=1 "The last man"
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The last man
Don't be afraid, it's not a sad story. There are no sad stories in =1. Our last man comes neither with a big bang nor with a whimper; he is accompanied rather by speechless expectation.
One the 29th of February 1976 a new era began. It was not a day of first discovery like man's discovery of honey, or of mountain climbing or of swimming in the sea. It was the day the last man disappeared. He had been the last one in school too. He didn't even know that he was the last man. He thought there were other men around him, but there weren't. Only people who looked expectantly at him.
His last moment came when he discovered that the invisible was more important than the visible, and that behind the manifestation of things and events there was always something else, something unseen. Behind each atom, behind each life, each thought there was a force. And it was not he himself who was acting or speaking, but forces which he had just discovered. This latest discovery had as a result, or rather was itself the result of some obscure forces ceasing to exist, forces which up to now had been behind the belief that man was the doer, the author of his actions.
It was a great day, because ignorance itself was gone from its last hiding place. The last feeling of ego, the last thought: “I, the doer”, was gone. And the division between the world and paradise had disappeared. It had been a long story. You remember, it started when the Word said, “Let there be light,” and now finally there was light, everywhere, only light, even in man's mind. But of course such a mind could no longer be called man's mind.
And there was a voice – or was it an echo from long ago – that answered: “Let there be God.”