I nod. Olaf certainly was talented in leaving one speechless.

     When asked to explain why such an approach would be illogical, he shrugs his shoulders and answers, "You tell me! I don't say it's illogical. To the contrary, that's the only logical thing that I could tell them, but they can't hear it. They've closed their eyes, their ears, their minds, and their heart. They've shut down their very Soul. The Chinese were once smothered by Mao's insane Cultural Revolution. Eventually they won their freedom from it. The West has not. It is more tightly entrapped than ever, but they can't see the foe. They just can't see."



     Olaf's comment that our breakthrough achievements wouldn't work on Earth caused a great deal of speculation among us.

     Mahesh came closest to a useful answer. He referred to distorted points of reference. He told us that he had seen lots of examples on his planet. At the height of its prosperity, everything began to be measured by cost rather than by its potential value or by its significance in promoting the welfare of society. On this basis the very best the people had to offer out of the depth of their common Soul, invariably appeared as too expensive, because it demanded the best from them.



      "If you look for the cheapest," he says, "you certainly don't look for the best, and the cheapest is what you will get. By this measure, you'll invest into poverty! Poverty always looks cheap, while in reality it is the most potent drain on the wealth of a society ever invented. The logic behind this is, that you don't measure correctly if you don't measure the right thing."

     Mahesh says that when society measures cost, it doesn't measure the substance of life; it doesn't measure its technologies that open doors: it doesn't measure its strengths that push back frontiers, or its dynamics that open new horizons. "How can you talk about costs," he asks, "when it comes to investing into life itself, without which you are dead, out of which wealth is derived in the first place?"

     Here, he begins to laugh. As far as I could recall, I had never heard Mahesh laugh before. "In measuring costs, you measure poverty," he says, "and poverty is always 'cost' effective! It is highly effective in costing a lot for what you get in return. Its cheapness can collapse whole civilizations," he says. He isn't joking. He suggests that this seems to be a fundamental law, which he suspects, sets the Earth apart from planet 'O,' just as it had been the case on his own planet where the real law of universal love and the general welfare has become increasingly trampled under foot.

     "As a consequence our world began to collapse," says Mahesh. "As the people's spirit began to die, the economy began to die too, civilization began to disintegrate; the physical support-structures were no longer maintained. Nobody, but a very few, could see that it wasn't the outcome of certain ensuing events that caused the collapse phenomenon on our planet, that it was instead the collapse phenomenon that had been driving the events, and that the phenomenon itself was driven by the collapse of the people's spirit. They lost their beautiful soul, and as a consequence they could no longer see it in each other. The collapse phenomenon soon reached a point that life itself was deemed to be too expensive to be maintained. Our society literally fell apart from within. As if someone had flicked a switch, our civilization turned itself off, or was turned off by external intervention that no one could see. The people on the Earth may be in the same situation. But would they listen to a warning? There had been warnings voiced on our planet, but people's ears had been too dull to hear them."



     We decided on Bohr's planet to let mankind's research ship return home, but enriched with the lessons that we had learned by observing the civilizations we had encountered, and their stories. Olaf said that he didn't need it anymore. The 'O' people's language had been decoded. Also, he wouldn't want to keep it any longer if humanity couldn't profit from the result of his work in keeping the ship utilized, as seemed to be the case. Nor could we see a safety exposure in letting the ship go. None of its crew had been exposed to Olaf's lecture on the BME. On the positive side, the ship's archives of films and broadcasts were rich with information that could aid mankind to end its struggle against itself if it cared to make the effort to become human again. Olaf assured us that we would know when this awakening begins, if it ever would. He suggested that we would sense the light of it right across the galaxies.

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Stories about  Love from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche