The capacity for tool making was long considered the signal characteristic that made human beings human. It was, that is, until Dr. Jane Goodall and others began documenting the behavior of chimpanzees. They soon discovered that at least this branch of our evolutionary family tree also fashioned tools suited for specific purposes from available materials. Tool making as a delineator of humanity lost its sacrosanct status.

Another favorite candidate was the use of language; but that too has fallen into disfavor in recent times due again to discoveries about the capacities of our primate relatives.

For some, intelligence seems like the last bastion of true humanity. Yet all you have to do is attempt to discover a rock solid definition of what intelligence is, and you will soon realize that there isn’t one. The definitions that are generally applicable are inevitably circular (e.g., “Intelligence is the ability to deal intelligently with one’s environment.”). Those that are not circular are either not sufficiently general, or they are meaningless in some fundamental way.

The uniqueness of man has become ever more challenging to identify, quantify and define. Perhaps one of the most singular characteristics of our humanity is our very penchant for wanting to distinguish ourselves from other species. Regardless, the field is wide open for a more suitable way of drawing the line between human-ness and all other -nesses.

I too have a candidate. It may not define humanity with ultimate precision, but I believe it does expose much about what has made us so profoundly successful on this earth. It seems to be intrinsic to our very nature to be social creatures. This hardly sets us apart from other species, but our pursuit of that essential cooperativeness does. It drives us to an almost obsessive search for more and better ways of communicating with one another. First with pictures, then signs, spoken words, then written, and in more recent times it has led us to create and develop the most extraordinary technologies by which to convey information from person to person.

The effect of this lust for communication of information, be it thought, feeling, knowledge or what have you, has been that we are able to know far more than any one of us could ever hope to learn by direct, personal experience in a single lifetime. It is as if, rather than isolated individuals adrift on the sea of life, we are connected at the brain stem to all those who came before us as well as to our contemporaries. Never has this been more true or more evident than at this time in our history. It is not ludicrous to say that we are all born a thousand years old in terms of the knowledge and experience we have at our disposal almost from birth.

I believe it is this insatiable capacity for sharing our combined experience that has allowed us to assume such a dominant position within the biosphere we call Earth. Yet the effect of all we have accomplished along these lines in the millions of years of our evolution is now being eclipsed almost daily by advances in the technology of communication.

It has become popular to declare that knowledge is power. If there is even a shred of truth to that assertion, then the gargantuan strides being made in the availability of the sum total of human knowledge to each living person are empowering all of us at an astounding rate. And that rate is accelerating moment by moment.

I also believe that a sense of personal empowerment is the one universal antidote for fear of all kinds, which makes it one of the most powerful known agents for real healing. By healing I mean the mending of lesions of all kinds, within and between individuals or groups. Even without our conscious intent, knowledge and a sense of personal power works its wonders on us one and all. In simpler terms, as our human world “shrinks,” it becomes whole.

The most powerful means thus far created for extending our ability to share information of all kinds already exists. It is called the Internet–a massive global interconnection of computer networks with the capacity to link millions of people like Siamese twins joined at the heart and mind. Though still in its infancy, it is already a part of daily life for many, and its effects ripple out from those directly connected to those who may not yet even know of its existence.

With the power curve of the basic technology going nearly vertical, and the cost factors plummeting, it is not unreasonable to expect that before the turn of the twenty-first century a majority of living human souls will be in “touch” with each other in ways of which our progenitors could not have dreamed. The propagation of this capacity for sharing ourselves and our lives will continue at a breath taking pace because it has to; it is in our genes if not our souls. The transformation it will perform on our sense of what it is to be human will be more profound than anything we, as a race of beings, have ever experienced. And it has already begun.

Thus far almost all examinations and observations of this phenomenon have been focused all but entirely on the wonders of the enabling technologies involved. Little has been said about the role the Internet is playing, and will continue to play, in the growth of the human race as citizens of this corner of the universe. This is a story in dire need of telling. It is a tale written neither by nor for idiots, but rather by, for and about the a noble species at last coming of age. It is the wondrous saga of man discovering himself through his brothers and sisters. And, as if to underscore its singularity, it is written, not in words and actions, but in streams of electrons and silicon wafers and fiber optic cables.

The journey has barely begun and already it has such force that it terrifies the faint of heart even as it thrills the adventurous. If it seems unlikely that the destiny of man should be tied to dots of glowing phosphor and incomprehensible machines, then maybe it would be good to remember that once even fire was considered the enemy of man. All things seem good when they serve us–and perhaps they are.

So you want to be immune to Swine Flu? Read on, but are you in for a surprise. 

In the last few days the consciousness of swine flu has virtually exploded. Everywhere people gather to exchange information, whether on TV, radio, newspapers, or the Internet, it is a main topic of conversation. Why? Because people are afraid. But the question no one asks is what are they really afraid of?

They can’t, in reality, actually be afraid of the flu. The reason is simple: there are thousands of other things that they have much better reasons to fear. Not that the irrationality of it would prevent their paranoia. One look at the “threat” of terrorism and its reactions will prove that unequivocally. The odds of being struck by lightening in your bed are better than being killed in this country by terrorists, dying of Swine Flu, Bird Flu, or winning the lottery for that matter. But I don’t see anyone freaking out about bedroom lightning strikes. It is more accurate to say that people are just afraid.

They are afraid of life itself in the final analysis. To understand more of why I say that and how I see it, read another entry in this blog. What that entry talks about in part is that for fear to take hold, we must believe that two things are true: there is a clear and present danger, and that we are helpless to defend ourselves against it.

In the end, what people are really afraid of is themselves. They have come to believe that there is something terribly, terribly wrong with them, and that there is nothing that they can (or perhaps even should) do about it. No where is this more obvious than in physical illness.

Any scientist will tell you that your body contains a wide variety of microbes, any one of which, if it started growing rampantly, could kill you. This is true no matter how healthy you are, no matter what your lifestyle choices are, no matter how old you are or where you live. But somehow, miraculously, most of us stay more or less healthy most of the time. How is that? My answer is simple: we choose not to get sick.

Is this choice fully conscious? Not in most cases. But not all choices are made in full view of the conscious mind, though the building-block choices from which the bigger ones are made are fully conscious.

For example, the choice to believe that to be human is to be flawed is fully conscious. If you have ever said, “What do you expect? I’m only human,” or “To err is human,” or “Nobody’s perfect,” you are professing an unspoken belief that there is something defective about human beings by their very nature.

So when you make a less than fully conscious choice that tends to prove that people, you in particular, are flawed, it is the natural outcome of countless fully conscious choices. It is not some kind of mindless instinct as Freud would have had us believe.

So to “catch” a “disease,” from the common cold to AIDS or cancer requires a long series of fully conscious choices, all of which seem as innocuous as they are obviously true, that lead to the ultimate not-so-consicous choice to lower the barrier to microbes that have been there all along, and allow them to propogate like mad. Shazaam!! You’re a sick puppy. It is not entirely different from an “overnight success 20 years in the making.”

Meanwhile, back at Pig Flu Ranch, no one gets sick who didn’t invite it. No exceptions. Does this mean that everyone sat down one fine day and said, “Ok. I think I’ll invite this flu strain to flourish in my body.” Hardly. But it does mean that they have been preparing for it, probably for years, and that they have their reasons for sending the invitation today instead of yesterday, tomorrow, or not at all. Just because we don’t know what those reasons are doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

“But what about the case of the baby who became the first American flu fatality?” you may ask. Fair question. Obviously a small child hasn’t had a long life in which to become flu-prone. But they are in the position of having to accept whole the beliefs, thoughts, and fears of the adults around them, especially their parents. And those are the raw materials from which they construct their realities as best they can.

A thorough examination of the adults around this child might reveal some very interesting things. It might show that they were overly concerned about safety in general, physical safety in particular, and health-oriented safety especially. It also seems likely that they subscribe to a belief system that brands humanity as a whole with having attributes such as powerlessness, untrustworthiness, and being at effect in their lives in general rather than at cause. They may also have beliefs that inform them that “their people” (by race, gender, culture, or origin) are especially burdened by all of the above. This is precisely why many “epidemics” occur in “developing” countries, where such belief systems are themselves “epidemic.”

At the end of the day, it comes down to just one simple rule: If you intend to get sick with any disease, nothing in the universe can stop you. And if you don’t, no power in the univese can infect you.

One more point: all the talk about the coming pandemic, though it is supposed to be preventive, actually has a far more dramatic effect on propogating the disease. In other words, these well-intentioned “public service” messages create far more illness than they could ever hope to prevent. But since no one keeps track of anything like that, it is totally and completely invible.

So, if you want immunicty, I suggest keeping these thoughts in mind. What you think about increases. What you resist persists. You and only you are the creator of your personal reality. If you don’t want Swine Flue in your life, then leave it entierly alone. Don’t listen to it, don’t talk about it, and for heaven’s sake stop thinking about it. The life you save is the only one you can save: your own.

When I was in my early 20s, I developed a bad case of resentment about forgiveness. My reasoning was straightforward and fairly simple. I saw the act of forgiveness as being equivalent to saying: “Even though you are a bad person who does bad things, I, being a superior and virtuous person, am willing to forgive you for the terrible things you have done.”

Okay, so I exaggerated a little. But it isn’t far off the mark, at least for the only brand of forgiveness I was accustomed to at that time. It seemed to me that it was at best holier-than-thou, and at worst wholy arrogant, insulting, and even hypocritical. That fit perfectly with those I had known who talked about it most. I wanted nothing to do with it, or anyone who thought it was a good thing.

My approach was simpler. I don’t care one whit what you have done. What I’m interested in is whether there is any plausible reason why I should believe you’re not going to do it again. Give me that, and we’re okay.

(fast forward several years)

After I had begun my education in metaphysics and had some time to expand it out in many directions, I revisited forgiveness. My whole perspective had changed. I now looked at the word itself: for- and give. I saw the for part as meaning before or prior to, and the give part, well giving. So my interpretation of what the word meant literally was to give in advance. But what?

After a lot of thought, I came to the conclusion that forgiveness is giving to someone, in advance, your permission and/or endorsement to be exactly who they are. In other words, it is not something you do after an offense has been committed, but rather something you do before it has. If you do it well, the offense will not be necessary and won’t actually happen. It is meant as a preventive, not a remedy. I liked that much, much better.

But I was not going to let myself off the hook with that, though it was quite an improvement. Not yet.

(fast forward several more years)

I came to a time in my life when I felt it was time to direct my creative energy toward writing a novel. But there were problems. The main one was that everyone says–and always has as far as I can tell–that a good plot needs to have tension and conflict to propel it along. Usually, that conflict is between characters, and most popular of all between good and evil.

However, I wanted nothing to do with good and evil. Nor did I want to keep company with the kinds of mindless characters that are usually pitted against one another in the pitiable struggle for survival, dominance, or destruction that is usually chosen by writers. I needed to find a new kind of plot, one in which there was stress and tension, but of a creative nature, and within conscious, growing individuals who ended up better than they started. Yes, they could act some of this out in their relationships. And yes, there might be periods of doubt, or even despair, as to their ultimate success.

But to satisfy my design criteria, everyone had to successfully navigate their own personally created obstacles course, and they had to come out the other end significantly better for the experience. Better yet, they had to end up thanking those who may have seemed like their adversaries during the thick of it.

Now, I’d never read a book like that, so I was at a loss for templates, patterns, or role models to follow. I had to wing it. What I finally came up with, after years of consideration, was the story I called When Gulls Fly Low. I’m not going to spoil it for you by telling you details of the characters or plot. I’m not that big a fool. But I can now tell you about how forgiveness–you remember forgiveness? That’s what this is supposed to be about, right?–how forgiveness became an integral, yet almost invisible, part of it all.

Perhaps I can use a brief quote from the book that was chosen by one reviewer to illustrate why she called it the best book on forgiveness she had ever read.

Henry, the protagonist, is talking another character, Josie. They have been adversaries until now, but she has now had a personal revelation that has caused her to remove herself as an obstacle in his life. She is surprised that he does not take the opportunity to gloat at having “dethroned the old battle-ax.”

Henry says:

“I am only trying to be who I most want to be. That is, in fact, how I try live my life. Yes, I could have held a grudge against  you. But what purpose would that have served? How could I possibly have benefited from that? It would have created an unbridgeable gap between me and the mother of the woman I love; it would have brought the problems of having to make war with you down upon my new family;   it would  have brought no joy to anyone on this Earth. How could I make such a choice knowing all of that?”

Josie replied, “Perhaps that is the key, Henry. You did know all of that.  I suppose it is only when we do not see the rest  of the picture, when we become obsessed with those powerful  emotions, that we fail to recognize the folly of our choices in time to prevent it.”

To my way of thinking, and the reviewer’s, this exchange is about Henry’s approach to what other’s might call forgiveness. Note that there is one word conspicuous in its absence: forgive or any of its relatives. Why? Because they are unnecessary. In fact, they would just get in the way.

From a somewhat higher philosophical perspective, it is even simpler. The reason for the very existence of the concept of forgiveness is based on the presumption that one person can come crashing into the life of another and do “bad things,” intentionally or otherwise. I reject that premise entirely. If we each create our own reality, and are therefore totally responsible for its contents, then the only possible person we could ever forgive is ourselves.

And if I accept, as I do, that even I am not capable of harming or injuring myself, despite appearances to the contrary, then even the self is beyond the need for forgiveness. All those things that might appear to be candidates for self-forgiveness are really just strokes of genius the brilliance of which as yet escapes my conscious minds. And even that is not a bad thing, because afterward I can always see how knowing about it too soon would have ruined the entire effect. For that I am rightfully grateful.

So, as the title of this piece states: Forgive Me Not. Bless me, thank me, learn from me. But do not commit an act of spiritual violence by blaming, then forgiving me, and casting yourself in the impotent role of a poor, helpless victim. There ain’t no such a thing, and I won’t pretend there is. I love you too much.

In the early 1980s I had a lot of friends who were into various alternative health care modalities. None of them was exactly setting the world on fire, nor did they seem to have much of a clue as to how to market their practices. There was a lot of talk about the subject, but it was all based on intuitive assessments of the attitudes of the public toward these matters. It occurred to me that instead of making up answers to our questions about the prevailing attitudes in our market, that we would be better off just asking people.

To that end I created a questionnaire and hired a company of professionals to administer it to several hundred randomly selected residents in our market area. The sample, in proportion to the population, was significantly higher than is typically used by national surveys, so it was statistically quite significant. I then sold copies of a report to practitioners to pay for it, and to make some profit for myself.

The survey was done in three parts: the first one contained five worldview questions, to get to know how people looked at life and humanity in general. The last portion was strictly demographics: age, income, etc. The meat was in the center section. Here’s how it worked.

I compiled a list of 20 areas of life that most people consider the very important. These included things like:

• physical health
• loving relationships
• prosperity and abundance
• world peace
• making a difference in the world
• dealing with change
• peace of mind

Clearly, these and the other 13 areas involved are among the most important concerns for most people, though their order of importance varies between individuals.

For each of these areas three questions were asked: “How important is this area of life to you?”; “How satisfied are you with the way it is today?”; “How motivated are you to do something to improve it?” The subjects were asked to rate each of these answers on a scale of zero to seven, with zero meaning no interest, and seven meaning very high interest.

I then created a formula that took all three of these scores and combined them into a single number between zero and 100 I called it a Composite Motivational Index, or CMI. The theory behind the formula was that the more important something is to you, and the less satisfied you are with it, and the more motivated you are to improve it, the more likely you are to take action. Conversely, if it’s unimportant, satisfactory, and you don’t want to change it, then you are unlikely to act. The CMI allowed me to make more valid comparisons in the likelihood of action between these 20 areas.

When the results were obtained, I put them into a database and wrote a program to crunch the numbers. Though there were many interesting things tha came out, there was one that was dramatically more important than all the others.

There was one area of life that scored a CMI of around 70 for all segments of the sample. It didn’t matter how you sliced and diced the data. It applied to men, women, young, old, rich, poor, in other words, everyone. The next highest CMI was barely half as high, less than 40. Clearly people considered this area more important, were less satisfied with its present state, and more highly motivated to improve it than any other thing in their lives, and by a factor of nearly two to one! What was it?

I’ll tell what it wasn’t: all the things you would have guessed. It wasn’t, relationships, money, prestige, or even physical health. The subject that trumped all others, even health and wealth, was world peace!

Keep in mind that this survey was done in 1983, when the Cold War had been raging non-stop for over 30 years. So when people talked about world peace, what they really meant was the threat of global thermonuclear war, not the occasional ground war using conventional weapons. And they were scared stiff. Many of them for their whole lives. When they said they were concerned about world peace, what they were really saying was that they were afraid we were going to vaporize the Earth one fine day, and they didn’t want that to happen.

Only a few years later, on November 9, 1989, the government of East Germany lifted the ban on travel to the West, and not long thereafter the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics dissolved. With these two seminal events the Cold War died, not with a crash or a mushroom cloud as we had so long feared, but with barely a whimper and a sigh.

The reason I have written down this story after all these years is to make one simple point: People created the Cold War for reasons and purposes of their own because it served them. And when they got what they came for, they withdrew their support, and it collapsed under its own weight, falling eventually into the slush pile of history.

We never were really at risk, though we had to believe we were to get the benefits for which we did it. No actual harm was done, though individuals did choose to be harmed in ways that were offshoots of it (like Viet Nam). But World War III never happened, because we never intended to actually go through with it, to make good on the threat.

Among the countless blessings we got from the war that never happened was putting Neil Armstrong et al on the moon, and the very Internet by which you are seeing this piece, along with all the technology that enabled these latter day miracles.

So next time you are tempted to look out through a soda straw at a world that seems evil, or dangerous, or just run amok, thy to remember the War the Never Happened. Is it too late to say, “April Fool?”

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Those were the famous words spoken by Franklin D. Roosevelt during his first inaugural address, and while he showed much greater insight than most people, before or since, he didn’t have it all figured out. Not by a long shot. On one hand, fear is much more subtle than that, and at the same time simpler. What follows is, I believe, not so much a matter of opinion, but rather a description of simple observations anyone can make, but few do.

Fear is our emotional response to a situation in which we expect to lose something we love or value. It can be a person, an object, a dream, comfort, joy, or just a thought. Whatever it is, we have the expectation that we are in danger of losing access to it. Set that down. The next question is, what is expectation?

We expect whatever our beliefs about ourselves, life, the universe and everything tell us we should, given our best understanding of our present situation. If our beliefs are truthful, our expectations will be accurate. They will also be attractive. If our beliefs are faulty, our expectations will be, too. And they will usually be unattractive.

For example, if we believe dogs are vicious and wild, then when we see one, we will expect it to go for our throat. Some will, but some won’t. If we believe that dogs are warm and cuddly, we will expect them to be friendly and lovable. Again, some will, and some won’t. Remember that.

But a single belief (and the expectations it spawns) does not necessarily lead to fear. It takes two beliefs to produce fear. I call them the Hammer and the Anvil. The hammer is a belief in the dangerousness of something. When this thing is present, it means danger. The Anvil is a belief that we are powerless to defend ourselves from that danger. Only when both beliefs are present are we compelled to expect a losing battle, and therefore feel fear. When you think about it, it’s pretty obvious.

If you believe that someone wants to hurt you, but you are surrounded by a team of commandos who love you, chances are you won’t feel much, if any, fear. Why? Becasue you don’t feel powerless to defend yourself. Conversely, if you are alone and totally vulnerable, but sense no danger of any kind, you will not feel fear. It is only when the Hammer and the Anvil come smashing together, with you in between, that you feel fear. But not all fear is created equal.

There are three variables that affect the degree to which you feel fear:

• the strength of the love or value you place on what you expect to lose
• the strength of your expectation of the danger
• the strength of your belief in your own powerlessness

The greatest fear comes from an absolute certainty that you are in immediate danger of losing something highly valued (your life, or the life of a loved one, for example) and you believe you are  without any visible means of defense. The greatest sense of safety occurs when you perceive no threats and/or feel totally empowered to defend yourself. Most of life falls somewhere in between.

Virtually all so-called “negative” emotions grow out of fear. Anger is the simplest example. Show me an angry person, and I’ll show you a frightened person. Anger is one response to perceived threats. Without a threat, no one feels anger. And no one who feels empowered to defend against a threat feels anger. Anger is only felt by those who see a danger against which  they feel they unable to defend themselves. Ring any bells? Yep. They are frightened, and frightened people get angry.

Hatred is just a specialized form of anger. So are resentment, envy, jealousy, and others. They all have one thing in common: they are a response to fear. And, as we have seen, fear is a response to a pair of beliefs, one in danger, the other in powerlessness.

In our culture, even the word fear has been all but banned in many of the contexts in which it is most present and debilitating. Words like “stress,” and “anxiety,” for example, are used to describe or label a variety of things for which “fear” would be a much more honest, direct, and useful term. You can “deal with stress,” but you can eliminate fear! How? Simple. You change the beliefs that create it.

The beauty of this approach is that these beliefs are virtually always lies. They convince you of threats that do not exist except in your own mind, and they further convince you of powerlessness that is equally erroneous. So they really can’t stand the bright light of day. Why do you think they hide behind words like “stress” and “anxiety?” If you look right at them, you might realize that they are just pure fiction.

Want proof? Of course you do. Here is a challenge. Set a little egg timer in your mind that will go off at least several times a day. When it does, look around and see if you can find a clear and present danger. I don’t mean one that your mind is convinced may be in the next minute, or next room, or the privacy of someone else’s mind. I mean a hungry lion look right at you from 20 feet away with lunch on its mind.

If you do this, you will find that you never, I mean never ever ever, find any such danger! The truth is that you are safe. Always. The only exception is if you fret about danger and powerlessness so constantly, for so long, that the Law of Attraction has no choice but to answer your insistent thoughts (and emotions). Usually, you are only given plausible evidence that the threats exist. But if you keep at it, every now and then, the danger arrives. However, this is highly unusual, and requires a lot of devotion to create it. As Seth once put it, “the Universe leans in your direction,” meaning that beneficial thoughts are given more weight than harmful ones.

So when you hear words like stress, and anger, and hate, know that what is really being addressed is fear, and that behind that fear are beliefs that demand it. If you would change the outcome, you must change the beliefs that create it. Nothing else will do.

One more word should be introduced here: peace. Peace is what you get when safety is a root assumption, and it is all there can be when no beliefs in danger or powerlessness remain. And not one nanosecond sooner.

In 1975 Jane Roberts published the second volume of the series that came to be known collectively as “The Seth Books.” It was entitled The Nature of Personal Reality, and it was the closest thing to a combined owner’s manual/Chilton book for human beings I have ever seen. It’s basic pitch was simple: You create your own reality. This was meant to be neither figurative, nor metaphorical, nor symbolic. Rather it was intended to be taken literally and completely as stated. Put even more directly, and in Seth’s own words for his previous book, Seth Speaks, “You have been given the gift of gods: you create reality.” And we do. There are no exceptions. That includes Twitter.

What has become clearer and clearer to me every day lately is how Twitter is probably the best example of creating your own reality in its most literal interpretation of all the social media on the Web. And being a microcosm of the physical universe in which we have our existence, it can but mirror the creativity we express there.

The key, it seems to me, in the nearness of fit between creating a physical universe and creating a Twitterverse lies in the creative process itself. In Twitter, you choose to follow certain people, but you do not choose who follows you: they do. To begin to grasp the importance of this simple fact, consider this possibility: not one single person follows you. That means that no matter what you post on Twitter, no one will know except you. Hardly seems worth the effort, does it. It’s like being a painter in a world where everyone is blind but you. Clearly, your followers are critically important to any possible benefits from engaging with Twitter.

Yes, if you just follow a bunch of people, you might learn something, or buy something, but you would not have much of an impact yourself on anything or anyone else. You would be impotent.

Conversely, if you don’t follow anyone, but you have thousands of followers, you’re equally limited in what you can experience on Twitter. It puts you in a position similar to that in which Beethoven found himself toward the end of his life: he composed music that everyone else could hear, but he could not. Hardly a desirable situation, let alone a satisfying one.

So it seems pretty obvious that the ideal arrangement lies somewhere in between. The variable is the ratio between those whom you follow, and those who follow you. Yet not all Twitterers are created equal, particularly in terms of the ways in which they match up with one another. For the most part there is more value in connecting with someone with whom you share interests, values, or knowledge. So most of us are far better off with those with whom we share the most in common, or with whom we have complementary needs. By that I mean a teacher/student, question/answer or buyer/seller relationship.

But what really intrigues me is that we create our personal Twitterverse by the choices we make. We choose, first of all, to engage with Twitter in whatever way we do. The nature of that engagement casts a tall shadow over all of our related experiences. How much time we devote to it, what we do with that time, how intimately we reveal and share ourselves, and even our basic intentions are all key ingredients in the equation, and all directly affect the nature of our personal Twitterverse.

The people you choose to follow is another massively important dimension. Most of the peole who wind up following you will come to you directly or indirectly because of people you are already following yourself. This may be do to a direct referral, such as #followfriday, or it may simply be someone following someone you are following, and looking at those who are also following that person. Then they see you, read your profile, and decide you look interesting.

Another common way people start following is by reading tweets you make that they find interesting, valuable, or intriguing. While you can, and hopefully do, originate your own tweets, many of them probably come in response to the postings of people that you follow. So your choice of those you follow, as well as your responses to them, along with your choices of original posts will have a direct and profound bearing on the number and type of followers you attract. Does this begin to sound familiar?

It should. It’s just the way things work in “real life.” We pick our friends, some of whom pick us in return. But in Twitter it happens at a more anonymous level, which virtually eliminates the element of obligation. There are no serious repercussions of following or not following any one individual. Either you do or you don’t, and that’s pretty much it. In the “real world,” there can be other repercussions. So the Twitterverse is a simpler, more pristine, and far easier place in which to experience a higher level of freedom of choice and action than most are used to.

There are other aspects of Twitter that permit us far greater freedom to experiment than we ever have in our offline lives. We can put new meaning into “being ourselves.” We can experiment with what it really means to be authentic, and we can do it in ways that dramatically exceed any previous high-water marks we may ever have achieved. And when it works, it is a powerful validation of the rightness of our very being. Countless times I have seen people absolutely blown away at the way they are perceived by others, others whose opinion they have come to respect and value, when they expose themselves in ways that they have always wanted to, but lacked the courage to attempt. Twitter gives them that opportunity, whenever they’re ready, and for those who seize that chance and run with it, the rewards can be immediate and inspiring, not unlike the recent Susan Boyle phenomenon.

When all is said and done, we each create our own Twitter by the countless choices we make, and we see the results of that creation in real time. I do not believe I have ever seen anything that offers anything even close to that kind of opportunity on- or off-line before. It is a tool that is as powerful as it is unlikely, and as popular as it is hard to explain. It’s not unlike trying to explain the appeal of sex to a child: they just don’t have anything within their experience to compare it to. Usually, we don’t even try.

To gain a broader and deeper vision of some of the concepts introduced here, you may want to read one or both of the pieces listed below. Each deals in more depth with some aspect of the creative process or the underpinnings or reality. Meanwhile, enjoy your own personal, private Twitterverse. And don’t forget that you are the only person in any universe who experiences the exact same one.

• Reality As Rorschach This will give you another example of reality creation from a different angle.
• Mirror, Mirror A piece exploring, from various angles, reality as a mirror of the mind.

Please leave a comment if you have one. This, like Twitter itself, is best used as a dialog.

There is an athletic team you may not have heard of. They are not affiliated with any city, league or country. They are what you might call freelance. They call themselves Team Hoyt, composed of father and son Dick and Rick Hoyt. You may want to watch a video about them before you read on: see it here.

If all you want is a feel-good story about these two memorable men, then you can find it easily almost anywhere you look. But this account takes a different, albeit speculative, approach. One involving multi-incarnational conspiracies and a kind of love and commitment that is foreign to all but a select few human beings, but should be ordinary to us all.

In science there is a dictum: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.” What that means to me is that the degree of eccentricity of one thing must be matched by the eccentricity of anything closely bound to it. Eccentricity means “away from the center,” even “abnormal” if you prefer. And by “bound to,” I mean intimately connect to or with. This is how I apply it here.

It is inconceivable to me that Dick and Rick just “happened” to wind up father and son, that Rick just happened to be born with his umbilicus wrapped around his neck, that the consequence of that was a life-long marriage to cerebral palsy. And forget about the odds in a random Universe of father and son becoming a highly successful athletic team in some of humanities most grueling tests of dogged determination and courage. In a truly random Universe, the odds of such a combination of events is about as likely as there being no other life out there beyond the atmosphere of Earth. Ya, right.

So what other explanation is available? I like this one. It may be entirely true, partially true, or totally untrue. But it does at least serve to illustrate the possibilities that are always present in each of our lives, but cast in so much more dramatic relief in cases like Team Hoyt. It is one of their gifts to us all.

In order for what I’m about to say to make sense, you must realize that I consider all time as occurring simultaneously. So the idea of past and future incarnations is nonsensical. They are all happening at once. We just ignore everything except what we are presently focused on. Set that down.

What if the lives presently being lived by Dick and Rick are not the only ones they share? What if they have other incarnations, perhaps in years that precede or follow today? What if they have many other relationships in those lives together? And what if they really love living out their fondest ambitions together? What if this shared incarnation one in which they conspired together to bring the learning, the power, the ambitions of many other lives to a fine point for the benefit of thousands, maybe millions, of other people? And what if they set the whole thing up for those and other more personal reasons? Wouldn’t that cast their drama in a far different and even more miraculous light? You bet it would. And that’s what I want to explore here.

As I watched a short video about Team Hoyt (you can see it here, too), I was moved by the love, the power, and the human drama it exposed. But I was also aware of the multidimensional backstory that had to accompany it. What the story was I didn’t, still don’t, and probably never will know for certain. But the fact that it exists and is a work of high art by any sane standard is to me incontrovertible. The rest is details.

As I watch these two men train, compete, learn and love together, I am overwhelmed with a sense of awe for the fantastic coordination, creativity, the astonishingly love and desire needed to pull it off. Yet there is living proof of it all.

While this is certainly a human drama, it’s domain clearly is not bound to anything earthly. Its power spins off into other dimensions of which we have little or no knowledge. It has to, for that is where it is rooted. It is a dance across the stars, in a way, a transcendental tango, if you will.

You might want to watch the video again here, and see it with some of these perspectives in mind. It may be even better than before.

And the dancers…are they not virtuosos? Do they not dance as one in ways that have never been attempted before? And does not the whole world stand up and take note? Yes indeed. And we thank you both, Dick and Rick, for sharing with us all your most unique and powerfully dramatic dance across the very face of time. It may not be The Greatest Show On Earth, but it will do till the real thing comes along.

Midas Crakenberry was the kind of man who gave curmudgeons a bad name. In all his 74 years, he had never spoken a kind word to, or about, anyone. He was, quite simply, the archetype of the proverbial mean old man.

Retired, he sat day after day on his front porch, drinking warm Jim Beam from the same filthy tumbler, the one with the chip on the rim. The only times he spoke were when grumbling to himself or shouting obscenities to any passersby who so much as glanced in his direction. Compared to Midas, Ebenezer Scrooge was the poster boy for cheerfulness. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, his life was not a pleasant one. Midas Crakenberry was, in short, waiting to die and his wait might have been short indeed, were it not for the unwelcome intervention. And that intrusion into the miserable life of one Midas Q. Crakenberry is the subject of our story.

It was July 23rd in the year of their Lord (as Midas insisted on referring to it) AD 1933. Midas was sitting, as usual, on the front porch of the ramshackle hovel he called home. The sun poured down like burning dust. Only the shade of the porch roof protected him from the worst of the heat. When he had finished his third glass of Jim Beam, he rose slowly and waddled into the house to get a refill. “Damnation!” he hissed to himself. “Should have brought the bottle out this morning. I hate this traipsing in and out.” He sounded like Yosemite Sam with an R-rated vocabulary.

Reaching the kitchen table, he grabbed the whiskey bottle, turned, and shuffled back out to the porch to resume his vigil. As soon as he sat down, he refilled his glass–well almost–the bottle was empty before the glass was half full. “Damnation!” he growled. “Now I’ll have to go get another bottle. I hate all these extra steps.”

He took a big slug of the vile liquid which left his face twisted even more sourly than usual, if that was possible. Smacking his lips, he look down the dirt road that ran past his house toward town. He saw two small boys walking slowly in his direction. His eyes squinted till they were little more than narrow slits. Sure enough, the boys were on his side of the road. He’d have some fun with them if they had the audacity to invade his domain. He surely would. Maybe this day wouldn’t be a total loss after all.

Midas had never married. The truth was that he couldn’t get a girl to go out with him twice. For that matter, most of them wouldn’t go out with him the first time. Needless to say, he was also childless. Never having spent any time at all around children, he saw them as little beasties, good for nothing at all, save providing him with objects for his harassment. Scaring children was one of the few activities that brought Midas what passed in his life for pleasure.

Much to his disappointment, the boys were onto him. (His reputation had long ago spread far and wide.) Fully 50 yards before the came to his property line, they crossed the road and worked their way back into the heavy underbrush on the other side until they were well out of Midas’s range.

“Damnation!” cursed Midas. “The little beggars got away.” He finished off the last of the whiskey in the glass. “I hate those stinkin’ kids,” he grumbled. “Hate them one and all.” He had only two choices now: stop drinking, or go in and open another bottle. It should come as no surprise that he chose the latter.

When he had returned to his porch perch and refilled his glass, he took a long swig. Just as he started to swallow the firewater, he heard a most unusual and startling sound. He nearly choked as his head jerked instinctively in the direction of the sound. At first he neither recognized the sound nor saw its source. Again it came, this time somewhat louder. His gaze was close enough now that it took him only a second to locate the offending object. But what was it? l He squinted then rubbed his eyes trying to focus. At last he saw, though with disbelief, the sorriest looking example of feline dissipation he had l ever seen. Low and behold, right there at the foot of his front porch steps, staring directly into his bleary eyes, sat a cat!

Again the cat made the noise. Now that he knew it was a cat, Midas realized that the sound bore some slight resemblance to the traditional “meow” that cats made. But this cat had apparently flunked out of meow school. The sound that it made was less like that of a cat than it was the horrible screeching of fingernails on window glass. It gave Midas goose bumps every time he heard it.

Now that he had things figured out–well, a little at least–he became angry. No one was allowed on his property, particularly not some mangy varmint that made such a godawful noise. “Git outta here, you mangy little shit!” yelled Midas, gesturing wildly with his free hand, the one without the whiskey glass in it. “If I have to come down there, you’ll wish I didn’t.” The cat made its now familiar sound. Nothing more.

Midas was becoming increasingly angry. Who did this disgusting creature think it was to defy him. He’d teach that damned cat not to mess around with Midas Crakenberry. He stood up and stomped his foot on the porch for emphasis as he shouted, “I said git! And I meant it!” Finally the cat, ambled slowly around the corner of the house and out of sight.

Midas sat back down and took a swig of Beam. “Guess I told him,” he muttered to himself with satisfaction. “Don’t expect I’ll see him around again.” He was so pleased with himself, he nearly smiled.

By the time the bottle was a third gone, Midas had dozed off right there in his porch chair. When he woke up, it was already dark and he pulled himself up, still quite drunk, and dragged himself into the house where he collapsed on his bed. There he stayed until the next morning.

After heating and consuming a can of beans that morning, Midas poured himself a glass of whiskey and ambled out to resume his vigil on the porch. To his surprise and disappointment, the first sound that greeted his ears was the awful screeching of the cat. “Damnation!” gnarled Midas. “You again? I thought I was rid of the likes of you.” There on the bottom-most porch step was the ragged cat, just sitting and staring at him.

Midas wasn’t going to take this insult sitting down. He rose to his feet again, but not before he grabbed hold of the empty whiskey bottle he’d finished off the day before. With great effort, he reared back and hurled it in the general direction of the offending feline. He really would have liked to have hit it squarely on its ugly head, and he tried his best to do so. However, considering that his eyes weren’t as good as they once were, he had a not inconsiderable hangover, and never was much of an athlete, he was lucky to send the bottle anywhere on the same continent as his intended target. Actually, he got an assist from a wind gust and only missed the cat by a few feet

The resulting crash of the impact and the tinkle of shards of glass splaying all over was sufficient to send the cat scurrying off again. Where it went was a mystery to Midas, but that was fine as long as the blamed thing was gone. “The nerve of some critters,” he grumbled as he stumbled back to his chair.

The remainder of the day Midas spent drinking, griping to himself about the unfairness of life, and giving a tongue-lashing to a couple of kids that had the temerity to walk past his house (they must have been new in town). By mid-afternoon he had again drunk himself into a stupor.

This time he managed to drag himself to bed before passing out. Midas crawled out of bed just after the crack of noon the following day and was at his post on the front porch shortly before one o’clock. He was slightly more hungover than usual and the effect on his mood was predictably negative. By the time he had consumed a substantial dose of the hair of the dog, he was almost back to his normal cantankerous self.

The sun was now high in me sky and the heat was more than enough to cause Midas to sweat profusely. He mopped his dripping brow often as he patrolled the horizon in search of targets for his wrath. Between the heat, the hangover and dog hair, he was on the verge of unconsciousness, but managed to stay barely awake lest he miss an opportunity to take pot shots at some hapless passers-by.

He was jerked out of his dazed semi-consciousness by a familiar howl. Even before he opened and focused his eyes (as best he could) he knew that the cat was back. When his eyes and brain finally reached agreement on how to work together, he saw that this time the cat sitting not on the steps, but right there on the porch at the top of the stairs! Crakenberry was furious. “Damnation!” he shouted quite out loud. “Get the hell off my porch you blasted varmint!” The cat didn’t so much as flinch. He jumped out of his chair and stomped his feet (which nearly caused him to fall over due to the disastrous state of his equilibrium). The cat stood his ground. Next, he tried to kick the cat but found that difficult to do since to do so required him to perform the delicate athletic maneuver of standing on one foot, an action of which he was incapable at the moment.

Not to be denied, Midas seized on the perfect solution. He staggered with all possible urgency into the house and reappeared moments later with the .45 caliber pistol he had brought back from the war.

“You get off my porch right now,” he said in a most serious way, “or I swear I’ll blow you right into the next county!” The cat just looked at him for a few moments, then opened its mouth and uttered that awful sound.

That was all Midas needed to push him over the edge into a murderous rage. He raised the pistol and brought it to bear on the blur that he was pretty sure was the cat. As the barrel wandered to and fro, at and around the target, Midas squinted, blinked and eventually, quite by accident, got off a shot. When the smoke cleared and the silence of the summer afternoon returned, the cat was nowhere to be found. All that was left was a small pool of blood on the porch and a few more drops trailing down the steps.

It was then that Midas experienced a strange emotion, one he couldn’t remember ever having felt before. It was not at all pleasant. In fact, it was one of the most unbearable feelings he had ever experienced. Had he lived a life that was within sub-light travel of normality, he would have recognized it as a heady mixture of guilt and remorse. Such not being the case, however, he just flopped down in his chair and took a long pull right from the bottle of Jim Beam.

For over an hour he sat and drank, drank and sat, and all the time he couldn’t quite shake that terrible feeling. In fact, he was pretty sure it was actually getting worse. And if that wasn’t bad enough, he couldn’t seem to get his mind off that damned cat. The worse he felt, the more he thought about the cat, and the more he thought about the cat, the worse he felt.

By mid-afternoon he had worried himself nearly sober. Finally, in an act of monumental desperation, he dragged himself out of the chair and staggered down the steps. He followed the thin trail of blood around the corner of the house and finally to the back. There in the shade of the back stoop he saw the cat. He froze in his tracks and suddenly he felt cooler than he had since January.

Had he killed it? What if he had, the damned thing had been asking for it. Hadn’t he? Well if that was true, then why on earth was he standing there holding his breath, hoping to see it move? For the first time in his life, he was actually sorry he had never learned to pray.

After several minutes of paralyzed staring, he moved slowly to the place where the fallen feline lay. As he approached, he could see a large flap of skin just over the right eye laying wide open. Crouching down, with trembling fingers (not entirely from alcohol narcosis), he reached out and touched the top of the cat’s head. When the cat twitched in response to his touch, he jerked his hand away so fast that he fell right over backward. Was it just a nervous reflex, or was it still alive? He didn’t know.

When he had regained what little was left of his composure, he reached out again and poked the cat’s belly. This time he clearly saw a leg move. It didn’t look like a reflex. Moments later there was more movement without his doing anything to evoke it. The cat was definitely alive.

Another new emotion surged through Midas. Had he ever experienced it before, he would have immediately recognized it as relief followed by elation. He gently slid his hands under the wounded cat, carefully cradling its bleeding head and lifted it off the ground. As quickly as he safely could, Midas carried the cat into the house and lay it down on a folded towel on the kitchen table. With a tenderness he didn’t know he possessed, he delicately washed the wound and, after folding the flap of skin and fur back in place, put a makeshift bandage over the wound. For his part, the cat lay very quietly and, though conscious, offered no resistance. He was a good little patient.

Once the operation had been completed, the cat opened its eyes and looked at Midas. Its lips parted slightly and to Midas’s utter amazement, he felt a damp and scratchy tongue rake across his finger. Suddenly, with neither warning nor prelude, mean old Midas Crakenberry, curmudgeon extraordinaire, started crying. It began with the unfamiliar sensation of a single tear working its way down his left cheek. Within seconds that single tear had lots of company. Before he knew what was happening to him, Midas was sobbing and wailing so loudly that he wondered if people on the road outside might hear him. But he didn’t care. It felt so good to be crying. How could anything feel that good to him? Nothing had felt good to Midas Crakenberry since…he had no idea.

The more he cried, the better it felt and the better it felt, the more he cried. Decades of fear, anger, frustration, disappointment, loneliness and lovelessness gushed out of him like a tsunami, and he reveled in it. He picked the cat up and cradled it in his arms and hugged it, careful not to squeeze it too tight. He raised it high against his chest so that he could rub his cheek against its fur. Again the cat licked him, this time on his still teary cheek. And it kept licking his tears away until they stopped coming quite a long time later.

There’s no point in saying that Midas Crakenberry was a new man after that. In some ways, he didn’t change at all. He still spent most of his time glued to his chair on the front porch, though the inflow of Jim Beam slowed markedly. He still kept pretty much to himself. He still bathed slightly less often than most people paint their houses.

On the other hand, it could be said that nothing in himself or his life was ever quite the same again. He never again shouted obscenities at passersby. Never again did he lay in wait to ambush innocent children. In fact, there are unconfirmed rumors that he was actually caught smiling and waving to one child who walked by one windy autumn morning. But the boy was alone and no one else can corroborate his story.

The cat knows, though. The cat (whom Midas named Phoenix for reasons too obvious to mention) knows more than he tells and we can only suspect that he always did. He knew how to turn Midas Crakenberry inside out. He knew they needed each other. He knew that from that day forward they would make Siamese twins look like total strangers. And he knew that they would one day be found laying frozen side by each on Midas’s rumpled bed, cuddled like sleeping children, smiling through catty lips. Yes indeed, Midas Crakenberry had himself quite a cat. And vice versa.

(From The Seth Material)

Now, and this will seem like a contradiction in terms—there is nonbeing. It is a state, not of nothingness, but a state in which probabilities and possibilities are known and anticipated but blocked from expression.

Dimly, through what you would call history, hardly remembered, there was such a state. It was a state of agony in which the powers of creativity and existence were known, but the ways to produce them were not known.

This is the lesson that All That Is had to learn, and that could not be taught. This is the agony from which creativity originally was drawn and its reflection is still seen.

Some of the discussion is bound to be distorted, because I must explain it to you in terms of time as you understand it. So I will speak, for your benefit, of some indescribably distant past in which these events occurred.

All That Is retains memory of that state and it serves as a constant impetus—in your terms—toward renewed creativity. Each self, as a part of All That Is, therefore also retains memory of that sate. It is for this reason that each minute consciousness is endowed with the impetus toward survival, change, development, and creativity. It is not enough that All That Is, as a primary consciousness gestalt, desires further being, but that each portion of It also carries that determination.

Yet the agony itself was used as a means, and the agony itself served as an impetus, strong enough so That All That Is initiated within itself the means to be.

If—and this is impossible—all portions but the most minute last ‘unit’ of All That Is were destroyed, All That Is would continue, for within the smallest portion is the innate knowledge of the whole. All That Is protects Itself therefore, and all that It has and is and will create.

When I speak of All That Is, you must understand my position within It. All That Is knows no other. This does not mean that there may not be more to know. It does not know whether or not other psychic Gestalts like It may exist. It is not aware of them if they do exist. It is constantly searching. It knows that something else existed before It own primary dilemma when It could not express Itself.

It is conceivable, then, that It has evolved, in your terms, so long ago that It has forgotten Its origin, that it has developed from still another Primary which has—again, in your terms—long since gone Its own way. So there are answers that I cannot give you, for they are not known anywhere in the system in which we have our existence. We do know that within this system of our All That Is, creation continues and developments are never still. We can deduce that on still other layers of which we are unaware, the same is true.

The first state of agonized search for expression may have represented the birth throes of All That Is as we know It. Pretend, then, that you possessed within yourself the knowledge of all the world’s masterpieces in sculpture and art, that they pulsed as realties within you, but that you had no physical apparatus, no knowledge of how to achieve them, that there was neither rock nor pigment nor source of any of these and you ached with the yearning to produce them. This on an infinitesimally small scale, will perhaps give you some idea of the agony and impetus that was felt.

Desire, wish, and expectation rule all actions and are the basis for all realities. Within All That Is therefore, the wish, desire, and expectation of creativity existed before all other actually. The strength and vitality of these desires and expectations then became, in your terms, so insupportable that All That Is was driven to find the means to produce them.

In other words, All That Is existed in a state of being, but without the means to find expression for Its being. This was the state of agony of which I spoke. Yet it is doubtful that without this ‘period’ of contracted yearning, All That Is could concentrate Its energy sufficiently enough to create the realities that existed in probable suspension within It.

The agony and the desire to create represented Its proof of Its own reality. The feelings, in other words were adequate proof to All That Is that It was.

At first, in your terms, all of probable reality existed as nebulous dreams within the conscious of All That Is. Later the unspecific nature of these ‘dreams’ grew more particular and vivid. The dreams became recognizable one from the other until they drew the conscious notice of All That Is. And with curiosity, and yearning, All That Is paid more attention to Its own dreams.

It then purposely gave them more and more detail and yearned toward this diversity and grew to love that which was not yet separate from itself. It gave consciousness and imagination to personalities while they still were but within Its dreams. They also yearned to be actual.

Potential individuals, in your terms, had consciousness before the beginning or any beginning as you know it, then. They clamored to be released into actuality, and All That Is, in unspeakable sympathy, sought within Itself for the means.

In Its massive imagination, It understood the cosmic multiplication of consciousness that could not occur within that framework. Actuality was necessary if these probabilities were to be given birth. All That Is saw, then, an infinity of probable, conscious individuals, and foresaw all possible developments, but they were locked within It until It found the means.

This was in your terms a primary cosmic dilemma, and one with which It wrestled until All That It was completely involved and enveloped within that cosmic problem.

Had It not solved it, All That Is would have faced insanity, and there would have been, literally, a reality without reason and a universe run wild.

The pressure came from two sources: from the conscious but still probable individual selves who found themselves alive in a God’s dream, and from the God who yearned to release them.

On the other hand, you could say that the pressure existed simply on the part of the God since the creations existed within Its dream, but such tremendous power resides in such primary pyramid gestalts that even their dreams are endowed with vitality and reality.

This then, is the dilemma of any primary pyramid gestalt: It creates realty. It also recognized within each consciousness the massive potential that existed. The means, then, came to It. It must release the creatures and probabilities from Its dream.

To do so would give them actuality. However, it also meant ‘losing’ a portion of Its own consciousness, for it was within that portion that they were held in bondage. All That Is had to let go. While It thought of these individuals as Its creations, It held them as part of Itself and refused them actuality. To let them go was to ‘lose’ that portion of Itself that had created them. Already It could scarcely keep up with the myriad probabilities that began to emerge from each separate consciousness. With love and longing It let go that portion of Itself, and they were free. The psychic energy exploded in a flash of creation.

All That Is, therefore, ‘lost’ a portion of Itself in that creative endeavor. All That Is loves all that It has created down to the least, for It realizes the dearness and uniqueness of each consciousness which has been wrest from such a state and at such a price. It is triumphant and joyful at each development taken by each consciousness, for this is an added triumph against that first state, and It revels and takes joy in the slightest creative act of each of Its issues.

It, of Itself and from that state, has given life to infinities of possibilities. From its agony, It found the way to burst forth in freedom, through expression and in so doing gave existence to individualized consciousness. Therefore is It rightfully jubilant. Yet all individuals remember their source, and now dream of All That Is as All That Is once dreamed of them. And they yearn toward that immense source, and yearn to set It free and give It actuality through their own creations.

The motivating force is still All That Is, but individuality is no illusion. Now in the same way do you give freedom to the personality fragments within your own dreams and for the same reason. And you create for the same reason, and within each of you is the memory of that primal agony—that urge to create and free all probable consciousness into actuality.

I have been sent to help you, and others have been sent through the centuries of your time, for as you develop you also form new dimensions, and you will help others.

These connections between you and All That Is can never be severed, and Its awareness is so delicate and focused that Its attention is indeed directed with a prime creator’s love to each consciousness.

This account needs reading many times, for there are implications not at first obvious.

The wet tarmac glistened under the airport lights as they threaded their way through the parked aircraft. Johanna’s curiosity was growing moment by moment. What on earth was Peter up to? Where was he leading her? All he had said when he asked her to meet him at the airport was that there was a little surprise waiting for her. Not much to go on, but that’s Peter, she thought. Finally, her curiosity was insupportable. “Where are we going, Peter?”

Pointing to a modest twin engine plane shining in the night 50 yards ahead he said, “You see that little number?”

“Yes. So what?”

“That’s where we’re going now. You’ll just have to wait for the rest. Trust me. It’ll be worth the wait.”

This was the greatest day of her life and she was giddy with the thrill of it all. To be offered a one woman show at the Fontaine gallery in New York City was quite an achievement for any artist. To receive such an offer less than three years after her first touch of brush to canvas was incomprehensible. The mere thought of it propelled her into low earth orbit. The joy of sharing this momentous evening with Peter catapulted her into outer-space.

From the moment she had learned of her triumph, she had felt nothing but pure, metaphysical, levitation. Even now, hours later, she hovered as she went through the motions of walking, except that now it was beginning to seem normal.

“Do you remember that scene from Cyrano De Bergerac, where Cyrano and his buddies were drinking at the inn?”, Peter asked.

“Yes”, said Johanna. What was unspoken but understood between them was her invitation to tell her about it anyway, just because she wanted to hear it again from him.

“Well, as you will recall, Cyrano and the boys were tipping a few at the local pub when a beggar came in, angling for a handout. Cyrano, who was not a rich man, carried his net worth in a pouch on his belt. While the others ignored the beggar, Cyrano took the bag from his belt and tossed it to the wretch with reckless abandon. Knowing of his lack of wealth someone audibly muttered, ‘My God, what a fool’. To which Cyrano responded, ‘Yes! But my God - What a gesture!’”.

Johanna smiled with quiet delight at his dramatization.

Peter continued, “Did I ever tell you the story about the boilermaker?” She replied, “No. Or if you did, I don’t remember.”

“Well, there was a boilermaker who was called upon to repair the furnace in a large building. He walked around the furnace for nearly a quarter of an hour and at last, taking a hammer from his tool belt, struck the boiler a single blow. It resumed to operation immediately. The building super was astounded and very grateful. He told the boilermaker to send him the bill, which, of course, he did. The bill was for $1,000. The super then sent a note to the boilermaker asking for an itemized bill. A few days later, the itemized bill arrived. It read:

This time she laughed aloud, for she recognized the poetry and eloquence of his meaning.

Peter continued, “Hold on to those two stories for a few minutes. Their stock is about to rise.”

They were now at the steps leading into the aircraft. Ascending, they found themselves surrounded by the kind of luxury that is known only to the elite of the world of capital. Plush carpeting combined with delicate appointments to frame a portrait of opulence. The cabin lights were so dim that she could see clearly only the area into which they had emerged. Barely visible, near the rear of the compartment, was a cozy lounge.

They buckled themselves into two swivel rockers as the door closed behind them as if by magic. Moments later they were airborne. A world of lights spread out below them as they sat in the near darkness of the their sky capsule. Not a word had passed between them since their embarkation. It was Peter who broke the silence.

“I have another surprise for you.” And as he spoke, the shadow of a human form lit a candle at the rear of the cabin. The candle light revealed the table upon which it rested. On the table were three other objects: a magnum of Champagne and two exquisite silver goblets.

“Shall we adjourn to the salon to begin our celebration?”, he said as he stood, offering her his arm. Together they walked to the table and sat down on the rich leather chairs provided. Johanna stared hypnotically at the light from the candle. “What a wondrous candle”.

The stone walls of the Brightwood Monastery were as smooth as the cheeks of the baby Jesus. The sun warmed them as if from inside, which of course was not the case. Brother Michael had just come from the coolness of the cellar and the touch of the warm stones was a dramatic but somehow exhilarating contrast. It was good to be in the warmth of the sun, thought Brother Michael, and it was just as good that the cellar was so cool, even in summer, so that the candles would keep well. After all, without the income from the candles, they could not support the monastery, and without the monastery, life as they knew it would cease to exist. He loved his life here at Brightwood. He loved the peace, the brotherhood, the spirituality, but secretly, more than anything else, he loved making the candles. They were the one material value he held above all the others. As long as he could keep making candles, nothing else really mattered. He had never given any thought to candles before he came to Brightwood, he recalled as he moved gracefully through the monastery courtyard. It had been a revelation to him, that first time he smelled the tallow simmering in the metal vats. He had felt certain that he recognized that smell from somewhere. It must have been dejavu he had decided.

His skill was now second to none and his candles always brought the very highest prices at market. It had taken him every moment of his 40 years at Brightwood to master his craft, but master it he had. From the first day his only wish had been to create the finest, most beautiful candles possible, and to continue to do so until he joined his creator in that other heaven, the one where he would go after his work was finished in this one.

Peter began again, “You know, of course, that we are here to celebrate your first solo show. What you don’t know is that I too have reason to celebrate.”

“Really? You’ve been holding out on me, haven’t you!”, she responded excitedly.

“Just a bit”, Peter smiled knowingly, “Just a bit”. His smile broadened.

“So what is it you have to celebrate that you haven’t told me about?”

“The story of the boilermaker has been a favorite of mine for a long time. It has been an ideal for me. Not being a boilermaker, I had to adapt the meaning of the story to my own life. What I decided was that the boilermaker was really selling knowledge. And what is that if not an idea, a thought, if you prefer. I have always believed that if a single thought could be worth, genuinely worth, $1,000, why not a million? So that became my goal. To sell single thought for one million dollars.”

She was laughing quietly but convulsively by now. How like him, she thought. How deliciously Peter.

“Well, today I did it.”, he recited rather matter-of-factly. “Today I received a cashier’s check for one million dollars in payment for a single thought.”

Johanna was aghast. At first she thought that he was kidding. One quick look at his face destroyed that illusion. He was plainly in ernest. Regaining her composure she asked, “What was the thought?”

“I’m sorry, love but I am not at liberty to say. It is one of the terms of my agreement with the buyer. I can assure you, however, you will find out soon enough. It will become public knowledge in less than a week. What I can tell you is that it was one hell of a thought!” Whereupon he began to laugh like Satan himself ( or was it Pan, or Shiva, or the Buddha sitting under his tree )? Johanna followed suit.

In the residue of their mirth, Peter reached for the bottle of Champagne and began to work on the cork.

The angry waves of the channel battered Henri Rousseau’s little fishing boat unmercifully. It was not the right season for a crossing to England, thought Marcel, not right at all. But what choice did one have these days? What with Hitler’s thugs on the march and the entire country gone berserk, any sane man would do just what he had done: leave France. Yet he was still a frenchman. Did he not get misty eyed when he heard the strains of the Marseillaise? Was it not he who had burned his own vineyards and broken every bottle of wine, even the 1917, the finest to be bottled since his great-great-grandfather had founded the Chateaux Du Pont label over a century ago? Yes it was he who had vowed that no bosh lips would ever find pleasure in the produce of Chateaux Du Pont soil. Of course, he could not have destroyed all traces of the loving effort of generations of his ancestors. He had only destroyed that which he could not carry.

He had scoured the wharfs of Le Havre until he was satisfied that captain Rousseau’s boat was the largest he could afford to bribe. Then, returning to Champagne for the last time, he had loaded a wagon with all that the boat would carry: three cases of the 1917 and enough seed to replant the vineyard in America. He left behind not only the ashes of his ancestral home and the vineyards, but 200 years of family history. It was a bitter farewell indeed. He was able to do it only because he knew that his progenitors would have done the same thing. They too would have realized that the only priority was the survival of the grape. It all seemed worthwhile, now. The plan had worked and in a few short hours, God willing, he would be in England on his way to America and freedom. He vowed that night to make America as proud of Chateaux Du Pont as he was. In the years to come, he did exactly that.

When Peter had dislodged the cork and the effervescence had subsided, Johanna said, “Allow me.” Taking the bottle from him, she began to pour the fragile liquid into his goblet.

As the first pink glow of dawn trickled into his shop, Claudius was sitting at his work bench, staring at his newest, and greatest, achievement. The hint of a smile was nearly visible on his lips, but no one would have noticed his mouth. Not at that moment - even if there had been someone there to notice - which there was not. It was his eyes they would have been staring at, his eyes that would have entranced them, captured them, held them for outrageous ransom, his eyes and the emotion that expressed itself through them. It flowed out gracefully, gently, yet forcefully, like the beads of water oozing through the first crack in a collapsing dike, like the crystal reflections from the single tear drop at the corner of each eye. Anyone, perhaps even those of us who were not there, could have seen that these were the eyes of a man in devout prayer, a man who had just died well, a man who knew that he would live forever. These were the eyes of innocent worship, not those of a man in awe of a deity, but of a man in awe of himself and his own divinity. They were the eyes of inspired humility. No one understood this better than Claudius. And no one could harness it as he did, to fuel the fires of his own amazement at the beauty he had created, at the process by which it was achieved, at the price he had paid, at his boundless wonder that it had happen at all. Yet there they were, two silver goblets, six years in the making, so identical that even he could not tell them apart, so perfect in every detail that even he could find no flaw, so finished that there was simply no more to be done. These he would present to the guild as his masterpiece, his price of admission to the loftiest ranks among his peers. When the sun settled below the rooftops, Claudius was sitting at his workbench, staring.

The goblets were filled, the scene was set and there remained nothing but the toast. Johanna lifted her goblet and began, “A toast …”. Peter interrupted, “Not quite yet. There is still one missing square in this crazy quilt. What I have not told you yet is that I spent the entire million on this celebration. Half for the plane, and the rest on this toast.”

Her eyes glistened like Roman silver. His exuded the serenity of monastic contemplation. The ecstacy of consummation was lifting them higher than the plane. Together.

She began again, “To the boilermaker.”

“To Cyrano”, he added.

“To us”, they whispered in unison.

A moment later, in a single heartbeat, their lips touched the silver, the champagne and the robust living light of the candle. And thus began the celebration.