introducing Students #1 and #2: Carlos and Saditha
Carlos and Saditha are students in the Academy
Hello Dear Friends,
This morning I am experimenting with writing story. I am turning my existing structure into story material. My story structure, with students and teachers in an Academy whose curriculum is Life: A Field Manual, is providing content for these new characters I just created today.
How I phrased it this morning:
I am switching from Lecture Mode to Story Mode.
What do you think?
Roland
As Carlos is driving to work, he can’t stop thinking about what he learned in class today. The name of the class: Basic Integrity. “If this is Integrity 101, it boggles the mind to think what Integrity 201 or, madre mia, Integrity 401 will be like.”
On the 10 passing through Monterey Park, Carlos is lost in another world, his mind completely entranced by today’s lecture. Driving with the flow of traffic, he ponders the staggering revelation that his life, his being, is a combination of streams of life-force energy, streams of colored light. “What the hell!?”
The professor is a flat-out genius. “Madre de Dios,” he thinks, “why hasn’t this Chica won the Nobel Prize?”
The human body as a car, that’s easy to understand. “A huevo!” The Middle Way, the Middle Path, means staying in the center of your lane on the freeway. The Middle Way was the subject of last week’s lecture, the last time this woman worked her magic on him. “No problemo comprender, Profesóra, that’s child’s play.”
But the human body as a radio transmitter: not so easy to capiche. Dr. Magdala really knew her stuff. She was mesmerizing the class with her knowledge of the distinct rays of universal expression, which she suggested could be pictured as streams or rivers of color, like ray beams or laser beams. Her example: the emerald-green-colored ray from the cult superhero movie Lanterna Verde (The Green Lantern).
Those different beams are received through the endocrine glands, and then transmuted and transformed into action in the human body and in the person’s life. The Head transmutes into thought, the Heart transmutes into emotion, and the Gut transmutes into impulse, what is often termed “gut reaction.”
Eastbound on the 10 through Rosemead and El Monte, past the 605 and on towards Pomona, Carlos hardly noticed the movement or the exits. He was just flying along in space, enthralled with the idea of being a human transformer for cosmic frequencies. This school is nothing like the math, social studies, science, and English classes he was used to from grade school and high school. These people were nuts. They were crazy.
And cool. Very cool. He had to admit to himself that this school was like nothing he had ever seen or experienced before in his life.
Fifteen minutes of torture. That’s how Saditha views her weekly call to her father. Ram Patekar is a strict father in the old mode, a living relic of times gone by, a traditional and completely familiar voice of a culture that has been around for hundreds of years, for millennia, nay, probably for tens and maybe even hundreds of thousands of years.
Reflecting on her World History of Human Civilization class, Saditha knows she is lucky to have access to this education. Leaving her history class, she ponders how people, and global civilizations, have been around a whole lot longer than conventional wisdom would lead you to believe.
“Conventional wisdom,” now there’s an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. Conventional wisdom says that all of history which is older than the ancient Eyptians, all of history pre-dating the global Flood, is basically the Flintstones: varying degrees of Stone Age barbarism, with cave men and cave women populating the whole world.
Saditha knows better. She knows that amazing global civilizations, with advanced technologies far different and far superior to modern technology, enveloped this planet.
But knowledge is a two-edged sword.
Outside of school, back in the real world, the family does not always smile on ideas that threaten rigid ancient codes of conduct.
“My own father’s rigid dogmatic beliefs could be as old as the antediluvian world civilizations I am studying,” Saditha conjectured. “But of course that’s nonsense,” came the follow-up thought. Her professor and the required textbook clearly indicated that the presumption of a male-dominated society and family structure only goes as far back as late ancient Egypt. In an earlier epoch of ancient Egyptian culture, the pharaoh culture was female-dominant. The pharaohs were all women. The entire power structure of royalty was women-based and women-dominant. Men wore facial make-up and dressed themselves to be appealing and attractive to women. Talk about role reversal.
Saditha is under no illusions about how ruthless conservative tradition can be. Even in the USA, even in a free society with a criminal justice system that is mostly competent and mostly free of corruption, that system is no safeguard. Men born in other countries still viciously harass, mock, ridicule, and beat their female relatives for behavior that the old hardened ways cannot tolerate. The daughters and nieces of men born into the Old World’s ways risk just harassment if they’re fortunate, naked violence and brutality, including serious injury and death, if they’re not so lucky.
Culture, family, and history are the enemy of change and freedom. Rigid adherence to cultural and religious doctrine is a license for savage behavior: disapproval, disdain, mockery and ridicule, contempt.
Ram Patekar did not know his daughter’s heart, because for Saditha, the risk of sharing her lesson material with her father was too great. Although she didn’t even admit it to herself, she knew what she must do. In her heart, she knew she had to protect herself. “My father does not have an open mind, or an open heart,” Saditha thought. “I must guard my thoughts and my speech around him. Even here in the U.S.”
Coming up next:
A story segment in the first person. The new character hasn’t been identified yet, let’s see who this turns out to be.
I am in my Senior Year in the Academy.