She and Wyatt were still together?
Yeah. I had plenty of room, so I invited them to live with me, rent-free. Erika’s career was starting to pick up steam. In her line of work, fantasy and science fiction writing, it was all about building brand awareness around the name and ensuring repeat readers through a series or trilogies. She could crank out a trilogy in a year. And not thin, wimpy little books. Big-ass doorstoppers. Often I could hear her writing upstairs, bashing the hell out of her keyboard. She typed like a prizefighter. Extraordinarily disciplined about her work. Wrote solid from nine to four every day.
Anyway, when she wasn’t writing books, Erika went to this support group for UFO abductees. You can imagine the place. Some community center room with an air pot of coffee, chairs arranged in a circle kind of deal. At least that’s how I pictured it. According to Wyatt the sessions could get pretty emotional and often Erika came home utterly drained. Through the group she met this therapist named Wendell Hoffman who looked exactly how you’d expect someone named Wendell Hoffman to look. He specialized in recovering buried memories of alien visitations through hypnotherapy. Wendell suggested that Erika attend a private session in which she would be put under hypnosis and he’d record her impressions on paper during the experience. Nothing sexual or untoward happened at these sessions, if that’s what you’re thinking.
So one night Wyatt and I were stoned as per usual, eating takeout Thai and watching 2001: A Space Odyssey. Erika came home and just stood in the middle of the room for a minute. At first I thought she was entranced by the movie but she was standing in such a way that she was just staring into the kitchen. People standing immobile for long periods of time isn’t really an uncommon event among cannabis fans, so she must have been standing there a really long time, maybe even into the star-child sequence, before I noticed it was weird that she was just standing there. So finally I asked her what was wrong. She just shook her head. I noticed she hadn’t set her purse down, and in her other hand she held a sheaf of papers. The astronaut turned into an embryo after some rad special effects and Wyatt turned off the DVD. “What’s wrong?” one of us said again. Erika handed us the papers.
Are these the papers right here?
Well, look at that. My God.
And she transcribed these, or wrote them, during a hypnotherapy session with Dr. Hoffman?
I don’t think he was an actual doctor, but yeah.
I was wondering if you might read this document aloud.
Do I have to?
Yes.
[…]
We’d really like you to read it aloud.
All right then. Here’s was what Erika wrote during that session with Wendell Hoffman.
1. The following is TRUE PROPHECY for humanity. Heed it and receive enlightenment and love. Disregard it and incur punishment and suffering.
2. The ultimate holy purpose of the human race is to actively spread organic life throughout the universe.
3. Haeckel’s Theory: ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: “Ontogeny is the growth (size change) and development (shape change) of an individual organism; phylogeny is the evolutionary history of a species. Haeckel’s recapitulation theory claims that the development of advanced species was seen to pass through stages represented by adult organisms of more primitive species. Otherwise put, each successive stage in the development of an individual represents one of the adult forms that appeared in its evolutionary history. The embryo becomes a fish, a lizard, a mammal. Haeckel formulated his theory as such: ‘Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.’ This notion later became simply known as recapitulation.” So says Wikipedia.
4. So it is with the life cycles of individuals and the species Homo sapiens. As the individual experiences childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age, and death, these stages are recapitulated by the human race as a whole.
5. Childhood: Breaking away from our primate ancestors with the acquisition of tools, fire, language, pantheism.
6. Adolescence: The majority of what we refer to as history, the rise of monotheism, nation-states, philosophy, empire, democracy, and the rapid migration of humans to every corner of the earth. The industrial revolution represents the end of adolescence and the onset of adulthood.
7. Adulthood: The information technology revolution. A growing awareness of the mortality of the planet. Secularism and global market capitalism as the foundations of societies.
8. Middle age: An era of stewardship, of securing our legacy, and also of regret.
9. Old age: A great slowing as the institutions built during adulthood begin the process of disintegration. Yet with this slowing and suffering, the blossoming of wisdom.
10. WE ASK: Can it be that our responsibility as humans during this age of adulthood is to reproduce?
11. If we CAN reproduce, we MUST reproduce. This is the law of living things.
12. Should we reproduce sexually or asexually?
13. If our species is to reproduce sexually, we must first find our lover. Perhaps this lover is already among us, waiting for us to begin our courtship.
14. If we decide to reproduce asexually, we must seek our children within. These children won’t live in the physical dimension we inhabit but will exist as cognitive constructs in a qputer operating system.
15. Our holy task is not as simple as reproducing to create a new species, i.e. Nietzsche’s übermensch. Our holy task calls us higher. We seek to reproduce life itself.