Enid & Josh, an Eternal Pair

fiction based on past lives

First Epigraph: Quote from Rasha

If you feel entangled by the people closest to you, it is because, in past lives, you have known them in different contexts. The major players in your script have been there for you, and you for them, in the full spectrum of roles throughout your history. You have been cherished lovers and detested enemies; you have run in the fields of life together as children. You have been parents to each other more times than you could count, and you have assisted in birthing each other’s awareness at each level of your unfoldment with every emotionally charged interaction for all this time.
— Rasha, Oneness

Second Epigraph: Quote from Plato

“Many great and wonderful deeds are recorded of your state in our histories, but one of them exceeds all the rest in greatness and valor. For these histories tell of a mighty power which, unprovoked, made an expedition against the whole of Europe and Asia, and to which your city put an end. This power came forth out of the Atlantic Ocean, for in those days the Atlantic was navigable; and there was an island situated in front of the Straits [Strait of Gibraltar] which are by you called the Pillars of Heracles; the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together…. Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, and over parts of the continent, and, furthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjected the parts of Libya within the columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia [west coast of Italy]. This vast power, gathered into one, endeavored to subdue at a blow our country [Egypt] and yours [Athens] and the whole of the region within the Straits; and then, Solon, your country shone forth, in the excellence of her virtue and strength, among all mankind. She was pre-eminent in courage and military skill, and was the leader of the Hellenes. And when the rest fell off from her, being compelled to stand alone, after having undergone the very extremity of danger, she defeated and triumphed over the invaders, and preserved from slavery those who were not yet subjugated, and generously liberated all the rest of us who dwell within the pillars. But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea.”
— Plato, The Timaeus tr B. Jowett

Eschatological Introduction

Each time, humanity starts over. Once again, we are animals, occupied with the concerns of animals. Food and safety are the limits of our interest. Comfort? We’re never really comfortable, but we don’t know it. We don’t miss a comfort we never had.

Food and safety and … oh yes, and sex. Sex is a part of animal life, always the best part and the worst part. When we attain mind and spirit in baby steps toward the realm of the gods, it is always sex that provides the original traction for that first step.

Humans have been on earth roughly 176,000 years. A yuga is 44,000 years. So that’s exactly four yugas. Exactly, yes. That means that we are now at the end of a cycle, the kaliyuga. Skeletons survive from the previous three cycles; but the fossil record can only provide the bones on which the rich flesh of a complex and deeply engaging drama must have hung. The rich dramas survive as myths, verbal traditions with far more resilience than a book or a fossil artifact.

There is progress in each cycle. Increasing awareness. Increasing abstraction. Increasing integration. As people cooperate on larger scales, their art becomes richer, their monument grander, their conceptions precede their creations, reaching toward a power unrecognizable to the animal self. And with the power and the integration comes a capacity for destruction. At the beginning, it is only males squabbling over Alpha status. Push comes to shove among the males, as the females run for cover, quietly plotting an indirect way toward the man they desire. By the end, there is so much power, so much concentrated power that conflicts take on existential proportions.

So you’re thinking that mankind predictably destroys what he has built. That’s part of the truth, but it would never be so regular as 44,000 years. The regularity is in the stars. 44,000 years is the Long Year, the precession of the earth’s axis under competing gravitational influences from the sun and the moon. Once in each 11,000 years, the ecliptic crosses the Kuiper belt and the earth is pelted by pieces of comets breaking up. Little pieces, just a mile or two in diameter, but enough to kick up quite a dust-cloud at the surface. The closest thing you can imagine is a series of hydrogen bombs, but their power is way beyond megatons. The dust remains aloft for a few seasons, and several years go by without a summer

The interesting thing is that as long as this happens during a hunter-gatherer phase, the impact is not dramatic. Every tribe experiences hardship, but very few actually perish. For agricultural humans, the consequences are more serious, and most of them succumb to the three-year winters. But if this season of comet impacts should occur during an epoch when mankind has advanced to a globally integrated civilization, the consequences are existential. Civilized man is far more comfortable, far more fragile, far more vulnerable to global extinction.

I tell you this only so that you understand: Josh and Enid have been here before. Not an unimaginable number of incarnations, but only four. We have chosen to take human form thrice before, and each time it was in the end days, the end of a yuga. Three times previously, we have come into the world, we have grown and learned and we have tired of life. Each time, we have reinjected passion into one another’s lives. Each time, our synergy has created the animus that could bridge from the dying world and survive into the world reborn.

Josh’s spirit and Enid’s spirit, male and female in turn, alternating each time who would be the male in the pair. We have been lovers. Once we were father and daughter, before that, in our first human incarnation together, we were siblings.

Number three

Picture a nation of aspirants. Their riches were spiritual. Their home was Northern Africa at a time when the Sahara was a rainforest. Josi and Ehud were born in Al-hirez, with a culture that had a long tradition of stewarding the jungle ecosystem. Their foremothers had long ago transformed a hostile environment full of toothy jaws and poisonous berries into an Eden of nutrient-rich nuts, edible roots, and psychoactive fungi.

People managed the land, but it was nothing like farming. We knew which plants like to grow near which other plants. We knew how to culture robust ecosystems that needed little management, and which produced a bounteous harvest, ripe for the picking all year round.

Key to the culture were elaborate mating rituals that limited reproduction. Population had remained stable for thousands of years, but surplus food never rotted on the trees. A co-evolved population of colorful birds, gigantic bears, and miniature elephants made sure that nothing went to waste. And, of course, there were domesticated dogs. Dogs have been man’s best friend from a time prior to which human memory knoweth not to the contrary.

What were the dramas of such a culture? The currency of that distant world was the kundalini experience, cultured in pairs at the peak of sexual ecstasy. Preparation for the sex ritual entailed years of isolation and ascetic sense deprivation. Josi wooed Ehud with a precocious passion when they were still children, and she was impatient to culminate their union while he felt drawn to a longer period of restraint and purification. Ehud enrolled in a rigorous training program, in which his simple daily needs were supplied as long as he maintained his discipline. He sat in meditation through long nights and swam in the Mediterranean for many hours each day. His sinewy body had progressed beyond hunger. Once in every seven moons, he would emerge from his silent practice for seven days of processing and learning and planning and discussion. It was only during these brief intervals that he spoke with Josi. Their conversations were focused and intense, with the exchange of ideas and passions that had ripened during many long months.

Josi had graduated from a less intensive program, and her days were divided between caring for elders and making music. Her life was socially rich and stimulating, deeply satisfying. Josi was giving her gifts to the community, and felt the gratification that comes from high bandwidth connection. She would relate seven months of experience and connection to Ehud, lively impassioned energized conversations that lasted days. Ehud was eager to take in her experience, for he had little of his own — little outward experience, little that could be verbalized. He was developing an inner witness who could provide distance and guidance through the most disturbing of experiences.

There came a time when Ehud, immersed in the midst of a seven-month retreat, felt a weakening of Josi’s psychic presence. He didn’t know details. If he had intuited that Josi was in trouble, he would, of course, have broken his routine, emerged from his practice. He would have done whatever was necessary to support Josi’s safety and wellbeing. But the feeling was not like this. It was just a distance, a drifting apart.

Increasingly, these intuitions dominated Ehud’s meditation. He cried, and watched himself crying He pined in loneliness, and watched himself feeling deeply alone. A skilled meditator, he would retreat one more level and watch the watcher. At these times, his feelings were only the more intense.

At the end of the seven months, Josi did not know any of what Ehud had experienced when she cast about for a way to describe the ecstatic experience she had had, a wild, spasmodic spark of kundalini energy. He had been an older man, not a marriage candidate, but a caring and experienced guide in the cultivation of tantra.

Ehud was stricken with a wrenching jealousy that no amount of yogic detachment could contain. He returned to isolation to deepen his practice.

At this time in history, a very different culture was evolving just eight hundred miles to the West. The island nation of Atlantis bred a population of rugged individuals in its harsh and mountainous terrain. With hand labor, the mountains were terraced to grow rice for the population, and the intensity of planting in the equatorial heat motivated the development of labor-saving technologies. A tribe on one of the smaller, less fertile islands invaded the Big Island, borrowed their technology and enslaved the native population. The population of Atlantis continued to grow and expand beyond the limits of what the islands could support, and thus the warrior nations were motivated to sail eastward, through the Strait, seeking conquests on the North and South shores of the Mediterranean.

The technologies of the Atlanteans would have been familiar to us. They used fire and burned coal. They had discovered iron, and knew how to make sharp blades and cannons. They had steel-hulled ships propelled by steam engines, not unlike the Mississippi river boats of the 19th Century. The people of the North African jungle had better technologies, but they were based on a combination of mind and physics. They were able to induce a molten state in which rock was malleable via the resonant power of several minds concentrating in unison. Their stone structures were constructed of heavy blocks that were made light, again by the psychokinetic power of minds concentrating in synchrony. Both the Atlantean technologies and the North African technologies were fully consonant with the cultures that they served.

In Europe, the city-states and fiefdoms that they invaded resisted in vain. But North Africa was an Eden that had not known war, was not prepared for war, could not conceive the horrors of war because it was so foreign to the ways of their culture. Wise elders from the region of present-day Morocco met with the warriors and generously offered to share the bounty of their land and the experience of their culture with the the needier and less developed civilization of Atlantis. As you might imagine, the Atlanteans took what was offered and demanded more.

Ehud and Josi knew of the Atlanteans. Stories had been coming from Europe and Africa for at least twenty years. Josi was frightened, but not so Ehud. Ehud harbored a deep confidence that all that is was meant to be. He had become impervious to fear — not blind or numb, but firmly rooted in a foundation of faith, faith especially in his own wellbeing, faith that extended to a belief that all the people for whom he cared deeply would be protected.

Al-hirez knew a kind of discussion that we today would call “politics”. There were people who wanted to study the ways of the Atlanteans so as to protect from their aggression; and there were others who advocated an intensification of the spiritual practices that already prevailed, in order to strengthen the connection to cosmic forces that were all the protection Al-hirez required. Progressives and Traditionalists. Josi sympathized with the former group, and Ehud with the latter.

The years passed, and our two heroes grew apart. They recognized that the intimate entanglement of their two souls was eternal, beyond the reach of any external circumstances. But in this world, in the soft clay of material reality, in the world of maya, there was little contact between Ehud and Josi. Josi was consumed by her work and from her work she frequently found a path to ecstasy. Ehud was bathed in a sea of imperturbable peace, but peace is not the same as bliss.

Josi, but not Ehud, actively promoted plans for The Wall. There was ample warning that Al-hirez might someday be in the path of Atlantean conquest, and the construction of The Wall seemed prudent. Like other North African cultures, Al-hirez had advanced knowledge of quarrying and stonework. They were able to cut and to transport hard granite blocks weighing hundreds of tons by processes that are difficult for our 21st century culture to understand. Tools were used, but not the kind of large power tools that we have today. Magic was used, but not the kind of instantaneous miracles that appear in our myths and Bible stories. The power of mind softened the granite, and it was then possible to cut and shape it. The power of mind made the cut stone blocks less dense, and thus a few strong men could lift and carry one. This was the same technology that built the Pyramids of Giza, and also the technology with which Ed Leedskalnin.built Florida’s Coral Castle in the 1930s.

All the while The Wall was being constructed, arguments persisted between the Progressives and the Traditionalists.

T — God knows more than we can know. Trust that She will protect us.

P — It is we who are the agents of God in the material realm; it is through our own initiative that She protects us.

T — It is dangerous to manipulate the Earth for goals that we can see. It is not given to us to know the long-term consequences of our actions.

P — The Atlanteans do not recognize our God or our common Source. They are dangerous to all that we hold dear. Of course we will pray, but we must also act.

T — Violence begets violence.

Josi was nervous. Ehud was oblivious, living in another world. Until, one day, Josi visited Ehud in his isolation and asked for his help.

J — You have one of the most highly cultured minds in all Al-hirez. We need your support in thinking The Wall into existence.

E — You need not worry. Violence cannot prevail.

J — How can you know this?

E — It is not something I can explain. My vision of peace is beyond words.

J — Of course, I am not asking you to participate in violence. It is the Atlanteans who threaten us with violence.

E — I don’t want to talk about it.

The wall was built without Ehud’s participation. And inevitably, when it was completed, there were frightened leaders who sought to install lethal weapons on its parapets.

The tanks and artillery of Atlantis were poorly adapted to the mud and thick vines of the jungle. Their advance through conquered territory was slow. In the space of several years, many in Al-hirez forgot why the wall had been built. But the wall had a creeping effect on their psychology. People’s connection to the harsh and magical greenery was weakened as they ventured less frequently outside the city Wall.

Ehud continued to turn inward. Josi grew ever more worldly.

And one year, as the rains ended, the siege began. The blast of cannons, the rhythmic shaking of the earth. Over and over, day and night, twice each minute, the wall was pelted at its weakest point. The blasts and the vibrations which were so frightening at first, gradually became a constant backdrop to daily life, unnoticed, unperceived. Twenty cubits high and ten cubits thick, the massive granite blooks resisted through the power of concentrated thought as much as the density of their amalgam.

The relentless bombardment proceeded from day to day, from month to month. The enemy could not succeed, nor would they leave or give up. Within the walls, routines adapted. Life went on. Fear congealed and steadied the people’s resolve. Their fasts grew longer, their meditations deeper.

Ever oblivious to his surroundings, Ehud continued and intensified his practice. Twenty-three hours of each day he remained in samadhi. But there came a day when his concentration was broken. Concern for Josi’s safety interposed on his meditation with a persistence for which his formidable powers of concentration were no match.

Ehud acted unhesitating, with precision, utterly without conscious consideration. He was the dissociated observer of his own behavior, experiencing his own feelings exactly as though he were empathizing with the responses of a close friend. He bounded from his cubicle, through the streets, locating precisely the closest portal to the city Wall, somehow penetrating the locked gate and floating up the stairs to the parapet. The Atlantean militia were already there, turning the defensive cannon on its bearings, pointing their lethal charges toward housing structure within. Yes, it was pointed by chance at the unit where Josi lay sleeping.

Ehud, crazed and flailing, threw himself on the soldiers, who fled in terror. He dove spread-eagle and stretched his energetic body over the cannon, which was loaded and charged, and the cannon melted.

What happened next must be related differently from Ehud’s perspective and from the perspective of the people down below, staring agape at the parapet. The effect was very much like the time dilation of a hypothetical observer who falls into a black hole, or the imagined story of Jarodir Hlamik.

Ehud felt the kundalini rising through his spine, as it had never done in his years of ascetic practice. Peace and equanimity be damned, he knew only a wild, ecstatic joy. His body was frozen in the moment, but this experience went on and on, unrelenting, growing (as if this were possible) in intensity as his capacity to contain the experience grew and matured. There was no possibility of thought or analysis in such a state. On a scale where sexual orgasm is 1, Ehud’s experience started at 10 and mushroomed exponentially. Did this continue for hours? For months, or maybe years? There is no time in such a state. Ehud was transfixed, thoroughly dissolved in a state of bliss that went on and on and on. Then he spoke the word, “dayenu”, and Ehud was no more.

The people on the ground felt a deafening blast that knocked them off their feet. The explosion left a clean break in the wall, but no one was seriously injured. Ehud’s body could not be found, but neither could the cannon and (no less a miracle) eleven other cannons atop The Wall also were plugged and non-functional.

This was the end, not just for Ehud, but within a few months, for Josi as well. Josi had not acknowledged in many years that her spirit was still intimately linked to Ehud, but now she languished and died one night in her sleep.

The Atlanteans returned to their island, having failed in their conquest. But the influence of their ideas lingered after them. The jungle kingdoms slipped gradually from a spiritual to a material focus, from stewarding the natural world to conquering it, from living by their instincts to living by their reason. They began to cut roads through the jungle, then to clear areas for farming. Too late, the people realized that that the jungle was not lush and thick because of copious rainfall; but the copious rainfall was attracted by the lush green forests, actively cooling the sea breezes from the Atlantic, creating precipitation and evaporation that recycled the cloud water many times over the 10 million square stadia of North Africa.

Then came the aerial bombardment, meteor impacts, instantly melting glaciers and global floods ensued. Were the floods a punishment for human cultures out of harmony with nature? Or was the earth at that point in its 11,000 year cycle where meteor impacts were so much more likely, and the ice age nearing completion?

We know the what, but not the why. The waters came in great tidal waves that flooded the rainforest and swept people out of their homes. Oceans rose, shore lines receded. The big island and smaller outposts which were home base of the Atlanteans were swallowed by the sea, leaving a few peaks that we now call the Azores.

And in the fullness of time, the human venture into agriculture, civilization, and technology began again de novo.

Number Two

This was the yuga in which the pyramids were built, along with other megalithic monuments of Easter Island, Machu Picchu, and lesser known pyramids of the Mayas, Eastern Europe and St Louis, MO. This was the time (88,000 to 44,000 years before the present) when interstellar travelers returned to mingle freely with humans, who learned as much as they were able to absorb from the primitive state of their science. It was an age in which their native animism was presented with technologies that were a million years ahead of them, technologies which, as Arthur C. Clark has told us 60 years ago, must have been “indistinguishable from magic”. Of course, the ETs were treated as gods, and that’s how they were described in the ancient oral traditions that survive to this day. But they did not want to be gods; they wanted only to be elder siblings, nudging their disciples along a path toward consciousness.

The Techlan peoples inhabited the high Andes, near Lake Titicaca. Josiah and his first wife, Fior, were as close as two humans could be. He was senior shaman to his tribe, and had healed many people from many diseases with his herbs and incantations. So when, in her 54th year, blood began to appear in her stool, he was not worried. But he failed. He could not heal his dear wife’s cancer. He took her sudden death on his own shoulders and felt humiliated, ashamed. He felt personally responsible for a monstrous evil.

For seven years, he mourned his beloved wife, consoled by their daughter, Ariel, who remained with him, assisted him, consoled him. Ariel had always been close to her father, but now she began to be an avatar, a reminder in the flesh of his lost Fior. Ariel was 39 years old now, and had never married. She had refrained from marriage for love of her father, an unnatural love, perhaps. That daughter and father should be wife and husband was her idea, not his. But in the end, he was powerless to resist her seduction.

(Yes, there was incest taboo in the Techlan society, as in almost all human cultures and, indeed, in animal instincts. But the Techlans permitted exceptions in the case of shamans, whose lineage was felt to be sacred and incorruptible.)

And so Ariel bore to Josiah a child in his later years, a daughter who was also his granddaughter. When Ariel died in childbirth, the grief was more than Josiah could bear. This new baby was his charge and his only consolation. He named his daughter (and granddaughter) Eden, and raised her as a single father. She was to him precious beyond all sentiment.

Eden was an intuitive child, a magical child given to speaking with an uncanny accuracy about things of which she had no experience. She absorbed the teaching of her father’s herbal arts as though they were mother’s milk. And even before her adolescence, the tables were occasionally turned, and Josiah found he was learning from her.

Father and daughter lived in a hut on the edge of the forest, apart but not distant from the tribal village. One morning, when Eden awoke, she reported an adventure during the night. Tall men with elongated skulls and pointy ears had escorted her from her bed, taken her to a shining metal room, where she awoke, bemused but unperturbed. Her memories of the event were hazy, but matter-of-fact and unemotional.

Josiah was concerned. He thought most naturally of possession, and worried for his daughter’s health. Should he perform an exorcism ritual? But Eden wanted no such thing. She insisted that she was healthy and that her mind was intact.

This was the beginning of a tense time between them. Josiah wanted only to care for Eden, but what she was reporting was outside his long experience—experience that included visions and trances as well as a long lifetime in a community adapted to severe weather, rugged terrain, and thin air. This was different.

Josiah consulted his inner voice, with some comfort but minimal information. There was reassurance concerning Eden’s safety, but no story in which he might embed the strange events. As Eden’s stories about her guests became more frequent, Josiah became the more eager to investigate with his own eyes and ears. He would remain at her bedside for a nightlong vigil. Nothing. Another night, no visitors. He would exhaust himself and the night when he slept soundly would be the night that Eden was carried off.

He could only surmise that the visitors were watching, that they knew when they were in danger of being detected, and stayed away. Or perhaps, possibilities that Josiah could not imagine. He still was not sure whether these events took place only within Eden’s experience, or in their shared reality.

…Until one day, Josiah looked on Eden’s profile and confessed to himself that she was with child. She had been with child for some weeks, but he had refused to see it.

Gently, he opened a conversation in which Eden could talk about her condition. She was sure it was related to the Visitors. She had been chaste, as was her upbringing, her discipline. Josiah tended to believe her, but he doubted himself. Was he allowing his love for Eden to get in the way of seeing her clearly? Was she more deeply in need of help than he could admit to himself? Despite both their deep trust and affection, father and daughter grew distant. The separation was not just an embarrassment; it was painful to both of them.

As Eden’s time approached, the midwife came to live in the hut with Eden and Josiah.

Josiah’s doubts were finally resolved when Eden gave birth to a pale-faced baby with elongated skull and almond eyes and pointy ears. He bowed down to his daughter and begged forgiveness for his doubts. He abdicated his position as Shaman, and anointed his daughter (and granddaughter), who, together with her son, whom she named Adam, led her people through an extraordinary transition time.

Botticelli

Some of the legendary achievements of this pre-apocalyptic period were witnessed by Josiah, and some were not accomplished until after his death. He may have participated actively in the early ones, but it is Eden’s name that history associates with the mysterious and seminal events.

Great stone monuments appeared, of which Eden claimed ignorance. In the oral traditions which are still witnessed to this day, each temple and plaza and even the pyramid appeared in a single night, with no witnesses to record how it was done. Anthropologists assure us that “a single night” is hyperbole, and that the buildings appeared merely in a far shorter time than the indigenous peoples imagined that the work could be done. We simply cannot know.

The pyramid at Tiahuanaco was discovered only in 2022 because it had been buried, and excavation has just begun. The temples around the lake and the Stonehenge of Bolivia came about in Eden’s lifetime, and we assume she was responsible for them one way or another. Like other megaliths around the world, these ancient structures attest to an ability to quarry huge stones, to shape and polish them, and fit them precisely into walls. Certainly, no construction of this type is viable today, and arguably, the mechanics are beyond our present technologies.

It is easy to say, they were built by space aliens with advanced technologies, but this hypothesis raises more questions than it resolves. Who were they? Why did they build on Earth? Where did they go, and why haven’t they returned? Or have they returned in recent decades, making appearances in thousands of sightings throughout the world, but they no longer wish to build anything or, indeed, to teach us their technology.

If these monuments were constructed with human means of the type known today, it must have required industrial scale machinery—at least the equivalent of the cranes that build our skyscrapers and the giant, diamond-tipped circular saws that shape our kitchen counters. We must ask what they used for energy. There is no sign that the world’s abundant petroleum resources were tapped before the 19th century; there were no plastics in the ocean before 1950; and there were no nuclear waste dumps until the insouciant profligacy of 20th century culture. Did they tap into some physical principle that we have yet do discover? And did they advance straight from simple stone tools to a superior physics without an age of fossil fuel dependence?

Perhaps the most plausible hypothesis is the most magical one: that their minds were entrained with their technologies, and they were able to accomplish feats of psychokinesis that today we observe extremely rarely, and which we regard as “miracles” or “magic”.

Some say it was Eden herself whose magic (or science) provided the technology for these constructions. According to tradition, Eden could transport herself (through quantum wormholes) and appear elsewhere on the earth, or even elsewhere in the universe. It is via extensive travel that she acquired knowledge that was so far beyond her tribe’s ability to assimilate. In addition to teleportation, Eden learned the (related) art of anti-gravity. She was able to assist the tribe in building with huge stone blocks because she could arrange for them to be almost weightless, and easy to move.

Machu Picchu was built at this time, and, remarkably, there are surviving underground tunnels that once stretched 300 miles from Titicaca to Ollantaytambo and Machu Picchu. The longest navigable stretches that have been found to date are 12 miles — an impressive feat in its own right, and certainly evidence of power tools. The remnant tunnels in this area which have been charted form a dotted line that supports the inherited oral traditions of the most successful preppers in recorded history.

For Eden had prophesied that a major catastrophe was nigh, and her warning came in enough time to plan an escape. Eden was associated with the construction and provisioning of an underground habitat. There were hundreds of miles of tunnels, underground residences, factories, monuments and places of worship. These were entire subterranean cities. We cannot know whether Eden inspired and instructed teams of thousands of engineers, administrators and workers, or whether she accomplished the construction directly by magic. We know only that her presence was unassuming, and she never laid claim to the mantle of a savior.

“The wisest of leaders is barely known to the people, and when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.” — Lao Tzu

And, yes, the people who emerged from these underground cities after 12 years when the surface of the earth was once again able to support life found themselves in a lush world, teeming with life and greenery, such as they had no memory or even imagination after years living underground. Their gratitude for the bounteous earth knew no bounds, and they named their enchanted land Eden, in honor of the shaman whose dreams and visions had prognosticated the apocalypse, whose wisdom and whose magic helped them to build the underground city that was their refuge and their salvation.

To what extent did Eden deserve the legendary status that history has bestowed upon her? All of us are making things happen with our thoughts and with our mere presence that would never have happened without us; and yet we are too reticent to claim agency in these circumstances. Noam Chomsky teaches us that “all speech is essentially channeling.” So is it really meaningful to distinguish between things that happen by our will and things that come through us? For Eden’s miracles, it is particularly difficult to distinguish her paranormal powers from physical notions of causality.

To what extent are we, sons and daughters of Eden, a hybrid race descended from Eden's half alien son? This is a more tractable question, to which anthropological geneticists may someday provide an answer.

Number One

132,000 years before the present. I apologize that so little is known about Josh and Enid in this era, or indeed about the civilization in which they lived and died. From its great antiquity, only oral traditions remain, from which the following story has been interpolated.

Jia-de and Yi-ni were twins, fraternal twins, boy and girl from the same womb. We can infer that they were particularly close growing up, and that they frequently shared that telepathic connection which is observed even today between twins..

The family lived in a mountainous area that is now Myanmar, then a part of greater China. As teens, their favorite play was exploring the caves and climbing along icy ridges. Crevasses opened, glaciers avalanched, feet slipped on the rocks. It’s not difficult to imagine that each saved the other from death more times than they ever reported to their parents.

China was a region of the globe with a racially distinctive population, but not a central government. Many communities were well-connected with communication channels that would be the envy of our modern era. They were also globally connected, with knowledge of peoples and events around the world. There was maritime travel, extensive global trade, but no air travel.

Yes, there was a Chinese culture 132,000 years ago, and yes, it has some relation to today’s Chinese culture, though obviously there has been much modification and influence from without and within. Before the impact event that ended that yuga, China had science, technology, art, literature, and pictographic writing (not surprising, since most ancient writing is based on pictograms rather than alphabets). Nothing of their writing or visual art survived the apocalypse, but their oral tradition was passed on through a few isolated tribes, and some of the gods and magic animals that appear in Chinese myth have roots in this time, three apocalypses before the present.

No stories survive of their middle years, but we may fill in gap. The twins found marriage partners, raised families in neighbor houses where their children knew their cousins as close as their own siblings. Yi-ni was busy in her career as a local administrator, in which she earned a reputation for wisdom and fairness. Jia-de was less invested in his role as merchant, and had more time for making music, and just watching the children grow up. Throughout this time, day upon day extending over decades, they met each morning at sunrise to do movement and breathing exercises, forerunners of the Chinese martial arts that survive to this day.

The twins were 50 years old when they became empty-nesters with unaccustomed freedom. Jia-de did what he always promised he would do: he tilled the rich earth and cultivated the land, raising beans and vegetables on the terraced slopes. Yi-ni did what she always promised she would do: she trekked to the West to live in a monk’s community, the life a renunciate in the higher and more remote regions of what is now Pakistan.

At the time when the oral legend begins, Yi-ni and Jia-de were 70 years old, and they had not seen each other in a full twenty years. There was a monstrous meteor impact far away in Greenland. Global communications in that world were such that Jia-de knew about the event immediately, Yi-ni not for six weeks. By the time the news of the event arrived at Yi-ni’s monastery, she might have guessed the sky was hiding something. There had not been a real sunrise in five days. Her sixth sense told her that the aftermath of this event would be felt for 10,000 years.

In more civilized regions, people had only five senses; or perhaps they had learned to silence their sixth. They turned to the scientists for a message about what to expect, but the scientists couldn’t agree. Most predicted that the dust in the atmosphere would settle in about six weeks. (Was this an actual computation, or did it simply “sound reasonable” since the global dust cover had taken six weeks to form?) But a minority talked about albedo and pH and the stratosphere. Their prediction was that sulfuric acid high above the clouds could darken the day sky by reflecting sunlight back into space before it had a chance to warm the atmosphere. The most pessimistic of them predicted a whole year of cold. Yes, the cold would be more noticeable than the dark. The sky would be just a little dimmer than usual, barely noticeable, much less than the difference between a sunny day and a cloudy day. But that difference would persist day after day, month after month, the entire world over. Temperatures, they said, would be 20^o cooler for an entire year.

Irresponsible! These alarmists were scaring people at a time when what the world needed most was to stay calm. The responsible scientists chastised the alarmists. Clerics and government officials rose to the occasion and offered reassurances, always citing the scientific majority. The alarmists found they had lost their credibility and their voice. Their more moderate colleagues shunned them and refused to debate them.

Jia-de had had his nose to the good earth for 20 years; he knew what crops could resist the cold; he knew when to plant them and how to protect them in deep frost. Jia-de’s garden fed his village. In a time of fear, he was a revered public servant, appreciated by almost everyone. He did not fear the cold or the hunger or the long days tilling the ground with an aged body and sun-brown skin that was hanging off his upper arms.

That summer, there was no summer. Twice it snowed in July. Crops failed, and the following winter was the hardest time in anyone’s memory. The extreme cold temperatures combined with food shortages elicited an anxious and distracted response. So long as people were cold and hungry, it was hard for them to focus on anything at all, even to imagine creative remedies for the cold and the hunger.

The consolation was that people came together as never before. They shared food and housing. Neighbors huddled in the houses of those who had fuel and stoves. It was truly a coming together, a time when people felt the support of their community as never before.

It was the following year that famine struck in full force. Food reserves were now exhausted, while ice still covered the rice paddies at planting time. In the village and around the world, people were too weak to get up from bed. The communal cooperation ended abruptly as wild-eyed marauding families would break into neighbors’ homes to plunder food. The next month they were cannibalizing the dead, and by winter they were fighting over the corpses.

Many left the village in search of food. Jia-de left in search of Yi-ni. He imagined her far away, ill-provisioned in a place even colder and more rugged than his village. How could he help her? This was not a consideration. Jia-de was beyond rationality. He wanted nothing but to be reunited with his twin.

Vehicles were abandoned, lifeless, because they had run out of fuel. Nothing had been brought in from the outside world for many months. The last of the oxen and horses had been slaughtered for food more than a year ago.

Jia-de left the village on foot, walking west and ever west, trekking over the foothills, dipping into the lowlands where he could, traveling alone, walking day after day, eating whatever he found along the way, mushrooms, berries, fibrous tuber roots that he could barely chew, occasionally fish, once a turtle. All told, there were not enough calories to sustain him. Walking, weakening, persisting.

A boy from a fishing village came upon him where he had fallen from a ledge, where he had lain for half a day, unable to get up and very nearly expired. The boy ran back and brought his father. The two carried Jia-de back to their home, fed and nursed him. As long as there were yet fish in the sea, they were not starving.

Hundreds of miles to the west and nearly four miles above sea level, Yi-ni sensed that her brother was in trouble.

She had lived the yogi’s life. She knew how to warm her body from within. She knew how to fast. She had mastered her body. Because of their practice, the monks’ community had survived the cold and the famine better than most. Yi-ni had not been suffering.

But now she set out in search of her brother, walking east through the mountains and the valleys, ever east. Without a map, without a plan, she knew where to go. She was not thinking. Her feet knew, and they would lead her to her brother.

Another year. Another summer without the sun. A year without products from overseas, a year without communications or news from other parts of the world. A year when Yi-ni was walking and Jia-de was languishing.

One morning, he looked up and saw his sister, not as a 70-year-old, but exactly as he had remembered her twenty years earlier. She was beaming. If anything, she looked younger than his memory. He could not decide whether she was a pilgrim or a hallucination until she kissed him.

Her smile brought peace. “I have seen the other side, and it is nothing to fear.” She told him. “Beyond this, I have no words for what I have seen. It is just like life on earth, in this body; and it is nothing like anything you have known or can imagine.

“We shall be together again in a future which is also a past and is outside time,” she said. “We shall love again, and we shall fight again, and we shall help and hurt one another again and again and again.”

Prologue

Yes, this story ends with a prologue. Enid and Josh’s connection from 132,000 years ago was not the first, but only the earliest for which the legend remains, the earliest for which we have language and memory.

They were porpoises together in a cold sea, migrating from arctic to antarctic and back. They were mastodons together, masticating the underbrush on the planes of North America. Before that, they were cats from the same litter.

One billion years ago, there were two paramecia who came together in conjugation, sharing and thoroughly mixing their protoplasm and their nuclear DNA. This was sex without sexes, no male and female. Individual identities were merged and recreated in the act of conjugation; no pretense of “me” and “you” but only “us”.