New Year’s Day, 2050. Looking back now, on the last 30 years, it hardly seems believable that I should be here at all, writing this; and yet, here I am. I was asked to write an elegy, to be broadcast during the commemorative services that will be held around the world over the coming weeks, celebrating the life and achievements of SOS Love.
I suppose the organising committee felt that I was the most appropriate one to call on: My not insubstantial poetic skills and my role as revolutionary and statesman in the movement, must have led them to believe that I was suitably qualified for this; but how do you honour a man who singlehandedly provided the catalyst that changed our world?
My name is John Tremayne. SOS was my beloved teacher, my friend, my confidante. He was the most extraordinary individual I have ever met, divinely inspired and simultaneously fully human. A husband, a father, he lived his life as did we all, before the change, struggling to get by in an insane, oppressive society, bereft of God and any evolved, humane sentiment.
There was a trend, in the early decades of this century, for “dystopian” fiction: books and films about how society was unravelling and how we would soon have to contend with a “dystopian” world government. The irony of this trend, as SOS had made clear to us back in the early days of the movement, was that we had never known anything other than “dystopian” governments.
Humanity’s “history”, the veracity of which is questionable to say the least, is nevertheless one long sordid chronicle of misery and suffering, despotism, death and destruction: Millennia of tyranny and exploitation of the masses by the mighty; endless successive generations of the ruling elite, brushing the crumbs off the banqueting table for the starving multitudes.
Much has been publicised, of SOS’s exploits, over the last 30 years. This information, carefully redacted to avoid any potential backlash, whilst the movement was growing exponentially, has never been brought to light before. Only the devotees of the original Sangha, who formed the core of the movement, after the formation of TOP, were privy to it.
Now, 6 years after his passing and with the world finally redeemed, it can be articulated, since it will make no difference. Man has finally taken his rightful place in the cosmos and nothing can destabilise his confident march towards infinity. It has fallen to me to reveal this final piece of the puzzle that was SOS; and I am proud to do so.
I was asked to write an elegy. I refuse, on the grounds that anything I can write will pale in the face of SOS’s own considerable anthology, most of which has been read and studied assiduously. Instead, I choose, as is my right, to write this requiem, drawing on his own divinely inspired poetry to fill the spaces in my text.
After his enlightenment experience, in 1996, SOS saw clearly what needed to be done in order to overcome the ancient malady: His revelation, of the true nature of God, the universe and all manifest existence, embodied in his Divine Theory of Everything, would be the catalyst, allowing struggling mankind to grasp, for the first time, the fullness of the Truth.
This is the way the World works
The Mind of God recedes
The Mind of God returns
In tiny pieces that cluster
To form Everything there Is
You are a being within a BEING
You live in a space of sentient seeing
A constellation of little traces
Constrained by the rules of all these places
And bounded by your greater Celebrity
You are a miracle in Time
You are the Breath of the Divine
Each magic piece of you aglow ☼ with the beauty of the W_hole
Each encounter with your Self
BIG or small; and All unchanged
Though nothing happens, All appears
You’re Father, Ra and Holey Ma
You are that I AM
You are
I
cs
29 March 2007
We are all familiar with these words, from the opening sequence of The Divine Theory of Everything, having read them in one form or another as children or adults. This remarkable manuscript that forms part of the curriculum of basic study, in our enlightened education system, hints at the depth of feeling and occasionally, despair, that he felt in the early years.
LOO INTO MY EYES… I AM NOTBA ME.
LOOK INTO MY EYES… I AM NOT SANPAKU!
I HAVE CROSSED THE GREAT DIVIDE THAT SEPARATES SOUL FROM SOURCE.
I HAVE VENTURED BEYOND HUMANITY, BEYOND THE HUMAN CONDITION, HELPLESS AND HORRIFYING; AND I HAVE RETURNED, AS I DID BEFORE, TO SHOW YOU THE WAY
I HAVE NOT COME BECAUSE YOU ARE ATTRACTIVE OR ENGAGING, BUT BECAUSE YOU ARE A_PART OF ME; AND I LOVE YOU. I TELL YOU THIS: YOUR ENDLESS SUFFERING PALES, BEFORE THE FINAL GLORY OF YOUR TRUE DESTINY.
WHERE TO START, WHAT TO SAY; WHAT DIFFERENCE WILL MY WORDS MAKE ANYWAY? HEED MY WORDS FOR THEY HAVE POWER! I AM HUMAN, WHO ONCE WAS GOD; AND MY HEART IS FULL OF YOUR SADNESS… AND OVERFLOWING. LET ME SHOW YOU THE WAY BACK TO ME.
SOS knew that for the dissemination of this knowledge to be permitted, in the world at large, it would require an extraordinary act of courage and commitment. In 2016, after a hiatus of 21 years of waiting for the appointed time, he published the Divine Theory of Everything and began the arduous task of gathering the ones who had been sealed to him.
The creation of the Sangha in Cape Town, brought an eclectic mix of individuals to his cause. My brother James and I were drawn to him, instinctively, as were Peter and Andrew Cavouras and, of course, Judith Isakow. We were the first to acknowledge his Divine heritage and we threw in our lot with him, choosing to fight and die, if necessary.
When the movement began, there was a completely different direction to our duties than what finally evolved into the formation of TOP and the ensuing political activity. At the time SOS felt that only a very “big stick” would suffice to begin the process of dismantling all the political structures that held humanity captive for so long.
His poem “Styx and Stones”, written in Johannesburg in 2019, when we were preparing for war, for the holy jihad that would begin to cleanse the cancer of human affairs, provides some insight into his conflicted state at the prospect of challenging the South African government of the time, to provide a national foothold for the emerging ideas of the “Common Cause.”
STYX AND STONES
Do not take me
For what you choose
For I am all of these:
Saint and sinner
Charming and perverse
White knight astride
The mare called Duty
Or Hades upon the loins
Of Persephone
Do not confuse me
With your dreams
For I am not a part of any
Creeping mediocrity
The slow Death that
Having sunk its claws
Into your withered hide
Will then make merry
Whilst your Soul’s denied.
What went through his mind, as he was preparing for his enforced isolation in the Lesotho Highlands, his “gestation period” of 9 months, when he left us to our own devices to cement our will for the struggle ahead? Perhaps his poetry can provide some inkling of his abhorrence at the methods he felt compelled to use, against his own nature.
Why, you ask, should he have felt conflicted? After all, the formation of a new political party, TOP, “The One Party “, was hardly cause to revile his actions. Ah… but there’s the rub. Politics was never SOS’s game. From the beginning he had planned an event so startling, in its audacity, that it would take the government by complete and utter surprise.
At the time, the Sangha, which numbered 216 adult devotees, had 2 bases: the public retreat in Darling, Cape Town and a very private farm in Hennops, northwest of Johannesburg, near the Hartebeestpoort Dam. Each location housed 108 devotees. Each site provided 2 nomadic groups of 24 and 12, respectively, for assignment to covert operations.
If this is beginning to sound, vaguely, like a military organisation, it’s because it was. All 216 devotees had undergone clandestine paramilitary training for 2 years. Amongst our ranks we had professional soldiers, telecommunications specialists, biochemists, nuclear physicists and a host of other skillsets, necessary to the appointed task of usurping an illegitimate government.
SOS knew from the outset that any attempt to supplant a national government would bring swift and violent retribution upon the perpetrators. Wether this manifested as a political movement, or as a revolution, the halls of power would ensure that those responsible were either co-opted or crushed. How then to stage a successful coup, particularly if there was to be no bloodshed?
The solution was as radical as it was unique:
“How do you change the world, John?” he asked me once.
“You can’t change the world, Da” I replied. “It’s too big, too powerful. We are too small.”
“A mouse is small; but it can climb into an elephant’s trunk. Make it go insane.”
“The mouse would be destroyed, Da.”
“Perhaps; but what if it reaches an understanding with the elephant? Stays inside, issues orders; moves only to reinforce its control – to ensure that the elephant moves only in the required direction.”
SOS applied the principle of this philosophy in an unprecedented manner. First he gathered around him a group of devotees whose motives were pure: After being exposed to his teachings, altruism and noble purpose were our guiding lights. To simulate the mouse, we embarked upon a course of action fraught with danger and potentially catastrophic, but we were stalwart.
One slight misstep would have resulted in defeat; and we would have gone down in “history” as the most spectacular failure of all time. We would have been labelled terrorists and lunatics; but we were adamant: Better to go down in a blaze of glory, sanctified by our attempt to liberate all human beings from their captivity, than to endure in a world gone mad.
Our strategy was simple: In a co-ordinated paramilitary operation we would simultaneously take control of 2 nuclear power stations (Koeberg and Pelindaba) as well as 3 strategic water supply installations in the Eastern Cape, KwaZulu Natal and the Free State. We would bunker down and threaten to unleash the apocalypse if our terms weren’t met.
Madness? Perhaps; but it was a good plan, well thought out, assiduously prepared for and set into motion by a dedicated group of highly disciplined jihadists, essentially, fighting a holy war for the liberation of humanity. The threat was to meltdown the reactors in the 2 major commercial hubs and to poison the water supply for a significant portion of the population.
Our demands were simple: The government would step down whilst members of our group would remain ensconced indefinitely, in the occupied locations, to reinforce the threat, until the principles of “Consensus Economics” had been operational for long enough, in the country’s affairs, for the general population to realise what a groundbreaking gift they had been granted.
At that stage we would assume the running of the country and the long-term benefits of “Consensus Economics” would result in a new utopia for its many millions of citizens, accustomed to the repressive colonial and Calvinistic norms of the last 400 years. This success, we had hoped, would permeate slowly to other countries, thirsting for their human birthright, freedom.
So what happened? Since I had known SOS he repeatedly amazed us with displays of limited prescience, but he was always adamant that he could only use this power sparingly and not rely on it to fix outcomes, lest he conjure up deviations that went against the intent of the Great Spirit. He was, of course, the Divine incarnate and had the power to influence our destiny according to his whim.
After he returned from his isolation, we noticed a subtle shift in his demeanour. We were all champing at the bit to get going, having trained so rigorously, for so long and having endured his absence stoically for 9 months; a stratagem that had precisely the desired effect of tempering us, collectively, for the struggle ahead and removing all our doubts and contradictions as to the wisdom of our endeavor.
The start of the pandemic at the end of 2019 signaled the reversal of all our plans. Whereas previously he had denounced the idea of a political struggle, now he announced that all our readiness and resource would be rechanneled into the formation of TOP and the dissemination of the party’s manifesto to the general public. It is a testament to the esprit de corps that he had forged, that we didn’t flounder.
Like a well-oiled machine all of our troops went into battle, but a battle of the intellect not of attrition. As a group we had marshalled some impressive resources and these were employed, at grass roots level, to insidiously persuade the exploited masses, weary at the betrayal of their aspirations by their own “struggle” heroes, of the efficacy of our philosophy. The rest is history.
The insanity of the “global pandemic” in 2020 played right into our hands, as SOS had known that it would. The aggrieved population, manipulated into further penury and loss of civil liberties, had had enough! The countrywide unrest in 2021 resulted in the referendum of 2022, which finally brought down the beleaguered government with a resounding majority.
In a few short years the astonishing success of our policies transformed the country into the utopian “rainbow nation” that had been anticipated in 1994. As this achievement permeated into the minds of the citizenry of other nations, an atmosphere of greater tolerance emerged and TOP was able to transcend national borders bringing salvation to all.
Of course much still had to pass before the world changed: the ring fenced nuclear war of 2024, which obliterated most of Israel and a good part of the Arabian peninsula; the forced relocations, over the decades of the 30’s and 40’s, of vast numbers of human beings living in low-lying coastal areas around the globe and the consequent loss of trillions of dollars of infrastructure in those countries.
The pyroclastic eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 2026, which changed the geography of North America forever and led to the first widespread uprisings of American citizenry, enraged at the atrocities committed by the National Guard during the crisis. It took another fourteen years before the successive coups, the anarchy and the religious mania eventually toppled the hollow edifice of the almighty dollar in 2040.
They say that the most powerful thing is an idea whose time has come. The formation of ECHO, the European Conglomerate of Halcyon Order, in 2030, was the first major breakthrough for the western world, the Europeans having already been conditioned to the idea of a transnational society. Europe provided the cultural backbone of legitimacy for the burgeoning world government.
The founding of AUNTS, The Asian Union of National Territorial Sovereignties in 2036, brought “Consensus Economics” to the world’s most populous region, with the resulting transformation of countries like China, India and Russia that had known only disparity for thousands of years. Old habits die hard and the rapacious rulers had fought desperately to maintain the status quo.
The United Northern Confederacy of Labour Economics (UNCLE), which resulted from the fall of the dollar, provided the seat of the new world government at Bethesda, on Ile de la Province, in the middle of Lake Memphremagog. The now defunct Canadian and American governments had ceded it to TOP in 2039 and SOS had taken up residence there, with his family.
I visited him shortly before he died. He had lived an ascetic life for many years in sylvan Quebec, although as the nominal leader of the new world government he had access to any resource, any extravagance, if he so desired. The aged body, the translucent skin, the racking cough from a lifetime of marijuana consumption, brought tears to my eyes.
He was sitting up in bed, reading some official-looking documents. The family was not around. He looked every bit his eighty-eight years; although frail, he still had the commanding presence that had arrested all the arguments and objections of eminent scientists, politicians and business tycoons, over the years of the party’s ascendancy.
“How are you feeling?” I asked him, with a lump in my throat.
“Lousy.”
“Are they helping?” I was referring to the doctors and medical personnel that staffed the Bethesda facility. He shrugged. I burst out laughing, as he began to whistle the old ditty, which had gone to no. 1 in the charts, seemingly a lifetime ago.
“No problem, my friend. Don’t worry, be happy!”
Judith came into the room: “He refuses to take the rejuvenation treatments, or any bionic enhancements and his condition has deteriorated, over the last week.”
“Who’s looking after him?”
“Pearson and the medical team.”
“He’s in good hands, then.”
“Yes, but he’s not going to budge. You should know that by now.”
“Why won’t you take the treatments?” I asked him. “You were the one who said long ago: ‘When my body parts stop working I’ll replace them with bionics’”.
“Stubbornness is not a treatable condition” he replied, his rheumy eyes twinkling with mirth. “What do you want me to do, John?” he asked, diffidently.
“Seriously, SOS, they called to say you weren’t doing well and had asked for me. I came as soon as I could, leaving Jian Ping, Fedorov and Singh fuming at lunch.”
He started to speak, then was suddenly overcome by a coughing fit, which lasted seemingly an age. After he had recovered, he replied slowly, measuring his words:
“The time has come, my boy. May I call you that? You’re young enough to be my son or grandson and we certainly share a bond that is closer than most families. Once I believed that I would want to live forever: In this body, in any body. To roam in realms unknown, in breathless wonder. That seemed to me the pinnacle of human achievement. Now that I am faced with the decision, I find myself strangely reticent. I gave up caring for this body a long time ago, when I chose to put all of us beyond the pale of our aberrated world. Now that we have won and I have no use for it any more, I cannot bring myself to infringe its dignity, by chopping and changing its parts. Whatever the Divine has given me, will be mine to use until it breaks; no treatments, no modifications. I will go quietly into the dark, without a whimper.”
I struggled to hold my tears at bay: “What about the movement? What do you need me to do?”
“Nothing. I just wanted to see you. To tell you that you have been a true friend: one that I would have felt honoured to die with, at any time in the last twenty-five years; as it turned out that wasn’t necessary. We set out to do the impossible and we succeeded, by the grace of Providence. How many men can say that? The movement is self-perpetuating now, as human beings have freed themselves from the thrall that has kept them in check for millennia. For me, I have decided that even if I were to live for a billion years, I would not be more fulfilled than I am now; and even if we did manage to change the whole world, what of it? What does it matter? In a hundred years from now, who will remember our story; and remembering it, will they tell it true, or will it be distorted through the prism of Time, into another irrelevancy?”
‘What should I tell the others?” I asked him.
The others were the original core of the movement: the 12 who had started the Sangha and who now held oversight positions in Europe, Africa, South America, Australasia and Antarctica, the new faux-temperate continent, experiencing burgeoning growth, under the auspices of TOP’s world council. The entire world had slowly succumbed to the seductive philosophy of “The One Party.”
“Tell them this: ‘In the end, only three things matter: how much you have loved; how gently you have lived; and how graciously you have let go of those things that were not meant for you.’”
I walked over to the window to hide my emotion and stood, looking hard into the sun, as he had taught us to do, so many years ago. The quote was attributed to Siddhartha.
“Don’t believe everything you’re told,” SOS had said to us, when he first challenged us to take up the discipline of the shaolin monks, practiced by adepts in every culture. After I had mastered the technique, the idea of alternate realities had no longer seemed so improbable. For a while now those alternate realities had been manifesting before our very eyes.
I had flown ultrasonic from Novgorod, where I was based, heading up the Oversight Committee of the Asian Union. I had had to excuse myself from a meeting of LE Counsellors, of what had previously been China, India, the Soviet Union and a host of smaller Oriental and Arabic countries, which had successfully transitioned to the new world government.
There were always stragglers; some small, obscure, national interests, mostly with fundamentalist overtones, which continued to frustrate TOP’s mandate, to unite the entire world under one equitable economic system for the first time in history! These rigid, repressive regimes continued to exploit their populations, using the age-old tawdry platitudes of the elite, ad nauseam!
They had to be assimilated, over time, through osmosis. After the South African government fell in 2022, allowing the first working model of a truly utopian society to be established, SOS had never wavered in his assertion that no government would ever again be usurped, militarily or economically. Their peoples would be allowed to make the transition to “Consensus Economics” without coercion.
Never again would human beings use force to impose their political will on others. The stragglers were a nuisance, of course, but the walls of Jericho were slowly crumbling, everywhere. In another decade, all of the remaining tin pot dictators would have been deposed, bloodlessly, by the due process of their own institutions. Never again would might be right! Compassion was the language of the new politic.
I flexed my newly-fitted PedoCorp bionic right leg that resolved years of suffering from the old baker’s cyst that I had picked up so long ago in a martial arts tournament. The Cessna Waverider that I had commandeered at the party’s depot at Jean Lesage, had brought me to the pupil, the central building in the “Eye of Horus” complex that Bethesda was fashioned in.
The Zeiss Ocularius transceivers, my only other concession to replacement body parts, fed back information and visuals on the superimposed holoscreen in my field of vision. I aimed the solarplane at the landing area and fired up the small VTOL landing unit. Antigrav would soon supplant all the fossil fuel frenzy of the last two centuries, creating incredible new fields of endeavour.
Overland, undersea and in space, we would create new frontiers. The old jargon still held me captive: space was now time, as even a six-year old knew, but old habits die hard; and until antigrav was widely assimilated into everyday life, I would continue to think in terms of space as “The Final Frontier”. In truth the human mind was the final frontier; consciousness and all its ramifications our goal.
I held the papery warmth of his hand for a while, then kissed him on both cheeks and walked outside to hangar the Cessna; it appeared that I would be staying for a while. As I left I heard him humming:
“Bro-o-ther Sun; and Si-i-ste-er Moon,
I hear you ca-lling, I can hear your tune.
Mmmm-mmmmmm…”
SOS’s legacy is well known. His “Divine Theory of Everything” married science and religion in an ecumenical exposition of our Divine nature which cut through all the dogma and the lies and half-truths that we have fasted on, for so long. His “Common Cause”, incorporating the principles of “Consensus Economics”, provided a simple, yet elegant solution to the seemingly eternal problems of sustenance and divisiveness. His will, which is our collective will, gave the impetus to the inertia of our long captivity.
Viva, SOS, Viva!
THE INEFFABLE SADNESS
When I was young and all was blind stupor
I knew the World and knew it well
I grappled with its lustful cries
And silenced its naïve goodbyes
As I grew older I awakened, slowly, from the dream
With pins and needles I revived my sight
And knew of ancient wisdoms, fresh imaginings
Old age and youth; the dawn, the twilight and the night
Then I grew older still in Time, in no time
My dreams flew off the wall, and landed
Splayed, in postures of discomfort
To my intense dismay I cried
Now Death which stalks me slowly as I slide
With open eyes I watch its firmness
That proceeds along my weaker side
Alone. A gentle tap; and then the dance
I am a Being who must die
To move on in the memory of Man
I tread the path of breathless wonder, for a day
And then to rest