Staying Out Of Eden

Chapter One- The Emigration

It was the stupid space program that started all of this. The manned mission to explore planet Venus. The crew sent back their video of the planet’s surface, the face of Venus as this garden paradise. After that, the accident wasn’t because of chipped insulation panels or broken O-rings or pilot error. It wasn’t an accident. The crew just chose not to deploy their landing parachutes. Fast as a meteor, the outer hull of their spacecraft burst into flame. Static and- The End.

The same way that World War II gave us the ballpoint pen, the space program had proved the human soul was immortal. What everybody called the Earth was just a procession station that all souls had to pass through. A step in some kind of refining process. Like the cracking tower used to turn crude oil into gasoline or kerosene. As soon as human souls had been refined on earth, then we would all incarnate on the planet Venus.

In the big factory of perfecting human soul, the Earth was kind a of tumbler. The same as the kind people used to polish rocks. All souls came her to rub the sharp edges off each other. All of us, we’re meant to be worn smooth by conflict and pain of every kind. To be polished. There was nothing /bad/ about this. It wasn’t suffering, it was /erosion/. It was just another basic, important step in the refining process.

Sure, it sounded nuts, but there was the video sent back by the space mission that crashed itself on purpose. On television, all they played was the video. As the mission’s landing vehicle orbited lower and lower, dipping down inside the cloud layers covering the planet, the astronauts sent back this footage of people and animals living as friends, everyone smiling so hard their faces seemed to glow. In the video the astronauts sent back, everyone was young. The planet was a Garden of Eden. The landscape of forests and oceans, flower meadows and towering mountains, it was always springtime, the government said.