Trev couldn’t help this feeling of exuberance as he walked round in a circle with the rest of the group on that night of nights. The 20th of December. The last night there would ever be. A minute later and his high dive-bombed. He hit reality. It stared him in the eye so hard he had to look away. Then, because Trev was still Trev, he took it on the nose. He really had to ask himself if he was sacrificing honesty for the sake of glory, or ego, or any other sort of dubious pleasure. Ok, he said, let’s look at the facts.
There was no point in trying to hide from the truth. This was the message he was always preaching to everyone else. The trouble was, this wasn’t about facts in the normal way. Not yet anyway. At the moment it was still a matter entirely of faith. He had spread his message to the group. He wasn’t trying to bamboozle anybody. Trev thought about all the Self Help books he’d looked at over the years, on the value of positive thinking. You could create the miraculous if you entered into a thing with the right spirit. And it wouldn’t even be a miracle. It would just be what you could achieve if you opened up your mind to look in a wider and deeper way. If you communed with the unseen; if you stopped focusing on the banal. If you took lessons from nature. And more. Because things didn’t stop there. There were a thousand ifs. And what they all added up to was accepting the way of intuition.
So, Trev bounced back, pulling himself up again. He wasn’t about to give in now to self-doubt, pessimism, and other negative ways of thinking. Because these were the things that did for you. They weakened your resolve, turning you into a soft and watery mess of a creature. No, he wasn’t about to succumb. Not long to go, he said to himself, and then inner would become outer.
He invited anyone in the group who wanted, to join him in a meditation. When he went into the right mental state he could conjure up the distant past. He could see the Mayan civilization before his eyes as though it were right here; as though it was the now. Trev closed his eyes and pictured a city of stone. Intricate and lacy stone edifices. As he moved in closer he saw it was Rio Bec in Yucatan. He wandered through its many plazas and palaces, honing in on the long low buildings with towers which rose to the sky. He saw himself climbing up and up many staircases all leading nowhere. He stared into stylised animal masks and cavorted with unfathomable serpents. He talked himself away from the tug of fear, telling himself this place was not strange or alien. It was not other. He passed into a deeper reflection and grew tranquil. He began to recognise everything around him as part of what he and all of them here on Ivinghoe Beacon were: As one. At the foot of an elaborate stepped pyramid he stopped, almost able to sense the presence of Kinich Ahau the ancient sun god. He found himself staring into the square stone eyes. He thought about the Mayan skills in astronomy, and how, even without precision instruments, they were able to view astral bodies in their observatories. Their sophisticated 20 based mathematical system and their calculations of the Long Count, or 365 day year. The Mayans had foreseen so much. Their predictions filled Trev with inspiration. He thought: There they were, and here we are now. From that day to this. All connected, all part of something so big you could not see the whole. But still, fundamentally, you were inside it. Knowing without seeing. You knew everything by being. You just had to be what you were. That was the most fantastic thing as far as Trev was concerned. If you let your mind go free it would not fail you.
As the night drew on and passed into morning Trev called the others to a final powwow. It
was cold now and everyone out in the open felt the chill, no matter how many
layers they were wrapped up in and despite the intense heat of the central fire.
“Today, as everyone here is aware, marks the end of the Mayan calendar”. Trev said as he sat cross legged in the circle alongside everyone. All was quiet and his voice rang out loud and clear. Here the world was now. There was no going back. Trev thought of the Mayans, who had correctly predicted the end of their own civilization and had then predicted the end of everything.
“What most of you will be wondering is how is the world going to end?” said Trev. “Well, we don’t know conclusively. We can only speculate. Over to you Dan. I believe this is a question you’ve been looking into for some time”.
“An intergalactic crash is the most probable cause,” Dan told everyone. “A planet will crash into Earth in approximately four hours from now. The end will come quickly for nearly everyone as the Earth itself becomes another spatial crashing fireball”.
Dan had some diagrams which he then handed round for people to look at, showing where the impact would be made and going into details about the speed of the crash itself.
“Another theory is there will be a major explosions under the ocean releasing a lethal amount of methane into the atmosphere”.
Dan went onto explain the possibility death may not be immediate for most of the inhabitants of Earth but people would die off gradually due to famine and plagues in a dust ridden atmosphere generated by exploding volcanoes and the vast increase of sulphur dioxide and other noxious gasses. After Dan had finished there was a debate about whether this Armageddon was some kind of punishment for the corruptions and wickedness of man on the planet. One or two thought this was likely to be the causal factor, but most believed it was simply a matter of the world’s destiny.
Then Julie who had been looking into questions of why Ivinghoe Beacon had been
chosen for their escape gave a little talk on the special magnetic force which surrounded the place. This was true for all the points on Earth where people were to be rescued. Then, the cooks went to prepare the Last Breakfast, and most people sat round the fire which they had kept burning bright and looked skywards in the hope and expectation of sighting the first of the spaceships which were travelling towards them.
Trev stood up and gazed into the growing light and thought the unthinkable. What if? It was not easy to abandon an idea once it had appeared. He found he couldn’t stop himself from finishing the sentence because the question was already there in his head. What if this is all a fantasy? He had found through experience it was better not to suppress the worst of thoughts once they had made an appearance. The very last thing Trev wanted was to undergo a loss of faith. For its own sake but also because it might drive the aliens away. At the very last moment they may lose sight of the group. The connection of everyone here with the beings out there was via meditational states. The act of saving may not have been a moral decision but a purely physical one. Trev felt he couldn’t risk any questioning which would reduce the power of the connection. He tried to empty his mind, attempting to be entirely at one with the spiritual energy within himself. He thought of the words of Krishnamurti, one of his favourite thinkers: ‘The mind has to be empty to see clearly.’ Faith and intuition were what had brought everyone here and given them this chance for continued life. Trev tried desperately in that moment to cling onto it. This was faith, the chosen path. They must not; he must not abandon the way now. It was the way of light. At the same time he knew you should not be doing battle with thought, or with feeling either. This was not the way to achieve true enlightenment. You must be aware of each of them but not be guided by them. You must let them shift and ride with you. Like mist; like time. Neither cling to nor abandon any element of what was. But all at once he couldn’t see the path and he felt a sudden surge of panic. Then he thought of Krishnamurti again, and how he had said: ‘Truth is a pathless land’. Ok, another paradox to grapple with. But he felt he understood. If you could identify a path your mind was not as empty as it needed to be.
Trev stared up into sky, trying to see and not see simultaneously in all the right ways. And then, just for a second he believed he saw up there in all the greyness, a burning light. As he stared upwards he heard others in the group cry out. Above them was a gold orange glow which kept on getting brighter and brighter as they looked. All around him Trev heard the sound of prayers, the sound of screaming, the sound of laughter, the sound of thanks given up to they knew not whom. It was a moment of one vast exhaled breath of relief; of joy. The breath poured out from everyone here. It was the best of breaths. Pure acceptance, pure knowledge of what now was. A recognition. This was history. It could never be turned back. The Saviours were truly coming.
Some of the group were silent, many were waving upwards in a gesture of greeting, one or two were kneeling down with their heads pressed to the ground, too overcome with emotion. Individuals had their separate responses but taken as a group they were one total mass of devotion. A welcome party of desire.
Trev felt the tears running down his face. He couldn’t have stopped them even if he had wanted to. He thought of all he had been through in his life. The agony of being homeless, of lying near the bus stop outside Waterloo Station with his face to the wall trying not to be aware of the cold, and filth and the humiliation. But he had never given in; never let the awfulness of his position destroy him. He had carried on with his journey and had arrived at this moment. Such a reversal. It felt like a vindication of everything he was and could be.