as possible, leaving just enough space for the tobacco to “breathe”). The stick would then be placed in the barn.  We repeated the process until the barn was full. A series of gas burners (3 each in 4 rows; 12 in all) sat on the ground beneath the tobacco leaves that were attached to the sticks. The heat from the gas burners would gradually “cure” the tobacco over several days. Then the tobacco would be ready to take to market.

Tobacco was a cash crop. Menelaus used it to pay the bills. He didn’t smoke himself.
The next day I helped him fix a couple of fences. After lunch, I departed.

For all practical purposes I was going to be back in 1962 for the foreseeable future This moment in time was thick with the celestial beings. My problem was finding them. Once the beam of light hit earth they changed into humanoids. There’s only one way of identifying a celestial but I’ll have to tell you that later (that is, if I figure out how to do so).

(All of) time is a conceptualization. We conceive the past and future the same as we conceive the present. Conception not perception. Perception is nothing more than a way of making a list. But the list maker is not part of the list. We stand outside the reality we perceive. Without conceptualization, we would have no idea of where we truly are in the great scheme of things. But conceptualization is only one of several tools for deciphering reality.

For convenience sake, I’m going to start calling the celestial beings FTLs. I don’t know if they’re really beings at all. They could be artificial in both substance and intelligence. But I’ve been told with good authority that they have the ability to travel Faster Than Light, hence FTL.

The FTLs are neither good nor evil, though they are certainly susceptible to being used and manipulated by those who are evil.  They are examples not of mind over matter, but of matter over mind. Their physical attributes are so great that they rarely ever need to utilize their minds.

According to my sponsors (the man and woman in Chapter 1) the FTLs quit visiting earth sometime in the late 20th century.

And that’s the crux of the problem. My sponsors, and the people they represent, need the help of the FTLs to accomplish something that would only serve to elevate humanity. My small part in this endeavor is to see if the FTLs would consent to a meeting with the man and woman. In fairness though, I must tell you, it’s still a long way to go before I can come even close to making that happen.

The idea of equality in human beings is a chimera. The FTLs are all equal but at what cost? Great power but no direction; they flit through galaxies without purpose. Only by luck or circumstance does anything good come out of their breathtaking celestial perambulations. There’s just as much chance bad will occur instead of good. There’s your equality.

If everyone is equal (I’m referring to humans now), then no progress will be made. Talent needs to rise to the top, and should be rewarded. Then as a result, everyone will be rewarded.

As Shakespeare said, the quality of mercy is not strained, it falls like the gentle rain from heaven. In my case, the quality of mercy was strained because the FTLs did not fall gently to earth. They came out of the sky, from the east to the west, like bolts of lightning. I was at their mercy, which depended on their whims. An almost impossible situation was facing me.
But now I can tell you how to identify an FTL: you ask the right questions (or is that “light” questions?).

Have you ever met an exiled thinker? Me neither. If you had lived in the Mediterranean area of the world anywhere from say, the 6th Century BC to around the 2nd Century AD, there’s a good chance, if you were living on or visiting a small, rocky island, you might have run into such a personage. Somewhere near the border of North and South Carolina, it happened to me.

He was living in a treehouse; one of his own making. Ala Tarzan, he had a rope that would swing him from the treehouse into the pond that was adjacent to his aerial home. Standing a few feet from him, I realized he should consider using that option more often. He also had a long gray beard underneath blue eyes and a bald pate. He was short and skinny. A little on the bony side. But that was more than likely because of his diet, which subsisted of whatever he rustled up in the immediate vicinity of where he lived. His name was Aris. His first name anyway. His last name was hard to pronounce and even harder to spell.
As I usually did when possible, I was walking through the woods. He spotted me from on high and invited me up into his abode. The way into his home was via a rope ladder, better suited for a much lighter man, and I found the going awkward, but I did make it to the top.
I couldn’t resist the urgings of my natural curiosity, “What in the world are you doing up here?”
Aris replied, “I am in exile.”
Had I gone back in time 2000 years? “Who exiled you?”
“It’s self-imposed.”
“Ah, I see.” I didn’t.
He continued, “Thanks for being nice but I’m sure you don’t. I went into self-exile to solve all the world’s problems.”
“Have you done so yet?”
“No, but I never really thought I could. I just thought it was important that someone give it a shot.” He glanced over at a pile of notebooks beside his handmade desk.
I asked, “Those notebooks full of ideas?”
“Yes, those are my legacy. My hope is when I die out here, someone will eventually run across this place and discover the notebooks.”
I didn’t want to discourage him, “It might just happen.”

We spent the afternoon talking and eating walnuts.