Star Maker
Consciousness abides...
Many years ago, when I was seven, I was standing on our balcony in the edificio Ipiranga with my father, overlooking downtown Salvador de Bahia in the distance, beneath the spectacular and sparkling southern night sky. After quite an extended comfortable silence, I asked: “Dad, what’s beyond the stars?” I recall my father was somewhat taken aback. He responded: “I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it.”
To this day, I’ve never forgotten dad’s forthright unpretentious honesty. I’ve never stopped thinking about that question either. As amazing as the world we can see is, the world we can’t see, beyond our vision, seems to be even more fascinating. What is more fascinating still, is that we can think about it, speculate about it, theorize about it, and sometimes we may be so fortunate as to encounter timeless truths.
In my teens, after I outgrew the Hardy Boys and Brains Benton, I was naturally drawn to reading Tom Swift, which in turn awoke within me my strong proclivity for science fiction: Asimov, Clark, Heinlein, Herbert, Bradbury, I devoured them all voraciously. Thinking back over the half century to those formative years, amongst all those gems, the Foundation Trilogy, the Dune series, Glory Road, the Martian Chronicles, there is one book that stands out for me far above and beyond all the others: Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker. I happily credit that book for this post.
Star Maker took me back to that evening on the balcony with my father, while that memory was still relatively fresh. I may have forgotten that evening all together, had Stapledon’s narrator not served to solidify it forever within my mind. It was as though he took that young boy’s hand and said, “You want to know? Let me show you what I think.” It was a mind-blowing journey. Star Maker expanded my mind at warp speed over light years, not just exploring strange new worlds, but conscious stars and galaxies as well. Sorry, Thomas, what it’s like to be a bat fails in comparison.
Star Maker opened my mind to the All That Is, and from that point forward, my reading of science fiction gave way to a life-time of explorations of consciousness. What followed shortly thereafter was a brief but intense period of experimentation with psychedelics. I’m sure my buddies and I tried almost every flavour of acid that one could buy on the Stephen Avenue Mall: White Lightning, Orange Barrel, Purple Double Dome, Yellow Sunshine, you name it, we probably tried it, blotters, pills, sugarcubes… That was just another phase for me, but an important one.
What stayed with me was the remarkable fluidity of consciousness, the opening of other worlds, but also worlds that we didn’t specifically evolve from. Fortunately, for the most part, I was able to keep my wits about me while tripping. What I took away from that experience is what a precious and delicate balance there is between the world in which we have evolved and our brain chemistry, along with first-hand knowledge and a firm conviction there is more to reality than meets the eye.
I have been blessed with the most wonderful life-long friends. One of whom, once I had gotten down to more seriously making a life for myself, turned me on to another writer that would help me start making intellectual sense of consciousness. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and his The Phenomenon of Man and Human Energy.
Aside from work and golfing, Teilhard’s books dove-tailed perfectly with where my head was at. His concepts of the noosphere and the Omega Point, and the notion of consciousness as a function of complexity of interaction provided me with my first conceptual framework for philosophically understanding the worlds I had been coming to know. I can’t help but wonder if he and Stapledon ever met…