The Millennial Reincarnations: A Novel
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The Millennial Reincarnations
A Novel
The Millennial Reincarnations
Updated and revised 3rd edition paperback © 2016
Copyright Daniel Mark Harrison 2016 All Rights Reserved
No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.
This second edition was published in Singapore by MarxRand Media 2016
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First published in 2015 by Publick Media Publishing in North America
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writers' imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real or. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-153-35-3726-3
The Millennial Reincarnations
By Daniel Mark Harrison
For Iris
PREFACE
A Brief Introduction To
The Millennial Reincarnations
Ω
i.
About The Millennial Reincarnations
By Diane Donovan
New age, spirituality and philosophy readers alike will find in The Millennial Reincarnations a different kind of message, delivered with a different style: a novel that reads like a cinematic widescreen production designed to capture immediate attention and explore the reasons why individuals are on the planet. If all this sounds heady - it is.
The Millennial Reincarnations is especially recommended for seekers who would absorb all this information in the form of a narrative that closely examines mind, heart, and soul in the height of millennial times (the late 1990s to the mid-2000s).
A series of experiences by people around the world serve as focal points in this sweeping (even epic) examination of universal connections, transition points, and connections that succeeds in embracing a wide, seemingly-disparate perspective.
One way that The Millennial Reincarnations achieves this goal while remaining accessible and lively is through sparkling, compelling dialogue that doesn't just explain or lecture, but reaches out and grabs readers: "This is what a power struggle looks like; and you are leaving one, which is why you see it and feel it now…Now take the pressure off the turbo and slide the cruise function along the bottom; the trick is to try and kind of glide within the space you see ahead – just let yourself stay there suspended for a moment and hang out the stabbing pain you feel for that’s not something we want to take back with us at all … … that pain, by the way, is the pain of a consciousness determined to condemn its own species to death for its own personal gain. It’s a pre-Millennial force dragging at your back wings …"
Why are we here? What are the forces that dictate life choices? How can Millennials become the first generation to let loose the ties that bind to embrace an ideology and approach to life that lends to taking wing and making most of one's presence on the planet?
It's Daniel M. Harrison's high-octane, compelling language that creates the path to help this generation perceive and understand these new opportunities; his approach that captures the connections between individual lives and greater purpose through a series of fictional vignettes; and his compelling vision of a reincarnated generation raised on new technology with the possibilities for new responses and vision unprecedented in human history that makes this such a stand-out discussion.
The fact that all this is couched in a fictional format makes it compellingly accessible despite these complex overtones: "Most of us are not really here for the money anymore, the same way most suburbanites aren’t in the picket-fence walls of a three square meter garden for the lifestyle; we’re here either because we entered a block with a one-way revolving door and there’s no way out … or we’re just in it for the ride."
Be forewarned: The Millennial Reincarnations isn't the kind of novel you'll want to tear through, no matter how gripping its language or approach. It's best digested in bits and pieces (there's so much to consider and learn) and it's a sparkling revolution of words that holds the potential to not just entertain Millennials, but help them transform the world. All that's required of its readers is an interest in psychology, spirituality, and the processes of choice and change. The Millennial Reincarnations is in a category unto itself and a standout in the mundane world of novels with canned plots and one-dimensional approaches.
There's nothing predictable or tired about The Millennial Reincarnations. It screams its message of faith, opportunity, and how individuals change worlds, and it's a gripping and unique account that turns the novel format upside down and imbibes it with an intense message aimed right at the Millennial generation.
ii.
Behind The Philosophy In The Millennial Reincarnations
By Mattia Ferraresi
Daniel Mark Harrison is an ambitious technology evangelist who has written a book (itself ambitious) that aims to upgrade the Cartesian "Cogito Ergo Sum" for something more applicable to the the Millennial era. The Millennial Reincarnations is a collage of stories set between 1990 and 2014, where the theme is not so much ideological as it is governed by the actions of the Millennial generation, in which the mentality of the generation is expressed at its highest level, which is to say, how it affects our entire society.
The final stage of enlightenment that will be conceived by this influential generation is, I Feel Therefore I am Not, Harrison argues. Harrison's reasoning is this: thinking skills, a capacity for abstraction and basic computation, on which Descartes founded everything he wrote, is now a questionable skill due to the fact technologically it is easily reproduced. There are machines that can "think" in a manner analogous to the Cartesian mode of thinking and to Descartes' notions of higher thinking, and in fact they do so more efficiently than any human.
So the problem has moved on from thinking being expressed as something of a mere Turing Test, lavishly conveyed in the movie "Ex Machina": if it is not the ability to think that is important though, what distinguishes man from machine? The answer is our ability to feel: and specifically, to feel sensations that can not be captured in an algorithm. The sentient machine, however, is no longer an image from an old science fiction book. In Silicon Valley, there are legions of engineers sure it is only a matter of time before one is created, and even if they do not act like man or conceive of ideas in the way man does, life and the universe of feelings is no longer the great moat that separates man and a surrogate technology from his enlightened self.
I Feel Therefore I Am Not is then the paradoxical outcome of the doubt that even the sentiment captures the essential characteristics of the human, so that if the process of feeling proves replicable artificially then we would "directly understand our own creative mechanism, which would cease to qualify us as human, making some form of human divinity out of us instead (this, after all, is what we aspired the Enlightenment)," writes Harrison. The interesting thing here about The Millennial Reincarnations is that it does not just line up the theoretical or moral dilemmas of man struggling with the prospect of a future post-human or trans-human self (which is not that new in and of itself), but the author instead explores the influence of this concept today, on how Millennials conceive of their work, the economy, their social bonds, their observance of the law, their sexual interactions, their accumulation of knowledge, as well as the criteria they use to make critical decisions about the kind of life they want and the aspirations they seek to cultivate.
Harrison carries
out an investigation here into the possibility that there exists for this new Millennial generation a metaphysical dimension whereby the Cartesian existential paradox is ultimately overcome, with thinking as the more synthetic of senses and feeling being something of an essentially human quality. These are certainly not matters to be entrusted to an algorithm.
FORWARD
The Anointed
Ω
In China, there are five distinct types of leader, and through the ages, the country has born several of four of these types many hundreds – and possibly many thousands – of times.
But it is only one of these five types – the very rarest of them all – that each time remains on earth throughout the generations to succeed for any measure of history in what becomes a destiny that alters the future.
This type is recognizable by his very appearance and manifestation, for he is each time, no matter his circumstances or his opportunity, or even his social class or upbringing, the one who comes ready to pay the price for the world by giving in return the world that is already his own as payment for its receipt.
Ω
The five types of men that lead from epoch to epoch all, with the exception of the unlucky fourth, have their role to play in the Empire’s euphoric rise to the top each and every half millennia or so.
Ω
First, there are those leaders who are loyal to the communities in which they are born.
These leaders are from grand and often skillful and learned regional families; they are those such as the Qiao family, for instance, who, being led by the illustrious 20th century financier Qiao Zhiyong, became a pivotal force in helping maintain the continuity of the Qing Dynasty successions within the Shanxii heartland of Middle Earth to which they were betrothed – the area in the middle of the country, what is considered by the local people to be the thumping heart itself of China, based as it is at the Holiest landlocked, river laden, resource-bearing center of the Asian world.
Ω
Next are those who are loyal to the country first despite its regions. For such men, Middle Earth’s cause as a unified homeland of the original Mongol people is what takes precedent over all else.
The leaders who hail from this school of ideology comprise men with names so great and grand in the present day that even a child of Lidice in the Czech Republic would easily recognize them by sound – names such as Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping (despite their opposition for one another, their unity in terms of motivation, if not so much method, was identical. This is often the case in China, however.)
For the faults the west would so much like to broadcast more often that belonged to these men, the reality was that they were truly the bravest sort of warriors; the vicious fighters who never backed down; even in the face of the harshest adversity they never lost resolve. It was they who fought psychopathic Japanese soldiers supported all the while by the soldiers’ sociopathic allies, that sent as envoys under false pretenses form some version of McCarthy’s delusional American Dream.
Then, having fought its imposition on their homeland tooth and nail, it was Deng who reexamined the facts – leaving the Nightmare aside for a second – and walked fearlessly up to the doors of a factory in the South East of China, and who was the first in the entire billion-plus population fearless enough to declare in the fear-stricken Communist heartland that “to get rich is glorious”, and to thus individually single-handedly propel into motion a series of events that witnessed the euphoric, unprecedented rise of the China we know in the present day, and the one that will likely precede our dominance of space.
Ω
Then there are the women. Women by and large are the wealthiest leaders in China; the wealthiest and perhaps, one must concede, the wisest, too. For they, for all their pretty pearls and endless black eyes and fragile bones are the least ideological of the lot. Rather, the women are really loyal to the coffers of the sovereign before they are loyal to its cause. The female of the species is devoted to the multi-trillion yuan renminbi-inspired – people’s silver-inspired, no less – industrial renovation of the country’s (mostly former) cobbled village streets and the practice of implementing its ever-rising commercial marketplace.
They are the creators and curators of the brand new blink-a-blink neon signs of the past two decades, the ones that are so dazzling and seductive from the uppermost level of China’s five star hotels and which tear you either way in the middle of the night; they are the ones who decided to offer 360 degree panoramas of the urban cityscape’s intoxicating views of money being made around the clock, just as it is they who sit at the bar in solitary, and one is compelled to feel, capricious abandon.
It is China’s women who most surely are the real experts in deception and the all-powerful hands at mastering the simplest, most dangerously complex human skills imaginable by which it takes a form of training to master that only the soul knows how to comprehend.
Dame Ming-hua is such a woman; the question is, which of her two female progeny is one too: is it Chanel, her daughter, or her vagabond niece, Sofia YuZheng Lincoln, the half-American?
Ω
Of the fourth type of leader who ascends the coattails of a revolution, there is little to mention.
For the unlucky fourth leader is never a leader for long. Like all countries, one can find those too who are loyal to themselves; but these men do not become rich, and if they do, they are rich for a day and stricken to poverty for overstepping the bounds of their own karmic allowance.
They are roadkill that line the battles of history books without names, soulless ghosts that lost themselves among a desperate and sudden quest for power that blunted out all the strength they had to live until the point of enlightenment. They remain stricken by eternal shadows, blind in the darkness of the past which they can only remember distantly, and cannot even gaze at, such is their weakness more feeble than the lowliest earthworm.
When the eagles see these men crawling from on high upon their mountain walls, they fall like thunderbolts and feed on their carcass before guiding their giant mid-wings to swoop back up into the air so as to land back in heaven again.
Ω
Rather would we speak of those who are truly the greatest kind of leaders, the masters not just of earth but of heaven too.
To those great leaders – the fifth kind among the ancient Chinese empire – that lead by complexity, there is always an additional section of sub-leaders involved and these men are loyal because they know that deep down, that only loyalty is not worthless over the game that lasts beyond one’s own lifetime.
Ω
If it is fate that decides the outcome each time the swords are drawn, and that as such one wishes to chance the encounter of a favorable fate, then loyalty is the only way to become party to the hand that is dealt.
It is to such classes of men only that the whole world is laid open, a gift from God above to his own replication and those who aids the fortification of that replica here on earth.
For them, it is not just China that is the ground upon which they may call their own, but the whole earth. In truth, one must see such a figure to believe in him, for he is the impossible, mythological, the one you imagine but never really get to meet or sidle up to. I have seen such a man.
Indeed, I know one alive today, and I know a woman too of similar substance (she is his relation). But this is extremely rare.
This type of leader often comes in many forms, and he comes every time for his very last lifetime.
And for that reason, he cannot ever die, for nothing can kill him, except his own acceptance of the outcome that is not to his own choosing, which itself is not a possibility, for that which he chooses is always his own.
This man is the man the Jews call a Messiah, the man the Druids call a God, and the man the Mongols call a Mandate – in every case, he is the one who is sent from above.
The Empire is all His and and anything which stands in His way will be destroyed completely until it can no longer pose a threat
nor lend its support.
Ω
For those who run alongside the Mandate, the Garden of Eden – replete with fruits as delicious as the sweetest of all of them and as pure-hearted as the least ripe of them – is the garden in which such men – and women – live forever between the lives they live here on Earth.
In this garden, anything and everything is possible.
When these souls return to Earth, it is to install the guidance and the lessons of the Mandate in a world that is somehow veering off course into the abyss of the past.
Nothing can stop such men or women when they come, for they come in the name of the Mandate, they serve at his pleasure and they remain as long as he so chooses for them to remain.
D.M.H.
Taipei, May 2016
“Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.” – Proverb
PROLOGUE
Genesis
Ω
S-S-S-SLOW DOWN now, ‘cause y-y-y-you’re c-c-coming off the bend, and I am now pulling all of you in as the light strips us bare glinting off the crack in the cave by that ocean there that we took flight off from just a moment ago –
Now you need to pull back towards the rear of the chrysalis that sent you here, back through metamorphosis – remember, this is only your first flight, and you’re still young here, comparatively speaking, in the galaxy of things. Just as for jet propulsion, landing is always the most dangerous part of all – and it’s what we’re going to try and do. Land back in heaven again …