The Jesus Incident

 

There is a gateway to the imagination you must enter before you are conscious and the keys to the gate are symbols. You are carry ideas through the gate...but you must carry the ideas in symbols.
--Raja Flattery, Chaplain/Psychiatrist

St. Augustine asked the right question: "Does freedom come from chance or choice?" And you must remember that quantum mechanics guarantees chance.
--Raja Flattery, The Book of Ship

The all-pervading, characterless background of the universe--this is the void. It is not object nor senses. It is the region of illusions.
--Kerro Panille, Buddha and Avata

A deliberately poor move chosen at random along the line of plan can completely change the theoretical structure of a game.
--Bicket quote, Shiprecords

Human hybernation is to animal hibernation as animal hibernation is to constant wakefulness. In its reduction of life processes, hybernation approached absolute stasis. It is nearer death than life.
--Dictionary of Science, 101th Edition

Dig your stubborn heels
Firm into dirt.
And where is the dirt going?
--Kerro Panille, The Collected Poems

Why are you humans always so ready to carry the terrible burdens of your past?
--Kerro Panille, Questions from the Avata

Gods have plans, too.
--Morgan Oakes, The Diaries

The fearful are often holders of the most dangerous power. They become demoniac when they see the workings of all the life around them. Seeing the strengths as well as the weaknesses, they fasten only on the weaknesses.
--Shipquotes

A good bureaucracy is the best tool of oppression ever invented.
--Jesus Lewis, The Oakes Diaries

Poetry, like consciousness, drops the insignificant digits.
--Raja Flattery, Shiprecords

Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them.
--Marcel Proust, Shiprecords

As I am your creation, you are Mine. You are My satellites and I am yours. Your personas are My impersonations. We melt into ONE at the touch of infinity.
--Raja Flattery, The Book of Ship

Just as a technician learns to use his tools, you can be taught to use other people to create whatever you desire. This becomes more potent when you can create the special person for your special purpose.
--Morgan Oakes, The Diaries

From you, Avata learns of a great poet-philosopher who said: "Until you meet an alien intelligence, you will not know what it is to be human."
And Avata did not know what it was to be Avata. True, and poetic. But poetry is what's lost in translation. Thus, we now permit you to call this place Pandora and to call us Avata. The first among you, though, called us vegetable. In this, Avata saw the deeper meaning of your history and felt fear. You ingest vegetable to use the energy gathered by others. With you, the others end. With Avata, the others live. Avata used minerals, uses rock, uses sea, uses the suns--and from all this, Avata nurses life. With rock, Avata calms the sea and silences the turbulence inherited from the rip of suns and moons.
Knowing human, Avata remembers all. It is best to remember so Avata remembers. We eat our history and it is not lost. We are one tongue and one mind; the storms of confusions cannot steal us from one another, cannot pry us from our grip to rock, to the firmament that cups the sea around us and washes us clean with the tides. This is so because we make it so.
We fill the sea and clam it with our body. The creatures of water find sanctuary in Avata's shadow, feed in our light. They breathe the riches we exude. They fight among themselves for what we discard. They ignore us in their ravages and we watch them grow, watch them flare in the sea like suns and disappear into the far side of night.
The sea feeds us; it washes in and out, and we return to the sea in kind. Rock is Avata's strength and as strength grows so grows the nest. Rock is Avata's communion, ballast and blood. With all this, Avata orders quiet in the sea and subdues the fitful rages of the tides. Without Avata, the sea screams its fury in rock and ice; it whips the winds of hot madness. Without Avata, the rage of the sea returns to smother this globe in blackness and a thin white horizon of death.
This is so because we make it so--Avata: barometer of life.
Atom to atom to molecule; molecule to chain and chain winding around and around the magnificence of light; then cell to cell, and cell to blastula, cilia to tentacle, and from stillness blossoms the motion of life.
Avata harvests the mysterious gas of the sea and is born into the world of clouds and mountains, into the world stars walk in fear. Avata sails high with the gas from the sea to find the country of the spark of life. There, Avata gives self to love, thence back to the sea, and the circle is complete but unfinished.
Avata feeds and is fed. Sheltered, Avata shelters, eats and is eaten, loves and is loved. Growth is the Avata way. In growth is life. As death resides in stillness, Avata strives for stillness in growth, a balance of flux, and Avata lives.
This is so because Avata makes it so.
If you know this of the alien intelligence and still find it alien, you do not know what it is to be human.
--Kerro Panille, Translations from the Avata

You are called Project Consciousness, but your true goal is to explore beyond the imprinted pattern of all humankind. Inevitably, you must ask: Is consciousness only a special kind of hallucination? Do you raise consciousness or lower its threshold? The danger in the latter course is that you bring up the military analogue: you are confined to action.
--Original Charge to the Voidship Chaplain/Psychiatrist

A word of caution about our genetic programs. When we breed for speed, we breed as well for very specific kinds of decisions. Speed chops out, edits out certain kinds of reflexive choices and long-term consideration. Everything becomes the decision of the moment.
--Jesus Lewis, The E-Clone Directive

Clones are property and that's that!
--Morgan Hempstead, Moonbase Director

The mind falls, the will drives on.
--Kerro Penille, The Collected Poems

Beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful. I will watch with the wiliness of a snake, that I may sting with its venom. You shall repent of the injuries you inflict.
--Frankenstein' s Monster Speaks, Shiprecords

Nostalgia represents an interesting illusion. Through nostalgia, humans wish for things that never were. The positive memory is the one that sticks. Over several generations, the positive memory tends to weed out more and more of what really existed, refining down to a distillation of haunted desires.
--Shipquotes

Religion begins where men seek to influence a god. The biblical scapegoat and Christian Redeemer are cast from the same ancient mould--the human subservient to an unpredictable universe (or unpredictable king) and seeking to rid himself of the guilt which brings down the wrath of the all-powerful.
--Raja Flattery, The Book of Ship

Judgment prepares you to enter the stream of chance and use your will. You use judgment to modulate will. Thinking is the performance of the moment. You sit in judgement, a convection center for the currents where past prepares a future. It is a balancing act.
--Kerro Penille, The Avata Argue

The mind is a mirror of the universe.
See the reflections?
The universe is no mirror for the mind.
Nothing out there
Nothing in here
Shows ourselves.
--Kerro Penille, The Collected Poems

You speak of gods. Very will. Avata speaks that language now. Avata says consciousness is the Species-God's gift to the individual. Conscience is the Individual-God's gift to the species. In conscience you find the structure, the form of consciousness, the beauty.
--Kerro Penille, Translations from the Avata

You call Avata "Firefly in the night of the sea." Avata has doubts about such words because Avata sees the landscape of your mind. Avata moves through your landscape with difficulty. It shifts and twists and changes as Avata goes through. But Avata has made such journeys before. Avata is an explorer of such landscapes. Your phantoms are Avata's guides. We are linked in motion.
What is this thing you call "the natural universe"? Is that something taken from your god? Ahh, you have separated your parts to create the unique. You do not need this separation for your creations. This fluid evasiveness of your landscape is your strength. The patterns...ahhh, the patterns. From yourself come the forces which shape the course of each thought. Why do you confine your thought in a tiny fixed landscape?
You find a distinction measurement and preparation of your landscape. You continually prepare, saying: "I am going to say something about..." But that limits what you say and it tells your listener to accept your limits. All such measurement and limiting date back to a common system in a simple, linear landscape. Look about you, Human! Where do your senses find such simplicity?
Does a second look at the landscape yield the same view as the first look? Why is your will so inflexible?
A magical affinity between object and likeness, between being and symbol, underlies all symbol systems. It is the assumed foundation of language. The word for thing or object in most languages is related to the word for say or speak and these, in turn, have their roots in magic.
--Kerro Penille, I Sing to the Avata

An infinite universe presents infinite examples of unreasoned acts, often capricious and threatening, godlike in their mystery. Without god-powers, conscious reasoning cannot explore and make this universe absolutely known; there must remain mysteries beyond what is explained. The only reason in this universe is that which you, in your ungodlike hubris, project onto the universe. In this, you retain kinship with your most primitive ancestors.
--Raja Thomas, Shiprecords

I play the song to which you must dance. To you is left the freedom of improvisation. This improvisation is what you call free will.
--The Oakes Covenant

There is fear in the infinite, in the unlimited chaos of the unstructured. But this boundless "place" is the never-ending resource of that which you call talent, that ability which peels away the fear, exposing its structure and form, creating beauty. This is why the talented people among you are feared. And it is wise to fear the unknown, but only until you see the new-found fearlessness which identity beautifies.
--Kerro Penille, Translations from the Avata

My imagination was too much exalted by my first success to permit me to doubt of my ability to give life to an animal as complex and wonderful as man.
--Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Shiprecords

Absolute dependence is the hallmark of religion. It posits the supplicant and the one who dispenses gifts. The supplicant employs ritual and prayer in the attempt to influence (control) the dispenser of gifts. The kinship between this relationship and the days of absolute monarchs cannot be overlooked. This dependence on supplication gives to the keeper of those two essentials--the ritual paraphernalia and the purity of prayerful forms (that is, to the Chaplain)--a power akin to that of the gift dispenser.
--"Training the Chaplain/Psychiatrist" Moonbase Documents (from Shiprecords)

Cain rose up against Abel, his brother, and slew him. And the Lord said unto Cain, "Where is Abel, thy brother?" and he said, "I know not: am I my brother's keeper?" and He said, "What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother's blood cries unto Me from the ground."
--Christian Book of the Dead, Shiprecords

Humans spend their lives in mazes. If they escape and cannot find another maze, they create one. What is this passion for testing?
--Kerro Panille, Questions for the Avata

The clone of a clone does not necessarily stay closer to the original than a clone of the older original. It depends on cellular interference and other elements which may be introduced. Passage of time always introduces other elelments.
--Jesus Lewis, The New Cloning Manual

Humankerro: Does the listener protect his own sense of understanding and consciousness?"
Avata: "Ahhh, you are building barriers."
Humankerro: "That's what you call the illusion of understanding, is it not?"
Avata: "If you understand, then you cannot learn. By saying you understand, you construct barriers."
Humankerro: "But I can remember understanding things."
Avata: "Memory only understands the presence or absence of electrical signals."
Humankerro: "Then what's the combination, the program for learning?"
Avata: "Now you open the path. It is the program which counts in the most literal sense."
Humankerro: "But what are the rules?"
Avata: "Are there rules underlying every aspect of human life? It that your question?"
Humankerro: "That appears to be the question."
Avata: "Then answer it. What are the rules for being human?"
Humankerro: "But I asked you!"
Avata: "But you are human and I am Avata."
Humankerro: "Well, what are the rules for being Avata?"
Avata: "Ahhhh, Humankerro, we embody such knowledge but we cannot know it."
Humankerro: "You appear to be saying that such knowledge cannto be reduced to language."
Avata: "Language cannot occur in a reference vacuum."
Humankerro: "Don't we know what we're talking about?"
Avata: "Using language involves much more than recognizing strings of words. Language and the world to which it refers..."
Humankerro: "The script of the play."
Avata: "The script, yes. The script of the game and its world must be interrelated. How can you substitute a word or some other symbol for every cellular element of your body?"
Humankerro: "I can talk with my body."
Avata: "For that, you do not need a script."
--Kerro Panille, The Avata, "The Q & A Game"

The mystery of consciousness? Erroneous data--significant results.
--P. Weygand, Voidship Med-tech

As the rock silences the sea, the One in one silences the universe.
--Kerro Penille, Translations from the Avata

The universe has no center.
--Shipquotes

Man also knows not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falls suddenly upon them.
--Christian Book of the Dead, Shiprecords

I like seeing things fall into place.
--Kerro Panille, The Notebooks

The family feeds its fledgling, and under the nest weaves twigs--Intelligence is a poor cousin to understanding.
--Kerro Panille, The Collected Poems

Hittite law emphasized restitution rather than revenge. Humankind lost a certain useful practicality when it chose the other Semitic response--never to forgive and never to forget.
--Lost People, Shiprecords

Remember that I have power; you believe yourself miserable, but I can make you so wretched that the light of day will be hateful to you. You are my creator, but I am your master.
--Frankenstein's Monster Speaks, Shiprecords

Though a pendulum's arc may vary, its period does not. Each swing requires the same amount of time. Consider the last swing and its infinitesimal arc. That is where we are truly alive: in the last period of the pendulum.
--Kerro Panille, The Notebooks

Avata informs through the esoteric symbols of Avata's history reduced to dreams and to images which often can be translated only by the dreamer, not by Avata.
--Kerro Panille, History of the Avata

In your terms, Self may be called Avata. Not hylighter, not kelp, not 'lectrokelp, but Avata. That is the Great Self in the language from your animal past. Avata. Finding this label in you, Avata knows we sing the same song. Through each other, Avata and human know Self. No second measurement for Avata. Same value every time. No separate qualities or forms. Thus with human.
Avata. But not Avata.
To name is to limit, to control. To name without knowing your limit is to hinder the knowing. At best, it is a diversion. At worst, it is a misrepresentation, a stolen label, a death. To name a thing falsely and to act thereafter on the name--that is killing, a cutting of the spiritual leaf, the death of the stem. A thing is Self or it Other. The naming is a matter of proximity.
Avata identifies the speciesfold magnetification, the magnetism of proximity; the wavelength of space: humanthomas humankerro, humanjessup, humanolakes. Avata concludes lack of sensory organ necessary to differentiate between clone and human. Avata does not consider this lack a weakness or misrepresentation.
Avata is one in hylighter and kelp, not separate in either, nor the same. Cells differ but share the One. Before human, Avata did not distinguish. Both are Self. Avata would teach you the self of Other, the human in clone.
Some things are because you name them. You perpetuate them in your language, you commiserate over the woe they have wrought you.
Say simply that these things are not so. Do not change the label but the labelness. Eliminate them from your life by washing them first from your tongue. Ignoring that which is false is also a knowing. Thus--learning. To learn is to grow and to grow is to live. You may practice forgetting and thus learn.
"Home."
That is your label for this place, humankerro. Avata washes your tongue here that you may properly inflect the name and then forget it. Avata brings you this to cleanse you of expectancies, that you may learn the cues to which Avata responds or refuses to respond.
This is how you learn Avata. You are both lower level and higher level, and the continuity is the continuity of your will. Observe the vine which is all Avata winding through "Home." Grasp the vine. Cup the waters in your hands and drink.
You are the observer-effect.
--Kerro Panille, Translations from the Avata.

And the Lord God said, "Behold the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever: Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the Garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.
--Christian Book of the Dead, Shiprecords

Even the seemingly immortal gods survive only as long as they are required by mortal men.
--The Oakes Covenant

Human, do you know how interesting it is, this thing you describe? Avata does not have a god. How is it that you have a god? Avata his Self, has this universe. But you have a god. Where did you find this god?
--Kerro Panille, Translations from the Avata.

In a fit of enthusianstic madness I created a rational creature and was bound towards him to assure, as far as was in my power, his happiness and well-being. This was my duty, but there was another still paramount to that. My duties towards the beings of my own species had greater claims to my attention because they included a greater proportion of happiness or misery.
--Dr. Frankenstein Speaks, Shiprecords

And the Lord said, "Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language...and now nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do. Let us go down and confound their language that they may not understand one another's speech."
--Christian Book of the Dead, Shiprecords

CONSCIOUS: from Latin com, with scire (to know).
CONSCIENCE: from Lation com(intensive), with scire.
CONSCIOUS: to know; conscience--to know well (or, in the vernacular, to know better).
--Shiprecords

Inflection is the adjective of language. It carries the subtleties of delight and horror, the essence of culture and social process. Such is the light-pattern displayed by the kelp; such is the song of the hylighter.
--Kerro Panille, History of the Avata (from the "Preface")

Myths are not fiction, but history seen with a poet's eyes and recounted in a poet's terms.
--Shiprecords

The prophets of Israel who preached the idea of the nucleus of ten good men required for a city's survival, built this concept on the Talmudic idea of the Thirty-Six Just Ones whose existence in each generation is necessary for the survival of Humankind.
--Judaism's Book of the Dead, Shiprecords

Poet
You see bones up ahead
where there are none,
By the time we get there
so do they...
--Hali Ekel, Private Letters

As the Jesuits recognized, a key function of logic limits argument and, therefore, confines the thinking process. As far back as the Vedanta, this way of tying down the wild creativity of thought was codified into seven logic-directing categories: Quality, Substance, Action, Generality, Particularity, Intimate Relation and Non-existence (or Negation). These were thought to define the true limits of the symbolic universe. The recognition that all symbol processes are inherently open-ended and infinite came much later.
--Raja Thomas, Shiprecords

The forgotten language of our animal past conveys the necessity for challenges. Not to be challenged is to atrophy. And the ultimate challenge is to overcome entropy, to break through those barriers which enclose and isolate life, limiting the energy for work and fulfillment.
--Kerro Panille, I Sing to the Avata

Behold, these are a small troop, and indeed they are enraging us; and we are a host on our guard.
--Muslim Book of the Dead, Shiprecords

Through the process of nostalgic filtering, Earth assumed for the Shipmen fairyland characteristics. The different strains of people, telling their different historical memories, could only make such stories mix in a paradise setting. No Shipmen ever experienced every Earthly place and clime and society. Thus, over the may generations, the reinforcement of positive memories left only the faith in how things were.
--Kerro Panille, History of the Avata

A horrible feeling came over me--a terrible amusement, for I believed that humankind, through the filtering of Ship's manipulations and the great passage of time, had lost the very ability to engage in war. I thought war had been bred and conditioned out of them at the very moment when they needed this ability the most.
--The Thomas Diatribes, Shiprecords

This the true human knows:
the strings of all the ways
make up a cable of great strength
and great purpose...
--Kerro Panille, The Collected Poems

SHIP: I have taught you about the classical Pandora and her box.
PANILLE: I know how this planet got its name.
SHIP: Where would you hide when the serpents and shadows oozed out of the box?
PANILLE: Under the lid, of course.
--Kerro Panille, Shiprecords

Man also knows not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil net and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falls suddenly upon them.
--Christian Book of the Dead, Shiprecords

Once my fancy was soothed with dream of virtue, of fame and of enjoyment. Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding.
--Frankenstein's Monster Speaks, Shiprecords

Why shouldst Thou cause a man to put himself to shame by begging aid, when it is in Thy power, O Lord, to vouchsafe him his necessities in an honorable fashion?
--A Kahan, Atereth ha-Zaddikim, Shiprecords

When humans act as spokesmen for the gods, mortality becomes more important than morality. Martyrdom corrects this discrepancy but only for a brief interval. The sorry thing about martyrs is that they are not around to explain what it all meant. Nor do they stay to see the terrible consequences of martyrdom.
--You Are Spokesmen for Martyrs, Raja Thomas, Shiprecords

This fetus cannot be brought to term. It cannot be a fruit of the human tree. No human could accelerate its own fetal development. No human could tap the exterior world for its needed energy. No human could communicate before departing the womb. We must abort it or kill both mother and child.
--Sy Murdoch, The Lewis Exchange, Shiprecords

In that hour when the Egyptians died in the Red Sea the ministers wished to sing the song of praise before the Holy One, but he rebuked them saying: My handiwork is drowning in the sea; would you utter a song before me in honor of that?
--The Sandedrin, Shiprecords