The Free Radical

Narrated Version click HERE.

A worker for the status quo: “Look, I’ve got to feed my family! Even if it means that the planet and all life upon it is destroyed in the process.”

This is today’s logic.

As a planetary collective, we are riding a train whose destination is catastrophe. Half of the passengers are snug and dreaming in their sleeper beds oblivious to any inkling of impending doom. The other half are milling about, checking out the other comforts and amenities aboard the train. Mostly, life inside the train seems actually pretty good.

The most curious of the passengers have begun to look out the windows to view the passing scenery. At first it’s rather pleasant– pristine vistas eventually giving way to sprawling rural agriculture. Calm, peaceful, sane. Then, the first outposts of industrialization come into view. Factories and refineries dot the landscape, coughing the dirty smoke from their enterprise into the air. It appears to dissipate, though.

As the journey continues, agriculture becomes more industrialized, more factories crowd the landscape, the air becomes visibly thick with the phlegm and sputum of the incredible productivity of meeting the demands of a pathogenic consumerism. And the train rushes on.

Eventually, a particularly far-sighted passenger pokes his head outside the window to see where exactly the train is headed. “Uh-oh… but that can’t be!” He begins to push his way through the throng of other passengers, attempting to get to the engine… and hopefully, the engineer.

Finally he arrives at the front of the train, and the scene that he’d glimpsed from the side window is now undeniably painted across the front windshield of the locomotive before him. “Stop the train!” he shouts at the engineer. The engineer shrugs and explains that he can’t.

“But we’re headed straight for that mountain!”

“Indeed.”

“But… there’s no tunnel.”

“Quite true.”

“We’re all going to die!”

“Very likely.”

“But… but… you have to do something!”

“I am doing something.”

“Yeah, you’re driving this train full speed into the side of that mountain up ahead!”

“That’s my job.”

The passenger is perplexed. Although the engineer’s answers appear to be truthful, they make absolutely no sense. He tries a different tack.

“Can I stop the train?”

“By yourself? No.”

“Can I get off the train?”

The engineer considers for a moment. “You may survive such a leap from a fast-moving train, but even so, our catastrophic impact is so near that you would very likely be consumed in the impending explosion anyway.”

The passenger feels defeated. He whispers “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why is this happening?”

“Intention.”

“What?!”

“This is merely the natural consequence of humanity’s collective intent.”

“Are you saying that collectively we’re intending to all die suddenly in a horrible cataclysm?”

“Not exactly.”

“Can you explain?”

“A train like this has a great deal of inertia. It takes tremendous energy to get it moving. But once it begins to accelerate, it quickly builds incredible momentum. The energy it utilizes is the intent of its passengers. Do you begin to understand?”

“Not really. I don’t think that any one of us is truly intending to drive this train straight into the side of a mountain, killing us all in the process.”

“True. And yet so very few are intending a different outcome. The intentions of the majority are elsewhere.”

“Where? Where are their intentions focused?”

“Almost exclusively inside the train. Their intentions no longer reach outside of the train. Their lives are here, aboard the train.”

“But they don’t know that they’re all about to die!”

The engineer shrugs. “Intention without awareness is inherently and precariously dangerous.”

“Why do you not seem to care?”

“Because caring might interfere with my duties, and–”

“And it’s your duty to drive this train straight into the side of a mountain!”

“At the moment, that would appear to be so. I drive the train according to its passengers’ cumulative intent.”

“You say that it appears to be so… that we’ll soon be killed in a terrible collision. Is it not indeed so?”

“I help facilitate the future, but I neither predict nor create it. Things– aboard the train– are rarely quite as they appear.”

“Please help me to understand.”

“Hm… a train like this tends to exist in a one-track mind;
And you might find as you ponder this– that singular track–
Ends in a bind, an inescapable fact of a most unsettling kind.
But how true is your point of view as you follow each other,
Sister and brother, single file for quite a lengthy while,
Never wondering much what else you might do… to reconcile
The promptings and churnings of your own inner yearnings
And the untold futures they may hold for you?
It’s a misuse of brains when people start thinking like trains,
Becoming slaves to the rails and all that entails,
Playing follow-the-leader when there’s really no need for…
Well, any of it… ‘cause it’s all really bullshit.
But you’re free to declare whatever drama you’d share
With huddled masses… all wrapped in despair,
Bemoaning your common fate, now to die… How unfair!
But ask yourself why would you choose such a lie, such a scare–
If you dare, for it’s never too late to lift the weight
Of the world from your shoulders…
For the way trains are built, and at last at full-tilt
They inevitably crash into boulders.
Could it be that minds are more like forests and gardens,
And less of pathways and tracks, not for carrying burdens
Or even transporting “facts”? They’re to grow and expand
Like an unclenching hand, reaching in all new directions.
The glorious future doesn’t actually spring from the past,
Nor is it found among familiar selections.
No, a thought has no mass nor any momentum–
At least until it’s been attached to intention.
And if you want something new then the things that you do
Must come from your own invention.
And allow me to mention as I explain once again
To dispel all the tension among the insane…
“Look man, you’re not a fucking train!”