2150 AD

by Thea Alexander

  “One answer,” I continued, “was that devolution and evolution are part of the cyclic process in which the macrocosm experiences itself. Another answer was that only some souls, not all of them, choose devolution‑evolu­tion to experience the thrill of fear, uncertainty, separate­ness, and the excitement of conflict and, of course, all the physical pleasures and pains.”

  “You mean the old saw about how dull perfection would be,” Karl interjected.

  “Maybe,” I replied. “We know that man can accept pleasure only to the extent that he is willing to accept pain‑that the rejection of either eliminates both. While the static concept of a micro Christian heaven of all peace and. pleasure would be truly hell, the macrocosm is a perfect balance of all opposites, a totally accepting experience of all pain and all pleasure, all hate and all love, all ugliness and all beauty, all fear and all conflict, with all calmness and all peace. In other words, the ultimate in excitement, ‑ enjoyment, variety, creativity truly heaven.”

  “Heaven for whom?” Karl asked sarcastically.

  “Why, for the Macro self, I suppose. It’s only when we have evolved to the awareness that we are the Macro self that we can experience this acceptance of all that is, all that ever was, and all that ever will be as perfect.”

  I could almost see Karl’s razor‑sharp mind racing furiously. “Are you saying that to this Macro self every­thing is perfect? Things like poverty, disease, injustice, death, and even selfish micro men Like us?”

  “Yes,” I nodded, “because they are perfectly balanced, and a positive and a negative that are equal cancel each other. Such things as poverty, disease, injustice, and death only exist at the micro levels‑never at the Macro level of awareness. That’s what the mystics meant when they said that all is illusion or maya.”

  “But it’s a damned real illusion to all us micro beings!” Karl retorted.

  “Of course,” I replied. “Who could enjoy an exciting play unless he could temporarily forget that he was just watching actors and actresses playing parts written by an author whose purpose was to entertain?”

  “So you agree with. Shakespeare,” Karl inserted. “All the world is a stage and all the men and women only players who, in their time, play many parts.”

  “Yes, I do. The essence of a good actor is that he temporarily loses himself in his part. The same with micro man. He has temporarily lost himself in a part and forgotten that he is the only one who chose it! That’s why there is no injustice from the larger perspective, because each soul has chosen every part it plays.”

  “Are you sure, Jon, that everyone is eventually going to wake up from their amnesia and realize that their true identity is God?‑what you call the macrocosm or Macro self?”

  “Well, that’s what all the mystics have been saying as far back in history as we have any record.”

  “And do you really believe in this sort of philosophy?” Karl questioned. He looked anxious and concerned as he said, “Let’s be practical, Jon: If you believe in rein­carnation, astral bodies, and time travel, how are you going to be a social psychologist? Our professors sure as hell aren’t going to accept these wild ideas.”

  “Okay, I’ll answer those questions,” I said and realized I was pacing the floor again. “First, the basic concepts of Macro philosophy are not new to me and have always appealed to me. My greatest objection was the micro one that they didn’t seem practical. Now I think that a Macro philosophy might be, in the long run, the most practical philosophy I’ve ever come across.

  “As for being a social psychologist‑I don’t deny the validity of the micro view of man as a highly evolved symbol‑thinking animal completely determined by his heredity and environment. However, I am not going to reject a Macro dimension which includes the micro one but adds the concepts of soul, karma, reincarnation, and the ultimate macrocosmic view which sees all as one indivisible universal mind.

  “Now, for my professors and fellow behavioral scientists, I accept the fact that in their opinion no one can be a real scientist and believe in a Macro philosophy. So, if they find out I’m even considering these concepts, I won’t be a social psychologist as far as they’re concerned. I’ll be a mystic nut who can’t tell the difference between hallucinations and reality.”

  “But,” said Karl, “you don’t have to let anyone know that you’re dabbling with ideas like reincarnation and Macro philosophy. You’ve been hitting the books for almost three solid years, and you haven’t once taken a vacation. It’s no wonder you get an escapist dream.”

  “Then, you think my dream is part of a mental break­down due to overwork. So you’re going to supply psycho­therapy for me if I’ll just keep my mouth shut and not talk to anyone else about my deranged ideas.”

  “Now, Jon, put yourself in my place,” Karl pleaded. “Just imagine that I came to you and told you all the things that you’ve told me today, and I admitted they were all based on a dream that I’d had the night before. Be fair, Jon. How would you react?”

  I couldn’t help laughing at the thought of Karl talking as I had. I said, “Okay, Karl, you made your point. If you came to me with the same story I’d say you were nutty as a fruitcake. But you’ve always been the hard­headed realist. I’ve been the philosopher.

  “Besides, I’ve always been fascinated by dreams, and you’ve never even bothered to remember yours.”

  “What you’re saying, then,” Karl replied, “is that you’ve always been the type to go off the deep end over some crazy dream. Jon, you’re too close to finishing your doc­torate to take chances like this. I’ll be glad to listen to you, no matter what you want to talk about, but don’t discuss this with anyone else yet. Okay?”

  “All right,” I said. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe it was all just a wild dream. I’ll test that hypothesis tonight when I go to sleep.”

  “Now that makes sense,” Karl said with relief. “Look, I have to go. I’ve got an appointment with one of my students, then a date with Cindy tonight. If you’re asleep when I get home, I won’t wake you up.”

  “By all means, don’t wake me up! I’m going to bed early tonight to see what happens.

  “By the way,” I continued, “I wrote down most of the details of my dream. I thought the organizational structure of the Macro society might interest you. It’s all in the notebook over there on my desk. If you don’t some in too late, you might glance through it.”

  “I’ll do that,” Karl said, and left for his office.

  The blowing snow held an invitation that I couldn’t resist. I hate the snow, and I love it. So I bundled up and went for a walk that ended in the university library. There I spent a couple of hours looking for books to support my hope that there was more to my experience than just an escapist dream fantasy. I failed.

  Around nine‑thirty I went to bed, yielding to an almost embarrassingly strong desire to see Lea again, if only in a dream. As I lay there waiting for sleep to come, I amused myself by reviewing the’ strange details my dream computer had given me on the structure of the Macro society and its strange metric. time system:*

  *See C.I. Data Excerpts.

  The more I thought, the more I wondered if maybe Karl was right. I had read about people making up their own world when they could no longer cope with their existing reality. Maybe I should take a vacation.

  No matter what position I tried, sleep simply would not come.

  About midnight Karl and Cindy slipped quietly in. I faced the wall and feigned sleep so as not to intrude.

  Soon I drifted toward sleep and was awakened by Cindy’s muffled giggles. “Damn it!” I thought and moved my pillow over my head as Karl, said, “Quiet, Honey,” in a hushed voice.

  The sound of their rustling about on his bed across the room was hard to ignore, but I did, and once more slipped into the edge of sleep. I sat up startled in my bed. Cindy had let out a shrill squeal.

  There they were, stark naked. Karl was nibbling on her ticklish inner thigh‑right there with me in the room
.

  “Damn it, Karl!” I cursed angrily. “Don’t you have any respect for the act?”

  Karl looked up, as startled as I had been, and, as Cindy gathered the blanket about her, his expression changed from surprise to amusement.

  He grabbed Cindy, blanket and all, and said playfully, “Hell no, Jon! We’re ballin’, we’re not in church!”

  Cindy’s apology was drowned by the voice of my own inner conflict. “Karl’s right, you know,” my evolved self was saying. “There’s joy and laughter to be shared making love with someone you care for. It’s wholesome. It’s healthy. It’s good.”

  Then my judgmental unevolved self came on with its rebuttal. “There’s nothing wholesome about Karl out there naked with someone he’s not even thinking of marrying. Or for that matter, her naked in front of him here in his‑no, our!‑bedroom. What kind of girl is she‑ anyway?”

  Then the response, “Oh, get with it, Jon. She’s a super person, bright, thoughtful, and fun. You know that. There’s nothing wrong with them sharing a perfectly natural expression of caring and sharing. If you were as bright as you think you are, you wouldn’t judge them. You’d just be happy for them.”

  “Happy for them, indeed! I’d never do that sort of thing,” the argument continued.

  “Oh, you wouldn’t, huh? Maybe you’re just a little bit jealous of Karl’s lack of inhibition, his freedom of expression.”

  And so the contest went till either they got quieter or I fell asleep, or both. Anyway, I‑ woke up Thursday morning at. my usual time with no memory of even the trace of a dream.

  January is miserably cold in New York, and this month was no exception. It had been eleven, snow and slushfilled days since my strange dream experience, and while I had remembered a few dream fragments, none of them ever approached the level of my 2150 experience.

  Did this fact support Karl’s “escapist dream” theory or negate it?

  He was worried at first and spent a little more time at home than usual for the first few days. When my nights failed to turn up any more such bizarre responses, I guess he finally decided it was all just a very therapeutic escape technique.

  I, on the other hand, was having a lot of difficulty getting it off my mind. While I went through my usual daily routine, I was not quite with it. A part of me lingered with my unusual experience and longed to return to it.

  I decided to do a little research on dreams and dreaming. Bundling up against the biting cold, I headed for the bookstore, where I went straight to the dream books.

  Scanning the shelves, my eyes fell on a single word.

  Macro!

  My eyes seemed to jump from my head! There it was. The light brown booklet I had seen before. The word I couldn’t remember from its title was Macro! “Incredible!” I thought. “Interpret Your Dreams from a Macro View.”

  I promptly bought it and spent the evening hours studying it and applying it to dreams I remembered.

  By ten‑thirty I retired convinced that 2150 and Lea were a valid reality‑perhaps a parallel reality or something like that which I didn’t really understand, but which I, none the less, was now sure existed somewhere in our universe; our macrocosm.

  CHAPTER 3: Carol

  I awakened, to my delight, in my library room back or should I say forward?‑in the year 2150. The pleasantly feminine voice of Central Information broke into my awareness and I realized that she was still answering the last question I had asked before falling asleep. While I had spent eleven days back in 1976, I had returned to a moment in 2150 time only a few seconds later than when I had left. Did C.I. know what had happened to me?

  “Excuse me,” I interrupted, “can you tell me how long I was asleep and what happened?”

  “You fell asleep,” C.I. answered, “three seconds ago approximately ten seconds in 2150 metric time. However, during that three seconds you experienced a time translation of approximately eleven days in 1976 time.”

  “How do you know this?” I asked, perplexed and somewhat uneasy.

  “Your chair,” C.I. responded, “monitors all your major physiological changes. Also, Lea, 7‑927, and others use this computer to make your time translation computations.”

  “What’s the 7‑927 for?” I asked.

  “When Lea was born she was the seventh child to be given the name Lea in Delta 927.

  My curiosity being fully aroused, I asked the next logical question, “How do you assign names?”

  “The Macro society has thirty thousand names which fit the major soul patterns, or vibrations. When a soul incarnates into the Macro society, its vibration pattern is calibrated and the name most closely fitting this pattern is then assigned.”

  I thought about this for a moment, then asked, “Can you tell me how closely the name Jon fits my vibration pattern?”

  “It fits very closely indeed,” C.I. responded. “But this is no accident, since your mother had a talent for this type of name selection. She was very highly evolved. What you, in 1976, call psychic.”

  Since Mother had died during my early childhood, I really couldn’t remember her too well‑psychic or otherwise. I was just going to ask C.I. how it (or she) had known about my mother when Lea came bouncing into the room looking even more beautiful than I had remembered. Before she could say anything, I blurted out, “Why couldn’t I come back? I’ve missed you.”

  “We tried every time you slept, Jon, but your anger at Karl prevented translation the first night. After that your belief in this reality was not strong enough to make translation possible until tonight.”

  “Well, how could I be in 1976 for eleven days and return here only three seconds later than when I left?”

  “You were never really gone from either place, Jon. But I think that the concept of time as simultaneous flexible subjectivity is beyond your current comprehension.”

  “Speaking of time, how old are you, Lea?”

  “Hmm,” she said, “that’s at least one question you forgot to ask Central Information. Before I answer I’m going to ask you how old you think I am.”

  “Well,” I said, “I’m not sure, but you must be some­where between eighteen and twenty‑five, and I’m hoping over twenty‑one.”

  “You’ll get your wish and then some,” she replied. Then with an impish grin she said to the computer, “Please tell us my age.”

  C.I. promptly replied, “In ‘time’ as understood by Jon, Lea 7‑927 will have forty years in three weeks and three days.”

  “You were born in 21101” I exclaimed incredulously. I couldn’t believe that Lea was almost 40 years old. Or to say it in their Macro way‑they speak of years of a lifetime as we speak’ of years of study‑she has had almost forty years.

  “That’s right,” she replied. “We have learned to arrest the physical aging process. The only elderly‑looking people you will see in the Macro society are the very few who were born before the year 2000.”

  “Wait a moment,” I interrupted. “Do you mean there are people living over a hundred and fifty years?”

  “Yes. Theoretically level tens could have as many years as they want, for greater mental awareness means greater physical control. Unlike micro man, our high Macro beings can move at will between their physical and astral bodies. They only remain in physical bodies as long as there are lessons to learn at the physical level. Our goal is to free ourselves completely from the limited, low ­vibration, physical existence.”

  “But, my physical body is enjoyable. I don’t want to give it up as long as it’s still young enough to bring me more pleasure than pain,” I complained.

  “Naturally. Nobody does,” Lea replied. “That’s the major reason we inhabit physical bodies; we want to. But, like all children, eventually we grow up and tire of our childish activities and seek new, more satisfying experiences. Thus, all souls evolve inevitably toward greater awareness.”

  “But I don’t‑‑‑‑“

  “I know,” Lea interrupted. “You aren’t ready for that yet. But y
ou are ‘ready to start experiencing one of our students Alphas. Let’s go. I’ll answer more of your questions on the way to your Gamma building.”

  As we walked hand in hand around the lake I said nothing for a while, and Lea respected my silence. I was contemplating what C.I. had told me about the social structure of the Macro society.

  “It seems to me,” I said, “that this is a terribly regimented and over structured society if everybody remains a student for the first thirty years of his life and must live in a student Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. One of the problems of the 1970s is that most young people in the industrial societies are kept much too long as students‑‘nonproductive’ members of society.”

  “Yes, that’s true. But our students are learning how to live satisfying, productive lives. They’re not wasting their time memorizing facts and studying irrelevant materials which they’ll soon forget because they don’t use them in their daily life. Perfect examples would be memorization of historical or geographical details, or your society’s devotion to learning foreign languages, algebra, and geometry, which most people never need to use.