‘But this should never stop us from exploring the extremes and potential in ourselves,’ Luke said. ‘We have discovered something wonderful. Now is the time to accept this challenge and to see where it takes us. Like exploring outer space. We must literally open our minds and see where we can go from here.’
It was becoming very difficult to get a grip on what we were achieving. I felt confused and overwhelmed at times. But then after experiencing another conjoining I was filled with inspiration and energy to complete our divine task. It had never been done before. Human spirits all in touch with each other at once. Individual life and emotions are already amazing – so imagine the collective power created with all of us working together. Attempting to discuss what happened next became overly complicated, though, and we dug ourselves into a bog of doubt, surrounded by mists of misunderstanding, and trapped in tangled threads of logic and reason. This existed beyond the realms of logic and reason. Instead we thrived on impulse and spontaneity. We had to have faith in what we were hoping to achieve, with a great deal of courage in our agreed convictions. Sometimes that’s all you can do. Put more simply: there are times when you have to make a decision, trust that decision and then just go for it. Do everything in your power to make it happen, even if you have doubts or second thoughts. What else is there? How else could we ever get things done? I’m always filled with doubt over just about everything I ever do. That’s where principles become important. There must be something steady or immoveable in your life. We all need that little bit of security, otherwise life becomes chaotic and frightening. And who wants that?
Luke became excited – obsessed even.
He swore he heard Gaia speaking to him.
‘It’s not a “voice” exactly. It’s a part of me – of us.’
‘So it’s a thought then, or your conscience,’ I replied, sceptically.
‘Well, it’s really thoughts that pop into my head that are not mine.’
‘Like what happens when we are numens, reading each other’s thoughts?’
‘No. It’s different,’ he insisted.
‘How?’
‘It’s much more powerful. It takes over every part of my body and mind all at once.’
‘How can you be sure that it’s not just the thoughts of someone else you’re connected to, or that you’re not constructing this “voice” yourself? Perhaps you want to hear Gaia so much that you are deluding yourself?’
‘Hmm, possibly. It does sometimes feel like I’m going crazy. Hearing voices is a sign of madness after all.’ Luke went silent, considering my suggestion. ‘Meeting Guy was the beginning of my descent into insanity.’
‘I don’t believe you’re mad, Luke,’ I added hastily. ‘But I agree that this whole thing lies dangerously on the edge of madness. We don’t really know what we’re doing.’
‘True. So anything I say or claim must be tested.’
I nodded. ‘The best way to approach all things, I find, is with an open mind and a healthy dose of scepticism.’
‘And trust in your natural instincts.’
‘Perhaps we need to somehow all focus our energy your way so that you can hear Gaia. Perhaps you are the vessel, the conduit. We need to channel all her energy to you, so you can receive any message she has for us.’
Luke’s expression went from contemplative to frowning. ‘No. That sounds wrong. It’s not really about me. I made that mistake already. It’s not about one person being the focus. No one person is any more important than any other. It’s about being connected. Guy used to talk about invisible webs and the interconnectedness of all things. That’s the answer.’
Luke made more frequent visits to his parents, sometimes with me and sometimes without, each time with varying degrees of success, in terms of ‘curing’ her. Luke felt he should be able to. He asked us as a collective consciousness to aid him, but I wondered if such ‘power’ – for want of a better word – was meant to help individuals or to help the whole world. I didn’t dare suggest to Luke that this might be an abuse of our new-found energy. Arthur had begun to have visions of becoming something ‘other’, which sounded familiar to me. I’d had dreams and vivid hallucinations about swimming underwater just before I changed into Delphinus. But it was hard to gauge how Sally was taking it all. She resisted, of course, but Luke had managed to get her to journey into her imagination and collective consciousness enough for her to be questioning all that we consider to be ordinary. It was just that her responses were often random and incredibly angry.
On one occasion she threw me against the wall as if possessed and rammed the heel of her hand into Luke’s nose, making it bleed profusely, but luckily not breaking it.
‘Get out! Just leave me alone. I hate you!’
Luke didn’t know how to deal with these moments. I felt it wrong to question him, whatever my beliefs were about his aims. I loved her and wanted her well, too, but wasn’t the healing of our planet just as – or more – important? There was no logical argument for this. I just had to support Luke and let him work his way through this one. It was a moral dilemma, but now was not the time for reasoned debate. Luke was learning some difficult lessons.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The next time we merged I listened as carefully as I could. I know ‘listen’ is the wrong word. I tried to be open and aware. A million new thoughts flickered and echoed inside me, but whose words and images were they? Were they mine? Did they belong to the people and numens I was connected to? Being in a room with dozens of people all chattering at once was bad enough, so millions simultaneously inside your head is enough to drive you crazy.
In fact, exactly that problem occurred. Quite a few hundred numens had to drop out from our experiments as glimpsing the divine drove them to madness. Some had to literally be pulled away and taken to hospital because they’d turned into gibbering wrecks.
Others dropped out or couldn’t reconcile such new-age, hippy nonsense with their own existing religious or rationalistic beliefs. What we were trying to achieve demanded absolute open-mindedness; something very difficult to find, even in our modern, tolerant world.
We tried mantras and songs, poetry and meditations, breathing as one, until Luke suggested something both obvious and radical.
‘We need to listen. It’s not about us pleading or begging. We are just adding more noise to the universe when in actual fact what we need to do is shut up and listen. Listening is not just about being quiet, it’s an active skill. Listening involves settling your own mind into a ready openness. Then you stay still and silent as the other person speaks. To listen means to clear your mind completely of worries, prejudice and any other thoughts. You concentrate on the person talking and give them your whole self.’
‘You have a point,’ I said. ‘Some people think that listening is allowing someone to talk for a minute while they are preparing their own next speech. That’s not listening at all.’
‘Exactly. Listening – and I mean really listening – takes time and energy and lots of self-control.’
‘The hardest bit is clearing your own mind of thoughts, fears, memories and desires,’ Hudor said. ‘Vriksha has much to say about this. He has been around for hundreds of years and has learnt to pace his mind and thoughts, but it’s a very difficult discipline to master.’
‘What we need to do is practice and learn,’ Luke said excitedly. ‘Not as individuals but in union; in our connectedness.’
‘Yes, learn to be still and patient. It goes against everything that modern western culture tells us.’
‘So we have to unlearn everything we have been taught,’ Luke said with a wry smile. ‘I remember Guy saying exactly that. Now I understand what he meant. We’re brought up to think that what we have learned is normal. Our idea of normal is just what we are used to. It’s not the only way. There must be better ways, but we are just too limited in our imaginations to see the true reality around us.’
‘Plus, nobody can have a phone with them,’ I said with a gigg
le.
‘Definitely no phones. No Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat – any of them.’
‘I hate it when I try to talk to someone and they’re just sneaking a look on their phone,’ I said with a sigh.‘It’s possibly the worst habit of our modern culture.’
Luke had a phone but now only used it for emergencies. I didn’t own one. One of the things about being a numen was that when you change into the animal, bird, plant or element you lose everything that is human, such as clothes, phone, wallet and so on, so having possessions only held you back. When I transform into Hoopoe or Dolphin I love the fact that I am entirely free. Free from worrying about money, work, ambition, being popular, getting a hundred likes for a photo of my lunch …
Don’t get me wrong. Being an animal has its own stresses, such as being hunted and killed by a predator – particularly a human – or of not finding enough food to eat each day. But that ability to not think and worry is a gift. Animals are patient, determined, focussed and tenacious. Humans could learn so much from that approach. Which is why being a numen is a life-changing experience. Everyone needs to be a rock or a tree for a few days. That gives you an utterly new perspective on life.
So that’s what we did.
The millions of us ready to conjoin threw away all our phones and technology. For the time we were together nobody could use or think the words ‘I’ or ‘me’. The only personal pronouns allowed were ‘we’, ‘us’ and ‘our’. Luke, Vriksha, Hudor and I travelled around the world training groups in the skills required.
The disappearance of Gene was both a relief and a concern. We had to be aware of any sudden attacks, and the fact that he lay low meant he was probably plotting something. And was he alone or working for a bigger agency?
Luke still received the odd death threat and his movements around the world had to be limited, and very carefully scheduled and planned. We couldn’t trust the media, and some governments still, so we used Gaia’s own Internet and social media channels to pull things together.
We even found ways of ensuring we all connected physically to make the bonds stronger. Here the elemental numens came to the fore, as they could span huge distances of air, water and desert by activating whole continental plates of rock, connecting all grains of sand and soil, or by vibrating the air into spindles and threads. Plant, coral and marine numens created cables of roots and other living materials that stretched across entire oceans.
Ceta helped me here too, arranging pods of whales and dolphins to connect islands to continents. These intelligent creatures understood our intentions and willingly helped. It was emotional to be a part of it.
Animals that were not even numens seemed to understand what we were doing. Insects amassed in their trillions and joined in without coercion. The natural world was coming together and each separate part knew instinctively what to do. Plants and trees interlocked and connected; snakes and lizards created wires that ran the vast lengths of the continental deserts. Other creatures like frogs just fused together into gigantic mounds containing thousands of single amphibians at a time. These mega-balls gave off a terrific amount of energy, directed towards us. It worked! Amazingly enough the experiments proved so successful that we brought in the best scientists and engineers to look at the applications for such energy creation. Giant technological steps were being taken, at a speed unprecedented in history. And we’d always thought things had moved on rapidly in our own generation but that was nothing to how our lives would probably be changed in the next few years. What a time to be alive!
‘The planet has been damaged,’ Luke explained in one interview. We felt the message had got through and now the Gaia Foundation had to consolidate its influence. Uncountable numens populated the world. New ways of living had already been adopted to revolutionise the way we lived on this planet. The world now needed someone to lead us into the new era. ‘So now it begins – the process of self-healing – and we are an essential part of it. Especially as we caused the damage in the first place. We humans – collectively – have to accept our responsibility. We’ve gone beyond blaming corporations, governments and individuals. We have to accept the responsibility as a species and now do everything we can to right those wrongs. Whether you are a rich person whose businesses pollute the rivers and seas, a politician who voted against environmentally-friendly policies, or just a person who has thrown a piece of plastic on the floor, we are responsible together – every single one of us. Stop pointing the finger and blaming others, and now step forward to do your duty. Your planet needs you. This is our only chance of changing things.’
We undertook training in those exercises that Guy had taught us: how to merge with each other; how to become part of a tree; how to experience being water or rock. We trained people into knowing the difference and similarities between being as colossal as a mountain and as tiny as an atom, and why each is as important as the other. Being able to become water, air or soil makes you realise why it is so essential to treat them with respect and care. By experiencing the changing seasons, years, millennia and epochs of history, it gives a fresh understanding of life beyond your own ephemeral existence. Of course, each life is precious and important, but we do overstate our significance, especially to ourselves.
And then it happened … we started to hear the voice Luke mentioned. At first it was a kind of humming, difficult to separate from rogue thoughts that crept in from those whose discipline hadn’t yet been perfected. Those interruptions never lasted for long and we learnt how to filter them out. But this humming never stopped. Though ‘humming’ was the wrong word. There was no word for it. Then it came to us as an image, initially out of focus but gradually became clearer and clearer. We knew exactly what to do.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
We submerge into the earth itself. Our limbs become roots and fungus rhizomorphs; they turn into trickles of water that lead to subterranean streams; they change into igneous and metamorphic rocks reaching down into the Earth’s core; they are sedimentary rock, such as limestone, filled with caverns and surprising forms of life; they transform into earthworms and nematodes that live within the rock itself; or even into chains of bacteria – microbes that exist purely on electrical energy. Together we become the Earth’s crust, mantle and core.
We inhabit the sea as plankton, algae, giant schools of fish, fronds of seaweed that stretch for mile upon mile, and as the water itself that spills over millions of square miles as well as into trenches deeper than Everest is tall.
We stretch up into the air as giant oaks and redwoods; we become fog and mist reaching out like wispy tendrils until we fill the entire sky with our rain-filled clouds. We are the oxygen and nitrogen. We are the carbon and the silicon, the iron, aluminium and magnesium, the calcium, sodium and potassium. The sulphur and chlorine … we take on so many different forms.
We rise upwards as helium and, as we push beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, we transform into hydrogen atoms. The changes are beyond our understanding; beyond our control. Who is controlling us? Luke? But he is part of us. Gaia? Initially we sense only bewilderment.
Up in the darkness of space we see things as they really are. It’s not a vacuum at all. Space is a very thin plasma that conducts electromagnetic radiation – solar rays. As hydrogen atoms we are dispersed widely, not packed together like the molecules in Earth’s atmosphere.
We drift. At least, it feels like drifting, but in reality we are travelling at 67,000 miles per hour. We always are on Earth. Each time we sit still for a minute we have actually sped over a thousand miles on our vast orbit around the sun.
And then we connect as atoms, molecules and compounds, increasing in density. As if we’ve become a black hole, we draw all matter towards us. Millions of galaxies, each containing billions of stars. Each star is a sun with its own solar system filled with planets, dwarf planets, moons, comets, asteroids, meteoroids, cosmic dust and orbital debris. All this is part of us as well as the miniscule electrons and photons, plus particle
s unknown to human science and understanding. Possibly anti-particles too. The colossal and the microscopic elements combine until size, volume and weight become irrelevant.
Eventually we become everything in the universe – a gigantic mass that is beyond our comprehension. All condensed into our one body. As if all the oceans were being poured into a thimble.
We become dark matter and dark energy.
And we understand everything.
Set out before us is five billion years of creation. Every microsecond exists at once. The beginning of light and sound and time and life. Substance and matter increase into shapes swirling and vibrating then colliding and smashing outwards. Ferocious explosions of light and energy force objects to shoot off at unimaginable speeds and distances.
We witness the formation of nebulae in an ultraviolet glow; supernovae; our own spiral galaxy – the Milky Way; of our sun emerging from a giant molecular cloud. We see how it develops over billions of years getting brighter. From that same beginning came the planets in our solar system, forming gradually from asteroids and planetesimals into a molten, volcanic, and poisonous mass of fire. Geological changes show cooling into rock and the very gradual signs of water and life. Unrecognisable continents of land shift into differing shapes; an atmosphere appears covering the new oceans only to freeze into ice for lengthy periods. Then come climate changes and enormous upheavals of tectonic plates, creating new continents and mountain ranges. Eventually plants, trees and grass cover the land, and the seas rise and shift. Eventually, breathing, moving life emerged: amoeba; insects; fish; reptiles; birds; mammals … primates.
Suddenly, scars appear in the forests then towns, cities and farmed landscapes appear stretched over the land. Homo sapiens arrive to claim the planet as their own; conquering nature and bringing agriculture, civilisation and technology to a once healthy planet. Forests are cleared. Villages, towns and cities spread like a disease into ugly urban bruises. Smoke and effluents choke the atmosphere. It happens so quickly. A horrible rapid end to billions of years of existence.
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