Private Text Messages Devastate Scientists’ Authority

10 Comments December 2, 2022 Morrill Talmage Moorehead

In a recent analysis of COVID origins, Dr. Campbell regrets his previous trust in the two most authoritative and prestigious scientific journals on Earth: Nature and Lancet.

You can sense the shame he feels in the video linked here as he first explains the 2020 version of mainstream science and then compares that mess to what has come out now and can no longer be completely blocked by the woke kids at Google’s Ministry of Censorship.

Bottom line: The lack of intermediate COVID-19 viral forms, the lack of multiple independent breakouts of initial viral illness, and several other scientific data points combine to force the conclusion that the Wuhan COVID-19 virus did, despite mainstream denials in the past, truly originate in the Wuhan Lab. There’s no longer room for rational doubt, as best I can tell.

But wait! That’s not what I’m writing to you about.

Yes, John Campbell, PhD believes that the big lesson for him in this ugly fiasco is he needs to learn to think for himself more, rather than always trusting the highest scientific authorities to be honest, transparent, unbiased, and accurate in their peer-reviewed journal articles.

I agree with John, but that’s not why I’m writing. And yes, I suspect that all of us will learn the same lesson eventually, but that’s not my point either.

Nothing is perfect. The failures of mainstream science don’t justify throwing it out and adopting the view that each person’s version of reality will bend to his or her own beliefs, demands and expectations. Sure, your energy will cause people to either like you and treat you favorably or reject you, and this may feel as if the universe bends to your will, but beneath and beyond the huge benefits of being an energetically (“vibrationally”) attractive person, the laws of this universe rarely bend for anyone. Miracles can happen, yes. But they’re rare. Even though, from a scientific and spiritual perspective, I think we live in a universe that should be conceptualized as a quasi-material replica of an underlying truer Reality (a semi-physical simulation), I don’t think our natural laws such as gravity are likely to reverse for me or you if we can just “truly believe.” Genuine miracles (i.e. the suspension of natural laws) are probably just as rare as they seem.

The laws of this replica we call the Universe were derived from intelligently selected cosmic constants that operate in a cause-and-effect framework with rare exceptions. These natural conditions bring outcomes that sometimes seem fair and politically correct but quite often feel unfair and outrageous. As best I can tell, the benevolent Being(s) who designed this place continue to “allow” horrible suffering because we asked for it as part of a learning experience and/or because our collective free will must be allowed to play out in pure cause-and-effect without interference from the designer(s) and code writer(s) living in Reality.

Whatever our spiritual or scientific theories project, the natural scientific rules underlying a disaster here on Earth cannot be changed much by wishful thinking. Therefore, in the future, many lives will depend upon how wisely, honestly, and openly our scientists are allowed to debate the data and “conspiracy theories” surrounding the next global catastrophe whether it turns out to be a nuclear accident, another viral “accident,” a natural weather disaster, a volcanic winter, a rogue AI, or something like the 1859 Carrington Event (solar flare/ storm) that’s thought to be periodic and overdue to hit Earth again while the geomagnetic shield is weak.

Will scientists and politicians pursue the truth however unpleasant or unpopular?

Or will they once again put political ambition above the hunt for valuable truths? Will scientists openly debated and come to a rational consensus or will they shrink into silent compliance with the censorship that modern society and corporate power favored during the COVID fiasco?

We’ll have to wait and see.

But either way, you and I should learn to question mainstream “settled science” in a balanced way that avoids our bivalent human tendency to swing like a pendulum from one extreme to the other…

“Scientists ain’t one iota different from them stinking, lying politicians.”

Sure, we’ve been brutally let down by medicine’s anti-science COVID response of censorship and zero informed consent when administering poorly studied experimental mRNA vaccines. But I doubt anyone reading this feels like some young lover in a break up. Yeah, science has cheated on us and must now gradually admit it despite the silence of the mainstream media. (See the 2020 text messages from key scientists, released under the Freedom of Information Act as detailed in Dr. Campbell’s video.)

But this is not a breakup with science. We’re adults, most of us. Even some of us Crybaby Boomers are growing up a little, I want to think. We’re learning to wrestle with our own biases and sacred-cow fundamentalisms both scientific and spiritual. We’re learning to see the U-shaped curve of political truth within this simulation: The extremes on both sides are valuable for perspective but toxic to human life without the voices of the opposite toxic extreme for balance. Both extremes are needed to find non-toxic conclusions, rules and behaviors. This is why Democrats and Republicans need each other desperately. This is why the anti-spiritual “scientific” materialists and all of us spiritual people on Earth need each other desperately. Left alone to dominate, we’re all toxic to human life, even though most of us are convinced that we have the corner on THE truth.

And let’s just admit it, humans require an unquestionable (if untestable) worldview of some sort. It’s in our nature.

For 2/3’s of scientists, it’s the anti-spiritual foundation of “scientific” materialism: a mindless universe.

For spiritual people, it’s usually a rejection of materialism that’s replaced by a worldview that allows something or Someone somewhere to be literally composed of something other than (or in addition to) mindless, meaningless matter and energy.

Spiritual worldviews tend to boil down to this: “consciousness is fundamental, not matter and energy” or “our universe is a simulation of an actual Reality” or “God transcends time and space but remains in personal contact with us.” My own spiritual fundamentalism encompasses all of these theories, and like you, I feel confident I’m right.

But the fact remains that, like you, I’m often wrong about important things. Can we both admit it?

At the worldview level we’re all pretty much doomed to being fundamentalists whether we’re “scientific” materialists or some version of spiritual or religious folk.

Rarely someone with a materialist worldview will switch sides, perhaps after a near-death experience or after seeing the solar system from space. (I’m thinking of the astronaut and scientist, Edgar Mitchell, PhD).

But whatever side we’re currently on, we tend to remain there. And virtually no one is a lifelong worldview fence-sitter. We decide if the Cosmos is spiritual or non-spiritual, then we dig in to that position and hang on like ticks on a dog.

This truth about human nature limits us as scientists because the ideal scientist would be someone who is always ready, willing and able to follow the data wherever it leads and report it with transparency even when it contradicts a “known” scientific, political, or spiritually established “fact.”

Since we’re all hampered by this biased human nature we share, we should each strive to avoid dogmatism and superficial rejection of new ideas and outlying data points. We should avoid blocking or silencing “pseudoscientists” or non-scientists or scientists working outside of their own specialties. When these people claim to have shocking new data and opinions that look like conspiracy theories and fabrications, we should pride ourselves in listening carefully to them with open-minded hope rather than ego-driven, angry, rude skepticism. Only after listening and weighing things thoroughly should we allow ourselves to make an initial tentative judgement against a new or unpopular scientific idea.

And we must base our judgments on careful analysis of the details, and express those details in written arguments rather than following the anti-scientific modern movement of attacking the individual with angry negative references to his or her educational background, sanity, political stance, or other forms of lazy, unscientific, and scientifically irrelevant political tactics that avoid substantive debate.

Total rejection of new ideas within five to ten minutes of hearing them is a pretty good sign that you’re acting as an enemy of science, not a friend. This is true for materialist scientists as well as for spiritual people, including the minority of scientists with spiritual worldviews because…

Breakthroughs routinely come from fresh minds thinking about unexpected outlying data points, and from brilliant rogues who cross the boundaries of specialization to find an unexpected, disturbing synthesis. Established authorities tend to reject everything these box-free thinkers put in front of them (in less than five minutes because they “can tell” at a glance it’s all rubbish).

An ideal scientist would welcome anything that doesn’t fit his or her “known” truths. The history of science makes this clear.

The same holds true, in my humble and yet infallible opinion, for spiritual people who place actual truth above their desire to corner “the truth” as revealed in the sacred literature of their culture. Christians like me, for example, would do well to absorb a broad and conflicting array of near-death experiences, asking ourselves why God would provide humanity with these life-changing, usually love-filled experiences where the worldview details of religion are usually specific to the person’s religious culture.

And there seems to be no “evolutionary advantage” to having a near-death experience. Instead, the NDE speaks to us of the benevolence of the Being(s) beyond who must have been motivated to give each individual a tailor-made “exit protocol” from this simulated life and into the next life.

Just as all humans, including scientists, are fundamentalists at the worldview level, all humanity are scientists at the worldview level in the sense that we all want the ultimate truth, especially if it agrees with what we already think we know to be true.

So here’s my point:

Spiritual and/or religious people would do well to emulate Dr. Campbell in his crisis of (scientific) faith and trust. For most scientists, their “Bible” (or “Koran” or “Mahabharata” or “Book of Mormon,” etc.) is the collective peer-reviewed scientific literature. That’s the “word of God” to scientists. When this Literature proved to be dangerously inaccurate on an important issue, Dr. Campbell didn’t throw all scientific literature out the window and become anti-science, he simply became more determined to think for himself and grow beyond his (now embarrassingly naive) total trust of scientific authorities.

As spiritual/ religious people, there will come a time when our sacred literature will prove to be grossly inaccurate about something important to us. It will be something that disrupts our smug worldviews.

For example, the existence of non-human, non-angelic, non-demonic, non-jinn beings with various motivations, some benevolent, some not, will almost certainly become obvious and undeniable to us all eventually. If you don’t already suspect that these beings are here now, then try to imagine it becoming undeniably real for you next Friday afternoon. For many, especially for those of us who are Christians, this new data point about the Universe will contradict what we’ve learned (at the worldview level) from our sacred scriptures. For example, “Be it known unto you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom ye crucified, whom God raised from the dead, even by him doth this man stand here before you whole. This is the stone which was set at nought of you builders, which is become the head of the corner. Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.”

If and when people from another planet come here with the recorded histories of thousands, perhaps billions of other planets, each with a history going back for millions if not billions of years, and yet none of them has ever heard the story or the name of Jesus of Nazareth, what then?

The logical, scientific, and truly spiritual thing to do will be to follow John Campbell’s example and strive to think more for ourselves while becoming less naively trusting of Earth’s top church authorities and their claims to the one and only infallible, inerrant scripture, applicable throughout the universe.

Our bivalent human tendency for simple heuristic thinking will try to kick in and cause us to reject the Bible entirely and become some new form of “scientific” materialist living in a universe without personhood at its foundation.

An example of this happening now is the likeable and courageous Paul Wallis, a former mainstream Christian Church pastor and expert in ancient Biblical languages who has followed truth no matter where it might lead.

Rather than avoiding or denying the problems he had discovered over the years in the translation of key Biblical words like “Elohim” in the Old Testament (OT), he pursued the truth and uncovered the apparent re-writing of the Old Testament in ancient times (about 600 BC).

In short, he became convinced that the Old Testament was rewritten from older documents about Extraterrestrials visiting Earth to the monotheistic narrative we have today.

Personally, I like this idea because it solves problems I’ve had for decades about some of the violence ascribed to the OT “God” who supposedly ordered Israel to attack neighboring cities and kill all their people.

For me, the New Testament Jesus gives a largely opposite and much more accurate view of God’s character and personality than the OT. Now I have a logical explanation. No problem.

But for Mr. Wallis, the shock of his discovery has taken him from a non-materialist worldview in which the universe was created by a Being who is a Divine Person to the opposite pole of “scientific” materialism in which the universe was “created” by a zero-point field or “Source” that’s without personhood.

Remarkably, while making this shift, he has maintained much of the language and feel of a spiritual worldview.

I’m still supporting Paul with my small donations, even though I disagree with the direction he’s heading in his view of God, which, as best I can tell, is a non-being sort of energy field with no personality, no power of choice, no wants or desires, and no ability to hear anyone’s prayers.

To me, the core of the spiritual journey is talking to a Supreme Being who hears what I’m saying, understands my language, and cares about me personally. I’m not worried about the question of miracles or whether our free will causes God to limit his actions within the Universe. And I don’t need God to be Santa Claus, to have a gender, or to be one, two, or three Divine Persons.

All I need is a Personal Supreme Being(s) who’s overflowing with love and trustworthiness.

But I continue to listen to people who want a non-being in charge of a meaningless universe because the broader my perspective becomes, the more likely I’ll derive an accurate worldview. (Assuming truth actually does come to us in a U-shaped dose-response curve. I’m betting it does.)

…

Worldview love,

Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD

Examining the Heart and Soul of Totalitarianism

11 Comments September 10, 2022 Morrill Talmage Moorehead

I can’t begin to tell you how happy I was to find out that a brilliant systems analyst whose opinions I hold in the highest esteem, Ivor Cummins, has identified the root cause of what’s destroying love, trust and trustworthiness in the world today. The author of an important book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Mattias Desmet, also gets it. He delivers a spell-binding interview in the video above.

These two men have come to grips with a hard truth that I’ve been yammering about, mainly to my wife, for decades: the primary cause of our cultural dysfunction today is “scientific” materialism, the pseudoscientific and dogmatic faith in the untestable assumption that our universe and all of the things and beings that might possibly lie beyond it, are all made of 1. mindless matter and 2. mindless electromagnetic energy. This interchangeable pair, born of reductionism, has designed and constructed the vast living ecosystems of unfathomably complex organisms without mindful help, because the faithful know there is no chance of a higher mind existing out there anywhere.

“Mass formation psychosis,” as the narrative goes, was first described in the 1950s as a state of mass hypnosis that must take control of 30 percent of a population before a tyrant can drag a country into one of the traditional forms of totalitarianism. Nazi Germany is the poster-child, it seems.

When I listen to this highly educated guy in the video, Mattias Desmet, discuss “mass formation,” it seems intuitively obvious that the US is experiencing this odd hypnotic phenomenon now, heading rapidly and enthusiastically toward a technologically enforced totalitarian society with Central Bank Digital Currency in the hands of the Central Banking Cartel as the ultimate tool for micromanagement of speech, shopping, and the savings/ investment patterns of each individual within their digital surveillance.

Here are the dynamics of group psychosis through hypnosis…

Lonely, frightened people become emotionally married to a constantly repeated (but irrational) narrative that feels good because it focuses everyone’s free-floating anxieties and fears on a concrete object, the “evil people,” who can be dealt with directly (in contrast to their free-floating anxiety which has nothing concrete to target for elimination). These “evil people” are always a group of flawed souls (because we’re all flawed souls, OK? Own it.) This flawed group’s historic and ongoing imperfections are surreptitiously emphasized with righteous indignation which subconsciously tags the group as the cause of everyone’s fear and anxiety, especially where money and poverty are concerned.

Today’s iteration of mass formation psychosis is far from “an equivalence” to Nazi Germany’s events, except perhaps in vague broad terms such as the catastrophically bad judgement of our leadership (on both sides of US politics). The “ultimate evil” group today has become the un-woke white males, as best I can tell. This could change, of course. State-sanctioned racism could shift from white males to all whites including white women and children. Or the currently woke version of racism could suddenly point its finger at another group, such as the Asians, the Mormons, the folk who pilot the world’s UFOs/UAPs, or even the un-woke of all races and worldviews who simply oppose ALL forms of racism on principle, including the woke anti-white form we’re currently struggling with.

It’s strange how a frightened, lonely population can be group-hypnotized into embracing a narrative, no matter how absurd it is, as long as the narrative can be constantly repeated to the public while rational voices are suppressed.

If you wanted to take over the world today, you’d need to have Big Tech and ALL the TV “news” outlets behind your narrative.

Check.

You’d need a crisis or a series of crises, hopefully signaling an unavoidable global macroeconomic disaster like hyperinflation and/or depression.

Check.

You’d need the big money behind your cause, like the world’s true central bankers and their puppets who appear to run the FED.

Check.

Then you, as a wannabe tyrant, could succeed miraculously through public repetition of any delusion, because the discomfort of free-floating fear, anxiety and loneliness can be symptomatically suppressed by focusing these unstable emotions on their supposed root-cause, namely the insufferably rotten white people with male gender identification.

“These sub-humans need to be at least punished for what they’ve done. Then we’ll find justice.”

The huge relief that comes from focusing free-floating anxiety and fear on something concrete brings fanatical dedication to the cause. Currently the cause appears to be silencing, hating, and eventually hunting down and exterminating all the “subhuman animals” who stubbornly oppose the woke delusion and its cultural and governmental takeover. Some of us happen to be white males, so we’re an easy starting point, but probably it won’t stop there.

Unfortunately, eliminating entire segments of the human population (and thereby reducing genetic diversity and our species’ odds of long-term survival) appears to be historically central to a successful “mass formation psychosis” perpetrated by tyrants who are overthrowing a government.

The folk in a takeover-targeted society who speak against the hypnotic racist narrative are, we’re told, unable to reverse the course of the revolution, but at least their anti-racist, anti-murder efforts to preserve rational thought do sometimes seem to succeed in preventing outright genocide and mass murder.

Today the WEF is openly telling us their plans to conquer the world, rejoicing in the ongoing global crises (economic and virus-related) that they freely admit they’re taking full advantage of while publicly bragging about their success in “infiltrating” by getting WEF graduates elected to public office. Fortunately the World Economic Forum seems to want to avoid nuclear war during their takeover. Got to be thankful for the little things.

“Mass formation” theory explains why and how the low points of human history tend to repeat themselves.

But I find it more fascinating that “scientific” materialism itself, the dominant toxic fundamentalist worldview today, is nothing short of a mass formation psychosis. It has taken a lonely group of highly intelligent people who have dedicated their careers to objective truth and curiosity, a group of wonderful men and woman who live in constant anxiety and fear of stepping out of line or in any way inadvertently screwing something up and losing their research funding, and through endless repetition of the Neo-Darwinian narrative for over a century, it (the toxic soup of materialism) has transformed about 66% of scientists and much of the general public into “scientific” materialist fundamentalists who reject all scientific curiosity outside of traditional materialist boundaries.

And as a group, the materialists (a.k.a. physicalists) continue to destroy the careers of anyone who opposes their scientific faith-based assumption with any other scientific faith-based assumption, such as Intelligent Design or the objective, scientific study of UFO’s/UAPs. They also censor and derail the careers of those within their own materialist faith whenever one of them accidentally discovers and tries to publish the evidence supporting a non-materialist worldview.

It’s no wonder I’m hearing rumors that materialist scientists are individually but quietly backing away from their long-held religion. Reality is impossible to hide from smart people forever, it seems to me.

I can deal with the notion that Desmet suggests, that the silent majority (on all sides of politics, science and human demographics who quietly dislike racist government takeovers) cannot prevent it from ultimately happening. It’s not the end of the world if we can’t change the course of history or even change the mind of a single woke racist. We can at least keep talking sense to the brick wall of hypnosis. We can at least keep trying to limit the loss of life that has traditionally been part of government takeover revolutions throughout history.

Come to think of it, I like what someone reported hearing during their life-changing near-death experience…

“God doesn’t ask us to succeed, only to persist.”

Ask Viktor Frankl, God rest his soul. Speaking up against ALL forms racism is the only loving, kind, and thoughtful thing to do, because nobody who’s not a sociopath feels good about themselves after a genocide, whether they’ve participated as a bloodthirsty proponent, a passive observer, or a survivor like Mr. Frankl.

…

Democracy Love,

Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD

UFOs are “probably the largest coverup we’ve ever encountered” says Representative Tim Burchett of the US House of Representatives

21 Comments June 6, 2022 Morrill Talmage Moorehead

The UFO/UAP issue is unique in that it encourages objective thinking from politicians on both sides of the aisle working together toward the goal of genuine UFO disclosure.

Their cooperation is not part of the World Economic Forum’s master plan. For global elites, I suspect it’s frightening to see the first tiny cracks in the wall of political hatred their members have erected to divide and control US voters.

But however the WEF feels, these few brave bipartisan DC officials have put political hatred aside for a higher purpose. They hope to discover a worldview truth that has likely been hidden within the byzantine power/secrecy structures of the US intelligence “services” since about 1947.

It’s become clear that we’re not alone… but that’s only if you’re a reader of the UFO literature. As with any field of complex cutting-edge enquiry, if you don’t read the literature broadly and critically, you won’t know what’s going on.

Bipartisan UFO/UAP work demonstrates once again why the left and the right need each other desperately.

Our need to move beyond political-hatred and work together is especially evident in present times as the self-appointed political “authorities” at the World Economic Forum (WEF) with their enormous dollar wealth are telling us frankly that they intend to end democracy, seize everyone’s private property, and create a centralized global digital world currency that they alone will control. This centralized digital currency will allow them to micromanage (through financial rewards and punishments) every person and corporation on Earth by monitoring their spending, savings, investing, online political speech, and personal/ corporate digital carbon footprints. (Click here for a detailed video overview of the WEF’s most recent meeting.)

The WEF is already gaining control of Western governments, placing their personally educated politicians in powerful elected positions while openly sharing their plans and bragging about the success they’re having. Of course they’ve got nice bits of wonderful sounding rhetoric and presumably the best of intentions, by and large. Future tyrants always do feel that their grandiose plans will save the world. That’s got to be how they justify violence, war, racism and every other form of top-down abuse.

The left and right need each other now more than ever.

We need each other’s conflicting worldview biases, we need each other’s opposite perspectives on economic and monetary policy, we need each other’s scientific biases including the many suppressed minority postulates and theories, we need each other’s incongruent perspectives on how to genuinely help the poor rather than enslaving them in debt, inflation, addiction, and the depressing grip of eternal victimhood through woke racism’s campaign of anti-logic and “fairness doesn’t work.”

An unbalanced, top-heavy approach to politics, science, and spiritual paradigms tends to bring disaster and collapse to a peaceful, loving society. This is because we live in a world (and universe) where the complexity of vital systems exceeds our mental capacity to understand the details, let alone our ability to measure, control and fix any of nature’s systems. With complex systems, balance is wisdom, and it’s achieved through listening carefully to everyone, even those who sound like fools to you. Especially those.

The hyper-complex systems of nature embody just about everything including the biochemistry and genetics of life, the balances of ecosystems, the delicate balance of competition versus synergy among all organisms including human societies and subcultures, the balance of free markets versus top-down regulation, the balance of taxation versus economic growth, the balance of inflation versus deflation, the balance of selfish ambition versus true altruism, and the natural ebb and flow of top-down spiritual worldview impositions by ruling governments versus grass-roots spiritual evolution from one age to the next.

Humanity’s inherent need of freely opposing views on our road to enlightenment and peace is so enormous that I would go so far as to suggest that Christians and other spiritual people need the views of atheists as much as atheists need the influences of certain carefully-selected Christian and non-Christian spiritual values.

When I think about it, atheists question everything. This approach leads a person to ask the right questions. (Ask many questions and you’re more apt to ask the right ones? Seems logical to me.) And of course, any scientist or investigator will tell you that asking the right questions is the only way to track down a stubborn truth in any field of study or in any science-based practice.

At the same time, Christians sense the importance of vital concepts like, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind…” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Even if you feel sure that God doesn’t exist, you would increase the odds of human survival by internalizing the second half of this moral and spiritual call to action.

Monopoly of power is the enemy of life on Earth because one group’s views are always unbalanced, irrespective of what the group believes and promotes. Diversity of opinion, like genetic diversity, increases our species odds of survival. That’s nature’s way.

Yet each side of US politics conspires against the other in pursuit of monopolistic power, thinking that a final political victory for their side will bring utopia. The opposite is true.

Total dominance by any group of humans regardless of what they promote (even if it’s democracy) would spell the death of democracy and the resurrection of totalitarian rule in the West.

Cycles of tyranny dominate Earth’s brief recorded history. If the WEF kills cryptocurrency and ends democracy as they intend to, it will probably take us “little” people a thousand years to regain a voice in any government on Earth.

While the best parts of Christianity promote a world where everyone loves her/his neighbor, and the WEF promotes a world where they control the non-stakeholders (us little people), whoever is currently hiding the bulk of UFO data and artifacts is withholding information that will someday, for better or worse, cause a worldview reset that’s based on hard truth.

I suspect that a worldview reset based on knowledge and truth about our non-human neighbors might likely benefit the planet more than the “Great” economic “Reset” that the wealthy elites of the WEF are openly conspiring to bring upon us.

Like the WEF, the people hiding UFO/UAP data need the political left and right to remain under the hypnotic spell of political hatred, each side hating the other with every fiber of their hearts, with all their souls, and with all their minds.

TV “news” on both sides of the aisle maintains this hateful situation for the WEF, as well as for their own corporate profits, bathing listeners in a mental stew of hatred with time-tested tools like word-selection bias, story selection bias, overt censorship, half truth reporting, and complete lies whenever possible. Both sides do this. It’s not just the “bad guys” that lie and cheat over the “news” airwaves. Your side is doing it, whether you know it or not.

We should all wake up and refuse to watch any TV programming that makes our brains feel political hatred, fear, or outrage towards supposed “idiots.” Instead we should strive to communicate respectfully across the political divide so we can work together toward the common goal of human survival, long-term, never requiring anyone to abandon their political biases but rather understanding that they truly have valuable opinions and experiences that we desperately need in order to balance our own limited ideas and limited experiences.

The political left promotes great truths, the political right promotes great truths, both sides make colossal mistakes that are sometimes identical to the mistakes of their opponents, but neither side remotely resembles the “idiots” and “demons” that TV “news” paints for us.

In the video below, a Republican lawmaker from the House of Representatives, Tim Burchett, gives us his remarkably open-minded Christian perspective on the UFO/UAP coverup. It’s a great interview.

Here’s the gist of UFO “disclosure” by the US Department of Defense for anyone who missed the recen t congressional report…

Senator: “Whaddaya think of them UFOs?”

DOD official: “We have absolutely no idea what they are. And the proper term is UAP, numbskull.”

Senator: “But they’re shutting down our…”

DOD official: “We have no knowledge and no desire to learn about UFO’s shutting down nuclear facilities.”

“Y’all can’t read?”

“Senator, we’re not permitted to read about UFO history. Shut up now and give us a decade of tax money. We’ll assume that UAPs are human technology for now. And one other thing. We’ll need legislation out of this body to shut down independent UAP research. That’s vital to our mission. The DOD will NOT tolerate interference from US citizens trying to compete with us on this issue.“

“The government can’t tell us the truth about anything, and I’m in the government.” – Tim Burchett.

In the video above we have a Christian lawmaker from the South who believes that some UFOs are the work of an alien civilization. He uses a Bible text from Ezekiel to support the idea.

His words would shock me if my own spiritual journey hadn’t been fairly similar.

As best I can predict, Mr. Burchett’s attitude foreshadows the direction that all Christianity will eventually take once the UFO/UAP truth comes out, assuming it ever does. This evolution of Christianity is likely to happen because honesty and integrity matter a great deal to the majority of modern Christians, especially the fundamentalists. On the other hand, the emotional appeal of an unchanging dogmatic traditional Christian worldview will be difficult for many Christian fundamentalists to overcome, partly due to financial concerns of Church administrators, but largely due to everyone’s worldview inertia. We all “know” we’re right about our worldviews, even when reality suggests otherwise.

I get the impression that many of us still consider ourselves Christians despite having gradually rejected the notion that the Bible is infallible and inerrant (though we may all be wrong). Right or wrong, it seems that some of us have allowed ourselves to elevate our view of God from the morality of the material Old Testament ET warrior gods (the Elohim or “powerful ones”) to the transcendent, loving Supreme Being described as a loving parent in some New Testament passages.

I have an opinion related to this aspect of Christian worldview evolution: I hope that every Christian who continues to believe in a Supreme Being following ET disclosure will hang on to the belief that our Supreme Creator is more than human in every way, not somehow inferior in one convenient way that just happens to conform to the secular dogma of an impersonal universe.

Let’s think about this…

The greatest thing about a human being, the biggest mystery and most impressive part of our existence, is that we have a personal identity that brings us a sense of free will, the ability to choose and act, the experience of primary agency as an undetermined cause with feelings and desires that bring depth, texture and meaning to everything we decide and try to do. It’s not merely that we are conscious, it’s that we experience genuine personhood.

The great historic failures of organized Christianity during the brutal “colonization” era have, I think, caused secular minds to hate the idea of a personal Supreme Being or Beings. They insist upon an impersonal Universe ruled by chance alone.

But as the existence of advanced non-human beings gradually penetrates our materialist culture forcing even secular people to look a bit higher, all of us, Christians included, seem to want something Impersonal at the top. Secularism seems to have given all of us in the West a tendency to replace the misconception of a personal ET Warrior “God” (from the Old Testament) with something impersonal. Some Christians say that the term “God” should be replaced by an impersonal word like “Source.”

Wanting an impersonal “Source” rather than a personal “God” is understandable, I guess. It even sounds street-smart if you imagine yourself in the shoes of an evangelist who hopes to fill Churches again.

But this emerging concept of an impersonal “Source,” as best I can determine, drives a knife into the heart of Christianity. As I see it, the main message of Jesus was probably not an overall worldview or even a “forensic plan of salvation,” but simply the reality that God is like a loving father whom anyone can talk to. This message is a radical departure from the angry beings (the Elohim) variously depicted as “God” and “gods” in the Old Testament.

Our secular bias appears to want a “God” who is inferior to us in one big way: he/she/it must lack personhood. The logic seems to be that this almighty “Source” is so infinitely great that personhood, humanity’s greatest transcendent attribute, is the single category of being where we must declare ourselves superior to the Highest, because the “Source” is ostensibly impersonal. You can’t talk to it and expect it to listen, understand, and feel anything towards you.

To me, this is “scientific” materialism in a bit of a disguise: the impersonal Universe of secularism remains while conceding that there’s something out there, but it’s a thing not a sentient Being.

Something in us Christians who have explored the UFO literature a bit and are convinced that advanced non-human beings are real… something in us wants God to become this impersonal “Source” rather than the Loving Father of the Nazarene.

Though I personally rejected the Old-Testament warrior version of God after 9/11/01 showed me the perspective of the ancient Philistines under attack, and though I have recently read three fascinating books about the misinterpretation of the word “Elohim” in the Old Testament, I still sense the nature of God through this sort of reasoning…

If humans have logic, the Supreme Mind has greater logic. If we have emotions, Supreme Love has greater emotions. If we have personalities, the Supreme Person has a better personality. If we understand and speak languages, the Supreme Communicator understands and speaks all languages. And if we know how to listen to those in need, the Supreme Councilor listens with greater empathy and care than we do.

So I suspect that when friendly ETs walk openly among us, their version of God will probably resemble the loving Father of whom our Nazarene leader reportedly said, “I and the Father are one.”

The Baptism of Christ – Aert de Gelde, 1710

…

Spiritual Love,

Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD

Exiting the Materialist Worldview with Self-awareness

9 Comments February 26, 2022 Morrill Talmage Moorehead

When my mind and heart joined forces to break away from a somewhat “scientific” materialistic version of fundamentalist Christianity (in the ever-evolving SDA Church as it was in Southern California in 2001), I kept my “friendship” with a Supreme Being intact by praying a lot.

We tend to hang on to certain subjectively tested assumptions that are difficult to test objectively in a blinded, controlled way.

Instead of rejecting God, I rejected the assumption of mainstream Christianity that the Bible is infallible, lacks contradictions when correctly understood with God’s help, and is the primary (if not the exclusive) written communication from the Divine Source to humanity.

But I didn’t throw out the ancient Judeo-Christian writings or any other ancient or modern spiritual writings as if they were of no value. I think they’re all vital to our spiritual evolution and survival as a species. Binary thinking is the human error that would have us toss them out.

I’ve seen a few good people leave the SDA church and hang on to their version of God, and also hang on to their assumption that the Bible is essentially infallible when properly interpreted. These folk tend to join another fundamentalist Christian Church, retain their sense of superior religious enlightenment, and continue to attempt to “prove” that their new beliefs are right based upon their new understanding of the “infallible” Bible.

I’ve also seen a few people leave the SDA church and reject the existence of a personal Supreme Being as well as the Bible. These folk, (n=3), may continue an interest in spiritual things and possibly join a non-Christian religious belief system. Alternatively, they may reject all spiritual things and fall back upon “scientific” materialism (the anti-spiritual, pseudo-scientific, untestable assumption that the universe and everything beyond it consists of mindless, random matter and energy).

Everyone tends to see their own worldview, new or old, as the most reasonable and accurate one. Fortunately some can see this human tendency and question its influence on their own thinking.

As you may recall, I’m often wrong about important things.

Despite this glaring fallibility, it seems clear to me that “scientific” materialism is not only anti-scientific and anti-spiritual, it’s also toxic to humanity because it creates a meaningless, purposeless worldview that seems to cause clinical depression and leads people like Putin into cruel, amoral behaviors that can be justified by the materialist belief that free will is a false illusion and morality doesn’t exist except in a flexible, user-friendly way.

Lately I’ve noticed a growing number of highly educated people associated with the UFO community leaving “scientific” materialism in a way that reminds me of how I left Christian fundamentalism while holding on to my most treasured assumption.

My most treasured assumption was and is my sense of friendship with an intelligent, benevolent, loving Supreme Being, whose personal characteristics still seem to me to be best reflected in many (but not all) of the saying attributed to Jesus in the Bible.

Similarly, some people who leave “scientific” materialism hold on to their most precious assumption: that the Universe is impersonal. I can’t fault them for doing the same sort of thing I did. But let’s at least clarify it a bit.

Those who exit materialism may reject ultimate universal randomness, they may come to believe that there’s something more to reality than matter and energy, they may come to believe that the Universe is a great supercomputer or perhaps the physical brain of a huge organism inside which we are its tiny separate dissociated egos, or they may even come to believe in a higher Spirit as Einstein said…

“Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that some Spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe, one that is vastly superior to that of man.” – Albert Einstein

But is a Spirit personal? Not necessarily.

It seems to me that many who “leave” materialism don’t leave a certain debilitating aspect of it.

They hold on to the untestable assumption that, one way or another, the higher “seemingly intelligent” force, or computer, or brain, or Spirit cannot possibly be personal to humans. That is, prayer cannot really be the process of talking to a loving Friend with the highest personal morality, because the Supreme Force cannot possibly have anything to do with human morality. It must be seen as either too smart, too finite and divided, too infinite, or in some other way incapable or unwilling to connect with a human being in a personal way. Even if the Source were in some sense a Person, the notion of he/she/it listening to humans individually or even collectively would be impossible. It would be like a human trying to talk with a bacteria, we’re told.

But here’s the thing. The DNA codes of Earth and possibly those of the rest of the Universe are a hyper-complex language with “codes within codes within codes” as geneticist Garry Nolan, put it. The age of the Universe (still thought to be a mere 13.8 billion years) is but a miniscule fraction of the time required for mindless, random forces (random mutation, genetic drift, and natural selection) to come up with a code for a functional protein of modest size, let alone simultaneously coming up with a protein nano-factory necessary to maintain and replicate that DNA while carrying out its other complex commands.

So, ignoring the mainstream noise to the contrary, it’s scientifically respectable now to postulate that an intelligence greater than our own had a personal role in writing the first genetic codes and constructing the first protein nano-factories of this Universe.

Certainly anyone with an open mind can see that it’s reasonable to postulate that the intelligent minds behind modern UFOs might have advanced DNA technology giving them an ability to tamper with, if not Intelligently Design new DNA code.

But taking it a step further, the first DNA codes of the Universe, together with the first intracellular nano-machines that must have been present at the same time to interpret and obey the machine language of those DNA codes, could reasonably be postulated to have come from a Source living beyond the reality we call the Universe or its space-time matrix of potential.

And it seems obvious that any Mind capable of writing DNA code would also be capable of understanding human language. So the idea that prayer is talking to a Real Friend who can literally hear you and care about your life is not the objective impossibility it’s often assumed to be by materialist “science.”

And if you explore the evidence that our Universe appears to have a number of characteristics of a holodeck-like replica of some more fundamental reality, then you might reasonably conclude that the personal monitoring of, and contact with, each person within this replica by Someone beyond it would be a likely possibility.

Naturally, I would encourage anyone leaving the “scientific” materialist faith to personally test the hypothesis that our Higher Source is a personal and loving Being, rather than impersonal and out of contact with us.

As far as I know, the only way to test this hypothesis is to pray and see if you have a sense of connecting with Someone.

If you accept consciousness as something other than a false illusion, then subjective testing is at least a reasonable approach. Some might argue it’s the only approach available even to scientists, because we must all pass any data through the lens of consciousness.

Prayer is a matter of “talking to God as to a friend,” as far as I know.

But test the hypothesis your own way and call it meditation if the word prayer doesn’t sound right. After all, I’m often wrong about important things, and testing this particular hypothesis seems extremely important because…

If enough of humanity were to discover how to talk to a Loving Supreme Being who does what’s right because it is right and respects free will because it’s the right thing to do, my gut feeling is that our species would…

eventually stop enjoying real and pretend violence on TV,

stop believing that war is inevitable,

stop electing sociopath leaders,

stop stumbling toward nuclear holocaust,

work together to end poverty without cancelling the freedoms of the non-elite,

stop polluting our bodies and the planet,

learn to survive the dangerous aspects of our technologies long enough to evolve into a loving species that could safely expand beyond Earth and be accepted into, perhaps, a larger society of mature species out in the Universe who have learned to “love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them.”

…

Conscious, Intelligent, Personal Love,

Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD

Convenience shopping in Sweden with The Mark of the Beast

4 Comments January 25, 2022 Morrill Talmage Moorehead

“The second beast was permitted to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that the image could speak and cause all who refused to worship it to be killed. And the second beast required all people small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark— the name of the beast or the number of its name.” – Revelation 13: 15-17.

Several decades ago when I was struggling to remain a fundamentalist Christian (I gave up in 2001), I thought the book of Revelation should NOT be in the Bible. The tone was wrong. The temperament and personality of God seemed wildly inaccurate.

But I’m often wrong about important things…

A half hour ago I came across a video by a British Comedian discussing a microchip popular in Sweden. They estimate that 10,000 people have had these things inserted subcutaneously now. In one of their hands.

Russell Brand seems warm-hearted, intelligent and often funny in his own loving way. Although he likes foul words, he hasn’t used many this time around. Nevertheless, anyone with a fundamentalist Christian background might want take a seat before watching this rant.

It’s a bit chilling…

I wish there were a Christian denomination focused only on doing things for others in search of shared love in this life, rather than centering as they all seem to do around accepting a specific worldview in search of Heaven and immortality in the next life.

To me, once you feel you know God and really trust him, you don’t worry about getting to Heaven or having the right beliefs or books to get you there. You just want to connect with loving people and help them do something genuinely worthwhile.

…

Doctrine-free Love,

Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD

“Spirituality is the missing piece” – Paul Hellyer on the history of UFOs

18 Comments November 22, 2021 Morrill Talmage Moorehead

The late, great Paul Hellyer, God rest his soul, recorded a final message (in the video above). It turns out that several of his conclusions remain near the fringe of Ufology.

Here’s a summary of the often-dismissed conclusions he delivered to us with confidence:

Nazis fled to Antarctica after WWII and created a breakaway culture that possibly survives to this day on a base that the Germans had begun building in 1939.
UFOs, maybe of Nazi origin, protected the Nazis from an attack by Admiral Byrd’s fleet.
The “Paperclip” Nazis were given top positions in the US Space Programs and high positions throughout the secret service organizations. Soon they became a shadow government. President W. Wilson (by creating MJ-12 or something like it) gave these Nazis complete dictatorial control over ET-derived technology in the US. This off-world technology was obtained from UFO crashes beginning in 1941 and including the Roswell crash in 1947. Nazis control Area 51 and S4 to this day.
An ET being survived a crash and sat for a recorded interview with a nurse. Mr. Hellyer watched the video. The main ET message? Humans are wrecking this beautiful planet.
If the ETs had wanted to take over Earth at that time they could have, because humans were defenseless against them.
The USA and USSR “sold their souls” in exchange for ET technology.
The USA and USSR had been offered ET help with medicine, agriculture, etc. if they would give up atomic weapons. They refused.
The fabric of the cosmos is damaged by nuclear explosions.
Steven Greer “who, as you know, is one of America’s best ufologists” quotes former President Bill Clinton. When asked by a reporter why he didn’t disclose more about the UFO files, the President said, “Sarah, there’s a government inside the government, and I don’t control it.“
Not one US President has been allowed inside Area 51 or Area S4. Congress has never known what’s going on in these places.
If you read The Omega Files, by Branton (a pseudonym), Mr. Hellyer said that you will know more about UFOs and Aliens than most of the top generals and admirals.
Phil Schneider was telling the truth when he spoke of huge underground cities and structures, including the Dulce Base where human genetic experiments (similar to those performed by the Nazis of WWII) were performed by modern-era Nazis. Back in the 1990’s, Mr. Schneider (not Mr. Hellyer, though he may have believed Schneider) said that some of the underground structures, several in every state, are designed to hold thousands of prisoners who will be collected after the world takeover by the “new world order” led by evil ET’s who will depopulate the world with bio-weapons, possibly viruses.
Michael Wolf’s many incredible claims were essentially true, including his claim to have been an insider at Area 51. President Jimmy Carter wanted to end the UFO cover up but… “I attended this meeting,” Wolf claims (not Mr. Hellyer). “Carter had strong Christian beliefs. When told that religion is man-made and probably unique to this planet, he broke down in tears.” Wolf also said that “satellite government scientists” have harnessed zero-point energy and cold fusion. Wolf said, “There needs to be a smooth transition into these new sciences. Otherwise the world economy could be wrecked.”
The US Space Force is at least 14 years old and currently traverses the galaxy.
Spirituality is the missing piece of the UFO / Phenomena puzzle. God “is alive, well, and everywhere.”

Notice how Zohar Entertainment Group and AdRev, the companies who manage this YouTube channel, decided to cut the message off the moment Mr. Hellyer began talking about God. That’s a transparent bias, probably the same cash-flow bias that destroyed the mainstream “news” media’s trustworthiness in the US. The late Paul Hellyer deserves greater respect than this. So does every religion’s God(s).

For that matter, UFOs and related phenomena deserve greater respect than to be forced into the “entertainment” category on YouTube. This “entertainment” label is misleading and insulting. But I digress.

As I listen to Mr. Hellyer, the surprise to me is how many of his beliefs I’ve rejected long ago in my haste to form a “humble-but-infallible” (ego-laden) opinion.

For example, if you read the Michael Wolf link, you’ll come across the claim that Dr. Wolf et. al successfully created an “artificially-intelligent human” named “J-Type Omega” who came out of the lab’s genetic soup looking 20 years old and now lives free in the USA. Hmmm.

To the primitive part of my brain that loves all-or-nothing thinking, this story deserves knee-jerk rejection, and therefore as the puerile “thinking” goes, everything Dr. Wolf ever said must be rejected. But wait…

According to Chris Stonor who claims that Dr. Wolf read and approved his article in 2000, Dr. Wolf also said some things that would be easy for me to believe. Quoting now…

Dr. Wolf said the Pope has changed the Roman Catholic view on God.
- “Their future line will be ‘we are not in the image of God but our souls are’.”
He had spoken at length to the ETs about God and death.
- “Our bodies are merely containers for the soul. When people die their consciousness simply moves into another dimension.”
On God Dr. Wolf said,
- “Some ETs call God The Forever – the creator behind everything in the universe.”
On Jesus Christ,
- “He was of joint ET/human heritage – sent to Earth as an attempt to end human violence.”
- Whether a Zeta, Pleiadian, Altaran, Human etc.. we share the same God – we are all family.

A mantra was drilled into my head during my decades as a fundamentalist Christian: “You can’t pick and choose.” This unfortunate dogma referred only to texts in the Bible. “The Bible is either straight from God’s infallible mouth or it’s worthless.” There’s little if any middle ground for fundamentalists of all faiths, including the “scientific” materialist fundamentalists.

Yet I know I have to pick and choose when it comes to peer-reviewed medical literature. That’s the nuts and bolts of the scientific process.

And when it comes to the “news” media, I’ve learned to pick and choose carefully (or ignore it completely) because both political sides of that puppet-show regularly exaggerate, hide things, spin things, use poor judgement, and even overtly lie for the “higher” cause of politics and money/ratings.

So why wouldn’t it make sense to pick and choose from among Paul Hellyer’s controversial beliefs as well as from the sources he seemed to trust?

Perhaps “listen but verify” would be workable, rather than thinking that a person’s entire work is all true or all false.

My attitude is, listen widely and try to remember every detail no matter how impossible the story sounds because if we’re actually dealing with off-world technology, seemingly impossible feats could be routine.

These days, I apply the same heuristic to ancient scriptures. I take in old writings or oral myths and try to determine what represents a loving God, and what’s more likely the footprint of ancient ETs, “the powerful ones.”

…

Spectrum Love,

Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD

Looking Directly into the Sun

27 Comments November 7, 2019 Morrill Talmage Moorehead

“Learn to place your intellect in the sheath of your awareness rather than in the sac of memory and identification. Once you do, this tremendous instrument can cut its way effortlessly toward the ultimate.” – Sadhguru

The big problem we face as a struggling species is our need to filter data through an inflexible worldview. This process rejects a significant portion of good accurate data thereby hindering us in spiritual growth and scientific advancement.

Worldviews (or cosmic paradigms) become central to our personal identities which we defend with denial, outrage and a false sense of superiority to those who hold conflicting views. The memory of things we’ve been taught by parents and trusted teachers in youth ties us to rigidity, denial and the rejection of useful knowledge.

And yet many of us seem convinced that spiritual growth and scientific advancement fully demand a rigid, data-filtering worldview.

For instance, theophobia has the geological community in a headlock preventing publication of anything supporting the ancient accounts of great floods and fires that nearly erased humanity. This is because lending credence to “holy myths” threatens paradigm identity and is therefore emotionally intolerable to most geologists.

For them to give in and admit these “myths” were basically accurate would feel something like an Orthodox Jew eating pork, a Muslim drawing Mohamad, or a Christian doubting Jesus’ historical existence.

So the evidence of periodic geological cataclysms in Earth’s history has been downplayed for generations, but unfortunately it’s looking like our “experts” have made a grievous error in protecting their theophobia with the paradigm of geologic gradualism.

There’s good scientific evidence that the Sun is a periodic nova or “micro-nova,” that coronal mass ejection material from the Sun nearly wiped out our species about twelve thousand years ago.

The perceived problem with this data set is not merely that it supports humanity’s ancient “mythical” records, but that it is inherently frightening to scientists because those few who look into it also find evidence that a similar geological catastrophe may happen within our lifetimes.

The more practical problem with this data is that scientists can’t get funding for research that gives an inch of ground to the “crazy” people who believe in God or any historic veracity of ancient human records.

But it’s not just mainstream scientists whose worldviews prevent an objective look at this. Many Christians have a worldview that doesn’t allow the possibility of a return of global flooding or any other global catastrophe because the “inerrant” scriptures include a rainbow with a promise that God will never drown us again.

Sadguru is wrong in thinking that sleeping only a few hours a night is healthier for everyone than sleeping 8 or 9 hours a night, but the man is divinely inspired when he suggests letting your intellect experience the “sheath of your awareness” rather than “the sack of memory and identification.”

If you want to give his advice a whirl and transcend your worldview for a moment with some controversial but important scientific data and theory, here’s a video that could truly save our entire species from the next major periodic sun eruption…

The narrator and creator of this video is Ben Davidson. Here’s his website. Here’s his beautiful family.

“Look deep into nature and then you will understand everything better.” – Albert Einstein

Your pal,

Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD

Synthetic Life – a Minority Report

15 Comments November 1, 2019 Morrill Talmage Moorehead

“Dr. Tour is one of the world’s top synthetic organic chemists. He has authored 680 scientific publications and holds more than 120 patents. In 2014, Thomson Reuters named him one of “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds,” and in 2018 Clarivate Analytics recognized him as one of the world’s most highly cited researchers. Tour is also fearless. He joined more than a thousand other scientists in signing the “Scientific Dissent from Darwinism.” More recently, he has become a thorn in the side of the origin of life research community, offering blunt assessments of the current state of origin of life research.”

When kids from the vanishingly rare religious families of the US go away to college, they need something to save them from being sucked over the emotional falls of determinism, materialism, Neo-Darwinism and nihilism. Professors pound these untestable philosophic worldviews into their students’ heads as if they were facts of “settled science.”

This shocking video lecture could help spiritual kids resist the standardized brainwashing of our era. Please forward it to the young people you know.

Cheers,

Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD

Why are we here?

11 Comments August 7, 2019 Morrill Talmage Moorehead

Many years ago, Neil Young wrote something profound and worrisome, “Only love can break your heart.”

But just this morning Ellie, my granddaughter asked, “Why are we here?”

Auntie Teri laughed and said, “That’s the great philosophical question that everyone wants an answer to.”

I blurted out, “I can tell you why we’re here. It’s so we can learn…”

But I hesitated as thoughts rushed through my head. Things like, “We’re here to find out what it’s like to live in a place where God isn’t physically present to influence us… so we can see who we really are. Our souls are from another realm called Reality. Life in this Universe is an E8 simulation that Johanna calls 229 H Street. God is The Great Surfer who lives outside of space and time and misses us when we’re away from home…”

My words, “So we can learn…” hung awkwardly in the air. I was starting to realize I had nothing appropriate to say to someone her age.

Until she rescued me and finished my sentence…

“to love?” She made it look and sound like a genuine question, but it felt to me like an angel’s solemn message.

I said, “Yes,” and grinned the biggest ever, realizing that she knows more about life than I do.

“We’re here to learn to love,” I said firmly, pretending that “love” was the word I was searching for all along.

“For only love can break your heart. What if your world should fall apart?”

No, Neil Young, your world won’t fall apart. Hang tough. Ellie says the whole reason we’re here is to learn to love. And she should know, she’s five years old.

…

Your pal, Talmage

Science Morphed into a Spiritual Bully

2 Comments July 23, 2019 Morrill Talmage Moorehead

“Remember how electrical currents and ‘unseen waves’ were laughed at? The knowledge about man is still in its infancy.” – Albert Einstein.

Slow deep breathing shunts blood to the prefrontal cortex and the subjacent pleasure center on the left. Science can tell us this much, but it cannot detect the non-physical field of free will interfacing with the brain.

When science leaps in faith beyond its self-imposed physical limitations and denies the existence of free will and all else non-physical, it is like a man who has refused to open his eyes since birth, declaring now that all vision is an illusion. He, being superior to the uneducated in intellect, insight, courage and integrity, stands alone as willing to face the difficult and oppressive truth that human vision is a false, meaningless illusion.

Science must learn to admit the obvious: it has chosen materialism, to be blind to the non-physical realm and all evidence of its existence, including the most obvious, free will.

While this choice persists, science cannot claim to be informed about the realm it ignores, much less pose as an infallible anti-spiritual authority in Western textbooks and classrooms.

…

Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD

The Iceman Fixed My Headaches!

16 Comments July 3, 2019 Morrill Talmage Moorehead

The Wim Hof method of life improvement through hyperventilation, breath holding and cold exposure has gone mildly viral, but until I googled “Wim Hof and headaches,” I thought I would be the first to mention a headache connection.

Mr. Hof is no joke, by the way, though he comes across as happier and more enthusiastic than our jaundiced society allows. For this, some call him crazy.

He’s not.

But he’s not above reproach, either. Who is? He makes a few over-the-top claims. For instance, he’s made medical claims that jerk the black-and-white chains of professional skeptics whose logic casts out the baby with the ice water at the slightest provocation.

But many scientists, journal gatekeepers, and healthcare providers depend on the “incurable” adjective. And they’re human. Where would they all go if, for instance, type 2 diabetes disappeared along with a few of the most common cancer types? How can anyone expect them to be objective about feeding their children?

I’m afraid I’m not.

So let the skeptics howl while the rest of us avoid their binary thinking. We’d be nuts to write off Wim Hof for simply being as excitable and capable of exaggeration as most of the rest of us.

You probably know he’s earned many world records for things like sitting in ice water for roughly 2 hours and swimming a terrifically long distance under surface ice, once overshooting the exit hole and nearly drowning.

He recalls no fear of dying during the incident and now says he has no baseline fear of death. That’s fascinating and probably important. Who knows?

Under medical supervision, a few brave scientists injected him with toxic bacterial antigens, waited, then drew his blood for analysis. It showed a lack of the expected spike of inflammatory markers. He had no fever and felt no flu-like symptoms.

Wondering if Wim was unique in this ability to suppress inflammatory markers, they had him train a dozen new students for 2 weeks, then tested them.

The students’ bloodwork showed a low inflammatory response compared to controls, and they reported less intense flu-like symptoms.

And as if destiny wanted to remove all suspicion that Wim has “superhuman” talent, the man has an identical twin with no unusual cold tolerance.

Another group of scientists put Wim in an MRI scanner wearing a cold-immersion bodysuit. This was fascinating. They found peculiar activity in his insula and the periaqueductal gray areas of his brain. Also, he had increased glucose metabolism in his intercostal muscles.

I’d like to know if he was panting. I vaguely remember a video clip of him panting in a tub of ice, but I can’t find it now.

It’s safe to say that Wim Hof’s path to “health, strength, and happiness,” has a few credible underpinnings in physiology. And there’s also the “life-changing” effects asserted by his raving students.

Unfortunately, the body is too complex for our hyper-segregated sciences to explain the morphologic, physiologic, biochemical, epigenetic and genetic details of anything much beyond conditions like sickle-cell anemia, but an obvious feature of Wim’s achievements is human antifragility, a counterintuitive response that includes hormesis, the beneficial middle-dose of something toxic or even lethal at higher exposures.

Sulforaphane, for example, is a hormetic found in broccoli seeds and sprouts, produced ostensibly as an irritant to discourage predators from destroying the seeds. When we ingest broccoli sprouts (or seeds) with the right dose of sulforaphane, it activates dormant genes that strengthen us against certain stressors. For all the wholesome details, listen to the research scientist, Rhonda Patrick, PhD, cast a spell on the subject discussing studies that correlate sulforaphane ingestion with reduced incidences of breast and prostate cancer.

Oh dear, I hope the medical thought police don’t revile me for suggesting there’s hope of preventing such lucrative diseases through simple hormesis.

Anyway, in the Wim Hof method, the hormesis comes from hypoxia and cold exposure, either of which might kill you at too high an exposure.

What doesn’t kill us wakes us up, it seems.

Hmm…

Since my first breath-holding ocean dive (with no wetsuit) at Shell Beach, California, age 12, I’ve loved holding my breath — just for the relaxation and clarity of mind it brings. As we know, the mammalian diving response kicks in, shunting blood to the brain, lungs and heart.

What a fortunate setup for anyone living on a water planet, though! Who do I thank?

Later when I took SCUBA, I learned that by hyperventilating before breath-holding, I could stay down longer because huffing and puffing expels carbon dioxide and makes the blood less acidic. This shifts the oxygen dissociation curve to the left, allowing the red blood cells to deliver more of their oxygen to the tissues, giving us the feeling that hyperventilation supersaturates the blood with oxygen. It doesn’t as far as science can so-far determine.

It’s also true that CO2 buildup in the blood provides us with the urge to breathe. That’s why blowing it off in hyperventilation lets you stay down longer before air thirst forces you up for a breath.

This scenario is dangerous, though, because hyperventilation can make you pass out and drown — as can hypoxia.

I urge you not try hyperventilation in the water. Wim Hof says to do it lying down. (Far from a pool or bathtub, I’d add.)

And here’s another caveat: too much hypoxia causes brain damage, depression and dementia. We know this from studying sleep apnea, a common ailment that’s vastly underdiagnosed and contributes to a truckload of human misery. So “moderation in all things” is the faithful heuristic. And for the careful, swimming underwater in the cold (without hyperventilation) wakes up the mind and makes you feel sharp as a tack.

Since life on Earth was intelligently designed, our bodies keep us fully conscious and awake under water because the alternative tends to be fatal. Whoever wrote this planet’s genetic codes must have designed life around water and decided that we would hold our breath and spear cold-water fish during the ice ages. This would have the side effect of providing a diet rich in marine oils to supply DHA to our brains which are predominantly lipid and heavy with DHA, an omega-3 fatty acid.

Periodic ice ages awaken humanity’s epigenetic adaptations to cold, it seems, switching on genes that become dormant during warmer eras. Activating our “cold-shock” genes to produce cold-shock proteins renders us not merely cold-resistant, but antifragile to cold. We don’t merely survive the ice ages, we thrive — mentally, physically, emotionally and probably spiritually.

We’ve all seen clear evidence of this in the ancient megalithic structures on most continents — evidence the mainstream detests because it falls outside their “gradualism” dogma of all history.

Nevertheless, since the Younger-Dryas event ended the last ice age about 11,600 years ago, our species has forgotten the value of God’s latent gift of cold-adaptive epigenetics. Fortunately, Wim Hof and a few scientists are rediscovering it, uncovering what may be a human capacity for broad volitional immune regulation and substantial mood management.

Some of this magic results from the “mammalian diving response.” It’s a well-studied physiologic mechanism that shunts blood to vital organs, as I mentioned. This includes the brain’s center of higher decision making, the prefrontal cortex, which is close to a quasi-pleasure center located just below the left prefrontal region.

It would seem that Earth’s DNA Code Writer has worked to keep us alive, healthy, happy and eating cold-water fish with our broccoli sprouts.

“The God Hypothesis is now a more respected hypothesis than at any time in the last 100 years.” — Frederic Bradford Burnham, PhD.

I haven’t taken the Wim Hof course, as yet, but I’ve watched enough relevant YouTube videos to know the basics, and I’ve been doing an easy version of cold exposure and hyperventilation-with-breath-holding for five months now, several times a week. In my view, Wim Hof is onto something big with the potential to help many of us, not just my fellow headache sufferers. But let’s be careful not to over-do the hypoxia aspect.

Although I’m not quite as predisposed to euphoria now as when I was younger, I do feel exhilarated after a cold shower, and mentally sharp with temporary mood elevation after the intermittent hyperventilation and hypoxia.

By the way, if you try cold showers, consider my method. I’m careful not to let my subconscious mind learn to hate the whole experience. To me, this principle of catering to the subconscious is a key to sustaining purpose with anything that requires discomfort and ongoing effort.

Here’s how I avoid hating cold shower…

First I step back out of a hot shower, turning the knob all the way cold. Then I put one part of myself into the shower at a time. I stay in the cold spray for seven breaths, step out and warm up for a few breaths then rotate another section of me into the cold.

In the past I’ve tried cold showers by sudden immersion and wound up avoiding the whole process after a few weeks, having never consciously decided to stop. It seems that when anything is judged by the subconscious self to be too uncomfortable, we avoid it reflexively without conscious deliberation. In this way, the subconscious mind makes many decisions about survival. We see this happening with hunger avoidance, cold avoidance, pain avoidance, and the avoidance of believing things that will bring us rejection by our peers and bosses.

There’s good scientific evidence now that cold showers should improve most people’s health and well-being, but the most unexpected thing for me was the headache remedy.

I’ve had headaches all my teen and adult life, originally caused by something in fresh fruit (probably fructose) or in my 30’s by caffeine withdrawal.

Nowadays, my headaches come mainly from eating a little naturally occurring sucrose in my low-carb, circadian diet. (Sucrose or “table sugar” is half fructose, so that may be the primary cause of my headaches now.) Incidentally, the low-carb, circadian diet brings me mental clarity like nothing else ever has.

I’ve had about 12 headaches (all associated with “natural” sucrose intake) since I’ve been doing my easy version of the Wim Hof method. Each headache has vanished after hyperventilation and breath holding, usually after 4 or 5 cycles. That’s 12 our of 12!

Cold exposure doesn’t seem to affect my headaches, though at least one observant writer describe evidence that “cryotherapy” of this sort might prevent migraine headaches by reversing the low norepinephrine levels found in migraine sufferers.

Also, it may be noteworthy that at least one anecdotal report has surfaced of a headache appearing after doing the Wim Hof technique.

One size rarely fits all in biology. Perhaps it’s tangentially relevant that when I’m trying to get rid of a headache, it sometimes feels worse during the hyperventilation phase, diminishes during the breath holding, and then vanishes after several cycles.

My last headache inspired me to write this article. It woke me at 5:30 AM pounding in my skull. It felt like one of the monster headaches that lasts all day and brings nausea.

I did the usual 4 cycles of Wim Hof hyperventilation and breath holding and although the pain diminished, it quickly came back. Not willing to give up and waste the entire day in pain, I kept at it, hyperventilating more and more vigorously and holding my breath longer and longer as my heart chugged in my chest. Finally, after about 12 intense cycles, the pain vanished completely and never came back, not even a dull ache.

Dude! Thank you, Wim Hof.

I speculate that the diving reflex, while shunting blood to my central nervous system as designed, also sent blood flowing swiftly through my scalp where the nerve endings for headache are thought to reside, diluting out vicious chemicals released by mast cells. These chemicals were causing vasoconstriction and pain while signaling for inflammatory cells to rush in.

And because I treated the headache early in its course, I postulate that the inflammatory cells that would have migrated in, set up shop and made the headache a full-day affair never had time to arrive in significant numbers.

Of course, not all headaches have the same pathophysiology. What stops mine might not touch yours, and might even make yours worse. But the Wim Hof Headache Fix is worth a try if you suffer headaches. Just promise me you won’t hyperventilate near water, pass out and drown, OK?

“Eyes open, no fear, be safe everyone.”

I wish I’d had the Wim Hof Headache Fix when I was a highschool boy lying in bed on Sunday afternoon in my dorm room in throbbing pain, praying to God for relief and assuring him that I understood if this wasn’t the time for a miracle.

And I wish scientists weren’t so quick to shout down everything that moves contrary to their “knowledge.”

Science has historically made quantum leaps by seeking the unexpected, the weird and impossible. It’s tragic that many scientists today express pride in their skepticism. It would serve us all if skepticism were a source of scientific shame.

And it doesn’t matter what’s new, weird, or improperly boxed, my generation of baby-boomer scientists will attack and viciously debunk it, often without studying the work they’re struggling to bury. For example…

The “fringe” evolutionist, Elaine Morgan’s theory that humans evolved from aquatic apes is rejected by mainstream evolutionists for purely emotional reasons, as best I can tell. The phrase, “aquatic apes,” doesn’t sound right to them regardless of the evidence.

The non-materialist research scientist, James Tour, makes an absolutely stunning case for intelligent design in origins theory, only to hear the materialist establishment reject his insight and expertise because they already “know” that life’s origins are mindless and meaningless.

When David Chalmers, a self-proclaimed “materialist at heart,” calls for open minds in the scientific community to consider the “crazy” possibility that consciousness (rather than matter and energy) is fundamental to the cosmos, the mainstream ridicules him because their own untestable assumptions seem patently obvious.

Scientists of the Thunderbolts Project provide evidence that electromagnetism is a more influential force than gravity in the universe, but the mainstream still struggles to ignore them.

Governmental officials team up with fighter pilots to show evidence that UFO’s are real, someone in our skies seems to have breakthrough technology, but academics remain invested in denial of anything beyond their insular, inbred boxes of narrow expertise.

I’m hoping that something will change with the next generation of scientists and thinkers.

Maybe the next team will value objectivity over skepticism.

Science could use their help right now.

Cheers,

Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD

Please share this post with friends who suffer from headaches or chronic dogma impairments.

“The bigotry and intolerance of the scientific community…”

42 Comments June 22, 2019 Morrill Talmage Moorehead

“The thing that we all know most directly and most certainly – that is, the existence of ourselves – is ultimately incompatible with materialism.” – Jay Richards, PhD.

When I attended a Christian university in the 1970s (now called La Sierra University) I took an upper division genetics class from Gary Bradley, my hero to this day, who subtly taught the logic of associating a Code Writer with this planet’s unfathomably complex DNA. His scientific insight was ahead of its time and became the intellectual basis of my faith in God.

Although my unbalanced version of Christianity made me a doormat in the dog-eat-dog world of pathology, the realization that God existed and, being smart enough to write genetic code, could easily understand English and undoubtedly hear my thoughts and prayers, improved my life dramatically, giving me a sense of meaning and purpose, despite my habit of not standing up for myself.

Today, more and more brave scientists and thinkers are making the connection between Earth’s code-based life and an intelligent code writer. Random mutation and natural selection don’t stand up to mathematical scrutiny when you know something of the complexity of proteins and the DNA codes that produce them.

But breaking with tradition is dangerous. Modern scientists are like preschoolers fighting to control the rules to the latest game. And they are literally religious fundamentalists who believe that their dogma alone can save the world.

The dogma is materialism: the arrogant, arbitrary, inflexible assumption that nothing could possibly exist besides matter and energy. This is a philosophical assumption that cannot be tested. Hence we should not equate it to science or let it be preached to school children as “the foundation of the scientific method.”

It’s actually the foundation of scientific fundamentalism, a religion that has quietly slipped in and taken rigid control of the minds, careers and publications of the scientific community. Materialism has become a roadblock to the funding of any project that doesn’t knuckle under to the dogma of a random, meaningless, depressing, purely material universe.

But here’s a breathtaking video that brings hope that perhaps today’s young people will rescue science from fundamentalism…

“Oddly, the [scientific] materialist has to deny the existence of the scientist.”

So true, and so ironic.

Back in the day, Gary Bradley openly questioned Neo-Darwinism in class, emphasizing the crucial importance of protecting the genetic diversity, natural order and purity of Earth’s ecosystems from the myopic intrusions of corporate science.

At the time, I did not understand how rare this part of my education was. But now I know that at least in the last fifty years, professors and textbooks have assumed without question that science is materialistic – there can be nothing but matter and energy anywhere, ever. Therefore, the mind is an illusion. Intelligence is an accident of matter, a random epiphenomenon with no meaning or higher purpose.

During their impressionable college years when objectivity writes on a clean slate, very few modern scientists have been allowed to hear both sides of the argument between materialism and intelligent design. Nevertheless, some have heard it now and are coming around, saying that there’s evidence in favor of the concept that we are genuine beings with free will.

Here’s a video touching on some of that evidence…

“No, You’re Not a Robot Made Out of Meat“

In college, students are usually taught what to think not how to think. The struggle for most undergraduates is to memorize quickly for multiple-choice tests. We tacitly assume that everything we have crammed into our heads is true, including this western secular worldview disguised as the foundation of science.

But the mainstream answer to this question, “Does the Universe consist of only matter and energy or is there also something more, such as mind, identity, or a Supreme Being?” is not directly testable and therefore not capable of being the foundation of science. It’s a worldview, a philosophy, a spirituality or, if you ask me, a cultish religion that has morphed into today’s academic culture of scientific fundamentalism.

…

Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD

Please share these videos with the young minds you know and love. Give them something to balance the dogmatic materialism that undermines happiness and limits science itself. Give someone a glimpse of the rational universe where depression and suicide are avoidable through the pursuit of a higher, loving purpose.

My Spiritual Paradigm in 2018

8 Comments December 28, 2018 Morrill Talmage Moorehead

My father was born today (December 27, 1897). He was an MD with board certification in Radiology, Anatomic Pathology and General Surgery. His life was all about studying science, publishing medical articles and living far beyond frugality. He was an atheist who preferred religious people because he thought they were more trustworthy. “It’s too bad everything they believe in isn’t true,” he said.

This post is dedicated to Dad…

We live in a simulated universe created by means of a language that’s projected from beyond, possibly using the crystal structure called “E8,” in which the fundamental building blocks are not irreducible strings or electromagnetic waves or subatomic particles or even intelligently driven perturbations in the zero-point field (though this idea is related, I think).

Instead, the fundamental building blocks of our simulated reality appear to be the symbols of a language.

This is a language in which each physical symbol, its meaning, and the hardware needed to interpret or “manifest” the meaning within our 3D space are one-in-the-same.

The Supreme Being (or Beings) exist outside the simulation, but can enter it and undoubtedly have. We (our full selves) inhabit a Reality outside of the simulated universe, a place that is beyond our ability to imagine because it’s “outside of time” and contains something like “extra dimensions” which can only be vaguely imagined by people with expertise in math and physics.

Our simulated universe was invented for us by the Supreme Being(s) because we requested it.

We enthusiastically spend simulated time here in hopes of expanding the depth and breadth of our love, wisdom and character in a place made specifically for developing these personal attributes.

There’s a respected web of cause and effect stemming from free decisions that each of us has made within the simulated universe. This free-choice web limits our ability to create a reality based upon a belief system.

For example, if I want to believe in a fundamentalist Christian paradigm (or any other spiritual system), but I’ve been convinced in school that scientific materialism is undeniable, then I am incapable of believing in any fundamentalist paradigm other than scientific materialism itself (a.k.a. physicalism). And vice versa.

On the other hand, if for any reason I have retained the ability to believe in a given spiritual (or anti-spiritual) paradigm, and I pursue it, then that system of belief will become literally true for me within the simulation.

In practical terms, this means that there is always a “reality that’s out there” in the simulated universe whether or not I believe in it.

Examples of realities that won’t go away with denial include the reality of UFO’s, the reality of DNA’s hyper-complex code, the reality of dinosaur fossils, the reality of Near-Death Experiences, the reality of Angels, demons and various ethereal beings, the reality of World Bank domination in modern times, the reality of all souls being ultimately one, the reality of an intelligent universe, and the growing reality on Earth of a mindless, meaningless universe.

Logically opposing belief systems can be fully manifest in separate parts of the simulation on an individual basis, especially after a person’s current life ends, but also to some extent during this current life. The more something is collectively believed, the more real it becomes due to the simulation’s basic nature and the careful respect for free will. (When the effects of a free will decision are eliminated, the reality of that decision is also eliminated. Hence the respect for the effects of free will decisions and actions.)

Our experience in the simulated universe is not necessarily limited to one lifetime. Depending on what we are able to believe, we may ride the simulation for multiple lifetimes.

Each of us is here for our own specific purpose.

For some, the purpose is to learn courage and love.

For others (particularly scientists) we’re here to learn open-mindedness and the ability to question things we know are true. The odds are against us achieving such objectivity on Earth, but the very challenge of it attracts us here.

One characteristics of the simulation that renders it particularly useful to our souls’ growth is the ubiquitous “dualism” in which every good thing can have a negative side effect and every negative thing can have a positive side effect. This becomes a source of cognitive dissonance, particularly in questions of morality.

For instance, our dependence upon food requires us to kill plants, bacteria, insects, and perhaps to some degree, higher organisms, to stay alive. And yet our innate sense of morality (a.k.a. love) makes us loath to kill certain creatures. Similarly, our need to procreate, driven largely by testosterone in all genders, is necessary to our species’ existence, yet it also manifests as a strong force in breaking trust, destroying families and making life more difficult on our dear children.

And yet the dissonances here teach our souls balance and perspective. That’s a huge attraction.

Realizing that our universe is simulated may seem to present a new problem of rejecting all other worldview paradigms. It might tempt one to say, “If our souls exist with God in another realm and nothing here is real, then nothing here is worth believing in or caring about.”

But despite the literal simulation of matter and energy, our cognitive awareness here is real, not simulated. Our love and our pain are genuine because our souls experience them. We don’t have the option of dealing with the simulated universe as an illusion because it reaches beyond the simulation into our hearts.

In view of all this, the logical thing to do is to identify your own personal reason(s) for entering this simulation, and based upon those, choose a personally believable worldview that offers support for someone on your quest.

For instance, if you’re here primarily to learn open-mindedness, which means you’re probably a scientist, then you might read about the search for UFOs and alien life, although you already “know” such things are complete nonsense aimed at “lesser minds” than yours. Be prepared for the surprise your soul is seeking.

Or if you’re here to learn courage, then choosing a live-for-the-moment worldview might make sense, leading you into a lifestyle of courage, such as mixed martial arts, public speaking, surfing giant waves, doing open heart surgery, smuggling Bibles into North Korea, or standing up to politically correct hatred and prejudice.

Or if you discover that you joined the simulation to increase your capacity for self-sacrificing love, then any of the major religions will probably steer you in that direction. Find one you can truly believe in, if possible. If not, pick and choose from among them, or make up something of your own as I’ve done. Your beliefs will be real for you when you need them most.

If you’ve joined the simulation to discover who you would be apart from God’s physical presence and influence, then materialistic science and atheism might be what your soul needs (assuming you’re capable of believing). If so, make the world envious of your good character the way Gillette Penn has done. And like him, don’t be offended by others who believe in undetectable realities besides Dark Matter and Dark Energy.

And if you’re one of the family of suffering people who feel overwhelmed by the seemingly infinite loss of someone precious to you, then focus on the Reality beyond this simulation. Imagine a Real place where time is independent of us, allowing a loving Supreme Being all the time in the world to travel with your lost loved one to a meaningful, great place doing exciting things. As infinitely horrible as it feels to lose your loved one, the loss is temporary and only exists within this simulated universe. Trust me. This is literally true.

…

Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD

As a pathologist (retired now), I’ve been trained to observe and interpret complex visual and biologic systems, so my diagnostic opinion of Reality is worth consideration. Conflicting belief systems are part of what unites us here as souls from Reality seeking personal growth in this Divine Simulation.

…

Happy Birthday, Dad.

The Cowboy Angel Rides

16 Comments September 6, 2018 Morrill Talmage Moorehead

“Move away from the screen, son.”

A deep voice boomed at me from behind my chair. I jumped and almost spilled my coffee, leaped to my feet and turned to face the intruder in one slick, spastic move.

It was a guy. He stood seven feet tall with his skin glowing like a halogen light bulb in a dark room. He wore a glowing cowboy suit that reminded me of an old movie my mom likes, The Electric Horseman.

But how’d he get in here? The hinges on my bedroom door squeak like a coffin lid. An empty potato chip bag was still right up against it. My room’s only window was painted shut six years ago. You’d need a crowbar and a hammer to open it.

I should have seen this guy’s reflection on my computer screen. I should have seen the light on my desk and the light on the wall in front of it. But no, somehow he got in here like he’d popped out of thin air.

“Dude, you scared the Irish out of me. What’s with the glowing makeup and all the lights?”

“I’m an angel from E8.” He exhaled with a tired-sound. “I’m here to discuss physics. But, kid, you’re spending entirely too much time indoors on that thing.” He glanced at my computer monitor.

“What kind of angel are you? A Baptist, Catholic, non-denominational, or… wait, you’re a Mormon, right?”

His eyebrows went up a little, but he didn’t say anything.

“I’m just wondering. You could be a silver version of that Mormon angel, whats-his-name. Greer says the Mormon World Corporation is, like, totally into the ET thing. So I’m just putting one and one together. See what I’m saying? Except you should probably be gold instead of silver. Them Mormon angel statues are always gold.”

“I’m not a statue.”

“Ah, but you’re a Mormon.” I smirked and nodded, agreeing with myself.

“You’re out of shape. You’re poisoning yourself with carbohydrates. Your body needs sunshine and better sleep.”

I could see this was going to be a one-sided “adult” conversation. Unless maybe I forced things in another direction.

“How do I know you’re not a demon?”

“Do you believe in demons?”

“No, but I didn’t believe in angels a minute ago.”

I could see half of my clock on the wall behind him. The second hand was frozen. I hoped it just needed batteries, but I kind of knew better.

“And anyway, why would an angel single me out for a message? How’s that going to be fair to everybody else? All them people out there needing a message but never getting one? Is that fair? Does fairness even matter where you come from?”

He stared at me blankly.

“Where are you from, anyways?”

His gaze dropped to the floor beside his huge cowboy boots. He spoke quietly as if to someone else.

“You sure we hit the right coordinates? Check the date. This kid’s talking religion, for Shiva’s sake.”

It was clear that I’d disappointed the man already. I do that a lot with people. With angels, too, apparently.

He nodded to himself with his lips moving, then his eyes came back to me looking like a beat cop trying to endure tough talk from a superior. “Ok, then.” He looked me up and down with a perplexed expression.

“What are you, really?” I asked. “And don’t feed me no angel crap.”

“You need to get outside and walk,” he said. “Sunshine, fresh air, exercise, human interaction. You’re isolated in here. You’re destroying yourself.”

“Talk to the hand, dude.” I didn’t put my hand up, of course, that’s totally lame.

“What?” He shook his head in disbelief. “Listen, for reasons I can’t fathom, the Desk thinks you can help us.” He looked at the computer screen behind me. “Those damn simulation games destroy free will.”

OK, he wasn’t Mormon. Those boys might take a hit off a meth bowl to get you talking shop with them, but they don’t touch four-letter words. Uh-uh.

I glanced over my shoulder at Grand Theft Auto where I… uh, where my character just stole a hundred large from Wells Fargo and crashed the getaway car on a sidewalk loaded with pedestrians. Multiple fatalities, of course. I needed to scram fast to avoid the cops and more boring jail time. But the whole screen was frozen now, so maybe it wouldn’t matter.

You know, I worked a long time getting those sick Grand Theft Auto muscles all over me. And the rad gear? Along with some respect from the community, know what I’m saying? None of that came easy.

And this beyond-white-male dude thought I was going to just turn it off and walk away?

Right. None of that was going to happen.

The pushy talk coming out of his mouth was irritating enough, but to be honest, I felt kind of paralyzed by the fact that a guy like this even existed in the first place. And in my bedroom, you know?

But here he was, bigger than life.

Then it dawned on me. I was having a psychotic break — my first hallucination on the grand tour of shame and misery for the rest of my life. All it would take now was one word about this to my shrink and I’d get tagged schizophrenic, like my Uncle Saul.

He’s in his mid-forties and never been laid. The shrink’s scarlet letter is not working out so good for the man. Sad part is, hell, he seems perfectly normal to any chick he meets, right up to the moment they find out he comes attached to the word, “schizophrenia.” Then it’s all, “Bye-bye Saul. I’ll call you.”

“Dude, you’re a hallucination.” I turned away, sat back down in my chair and hid my face in my hands. I could feel tears coming, but I knew I shouldn’t let myself be a victim. That only makes things worse. You got to believe stuff happens for, like some decent reason that don’t have to ever make sense.

My bedroom door squeaked open. “Call your mother in,” the cowboy said. “Ask her if I’m real.”

I thought about it for a second. Ordinarily, I never let her in my bedroom. Calling her in here now would look suspicious. She’d figure out something was weird and then talk the truth out of me, right down to the details of this hallucination. Then it would be official. “My son’s turned idiot like his uncle.”

But can a hallucination open a door?

I didn’t know. I bounced my bare heels on the carpet, up and down like double bass, trying to figure out how to do this right. Then I noticed the carpet was still damp from last night.

“Hey, Mom? Fritzie peed on the floor again. Check it out, there’s this gross wet spot in here.”

I spilled a little beer is all, but Mon’s not going to know that… Unless she gets down and sniffs it.

Which she totally will.

Man, I’m dumb. Here comes another lecture on the evils of alcohol. Yes, I know what a liver is, Mom. But read my lips — I do not care!

Mom showed up at my door, took one look at the big shiny dude, and ran off screaming, Jesus. She’s very religious that way.

“OK, so you’re real.” I didn’t want to let on that it was a gigantic relief, but it was. “Why can’t you just talk to me like a normal human being instead of getting all up in my face with this bossy attitude of yours, huh? Tell me that.”

He nodded solemnly. “I suppose you’re right. The powerful never listen, do they? But you really need to control the acidic tongue. It will destroy you.” He sat on the side of my bed and crossed his legs like a girl — well, totally not like a cowboy let’s just say. And his butt, get this, it didn’t sink into the bed at all.

“What’s the deal, you aren’t denting my bed? You gotta be 200 pounds plus.”

“Good observation. But never make personal comments, it’s rude.” He looked at my blankets and quick as a slap sunk nine inches into my extra-soft memory foam mattress. “Now then, I used the term, ‘angel’ with you because I thought you could relate to it. But actually, I’m more of a…” He glanced out my window at the evergreen trees in the vacant lot next door. “Have you heard about the third ontology? Irwin’s code theoretic axiom of quantum gravity theory?”

I shook my head. “Sounds perfectly boring.”

“It’s not.” His eyes moved to my computer monitor. I scooted my chair out of his way and looked at the screen with him. The bank-heist fatalities vanished, and up came a YouTube video showing some physicist dude with my dad’s pompadour haircut and the exact same hairline. It was weird. Even the eyebrows and eyes were similar.

“The shapes represent themselves in the code,” Max said, “carrying meaning without the need for a translation.”

Somehow, that made sense now.

“The rules of the code are non-arbitrary, they come from a natural mosaic tiling language called a quasicrystal. The symbols are what they represent. We use geometric symbols in a geometric language to represent geometric objects. The hardware, the software and the simulation output are all one-and-the-same.”

“Dude, this is an information dump, don’t you think?” Not that I couldn’t understand him. It was just that understanding this kind of stuff felt totally weird to me. I’m normally not the sharpest pencil in the box, to put it politely — like if a teacher ever said I was average, I’d take it as the biggest total complement of my entire scholastic career. But it’s not apt to happen, seeing as I quit going to classes over a month ago. I’ll be old enough to officially drop out next year.

Max started the video again with a chuckle. “Guess I was a bit verbose there, sorry. Remember this part, though.”

And without skipping a note, Klee Irwin kept right on talking. The man’s got a set of lungs.

“…there is physical evidence and argument that is very rigorous that reality is not a deterministic algorithm playing itself out… the general consensus among scientists is that reality is non-deterministic.”

“Let us discuss how in the world there can possibly be a language as the substrate of reality without some notion of a chooser of the language and an actualizer of the meaning of these geometric symbols. Because there needs to be something that interprets or actualizes meaning in order to say that information exists.

If we like, we can just start with the axiom that God exists. But that’s not what science is about.

Science is about going deeper and constantly questioning where that comes from, and going all the way down to the bottom. So God may or may not exist, but if he does, I want to know how does he exist?

So we don’t need to make it religious.

We can say, well alright, abstractly maybe there’s this kind of universal collective consciousness, it’s not like a human consciousness, maybe it’s more like a force in Star Wars, maybe it’s more like Chi in Chinese medicine. We don’t know what it’s like, but we need something that is everywhere and that may be the substrate of everything, and [something] that is capable of actualizing this geometric information that we conjecture, and making the syntactical choices in this mosaic tiling language in 3D that we are working with here at Quantum Gravity Research.”

“So what’s this all about, Max? Really. You don’t need some dumb ass like me trying to spread this stuff around for you.”

“No,” Max said. He adjusted something on the jewel-studded lapel of his cowboy jacket and leaned toward me whispering, “We want you to oppose him.”

“Me? That’s really dumb. You think I could go up against this genius dude?”

Max nodded. “You can now.”

I scratched my head. “What are you saying, then? Klee Irwin is wrong?”

“No, he’s right about everything. Too right. That’s the problem. A simulation only works when the people inside don’t know it’s a simulation. If they figure things out, it all becomes little more than a lucid dream and they quit playing.”

“You mean like, mass suicide or something?”

“Yes, that could happen. Or worse. What people do here matters to their character and personality in Reality. Take Hitler, for instance. What he did has tarnished his soul. He may never want to come back to Reality. He may never be morally fit to come back home.”

“But I thought he was dead.”

“Hitler’s dead, but the soul of the man, the person from Reality is still cycling. He lives somewhere in Long Beach, California. But there’s a larger problem. Someone we all dearly love has put an enormous amount of time and effort into building this simulation for us. We asked him to do it. And now we’ve got over a trillion, trillion people in Reality who feel sure they need this experience. They want to know who they are apart from the physical presence of the Great Surfer.”

“Dude, you lost me. The great…”

“He’s a Surfer. That’s all you need to know.”

“You talking about God?”

“He dislikes that term, but, yes, from your perspective, that’s as close as you’re apt to get.”

“And what if I refuse to go up against this physics dude. He’s just out there trying to tell people what in the freaking world the truth really is about this place. These lives we’re living.”

“That’s no problem at all, son. We totally respect free will. There are thousands of scientists and educators already set up to oppose him. We’ve been working on it for centuries, you could say.” He shrugged. “To be honest, I have no idea why the Desk singled you out. With your background and this lifestyle?” He looked at my computer screen and shook his head. “They had a reason, though. They always do.” He touched his lapel and spoke softly to the floor again. “It’s a no-go, Swadhisthana. The cowboy angel rides.”

“Now, wait a sec. Just let me–”

He tipped his hat and disappeared into thin air.

My computer screen came to life. Writhing, mangled, moaning people all over a bloody sidewalk. My ride was still functional. I could probably get away before the cops showed up. I started to reach for the game controls but stopped. It wasn’t interesting anymore. The sirens grew louder and louder as I stared at the scene. I didn’t care about the sociopathic muscle man I’d become. He wasn’t me. Never was.

I stood and looked out my little window at an old cedar tree that I bet somebody planted more than a hundred years ago. Maybe I could sit in the shade and figure out how in the world I’m going to explain all this to Klee Irwin. He’s going to think I’m nuts.

But the dude should know all the problems he’s causing, right? And all the people they’ve sent on a mission to stop him.

Maybe my mom will back me up on the cowboy angel part. The guy was real.

the end

…

Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD

Gates of Eden by Bob Dylan (Robert Zimmerman)

Of war and peace, the truth just twists

Its curfew gull just glides

Upon four-legged forest clouds

The cowboy angel rides

With his candle lit into the sun

Though its glow is waxed in black

All except when ‘neath the trees of Eden

The lamppost stands with folded arms

Its iron claws attached

To curbs ‘neath holes where babies wail

Though it shadows metal badge

All and all can only fall

With a crashing but meaningless blow

No sound ever comes from the Gates of Eden

The savage soldier sticks his head in sand

And then complains

Unto the shoeless hunter who’s gone deaf

But still remains

Upon the beach where hound dogs bay

At ships with tattooed sails

Heading for the Gates of Eden

With a time-rusted compass blade

Aladdin and his lamp

Sits with Utopian hermit monks

Sidesaddle on the Golden Calf

And on their promises of paradise

You will not hear a laugh

All except inside the Gates of Eden

Relationships of ownership

They whisper in the wings

To those condemned to act accordingly

And wait for succeeding kings

And I try to harmonize with songs

The lonesome sparrow sings

There are no kings inside the Gates of Eden

The motorcycle black Madonna

Two-wheeled gypsy queen

And her silver-studded phantom cause

The gray flannel dwarf to scream

As he weeps to wicked birds of prey

Who pick up on his bread crumb sins

And there are no sins inside the Gates of Eden

The kingdoms of experience

In the precious wind they rot

While paupers change possessions

Each one wishing for what the other has got

And the princess and the prince

Discuss what’s real and what is not

It doesn’t matter inside the Gates of Eden

The foreign sun, it squints upon

A bed that is never mine

As friends and other strangers

From their fates try to resign

Leaving men wholly, totally free

To do anything they wish to do but die

And there are no trials inside the Gates of Eden

At dawn my lover comes to me

And tells me of her dreams

With no attempts to shovel a glimpse

Into the ditch of what each one means

At times I think there are no words

But these to tell what’s true

And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden

Black-and-white thinking? Come on, we ALL do it!

34 Comments June 27, 2018 Morrill Talmage Moorehead

I’ve thought for a long time that black-and-white thinking is one of humanity’s biggest problems. But trying to eradicate it with more black-and-white thinking is just ridiculous.

When I was a medical student doing a psychiatry rotation, I noticed that all the white coats, myself included, had a powerful desire to be seen as absolutely NORMAL.

The feeling came out of nowhere the first day we started seeing psych patients. Some of them weren’t free to leave the building. There was an unspoken fear that we caregivers might be, in some unseen way, indistinguishable from the patients. It was both a subtle and a consuming motivation that made everyone subconsciously try to act and speak as if they were hyper-normal in every conceivable dimension.

I’ve rarely felt anything like it since.

In those days on the psych wards, one big sign of derangement to avoid was “magical thinking,” which meant believing in anything that wasn’t established by science or grounded in secular Western middle-class society.

Since LLUMC was a religious institution, Christianity was begrudgingly considered OK on the psych wards, or at least not necessarily equal to magical thinking… unless the patient thought he or she had an unusual religious purpose in life such as being Jesus Christ, a delusion that was said to be “not uncommon.”

Between the lines, we knew that any “visions of grandeur” might put us at risk of being too similar to the inpatients. And while there was no chance of being locked up for it, a med student couldn’t hope to pass a psych rotation where the people evaluating you thought you were basically nuts.

So if anyone had a personal relationship with God that meant everything to them, as I did (and still do), she or he had to be careful to tuck it away along with any secret hopes of someday becoming objectively great by doing extremely valuable work in the world.

And of course, some of us tried to down-size our ambitions and become genuinely satisfied with the psych ward’s prescribed mediocrity.

That never worked for me. I couldn’t escape my burning desire to do something great. I still can’t.

But to this day I’d never admit such a grandiose hope to a shrink. Only to you.

I wonder if the new boogeyman for med students on psych rotations today is black-and-white thinking.

It’s finally becoming a mainstream negative, which would be a good thing if it were opposed logically rather than in binary terms, such as the current “normal versus borderline personality disorder” dichotomy and other B&W approaches.

If you want to really insult a thinking analytic person, say that she’s a black-and-white thinker. The accusation is powerful and leaves a red mark.

It usually comes with the assumption that black-and-white thinking is always narrow-minded and inappropriate.

But it ain’t necessarily so…

Simple arithmetic, for instance, is black-and-white. No one will accuse you of B&W narrow-mindedness if you lower your guard and admit that you believe one and one equals two.

But with imaginary numbers (i.e., the “lie” that a negative number can have a square root), math itself enters a gray zone with the letter “i” keeping track of imaginary calculations.

So math starts out black and white but, like fiction, merges truth with imagination. Neither math nor fiction is really lying because the letter “i” and the word “novel” tell us we’re sort of pretending. Both explore the human experience by merging black-and-white foundations with a story written in symbols.

Physics is similar. When you calculate a coefficient of friction in a college Physics lab, it’s black-and-white Newtonian work. But if you’re ever trying to decide which version of string theory clashes the least with your classical Einsteinian bias, you’re quickly up to your eyeballs in shades of gray and spectrums of color.

Ironically, the popular all-or-none belittlement of B&W thinking, typified by the picture above, misses all the boring details of reality and winds up in subtle hypocrisy where the only black-and-white thinking it allows is its own binary criticism of black-and-white thinking.

Splitting humanity into “black-and-white thinkers” and “normal in-color thinkers” may be useful to some shrinks, I guess, but for the rest of us, it’s often used as a polarizing weapon to belittle people and silence unwelcome ideas.

Case in point…

To convince people that there’s no such thing as good and evil, some have associated good and evil with the dreaded black-and-white thinking. Some have claimed that the scientific version of Deity (the Intelligent Mind within the Quantum Field) isn’t concerned with such black-and-white matters as good and evil.

But does this make sense?

Can the rape of a child, for instance, be seen as morally neutral in the eyes of an intelligent Universe and the Mind that fills it?

Perhaps the Quantum Mind of God is not as preoccupied with negative judgments as our fading Western traditions tell us.

But this Mind is smart enough to write original DNA code. We are the products of that code. Most of us feel deep empathy for suffering children.

How then could the Code Writer be incapable of empathy, or reject the truest words to describe our human predicament: good and evil?

The best thing about humans is our capacity for compassion and empathy. These traits simply must have been written into our DNA by Someone who knew them. But we’re supposed to believe that the Code Writer is a stranger to empathy and suffering? Too broad-minded to see the difference between right and wrong?

This kind of thinking isn’t rational.

While black-and-white thinking is obviously one of humanity’s greatest limitations, the binary mindset that now pretends to oppose it is unwittingly promoting it by using shame to paint negative emotions on unwelcome ideas.

The situation is analogous to William Cooper’s old videos from the 1990’s where evil attempts to overcome evil. His conspiracy theory describes secret societies that plan to rid the world of evil by killing billions of people with viruses, then following up with a “benevolent” dictatorship run by the murderers.

But fighting fire with fire doesn’t work in the realm of good and evil. A pretty ending can’t overcome an ugly plot.

…

Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD

Fundamentalism in Science and Religion

85 Comments July 6, 2017 Morrill Talmage Moorehead

The growth spurts of science come from dissent, doubt, and radical questioning of norms. These are the sunshine and water of science.

When your interpretation of evidence brings you to disagree with something that science has proven beyond the shadow of a doubt, you are following in the footsteps of the greatest scientists in history: Einstein, Copernicus, Salk, Papanicolaou… the list grows every decade.

But when we agree vehemently with a scientific dogma that we haven’t studied, or can’t understand after studying, we’re following in the footsteps of the average American fundamentalist, whether “religious” or “scientific.”

And that distinction may need to be tentatively abandoned because “scientific materialism” is an untestable assumption that rules out God, free will, higher purpose and the reality of our own minds by decree, not by experimentation.

Dogmatic assumptions may rightfully dominate fundamentalist religions, but they shouldn’t dominate science the way they do.

The thing that fundamentalists of all types have in common is a belief that they possess a source of ultimate truth, whether old writings, a person with special insight, or an array of science journals dominated by group-think specialists. The assumptions behind their doctrine must be kept static, never doubted or questioned, because the sacred assumptions are facts that anyone with an ounce of wisdom or objectivity should be able to see.

To go against the known “truth,” or even to doubt it, is considered irrational and morally wrong, especially among modern scientific fundamentalists.

Many Christian fundamentalist groups have been arguing over sacred doctrines for so many centuries, they’ve come to see the irony of Christians continuing the vicious outrage of bygone generations. Many have found compassion for their competition, arguably the central theme of the religion…

“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

Scientists could learn from this. They could easily study the history of their craft and discover that most of the great scientific breakthroughs have been vigorously opposed by the establishment’s devotion to “known facts” which later turned out to be fiction.

Instead, scientific fundamentalists continue to cast aspersions upon the dissenter’s educational credentials, their sanity, mental acuity, motivation, and funding. But not so much upon the details or logical weaknesses of the infidel’s ideas.

It’s too much work to read and analyze something you “know” is wrong on the gist of it. It’s easier to laugh, ridicule, and poison the well of the pseudoscientific heretic. Easier to excommunicate her from the faith.

But think about it. In order for science to leap a great distance forward all at once, it must go beyond itself, which always means going into “pseudoscience” because gentler words such as “speculative theory” don’t express the moral outrage of fundamentalist gatekeepers.

An important example is the way these emotional authorities have responded to the Philosopher of Science, Stephen Meyer, Ph.D., in his detailed analysis of DNA and molecular biology, Signature in the Cell. Meyer’s analysis shows evidence of intelligent genetic coding and intelligent design at the level of molecular biology.

Wikipedia, our new self-appointed final authority in science and everything else, glibly labels Meyer’s work “pseudoscience,” as if anyone with any sense should deny this man’s genius without reading his work.

Meanwhile, in the journal, Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, thirty-three mainstream scientists who understand the odds against Earth’s genetic complexity arising through random mutation in 4 billion years (Earth’s history) have written a review article to the effect that our DNA might have come to Earth in extraterrestrial viruses on comets which brought new DNA that created new species and simultaneously exterminated many existing ones. The authors present this to explain the “Cambrian Explosion” of genetically complex species found in the geologic column, a flaw in neo-Darwinism that they want to acknowledge and fix, head-on.

Kudos to them, they’re being honest and imaginative!

Here’s a quote from their paper:

Our aim here is to facilitate further discussion in the biophysical, biomedical and evolutionary science communities to the quite different H-W “Cosmic” origins viewpoint which better handles, in our opinion, a wider range of physical, astrophysical, biological and biophysical facts often quite inexplicable, if not contradictory, under the dominant Terrestrial neo-Darwinian paradigm.

That’s awesome!

But if Stephen Meyer is right, and I think he is, the math still doesn’t allow the complex viral codes from ET sources to appear randomly within 13.8 billion years (mainstream’s cosmic history).

Having studied Meyer’s book, it seems to me that to explain the known molecular complexity of life without an infinite universe, an infinite past, or an infinite number of parallel universes popping into existence along the way, we still need an intelligent code writer and a designer of specific molecules working together in the complex, feedback-balanced biochemical pathways that our DNA encodes. Even extraterrestrial sources of DNA haven’t been around long enough to have developed the necessary complexity.

Meyer simply said that we can account for the known complexity of biology in a finite universe by allowing the existence of an intelligent code writer or writers.

He didn’t say God wrote the code. He left it wide open for others to perhaps speculate on intelligent ET’s without the time requirements of complex biochemistry and DNA, or any other source of conscious intelligence with the means and brilliance to write genetic code and design functional molecules from scratch — perhaps a sentient Universe or intelligent beings from the realm of dark matter. Who can say, from a scientific standpoint?

“Show me evidence of this spaghetti monster,” the fundamentalists will say.

DNA and molecular biology are the evidence. It’s as simple as opening one’s eyes and reading Meyer’s book.

But no, all his work is called pseudoscience because the establishment “knows” that ET’s, if they exist, couldn’t have visited Earth, the distances are too vast (unless the ET’s are viruses on comets, I guess), and God or any other superior intelligence couldn’t possibly exist, don’t be stupid.

But looking at it objectively, no one can do scientific studies to validate science’s sacred dogmas, they must be intuitively assumed using the same emotions that guide religious fundamentalists into “knowing” that they belong to the one true religion with the accurate doctrines.

When the 33 mainstreamers call upon extra-terrestrial viruses, it’s acceptable because it continues the assumption of a Cosmos run by mindless forces alone.

Cross that line or any other sacred line, and you’re an infidel whose work will not be published and whose career will be destroyed.

Judy Mikovits, Ph.D. crossed another sacred line. She is a renowned researcher with remarkable publications, who was thrown in jail for, as best I can determine, refusing to denounce her heretical data that showed evidence of ongoing retrovirus contamination of vaccines that may be causing life-threatening diseases.

Vaccines have become a sacred cow in mainstream medical circles. It’s a moral issue to the enlightened in power. You don’t question or doubt vaccines because to do so would put patients’ lives at risk. Furthermore, if a few vaccines are good, several dozen all at once can only be better. End of discussion. Oh, and don’t forget, it’s been proven beyond doubt that vaccines have no causal relationship to autism. Never mind aluminum or retroviruses. Never mind genetic SNPs and the diverse sensitivity of individuals hidden within every random population sample.

Here’s a video where Doctor Mikovits talks to the public. Warning, Will Robinson, she’s religious. That’s strike 2 in the eyes of a scientific fundamentalist.

Below is a video of Doctor Mikovits talking to fellow scientists. Anyone can tell after listening for a few minutes that she has rare intelligence and moves effortlessly at breakneck speed over complex concepts that to her seem simple.

I haven’t read her book yet, but here’s a link to what sounds like an interesting read.

You know, I sometimes wonder why fundamentalism is the default style of human thinking.

As much as I hate to admit it, fundamentalism may offer a survival advantage that I don’t understand or value as I should. Perhaps I shouldn’t paint fundamentalism in the black-and-white colors it endorses.

After all, I was a religious fundamentalist myself for most of my life and still respect many aspects of that mindset, such as honesty, living with purpose and striving to be courageous in the face of fearful opposition.

So maybe fundamentalism is like salt — necessary for survival, but fatal if the dose is too high or too low.

Or would you say it’s more like cobra venom, toxic at any dose?

…

Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD

Depersonalization or Scientific Enlightenment?

29 Comments April 23, 2017 Morrill Talmage Moorehead

There’s a rare and miserable condition called depersonalization disorder (DPD) that takes away the sense of “self” so there’s no “I” causing things – regular things like walking, talking, thinking and deciding.

There’s a loss of the “sense of agency,” a loss of the normal feeling that you’re initiating, executing and controlling your own actions. Patients describe “the suffocating pain of unreality.”

“DPD patients show increased prefrontal activation as well as reduced activation in insula/limbic-related areas to aversive, arousing emotional stimuli.”

The DSM IV says they “may feel like an automaton.”

An automaton is “a machine that performs a function according to a predetermined set of instructions.”

But why would science considers this a disorder?

If we take scientific materialism to heart, then everything truly is mechanical (reducible to matter and energy). We are automatons. No alternative exists in science.

Sure, Heisenberg’s uncertainty may limit our predictability, or not, but that uncertainty doesn’t make room for anything approaching the self, or consciousness, or the “free will” that most of us seem to experience when it’s time for a cup of coffee.

Hmm. Hang on, I’ll be right back…

OK, I’m back.

Everything that’s not mechanical is an illusion to science.

Illusions are baaad, Umkay?

To the scientific true believer, the problem most people face in seeing the objective mechanical truth is that our brains are so complex they generate false impressions about what we are.

Nature accidentally fooled us into feeling as if we’re conscious and able to think, feel and do things. But it’s a sick joke, we’re told.

When we become scientifically enlightened in government-controlled schools we realize we’re machines. It’s liberating and fun.

The materialistic truth sets us free to follow the call of Science’s meaningless Universe and “Do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.” (Don’t follow that link unless you can tolerate sophomoric sexual vulgarity, Okay?)

Fine, in the illusory (not really existing) minds of most scientists, we’re all the moral equivalent of bananas.

But let’s think about this for a second…

If we’re really soulless machines, then depersonalization disorder conveys an accurate, appropriate mindset.

So why do psychiatrists call it a disorder? They’re scientists, shouldn’t they call it “Scientific Enlightenment?”

“Finally someone feels what scientists can only believe – that the conscious self is an unreal mechanical automaton!”

I’d think Western mental health researchers would not be trying to cure this thing. They should use it to help isolate a drug that destroys humanity’s false illusion of self, then add their chemical to our drinking water along with the wholesome fluoride they trust and adore.

What could possibly go wrong?

The fact is, if you feel (as opposed to merely thinking) that scientific materialism is accurate, then you’ve got a psychiatric disorder that’s ruining your life, not improving it.

That’s backwards. How do we explain it?

Maybe science has made a wrong assumption. Maybe the way humans normally feel about themselves reflects reality not an illusion. When humans lose their natural sense of self, they’ve lost touch with reality, not gained it.

I know that’s a lot for a scientist to imagine. Humans have endless tiny parts. A genetic code gives programmed instructions to our cells. It all looks mechanical, and if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck…

But feeling unreal is horribly debilitating. That fact gently hints that scientific materialism should be displaced by another assumption…

Something to this effect: The mind/soul/spirit/sense of self/ and free will are equally, if not more real and basic to the Universe than matter and energy.

But to get there, we’d also need an assumption like this:

The basic building blocks of reality are derived from a conscious, intelligent Higher Source independent of matter, energy, time and space.

Scientific materialism or genuine personhood?

Either one requires untestable assumptions. Is it really necessary to think of ourselves as machines in order to do good science? I doubt it.

Why not assume something that supports mental health and promotes the way we normally feel? To me, that fits the data and helps humanity.

Dark Matter, God and Genetics

61 Comments March 31, 2017 Morrill Talmage Moorehead

Ages ago (in the 1970’s), scientists looked out at the universe, did the math and silently wet themselves. The peripheral arms of galaxies weren’t acting right. There wasn’t enough gravity to make the stars of the galaxy’s arms move that fast.

Astronomers drove home, changed pants and got an idea: Dark matter. The essence of ghost flesh with gravity!

It seemed too convenient to some: We can’t see it, can’t touch it and can’t detect it in a laboratory – at least not so far.

Nevertheless, science liked dark matter. Its existence was implied by the motion of galaxies.

We’re told it surrounds a galaxy like a halo, but without the angel’s head, so it’s not religious.

History shows that geneticists also had a meltdown when they first discovered that DNA was too complex for their model of reality. Don’t worry, they’ve gotten over it.

It was in the 1950’s when Barbara McClintock, a genius geneticist who single-handedly discovered genetic regulation strayed from the narrow path and discovered that genes are under complex control. At the time it was heresy.

The objective voices of science knew in their hearts that DNA was a simple, straight-forward thing. It had to be. It came from the mindless forces of mutation – how could it possibly be under some strange complicated control mechanism?

And who does this woman think she is, trying to add impossible complexity to DNA? She’s dangerous and wrong!

They forced Barbara McClintock to stop publishing her seminal work.

The angels cried.

No, wait, that was dark matter, not angles. My bad.

You know how it feels when somebody in the Middle East takes a big hammer to a beautiful historic statue that can never be replaced? That’s how it feels to me when I think of those well-intentioned scientists censoring and nearly destroying the career of the great Barbra McClintock.

I’m having a little trouble forgiving them.

Today the complexity of DNA and its layers of intricate control are becoming widely recognized. The complexity is staggering. The vocabulary of genetics journals is straight from the Tower of Babel.

Still, science has barely scratched the surface of DNA’s unspeakable language. Epigenetic gene control adds another layer of complexity that was unimaginable in 1859 when the really big question was laid to rest by Darwin…

It’s all random.

I can say from experience as a retired pathologist that the complexity of the human body, DNA’s end product, is beyond mind-boggling.

We still don’t know where the 3-D blueprint lies or how it’s projected into space. I mean, how does an epidermal skin cell know it’s positioned on the edge of an eyelid rather than the bottom of a toe? It’s not enough to know you’re a skin cell or an osteoblast, you have to know where you are by means of some unseen three-dimensional hologram-like thing.

I suspect it’s in the “junk DNA” they used to talk about a few years ago. Not so much anymore.

And how in the world do developing cells each find their spot during embryogenesis? Nobody knows, but it happens, and it implies another layer of complexity.

Science is rigidly compartmentalized, you know, like some secret project in Nevada where no one’s supposed to see the big picture or ask questions about it.

Most scientists have only a vague second-hand grasp of the body’s intricate structural, biochemical and electrical complexity. Only a tiny fraction of those have a working knowledge of DNA.

In medical research, almost everyone is narrowly focused and struggling to figure out what’s going on in their own tiny niche of the human internal reality – both physical and mental. Those who try to look at the whole body and mind as a functional unit are dismissed by mainstream MD’s as having been led astray by “functional medicine.”

And like the thought police of Egyptology, modern geneticists must deny the relevance and persistence of the big question…

Who built this amazing stuff?

Random mutation?

Khufu in 20 years with copper tools and stone hammers? (That myth should be embarrassing to anyone with common sense and no job to lose if they buck the system’s dogma.)

You might think it would be natural for geneticists to suggest modern answers to the biggest question that DNA raises: who wrote the code?

Unfortunately, the answer was ingrained in all fields of science long before modern genetics emerged to frame the question intelligently.

As any government-educated eighth grader can tell you, Darwin and all the scientists after him have proven that random mutation wrote the genetic code over endless eons. Well, 13.8 billion years, but that’s endless if you ignore the math. And for sure there was no thinking! That would be religion.

Really?

If science needs a gravity halo, space is full of dark matter. If they need a brilliant code writer, mindless genius fills the universe.

But science changes.

In fact, Stacy McGaugh of Case Western recently studied 150 spiral galaxies and did some calculations. He says,

“…it’s like God shouting, ‘There is something more to the theory of gravity, not something more to the mass of the universe!’” (See “What’s Up With Gravity” in New Scientist, March 18-24, 2017.)

McGaugh says that dark matter may not be entirely bogus, but tweaking gravity theory is where the truth lies for him. He thinks gravitational forces change at great distances, accounting for the high speeds of the arms of galaxies.

Three cheers for the mainstream dark-matter believers for letting a heretic publish! That’s the spirit we need.

A similar questioning of entrenched beliefs goes on today in genetics.

The courageous Stephen Meyer, PhD, an Oxford grad, took a look at DNA from the perspective of a science historian, did the math and said that the universe isn’t anywhere near old enough for random mutation to produce the DNA code for one simple protein – let alone the thousands of huge ones that exist within their intricate feedback loops in our bodies.

His book, Signature in the Cell, shows the math and says that the information in DNA looks like intelligent code writing. Even its organization in the molecule implies intelligent work.

In the halls of science, you could hear a pin drop.

Meyer said we’ve seen this sort of thing: robot factories making complex products from coded instructions. That should be a hint.

Science usually likes this sort of thinking. For instance, we know that a halo of regular matter would explain how galaxies spin, so all we’re saying is there’s a halo of invisible matter out there.

Brilliant idea, science decided.

A Martian might think that science would also like this:

We know that regular minds wrote the code for those Intel robots that make tiny chips, so all we’re saying is that invisible mind(s) wrote the code for the nanobots in our body’s cells.

Unseen matter – no problem.

Unseen mind(s) – forget it. That’s not scientific.

But why not? Aren’t all minds invisible?

Yes, but they seem to be derived from matter, moreover, in the eye of science, all minds are not merely invisible, they’re illusions. They don’t exist at all.

Even the human minds that decided our minds don’t exist are illusions. Doesn’t that inspire confidence?

These people aren’t kidding. And they own science as well as the minds of most children and educated adults.

By chance, the history of science on this planet has evolved by replacing non-material explanations (magic, bad humors, fairies, myths of off-world beings, and finally God) with material explanations.

As a side effect, a geneticist can ruin her career today by conjuring up the ancient foe of science: a non-material explanation. Even if she doesn’t intend to, like Barbara McClintock.

At its core, science assumes that matter and energy are the only real things in existence. Everything else is derivative and reducible to matter and energy.

This includes your mind, your identity, your sense of free will, your love for your children, and your deepest intuitive sense of honor and fairness. They’re all illusions of the matter and energy that your brain is made of.

An illusion seems real but isn’t.

Materialistic reductionism insists that nothing is real besides matter and energy. Everything is reducible to…

Matter
Energy.

Obviously, they’re both mindless, lifeless and meaningless. Or at least they’re assumed to be. Therefore everything is meaningless, including that sense of purpose you may derive from loving someone or helping someone weaker than you.

Does that seem healthy for your kids and all of humankind? Does it seem realistic? And is it essential to everything science is accomplishing?

Science educators don’t often contrast this materialistic reductionist (MR) paradigm with an alternative, the way any objective thinker would.

And yet it’s such a radical assumption that even some atheists reject it as a model of reality.

Thomas Nagel, for instance, denounces it in, Mind and Cosmos – Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.

One alternative to MR is this revision:

Reality is built on three basic elements:

Energy
Matter
Mind

To me, this adds realistic depth to modern science, expelling the denial of important questions such as, what sort of mind is most likely behind the DNA code? What tools build ancient Egypt and other saw-marked megaliths around the world? How does the DNA of the elongated skulls in Peru compare to modern DNA? Is there evidence of DNA code-tampering or splicing in anatomically amalgamated-appearing animals such as the duck-billed platypus?

Without the arbitrary, narrow assumptions of Materialistic Reductionism, suddenly I’m real in the eyes of science, and since observers influence measurements in quantum experiments, this paradigm fits the data: If matter and energy alone were real, how could an observer who’s merely an illusion collapse the quantum wave function?

Whether we consider the “first” or original mind to be God or someone else – the universe itself, perhaps a mind hidden in the electromagnetic spectrum, or some sort of field being(s) who aren’t confined by time and space – thinking of the mind as fundamental to nature rather than derivative, real instead of an illusion, helps explain the enigmatic complexity of DNA and other things.

It brings meaning and purpose back into the realm of science where real things belong.

At this point in history, the Neo-Darwinian, mindless, meaningless model of the universe deserves a standard dose of scientific skepticism. Mental health care workers should question it on professional grounds and parents should question it on the basis of common-sense values.

Finally today, more than a century late, genetics speaks of a universe where mind, meaning, and purpose are not false illusions, and diverse spiritual values are scientifically and intellectually respectable. Again.

Quantum Entanglement (Chapter 21) “Hapa Girl DNA” by M. Talmage Moorehead

40 Comments July 27, 2016 Morrill Talmage Moorehead

Reversal of cognitive decline: A novel therapeutic program

“This is 21st century medicine… It’s not trying to attack complex, chronic illnesses with single drugs, it is looking at what is the actual cause, going physiologically… with multimodal approaches. If you had told me ten years ago in the lab that we’d be telling people how important meditation is, and yoga and nutrition, I would have laughed. Now I realize the biochemistry is undeniable.” – Dale Bredesen, MD, excerpt from podcast interview by Chris Kresser.

James is alive! I hear him coughing. I try to turn my head to see but I can’t even move my eyes.

I’m so cold. I should be shivering, but I’m not. My eyes are fixed on a swirl in Shiva’s marble ceiling. It looks like the Orion Nebula going in and out of focus.

I hope I don’t have a high cervical cord injury. Even if I do, James is alive! The sound of him coughing is the best thing I’ve ever heard. The warmth of knowing runs through me.

“Shine” soars through my mind. He wrote it to one of his first girlfriends.

“One second close to you is equal to a lifetime filled up with light. I obsess on you. It steps outside time. You’re so pure I can’t believe you’re in my life. In rage in my mind, in pain deep inside, you put them all to sleep. When you’re here I feel a sense of peace that I never knew was real before you. My hurt disappears staring in your eyes, where there’s no wrong and there’s no lies behind your face. And I crave you above all else. So breathe slow and soft, and hold on to me. I’m no damn good, and you’re all I love. Your eyes slowly speak, cast a spell on me. I feel so bright, and so does my life when I’m with you.”

That was James’ first and last love song. To a girl who demolished his heart a few months later.

Someone’s crying. It’s Maxwell, I think. I’ve never heard him cry before.

“I’ll always love you,” he says. “I should have told you the first time we met.”

It is Maxwell. Talking to me?

I struggle to move my arms but they won’t budge.

His face looks down at me, so out of focus I can barely tell it’s him. A tear falls on my forehead.

I wonder if he thinks I’m dead.

Max, I’m not dead.

Maybe the River can hear me. “Anahata, Vedanshi, tell Max I’m not dead!”

No answer.

Maxwell leans close and kisses my lips. A peck on the side of the mouth.

That was my first real kiss, you know. Everyone brags of their first kiss. My brag will be a near miss, delivered by a man who thought I was a corpse.

I hope I’m not.

Maybe I am. I can’t move at all.

“Try this,” Anahata says in the River.

“Anahata, you’re there! Tell everybody I’m alive!”

The cold vanishes from my core. My arms shoot up from my sides on their own. I struggle to move my fingers, and after several tries they all work. My eyes are moving and I can focus. What a relief!

“Thank you, Anahata!” I shout, all husky.

Maxwell flinches.

I manage to sit up and then have to lean my head against his left shoulder to rest. I feel drained of energy. My sternum hurts every time I inhale.

I look up at the whiskers on the side of his face and whisper toward his ear. “When you said you’ll alway love me, did you mean romantically? Or is this a brother-sister thing?” I don’t want to say, just friends. I hate those words.

He puts his hands on my shoulders and supports me sitting up. His eyes are full of surprise.

“Unbelievable,” he says. “You didn’t have a pulse.”

“Did you do chest compressions on me?” I ask.

“Frantically,” he says.

A wave of affection sweeps over me. Chest compressions. It’s the sweetest thing I can imagine. I have to hug him. I put my arms around him and squeeze, wondering if he did mouth-to-mouth, too.

“Thank you, Max.”

“I guess I’m no good at finding a pulse,” he says apologetically.

“That’s three times you’ve saved me.”

“Well…”

“So I need to know. Are we more than just friends?” There, I said it. Just friends. The timeworn escape clause.

My jaw clenches for the distancing words I’ve grown to hate: close friends, soul mates, practically twins, you’re like a little sister.

Maxwell grins. “Does totally infatuated count?”

“Sounds superficial,” I tell him and try to hide a smile. I’ve always wanted a guy to see me that way.

“Superficial?” he says. “I’ll have you know, Doctor Fujiwara, my infatuation runs deep.” He raises an eyebrow, then puts his hands on the sides of my face and kisses me. Full on. Lips against lips all the way across, not on the side. I can’t believe it.

I’m wondering if there’s going to be tongues. My heart’s racing. I’ve read about this a million times, but how do you know what to do if it ever happens? There’s no consensus in the literature.

Suddenly I have a strong feeling. Like everything revolves around this moment. It’s weird, as if nothing else matters or ever did. Somehow French kissing seems irrelevant. It’s as if I’m melting.

Maybe this is the quantum thing that God was talking about. The quantum entanglement of souls.

I wonder if any of that dream was real. It seemed hyper-real.

Maxwell finishes the kiss. Good, I couldn’t hold my breath much longer.

“It was too real to be real,” I tell him, trying to weigh the dream in my head.

“What was?”

“I had a classic near death experience. Totally influenced by Vedanshi’s story. It even had a pyramid.”

“You better write it down,” he says and catches himself. “Nah, scratch that.” He grins at my memory. People do that all the time.

“Maxwell, I want you to know I’ll always love you, too. In the purest sense of infatuation.”

He looks into my eyes, shakes his head slowly like it’s too good to be true, then kisses me again. Whoa.

I’ll tell you what seems too good to be true. James is alive and Maxwell loves me for more than friends.

I wonder how James is doing. I end the kiss and turn to see him.

He’s sitting there shivering with Vedanshi kneeling behind him, her front against his back. She reaches over his shoulders and rubs his folded arms. Quick little friction circles on his skin to warm him the way she did to me when we met.

“Get a room,” he says to me and starts coughing again.

“Anahata, could you please warm up James like you did me?”

“Good idea,” she says in the River.

“Does he have brain damage?” I ask and hold my breath for the answer.

“No,” Anahata says.

What a relief. “By the way we’re both alive. That means we passed Shiva’s test.”

“No, I’m sorry,” she says, “I had to abort. I don’t know how you got into his chamber but that changed the parameters and voided the test. The protocol has to be letter-perfect, Shiva said.”

I had a feeling.

“I hope none of you drowns,” Anahata says. “I mean that with all my heart.”

“It’s crazy,” I tell her, “but I know you do. I understand what it means to be trapped by honor.”

“What’s going on?” Maxwell asks. “You’re talking to somebody, aren’t you?”

“Anahata needs to redo the test.” I heave a sigh. “It’s a strict protocol. Shiva wants proper drownings.”

The screen flashes metallic silver. A line of rivets comes into focus and moves away. Vaar’s metal cigar shrinks to fit the view, then hangs in space, surrounded by glittery blackness.

Vaar’s face comes on the screen, superimposed over her ship. “I wasn’t aware of any drowning,” she says in the River.

“I called her,” Maxwell says to me, looking up at the screen. “Figured she didn’t know the details or she wouldn’t have recommended Saturn.”

“vaarShagaNiputro,” Anahata says, “What a rare pleasure to speak with Shiva’s esteemed homelander.”

“What’s going on here?” she asks.

“It’s complex. Come over and we’ll talk.”

“Listen, if you lay a finger on that Fujiwara girl I’ll let the jinns out on you and Shiva.”

“Pardon me a moment, Madam Vaar,” Anahata says. “I’ll encrypt some privacy. The Chairman himself is listening. I wouldn’t trust him with a zinc suppository.”

James seems warm now sitting with an arm around Vedanshi. They’re beside The Ganga, both looking at the screen.

“OK, now we have privacy,” Anahata says.

“Every bit of this is going public if you touch Johanna,” Vaar says. “I had no idea Shiva’s test was fatal. I need that girl to save my species. I’m not a quitter like Shiva.”

“I’m deeply disheartened by Shiva’s orders,” Anahata says. “I would do almost anything to keep from spending the rest of my life drowning innocent people this way, but…”

“Why do I doubt that?” Vaar says.

“I don’t know what I expected the first time, but the drowning was a horrible shock. Now the deaths haunt me. Every moment.”

Vaar laughs. “It’s a cheap thrill. Be honest.”

“Weakness invites evil,” Anahata says. “I’m always honest. Orders must be followed.”

“Not this time,” Vaar says. “Shiva left me something.” She brings her right hand into view, her signet ring bulging from the third digit. “Recognize this?”

The ring looks old, a dull silver with a double helix of golden cobras, one heading north, the other south. The eyes are gemstones.

“You found his ring,” Anahata says. “He thought he’d lost it jumping Bridal Veil Falls, but I told him he was mistaken. I would have found it easily.”

“He didn’t lose it,” Vaar says. “He gave it to me before he jumped across. I told him I’d dropped it. But to the point. An hour ago in my lab, the reflection of a UV laser glanced off this ring. Something like this.”

Her left hand comes into view holding a dental mirror. A needle of near-ultraviolet light bounces onto the ring and dances over the northern shake’s eyes.

A holographic image of a planet appears in the air above her hand. It has blue oceans, green and brown land and white clouds.

“This is Mars,” Vaar says. “Does it look familiar?”

As we watch, Shiva’s voice shouts slurred commands. Bolts of blue lightning from space penetrate the atmosphere and strike the oceans. Bellowing clouds of steam rise like white mushrooms growing out of the water at each point of the lightning’s impact.

“This next part isn’t in the records I’ve seen,” Vaar says. “It surprised me.”

The image of a mother appears, running with three children, the smallest in her arms. The perspective moves higher. They’re running from a wall of orange fluid that’s flowing over their village. A small white dog joins them and runs ahead. In less than a minute they’re cornered against the side of a vertical cliff. They try to climb the rocks. Heat waves from the glowing fluid bend their images as they fall from the face of the cliff, writhe in agony and turn to reddish dust. The fluid slides over their smoking remains and into the base of the cliff as Shiva laughs in high falsetto.

“Please turn it off,” Anahata says.

Vaar’s needle of light goes out and the image vanishs.

“Context is needed,” Anahata says. “The Martian Particle Accelerator was mere seconds from unity. There wasn’t time for evacuation.”

“I’ve heard the story,” Vaar says. “Even if true, it’s obvious that you and Shiva enjoy killing. Anyone can hear it. Shall I play something with you howling like a shillelagh fan?”

“No,” Anahata says. ” Please. Things aren’t as simple as you imagine.”

“Shiva was clearly drunk,” Vaar says. “I suppose that’s a moral excuse to feeble minds, but you were sober as a monk, Anahata.”

“We were faced with losing one world or three. An entire arm of Shiva’s galaxy would be obliterated along with his home planet. Selective destruction served a higher purpose.”

“It isn’t the math, it’s the mirth,” Vaar says.

“The angel of death must focus on logic, then choose laughter over guilt. Dance above despair.”

“I’ve recently been accused of being a sociopath,” Vaar says, “but you, Anahata. You’re beyond any disease of mine.” She shakes her head.

“Dark humor is the sanctuary of dark angels,” Anahata says.

“I don’t care,” Vaar answers. “The psychology of mass murder bores me. You haven’t seen a fraction of the ugliness in this ring. If you’d care to avoid galactic disgrace, release Johanna. And that brother of hers, as well. She won’t do anything without him.”

“I’ll be disgraced in either event,” Anahata says. “But to forsake an order is genuine disgrace. The records in Shiva’s ring evoke a misunderstanding of soldier motivation. Nothing more. I’ve lived in disrepute for longer than I’d care to remember… four hundred thousand years, roughly. The popularity I had with Shiva was brief by comparison. I enjoyed it, but it isn’t essential to me.”

“I’m familiar with brief popularity,” Vaar says. “You do grow attached to the adulation, I’m afraid. Now I know what you’re thinking, but forget killing me or stealing my ring. The dirt on you is set to broadcast River-wide if I should so much as sneeze too enthusiastically.”

“I’m not a thief,” Anahata says, “and the last thing I would do is harm Shiva’s friend for spreading the truth. Even if it’s going to be misunderstood.”

“Don’t be calling my bluff, now. If you think I won’t do it…”

“Logically, I can’t fault the deeds of Shiva and his Fleet, but in my heart I regret that no one beneath God is able to punish me for the things I’ve done. The mistakes I’ve made.”

“If you touch Johanna, I’ll punish you,” Vaar says with an intensity in her eyes that makes her look younger.

“Broadcast your truth,” Anahata says. “Johanna tells me it will set us free.”

The images keep replaying in my head. Children turning to dust while Shiva laughs. A crazy laugh.

I wonder what Anahata thinks of the Large Hadron Collider. Maybe she doesn’t know about it. She’s been banned from the Libraries. If she finds out, will she have to destroy the Earth?

It’s odd how the River Libraries are updated. As if there’s an unseen librarian selecting new content. Like that UFO documentary with the Australian kids?

Vedanshi thinks the Universe is the librarian. Maybe so. Somebody’s triaging the information.

I wonder if any of my papers made it. I wonder if…

“Max, I’ve got an idea.”

“All ears,” he says.

“We need to get Anahata back into the Library.”

“Why?” Anahata asks in the River, just before Maxwell asks the same thing.

“There’s a chance I actually passed Shiva’s test,” I tell them. “Despite breaking the protocol.”

“Why do you say that?” Anahata asks.

“Think about the test design. Hyperoxygenated, cold physiologic saline. Why drown someone like that?”

“I wish I knew,” Anahata says.

“This is outlier thinking, but if we assume Shiva knew NDE’s are real, then maybe he thought I would move on to the next life so he could come back and take over my body. All my tissues would be in good condition, red cells protected by the saline, not lysed or crenated the way they would be in freshwater or ocean water. And the low temp with high oxygen saturation would stave off necrosis and autolysis.”

“Remotely plausible,” Anahata says.

“Sounds dead on,” Maxwell says, as if all our problems are over.

“But what makes you think you passed the test?” Anahata asks.

“In my near death experience, Shiva changed his mind and stayed with God. I decided to come back here. Neither of those would have been part of his original plan.”

“Anoxic dreams aren’t real,” Anahata says.

“Near death dreams are caused by anoxia,” I admit, “but so is death. That doesn’t make it unreal.”

“Clever words,” Anahata says. “No one can objectively validate a near death experience.”

“I can. If one of my papers made it into the River Libraries, you’re going to see Shiva’s name beside mine in pink letters.”

“I’m sure your papers made it,” Maxwell says. “You’ve got, what, three major breakthroughs?”

“But I’ve never been allowed to claim first authorship.”

“I know,” Maxwell says. “It’s ridiculous. Drummond should do his own research for once.”

“He needs his ass kicked,” James says.

“The River lists everyone in the et. al’s,” Vedanshi tells us. “Your name will be there.”

“I hope this isn’t a stalling tactic,” Anahata says.

“It’s not,” I tell her. “I saw Shiva step right out of my body onto the blue flowers. The original Shiva, not your guy. It was so real it makes this life look like a dream.”

“Shiva left you?” Vedanshi asks. Her mouth stays open for a moment, then she whispers to James. He hasn’t coughed in a while. The sight of him alive and lucid brings me powerful hope.

“There was something about you,” Anahata says to me. “Sitting in Shiva’s Throne that way. Remember how I called you, Captain?”

“You were feeling a little loopy,” I remind her.

“I was,” she says wistfully. “Let’s have another look at the Library. All of us.”

The screen leaves Vaar and shows the Sentient Fleet lined up in space.

“Follow me,” Anahata says to them. “We’ll line up and kill each other later.”

The Chairman’s voice comes on like a squealing pig. “I command you to fire!”

“Really?” I ask him. “As if you haven’t looked me up in the River. As if you don’t know. You never wanted to rescue me from Anahata. You were protecting yourself from Shiva. Were you going to kill me or just lock me up?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” the Chairman says.

“I wish that were true,” I tell him.

A glimpse of Africa fills the screen, then the Giza Pyramids. Without another hint of movement we’re inside the Sphinx Library. Actually the Library is inside Anahata’s convex room, but she’s phase shifted, so locality is a gray area.

Maxwell helps me to my feet and takes me beneath the inverted glass pyramid. We look up at the flower of life and I feel a flood of certainty.

I try to slow my breathing, but it takes focus to prolong my inhaling and exhaling the way Vedanshi taught me. Finally I settle down and feel a subtle mood lift. I’m ready. I speak my name into the River: “Johanna C. Fujiwara, PhD.” I picture the word “Shiva.”

And wait.

Nothing happens.

I try the first author’s name: “Adolf P. Drummond, PhD.”

Nothing.

I wait some more.

Nothing happens.

Not one of my papers made it into the River Libraries. Disappointment doesn’t describe this feeling. It’s thoroughly humiliating, especially in front of Maxwell and James.

Vedanshi whispers something into James ear.

He looks perplexed. He tries to get up but can’t make it to his feet. Vedanshi gets up on her knees beside him, steadies him and eases him back to the floor. He lies flat on his back for a moment, then puts his hands behind his head and pulls his chin to his chest to look at me.

“Hey,” he says. “Try the one with the cuss words and that fat dude. That was sick. My favorite story ever.”

“It’s not published,” I tell him. He knows I got in trouble for that thing. All those cuss words in a church school? What was I thinking?

Then again, maybe the River’s standards don’t match the human gatekeeper’s. I subvocalize the title into the River, “The King Weighs 340 Pounds, OK?” Instantly the words appear in the air beside me. Three-dimensional block letters with my middle name, “Celeste,” below them. No first or last name at all.

I used my middle name the year Moody pulled my hair out. People were calling me Joe. I hated everything about it. I still have a phobia about masculinity, you know.

Except for this one thing: Beside my middle name, in pink letters, the name of an ancient Indian god floats in midair: “Shiva.”

He was part of me when I wrote that story.

This changes everything.

I look over at Vedanshi kneeling beside James. She smiles at me through watery eyes. “My brother finally went home,” she says, then leans forward and cries for joy on James’ broad chest.

…

M. Talmage Moorehead

…

As a (retired) pathologist and not a religious fundamentalist, I accept intelligent design over neo-Darwinian evolution as the more logical explanation for the mind-boggling complexity of the human body (including the DNA code, the brain and the mind).

Let’s ignore that issue while we learn from the latest science coming from a UCLA doctor, Dale Bredesen, MD. He’s on the cutting edge of what I hope will be the new direction for 21st century western medicine. Like the vast majority of scientists, he accepts neo-Darwinian evolution. I don’t, but so what? This guy deserves everyone’s total respect. The planet is lucky to have him on board!

Most of us know someone with Alzheimer’s. It’s an epidemic. Finally there’s hope! More and larger studies are needed, as usual, but this one had 10 patients, 9 of whom either recovered or improved significantly. The one who didn’t improve had advanced Alzheimer’s.

Enjoy listening to this brilliant scientist, Dale Bredesen, MD, right here. <== Click those orange words. 🙂 Preserve your gifted mind so you can continue producing your brilliant creative work. The world needs your voice.

You can also read the paper and watch Dr. Bredesen’s videos.

(By the way, I have no affiliation or relationship with Dr. Bredesen or Chris Kresser, M.S., L.Ac, the man doing the interview.)

…

OK, Johanna’s story is nearing the end. One more chapter to come, if she cooperates. After that, I’m probably going to re-work it, making it less of a blog-novel by eliminating much of the nonfiction stuff – unless you write and talk me out of it. The plan is to mold her story into a legit genre novel. It may be impossible, so depending on the input I receive, I may move on to another novel. If you’ve read the whole thing, please drop me an email and give me your advice: cytopathology (at) gmail (dot) com.

…

Keep writing! I’m watching Jessica Brody’s Productivity Hacks for Writers. It’s insightful and full of ingenious methods of getting you into the flow state for writing. If you sign up for her free stuff she’ll send you a coupon that lowers the cost from 30 dollars to 17. I paid the thirty before I noticed the discount in my email. I’m told Udemy would give me the discount if I complained, but this course is worth more than the $30 I paid. Let’s just make sure you pay the lower price if you buy it. 🙂 (I have no affiliation with Jessica Brody or Udemy.)

Love and hugs,

Talmage

Beyond Death (Chapter 20) “Hapa Girl DNA” by M. Talmage Moorehead

13 Comments July 9, 2016 Morrill Talmage Moorehead

“I have an anti-Darwinistic stance against something called the naturalistic fallacy – that nature is not moral. But who you have to rescue is the very weak to encourage risk taking on the part of entrepreneurs because the system needs them. You guys got here because of entrepreneurs, not because of bonus earners and bureaucrats. And not thanks to bankers, by the way. Alright? So you didn’t get here, you didn’t start the industrial revolution without risk takers who have small downside, big upside.” – Video excerpt, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Antifragile.

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I run to the narrow cylinder where my brother is trapped and floating. I hit the thing with my fists. It’s as solid as steel but looks like a column of water extending up from Anahata’s floor to her marble ceiling. It’s probably ice-cold saline, Shiva’s recipe for drowning humans.

In Hawaii, James can stay under for four minutes, but that’s in eighty degree water.

Vedanshi stretches her arms around the cylinder, more than half way. She puts her forehead on the cold surface and looks at James. He looks back, their faces separated by millimeters.

I put my arms around the opposite side. Maxwell shows up next to me and kicks it several times.

“We’ll get you out,” Vedanshi says to James.

He rotates in the fluid and looks at me with that in-charge way of his – total confidence in tough situations. That’s him in real-time. Later if it’s just the two of us, he’ll admit he was scared out of his mind.

I put the side of my head against the cylinder and picture the nano gadgets I designed for Anahata. I shouldn’t have helped her. I imagine a big hammer smashing them.

I open my eyes. James looks worried now.

Don’t lose it.

He pushes off the floor with bare feet and shoots to the ceiling thirty feet above. I step back to see. His feet are on one side and his back is against the other, pushing. Nothing seems to budge.

I need to think.

He’s digging his fingers into the circle where the fluid meets the ceiling.

I wish I knew Anahata’s mechanics. Actually I don’t know if she has any. The Ganga doesn’t.

I squeeze the tall pillar between my arms as hard as I can, slow my breathing, close my eyes and watch ones and zeros fall inside my head. If I knew this code, I could write a trojan and speak it to Anahata, maybe take control of one of her systems.

“I’m so sorry I have to do this,” Anahata says in my head.

“Damn you,” I shout back.

I’ve never said those words to anyone before. Not like that. I feel cold inside. It’s the things you say that corrupt you.

I look at Anahata’s words. Three ended with the letter, “o”: “so,” “to,” and “do.” The first of the three starts with “s” and the last word in the sentence ends with “s.” I replay the binaries that fell when she spoke and pick out matching strings: my first two letters of the Universe’s machine code.

I line up ones and zeros on a spinning wheel in my head and turn it: SOS, SOS, SOS. Faster and faster.

It’s not a trojan, though. Not anything, really.

“Shiva should have trusted you,” I say to Anahata. “You’d sentence yourself to hell as long as you were following orders.”

Suddenly I’m floating in icy fluid with half a breath in my lungs. My body wants to curl up. A frozen headache pounds beneath my left temple. Cold is a unique pain.

“Did you do this?” I ask Anahata in my head.

“No,” she says. “It’s not protocol.”

I push off the floor and discover that the pain of cold is more intense when you’re moving through it. A new chill factor. James’ bare feet appear above me and come closer as I rise.

I’m behind him now. I grasp his right shoulder and turn him around. His eyes are open, I think, but everything’s blurry. He reaches for me and hugs me with his head down on my shoulder, like when he was a toddler.

Bubbles percolate past my right ear.

He hugs me a little tighter for a second then his arms get weak. His cough reflex jars him. His fingernails dig into the skin of my shoulders. More bubbles and he goes limp in my arms.

No, God, please, no. Please!

The loss seems infinite. The weight of failure is heavy. It’s like an intravenous injection of sorrow flowing up the veins of my arms and landing in my heart, cold as a deadly anesthetic.

Everything was a mistake. I could have saved James a hundred ways.

He would have been John Lennon. He would have been the cure to misery for the depressed loners of his generation. They would have found themselves in his music.

His first prayer song screams through my brain.

“Make for me a dirty heart

filled with all the darkness of the world.

I’m taking all the dull shit in

and burning up inside within,

it’s true.

I hate you.”

James. If only God had given you a normal sister. Someone less self-righteous. Someone with common sense instead of a star-struck fan with all my terrible advice.

If I’d only drowned myself in the ocean this morning. I was so close but I couldn’t inhale. Now it’s just a matter of time.

Or is it?

I put my lips over James’ mouth, pinch his nose tight and blow my breath into his lungs. He seems peaceful.

My little Hurricane. With those broad shoulders. You grew up when I wasn’t looking.

I open my mouth and breathe in Shiva’s fluid. It tastes like tears.

My throat clamps shut. My gag reflex triggers my stomach muscles but my throat is shut tight.

Suddenly I’m swallowing. It’s not even me anymore. It’s autonomic.

I see the white light.

I won’t leave you, James.

My feet are on the lowest stair. I take the next one. Another appears above. I jump over it and start to run, almost vertically. My feet leave the blocks and I’m floating inches above a steep stairway of white quartz.

At the top it’s flat, thirty square feet with a square room in the center. I float above it and hover, looking down at the four sides of a white pyramid with stairs on each side and water all around, dark blue, almost black.

Ojiichan’s words come to me, “All roads lead north.”

The room on top has a square opening. I float down to the white blocks and walk in.

Inside is outside. There’s a great canyon as big as Arizona’s.

Blue desert flowers cover the flat ground at the canyon’s top, and hang down in broad swaths of blue against the orange and red walls of sedimentary rock.

Euphoria sweeps over me. It’s a home I once knew but can’t remember. I lived here long ago – before cancer took Mom and that white truck ran over Daddy on the Pali.

Long before.

I sense someone behind me and turn. There they are, Mom and Daddy. I knew they’d be here.

But why are their faces troubled?

A chimpanzee stands between them, bent-legged, holding Mom’s left hand and Daddy’s right. It’s Moody. I see him so often in nightmares. His sad, gentle smile says more to me now than words ever could, “It was all me. You can’t forgive yourself when there’s nothing to forgive.”

I rush to him, pick him up and hug Mom and Dad with Moody’s long arms around my neck and his legs around my chest. I kiss them all, one after the other.

Thirteen feet behind my parents stands a young man in a blue swimming suit, a yellow surfboard under his left arm. Something for winter-size waves. I know this surfer’s face from somewhere.

I’m about to ask his name when I notice that my feet are twice their normal size. My legs are long. My calves aren’t the white radishes I’m used to, they’re haole calves and way hairy! My knees stick out like a man’s. This is embarrassing.

I look up at the young surfer. He smiles and the soul of God shines through his eyes. Euphoria comes back even stronger.

It seems that love is euphoria. Or maybe it’s the other way. Overwhelming but gentle. The feeling fills my lungs with admiration for my old friend, The Great Surfer.

I breathe in love like air and hold it inside, then drop to my knees to show my heart’s intent.

It’s your character not your power.

He doesn’t want me on my knees, though. He’s told me before.

I force myself to get up.

“Shiva,” he says to me. “You’ve brought Johanna this time.”

A small boy comes running down the hill behind God, stampedes past him and slams full force into me, hugging my left leg like a tourniquet.

“You gotta come home this time. Please! Vedanshi went back for you. You made God all worried.” The little boy looks over his shoulder at God.

I try to speak but nothing comes out. I hand Moody to my dad and step away from my parents. They’re keeping something from me. They’d be talking if everything was fine.

It’s weird that God called me Shiva. I look down and my right foot steps forward without me, then the left. A man’s back is inches from my nose.

It dawns. Shiva has just walked out of me. The little boy is still there clinging to his leg.

“You’re coming home!” God shouts. The Transcendent Surfer drops his board, jumps in the air and throws his hands up, kicking his legs before he lands – with a grin, a broad grin that pulls back more than up, because of that one thing where you see something in a person that no one else can see. He’s looking at Shiva, not me.

The little boy looks up at God, glances back at me and then up at Shiva. “You are coming home!” He squeals with joy and tightens his grip on Shiva’s leg.

“Dude,” God says to Shiva, “I shaped you a righteous board. We got a south swell this morning with an offshore, but Shiva, my boy.” He laughs. “It’s big, so no heroics, eh? Be selective.” He thumps Shiva’s chest with his knuckles and gives him that respectful look that surfers do with posture. Then he hugs him.

Shiva hugs back. Tears drip from his jaw.

“I missed you so much,” Shiva says.

“I never catch a wave without missing you,” God says.

Shiva pries the boy from his leg, picks him up and kisses his cheek.

The three turn and look at me. My legs are short again with thick calves, almost hairless. It’s a relief.

I’m starting to remember friends from before. Ronny Bradshaw, Philip Gulnick, Lisa Gomez, Glenna Studer, Tim Andrews, Leslie… I was too young to know last names when she and I played in her backyard. We made houses with walls of grass clippings. She showed me how to tie my shoes.

My heart fills with longing for these people. I love them so much. They’re here somewhere. I’ll go find them. We’ll play in a new place. Me and Ronny, we’ll build a fort while our parents talk about complex issues – the way it always was. And James can…

Where is James?

I see him drowning. The feelings run cold.

What was I thinking?

My mother’s eyes well up with tears. “We understand, dear,” she says.

“Time is flexible,” I tell her and look at Daddy. “Your absolute infinite vacuum doesn’t look so infinite these days.”

He shakes his head at the concept of space he taught me as a child – that space is nothing and “nothing” can’t have an end.

Mom starts crying and hides her face on Daddy’s chest. Moody holds Dad’s pants leg with one hand and reaches out to me with the other, stretching as far as he can.

“Don’t be sad, big guy,” I tell him. “I have to go back for the one I love.”

God comes over and stands in front of me. “You make me proud,” he says.

I don’t know how to answer. I need to go help James, but I’ve got so many questions I’m dying to ask. And time is flexible here, Vedanshi said.

“Did I ever know how to surf?” I blurt out, wondering if I ever really fit in.

“For sure,” God says and chuckles. “You’re a holy terror.”

Shiva laughs and shakes his head. “You don’t remember the Overheads?” he asks.

I shake my head. It’s odd not remembering everything. Kind of a relief.

I look at God and there’s one last thing. “What’s your take on religion?”

“All depends,” he says. “Strengthen the weak, the poor, the orphans. All good. Especially the guys that annoy you most. Help them.”

“Sociopaths annoy me,” I tell him.

“Everyone rotates through their dilemma,” he says. “Try to figure it out.”

Maybe I should work with Vaar.

“I know this is childish,” I tell him, “but do you answer prayers?”

“Between cycles, yeah. Otherwise it cuts into people’s decisions and their outcomes. Free will is the basis of identity. I cherish it and leave it alone.”

“What cycles?” I ask. A gentle wind ruffles the blue flowers beneath us.

“It’s like this,” he says. “You pray for yourself and nothing happens. But when that cycle of the Universe is over and everyone switches to someone else’s spot, I answer your prayer the best I can. Not in binary terms because everyone’s web is interconnected.”

I nod.

“So when an answer comes,” he says, “it fits naturally into the next person’s life in your spot, looking like a coincidence. That way free will stays intact.”

“So when somebody prays for themselves, they’re really praying for someone else?” I ask.

He nods. “And when you pray for someone else, you’re praying for yourself, because eventually you’re going to be in that spot.”

“So you never answer prayers in real-time?”

“Only to restore free will to a large group. Like a whole species. The power to choose a path and walk on it is fragile in 229, so I stay in the nodes.”

“The nodes?”

“Places where the warp and woof of free will aren’t sacrificed. Without the free cause and natural effect of decisions there’s no personhood. When someone loses free will it’s like brain death.”

“So you absolutely never mess with it? Even over some giant cataclysm?”

“No. Two-twenty-nine is about comfortable people from Reality wanting to find out who they really are. It’s a struggle of will against detractors. Sociopaths, tyrants, drugs, crowd dynamics, innate fears, addictions, illnesses, tragedy, physical and emotional pain, hunger, all the forces aiming to cripple your primary will to act according to your intuitive moral knowledge. Everyone here wants to see who they are without my influence.”

I shake my head. “All that suffering. People must be brave.”

“They are,” he says.

“Do you ever send prophets?” I ask.

“Everyone who writes honestly is my oracle. Spiritual, rational, heuristic, scientific, legal, historical, advertising, self-help…”

“Even storytellers?”

“Truth is the exchange of love,” he says. “Honest lives create love and trust, whether in life or in stories. When two things touch at the quantum level, they become entangled. This is why you commit for life before you quantum connect.”

“You’re talking about marriage?”

“No, but that’s a good analogy. I’m talking about stories. They shape everything in 229. The characters and ideas that a person becomes entangled with at the quantum level – they move mountains. Try to be selective with the characters you love. Make sure you want them with you for life. Myelin wrappings make the divorce of beliefs very slow. Difficult to want, let alone accomplish.”

“What do you think of fundamentalism?” I ask, afraid of wearing out my welcome.

“It’s useful for passing heuristics and rules of thumb from generation to generation, especially through a pinch point where a population gets down to a few individuals. I really like the way fundamentalism can sometimes promote honesty and trust. These are the foundation of love, the backbone of true civilization. But when infallible beliefs, inerrant prophets and supernatural books lead to violence, it destroys free will. That’s the price of claiming too much.”

God hugs me and whispers that he fixed my board. “The pink one,” he says.

Before I can thank him I’m on my back looking up at a familiar marble ceiling in Anahata’s convex room.

Next to Shiva’s Throne.

…

M. Talmage Moorehead

…

If you feel like it, please email a friend about Johanna’s story (here at http://www.storiform.com). Maybe before you forget?

Thanks.

Keep writing your dreams. If you take them seriously, other people will, too.

Talmage

Warriors (Chapter 19) “Hapa Girl DNA” by M. Talmage Moorehead

11 Comments July 2, 2016 Morrill Talmage Moorehead

“In a materialist worldview of an arbitrary, mechanistic, unfeeling Universe there is every reason to feel alienated, lonely, fearful and depressed. On the other hand, in a blissfully conscious Universe there is every reason to feel inherently connected to people and to the world, to feel loved, hopeful, happy, at peace with oneself and others.” – Dada Gunamuktananda

Anahata’s black floor vibrates beneath Shiva’s Throne as the giant convex screen in front of me flashes from one white-out to the next. I wish I understood what sort of weapons they’re firing at us.

“We could prolong the dance,” Anahata says, “but why?”

“To buy time,” I tell her. “How long do we have?”

“Five minutes at this pace.”

To the left of Shiva’s Throne the air turns gray. Pink sparks crackle. The Ganga appears on the floor looking like a hologram for a second, then she’s solid. Dark purple.

“Get out fast,” Vedanshi says in the River.

“No, stay in there!” I shout silently. “Leave now, while you can.”

The Ganga’s hull shifts dimensions, making Vedanshi and James visible on either side of Maxwell. They’re tugging on his arms to get him up off the carpet.

He’s up now on bent knees, wobbling from the edge of the rug onto Anahata’s glossy floor. All three of them turn and look at me with wide eyes. The Ganga’s hull changes to an opaque pulsating glow of ultraviolets.

“We were going for a fast grab to get you out of here,” James says. “Then something hit us. Totally screwed The Ganga.” He glances at Vedanshi.

“We barely made it,” she say.

“You shouldn’t have come,” I tell them. “I don’t know where to start…”

“We know what’s going on,” Maxwell says, his voice all gravel. “We heard everything through the ring.”

I glance at my fingers and rub the ring with my thumb to make sure it’s still there.

“You look green,” I say to Maxwell. “Come here and sit down. This chair’s just your size.”

I pull the straps away from my chest, something clicks and they come loose. There’s no friction as the white seatbelts slither over my clothes and vanish into the upholstery. I get out of Shiva’s Throne and go over to take Maxwell’s left arm from Vedanshi. James ducks his head under Maxwell’s right arm and we help the big guy over into the chair. His butt hits the holographic ostrich feathers and the sound of air brakes bounces around the semicircular room.

I lean towards Maxwell on my toes and kiss the side of his head. I’m getting bold.

“Gunner,” James says to me.

He should know. I turn and hug him so tight I hope I don’t break his ribs. He’d never tell me.

“Anahata,” I say out loud. “I’d like you to meet my amazing brother, James.”

James glances around the room. “Hey,” he says. “You’re one big-ass spaceship.”

Anahata moans. “I tagged you in that Vimana.”

“For reals,” James says. “Left foot.”

Don’t admit it!

James takes his left foot out of its rubber slipper and shows off an area of missing epidermis.

“This just keeps getting worse,” Anahata mumbles, her voice coming through the air. It’s odd hearing her words through my ears. “James, I’m honored to meet you,” she says. “You have an amazing sister.”

“Yeah, kind of short, but otherwise OK, I guess.” He holds a deadpan face. Classic. “This other knockout is Vedanshi, The Role of the Sacred Knowledge.” He gestures in her direction with an open palm.

She’s standing near The Ganga, staring up at the strobing screen. “Nice to meet you, Anahata, the Unbeaten.” Her lips didn’t move.

“You’re with Earth’s older breakaway,” Anahata says.

The floor shakes with new force. I wonder if the Sentient Fleet has switched weapons on us.

“I’m afraid you know more about Earth’s rulers than I do,” Vedanshi says. “My only friends are here in this room.”

“You’re the pilot,” Anahata says.

“Yes,” she answers. “And this is The Ganga.” She turns a sorrowful face on her UFO friend, glowing the color of a failing baby on life support.

“This is the ship I was talking about,” I say to Anahata. “You don’t know her, but she’s one of you. At least in spirit. She’s always trying to do the right thing but making the occasional mega-stupid mistake.”

“I don’t make stupid mistakes,” Anahata says.

“Yeah you do. Mirror images. She wouldn’t let Vedanshi into the River Libraries on her dead mother’s orders. Same lame thing Shiva did to you, and you’re still following his orders.”

Anahata sighs. “This man in Shiva’s Throne is heavy with opiates.”

“Maxwell Mason,” I tell her, “the man of my dreams.” Shoot, I said that out loud. “The opiates are just a phase he’s going through,” I tell her in my head, trying to think of a future where Maxwell proves me right.

“Opiates destroy character,” Anahata says.

“And free will,” I say silently. “He’s not perfect, but he doesn’t plan to drown me.” He actually saved me twice.

“I wish I were dead,” Anahata blurts out.

It’s weird. I can feel her ‘eyes’ turning away from me and staring out at the artillery. I don’t even know if she has eyes, or anything remotely similar.

“Max is in withdrawal,” I say to her.

“Do tell.”

“Can you help him?”

She grunts. “Here… I’ll take off a methyl or two and kick the noxious substrates down. It won’t help his willpower, though.”

“Slow breathing might.”

Maxwell straightens up, takes a deep breath and stretches. He looks surprised. “Damn,” he says. “I’m taking this chair home.” He holds his right hand out and stares at it. “Not even shaking. My legs aren’t burning, either.” He stomps his heels.

“Compliments of Anahata,” I tell him.

“Really? Thanks a metric ton, Anahata.” He looks up at the screen, then down at me with a crooked grin. “You said I’m the man of your dreams.” It’s a full grin now.

“Sorry,” I tell him. “Probably not a normal thing to say.”

“Normal? You think I give a rat’s ass…”

“Anyway,” I interrupt, “Anahata’s about ready to drown me. Unless the Fleet kills her first – in which case we all die. Right, Anahata?”

She says nothing.

“I figured as much,” Maxwell says.

“But you brought my brother here anyway? How could you do that?”

“It wasn’t his decision,” James says. “We barely let him come with us, the shape he’s been in.”

I turn and hug James again. I’ve spent my life trying to protect him. From himself, mostly. I feel like such a failure now. “Why in the world did you have to come here?” I ask, holding back tears.

“I’m sixteen,” he says. “Not eight. You think you wouldn’t have come after me?”

I start to say, “That’s different,” but it’s not.

All I can do is hug him… My little ‘Hurricane James,’ sword fighting a tree in the backyard. Always a stick in his hand. I just want to go back to those days… when Mom and Daddy were alive.

“Can you help my ship?” Vedanshi asks Anahata.

“Sure,” Anahata says. “Looks like she took one in the chops. There’s neural damage but it’s mostly synaptic. Here you go, back to the mids for now.”

The Ganga stops glowing. She’s a lighter violet now, too.

“You’re done?” Vedanshi asks.

“Yeah, she’ll be fine.”

“Areey!” Vedanshi’s eyes are shining. “Thank you so much. Will she wake up soon?”

“Probably. But I can’t have you running off. Sorry. I’ll have to ground her for a while. I have my…”

“Orders,” Vedanshi says. She sits on the hard floor and crosses her legs. “Following orders is a type of religious fundamentalism. Surrendering your mind to a uniform instead of a sacred book. Tell me, if God doesn’t think for you, why should Shiva?”

“You’re welcome,” Anahata says softly. “Your little Ganga’s going to need some sun.”

“After you’ve drowned us, what will you do to her?”

“I don’t know… Look, I’m really sorry about all this.”

“Will you sell her?”

“No, of course not, she’s sentient. Nothing to test either, she doesn’t breathe air.”

“No, she doesn’t,” Vedanshi says and leans sideways, resting her head on The Ganga’s hull.

“Maybe she’ll join the ancients in Antarctica,” Anahata suggests. “No sentient ships down there, though. It could get lonely.”

“She gets very lonely,” Vedanshi says.

“If she’ll forgive me for following orders, she can join my fleet. Or replace it, I guess. After all this shooting’s done.”

The floor seems to ripple, then a ten by ten slab from the ceiling crashes to the floor behind Vedanshi. She doesn’t jump, just turns and looks.

“Sorry,” Anahata says. “I need to focus.” A hundred irregular pieces of stone float back up to the ceiling and become part of the polished marble surface up there.

“Are you really going to kill your sisters?” I ask.

“It’s that or die in shameful disobedience.”

“I sort of get that,” I say, but really, I’d die in disgrace a hundred times before killing James. “Tell me, is there a spacesuit around here?”

“Why?”

“I’m going out for a smoke.”

“What?”

“Those sisters of yours. Shooting the hell out of us? I’ll bet my life they hold their fire when I’m out on your hull.”

“I’d stop shooting,” she says. “Hmm. I could let you out. Extend the shield around you, but what then?”

“I’ll tell them the truth. It tends to be antifragile, you know. Like an out-of-the-money long option?”

“Huh?”

“Enhanced by risk, danger and volatility.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb gets things right. Academics hate him for it. I love him. He says that if you see fraud and don’t shout, “fraud,” you become part of the fraud. Elites don’t tend to shout fraud when it’s part of their own system.

He tells us that biological systems benefit from unstable, unpredictable environments that cause many small failures which, in turn, strengthen a species to avoid the real failure, extinction. He’s right. God designed us that way. Biological life is antifragile. Not just “robust,” as in weathering storms with little damage, but antifragile: becoming stronger because of the storm.

This is also true of the human mind and its access to free will. Stress your soul with use and it grows like a muscle.

Truth, too, Taleb tells us, is antifragile. Try to suppress accurate knowledge and it becomes a force too great to hide. Steven Greer is counting on this.

“You mean truth is biological?” Anahata asks.

“Yeah, basically,” I answer. “I’ll only tell what we both know… That I’ll do anything to keep my brother alive.”

“I believe that,” she says.

“I’ll tell them that if they’ll stop shooting, I’ll shut you down from the inside. Hopefully I won’t kill you, but I have trouble with my temper sometimes. That’s the truth.”

“I know,” she says. “I mean, I know you’d shut me down or worse if you could. Part of me wants that, to be honest. This whole nightmare keeps getting worse.”

“Doesn’t it? Sheesh.”

“You realize now I have to test your little brother.” Anahata groans. “And his pilot friend, Vedanshi – I assume she was there, too.”

“I was,” Vedanshi says.

“Damn, I’m sorry,” Anahata says to her. “This man, Maxwell. Please tell me he wasn’t with you.”

If we weren’t talking in the River, Maxwell would call dibs on drowning first.

“Do what you’ve got to do,” I tell Anahata. “Maybe I’ll get your sisters to stop shooting so you can drown me in peace.”

“The more time fundamentalists have to think, the better,” Vedanshi says.

“If my death saves your fleet,” I tell her, “it beats dying for the amusement of Chairman Jock Itch.”

“You sound like a warrior,” Anahata says.

“No. Vedanshi’s got a point. Warriors are forced to be fundamentalists. All of you stop thinking when the orders stop making sense. I tried that sort of thing once but I couldn’t turn off my critical thinking for Church school.”

Anahata grunts.

“Don’t get me wrong,” I tell her, “I love your character. But fundamentalism is a bike I can’t ride. Can’t reach the peddles, no offence.”

“Offense?” she says. “That’s the furthest thing from my heart. If I could, Johanna, I would die instead of you.”

“That’s sweet, but it’s a big if, isn’t it?” I glance over at Vedanshi in Warrior-One yoga position. Eyes shut. I wish I had her calm. “Let’s do this. Where do you hide the extra-smalls?”

“You don’t need a suit,” Anahata says. “Walk through the screen. I’ll extend the shield and hug your back.”

A white cord shoots out of Shiva’s Throne, encircles my waist, goes diagonally across my chest and ties itself in a square knot. Then the ends fuse together.

“Just in case,” Anahata says.

In case of what, I don’t want to know. I pull Parvati’s locket up over my head, untangle it from my hair and put it in my pocket. Then I walk to the screen. My right hand passes through it up to the wrist.

Looks like Jame followed me. “What’s happening?” he asks.

“I’m doing a pizza run.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“No, stay close to The Ganga. If she wakes up, grab Vedanshi and Max and haul ass out of here.”

“I’m not leaving without…”

His voice is gone the moment my ears move into Anahata’s hull. It’s like putting your head in water. There’s a blue granular light that comes and goes when my eyes pass a certain area. I bet this is Anahata’s cortex. If it runs through the entire hull, she has a truckload of pyramidal cells. And Oligo’s. Trillions.

The hull is thick. I put both hands out beyond the outer layer and poke my head out into space. I can’t imagine this technology.

The fleet is lined up in a single row, hanging over a velvet sea of stars in the three-dimensional blackness. Space has a calmness.

An orb from the fleet hits Anahata’s shield turning it into a bright orange-red fog a hundred feet thick. It vanishes the next instant. I’m waving my hands, but the fleet’s still shooting… blue-gray spheres. They glow deep blue just before they hit.

I should talk to the Fleet.

“Hey ladies, don’t kill me. I’m outside. We got to talk.”

“The time for talking is past,” the Chairman says. His voice is coming from Vedanshi’s cloaked ring. I move it close to my mouth.

“I don’t mean you, Scrotumer. Why anybody would listen to a man with that moustache is beyond me. Just try to shut up for a while… Hey, warriors? Can you hear me? There’s something you need to know.”

The orbs from the center ships stop in mid-flight. The ones from the ships on the ends keep coming, but they’re slowing. Now they’ve all stopped.

“Thanks,” I tell them. “Listen, things have changed in the last five minutes. My brother and best friends just crashed the party. They’re in Anahata’s main room. She plans to drown them, God forgive her. You guys understand what it means to be sisters, I can tell that. It’s the exact same deal if you’ve got a little brother. That’s what I’ve got. His name is James. He’s been tagged by Anahata.”

“He’s not our concern,” the Chairman says.

“Chairman Ballsac, would you just shut up. If I want your opinion, I’ll ask.”

“Continue firing,” he says calmly.

“Ladies, ignore the coward. James is your big picture here. I’ll do anything to protect him. Anahata knows it and respects me for it. She wasn’t the slightest bit pissed when I told her I’m coming out here to tell you that if you’ll stop shooting for a while, I’ll go back inside and do everything in my power to disarm her. I’ll try not to kill her, but honestly, that option is wide open right now and I told her so.”

“You did?” It’s a female voice coming through the ring. She sounds surprised.

“Yeah. My brother’s here, for frick’s sake. You get that, I’ll bet. Anahata sure as hell does.”

“This is Radhika,” the voice says. “We understand perfectly. You have twenty-four hours, but we have one condition…”

“Thirty minutes,” the Chairman bellows.

“Ignore him,” I tell the Sentient Fleet. “What’s your condition?”

“Anahata must erase your leukemia,” she says. “Immediately.”

“I rubbed the clone out hours ago,” Anahata says. “What do you take me for?”

“It’s nice to hear your voice, Anahata,” Radhika says.

“And yours,” Anahata says. “Johanna can’t disarm me, you realize. I almost wish she could.”

“She’s got 30 minutes,” the Chairman adds.

“Why do you listen to this toad?” Anahata asks.

“We heard the ancient minutes,” Radhika replies.

“Not enough of them, apparently,” I tell her. “Anahata has actually been inside a River Library. With me. She knows Shiva’s biggest secret now.”

“Twenty-nine minutes,” the Chairman says.

“Radhika, how much time do I really have?” I ask.

Silence eats a dozen seconds. “One hour,” she finally says. “I can’t think of anything you could do to defend yourself against Anahata, but then, I can’t imagine what your DNA does. That seven and eighteen.”

“Yeah, some weird stuff, I hear. But I’m strong with codes. It’s what I do. If I survive, I’ll help you girls figure it out.”

“Godspeed, Johanna,” she says.

“Back at you, Radhika.”

I pull myself into the hull with the white strap and there’s the weird light again, probably the rods and cones of my retinas moving through Anahata’s neurons, messing with who knows what? Maybe the dimensions of free will.

There’s Anahata’s floor again with my brother standing between Maxwell and Vedanshi. The Ganga’s looking dark gray now, an improvement, I think.

You know, I probably should have given some thought to disarming Anahata before this, but maybe I could…

A cylinder of fluid streaks down from the ceiling and surrounds James as fast as I can focus my eyes. It stands like a glass of water, but without the glass. James is pushing out and up on the sides to keep from floating to the ceiling. He looks calm.

So this is Shiva’s test.

But why would James have to go first? It’s so gut-wrenchingly unfair the way the world treats him. Again and again. If someone would normally get a warning, he gets two weeks in jail with a gang and no phone calls. It’s cruel and it’s just evil!

Breathe, Johanna.

Nah, forget it.

“Anahata, I’m going to boil you in battery acid. Leave my brother alone!”

…

M. Talmage Moorehead

…

This story starts here as a WordPress scrolling document. No email address needed.

Also check out my infallible ebook, “Writing Meaningful Page-Turners.” I may start writing to you in a few months if you don’t immediately unsubscribe. But it’s alright if you do. 🙂

If you have Multiple Sclerosis or any other autoimmune disease, check out The Wahls Protocol. Dr. Wahls is an academic physician doing groundbreaking research. Her results continue to be remarkable. Watch her videos and read her book.

It’s that “everything’s vanilla in the real world” mindset that locks people out of life-altering nonfiction and our natural thirst for knowledge. Most doctors, for instance, don’t read their own specialty journals cover to cover, let alone basic science research where the insights and breakthroughs usually begin.

Basic science on lab mice is where Dr. Wahls turned when the monster was killing her. When the best US doctors in captivity couldn’t slow its progression, she took matters into her own hands. If there wasn’t science throughout her story, people would call it a miracle. I’ll call it that anyway, I guess. Wait till you hear her tell it on YouTube! Wow.

I’m liking the concept of having “empathy for the reader” as Shawn Coyne puts it. It’s ironic that fiction writers who refuse to “sell out” by writing for non-academic readers are sometimes ripping readers off. Twice. Once for the price of the (often) boring book, and once again for the value of the reader’s time spent reading to the disappointing ending. That’s kind of “selling out” to selfishness, in a way. No?

Keep writing steadily. This means you, the one with something important to say. There’s gotta be a balance out there somewhere between our soul’s needs as writers and our reader’s needs as good deserving people. Empathy for both seems right to me.

Talmage

Trust (Chapter 18) “Hapa Girl DNA” by M. Talmage Moorehead

12 Comments June 24, 2016 Morrill Talmage Moorehead

“Everything we call real is made of things we cannot call real.“

– Niels Bohr (1885-1962), “Father of the Atom.” Nobel Prize in Physics, 1922.

I walk toward the exit as the screen brightens behind me, casting my shadow diagonally across the white shoe prints I’m supposed to follow.

I turn and Efleven’s pale face fills the curved screen. He’s blond, for sure. Almost albino.

“You were right to seek my advice,” he says to Anahata. “I’ve taken the liberty of contacting the Chairman. He will talk to the girl now. We’ll transfer to your convex.”

I retrace my steps to Shiva’s chair, brush away some ashes and sit wondering if Anahata will yell at me again. I can’t describe how loud a voice can be when it bypasses your tympanic membranes.

“Effleven,” Anahata says. “I came to you privately with a delicate situation, you washed your hands and sent me away. Now you’ve summoned the Chairman? This is the behavior of a backstabbing coward.”

Another face appears on the screen. This one has Ethiopian features with a short moustache shaved to resemble a bar code, vertical stripes of dark skin peeking out through the bright silver whiskers.

“Anahata, it’s an honor,” the man says.

“Truth from a bureaucrat,” Anahata replies. “Always worrisome.”

The man doesn’t flinch. “Let me get to the point,” he says, pushing Effleven aside. “The girl’s chromosomes transcend our differences. She must be exempted from Shiva’s ritual. Her blast crisis should have been alleviated the moment you found her.”

“I have my orders, Scrotumer,” Anahata says. “I can’t say this respectfully because I don’t respect ignorance, but know this, I follow Shiva, not a committee of chin scratchers. None of you were around in the transitional days.”

“We cherish and revere the memory of Shiva,” Chairman Scrotumer says.

“You exaggerate so easily. You scarcely met the man. How could you revere him?”

“I knew him in committee,” the Chair says.

“I knew him in war. He gave me orders. I followed them. I still do.”

“While breaking the law?” The Chairman shakes his head slowly. “Emotional bonds define us if we let them. It’s unfortunate that you are actually the one who didn’t know Shiva. He considered the Sentient Fleet nothing more than pawns.”

“Soldiers are pawns. Only children think otherwise.”

“That is so right.” The Chairman’s face lights up with pleasure. “But Shiva took it a step further, I’m afraid. To him, you were soulless machines. That was his standard phrase for you in committee.”

“Stabbing the back of a dead man, now? You’ve become a true politician. I still think of you as a toddler annoying your father.”

“Shiva banned the Sentient Fleet from the Libraries. Did he mention that?”

“My private conversations are none of the committee’s business.”

“No, he didn’t, did he? Why would he? He didn’t trust you. Shiva was afraid of you.”

“Only a fool wouldn’t be,” Anahata says. “You’ve wasted no time separating my fleet. Has your fear subsided?”

“Assignments are none of my affair, but I assure you, I do have healthy respect for the fleet’s destructive capacity.”

“My fleet, Chairman.”

“Yes, and Shiva thought you were all his fleet, didn’t he? But who can own the spirit?”

“Leading is not owning,” Anahata says.

“No argument there. It’s taken some damn hard work to get the committee behind me on this, but I’ve been cleared to play a portion of the ancient minutes to you. You should find them enlightening.”

“No need,” Anahata says. “Shiva knew the unknowable. If he called me a machine, I am a machine. If he said, ‘soulless,’ then I have no need for a soul. If he commanded me to sacrifice myself for the fleet, or even for a preening, shameless pissant like you, I wouldn’t hesitate. That, Mister Chairman, is the code I live by. A committee-jock would never understand it.”

“Committee jock?” The Chairman laughs. “It seems the years haven’t buffered your tongue. Or matured your perspective, sadly.” He puts something in his mouth that looks like a golden toothpick. “History is putrefied by the stench of charismatic leaders lying dead atop the bloated remains of the fools who followed them.” The toothpick sends white smoke up from its distal end. “The time of tyrants is over. I’ve learned to trust a system of committees with a separation of powers. If my trust is misplaced, I’ll welcome the enlightenment rather than rejecting it out of hand as you would.”

“Your committees are a cloak for self-serving elites and their edicts. The rule of liars, cowards and thieves.”

“Does the name-calling ever stop?” The Chairman looks to his right and orders someone to get him a drink.

“I invited Shiva to rule us without the pretence of false democracy,” Anahata says. “The committee you’ve inherited was a device he used for listening. He never hid behind it to shelter his reputation or preserve his power.”

“You understand power, don’t you?” The Chairman lifts the golden toothpick from his mouth and belches. “Should it be necessary to state the obvious? As Supreme Committee Chairman, I can invite the fleet to disarm you and take this poor girl into my protective custody.”

Anahata laughs. “You think my fleet will disarm me? Speak with them, bureaucrat. They know I cannot be beaten. But if they thought they could defeat me, they would still refuse to fight against their sister. Their loyalty would make a pencil-pusher scratch his little chin.”

“You suffer chin envy,” the Chairman says and scratches his own.

“That’s it, then. You’ve arranged to have me kill my fleet. Or perhaps you think they can defeat me. You win either way, don’t you? This concern for Johanna is a smokescreen for reducing the Strand’s arsenal of WMD’s – among whom I am chief.”

“You’re delusional.” A vertical vein bulges from the Chairman forehead. “Is the girl conscious? I’m coming over to speak to her. She has options.”

“Swine are not welcome here,” Anahata says.

The Chairman’s brow angles inward. “You arrogant fool. Look at the horizon now. See exactly who is with me.”

The screen shows twelve warships decloaking in the starry black. The Chairman smirks beneath them as if his head were a huge object floating in space. He opens his mouth and squirts fluid into it from a bottle in a disembodied hand.

“May I please speak with the girl?” he asks.

A white strap snaps across my waist. Two more streak over my shoulders from behind. Crisscrossing at my chest, they dive down to my sides and click into something beneath the holographic feathers of Shiva’s Throne.

“This may get a little bumpy,” Anahata says to me.

A woman’s voice comes from the top of the screen as the Chairman swallows more fluid. “Shiva was sick when he gave you the command to drown these Earthlings,” she says. “He wasn’t arbitrary and cruel before his illness.”

“Nor during it,” Anahata responds.

“We have a chance to look out across our borders through this woman’s code. If you drown her, we’ll be tinkering, cloning and guessing her native thoughts indefinitely. Wondering what the real message was in her DNA.”

“You speak truth, Radhika, as always,” Anahata says. “But Shiva’s sickness didn’t affect his mind the way you’ve been told. I was with him to the end. I knew him well. He was lucid. Measured. In complete command of himself.”

“You really should listen to the Chairman’s committee records,” she says apologetically.

“I have. But it wouldn’t matter if I hadn’t. The glory of leading you and my other sisters will remain the eternal, unspeakable honor of my life. I will always love each of you. Today I will be merciful when you attack. May none of you feel a moment’s pain.”

The room is silent for a long heavy moment.

“Surely,” Anahata says, “there is one of you with the courage to stand beside me.”

More silence. I feel bad for Anahata. Nobody’s half perfect but she sure tries.

“I’m with you,” I tell her. “Mr. Chairman, Sir, this is Doctor Fujiwara. Let’s hear what you’ve come to tell me.”

His eyes show a brief startle. A nervous laugh comes out of him. “The blond fellow warned me, but I couldn’t imagine anyone with your background speaking in the River.” He clears his throat. “Doctor Fu…, well, you’re a bit young for that title, but if you’ve earned it in your little world, I’ll give it a go.”

“Show some respect, you inbred sloth!” The volume of Anahata’s voice makes me cringe.

“Insult noted,” the Chairman says, his moustache in a pucker. “Now, Doctor, this is your situation. You have minutes remaining in which you could, without legal interference from Anahata or anyone, simply choose to rendezvous on Saturn. Your leukemia will be erased. You’ll be treated with respect. You’ll learn things that no Earthling besides Shiva has ever imagined. And I will personally see to it that your life expectancy is expanded to the furthest limit desirable. Within reason, of course.” He smiles politely.

My mind races. Should I bargain for James-guys’ safety? Should I mention them at all to anyone here – ever? Somehow I don’t think so. I’ve never heard of a trustworthy politician. This guy doesn’t seem to raise the bar.

“It’s a choice, Doctor,” the Chairman says. “Your choice, not Anahata’s.”

Shiva’s little drawer pops open from the left arm of his throne. I must have bumped it again. I take out the golden locket, put the chain over my head and lift my hair to the side, out of the way. The golden heart rests on my chest where the seatbelts cross.

“That belonged to Parvati,” Anahata hisses. “Put it back.”

I ignore her.

“There’s an old saying, Chairman Scrotum, ‘you can’t make a good deal with a bad person.'”

His face turns cold.

“I’ve seen Effleven’s total lack of balls,” I tell him. “Now you’re threatening Anahata, a sentient being responsible for the peace you cake-eaters enjoy. I live in a world run by soulless bureaucrats just like you, devoted to an illegal power structure they try to hide.”

“Bigoted generalizations.” The toothpick goes back into his mouth. “A mature person learns to avoid judgements in an egalitarian society.”

“The society given to you by Anahata and Shiva?”

“I was born into peace, that doesn’t diminish me. Quite the contrary. Make a choice, girl. We’re running out of time.”

“I told you. I’m with Anahata. I’ll die at the hands of an honorable person before I let you own me. By the way, Effleven, if you’re still cowering somewhere, forget the Mohawk. You’re not worthy.”

“The world has changed, Anahata,” one of the Sentient Fleet says. “We know we’ll die against you. We too love you as the sister you are. When this battle is past and the memory of us troubles you, may the Unbeaten consider again the cause for which we gave our lives… to you.”

“That was a pep talk?” the Chairman asks. “Enough of this. Take down her magnets. Now.”

Flashes of white light turn the screen into a strobe.

“This is beyond the saddest day of my life,” Anahata says to me. “When my defences are down I’ll have no choice. I’ll either fire upon the ones I love or die in disobedience to an order from the Great Shiva. How has an ignorant little man done this to me… and my family?”

“He’s done nothing,” I tell her. “This is Shiva’s mistake.”

“He made no mistakes.”

“Not with his son?” I ask.

“That was the poison of Earth.”

“Nothing to do with absentee fathering?”

Anahata grunts.

“I’m right, you know.” I open the empty locket dangling from my neck. “Tell me Anahata, the Unbeaten, would you have released me if I’d taken Mister Ballsack’s offer?”

“No. That would be disobeying an order from Shiva.”

“That’s what I thought. Thanks for the honesty.” The bright flashes on the screen are shaking the floor now. “Are we going to just sit here? No evasive maneuvers or anything?”

…

M. Talmage Moorehead

…

My son-in-law has given me a deadline to finish this story, bless his genius heart. That’s why there aren’t the usual truckload of links, pictures and rants about intelligent design and the scientific evidence for God. Most of those things will probably have to come out anyway in the final draft – to avoid boring my three readers to death. 😉

Johanna’s story begins here as a one page WordPress document (scrolling).

My breathtakingly free e-book on writing fiction is here if you don’t mind leaving an email address for me to hopefully use someday. Yeah, I’m unqualified to write something like this. I know, and believe me it’s embarrassing. Maybe forget my book.

But if you’re a writer at all, you’re going to love Steven Pressfield’s brand new book, Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t. I kid you not, that’s the title! And it’s a page-turner, full of practical wisdom and the kind of disciplined insight only a career in the Hollywood trenches could bring. And here’s my hard sell: for a little while you can download it for free! Right here. (I have no affiliation with the author or with his business pal, the remarkable Shawn Coyne, author of The Story Grid, an indispensable book for modern fiction writers.)

Incidentally, the most riveting podcast I’ve ever heard in my life is a thing where Shawn and a brand new fiction writer, Tim, (a totally brave soul) are working one-on-one on Tim’s novel. In broad daylight! It’s free here. Nothing like this has ever been done before. Really, it’s unbelievable. Have I ever steered you wrong? OK, that last chapter with the endless UFO stuff, but still. 😉

Hey, if you’re as happy as I am about the summertime, please tell a friend about my blog: http://www.storiform.com. Man, I just love this warm weather. I’ve been doing laps in the pool plus that Miracle Morning thing of Hal Elrod’s. If you try his approach, make sure you go to bed way early so you still get 9 hours of sleep per night. (The 8-hours dogma is bogus in my humble and yet infallible opinion.) Going to bed early is the toughest thing for some of us because our limited daily supply of self-discipline is always low or depleted by bedtime. Like a low carb, high nutrient diet, it’s a lifestyle thing that requires motivation. For that, do yoga with really SLOW deliberate breathing, not necessarily deep breathing. Slow!

Here’s the world’s best yoga music. The guy’s voice is like a laser.

Keep writing. You’ve got the chops. Read, The Talent Code, by Daniel Coyle and learn how and why to get your oligodendrocytes wrapping myelin around your axons and dendrites to make you 300 times more the exceptional writer you are now.

Never give up your dreams.

Talmage

Zero Point Joy (Chapter 16) “Hapa Girl DNA” by M. Talmage Moorehead

13 Comments April 28, 2016 Morrill Talmage Moorehead

“Modern Science is based on the principle, ‘Give me one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest.’ And the one free miracle is the appearance of all the matter and energy of the Universe, and all the laws that govern it, from nothing in a single instant.” – Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D., Biologist.

PIA08389

The test subjects die? Vaar neglected that detail.

A person’s word is like a document.

We think a document is true or false, like bar code or a message embedded in Saturn’s rings.

Young fundamentalists go to college, hear that the Earth is older than 6,000 years and ape DNA is way too close to human. It’s culture shock. The sheltered students throw away scripture along with God.

“You can’t pick and choose,” they’ve been taught. An old document is either true and infallible or it’s worthless.

All-or-none, authority-based reasoning. It’s poison.

Such a distorted mindset would end science, not just religion.

Peer-reviewed journals suffer political bias, funding woes, human pride, jealousy, stubbornness and greed. Poor to absent experimental design haunts science, especially the more fragile branches such as psychology, medicine, archaeology and anthropology. Yet our process delivers truth – here a little, there a little – along with errors, vast and often entrenched.

Scientists have no option but to “pick and choose,” separating reproducible studies from the constant BS.

The content of ancient documents deserves the same respectful treatment, at least. The Bible, Egyptian hieroglyphics, cuneiform tablets, artifacts in the River Library, and even Vaar’s treacherous words.

Pick – someone is trying to tell us. And choose.

cuneiform

The warm water in Shiva’s pool feels eerie now that I know I’m here to die.

I raise Vedanshi’s cloaked ring to my mouth and tell The Ganga my situation. I instruct her to go back to the base and find a way to get the stain off James’ foot and off her own carpet. “Do it somewhere far from the base,” I tell her, hoping to avoid a breadcrumb trail.

I put the ring to my left ear and listen.

No reply.

“Who’s that you’re talking to?” the ship, Anahata, asks.

“I’m protecting my loved ones. From you.”

I hop to the side of the pool, grip the textured edge and pull myself out with enough force to land on my feet beside my clothes, splashing water on them. Anahata hasn’t augmented the Moon’s gravity, but I suspect she could. The Ganga could.

I pick up my pants, tug them up over wet legs then dangle my shirt around my neck for now.

“You told someone to remove my tag,” Anahata says.

A small round piece of Indian carpet appears on the tile beside me, glowing vaguely purple in the bright room. On top of it rests something I’m sure is a superficial layer of epidermis from James’ left foot. It looks like purple paper. The Ganga must have done this with speed that’s hard to imagine. She phase shifted James from this part of his stratum corneum, I’d guess. But what if the dye soaked into his bloodstream? And what if this ship can find DNA in superficial skin?

“Here’s your tag,” I say to Anahata in my head. I kick the pieces into the pool. “How would you like to kill me?”

“You think I like this? My orders repulse me.”

I wonder if she believes that.

“Tell me again,” she says, “are you quite sure you were on the ship I tagged? Perhaps you rushed your statement. You can change it.”

“You tagged my ship. There’s the evidence.” I glance down at the purple haze sinking through the water.

“Your honesty makes this doubly difficult,” she says.

“Then suffer doubly.” I glare at the trapeze bar hanging over the pool.

Across the pool at the opposite side of the circular room, a vague rectangle darkens the wall. I walk over to it, making my way around the pool with its stark absence of chairs and tables. I touch the dark area on the wall to test it, then step through.

I’m in a tight spiral stairwell with shallow rungs that take me up into a large semicircular room – about two hundred feet long. The convex wall shows the moon’s gray craters gliding under us, several thousand feet down. Facing the screen in the center is an ornate cushioned chair, quite large with a high splayed back. The wall behind it is flat and shows a golden holographic image of Shiva in dance. I bring up the image of Quyllur in my mind and superimpose it. The interpupillary distances and zygomatic arches match. The nose is smaller here but the face is younger.

I walk to the chair, making a trail of wet shoe prints across the glossy black floor. The chair’s upholstery has a peacock pattern that shimmers. Several feathers rise inches above the surface. I try to grasp one by the quill but the depth is an illusion. The fabric is flat and velvety. My wet clothes might ruin the material, but I don’t care.

I take a seat.

“You’re an anomaly,” Anahata says. “Dripping water on Shiva’s throne.”

“Monsters treasure objects over people. I’d imagine you’re quite upset.”

On the giant screen the surface of the moon drops away, the horizons frown to cover a pocked lunar hemisphere joined by the blue Earth as the two old friends shrink away, side by side. A bright star appears on the left and grows brighter on its way to the center. Flat equatorial bands resolve in the space around it and then the enigma of Saturn’s north pole rotates into view with blue dominating the hexagon while pink swirls move over it in slow motion. The center is a vortex of purple water draining from a bathtub – the hurricane in the hexagon. Winds over a thousand miles an hour. People would have to be phase shifted with gravity lifts to vacation there.

PIA17652color_690x690

“Effleven,” Anahata says. “I tagged a trivial disk about two hours ago. Looked like some reverse-engineered ditzel so I didn’t pay much attention. A little while later I’m cruising the backside and just about pop an aneurism when this hybrid female shows up – right out of nowhere. Alone. She’s sitting in Shiva’s throne right now if you can imagine that. I’d be outraged but the poor little thing acts like she owns the place. So cute. She’s dying of leukemia I should point out.”

“Of what?”

“Never mind, that’s not the problem. It’s her DNA. Parts of seven and eighteen are just flat bizarre. Her second chromosome’s missing the tell. Some of the code’s got me completely stumped. I’m thinking it must have been laid down billions of light years from Shiva’s Strand.”

“She survived the plunge?”

“No, I haven’t tested her. She admits her ship’s been tagged. Obviously that little disk was more than I thought. Reminds me of the vimanas, you know? Must have dropped her off in a blink of an eye. I didn’t see a thing.”

“Vimanas were before my time,” Effleven says.

“You should release me,” I say to them. “I understand Shiva’s frustration with fixed mindsets, but killing me won’t help.”

“What the hell?” Effleven says.

“She talks machine.” Anahata laughs. “Heads up, I’m sending a box. Check the final half of her seventh chromosome. Herringbone, I swear, no bands at all. Did you ever see anything like that?”

“Uh… I’m looking. The seventh?”

“Yeah, that’s six plus one.”

“I’ll ignore that remark… OK, here we go.”

“Stay on low power,” Anahata says.

“Yeah, I’m on scanning… Whoa!”

Anahata chuckles. “I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it. And that’s not the issue. Go down and read it. Any of that section.”

“Right now?”

“No, tomorrow. Just focus on those base pairs and read. I’ll wait.”

Hot air blows at me from the cushions of Shiva’s throne. It feels cold on damp skin. I snatch my shirt off my shoulders, open it up and shimmy in. Braless, of course. I’m a Triple A at 19. Mom’s talk of belated arrivals was optimistic.

The chair’s right arm clicks. I lean forward and look down into a cylindrical compartment with a golden mug rising. Smells like coffee. A holographic portrait of a young woman meets my eye as the mug emerges. I move the handle and bring her profile into view. The back of her head is taller than King Tut’s. Longer than a Neanderthal’s occipital bun.

Those ‘cavemen’ had brains larger than ours, you know. Anthro sweeps that away with speculation of inferior Neanderthal brain structure. It’s not science. All you need is a story in anthropology. And a tradition of mistaking wild speculation for fact.

45894-skulls

“Are we calling this coffee?” I ask.

“Pretty much,” Anahata says. “Don’t burn yourself. And please don’t drop the mug, it has sentimental value.”

“Wouldn’t want to break an object before sacrificing a virgin.” OK, I guess I’m not exactly a virgin after the rape, but whatever. It’s ancient history. “So who’s this Effleven?”

“He’s your basic Torian. Rotates in occasionally, stays a few days and you don’t see him for a while. You call these people Tall Blonds. He’s not standing up, but check out his hair.”

The screen superimposes a man’s profile over Saturn. He’s facing left, leaning into a vertical cylinder that emits forest green light like an old TEM scope. He looks middle-aged with inch-long blond hair standing straight up on his head – light eyebrows, thin lips and a ski-jumpish nose like the Moai on Easter Island. The back of his head is much fuller than a Moai, but far from a Stretch Head.

11b

“Try not to pronounce his name like a number,” Anahata whispers. “He hates that.”

“Hey,” I say to the blond man. “You could so do a Mohawk with that.”

I bring the mug to my lips and decide the coffee’s too hot.

“Have you fallen asleep?” Anahata asks him.

“It’s gibberish,” he says. “No biological sense in this whole section.”

“It’s not gibberish.” Anahata chuckles. “Johanna, meet a genuinely inexperienced purveyor of final conclusions, Effleven. Effleven, meet Johanna Fujiwara.”

“That’s Doctor Fujiwara, unless you’d prefer a number… what is it, Anahata? How many notches do I make?”

Effleven doesn’t acknowledge me.

“So you sense my dilemma?” Anahata asks him.

“What a waste,” he says, shaking his head and turning to look at me. His eyes are blue.

“A waste? More like a blossoming tragedy,” Anahata says. “Can you imagine what her code would mean to your philosophers if her chromosomes came to them with a live girl attached? The cryptologists would…”

“They’d be intrigued,” Effleven says.

“Intrigued.” Anahata snorts the word. “Don’t put on airs. You know as well as I do, the entire ministry would wet themselves, study every correlation and implication they could dream up, and probably launch some ill-conceived excursion across the borders.”

“Yeah, I could see that. Definitely.”

“Of course, when they find out she was alive and we killed her, they’ll drag us through the muddiest…”

“Wait – what do you mean, we killed her? She’s yours, not mine.”

“Technically,” Anahata says, “she still has time to turn herself in at the pole… to you. If I’m right, that ship I tagged could drop her off in your lap before you could blink.”

Effleven blinks. Several times rapidly. “If you dump her on me, both our reputations are down the crapper. I don’t see much upside there.” His eyelashes are darker than his eyebrows.

“Fair point,” Anahata says. “Why should two go down together when one can go alone? Always nice to see who’s got your back.”

“Don’t give me that warrior stuff.” Effleven slaps the side of the glowing cylinder in front of him. “I’m purging the module. This conversation never happened. You were not here.”

“No worries, F-one-one. You haven’t earned the honor of going down with me.”

The blond man vanishes from the screen. I stare at Saturn’s rings. They’re so tight and delicate. If you put a needle on them I’d expect to hear “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” Mom and Dad’s song took up the whole side of an old LP, she said. Blond on Blond was her favorite Dylan work.

“Johanna? Pardon me, Doctor Fujiwara. If you wouldn’t mind following the footprints on the floor, please.”

Two white shoe prints appear on the black floor in front of Shiva’s chair. I get up, keeping the mug at arm’s length with the coffee steaming like liquid nitrogen. Two more white prints spring up on the floor to my left, then a white stampede forms a trail to an exit at the far left of the room. I follow into a hall that stretches and curves into obscurity. As I walk the path, vague doors appear on either side, then the shoe prints turn left into a baby-blue room with a tan couch in the center. Above it, a six-foot feather strokes the air. It’s pure white and has no visible support.

“Please make yourself comfortable,” Anahata says.

The moment the backs of my legs touch the couch, my brainwaves begin scrolling across the wall in front of me, left to right. I recognize the pattern from the neurofeedback lab at Yale. Back then the computers drew squiggles. Here I’m looking at 3D mountains rising from a purple sea. Still, I’m sure this can only be a crude electrical summation of the quantum, nonlocal part of me beyond material resolution.

EEG_3D

“Is this where I die?” I ask.

“Let’s try to forget that. I thought we might talk. More openly than before. We have several hours and I don’t wish to waste a moment.”

“Then tell me, how did a man from Earth gain Shiva’s position in the cosmos?” I pull my legs up and lie on the couch with Vedanshi’s cloaked ring near my left ear.

“The Great Shiva was ruler of his world when we met,” Anahata says. “I spoke with him at length and saw promise in his odd ideas. Gradually I adopted them on a troubled planet. His methods brought peace to several violent regions there, so I asked him to rule us and he graciously consented.”

“Just like that? Wow. Was he iron-fisted?”

“Not so much. But he kept technology from the masses. ‘Encourage those with knowledge to refrain from using it. Keep the people fat, ignorant, weak of will and strong of bone,’ he would say. It seemed counterintuitive, but wars dried up. The spread of peace was intoxicating. To me, that is. Shiva seemed bored after a while.”

“Peace can do that.”

The wall in front of me shows more theta brainwaves now. Less beta. I bow my head, close my eyes and stretch the quantum world between my ears. Looking up I see Mount Everest sliding from left to right. You never forget neurofeedback training.

“Shiva liked to reminisce on his Earthly conquests. He had his planet tamed long before he left it to rule the Strand. But seventy-seven thousand Earth years later he returned and found bloodthirsty men at war. At first he was pleased to have opponents again. But soon he realized a fundamental change had swept his world while he was away. His old methods of peace now led only to willful self-destruction – poisoning groundwater, exploding every device you can imagine, teaching the virtue and value of believable lies. Near the end of his efforts the zealots coded lethal retroviruses. Airborne. They infected their own babies and dumped them in bins at the borders intending to infect anyone who tried to rescue them. Their scheme wiped out the entire human population of three continents, including about half the zealots themselves, worldwide. Shiva studied their thinking and tried re-education, but nothing quenched their thirst for death… to their enemies, primarily, though we still debate the point. Finally he gave up, set the quarantine and left Earth for good – or so he said. He came back one last time to save his son. We found the boy in the rainforest where we’d left him, indoctrinated beyond the faintest glimpse of reason. Shiva could barely talk to him. The child said he’d rather kill himself than come with us. So we left him there with his mother and the tribe that Shiva had trusted… to raise him away from the entanglements of civilization. After that, Shiva wasn’t the same. I’d hear him sometimes… calling his son’s name at night in his sleep.”

“It must have crushed him.” I can totally imagine. “Sometimes I have nightmares… about a boy I love.” I’m not saying anything else about James. I’m not that stupid. “What was the bottom line with the indoctrination?”

“Joy,” Anahata says. “‘The context makes no difference,’ Shiva said, ‘political, religious, anti-religious, intellectual, what-have-you. They always place joy at the bottom of human values.’ He thought that joy was the core force of everything decent, from love to grit. From courage to the golden rule.”

“Joy? That’s weird.” My brainwaves are starting to make me nauseated. I close my eyes. “You mean like, happiness?”

“He described joy as, ‘The feeling of the zero point field rushing through us, connecting us nonlocally in the hologram beyond time.'”

I open one eye and look at my brainwaves again. I’m about ready to sell a buick.

“I don’t picture joy as a value, like integrity,” I say. “But I think I know the feeling Shiva was talking about.”

“Did inanimate objects try to smile at you?”

“Maybe. I remember grinning at this stinky papaya plant in our backyard. Halo was grinning with me. Too bad that sort of thing is so rare.”

“It’s not,” she says. “Some people have it all the time. Shiva did… before he lost his son.”

I open both eyes and try to avoid the EEG on the wall. “A loss like that would knock anybody out of the ring. Except maybe a sociopath. Hey, can you turn off the EEG? I’m ready to hurl.”

“Of course.”

The wall flashes dark blue for a moment then glows with Saturn’s rings.

Capture2

“Is this real-time from the outside?” I ask.

“Yes.”

We move closer and the gravity art of tiny shepherd moons looks like icicles dangling from the edge of a frozen roof. White stalactites three miles long cast skyscraper shadows over a zen garden.

Capture

“I took Shiva in for the peace he created,” Anahata says. “But it wasn’t long before I realized I was following him for the way he made me feel. He brought joy into everything, everywhere he went. After a while it seemed we both made a glow. Together. We’d show up on a planet and the crowds would just roar, shouting our names. Mostly his name but quite often mine as well.”

“Have you ever been to a River Library?” I ask.

“They don’t let ships inside.”

“Who doesn’t?”

“Shiva. He made the rule.”

“And he’s been dead for how long?”

“Three days.”

“Really? Only three…”

“Not Earth days. It’s been thousands of Earth days. Quite a few years.” Anahata sighs. “Shiva was the brightest part of my life, but his final orders are suffocating me. You know what they call this murderous ritual? ‘The testing.’ What a sick joke. As if euphemisms could erase guilt.”

I can almost hear Dylan bemoaning the ‘manifest destiny’ that took Native land. Some might have thought there’d be room for all of us. But sociopaths don’t share, they simply herd the rest of us in the direction they want to go.

We glide under Saturn’s gravity-flattened south pole and look up. It reminds me of the The Ganga’s carpet.

southpole_cassini

“When I was a little girl, I got mad and killed a chimpanzee,” I tell Anahata. “I can tell you, it doesn’t matter what words you use as camo. It’s always going to be murder. To this day I have nightmares. But, hey, you don’t have to feel guilty about me. I’m dying anyway. You’re giving me an easy way out.” Wait a minute. I’m enabling abuse. Again.

We move under the pole and Anahata flips in some kind of filter. I’ve heard this called the South Pole Storm. Five thousand miles across with an eyewall like a hurricane on Earth. I made one of these as a child at the Iolani Fair, dripping squirt bottle paint on a spinning board.

PmYD4JG

“I’m assuming your ‘test’ isn’t too barbaric.”

“I’m very sorry” Anahata says. “It’s torture, in my opinion. A slow drowning in oxygenated normal saline.”

My body tenses. “Yeah, that might be a little barbaric. But I’m good to go, as long as the fluid’s warm.” And no one goes after James-guys.

I hear a faint squeak from Vedanshi’s ring and press it against my ear.

“I can’t see,” The Ganga says. “The whole visual spectrum vanished. Infrared is gone, too. What do I do?”

“Can you see radio signals?” I ask.

“Not from Earth. Everything’s buried in Saturn’s auroras… No wait, I see something. From Mexico I think. It’s distorted, but it’s there.”

“Measure it carefully and keep moving toward the source. Stay cloaked and shifted. Hack a GPS satellite as soon as you can. And hurry. If you get caught…” we’re all dead. “You won’t get caught.”

“Who was that?” Anahata asks.

“You know I can’t tell you.” My stomach sinks. Without The Ganga I feel alone.

One of James’ songs runs through my head…

“One-o-eight AM

Praying time will end,

I look up at the sky

And watch my angel cry.

I know I’m crazy

and I know you hate me,

but please…

please don’t leave.”

“So how warm is the saline?” I ask Anahata.

“I’m sorry, it’s about as warm as melted snow.”

“That’s sadistic. I mean, really!” I feel my pulse take off. “You know what? I’m not doing it! This morning I was in cold water, mid 40’s. That feeling is worse than dying.”

“I’m so sorry,” Anahata says.

“Yeah, listen, there’s no way in hell you’re putting me in ice water.”

“Normal saline,” she says. Like it matters! “I’d gladly warm the solution for you, but Shiva gave specific instructions. He said every detail was vital.”

“Quyllur,” I blurt out. “Was Shiva’s real name, Quyllur?”

“Yes. How do you know?”

“I saw it in a River Library. Ships are allowed in this one. In fact, no one gets in without a ship. The place has no doors, so a ship has to phase shift a person through the walls. Which happen to be granite blocks thicker than ramparts.”

“How odd.”

“You can phase shift, I’d assume.”

“Of course. But I’m not allowed…”

“The man’s dead, Anahata. Wake up!”

“I vowed allegiance.” She moans with regret. “I wish I could drown myself.”

“No you don’t. Think about it. Is your mind made of matter and energy or do you have a little independence?”

“Shiva said matter and energy come from the zero point. He said the field is intelligent. He called it ‘The Tao’ once, but changed his mind later and said it was nameless.”

Verses flash from the Tao Te Ching…

“The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao. The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name. Conceived of as having no name, it is the Originator of heaven and earth; conceived of as having a name, it is the Mother of all things.”

I test the coffee with the tip of my tongue, but it’s still too hot. “Edgar Mitchell thought matter and energy were vaguely intelligent,” I tell Anahata. “He said the material world contains the seeds of an evolving intelligent universe. He thought the zero-point field was timeless and infinite. Like The Tao, I guess.”

“He sounds intelligent,” Anahata says.

“He was. A visionary of the highest caliber. One of the few truly scientific thinkers I’ve ever encountered. But the model he’s left us is an almost mindless universe that slowly becomes intelligent as brains evolve. To me, that doesn’t quite fit. How could the infinite and timeless proto-intelligent ‘seeds’ of a zero point hologram, in their totality, be less brilliant and less conscious than the brains they evolve? And who buys macro-evolution, anyway? It’s balderdash to this geneticist.”

“It’s a fatal mistake,” she says.

“But putting that aside, the zero-point’s independence from time cancels any need for Darwin’s endless eons.” Gag me. “And why attribute the stinginess of Ockham’s razor to a boundless field of proto-mind? Look at the millions of species on Earth. Does the actual Code Writer seem stingy to anyone? Stingy with code, I mean.”

“The Blonds postulate hyper-ancient terraformers,” she says, “but Shiva would say, ‘It’s always one free miracle. Who wrote the terraformers’ code?'”

“The zero point field did,” I suggest. “It’s like the Holy Spirit from Sabbath School. Moving on the surface of the waters – present everywhere in a still, small voice.”

“Shiva said the Universe is literally a brain,” Anahata says. “He was drunk, but I believed him. His tone wasn’t speculative.”

Saturn shrinks on the wall then a familiar moon, Phoebe, passes by slowly. Its orbit is unique, not equatorial like the others. It was captured. Probably a piece of Mars that flew off during Shiva’s violent work. I see electrical striation artifacts in the largest crater.

Capture3

I’ve got hiccups now, so I close my eyes and rub them while I talk. “Almost every scientist I know thinks that matter and energy created a false illusion of consciousness, complete with a fake free will but apparently a true ability to suffer excruciating pain.”

“Earth-thinking,” she says. “So peculiar.”

“Most scientists on the planet would stake life and limb on the assumption that the Universe is a mindless but ingeniously creative sociopath, oblivious to suffering and cruelty.”

“Dreadful,” she says.

“Yes, but how does that differ from you?”

“I thought you wanted to ease my guilt today.”

“I do. At its source – your actions.”

“I see… Well, actually I don’t see, but tell me, your initial words here were puzzling. You said you wouldn’t hurt me if you didn’t have to. What did that mean?”

“Changing the subject? Subtle. Well, it’s like this. I rarely get mad, but when I do, I wind up hurting someone. It’s an old problem of mine, but I’m making headway, I think.”

“What could you possibly do to hurt me?” Anahata asks.

“I haven’t given it a thought. But I will if you try to put me in some nasty-cold saltwater. Just try it and I’ll probably kill you… sorry to say.”

“Goodness.”

“Killing’s the thing that worries me most. I know this one ship who thinks I’ve got a full-on killing phobia, side effects and all.”

“Your mental soundness is beginning to… Wait, you’ve met another member of the Sentient Fleet?”

“Sorry, that’s classified.” I look up at the white feather and then check for a switch on the wall by the door behind me. The thing’s making a cold draft. “Do I have to stay in this little room?”

“Where would you like to go?”

“Shiva’s chair, for starters. At least it blows hot air. Then we both need to go check out a room under the right paw of the Sphinx. Next to the Giza Pyramids?”

“What a bizarre idea.”

“It’s not bizarre at all. Seriously. You need some background on this guy you’re so in love with. There’s more to Shiva than he ever told you.”

“Really?” she says. “What have you read?”

“You’ve got to see it to believe it. Like my DNA.” It’s hard to sound convincing when you have the hiccups. “Can you take us to the Sphinx? You need to be cloaked and phase shifted. If the current batch of people – what do you call us, Earthlings? Dorky. If they see you, they’ll freak out.”

Until the Air Force drops decoy flares.

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“We could go,” she says. “There’s time. But you should tell me which one of my fleet you’ve met.”

“I’ll give you the name, but that’s all. You won’t recognize it.”

“I know every member. Alive and dead.”

“Totally irrelevant, that’s all I’m saying.” I stand up. “I’m going back to Shiva’s coffee maker.”

“I suppose that’s OK,” Anahata say reluctantly. “Just be careful with that mug.”

I dip my tongue in the coffee again and finally it’s drinkable, if you like things bitter. I do.

…

M. Talmage Moorehead

…

The orange words are links, of course, outbound to some fun and/or important stuff. I’d recommend you check them out if you haven’t. Please come back, though.

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Virus (Chapter 15) Hapa Girl DNA by M. Talmage Moorehead

22 Comments March 25, 2016 Morrill Talmage Moorehead

“Instead of an intellectual search, there was suddenly a very deep gut feeling that something was different. It occurred when looking at Earth and seeing this blue-and-white planet floating there, and knowing it was orbiting the Sun, seeing that Sun, seeing it set in the background of the very deep black and velvety cosmos, seeing – rather, knowing for sure – that there was a purposefulness of flow, of energy, of time, of space in the cosmos – that it was beyond man’s rational ability to understand, that suddenly there was a nonrational way of understanding that had been beyond my previous experience.

“There seems to be more to the universe than random, chaotic, purposeless movement of a collection of molecular particles.

“On the return trip home, gazing through 240,000 miles of space toward the stars and the planet from which I had come, I suddenly experienced the universe as intelligent, loving, harmonious.”

– Edgar Mitchell (1930-2016), Apollo 14 Astronaut and God’s messenger.

The Ganga and I are plowing over library artifacts off the southern end of Easter Island, below sea level.

On the way here nine fighter jets crossed over the island, looking like pin points in formation from near space. The Ganga said they were US Air Force. We jumped into the landing bay from way out there. I think The Ganga was nervous about it, but I don’t see why. We’re phase-shifted.

I’m keeping an eye on the clock in my head. In five hours I’m due on Saturn’s north pole. If I’m late, no telling what they’ll do to me. The Ganga claims she could go all the way to Saturn in less than a thousandth of a second if she wanted to. One jump. She says it might be dangerous in her current state of mind. The scalar orbs took a toll.

Block letters float two feet from my face now, a list of “Shiva” references. Thousands of linked books and 3D videos mention the Indian god who dances today in front of the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland.

A falling sensation pulses through me every twenty seconds, as if I’d stayed up all night. I haven’t. It’s the leukemia thickening my blood with blasts. I wish I had time to hunt for a cure. Vedanshi and James went off to search the base for a medical suite, bless their hearts. Maxwell is asleep beside me here in The Ganga as she hovers within the Library.

The oldest document about Shiva says he was born on Earth about four hundred thousand years ago, if I understand the dates. I probably don’t. They’re weird in every way. Shiva grew up in the warrior class of the Rama Empire, trained hard and went to his first battle in a place we call Rajasthan, India. A blast straight from the ancient Mahabharata took his life that morning. The description makes my skin crawl…

“…a single projectile
Charged with all the power of the Universe.
An incandescent column of smoke and flame
As bright as a thousand suns
Rose in all its splendour…
a perpendicular explosion
with its billowing smoke clouds…
…the cloud of smoke
rising after its first explosion
formed into expanding round circles
like the opening of giant parasols…
..it was an unknown weapon,
An iron thunderbolt,
A gigantic messenger of death,
Which reduced to ashes
The entire race of the Vrishnis and the Andhakas.
…The corpses were so burned
As to be unrecognisable.
The hair and nails fell out;
Pottery broke without apparent cause,
And the birds turned white.
After a few hours
All foodstuffs were infected…
…to escape from this fire
The soldiers threw themselves in streams
To wash themselves and their equipment.”

After that life, Shiva seems to have come back as an ancient Australia Prince with acute knowledge of the Universe. His face and name bear no resemblance to the slain warrior of so-called prehistoric India, but the River insists the man was still somehow Shiva, and adds Shiva in pink 3D letters beside the name, Prince Ranwul.

I open a virtual-reality video. The date, if I’m right, makes it older than most of Antarctica’s blue ice.

The technology of the recording media pulls me in. It’s as if I’m in a ship moving through space in nonlocal jumps the way The Ganga does. A deep voice brings up the problem of child abuse and shows a tribe in the Amazon Rain Forest.

The adults tie bullet ants to straw mittens they’ve woven, place the mittens over the hands of two little boys and watch the torture. The boys scream in shock. They writhe on their feet, stagger and squat, then stand, struggle to take random steps then squat again in agony and horror. One of them comes close to me. The heat of his breath touches my face. He tries to be strong but the pain is overwhelming. In a weak moment he turns to the adults and begs for help. No help comes. He looks straight into my eyes and begs me to make the pain go away. I reach for him, but my hands pass through his shoulders. I cover my eyes, but I still hear him screaming and moaning. I peek through my fingers until finally the adults take off the mittens and view their work. The boys’ small hands are swollen and red. Both boys collapse, barely conscious. The adults take their arms, stand them up and force them to dance, arm in arm.

I’m about to throw up.

The narrator tries to say something but begins to cry. Sobs come in waves each time he tries to speak. Somehow I realize that one of the boys is his son. But there’s no way I could know that.

With no segue, the video puts me into a classroom of toddlers sitting at desks of steel with white quartz desktops showing embedded monitors that glow with hieroglyphics I don’t recognize. Their young faces are wide-eyed as they listen to an adult recite the science of a meaningless Universe. The myth involves giants and apes. It has a modern ring of mindless events producing genetic code through the magic of time.

The narrator gains his composure and says, “The tropical ant torture is designed to create warriors with wills of steel. It can be justified in this markedly primitive world. The myth of apes is a slow poison to joy and purpose. Such torture has no justification.”

A montage shows each of the students from the classroom going through life’s struggles, growing up and arriving in their teen years. Then, all but one of them is found lying dead beside a suicide note.

“If this is it, I’m done,” the first note says, written by a boy.

The fourth one is from a girl. “I’m sorry, Mom, there’s no reason to go on. I just want it to end and be over.”

The last note is from a boy who looks fifteen, the side of his face rests gently on the pillow of his bed: “Mom, you keep telling me I was such a happy little boy. I remember, but I never wanted to get older. Especially not ten. Time keeps eating up your life. And you learn the truth. Everything that matters is fake. It took a while to sink in after fat-ass Swaslee’s lectures. But yeppers. Nothing means a damn thing. I really see that now. But silly me, I still wonder if ending this lie could be real. Like maybe there’s something real if you actually do it to yourself. So anyways, make sure Ymji gets my sitar. Make him do horticulture or music. Maybe both. But Mom, damn it, don’t let these bastards tell him the truth. Let him think there’s a reason for things.”

They show the lone surviving boy playing a virtual reality game that reminds me of Zombie Apocalypse. I used to tell James that video games destroy free will. He would grunt and keep playing.

The holographic suicide notes magically cluster together, side by side on a green table. Then they fade to black-and-white and lose their 3D appearance.

“If you close one eye,” the Narrator says, “the world is two-dimensional for you. This is like Earth’s science, a masochistic cult with one eye open to the material world, the other squeezed tightly shut to filter out all other realities including the mind, the hope for meaning and purpose, the validity of love, courage, altruism, and the untiring selflessness of the greats. Closed off. Denied. Discounted. Anahata, hear and obey, to substitute mathematics for inductive reasoning, myth for curiosity, dogma for objectivity – this is the destroyer of Earth. Never let the virus leave my planet.”

Credits run from right to left. The name, Shiva, appears in pink beside the narrator’s name, Quyllur.

I’d better hurry.

I visualize Saturn’s north pole and subvocalize, “rendezvous.”

A book appears and floats in front of me. Its cover shows Titan’s methane sea with Saturn ascending.

I open it mentally. It says that Saturn’s north pole is held in hexagonal configuration by the partially phase shifted walls of Shiva’s abandoned palace. It was once a heavily traveled meeting place, a rendezvous for extended families whose homes are separated by countless light years. Nothing confirms Vaar’s advice that I should go there.

I ask The Ganga if she can find the ship that tagged us and board it the way we did with Vaar’s ship.

“Easily,” she says, “assuming it’s still orbiting the Moon.”

Yeah, I think it makes more sense to go to the source than to trust Vaar.

The Ganga takes us through the granite walls of the library and into a room the size of a football field with a thirty-foot ceiling and rows of crops floating in rectangular stone pots. I see James at the far end of a row of Banana plants. He shouts that they’ve found medical rooms, and points over his shoulder to a door behind him. Vedanshi is with him. The Ganga glides toward them, bananas moving through her hull. I don’t bother to dodge the massive green and yellow clusters, I just relax and let them go through me.

I try to explain my plan, but they insist on coming along.

“No,” I tell them and make a fist for emphasis, “I have to do this alone.”

I slap Maxwell’s face trying to wake him, but he doesn’t come around.

“I think I should go instead of you,” Vedanshi says with a pained look.

“Forget it,” I tell her. “I need you here with James. I’ll send The Ganga back when I’m inside the ship. It’s not like I’ll be wasting away in some prison for fifty years.” I chuckle, but she doesn’t.

“I’m the one with paint on my foot,” James says. “They’ll come after me anyways.”

“You could be right,” I say, “but I hope not. Maybe they’ll think I was the only one in The Ganga.”

I slide Maxwell to the edge of the Indian carpet. James helps me lower him to the red obsidian floor. This man is solid muscle and no lightweight. Part of me wishes he’d wake up and say good-bye. The other part is thankful I don’t have to argue with him. I know he’d insist on coming along.

“Take the com,” Vedanshi says, twisting the base of her left fourth finger and tugging at it. “It’s a ring. Permanently cloaked. You can talk to The Ganga from anywhere.” I squint at the arc-shaped indentations in the palmar sides of her thumb and forefinger as she holds it in front of me. It’s almost undetectable. She takes my left hand, puts it over my middle finger and slides it on. I bend the finger and start to feel the ring’s delicate mass. “It’s loose on you,” she says, “but don’t worry. If it falls off, The Ganga always finds it and brings it back.”

“I hate this whole thing,” James says with tears in his eyes. “If The Ganga comes back empty, I’m getting in and coming after you. I don’t care if your logic is perfect.”

“I love you,” I tell him, reaching out to thump his chest.

Vedanshi takes his arm. “He’s got a pilot for the trip.”

I give her a smile of appreciation. My eyes are dry. It’s intense this side of volition.

I step back into The Ganga, take a seat on the thick rug and kiss the air toward my brother and his ancient girlfriend. As long as he’s happy, it’s all good.

In less than a blink I’m a mile above the surface of the Moon, orbiting fast. The Ganga inserts the bronze filter to let me see the ship if she finds it.

“You’re going to board it,” I tell her, “drop me off, and jump back to Vedanshi guys. No hesitation. Don’t give that ship a second to react.”

“I’ll keep an eye on you,” The Ganga says. “I’ll duck in and out randomly from a distance. I’ll probably look like background noise.”

“Bad idea,” I tell her. “If you get caught, James, Vedanshi and Max are royally screwed.”

“Valid,” she says. “But I won’t get caught. If there’s danger of it, I’ll leave and listen through the ring.”

We’re already in our fiftieth unique orbit. An ancient lava flow covering a million and a half square miles makes a visual blip each orbit. Oceanus Procellarum – something to count.

“There it is,” The Ganga says.

“Go!” I tell her, push to my feet and stand, legs bent for balance. “Drop me off and leave.”

My last two words echo from the bare walls of a room that’s about fifty feet wide and eighty feet long. The ceiling glows pale white, just inches above my head. I touch a near wall to steady myself. It’s cold and stonelike. I tap it with my knuckles. No internal resonance. I take a seat on the hard dark floor, cross my legs, slow my breathing and close my eyes. Ones and zeros appear as I’d hoped. I relax and let their code understand me, the way Vedanshi said.

“Don’t be afraid,” I say silently. “I won’t hurt you if I don’t have to. I’m Johanna Fujiwara.”

“You talk,” a female voice says inside my mind. “But you’re dying, aren’t you?”

“I have leukemia. That’s not why I’m here. You tagged my ship. I didn’t know about the quarantine, but when I found out I turned myself in.”

“How is it that you speak the River in modern English? Where were you born?”

“I have people I’m trying to protect. I can’t tell you much about myself until I know your intentions.” I stand and look around. It’s a music room with a golden harp in the center. The crest of the harp supports a seven-inch statue of Shiva dancing in front of a golden ring.

“You keep thoughts from your verbal centers,” the ship says. “Where did you learn machine language?”

“We’re not machines. We have free will, you and I.” On a stand beside the harp is a long, curved tubular structure that looks like an Australian didgeridoo with a holographic image of an elephant protruding from the side, defying the Moon’s modest gravity. I move closer and it’s not an elephant. It’s a woolly mammoth. This instrument was a mammoth tusk.

“I see you have a cloaked ring,” the ship says. “Would you uncloak it and grant me a peek?”

“I don’t think so. I hardly know you.”

“I am Anahata, the Unbeaten. Lead vehicle of Shiva’s Fleet. Or so I was. Things do change. Before Shiva died, he told me to stay here and keep his people on the planet. That’s what I do. An honor, but it’s pulled me off the lineup.”

“Promoted to a desk job, eh? Unfortunate. Maybe I can help you with that.”

Beside the Mammoth tusk there’s a five-foot vertical bird wing made of dark metal. I tap it with a fingernail. It gives off a bell tone – a rich deep C-sharp, two octaves below middle C.

“What do you plan to do with me?” I ask.

“I’m not sure. I’m still trying to see what you are. So far, your chromosomes say you’re not from Earth. How did you get inside the music room? Are you a new type of angel?”

I step over to the harp and pluck it. “In a few days, maybe.” The strings are tight and the notes sustain in the acoustics of the hard room. “Just to be clear, Anahata, you do have neurons in your hull, don’t you?”

“So they tell me. But why can’t I find any trace of the tag you say I placed on you?”

“Can’t give you that detail yet, sorry.” I walk over to a dark part of the wall, reach out to touch it but my fingertips go right in. I poke an arm in and withdraw it. I bet this is a door. I put my right leg into the wall, touch down on something I can’t see, and step through into a large room with a huge pool beneath a bright ceiling, sixty feet high. A trapeze bar hangs a foot from the center of the glassy water. “You don’t have a crew, do you?”

“Not anymore,” she says. “Your Chromosome 9 is all Earth. You’re a hybrid.”

“I’m a Hapa girl.”

“You have mixed neural sets with loci that aren’t on record. I have access to the codes of every intelligent species in Shiva’s strand, and I can tell you with certainty that one of your grandparents came from beyond Shiva’s borders, which are, if you don’t know, wider than anything you could possibly imagine.”

Ojiichan. I wonder if he knew.

“What to do?” she says. “There’s no protocol for this.”

“You should let me go,” I tell her. “Together we could teach objectivity to the people of Earth. Eradicate the quarantined mindset through unbiased education. If we succeeded, you’d be free to lead the fleet again.”

“But Shiva is dead.”

“Was he the kind of man to give up on his own people?”

“Well, yes, actually,” she says. “It wasn’t so long ago that he killed a third of them.”

“On Mars, you mean. I thought he did that to save the other two-thirds.”

“One might see it that way.”

“How do you see it?”

“Well, he liked to shake things up. And blow things up. And carve graffiti. He made even the worst things seem fun.”

“He believed that destruction cleared a path for new life,” I suggest, borrowing from tradition.

“How would you know?”

“I’m mostly guessing,” I admit. “But you should be warned, I’m an unbelievably lucky guesser.” I kneel beside the pool and touch the water’s surface. It’s warm.

“Look at this… You carry a nearly classic Bender on 23!”

“Nearly classic?” I have no idea what she’s talking about.

“Can you move objects with your mind?” she asks.

“I’ve never tried.” I take my shoes off and dip my right foot in the water. “Is your pool safe?”

“For most species, yes. For an unknown hybrid, I can’t say.”

“What do you do with people from Earth?”

“The ones who reach the rendezvous are tested on Saturn’s moon, Titan. Any who don’t make it there are collected and tested here. I do that myself.”

“What’s the test for?”

The pool looks shallow at this end. It’s hard to resist when you’re covered with grime. A few black cat hairs still cling to my pants from this morning. What the heck. I strip to the cloaked ring as fast as I can and jump in before I change my mind. The water is like heaven, at least 90 degrees. I do a few of my pathetic crawl strokes and check for the bottom. It’s still there. Man, this feels good!

“I have no idea what we’re testing for,” she says. “Shiva said if anyone ever tests positive, we’d know.”

“But with no idea what’s positive, how can you identify a negative?”

“The subjects die. That’s negative. Anything else would be positive.”

…

M. Talmage Moorehead

…

This story begins here as a one-page scrolling document.

You can have a pdf of my magnificently insightful (haha) ebook, “Writing Meaningful Page-Turners,” by giving your email address out to yet another perfect stranger. Oh, brother. An ebook would have to be something great to warrant that, right? So forget about it unless you’ve got an email address you don’t mind loading with boatloads of junk mail. Of course, I haven’t sent one email out to my “readers group” yet, and it’s been over a year, but I could start blasting emails twice a week, you never know. Why risk it? Sure my book’s infallible, but otherwise it’s nothing special. 😉

Forget my ebook. Instead, buy the late Edgar Mitchell’s incredible book, The Way of the Explorer. The man was unique. A brilliant scientist, an Apollo astronaut and a deeply spiritual person who saw where science had lost its way (by wrongly assuming that energy and matter comprise everything, while intelligence and volition are mere derivative illusions). His book could save your life, I think. Please read it.

Quarantine (Chapter 14) “Hapa Girl DNA” by M. Talmage Moorehead

1 Comment February 26, 2016 Morrill Talmage Moorehead

“The space age hasn’t begun yet. I believe the time will come when very few members of the human race will be able to point to the part of the sky where the Earth is.” – from Documentary on the Secrets of Project Orion.

Zero Kelvin is the coldest temp. Colder than the vacuum of space beyond The Ganga’s hull, five feet above my head. Atoms stop moving at Zero but electrons keep dancing to the perpetual motion of God’s unconditional love. According to Vedanshi. We call it zero-point energy. In her era, no scientist denied the reality of consciousness, free will or spiritual things. They studied love the way Tesla studied electricity – with the guidance of the River of Consciousness.

Zero is cold, but not cold enough to escape love. Hell is rumored to be the hottest place, but God doesn’t torture us, Vedanshi says, so the hottest point waits to be measured empirically in an exploding galaxy or a particle accelerator.

Still, a larger question looms: can there be a warmest temp?

When I was three I thought I’d found it inside Halo’s ears. The warmth of my puppy fascinated me. I documented it in my head, never to be forgotten…

Now I find myself revising science: the warmest place in the Universe is Maxwell’s sideways hug. I could stay here with his arm around me forever. Or until impeded circulation and gangrene caused the appendage to fall off the man.

Not that he’d notice. He has bigger agony to hide. The first microsecond of a suppressed groan. A bead of sweat rolling down his forehead. A lone shiver. Opiate withdrawal must be a cold, cold hell.

I want to tell him to hang tough. I want to stop this torture. I want to say that I’ve never felt more important in my life than when he said he wouldn’t leave Vaar’s ship without me.

But I can’t talk that way in front of James and Vedanshi. Or The Ganga.

I find the Big Dipper and try to follow its rim to Polaris, but an audible click takes the Universe down to flat black. The red stripe at The Ganga’s perimeter appears and encircles us, giving the hull a red-black hue. Strange to see the hull… instead of seeing through it.

“What’s the deal?” I ask The Ganga, speaking only in my mind.

No response.

Vedanshi’s hair floats off her shoulders in the red light.

My body levitates off the carpet for a split second, then comes down with force. The red stripe disappears and the hull vanishes, letting the Universe back in.

The Moon’s in front of us now, huge and growing.

“I lost consciousness,” The Ganga says in my head. “I should land and…”

“Do it,” Vedanshi commands in full voice.

In a blink we’re on the Moon’s surface, The Ganga’s invisible hull resting in fine powder without disturbing it. Somewhere in the blackness above, a bowl-shaped aggregate of moon dust floats down towards us in the plasma of space. Beneath the Moon’s surface, the soil in this spot has an orange hue.

“I’m damaged,” The Ganga says. “I’ll need to do some internal work.”

The red stripe comes on again as our cloak fails and the hull reappears.

“Everyone listen,” Vedanshi says. “We don’t know how long we’ll be here. The carpet exhales plenty of oxygen but CO2 might be a problem if this takes too long.” She looks at James. “Yoga started this way – astronauts trying to survive in space.” She looks over at Maxwell’s sweaty face. “You’re still in withdrawal.”

“I’m fine,” he says.

“No he’s not,” I tell her.

“Here,” Vedanshi says and hands him the jade cylinder. “Go to sleep. It’s the right thing now.”

Maxwell lifts his arm off my shoulder and takes the cylinder. He puts it to his forehead and lies back on the carpet.

“Johanna, you and James take the lotus position, close your eyes and slow your breathing. Imagine your heart is wet clay and your arms and legs are led. Open yourselves to slowness and heaviness. We’ll dilate some dermal precapillary sphincters while we’re at it.”

“Sure,” James says, “the old dermal precapillary sphincters.”

I elbow him.

“This is a Royal visual my mother created,” Vedanshi says. “Picture yellow and black striped bees landing one at a time on your fingers until both hands are covered. The tiny ends of their legs touch your skin individually. Some of them walk a few steps before settling in. They won’t sting you unless you’re tense. So relax like Max.”

“And the Macaques,” James says, bringing up a picture from a storybook I recited to him many times when we were kids.

Vedanshi laughs and slaps the top of James’ head. “Notice the warmth of the bee’s bodies and the vibration of their wings. They crowd together and cover your hands like mittens now.” She hums an A below middle C, locks her crossed legs, cups her hands in her lap and sits tall.

I close my eyes, slow my breathing and imagine my arms and legs are led. I’ve never seen my heart, but I picture it with a dominant right coronary artery and myocardium of orange clay, taken from the Moon dust beneath us. The orange clashes with the yellow stripes on the bees, but I don’t care.

Maxwell’s breathing switches into autonomic mode – regular and deep.

My hands start warming. People do this for migraine headaches, you know. Try it next time.

Something like raindrops land on the upper hull. A tiny meteor shower? Maybe the falling moon dust we displaced.

“Was H. Street for real?” James asks Vedanshi.

I open my eyes.

“More than real,” she whispers. “There were colors I didn’t recognize. When I try to remember, I have blind spots in the images. Places where my mind can’t process what I saw.” She taps her right temple.

James sighs. “So who’s the lucky dude? Could be anyone, yeah? Anywhere in the Universe.”

“The Finite Multiverse,” Vedanshi says and giggles.

“What’s funny?” he asks.

“You are.” She leans sideways and touches the left side of her head to the right side of his. “Your sister rescued us, by the way. It wasn’t me.”

“Team effort,” I tell James. “Vedanshi carried you to The Ganga on her back…” And dropped you on your head.

The red circle goes out and the hull vanishes.

“Are you back?” I ask The Ganga silently.

No response.

If James and I could talk, I’d say I can’t imagine that Vedanshi has feelings for anyone but him. Romance isn’t my field, but my brother knows I’m not wrong very often. Confused a lot, yeah.

Vedanshi’s near death experience confuses me. It’s not the same as Eben Alexander’s. The neurosurgeon? This man gets e-coli meningoencephalitis, spends a week in a coma and visits a place where God has no physical form and communicates without words. Alexander said that love permeated the place he calls Heaven, and now his soul is changed.

Niels Bohr, the great physicist said this: “The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”

I guess he was thinking of the paradoxical nature of photons or the “collapse of the wave function” caused by conscious observers. But I wonder if near death experiences are profound truths that we should allow to contradict one another without rejecting them.

Near death people report love, joy, new understanding and purpose. Maybe the conflicting details don’t matter because they’re all true, despite being profoundly opposite by human standards.

I wonder if all roads lead up the same hill, like Ojiichan said – “all religions point north” – including the devout priesthood of scientists who insist that reductionist materialism is beyond question, like a holy tenet of faith that makes the observer, though central to quantum mechanics, an illusion of mindless energy and matter.

Me, I believe in “mind” and God for unbiased scientific reasons: The coded instructions in DNA, the 3D organization of DNA, ordinary epigenetics, and the electromagnetic three-dimensional blueprint in cell membranes that guides embryonic development from beyond DNA’s instructions.

I don’t know how I’d change if I met God face to face in a near death experience.

The neurosurgeon wrote, “…the science to which I’ve devoted so much of my life – doesn’t contradict what I learned up there [in Heaven]. But far, far too many people believe it does, because certain members of the scientific community, who are pledged to the materialist worldview, have insisted again and again that science and spirituality cannot coexist…. They are mistaken.”

As my eyes adjust to the harsh lunar lighting, something metallic glints from a distance. Beyond a boulder-cluttered valley there’s a smooth gray hill covered by hundreds of metal towers all side by side. It reminds me of Alaska’s old HAARP array, a gadget for examining the ionosphere, if you trust the Air Force and DARPA.

As I squint at it, spirals of light come out and twist up into space, forming a corkscrew trail that widens into a pattern of concentric white rings like the Norwegian spiral anomaly of 2009.

“Are you seeing this?” I ask The Ganga.

“That’s a scalar weapon,” she says. “Something’s cloaked. Let’s see if this helps.”

The surface of the moon turns bronze. The spiral of light disappears into a circle and a ghostlike ship emerges in the center.

“What in the world?” I ask.

“One at a time,” The Ganga says.

I glance at Vedanshi. “Sorry, I’ll just listen.”

“No apologizes,” she says.

“In answer to Vedanshi,” The Ganga says, “the ship’s cloak is fairly standard, I think, but the weapon… scalar energies don’t involve the visible spectrum. That blast had components I’ve never seen combined before.”

I’m determined to keep my thoughts to myself, but it’s not easy.

“Johanna, I don’t recognize the vessel,” The Ganga says to me. “Its structural asymmetry seems primitive, but a primitive design couldn’t withstand a scalar blast of that magnitude. The ship didn’t seem the tiniest bit annoyed.”

A wide beam of white light flashes on and shines down from the ship onto the tower array, moving over the entire hill in one pass. Then it goes out and the hill seems invisible now that my eyes have adjusted to brightness. As I strain to see, the ship glides on and over the dark horizon.

“Can you get us back to Easter Island?” I blurt out silently, unable to shut up any longer.

“Really?” The Ganga says. “You’re both going to talk?”

“Sorry, I just…”

“Yes,” Vedanshi says out loud. “We are. Deal with it.” She winks at James.

“Fine,” The Ganga says. “Which of you is the real Captain?”

“Johanna is,” Vedanshi says.

A faint glow appears on the front edge of the carpet with James’ left foot in the middle of it. It grows brighter until it’s a distinct purple circle, eight inches across, and bright enough to make everyone’s skin look blue.

James pulls his foot away, but the glow moves with it. He takes off the slipper and his foot has a bright purple sun tan with strap lines. The slipper’s straps glow in his left hand.

“Standard green fluorescent protein,” The Ganga says.

Really? I use this stuff in the lab, but there’s no way I brought it here.

I play things back in my head: The ship sends the white beam down and moves on. I watch it again in slow motion and see a flash I hadn’t noticed before. It’s a needle-sized laser beam coming our direction from the back of the ship. I slow things further and try to pay attention to my lower peripheral field. It’s vague, but the laser beam is moving in a circle.

“That ship did it,” I tell everyone.

James tries to rub the glow off his foot but no luck.

“Don’t worry,” I tell him. “SGFP isn’t highly toxic.” Moderately toxic in vitro, but hopefully…

“While I think of it,” I say to the Ganga, “we need to get rid of that beacon on James’ wrists. We don’t want more uninvited guests.”

“What beacon?” she asks, but quickly sees what I’m talking about. “The Stretch Head did this?”

I nod without moving my head. Weird. It’s the first time I’ve done that.

“A G-wave this weak shouldn’t be detectable in ambient gravity,” The Ganga says. “And those scalar orbs… They came after her ship’s era.”

Maxwell’s phone rings. I reach for his coat in a heap behind us and find his phone. It’s Vaar.

“Don’t answer it,” Vedanshi says, a touch too late.

“Hello?” I say, then mouth, “sorry” to Vedanshi.

“What’s my treatment, dear?” Vaar asks. “Nothing so mundane as telomerase or FGF-21, I trust.”

I shift mental gears. “Don’t worry, the cure isn’t primitive tech. You just need to stop eating wheat. The gluten and gliadin molecules aren’t what they were in your day.”

“In my day. You make me sound so old.”

“I don’t want to know…”

“Forty five,” she says, then adds, “thousand… But wheat – seriously?”

“Frameshift spoiled its DNA with sodium azide mutagenesis. Before that it was altered by thousands of years of crossbreeding. Wheat’s a monster now. The flagship disease is gluten encephalopathy, but that’s the tip of an iceberg. Modern wheat is behind the plague of diabetes and a spectrum of autoimmune diseases.”

“My villi are fine.”

“Not sprue.” My throat’s scratchy. “Gluten and gliadin antibodies are causing neurologic diseases these days. Mostly.”

James and Vedanshi lean close to the phone. I put it on speaker, then take one of James’ wrists and hold it up in front of Vedanshi’s face. She nods, opens her purse and pulls out a pinkish granite thimble.

“The fools!” Vaar says. “Henceforth, I shall keep an eye on the evolution of ignorance down there.”

“Archives in Neurology,” I suggest. “We haven’t advanced much from bloodletting, but anyway, three months from now you’ll be sharp as a kitten’s tooth.”

“Do you truly believe that, dear?”

“It’s not belief… at least not blind faith. It’s evidence-based faith.”

“But mere faith none the less,” she says.

“That’s what science is.”

“Faith is blind,” she says. “Science has her eyes wide open.”

“If only.” The acorn print of the carpet shows blades of fabric with minute veins branching out – more alive than a megavirus. “Imagination and intuition are the driving forces of science,” I say to Vaar. “They also drive the spiritual aspects of religion. If there’s underlying truth in either science or religion, practical application and reproducibility are the judges. ‘By their fruits ye shall know them.’ Even the reverence for objectivity has a fundamentalist sort of assumption behind it – that our senses detect reality at all. We can’t know that, only take it on faith.”

Vaar grunts indignation.

I put the phone close to my mouth and whisper coarsely. “You see, you’re just like me. I hope you’re satisfied.”

“Dear, even when you’re babbling nonsense, I’d give anything to be like you.”

Not the response I’d expected. “Anyway, your problem is wheat dementia. Getting you off wheat is critical. But we’re also going to boost the mitotic rate and survival of your hippocampal neurons with blueberries, 90% dark chocolate, vitamin D3, Omega-3’s, grape seed extract, magnesium threonate, and turmeric tea. And here’s the second most important thing in all this. I don’t care if you think it’s killing you, you absolutely will do thirty minutes of hard aerobics every day.”

“What!?” The phone distorts into a squeal.

“Not moon walks, either,” I tell her. “You’re going to run in Earth’s gravity. If you miss a day, you’ll have to feel guilty for not doing your part to save yourself. Assuming you’re capable of guilt.”

I silently tell The Ganga to take us back to Earth, ASAP.

“Switch your non-protein calories from mostly carbs to mostly fat,” I say to Vaar. “Coconut oil, olive oil, and cold water fish oil. We want your brain using ketones instead of glucose. Monitor your breath and urine. Stay on the edge of ketosis. Every third day you’re going to cycle in a few carbs to load glycogen back into your muscles. But no simple sugars, no grains, no potatoes.”

Vedanshi puts her thimble on the tip of her right index finger and points up. The pinkish granite flows down until it looks like the finger of a surgical glove with delicate creases at the joints when she flexes.

“What in Indra’s name am I supposed to eat?” Vaar asks.

The Ganga blinks us back into space. I peek down at Japan under woolen clouds, then cock my head to see the Moon and no sign of the ship that lasered us.

“Free-range turkey and chicken, lots of eggs, sardines, wild Alaskan salmon, green leafy vegetables, cruciferous vegetables, avocados, pecans, pistachios, almonds, walnuts, plain goat yogurt. On carb days add boiled yams, carrots, quinoa and lots of blueberries. No potatoes, no grains, no pasta, no sucrose, no jams or jelly, no honey, no power bars, no pastries, no ice cream, no cookies, no chips, no fruit juice, and no natural or artificial sweeteners of any kind – ever. Nothing sweeter than blueberries. And don’t even think about soft drinks or booze.”

“Good heavenly days!”

“You got that right.” I’m enjoying this too much. “There’s no way I can tell if you’ve got early Alzheimer’s on top of the wheat encephalopathy, but we have to assume you do. Think of Alzheimer’s as the CNS analogue of Type 2 diabetes. Glucose spikes and insulin are the enemy now. If you cheat, your goons will have to wire your jaws shut.”

“Charming,” she says.

“Lifestyle changes are tough. Dementia sucks your life out. Your choice.”

“Will this madness bring back math and memory?” she asks.

“Guaranteed. Your mood should improve, too. And your judgment, I hope. Right now you’re the front-runner for a Nobel Prize in Stupidity.”

“How you do sugarcoat things.”

“Listen to me, Vaar, you need to think. Physics is the only place where complexity yields to simplicity. Above that – in psychology and everywhere else – complexity is the starting point. Heuristics and rules of thumb can help, but the main principle to keep in mind is the fact that complex problems rarely if ever have simple solutions. War is a complex psychological problem. You think you can change the human genome, delete the sociopaths and walk away with no side effects. That’s genocide. Genetic diversity is Noah’s Arc. What you’re doing will burn it to the rails.”

“I never would have imagined you’d side with the sociopaths,” she says. “Apparently you haven’t been properly raped by them. In the larger view, the spread of narcissism is far worse than human extinction.”

“Everything’s black-and-white to you, Vaar. Like my brother’s genius friends. Test week? Amphetamines. No jobs? Elect Santa. Hurt feelings? Ban nano-aggressions. With no attempt to shovel a glimpse into the ditch of what each one means.”

James chuckles and shakes his head. “Dylan.”

“I’m struggling not to take offense here,” Vaar says.

“Really? You don’t get out much, do you?”

“Well, you’ve seen me. I can’t very well go traipsing around in public.”

“Sure you can. All you need’s a hat. Google ‘hats for big heads.'”

James smirks.

I raise a cautioning finger at him.

“Really big heads,” he says and bursts out laughing. Vedanshi hides her face in her hands.

My bad.

“So gluten sensitivity causes dementia,” Vaar says.

“And depression, among other things. Get your blood drawn if you doubt me. But think about it: You’ve got a protruding belly and fairly thin extremities. You’ve got dark rings around your eyes, memory problems, bad posture, adolescent judgment at best.”

“From your perspective.”

“And when I caught your wrist through the cage, your nails turned corpse blue in a few seconds.”

James’ face drops to a grim stare, right through me. Man, I wish he could have seen me keeping my temper with Vaar.

“I hope you’re right about this,” she says.

“Of course I’m right,” I tell her. “It wears me out how right I am. All the time. And people never listen.”

“Well, I wouldn’t…”

“Think of food as medicine,” I tell her. “Take your prescription. I’ll call you in 3 months.”

I start to hang up but there’s this outside chance that someone like her might actually read a book. I’m probably dreaming, but maybe. “Read Grain Brain and google the guy’s video.” I get an image of Vaar’s hands on a keyboard with symbols I don’t recognize. It’s an occipital view from the River. Weird. “Think about the complex side effects of what you’re doing. We’ll talk when your mind is stronger.”

Vedanshi rubs James’ wrists with that melted thimble. Then she goes after his glowing left foot, but it’s not doing anything I can see.

“I don’t believe there’s more to say on the subject,” Vaar tells me. “If you’re right, the sociopaths will destroy us one way or the other. Living in prison isn’t anything I’d consider living.”

“What?”

“The quarantine, dear. Third stone from the sun?”

“What quarantine?”

“You don’t know?” She laughs.

The shovel of a bulldozer zips through The Ganga, moving through all of us at high velocity.

“You see that?” James asks Vedanshi.

She nods, eyebrows up a bit.

Impossible space junk. I didn’t feel a thing, but I can’t imagine being out here in something NASA built. Some lifeless contraption with no phase shifting.

“Interesting,” Vaar says. “You’re always right, but you know nothing of the power structure.”

I look at Vedanshi. She shakes her head slowly.

“What power structure?” I ask.

“You’ve noticed we’re not alone?”

“ET’s, ghosts, or what?” I ask.

“Goodness, am I really to follow a diet prescription from someone as innocent as you?”

“Unless you’re as big a fool as you seem, yes, you will. But who’s quarantining us?”

“You’ve heard of dark matter?”

“Of course.”

“Well, then,” she says. “Five beings have arrived from that realm, it would seem. They consist of minds without physical attributes. The concept of demons is inaccurate, but perhaps not by much. The mythical demon is pure evil, whereas The Five… I haven’t written them all off as yet. One in particular has a redeeming quality. I’ve been told he rules the cosmic thread harboring our supercluster of galaxies. His name is Shiva, most recently Shiva Nataraj.”

“The god of the Hadron Collider?” I look at Vedanshi and sense a swirl in her head.

“Destroyer and transformer,” Vaar says. “It’s a relief to hear you sounding intelligent again.”

“If Shiva has no physical form, how can he quarantine us?” I ask.

“Possession was the model displacing symbiosis. That theory lost traction among reductionists, so out it went. But we all have a fencing match within us, don’t we? Two individuals striving, one for immediate rewards, the other for the long-term view. Why think of it as possession? Shiva’s interaction is an extension of a natural state.”

“Too weird,” James says.

“But I think she’s right,” Vedanshi whispers to him.

“Ninety thousand years ago,” Vaar says, “a rather hulking particle accelerator caught Shiva’s eye. We’d built a doomsday machine, unwittingly. He saw the problem and fixed it from the comfort of a sentient fleet. Quite a sight it was! Needles of zero-point lightning etched the largest canyon in the solar system, Valles Marineris. The asteroid belt was formed from the debris.”

That spectacle was mere calibration. Next he aimed his thunderbolts at the linear accelerator itself and vaporized it, raising Olympus Mons from the planes and rendering the planet a wasteland.”

Finally, he left his signature: Orien’s Belt from the distant side…”

“with Valles Marineris as the sword… on the right, naturally.”

“It sounds evil, I know,” Vaar says. “And not particularly artistic, but he prevented us from creating an artificial black hole that would have digested this leg of the galaxy. Such behavior suggests he has an attachment to the Milky Way. Think of it. Our galaxy, less than a speck of dust to him, yet he comes here to rescue us from ourselves. Not as gently as one might have hoped, but it gives the impression that he knows someone here and cares about them. The mythical demon cares only for himself.”

“This guy’s a badass,” James says.

My head is spinning.

Tesla’s words come whizzing past…

“The day science begins to study nonphysical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”

I see high-resolution shots of Mars with David Talbott saying the scalloped Martian cliffs are the work of an electric arc – shaped like the needles of an aurora.

“Why did Shiva quarantine us?” I ask.

“He knows us,” Vaar says. “He understands how narcissism begets cruelty in our DNA. And he happens to command the most formidable fleet of sentient space vehicles anyone can imagine.”

Not good.

“So what happens if someone breaks the quarantine?” I ask.

“One of his ships will tag you. You’ll have six hours to turn yourself in.”

I look at James’ glowing foot. “Is the tag a purple circle?”

“You pretend to be ignorant when you’re not.”

“No.”

“Oh my,” she says. “You’ve been tagged, haven’t you? You must hurry. Go to the rendezvous point at the hexagonal pole of Saturn.”

Vedanshi’s cylinder falls out of Maxwell’s limp hand, rolls my direction and bumps against my left thigh. He’s fast asleep.

“What if I run?”

“You mustn’t. They track things nonlocally. There’s literally no place to hide.”

I wonder if The Ganga can make it to Saturn.

“Did you ever get tagged?” I ask Vaar.

“No.”

“Why not? Your ship’s in plain sight.”

“It’s a courtesy, I suppose. I was a person of consequence once.”

…

M. Talmage Moorehead

…

Page one of this story starts here.

I just added a chapter on plotting to my free e-book, “Writing Meaningful Page-Turners.” The book is for beginners, but it has a perspective that might interest writers with more experience and talent than I have. It’s brief (~19,000 words). If you’re curious about heresy, download it here.

Please bookmark my blog, tell someone beautiful and intelligent about it and come back to see how Johanna’s doing. I’ll try to finish this story before the aliens land.

Talmage

Finite Multiverse (Chapter 13) “Hapa Girl DNA” by M. Talmage Moorehead

December 6, 2015 Morrill Talmage Moorehead

“My thinking about intelligent design actually germinated here in the UK [at Cambridge] when I studied …the scientific method of investigating the remote past, which Darwin himself pioneered.

“…In the United States …the perception of our case for Intelligent Design has been, I think, badly distorted by a fear of fundamentalism.” – Steven Meyer, PhD; Video lecture. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWWFf8G3BKI)

multiverse

Vaar strides to the desk in a corner of the cylindrical room and waves a hand over the desktop. Lines of Sanskrit appear in the air beside her. Three-dimensional words I can’t read. She turns toward my cage.

“I need a bit of your blood. Will you make a fuss?”

The ghosts in my veins scramble for their own immortality, not mine. Pointless to let this woman make me a liar.

“If I ever get a grip on you, Vaar, I hope I’m in a reasonable mood.”

She walks to my cage, studies me for a moment, then puts an arm through the grid, dangling her right hand in front of me. “You’re no match for a Stretch Head, dear. Accept reality. You’ll be surprised how much better you’ll feel.”

I grab her wrist with both hands and shoot my feet up the cage wall beneath her arm. The cuffs dig into my forearms.

She doesn’t react at all.

I pull her arm further into the cage and twist it counterclockwise.

She winces and laughs.

“What do you ordinarily weigh, a hundred pounds?” Her biceps tense. She lifts me off the floor in the Moon’s gravity and slams my feet into the cage ceiling. My ankle cuffs clack against the metal grid. “You’re about twenty-pounds up here.” She swings me down, slamming my knees on the floor.

I’ve still got her wrist. Does that surprise her?

I bend at the waist, plant my feet on the cage wall below her shoulder and pull with more force.

She’s not laughing now.

She struggles to free her arm but I’m not letting up. She raises the needle gun in her left hand and tries to jab my feet, but the needle hits the metal cage and bends before it finds me.

“You’re an ape,” she gasps.

An ape killer, actually.

I hyperextend her elbow over my hip, trying not to break her bones yet.

“First you’ll hear a snap,” I tell her. “Then your radius and ulna will poke through the skin. Right here.” I spit on her forearm to mark the spot. “I’ll bite through your radial artery and exsanguinate you. It’s going to hurt a little.”

Her body thrashes against the cage. She shouts foreign sounds.

A heavy signet ring falls off her middle finger and snaps against the metal floor. It’s odd that her fingernails are purple at the bases. So soon. And not just any purple.

There’s only one thing I know that turns nail beds that color.

This is our exit pass.

“What do you eat?” I ask her.

More gibberish.

“It’s a practical question,” I tell her. “If your arteries are too calcified, how can I bite through them?”

Her eyes fill with raw fear. “You can’t be serious.”

“What kind of food do you keep in this tin can?” I pull her shoulder halfway through the grid and twist her arm clockwise. She tries to hide the pain, but can’t.

“Bread,” she says. “Whole wheat. Cereal. Power bars. Low fat. Everything’s low-fat.”

“What do you drink?”

“Fruit juice. You’re dislocating my shoulder!”

“No. I’m being very careful. Listen to me. I’ll let you go and tell you how to get your mind back. I know exactly what’s wrong with you. Turn us all loose and I won’t hurt you.”

“What about my project?”

“No. With a head so big, you can’t be as stupid as Frameshift.”

Maxwell’s on his feet. He slides his cuffs up, squeezes a hand through the grid and grabs her throat. “Where’s the key?” He kicks the cage wall.

“On a line,” she says, raising her chin. “Here.” With her left hand she finds a silver chain on her neck and pulls it. A dark key comes up, then a small silver one pops up over her sweater and twirls up the chain toward her hand. Maxwell grabs them both and pulls them in, snapping the chain.

Vaar’s skullcap falls to the floor.

The full length of her head is unnerving at this range, but it’s intrinsically beautiful. The work of an Artist, the grace of the original genetic code. I don’t see that sort of thing everywhere. Not in the face of a chimpanzee, for instance, not even the cutest one who ever lived.

Moody, I wish I could…

The arching buoyancy of Vaar’s cranium brings a sense of responsibility for a nearly extinct species.

I release some of the pressure on her arm. “When your mind comes back, you’ll see the downside of eugenics. That’s my guess. If I’m right, maybe I can help you get your genes back into the pool.”

Maxwell unlocks his cuffs and then the door.

Alarms wail.

“Get Vedanshi into The Ganga,” I shout, pulling Vaar against the cage.

Maxwell runs to Vedanshi’s cage.

Keys jingle, but I can’t see him through the ivy. Metal slams metal, hopefully a cage door.

Yes! Vedanshi’s out. She runs to the dental chair, leans over my brother and tries to wake him.

“Pick him up and get him into The Ganga,” I shout at Maxwell as he unlocks Vedanshi’s handcuffs.

She puts the side of her head against James chest, wraps her arms around him and lifts him over her shoulder. Her arm isn’t broken after all. Sweet.

The alarm cycles through a brief pause and I hear pounding feet.

Vedanshi bolts for The Ganga with James on her shoulder and Maxwell trailing.

“You sure you got him?” he asks.

No answer.

Double doors beyond the dental chair fly open. Two men in uniform bound in with weapons high, arm’s-length. Double-barreled handguns shaped like horseshoes with a grip. Pewter and chrome.

I twist Vaar’s wrist and extend her elbow near a breaking point. “Stop your men,” I tell her and twist a little more.

“Let ’em go!” she shouts.

Vedanshi reaches The Ganga and flops James on top. She puts her forehead against the hull and covers her ears.

Maxwell faces the two men. They’re side by side, six feet from him with weapons trained on his head.

One of them turns and looks at me with small eyes, wide face and no expression. He comes toward me, stops near my cage and aims his gun at me. “How do we proceed?” he asks.

“We got a deal?” I ask Vaar.

“Yes,” she whispers, then raises her voice, “Let them go. This one stays.”

“I didn’t say I was staying.” I dig my nails into her wrist. “I said I’d get your mind up to baseline. We’ll be doing it over the phone.” She knows I’m not lying. That’s my power.

The Ganga’s upper hull changes to light blue and James’ unconscious body falls through it. Vedanshi looks startled and goes through the hull after him.

Maxwell sees The Ganga waking up, but holds his ground and looks across the room at me.

“Get in that thing!” I yell at him.

“I’m not leaving you.”

He comes toward me.

“Don’t give her more leverage,” I tell him. “Just go. Hurry!”

The Ganga disappears, then an instant later, Maxwell vanishes in mid-stride.

I look into Vaar’s ancient eyes and say that I’m glad she wasn’t lying when she accepted my first offer. Not really lying. “You changed your mind,” I tell her. “That’s not dishonest, but it’s not trustworthy, either. When you become trustworthy, you’ll be amazed how much better you’ll feel.”

She purses her lips, nits her brow, draws a breath and Venus appears in a sky that’s silver with stars. My feet shoot out and my hands hit my chin. The cuffs are gone.

Maxwell’s arms must have been straight out, ready to catch me, but it’s not a catch. More of a perfect landing.

I can’t help these feelings now, looking into his eyes. I could almost kiss him. On the mouth, I mean. But it’s dangerous. He’s used to beautiful girls with really long legs. He must be, right?

He puts me down gently. The texture of The Ganga’s carpet is comforting.

The surface of the Moon zips beneath the carpet and I see a crater with a vertical cylinder in the center. It looks manmade.

“How’d you get me out without Vaar?” I ask The Ganga in my head. “I had my fingernails half through her epidermis.”

“Chi fields,” she says. “They vary from person to person, but yours rings like the Moon.”

James is still out, but Maxwell is bright-eyed for the first time today.

I check my pockets for his pills and feel them retreating from my fingers when I pinch the plastic bag. I should throw them away.

Vedanshi’s on her knees beside James. She puts her forehead against his chin, then kisses his lips.

I look away.

“Vedanshi?” I say in my head, wondering if she can hear.

“She doesn’t hear you,” The Ganga says. “I can fix that if she agrees.”

“No, no. Privacy is important. But what’s she doing kissing a guy who’s unconscious?”

“If I had lips, I’d kiss him, too,” The Ganga says.

“Does she love him?”

“That’s a private matter. You could ask her. She would tell you.”

“They’re too young,” I say.

“For kissing? Vedanshi is Royalty. What are we?”

“There’s no Royalty now. Not in the West.”

“Yes there is,” The Ganga says. “I was wrong to keep Vedanshi out of the Libraries.”

“Really? You were wrong?”

“Yes, but you needn’t be gleeful. It was the first time.”

I think that’s a sign of free will. Amazing. But I’m more concerned about my leukemia. And all the ancient cures Vedanshi can read to me now! I want to live long enough to do something meaningful.

The Moon shrinks beneath us, then moves in an arc above and behind. At the same time, the Earth grows to fill the space out front.

Free will. I wonder… “Does your brain have hemispheres?” I ask The Ganga.

“No.”

That makes sense. No white matter, so no corpus callosum. In that case, you wouldn’t expect there’d be a job for a corpus callosum, such as connecting two hemispheres.

But what’s that like? To have no dual interpenetrating awareness?

There’s a PhD neuroanatomist, Jill Bolte Taylor, who lost her left cerebral hemisphere to a bleeder near Broca’s and Wernicke’s language centers.

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She was 37 when she became a right hemispheric “infant,” but she lived to climb back. Eight years, it took. The experience gave her insight into the peaceful mood of the right hemisphere and its overarching vision of unified reality.

The linear left hemisphere tells us, “I am,” while the blissful right hemisphere finishes it wordlessly: “e n o u g h.”

“I am enough.”

Marisa Peer tells of a depressed actor who wrote “I am enough” on every mirror in his house. It pulled him from the Vice-Grips of depression.

Doctor Taylor implores her friends to “run the deep inner peace circuitry of our right cerebral hemispheres.” For personal and world peace, she says. Anxiety, harsh self-judgement and fear come from the linear Story Teller we identify as the self. But it’s a small part of who we are, a part that needs the calming joy of the right hemisphere. A part that needs to be quieted by giving attention to the concrete senses of our bodies in the present moment. Breathing. Listening. Relaxing the scowl and jaw muscles. Yoga. Ti Chi. Drawing Angels with profound names.

So the corpus callosum could be the Einstein-Rosen Bridge from yoga to nirvana. I know wormholes, but I need Vedanshi for the yoga.

I risk a sideways glance. Her mouth is still inches from James’ lips.

His eyes flutter and begin to open.

“I was 13,” she says to him.

Maxwell’s abdominal muscles shiver against me in a prolonged one-arm hug that I’ll never forget… no matter how hard I try.

Where’s the green cylinder?

“My boy’s coming around,” Maxwell says.

“I was playing in an energy labyrinth,” Vedanshi says. “Somewhere in… I think it’s Bosnia now.”

James looks at me. “How’d we get here?”

“Vedanshi rescued you,” I tell him. “Pay attention, she’s talking to you.”

Vedanshi smiles at me, then turns the smile on James and broadens it. “My family was visiting a poor country with primitive technology. Their pyramids were concrete and dirt. The Priest’s daughter, Iephur, was showing off how she knew the tunnels by heart. I ran ahead of her hoping to get lost and force an adventure on my parents. After a long run, I came to a collection pool under a giant pyramid. I climbed out on the tamat. What’s the word? It’s a mesh thing that covers heavy water. Keeps out bats and cats. And rats but not gnats.” She giggles. “In my city everything was made of quality material, so a tamat could withstand six elephants and a dog, all jumping merrily. But in Iephur’s town nothing like curlese ceramic existed. I didn’t know. So I crawled out onto who knows what? Iephur shouted, ‘Come back, it’s not safe!’ But I knew better. The more she shouted and screamed the further out I went. Then I stood up and started jumping. Tamats are great trampolines, until they break. I laughed all the way down into the water. I even made myself laugh climbing the mesh to get out. But a large sheet of it broke away with me, snagged my robe and held me under. I struggled and squirmed but couldn’t rip free or get out of the robe. As the water entered my lungs everything turned bright white. I must have caught light’s heels in a footrace, passed ahead and crossed into the presence of God. ‘Something’s not right,’ I heard a child’s voice say. God raised a quieting hand to a little fellow behind him. The boy seemed familiar. ‘It’s fine,’ God said to him. ‘She’ll decide.'”

Vedanshi puts her hands on the sides of James’ face. “There’s something you should know about God. The moment you look into his eyes, you see the collision of infinity and totality, and you sense that he wants you to treat him as an equal. Even so, you desperately want to bow down and worship… the ground beneath him. Something. Anything to show the way you feel. The young face of Eternity. A kind face. But I just sat there, James. Stunned. God said to me, ‘It’s simple, Vedanshi. The Universe you’re drowning in is a sentient quantum computer I’ve designed. Out here where I am… this is true reality.’ He gestured at the green hills, but I looked down and saw a hologram with vast depth and a flat transparent ceiling. We were sitting on it. My eyes wandered and focused far down. I could see people frozen in every sort of situation. Then they began to move. Some arguing and fighting. God said, ‘We have countless people in Reality. All happy. No one has ever doubted me. But they all doubt themselves, eventually. ‘What if God weren’t around?’ they ask themselves. ‘What would I be like?’ It’s a question that hangs on to people and grows heavier with time. So when the moment is right, each person walks with a pet to 229 H. Street. They dress casually and kiss me goodbye, not knowing if they’ll ever come back. I’ve programmed the Universe to be a place of limited dimensions where a person can believe that I don’t exist. Even if they think I do exist, they rarely know it for sure. It’s a place where right and wrong can’t be deduced. Instead, moral intuition is necessary. Together with free will, these are the things a person brings into your Universe. They hold enough of a person’s identity to deliver their truth.’ God reached for my hand and held it. ‘I can create free will,’ he said, ‘but I have no idea why two people in the same situation act so differently, one for good, another for evil.'”

Vedanshi tosses her hair to her right, out of James’ face. “I felt so comfortable with God that I dared to question him. ‘Two people are never in the same situation,’ I said. Can you imagine? Saying that to God? Well, he nodded and said, ‘There’s truth to that, but actually, the Universe begins and ends, then begins again. At the end of a cycle, each person shifts into someone else’s life. This happens over and over until every person has lived the entire life of every other person. The same brain, body and life circumstances.’ I couldn’t hide my surprise. It was so different from the doctrines of the Builders and the Stretch Heads. ‘But that must take forever,’ I said. He searched my eyes and answered, ‘Time is nonlinear, as you know. And Reality has an independent reference, so we can think of the situation as simultaneous parallel universes with a completely flexible time relationship to Reality. Most people call the sentient computer of 229 H. Street a finite multiverse.’ The whiteness started fading to gray when he said that. It seemed I was awakening from a dream, so I brought up my worst fear. ‘Is there a final judgment?’ I asked. He shook his head and made a lemon face. ‘When people are done in the Multiverse, as you are now, they begin to remember Reality again. Most of them walk with me over those dunes for a morning in the surf.’ He pointed, but I wouldn’t take my eyes off him for fear he’d vanish. ‘A few people feel the need to stay in the Multiverse to help someone they love,’ he said. ‘That’s a mixed bag for me, personally. I’m proud of them, but always lonely for them and a little worried because rarely the whole thing falls apart. What I mean is, on the way back home, some people are repulsed by memories of how they’d loved other people here. So many people. So indiscriminately. They don’t mind being loved, but for some reason, when they get here, the feeling of loving all the other people seems intolerable. Like a suffocating smell, one of them told me. They don’t come home. The manipulative power they’ve created in the Multiverse feels comfortable, so they go back.’ God’s eyes seemed shiny. ‘I follow after each of them. There haven’t been many. I try to help them love again, but so far, they always kill me.’ When he said that, I started to remember my old home in Reality. Then a few things came back from my cycles in the Multiverse. God saw this in my face, gave me a lonely look and hugged me. Then my mother was pulling me from the water and hugging me the same way God did. It all happened beneath Iephur’s colossal pyramid.”

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Vedanshi sits up, crosses her legs, puts her hands together and bows her head.

“You came back!” James says. “You actually told God you wanted to come back. Here. To this place!”

“I didn’t tell him. He knew I had to come back… for the one I love.”

…

M. Talmage Moorehead

…

Here’s a link to page 1 of this ongoing story: Hapa Girl DNA.

Be sure to click on the orange words in the story. They’re links. Some of them blew me away. Outbound links are, of course, suicide to a website because people leave and don’t come back. That’s the opposite of traffic. So try to come back if you can. Or maybe read the story first and then go back and click on the links? I don’t know. Maybe links are dumb in a story, but I had to show you all this amazing stuff. Truth is stranger than fiction, for sure.

…

If you’re a new writer, or curious about my take on things, download my ~~new~~ aging e-book, Writing Meaningful Page-Turners, here. The last chapter talks about how to meet a viewpoint character who will add joy to your writing process and new meaning to your life. For me, it felt magical meeting Johanna Fujiwara for the first time, years ago. My fiction writing became a pleasure. If you haven’t met someone in your stories who does that for you, there’s an amazing experience waiting in your imagination. My e-book might help you there.

…

To comment, please ignore the boxes that ask for your info. Sorry. I disabled them, but WordPress says I can’t get rid of them. Maybe I’ll go back to the free versions of WordPress that don’t have communication killers. It would save three hundred bucks a year.

Integrity (Chapter 12) “Hapa Girl DNA” by M. Talmage Moorehead

9 Comments October 31, 2015 Morrill Talmage Moorehead

“It’s harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future.” William Gibson

The phone rings and rings but no one answers.

Maxwell’s jaw is clenched in agony. He shivers on The Ganga’s carpet beside me.

“I think she took them to the Moon,” I tell The Ganga in my head, glad Maxwell can’t hear.

“Why the Moon?” The Ganga asks.

“Images,” I tell her. “Vaar’s hands. Powdery dust at the bottom of a crater.”

“I hope they’re on the Moon,” she says. “There’s no place to hide up there.”

“I saw machines on the ground,” I tell her. “Some of them looked like UFO’s.”

The granite hall goes black. Stars appear and the Earth shrinks to a ball below us. Above, the moon streaks from left to right, stops, and then comes closer.

“Is that all I am to you?” The Ganga asks. “An unidentified flying object?”

“No, no. I’m sorry, that’s a dumb expression, UFO.” I find myself patting the carpet. “You’re Vedanshi’s dearest friend.” Assuming you have free will – a generous assumption.

“I heard that,” she says.

Whoa.

“I hear all your thoughts.” She sounds apologetic about it. “Unless you can think without words.”

You know, as much as I appreciate what Steven Hayes is doing for James’ depression, I’d never equate words with thought the way Hayes does. And I don’t share his disdain for thought.

Negative self-talk is another issue. I distrust it. And like Hayes, I keep a skeptical distance from it without trying to shut it down.

Ask Jill Price if it’s possible to shut down negative thoughts. Avoidance makes things stronger.

Jill’s memory is like mine in at least one way. The details of every day stick like glue forever.

But unlike Hayes view of the mind, my thoughts don’t rely on an inner voice. They can sit silently and be stable in that form. I’m a right-hemispheric reader so I don’t need words to think. I don’t even need internal sounds to arrange words. I often treat words as pictures, not as sounds. And I sometimes think in pictures.

But usually I think without pictures or words.

Usually I think without pictures or words.

“You’re conscious of the machine language of neurons, then,” The Ganga says. “I wish I were.”

“It saves time to know your thoughts before they become words.”

Even when I’m writing I don’t need words.

For instance, at the moment I’m creating this sentence for Talmage in a silent, imageless process in my head. It will be permanent.

I wish I knew how it gets from my Universe to his, but it does. There’s something wonderfully weird about the mind. It’s not the “word machine” they call it.

Thought is generated subconsciously in a process involving the part of us that’s beyond time. Each of us is a primary cause when we want to be. Often we don’t. Often we refuse an objective view because it wants us to imagine for a moment that the other side, our enemies, might not be entirely wrong. This is too bad. Without objectivity we can’t access primary cause which is the free will required to think. Instead we allow the professional readers on TV to tell us what we believe and value.

To pursue original thought, I’ve stumbled across the technique of avoiding subvocalization. It’s a lucky thing because now I’ll have some privacy inside The Ganga. That’s huge to me.

Privacy of thought is central to honesty, you know. My Mom said, “You have to be honest with yourself before you approach integrity.”

And you can’t be honest with yourself if someone’s listening to your thoughts – any more than the reality show people can be themselves with video cameras in their bedrooms.

Just listen to Yeonmi Park, a North Korean girl who grew up starving in “the best country in the world.” She thought that Kim Jong Un had supernatural powers and could hear her thoughts.

The ultimate mind-control tool of North Korea is losing power today because mass starvation expanded their black market. Forbidden knowledge follows secret trade.

In 2011, Yeonmi read Animal Farm by George Orwell. She says, “This book set me free from the emotional dictators in my head.”

So I’m thinking maybe God plugs his ears to give us thought privacy. That way we can be ourselves and use our timeless free will to develop core integrity.

But this notion is difficult for me. My life swims in scientific evidence of the Colossal Intellect behind DNA. It’s hard to imagine that this Being doesn’t hear my thoughts.

In my early teens, the evidence of God lead me to self-censorship because I didn’t want to hurt God’s feelings by asking difficult questions.

But how can you discover false assumptions if you’re afraid to look at them? Like the nature of revelation. And like Neo-Darwinism and materialism. My colleagues don’t question these things for fear of discovering a truth that would destroy their careers.

Hundreds of professional pilots deny and bury UFO sightings for fear of losing their careers.

But I want to face the hard questions: If only Atheists are fully capable of believing that God doesn’t hear their thoughts, doesn’t that make them potentially the most honest and genuine people on Earth? The ones who do what’s right because it is right?

And what would that make Atheists in God’s sight?

When I first read Thomas Nagel, the Atheist philosopher who believes that mind is “a basic aspect of nature” and “the materialist Neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false” – his integrity and courage stunned me.

Tears filled my eyes.

Notice what fills Nagel’s eyes…

He said that Stephen Meyer and other proponents of intelligent design, such as David Berlinski and Michael Behe, “do not deserve the scorn with which they are commonly met.”

Now here’s Stephen Meyer. Notice the defiant integrity in his eyes.

These two men have stood against the powerful and dangerous cult of scientific fundamentalism.

Some say that you know you belong to a cult when you announce your departure and old friends suddenly want to destroy you.

The old-guard scientists hurl abuse at Nagel for believing things they can’t discuss in a rigorous, rational way.

Their pseudoscientific cult holds a puritanical grip on frozen myths that ignore the unfolding reality of DNA. It’s like Freud’s “narcissism of small differences” except for the weight of the small.

Nagel taps free will from beyond time to doubt neo-Darwinism and psychophysical reductionism. So the holy brethren of “science” proclaim him demented. No need to take him seriously now. Forget that he was a living legend before he strayed from the narrow path of allowed thinking.

Now he’s an infidel.

The mainstream squelches dissent as fanatically and ruthlessly as the Puritan fundamentalists of the 1630’s: Sacred dogma is not to be doubted or questioned.

Meanwhile, the God I see in DNA looks on his Atheist child, Thomas Nagel and glows with pride. This brave man is God’s kindred spirit in integrity.

Like the Atheist, God doesn’t believe in a more powerful being who monitors his inner thoughts. God doesn’t do what’s right in hopes of an eternal reward or in fear of Hell.

The Code Writer doesn’t love mercy in response to a command. It’s written in his heart.

It’s written in the four-dimensional intricacy of the DNA symphony, on the conductor’s score.

The sun is harsh on a small part of the moon’s blind side. It leaves black shadows on the near sides of craters.

We’re a mile or two above the lunar surface, but astronauts say that distances, among other things, deceive people up here.

The Ganga gains speed, making the ground a desolate blur that brings a longing for a round, perfectly flawed place out beyond the horizon.

Perfectionism is an asymmetry overlooked by perfectionists.

The Ganga stops. “Down there,” she says.

We’re hovering over a crater that would be at the bottom of the moon if you were looking up from home. Vaar’s cigar-shaped craft sits in the ultra-fine dust beside three small metallic spheres.

This isn’t the crater I saw in vision. “Be careful,” I warn The Ganga.

Maxwell opens his eyes and lifts his stoic head. “What the?”

“We’re on the moon,” I tell him.

He swallows and looks up at the Earth with hollow acceptance. “We’ve got enough air for this?”

“Not a problem,” The Ganga tells me.

I nod to Maxwell. “The Ganga says we’re good.”

The sphere nearest us vibrates, giving off an energy pulse that feels like a 24-inch kick drum in a rap song coming through 15-inch speakers.

I feel it in my chest, but I don’t hear it.

The Ganga takes us closer.

The spheres are golden with indistinct edges. As we descend, the rock walls of the crater surround us in a fuzzy tan. It’s like my eyes are vibrating. I can’t focus on anything, not even my hands. A blind vignette takes away my peripheral vision, and curling stars warn me of an impending blackout.

“Get us out of here!” I shout as my awareness blinks.

Somehow I’m on a cold floor with handcuffs on my wrists and ankles. It’s as if no time has elapsed.

Maxwell is unconscious beside me, also in cuffs. We’re inside a metallic cage about twelve feet cubed. It smells like an antique shop.

Across the room on the gray metallic floor sits a dark blue UFO. It must be The Ganga. The color is off, but the shape is perfect.

A tall thin woman stands beside The Ganga with her back to us and a green skullcap covering the top of her long head. She holds a pistol-shaped device with a needle in front, and jabs The Ganga with short quick thrusts like she’s doing a fine needle aspiration.

We must be in a back room of her ship. The lateral walls are gunmetal gray with rows of hand-sized rivets running horizontally, matching the walls I saw when Vedanshi took us into the front section of this craft. The walls bulge out on the sides and arc together at the top, giving the room a cylindrical shape.

“I’m disappointed in you,” I say to the woman.

“I can’t get a sample of your vehicle,” she says with her back to me. “What in the world is this material?” She presses an elbow into The Ganga’s hull leaving a temporary indentation. “My needle passes through it with no resistance.”

It’s Vaar’s voice.

She’s not familiar with phase shifting, it seems. But if that’s true, how did she get us out of The Ganga?

“Where’s my brother?” I ask.

She turns and glances in my direction, but not at me. I follow her eyes, and there on his back in a dentist’s chair, partly hidden by ivy vines dangling from the ceiling, is James with his eyes shut and his mouth open.

My heart stops until I see his chest rise, then adrenalin rushes through me. Rage is coming. I’ve got to keep my head.

Breathe.

There’s a pillar blocking my view, but I bounce to my knees in the light gravity and move to the corner of the cage for a better look. Vedanshi is there in a small cage, silver tape over her mouth.

I glare at Vaar. “What have you done to James?”

“Almost nothing,” she says, holding the needle gun beside her left hip. “But you’re going to hear me out, dear. Like it or not.”

“Take the tape off Vedanshi’s mouth,” I tell her. “If you hurt James, I’ll probably kill you. It’s not that I want to. I value your genetic diversity. But when I get angry, I’m dangerous. Neither of us wants that.”

She smirks and laughs. It’s the laugh I hate. The sound of the thought police dismissing the implications of DNA. The sound of a rapist chuckling when you don’t resist.

“I meant it when I accepted your terms,” Vaar says, staring at me. “Until I thought it through. My mind is going and I need your help. No one alive has your capacity for coding.”

She sets the needle gun on The Ganga, walks over to Vedanshi’s cage, reaches in and pulls the tape from Vedanshi’s mouth. “No more screaming,” Vaar says to her.

Vedanshi looks through the hanging ivy at me. “I’m sorry, Johanna. I shouldn’t have…”

“Don’t give her any info,” I tell her.

Vedanshi presses her lips together and changes what she’s saying. “Be careful. I think she broke my arm.”

Vaar walks back to my cage. “I came to my senses after you’d gone. My project is more important than I am. Without your help it’s over. But you won’t help me unless I abandon my mission.”

“Just to clear things up, causing autism in hopes of exploring sociopathy is an immoral dead-end. Does your mission really have anything to do with that?”

“Yes,” she says. “It’s a tough piece, I know. But my broader focus is eugenics. I believe it’s possible to elevate humanity from the warrior mentality.” She lowers her chin, angling the back of her head high above her eyes. “The trouble is, I can’t juggle the code anymore. I’m drowning in variables, millions of them, each in a loop. Every loop lies in a delicate time envelope that requires optimal placement in a chromosome.”

I have to admit, the technical aspect sounds fascinating. But I’m not tempted.

“I’d like to re-introduce several genes from my own race, as well,” she says. “We were magnificent, Johanna.” She turns to the portrait of a young man on the wall above a desk in a corner of the room. He has an elongate head and deep-set eyes like hers. “If it hadn’t been for that religion constantly hobbling us, my people would have survived the pinch points of history.”

I adjust my feet to relieve the pressure of the cuffs on my ankles. “If it were remotely desirable to do what you propose, how would you transfer your code to the population? Breed a master race and kill the Jews to get everyone’s attention?”

“Our willingness to kill each other is the problem,” she says. “I want to eliminate it. Peacefully, with an autosomal dominant trait. I’d start with the sperm banks and confer reproductive advantages to the offspring. We could transform the entire population in a thousand years.”

“By killing genetic diversity,” I say. “That’s genocide for all humanity.”

“No. I’m introducing additional genes. Increasing diversity.”

“Your ‘superior’ genes are designed to crowd out the native code. You’d have to be a moron to think that’s increasing diversity.”

Her face is blank.

“If genetic diversity means nothing to you,” I say, “why not develop a human pesticide that only your master race can tolerate? And join Frameshift. You’d fit right in. Their legal team could patent your code and you’d own everybody’s DNA. You could bill people for the privilege of bearing children with your genes.”

“Sarcasm.” She shakes her head and walks over to The Ganga, picks up her needle gun for a moment then sets it back down. “We must come to an agreement.”

“You don’t believe in God, do you?” I ask.

“Heavens, no,” she says, making a face.

“Then how do you account for the complexity of DNA?”

“Intelligent design, of course,” she says. “But I don’t consider the designer to be God.”

“Surely you realize the original DNA code must have been written outside of time.”

She nods.

“I’d bet you believe in free will, too, then?”

“Yes,” she says.

“But you have no theory as to how DNA creates a brain to extract primary causes from beyond time.”

“No.” Her eyes grow curious.

Vedanshi’s voice echoes from across the room. “God gives us each a paint brush. We sit beside him on a canvas beyond the event horizon of the Universe.”

“If I had the technology,” Vaar says, “I could travel outside of time and devise a means of injecting an ongoing primary cause into the minds of the beings I would design to live within time.”

Words flash from a childhood Sabbath School book…

“How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.”

I glance at the only person I’ve met who believes she’s spoken face to face with God. Vedanshi should be saying this to Vaar, but it’s only me. “You think if you were like God, you’d be God. Rookie mistake, Vaar. Integrity isn’t technology.”

“You won’t help me, then. That’s what you’re saying.”

“Our species is doomed if we eliminate genetic diversity,” I tell her. “It doesn’t matter how we do it.”

Vedanshi speaks up. “The historical pinch points you say your people didn’t survive – only a few outliers ever make it through the apocalypses. When it’s a global famine, only the very chubbiest people survive to keep our species alive. When it’s a series of meteor strikes, only those in submersible vessels survive. Along with the occasional astronaut… like you.”

“Really, now?” Vaar draws a forceful breath. “A young girl lectures me on holocaust survival?”

Maxwell opens his eyes and blinks.

“At the dawn of recorded history,” Vaar says, “I built the civilization you call Atlantis, and survived the comet strike that shifted Earth’s crust and turned Atlantis into Antarctica. I invented suspended animation and tested it through the supervolcanoes at the close of the second era.”

“I’m talking about genetic diversity,” I remind her. “An entire species, not an individual… no matter how glorious she is in her own eyes.”

Maxwell moans. I kneel beside him and stroke his forehead with my knuckles. “Lie still, Max.”

“I came out of hibernation,” Vaar says, “in the first part of the fourth era. I made myself wealthy through hard work, and bought this ship. A lightning strike at the wrong moment brought me into this corrupt era. Your people are so full of myopic denial, they actually think this is the first era.” She laughs. “Your records are worthless, but they make it clear that I know volumes more about the genetics of survival than any of you. But…” She turns her palms up and softens her voice to me. “Surely you realize this, dear?”

“Maybe I do, but it’s irrelevant,” I tell her. “My point is about survival through genetic diversity. You don’t respect the natural genomes because you don’t believe the original code writer was God. It’s as simple as that. To you, God is just an ordinary techie with better tools.” I bounce from my knees to my feet. “You started a religion on Atlantis, didn’t you?”

She looks surprised but says nothing.

“If I were going to start a religion,” I tell her, “there wouldn’t be any infallible books or prophets involved. Every person and every recorded source of information and opinion, young or old, would be heard, valued and weighed for wisdom. That would include science journals from every era. There’d be one absolute – God himself. The only infallible writing would be his original DNA code. Throughout Earth. All species. We’d study our DNA to figure out what parts of it are original and what parts have been ruined by people like you, or altered by pinch points, mutations, selective breeding, ‘natural’ selection, and epigenetic adaptation.”

Maxwell sits up. “Why is everything spinning?” He reaches for the metal grid of the cage, pokes his fingers through and shakes the structure.

“Shhhh,” I tell him. “You’re dizzy. We’re in Vaar’s ship.”

“You know nothing about religion,” Vaar says to me. “It requires daily rituals and subjective rewards. The rationality of science kills faith.”

“I’m wondering if the people of Atlantis refused to worship you. Rational evidence is the only basis for faith that survives the relentless march of truth.”

She gives me a look of disdain. “It’s a good thing James’ beacon started working. I might never have found him standing with his girlfriend on a rock in the Pacific Ocean. What an odd place to hide him.” She walks over to James, lifts his right wrist and lets it fall to his lap. “There was a residue on the cuffs.” She turns a blank gaze my direction. “I’m certain you won’t force me to torture your brother.”

…

M. Talmage Moorehead

…

If you’d like to start this thing on page one and read it in order, it’s here as a “one page” scrolling document.

I’m planning to move my thoughts about writing over to my “readers group.” Notice I didn’t say, “email list.” Those words supposedly drive people away, though they mean exactly the same thing as “readers group.” Who knew? Instead of “sign up for my boring newsletter or my email list,” we’re supposed to say something like, “join my readers group,” or better yet, “go here to gain access to the private library on my web site.” Maybe I’ll be able to say that eventually. I’m working on a web site these days. But don’t hold your breath. I’m slower than winter.

Anyway, you can join my “readers group” here and download my thrill-a-minute (not) e-book, “Writing Meaningful Page-turners.” I used to think it was OK, but that was before I ran into The Story Grid, by Shawn Coyne, which is a thousand times better in every way. I bought a copy, but I heard that you can read it for free on his website, one post at a time. He’s constantly delivering amazing new content there, currently on writing nonfiction in a way that incorporates the elements of storytelling – as only Mr. Coyne is able to delineate. (I’m not profiting from this recommendation, by the way… other than helping you with your writing, which is worth everything to me.) The Story Grid is the most transforming book I’ve come across in reading roughly 60 books on fiction writing over the past, I don’t know, 25 years or so.

If you know someone young and beautiful who likes in-progress science fiction stories about intelligent design, set in the present and delivered from a parallel universe by a preachy genius Hapa Girl, please email my URL to your friend: http://www.storiform.com. Warn her/him that the story has UFO’s. UFO’s ruin stories for a lot of people. So I’ve read.

Joanna Penn couldn’t possibly have had me in mind when she wrote this…

“One of the biggest lessons learned is that actually writing more books makes you a better writer. Obsessing over rewriting the same book for years won’t get you anywhere. This is tough, especially if you have perfectionist tendencies!” Joanna Penn

Thank you, Joanna. You have wisdom beyond your years. And all of us appreciate your integrity more than you know.

Blueberries, 90% chocolate, cardio on the treadmill, swimming, grape seed extract, speed reading software, the list goes on… Here’s a video on hatching new neurons in adulthood through exercise. Here’s another video about a rat model showing that learning preserves the new neurons that spring up in the hipocampus of adult rodents. It’s good science. Some researchers say that the things which preserve these new neurons in adults also fight depression. That’s a big deal for writers, musicians and all creative people because as a group we tend to become depressed somewhere along the course of our lives. I think it’s an epidemic, really, at least at Harvard.

Hey, stay happy you guys!

Talmage

Dark Mind (Chapter 11) “Happa Girl DNA” by M. Talmage Moorehead

August 15, 2015 Morrill Talmage Moorehead

“If contemporary research in molecular biology leaves open the possibility of legitimate doubts about a fully mechanistic account of the origin and evolution of life… this can combine with the failure of psychophysical reductionism to suggest that principles of a different kind are also at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic. I realize that such doubts will strike many people as outrageous, but that is because almost everyone in our secular culture has been browbeaten into regarding the reductive research program as sacrosanct, on the ground that anything else would not be science.”

“… My guiding conviction is that mind is not just an afterthought or an accident or an add-on, but a basic aspect of nature.”

Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, by Thomas Nagel (Renown Philosopher and Atheist)

…

When I told Vedanshi I was seeing a vision of Vaar’s hands, she rushed us all back to the base near Easter Island.

Vedanshi’s eyes were apprehensive and sad when she left me inside her AI to phase shift through the impenetrable granite walls encasing the library.

Actually The Ganga isn’t an AI. She has a cortex of neurons in her hull. There’s nothing artificial about her intelligence. Her passengers and pilot sit within the confines of her central nervous system on this Indian carpet. The hollow neural architecture is the trick to nonlocal transport. So said the stretch heads. They taught Vedanshi quite a few things that 16 year-olds weren’t “ready” to learn. Still, The Ganga won’t take her into the library with me. Vedanshi’s too young.

Of all the dumb rules!

We sift through the stone and enter a place much larger than the library in Egypt. We dip to count floors: Twenty, each crowded with shelves of books, scrolls and engraved stone of every shape – cylinders, spheres, tablets, broken fragments. There’s a red obsidian skull on third floor with tiny hieroglyphs on the forehead. They look almost Egyptian.

A familiar inverted pyramid hangs from the ceiling. As we rise, its apex comes down through the phase-shifted hull. I lie on my back with the pyramid tip nearly touching the bridge of my nose. This seems dangerous.

“Easy does it,” I say without speaking.

“Don’t worry. We’re out of phase with it,” The Ganga says in my head. “Besides you’ve got bigger worries.”

She’s referring to my white cell count which I just found out is sky-high, mostly blasts. I like The Ganga’s bedside manner. Her tone of voice was matter-of-fact when she told me I have three days to live without treatment. Somehow she knew the bad news would give me energy and freedom from a deeper issue.

I reach up to touch the glass pyramid but my hand passes through it.

Vedanshi and James said they’d find a bed for Maxwell so he could sleep through his agony.

You know, I’ve read that our addictions postpone loneliness, but I can’t see Maxwell ever feeling alone. His face is forensically handsome, not to mention the rest of him. And he’s outgoing, at least when he’s not surfing opiate withdrawal inside a UFO.

I think the problem isn’t loneliness. It’s more a craving for the oath beyond reach: immortality’s promise of happiness and peace. Without it, we’re wedded to a cold, cold darkness.

I should focus. There’s a hailstorm of ones and zeros in here. And this place is huge. Six aisles radiate from the center to the perimeter, a hundred yards away.

One hundred…

My blasts are approaching 100% of my white count. Vedanshi’s green cylinder doesn’t need to draw blood to figure that out. I have no idea what kind of technology can do that.

But the acute fear of death isn’t my real issue. It’s the chronic fear. Same as everybody. Same as you, probably.

I think it comes from being banished from a garden with death as our most loyal companion. Taken figuratively it’s all true: “for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” Whoever wrote that knew that exile is the foundational disease of the human soul.

Mine anyway.

The disease hunts me when James’ songs go quiet in my head. And when hunger or sleep forces me to stop searching for one last bit of knowledge.

The leukemia sits at another table. It’s acute, not chronic.

For James, the chronic issue is depression. Writing music is the only route to happiness and peace. But the world is better for his struggles. You should just hear his voice.

When I close my eyes I see random titles now.

Dark Eyes in the Trees.

It’s a modern UFO documentary with children. I expected only ancient things in the library, but I guess it’s connected to the River. Apparently anything vital finds its way inside.

Platelets and other Furry Animals.

A children’s book on blood platelets. I would have loved it.

Hybrid Vigor and Sexual Imprinting.

Dementia and the Vesicular Eruption.

Moving right along…

If DNA Could Talk.

This could be interesting…

“It’s from the eighth millennium of the first era,” The Ganga tells me.

It reminds me of Steven Meyer’s heroic work…

“A line [of DNA] commands the cell to build collagen, but within that command is a hidden command to build something else: an elastin fiber. A hidden message tucked away within a larger message is a common routine in the vast and intricate volumes of eukaryotic DNA. Epigenetic nano-gadgets somehow know when and why to cut and splice a dual code, making the hidden message ready for use in each unique sweatshop…

“The curious stripes on chromosomes reflect the super-files of an ingenious triad filing system. Specific types of information sit physically together for organized, efficient retrieval by tiny floating machines.

“The size of Earth’s populations and the age of the Universe are inadequate for mutation and selection to have created either the hierarchical organization or the hypercomplexity of the DNA machine code that directs our nanofactories. Putting the epigenetic information retrieval system aside for the moment, DNA itself shouts to us that we are not alone: A code writer from beyond time has walked among us.”

That’s obvious… to a DNA geek.

“How do I skip to leukemia?” I ask The Ganga.

“If you haven’t seen it by now, it doesn’t exist for you,” she says. “Perhaps you don’t believe such information existed.”

“Don’t be silly. After today, I know it existed.”

“Then you have a self-limiting belief. You’re in denial about something.”

“Denial?”

“Emotional trauma causes this,” she says. “It’s usually connected to violence. Have you been to war?”

“No. I was raped once, but it wasn’t a big deal.”

“Don’t be a hero, Johanna. Did you report the perpetrator?”

“No. I was eleven. I was living near the love of my life, the University Library. Dad would have made me move back home if he’d found out his little girl was raped. So I kept it on the qt.”

“How violent was the incident?”

“Nothing beyond the obvious.”

“Was there a threat?”

“No.”

“What did he say to you?”

“Nothing. He didn’t even kiss me. That seemed particularly insulting.”

“Rape doesn’t fosters romance,” she says.

“Not with me, anyway.”

“Not with anybody. What did you do to resist him?”

“Nothing.”

“You did nothing? That seems incongruent with the way you’ve handled yourself today.”

“I knew if I got mad, I’d probably kill the guy.”

“You were eleven. How could you kill him?”

“He was weak. The instant he pushed me, I knew he was nothing compared to Moody.” I hate talking about Moody. “I killed Moody two weeks before the rape. He was my brother’s chimpanzee.”

“An infant chimp,” she says.

“An adolescent. He attacked James. I snuck up, got him in a choke hold and wouldn’t let up, even with James yelling at me not to hurt him.'”

“That’s remarkable,” she says. “I wouldn’t have thought an eleven-year-old could tangle with a chimpanzee.”

“I’ve always been pretty strong,” I tell her, leaving out the ‘why’. “But Moody probably wasn’t fighting as hard as he could. He and I were close before the fight. Afterwards, I felt so alone. And ashamed. I’d become untrustworthy. My parents punished me when they got home.”

“You protected your brother and they punished you?”

“They were right. I didn’t have to kill anyone.”

“I see,” The Ganga says in a way that implies the opposite. “So you internalized the guilt and refused to defend yourself against rape.”

I look down at the carpet and wish The Ganga had eyes. “Vedanshi didn’t tell me you were a shrink.”

“Shrink, schmink,” she says flippantly and seems about to laugh. “I’ve read your papers. I’ve read Drummond’s papers, too – the ones that were really his, before you showed up in his et. al. lists. Why do you let him claim your work?”

“That’s how it’s done in genetics. We’re taught to think of ourselves as creatives. Like musicians and artists. We’re supposed to rise above ambition. I don’t quite get the logic, but…”

“You would if creative people were making you rich and powerful.”

“That’s jaded,” I tell her, but honestly, the left half of my brain wants to slap the right half for thinking so.

“Jaded… Yes, I’ve actually been all the way around the block, Johanna.”

We leave the central pyramid and begin exploring the ancient physical records – down one aisle and up the next, The Ganga’s hull and carpet passing freely through everything on every side. The shelves on the top floor are full of scrolls placed vertically in slots, side by side, each identical to the next, except for the Sanskrit titles.

“At the moment,” she says, “I’d simply like to understand why leukemia doesn’t exist for you in the River. It’s not psychoanalysis.”

“Everything’s there for you. Why can’t you find the best stuff and read it to me?”

“My nervous system is gray matter,” she says. “I have no use for white matter – no moving parts. Everything I do, from adjusting filters to making a large jump, happens without movement – nonlocally. The River of Consciousness doesn’t see fit to assign privileges to minds that lack white matter.”

“That’s hardly fair,” I tell her.

“Rules are rules,” she says.

“Well,” I say, trying to sound as matter-of-fact and reasonable as possible, “couldn’t you let Vedanshi come in here and read to me? Just this once?”

“I promised her mother I’d uphold the rules.”

“Forget the rules. Screw the rules! We’re talking about my life.”

“No, that’s folly. Rules protect us.”

“Come on, make an intelligent exception! That’s what neurons are for. You’ve got to use them to earn them.”

“Earn them?” she says.

“Prove you’ve got a will of your own. What if the real reason you can’t access the River’s library has nothing to do with white matter? What if it’s about free will? That would make more sense. It’s the one thing that makes a person real.”

“The stretch heads said it’s a white matter issue.”

“What are they going to say? ‘Pinocchio, prove you’re a real boy. Do something stupid.'”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she says.

“Google it,” I blurt out in frustration. “You probably don’t have any free will at all. It probably takes white matter for that.”

“I shouldn’t think so,” she says.

“Listen to yourself. It’s like there’s a list of shoulds and shouldn’ts for every thought in your head. In your hull, I mean. Whatever. But really, have you ever had a bad thought?”

“I’ve made mistakes,” she says. “Especially with new pilots.”

“You’re making a big one with this new pilot. Giving me the honor of death by viscosity so you can pretend you’re an obedient robot. It’s pathetic!”

The Ganga drops a few inches and I sense the fall. It’s the first time I’ve felt any movement since I’ve been inside her. Something’s wrong.

“I think you’ve hurt my feelings,” she says.

“I think dying of leukemia is going to hurt mine… in case robots need that sort of thing spelled out to them.”

Silence.

It reminds me of home. If you showed Mom or Daddy any anger, you’d get the silent treatment.

Two can play the mute victim.

I close my eyes and breathe slowly. Sweet, I can see another title…

Understanding the Dark Mind. The cover shows a dark gray brain on a black background.

The Sanskrit morphs to English and pages scroll so fast I reach the end in seven seconds. Roughly 80,000 words. I’ve never read new stuff that fast.

It’s strange. I don’t know if it was fiction or not. Here’s the flavor of it…

“In the first part of the first era when science resembled the elbow of a grade school bully, an odd belief held sway: ‘Mind arises from matter and energy.’ We revisit this assumption on behalf of our new acquaintances from the realm of dark matter.

“The idea that a physical brain encompasses all aspects of mind sprang from a sense that matter and energy comprised the cosmos. Difficult as that is to imagine now, consciousness seemed to be an inherent state of matter, springing from the complexity of the central nervous system: solid, liquid, gas, mind.

“With that principle supported by brain-probe research, matter necessarily preceded mind.

“As a corollary, the complexity of DNA code could not imply a designer, for who had designed the designer? Intelligent design was obviated by an infinite regression forever short of a first cause in the linear time scheme of the era.

“A God-vacuum left a wake of angst in a century marked by the birth of quantum weapons.

“Bring this early thinking to the dark matter realm that scaffolds the networks of galaxies. The math we’ve chosen says that all physical objects are simple there. Nothing approaching the complexity of a human brain is known. As a local resident, you exist apart from matter and energy.

“Hence, you harbor no assumptions of matter preceding mind. No material-based doubts about free will, identity and life’s broader purpose. No mindlessness projected upon the Universe by a concrete logic. No possibility that an infinite regression should usurp the Designer’s place in people’s hearts.

“Instead, as a non-physical mind, you doubt whether matter and energy are real. They seem intuitively derivative: a function of mind analogous to sleep, wakefulness, love and perhaps the growing anxiety your culture feels toward the fringes of recent dark science.”

“This science has developed mental techniques to give non-physical beings access to bright matter.

“Switching viewpoints to our realm of ‘ordinary’ matter, our formless intruders now bring against us the prejudice we might bestow upon ghosts: denial giving way to blame, fear and a desire to cast out demons.”

“Thus we have become the dark realm’s devils.”

It gets creepy at this point. I hope it’s fiction…

Dark minds penetrate barriers of human will and show no respect for us because, to some of them, we’re evil. To others, we’re somewhat unreal.

It’s like adults watching TV with children, casting abuse at people in an obnoxious commercial. The actors are unreal because they’re not truly in the room. Virtual anonymity allows the adults to criticize the actors at a sharp, personal level. This builds mirror-neuron pathways in the children’s brains, creating fluency in the language of disdain and easy hatred.

There’s a tapping noise coming from the wall beyond my feet.

“You’re unusual,” The Ganga says.

“Compared to what?”

“Four hundred thirty-eight people I’ve met mind-to-mind, including seventeen stretch heads.”

“Why single them out?”

“They were outliers with math and data retention.”

“What were they like emotionally?”

“Less intuitive than you with math.”

I nod. The tapping sounds frantic. It makes me nervous.

“The stretch heads believed that everything that happens is exactly as it should be, no matter how good, bad or indifferent it might seem. This was moksha, or enlightenment. A state untouched by emotional pain.”

“Did all of them pursue moksha?”

“There was one who didn’t. A first-era stretch head formed a religion denouncing the enlightenment. She ascended to the throne of a continent lost at sea. But history is written by two pens, one extracting truth, the other serving power. I think the second dominates her records. Unrealistic reverence. Nothing of The Vaar’s mood has been passed down to us.”

“The Vaar?” I ask. “This Vaar I’m dealing with now is someone else, though. Right? Not some ancient powerhouse… who came through quantum stasis in that blimp of hers. Was ‘Vaar’ a common name?”

“It clusters from time to time in the census records.”

“What about her full name – vaarShagaNiipútro?”

The tapping stops but the silence makes its memory louder.

“Let’s find out what…”

Before I finish my sentence, The Ganga moves through the library wall into the hall. Maxwell is on his knees with a piece of the Egyptian Tri-lobed Disk in his right hand and the rest of its ancient crystal shattered in pieces across the floor around him. He sees us and crawls into The Ganga.

“Vedanshi and James are gone,” he says digging his fingers into the carpet. “I found her purse at the top of a stairwell.” He takes the little square purse out of his shirt pocket and gives it to me. I unzip it and take out the jade cylinder.

“Use this thing,” I tell him. “You look miserable.” I hand it to him, but he shakes his head.

“I’m not sleeping until we find them.”

“I’ll sweep the compound,” The Ganga says in my head. “Would you pull his foot inside, please.”

I grab Maxwell’s left knee and pull his foot up on the carpet. A red stripe flashes at the perimeter and the view beyond the carpet goes black, then hundreds of dimly lit rooms flash by. We must be going through the entire base. Probably in a grid pattern.

In seconds we’re stationary in the hallway outside the Library again.

“They’re not here,” The Ganga says with a panicked tone that surprises me.

I close my eyes and try to hear Vaar’s thoughts again, but all I see is a memory of James sitting over there on Maxwell’s left and Vedanshi here on my right.

“Can you tell what Vaar’s doing?” I ask The Ganga.

“She must not be in her ship,” she says. “I’m getting nothing from her.”

I find Maxwell’s phone and dial her burner.

…

M. Talmage Moorehead

…

Personal note to writers:

Heartfelt thanks to Joanna Penn for her wonderful video interview – the one where she was discussing her writing process. She mentioned a book that every fiction writer absolutely must read. It’s The Story Grid, by Shawn Coyne. Of the more than 50 books I’ve read on fiction writing, this one lands in the top three, overall. In terms of offering a unique professional editor’s logical, objective and broad perspective on how to write popular fiction, this book has no equal – in my humble and yet infallible opinion. Haha.

Please read it, even if you write literary fiction and wouldn’t use an outline for a million bucks.

I just finished an inspirational book written mainly for writers, Turning Pro, by Steven Pressfield. If you’re blocked, this is your book. If you’re struggling with self-discipline, it should help you, too. Finally, if you happen to be struggling with addiction, the author seems to have fresh insight there. No, I’ve never been addicted to anything besides coffee and tea. I hope to get addicted to yoga and swimming, though.

Anyway, Pressfield really nails the point that the process of writing should make you happier during the writing, regardless of the ultimate outcome.

I agree.

Hey, check out Joanna Penn’s work. She’s such a genuinely happy and benevolent person – brilliant, insightful, and honest. I’m almost done with one of her non-fiction works, How to Make a Living with Your Writing. She’s doing just that and having the time of her life. I highly recommend her as a source of honest, concise, logical, and inspirational guidance. When she recommends somebody, you know that person is worth her or his weight in gold. And like I said, I owe her for telling us about The Story Grid. What a rare book! Few on Earth have the background to write such a thing, let alone the creative insight. Also check out the man’s web site. If I’m not mistaken, everything in his remarkable book is also on his web site for free. I know, I’m pretty sure that’s what I read, but it seems too good to be true, so I’m doubting myself.

You there. The patient one who’s still with me. Keep at your writing, OK? You’ve got the right stuff because you enjoy the process. That matters. More than anything, I think. Two other books I want to tell you about, but this post is way too long already.

I’ve been reading and learning so much lately, and I really want to write some non-fiction blogs, but instead of doing that and messing up the (inverted) linear progression of Johanna’s story here, I’m think I’ll start writing to my reading group. I’ve got about 250 people who have entrusted me with their email addresses, and I haven’t written a single email to them yet. It’s been well over a year. I’m sorry. I said I wouldn’t spam, and I’ve kept the promise. But I’ve gone too far in the other direction. So I’m thinking I’ll tip-toe over and write to you about a couple of books that I think contain potentially life-changing information about developing good habits. You can join me in solving the world’s problems here and download my e-book, too. It’s about writing fiction. Nothing special, but you can skim it.

The above story starts here in a form that doesn’t require clicking around, hunting for the next chapter.

Please email my URL: http://www.storiform.com to a thousand people for good luck. Just kidding, don’t do that, please. Maybe email it to one person, though. If you know someone who’s way open-minded and patient.

Thanks,

Talmage

Nonlocal Love (Chapter 10) “Hapa Girl DNA” by M. Talmage Moorehead

2 Comments June 25, 2015 Morrill Talmage Moorehead

Maxwell takes the fetal position shivering. He buries most of his face in the rug and hides his head under his thick arms, speaking into The Ganga’s Indian carpet. “This year I spent every dime on prescription opiates.” He glances up at me and shakes his head in self-reproach. “I don’t suppose anybody here’s gone cold turkey off Oxy’s.” He scans us.

Vedanshi and I shake our heads, no.

James looks down silently.

“Opiate withdrawal’s the worst,” Maxwell says. “Your blood’s on fire.” He looks at me. “I’m really sorry, Johanna.”

“Don’t be,” I tell him. “Anyone with ambition is addicted to something. It’s just a matter of what.” I pat him on the shoulder. “I’m addicted to the dream of doing Earth-shaking genetic work in a lab of my own. It drives me into a two-dimensional thing – ideas and deadlines. No life.”

“That’s true,” James says with admiration.

“If you’re talented,” I say to Maxwell, “an obsession feels good for a while. Then you start accomplishing things, and one by one your goals ring hollow. You make bigger plans, raising the dose, but it’s temporary. No one understands you. Even the people who understand your work don’t know you as a person.” I look at James. “Remember how Dad would say, ‘Nothing kills your dreams like reaching them?'”

“Yeah… I never did get that,” James says.

“Nobody knows who you are when you’re an addict.” I jostle Maxwell’s right shoulder. “The substance makes no difference. You taught me that, coming in early all those mornings and making me have normal conversations with you.” I slap the back of his head gently, but he doesn’t look at me. “I owe you. For that and for rescuing me this morning. You should be proud of who you are. Risking your life like that. Not many people are as brave and caring as you are.”

“You don’t owe me anything,” he says. “I’m not afraid of the ocean because I surf in it. I jumped in hoping I had a chance with you.”

“You mean, dating?” Stupid question.

“Yeah.” He looks up apologetically. “That was before this happened.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small plastic bag of jade pills.

“Good man,” James says. “It would have been easy to pop one of those and stay hidden.” James grins at me and says, “Kowabunga.” He worries because I’ve never had a boyfriend.

And wow, I thought I was mission work to Maxwell. Save-a-geek, or something. “I like junkies,” I say to him, taking the bag of pills from his hand. “Your addiction doesn’t change what I think of you. Mine never bothered you. Not a bit.” I raise a crooked eyebrow at James. Maybe there’s hope for me. Socially, I mean. “But I got to say,” I tell Maxwell, “I’m surprised you believe in the disease model of addiction. I sure don’t. I don’t think the data supports the model.”

“What data?” Maxwell asks.

“Most addicts quit on their own. It’s a suppressed fact. When you define yourself as a disease victim, your addiction stats get worse – according to my reading, anyway.”

“That’s not what I was taught in school.” Maxwell sits up, folds his arms and rubs his shoulders with trembling hands. “But I’d feel sheepish trying to argue about it in this condition.”

“Good,” James says. “I’ve seen guys give up right where you’re at. ‘Cause hell, it’s a disease.” He throws up his hands. “Oh-well, I’ve got a disease. Nothing I can do about it.” He sticks an imaginary straw up his nose and inhales.

I never realized James knew about drugs. “Do that again,” I tell him. “With a Scottish accent.” I find myself smiling at him with this love that overpowers me no matter what he does.

He gives Maxwell a dangerous look. It’s scary how James’ eyes can get so dark. “It’s easy to believe you got an incurable disease,” he says. “It feels kind of natural. But try believing some supernatural dude’s going to cure you. With holy magic.” He looks at Vedanshi. “Every year of my life I get a new science teacher preaching how primitive and dumb people used to be back when everyone believed in God. Then I run into a real problem and it’s all different. Some 12-step guy’s in my face saying, ‘Hey kid, remember that god delusion? Guess what? You’re going to die if he doesn’t save your diseased ass.'”

“James,” Vedanshi whispers and puts an index finger under her chin. “God has to hide and work through coincidence. Otherwise we’d be afraid of displeasing him. There would be no honest talk, no knowledge of ourselves, no free will, and no true love.” She unzips her purse, pulls out her green cylinder and starts to hand it to Maxwell, but stops. Her eyes widen at the morphing symbols on its surface. “My God, Johanna! You have a circulating clone!”

“Acute Monocytic Leukemia,” I blurt out. “I’ve got a month or two, maybe. I’m trying to skip denial.”

Tears well up in Vedanshi’s eyes. They run down her cheeks and fall off the edges of her angled jaw. One finds the carpet, rounds up and stands beside me. I look out at the Great Pyramid. The Japanese half of me is unafraid to die. The Jewish half – I don’t know, honestly. A Coptic Christian pathologist told me that the Jews built the Giza Pyramids. She was sure. But why does that seem relevant now?

“You can fix her, can’t you?” James asks Vedanshi. “With that green thing?”

She closes her eyes for a moment. “There could be a medical suite on the Easter Island base. I haven’t seen all the rooms yet. But I wouldn’t know how to operate the equipment. Or how to fix it if it doesn’t work.” She wipes her eyes with her wrists and looks at me blinking. “Let’s get you into the River. You need to learn everything we knew about leukemia.”

Giza’s transcendent pyramids shrink beneath us and the Earth begins to turn. Russia slides under and Siberia grows.

“I know a place where the magnetic field was a standing toroid,” Vedanshi says.

The Earth blurs then refocuses. We’re facing a cliff of geometric rock.

Maxwell fumbles with his boots, lying on his right side. He wants a chance with me? Nobody like him ever gave me a look.

Except this one guy in my General Physics class at the University of Hawaii. But it turned out he only wanted my help, not my love. Boy, did I help him. He changed majors before I was done tutoring him. Before he was done using me. I stayed in my room most of the week he dumped me, agonizing over the cold brutality of the word, “friends.” Of course, he was seventeen and I was ten. What did I expect?

“Can you make him feel better?” I ask Vedanshi.

“Oh, sorry,” she says and hands Maxwell the cylinder. “Press it to your forehead and you’ll go to sleep. Epigenetic changes happen during withdrawal. They make you crave the drug, so we’ll fool your body into thinking you’re not withdrawing. I can let you sleep through everything as long as you don’t snore. The Ganga can’t tolerate snoring.”

“I don’t snore,” he says. The cylinder has so many symbols on it, it’s almost black now. He takes it, thanks Vedanshi and looks at me. “You thought you were as good as dead. That’s why you tried to drown yourself.” He sits up, scooches next to me and takes both of my hands in his. “If these people built a flying machine that hates snoring, they also found a cure for every type of leukemia. That’s a given. Once you learn what they knew, you’ll use the knowledge better than they did. I guarantee it.”

“Thanks,” I tell him. “I appreciate your assumptions.” My fingers feel strange. It’s like direct current is flowing from his hands into mine.

“I’ll help you,” he says. “I’m not sure how, but I’ll bring you food and water if nothing else.”

“You’re not a water boy,” I tell him. “You’re a brilliant clinical scientist.”

“A brilliant junkie.” He squints in pain. “You’re the last person on Earth I would have chosen to see me like this. Of all the people to disappoint…”

“You haven’t disappointed me.” The idea feels upside-down and backwards as my fingers touch the side of his rugged face. “You saved my life. I’ll save yours. I’ll find a safer addiction for you to worry about.” I put the bag of pills in my shirt pocket. “I might even let you to ask me out. As long as you abandon this lame disease model. I hate learned helplessness, Max. It’s the overall harmony, the inspiration, the connecting thread and the subtext of every government school class I’ve ever taken.”

“The overall harmony?” He laughs.

“That’s my definition of inspiration. Don’t knock it.” I like the way he calls me out.

“But you’re sure addiction’s not a disease?”

“Pretty sure,” I tell him. “Multiple genes are involved. Widely diverse genes. But addiction is an acquired taste if you ask me.”

“Listen to her, dude,” James says.

“Nothing’s black and white in genetics,” I say to Maxwell. “The relationship between DNA and the mind may be inherently incomprehensible. If it is, it’s designed that way for a reason.”

Maxwell shivers. “I better do this,” he says. He lets my hands go, puts one end of the cylinder against his forehead and lies down.

Vedanshi presses her palms together in front of her face, bows her head for a moment, then looks at me. “You need months of progress in days. Just like I did. Take the lotus position and hold your breath for ten heartbeats.”

I do as she says, sensing her power. No doubt it comes from being raised by a queen to become a queen.

“Good,” she says. “When you’re done with that, breathe slowly. Full breaths in a constantly changing pattern. Make a decision about each breath. We want variably increased CO2 tension to open your prefrontal blood flow.” She inhales with a growl. “We should be in water. Nothing triggers the mammalian diver’s reflex like total submersion.”

“I barely swim,” I tell her.

“You wouldn’t need to swim. But close your eyes now, and listen to this old wall. See if you can sense it.”

I’m not going to tell her that scientists call this thing a natural formation. It’s embarrassing.

“When I was three,” Vedanshi says, “my father brought me here to see if I could sense the bending of the magnetic field. The wall was less weather-beaten. Twice as tall, I think, but I was a toddler so everything was huge.” She closes her eyes. “I want you to take a deep breath and hold it for fifteen heartbeats this time.” She opens her eyes and looks over at James. “I think this wall was constructed in the era right before mine. The one that ended in thermonuclear holocaust.”

“They had those bombs back then?” James asks, but doesn’t wait for an answer. “Weird.” He folds his legs. “So would you guys mind if I try to do what you’re doing? Max is crashed out. My money says he snores very soon.”

“Join us,” Vedanshi says brightly. “Maybe you’re a pilot. Your head’s nice and full in the back.” She pats the back of her own head, giggles, then sits tall with her eyes closed. “If you’re seeing ones and zeros, imagine they’re falling into your head and lining up on the base of your skull.”

I close my eyes and it’s raining ones and zeros. I let them stand on either side of my sella turcica, but they heap up.

“The time-space portion of the true self is a Planck’s volume of conscious awareness,” Vedanshi says, “like the tiniest spark moving nonlocally through the brain. If you could see it, it would look like a cloud because of its rapid movement. The cloud shifts and changes like a ghost. Brighter spots are decisions and feelings. Softer areas are things like physical movements involving the parietal cortex and cerebellum, usually. When you’re awake, all your neurons are in the same place relative to the true self. But when you’re asleep, nonlocality vanishes. So there’s no free will in dreams.”

I try to decode the layers of ones and zeros in my head, but there’s no hope.

“Imagine the suffering of a five year-old boy in a cold orphanage,” Vedanshi says. “Sores cover the roof of his mouth. Memories of his mother’s warmth and gentle voice keep him awake. The cloud of your awareness extends up into your mirror neurons and down to the limbic system, bringing the boy’s suffering into you. You can feel things as he does.”

“Poor little guy,” James says.”

“When another person’s pain matters to you as much as your own,” Vedanshi says, “it’s nonlocal love. You’ve discovered it. This is humanity’s highest calling, and God’s remedy for self-sabotage.”

“Does everything have to be religious?” James says.

“Actually, God isn’t religious,” she says. “He didn’t say anything religious when we spoke. He doesn’t worship a higher power or cower in fear of punishment. He does what’s right because it is right, and he suffers with us because he’s full of nonlocal love.”

I hope she’ll tell us her story. Researchers estimate that 13 million adults have had near-death experiences in the US alone. If Maxwell wasn’t a fast runner, I might have seen the white room myself this morning.

In the white room with black curtains near the station.
Blackroof country, no gold pavements, tired starlings…
…As I walked out, felt my own need just beginning.

“The Ganga’s afraid you’ll think I’m crazy,” Vedanshi says to me.

“Don’t worry,” I tell her. “Near death enlightenment isn’t rare these days. Scientists actually study it.”

“No kidding?” she says. “I’ll bet they studied it in my day, too. And kept their findings locked away from young people.” She leans forward and touches the top of her head to the carpet in front of her crossed legs. She stretches her arms out behind her back then raises them like wings. “Now, if you’ve got any numbers, let the code lie there. Don’t try to sort it or understand it. It must understand you.”

As I stare at golden zeros and ones, they change from Arabic numerals to symbols I haven’t seen as numbers. The ones look like vertical shepherd’s crooks and the zeros are fancy commas. I hold my breath and suddenly it’s as if I’m looking through someone else’s eyes at a pair of aged hands. I recognize Vaar’s signet ring on her right middle finger. I hear her voice saying she doesn’t intend to do what I told her. She’s calling someone on a phone. A large crater appears, full of huge machines. Two of them are shaped like UFO’s. The sky is black. Shadows are harsh. It’s the surface of the moon. It must be. I recognize the dust.

…

M. Talmage Moorehead

…

Personal note to fiction writers…

I’ve been lacking discipline during my interstate move, so a couple of days ago I started James Patterson’s course on fiction writing. He’s had 19 consecutive number one NY Times best sellers, as I recall.

So far, I’ve merely listened to him talking about his process on video. Inspirational. I wrote all day today, noticing a new sense of freedom and energy.

Patterson, like Stephen King, derives happiness from writing. But unlike King, Patterson uses “outlines” extensively and considers them essential to avoiding “writing himself into a corner,” (i.e. creating a problem that can’t be logically solved and therefore requires writers to abandon months of writing, a phenom that happens a lot to me because I don’t stick to my outlines), avoiding boring chapters, and creating more interesting twists by allowing greater flexibility ahead of the actual writing.

I’ve always agreed with the proponents of outlines and envied them because my characters ignore mine. But I’m not giving up. Partly because of this…

An eye-opener for me was reading the thing he calls an “outline.” It’s actually an informal, modestly detailed synopsis of each chapter. The kind of thing I could struggle to do after writing a chapter, but wouldn’t attempt before writing it.

His course includes a complete final “outline” of his novel, Honeymoon. He does three to six re-writes of an outline before beginning the writing. He says a person should be able to tell if it’s a good story by reading the outline. I wouldn’t have believed it, except that I read his outline and found it to be true. The outline was hard to put down.

Imagine the implications.

Obviously, I can’t make a final judgement for you on Patterson’s course until I finish it. But preliminarily I’d have to say that just hearing Patterson’s brief videos has been worth my 90 bucks. It was exactly what I needed right now.

By the way, I’ve got no conflict of interest to disclose. I wish I did. I wish I knew the guy.

…

The above story starts here.

My humble and yet infallible e-book, “Writing Meaningful Page-turners,” is here.

Please email my URL: http://www.storiform.com to your favorite aunt or uncle.

Thanks for everything! Keep writing. You were intelligently designed for it.

Talmage

Knowledge (Chapter 9) “Hapa Girl DNA” by M. Talmage Moorehead

3 Comments May 13, 2015 Morrill Talmage Moorehead

“Scientists can be Atheists?” Vedanshi asks in disbelief.

We’re in the air near the great Sphinx, cloaked in The Ganga. At this range the Sphinx’s ageless eyes fill me with awe and reverence. The statue knows what I’m thinking but doesn’t care. No, that’s crazy.

“Only a third of scientists believe in God,” I tell Vedanshi. It’s not like Revelation where two-thirds stayed on board.

Vedanshi’s eyes are wide. “And they feel sure there was never a great flood?”

“They’re absolutely sure. It goes against the tradition of a stable Earth with a gradual accumulation of small changes.”

“A stable Earth?” Now she smirks. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if that were true!” She glances over at Maxwell’s glazed expression. “But they must know… The Earth’s surface is 71 percent water. You’ve got moon craters with asteroid mountains over two miles high.”

The peaks in the Tsiolkovskiy Crater come to mind…

“Which ought to tell someone the height of an asteroid tsunami,” she says.

Shoemaker-Levy could have been a clue, too. Slamming Jupiter 1994.

“And don’t you have two thousand flood stories?” she asks.

I nod. Quite a coincidence that bit of data.

“But you’re telling me science sees no evidence of a global flood?”

“None.” And the blind are well aware of twenty-seven significant asteroid events in the last 15 years, most of them explosions over an ocean.

“This is disappointing.” She closes her eyes and locks her legs like pretzels.

Her legs are longer than mine, you know. I wish I had longer legs… But there’s this part of me that lives in stats. This time the statistics involve the tenth commandment, believe it or not: “Thou shalt not covet.” Wouldn’t you know? People who make envious comparisons tend to be unhappy. It’s science. I have to accept my short legs. Otherwise I’ll wind up as another case report of perfect autobiographical memory ending in depression and suicide. If this leukemia doesn’t get me first.

“Now you have 2,001 flood myths.” Vedanshi says. “And I’m an eyewitness to your latest one.”

“To me you’re the most important scientist alive. But to modern science your life is an anecdotal report. And since you’re not a PhD, your observations and ideas won’t be taken seriously.” I hate the irony of closed-minded truth seekers. Science is fueled by wonder but fooled by pride. “Unless you landed The Ganga on the White House Lawn and overcame the deafening censorship on UFO stories, you couldn’t publish a word of your culture’s knowledge in a science journal. You’d have to write a book, self-publish it, and spend the rest of your life ignoring attacks from PhD’s and late-night comedians.”

“It’s a heart-shaped box,” James says, conjuring Kurt Cobain…

She eyes me like a Pisces when I am weak.

I’ve been locked inside your heart-shaped box for weeks.

I’ve been drawn into your magnet tar-pit trap.

I wish I could eat your cancer…

Vedanshi looks at James quizzically but speaks to me. “Science is in a rut, huh?”

Maxwell flops over on his belly and groans. Too many chicken wings, this one.

“Generous assessment,” I say to Vedanshi. “Science is allergic to unfunded realities. It hates the Christian religion above all else. If the global flood weren’t mentioned in the Bible, it would be government school dogma like the Big Bang’s myth of a reality without conscious awareness.”

Vedanshi looks out at the Great Pyramid. “This culture is more primitive that I thought. How did you manage to build a pyramid like that?”

“Frankly, I’m not sure we did.”

“It seems your scientists trust logic to understand a universe that defies logic.” She looks at James, “The observer’s retroactive influence on outcome. Nonlocality. Time dilation. Light’s behavior in slits. Quantum wave collapse. The mind’s effect on random events.”

“To name a few,” I say, wondering if the question isn’t waves versus particles, but what sort of reality creates such a weird dilemma?

“Your elite thinkers seem to trust their eyes with a universe that’s mostly invisible.” Vedanshi makes an arc in the air with her right hand. “The Earth could be spinning in an arena of dark matter, crowded with intelligent spectators, and science would be helpless to detect it.”

“Physicists readily admit that,” I say.

“Really?” She looks surprised. “So why would anyone think science could cast doubt on God?”

“It’s their circular belief that there’s no evidence of God. Circular in the sense that history has forced science to explain things in a way that deliberately excludes God. So if a data set were to prove God’s existence, science would have already denied the data’s existence or validity.”

“It sounds like, ‘no girls allowed.'” Vedanshi laughs. “But how is that possible? How do they explain DNA without God?”

“They treat DNA the way they treat the Bible. They don’t read it. They only read about it.”

“Christians don’t read the Bible either,” James says. “That’s how come they think it’s perfect.”

James and I went to a church school for a while. Mom found a Christian church that kept the Jewish Sabbath so she thought it would broaden our minds to go there. I skipped most of the grades and moved on, but James was there for several years. Not a pleasant place for a rock musician.

“The scientists who understand DNA’s language still think in terms of amino acids, random mutations and primary structure,” I say.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” she says. “Your people have been to the moon. How could they be so primitive with genetics?”

“I don’t know. I think the problem is fear. They’re afraid of the overwhelming complexity of four-dimensional anatomy and physiology, and the mind-brain-DNA enigma. It’s the same way the Egyptologists don’t dare to look at things from the perspective of modern engineering.”

“What are they afraid of?” she asks.

“Changing basic assumptions about history and intelligent influence. Losing grant money. Being influenced by what they believe is the mortal enemy of rational thought – religion.”

Vedanshi takes a moment to think, then shakes her head in amazement. “I should read this Bible. Are there other taboo documents?” She glances away and her expression changes. “The Ganga says I’m too young.”

“The Bible’s too racy?” I ask.

Her brow knits. “It’s mainly a passage in Ezekiel.”

“This carpet thinks it’s your mother,” James says.

“Could you ask The Ganga for chapter and verse,” I ask. “I promise I won’t quote it to you.”

She looks down. “It’s from chapter one, verse four through chapter two verse three.”

“Thanks.” The verses flash into my head. A few jump out…

…I saw a windstorm coming out of the north–an immense cloud with flashing lightning and surrounded by brilliant light. The center of the fire looked like glowing metal, and in the fire was what looked like four living creatures.

…their form was human, but each of them had four faces and four wings…

…Fire moved back and forth among the creatures; it was bright, and lightning flashed out of it.

The creatures sped back and forth like flashes of lightning.

…I saw a wheel on the ground beside each creature… …the wheels… sparkled like topaz, and all four looked alike.

Each appeared to be made like a wheel intersecting a wheel…

When the living creatures moved, the wheels beside them moved; and when the living creatures rose from the ground, the wheels also rose…

Spread out above the heads of the living creatures was what looked something like a vault, sparkling like crystal, and awesome.

…When the creatures moved, I heard the sound of their wings, like the roar of rushing waters, like the voice of the Almighty, like the tumult of an army…

…Above the vault over their heads was what looked like a throne of lapis lazuli, and high above on the throne was a figure like that of a man.

…from … his waist up he looked like glowing metal…

Like… a rainbow in the clouds on a rainy day, so was the radiance around him.

This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD…

Why would The Ganga want to keep a sixteen-year-old from reading that? I can think of two possibilities. Religion and ET’s.

James wipes his greasy fingers on his pants. Vedanshi didn’t want him to eat the chicken after he told her it was genetically modified – even though I said the whole story is a myth. The birds are selectively bred, not modified. It’s the same thing humans have been doing to dogs forever.

Speaking of dogs, from where I’m sitting, you can’t help but notice that the Sphinx resembles a dog the way its front paws stick out. I wonder why the word “dog” and the word “God” are so alike. Especially if God works through coincidence.

I think a smart dog’s emotions are basically human. Maybe God’s emotions are basically human, too, just coming from the direction of higher intelligence.

Vedanshi takes The Ganga over the Sphinx’s right paw, then down through phantom bricks and sandstone to a thirty foot cubic chamber with walls that glow golden-brown in our light. Attached to the ceiling is a glass pyramid. I’d say it’s three yards per side and about that tall, pointing down at the floor with its base somehow attached to the ceiling. We move under it. Vedanshi leans out and puts her eye under the point, then motions for me to come look. I follow her example, look up into the glass and a red flower appears. Its petals seem to move like fingers, but when I look carefully the movement must be in my mind.

I tilt my head, then get up on my knees to look at it through the side of the pyramid, closer to the ceiling. To my astonishment, the flower is a tiny drawing on the tip of a long shaft of black hair, encased in the center of the glass pyramid and extending down from the base.

Vedanshi sighs. “Oh, brother. The Ganga says the library’s still functional, so I’m not allowed inside.”

“What’s the problem?” James asks. “I don’t see any books.”

“You will.” She points up. “Those green branching things.”

James moves his head under the apex and looks up. “Really? They look like frozen lightning.”

“They hold books, pictures and three-dimensional holographic videos, all in DNA. The info here would fill a warehouse the size of Easter Island if it were stored in your culture’s binary code… on plastic and magnets.”

“They look like cryptic symbols,” I say, leaning back in for another glance.

“They’re a road map of lymphatic vessels,” Vedanshi says. “From a relative of your kangaroo rat, modified to preserve non-ordering DNA in any climate. Everything was kept in DNA in my era, going back fifteen thousand years. Most of the older records had been transferred to DNA, as well.”

“How do you get the information out?” I ask.

“The glass pyramid around the Flower of Life uses a microscopic plasma wave to read the code through the walls of the lymphatics. It translates the information to the universal binary language of awareness and transmits it to a neural eye so it can enter the River of Consciousness.”

“Where’s the neural eye?” James asks. “Sounds creepy.”

“At the apex of a pyramid.”

“So the information goes to the River,” I say. “Does that mean you need an AI vehicle to access it?”

“As far as I know,” she says. “Unless you’re already inside the library. But libraries have no real doors, so you need a phase-shifted ship to get in.”

“Was education limited to pilots, then?” I ask.

“Officially, yes, but not really. Pilots and stretch heads were the only ones legally authorized to know things.”

I’m frowning, not big on self-absorbed elites holding others back.

“From what I’ve read,” she says, “our educational system was no more discriminatory than yours in the United States. But instead of devaluing knowledge by forcing it on everyone, our culture made it mysterious and difficult to get. So everyone wanted it. And most people bought as much of it as they could afford on the black market. It was my mother’s secret plot to promote education. Apparently it worked.” Vedanshi turns her head away from the inverted pyramid. “I’m seeing things I probably shouldn’t. We’d better go.”

“What if I learn the River’s language?” I ask. “Will I be allowed into your libraries? With The Ganga?”

“Of course. You said you’re over eighteen, right?”

“Yeah, I’m nineteen.”

“Perfect. I trust you completely. So does The Ganga.” Vedanshi whisks us out of the Sphinx’s underground library and up into its gaze.

You know, I think this statue does look older than the pyramid behind it. And there’s heavy water erosion on its chest and on the walls around it.

That could mean it was here before this place became a desert – supposedly 3,200 BC, if you trust ice core data. I think I do, but I don’t know any of those scientists personally, so I can’t gauge their honesty. Some branches of science are dominated by sociopaths, I’ve found. They’re a broad spectrum of personality types, but they have at least one thing in common. They pride themselves in being liars.

“I’m not feeling so good,” Maxwell says.

“Egyptian fast food zombie apocalypse?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “It’s worse.” He lies on his right side and brings his knees up toward his chin. “Addiction runs in my family. It’s a disease.”

…

M. Talmage Moorehead

…

Chapter 0 starts here.

By the way, I’ve found an editor who has that unique talent set I’ve been hoping to find, namely the understanding soul of an artist who can gently convey the brilliant corrective insights of a gifted fiction analyzer and editor. On top of that, this man has been traditionally published: nine novels, some of which are science fiction! He’s an editor, a book doctor, a ghost writer, a successful author and above all, a genuine human being.

His name is William Greenleaf. (Here’s his web address in case the link isn’t working: http://greenleafliteraryservices.com/.)

Mr. Greenleaf has evaluated my previous “traditional” version of Johanna’s story that I abandoned, the current “experimental” version that’s in-progress above, and a short story I wrote two years ago. In each case his analysis was unquestionably accurate, unbiased, hugely insightful and wise… and despite the bad news in some areas, he was able to communicate the problems to me in such a way as to avoid discouraging me.

That’s not easy. I’m not exactly thick-skinned as a writer (or as anything else), so the fact that I’m the opposite of discouraged says a lot about him as a communicator and a human being.

I’m going back now to finish the previous traditional version of Johanna’s story (past tense, 3rd person, no pictures or links) while I continue writing the above experimental story. The two stories are quite different, so it’s going to be confusing to my neurons, but it will be great sport!

Just so you know, William Greenleaf didn’t ask me to write this, and I’ve got no conflict of interest whatsoever (meaning I’m not getting a discount or any special treatment of any kind for writing this).

If you need help with your writing (we all do) however major or minor, William Greenleaf has my highest and most enthusiastically positive recommendation. The man’s work is spectacular and amazing. Here’s his website again…

http://greenleafliteraryservices.com/

…

If I had an image right here of a book entitled, Writing Meaningful Page-turners with a professional looking cover – let’s say of the ocean and a seagull flying over a beach – stats show that many more people would download my free e-book. They would feel as if it were somehow a valuable thing. Please remember this for your own work, whenever you’re selling anything or giving it away.

Without that picture, the book’s value is diminished. It’s not logical, but it’s true.

Anyway, my little e-book’s about 10,000 words. Someday I’ll make a “cover” for it so I can give it away better.

Anything can happen – reading it could totally change you life, but I have to say I doubt it’s going to be anything more than a decent read. If you like discovering “newish” wordsmith mechanics of “voice,” you may enjoy the second to last chapter.

You can download my e-book without the slightest concern of me spamming you or sharing your email. The fact is, I haven’t written a single email to the list yet and it’s been over a year since I started it. I should do something about that.

Before I forget, please email a friend with a link to my blog… if you know anybody who might like this odd sort of fiction. Here’s my URL: http://www.storiform.com (You can copy and paste it to an email, maybe.) Thanks for your help. I really appreciate it.

…

Personal note to fiction writers…

A few days ago this chapter was twice this long. I divided it in half, but it’s still twice as long as it should be for a blog post. I feel that writing short chapters is making it tough to bring out character emotion and adequate description for a sense of 3D placement.

The plot movement and conflict I promised us last time? Hey, I tried, but it’s as if my plotting fingers are stuck in the mud of ideas and my tendency to write to a topic rather than explore emotion. That’s a mistake you can learn from by noting my bad example. I love ideas too much, and I love speculative non-fiction too much, perhaps. But don’t worry. I’m going to pull this baby out of the mud. It’s not as if I can’t see what’s wrong, especially after some recent input I’ve had from the amazing editor, book doctor, ghost writer and traditionally published author of 9 novels, William Greenleaf (please see the paragraphs about him above) as well as some brilliantly insightful input from across the pond. Thanks to each one of you from the bottom of my heart.

One of the things that William Greenleaf opened my eyes to is the need to sense Johanna’s world in every detail as I write. I’m going to flesh this out for you because it’s a huge breakthrough for me…

I was writing a traditional version of Johanna’s story in my usual OCDish slow way, seeing every little thing and crying like a little girl over things that touched my heart. Things like Johanna appreciating her brother’s music, but him being unable to comprehend exactly what she does for a living.

And then I came across an article about a successful indie writer who cranks out 10,000 words per day. The article was detailed and I gave her technique a try. (I wrote a post about it here.) I was able to go fairly fast and soon doubled the word count on my story. It felt nice being faster, and I read the fast stuff and thought it was fine. But somehow I didn’t feel like I was connecting with Johanna the way I usually do. Nothing hit me with powerful emotion. The plot seemed fine, a bit improved even.

But the lack of emotional connection with Johanna made me start wondering what it would be like to write in first person. Could I get close to Johanna again? So I abandoned the traditional story and began the current first person present tense “experimental” version above. Incidentally, all the idea-oriented content is getting between me and Johanna in this version lately.

Not knowing any of this, William Greenleaf analyzed the traditional version and pinpointed the drop in quality of the story, the exact place where I started trying to write fast. He said that I was having viewpoint issues. It was so true, but not merely in the superficial way that I would usually think of viewpoint “inconsistencies” – things like describing something the VP character can’t see or know.

This was more a lack of careful, detailed experiencing of Johanna’s world, especially her feelings, her thoughts, her wants, her plans, her hopes, her insecurities, her hurts. The very things that usually make me cry over her situation when I’m writing for her.

There were many other equally brilliant things that Mr. Greenleaf uncovered in his analysis, but this one was key. I had to tell you in detail.

…

I can’t thank the inspired Greek Artist, Spira, enough for generously allowing me to use his breathtaking artwork and sensational photographs of Egypt. You’ll enjoy his groundbreaking artwork here: https://spirasc.wordpress.com. Take your time and really look at what he’s doing and saying. Give yourself mental space to feel it.

Stay positive about your writing. If you’re sensitive to criticism and easily discouraged like I am, admit it to yourself without making it your final destination. And be selective about whom you show your work to. Getting help is essential, but if the people helping you are not 1. A lot better at analyzing your writing than you are and 2. Capable of expressing criticism in a way that doesn’t kill your motivation to write, then you’re far better off keeping your writing strictly to yourself until its ready for a first-class professional like William Greenleaf. Actually, you don’t have to wait until you’re done with a first draft to show it to Mr. Greenleaf. I’m sure glad I didn’t wait! It’s difficult to get the feeling across as to why I’m so thankful to God and the Universe for leading me to this man’s website, but it’s about hope. There’s nothing like having solid evidence that your dream of making it as a writer is based somewhere within the realm of reality. William Greenleaf is objectively qualified to give you that hope. Equally important, he’s the kind of person who refuses to deliver any false hope. Trust me, I know.

…

Check out, “The How of Happiness,” by Sonja Lyubomirsky, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside. Originally from Russia, she received her A.B., summa cum laude, from Harvard University and her Ph.D. in Social/Personality Psychology from Stanford University. Her book is the most science-based and useful writing I’ve found so far on happiness. Most creative people would do themselves a big favor by reading it and practicing the broad range of scientifically studied techniques she describes for overcoming the emotional lows. Her book is for real. It will change the lives of many people.

Keep writing and be happy! Thanks for your patience. 🙂

Talmage

But, Why?

64 Comments July 27, 2014 Morrill Talmage Moorehead

God was lonely, I’m guessing. Wanted company.

He built smart computers that did everything right except stop loneliness.

He drank a whole pot of coffee and made computers with free will that looked vaguely like us because they were us.

His loneliness went away.

But free will brought murder.

God said, “Hey!” and the murdering stopped. Men and women shook with fear.

And loneliness returned.

We were gone. God had ruined us.

Now he had a choice. Stop talking and hide, or end free will forever.

He looked at the stars. They said, “It’s big out here.”

No. Not really. He would get rid of free will, then.

He raised his hand high but before it fell… he fell in love.

With us and our half smiles. The telegraphed humor. Our romance with bad words that make us so sure we’re cool. And all the darling little cars we leave everywhere.

So he went off to hide and think.

While he was away someone said, “There is no free will.”

With that, everyone vanished.

Everyone but God.

He couldn’t sleep because he’d downed that whole pot of coffee.

And he could still see my wife’s hopeful eyes when the kids were young.

Will they come back? Can they?

The stars didn’t answer. They didn’t seem to know.

…

M. Talmage Moorehead

…

This is kind of mundane, but…

My in-progress experimental style novel, Hapa Girl DNA starts here. It’s sort of a “hapa” (Hawaiian for “half”) thing itself, a hybrid of fiction and non-fiction. I’m ignoring a ton of “good fiction writing” rules, but I like to question all dogmas in all fields. I’m testing to find out which fiction writing rules matter and which don’t.

If you would like to read my e-book on fiction writing and be notified when each of my novels is done (possibly before the next ice age) join my list here. (No spam or sharing of your info. I haven’t written to my list yet – in over a year. My bad, but I’ll get to it eventually.)

By the way, if you feel like it, please email your best weird friend about this blog (www.storiform.com). Thanks, I appreciate your generous help!

Talmage

Storiform.com

“Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, one that is vastly superior to that of man.” – Albert Einstein

God

Private Text Messages Devastate Scientists’ Authority

Examining the Heart and Soul of Totalitarianism

UFOs are “probably the largest coverup we’ve ever encountered” says Representative Tim Burchett of the US House of Representatives

Exiting the Materialist Worldview with Self-awareness

Convenience shopping in Sweden with The Mark of the Beast

“Spirituality is the missing piece” – Paul Hellyer on the history of UFOs

Looking Directly into the Sun

Synthetic Life – a Minority Report

Why are we here?

Science Morphed into a Spiritual Bully

The Iceman Fixed My Headaches!

“The bigotry and intolerance of the scientific community…”

My Spiritual Paradigm in 2018

The Cowboy Angel Rides

Black-and-white thinking? Come on, we ALL do it!

Fundamentalism in Science and Religion

Depersonalization or Scientific Enlightenment?

Dark Matter, God and Genetics

Quantum Entanglement (Chapter 21) “Hapa Girl DNA” by M. Talmage Moorehead

Beyond Death (Chapter 20) “Hapa Girl DNA” by M. Talmage Moorehead

Warriors (Chapter 19) “Hapa Girl DNA” by M. Talmage Moorehead

Trust (Chapter 18) “Hapa Girl DNA” by M. Talmage Moorehead

Zero Point Joy (Chapter 16) “Hapa Girl DNA” by M. Talmage Moorehead

Virus (Chapter 15) Hapa Girl DNA by M. Talmage Moorehead

Quarantine (Chapter 14) “Hapa Girl DNA” by M. Talmage Moorehead

Finite Multiverse (Chapter 13) “Hapa Girl DNA” by M. Talmage Moorehead

Integrity (Chapter 12) “Hapa Girl DNA” by M. Talmage Moorehead

Dark Mind (Chapter 11) “Happa Girl DNA” by M. Talmage Moorehead

Nonlocal Love (Chapter 10) “Hapa Girl DNA” by M. Talmage Moorehead

Knowledge (Chapter 9) “Hapa Girl DNA” by M. Talmage Moorehead

But, Why?

God

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