The Integrity of Destiny
He couldn’t remember the second time it happened. It was when he was a kid — not very long after the episode on the bus with his mother. Some character had come into his vision and it was as if an unseeable multi-dimensional screen had been switched on in his mind. He received impressions, scenes, conversations, sounds, smells, noises, like dribbles trickling down from some infinite network of the sum of human thought and action. Often they would come all at the same time, yet still be individually discernable — rather like those exploded diagrams of engines one sees in car manuals, in which you are shown even the smallest part but also the entire engine itself, thus making it clear how the whole thing fits together. Nathan saw people’s lives like that. “Exploded diagrams of happenstance and synchronicity”, as he called them.
Later he would also be able to see their bodies in the same way. All their particles of energy blasted apart like a photograph taken in the heart of an act of nuclear fission, with every particle vibrating and moving like dust eddying in the street of an old deserted town. Under those conditions, it was easy to see how everyone is made up of more than 99% space, with less than 1% matter holding that space together. How does that work? How come we cast a shadow? How come everyone stays in the same shape day after day (and even after death for a while)? What was it that determined the shape that anything or anyone would take? Those were the questions in Nathan’s mind from a very early age.
As soon as he was old enough to do so (though he had already half realised this for himself), he discovered that the apparent solidity of matter was due to either gravity or electrostatic force, all of which, he concluded, must be based on the sheer integrity of destiny — that is, a shape will take its form according to whatever it is meant to be in the overall flow of all things. The knowledge that 98% of all the atoms in our bodies are replaced every year had inspired him to realise that it is not matter which creates consciousness but the other way round. He would spend the rest of his life trying to absorb the mighty implications arising from this and where they fit into the development and use of his own extraordinary gifts.
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© Alan Morrison, 2014
The Naked Troubadour 