I didn't have any idea what they were talking about then. They were so
urgent and desperate, I guess they forgot that I was just an ignorant,
no-good space bum who'd happened to strike it rich, and then gotten
himself into a killer's brawl.
Later I got to know a little about the various stages of consciousness
and how they determine what reality is.
But then, I knew next to nothing; so I asked them again to please
explain what it was all about. They tried to explain, but you can't
explain color to a man who'd never seen color. And that's the way
it is with trying to explain Fourth Stage reality, the next step
above three-dimensional awareness, to a man who's all tied up in the
blindfold of three-dimensional perspective.
LeStrang and Glora and Malcolm were Fourth Stage people. They had
come back through a barrier, a state of mental awareness separating
Third from Fourth dimensional reality; they had come back through this
barrier from the Fourth Stage plane of reality. This is coexistent with
Earth's Three Stage plane, and it's called Mohln.
LeStrang had come through to destroy Earth; then Glora and Malcolm, at
great sacrifice, had followed him into Three Stage Plane, or Earth, to
try to stop him.
Their only chance was to get some sucker, someone who could be
destructive, as they said. They couldn't. So I'd been picked, and had
chased the mad guy back where he came from. Back to Mohln, the Fourth
Stage.
According to Malcolm and Glora, when LeStrang came back through the
barrier a second time, he would probably have some way to destroy Earth
that couldn't be stopped--not even by me, the big super-super killer.
"His is a paranoid mind," Malcolm Mergon said. "He is unpredictable.
His delusions of two different realities may change its course of
action, but his psychological character can't change. His methods
will; he is destructive. That is his goal, motivated by paranoiacal
desire for revenge, because of persecution. He must be killed; that is
the only way. We have tried everything else. We can not influence him
mentally. There is no rapport with diseased and twisted personalities,
such as his."
I felt as though I didn't have any mind of my own left--and I didn't
care much. I was bigger than any lousy human I'd ever met, besides
Malcolm and Glora, or LeStrang. Maybe a few ESP guys around the planets
had a little of what I had, but nothing like me. I didn't want to
go back to being a narrow Third-Plane mind, squeezed down to blind
thinking not much above any other animal's.
So I agreed to go through the barrier. There was a lot of explanation
there, too, and I guess I remember some of it; something about
reality--being relative to degrees of awareness.
He talked about how consciousness was a great machine that evolved
slowly, powered by basic energy, the energy that makes atoms and
electrons. He told me about how this machine evolved, how it was once
only one-dimensional in its awareness, then two-dimensional, then
three. But that there were ever higher degrees of awareness; and for
each definite plane of increased awareness, was another coexistent
world.
They told me how the evolution was gradual, sporadic among different
people, but gradual among species over millions of years of time. And
now the increase in extrasensory perception showed that more and more
third-stage minds and nervous systems were developing very close to
breaking the barrier into Fourth Stage awareness. A new world. A new
reality of tremendously expanded senses.
That's what he said, Malcolm Mergon.
Then he said that the mind and the nervous system being a great and
highly complex machine powered by the basic energy of the cosmos, that
machine could be tinkered with, changed, stepped up--automatically--if
the tools were available.
They had the tools; they had minds so far above mine it wasn't anything
you could even talk about. Not and make any sense out of it. Everyone
has the latent capacity to develop Fourth Stage consciousness. Even a
one-celled amoeba, given time, will develop it.
But me--they were going to make me develop it fast. My sensory
apparatus would grow in complexity and degree of awareness of
higher-stage reality. And I would be in that other plane of Mohln where
the guy I was after had gone.