Blair propped his heels on the desk and clasped his hands behind his neck. He hoped that all this was not about to disrupt the progress he was making toward a better understanding of the way Hyadeans thought, and how those who spent any period of time on Earth began to be affected by it.
Earth had been dogmatizing itself into a virtual Dark Age for the best part of a century, discovering little that was fundamentally new, concentrating on technological improvements that it persuaded itself constituted science. The cause was a system of social dynamics that encouraged the pursuit of rewards in the form of accolades and funding, and then conferred them in recognition of what was “right” rather than what was true. The result was an Establishment that repeated the history of the medieval European Church by selling out to the political system as purveyors of the approved Truth in return for patronage, prestige, and protection. The irony, Blair was beginning to suspect, was that the solution might well lie in what all the great religions of the world, in essence, had been teaching all along: controlling passions and cultivating the ability honestly not to care what the answers to supposedly objective questions turn out to be. An even greater irony was that the Hyadeans, who seemed to possess this quality innately, seemed bent on imparting to their discoveries the significance and deeper meaning that generations of Terran scientists had been working diligently to expunge from theirs.
The Hyadean account of subatomic phenomena was close to what had become known on Earth as the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, and described a vast, fantastic, virtually infinite superposition of everything that had happened, would happen, or could happen. In making the decisions to follow one path rather than another through this ever-branching labyrinth of possibilities, the individual assembled together the sequence of perceptions and experiences that were interpreted as the universe and its flow of time. In fact, there were uncountably many universes, but isolated in such a way that at their normal, day-to-day level the inhabitants of any one had no knowledge of the others, or awareness that they even existed. Other “nearby” realities did, however, interfere at the quantum level, which was another way of saying that information could travel between them.
People had been insisting for centuries on the reality of things that science was unable to explain. Now, instead of dismissing such possibilities out of hand, it had become fashionable for scientists to grant that there might be something to some of the claims and to cite quantum “leakage” as the answer. Hence, there was still no case for invoking any “supernatural” phenomena beyond what science could account for. It was just that “science” covered more now, the world was a bigger place, and “natural” meant more than it used to.
The Hyadeans saw things the other way around. Whereas the Terran physicists found an ultimate mechanistic explanation that removed the illusion of purpose from all equations, the Hyadeans were beginning to see the whole, immense totality as a framework ideally suited to making morally meaningful choices possible. From there, having no preconceived notions to get in the way, they had followed their propensity to simply accept what the facts said and seemed to be arriving at the—to them, utterly new and revelational—conclusion that it had been designed that way, by an intelligence, for a reason.
At first, Blair had been taken aback. Since graduating, he had generally accepted uncritically the materialist doctrines that underlay his training, and their assumptions had become habit. But now, since meeting the Hyadeans—and particularly after having to forget so much of what he had believed before—he wasn’t so sure. Even before the Hyadeans came, increasing numbers of Terran biologists had been astounded by the complexity that they were finding even in allegedly primitive organisms, and saying that such organization couldn’t have come together of itself. Blair tried to fit this in with the Hyadean picture of the cosmos as initially hot, high-density entities spinning off progressively lower-energy objects from quasars down to stars and eventually planets. What else were planets but assembly stations for constructing living organisms and providing an environment for them to develop in? If it was purposeful, then the purpose of life was to evolve consciousness; and what other purpose could consciousness serve than to provide the means of undergoing experience? It was all so uncannily close to what Krossig was getting so excited about. What did Blair make of it? He really didn’t know. Maybe he was becoming a lapsed atheist.