21.

The only thing that told Joshua that this place had any civilization was the fact that he was walking barefoot along a smooth, white concrete path. The trees were spaced thinly with little vegetation on the ground level, but above the great branches spread out to fill in the spaces, intertwined their fat green leaves in a high canopy. Sunlight came, but only in little splotches and spots of bright yellow; but even in the shade it was warm, pleasantly so.

He did not know where he was headed, but walked the path just as he'd found himself doing; it did not occur to him that he should change direction at all, nor that he was lost. He was not in fact lost, and knew just where he was going; but this does not mean he knew what this place was, what country, what planet, what was fifty yards ahead of him or fifty yards behind. And so he walked on.

Finally he came to a great stone structure, with classic pillars, a Grecian structure, nothing brick or wooden in it. It was not some ruin though--it was fresh and new. It reminded Joshua of Greek statues and sculptures seen in museums; but while these often have shoulders broken off abruptly, cracked faces or other signs of ancientness, everything about this marble was fresh, brand new, like the shining plastic of toys still in their boxes.

He saw a bearded old man--a white man with flowing curly hair coming from his cheeks and chin. He was wearing a white tunic--again of the Grecian style--brown thong sandals on his feet. Everything about his appearance spoke of health and sanity.

"Welcome, my friend, welcome," he said, his arms outstretched. He came and embraced Joshua and kissed each of his cheeks in turn.

"Do I know you?" said Joshua, who hadn't reacted nor returned his kisses.

"No," said the man, "I don't believe we know each other, but is this any reason why I should not kiss you? You're a man, after all--men must love their fellows, for this is the solution to everything. Come--we shall celebrate with the others. Come."

Joshua followed behind him through the grand colonnade, enchanted. "What are we celebrating?" he asked.

"Why, silly fellow!" said the man. "Is not to enjoy oneself an end in itself? Enjoy yourself and you shall enjoy doing so--otherwise is impossible!"

They came to a grand open space where the sea spread out in front of them. There were men and women reclining, exchanging kisses here and there, eating grapes, figs, dates and meats. The low hum of their chatter hit Joshua's ears. He looked again to the sea. The building was set right into it--the columns went off into the water, steps leading one down into the depths of black. There were men and women idling in the sea, the waves mild, floating or sitting here and there in the water. Wine was plentiful, and all were reclining in perfect ease.

"Am I in heaven?" asked Joshua of the man with the flowing white beard.

"Do you think you are?" asked the man.

"I . . ." Joshua was unsure what it was he thought at all. Uncertainty was the only thing he could be sure of, after all of this madness.

"We are gods," said the man--"yes, gods. But the only difference between gods and men is this. That we do not terrorize one another--we bless one another and so are all of us blest. Never a murder, never a resentment, never a hard word among us. It is perfectly in your power to make the earth as heavenly as our world here--but you do not do it, and this is incomprehensible to us."

"Is this where God lives?" asked Joshua.

The man leaned his head back in loud, deep chuckles.

"God," he said--"God. We do not know if he exists. We do not know where we go when we die--and we do all die--we do not know what lies unseen past the grave or in some secret place under the visible world. But is this any reason for us to make the world a terror for ourselves? It's madness to do so! No, we do not know many, many things; each of us is here only for a moment, and we know not anything of God or an afterlife. But these things do not mean we ought to all stand up and slit one another's throats like madmen--that would be the same as each of us slitting his own." He shook his head. "Really, when we look down upon the earth, and see how men make the world a very hell, we cannot comprehend it at all."

"I think I'm in hell right now," said Joshua. "I keep dreaming of scene after scene, and I can't wake up."

"Come, sit down, let us discuss these things at ease," said the man, whose name Joshua still did not know. They reclined together on soft silken cushions, and the man poured them each a beaker of wine.

"You mentioned that old 'Tree falling in the forest' cliché earlier. Let me give you a secret--for the truth of it is far from cliché. The idea of a silently falling tree is that there is no real noise--the air particles collide in waves going out, in complete silence, while it is just the human brain that interprets this to the mind as noise. Really there are just silently colliding particles. But that--even that is just a trick of the brain. It's only that instead of looking at it in the way the mind presents to us sound, we are looking at it the way the mind presents to us sight. While what it truly is must be in terms of neither sight nor sound. I don't mean that perceptions are not caused by real bodies--only that those bodies are as little of the nature of sight as of the nature of sound. Thunder is silent, particles silently going out in waves--but the lightning too is black as night--for its flash is only the mode of presentation our minds happen to have."

"How then are we to know the true nature of things?" asked Joshua.

The man laughed in a friendly, warm way once more, his throat working out the chuckles one after another.

"The true nature of things," he said when done laughing. "Well, that we were never meant to know. The human organism can only know human truth. And the only way to know the deepest truth is not to question everything, but to accept plain facts with pure innocence, even gullibility. Sight, sound--they are both the reality complete, with nothing false about them. This life is not about finding some hidden reality--it's about realizing just how much is obvious to us. Trust in your senses--they could not be but that they be plain reality, for nothing can be but that it is real."

"I think . . . I still think I am in hell," said Joshua.

"Then sip your wine--you haven't touched it!" said the man. "Even in hell there are times of delight!"

He stood and wandered away. Joshua looked about himself, at these gods that reclined in the heart of heaven. "These people do not know how anguishing all of this is to me," he thought--"anguish such as mine, should they know it existed, would astonish them to their very bones."

Now Joshua wondered if he were going insane, and he hoped that the agony of being insane were somehow mitigated by that very insanity, so that the insane were not cognizant enough to know how much they suffered. And suddenly the thought of going insane delighted him, as if it meant escape from everything that mattered, just like ten thousand dollars of debt matters not at all to a man mortally wounded.

As he sat and finally sipped his wine, thoughts flowed through him that he did not understand; they were vague impressions of his surroundings, mediations upon subjects he knew nothing of and understood little about. At times like these he thought he knew exactly what must be done without knowing what it must be done in reaction to, and knew just what he must say without knowing what he meant by it.

As a young man Joshua had considered things like incest and cannibalism impossible. Not impossible in the sense that they were not an option--impossible in the sense that a man eating stones and concrete, iron and steel was impossible. Human flesh was simply not food; how could men eat it? He wasn't sure just why this occurred to him now; it was silly, but nothing said by the grimmest saint or wisest sage was not. In any case, it mattered little--it would not end the Dreamtime, so should he even plumb into some chasm within himself and attain the very Nirvana, unless it meant an end to these dreams, it was like billions in real estate located on Mars.