The next moment they became acutely aware, once more, of their hairy bodies.
“It’s a long journey...” Alec marveled.
“…but well worth the years of evolution, don’t you think?” She knew what he meant.
“To go back and dream, till the creatures of our dreams join us, up there, beyond the Far Country.”
“Endowed with attributes that enriched their individuality during countless eons of growth...”
Eve moved her lithe body toward a nearby tree, and reached up over her had. “...your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil,” Suzy mused, completely lost in her thoughts.
“You know, it isn’t true. Gods do not know good and evil. In God’s eyes all things are good. God’s cannot behold evil.”
Eve’s jutting jaw parted in a hideous grin.
Perhaps, she thought, perhaps though it was all merely symbolic, it had to be done. As of now, they were her creatures. She reached out for a round fruit, tore it from the branch and bit into its lustrous redness. Her brown teeth left an irregular scar on its pristine surface. Then she offered the rest of the fruit to her mate. He took it and started eating.
And it was good.
To this ancient day, the apes have eaten only berries, fallen nuts, whatever they could find on the ground. If it lay there, it was good. Yet in this singular moment of their journey they had taken a giant step. They had been given a choice. They could reach up or stoop down. They could say ‘no’. “I will not eat that which is at my feet. I shall reach up and eat of a fruit from above. I shall exercise my choice, my will.”
There was another aspect to the momentous event that happened simultaneously. Eve, reaching up for the apple, stood on her hind legs. Till this moment they’ve lived only on the ground. Today the trees became their new domain.
After Alec and Suzy left the apes’ bodies, the two hairy simians remained motionless. They felt something very important had just taken place. They did not understand what. But their eyes retained some of the gleam which, till a moment ago, spoke of advanced intelligence. One day they would know exactly what had happened.
They would know that they’d just taken their first step towards the stars.
“You can’t experience real bliss until you are fully conscious of it. No matter what the price, the apple was necessary.” These were the first words Suzy uttered finding herself in her own body. She felt surprisingly naked without her hair. It was as though someone had shaved her all over.
“Yes. Apparently that’s what it’s all about.” Alec spoke softly. Then he laughed. She’d forgotten he could read her thoughts.
“Well, you don’t have X-ray eyes, so there,” she snapped.
“Are you sure? I’ve been at this game a lot longer than you, darling…”
But she was right. Had he X-ray eyes he would have seen the slipper behind her back which, in the next instant, was propelled expertly at his solar plexus.
“Ouch! What’s that for?”
“Just making sure you’re in your own body,” was her wry comment.
“Soon you will find out for sure,” he said hoarsely. “You know,” he continued, after clearing his throat, “our minds have grown too complex to conceive of the simplicity of Eden. That is why, some say, we all merge, periodically, into a single pod, to start again and experience the joys of real childhood. Like the breathing in and the breathing out of Brahma.”
“You know about that?”
“I didn’t want to accept it. The universe fascinates me so much that the concept of the Big Crunch, the awakening of Brahma, is abhorrent to me. I want Brahma to keep dreaming forever.”
“And yet?”
“It’s all different now. Now I feel much more part of Brahma than of the universe. No matter how beautiful, enchanting, mysterious, and all the other superlatives applied to it. I think I can finally accept that our glorious earth, and the abundance of wonders on it, is all an illusion. That my true self is always up there, where Sacha said he’d never left.”
“And shall go in and out and find pasture...” Suzy quoted one of his notes. She unexpectedly realized that her power of recall became very different. The last day or so, she found she could recall anything she wanted to. There were no blanks in her memory.
“And we can actually create our own heavens, or Edens, right here, on earth, now, independently of other people. Within our individuality, each one of us is the total reality.”
Alec’s voice was filled with wonder. He knew what he knew, but he continued to absorb the wonder of it all at different levels of his awareness. Infinity takes a long time to absorb. Perhaps forever.
Suzy’s smile assumed a dreamy quality. “Now that I can stand back,” she picked up the scheme, “I see the real difference between Edenic and true Bliss. The real thing is the state of awareness of infinite possibilities. It gives birth to the cosmic splendour of the Far Country. To universes that are yet to come. The Far Country is only as marvelous as our thoughts make it. Bliss is pregnant with the possibility of countless, absolutely countless, Far Countries.” Suzy shared her thoughts without uttering a word.
Alec agreed.
“Yet men whose minds are empty would find the Far Country an absolute hell. Imagine finding yourself alone in a universe of absolute darkness, not a single spark of light to keep you company. It would be almost as bad as I found it in the emptiness of the gray, indifferent reality of stasis––the hell beyond hell! Indifference is by far the greatest of depravities. And make no mistake, there are men who do not care at all about their mental development. They never examine their lives, nor the potential of their minds. I hope they never wonder into the Far Country by accident.”
“An unexamined life is a life not worth living,” she read his thoughts. He was thinking of Socrates.
Suzy’s eyes remained filled with wonder. The incredible experiences were gradually impregnating her mind, her heart, her soul. She was metabolizing them, making them her own. Alec thought she was ready to start building their own Paradise, their own Eden, their Delight, right here on earth.
“On one condition,” she sounded quite serious, this time speaking out loud.
“What is it, darling?”
“I don’t care if we’re naked. But I absolutely insist on skins.”
Alec squared his jaw and replied in grave voice: “I’ll see what we can do about it,”
And he’s been doing something about it ever since.
***
Epilogue
What is the meaning of life? To be happy and useful.
HH the Dalai Lama
Just Living
After reaching out from the emptiness of nowhere, to the euphoria of the here and now, Susanna and Alexander came a full circle. They realized that all their trips began and ended in the ‘present’. Great diversity of states of consciousness became available for them, almost overnight. They’d learned that life consisted of continuous becoming, and becoming meant change.
“I’ll make all her dreams come true,” Alec repeated often, his voice filled with gratitude. He was addressing both, Suzy and Sandra.
“We only just scratched the surface of infinity,” Suzy said on their return to LA. “The sad part is, that we cannot share our worlds with others. I have just you and Sacha. Anyone else would regard us as crazy.”
“There had been those who spoke of various heavens,” Alec murmured, “Remember Saint Paul?”
Suzy remembered. “‘I knew a man… such an one caught up to the third heaven’, he wrote in his letter to Corinthians. Still others spoke of seven heavens…” she said dreamily.
“Do you think anyone ever took them seriously?”
It was a moot question.
Their holidays were over. The responsibilities Alec took on at the Institute demanded his physical presence. He raced across the park in his wheelchair, souped-up with muscle power. He was glad to be back. He was also glad to add his share to the fabric of the univer
se, to the matrix of the world he knew and loved. He was glad to be back.
“It’s like having your cake and eating it,” he defined his view of the world. “I dream my dream, I make it real, I improve on it, I solve the problems inherent in it, and, most of all, I enjoy it. To paraphrase Krishna: life’s all pleasure.”
Just living, they called it, though they could have said, just dreaming. “Life is an assortment of wondrous dreams, fragments of dreams, reveries and, on occasion, nightmares. Our innermost desires create them. This physical reality, no less so. Although, only in the Undiscovered Country I feel truly awake.”
Suzy nodded. She was beginning to understand what he meant.
Sometimes, all three of them would wake up, together, in different reality. They took it for granted that they belonged there. That the universe was theirs to explore.
For almost a year, nothing much happened. Alec gradually improved; he worked hard, exercised as best he could, played with Sacha in his spare time. He found his slow progress annoying.
“It took you ten years, Sir, to reach this condition. It might take you a little while to come out of it,” Matt volunteered a rare opinion.
Then, all sorts of things broke at once. Dr. Alexander Baldwin, Ph.D., did win the Nobel Prize, though, surprisingly, not for the Theory of Information. Without his knowledge, he had been a co-nominee, proposed by people in CERN. The prize went to the scientists who made the greatest contribution towards arriving at the Unified Field Theory. Alec didn’t see much of the money. His mother took care of most of it. As for fame, it seemed that Dr. Desmond McBride took the honours virtually upon himself.
“I always told you he was a brright lad, lassie, didn’t I?” Des asserted gravely, his cheeks pink with pride.
Using Alec’s winnings, Alicia and Suzy opened a school of painting in Solana Beach. In their school everything was free: paints, paper, cloth, board, pencils and brushes were all provided by the school. Otherwise, it was doubtful if any children would come. Classes, weather permitting, were held in the open air. If not, they gathered mostly on the covered terrace. Suzy drove down, with Sacha, for alternate sessions. The best paintings of each of their protégés and protégées had been, in due course, exhibited in Caltech’s corridors. Any proceeds went principally towards the purchase of artists’ materials, and the money left over, if any, had been equally divided among the participants.
In some ways, Alicia was learning from her pupils. She found that children couldn’t lie. When adults painted, they tended to improve on nature’s version of the truth. Their vision was tempered by their expectations, or by desire to please a prospective admirer.
Children, she’d discovered, didn’t do that. They seemed nonjudgmental. They neither changed nor augmented nature’s portrayals, yet contributed their own, unique view. They painted the truth as they saw it with their pristine eyes. They had a way of extending their vision by incorporating love or admiration or fear or even dislike into their creative process.
All the while, Desmond was strutting at Alicia’s side like a slightly over-aged peacock.
“The lassie is a verritable dynamo!” he crooned regularly. “She’s neverr too tirred to help the urrchins. I wish I could teach them some physics,” he added in a more somber tone.
“Try to find a practical side of physics,” Alicia suggested.
In time he did. It was a joy to behold a gray-haired Professor sitting cross-legged on the beach, giving a lecture on elementary particles to a group of boys. Occasionally a girl or two would join them, but most of the ‘wee lasses’ preferred Alicia’s classes. Des thought this was most unfair.
“After all the inner realities, the infinite wondrous, intricate patterns of the Far Country, the unadulterated beauty of the Home Planet, the inexplicable Bliss of the Undiscovered Realm, or the more humble pleasures of Eden with its frolicking, irresponsible childhood, it is good be here, right here, with you and... and... just live.”
Alicia took Des and Sacha for walk, Suzy lingered on the terrace, cuddled under Alec’s arm.
“It’s overcoming the little everyday problems, mustering all my resources to face the big ones... or watching Sacha take his first steps...” she sighed.
“...hearing him say the first recognizable ‘mama’,” Alec continued dreamily, “...to watch the joy in his mother’s eyes when she discovers yet a new gift in a gifted child… to hear Des roll his r’s each time he’s happy, all this and so much, so very much more, in our common, everyday-life, makes this the reality I want to abide in. I don’t care if it is my own or even my wondrous Princess’s dream. As long as she dreams also of you, I’ll stay here for as long as I can.”
He brushed her forehead with his lips.
“Up there, there is no passage of time,” he continued. “Wherever I place my attention, I am there. Whatever I desire, I have it. It is not really a becoming––it is almost a state of being. Yet, strangely, I am only aware of this on my return.”
A little later Alec grew pensive once again.
“I wonder why it took me so long to understand what Sandra was saying.” There was self-deprecating disbelief in his voice.
“You’re thinking of her ‘just live’ admonition?”
“Yes.” The frown remained on his brow, but his voice recovered its confidence. “She didn’t mean us to ‘just live’ at all. Not in the sense that most people would understand it. ‘Just living’ could easily be understood as living passively, in an attitude of indifference. It could be that in this sense many people ‘just live’. Like little vegetables. That’s not at all what she meant!”
“She meant for us to live in the present. ‘Live now’ is what she’d really said?” Suzy read his thoughts before he could enunciate them.
“Precisely. She’d meant that we all continuously create our realities. In the present. She meant that if we shut off the past and the future, only then we we’ll able to experience ‘just living’. When we live each moment fully...”
She smiled. She never felt as close to Alec as she did since they began roaming the universe together.
“But if we are all individuals, whose worlds are we aware of?” He heard Suzy’s thought inside his own mind.
“Our worlds overlap. You and I like the same books, same paintings, music, flowers, trees, nature… if we share a great deal, and particularly if we share our beliefs, our universes will overlap. It’s like sharing the genetic code. We merge. To the extent we share what we like—I prefer the term love, because love unites—to that extend we share our creations.”
After a long pause she asked: “Are you my creator?”
“I am the creator of my image of you, even as you are of mine,” he was speaking aloud. “The closer our images of each other get to the truth, the more our realities will overlap.”
“When two or three are gathered in my name…” Suzy quoted an old memory. “the more your and my I am, our individual globules of light merge...”
“You are my light,” he whispered.
The weekend was over. Back in LA apartment Matt stood at the door, his coat dressed over his arm.
“You won’t be needing me, Dr. Baldwin,” he said. “I’ll be on my way, if you don’t mind.”
“What?” Alec got to his feet and took two steps towards Matt. He swayed, then staggered. Matt remained perfectly still. He didn’t move one muscle to help him. Alec took another step towards his towering male nurse, the man to whom he virtually owed his survival. “B-b-but... but y-you can’t, Matt. You just...”
“You don’t need me any more, Sir.”
The most Alec had walked at the time were three steps between the table and the settee.
“But were will you go?” Alec couldn’t imagine having dinner without Matt sitting at the other end. “What will you do?”
“I have a ticket to Tunisia, Sir.”
“Tunisia? Why on earth Tunisia?”
“There is a blind man there who needs my help.”
“But
how can you help a blind man?”
“I’ll tell him, Sir, that Allah is All-powerful.”
“Didn’t J-jesus say s-something similar…”
Alec was bubbling. He was playing for time, searching his mind for something to say, to keep Matt for a little longer. He learned to rely on Matt far more than he cared to admit, even to himself. It would feel like loosing my right hand, he thought. Why do we take so much for granted? Was Matt really going? My God, how ungrateful I’ve been to him.
“So did a number of Hebrew prophets, Sir.”
Matt glanced at Sacha who left his toys and was staring directly into Matt’s eyes. Silence stretched. And then Alec felt that there was more light in the room. As if someone were playing with the dimmer switch over the dining table. Only no one was.
“You really are going, aren’t you?” Alec was calmer now.
It was beginning to sink in. Suzy was standing, her arms hanging loosely at her sides. She had grown very fond of Matt, only she’d never told him that. In fact, they hardly spoke at all. How strange, she thought. Yet, I always felt that I knew him. I mean, really knew him…
“We all have our purpose, Ma’am,” Matt addressed Suzy with his usual courtesy. He allowed his coat to slide onto the back of a chair. “We grow by fulfilling it.” And he looked at Sacha again. Their eyes met for the last time. Then he bowed and moved towards the door.
They haven’t even heard his footsteps. Strange, Alec thought, incongruously, a man that size moving so quietly. Then he grabbed Matt’s coat, staggered, then run after him into the hall. Matt was gone.
“Perhaps he won’t need his coat in Africa,” Alec mumbled. He felt lost, as if part of him evaporated into thin air.
Suzy, her eyes wide, was staring at her husband.
“What?” he asked. “What is it?”
“Y-y-you r-ran to the hall...” she stammered.
Alexander: [Alexander Trilogy Book Two] Page 33