CHAPTER FIVE

I'd want to watch co-ed football every day.

Tom Oakley
T.H. Bell Junior High
Washington Terrace, Utah

I want to become a full-time tourist. I'd drive a Lambourgini and stay at the most expensive motels. While in Australia, I'd drive a Land Rover.

Ann Whitesides
"Over 21"
Huntsville, Utah

There will be lots of whipped cream. And purple flowers. It will be Spring.

Tim O'Neil
T.H. Bell Junior High
Washington Terrace, Utah

In 1,000,000 years I'm hopefully sitting on some cloud or floating around keeping an eye on my descendants - keeping them out of trouble. And of course, having fun and relaxing. I think we kinda stick around the living to see what they are up to...and when possible, help them. Maybe guardian angels are people that have died and now contribute their afterlives to helping the living. I think if you were a bad person in life, then you will be stuck roaming the land of the living and never actually experience total peace, relaxation and rest. Life is very hard and stressful for your soul, so continual peace could be a choice for those who have had a hard life.

Clint Walker, 15
"Crimson Death"
Higher Life BBS co-operator
Ogden, Utah

I think the creation of the Earth to god was similar to a person building an ant farm; just something to do. God did make his ants in his image, though. Other gods (there are many) saw that our makeup - being in the image of god - left within all of us the ability to become gods (creators). I believe that when people die we pass on to become gods. In fact, it was the forbidden fruit which made us immortal, or gave us the ability to pass on. This mortal world holds us back and keeps our knowledge minimal to such an extent that each human actually has great forces fighting within; the immortal god that we are to become, and the mortal world we were intentionally made to live in. I think dogs go beyond to the same afterlife as us, and are gods and definately immortal. Not being made in the image of god, (they) are not creators, yet their loyalty to man through a common brotherhood is eternal. I believe deer, cattle, and all other animals - being children of the earth and not some greater scheme - are created here for us. What little soul they have reincarnates over and over upon the Earth in its same form. At the time in space that the Earth should be destroyed, these creatures will form as one and unite as an energy. (They will) simply be at peace with things, somewhat like Nirvava. If we should find the ability as creators.....we may choose to curse the beasts of the Earth with the knowledge of right and wrong, making it impossible for us to bring them with us. Once back there in the beyond, I believe man simply creates. Each man is his own god, and we create our own life and worlds and energy. Now this is the balance; to me, what others (call) god, is ENERGY. There is an energy in the universe which makes an equal and opposite reaction to every action. Right to every wrong. Your highest peaks comparable to your lowest lows. This also controls carma. It is this energy we will work toward preserving. We will live in perfect, peaceful harmony in our afterlife. Unless something happens - like some idiot throws forbidden fruit in our ant farm.

Jacob Woodbury
Castle BBS
Ogden, Utah

I think heaven will be a place where everyone will live in harmony and worship God together. There will be no sorrow and no sadness. We will all follow God's laws and be eternally joyous with God.

Roz
StormWatch BBS
New Jersey

As a Buddhist, I believe in SAMSARA, which is transmigration in six ways, just like a wheel. In my understanding of transmigration, heaven or hell is not a "place." When a person has died, his soul or spirit doesn't go anywhere; heaven or hell is in his mind. We are now in a "space" which we conceive in our mind. Because we all have very close "causes" which we bring from our last lives, very close "effects" then exert on us. (Animals) are in a different part of SAMSARAM from ours, although we live in the same space. All creatures live in spaces that overlap. We can see a part of animals and insects, but we are not able to see the "ghost." The creatures from other planets with a higher technology might be the "gods" in heaven. They might live on another planet which we have never heard about. The gods who live in heaven have a much longer life than humans. They can get anything they want just in a thought. Heaven and hell do not exist in another space. More specifically, heaven and hell are a reflection of one's deeds in his life. For instance, if a person did good in this life, he would not be afraid of his death. As a result, heaven appears in one's mind when a good guy dies, and hell appears when a bad guy dies. The power that keeps the wheel turning around is "greed of life." We are unwilling to give up everything, including our beloved family, when we have to leave. Due to this feeling toward our beloved people, things, or even places, a person may come back to these people and places in a different life form; maybe a cat, maybe a man, depending on what he has done in his last life. When we can be masters of ourselves, then we will be able to control the materials. This means you are free from the wheel. After you die, you can go and do anything you want. No thing or no sentiment can lead you to do anything you may regret thereafter. Outside the wheel, there are also many levels. The highest level is Buddah. He is always free to think - free to come and go anywhere, anytime. It is "empty" or "quiet" in his mind - as clear as a deep sky. This feeling of "emptiness" is the highest delight and is called nirvana, meaning "no life or death, either physical or mental." This emptiness may be experienced in meditation for a short period, but a Buddah is always in this state. In brief, everything - material or non-material - is made by one's mind, no matter if you are dead or alive.

William Hsiao-Wei Lo, 25
Studying English as a second language
in Canada
From Taiwan
Asian Link BBS network

Circles

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary picture is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere and its circumference nowhere....Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.

This fact, as far as it symbolizes the moral fact of the Unattainable, the flying Perfect, around which the hands of man can never meet, at once the inspirer and the condemner of every success, may conveniently serve us to connect many illustrations of human power in every department.

There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees. Our globe seen by God is a transparent law, not a mass of facts. The law dissolves the fact and holds it fluid. Our culture is the predominance of an idea which draws after it all this train of cities and institutions. Let us rise into another idea; they will disappear. The Greek sculpture is all melted away, as if it had been statues of ice: here and there a solitary figure or fragment remaining, as we see flecks and scraps of snow left in cold dells and mountain clefts in June and July. For the genius that created it creates now somewhat else. The Greek letters last a little longer, but are already passing under the same sentence and tumbling into the inevitable pit which the creation of new thought opens for all that is old. The new continents are built out of the ruins of an old planet; the new races fed out of the decomposition of the foregoing. New arts destroy the old. See the investment of capital in aqueducts, made useless by hydraulics; fortifications, by gunpowder; roads and canals, by railways; sails, by steam; steam, by electricity.

......The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own. The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end. The extent to which this generation of circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth of the individual soul. For it is the inert effort of each thought, having formed itself into a circular wave of circumstance, as for instance an empire, rules of an art, a local usage, a religious rite, to heap itself on that ridge and to solidify and hem in the life. But if the soul is quick and strong it bursts over that boundary on all sides and expands another orbit on the great deep, which also runs up into a high wave, with attempt again to stop and to bind. But the heart refuses to be imprisoned; in its first and narrowest pulses it already tends outward with a vast force and to immense and innumerable expansions.

Every ultimate fact is only the first of a new series. Every general law only a particular fact of some more general law presently to disclose itself. There is no outside, no inclosing wall, no circumference to us. The man finishes his story, - how good! how final! how it puts a new face on all things! He fills the sky. Lo, on the other side rises also a man and draws a circle around the circle we had just pronounced the outline of the sphere. Then already is our first speaker not man, but only a first speaker. His only redress is forthwith to draw a circle outside of his antagonist. And so men do by themselves. The result of to-day, which haunts the mind and cannot be escaped, will presently be abridged into a word, and the principle that seemed to explain nature will itself be included as one example of a bolder generalization. In the thought of to-morrow there is a power to upheave all thy creed, all the creeds, all the literatures of the nations, and marshall thee to a heaven which no epic dream has yet depicted. Every man is not so much a workman in the world as he is a suggestion of that he should be. Men walk as prophecies of the next age.

........There are no fixtures to men, if we appeal to consciousness. Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood; and if there is any truth in him, if he rests at last on the divine soul, I see not how it can be otherwise. The last chamber, the last closet, he must feel was never opened; there is always a residuum unknown, unanalyzable. That is, every man believes that he has a greater possibility.

........Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk.
........We learn that God is; that he is in me; and that all things are shadows of him.
........The natural world may be conceived of as a system of concentric circles, and we now and then detect in nature slight dislocations which apprize us that this surface on which we now stand is not fixed, but sliding. These manifold tenacious qualities, this chemistry and vegetation, these metals and animals, which seem to stand there for their own sake, are means and methods only, are words of God, and as fugitive as other words. Has the naturalist or chemist learned his craft, who has explored the gravity of atoms and the elective affinities, who has not yet discerned the deeper law whereof this is only a partial or approximate statement, namely that like draws to like, and that the goods which belong to you gravitate to you and need not be pursued with pains and cost? Yet is that statement approximate also, and not final. Omnipresence is a higher fact. Not through subtle subterranean channels need friend and fact be drawn to their counterpart, but, rightly considered, these things proceed from the eternal generation of the soul. Cause and effect are two sides of one fact.

........But lest I should mislead any when I have my own head and obey my whims, let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back.

........Thus there is no sleep, no pause, no preservation, but all things renew, germinate and spring. Why should we import rags and relics into the new hour? Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only disease: all others run into this one. We call it by many names, - fever, intemperance, insanity, stupidity and crime: they are all forms of old age: they are rest, conservatism, appropriation, inertia; not newness, not the way onward. We grizzle every day. I see no need of it. Whilst we converse with what is above us, we do not grow old, but grow young. Infancy, youth, receptive, aspiring, with religious eye looking upward, counts itself nothing and abandons itself to the instruction flowing from all sides. But the man and woman of seventy assume to know all; throw up their hope; renounce aspiration; accept the actual for the necessary and talk down to the young. Let them then become organs of the Holy Ghost; let them be lovers; let them behold truth; and their eyes are uplifted, their wrinkles smoothed, they are perfumed again with hope and power. This old age ought not to creep on a human mind. In nature every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit. No love can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love. No truth so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts. People wish to be settled: only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.

........The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory and to do something without knowing how or why; in short to draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful. It is by abandonment. The great moments of history are the facilities of performance through the strength of ideas, as the works of genius and religion. "A man," said Oliver Cromwell, "never rises so high as when he knows not whither he is going." Dreams and drunkenness, the use of opium and alcohol are the semblance and counterfeit of this oracular genius, and hence their dangerous attraction for men. For the like reason they ask the aid of wild passions, as in gaming and war, to ape in some manner these flames and generosities of the heart.

Circles: An Essay
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1841

Chapter Six

Contents