For some nondescript time, the expression in his eyes hovered on that thin line between dream and reality. Alec looked deep. What he saw was not just the absence of any good or evil. He saw bliss. Perhaps… absolute bliss. Sacha was not claiming membership to the universe––he was the universe. Total, complete, with nothing missing, nothing encroaching on, or detracting from, its wholeness.
Sacha was the Universe.
The stars, nebulas, galaxies, were but his toys. His domain no less than infinite space. Neither past nor future invaded its wholeness. It was the eternal present, the singularity of existence, which transcended time and space and any other limitation. There was nothing—nothing to limit or hinder him in this singular realm.
Then Alec detected a pang of hunger––a rude awakening into the physical world.
Until recently, all Sacha’s needs had been taken care of immediately. He’d been hardly aware he had any. His consciousness had been less than rudimentary, rather like a tree being aware of having sufficient water to feed its leaves. It could never have been described as human. Now... now Sacha had to fight to satisfy his needs. This effort came to him quite naturally. He took a lungful of air and let it out through a squeezed larynx. Something between a scream and a whimper. It worked. Food came soon after.
Alec offered the bottle: pre-prepared, waiting, the right temperature, the right mix of nutrients. For a minute or two Sacha became quite human, preoccupied with his physical body. Then...
Then, but a few seconds later, Sacha returned to Eden. Alec followed his son’s retreat into a realm of indescribable bliss. They both did it quite easily, as though it was the most natural thing to do. For a short while Alec hung suspended in the universe of his son’s making. Inexplicably, he shared his son’s overwhelming joy.
So this is Paradise? No wonder the Hebrew word for pleasure is Eden....
But Sacha was not to remain there. Not yet. For the next few moments Sacha was draped, helpless, suspended over his father’s shoulder. After a sigh of contentment, Alec laid him with infinite care in the cradle surrounded by the tropical jungle, or what Suzy so aptly named her Eden. Instantly Sacha fell asleep. Alec withdrew, as though respecting his son’s privacy.
Alec sat for long time—thinking. There were memories storming the ramparts of resistance he’d built between his youthful daydreams and the reality he’d chosen to live in. The physical reality, the realm in which he could experience the fastest, the most efficient mode of becoming. The reality he’d chosen; the reality that punished mistakes, even as it rewarded commitment, guiding him ever forward, ever towards greater successes. He’d thought he’d found satisfaction in the realm of physics. The micro- and the macro- cosmos met there, in an amalgam of astral to sub-nuclear branches of his chosen disciplines. His research had been so intensive that he’s completely forgotten that the other realms, his private domains, had once been just as real.
There was a great deal more that he’d forgotten.
If it hadn’t been for his son, he might have forgotten forever. He might have lost all he’d learned on the Home Planet, or in the Far Country. Now, in that single communion with his son’s consciousness he realized that one cannot give up one reality in order to serve another. He needed to be whole, even as his son was still whole. To be complete one had to recognize one’s total make up. One’s total being.
But the most fundamental revelation that his son had brought to him was that in his pursuit of a dream he’d forgotten about the dreamer. In order to just live, as Sandra had once put it, he forgot who it was that did the living. By intensive becoming he’d lost the power to just be. He’d lost the very essence that enabled him to pursue his dreams.
There comes a time when one must become, once again, a little child.
Only children hold the keys to paradise. Now that he’d recovered his key, he decided never to lose it again. And for some inexplicable reason he felt as though something within him wanted to sing a song of joy, of glory, of happiness, as though bliss was his to achieve.
“Thanks Sacha,” he whispered. “Thank you, my son. I’ll always be grateful to you for this moment. You’ve taught me more than I can understand at present. You reminded me who I am.”
Yet soon Alec’s eyes filled, once again, with apprehension. Am I too late? Would this precious key, this knowledge, still open the gates to my inner worlds?
***
10
Back to the Drawing Board
Alec knew instinctively that the revelation he’d had when gazing into Sacha’s eyes would affect every aspect of his life. His, by now, famous equation, a concept rivaling Einstein’s E=MC2 was just part of it. Alec had proposed a theory that reduced matter and energy to information. His equation simply stated that I=MC∞. ‘I’ stood for Information, ‘M’ for mass and ‘C’ for the velocity of light. The funny figure eight lying on its side was the symbol for infinity. At first glance, to a mathematician, or a theoretical physicist, the equation did not appear to make sense. After all, anything multiplied by infinity became infinite; on the other hand, in the practical sense, no more could square the speed of light.
But that was the very purpose of the equation. No limits could be set to Information, nor to its omnipresence in both, mass and energy.
Essentially, the equation represented an expression of a philosophy; an attempt to express a philosophical concept in mathematical terms. It appeared too simple—even as Einstein’s equation made this impression on the previous generation of scientists. People hate new concepts, new ways of thinking and particularly when, in order to accept them, they have to give up the lackadaisical, false comforts that only mental stasis can offer. All established organizations detest changes. So do the ruling members of political systems, religions, and regrettably members of academic hierarchy.
Alec was a harbinger of change.
A deeper examination of the theory provides that matter and energy in their initial state are beyond both time and space. Beyond spacetime. The theory stipulated that Information, which is extant in both, had to have existed before the universe came into being.
Before the original Big Bang.
In the SSC at Waxahachie, the world’s biggest, most powerful Superconducting Super Collider, scientists were trying to recreate conditions that they thought existed immediately after the Big Bang. They assumed that matter became more complex with time, even in the first few millionths of a second. To discover the origin of the universe, they were endeavouring to find the original building block of the universe, a particle so tiny, so ‘primitive’ that Dr. Leon Lederman once called it the God Particle. Alec grinned as he recalled how Dr. Lederman subtitled his book: “If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question?”
People had forgotten what the question was.
“Who cares what the original particle is,” he smiled sardonically at his own thoughts, “if you don’t know what to do with such knowledge?”
“We want to understand the nature of life,” Dr. McBride had said. “We must never forget why we are physicists. All we learn must have a purpose. Otherwise... we are just dilettantes indulging in snobbish pursuits.”
Einstein put it more bluntly. “I want to know the thoughts of God,” he’d said, “the rest are details.”
Alec wondered if intellectual snobbism wasn’t the worst kind—the most harmful. For too many years, too many scientists have concerned themselves with details. They’ve been hoping to discover particles so small they would have only two dimensions. They called this pursuit ‘the super-string theory’. They thought they would discover minute squiggly pieces of energy that held nothing but information. The information would be held in the specificity of different vibrations—or something to that effect.
“They cut the pieces into ever-smaller pieces until there simply was no knife sharp enough to cut any further,” he told Suzy.
Until the SSC. Until they could smash matter into such small particles that they could neither see them, nor measure
them, nor do anything with them. Why?
No one quite knew. Some people just like smashing things.
Alec had other ideas.
In the meantime, Sacha kept growing.
Suzy, forgetting her artistic aspirations, concerned herself with Sacha’s welfare to the exclusion of almost everything else.
“The first three months are the most important,” she would say, time and again. “They can leave an indelible mark on the rest of his life, you know.”
Alec knew. He’d read the very same books she’d read. He took part in Sacha’s early days as much as he could. He’d also bought a compact disk player to assure that Sacha would experience the harmony of Mozart’s genius for many hours at a time. Right from the beginning.
Suzy went much further.
She’d learned that the owners of their building were thinking of converting the apartments into condominiums. Even before they officially announced their intentions, she made an offer to buy not only their own place (it wouldn’t do to move Sacha so early), but also the one bedroom apartment next door. The offer she’d made was absurdly low, but the owners needed money right now, to cover the initial legal and permit expenses. It was a provisory down payment to be credited against the rent, if the deal didn’t go through. Suzy was showing first signs of financial astuteness.
She sketched her own plans as to how they would interconnect the two apartments into a single, beautiful home. The ‘new’ living room would become Alec’s study and a spare guestroom, if necessary. Since Sacha’s birth, Alec worked a lot more at home, and needed more space. In addition, the extra bedroom in the adjoining apartment was large enough to accommodate a settee, which could open into a double bed, should her parents want to visit. The rest of the time it would serve as her studio. The extra bathroom would be very useful whenever they had guests, and the open counter of the extra kitchen would make for a wonderful bar ‘for the Professor’, while the rest of it Suzy proposed converting into a ‘wine-cellar’ with some extra storage space for her paints and brushes. Not the happiest of mixes, but Alec was too busy to point it out. To crown her proposal, Suzy negotiated extra storage space in the basement and garage space for two cars. If the condo conversion went through, they could be happy there for the foreseeable future.
“You are not going to run out on us to some other university or something, are you darling?” Suzy asked. Alec certainly had no intention of doing so.
In fact, Alec approved her plans all the way. He was grateful that she was not only taking care of Sacha’s welfare but also his own. The additional income he was earning as a guest lecturer on a worldwide circuit made the proposal well within their means.
The only problem that remained was that both Suzy and Alec were growing more and more tired.
Sacha put considerable strain on Suzy––as babies usually do. Alec, while enjoying his extracurricular visits to far away places, was burning the candle at both ends. Even as he was growing in demand on the lecture circuit, more students attended his regular program. He needed more time for research, mostly to keep up with the work of other physicists, which meant reading voluminous publications. His theory had been picked up by a number of brilliant postgraduates, who began to expand on its implication in a number of diverse and imaginative fields. Alec could hardly keep up with the avalanche he’d created.
But what really unnerved him were the thoughts that crowded his mind as the direct result of his communion with Sacha. He knew that he must go back to the original experiences he’d had as a boy. Not the daydreams of buccaneers and polar explorers, but to the essence of, what he’d called at the time, the Home Planet and the Far Country. A dozen years ago he understood those visions, or concepts, as much as a fourteen-year-old could. This was no longer enough. He had to dissect the experiences in a more scientific way. He had to find a way to accept the past events not just emotionally but to integrate them into his psyche––intellectually. They had to make ‘scientific’ sense. He’d dismissed, as best he could, the concept of a personalized Sandra. He could not dismiss his own, personal memories.
First he tackled the Home Planet.
He recalled, in incredible detail, his first few visits to the imaginary world, wherein he had been apparently capable of experiencing, or even creating, whatever he put his mind to. There was a question, though, that could completely change the equation. Had it been he who had decided what to see and learn, or was it the dead-and-buried Sandra who had directed his development? And if it had been Sandra, then, for the thousandth time, he was back to square one. Is there, or had there ever been, a dichotomy within his psyche that would forever haunt him, invade his peace of mind, interfere with his scientific mindset?
Who was Sandra?
If the psychologists were right, then we all incorporate more than one aspect of our perception within the entity we call man. The id, the ego and the superego, correspond fairly closely to the emotional, mental and perhaps the spiritual aspect of our individuality. The ‘spiritual’ aspect, of course, had no equivalent in science, but the concept of superego has been accepted in psychiatry. If Sandra corresponded to his superego then he could at least study this concept. Freud had introduced the superego of which the key component was the ego-ideal. Whatever that meant was another story, but at least old Sigmund, for better or for worse, had been an avid atheist. This precluded any spiritual connections, should such prove ‘undesirable’ in some circles of the ‘scientific’ community.
Alec tried hard to maintain an open mind.
What he found fascinating, though, was that Freud placed the key components of the self, namely the id, ego and the superego, squarely in the unconscious. What of consciousness? Probably it was the result of the three. Not the essence itself, so to speak. The old Austrian had also assigned to the superego a set of moral values, or self-critical attitudes. Is this what Sandra is? And if so why, at least in his experience, had she been ‘externalized’ within his youthful experiences?
In a later structural model proposed by the father of psychoanalysis, a more complex psyche emerged. It introduced a struggle among the three internal agencies: the ego, id, and the superego. Alec found no real evidence of any struggle between his experience of Sandra and his own emotions or intellectual needs— other than occasional longing for the awareness of Sandra’s presence. A search for understanding was definitely a struggle, but that had nothing to do with the Freudian context. Anyway, the result of such a struggle as Freud proposed was neurosis, and Alec, rightly or wrongly, did not recognize himself as a neurotic.
On the other hand, does anyone?
After a prolonged search, Alec found a greater affinity with the Jungian tradition. Marie-Louise von Franz defined Self as ‘an inner guiding factor that is different from the conscious personality and that can be grasped only through the investigation of one’s own dreams.’ If his images of Sandra could be relegated to dreams then he was on the right track. Before he’d experienced the ‘unification’ with Sandra, she could have been definitely described as his ‘inner guiding factor’, and equally as certainly she’d been ‘different from the conscious personality’ he’d then espoused. If Sandra could be defined in terms of psychology established by Dr. Carl G. Jung, then Alec could finally accept that she, Sandra, was not a figment of his imagination but an expression of his inner Self.
Finally!
Finally Sandra became a concept acceptable in more precise scientific terms.
A valid, scientific, respectable concept.
So what?
So nothing. But Alec, having been trained as a scientist, needed such an affirmation so as not to become... neurotic. And a nominee for the Nobel Prize should not allow himself to become one. It might be frowned upon. Even in the fairly lax circles of Caltech. Finally, Alec felt that he was on safer ground—even if his ground did rise to the infinity of the Far Country. Infinity was something he could deal with. He’d used the concept in his own Theory of Information.
He took a d
eep breath.
Back to the Home Planet.
The concept of Home Planet, even by Sandra’s definition, was a construct of his own, needed to externalize his ‘inner guiding factor’ which Freud called the superego, and as some of the modern movements referred to as the ‘Higher Self’. In his childhood, he’d managed to externalize this part of his self in order to derive the greatest benefit from the Freudian ‘set of moral values or self-critical attitudes’, or the Jungian ‘inner guiding factor’.
Things were beginning to fall into place.
Sandra fit into both categories. She had been definitely his guiding light, and the arbiter of his moral values. He’d trusted her implicitly. She couldn’t lie, he remembered. And... and she was always with him. This last should have been a dead give away. Only an integral part of himself can always be with him. And Sandra always insisted that, in a manner he couldn’t understand at the time, they’d always be together.
“Like two peas in a pod,” he recalled her exact words. Words she’d repeated, then, many times.
So the purpose of the Home Planet was to impart on his young psyche certain values which could not have been understood, certainly not at that time, without such drastic, if for the most part pleasant, experiences. He’d learned responsibility for his actions. He’d learned to reject all limitations, to rely on his own self. He’d even learned to recognize that everyone travels his or her own, individual path. A path that was neither better nor worse than any other—just different. And all this he’d learned as a boy of fourteen in such a profound way that, if called upon, he could recite Sandra’s words even now. What a marvelous, complex structure man is... he mused. Even a boy has the potential to understand the most profound tenets of ethics. The respect for others, the love of one’s neighbour...
And suddenly he realized that these were not some ancient, perhaps outmoded, religious dogmas, but that this information had been stored in aspects of his inner self from before he was born. Before his private universe began. The information was always there. All he had to do was to find access to it.
Alexander: [Alexander Trilogy Book Two] Page 13