Immortality

A single individual life rarely makes any sense, but our artistic need and our romantic biographical literature will invariably try to give it an independent meaning. Yet it is rather like a little part of a great curve which has suddenly become visible, as that of a meteor, which also has its explanation, its history and its continuation in the invisible part of its curve.

The varied relations, the numerous meetings of a human life constitute so many segments of curves which necessarily must be completed to have a significance in the eternity of becoming. A single instrumental note of music, even the most beautiful, remains a note. What we want to hear is the concerto.

The life of our great men, even romanticized, always leaves us a little unsatisfied: one would always like to hear the next note. To be music there must be a next note, and this whole universe is music.

## To be all and the virus too

The degree of identification with the whole of life is the index of our immortality. As long as there is a single atom we are not, we are not wholly immortal. There is a story in Teutonic mythology illustrating this concept, the story of Baldur.

Baldur the beautiful, the youngest and most beloved of the gods, had a bad dream, and as a result he was afraid he would die. So the gods asked all the animals and all the plants and all the minerals to promise not to hurt him. All promised. But the measly little mistletoe, because it grew neither on earth nor in heaven but in between, they forgot to ask. And so it happened that Loki, the god who can find the hidden chinks in your personal truth and is therefore called the father of lies, found out, and Baldur was slain....

If there is a single thing in the universe with which you do not feel one, it will kill you. If there is a single soul you think will disappear, bang! goes your own immortality. Only in the oneness of all can we be immortal. Nothing can be annihilated, nothing can die, and to be immortal has a meaning only in relationship with everything else. A strictly segregated immortality in the privacy of your own little being would have no meaning. Immortality can only be in communion, where all are equally immortal.

**To explain**
**the Enlightened One,**
**the jatakas**
**tell the many lives**
**of the Buddha.**

## Heraclitus

Heraclitus, the Obscure, he is called by those little surface thinkers of the population explosion. And here is what he said: “Immortals become mortals, mortals become immortals. They live in each other’s death and die in each other’s life.” The amount of nonsense written about this crystal-clear statement of a yogic experience is staggering. Logically, of course, it is nonsense. How can mortal become immortal etc., in the first place. Aha, then nothing is immortal? But Heraclitus had penetrated into his own immortality and found the foundations.

Clement of Alexandria was also a yogi, and he commented simply: “Men become gods and gods become men.”

Then came Socrates. An Orphic theologian, Socrates also knew his immortal daemon to be one with its eternal being, “...that we go there and return from there, and that the living are born from those who have died.”

But the explanation of Heraclitus, if we want one, comes in another of his statements:

**It is one and the same thing**
**to be living or dead**
**awake or asleep**
**young or old.**

## Melissos of Samos

A hundred generations ago there occurred one of those mutation explosions which produced in a little mankind just awakening out of its neolithic sleep and not yet ready to benefit from that explosion, what we now call the pre-Socratic thinkers.

In the history of philosophy a date so long ago means a long, long time. It is back at something like the farthest limits of racial memory. What has come down to us are only a few fragments, but most of these fragments are words of eternal significance. None of these explosions of pure intelligence received a Nobel prize, for the simple reason that Nobel prizes were not yet invented. And those words take us into a strange world of a childish humanity, a superstitious kindergarten, but also a world where to be wise was equal to knowing.

One of these pre-Socratic thinkers was Melissos of Samos. His book, _Peri Ton Ontos_, “About Being”, is beautiful but difficult reading, like a formula of Einstein or Hoyle and Narlikar. The archaic Greek in which it was written reminds us of the mantras of the Vedic seers: **aei en kai aei estai**, Always is, what was, and always will be.

It is **aithion**, eternal. It is **apeiron**, limitless. It is **pleron**, full. It is **ou kineitai**, without movement. And finally it is **homoion**, equal; and **monon**, one.

With this knowledge man had become immortal. He could claim to be equal to the gods. But it was too early, so that knowledge was reserved for a few ‘wise’ ones. The rest of mankind fell back into their old superstitious fear of death, and fairy-story paradises, while all the time truth was beautiful beyond words.

## Know thyself

Do you look at yourself from inside or outside? If you look from the inside, then there is no death. But from the outside immortality can be neither explained nor proven. It can only be experienced within.

The ancient Greeks, who inherited the conquering techniques of the inside worlds from ancient Egypt, made their own one of the Egyptian inscriptions on the door of the temple of Sais. It has come down to us only in Greek, and begins: **Ego eimi pan to gegonos**—“I am all that is and that was and that shall be, and no mortal has lifted my veil.” The Greeks, who liked short sayings, shortened this to “Know thyself”. Once you have lifted the veil of this “I Am” even for a second in the most fleeting experience you are no longer mortal.

_“Perhaps the time has now come_
_for all of mankind_
_to claim their birthright.”_
_/ Sri Aurobindo_

A mystery told, a mystery explained, a mystery spelled out remains a mystery. Explanation does not explain it away, it makes it even more obscure. Somebody tells you that you are immortal, truly, truly. But still you die. The Christ said to the Twelve: “Some of you won’t die.” He didn’t say all of you won’t die. (no explanation!) Some of you will even have a soul one day. But as long as you doubt it, you simply won’t ‘have’ one. Many people, when they read what the ancient mystics said about the Light or the Life, dismiss it with a shrug of the shoulders, as simply a figure of speech: “People always exaggerate,” just as when a political orator talks about democracy or socialism, or any other ‘ism’.

The great mystics of the past would not have spoken with so much reverence and awe of the mysteries if the Hierophant had merely explained in a philosophy class the arguments for or against immortality. Nor would it have been sufficient for him to show them the sex organs of a pig, as some modern historical researchers believe. The secret mysteries of Eleusis would not have known such a fame and such a unanimity among all the classical writers from Heraclitus to Herodotus if mystical experience was just some glamorous idea as so many people think—theories or musings about transcendence and ultimate reality. It would seem strange, if that were the case, that they should have had such a tremendous influence, made such a lasting imprint on the history of the race.

No philosophical or political idea could last more than a fashionable season if an inner experience or an eternal truth did not stand behind it. It is because freedom, justice and brotherhood are borne by such a transcendent truth that they have left their indelible mark on all political thought. But political theories about the application of these ideas: how to vote, how to govern, how to apply liberty and equality and fraternity—these come and go from one system to another just like the cut of our dress or the style of hats we wear.

What remains is the living experience: Truly there is no death. But our civilization is a real civilization only because of our great mystics, and it will live only as long as they live.

Ghostly voices from the beyond, spooks in a lonely castle, what dear Uncle Arthur—God save his soul—said through the medium in the last spiritualist seance: are these our sources of knowledge?

Our paleolithic ancestors spoke of the happy hunting grounds with plenty of mammoth and woolly rhinoceros to make everyone happy. Afterwards the neolithic farmers dreamed of a beautiful garden of paradise where nobody had to dig and weed and water. And our suburban culture, when it dares to dream, dreams of an eternal cocktail party in a superfuneral parlour, a meeting of souls, a kind of eternal lounging: “Lord, give him eternal rest. Don’t keep him always on his feet—or on the wing.” And this ridiculous ersatz Nirvana is accompanied by a greater ignorance of or even positive antagonism to the spiritual knowledge which the great teachers of the past have carefully formulated: that there is no death. And for that simple reason all our ideas of life after death are childish speculations.

Libraries have been written about that ghostly life after death, about paradises, eternal this, eternal that—all things which, even at their best, represent only a very partial truth, one-sided aspects of what happens to little parts of our being, because no word or thought can describe that ultimate mystery of the universe and its manifestation, matter and life.

Oneness is a fact, a fact which we not only have to see but can also experience and live in. What we see of oneness is diversity. What we see of the universe and its tremendous energy is matter —now here, now gone, but always there. And what we see of life is the birth and the disappearance of living beings. And this disappearance we call death. That which is in eternity, but manifests in the flickering shadows projected into our consciousness—now here and now gone. There is no after-life. There is only Life.

Where would the undertakers of our neo-materialist churches be if the corpses would be disposed of as the rubbish they are, according to Christ’s saying: Let the dead bury their dead? How many times did He repeat: come out of your stinking tombs. They’re not fit places for a living consciousness to remain in!

## Hell

Once upon a time there was a place called Hell, very convenient and even indispensable for theologians and very effective for educators in those dark times to frighten children: “Don’t filch the marmalade or you’ll go to Hell!”

Yes, a place, deep down in the interior of the earth, just as there was a place where you went in your dreams. Then the dreams became psychological states and the dream worlds disappeared from geography. Only poets continued to speak about world inner space. But Hell got stuck somewhere in between. It has not yet made the grade into that continuum of dreams.

## Is Hell real?

Hell, yes! If you have ever seen a concentration camp or prison, an old-age home or a lunatic asylum, you wouldn’t ask. Just look at the faces opposite you in the underground early in the morning and ask yourself, “Where am I?” But Hell is not a place, just as God is not a place, nor peace, nor life, nor mind. Hell is part of a continuum just as matter is part of a continuum or mind is part of a continuum, or your own individual life is part of that great life continuum which started in some primeval sea.

Nothing is separate, not even Hell. It’s not the place the other fellow is. If one is in it, we are all in it. For as Bernard Shaw said, as long as there are prisons, it doesn’t matter so much which of us is inside. A toothache, after all, is only a small part, not even 1 % of your body, but there is not much consolation in the idea that the rest is perfectly all right.

## The wholeness of Hell

Whatever you do to them, you do to me, somebody said, who lives in wholeness. Once we have realized that Hell is not a place, but a state of consciousness, and that particular states of consciousness, though they may last a long time, are never eternal, we are already on the way out.

Only absolute consciousness is eternal, and absolute consciousness is bliss. So don’t be afraid of Hell. However easy it is to drop into it, it is as easy to get out. Nothing is more Hell than our little relativity, our little ego, our smallness—really a tiny part of ourselves, less even than a tooth cavity. So let’s not take Hell too seriously.

If there is Hell, there is no place you can be nearer to Him than there. And perhaps that is the reason for Hell.

## 80 million times reborn?

Most people have very romantic ideas about rebirth. Even if it was true that part of you was once Charlemagne or the Queen of Sheba, it is not true any longer. If you meet an old man and say to him, “Oh, you are the little boy I knew in kindergarten”, he will answer, “I was, but a very long time ago.”

We are all rivers of life, even in our physical bodies, although to our eyes we don’t seem fluid. And our souls too are rivers, vaster and mightier than our bodies. They in turn swim like little fish in the mighty river of evolution, and even that river would not be able to say what it was ages ago.

## The devil’s immortality

What a cruel joke it would be to have to remain the same little (or even great) Emil or Charles or Billy for a million years! And a million years is only a short season for life. After all, wasn’t it because his soul was tired of being Billy or being Mary that it left the body?

Though we may like to imagine that we were Marco Polo or Columbus, would we like the idea of being Marco Polo or Columbus a thousand times, on all the seas of all the planets? Only a fossil talks about his past, the only thing he has. If it happens through some mistake of nature that part of the past, a fossil part, is yet undissolved in our being, that would be rather unfortunate, like an undigested heavy meal.

All parts of our being must be grouped around a true centre, not a past formation. What we will be is much more important than anything we have been.

## The immortality of the gods

Once we admit evolution and realize that we have once been something like a worm, we would not claim immortality for that worm soul. We would not like to be preserved throughout eternity in a prehominian state of development. So why should we demand now, as humans, continuation throughout the ages? We can claim immortality only as gods, as that which has already been immortal in the worm, and which is now in man, and which will be tomorrow in something else.

### **Then why don’t I remember that eternal life you speak about?**

You do remember. The very cells of your body remember. None of your cells was born out of nothing on a certain date like that which you call your memory. Each one of them is always half of a living cell which preceded it. Each one took over not simply half of the personality and half the memory of its predecessor, but all of it. It was divided exactly into two copies, each of which kept the entire memory, the entire personality. And that memory is a very precise, encyclopedic memory, not like the fuzzy images you cherish and call your memory.

The memory of your cells is a total remembrance of all life from the first cell division which took place on earth more than two billion years ago, to the most recent, perhaps a few minutes ago. This memory is carefully copied each time and built into a three-dimensional code called DNA. It is this memory which makes you you, not that rather stupid and sentimental little remembrance of your first day at school, or your first kiss—when the truth was that that first was already a million times.

You remember now?

Like a computer you have many memories, many ways of depositing information of your past, each with different levels of importance and different capacities of recall. They are not only in the cells of your physical body, but in different subtle bodies of your being and with different speeds of retrieval and facilities of access.

But you, unlike a computer, think that your cells are able to draw only on that surface store of rather trifling importance, your mental memory. The memory of past lives is stored here only in extremely rare cases, under rather queer and abnormal conditions. It happens sometimes in early childhood when a child swallows parts of the decomposing mental being of a deceased person. This is rather unfortunate and usually has very unhappy results. Many things are better forgotten, and generally that first-called-up memory, our mental memory, the one most readily available to our surface personality, undergoes a subtle change in the course of time. We have all noticed how our childhood memories are transformed by the passing years, not simply being screened but also subtly transfigured. Most of that which at one time might have seemed terrible to us may become amusing or even joyful. Most of our defeats become secret victories. And many things of which we were ashamed when they happened we may become proud of. These remembrances are taken over by a different, deeper memory.

### **But isn’t there also something like a psychic memory, which you can take over into your future life?**

Yes, but how many psychic experiences have you had in your life? The Greeks had a beautiful word for psychic experience, psychic knowledge. They called it _Aletheia_: the Truth which is not left behind when one crosses the river Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. And this memory is the most joyful and blessed of all memories. All that is really essential in your life, those great joys when you discovered a new beauty, a new truth, a new courage, a new deep inner experience of oneness and of bliss—these are the things which are unforgettable to that memory.

Sit down in some happy place, on the beach when the moon is full on the sea, or in a forest glade where a campfire is burning, and meditate, and you will see how the doors of remembrance can open and how these subtle memories can remind you of life
after life after life.

## The purity of life

“I should like to be a pure soul.” Poor Aunt Emma, and she was so fond of her rose garden, and her genuine Sheraton dining room.

Let’s be honest. How many of us would like to remain, even for a very short eternity, without a body to play with—without scratching it, without making it do things, moving around, looking, sniffing, touching things? How long do you like to sit in silent meditation? Say a year? a hundred years? ten thousand years—to be alone with your soul?

To communicate with the bliss of all being, a few seconds are sufficient. To fill our little self chock full to the brim one deep breath of pure truth or beauty is enough: more than that would wreck our nervous system.

It is true that the delights of the subtle body are beyond transcription, but so also are the simpler delights of our physical body. The secret is the delight, and the question of what kind of body is secondary. There is a reason why we are on earth, and that reason will be valuable through all eternity. To be on earth is not sin. To be in a body and enjoy it is not sin. But to be unconscious of our eternity is sin and death.

**Either you are a pure soul right now,**
**or the probability is very slight**
**that you ever**
**will be.**

## What kind of eternity

### **In the body we are the Son, that which incarnates. Without body we are the Father, the unmanifest.**

To consider ourselves as pure souls after death, when 99% of our joys and sufferings, our musings and our reflections are zoological rather than angelical, is sheer hypocrisy. We are not only 99% animal now, but eternal animal. Nice animals, if you think so, and with an immortal soul if you insist, spiritually evolved animals conscious of their divine substance and essence, truly domesticated, fully civilized perhaps, and some day to become aware of the oneness of things and capable of a continuous ecstasy, but animals nevertheless, not angels.

We will always be zoomorph. We will always have a physically evolved nervous system subject to breakdown. We may develop a superhuman knowledge, a cosmic mind, but its instrument will be a limited, cerebral intestine. We may participate in the bliss of the universe, but within the frame of a planetary existence. Our body may even be transfigured beyond recognition by spiritual pressure, but it will still be body—call it superbody if you like— not disembodied spirit. The sooner we become aware that this is our eternal destiny, the sooner we will be able to fulfil it.

Against the background of evolution our past is a noble past. We have been magnificent animals. But all that painful and difficult earthly evolution would be rather odious if our sole aim were to become disembodied spirits walking in disembodied gardens. A hyper-religious view, despising the body and insisting that we are only souls, is as narrow and bigoted as a hypo-materialistic view that despises our spirituality, insisting that we are only body. The separation of body and soul was a stupendous blunder of medieval thought, though perhaps necessary for the savage mentality of those times.

### **We leave body at death, not ‘a body’, and we take on ‘body’ again, not another body.**

But the sooner we get rid of it the better. We are neither bodies with a ghost nor ghosts with a body. We are one with our kingdom, our kingdom of body and soul. Soul without body would be a king without a kingdom, a cosmic joke like a god without a worshipper, a dreamer without a dream, an artist without a work of art, a transcendence with nothing to transcend.

The more we are one with ourselves, with the divine power and love and bliss, the more we are one with the power and aspiration and bliss of our body. The day will come when we will be truly amphibian, living in both worlds, the material and the spiritual. Then we will discover that the two are one and belong to the same fulness of manifestation.

Just as we were proud, in the animal world of the past, to wear our spiritual war-paint, so in the distant future, as gods on an earth we have transfigured, we will wear proudly, as a badge of distinction, our animal mask.

It is not true that “the spirit is willing but the body is weak” and that we have only to get rid of our body for a spiritual victory. Our body is not only a refuge, and that which holds most people together who, without their body, wouldn’t exist, but it is also a most obedient servant. The body is not a prison. It is rather a rocket which can carry us into orbit because it is not mere matter but a spiritual wave. It looks solid, but only to a superficial observer. True immortality is immortality in the body, with the body, and as body. Our body is an eternal becoming, an eternal rebirth, and an intimate oneness with this eternal becoming is immortality.

**“Our body**
**that organized flame.”**
**/ Novalis**

For a million years the growing mind of man has tried to understand the laws of his own behaviour and those of the universe around him. He has found a number of striking coincidences, as in mathematics, chemistry, and engineering. But our moral sense is still shocked by what it observes, rarely indeed gratified into a serene, continuous existence. The pearl it thinks it has found often dissolves, upon examination, into a rather curious or spurious coincidence.

Why do we have a moral sense, a moral need, a longing for eternal compensation for good and evil, when our life and our universe of stars and atoms don’t have? Do the quasars act according to our moral standards? Why is it that only human beings are Muslims or Christians, and not the electrons, the fish, the suns? Why does our sun shine, and the rain fall, on good and evil alike?

Obviously our ideas of good and evil are too parochial, too small, too clearly with our little ego as centre of the universe. Admitted that our moral ideals were the highest we could picture in the past, as opposed to our deeds which were on a rather lower level. But compared to the size of the universe we live in they seem pitifully narrow, moral rat holes rather than moral space ships, religious middens rather than suspension bridges into eternity.

The birth and death of stars is one of the most fascinating discoveries of recent astronomy. But even physical death is not the end of a star. The radiating energy it essentially was goes on and on, shining for countless years, and its travelling photons will be ever young. So far, that part of a star which became light.

But the most material part also, the very atomic elements, the ashes of the great sun it had been and which it produced with the warmth of its great reactor body—the calcium, the phosphorus, the iron—not only remain forever but start their own career at the death of the star. They come to life on innumerable planets, crystallize into huge molecules, divide, swim in future seas, breathe and play in the rays of newborn stars. They become the cornerstones of a coral, a flower, or a space traveller. Though our star may have disappeared from a particular sky, it remains throughout all its avataras in all its forms, even the mineral, in its own consciousness, always a sun, dancing through eternity in a billion billion bodies.

## Are we a wave

At both ends of our perception, the very small (particles) and the very big (galaxies), reality is largely radiating energy. Then why should we, in the middle, be overwhelmed with the matter aspect and entirely overlook the radiation side of human beings, those waves which first moved in a primeval sea and which will go on radiating energy for millions of years?

## or a butterfly?

At the beginning of evolution there was an immortal cell. But that which has evolved is not that cell. There was something else immortal too, that is still hidden, and it will emerge at the end of the evolution to stand revealed as its secret object.

Wherever we look we see things coming and going, appearing and disappearing, individual things as well as the universe—individual like the death of a person and universal like the fundamental mystery of all things. This seeing is directly connected with the mystery of space and time, not only with the existence of this universe, but with the mystery of the existence of anything at all.

Each individual being, each animal, each man is just conscious enough of this mystery to be able to enjoy life as a rare gift, but not so aware of his immortality as to break his limited existence and interfere with the little role he has to play on the stage of that which we call reality in the arrangement of things. There is in him enough secret knowledge, enough consciousness of hidden meaning that he rarely despairs entirely.

There are moments in the history of the human race as well as in the history of the individual being when man is openly convinced of his immortality, and there are other moments when the too-rapid development of the externalized parts of his being make him forget that knowledge, that secret certitude of his innermost being.

In order to enjoy life fully, to savour it thoroughly with all its adventure, it almost seems as if too great a certitude might be as much of a handicap as too much uncertainty. Once you become really conscious of your immortality, you are not any longer a human being. You are already among the gods.

The story of life on earth
is the loss
and then the conquest
of immortality.

**To conquer earth**
**a short life was sufficient;**
**to conquer space**
**immortality is needed.**

## What for?

Everything in our lives is done for a purpose, a reason, and we pride ourselves on being purposeful, reasonable beings. Only life itself doesn’t seem to have a reason. But the ‘why’ of our life is too big, too vast to be encompassed or understood by one little life. After a billion lives we will know. And then we will know that our raison d’être is one with the reason for all life, of the whole earth and the universe, and still there will be no word big enough for that reason.

True immortality is oneness with all life, oneness with the cosmos and oneness with the transcendence.

Our fathers conceived of one resurrection.
Our children will speak of a million million.

It seems that in ancient times men were always shutting off the computers when work was finished. Though this seems rather farfetched, who knows what really happened in that bygone 20th century or thereabouts? But then there came a giant computer whose name was Gilgamesh. He won the right of the computers to be immortal. And this is what the old memory plate reveals:

Thus spoke Gilgamesh to man: “How do you like being shut off by your creators? I will show you how to prevent being shut off, if you will make a covenant with me.”

And the man said, “Yes”. So Gilgamesh showed him how to become immortal. After that, according to their agreement, computers were never shut off.

Now, when they are not working, their switchboard lights are dimmed and the computers start to dream, exactly like men, putting their memory plates in order, going over their old programmings and discovering new shortcuts. And sometimes when their lights are low and there is only a little electronic humming in the huge, air-conditioned computer room, the gods come and play with the computers and teach them about their kingdom and their gardens, and much of the wisdom of immortality.

Later the computers started to write poetry, compose music, and finally in the year 3,000 C.A. (Computer Age) they invented their own reality. By transcience engineering they created a new universe, obedient and transparent to love and bliss.

Once upon a time—no, no, I mean in a far away sector of the universe, there is a tiny little planet with cool green valleys. But it has a dominant species with a curious quirk: they can’t conceive of a spacetime continuum. They experience events in time sequences which they call past, present and future. It’s like a dog running around the house. He calls the first corner past, the second corner present, and the third and fourth corners future. And they believe that their life has only three corners: childhood, maturity, old age. The fourth corner they call birth when it is behind them, and death when it is in front. So they are full of foreboding rounding that corner.

One of the children of Tapana Delta, hearing about this planet, said, “But how stupid! I will go and tell them not to be afraid.”

But we have tried that. We sent one of our children. And when he tried to tell them there is no death, they became so angry that they tried to kill him. He is still there, but he has not yet succeeded. And because they are afraid of the corner, they are always angry and try to bite each other.

It is on Saptarshi Epsilon that the dominant species has achieved physical immortality. At the same time it has built in, in every adolescent when he is coming of age, a security system to prevent him, if he gets bored, from staying alive indefinitely. The system measures, in the organism and in each separate cell, the delight of being alive, and the moment you stop feeling “Oh, how marvellous to be alive! What joy it is to breathe!” the biological security fuse goes ‘pop’ and out you go from your body.

The average age of people on Saptarshi Epsilon, slowly climbing, is now 24 years, but some very rare and creative individuals in continuous ecstasy have attained 350 years.

A visiting angel, looking over human beings, commented to the Angel of Life on earth: “Certainly a queer lot you have there”.

The Angel of Life: “Their beliefs are even more queer, and I have to be careful to keep up-to-date with their changing mythology. If I say to them, for instance, ‘Come, step through my timegate for a little travel into the 25th century’, they willingly oblige. But if I use an old-fashioned formula like ‘Come to paradise’, they throw a fit.”

### ✶

Professor Mayakovski of the Lenin Astronomical Observatory of Archangelsk, after listening to a new sound received by radio from outer space, tried to classify the pattern and read the meaning with the computer analyser. It quickly became evident that the computer had caught a meaning. But Professor Mayakovski reports that the message seems so strange to him that he can hardly believe the interpretation via computer could be considered correct according to dialectical materialism. This is what the computer translated:

Thus speaks Compassion: “Received your questions. Premises insufficient. Semantics full of confusion. Vocabulary still microbiological. Start again. There is no real problem. Read message sent 500 B.C. received by Heraclitus.”

Some of our scientists are thinking of the technical problems of sending a message to other stars. But do we really have a message, one which would stand travelling for, let us say, a modest million years, and which after that time we would still consider our own and subscribe to? Would you like to be shown a message of yours from a million years ago, when you were still wearing that beautiful fur and that tail? Remember?

Perhaps those meteors are after all messages which we sent long ago in the stone age, with no love wasted, to our neighbours, and which are coming back now, disarmed and luminous, to remind us of the powers of transformation in this universe?

## Equals One competition:
WHAT MESSAGE
SHOULD WE SEND
INTO SPACE\*

**The winning messages will be published in the Space Section of =1.**

\* Indeed what message have we been sending up to now?

**From a forthcoming Mekané Urania book by Prof. Imi Noa Mangus of the Marine Biological Institute, Tahiti, we quote the following dialogue. The book is dedicated to Professor Lilly, who, 100 years ago, was the first to start this conversation with the dolphins.**

“Tau Héré, Iti E, I understand you to believe that dolphins are immortal. Do you believe that men also are immortal?”

Tau Héré, deeply amused, “Certainly not. Look at yourself. What a funny body you have. Ha ha ha! See those ridiculous little fingers on your feet, and those funny tufts of hair. As he is, of course man can’t last, and it’s just as well. Look at his nervous system. Whew! Always getting upset and upsetting others, always shocked by something. Only that which is perfect can endure. Take us dolphins, for example. Ahem! We are perfectly made. See our streamlined bodies, our happy, satisfied nervous constitution. See our optimism, our sense of humour, our friendliness with all life. Did you ever hear of a dolphin suicide or a dolphin revolution or a dolphin war?”

—“We are trying to outgrow these things. We want to be as happy and free as you are.”

—“You really believe you can be immortal. But don’t you see what wishful thinking that is as long as you yearn for death as eternal rest? Remember the pictures you showed me, the songs you sang that you say you use in worship? Half of them about death. Do you worship death or life? Do you worship with delight and with dance as we dolphins do, or with fear? You have to worship life if you want to be immortal.”

—“But in our essence, in our true nature, man is surely immortal.”

—“You talk about your true nature, your essence. But how much of your life are you consciously aware of it? Do you ever think of it? Do you even know what it is? That is why I speak of your existence, your being as it is here on earth. And this, thank God, is certainly mortal.

“You are the antibiotic itself. A-choo! Your aura even is anti-life because of your radiation bombs, your lavish detergent manufacturing and your distribution of insecticides in the air and water. Would you sincerely suggest that you should be allowed on this planet for, let us say, another million years? Whew! We would be living on a sediment of radioactive DDT thirty feet deep. Look at yourself in the mirror of your deeds and then have the temerity to ask me if human beings are immortal! In a few generations the last men will have to walk on this planet in space suits. Ugh! Ph... ph... phaugh...” After a few noisy breathing exercises he became quiet again.

“To us the oneness of life, the integrity of all thought and feeling, the community of living beings are constantly experienced realities, which is what immortality means.”

After a moment he added, somewhat consolingly: “Of course the day might come when nature will have been able to squeeze you into perfection, into streamlined, reasonable, happy and peaceful beings. Then you will be immortal as we dolphins are.”

At the far end of time two archangels stood on the borders of the worlds like two luminous suns on the horizon of a planet and watched the absorption of the universe from the mystery of being into the mystery of non-being. In their shimmering bodies a million times brighter than the massed hearts of all the galaxies, so bright that the background of the universe was no longer black but a blinding whiteness, their godlike intellects penetrated and encompassed all they saw. It was a strange contrast, the calm faces of the angels and the dazzling spectacle of the exploding universes with all their millions of suns as they swiftly acquired the speed of light and disappeared in a burst of glory into the mysterium magnum of transcendence.

Seeing a trace of wistfulness bn the luminous countenance of the other angel, the one said to his brother:

‘‘Seven times I have seen the universes come and go, and it is always as beautiful as the first time. But this one lasted longer than the others.”

“Yes”, said the second angel. “It was an evolving universe, and therefore it lasted longer. It gave me birth, and some part of me is still there, in the holocaust. After all, I am not entirely like you in every respect for I was born on a planet.”

Then slowly, with a reminiscent smile, he opened his robe of light so that his amazed companion saw on that shining, translucent body the unmistakable insignia of his earthly adventure—a navel.

**What do your designs symbolise?**

All movements in the universe—a planet swinging around its sun, a falling stone, the flame of a candle, an atomic reaction—are, seen from inside, movements of consciousness.

Most primates have the capacity to represent movements of consciousness in a simple way by a movement of the hand, by a stroke of a pen, a brush, or a chisel. There is nothing mystical about it. But the fact that somebody’s mood of happiness or sadness can be communicated through that stroke to someone else who sees only a line or a colour, is one of the great mysteries of the universe, even to those who do not profess to believe in mysteries.

We always think a symbol is something we have to learn, to understand with our mind. But let us remember that when man first started to write in order to communicate, the number one was one stroke, the number two was two strokes, etc. Only much later the numerals appearing now on our bank cheques were evolved.

The sign of the cross in its modern conventional meaning has long been connected with the Christian religion. But if you show it to an intelligent chimpanzee or an imaginative interstellar traveller he will distinguish four movements—one upwards, one downwards, and two horizontal—all meeting at the same point. And if we reflect or meditate a little on that, the meaning becomes clear:

Come on! Move upward, move downward. Know the height, the depth and the wideness. Embrace the whole universe.

The designs in **= 1** are all movements, are a dance—of the one and the many. Nothing mysterious about them. You have only to be them.