chapter nineteen

Chapter Nineteen

           

            Maxwell felt better once he regained control of his mind and body.  It was also good to get some food inside his stomach. 

            Jimmy Glick decided to break the ice.

            "I feel like there's an elephant in the room, so I'm just going to go ahead and ask.  What in God's name is going on with you, Maxwell?  Are you trying to get yourself expelled?"

            Maxwell didn't see any point in avoiding the inevitable, so he began explaining the whole story, "You know, Jimmy, I honestly don't know what's going on, but this entire fiasco really started when you asked me whether or not I believed in God.  Suddenly my eyelids started going crazy, and now I've been having these insane dreams, not to mention that I've started sleepwalking.  Basically, there are entire stretches of last week where I dipped totally in and out of consciousness.  I had no control over what was happening to me earlier."

            "That's strange.  Simultaneously awesome and strange."

            "That isn't even the weirdest part, when I was at home suspended, the same thing happened to me where I just blacked out like that.  This was after I realized my eyelids where communicating to me through a series of binary blinks and twitches.  I decoded the message and it told me to 'know thyself'.  Actually, it said 'gnothiseauton', which is Greek for 'know thyself'.  Plato among other philosophers was credited for having said that.  Anyway, when I came to, it started getting really weird."

            Jimmy looked at Maxwell completely dumbfounded, still ruminating over the irony from the last statement.

            "I wind up completely naked in a pitch black cave.  I found my way out, eventually.  You can see all of my scabs and bruises still.  As it turns out, the cave is in the woods behind my house!"  He continued telling Jimmy about how he'd gone back into the cave, and how he'd found the homeless guy living deep within its bowels, and how the old man had known his father and could communicate with 'other realities'.

           

            Poor Jimmy didn't know what to say upon hearing all of this.  He decided that Maxwell had finally lost his marbles, but he didn't really care that much.  Maxwell figured he was probably just glad to hear such a fantastic story to begin with, either that or the fact that he was making Jimmy look increasingly normal.  They finished eating, then changed the subject.

           

            Upon returning to the classroom after lunch, Ms. Mooseknuckle eye-balled Maxwell very closely as he made his way past her desk.  Maxwell, staring right back, received a very peculiar feeling.  He took his seat, and the classroom slowly filled until they were once again ready to proceed with their studies.  There was something about Ms. Mooseknuckle that was pure evil to Maxwell.  He could detect some kind of a sinister aura about her, ... diabolical even.

            The bell sounded and class started, as the students split into their groups, Ms. Mooseknuckle had determined that the debate teams were too uneven, and so had put several other kids on the evolution side.  There was the core group of Maxwell, Jimmy, Jenna, Frank, and Vince, and now five other kids who wouldn't be of any use to either side.  Maxwell imagined that this was intentional.  If he could tell anything about Ms. Mooseknuckle, it was definitely how she wouldn't be opposed to sabotaging his group's main effort.  The project itself was to be presented on Tuesday of next week.  Today being Friday, giving them no more than three and a half more days for preparation.

            "What happened to you earlier Maxwell, are you okay?," Jenna asked him.  He could tell she was genuinely concerned, but he didn't really know what to say that could help her understand.  It was shocking enough that Jimmy took it as well as he did, and he didn't want to push his luck, so he decided to tell her as little as possible.

            "Yes, I'm okay.  I know that was, um, a little weird when it happened.  I didn't mean to scare you.  I just started feeling really sick and all of a sudden I blacked out.  I didn't even know what kind of scene I had caused until I was in the principal's office."

            "He has Dr. Schmidt by the ….," Jimmy interjected.

            "That isn't true, and don't be so disgusting.  I just told him what happened, and he sympathized.  He knows a little more about what's going on with me, so he knew there wasn't any harm intended.  You probably think I'm crazy, don't you?"

            Jenna looked a little confused.  She wanted to believe Maxwell.  For all she knew, he was telling the God's honest truth, but she couldn't help but be a little scared of him.  She politely shook her head, then opened up her notes.

           

            They went over some things they'd researched from the night before.  It wasn't hard to find evidence to back the argument that they where hoping to make.  Frank had a stack of papers in front of him and started rattling off all kinds of information.

             "Fossil records from throughout history indicate a lineage all the way back for six hundred million years.  Before this time, they found out how there weren't any organisms on the planet outside that of simple bacteria and eukaryotic life forms which would ultimately become the precursor for all the more advanced life forms that came after.  This meant that for over three billion years there hadn't really been all that much to see, only a little water, a few chemicals, some rocks, and a few single celled organisms."

            "What are eukaryotes?," asked a newcomer whose name was Donny.

            "Eukaryotes are organisms, in this case protozoans, amoebas and other simple or single celled organisms that have a nuclei.  This means that their genetic material, the controls that guide the cell from its birth to its death in every aspect, has been compartmentalized inside a nucleus.  This is a feature that bacteria, or prokaryotic life forms lack," Frank explained. 

            He continued, "Scientists also realized, much to everyone's surprise, that the Earth became livable about 3.8 billion years ago, not even a billion years after the planets's original formation.  So for much of the first billion years, Earth was a very hot and very unihabitable meteor and comet sponge.  Wild collisions and massive explosions made the planet unsuitable for life until a couple million years before all the life we know today began to take off.  The thrust of this tidbit of knowledge was that life took hold on this planet extraordinarily quickly, and has been gathering steam ever sense.  Remarkably, in all of its complexity, it didn't take very long for these random processes to produce some very complicated forms of replicating nucleic acids, one of the fundamental characteristics of the biological life forms that scientists know of today."

            What Frank was saying didn't seem to be all that unsettling to anyone except Maxwell, so he decided to play the devil's advocate.  "From a probability standpoint, more time than the existence of the known universe would be needed for such a complex process to come together randomly.  One researcher put it like this, "It would be as if a twister had blown through a junkyard and in its wake left a fully assembled 747 jet airplane.  Do you see the problem here?  For as intelligent as mankind is, we really have no idea how to put chemicals together in such a way that the end result is life.  We want to say that we aren't intelligent enough to do something that a supposedly 'un-intelligent' mother nature can do with her eyes closed, by complete random processes, and in the span of only a few million years, which is a far cry from the eons and eons of the time cycle of the actual universe itself!"

            Frank looked insulted upon hearing this, "What are you saying Maxwell, that you don't believe animals are evolving from essential elements?" 

            "I'm not saying anything like that.  I am just saying that you better be able to explain yourself better if you want to win this debate."

            No one really knew how to respond to Maxwell's statement, instead, they went back to their original discussion, almost as if he hadn't said anything at all.  The afternoon drug on, and after awhile they were all instructed to return to their seats. 

            By now the school day was almost finished, but there was one more thing on the agenda.  It was the test that Ms. Butternut had scheduled the week before, one that Maxwell hadn't known about. 

            He took the test, guessed on every single question, and that was that.  His grades where screwed anyway, at least as far as he could see it.  Maxwell had bigger concerns on his plate now.

           

            The day let out and Maxwell went home.  He darted to his bedroom, gathered his things and headed towards the cave.  As he was walking through the woods, he noticed his mood slowly picking up.  By the time he'd gotten to the cave, he was so filled with contentment that he could hardly contain himself.  It was a curious thing, this cave.  It had an intoxicating effect upon him, and his departure was always met with a hangover. 

            As it is with so many so called ‘mystical experiences’, the mind tends to grasp hold of whatever 'it' is, and whatever 'it' can get ahold of, 'it' analyzes to no avail.  This is because the true essense of 'it', Maxwell would come to understand, is that 'it' is as elusive as running water or smoke upon the wind.

            Even though Maxwell fully understood that he was going to feel like dog-shit the next day, he still made the decision.  It was not even a question.

             Maxwell would be going back to the cave. 

            As he climbed up the final ravine, he found Tom in his usual spot, smoking away on his mysterious pipe.  His lightbulb had already burned out of course, but he was getting used to this, the facts of life.  He'd brought many spares, and as it were, he never even needed a lightbulb due to the luminescence emanating from Tom always being more than enough to make his features visable.  Maxwell began feeling the light.  His mind gradually cleared, then slowly expanded.

            "Tom, what in the world did you do to me?  I don't remember exactly what happened last night, but I remember you touched my forehead and all I could see was the brightest light ever imaginable.  The next thing I know, I wake up in the emergency room!  To top it all off, I've been 'remembering' things all day.  I've been seeing things, many things, different images and ideas, and I've no idea why.  It's like they aren't even my ideas to begin with, because they're so different than anything I've ever thought of before.  Do you know what I'm talking about?  What did you do to me?"

            Tom took a long slow drag from his pipe.  He looked deeply at Maxwell, intentionally surveying him up and down as if he were in very deep contemplation, nothing was said for a great while. 

            Just as Maxwell was about to break the silence, Tom laid his pipe on the ground and began to talk, "You've seen the light for the first time in your life.  Your eyes were opened, and you experienced something new, something much larger than you're used to experiencing, but what you saw was but only a fraction of all that there is.  A simple grain of sand on an endless beach of infinite knowledge.  The well of truth is much deeper than you might think, oh yes indeed my young friend."

            Maxwell was fascinated by what Tom was saying, perhaps even a bit mystified.  "Are you going to explain to me why all of this is happening?  Why'd you show me this 'light', and why do I feel so differently every time I come here, and how is it, Tom, that I saw my principal's past?  How is that even possible?"

            Tom slowly grinned.  It was as if he enjoyed dangling this mystery in front of Maxwell, watching the boy's exasperation as he groped to figure it out, "You're starting to get exasperated, and I like what I'm seeing!"

            "What?," Maxwell, wandered? Even though he was beginning to feel droplets of this so called light upon his head, was slowly growing irritated.

            "It's okay to not understand sometimes.  Some things, in fact, can never be fully understood, or should I say, some things can never be understood until the time is right."

            "Okay, so when is the time going to be right, and make up your mind, is there time or isn't there, because your inconsistencies are really starting to frustrate me!"

            "See, you're starting to catch on aren't you."

            Maxwell just stared at Tom. 

            "We've already discerned that time is imaginary.  We've also determined the planet to be an organism, one that is simply larger in scale than any common bio-form here on Earth's crust.  I've also told you that the root of everything is consciousness.  These are important starting points for you in your understanding.  You're at the beginning of a very long journey, my boy.  You are indeed 'chosen'."

            This caught Maxwell off guard.  He was curious to find out what Tom meant by this.

            "Don't think for a second that you're the only chosen one.  The last thing we need is for you to get a big head.  Big heads are the result of big egos.  Big egos stand in the way of the light and the path in which you must now take."

            Maxwell couldn't help but laugh about this.  'This old timer must not know me very well,' he thought, then he said Tom, "I don't have any confidence whatsoever.  I'm a social misfit, a complete outsider.  I'm awkward around people and I don't have any extraordinary talents.  I'm not fast, I don't get very good grades, I've never once had a girlfriend, and people definitely think I'm crazy.  I see a shrink and I'm talking to a strange old man who lives in a cave, so I'm even starting to think I might be a little crazy myself.  How can I possibly ever be 'chosen' or in any way have a big head?"

            "Have you noticed your life being fairly difficult lately?"

            Maxwell had noticed in fact, but he found he was reluctant to divulge in this information.  Instead, he shook his head to the contrary, "no, not really."

            Of course Tom knew better than that.  It didn't really matter anyhow, "Well, things are going to get a lot tougher 'everywhere'.  People are having a hard time.  It's a simple fact of life, and the reality of the situation is this; it isn't going to get any easier for quite a while, rather, things are actually going to get significantly more difficult before they start to get easier."

            Maxwell wasn't comforted in the slightest by this notion.  He couldn't possibly imagine things being too much more difficult than they already where.

            "Do you think that it's any coincidence that you're studying evolution in school?  Do you think that it was coincidental that you studied binary, or Plato?  What do you think about all of this?"

            "It's certainly very strange," Maxwell conceded.

            "These 'so called' coincidences are not coincidental at all.  In fact, they're very significant markers.  Just like the dreams you've been having, and the visions you've been getting since you've discovered the cave.  It's no coincidence that your father died, and that I knew him very well.  Everything has its purpose.  Wisdom is at the source of all things.  You might even call it divine knowledge.  You can call it whatever you want, but it's something that your eyes haven't been opened to yet.  I know it's hard to believe, but you're slowly beginning to catch a glimpse of the larger picture."

           

            Maxwell was dumbfounded.  Everything that Tom was saying, it seemed, he already knew somewhere deep down inside himself.  He was 'remembering something' that was buried inside the ancient core of his very beginning.

            "When I tell you that consciousness is the driving factor of everything, what I mean to say is that consciousness pre-dated what you know to be the cosmos, or outer space, in all of its entirety.  In fact, infinity is nothing more than infinite possibilities being played out by an infinite and timeless consciousness.  This is something that you have to understand, and eventually, everyone must understand, or reality here on earth will be extinguished once and for all, at least as humanity knows it.  The world moves on at any rate, regardless of this fact.  The question then becomes, 'do you and your kind wish to be players in this great cosmic drama that is slowly unfolding itself before you?'."

            Maxwell didn't say anything.  He was trying to take it all in.  The words Tom was saying slowly resonated with him, and strangely, he probably wouldn't have agreed with Tom two days ago at all.  He could now tell that there was some kind of great truth in the things this old man had to say.

            "The world is moving on, changing, accelerating.  It's evolving at an exponential rate.  A big assumption with people is that humanity is the apex or penultimate of this evolutionary cycle.  This is the worst possible assumption anyone can make, and it's leading the proverbial train into a brick wall.  So many people can't see the forest for the trees.  When the center of the universe is the ego, and trust me, the vast majority of people see the world through this particular pair of glasses, the individual becomes sick, and when more people are sick than not, society as a whole is diseased.  Mankind is the worst illness this planet has ever known.  This doesn't have to be the case, for there is still yet time to grow.  The single biggest misconception is that we're supposed to be the 'end result' of evolution, or that God simply put us here to live in any which way we like as long as we choose Him, because 'heaven' awaits.  This is called fallacious thinking.  This is mentally insane.  The world, at large, is mentally insane. 

           

            Maxwell's jaw dropped.  He'd long suspected something along these lines, but never had the words so appropriately described what he was feeling.

            "For humans, the time to grow up has come and gone.  A critical tipping point, or 'chaos point' if you will, where we either go the way of the dinosaurs and ninety-nine percent of all the species ever to have existed on this planet, or we evolve as a species into something brand new and better in every single possible way than anything this planet has ever seen before.  Something more coherent, a planetary civilization that lives in accordance with the evolving 'planet as organism' model.  Right now, we're on the threshold of the next quantum shift in evolution, a macro-shift is taking place, and you Maxwell, are experiencing it as an internal change.  The next phase in human evolution will happen to more and more people, something similar to what you are now experiencing inside yourself, or it could be in a completely different way, completely unique to the individual.  To some degree, everyone has a unique journey to take, all their own, but know that there is more to this picture than meets the eye.  Know that the shadow on the wall is not the thing in and of itself.  Reality will reveal ever more of itself in due time."