ANNERLOBE
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Magnificent art, a triumph of science, a temple, a wonder
of more worlds than ours, how may it be uttered?
To participate in life within it, instead of wonderment at it,
is a part of the initiation of each citizen of Annerlobe.
This city of space was the host, not to militant keepers of justice,
nor the explorers of the outward universe, but to worshippers, adepts,
with a calm and serene sensitivity, a benevolent potency,
and an intense relationship with one another, that displayed itself
in devotion each to the other, excelling utmost care we give our own flesh.
To describe their nature requires this one learning . . .
the living process involves the intricate and abundant exchange of energy
with every form and being.
The enlargement of living, or evolution, is to gain fraternity
with an ever larger society of beings, and to harmonize one's motions
more and more intricately with all one's surroundings,
at greater and greater ranges.
Universal organisms were the order of magnitude of the momentary reach
of the living field of this company.
Their consciousness, each moment, beheld beauty
toward which many would only prostrate themselves, in awe.
It is even that posture of awe and wonderment that forbids many
from accepting the benevolence of that beauty for their own person,
and the contribution of their person to the enlargement of that beauty.
The purposes of the citizens of such a city as this!
They traversed not only the universe in its acknowledged form,
but they moved even through the essences . . .
witnessing other rates of living processes.
At one time they were both searchers into those forces
which elicit most subtle effect, and participants in the discrimination
of the very scheme of creation.
Not peculiar to their stature, their attentiveness
was often fastened upon the least ordered manifestations in the universe.
And it became their task in part to expedite the process of ordering,
wherever their wisdom made more comprehensive the designs
of those cultures or civilizations.
The human kingdom is a band of consciousness in the spectrum of evolution.
Human beings transcend the consciousness of their kind
in company with the instructive ecology which surrounds them.
There is a coevolution of the species and its ecology.
The citizens of Annerlobe became to humankind
a fount of somewhere inspirers.
They provided a field of force, within which humankind lived and moved
and had their being, and became to humankind their overseer,
an answerer of their prayers, their angels in the heavens.
The proximity of those of Annerlobe, was,
in the early cycles of man's ascendancy, one of great distance.
But from time to time they would take upon themselves human form,
the bounding of human consciousness in the terrestrial ecology.
Forces are never known by human consciousness,
until they have displayed themselves, sometimes with enormity,
in the motions and in the mutations of substance and form.
When the changes wrought are so gradual
that they require a scientific historian to be noticed,
the forces may go unacknowledged.
Often too, a force displays itself so intermittently, in every age,
it becomes a newly acknowledged phenomena, that is observed by so few
and occurs with such rarity, its periodicity goes unnoticed . . .
until formulated from myth, legend, scantiest clues in history.
The pioneer observer will wait its occurrence and scorn the charge
that his promptings are occult, superstitious exploitations.
Somehow the observation is always left to clandestine undertaking
by the courageous, if not the compelled.
Annerlobe interventions were rare and their interventions
were usually witnessed by superstitious witnesses, who were ill-believed
when they reported their experiences.
It only increased the pain of being pressed away for those
who longed to abundantly assist.
The bridge to their greater nature was offered to those
who were at first visited,
which deepened their fraternity with the citizens of Annerlobe.
A band of the most achieved came to be the most skilled and concerned
about the destiny of the race.
That band of the concerned, had themselves left behind
the need to propagate credit or acclaim for their labours,
and had come to realize their scheme of care was best executed
by anonymous dwelling.
And so they were seldom seen and only came to be known
to others of their kind who were at the periphery of transcending achievement.
They became very constantly attended members of the race
by the concerned ones . . . both for the sake of their own ascendancy
as well as for the sake of those ascending through them.
Through history, it became the frequent means of tutoring man,
to inspire the children's tales.
The evolutionary goal of each kingdom was often first known by the children,
and the operations of the universe first comprehended
by their believing minds
(only to have systems of education suppress their insight).