Thursday, October 13, 2011

Unaged World.


What does The birth-death cycle mean to you?
Turbulence.I meet someone,Learn their name, say a word, they're gone.Others come like waves. Rise, fall.Ripples in a wheat field, blown by the wind.

And what did primitive man make of them?
Shamans who knew it all told there were gods up there then.Shamans who knew about them told us.A great mystery.

What do you think of dying, John Oldman?
Well, we had the practical concept.You know, we stopped,Fell down, didn't get up,Started to smell bad, come apart.Injuries we could understand.If someone's insides were all over the ground.Infections...they were, uh, mysterious.Aging...the biggest mystery of all.

How do you define human race progressing with the time?
I'm a little behind the times.The same in other areas--I can't keep up with the new stuff that comes along.No one can.Not even in their specialty.So much for the myth Of the super-wise,all-knowing immortal.

How did you utilise the Ten doctorates?
Living 14,000 years didn't make me a genius.I just had time.Time.We can't see it, we can't hear it,We can't weigh it, we can't measure it in a laboratory.It's a subjective sense of becoming What we are instead of what we were a nanosecond ago,Becoming what we will be in another nanosecond.The hopis see time as a landscape,Existing before and behind us,And we move-- We move through it,Slice by slice.Clocks measure time.No, they measure themselves.The objective referent of clock is another clock.How very interesting.

Are you comfortable knowing that you have lived while everyone you knew,Everyone you knew, John,Has died?
I've regretted losing people...often.It's more of like survivor's guilt.

Do you feel a vacancy in your life about something you wish could be filled by a face, a voice, an image?
I'd move on.I had to move on.Making him history's biggest bigamist.

Where were you in 1292 a.D.?
Where were you a year ago on this date?

Who escaped the aging process as you have?
Anyway, it was the 1600s, and I met a man,And I had a hunch that he was...like me, so I told him.He said yes,But from another time, another place.We talked for two days.It was all pretty convincing,But we couldn't be sure.We each confirmed what the other said,But how do we know if the confirmation Was genuine or an echo?I knew I was kosher,But I thought, "maybe he's playing a game on me."You know, a scholar of all we spoke about.He said he was inclined with the same reservation.Now, that's interesting.Just as we can never be sure,Even if we wanted to--I mean, if we were sure,You couldn't be sure of that.We parted, agreeing to keep in touch--Of course,we didn't And 200 years later I thought I saw him In a train station in brussels.Lost him in the crowd.

Do you believe in God?
As Laplace said,"I have no need of that hypothesis."He may be around, though.He's everywhere. We just can't see him.And about his creation..I'm not so sure it was created.Maybe it's just accumulated,fields affecting fields.What about the source of the field energies?Wouldn't that imply a prime mover?I'd wonder about the source of the prime mover,Infinite regress,but that doesn't imply anything to me.Back to the mystery.It's a very old question,But there's no answer except in religious terms.

Did you ever meet any person from our religious history?
I am one of them.Here'e the hint.Guy met the Buddha, liked what he heard,Thought about it for a while,Say 500 years, while he return To the Mediterranean,Became an etruscan.Seeped into the roman empire.He didn't like what they became--A giant killing machine.He went to the near east thinking,"Why not pass the Buddha's teachings on in a modern form."So he tried.One dissident against rome?Rome won.The rest is history.

I knew it.He's saying he was Christ.What about The crucifixion?
He blocked the pain as he had learned to do In tibet and india.He also learned to slow his body processes down to the point where they were undetectable.They thought he was dead.So his followers pulled him from the cross, placed him in a cave...his body normalized as he had trained it to...he attempted to go away undetected,But some devotees were standing watch.Tried to explain.They were ecstatic.Thus, I was resurrected,And I ascended to central europeTo get away as far as possible.

"Did you know voltaire was the first to suggest That the universe was created by a gigantic explosion?I think paul would agree.And then goethe was the first to suggest That spiral nebulae were swirling masses of stars.We now call them galaxies.It's kind of funny how often new concepts of science Find their first tentative forms of expression in the arts.So did beethoven do physics on the side?He spent most of his time lying on the floor In front of his legless piano Surrounded by orange peels and apple cores.Now we're on the floor
listening to beethoven.Full circle."


Do you have faith in the future of the race?
I've seen species come and go.Depends on their balance with the environment.We've made a mess of it.There's still time,If we use it well.Christianity has been a worldwide belief For 2,000 years.How long did the egyptians worship isis Or the sumerians ishtar?In india, sacred cows wandered freely As reincarnated souls.In a thousand years,they'll be barbecued And their souls will be in squirrels.

What about the name "Jesus"?Did you pull that out of a hat?
I called myself John.I almost always do.As tales of the resurrection spread,The name was confused with the hebrew "yochanan,".Meaning "god is gracious."My stay on earth was seen As divine proof of immortality.That led to "god is salvation"Or hebrew "yahshua,"Which in translation became my proper name,Changing to late greek, "iesous,"Then to late latin, "iesus,"And finally medieval latin, "Jesus,"And it was a wonder to watch it all happen.

Then you didn't claim to be the Son of God?
Began as a schoolhouse and ended as a temple.I said I had a master that was greater than myself.I never said he was my father.I wanted to teach what I learned.I never claimed to be king of the jews,I never walked on water,I never raised the dead.I never spoke of divine except in the sense Of human goodness on earth.No wise men came from the east to worship at a manger.I did do a little healing With some eastern medicine I'd learned.That's it.The three wise men began as a myth About the birth of the Buddha.

End of the line. Everybody off.This was a hoax.I had the perfect audience,Anthropologist, archaeologist,Christian literalist...a psychologist.
I'm gonna go home,And I'm gonna watch star trek For a dose of sanity.


But I wanna know what's your real name?
Believe it or not, the sound was always John.

What other pun names have you used?
Lots.John Paley for John Paleolithic,John Savage--Got really crazy about 60 years ago.When I was teaching at harvard,I was John Thomas Partee.
John T. Partee--

The movie that rewards inquisitiveness.

Courtesy:The Man From Earth

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