by Unknown
He also added that the people of the Eldere thought that “letting go of your dreams” was a result and a sign of life experience and wisdom, and if they saw today's wise men they would consider them and treat them as “overgrown children”.
“But our wise men are still capable receivers and much wiser than the ones of past generations because they never let go of their dreams and never forsook their ideals in the face of a belief of dubious origin.”
He then spoke of all the different forms of “local states”—namely our nations”—before the Eldere, and briefly looked back on the entire period of their own prehistory: our present and immediate future that is, up until the end of the 24th century. If I’m conveying his words correctly, he said that in terms of state organisation, in conjunction with the corresponding social realities of each time, three were the big turning points of “prehistory”: the period of the Athenian democracy, the end of the 18th century (with the North American and French types of states) and the mid-20th century (with the emergence of the welfare states of the North Europeans and the states of social peace, insurance and prosperity of the Scandinavians). He added that while the Athenians had their own type of political institutions, they also had a Plato and a Socrates to complete them.
He also said, however, that our ancestors thought that the answer to every social problem was the ensuring and safeguarding of a high standard of living, in the material sense of the word, that is the abolishment of poverty, unemployment, and insecurity of tomorrow. But such a mentality and tactics ignored the human factor and its internal texture completely because you do more harm to people if you provide solutions to all their economic problems and relieve them of any concern and responsibility regarding living from day-to-day if their souls lack faith in eternal values and ideals and if central moral values and orientation in life are non-existent. The internal balance of these people is more at risk then.
He repeated once again that the distinction between good and evil, right and wrong, is not man-made; instead it has an eternal meaning that goes much deeper than we think and reflects and responds to greater realities, which we now know to exist. This distinction would still exist and remain unaffected even if life stopped occurring or had never occurred on our planet. There would be life on other planets. The so-called innate morality in a worthy man, he says, has incredible depth of origin: it is not accidental or hereditary.
“This awareness has now offered us the consciousness of the destination of human life, which is purely Aidersian and which humans of prehistory or even the Eldere were completely unaware of since they had unilaterally turned all their attention to the economic and industrial culture of the time. Knowledge was incomplete and one-sided. There is no here and there, now and then. Reality is single and multidimensional and contains everything within it.”
I remember him saying, among other things, that the duration of this life or the happiness in it doesn’t matter as much as the pursuit of excellent experiences, the best reflections of the Samith (art, sacrifice, love). The central idea, if I understood correctly, was the rise of the idea of the High, the Divine, the Wonderful, in all their manifestations. He was trying to express in every possible way his worship of the great ideals.
“They gave value to their lives,” he said, stressing the words “they” and “value”, “regardless of whether the life of those who passed from mortality to immortality was short and full of pain. Their struggle and their sacrifice were not in vain even if what they achieved ended up disappointing them. And not so much the struggles and sacrifice per se, as what they represented in that particular living environment. In fact, the insignificant and humble ones, those who weren’t made for greatness, proved more worthy compared to those whose lives were paved with roses, by facing life’s challenges successfully against all odds. And when I say ‘successfully’ I don’t mean in terms of profit, but in terms of morals. Tangible happiness, even if we agree it exists, isn’t worth as much as confronting misery. Thus life, down here, was earned not by those who were happy and fortunate, but by those who kept a proper moral attitude in the face of challenges as well as joys.”
He couldn’t stress more that happiness only exists in the form of “potential”, which as I found out was a special Aidersian term. I also learned that Lain had lost his only child if that says anything about him…
Another thing he said that struck me was that the inner need for affection and good deeds was capable of giving meaning and value to the life of even the most isolated person, the most underprivileged and alone. Thus, from an early age—and he emphasised this part as a recommendation to his students”—we need to be able to distinguish appearances from the essence of things. He then underlined the need for the modern, enlightened person to fight against the instinct to attain easy happiness and a long life because without the corresponding intensity and high level of spirituality, there can exist neither happiness nor true longevity.
Finally, about life in this environment he said that it is transient and temporary and that’s the reason why it’s so short and of low quality. The moral and spiritual individuality comes here to live a painful adventure, full of frustrations, a dramatic experience of living in foreign lands, dominated by a constant, painful feeling of absence from its true home; a feeling of nostalgia, thirst and lack of fulfilment.
ARTISTIC CREATION: ARTISTS OR PROPHETS?
19-II
Yesterday we reopened the subject of culture and artistic creation no longer being considered as a mere projection of the human spirit in the outside world. He claims that everything that has been carried out throughout the entire human history in the fields of culture and art does not fall into the category of creation but into that of revelation—a partial one for that matter—a revelation of amazing things, which, however, were “pre-existent”, unrelated, that is, to the appearance of man on Earth.
And deep down, he said, everyone preached the same; Plato and Christ, Praxiteles, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Goethe, Wagner, Einstein and Henry Durant, Agni and Menestrem, Valmandel and Larsen. Except that everyone expressed it in their own language; some with teachings, some with tables, others with sculptures, lyrics or discoveries. They were all prophets without knowing it and they had expressed, though timidly and incompletely, some of the truest, most divine meanings and purposes of this life and of the world in general.
The moments experienced by a cultivated art lover, a sensitive receiver that is, before a great work of visual art, have much in common with the corresponding hours of prayer or reverie of a religious man or a philosopher or with the moments of a poet’s inspiration. It is the same “intuition of the glimmer of the Samith” revealing itself in many different ways and forms to the capable and worthy receiver; it is the same “feeling of liberation” from the confines of mundane living, the cruel fate of life.
He said that after the acquisition of Nibelvirch, dreams and ideals proved to be much more real and tangible than everything that the simple material reality of the natural world contained. And the great poets, the previously regarded as mad, suddenly transformed into prophets! In the end, the creatures of their imagination proved to be real!
He also spoke about religions, saying that the people of the past leaned entirely on the major religions that had been formed over the centuries. But what is more important than the individual religions is the religious feeling, innate to humans due to some turning points in their biological and spiritual development, this “thirst of soul” that makes us consider life impossible without the existence of “higher powers” or “the divine element”.
Formerly, people exclusively admired the scientific theories, laws or discoveries of their era: Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Einstein, Astrom, Jergesen, Sioberlef, which had to do with the universe and celestial mechanics. Nowadays, however, said Lain, we know that sooner or later new “truths” will give way to the old ones, disprove them and displace them.
Based on Lain, the same goes for social life. Peop
le in the past gave importance to its rules, codes of conduct and its limits. Nowadays, we know that what counts the most is the innate consciousness that exists within each person, which wants justice and morality to reign and gets upset in the sight of unrighteousness.
All these forms of internal necessity are nothing other than that “thirst of soul and spirit” for the Samith. It depends on the psychological type of each man. Some find salvation in art and others in religion. This is what we now believe. This is what now leads us; the memory of the Great Reality, the Samith, which everyone has now seen with their own eyes…
20-II
On artistic creation, I remember him saying that, in the past, by the end of the Eldere, theoreticians believed that art was the process of creating a beautiful and higher world above the real one, an ideal or illusory world, something like a dream. But that wasn’t the case. The main goal of the artist is not to give knowledge, but superior experiences, to bequeath to his contemporaries that experience which creates and transmits artistic emotion. An artist’s job is not to disclose, but to touch the heart.
“Like the genius composer, the great philosopher or the inspired poet, the worthy scientist or the noble founder of a religion, like the leader who sacrificed his life for the sake of his people, choosing his biological self-destruction to save the rest, so does the great artist take on the characteristics of a small god who has the power to give us timid and fleeting glimpses of what really exists: the Samith.”
22-II
Today, in the morning, he repeated that “before the arrival of those great, visionary Aidersian spirits”, half of the people agreed that life was unique and unrepeatable and that we were lucky to even experience it once. The other half argued that coming into this life is another experience of biological existence that dedicates itself to the spirit. That type of experience made its appearance on this planet too. Life will be short time-wise—a few decades only—but will be endowed with the full potential for moral and spiritual supply and “broad knowledge”, since man will watch the evolution of life and culture unfold on this planet only in a few years, a process that formerly took a whole millennium.
But now they know: the wonderful experiences of life are not an inner issue; they have their external source. The old generations were lured into a hasty and superficial psychophysiological interpretation—a shallow interpretation for that matter. The biological existence on Earth is said to be a “pathway full of pain and glory with an exquisite secret meaning” for the spiritual entity of evolved human beings.
Eventually, he concluded, humans grow to love their body—something that would be incredible if said to them from the beginning—the mortal coil, because it is a fragment of their ego and they have been closely associated with it. They mature with it, they hurt, feel love and pain, enthusiasm and noble passions with it, they go through thousands of inevitable organic adventures, dangers, pain and diseases with it and, at last, they are separated from it amongst tears because it has been part of who they are…
24-II
I couldn’t follow today’s entire lecture. From what I could understand, he was saying that, just like in Tinersen’s parable of the tropical land’s apple, the “great secret of the world and life”, which drew the attention of the curious soul of the Kiils, the creatures living in the apple, was the third dimension, namely something that existed, but was inconceivable to their mental antennas. Likewise, the distance that exists between our world and the Samith is for us incredible.
THE “BEASTS” OF HISTORY AND THE VALUE OF HUMAN LIFE
In another diversion in his lecture, speaking about megalomania and the destructive tendencies of many of the “wild beasts of history”, as he called them, he said, “The biggest culprit for the corresponding crimes against humanity, bigger than even the international thugs of the beast of the Apocalypse, like, Clarissa Leyton, the oppressor Tebrief, the bloodthirsty dictator of an era of stifling and intolerable overcrowding and other “wild beasts”, was the living environment of those dark times. [Lain used the number 666. Perhaps he meant Adolf Hitler but avoided mentioning his name to Dienach in order to protect him from this knowledge in case he returned to his normal body].For the villains alone couldn’t have committed such crimes if life and society had had the foresight to be structured differently.”
When it comes to a paranoid man, it is better to control and tame him than to go against him. The proper assessment of things did not escape those paranoid leaders, who supported the doctrine of “action, not thought”, but relied even more on the intellect and the spiritual and moral climate of their time. That’s what prevented the organisation and proper functioning of institutes.
People of those times failed to maintain a legal order in a context wider that the mere territory of a country, so that it constitutes a “true legal order” that it wouldn’t resemble a castle in the sand. The human factor wasn’t truly appreciated since people were merely perceived as a number rather than as a moral and spiritual value.
“Today,” he added, “such vainglorious maniacs would be considered despicable because, led by their thirst for power and hiding their criminal propensity under the mantle of material power and under the pretext of trying to make a new and better world, they trampled countless beings, each of whom was a whole separate world, as if they were autumn leaves. And now we know the value of each and every being; we don’t look at them as living material or as mere organic matter, but as moral and intellectual entities. But back then, the “furious world rulers” and the individual local political leaders had their way to present all our great, current truths and realities as fairy tales, didactic exaggerations and empty moral teachings.”
Then, if memory serves, he said that nowadays nobody has the right to “think on behalf of his fellow man, control him or act like a blind force of nature deciding on the bigger or smaller duration of his earthly life.” But that’s how our ancestral eras prior to the Nojere faced life as a whole; they believed that a mere aspect of the Samith, our physical universe and the matter and energy contained in it, together with the laws of nature, was everything. The dimension of depth escaped them. Our ancestors suffered the same illusion as the Kiils from Tinersen’s parable of the tropical land’s apple…
27- II
The Reigen-Swage Institute in Markfor can offer you unforgettable winter nights. I’ve been coming here every day, from the first morning hours, since the beginning of our November, about twenty days now. One can divert and transport oneself in there and think they live in other worlds, other eras.
Here, the art of entertainment has taken incredible paths, unimaginable for our own time, and has invented new, impressive forms of art, entirely different from our ancient theatrical art and our shadow theatre. This amazing art of these times offers you a vivid spectacle that is also accompanied by sound!
Forgive my feeble and clumsy writing, which cannot in the least describe or illustrate any of those miracles I saw with my own eyes. Forgive me, you, who will one day have my papers in your hands. I wasn’t even worthy of seeing them, let alone describing them… I wish you could have read them straight from my heart, before expression betrayed them, before my human words ruined their magical beauty…
The sea had its own fragrance while you sailed on board the French triple-decker Ocean from the last quarter of the 18thcentury, sitting high on its tallest mast, listening to the sounds made by the large sea birds mingling with the officers’ orders. The same emotion was generated in the glade of the Tyrolean slope; the same in the country of the aurora borealis; the same in front of the authentic image of the red planet’s landscape, which is said to have been sent from our own people hundreds of years ago. Everything looked so real! You think you have been transported to the actual places!
But my biggest passion was history, just like for so many adolescent boys and girls enrolled in the Lain Institute. We sit here and the history of bygone eras unfolds before our eyes.
Even more imperati
ve—needless to say—is my thirst to know the European and world history from the 20th century onwards. And now they have archived all this with remarkable accuracy and in great detail, and they know everything much better than we knew the historical facts of the corresponding time difference from our era.
The disasters and the ensuing losses of valuable material that occurred— especially during that terrible calamity of year -87 of their calendar (approximately our year 2300)—were much larger in size, extent and depth than any other that we had witnessed in our time. Nevertheless, much survived. Apparently the terrible torrent of overcrowding, the unexpected population explosion with the horrific consequent conflicts and atrocities and the new weapons of mass destruction did not sweep everything away. And so today's researchers know about the eras before their 16thcentury(our 40th) much more than we knew about, say, the Roman Empire and the past forms of political and social life. Their representations in particular, contain less fantastic and artistic elements, compared to ours, and many more authentic ones. And that’s because they’re based on more numerous and better selected documents.
THE DECLINE OF THE 20TH AND 21ST CENTURY
Overpopulation shows its face
28-II
The 20th century saw the end of European hegemony in the whole world, not only in terms of military, political and economic power and influence, but also in terms of the imposition of authority and ethics. If Lain is to be believed, the whole century flew by in this manner, completing this mournful fall of Europe’s civilisation, which had taken the form of a techno-culture of which the main features were the plentiful standardised industrial products, meant mainly for consumption, the unconditional and unlimited admiration of the technical applications of the natural sciences—and all economic values in general—the craving for material comforts in life, the indifference to inner cultivation and consequently, a huge vacuum in people’s soul and emotional intelligence.