“You’re doing just fine,” she said, “but right now I want you to try something else. Look about twenty feet directly in front of you and tell me what you see.”
I changed my gaze and looked intently, but though I felt a warm, happy glow inside, I saw nothing.
“Try some more Macro contact recall,” she suggested, “but keep looking.”
I tried for about thirty seconds, then suddenly my mind seemed to shift focus and I became aware of a dazzling white light surrounding the body of a strong and handsome man.
“I see him!” I said excitedly. “It’s Eli. Why couldn’t I see him normally?”
She laughed at my use of the word normally and answered, “Because this time he’s using his astral body to visit the thousand Deltas of his Kton. You remember that you occupied only your astral body when you first came here. Then you entered the physical body which had been prepared for you.”
“Yes,” I said, thinking it over. “And some of the students couldn’t see me until I got into this physical body.”
“Actually,” Carol said, “only level nines and tens are always clairvoyantly aware, so it’s possible for anyone in our Alpha to occasionally miss seeing an astral traveler.”
“What’s the advantage of traveling around in your astral body?” I asked.
“Well,” Carol answered, “it’s the only way you can travel to any of the non‑physical dimensions. But the reason our upper levels use it so much is that it takes considerably less energy than translating the physical body from place to place. Astral travel permits instant translation to a series of places without fatigue.”
“What do you mean, Carol?” I asked. “I don’t remember anything ‘instant’ about my traveling when I first came here. In fact, when Lea and I were running to the research center I couldn’t even catch up with her!”
Carol laughed. “That’s because you thought you were occupying a physical body, and you were limited by your belief. You didn’t think your physical body could run any faster, so it didn’t. It’s as simple as that.”
“You mean,” I asked, “that if I had realized I was using only my astral body I could have traveled faster?”
“Faster, indeed!” was her response. “Faster than the speed of light. That is, of course, if you believed it was possible. You see, the astral body has no mass, and, thus, is not limited by the speed of light. In other words, at the astral level your mind is not hampered by clumsy, dense, physical matter, so a thought manifests its consequences immediately. You just visualize it and it happens. Level tens can do the same thing with physical bodies, but it takes more thought energy.”
I shook my head and, turning to Carol, exclaimed, “That’s amazing! I’d really like to learn to do that.”
“We’d better master telepathy first,” Carol responded as she looked over to where Eli had been standing, then back at me.
I followed her glance to the spot where our Ktar had been, but he was no longer there. “Where’d he go so. fast? To another Delta?”
“You need more practice, Jon,” she noted. “You missed his greeting to us as well as his statement that he was leaving us to go visit with Lea.”
I felt embarrassed at missing Eli’s communication to us. I had thought I was doing pretty well, but that certainly put me back in my place. “I really wanted to talk to him, too. Guess I need a lot more practice,” was my painful conclusion.
Another question popped into my head. “Say, you mentioned that he was a Ktar. I was wondering, are all your leaders level tens?”
“The top ones, yes,” Carol answered, “Our three Mutars, who are leaders of 100‑million‑member Mutons, and the thirty Ktars, who are the leaders of 10‑million‑member Ktons, are all level tens. The rest of our current 127 level tens are Ztars.”
“That means,” I interrupted, recalling my C.I. training, “that they are leaders of your million‑member Ztons, right?” To her nod of agreement I added, “And since you have 300 of these I suppose the other Ztars are level nines.”
“That’s right,” she nodded, “and since we have currently 3,306 level nines, all of the 3,000 Atar positions, as leaders of 100,000, are filled by nines.”
“Then I supposed it logically follows that the Deltars are either the few nines who are not Atars or all eights.”
“Yes,” she said, “since there are some 39,000 level eights we have more than enough to fill the remaining 30,000 Deltar positions and the rest are Gamma leaders.”
“But since there are 300,000 Gamar positions,” I surmised, “the rest must be filled by level sevens.” I paused for a moment to let a nagging thought come to the surface of my mind. “Okay,” I went on, “maybe you can tell me what was the youngest age that anyone ever demonstrated nine‑ or ten‑level awareness.”
“I’ll have to ask C.I., Carol responded and began talking into her mib. After a couple of moment she said, “The youngest age to reach level ten was thirty‑nine and the average age of all level tens at this time is 107. As for level nines, the youngest ever to demonstrate level nine awareness had had thirty‑three years and the average age of all level nines at this time is ninety‑three. The youngest age of attaining level‑eight awareness was twenty‑seven, and their average age is seventy‑seven.”
“That means,” I said, “that if I make level three in three months, I’ll be doing all right.”
“Not bad for a beginner, Jon. Not bad,” she teased, then added, “I’m glad to see you optimistic because it certainly won’t be possible unless you first believe you can do it.”
“We’d better get over to the 3rd and 4th triads now so you can meet your younger brother and sister,” Carol added.
“Will I be taking someone else’s place? I mean, don’t they already have an older brother?” I asked.
“He’s gone already,” Carol assured me. “He was my previous Alpha mate, but he has gone to another Delta to complete an Alpha there.”
I realized that I hadn’t asked Carol about her previous Alpha mate before because I had felt guilty about the possibility of my displacing someone. Then, when I got to know Carol better, I felt little stirrings of jealousy when I thought about someone else preceding me as her mate. Now I checked my mind carefully and found few remnants of either guilt or Jealousy, so I asked her if she didn’t miss him.
“Not really,” she ‑ replied. “You see, we share almost identical soul notes, so I can reach out to him telepathically anytime I wish. I’m happy to know that he is as pleased with his new Alpha mate as I am with you.”
“But I thought your telepathy was very limited,” I said, puzzled at her apparent ability to reach out clear to another Delta.
“You’ll find, Jon, that it’s ever so much easier to communicate telepathically with those whose soul notes are close to your own. Take Steve, for example. His soul note is very different from mine, so I would have to work hard to receive from him even as far as across the lake. However, the closer the soul note vibration, the easier it is to communicate and the greater the distance your message can carry to that person.”
“That sounds reasonable,” I responded, then added, “Tell me, how did there happen to be an opening in another Alpha just when I arrived? Did someone die?”
“Oh, no,” she assured me. “There haven’t been any deaths in the 7th triad for over three years. However, frequently someone will volunteer to work on Micro Island for a few months. That will often leave an Alpha either one or two short.”
“What kind of work do they volunteer for out there?”
“We offer our services as Personal Evolution tutors,” she replied. “Some of their children, as well as a few adults, seek our services.”
“If those on Micro Island are ‘similar to micro man of the 20th century,” I said, “don’t you run some risks visiting there?”
“Yes, we do,” she admitted. “At least, those of us who have not yet reached the higher levels of awareness do. You see, it’s no problem for a level nine or ten to cope
with an attacker, a robber, or an assassin, since their precognitive and telepathic powers would warn them and their PK could teleport anyone who bothered them clear to the other side of the island in the blink of an eye.”
“That’s some way to‑handle a nuisance,” I laughed. “Do they attack their tutors very often?”
“Oh yes,” Carol replied. “Anyone who kills a member of the Macro society automatically becomes something of a hero to a great many of the inhabitants of Micro Island.”
“Well, how do you handle that?” I asked. “How do you punish them? And why do they want to kill you in the first place?”
“To answer your last question first, they hate us for living so differently from them,” she replied. “As for punishing them, of course, we don’t. We’re careful, therefore, to let only those who have attained at least second‑level awareness visit Micro Island, and even they are protected by telepathic communication with a level nine or ten.”
“You said it had been three years since anyone died in the 7th triad. Was that last death here or on Micro Island?” I asked.
“On Micro Island,” she responded. “It does happen occasionally, but more often than not, it happens to the older students who ask not to be protected.”
“Good God!” I exclaimed. “Why would they do that?”
“For the same reason that the great Macro philosopher tutor, Jesus, permitted himself to be crucified‑to show micro man that the soul of man transcends his body,” was her explanation.
I shook my head. “I never could see that bit about getting killed or crucified just to show others you aren’t afraid of death.”
“I think there’s more to it than that,” Carol said, “but right now we’d better give our attention to finding your younger brother and sister.”
As we walked the short distance to the recreation learning area of triads three and four I wondered about the necessity of assigning older students to supply the caring relationship of a special brother and sister to each younger child.
Carol picked up my thoughts. “It probably isn’t as important now since we would provide this relationship even if we weren’t assigned it. But when the Macro society began there were not as many highly evolved souls who could telepathically tune in to the needs of others so, in order not to miss anyone, elder brothers and sisters were assigned to all students. Then, as our Personal Evolution tutoring system developed, elder brothers and sisters were assigned only to the first four triads.”
“Speaking of tutoring,” I said, “how does it work? What’s the difference between that and teaching?”
“First of all,” Carol replied, “we here in 2150 do not believe in the ancient concept of teaching where students passively absorbed or blocked out what a teacher was desperately trying to give them. We, therefore, have no teachers.
“We believe learning to be an active process where one person reaches out and takes knowledge stimulated by his interaction with a resource person.”
“So you feel knowledge can only be taken, not given,” I summarized.
“Yes. Now, to answer your question, resource persons are specialists in learning areas such as agriculture, ecology, or bio‑physics, for example, while Personal Evolution tutors deal with all learning and all human problems.”
“It sounds like you think resource people know all about something and your P.E. tutors know all about everything. Do you really believe that’s possible?” I asked.
Carol was amused by my skepticism. “It depends on what you mean by, ‘know all about everything.’ To the extent that our tutors have attained moments of total Macro contact awareness, they do know everything. But knowing the answers to all questions and living these answers are two different things.
“Even a Macro person cannot live a perfectly balanced Macro life,” she added. “We just haven’t evolved to a state of constant Macro awareness yet. When we reach that state of evolution we will have outgrown our need for a physical body‑even a Macro one!”
“All right,” I said, “what you’re saying, then, is that you have tutors who can supply all the answers, but that the real problem is not finding the answers but putting these answers into practice in your daily life living them. The same age‑old problem.”
I went on, “If you only have 127 level tens and 3,306 level nines, and since they serve as your leaders, this must leave you with a real shortage of tutors.”
“Oh, no,” Carol assured me, “there’s no shortage, because all persons in levels six and above function as P.E. tutors. This includes thirty million sixes and three million sevens as well as the thirty‑nine hundred eights.” (See C.I. Data Excerpts.)
I did some quick mental arithmetic. “That makes 33,003,900 tutors, so there are less than ten pupils per tutor. Still, if everyone saw a Personal Evolution tutor every day there would be no time at all for the level sixes, sevens, and eights to do anything but tutor. That doesn’t sound like much of a life. Don’t they get tired of all that?”
“I can see where that would be a tiresome existence,” she answered. “Fortunately, it’s not that bad at all. You see, only students see a tutor every day, and even that isn’t required. The vast majority of our Macro society doesn’t visit with a P.E. tutor more than once a week.”
As she finished speaking we entered the thousand-square‑yard recreation learning area of the 3rd and 4th triads. I was impressed by the tremendous activity going on for as far as I could see. There were at least thirty tennis courts, three football and soccer fields, and all kinds of gym equipment. There were also tracks and swimming pools with meets in progress in each area. I turned to Carol and commented, “It seems to me there are a lot more triads out there than just the 3rd and 4th.”
“That’s because the 5th and 7th triads are assigned to the 3rd triad, and the 6th is assigned to the 4th,” she explained.
“Oh, that’s right, the older brother and sister system,” I replied. “But why are two triads assigned to the 3rd? Do they need extra attention for some reason?”
“Actually,” Carol answered, “It’s the first two triads that get the most attention. We use the 3rd and 4th triads for the 5th and 6th and 7th triads to practice developing their skill at maintaining a helping relationship with someone younger.”
“It seems that helping someone is the most highly honored achievement in the Macro society,” I observed.
Carol nodded, saying, “That’s why our P.E. tutors occupy our most respected social positions and provide our top leadership.”
“In the 20th century,” I said, “we valued the entertainment profession more than any other, I guess, for we gave our most valuable rewards‑money and fame‑to entertainers like movie or TV celebrities or sports stars.”
“That’s because micro man’s life is so miserable that he uses any sort of entertainment to escape,” Carol explained, “so, naturally, entertainers would be paid more than anyone else.”
“You know,” I reflected, “that doesn’t say much for the value we placed on education, does it? Teaching was one of our lowest‑paid professions.”
“That’s true, Jon,” Carol ‘ responded. “Micro man placed very little importance on education. Your schools, therefore, were often filled with inadequately prepared teachers who were expected to teach their students how to memorize facts and detail instead of how to think creatively. Much time was spent on subjects which were of little use to the average person, such as foreign languages, algebra, and higher mathematics, while most learning programs gave little or no attention to the most important subject of all‑human behavior and life philosophy. I group these two together because man’s behavior is always the result of his beliefs, that is, his philosophy of life.”
As she completed this observation a boy and girl ran up to her and wrapped their arms around her. They looked strong and healthy and, like all other Macro society children, they possessed great physical beauty. I was thinking that they must have had about 10 years when I received Carol’s telepathic
message that they were both just 7. She telepathically teased me about having already begun to think in 2150 terms, then introduced me as her new Alpha mate and, therefore, their new brother.
As their eyes reached out to me, I realized another reason why members of the Macro society greet each other silently. They are using this silence to concentrate on the delightful nuances of telepathic contact, which removes all possibility of fear or distrust. I learned that the boy’s name was Neal and the girl was Jean, but most importantly I learned that I felt joyously happy at our meeting, almost as if they were my long‑lost friends. I wasn’t surprised when Carol explained this, saying that I knew them in other lifetimes in which we were very close.
Jean demonstrated her awareness when she picked up the fact that tennis had been one of my favorite sports before losing my leg, and she suggested that we all play a game of doubles with Carol and Neal standing her and me.
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