by Unknown
We arrived at the terrace around the time the sun was setting. At some point, for some inexplicable reason, all those who were sitting on the terrace, stood up and started heading towards the second balcony. Everyone had stopped talking and the only thing you could hear was the twittering of the birds. We hadn’t yet arrived when Silvia beckoned me to go closer. We joined them and I was impressed by the religious devotion that characterised everybody’s behaviour even though we were outdoors, not in a church. But suddenly, I heard a melody, a very familiar one indeed. “It’s ours! Ours! Of our time!” I thought. I then realised it was a part from Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. No matter how much time has passed, it hasn’t been forgotten! I felt the need to say something to Silvia; a word, a name, something. But I barely managed to stifle a cry of joy inside me. Only a castaway who sees the vessel that will save him approaching, after days at sea, can feel the way I felt at that moment: a feeling of salvation and incredible pride. I wished that Stefan was there to tell me why, if such a strange barbarity characterised my time, modern culture now takes its works of art and turns them into prayers. “Listen, Stefan!” I would say, “This comes from an era that you call ‘prehistoric’!”
The symphony played for quite a while. The dusk had already fallen, when I noticed the tear-filled eyes of two of the people next to me, who were devoutly listening as the prophetic words of the chorus faded out, words that cried faith for the great destiny of humanity, words that were written more than twenty centuries ago…
Froh, wie seine Sonne fliegen
Durch des Himmels pracht’gen Plan
Laufet, Bruder, eure Bahn,
Freudig, wie ein Held zum Siegen
(As joyously as His suns fly
across heaven's splendid map,
follow, brothers, your appointed course,
gladly, like a hero to the victory)
As soon as night fell, the environment around us changed completely. We were about to leave because we had told the group that we’d have dinner all together, when we heard the first young voices and saw the first bonfires on the nearby mountaintops and in the clearings of the woods on the opposite slopes. Little by little the songs multiplied and so did the fires and the phrase “The new Cives... The new citizens!” was chanted by every mouth. We learnt that thousands of young men and women had just completed their two-year service yesterday and would stay here tonight, in the "palaces of the foreigners". They had already put spare tables and chairs all over the ground and first floor and had made many preparations that we hadn’t even noticed. If you looked around, you wouldn’t find a single unhappy or dissatisfied person, as though everyone was possessed by the charm of the old beloved tradition. Even older people were singing along to a few songs they remembered from their time of service. The “partners” on the other hand, the future Cives—still children—bubbled with excitement, enjoying in advance the bliss of the “great day” which, for them, was due in a couple of years, but still, today it had at least interrupted the monotony of work.
The new citizens are burning their deep green, silken work-suits. The ritual will soon be over and several of these young men and women will spend the night at our Civesgard. But we need to go. As we leave, I see all the gestels together for the first time; these majestic hotels must number over 100 in the whole area. I hadn’t realised how many they were during the daytime but, now, as I see them glowing from above, they look like an entire state of hotels that spread further than the eye can see!
THE ESSENCE OF SAMITH AND THE GLIMPSE OF THE GREAT BEYOND
14-X
Stefan and I went for a one-hour walk in the Albiel forest, just the two of us. It was another precious day and the whole thing reminded me of my first walks in the company of Father Jacob. At the time, I was overcome by bitter scepticism and lack of faith. How many great and incredible things have happened to me since then! This time, I might have not had a very educated clergyman by my side, but then again, the people of today seemed to know much more and at a younger age than any of the educated men and women of our time; it is as if they are redeemed from doubt.
“Stefan, promise me that you’ll take me to the Valley of the Roses when the time comes,” I urged him in a warm voice. “I think I more than deserve to come with you. Please promise this to me! You know how much I’ve suffered… It’s only fair that you satisfy my request.
My words left him a tad pensive. Avoiding my gaze, he gave no answer. I continued, “Think about it! Not even Jaeger would object to this. I remember his words: ‘Trust Stefan; he will lead you through everything.’ And then he stressed that I need to look more into the great spiritual paths that have now been opened to humankind.”
“But who would object?” asked Stefan in complete honesty. “It’s just sad to realise that you still believe that the Nibelvirch is a question of place and that the Valley of the Roses has some kind of magical power. You will be disappointed. Do you too think you’re ready? If only you knew how many of us think we’re ready and how few actually are…”
He then asked me, changing topic, “Did you take a look at the books I gave you?”
I had to tell him the truth, that is, that I had understood very little on the subject of Volkic Knowledge. It wasn’t that their modern, rich in Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian roots, universal language—a corrupted mixture of Danish and American, I would call it—was too difficult for me to understand. On the contrary; the problem was in the meaning and in the very specialised terminology mentioned in these books without the slightest explanation, as well as in a few completely unknown words of the old language used by the Ilectors of the Valley.
I was overwhelmed with enthusiasm and eagerness in anticipation of finally discovering this “knowledge”, which I now knew existed and was widespread among people after so many centuries. That’s why Stefan’s words about my upcoming disappointment jolted me back to earth. I saw him looking at me initially with surprise and immediately after with a light-hearted smile, like an adult who’s realising the naivety of a small child.
“Now I see how useless the books I gave you to read were. And it’s normal to have felt and understood so little of what you have read. Did you truly believe that we have conquered the pure essence of these great things and have actually managed to make it our own? Do you belittle and undervalue the essence of the Great Reality so much that you would think that it’s so accessible to our cognition and mental abilities?
“It isn’t my belief,” I replied in a voice that faded along with my hopes. “Everybody shared the same belief in my time. And to think that the main supporters of this belief were the world’s greatest minds of the era, who are still being cited and referred to nowadays. Each of these spiritual leaders analysed how the biggest questions about the world, life and the origin of God and reality could be explained. And they seldom agreed with each other. Each of them had their own interpretation. But there was one thing they all agreed on: that the substance and texture of the Great Reality is not impenetrable to human perception. The Indians, Chinese, Egyptians, Greeks and other Europeans after the Renaissance believed that they had found the explanation or, at least, that they were very close to finding it. And of course, everybody thought that their own theory was the correct one.”
“You’re right,” said Stefan. He didn’t say anything else for a while, as if he was contemplating the past. “You’re right, that’s how it was back then; and not only in your time but even for a great while after it, until the time of the first Nibelvirch, a couple of centuries ago. The world lacked so many wise teachings until then. But only when the Oversyn came, along with the acquisition of direct knowledge, did we realise that reality is so incredibly great that our poor perception and rational organisation and our ‘antennas’ in general are in no position to capture its essence.”
“So the Nibelvirch didn’t really offer you the knowledge of the Great Reality…” I murmured.
“The knowledge of its essence, no−only a ‘superhuman’ cogniti
on could perhaps understand it or at least conceive of it. But it did offer us the knowledge of its existence in a direct and obvious way, completely different from the teachings of your time. And that’s what ultimately rescued and redeemed us, putting an end to our metaphysical doubts once and for all. Because it’s one thing to have people telling you and trying to convince you that something bigger than you exists, but it’s another thing to see the light within you and feel its existence yourself!”
“So were we and all our teachings wrong about everything, all those years? Was no part of our knowledge right?”
“On the contrary; we consider them the first attempts of humankind to approach the Light and therefore we greatly appreciate and honour them! But all this surfaced only because of the Nibelvirch; it all originated from the nostalgia and the thirst for the Samith, as were the greatest works of art and all great human accomplishments. This thirst of spirit and soul for a godlike destination and proof of our superhuman origins is what makes us idealise and beautify thousands of aspects of our everyday life in this poor earthly environment: virtue, forgiveness, friendship, humanism, youth, beauty, justice, happiness, freedom, affection. The lack of the Samith is the deepest source of all great works of intellect.”
And the truth is that man’s destiny in our time was to be born, to love, to hurt and to die. Seemingly, at least. But because man's consciousness intuitively knew that something bigger was concealed behind appearances; it couldn’t tolerate this explanation and rebelled.
“We could not explain it,” I said, “and we secretly wished to have been born robots without the ability or the need to conceive of all these things since they are so alien and inapproachable anyway, so incompatible with real life.”
“They’re only incompatible in the poor and temporally finite environment of this world and life. But if nothing bigger existed, none of our thoughts and concepts like eternity, infinity or God would exist either. The innate mental propensity for perfection would not exist and neither would the Platonic world, Buddhism, or even Christianity—to speak in your own language. Acts of self-sacrifice such as Socrates’ refusal to flee, the 300 of Leonidas or even the crucifixion of Jesus, never would have happened in human history.”
I didn’t want to speak or listen anymore. I had entered another dimension, a different, more empirical world of questions and answers. There were already far too many concepts I needed to contemplate. However, I felt that a gap had somehow been filled inside me, that many questions had been answered and many doubts resolved; yet more were born out of their ashes.
INFINITY, AFTERLIFE AND THE ORIGINS OF THE ETERNAL IMPULSE TO DO GOOD
14-X Again
(Late at night)
From yesterday's conversation with Stefan I saw why these people are concerned with the major “historic” cases of the least famous and low-profile altruist: unknown people who did not go down in history, such as convicts serving long sentences, who changed their inner world, or random parents with stories of incredible acts of sacrifice. People here believe that, although such acts haven’t been registered in the collective memory of mankind through history, once recorded, they are equally as important as any famous act and that they haven’t been lost.
Stefan told me that they had known about the sanctity of human suffering since the era of Christianity and that the Nibelvirch had simply helped them realise how significant this moral value was. I asked him his opinion of Christianity and he told me that it was a very comforting religion that worthily stood in for direct knowledge for thousands of years. His words made me feel very good and boosted my faith that had begun to falter with everything that I have seen since I woke up here.
“Not that we have now grasped the meaning of life. On the contrary; but even the fact that we know how indescribably great the reality objectively is, and the fact that we know it exists for everyone, sooner or later, is enough to free us and grant us salvation. The time-space continuum, you see, is not exactly as imagined by human perception. Infinity and the ever-present are one and the same. Objective reality is multi-dimensional. Numbers, matter, the spirit, individuals, ideas or infinity do not exist separately, but all together. If we could penetrate the true meaning of each of the aspects of the Samith, the Great Reality, then we would also feel God. We would be able to understand the purpose, texture and meaning of life. We would acquire a wisdom superior to that of humans. But that just can’t happen, my friend… Direct knowledge, the Nibelvirch, showed us that the physical universe, creation, God, infinity and all these notions, are mere aspects, mere sides of the Great Reality. And there is a multitude of other sides, inconceivable to humans.”
According to Stefan, after the Nibelvirch, man's attempt to reduce all phenomena of the world and life to a single "principle" has remarkably decreased. Now people see many aspects of reality as components of the Samith. He kept reiterating that only a small part of it can be sensed by our antennas. That’s as far as our “knowledge capabilities” go. “I know, my good friend, and you understand how much more difficult that makes my life. My own antennas are even smaller than yours”, I thought to myself.
I was, however, encouraged by the view that in the Great Reality nothing goes to waste and nothing is ever lost. Even if everything else is destroyed, our spirit will find a way to manifest itself—probably somewhere else—but what matters is that it will. Today, it is argued that the purpose of life is clearly the self-cultivation of the spirit— particularly for our species and for life on our planet—and that’s as far as humans can go. As Jaeger told me, man’s life purpose should be the steady upward course towards an increasingly spiritual culture. People will never understand the larger purposes of life, no matter what they do.
The big difference is that, nowadays, the anonymous hero, the martyr of everyday life is never forgotten and that’s because they understood the sanctity of human suffering: the acts of love for your fellow man, forgiveness, patience, sensitivity, compassion and self-sacrifice bring the person one step closer to the divine. In their eyes, inner man is a whole new world. And that’s because they believe that the real world lacks the secret of the almost symmetrical composition of the individual and the universe, the microcosm and the macrocosm, the aspect, that is, of the natural world, which is also one aspect of the Samith.
All this was not completely unfamiliar to me. I was surprised, though, by the fact that Stefan was talking in a way as if he weren’t another simple person like everyone else, but as if he were standing on the other side, on the side of the laws of creation. Anna inadvertently came to mind again, the memory of our last meeting on the hill with the windflowers.
“Stefan, it has happened to me before, in my normal life, to hear a person speaking the way you speak, as if standing higher on the human scale than the rest of us.”
He replied, almost offended, that he wasn’t speaking from a position of superiority, but it was just that the human standards were higher and more enlightened now than in my days. I fell silent…
“It’s alright. You don’t have to say anything if you do not wish to. What was the name of this “precursor” that you came across? If we go to the Valley you may see their statue along with the others.”
“No, no, she wasn’t famous... She was nothing but a noble existence that died young and unknown.”
This time we both stopped talking. Stefan was the first to break the silence. “Why are you so surprised by the way I think? After all that we have seen, how could we possibly think in the same old way that you did? Now we have a tangible reason to keep our soul more serene.”
I couldn’t help myself and said, “You mentioned before that nothing is ever lost. Did you see that too or is it just an assumption? What difference does it make for me how big reality is if I’m no longer here to see it? Tell me, Stefan, what did you see about the afterlife? Is there a better world beyond this one?”
“That’s how it used to be divided and defined, I know: the past, the present and the future. Bu
t we do not divide it like that anymore. Now we know that life is one as is the world; one entity, one essence. Reality is fluid and the environment of our life, including us, is a small subdivision of the Samith. Reality is everything, and nothing that exists in it can ever be lost; and this certainty, as I told you, this inclusion in the Samith, is sufficient to keep us away from all the pain and past doubts.”
He talked to me about the voluntary return to organic life, to fight again, to gain new experiences, to be challenged, to love, to hurt, to give ourselves unconditionally, to learn to do good, not because we have to but because we want to, because of an internal impulse. With all this as our tools and guardians, we can accomplish our mission and shorten the road to our godlike destination. “To some extent, we create our own destiny,” he said verbatim, much like a theosophist of our time. He also talked to me about “the barrier of oblivion”, which isolates this life from the knowledge and recollection of former ones. He then asked me how it is possible to not have heard, in our time, any teachings or interpretations that even vaguely resembled the principles of Volkic knowledge. I told him that there were a few similar views and ideas on the subject, but they were relatively tentative and too weak to be heard outside of certain intellectual circles.
He respectfully spoke of the great figures of the past, whom he described as “precursors”. He mentioned the names of Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Jesus, several Eastern figures I do not remember, Plotinus, St. Augustine and Origen, Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza and Kant. From the 19th century he spoke of Engels and Kierkegaard, who are now considered among the greatest. Beyond that, he said the era of one-sided technological prosperity that followed and lasted for about five hundred years, created a climate that was not conducive to the emergence of great spiritual figures and teachings. The next names he mentioned were of some great intellectual minds of the Valley of the Roses and especially Chillerin from the Aidersen Institute.
