She took another sip of water. “And that’s the problem,” she said. “Not what man does but how he thinks, because that’s what determines what he does. We don’t need more knowledge. We already know that global population has to stabilize, that irreplaceable resources can’t be squandered, that war and preparations for war are more than any nation can afford. We know that. Everybody knows it. But the population grows and the world’s stores are depleted and nations arm themselves and make war.
“Everybody knows better, but ego makes villains of us all. The Japanese think they have to go on slaughtering whales. The Arabs think God wants them to blow up airplanes. In Ireland the Catholics and Protestants are having a religious war. That may even have made a certain amount of sense in the seventeenth century, but it’s completely ridiculous now. And everybody knows that, everybody on both sides knows that, and nobody can stop it.”
“You said it’s always worked out in the past.”
“Yes.”
“Maybe it’ll work out now. Some people will be killed and some species will die out, but that’s been happening since the Flood. Maybe it’s still just part of the process, maybe—”
She was shaking her head. “No. We’re running out of time.”
“How do you know?”
“I was given to know it. But people have always known. So many of the religions talk about the Last Days, and many of them seem to agree on a date somewhere around the year 2000. The Mayan calendar runs out in the year 2011. The predictions of Nostradamus grind to a halt around the end of the century. According to a Brahman story, Brahma began breathing out the universe in a single breath — which, incidentally, fits remarkably well with the Big Bang theory of creation. Around the year 2000, Brahma runs out of breath.”
“And the world ends?”
“No — he begins inhaling what he breathed out. You can interpret that as you please. Maybe it’s the end of the world. Maybe it’s the beginning of something else.”
“Like what?”
“A new age. There’s a theory that says Nostradamus and the other prophetic systems end when they do because a new time is going to dawn, and history will cease to be predictable. Everything will be so utterly different that no one with his feet planted in the Old Age can guess what it will look like. Nostradamus can’t foresee it and the Mayans can’t count the years or predict the eclipses.” She held out her hands. “So those are the choices, my friend. Heaven on earth or the end of the world.”
“Either way, a whole new ballgame.”
“A new game or no game at all.”
He scratched his head. “This is hard to take in,” he said.
“I tried to explain as well as I could.”
“You did fine. The hard part isn’t understanding what you’re saying, it’s getting my mind to wrap itself around the idea of it. Either the world ends or Man behaves in a completely different fashion, is that what it adds up to?”
“Yes.”
“But knowing we have to act differently won’t cut it, because we’ve known that all along, and we can’t do anything about it.”
“Yes, because it’s not a logic problem. We know right now how to feed the world. Instead we have farm surpluses and banks foreclosing on farmers and grain rotting in warehouses and famine in Africa, all happening at once. Knowing doesn’t help.”
“Then what the hell do we do? If we’re the cancer, how do we cure the planet without destroying ourselves? What you’re talking about is a wholly revolutionary change in human behavior.”
“Yes.”
“It’s human ego that’s the planetary cancer, isn’t it? How do you cut the ego out of a human being? What kind of scalpel do you use?”
“That’s not it,” she said. “You can’t remove the ego surgically. You can’t kill it or crush it. Human destiny doesn’t call for us to wind up as ants in an ant colony, the selfless servants of a despotic planet. The way we have to deal with ego is by transcending it. We have to outgrow the illusion that the ego is right and that anything can be good for one of us if it’s not good for all of us. We have to remember who we really are.”
“‘Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.’ You know the Yeats poem?”
“Yes.”
“That’s what this is beginning to sound like. ‘The Second Coming.’”
“Yes, it is, isn’t it?”
He looked at her. “Sara,” he said, “this isn’t some elaborate cosmic joke, is it? Jody wanted to know if we were heading for Washington. Should I have told him that our actual destination is a little north of there, where a Pennsylvania Dutch farmgirl will soon be preparing to give birth to a babe in a stone barn outside of Bethlehem?”
She laughed.
“Well? When we pass Harrisburg, do I start looking for a bright star?”
“No,” she said. “That’s not how it will happen this time around.”
“Then we really are talking about the second coming.”
She nodded. “The first time the Christ Consciousness came to earth it was in the form of a single man. It happened more than once, incidentally. There have been Christs besides Jesus. There was Krishna, there was Buddha, there were others. Different civilizations had their individual visitations. The second coming will be for the whole world, and it won’t be one man. The second coming will occur when the Christ Consciousness is instilled in the entire human race.”
He thought about this. “And that’s what this is all about,” he said. “What we’re walking for.”
“Yes.”
“High-stakes poker. Either the world comes to an end or it’s heaven on earth and two cars in every garage. Two smog-free cars, I suppose. Solar-powered, probably.”
“Could be.”
“All because an aimless bartender in Roseburg, Oregon, decided it was a nice day for a walk. Shouldn’t I have talked to a burning bush first, Sara?”
“I thought you heard a voice.”
“Yes, I did. I tend to forget that. Well, what did I do? I went for a walk and ran into a strange sort of St. Paul who fell out of his truck and joined the party. Then we met a lady who phased out her eyes so she could see better, and now we’re within a few miles of the spot where the Indians brought Custer an abrupt sense of his own mortality, and I’m having a wonderful time, Sara, I really am, but it’s hard to believe we’re saving the world.”
“What happens to people when they start walking with us, Guthrie?”
“They quit smoking, they hyperventilate, their tattoos fade, their arthritis dissolves, their acne clears up, their warts disappear, and now it looks as though they grow themselves new teeth. Suppose we pick up a guy with an arm missing. Will he grow a new one?”
“Why not? Crabs and lobsters do it all the time. What else happens to people, Guthrie? What happens on the inside?”
“We change.”
“Yes.”
“We don’t turn into clones. If anything, people become more completely themselves.”
“That’s right.”
“We walk out of our old lives. We let go, we open up. We forgive and forget, and one of the things we forget is who we thought we were.”
“And we remember who we really are.”
“Yes.”
“And love our neighbors as ourselves, and act out some of the other radical notions that fellow was talking about on the mountain.”