Sime~Gen Inc. Presents

ReReadable Books

(June 2007)

"The Soul-Time Hypothesis: The Incredible Edible Human"

By

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

I was sitting on my back porch watching lizards flash over the cinderblock fence and pondering the Kabalistic principle that the soul enters manifestation through the dimension of Time. Lots of birds around. Suddenly the pattern of ecology, food chains, predator and prey, the nature of life and human life flicked into sharp focus.

Yes, humans are (presumably) at the top of the food chain on this Earth. But how did we get there?

The Kabalah says God decreed and it is so. But the Kabalah also explains a lot about the soul, the spirit, the body, the links between them, how humans fit into Creation, what we’re here for and how to do that job efficiently.

Yet look at us. We are soft skinned, almost hairless, scaleless, featherless, soft, easily killed, and delicious to eat to most predators – everything from viruses and bacteria to tigers, bears and wolves dine delightedly on humans.

We can’t run fast as a lizard or gazelle. We can barely see compared to an Eagle. Sense of smell? Hearing? Forget it. We are delicious and defenseless. But we’re the top of the food chain. How did that happen????!!!!

Science Fiction has long illustrated the anthropological concept that the singularly human trait of Time Binding puts us at the top of the food chain.

What is "Time Binding?"

It’s not just intelligence. Lots of creatures mature to the level of intelligence of a 3-5 year old human.

Humans are hard to birth because of the over-sized head, the brain that is already complex at birth and continues to grow more complex to adulthood. That long gestation and difficult birth makes it harder for the species to survive. So that brain has to deliver some unique survival advantage.

And it does. It allows the enormously more complex human soul broadband access to material reality – huge dataflow going both ways. So maybe the soul manifests through time, via the human brain and nervous system?

What can the human brain do that animals can’t?

Hypothesize. We can think about what is not, may yet be, was once long ago, and we can teach the past to future generations – to communicate through time about hypotheses. Time Binding is the ability to see a pattern develop from the past through the present to the future, and communicate that hypothetical pattern to other humans.

This ability to know what is not and to Bind Time vertically, past to present to future, and back again through Imagination, is our defense against being eaten. We recall the behavior of predators and teach it to our children. We hypothesize how to use that behavior against the predator. We build societies to amass and communicate knowledge. That’s how we got to the top of the food chain!

All of this magnificence has been built by the individual. Some of us can remember bits and snippets of past lives. Some can snatch an image of the most likely future. Some can garner impressions directly from other people’s minds. And we talk, in words, symbols and actions, binding individual identities into group identities.

Search Identity on simegen.com to find columns from 1993 through 2003 discussing magical Identity.

In Astrology, there is the innate tension between 1^st House and 7^th House – the individual vs groups. Humans are made out of that tension and the ability to bind the opposites into a whole. Life is about binding, creating patterns, organizing chaos, countering entropy, and ultimately defining separate identities to recombine into wholes.

Science Fiction and Fantasy are the creation of that Time Binding faculty. This literature of the un-real frees us to explore what is not, can never be, or what could be created only by changing the rules of reality.

Ultimately, our only survival trait is that ability to interface with Time in ways other creatures can not.

Perhaps we will recognize the "people" of other planets not by their bodies, or even their brains, but their familiar ability to hypothesize. Perhaps one day our survival as a species will depend on out-hypothesizing some other species. So let’s practice.

The King Imperiled by Deborah Chester, a prolific author you may want to check out more carefully. This is a sequel to The King Betrayed, which I have not read, but this novel stands alone quite well.

The King Imperiled is written from several points of view, but each one follows a plot thread that converges on a single karmic destiny driven by a curse and justified by love.

The single most profound impression I retained from this novel was of the magical concept that the King is inextricably bound in life and death to his Land. Therefore the King’s decisions are magnified by a power beyond human comprehension.

That notion separates the Identity of the person who happens to be King from the King himself. That is, there is this human being no different from you or me, who may have been raised with a manager’s education, who is then magically saddled with the onus of having his (her) every decision manifest more powerfully than a normal human’s.

Nations once measured Time by the reigns of their Kings. The King was the soul of the Nation.

Bloodstone by Barbara Campbell is Book #2 of the Trickster’s Game series. I haven’t read #1 of that series either, but this book two stands on its own very well indeed.

In the Trickster universe, there is an adjacent reality where the gods preside, and even communicate with humans. One of those gods is the classic Trickster who is manipulating human affairs through covert games.

Campbell draws us a picture of a world where human souls travel from body to body, at a price. A civilization based on this practice faces off against a civilization that shuns the practice – and of course the soul-travelers are winning as the story opens.

Why "of course?" Because the soul-travelers Time Bind more efficiently. A single person can trade bodies, live many lifetimes and learn from experience, then take a young body full of sexual appetite to start all over.

Is there anything you can think of about human nature that would make such a practice a bad idea?

What if you were one of the few who had the talent to make such a body-to-body journey to avoid death, but you were born into the society where the practice was forbidden?

What if you discovered your potential as the ability to look out of a soaring hawk’s eyes and enjoy the freedom of flight? Would it seem unethical to mangle the bird’s free will under your grip? Do birds have souls? Is a bird’s soul more important than your pleasure? We eat birds.

If you felt the bird’s soul shoved aside so you could share his flight, would you yearn to try it with a human, to look out of the eyes of someone far away, to see what’s going on in your world (since there’s no CNN in that world).

And if you could shove a human soul aside for a glimpse of his world, would you then yearn to replace that soul with your own?

Maybe you wouldn’t. But how would you respond if the practice hit your brain’s pleasure center – a real toke of a hit, addictive and grand?

Bloodstone is 566 pages of very small print, a vast and complex novel asking huge questions. It is the story of how it happened that a talented shaman’s apprentice of a losing civilization was cast out of his village, and his whole family voluntarily went with him to make a new start.

The book discusses what it would mean for one soul to use the brain of another body to manifest in reality. And it talks about the plots of powerful beings from an adjacent reality toying with human destiny, as humans toy with each others’ destinies – and what a human’s options are.

If you think you can withstand the lure of soul-travel, then try this vampire e-book novel from one of the better e-book publishers, Linden Bay Romance. You can get these in paperback, too. Forbidden: The Claim by Samantha Sommersby is well written, wildly erotic like most Linden Bay titles, and very, very vampire. When a powerful vampire wants a woman who is forbidden, what does he do?

Now we come to a novel I planned to discuss in the December 2006 column where I introduced the Kabalistic concept of the klipot, the shells that hide the divine spark in most things in the world.

Hammerfall by C. J. Cherry is set on a desert planet that is the victim in a vast interstellar political game. It is an absolute must read if you are puzzling over the klipot, Time Binding, the soul, free will and fate. But it is especially absorbing if you are looking for what it takes to become a tzadik, as we discussed in the December 2006 column.