The Perils of Planets as Playgrounds

It used to be such a pleasant place to visit. I used to go when I needed a diversion. The vegetation, from the smallest watermeal to the tallest sequoia, had such personality, flamboyant really, quite chatty. The animals were generally a rambunctious, creative, and emotive lot; they always made me laugh. The water and rocks collaborated far better than on other planets, even though the water usually won any arguments over time.

I traveled there thousands of times, bringing mathematical formulae the way one brings a toy to a toddler. I even grew quite attached to some of the humans who caught on quickly: Thoth, Aberash, Pythagoras, Hypatia, Liu Xin, Pingala, and Itzamna. Some of the languages that developed, like Sanskrit, Hebrew, and Greek, were founded on the energies of numbers. Unlike many of the plants and the other animals, the humans were not content to express the universal laws and ratios with their being; they strived to understand them, along with the frequencies, patterns, relationships, and operative functions I shared with them. I enjoyed their enthusiasm, so intent were they on learning more. I departed, desirous of seeing what they would do on their own with what they learned, and continued on my journey.

By the time I returned, a few Earth centuries later, I was pleased to see how they had expanded upon the lessons. What fun I had with Bonacci, Bhaskarachary, and Cheng Dawei. I found Da Vinci exhausting and Madhava exhilarating. They were hungry for knowledge. Da Vinci wrote down everything, truly everything. It was as though he couldn't recall a thing unless he recorded it in his notebooks. I grew exasperated and impatient, like one does reciting the numerical sequence time after time for one learning it for the first time. I left it to the water, the wind, and the plants to continue the lessons.

Some humans were eager students. I preferred the mathematicians, who sought knowledge for its own sake (the numbers were their playthings), and astronomers, who wanted to understand the movements of the universal bodies, to the engineers, who were too often lured into developing destructive machinery and inventions. Those who could attune their own frequencies to the universe sometimes generated ideas that made me shake my head in amazement.

They created exquisite works of art based on the harmonious proportions and sequences they saw bathed in gold light and they found inspiration in unexpected sources. The shapes of our vehicles, which materialized in three dimensions as a pyramid or cone with two plasma hemispheres at the base, or in two dimensions as a sleek triangle with two half circles, an expression of the graphed formula for (x2+y2−1)3−x2y3=0, became the symbol of love, a heart. Its ubiquity continues to fill me with pleasure. It's touching, really. After our visits, architects all over the planet attempted to replicate the pyramid or cone portion of the craft, the apex pointing upward, as though preparing to follow us through the heavens. Artisans made copies of the heart form of the sleeker ship in many adornments, especially lockets in which they secreted treasures or images of their beloved.

By the time I returned again, the energy surrounding the planet had shifted, growing pains. It became more onerous to find receptive humans. Ramanujan was exceptionally sensitive to theta functions and partition formulae; he was an utter joy whose inner light shone for less than the blink of an eye. Einstein was a challenge; his personal slovenliness disgusted me and I was never certain as to whether he were really understanding or not. What ever made me choose him in the first place? The challenge, most likely. In any case, this stage in human development made me melancholy. The childhood of humanity, full of wonder, awe, and curiosity, was yielding to cynical adolescence, with its assertion of will, opposition to self-control, rules and standards of conduct, its insistence on railing against all boundaries, and its reckless experimentation without considering the consequences.

The planetary energy grew darker, denser. The dawn of the nuclear age, the destructive power in the hands of adolescents so prone to impetuousness, filled me with dread. That was the downside of this species. On the one hand, they could be so ingenious and collaborative when conquering obstacles with determined alacrity; on the other, they took too much pleasure in exerting force and the ability to obliterate.

Earlier, I had anticipated that the creative impulse was healthier and had encouraged it. My dear Friar Mendel was the most gleeful putterer with his mice and peas, who were willing instructors. He didn't need much from me, in reality. I chose him, as so many others, because of his devotion to joining with the Oneness. The ability to quiet the mind and be receptive to messages made for an ideal candidate. The relatively harmless hybridization of plants resulted in robust vegetation and flourishing crop yields to wisely steward resources and reduce suffering. Human understanding of genetics increased rapidly and that's when events took a particularly unfortunate turn.

A genome can be like an enticing playground. Other species had conducted experiments on Earth when the planet was in its infancy; ethically questionable perhaps, but they chocked it up to the prerogative of higher intelligence to conduct research. The sophomoric and frivolous are unable to resist the temptation to make outré combinations to see the results. Admittedly, adding bioluminescence and extravagant pigmentation is mostly harmless fun. What is life without whimsy, after all? The narwhal, octopus and emu never fail to bring a smile. Aesthetic abominations like the lamassu, centaur, and aqrabuamelu, among other memorable embarrassments were mostly contained and eradicated with minimal collateral damage and suffering. The more evolved species realized the futility and perils of disharmony and sought to avoid it. Humans were not in that category...yet, though I continued to hold out hope.

When scientists interfered with the germlines, albeit ostensibly for human benefit, their overreach, lack of wisdom, and contempt for (or ignorance of) harmony and balance became evident. The characteristics humans couldn't engineer they sought to eliminate in other ways. And then the obsession with the brain as though it were the seat of the anima became yet another means of control. MRI, CT, PET, and other scans determined each fetus's potential not merely for intelligence, impairment, deviance, criminality, but hundreds of other traits and behaviors based on neural structures and functions. Fetuses deemed unsuitable were destroyed. The population dwindled and its vigor unexpectedly deteriorated wherever these supposed experts held sway. The truth of consciousness, self-discipline, and volition was subordinated to pseudoscience.

Regardless of their misunderstanding of the interplay of genes and consciousness, some of the choices they made regarding desired characteristics were egregiously imprudent. Rather than collaboration and sociability, extreme individualism was valued. Rather than altruism, narcissism; not scrupulousness but recklessness; not challenge-seeking but security-seeking. With such attributes, they would never join the ranks of the intergalactic star voyagers. Their civilization would continue to decline, their planetary aura would further lose its luster.

Those who continued to quiet the mind and access the Oneness largely escaped by retreating to isolated enclaves and learning to listen to the wisdom of the water, rocks, and wind, the grasses, the trees and insects. Oak trees and spiders, sapient, elegant, and graceful, were particularly generous conversational partners.

Some admonished me for giving the humans too much, an echo of the hapless Prometheus, I suppose. They found this new stage of humanity tedious and tiresome. Other locales with higher frequencies and lighter auras became more fashionable. Several perfunctorily suggested another cleanse of the planet with one of the customary methods in our elemental repertoire: cold, heat, fire, water, ice, or the asteroidal bombardment trope, but I resolutely disagreed. I wasn't willing to give up on Earth. I felt genuine affection for the place and inhabitants, with all their flaws. This was just an unpleasant stage of development to forge through.

I confess, however, that even I probably let more time elapse between visits than had been my custom.

Upon my approach to Earth, the change in the Van Allen belts encircling the Earth was visible. Great progress had been made in terms of the harmonizing of the noetic with the physical sciences. The mystics, the mathematicians, the physicists, and the poets, who throughout human history were rarely far apart, approached a common understanding and demonstrated to other empiricists and materialists the truth of the numinous and the power of consciousness. Humans were quieting the mind and joining together with the elements, and the other flora and fauna to access the Oneness. Intellectually, experientially, and in the depths of their being, they were realizing there were dimensions to existence they would never be able to apprehend through their customary methods. They were regaining their awareness of the sacred order and their relation to the cosmos. They were once again embracing the mystery. And it was good, it was true, it was beautiful, and it was divine.