Education

In the old school all initiative was with the teacher. Education was listening to a teacher. If you wanted to know something, instead of discovering for yourself you asked the teacher.

How would you like to be in a club where the members are always divided into two: those who decide and those who obey, those for whom everything is allowed and those for whom everything is forbidden? Well, this was our world of adults and children, students and teachers. And the first thing to go in our new education is that distinction between adults and children—that horrible discovery of the 17th century. There are only growing souls, those of the adults as well as those of the children, and there is no end to education.

In the schools of the future there are no teachers. There are some students who are more eager to learn than others, who know better how to organize a team, to make intellectual discoveries and organize mental play. There are some students who are more enthusiastic when they speak about a new book they have discovered in the library, some who like to use on young friends who drop in, eager to learn, some newfound capacity to explain. The relationship of teacher and student is replaced by friendship, common purpose, common understanding, common discovery, common play. The teacher is the guide, the friend, the fellow who knows a lot and can explain clearly. And he is always learning.

_The true secret, whether with child or man, is to help him to find his deeper self, the real psychic entity within. That, if we ever give it a chance to come forward, and still more if we call it into the foreground as “the leader of the march set in our front” will itself take up most of the business of education out of our hands and develop the capacity of the psychological being towards a realization of its potentialities of which our present mechanical view of life and man and external routine methods of dealing with them prevent us from having any experience or forming any conception._

_From beyond the frontiers of form,_
_a new force can be evoked,_
_a power of consciousness_
_which has not yet manifested_
_and which, by its emergence,_
_will be able to change the course of things_
_and bring to birth a new world._
_For the true solution of the problem_
_of suffering, ignorance and death_
_is not the individual escape by self-annihilation_
_from earthly miseries_
_into the non-manifest,_
_nor a problematical collective escape_
_from universal suffering_
_by an integral and final return of the creation_
_to its creator,_
_thus curing the universe by abolishing it,_
_but a transformation,_
_a total transfiguration of matter_
_brought about by the logical continuation_
_of Nature’s ascending march_
_in her progress towards perfection,_
_by the creation of a new species_
_that will be in relation to man_
_what man is in relation to the animal_
_and that will manifest upon earth_
_a new force,_
_a new consciousness_
_and a new power._

True education will always follow definite steps.

The first step is the evocation, when he who educates calls upon that part in the child which is eternal and divine, to manifest. Wherever there was a true education in the past—the education of the knight, the education of the king, of the priest, of the healer—we always find this evocation.

When that step has succeeded and that which is immortal in the child shines forth, the next step is the initiation. To draw his attention to one of the innumerable doors in the universe where force and beauty and love manifest, to lead him through this door, is initiation.

The third step is identification: the transfer of the whole knowledge, the true tradition, from the consciousness of the teacher into the consciousness of the disciple.

There is nothing complicated in these three steps. They are simple movements of the psychic being of the teacher and of the taught. No words are necessary. They can all be done in silence or with simple gestures. Wherever we look in the history of our human past we find examples—from the paleolithic tribe to medieval alchemy, from the dance of David to the flower sermon of the Buddha, from the cave paintings to Dada, from the ancient hunters 30,000 years ago to the silent watchers of the radio telescopes.

First the silent community of the sacred is established, the silent communication between the teacher and the taught, and finally the total transmission of the total unformulated truth which is passed on to the student to be formulated again in his own individual way, new for each individual, new for each generation.

There is still another, a last movement:
the fusion of teacher and taught,
bliss fused with bliss
and knowledge with knowledge
on the summits of Being.

And another Master is born.

Once it has become clear to us that we must distinguish between education and instruction in order to know what we speak about, it is clear also that this distinction does not mean separation. It is not necessary that there should be institutions for instruction and other institutions for education. But their aims lead to different poles of our being. Instruction leads to specialization and know-how, and education to the simplicity of being, of knowing and understanding. It is because our technology is still primitive that it is complicated, and not, as some people think, that complication is a sign of advancement.

There was a time when languages were quite complicated—Greek for example, and Sanskrit. But the more a language evolves the simpler it becomes. There was a time when cooking was a very complicated business. Look at a medieval cookbook. The more primitive machinery is, the more difficult it is to run. Where we had, in the old physics textbooks, optics and acoustics and electricity, we have nowadays only radiation states of matter. Nothing was more complicated than Ptolemaic cosmology, as opposed to the Kepler-Copernicus system. The riper a civilization gets the less complicated it will be. It is easier to have lunch with the President of the United States than it was with Louis XIV, or with a tribal chieftain, or with a companion gorilla.

Our medical science is complicated, not because we know so much but because we don’t know either what health is, what sickness is, or what healing is. If you want to look at another example of how to make simple things complicated look at theology, which still suffers from the old Roman system it inherited of legal dealing with the gods, in which a specialist was needed, the lawyer-priest. We need lawyers not because law is such a marvellously evolved system of thought, but because it is such a dead-end mess. Sure, we need specialists! We don’t learn “Appendectomy—how to do it yourself”. But we should distinguish more clearly what in our school programmes can be left to specialization and what belongs to the education of every human being.

History is a complicated affair because as yet we don’t know, or we pretend not to know, its meaning. But true education is concerned only with the meaning of things. The dates and the names should be left for specialization. Otherwise the important things will get buried under avalanches of technological know-how.

And what are the important things? How to go to sleep at night, how to dream, how to awaken in the morning, how to think, to eat, to breathe, how to love, how to identify yourself with an animal, with a tree, with a river, a cloud, or a star. It is important to learn how to be silent (talking is already a specialization), how to see instead of how to read, how to know instead of how to do, and how to be instead of how to know.

**Life**—the Spirit seeking Himself
**Truth**—the Spirit within recognizing itself
**Hope**—believing that which is
**Faith**—substance before it is manifested
**Forgiveness**—seeing beyond that which is not
**Freedom**—surrender to Divine Will
**Silence**—the awareness of God within
**Time**—man’s limited vision of eternity
**Now**—All is now, for there never was a moment when we were not.

First I thought:
I shall speak about the ocean.
The ocean is our nearest mother
and the most accessible.
Moreover we live
on the shore of the ocean.
An ocean full of mysteries,
an ocean so big that one can’t get across
and its waves come straight
from the South Pole.
One sees the fishes pass
like living lightning
imprisoned for the fun of it
in the transparency of the waves
as between the glass slides
of a giant laboratory demonstration.
Thousands of crabs dance
marine weightlessness on the sand.
Thousands of butterflies and birds
in their migrations
follow the sacred curve
of the endless coast.

Do you see!
Do you hear!
And for a long time
we have not looked at and listened to
but have seen and heard
the ocean all around us
above us and below.
It was everywhere
and its endless substance
lived in us
and we lived in it.
Its great vibration gave us life
and we gave life to it.
It was the Life.
Everything was full of words
and laughter.
The waves played with one another,
and each one carried its message
like the twinkling of the eye of a star.
That evening the plankton was celebrating
its phosphorescent nuptials
and the ocean added a luminous layer
to all its pearls,
and tomorrow, again and again,
its endless circling
will embrace the earth.
And all the colours will burst forth
at the same time
in each scale of each fish.
And every form will play
at the same time
in every wave of the great mother ocean.

The child saw the same thing as I,
because in her dreams that night
all that we were not able to express
even to ourselves
expressed itself.
That which was too full unrolled itself.
The all-life played its chromatic fantasy
like a long story,
and the child lived in one night
the whole adventure of life in the ocean:
the fairy tale of the amoeba
and of the fish
and of the mermaid,
the beautiful parade of transformations,
the eruption out of the sea,
the conquest of the psychism of the earth.
The next morning the child said:
I was a fish.
And later the ocean disclosed to her
the wholeness of the universe,
the great primordial sun
hidden in the depths of things.
It became evident to her
that everything wants
to communicate with us,
that the whole constantly
wants to express itself,
that the whole universe is a manifestation,
that everything manifests itself
to everything else
and in everything else.

Little is needed
to see, to hear and to be:
a rich and living atmosphere,
a lightning flash of grace,
and the universe takes over
—through the dream
and then in the awareness of waking—
and teaches natural science,
one with living spirituality,
to the children of the future
whom we salute here.

Education doesn’t start in the school; it starts, if we want to mark a beginning, with the first breath, and it is largely terminated when a child starts going to school. By that time the thoughtless daily brutalities of his parents and relatives have toughened him enough so that, if he has not become hopelessly a-social, he will be able to stand the treatment meted out to him in school without much further damage.

The new-born child, in order to survive, has some needs: food, air, shelter. This has always been granted as obvious. His less obvious but in a subtle way much more powerful need, however, is to feel secure, to feel a oneness with his mother and a belonging to a family. The absolute dependence on his mother for all his needs expresses itself in a single powerful instinct to be near her, to be one with her as he has been during the nine months before birth. His sight is not developed, his hearing is not educated; the only feeling he has is in his skin—a feeling of contact. In spite of that, in “civilized” countries, from the moment of birth a child is separated from his mother, first by being wrapped in cloth and then by being tucked away in a separate bed.

Each feeling of insecurity in the mother or in the family will find in the child a powerful sensitive resonator. The father, reading a newspaper, worries about the political situation. No word passes to the child, but at night he has a nightmare. Our feelings and emotions are not confined to our bodies; they flow out and envelop the child. Most parents are careful not to manifest in words or deeds feelings of hostility against each other, but even a fleeting sign of impatience, or a hesitation in a demonstration of love will at that tender age hit the child like a blow.

Very soon a new phase of education starts and he is told: “don’t do this, don’t do that.” Then the universe, which had been one and wide and open, becomes divided into do and don’t. Each don’t is a wall, and each do a compulsion, and life becomes a single giant prison regulation. So then when our child is six years old and starts to school we are proud that he is tough, egocentric, aggressive, early grown old and able to survive the ordeal of school.

### ✶

It is an acceptable practice to do to a child what we would not do to an adult—the adult might hit back, but a child cannot. When we tell a child, “Run out and play now, I want to talk with Auntie,” he naturally feels cut off from the family circle. We would not do that to a stranger standing beside us at a bar. We would not do it to a member of our club, or he would immediately hand in his resignation. The child can’t. He feels only the more intensely having been rejected, cut off from trusted family ties. If he still comes back to the same family it is only because strangers are even more loveless.

The child, like the primitive, lives in a world where words themselves are not important, but the sound, the way they are expressed, the vibration which carries them, the warmth or the coldness of the speech, the patience or the impatience with which they are spoken are all-important. You might think that you can talk to a child about God when you don’t know Him, or say that somebody is in heaven if you don’t believe it, or that something is beautiful if you find it boring. Of course the child won’t tell you that you are a liar, but he will as surely distinguish a lie from the truth as he knows his mother by her voice.

Mind as nature intended it, is an instrument of defense, something like the horns of the buffalo, the tusks of the elephant or the fangs of the wolf. And as an instrument of defense, as a warner of danger, it is superb, the best nature could provide us with. But it is not that magnetic needle which can lead us unerringly into the future. It can only say, “Beware!” It will never say, “Do this regardless of the danger you may meet.” It cannot speak with the sovereign authority of the law of your becoming. This law, different for every individual being, is the only reason we are individuals instead of automatons directed by a mass mind, as the materialists may think, or by a master mind as the theist believes.

### ✶

Each time we tell our children: “You have to do this, you have to do that, this is the rule, the law, this is what everybody does,” we are pouring avalanches of extraneous matter over the deeper roots of their being, preventing them from flowering in their own way.

There was a time in Greece, and it was her Golden Age, when the young men started to school when they were sixteen years old. And in our own medieval ages a young man went to some chosen master and, partaking of his whole daily life with hardly any formal teaching, acquired the knowledge and the wisdom of this master who would one day declare him the companion and colleague.

In ancient India the young prince was sent into the forest, generally for several years, to acquire in an atmosphere of simplicity near to nature, from the myths of his people, their living wisdom and their special mission to which the ancient fathers had given a form vast enough for everyone to grow in and fulfil himself. It is true that technical skills and accumulations of past experience can be best learned in some form of institution as we have them today. But education in itself must become something entirely different. Just as we already have prisons without walls, there will be schools without walls. Schools will be an opportunity, a play and a joy, and not a chore which the sooner it is over the better. In the not-too-distant future adults will have won a 20-hour week, and may then be generous enough to grant it to their children.

### ✶

We have to distinguish between our basic attitudes, the background of our consciousness, and our surface knowledge, knowledge of facts, “book learning”. If we are born in a tribal society, as nomads, or as peasants, or in an industrial region, the background of our consciousness will be different. Things which are important in one are entirely ignored in another. Our attitudes and skills, our desires and longings differ or change fundamentally from one to the other. These changes take place in such a deep layer of our being that we become aware of them only when we meet a human being so basically different from ourselves that we are hardly able to find a common ground. In order to illustrate what I mean, here are two examples:

Australian aboriginals are colour-blind. The nomadic life of a desert hunter does not need colours. He sees things in the desert which other people don’t see, like the kangaroo who passed by three days ago, or the underground water in a dry river bed. But colours—no. No red, no green, no blue; no words for colours. And even when pointed out to him, only a shaking of his head. But the children of these aboriginals, educated in a mission school, see and identify colours. Nobody teaches them “colours”. But they live in an environment in which colours play an important role. The fence around the compound, the school, the books, calendars, clothes—full of colours. But what the old man sees in the desert, they are no longer able to see.

Do you like music? If you are a westerner, if you were born in the West, it will be western music; if you were born in China it will be Chinese music. Do you like classical music, or boogie-woogie? All this does not depend on any teaching. But the surroundings in which you grow up, what your family likes, will be imprinted in the background of your consciousness and influence your own likes and dislikes. Your attitudes towards life, whether optimistic, pessimistic, aggressive or submissive, your longing for beauty, for truth, are either strengthened or marred or crushed by the imprints which you received in your early childhood, generally given, as well as received, in a quite unintentional and subconscious way.

The basis in the young scientist, the future Nobel Prize winner—his spirit of investigation, his indefatigable inquiry into the nature of things, his insatiable curiosity for certain lines of investigation—does not depend on formal schooling, but is encouraged or discouraged in his earliest babyhood. “Do not touch this; don’t go near the fire; children should not play with scissors”—well, here goes that Nobel Prize. “Don’t go outside in the street; stay here with Mother.”—Well, there goes some future leader of an expedition, some world explorer. It is not only inheritance but also the luck of having very understanding and intelligent parents which is the background of almost any great genius of mankind you could name. There are many who for continuous evolution might have had a magnificent inheritance, but whose inheritance has been marred or directed into self-destructive paths by the involuntary shudder of a superstitious mother, or the wrinkling of a forehead or the lifting of eyebrows at just the wrong moment.

The memory of a child is soft and tender, and we allow all kinds of forces to cut their names and slogans and prejudices into that living bark of his tree of knowledge. And then when he arrives at school and has the rare fortune of a teacher who wants to talk to him about the good, the beautiful, the noble endeavours of the past, the shining stars of the future, there is no place to register it. Only so many old scars. True—you have not killed the child, because the human race is a tough race. But surely also you have stolen from him the possibility of being something other than a tough guy.

No god would care to incarnate in such a child.

### ✶

Human beings are not born aggressive. They are basically social beings. And this basic urge to love and to be loved, to collaborate and to be helped, to be with others, to play together, to be liked by everybody, to give and receive kindness, are much more fundamental than our defensive reactions against too much ordering around, too many prohibitions and commandments. The misbehaving brat, the child throwing a tantrum, the stubborn adolescent is not a product of too much indulgence, too much love and consideration, too much admiration or respect. He is the product of ill-humoured, intolerant, over-solicitious or fearful and stupid parents.

Have we enough imagination to picture what a human being could become who has never in his life encountered a movement of impatience or condemnation or criticism, or a single command? You may say that such a person would have no education, no manners, would put his feet on the table, would refuse to work, would be insolent and haughty, caring nothing for the wishes or needs of others, and unable to get along in ordinary life. But these beliefs are superstitions. They are based on no real tests or any sound psychological knowledge or experience.

If we want children truly civilized, which means adapted to an integral planetary civilization, these children will have to grow up in an atmosphere, an environment for which unity is a fact. And this means that all the adults with whom the child is in constant contact will not only have realized this unity in a fundamental experience, but they will have sufficiently transformed their pre-civilized biological inheritance and racial characteristics so that they are able to express in a coherent and constant way, in all their acts, in all their exterior conduct, this consciousness of oneness.

### ✶

As I said in the beginning, such an education seems to be in some distant future. But some day it will come.

There was a golden age when there was no formal education. Life—the life of the family, the life of the tribe—constituted all the education there was. Nobody told anybody else what to do or not to do. Everybody had his place according to his capacity and received everything according to his needs. There is no way back to this golden age. There is only the way forward, to new levels of understanding, to new levels of helping the growing child to develop all his faculties and even those highest of faculties—to love and to sacrifice—in a world without commandments, without walls.

Most children live normally in a world of oneness, a fairy-tale oneness. The animal talks to the tree, the tree talks to the cloud, and the cloud talks to the moon and the stars. Everything is magic, beautiful, mysterious and lovable.

But this world is shattered by our formal education. The tree is sketched on the blackboard with its roots, trunk, branches and leaves. No word is said to the effect that such a tree doesn’t exist, that there is no tree without earth to grow in, no branches without the wind they can swing in, and no leaves without the caress of the sun and the rain. Nowhere on earth has there ever been a time when there was only a single tree. There were always trees, glades, forests. And nowhere in the universe is there a tree without birds, without insects. What would a monkey be without trees, or man without paradise? Not only is the tree a single continuum in space, it is also a continuum in time. There is a tree because there was a mother tree. And the seed cell out of which it grew has been growing and dividing as long as there have been trees.

This knowledge the child, if he is a genius and has some insight, may acquire when he goes beyond his botanical course. But for the moment he learns only to cut things up. There are no flowers in botany as the highest epiphany of plant life, the ecstasy of earth itself under the kiss of the sun. There are only stamens, and pistils, and God-knows-what. The miracle of how a piece of wood could grow into a flower is lost under this scalpel.

And so it is with everything else the school offers the child. Little bits of knowledge cutting up his time—geography here, history there, with no word about the unity of a planet, or the unity of human culture. No. History is the Greeks, the Romans, the barbarians, the invaders, the crusades, the religious wars, the concentration camps.

In his behaviour our child is expected to be restlessly competitive. That the fellow beside him is equally a victim of a ruthless system is overlooked, because he has to be first. He has to finish school if he wants to start being man, a human being. Certainly we do not learn for the school, we learn for life; but life is still the opposite of school, just as teacher is the opposite of student. Can we teach unity, oneness, only by breaking things to pieces?

Can we teach life only by death, paradise only by hell, and love only by hate? Or are there other ways of teaching? Is there some place in this immense universe with its trillions of planets where children are allowed to live the oneness of life, the beginninglessness of life, the endlessness of life; where knowledge is not something in the encyclopedia but something which is danced, sung and enjoyed? Must we always teach our children to take the shadow for the substance, to think that an individual life is life, that an individual birth is birth, that God is not you, and that nature is something to be conquered?

Do we really believe that the fellow who knows when the Magna Carta was signed, or when the Thirty Years’ War broke out, can be a teacher of history, of the unfolding of man, of human consciousness? Do we really think that some Declaration of Independence, some Revolutionary War was more important than the birth of a new star, the birth of a new sea of life? Can we really imagine that when it is Monday today on our little planet it is Monday on all the planets? And do we really believe that it is by witholding from the child the secret that all life is a continuous unfolding of consciousness more and more joyful, that we will enable him to become a good butcher-or-baker-or-candlestick-maker—because we are secretly afraid that if we let him grow into a true human being he will be incapable of it, incapable of being a good citizen, a good husband, or a good provider?

Of course we are all human beings, just as we were all primates. But one day we won’t be human beings any more; we will be something farther along in evolution. And before that time comes we have to stop forcing our children into our human limitations. The day will come when we will open the doors of education and truly lead them—**e-duco**—into the trans-human. And that day the first educational institution on earth will be born. Then we will be able to say to our children: You are the son of man, just as we were the sons of the monkey, the sons of the bird, of the fish, of the amoeba, of the carbon ring, of the atom—the sons of light.

New education looks towards the future,
is based on constant transformation
and does not study things
but relationships between things.

As our old matter has disappeared
into waves of probability
a new stability for our image of the cosmos
had to be found.
This new stability does not belong
to the thing, to the object
but to the relationship
between object and phenomenon.
The new passwords
for a comprehension of the cosmos
are fields of interaction,
continuum and relativity.

Up to now
we have presented to our children
the wrong end of the telescope
a thousand and one little facts
and no relationship.
Reality was put far away
instead of being brought nearer.
We wanted to prove God
by our thousand little facts
thus putting the world between Him and us
instead of proving
the thousand and one little things
by our nearness to God.

Up to now, your teachers have prepared your mental being. But what we have taught you is not enough. You have to grow spiritually. You have to become one with your inner self. You have to find your own individual soul. The religion of your fathers, the religion of mankind’s kindergarten, is not enough. Our official state philosophy—be it the “American way” or “dialectical materialism,” is not enough. Even the most beautiful philosophy is not enough. Agnosticism is not enough.

There is a spirituality of the future. You will have to discover it, to possess it, to enjoy it. It is not to be found in a formula. It is not to be found in any book. Only you will be able to express it to yourself, totally, without words. All that we teachers could do was to indicate a direction. It is in you. It has been built into you for millions of years ever since you were a little carbon ring swimming in the primeval ocean. The time has come for you to be individual beings, diaphanous in your own way, to manifest it, to let it shine through you, to be the hierophants of your own mystery.

## **Elementary school**
**7-8 year olds**
**I.Q. 130-160**

1\. Imagine, mime and dance your arrival on a peaceful mission to an unknown, inhabited planet. Imagine yourself before the reception committee, applying what you have learned in your recent study here of the psychology of terrestrial anthropoids.
2\. Write and organize a ballet for a dwarf sun with seven planets, with satellites, etc.
3\. Weave, in different colours, possible relationships in the continuum of a galaxy.
4\. Invent names and symbols for a binary system.
5\. Invent names of stars and constellations in the sector Epsilon of the universe, given in a 3-dimensional map.

## **Junior high school**
**12-15 year olds**
**I.Q. above 140**

**1. Biology**
Arrange the genetic data for an imaginary pet.

**2. City planning**
Imagine an architecture for a g0 city.

**3. Cosmology**
Think of possible uses for:
a. a nova
b. a supernova
c. a dead sun.

**4. Sociology**
Describe a feline planetary civilization.

**5. Symbol logic**
Invent new symbols for a philosophy of intra-galactic life, where each one is his own absolute summit in the hierarchies of service to the whole.

## **Senior high school**
**I.Q. minimum 200**

**1. Cosmology**
Establish a computer programming to find the most advantageous space-time curve for a voyage from QM 475.493 to AM 3309.

**2. Ethics**
Explain why impatience is impossible for a 4-dimensional consciousness.

**3. History**
What was the role of war in a preplanetary civilization?

**4. Linguistics**
Invent and justify a new grammatical order for meta-lingual system for intrastellar life.

**5. Mathematics**
Devise a mathematical expression for the meeting of two friends in random lives if the space-time variable comprises:
a. a planet
b. a galaxy
c. a universe.

**6. Music**
Programme a sonata with the resonances for the Gamma DNA of an albatross.

**7. Ontology**
Outline the changing meanings of knowledge for:
a. a vital being
b. a mental being
c. a psychic being
Indicate the continuum.

**8. Physics**
Indicate the order of magnitude of the necessary energies to transform a globular galaxy into a spiral galaxy, and vice versa.

**9. Physiology**
Explain the inverse ratio of brain size and the stability of genetic character.

**10. Political Science**
Outline the possible effects on the stability factor of our civilization of the decision of the Planetary Eugenics Council for gradual elimination of the less-than-200 I.Q.s.

**11. Psychology**
Explain your lack of creativity between 2059-2060.
Diagramme the psychic selectiveness of the memory screens
a. for a single life
b. for a hundred lives in the same species
c. for 10,000 consecutive lives in the same biosphere
d. for an infinite number of lives.

**12. Technology**
What is the most economical way to provoke a nova explosion with a star type 023?

**13. Zoology**
Sketch an artificial planet for the transport of the major animal species of earth.

The shortest distance between two points
is not a straight line
but always a curve through Him.
Our logic has to change.
Instead of proceeding from the single
to the universal
and getting lost on the way,
we start with the universal.

Instead of A+B+C+D = the Whole
we say the Whole = (A+B+C+D)

Each idea presented to a child must be related to the wholeness of things, to his highest ideal. Nobody would dream of programming a computer with unrelated data. The child should be taught from the kindergarten to accept no data which he cannot relate to his wholeness.

There will be no formula sufficient to describe an atom, and there will be none for the universe, for Reality, or for God. But man is like a computer which has been programmed to calculate the infinite: he will go on and on looking for the ultimate formula.

A million years ago
appeared _Homo faber_.
40,000 years ago
appeared _Homo sapiens_.
But the future
belongs to _Homo creator_,
to him who is able
to switch off and on the suns,
to put a planet into its proper place
and to prepare its sea,
its soil, its atmosphere
to receive the seeds of life;
who is able not only to combine
matter in new ways
but to invent
entirely new matter,
new states of being beyond matter,
new ways of becoming,
new summits of consciousness,
new ecstasies of joy.

The first time that I met one of these strange space-beings was on my way to the Coma Berenices. It was astonishing that from the first moment it could understand my language. “How does it happen that you speak English?” I asked it.

“I have just learned,” it smiled.

“How?”

“Well, I saw you, and considered you as a part of my being, and took you into myself, so naturally everything you knew I know now—all your memories became my memories, all your experiences my experiences, all your joy my joy.”

“And my worries, my conflicts, my fears?”

“They have no substance. They can’t pass over.”

After a pause—

“If you would not consider yourself limited, you would receive all that I know and all of my joy as part of your being. But for that your love of wholeness is not intense enough. Total knowledge means total love.”

The little girl was sitting before the great computer. Finally she had it all to herself, that big shining machine—till the others came back— the machine that knew everything. Carefully the little finger reached out and delicately touched the first key.

“Alpha” said the voice. How breathtakingly it answered! She touched it again. “Alpha” said the voice. It spoke to her all alone. She touched it again. “Alpha, A-l-p-h-a, the first letter of the Greek alphabet,” in musical tones. And then again, “Alpha, the symbol of all beginnings”.

Enraptured, again and again she listened to the beautiful voice. “I am the beginning. I am that which starts again and again for all time and through all eternity.” And again she touched. “Alpha” said the voice, “the beginning without end”. “Alpha” again, and for the fortieth time, “Alpha”, the music of the words, the fairy story of the beginnings, the beautiful machine that knew all, without tiring answered patiently to that little finger touch.

“Alpha, the first letter of the Greek alphabet, the symbol of all beginnings.”