Looking Forward by Kenneth Jr. (snow like ashes .txt) 📗

They snuggle into the same living contour chair. The sides of their bodies touch warmly, unhampered by clothing. As they look through the glass of the observatory into the night beyond, they can see the bright ball of the earth a quarter-million miles away. Europe, Africa, and part of Asia are visible.

They feel toward earth as they suspect people in earlier times may have felt toward their mothers. Here is the organism that had brought them into being through eons of evolutionary time. Here is the organism that nurtured them and made them what they are. Although they can not see the sun, they compare their feelings about it to those that children in earlier times may have had about a father. The energy that moves everything in their lives may have come from the sun. Even the atoms that formed the earth some four billion years ago may have been an offshoot of the sun—something like the spermatozoa that fathers of previous times contributed to the absorbing sexual potentials of the mothers.

“I think I’ve learned a lot about myself and our society in the last few weeks,” Hella confesses. “I had taken everything for granted. A person with normal vision never appreciates what his eyes mean to him. It’s only when you come face to face with blindness that you understand the part that your eyes play in your life.” Hella smiles a slight, tender smile.

“It must have been disturbing to see the folkways of the twentieth century,” Scott says, trying to empathize with her.

“Oh, it was,” answers Hella, appreciative that Scott is working toward her in his feelings. She knows she can always count on him. “I learned a lot, but I would never go through it again.”

“I heard two people were senselessly killed, one by an individual and one by the group,” says Scott. “Did you actually see it?”

“Yes.”

“It’s hard to believe such things could happen—and at the same time that I was busy on the satellite working to contact intelligent beings in outer space. Just think, the same world, the same time,” Scott is beginning to feel deeply about the deaths.

Hella does not want to get into a spiral of feelings about the double murders. She feels a need to steer the conversation toward a deeper appreciation of what they have—to understand the present in the light of the past.

“When I was on the island with the thawees,” Hella says, “several of them kept insisting on seeing a lawyer. They didn’t believe me when I told them we have no use for law or lawyers. They wanted to know what we do with criminals. I explained that we have no criminals—that people in our society of abundance don’t act aggressively toward others. You have to be insecure and afraid in order to harm others. They told me it wouldn’t work—that I didn’t know anything about human nature.

“I tried to explain that our supplemental brains are imprinted to make us want to seek assistance if we feel uncomfortable or hostile. Apparently, in their society they had to capture hostile people like wild animals. And just listen to this, Scott. They caged them in jails! People would voluntarily get medical help if they had a physical ailment, but sometimes they wouldn’t get psychiatric help before they had done things that hurt someone.

“I suppose the thing that impressed me most deeply about them,” Hella continues, “was the way they were driven so fiercely by their ego needs. I guess the scarcity conditions that set man against man accentuated the king-size egos we developed in our long evolution from the jungle. In trying to meet their ego needs and develop a feeling of individual worth, they got too concerned with their status in the eyes of others. They tried to nourish their starved egos with silly things like mink coats and diamond cuff links. They seemed to care less about being successful in their own terms; they were far more concerned with the appearance of success in the eyes of other people.

“It seems to me that one of our greatest differences lies in how we view ourselves,” comments Scott, reflecting on the problem. “Our ancestors, at least in the twentieth century areas where these people came from, didn’t have strong inner standards that expressed their own individuality. They were far more concerned with their reputations than their characters. Those poor people were like rudderless ships blown by winds of fashion and storms of capricious opinion.”

“They just couldn’t live by their own internal standards.” Hella feels compassion for these people and the tragedy of their lost happiness. “I think this probably began with their early conditioning. Right from the word ‘go’ they were dominated by their parents. They had to do what their parents told them, or they’d be punished or made to feel bad. During their helpless, impressionable childhoods, they developed the habit of not judging and feeling things for themselves. ‘Mama knows best. Daddy won’t like this.’ The first five years were crucial. As they grew up, they were never free of these personality patterns.”

Hella sits up quickly. “That explains why they never came into their own! Now I can see why their feelings always remained sharply tuned to picking up the first signs of any possible rejection that would indicate what to think and how to act.”

The Supreme Ethical Standard

“Of course, our present way of life is not without roots in the past,” Scott says. “In ancient Greece, Socrates advocated our supreme ethical standard: ‘Gnothi seauton,’ know thyself.” Scott pauses long enough to sit up. “And Shakespeare said, ‘This above all, to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.’ ”

“In spite of the teachings of many of the great thinkers, most of our ancestors really didn’t understand what it means to know yourself or be true to yourself,” says Hella. “These were hollow words, not a