Contact With Contact and The Consonance

While a lot of people ignored "Contact" and made fun of this film, I simply adored it. I also adored "E.T."

I denied myself E.T. Every time I saw that bike hurling through the sky across the face of our own moon, emotion pulled at me like crazy.

I dodged through town, often, I'd pick up thing after thing for Alice then.

I denied myself E.T.

I kept hoping The Consonance would find us sitting out here
in this star system here, one of their mighty probes might discover us. However, they did not. Year after year went by, and then those
wonderful pictures of that child floating above that moon carried by
bicycle, just haunted me completely.

It was destroying me as I walked with emotion through store after
store, while that gentle, lovely picture moved all around me, and I
thought about The Consonances ' failure to contact us.

They had planted some stuff in me many years ago as a kid, and I started working on some of their ideas, and I hoped against hope they would just get out here in time to fix what was going on down here with us, and we'd be able to grow as a species again.

They had seen me as Absolute Seeker sitting here, I guess, when I was very small, as a child, and had chosen me to impart their message to early on.

I began work as a child on "7" a book I was going to write about -- something. The thing just started showing up inside my mind.

I furiously started, then got restless, and started to fade on it. It was
just weird, and I showed part of what I was working on to Edward, as I remember, way back then, and I think he was
very impressed what a child had done, and really helped me with it. He encouraged me to go ahead and work on that little book called "7"
I was writing. Working on. That encouragement
was one of the greatest single moments that inspired me ever
to create anything. Any kind of art,
anything.

And then, "7" started to slowly shimmer away. The idea just faded.
Then ...

Seven Strong ... I began to be fascinated with Seven Strong. Then
much later, in my teens, the mighty The Consonance started showing
up. The mighty keystone had been laid. It was done. I had figured out
the seven races at the center of our vast universe running the entire
universe and keeping it governed. Contact between The Consonance
and our small world had been achieved,
and as a young man in my teens, I didn't truly accept the idea that these
ideas really had any merit. I didn't know I had just received a message
from way out in outer space, implanted in my mind, that there were
seven powerful races governing our entire universe
and that they wanted me to somehow ... lead us on towards them and
our race to leave this world and start the trip to them outwards to join
them.

We will never, ever join these people. At all. We will. Never. Ever.
Reach them at all.

We will never, ever reach a fraction of their accomplishments.
Probably during the entire history of our universe. They are of
mammoth scale to any conception of reality we have
here on Earth, and all beings throughout our universe, most, are
in this position as well.

They simply cannot be touched by most civilizations in our vast
universe. They are the highest achievement of life as we know it. Of
all recorded time. Of all history.

They can make a man immortal, they can do things in mere moments
we find ... simply undoable at all. They do it for ... all species, these
beings. They keep the whole universe governed, running, going. I
thought this ludicrous, I accepted that the vast distances involved
would preclude this, but it just does not. The Consonace is just so huge that they simply don't care. Their technologies just rip through everything here. Universes after universes were born, and they are IT. They are SEVEN. They are the seven BEST civilizations. Ever.

They have figured out how to transcend time, to shove universes
forward as they begin to appear. They have cracked everything, and
every time any universe shows up anywhere, it is because of these seven incredibly advanced societies that they exist. All life anywhere
is governed by them.

They are simply too technological powerful, so grand, so intelligent
we will NEVER EVER meet them. We will never shake any kind of
alien hand from them.

We cannot. We were never meant to, because they are meant to
govern all of us. They are meant to govern all sentient beings through
the entire universe. They are busy, and they don't want all those guys
from ALL THOSE WORLDS just gumming up their time. Busy, busy, busy,
busy, busy, busy, busy. WHY do we want to
shake hands when we have to RUN the entire universe,
the entire universe, the entire universe ... as we know it?

I FEEL FINE!

Because, all races just flow towards these guys. In a gentle flow towards the
center of all the civilizations. We WILL shake many of these hands out there,
because we will shake all of theirs.

The Consonance? So? They govern everything. Why get so misty-eyed
about meeting them? They are simply the governors of the entire universe.
They are the glue which holds the entire thing together, and other races are all
their benefactors. These races ... all the alien hands anyone could ever want to
rub ... and many of them far, far more advanced than we are, certainly.
So, the mighty Consonance will just govern everything, and all civilizations
proceeding outwards towards their governancescape will just know they
approach very, very slowly towards their ideal as this universe slowly ages,
and time slowly progresses, until the last star winks out of existence within it.

The end of time.

What happens then is complete and utter mystery to me now.

I don't think I wish to know what happens at this time. I'd of course like
us to continue beyond with them as they create other universes, but I just don't
know what will become of our race then.

Our very survival as a world has always been on my mind, really.

I used to hope against hope that as our space program reached out
and our passions for space exploration started to ebb, as many of our finest
science-fiction writers predicted in the 70s and 80s -- I remember many
works where you've got people in outer parts of our solar system out there
trying to get along, and back here, on Earth, politicos running around arguing
that monies should not be spent to support what was going on in outer space.

This bothered me, many years ago, as I read these predictions from these
great men and women writing these find predictions of our future society.

I thought, Yep. They are entirely correct in this. This has got to be what happens to us. We are just going to get the space program started, then we're going to get a lot of political garbage down here about it being too
expensive. Message after message about this.

As I read story after story from the finest science-fiction writers back then,
I began to get very emotional, as our space program began to be curtailed,
and I saw this prediction coming true. I winced at it.

I started hiding from the whole thing, I was BOLDY interested in this when
I was a small child, my heart simply SOARED when we went to that moon,
I sat down in front of Grandma's TV set down there and watched as Neil
Armstrong's foot touched that moon, and I knew we had just won over the
whole problem of securing our destiny among the heavens. That was it.

Finished. Done. We would travel to the stars.

No question, it would be achieved. Whew. It was over.

Then ... more trips to the moon. Whew. Fine. There will be BASES
on that MOON! The thing is going to be covered
with the things. It's going to be simply alive with life up on
that moon!

We would spread slowly outwards. We would master all our scientific
woes and some would stay behind on our world, but most of us would
leave and fan away from here, and we would just leave this Earth
and develop as a technological galactic sentient species.

Whew.

The the nightmare began: Apollo. Over and out. No more.

No more bases on the moon. None.

My stomach sank. It sank. No ... life on the moon. None.

No outward expansion. None.

Just space probes to study life out there, not to go outwards at all,
as in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and encounter other minds and learn
from them.

I was wracked with that, seeing us spend all this time hurling these
space probes with our rockets towards Mars and all those moons in
the outer parts of the solar system, and I just started shaking my
head at all that. All this attention was given to pursue science and none
to the sociological benefits of meeting other minds in outer space.

As in the greatest single science-fiction movie of all time, the mighty Contact.

(Give a guy his choices of movies.)

I saw the movie, and I saw Jodie Foster hurl at fast speed through wormholes
to the center of our galaxy, where these races, very much like The Consonance
awaited us, and I burned with passion towards the entire movie. I saw it as
one of the most beautiful science fiction movies I had ever seen in my entire
life in any cinematic sense at all, because I had seen such beautifully photographed, emotionally-charged, sloooow scenes of Jodie descending with liquid grace ...onto the beach of another world, where her deceased father awaited her,so Jodie gently ascends and her fine, female body merges with the sand, and her wonderful deceased dad, portrayed by an alien, lulls her into
such comfort about their wonderful time together in the early years before
he died over a heart attack, early in the film. When I saw Jodie's body
descend, it was the singlemost powerful moment of that entire movie,
Jodie's body jerking around inside that space thing, that little ball she
bounced around inside of, the probe rocketing around, the probe
just vaulting around in grand fashion through wormhole after wormhole,
the wonderful scene at the beginning of the movie where the camera
aspect is just ripped from the Earth, and we listen to (not accurate at all ...
WHO THE CARES! A MOVIE CAN'T ACHIEVE PERFECTION!) radio broadcasts
of us as the perspective knifes outwards and these grand vistas appear.

MY GOD, what an INCREDIBLE, INCREDIBLE EXPERIENCE
that film was to me. It just threw me into myself. It rocketed through my
entire life, and now, after the thing came out, it didn't sweep the whole
country!

I was watching this movie with Alice's son, Kip, and he was making
fun of some of my FAVORITE MOVIES
PREMISES!

I don't care if the transit time thing within the first part ...
I don't care about any flaw, to me, to me as someone invested in the survival
of our species, Contact was it. Contacting other civilizations out in outer
space is simply one of the things a society must do to survive.

We did it down here on our Earth to populate it, to spread across it.

Then as the Earth is conquered, we move away from it, and leave it behind,
and begin to move outwards, continuing ... the process of the very simple
idea of colonization.

The process is simple here, but we had all these resources here to get
ourselves going on our problem of getting our peoples off the Earth
and out there, because our Moon just sat there smack dab, right there
in Earth ORBIT! It was of tremendous benefit to us on all levels.

This enormous storehouse of material just hanging there for us to plunder.
It was a huge jumping off point, and we weren't taking advantage of it at all.

We're throwing our probes elsewhere, and the moon sits there and waits
for us to populate it, so we can move from its surface outwards.
It was like having a door to the outside, and you don't want to go through
it, so you get a big shotgun and drunkenly blow a big hole in a big wall,
and step through it or something.

We were hurling space probes all over the place, and the moon sat there.

No bases anywhere on it at all. No outward expansion. None of the
grand promises of the mighty JFK back in the sixties.

Then, as the many years of my life until age 50 now continued, I got
more, and more, and more depressed as that E.T.photo haunted me
in stores, I'd move through these stores slower and slower and that picture
would bob around in my vision, and my stomach began to sink lower,
and lower, at the mere sight of it.

But I have been recently been assured this situation is over. You may
have noticed the situation down here has considerably improved, and
that is thanks in large measure, to me.

I sat in Star Trek as I pondered the electricity thing and watched as
the audience, now completely almost devoid of the confusion that has
followed their minds paths' until now (which used to be a menace to
my thinking mind) was totally gone.

Then, my intellectual facilites knifed onwards at incredibly vast speeds,
people began calming because of my actions on the previous Sunday.

I sat in Star Trek and all the wonderful people my few actions benefitted
were sitting there in the theater, their slow hands passing glowing electronic
devices like cellphones calmly back and forth, and I knew, at age 50,
it was just ... done.

mark