part 3

So here we have it after all these millennia, the former nomads and the foreigners who are harvesting their money, all living peacefully together killing, stealing, fornicating, and basically behaving like a bunch of ten year olds who have just learned that their parents are off on vacation forever and have left them weapons to play with while they are gone.

Living in this place at this time was a carpenter. The carpenter's birth and childhood are the subject of much speculation. Some claim that he never actually lived, a complaint often made by people about their own lives these days. Others claim that he was conceived by magic and born in a stable attended by three members of foreign royal families who brought rare and valuable gifts including gold, but apparently not enough of it to secure better accommodations. Still others claim he was born in secret and educated by the secret mystery schools who make this claim.

These secret mystery schools are still secretly in existence today and we secretly know this because secret applications for secret membership in them often appear secretly in certain secret popular magazines.

Whether or not he lived is, of course, not important, what is important is that so very many people believe he lived, and of course if we believe something hard enough, we can make it be true, even if it isn't, and even if it wasn't two millennia ago. In any case, since this is, after all The Story of Xty, it seems appropriate somehow, that X appear in it.

So X lived, and was a carpenter, and looked around at what was happening in his social and political milieu, and wasn't too happy about what he saw. The first thing he noticed was that it was hard being a carpenter in a place where all the buildings were made of stone and mud brick and all the trees had been cut down centuries ago.

He was also growing tired of spending his time off with the other carpenters who couldn't seem to think of much else to do but drink beer, get in fights, and make entirely transparent and equally futile efforts to score, so he decided he had a gift for social commentary, and may as well see if he could make a living of it. He made very careful observations about how people went about acting out of their own self interest and justifying it by systematically ignoring any data that would lead to a compromise in that self interest and systematically accumulating any data that would support the continued vitality of it.

It did not escape his attention that the ten rules the cosmic ET had given them long ago and which were so simple you could write them on a single piece of paper with a crayon held in your teeth, had been buried under piles of commentary so large they would fill the hull of the Titanic, all designed to drain them of meaning, substance, and influence.

This, he decided, was what had happened to all of the trees, forcing people to write on the skins of animals. This is very difficult because animals are very bumpy and always trying to get away.

He then thought very hard about why it was that people couldn't follow ten simple instructions and he came to the conclusion that there were just too many of them, and if he could simplify the code into a couple of principles that could be universally applied and still be effective as a tool for guidance, maybe people could get things straightened out.

So he went to the cosmic ET and asked if he had any suggestions for replacing the ten rules with something that might work a little better, since the ten rules didn't seem to be working at all. They talked it over and then X went back to the rest of the former nomads and started lobbying for a new contract.

"Listen," he said, "The ten rules don't seem to be doing much good. You are still killing and stealing and fornicating and I talked to the cosmic ET about this and he said he was willing to tear up the old contract and make a new one if there's any chance it will improve the situation.

"Here's the deal, he thinks love is very important. He thinks that after all he has done for you, you should be a little grateful and have some consideration for him and what he has done for you. Then, you should have some consideration for one another, maybe even as much consideration as you have for yourselves. What do you think?"

And they answered, "What the hell are you talking about? The ten rules work just fine. We have this huge pile of loopholes to tell us just under what conditions we can go ahead and kill, steal, and fornicate, and we don't need you to tell us we can't. Besides, the foreigners aren't about to be a part of the deal, so why should we be nice to them if they won't be nice to us? And while we're talking about it, what do we have to be thankful to him for, what has he done for us but leave us here to be pushed around by the foreigners? The only reason we pay any attention to him at all is that he is the alpha male for the whole cosmos and can burn anyone of us to a crisp whenever he wants. What we really need is the great military leader he promised us to come with supernatural powers and kill the foreigners so we can be in charge. It's our turn, we waited long enough. By the way, if you know the cosmic ET personally, why don't you go get a flaming sword from him and help us kill these foreign sons of bitches?"

"No," said X, "you don't understand. My father has given you everything. The Earth, the sun, the sky, the water that quenches your thirst, every swallow, the air you breathe, every breath, the very life that pulses within you is a gift, in you is the fulfillment of fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution, you are the very universe become self aware. Listen carefully, I will say it again, you are the self awareness of the universe itself. He has made for you a paradise of incomprehensible beauty, a magnificent and sacred place the splendor and significance of which only man has the capacity to apprehend, and here amid this bounty you see nothing but the things that others have, that you only desire because they have them. It matters not what the foreigners do. They have their own destiny, their own path to what is true, their own conscience to answer to. You are only and always responsible for your own conduct, for the development of your own spirit, yet to know the truth of this, you must be willing to look without fear into the center of your own hearts and see without turning away what is there and then and only then will you change, for change you must, or live in hell, for this it is, and you have made it so."

They replied, with some irritation, "Where do you get off saying the cosmic ET is your dad?"

"Pay attention," said X. "I don't mean he is some guy I claim as my biological father. He is not some old bearded bozo camped on a mountain top nursing his indignation. He is an event of proportions so utterly vast and of such character and magnitude as to be impossible to contain in human consciousness. He does not possess local spatial and temporal coordinates. I use the word father as a metaphor for that which is at my source, as he is at your own source, as he is at the source of the cosmic intentionality which informs all matter and energy and which is made manifest here and now for us as this planet and all that it contains in all its unutterably complex diversity and interrelatedness and its unspeakable harmony and abundance and for which we evolved and were designed to attend and appreciate as well as to take care of one another as the family of man. This is your new covenant, to stand in awe at the magnificence of the creation we are heir to, and to surrender to the compassion that yields a concern for the well being of your fellow man that is not some part of, but equal to the concern for the well being of your self and so annihilate the distance between subject and object, between yourself and all that is not you and so truly know your father, and find peace. This is what it is to love god and your neighbor as yourself. Sign here."

The former nomads were skeptical. "So how will we worship and sacrifice?" they asked.

"If you are a father, and love your children, and provide for them and raise them with tender care and wise guidance and see them off to live their own lives, how do you want them to behave of their own volition? Do you want to see them grovel in fear at your feet and sacrifice a goat every time there is a storm? Of course not. What you want is what any loving father wants from his children, you want them to be happy and prosperous and to love and take care of each other and to love you in return, and if you are lucky, to have them appreciate something of what you have done for them and if you are very lucky, very, very lucky, to have them think that you are the greatest father there ever was. Your father has treated you well but you are children no longer, it is time to act like men."

The former nomads thought it over. "Perhaps he is right," they said, "Perhaps we are so concerned with what we want and with finding fault with everyone else we have lost the capacity for critical self examination. Perhaps our greed and egocentrism blinds us to the voyage of self discovery that permits an actual transformation of consciousness, a transformation so profound it would return us to the place the cosmic ET originally made for us, a place of peace and not of fear. Perhaps compassion is a more effective guiding principle than greed or hatred." They looked around at one another.

"Nah." they said, "We would rather have the flaming sword," and took him to the foreigners who agreed he was a troublemaker and laughed at him and made fun of him, and then tortured and executed him along with the other social deviants.