Seeing that Desmond was embarrassed beyond his due, Alicia walked up the sloping sand to the footpath and put her arms around the Professor’s neck. “Ali,” she said without taking her eyes off Desmond’s, “What would you say if I moved in with the Professor?”
“What and live in sin?” Alec was shocked.
“Neverrr,” the Professor finally came to life. “We alrready have a piece of paperr that makes it all legal!”
“A piece of paperrrrrr?” Alec looked down his nose at the Professor who once again seemed at a loss for words.
“We thought you young’uns might want to witness ourr vows in a chapel,” he added miserably.
“A CHAPEL?” Alec roared, loving every minute of it. This was the first time since he’d met Dr. Desmond McBride that he held the upper hand. Not for long though.
“That’s quite enough, Ali,” Alicia brought her son down to earth. “In the chapel, next Saturday. We thought that you might be Desmond’s best man and Suzy my bridesmaid. We don’t want anyone else, except Sacha and Maria, of course.”
Strange that no one mentioned Matt.
Ten minutes later the congratulations were over.
“I suppose I’ll have to call you daddy?” Alec smiled. He was on the verge of chuckling.
“You’ll call me as you always called me. Or at least the last yearr orr so, laddie.” Authority returned to Desmond’s voice.
“And me?” Suzy asked.
“You can call me anything you want, lass. Anything at all, but call me!”
And they all laughed.
They decided to get back and raise a toast to the lovers. Alec’s worries about being so far from his mother were over. Suzy didn’t have that problem. She had three brothers in Canada, and her parents were still very much together. Alicia, on the other hand, has been all-alone, and Alec simply couldn’t look after her from across the continent. Thanks to dear ol’ Des, she’d no longer be stranded. What’s more, Suzy would recover her painting companion.
As for what was happening in the hearts of the ‘young couple’, no one would ever know. But on the way back, Alicia and Desmond walked together, hand-in-hand, like a pair of youngsters. Every dozen steps or so, Alec and Suzy heard Alicia’s unmistakable cascade of laughter reaching them from the water’s edge. Whatever else fate would deal them, they would have many laughs together. The Professor was as young at heart as the circumstances permitted. And the new circumstances were all in his favour.
And then Suzy looked down at Alec at her side and stopped dead. Her eyes were as wide open as her mouth.
“What is it darling?” he asked.
“You’re a-arms... y-you are using your arms,” she half-stammered.
“Oh? I hadn’t noticed,” he lied. But his heart was as full of joy as his wife’s. He could now hold his son in those very arms of his. For the first time in months. Thanks Sandra, he whispered.
He closed his eyes and held his breath. Just for a moment. The ground was just below him. He decided to put his feet down, on earth, before he got dizzy. This was like the difference between dreaming and a waken state. His senses responded to the environment in quite ‘normal’ fashion. Here, he was standing on his own feet.
“Why here? Why now?” he wondered. “I thought...”
“I thought you asked for me.”
The voice came from just behind him. Alec was standing in front of the same old archway in the wall he’d visited so many times in the past. So similar to the one on Atlantis, only this was definitely Home Planet. He felt it, he was sure. And Sandra was just behind him. He would recognize her sweet voice anywhere, on earth or in outer space. He spun on his heels and nearly collapsed. Facing him was Suzy. Only more beautiful, more radiant, more exquisite.
“I cannot be quite as you’ve seen me before. After all, I am really within you. I’m the servant of your image of me.” And the smile she flashed was as coquettish as Suzy’s ever was. The Sandra he looked at was a beautiful woman, a little girl, a wise matron, all in one. She was also Suzy.
“H-how... d-do I call you?” he stammered.
“You already did. I am Sandra. I always have been. That is why you are Alec-Sander, remember?
“Alexander...” he corrected automatically. Then he laughed. “But you are also her!”
“I am anyone you choose to make me. Don’t forget that here, on the Home Planet, you are the absolute creator. The boss, so to speak,” a disarming smile never left her lips.
The lips he’d kissed so many times. Only here, they were even more desirable.
“I think you’d better leave that part of it for the earth...”
She was definitely teasing him. This was Sandra all right. No matter what she looked like. He remembered the old days, when he’d been hardly fourteen––the awareness of the difference between boys and girls only just invading his youthful consciousness. This was different. Very different.
“I get the message,” he murmured. He didn’t have to. He also remembered that Sandra could always read his thoughts. After all, in a way, she was also him.
“Now you get it!” she encouraged.
“So finding you desirable is like... like making love to myself?”
“Not quite. But man has been told to love others as himself. So...”
“Isn’t that religion?”
“What is religion?” Sandra did not give in. Perhaps she was as stubborn as he.
“It’s a method of controlling people,” he answered at once. “Of controlling their minds.”
“You are talking about the people administering religions. The priesthood. Of them it has been said that they have the keys to the kingdom of heaven, they do not enter themselves, yet they don’t allow anyone else to enter. Suzy told you that some time ago.”
“Well?” He was standing his ground.
“Well what? I am talking about a number of great men who found a way to reach within themselves, as you did when writing your thesis, as Mozart did when writing his Requiem, as sculptors do when exposing the sculpture hidden within the stone. Other great men reached within and found wisdom which could benefit all man.”
Sandra was quite up to date. She knew of his recent discussions with Suzy.
“Of course I know. I am you. When will you accept that? You are no longer a little boy. You should not pretend as little Alec did. You have to face the truth.”
Alec knew all that, but he still found it confusing.
“It is not really confusing if you accept that you are more then meets the eye,” Sandra was not as complaisant as she’d once been.
It was definitely time to grow up, he sighed.
“Precisely!” she concurred.
Alec laughed. “It’s like talking to myself...”
She didn’t say anything. But he knew he was right. He also knew that he had a choice of pretending that all this was a dream, or that he was on the verge of growing up. Only this growing up required a complete metamorphosis. He would have to give up his independence, his personality, and submit to Sandra within him. Submit to her will.
“Would that be so difficult?”
“It would be a form of dying. Man does not find dying easy...”
He actually said this aloud. And in that instant images of millions and millions of men slaughtering men, during thousands upon thousands of years of wars, pogroms, concentration camps, induced plagues, earthquakes, tidal waves and a thousand other cataclysmic events throughout history of man... all these seemed to fill his mind simultaneously. And then he saw the crowning glory—an atomic bomb fulminating its horrific yet spellbinding beauty as the mushroom rose towards the sky.
“Are you quite sure of that?” Sandra’s voice was deep inside him.
“To die, perhaps to dream no more...” there had been others who dreamt of dying. “To dream no more. Does this mean living one’s dream instead?”
“There is only one way to find out.”
In all this time Alec was standing motionless, facing Sandra. For some reason sh
e didn’t offer any more answers. Was he to find them out himself? Or were the answers already etched within him. Hidden inside his mind even as a sculpture is hidden within a block of granite. That last was the obvious explanation. Was he sculptor enough to bring the unseen reality out into the daylight? To his waken awareness? Why is it that we must all find our own, individual way to the truth? Wouldn’t it be easier just to read a book and follow the instructions?
Perhaps there was such a book...
But the concept of death never came easy to Alec. Life, or what he recognized as life, that energy within him, was such a powerful force. His unspoken promise to Sandra was by far the most important commitment he’d ever made. Yes, a conscious commitment. All his inner travels, even as a little boy, had been really a celebration of life. The problem with death was that it was so final. It seemed so permanent. That’s what was wrong with death, he thought. It was so permanent.
And then it struck him with a clarity he’d never experienced before.
“You want my ego to die, don’t you Sandra?”
But Sandra was nowhere to be seen. Once again, he was alone.
He woke up in the middle of the night. His first thought was that of being angry with himself. He was angry with himself for having wanted to ask Sandra so many questions. Even in his dreams. He refused to admit to himself that he’d been dreaming about seeing her for a long time. For years. He wanted to ask her so many things, more things every day... How did the ocean waves act the way they did? Why was there thunder and lightening after the first tsunami on the beach? How do sculptors know what is inside a stone? How could Mozart know the whole composition before he took pen to paper? And, for that matter, how was it that he seemed to have visited Atlantis? And Lemuria? And…?
So many questions.
But the next thought in his troubled mind had to do with Suzy’s, or had it been Sandra’s, smile. There was something whimsical in that final look. It was as though he’d made a mistake. As if he got things quite wrong…
At this precise moment Sacha sang a single, joyful note. It climbed and climbed towards heaven, lingered there for a timeless moment and resolved itself into cascading laughter.
And then Sacha returned to sleep. And so did Alec.
He dreamt a normal dream in which he was able to walk. And run. People do not appreciate the simple pleasure of walking. The almost sublime pleasure... Next morning he awakened with a broad smile. He was finally ready to accept his fate.
***
20
Wisdom of the Past
The first time it happened, Alec was scared out of his wits. He fought to get back into his own body, his own time, his own consciousness. It took him a long time to relax, whatever ‘long time’ represented in the inner realm. But whatever impulse brought him to experience the great minds of the past, wouldn’t let go. He felt like a schoolboy who must do his set homework or he wouldn’t be allowed to advance to the next class. He occupied other bodies, at least he thought he did, but not like this.
“Something is playing with my atavistic memories buried deep in my subconscious. Probably stored at the genetic level.”
Suzy looked worried. “Well? What else can it be?” he asked defensively. “Or I am just stark raving mad,” he muttered, too low for her to hear.
On that first occasion, Alec found himself in early sixth century BC. He had no idea how he knew that, since the people here, or there––depending from which time frame you were regarding them––obviously had never heard of Christ. Perhaps he’d only dated the experience after he got back. Of late, his inner and outer worlds became inextricably overlapped. Anyway, to the people he’d visited, it was just another day.
But what a day it was!
The air was so pure, so refined, that for a moment Alec derived pleasure just from breathing; although, he soon realized, they were not his lungs that languished on this sea air. Evidently, neither was it his body. Contrary to previous experiences, he had no control over its functions.
So it happened. I am finally and irrevocably paralyzed.
The body was lying on a straight, rather hard cot, its eyes closed, its muscles in total repose. An instant later he sighed in emotional relief, realizing that the body he’d entered was asleep. Alec explored his host’s subconscious. He soon ascertained that he was in Miletus, a harbour on the balmy Aegean Sea, in Caria, near Samos. The host, whose personality and name remained to be determined, was proud of his city, which apparently had been designed on a modern, rectangular layout, by the best planers in Caria.
Alec also learned that his host was both, a philosopher and a scientist, as well as a practical man, a skilled manipulator of market trends, and thus a man of substantial wealth. Miletus itself had already been recognized as the hub of progressive thought. It also flourished in business and was later credited with having been the cradle and inspiration of science and philosophy, which evolved into Western Civilization.
He’d also discovered, there and then, that the early Greeks never claimed to be forefathers of major philosophical or scientific trends. They were well aware that not only Cretans but Mesopotamians and Sumerians, not to mention the Egyptians before them, had been their precursors by several millennia. Only later, much later, we, of the Western Civilization, thought of the Greeks as the true fathers of modern science. But the error of this assumption came to Alec only after his return.
What am I doing here? What has all this to do with me?
Alec ‘saw’, if one can use such an inadequate expression, the thoughts of the day through the eyes of Thales, or what the eyes of Thales had accumulated over the years. For Thales turned out to be the name of the host who, so conveniently, decided to take a nap at the right time.
“All things are made of water,” Thales declared.
I am also reading his past thoughts. What an incredible storehouse of information is a man’s subconscious. Is this what I am supposed to reach into?
For no reason that made any sense, after only a cursory scan of the ancient Greek’s mind, Alec returned in his own time. The whole visit seemed fragmentary, without any particular point, rather as though it formed part of his general education and served only as a background for some later purposes.
On his ‘return’ Alec thumbed through books he’d not seen since his schooldays. Thales counted as one of the wise men of the Greek Tradition. He had not only advanced the knowledge of his day, but was well versed with science dating back to Babylonian records. He appears to have been a learned, cultured, and astute man.
Even as with Thales, on a number of future occasions Alec had been placed in other ancient bodies, perhaps minds is a better word, minds of men of unprepossessing knowledge, but even more so, of impressive strength of character. None of them had given an impression of being woozy headed philosophers, detached from the stream of everyday life. They’d all been active participators in the development of their civilization. Not at all like some specialized wool gatherers Alec had met in his own time. Not one of the ancients seemed afraid to state the truth as he saw it, regardless of the consequences to himself or his reputation. Those condensed snippets of knowledge from the past, which Alec gathered, emanated from a number of minds, but only, while the consciousness of the host body was sedated by a relaxing sleep.
There had been a number of men whose character could serve as a paradigm for us today. Perhaps that was the lesson Alec was meant to learn. Perhaps today we also need men we can look up to. Not idols of the stage, film, or the arena of professional sports, nor the inflated egos of political puppets. Perhaps, what we needed today, he mused, are our own giants.
Giants of the mind?
Alec recalled but a few of the minds he’d touched on. Anaximander, not just a scientist and philosopher, but an inventor, and a man versed in practical aspects of everyday life. Later Pythagoras who’d established a more mathematical tradition and introduced the notion of universal harmony. Heraclitus who’d developed this concept of balance, a
view of the world that relies on a balanced adjustment of opposing tendencies.
Behind the strife and struggle between the opposites, there lies a hidden harmony or attunement, which is the true nature of the world... Alec read in his mind.
“Good God!” Alec exclaimed, while recounting some days later his experiences to Suzy. “This was five hundred years before Christ!”
“Could Jalaludin Rumi have said it any better?” she mused, equally as stunned. Rumi live in the 13th century of the present era.
Alec grew more and more pensive.
Have we really advanced from those days? Are we really more developed as human beings? Or do we tread the mill in the ever-recurring present. All things are made of water... he recalled Thales’ words. Does water symbolize a constant stream of thoughts? Churning and churning, round and round, without ever going anywhere? Is this where we have our being?
In time, Alec had been shown the minds of other great men. Always strictly as an observer. He couldn’t probe, search for items of interest, outside what was readily available. Even at the very beginning he’d felt instinctively that taking over an advanced mind would be a horrendous crime, akin to black magic.
In sleep, however, even if the men, on waking, were to be aware that someone had visited his dormant consciousness, he would have assigned it to dreams; and dreams then as now, had not been fully understood. Even today Alec was aware of an enormous variety of dreams, from symbolic communications from one’s own unconscious, through purely relaxing and therapeutic images, to settling some antagonistic subliminal conditions, all the way to vivid, extremely real and palpable experiences, with which he was very well versed. Anyone attempting to create a Unified Theory of Dreams would be condemned to dismal failure.
“No disrespect intended, Sigmund,” he smirked, with just a tinge of condescension. Freud was one of Suzy’s heroes. “Our conscious mind is to our subconscious as the tip of an iceberg is to the remainder of its submerged body.”
Alexander: [Alexander Trilogy Book Two] Page 26