=1 "Umé"
 |
 |
|
Umé
Gene was approaching home planet, now only a fraction of a parsec away. The powerful braking gave him the feeling of gravity again, which he had not felt for six years, and he didn’t like it. But he had finished his mission; he had spent twenty-six years, nine months and twenty-three days on his trip to Gamela, and ten years on that marvellous planet itself. But since he had travelled at 97% of the speed of light, time on earth was now the year AD 2280; and it was 212 years later than when he had left. But about what he had learned—what could he tell them? Would they believe anything he said? Never mind, for him at least the trip had been worth it.
Two weeks later he touched town at World Space Port. Nothing had changed much. There were huge crowds and government officals just as in 2068, and medical examinations, security checks, reporters. At length he found himself in a big hall, comfortably installed in a gravity acclimatizer and enclosed by glass to prevent sudden infection by earth diseases to which he no longer had immunity. He was receiving the world press. After a few silly questions: “How does it feel to be on earth again... to see so many people?” or “Do you feel at home?” he interrupted:
“No other questions?” and then launched into his report.
“My mission was to ride on a just-discovered kappa beam to the planet Gamela of Zeta Aureonis. I shall omit technical details, relegating them to my official reports and diaries, and will try to give you only the gist.
“It took me six years, earth time, to reach Gamela, travelling at beam speed which is 97% of the speed of light, and on arrival I was showered with friendliness and with gifts. The thousands of specimens I brought with me have been turned over to scientific institutions, where I expect many will become part of a travelling exhibition which all of you may see.
“The purpose of my trip was to contact an obviously higher civilization which had invited me, as a representative of earth, to visit them on a kappa beam. I was told before leaving that the purpose of accepting the invitation was to obtain help and guidance for our problems on earth — poverty, crime, disease and war. Although the civilization of Gamela is indeed splendid and far ahead of ours, and although I was received as a brother and all imaginable help was given me, I am afraid that in that part of my mission I failed. For two reasons, perhaps. You won’t believe what I am going to tell you, and the message I have, if it is a message, may be lost for mankind because we are not yet able to understand it. It requires an understanding which only evolution can bring.
“For our purely technical problems, I brought a whole magnetic library with me, a complete encyclopedia of knowledge which I have already handed over to the component authorities and which I hope will be published shortly in all the languages of earth. I am sure that it represents a great step forward for our technology and science.
“The beings with whom I came into contact were extremely friendly, yet it was almost impossible to understand the principle on which the mind of Gamela functioned. Their books of philosophy seemed absolutely incomprehensible. They made no mention whatever of most of the human problems with which we are concerned. There were no words for them even in their historical dictionaries. So from the very beginning language was the great obstacle. I had already prepared, during my six-year trip on the kappa beam, for my arrival, learning all the mathematical symbols and whatever words could be learned from an illustrated encyclopedia, yet verbal communication was still difficult.
“They had no words to describe any of our problems or difficulties: poverty, indigence, disease, illness, suffering, sickness, death, mortality, killing, murder, war, battle, weapon, crime, punishment, execution, prison, disaster, calamity, tragedy — or hundreds of similar concepts. When I tried to make myself and the problems of earth understood by describing things as they are here they simply laughed and wouldn’t believe me. They declared that a world such as I described couldn’t logically exist. My description, they said, was a contradiction in terms. There couldn’t be a planet like that. It wouldn’t be a planet, but a bad joke, simply a joke. A universe, they contended, was naturally a collection of conscious beings, a gathering together of forces inclined by themselves to form a harmony, an aggregation of things, souls and intelligences logically belonging together and logically desiring to form a whole. How could there be, in this ‘set’, this oneness, this unity of things, a contradiction? Wouldn’t evolution take care of contradictions? The moment you are born together you are one. You are from the same womb.
“One day when I had mentioned the words ‘universe’ and ‘cosmos’ one asked me how it was possible, once we had become aware of the concept of universe or cosmos, for us to insist that it could include chaos, that there could be any individual — or as he said — separate misery or tragedy.
“Another day we discussed pain, and after I had finally made myself understood with the right words, I said triumphantly,
“ ‘Well, there you see, pain means suffering, discomfort, worry, anxiety, grief, sorrow, distress, anguish, misery, desolation, despair.’
“ ‘Not at all,’ they replied. ‘Physical pain is simply a signal from our body or a part of our body asking for immediate attention. Pain,’ they said, ‘is good’. And the word they used for good, one which was constantly on their tongues, was ‘umé’.
“And then suddenly I understood. These people had never eaten from the tree of knowledge! They did not know good and evil. They knew only good: umé!
“ ‘What is the opposite of umé?’ I asked.
“ ‘There is none,’ they answered. ‘Logically there can’t be any, because umé means belonging to the universe, belonging to the oneness. There can’t be anti-umé, any more than there can be anti-meaning.’
“Eating some of the delightful fruits of Gamela one day, I had pronounced them ‘umé’. Laughing, my friends said,
“ ‘Yes, this fruit is umé, beacuse your body and this fruit belong intimately together. You both belong to the same oneness. You have been born in the oneness, and continuously intended for each other. You evolved together in this oneness through billions of years. Therefore now you pronounce it umé. But it was always umé, and will always be umé, and there is nothing which is not umé.’
“ ‘Oh, no,’ I insisted. ‘There are “bad” fruits, with a “bad” taste, dangerous, even poisonous.’
“ ‘There are fruits,’ I was told, ‘which were not destined for your body, which would be out of place there. Therefore they have what you call “bad” taste, to warn you not to eat them. But they are not bad in themselves. And since they may be useful for some other purpose, they are still umé, good. All is umé, though sometimes umé is hidden.’
“And another time this incapacity for seeing anything negative — or should I rather say this high capacity for seeing everything positive — became clearer to me. I was playing some earth music one evening, to a few Gamelans who had become my friends. Hardly had the chords of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony [00:54] begun when they started to smile.
“ ‘No, no, it’s not true,’ they finally said.
“ ‘What is not true?’ I asked, astonished.
“ ‘This noise says the same thing you have so many words for: suffering, tragedy, strife, opposition, antagonism. But it is not true. There are not of these things you believe in so much, which you say are a part of your civilization. You must awaken from this dream. Awaken to reality, which is one and umé.’
“I began to wonder if that awareness of the oneness of things might be a question of evolution. We spoke about education, and they explained that education means to be made more aware.
“ ‘Aware of what?’ I asked.
“ ‘Of umé,’ was the answer.
“ ‘Aren’t children aware of umé?’ I asked, thinking of ice cream and lollipops.
“ ‘Oh, yes,’ they answered. ‘But there is no end to the scale of awareness, to its intensities, to its vastness. On the summits there is an umé which is almost unbearable. And on the other hand some animals on our planet have to be made aware. Otherwise they might hurt people.’
“ ‘How do you do this?’ I asked.
“ ‘By loving them,’ they said.
“One day a Gamelan spoke about one of their poets. ‘He has a magnificent grasp of umé. A vast new awareness of it. He sings about the oneness of the stars and galaxies, and he says that a supernova is the most umé which can happen in one’s lifetime.’ And I asked myself, ‘How primitive must be our awareness, that we can’t feel that!’
“Another time, when we spoke about religion, and they had insisted that religion was simply awareness of umé, I happened to mention that Christians believed that the Son of God died on the cross.
“ ‘How,’ they asked, amazed, ‘can you believe that a child of umé could die, as you say? He might, of course, have left his body hanging on the cross, to teach you that there is no death, no end to anything in this universe, only a continuous beginning.’
“ ‘We also have a symbol of a cross in our places of meditation and inner enjoyment, but our crosses are empty of dead bodies. They symbolize the four directions of awareness of umé, the two great movements: one up and down the scale of umé, and the other horizontal, embracing all the umé of the universe. And where the two meet, we are right in the heart of umé. We call it the cross of joy.’
“I don’t know whether I have made myself clear,” Gene said as he finished. “There are no solutions to our problems on Gamela because they are not true problems. Any statement of them lacks in fundamental logic. Crime, poverty and death do not exist because they cannot exist. They take place only in our unschooled, primitive minds, and disappear in a more highly evolved awareness. Only as long as we insist on living with them will they be a part of human life.”
In the silence that followed, he waited hopefully for some sign that he had been understood.
See also