Meddlers from the End of Time

A long message received from Stimson Jaycat; visions, landscapes, meditations.  Read on  . . .

 

Before the events of May and June of 1987 put me on a quest regarding a recovery of Gnostic practices and world view…culminating in the months leading up to the last war and pretty much wrapping it all up for me on my fortieth birthday, I’d had a series of “visions” if you will that seemed to be a fusion of two of my favorite classic Golden Age Science Fiction novels: THE END OF ETERNITY by Asimov and THE CITY AND THE STARS by Clarke.These visions would be most pronounced in the Ruins of Chollas Station north of College Grove Drive. Those ruins are still mostly intact…though the area that was grated to be the start of the land fill has been re-visioned by the city of San Diego as an Athletic Field.

Even thirty years after my first encounter with the Ruins, they are still pretty much the same, not a whole lot of decay: early in the 20th Century they really knew how to make concrete that lasted.

Or Did they?

My failed Science Fiction Writer mind wondered some times if that was just a cover by the City, as half the neighborhood didn’t even seem to be aware of the existence of the ruins.

In the Visions, the ruin had actually always been there, before the coming of the white man, and were impossibly old, on the order of 30 Billion years, older than the physical universe.

That it had actually fallen back in time from some later epoch.

As part of the perfect final city, going back into the past to ensure that the future turned out the way it did.

A moebius loop paradox of galactic age endurance.

The People at the End of time were actively reaching back thru the ages, working on manipulating history to come out the way it should.

 

They way it should?Real time was at the end of time, the time of perfection, when humanity had reached its highest goal.

But there were factions at the end of time that wanted to reach into the past, start nuclear wars, change elections, have person a make choice c instead of d in their life;  just to change their own standing, or their group’s standing, at the end of time.

A nuclear war in 1988 would have only small adjustments in the final city. In all possible worlds the Final city is there, just with different aspects.

The City at that end of time was much like Diaspar, the version in THE CITY AND THE STARS, not  as in AGAINST THE FALL OF NIGHT: Enclosed, everyone dinkin around in virtual environments of intellectual exploration or having esoteric sex, mathematical pursuits that go on for tens of thousands of years across incarnations; human beings incarnated via a Master Computer, sex only for enjoyment not reproduction. A potential population in the trillions, with only a few millions actively incarnated at any given time.

Sounds like Heaven.

The Eternals and the Factions: One of the actual jobs in this Diaspar like city was monitoring the prior centuries, millennia, eons and making corrections to time: ensuring the time line. But unlike Asimov’s Eternals who could only manipulate Centuries starting from the 2600s: when the Temporal Field was created, drawing energy from Earth’s Sun’s Death Throws, these Temporal Guardians/Adjustors and Rogues had access to all time, including a pre-human dinosaur civilization. The dinosaurs didn’t die out, our human ancestors at time’s end dropped the bomb on them.

Not a totally original notion, all of this. LAST AND FIRST MEN has the mind of a Last Man influencing Olaf Stapledon to write that book. In LAST MEN IN LONDON the premise is revealed that Olafs’ Last Man had been with him for decades, and actually influenced much of his actions…which I wasn’t to read until about 1996.

But it was never clear from these Blakean visions if the Platonic Guardians were actually physically traveling back in time, or if they were just mentally traveling back in time, focusing on key individuals at key times.

The last half of the twentieth century being a Crux Period from the view point of the end of time…that this was the era in which humanity could make or break it’s world.

Anyway.

Events in Ocean Beach in the last weeks of May 1987, and then leading up to a return there on June 10th of that same year, sent my life in a completely different direction, hot on the heels of hermetic speculation . A year later, after a correspondence with a celebrity on the subject, I was enmeshed in a close study of the published material pseudo Gnostic Victorian club, actually making up some of my first elaborations of their spiritual speculations at that point, diverging from their stodgy co-masonic practice.

 

Little did those Victorian Speculators, or myself and my late twentieth century comrads, realize that the information they took as a supreme spiritual key to understanding the universe was actually a miscommunication from a yet different set of humanity, a mere seven billion years past our own era.
 
And then making a re-entry into the work force in a completely alien field to my interests, and actually succeeding in it.
 
All through the 1990s there was this constant background interest in this misunderstood communication.  One myth stated these were semi-divine beings.  Another that they were Extra-Terrestrial in Origin.  Until the accident with the laser driven time machine in 2012 no one realized that this key to the spiritual universe was a partially working radio to a race of Man facing extinction on an Earth nearly swallowed by a Swollen Sun.
There should have been clues that this wasn’t what it seemed.  Everyone who spent any considerable time delving into it suffered strange flu like symptoms.  Or worse, became allergic to almost everything in modern life.
 
And again…there was one of those shifts in perspective, and most of those involved in this studies became engrossed in the Philosophy and Life Style going by the name of “Agape” which promised to be a unification and solution to all western philosophy, religion, and spiritual yearns.
This failed, scattering everyone back to their individual lives.In times of Social Crisis like the failure of “Agape” I found myself returning to the Stapledonian Mytho of long geological eras of human and other intelligences’ history.

During the 1990s I got this fix via Dr. Benford’s novels set about 30K years from now near the Galactic Core…where humanity had come to Bitch-Slap ancient Machine based Intelligences for attempting to play the forced extinction game on them…only to end up being rats in the walls…until humanity played the final trump.

Benford’s sequel to the Diaspar story: BEYOND THE FALL OF NIGHT, tied in his Galactic Novels in a loose way to Clarke’s condensate of LAST AND FIRST MEN and STARMAKER: A time eons after carbon and electronic based intelligences settled their differences and got on with business.

In some ways I feel like a periodic comet looping around two binary stars at a 101 AU distance from each other: One being the Stapledonian Mythos and the visions of Winter/Spring 87, the other being an interest in Gnostic studies and practice, also binaried to Heideggerian ontology

Two years ago I had come to a point in my studies of original Gnosticism where I had made a major breakthrough into something new, actually putting together a more original system of doing things, more in line with the historical Gnostics and not the Victorian Era Simulation…and then suddenly I am in charge of computers around the world and my Dad is diagnosed with Lung Cancer…derailing continuing development from those discoveries to deal with a !CRISIS!…feeling like a microcosm of one of Stapledon’s future races of Humanity: They would reach some kind of spiritual pinnacle and then Viral Cloud Intelligences would invade from Mars, or their racial Joy would knock the moon out of Orbit, or after taking a billion years to arise again on Neptune and attain a perfect society there telepathic unity would upset the Sun (also an intelligent being) triggering a Nova Event to wipe out the vermin in his system.

 

 
With my father having one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel for a year and a half, was forced to re-experience the neighborhood in which I grew up.Returning to Oak Park on a daily basis brought back memories from forgotten decades, and a rediscovery that Chollas Station had been reopened to the public: the City closed it down in Spring ’88: giving me access to that space and the old memories.

The ruins endure.

 

The ruins look the same.
Though one structure ended up buried in adebris flow after the mud hill above it collapsed.
And yet many in the surrounding neighborhoods are oblivious that it is there.
Walking the ruins the day before thanksgiving last year produced a brief sense of fractured eternity, a cascade of images, of events and personages up and down the time line, and to the sides.

Those have been recorded elsewhere.  

 

While Clarke’s Diaspar is a perpetual presence in my imagination, the visions of that final city, and it’s broken projections into the current era, only occur in the anomaly of the ruins of Chollas Station.

 

Every now and then, confused individuals are found stumbling out of the Western Gate at Chollas Station road, and wander down into Redwood Village, babbling incoherently and trying to purchase food and drink at Trade Winds Liquor with what the owner of that store has told me was  “Monopoly Money”.   And chases them out of his store.

 

Outside of the ruins the Final City is only a vague presence.

 

Yet “when” I am is always suspect.  Doug Smith says we don’t even know what planet we’re really on any more.  Or what year this really is…

 

Falling off to sleep initially I dream of the Warner Valley, 50,000 years from now, when the male gender has gone extinct.  As I fall deeper asleep it’s Alexandria just before World War Two.   And Alexandria endures thru the night, in the predawn sleep it’s the Alexandria of Origen and Plotinus, and listening to the same lecturer that formed their thought, in that same academy like place…