An article by Sha'Tara - local writer and friend...

The Homeless Alien Consciousness

[thoughts from   ~a burning woman~   Sha’Tara]

I remember driving at night on open prairie roads.  I remember turning off the headlights and driving by the light of the moon.  You could see the road because the ruts cast dark shadow lines that stretched in front to fade in the distance.  Prairie roads can go for miles and miles straight as an arrow and you wouldn’t be driving all that fast in any case so it wasn’t really dangerous.  But that wasn’t the point. 

All around were flat fields of frozen snow resembling glistening white sands in an endless desert.  Ice crystals sparkled in the moonlight and above the stars were so bright and seemed so close, if you stopped, turned off the engine and walked far enough away from your crackling cooling vehicle, you could literally hear or feel a hum all around in the windless ten to twenty below zero temperatures.  Alone in the vibrating silent desert of ice-crusted snow undulating in low dunes your heart would suddenly overflow and sobs would come because of the questions that arose as endless as the vast expanse you were looking at.  Questions so deep few individuals in their teens could hope to answer.  Many of those questions still remain unanswered, though they may have been asked a thousand times or more since.

And that’s good because they provided the basis, the reason I spent this life searching the cosmos for understanding.  My experiences in traveling empty prairie roads in the long winter nights under crackling starlight and dancing aurora borealis prepared me for another type of travel: that of moving at or near the speed of light in ships that probed the endless, black distances of space between solar systems.  The remembered ships were small, completely automated, and sometimes you were the only crew on board.  Alone between worlds.  Sometimes surrounded by bright starry constellations, sometimes passing by massive expanses of gaseous formations giving off shadowy, murky or lurid colors, and sometimes nothing but the black emptiness of space—of infinite space.  You and your wonderful little ship less than a micro-speck in the all that is.  Totally alone.  These strange voyages were usually tests.  Would your mind lose its focus, become lost and become a self-destroyer?  Would it reach some destination, or return, in a vegetative state?  Should things go wrong we were provided with the means to self-destruct, so we had that power.  We always have that power… and it frightens us probably more than anything else.

Lately I’ve been re-living some of those travels in darkness and emptiness.  And I’ve been pondering this: am I the alien here… or is the world I live in the alien?  This is no spurious question for if I am to ever come to know who or what I am I must answer this one first.  There is no question that one of us is the alien.  With each passing day I withdraw further from this place.  My mind continues to analyze the conditions extant on this world and to reject them.  There is a growing ‘wrongness’ of things here, or perhaps it is me who is changing and seeing ‘wrongness’ where others can only see normalcy.  If it is I who is changing based on remembered other lives, on remembered other worlds or other dimensions of existence, then I am the alien here.  If it is the world that is changing and the level of ‘wrongness’ or evil growing, then the world must be the alien.

Self-destruction was never my choice in those remembered lives, and it will not be my choice in this one either.  In mind I may be withdrawing but I am going to finish this, come hell or high water.  Not because I remain curious about this world, that it may still hide some secrets from me—it does not—but because I still have things to do here.  Seeds to plant, and I must wait for the proper time to do so. 

We who have attained ISSA consciousness can no longer pretend we are here by accident, or that we have no choice in being who we are.  Now is the time to develop a responsible attitude to everything.  Blaming or passing the buck doesn’t work anymore.  We see this everyday, as our man-made world caves in on itself and the hole opened up getting wider and deeper.  We see and we sense.  The great things we once so proudly relied on as a modern society—democratic freedoms, universal education, stalwart religions, ideals of capitalistic free enterprise and financial acumen, global leadership in superior technology—this ideological idol we created for ourselves from our beliefs, is falling.  Once all we could see was its head of gold but now we are staring at feet of clay.  And those who trusted in it are indulging themselves in the coarse and gross ‘art’ of self indulgence created from shirking responsibility and blaming others for worsening conditions.

Let the failed false values collapse then.  Let it all get sucked down the black hole formed of idolatrous worship.  And let all those who still cling to the falling shards of their great idol fall in the hole with it.  They are exercising their right to choose.  And I am exercising my right not to follow suit.  To pull back by remembering both the past and the future thus forging for myself a new path through the chaos, then the black emptiness.  Perhaps the future cannot be known but it can be surmised at.  The interminable voyages endured alone were survived.  From visions of incredible sights and encounters with equally incredible worlds, understanding and wisdom developed, anchored themselves in the mind, creating a being that would be ever-questing, ever wondering, ever moving through infinity: the homeless alien consciousness that can never be stopped, never be destroyed.