"Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habits. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny." -- unknown

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results - Albert Einstein

Story, as yet untitled.
Feb 9th, 2002 - 10:32 pm

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Did you ever stop to consider how different your life would be if one event didn�t happen? For every person it�s something different, but everyone has one. Everyone has that one event, whether they realized it then or not, that defines the rest of life for them. I didn�t know mine when it happened. In fact, I had next to nothing to do with it. My event was when my mother and father reluctantly allowed my great-great-grandfather to live with us.

I was five at the time. I knew enough to know that I should be scared of him. It�s not that he was wicked man or anything like that, it�s that he wasn�t like normal people. Normal people always think to be afraid of those that are different. I knew that my parents were not happy with him staying with us. I could hear them whisper at night when they thought I was asleep. They said I should never be alone with him and hopefully he would die soon.

It was a very complex situation, far too complex for the mind of a five year old. He fascinated and repulsed me. I was drawn to be near him, but terrified, even without my parent�s whispers to be alone with him. Everyone talked in hush tones in those days, not at all like before he came. Thankfully, he seldom left his room. He never took meals with us or went anywhere with us. I would sneak down the hall at night and listen to his closed door, but there was never anything to hear.

Being the father of my father, he was a very old man. His face was worn with lines, no not with lines, but canyons. There was no gray in his unkempt hair, it was pure white. His skin looked thin, like at any moment it would tear and his insides would burst forth. You could see every vein and bone in any exposed bit. Thankfully his face was mostly covered by his beard and disheveled hair. It was his eyes that I recalled the most. If those dreadful lavender orbs fell upon me, I could feel them searching my mind and soul. I had never seen such beautiful eyes since. I�ve never seen natural lavender eyes since.

He spent nearly every moment lying on the bed in his room, as if he did not have the strength to move. Now and then strange men would come to talk to him. His voice, though soft, was quite strong. It was if his body was failing, but his mind was as strong as ever. It�s hardly surprising his body was giving out. He had to be well over 150 years old. No one lived to be that age, but he had to be at least that, but then as I said, he was no normal man.

His story is long and unbelievable. If I had known but a fraction of then, I doubt I ever would have set foot inside the house while he was there. To this day, I can not fathom why my parents let him stay with us. They must have been coerced, which as you shall soon see is not to far fetched. He was a man whose time had long since passed, but he clung to life to finish one last thing. That last thing was passing his knowledge on to me.

You see, he was a member of an ancient religion, cult, as my father would call it. They worshiped no god or non-human being, but instead worshiped the mind. The basic premise was that a human mind was the key to everything. They were not troubled with questions like �what is god like� or �where did we come from�. They focused on the fact that we where here and had at our disposal an impossibly complex and powerful tool, the mind. The goal of life was to access and use as much of your brain as possible and through these efforts you could achieve anything. They tended to shun outsiders and anything material. These things they regarded as distractions.

My great-great-grandfather was an important man in this religion. He was considered to be what any other religion would call a priest. He had no official title. Titles were not needed. They focused on learning and applying what they learned, those who had something to teach were listened to and those who did not, listened. There was no leader, nor was there any want for one. As religions like this do, it started small and slowly at first.

If it had stayed small, well perhaps things would be different, but the mainstream culture heard, at first, faint rumblings of this grown �faith in self�, as they called it. Stories of people who could do unnatural things spread and as they did, the establishment that was felt threatened. Here was an organization, a religion, a cult, call it what you will, that put the emphasis on life not just on the person, but on the mind. It said that all things physical were pointless, unless they served to keep the mind alive. It said there should be no government, no political structure at all. It said that through natural selection, if needed, people would rise to lead people out of times of trouble and if there was no need then there should be no leader.

It said a great many more things and what I�ve said so far is just a simplistic overview at best. It�s easy to see from what I�ve said it was viewed as a cult and then, as it grew more popular, a threat by the establishment. Governments reacted in the only way they can, with law and force. It was outlawed, whose were found to practice the religion were jailed. Of those this just opened whole new groups of people to the faith. For in jail the other prisoners found the self-exploration aspect of faith a wonderful diversion as they sat inside their cells.

Other forces were at work in the world as slowly the Self-Faith movement spread. In far, far away lands war over land erupted. The war spread across the lands. Massive armies were gathered and legions of men marched to their deaths. Nature chimed on this time of great unstably and tragedy with several catastrophic disasters. This was about 100 years before my great-great-grandfather came to live with us and was known as the Cataclysm.

Much was lost in the wars, floods, earthquakes and volcanoes. People fervently believed the end of the world was near and when it became apparent that it was not they became confused. Whole countries were gone, destroyed in war or submerged in water. New islands had risen from the depths of sea. There was no a single city left untouched. No governments were left intact. How many people died has been debated since then, but the number is colossal. Never before had such a collection of horrible events strike man at once.

It is said that the Cataclysm lasted 60 years. That�s 60 years of war, strife, famine and natural disasters. That�s whole generations of people being born into a time that knew no peace, no prosperity. They knew only war and death. Life was truly savage, short and brutal. People did what they could and organized themselves into small groups for protection. Any other group was a threat. Territory was fiercely guarded and competition harshly dealt with. People being people sought to find a cause for the misery that had befallen them and those who sought power took the chance to blame this odd religion that they could not understand. They took the name Self-Faith and shortened it, calling the followers Selfers. They claimed that the Selfers had angered the gods, for the gods were quite back in fashion after nears of neglect and scientific ridicule.

Systematically the newly termed Selfers were hunted down and killed. Rational or not, the people had someone to blame and to focus hate on. My great-great-grandfather almost certainly born in the years of the Cataclysm, though he never spoke of it me. He grew up the child of an outlawed and hated religion. He grew up in a world he, nor anyone, understood and was forced from the start to fear for his life. I think it is this situation that caused him to become the man he became. The things he must have endured and did to survive, I shutter to think of them.

To be sure he was not the only one to carry the beliefs on, but he was one of a very few. They did not teach anyone the things they knew. They felt betrayed for they knew they had no part, and wanted no part, in the politics of the world. They knew they had not been involved with the wars or any caused any sort of natural disaster, but they were blamed. Instead they sought far away lands where they were not know and there they become Wisemen. To say there was just a handful of them, distrustful of even each other, would probably be close to the truth.

Time passed and the focus of life soon turned to survival. The world was destroyed. People lived in the cities, what was left of them, but none of the machines worked. There was no one to make power or spare parts. There was no one left who had gone to universities, indeed there were no more schools. Basics skills of the pre-Cataclysm world like reading and math were luxuries in a world where you had farm and hunt for your own food. People became primitives living in a rusting, crumbling technological wonderland.