Dear Folks, Here it is, the Preface to my newest book, The Evolution Angel, Book Two, Gaia’s Plan.

Ten years in the making and following the best-selling first Evolution Angel.

I hope you like it and would love your comments.  Enjoy!

The Evolution Angel

Book Two:  Gaia’s Plan

Copyright 2010    Rev. Dr. Todd Michael

Preface

We’ve got diamonds

on the souls of our shoes.

Paul Simon

There is an old, but classic science fiction book by the genius Arthur Clarke:  The City and the Stars.   I haven’t read it in thirty years and can’t seem to find a copy, so I’ll have to go mostly by memory.  But I read it several times way back when, and it made a really strong impression on my formative consciousness. So, I think I’ve got it down pretty well.

In this book, we humans have become ultra-technologically evolved, and are systematically searching the universe for alien intelligence in huge, near light-speed ships.  After a few centuries, this one ship finally finds a planet around a dual star-system.  It is promising indeed.  It has oxygen, water, the right temperatures, dry land, and all the other things life would seemingly need.

Explorers quickly determine that there is one city on the planet; one that flagrantly displays the remnants of a huge, unfathomably advanced civilization.  But the city is completely abandoned, and in a state of advanced decay, as though no one had lived there for several thousand years.  It appears to have the remnants of antigravity and time-travel amenities. There are no dead bodies to indicate a plague or other mass disaster.   It appears somehow intact, as though the inhabitants had simply disappeared. This city makes New York look like a Neanderthal camp.  The people that had built this city, and lived prosperously within it, had apparently solved virtually every problem that science could offer.

Sadly, there was nothing much else on the planet.  Just a seemingly pathetic group of loin-clothed shepherds living in a Stone Age camp, just outside the city walls, in an orchard. They seemed to be somewhat daft, having very little to say.   They had very small, limited vocabularies.  Just words about their goat and sheep-like animals, and orchards, and simple, everyday tasks of living.  They seemed utterly devoid of motivation and ambition, and were content to simply tend to their animals.  But they were happy and laughed a lot.

The searchers from our expedition party search and search trying to unravel the mystery:  What had happened to all these people in the great city–their technology obviously abandoned now, oxidizing and useless in the hot sun for several thousand years? There was no sign at all that they had been invaded and conquered.  No sign, on geological analysis that there had been any climactic or astronomical disturbance.  They puzzled over it for months and months.  Where had these people gone?  A virus?  Not likely with their medical science, and no dead bodies to indicate any sort of plague.  Where had they gone?

One of the researchers, during their long months of studies, befriended one of the people in the village under the big trees outside the doors.  He seemed a friendly man; I guess what you could call a sweetheart.  For months, on his off-time, the researcher sat with this man, getting to know him, even though it appeared as if he had no useful knowledge whatsoever of the fate of the great city.

One day, the researcher lapsed into a state of deep melancholy, the classic dark night of the soul, filled with doubt and fear and hopelessness.  He found himself searching deep within, trying to understand the state of the Universe, of Life—of his own life. The older man sat with him silently, apparently empathizing.  After a time, he steadied himself on his walking stick, reached over, and touched the researcher on the forehead.

He was immediately blown into a trillion pieces of ultra-radiant light, and supreme ecstasy, able to see and understand all that was, is, and that all that will be, with perfect equanimity and happiness.  He could See the entire light of a infinite number of universes-understanding everything and feeling a state of intense bliss. The feeling is so completely overpowering, that he falls to his knees weeping—in pure rapturous joy and simultaneous sadness that he has wasted his life looking for the wrong thing and in the wrong place:  That everything we can possibly want and need is right here inside us, right now, just as we are.

The City didn’t matter in the slightest, any longer.  These simple people were perfect just as they were. They, their consciousness, was the legacy, the endpoint of evolution of their entire civilization.

*****

We do have diamonds on the soles, souls, of our shoes.  The last place we’d look for them.  A metaphor for what is inside each of us. This book is dedicated to Gaia’s dream, her visualization of where she is going, the greater plan for this tiny speck of a world.  A world within trillions upon trillions of universes.

We know everything. Technology is fine.  I am not a Luddite and have a Mac Book Pro, a digital recording studio, and a gorgeous digital SLR camera.  But, in the end, that which is inside us will far outshine anything technology could ever offer us.  In the final analysis, technology will pale in comparison to the spectacular light we will find within.

Imagine:

What if…

God bless you, Dr. Todd