DATA
Whatever the time distortion, I must add the antimatter at the appropriate moment.
Geordi, if the Professor was right, I will need a twenty seven second countdown.
LAFORGE [OC]:
You got it, Data.
DATA:
Captain, I now have the antimatter and am moving towards the opening at the end of the lab.
The next time distortion should occur within seconds.
Geordi, begin countdown on my mark. Now.
(There's a big sparkle. Data looks back to see himself midway across the lab - no 2 - and getting the antimatter - no 3. Meanwhile, Geordi's voice is counting down, very echoy)
DATA 3:
Captain, there appear to be three of us.
DATA 1:
Should I drop the antimatter or wait for one of you?
DATA 3:
Only one of us is at the correct time continuum.
DATA 1:
Which one?
DATA 2:
Me. It's me!
GEORDI [OC]:
Five, four, three, two, one.
(The middle Data arrives at number 1 and the antimatter goes in, before number 3 gets there. The effect stops. There is only one Data)
PICARD [OC]:
Data, report.
Are you all right?
DATA:
Yes, sir.
PICARD [OC]:
Is it closed?
DATA:
It is well patched, sir.
Closed indicates a permanent condition, which I cannot guarantee.
That’s cool man. I just watched the pilot and noticed a running image of your work: The human centipede.
GM: (laughing) You know I haven’t seen Human Centipede. I can’t watch horror movies.
LOL. Well my guess is that those forms of one long continuous being, which looks like a centipede, is your visual description of a self, moving through time, which you said you learned in Kathmandu in 1994 as how things actually are. How does this experience still interact with your life?
GM: We can’t see any direction in time. We can’t see back, and we can’t see forward. We can remember back and imagine forward, but that’s it. We’re trained to feel like ‘individuals’ so we don’t actually see ourselves as the extended processes that we are, shapeshifters who transform through decades from small, plump baby things to large and horny muscular teenagers, to hard-working, middle age adults, and finally desiccated seniors dying on beds. If we sped that up and showed one human life over ten minutes, it would be a body horror werewolf transformation more outrageous and horrifying than any seen onscreen.
But to me it’s like the color of the sky, it’s so self-evident that to see a bird fly past the window is to imagine its skipping solid trail through the medium of time. In time we are all connected, there’s just no denying that. There’s nothing mystical about any of this. I’m talking about stuff that is simply real.
Imagination can give you the ability to look backwards and forward. So, when you run it backwards, think how your grown-up mature body was once smaller, less massive, less capable of interacting with the environment – that’s real. Run it back to the beginnings of life on earth ad it’s clear that we all are one thing. A singular organism made of many parts, just like a human body with its billions of individual skin cells – which die and fall from the body every day.
So, what does that mean? If people learned this in school, if we understood and accepted, we were all the same fucking thing(!) it might help prevent the collapse into mad division that’s occurring, just now. It’s just a matter of perspective that could change everything.
But the organism we’re part of might be sick, who knows? When cells in a body turn against one another and the system that supports them starts breaking down, it’s cancer…
You had the gnostic experience. To just hear it or read it is one thing but when you have the experience that seems to be the most convincing thing.
GM: Well, it seems to become self-evident. It’s really like someone turns your head around in Plato’s cave and you realize that there’s a light and someone’s doing shadow figures with their fingers. Once you’ve seen it, you’ve seen it. And it’s ‘Oh, of course’! Of course! There’s no denying it. But I guess to have that experience is its own confirmation. It’s like living by the sea all your life, then having to explain that to someone living inland who’s never seen the ocean and doesn’t believe an ocean could exist because they’ve never seen one.
To me it can be confirmed intellectually by just thinking about time and how you are embedded in time. You know you had to be six years old to be here. So, where the hell is ‘being six’? Well, being six exists in a time direction that you can’t see or point to, but it’s still there. To misunderstand that is equivalent to flying from Los Angeles to London then, after touching down at Heathrow, insisting that Los Angeles no longer exists!
And once you’re truly aware of time as the medium through which we transmit our physical signal, then there is no denying that your personal track winds its way back into your mum and she goes back to her mum and it all goes back to that single dividing cell 3 and a half billion years ago. To me, that’s just basic mechanical shit. That’s not mysticism. I’m not interested in ghosts and spirit worlds. If I’m going to have transcendence, I want to be able to touch it.
We don’t understand that it’s time for us to withdraw our projection and actually relate to The Other Person.
True Marriage can only be based on Human Love, which is different from romantic love, being in love, or in-loveness.
Don’t Mix Levels
When Gold is being exchanged, there are two rules that can save both parties trouble.
First, when you put your gold onto someone, you have no right to pester that person.
To project Meaning and Importance onto another person is enough.
You don’t want to smother him.
Second, don’t mix levels. Alchemical gold is an element in its own right and shouldn’t be mixed with anything else.
Friendship, companionship, sex, fun, work—all these relationships can be good, but it creates a mess when you express the alchemical gold through them.
You may end up marrying the person who carries your gold.
That’s legitimate.
But don’t mix the gold with the many other facets of relationship that are possible.
“Blessed are the pure in heart.”
Pure means unmixed.
On what level is it True? On what level is the Virgin birth True?
Almost all psychological suffering is caused by mixing levels.
Everything in you is good in its own right, a construct of God.
But contamination of one thing by another can short-circuit both.
Much of my time as a therapist was spent making an effort to get patients to state as simply as possible the elements of their problem.
As soon as the issues are understood clearly, it’s usually clear what to do.
When you are struck, when gold is being exchanged, sit quietly until the smoke clears and you see where you are.
Love and Marriage
Sometimes, when you put your gold onto another person, he also puts his Gold onto you.
It gets complicated when the exchange of gold goes both ways.
One of the contaminations of levels that we make— we’re scarcely able to think otherwise—is that the exchange of gold means marriage.
Marriage is Good, and Gold is Good.
They may go together nicely.
But they’re not synonymous.
It can be a problem when we mix these things up.
We think, "I’ve fallen in love, I must take her to bed."
Maybe you will, but that’s not synonymous with falling in love.
In our culture, mutual projection is regarded as the prerequisite for marriage.
We take for granted that we will marry the person we are in love with.
But being in love is not enough to guarantee a successful marriage.
When you fall in love, you feel overwhelmed with excitement.
You’ve projected your gold, your deepest inner value, onto the other person.
You’ve given it to her to incubate for a while, until you are ready to take it back.
And if the feeling is mutual, she has given her gold to you.
For the relationship to succeed, somewhere along the way each of you has to take your gold back.
Unfortunately, that’s usually accompanied by disillusionment.
“You’re not the knight I thought you were.”
“You’re not a princess when you wake up in the morning.”
The gold comes clattering down by way of disappointment.
If we could only understand that we put our gold in someone’s lap for a period of time—until we get stronger—and someday it will come to an end.
We aren’t wise in this respect, and it’s one of the most painful issues in our culture.
Five years later, when the relationship isn’t working, we don’t understand that it’s time for us to withdraw our projection and actually relate to the other person —our partner, our spouse.
True marriage can only be based on human love, which is different from romantic love, being in love, or in-loveness.
Romanticism is unique to the West, and is a relatively new occurrence, only since the twelfth century.
Romantic love is not a basis for marriage.
Our human life, our marriage, is fed by the capacity to love human to human.
When we’re in love, we put our gold—our expectations—on the other person, and this obliterates her. There is no relatedness.
Loving is a Human Faculty.
We love someone for who that person is.
We appreciate and feel a kinship and a closeness.
Romantic love, on the other hand, is a kind of divine love.
We deify the other person.
We ask that person, without knowing it, to be the Incarnation of God for us.
Being in love is a deep religious experience, for many people the only religious experience they’ll ever have, the last chance God has to catch them.
[Transcriber's Note: This text was produced from a photo-reprint of the 1818 edition.]
IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOL. I.
Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?——
Paradise Lost.
London:
PRINTED FOR
LACKINGTON, HUGHES, HARDING, MAVOR, & JONES,
FINSBURY SQUARE.
1818.
TO
WILLIAM GODWIN,
AUTHOR OF POLITICAL JUSTICE, CALEB WILLIAMS, &c.
THESE VOLUMES
Are respectfully inscribed
BY
THE AUTHOR.
The event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr. Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence. I shall not be supposed as according the remotest degree of serious faith to such an imagination; yet, in assuming it as the basis of a work of fancy, I have not considered myself as merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors. The event on which the interest of the story depends is exempt from the disadvantages of a mere tale of spectres or enchantment. It was recommended by the novelty of the situations which it developes; and, however impossible as a physical fact, affords a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions more comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield.
I have thus endeavoured to preserve the truth of the elementary principles of human nature, while I have not scrupled to innovate upon their combinations. The Iliad, the tragic poetry of Greece,—Shakespeare, in the Tempest and Midsummer Night’s Dream,—and most especially Milton, in Paradise Lost, conform to this rule; and the most humble novelist, who seeks to confer or receive amusement from his labours, may, without presumption, apply to prose fiction a licence, or rather a rule, from the adoption of which so many exquisite combinations of human feeling have resulted in the highest specimens of poetry.
The circumstance on which my story rests was suggested in casual conversation. It was commenced, partly as a source of amusement, and partly as an expedient for exercising any untried resources of mind. Other motives were mingled with these, as the work proceeded. I am by no means indifferent to the manner in which whatever moral tendencies exist in the sentiments or characters it contains shall affect the reader; yet my chief concern in this respect has been limited to the avoiding of the enervating effects of the novels of the present day, and to the exhibitions of the amiableness of domestic affection, and the excellence of universal virtue. The opinions which naturally spring from the character and situation of the hero are by no means to be conceived as existing always in my own conviction; nor is any inference justly to be drawn from the following pages as prejudicing any philosophical doctrine of whatever kind.
It is a subject also of additional interest to the author, that this story was begun in the majestic region where the scene is principally laid, and in society which cannot cease to be regretted. I passed the summer of 1816 in the environs of Geneva. The season was cold and rainy, and in the evenings we crowded around a blazing wood fire, and occasionally amused ourselves with some German stories of ghosts, which happened to fall into our hands. These tales excited in us a playful desire of imitation. Two other friends (a tale from the pen of one of whom would be far more acceptable to the public than any thing I can ever hope to produce) and myself agreed to write each a story, founded on some supernatural occurrence.
The weather, however, suddenly became serene; and my two friends left me on a journey among the Alps, and lost, in the magnificent scenes which they present, all memory of their ghostly visions. The following tale is the only one which has been completed.
