by Leo Virg

The deep glistening sky of the night before, with its sparkling stars against the azure and the philosophic mood it had produced, was still on my mind. Astronomers had just come to the conclusion that there may be billions of galaxies beyond our own jeweled Milky Way, and physicists had simultaneously broken the atom and found it to be a veritable solar system in miniature. Could these two extensions of science in such opposite directions solve the riddle of life? Would we finally know the whence, why, and whither of our existence? Is the electron after all the philosopher’s stone, the cornerstone on which all this glistening structure is built? Is our earth a small grain of mortar in that magnificent edifice? What form does that cosmic building finally have? Does it resemble a towering mountain? Or a roaring sea? Or maybe it has the form of an animal? And what about the electrons, which resemble miniature planets? Are they inhabited by a minute humanity of our own intellectual and evolutionary standards? I sank deeper and deeper into my questioning meditation. I started to feel one with that enormous cosmic structure, and one with that infinitesimally small, miniature human creature existing on one of the electrons, maybe in my own little finger.

I heard a whizzing sound as of an object moving fast through the calm air above my head. The sun was suddenly darkened as by a passing thick cloud. Looking up, I got my first personal view of a “flying saucer,” and a very, very close view at that, because it was heading right down in the field beyond the hedge. Its body was shaped like that of a turtle, and it was of a metallic color. It seemed to float in the air without visible, mechanical means of support.

I sat there aghast while it landed. Then I became curious to see what would come out of that contraption. My curiosity was, however, only intensified by the strange figure who emerged from it. He looked like a cross between a human being and a grasshopper. Through his transparent space helmet I saw a head of triangular shape with the apex turned down. The small mouth was set very low, which gave him a rather weak-willed appearance. The eyes were large and luminous, set slightly below the center of the head, which gave him a very large forehead. His body was very slender with the bony structure apparently on the outside, as if to protect the muscles from a great pressure. The most amazing thing, however, was his color. It was green! This more than anything gave me the impression of a similarity to a grasshopper. The little hair he had was of a reddish brown.

He came toward me with the graceful ease of a highly evolved person and with a kindness in his eyes, which relaxed me and at the same time attracted me. I got a feeling of kind compulsion, as he gestured an invitation for me to approach and enter the saucer. I did not seem to be able to muster any power of resistance. My legs simply carried me toward and inside that saucer as though my body were controlled by an outside impulse.

As I entered, I saw another one of those unearthly beings sitting at the controls of the contraption. There were four seats, and I sat down in the one back of the pilot as if of my own volition, although I certainly had no conscious intention to take such a risk. My host sat down next to me. I thought of him from the start as my host and myself as his guest even though there was a certain compulsion involved in the relationship.

We were suddenly lifted as in an elevator at a tremendous speed, although there seemed to be no gravity to press us against our seats. The course soon was directed forward. The speed seemed to be increased by a phenomenon similar to that of a flat stone which skids through the air seemingly faster and farther than the original propelling force could have carried it.

I was handed a suit and a helmet like that of my host. By now I had acquired a feeling of assurance and safety which entirely eliminated any fear or nervousness. I felt as if I were going through an initiation among friendly brethren, who would do me no harm, even though the experience bordered on the frightening.

Soon I began to feel as if my imagination were being influenced by my host. I felt as if he were transmitting pictures and ideas to my mind, silent movies, so to speak, which could easily be translated into words, like this:

“We use no special language to communicate with one another. We communicate by tele-visualization. To make this clear, I must remind you of the discussion of thought and speech which you had in a boarding house in London long ago.”

My memory suddenly brought me back many years to the time when I was boarding in London. The gentleman of the house was a lawyer, who had lost one eye and with it most of his clientele. His wife therefore took in boarders, but she was rather particular in her choice of customers, as all of the members of the family were highly educated. We could therefore at the table sustain a conversation of high quality. She had found that a certain type of foreigners who traveled for their education was her best bet. We were therefore all of foreign birth and education, hardly two of any one nation.

One day the old gentleman asked us whether we thought in our mother tongue or in English when we spoke English. A Hollander instantly answered that he never thought in any other than his mother tongue. While he spoke, I had time to analyze my thinking apparatus and came up with this answer:

“I think you are wrong. There seem to be two sorts of thoughts, one in words and the other in pictures. When you think of a horse running, you do not tell yourself, ‘The horse is running, the horse is running.’ You actually see the horse running. During a conversation your mind may travel all around the world in a split second, not by words, but in pictures. You then comment on this mind-traveling in words. If you are alone or speaking to Dutch people, you use the Dutch language, but if you are with English-speaking people, you use English words directly. You have not got time to think in Dutch first and then translate into English, nor would you be able to speak with such good grammar as you do, if you were translating from a language in which the words are placed in a different position from that in English. At least, I know that I do not use Swedish words as stepping stones to the English when I speak.”

“You are right!” This rejoinder from my new companion, superimposed on my mind, brought me back through time and space from London 1906 to a 1955 space ship half way into nowhere. “You speak of your mind’s pictures directly in the language in which you are conversing. Similarly, your companion’s words throw the picture of his thoughts directly on your mind’s screen. I do not even need the cumbersome medium of words. I project my mind’s pictures directly on your mind’s screen. You need to translate them into the words of a language only if you want to write or talk about them. In the same way I can see your mind pictures. Thus we converse like this without any language at all. As a matter of fact, where I come from nobody ever uses words, so we no longer have any language. We converse entirely by tele-visualization, as many of your animals do.

“We are people from a far-off planet and have decided to take you there so as to give you the right perspective of your earth and its co-ordination with the rest of the universe. We have chosen you because as an artist and writer you have developed your visualization more than most people. Your all-around education and travel, your unprejudiced study of the different religions, and the inner calmness which you have gained during your many adventures and experiences, makes it easier for us to deal with you than with anybody else on your planet. Then you seem to have carried with you from past lives a knowledge which will be a good foundation for the understanding which we want to give you in this eleventh-hour effort to save your planet and the whole of our solar system from destruction.”

We had now reached so high in the air that the reflection and condensation of the sun’s rays had become so minimized as to let us see the stars, although it still was about noon in my home town. Suddenly everything went black; we had evidently left the earth’s atmosphere, which serves as a medium of vibration for the light rays. Quickly the pilot pulled some kind of screen in front of the wind shield. The screen was evidently made of a material which responded to the light vibrations, because we could again see the stars. Our course was set on a certain bright star.

Now the moving pictures were again projected on my mind’s screen:

“We have developed to a point where we can stretch our consciousness and visualization into all parts of the universe, but we are naturally most interested in our own solar system. We have been horrified to see how the inhabitants of your globe lack real spiritual development. You seem to play with gadgets like little children, without any idea of why you are born, or what part you should play in the affairs of the universe. The prevailing idea seems to be that you are there only to seek self-satisfaction both in this life and in its hereafter, a self-satisfaction with gadgets in this life, and harps, women, wine, or continuous ease and inactivity in the hereafter. You use three-fourths of your working time producing unnecessary gadgets, stimulants, and narcotics, instead of finding out what you are supposed to do and then doing it. Many of your spiritual leaders have become mere scalpers, selling tickets to an imaginary heaven. Some of your political leaders accept their election as an invitation to graft, greed, and inequities of all kinds. A great deal of your financial, industrial, agricultural, medical, and labor leaders are ready to cheat, degrade, poison, or even kill you with gadgets, stimulants, wrong food, goons, and now even A-bombs and H-bombs. It is particularly the development of the latter which has forced us to take this chance of possibly bringing the earth men to their senses.

“When you kill one another with block-busters, it means no more to the universe than it means to you when your child burns a finger, but the explosion of an H-bomb is comparable to that child’s opening all the gas jets and exploding the whole house. The block-busters are means of gaining wisdom the hard way, while the H-bomb may spell finis to the entire solar system. We, the people of the other planets cannot accept such a danger without an effort to prevent it. That is why we are forcing this trip on you. We are going to try to evolve your consciousness to include the whole of the cosmos, try to make you understand what place your earth has in it, and, above all, what part your humanity is supposed to play within it.

“But I see what a task we have before us. You are like all the earth people: gadgets, gadgets, and more gadgets. You have only listened with your mind distracted by the problem of what fuel we are using in this vehicle and what makes it fly! We use lead, which has an odd isotope just like uranium. Lead is more plentiful than uranium on our planet also. While uranium behaves like a bull in a china closet with great explosions, which prohibit the direct use of it for peaceful purposes, lead allows itself to be harnessed and become useful like an ox. We use its tremendous force directly to produce an electromagnetic field, which repels or attracts this vehicle from or to the different heavenly bodies. Thus we move about as if this “saucer” were a heavenly body itself. You may recall one of your first lessons in electricity, when your teacher electrified pellets of a floating material by the electrodes of a machine producing static electricity. He then placed them on top of the water in a basin. Those magnetized by the same electrode and thus charged with the same electromagnetism, repelled one another, while those of opposite charge attracted each other. We charged this saucer with the same electromagnetism as that of your globe. By making the charge smaller, we allow ourselves to be attracted by the earth, while by increasing the charge we are repelled by it. By equalizing the charge we can stand still in the air. By using the force up or down and tilting the saucer, we can gain a motion in one direction or the other. The electromagnetic field embraces, of course, everything inside the saucer, you included, which saves you from the struggle between the vehicle and your gravity. In your flying machines you endow the vehicle with a power which overcomes the gravity, but everything inside the vehicle is still subject to the tremendous pull of the earth’s gravity. It is this struggle between the force of the motor and the gravity which sometimes becomes too great for the occupants, who are blacked out by it. We are not subject to that risk. Now are you satisfied?

“Your inquisitive mind becomes an obstacle rather than an asset unless you allow me to direct it. By relaxing you will gain more knowledge in the short time for which we are going to keep you, than you would in a thousand years of experimenting with gadgets. We are also educating other earth men, whose minds are more concentrated on electronics and gadgets than yours, in the scientific aspects of our saucers. You have trained your mind in metaphysics as well as in physics. You have carried over from previous lives a great knowledge of philosophy. Go back in your mind to the discussion you had with a young lady about the universe, and you will understand that you could not have gotten those ideas from this life’s education, which entirely excludes the why and wherefore of life on your planet.”

My visualization was suddenly pushed back into a memory of a conversation with the young lady some fifty years ago. I was at the time studying at a technical college, where I learned all about molecules and atoms, which at that time were considered the smallest indivisible particles of matter. To add to my all-around education I was also studying a book on popular astronomy on the side. This combination had produced in my mind a philosophy, which I tried to explain to the young lady in this way:

“The Milky Way looks to me like the bone in a huge body, in which our solar system is a molecule and our Earth an atom. Now then, what do you think we are in relation to that body? Are we useful beings in its service, or are we merely TB germs destroying it by our selfishness?”

She glared at me. No young man had ever before dared to consider it an even remote possibility that she was a TB germ! She finally regained enough self control to say:

“Sir, I don’t know what we are, but I certainly think you are crazy!” With that she left me.

Thank goodness that she wasn’t one of the dozen or more girls with whom I was in love at the time, or it might have killed a perfectly good philosophy right there and then and perhaps a budding philosopher with it. I became, however, very discriminating about my audience thereafter.

My visualization was again taken over by my host:

“Right you are. You earth people have come very close to being TB germs the way you handle your A- and H-bombs! It was this budding philosophy which made us choose you. You know now from astronomy that the Milky Way is only one among possibly trillions of similar galaxies, and from physical science you have found that the atom can be divided into a submicroscopic solar system. We therefore hope to teach you the full extension of that budding philosophy on this short visit to our planet. Here we are now.”

On Another Planet

The saucer landed on a strange looking continent, which I had seen coming toward us at a speed of a terrific number of miles per second. The slowing of the unearthly speed did not inconvenience me in the slightest, which again proved to me that the saucer indeed had an electromagnetic field of its own which included its passengers. We landed as softly as if on a bed of eider down. I was quickly taken out of the saucer and whisked into a cube of some heavy, transparent material.

Again I was subject to the impelled visualization:

“You may take off your pressure suit and mask. We have taken pains to accommodate you, the earth man. We have made numerous journeys to your planet to study conditions there. We then built this cube, through which you can see, and which contains the right mixture of elements in your air, the right temperature, and the right pressure to correspond to the internal pressure of your body. It may have been a mistake to make the cube transparent because your mind will probably wander to such problems as: ‘What crags are those? Are they extinct volcanoes? How funny those men look without their oxygen masks!’ By the way, ours are not oxygen masks. We do not breathe oxygen, because that exists only in small quantities in our atmosphere. We breath carbon dioxide like the vegetation on your globe. Our blood therefore contains chlorophyll instead of hemoglobin. That is why we look green instead of pink like you. Carbon dioxide is heavier than oxygen and makes our atmosphere just that much heavier than yours. That is why the material in your cube is so heavy. The pressure inside is so much lower. That is also why we carry our bony structure on the outside to resist that pressure without any increase in blood pressure.

“Now I will give you a few minutes to look around to satisfy your curiosity.”

The first thing to interest me was their heads without the masks. They had very slim, tall necks, on which the apex of their triangular heads seemed to rest. Their noses were thin and bowed, their very small mouths were set far down in the apex, which made them look completely void of will power. Yet, I had experienced the tremendous, compelling will power of these people when I was forced into the saucer. Could it be that the mature judgment and strong purposefulness of their brains, concealed behind those large foreheads, produced a stronger will power than the hyper-developed desires and passions indicated by our powerful jaws? Anyway, the calm, harmonious and kind expression of their faces and their tall and slim but graceful bodies made them look beautiful in a way not at all like the grotesque and dwarfed space men of our imagination.

“You are right,” came again the response in the picture language. “We are evolved to a point where all our energy is expended on the higher planes of consciousness. The consciousness of most earth people is all centered in their mouth and sex. They will use their mouths from morning to night continually eating, drinking, chewing gum or tobacco, smoking, kissing, or, last but not least, talking and talking. Their work is centered on getting the wherewithal to keep the mouths busy. We eat and drink very little and for no other purpose than to keep fit and alive. We do not talk, since we transmit our thoughts by visualization. Our sex is used only for procreation, not for continuous and purposeless self-satisfaction.

“Now I find your mind wandering again. You are looking for lakes, rivers, or seas. Over there is a river. It is not filled with water. Water is scarce on this planet and would stay frozen at our low temperature. It is liquid carbon dioxide, which is as benevolent to us as water and air are to you. You are now looking for cities. We do not live in congested cities like you. Our communications are so fast and our tele-visualization so powerful that we can be with one another or communicate with each other any moment we like, even though our homes are far apart. Needless to say, our tele-visualization dispenses with telephone, telegraph, radio, television, and mail. Our will power is so strong that we need no stimulants, which saves a lot of time for more useful purposes than producing drugs. You wonder how we make money. We don’t use any. Money is merely a medium of exchange. We have attained to the point of evolution where we do not need any such medium. We exchange our services freely and justly without it. Nobody can cheat when everybody can read the other’s mind. It is to this point of evolution, this widened consciousness, to which I am trying to evolve your mind. You are not able to live like we do, so long as you have the idea of separateness from other beings and from the universe. You may call life on our globe communistic, but it has no resemblance whatsoever to the despotic totalitarianism which passes under that name on your globe. Christ, Pythagoras, and Buddha were as highly evolved in many ways as we are. They tried to live our way in real communism with their followers. There were, however, too few people of sufficiently high standard to continue that kind of life. It soon degenerated, therefore, into graft, greed, and tyranny like the communism of today on your globe, where a few live in high luxury on the fruits of the slave labor of the rest. Marx himself has by now probably worn out his coffin turning in his grave over his philosophy being used as an excuse for exactly the inequities against which he preached.

“But let us come down to the real object of this trip. We are going to make you visualize a journey, the one which we take at our highest initiation, and the one Christ had to take before he realized that he was the “Son of God” and that all humans were his brethren. This initiation has so far been a deep secret, but in desperation over the low spiritual standard of the earth people, and seeing how their technical development is running far ahead of their moral and spiritual evolution, we will allow you to write about it on your return to earth. So now you are off! Learn all you can!”

Excerpt from Twenty Trillion Light-Years Through Space

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