--> Celebrating the 2-week anniversary of this forum . . .
. . . with an update, a news report
I have not been idle.
Roland’s Universe, the mythology and the Book itself, are advancing on multiple fronts.
The Plot, the overall storyline for the entire Book, is in development. Actively considering a particular Plot right now and have submitted a request through channels for guidance on that storyline. Could possibly involve giving a Faculty member a voice, making that Faculty member a character. No small thing if it happens.
Two characters, Sheryl and Carlos, each have their own lifelong addiction they are working on: food and sex, respectively.
All the characters are acquiring professional careers, areas of expertise. Surprise surprise, those areas of knowledge are the ones that matter the most to me: sustainable housing (Nehanda); truck driving and transportation (Carlos); social and political systems engineer (Saditha); eco-friendly / bioproducts / healthy living expert (likely both Nehanda and Carlos)
I have submitted an application through channels, an FOIA and request for approval if you will, to tell the story of the pandemic. The story of the pandemic could possibly entail an interview with Tara, the Principal, meaning her voice and character would appear. No small thing. Otherwise I might just be given the essentials of the story, what the pandemic is and why it is here. Or the application could be denied, of course.
The Book, it appears, might include excerpts from Life: A Field Manual itself between story segments of the characters. In other words, before and after story segments for Sheryl, Nehanda, Saditha and Carlos, I may place course material from the curriculum. Still exploring this book structure concept.
The Mythology itself is acquiring more detail and definition. Will elaborate.
Roland’s World, the mythology I am developing, is a metaphor for life. My life and your life. The Academy is a metaphor for how things really work, perhaps behind the scenes. That metaphor has been developing for years, but since the establishment of this Substack forum, things are accelerating.
For example, recently I have discovered that the Faculty are superheroes. Don’t know why it took me this long to see it: now that I see it, it makes perfect sense. The Faculty are real people from history who have achieved greatness. Until now, I have been calling them master teachers, role models, mahatmas, great souls, labels like that. “Superheroes” is not a label I was employing, but think about it: they have the ability to produce miracles. They can appear at will far distances apart. They can travel from one location to another in the blink of an eye, sort of like teleportation. They can tell you about your past lives, and your most basic and fundamental life challenges.
I have been working multiple tracks simultaneously: this process most definitely is a type of multi-tasking. One of those tracks is exploring what my mythology has in common with existing mythologies, like Star Wars, Men in Black, The Last Starfighter, Adventures of Pluto Nash, Galaxy Quest, Indiana Jones, Total Recall, et al. The answer: Magic. Miracles. What people love about these movie franchises is that miracles happen, sometimes in the guise of “new technology.” In Star Wars, it’s the Force and the Jedi Knights who harness it. In Men in Black, it’s the aliens and the miraculous things they do, plus the technologies that the Men in Black employ, like the neuralizer which makes people forget things. The neuralizer is a magic tool, like the invisibility cloak in the Harry Potter franchise.
Faculty members produce miracles. They are known for it. Some of the masters of old, like Confucius and Lao-zi, aren’t known for miracles, but most of the other great souls are surrounded by legends of this kind.
Skeptics and materialists, and just plain intelligent people, might balk or scoff at the idea of miracles, or the idea of reincarnation. It makes perfect sense to be skeptical: if you don’t have personal experience, why would you just start believing in it, like some credulous weak fool. However, presented with the evidence, intelligent people can learn about fundamental aspects of life that aren’t generally believed to be true.
Thinking of Faculty members, the Great Souls in history, as superheroes is surprising and perhaps even shocking, but it makes perfect sense. Think about it: superheroes have fan clubs. They have their adoring admirers, the people who idolize them. What an interesting and unusual description of a religion.
Let’s just take one aspect of this worldview, this gestalt, this mythology, that I have spent my entire life developing:
Reincarnation. If you have done as much study as I have, you learn that all but one reference to reincarnation was removed from the Christian Bible at the Council of Nicaea. That one omission was surely an oversight, because every other reference was stricken from the record. That council produced what is known as the Nicene Creed. Before that convention whose conclusion ended up being doctrinal censorship, the references of Jesus-Joshua speaking about past lives were legion. The first location of the spread of Christianity took place in Antioch, and the Greek Orthodox Church likely got its start there. So the most pure, undoctored accounts of the tradition of Joshua-Jesus’s life are likely to be had there, plus in early gospels that have been showing up, even newly discovered accounts like the gospel of Judas and the gospel of Mary Magdalene. Those earliest accounts, the original versions, missed being censored.
A cursory study of the Buddha, Pythagoras, the Gnostics of Alexandria, among many many other sources, reveals oodles of information about reincarnation. If you keep an open mind, you can find plenty of information out there. I once wrote an article that begins with a line something like, “What do Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, George Patton, Thomas Edison, Pearl Buck long list of famous names from history here all have in common? They all believe in past lives.”
The Great Souls also are able to appear at will. In multiple locations at once. Sounds impossible, sounds incredible, and yet there are numerous accounts from different traditions all over the world of this phenomenon. There is even a word for the image of yourself that you project: the mayavirupa. It’s like a hologram, or a projected audio-visual movie image of yourself. A fictional version of the mayavirupa even appears in the Star Wars franchise, when Obi-Wan and Yoda appear to Luke and friends even after they have “died.” They sort of look like ghosts.
Ok, ability to do miraculous things aside, let’s talk about religions.
When I refer to the man at the center of the Christian Bible, I use the name Joshua. This man was born and lived his life as a Palestinian Jew. He was not a Roman. He was not a member of some other religion. He was not raised Greek-Hellenistic, a culture that dominated the Mediterranean right up until the Roman Empire took over around 150 years before Joshua-Jesus. So his name, Joshua, was a common name from that culture in that period of time.
Just in the past few days, I discovered that Jesus-Joshua is mentioned over 150 times, directly and indirectly, in the Quran (Koran). He is specifically named in over 90 verses of the Quran. In other words, he is a major figure in Islam. Who knew? Muslims consider Jesus-Joshua the predecessor to Muhammad, the prophet who went before Muhammad. Muslims call him Isa, son of Mary.
So Jesus-Joshua-Isa is a central figure in no less than 3 major world religions.
A superhero. A religious leader. A major figure in human history.
What makes this mythology, this gestalt, this world view, unusual is that it is based on reality. Roland’s Universe is not a fictional world, like the worlds of Harry Potter and Star Wars. It’s more like Main Street in Disneyland, a stylized or microcosmic duplication and portrayal of something from real life. The buildings on Main Street, and the railroad engine that drives through Main Street, are custom-built. They are not production railroad vehicles or production buildings. The buildings are smaller than real life, designed to give the illusion of being real buildings, but they are a theater set. They are story buildings. The people who work at Disneyland are call “Cast Members.”
So Roland’s Universe is a metaphor, a theater set, a specially tailored duplication of the real world it attempts to mimic.