This story was written by Marianne Velvart
STAGE 2
ATTENTION LADIES AND GENTLEMEN AND CONGRATULATIONS! You have begun de-construction prior to boarding this flight and have successfully passed Stage 1! You have stepped into pools smooth as glass and have emerged like Lalique, vulnerable, transparent, valuable and clean.
Those pools – mirror sheets now stained with your preconceptions – have been obliterated. You are chaste – an open doorway and free to reassess all things, though still susceptible to new infections. Alas the human condition (at the current developmental level) is terminal.
As yet you have no characteristics except those of early infancy but you do possess the full complement of predispositions that mark the chemical and spiritual (some assert with vigour) basis of an individual.
Thus endowed, you’re both judge and jury, self-contained and at liberty to form autonomous notions. The only precluded freedom is that of not choosing a stand. While fence sitters seldom take their position to be a posture, it is still a stance.
May I hereby wish you an exhilarating passage and as soon as you’ve signed the disclaimer, you’ll be set to advance your minds proportional to capacity.
!!POINTS OF ESSENTIAL INFORMATION!!
Our guests are invited to note the ‘tongue in cheek’ overtones of their inflight experience!
A sense of humour is not compulsory but advisable.
As a further cautionary note, in the presence of absolute ideas and ideals, all passengers are best assured of their inferiority. For if such absolutes exist then they are abstract to the cognitive abstractions of man as perceived to be a learned ape.
We are delighted to offer a running plot throughout this potted quest. The level on which passengers are ready to receive, are at their own discression, as with life.
The entertainment on board is of the ‘more challenging kind’ then has been offered by the popular trash culture of the 20th and early 21st centuries. The forthcoming drama, like life, shall neither be easy nor comfortable. Ascension never is. Man’s moral hypocrisy is arguably the most promising springboard of all. We aim to please.
Please relax and enjoy the ride!
STAGE 3
WARNING!!!!!
From this point of the voyage, all uncritically swallowed dogma of former conditioning must be treated as contraband.
Sneakily summoning the old, comfy go-to of formerly received constructs is a common ploy after conversion. Those who have drifted backwards in this way must now turn out their pockets and endure a wide open mind.
From this juncture only blockheads are excused from the fast track to free thought. Any late applicants for this exemption must now evacuate by parachute while the others get accustomed to fresh altitudes.
STAGE 4
Good evening voyagers.
I trust that we have all relaxed sufficiently to be amenable to the notion of humans’ intertwined fates with each other and the earth.
If you slant your glance across the length of the shuttle and down to its transparent tip, you will see the home globe from the point of the equator, 10 Longitude and 40 Latitude otherwise known as the 10/40 window on earth.
80% of the world’s poorest live here, from Africa to Japan threading aridly through to India.
Please do not be alarmed as the automatic straps clamp tightly on to hold you in place.
INTRODUCING THE REVOLUTIONARY VICARIOUS SIMULATOR UNIT!!!!
For the duration of a mercifully trimmed nanosecond, you will be exposed to the combined suffering of the poor of your earth condensed into and experienced in the self-maimed body of a Calcuttan beggar child.
…………………..can you hear the silence unspooling?
Our craft is receding from the home sphere. All resurgent circular reasoning, clutching at justifications, religious or academic dogma swallowed, regurgitated, masticated, modified to fit materialist or consumerist rhetoric shall be now diffused. Herewith, your cooperation is both helpful and imperative.
As a final exacting measure, we must ask passengers to examine themselves for any vestiges of the former fantasy culture and its corresponding conceits.
As attested by humanity’s historical treatment of one another we are now entering the yawning chasm which is our moral credibility as a species.
PLEASE HOLD TIGHT IN CASE OF TURBULENCE!!!
We are about to score the surface of a new dimension –
ENTERING ACCELERATED ENTROPY ZONE!!!!
At this quadrant of the cosmos, your old currency (blanket metaphor for all your perceived virtue) means diddly squat – PLEASE TRY NOT TO PANIC!
STAGE 5
Good evening and greetings, my fellow pilgrims of the deepest depths. Try to ignore the temporary pitch blackness aimed to stimulate a sense of synchronicity. For every five-sensory distraction exposes us to gravitational suction. Thus the information explosion of the digital age simultaneously endows and removes us from ourselves in the existential raw or pure form of being.
You must appreciate that we had to take you out of a welter everyday concerns and habitual viewpoints. The stars still twinkle at large but the shuttle picks its path through the ‘off’ blinks on a tough love trajectory in the dark which is conducive to inner sight.
Growth spurts in humans have a tendency to occur at times of challenging extremities.
Breathe.
What do you find when you’re alone with yourself? Scary, isn’t it?
The acknowledgement thereof is enough for now.
You have now left behind the sentimental notion that your race is a predisposed paragon, subject to lapses only when outside forces manipulate. So much for X earth years of secular deterministic psychology and the spurious nature/nurture argument that extracts the role of choice and soul.
At the very least you have accepted that logically, the moral neutrality of the universe’ is itself subjection and that on this, you indeed could be wrong.
You have comprehended that the idea of ‘abstract therefore non-existent’ is also theoretical therefore equally non-existent or refutable.
………Can you hear the silence unspooling and feel the universe expanding in your mind?
STAGE 6
Ladies and gents, you’ll be relieved to observe that the lights have come on.
We shall hereby commence the concluding phase.
Please put on your headsets located above your crowns and prepare (as if near death) for the ultimate lateral twist.
The final jolt may make prior assumptions about the nature of life into a crude guesswork.
Get ready for the natural conclusion to all staunchly materialistic evolutionary theory.
If the cosmos is dead so are we and all we do and think.
Conversely, we are unimaginably complex, transitional forms. Exceeding our compositional nucleotides, just as Nano-scale symmetry is hidden in solid matter so the devil is in the detail so to speak.
Tribes tend to think they’re superior to all the rest. Every damn fool thinks he has a handle on truth but a culture is dignified or defiled through its treatment of each other and the earth.
A moral harmonic rings the universe of which we’re observant, interacting, interwoven threads, nodes and notes.
You have arrived back home and we apologise for the lack of definitive solutions. Collectively, we have a long way to go.
Thank you for the privilege of your company –
Your captain and fellow bankrupt (yet fizzing with potential and an uncanny verve)
May the ‘life force’ be with you,
Signing out, M.V.