Quite a while back I started a post about discovering, or maybe rediscovering, in a book a concept I have seen stated frequently in books by all sorts of people from the Sufis to Shakespeare in one way or another. Here is the statement in the raw; be in the world, but not of it.
Be in the world, but not of it.
I have read this statement in one form or another for many many years and knew it to be an important component, perhaps even a commandment for those who desire to be what is called enlightened, compleat, self-actualized and many other terms. I have frequently turned it over unsuccessfully without ever coming to any conclusion. Occasionally, I have made an attempt to concentrate on the phrase or meditate on it, but my efforts ended inconclusively or, humorously, I just fell asleep. Not a particularly enlightening event, but restful.
This last summer, I re-read a novel called Star Bridge, which I have had for many years and which I periodically re-read because I always seem to find something new hidden in its content. The book was written in the 1950's and a brief synopsis might be in order. The plot follows a soldier of fortune, a mercenary, who has been hired by a mysterious individual to assassinate the head of an enormous star empire. The soldier falls in love with his victim's daughter, brings down empire, sets the stage for a new social order to address new threat to mankind, happy ever after.
The title of the book comes from an invention of the authors to allow the humans of their story to occupy a vast area of space without having to fly space-ships at or near the speed of light, or faster than the speed of light, which seems to involve a lot of physics problems which the authors found unacceptable as a solution to galactic empire. So the authors invented a system of "bridges" which is powered by a star, Canopus to be precise, which all lead to one planet, Eron, and through and from which all travel and transport and energy must flow, making the race of humans inhabiting Eron the automatic rulers of the empire because they know the "secret". Fairly prosaic as a story with lots of adventure and action suitable for the era in which it was written.
These "star bridges" are the key to everything in the story and for my own purpose here. As a device of the story, a bridge could only be activated by one being, the last member of an alien race whose relatives were wiped out by the carelessness of greedy humans looking for treasure. In the story the alien is personified by anthropomorphising it as a female, even though the creature can take on pretty much any shape it wishes, as long as the size is compatible. The authors call her Lil. Lil is thousands of years old and was, in fact, saved by a Chinese man (incidentally the last member of his race also in the story), whom she has kept alive longer than the normal human life span. Why she has assisted the man seems to be an ultimate act of generosity, but her assistance has led to this star empire which now must be brought down for plot purposes and she will assist in that also.
Plot aside, it is the nature of the bridge that fascinates me. To travel between stars humans must enter a ship which must enter a gate to be pushed into a lock which then pushes the ship into the "tube". The story has the color of the "tube" gold and the race of Eron are called the "golden" people because somewhere in the past there was a mutation to humans on the planet which made their skin appear golden. The great myth and mystery which binds this star empire together is that only the "golden" folk, someone of pure "golden" blood, can activate one of the tubes. Inside the tube, as we learn from our hero, whatever exists outside the tube does not exist and inside what exists is only consciousness. Outside the tube, anything coming into contact with the surface of the tube, which is of course, some sort of energy field, is immediately destroyed, deadly but beautiful. People traveling in ships through the tubes are put to sleep ostensibly to avoid them learning the "secret" of the tube. Our hero, in desperation, escapes through the tube fully conscious and nearly goes mad, but does indeed discover that secret. Everything inside the tube is equidistant from everything else. Nothing exists inside the tube except consciousness aware of itself, self-observant consciousness. In the story, the tubes can only be created through the alien, Lil, using her "mind as the matrix".
"An organizational structure in which two or more lines of command, responsibility, or communication, run through the same individual" is one of the definitions I found for the word, matrix. The planet Eron is described in the book as holding all the myriad strands of humanity together through the commonality of the tube. The tube which is nowhere, but goes everywhere it wants with caveats. The story never really explains how long it took to get to the planets to be able to build the tube structures, although it hints that the time involved would make communication inter-generational. So the structure of "the empire" is of the mind of Lil and the tubes are where consciousness exists of itself, and consciousness exists outside the universe but inside it, indeed is shielded from it, as well.
In the world, but not of it.
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