God as Gardener, Earth as a Garden
This is an artistic reimagining of a key chapter "Hearsay Evidence" from Robert A. Monroe's book "Far Journeys" 1985. The author's terminology (Loosh, Someone, Sowings, DLP Formula) is kept intact. The original text is a "report" Monroe received in an altered state of consciousness, explaining the nature of reality and the phenomenon of Loosh.
Imagine there's this rare, priceless substance out there, somewhere beyond our world. So valuable that beings travel between realms, take risks, hunt it down, and harvest it. It's not gold, not energy, not some physical stuff in the usual sense. It's the byproduct of certain states of life. Let's call it Loosh, for argument's sake.
For ages, Loosh was stumbled upon by accident - in places where life sprang up on its own. But those spots were rare, unstable, and tough to control. So one wise experimenter, let's call him Someone or simply the Gardener, decided to stop searching and start cultivating the harvest artificially. He built a special Garden: a closed ecosystem where the exchange carbon and oxygen would produce this substance.
First Sowing: Failure in the Test Tube
He created a liquid medium and stocked it with simple single-celled organisms. Life flickered into existence - and fizzled out almost immediately. Energy is released, but there is too little of it, it's too rough, unformed. These creatures' lives were too short, too small-scale to yield anything worthwhile. The Gardener realized: life needed to be longer, more complex, more resilient.
Second Sowing: The Silent Forests
He shifted the experiment to a gaseous environment with a solid base. He made plants-rooted, immobile things with trunks, leaves, flowers. They grew, reached for light, breathed; the exchange ramped up. To harvest Loosh, he even used wind and storms to rip life away from them, releasing the substance. But the results disappointed again: more Loosh, sure, but still crude, primitive, barely useful. And it took too long to ripen.
Third Sowing: Giant Consumers
The Gardener saw he needed mobility and a different kind of exchange. He took the simple cells from the first sowing, scaled them up, made them mobile, and tuned them to feed on the second sowing's plants. Enter the first animals. They devoured the plants, shortening their lives and forcing out Loosh. Extra Loosh came from the giants' own deaths. Quality improved, but the process was slow and inefficient. The Garden teetered on collapse: the giants nearly ate every plant. Then came the breakthrough. When the giants fought over scarce resources, conflict unleashed massive amounts of much purer Loosh. Struggle was the catalyst.
Fourth Sowing: The Perfect Ecosystem
He redesigned the entire Garden into a complex, balanced system, with:
- plants as the base of the food chain
- small predators feeding on plants
- large predators preying on the small ones
Tension filled the Garden. Chases, clashes, survival struggles-all ensuring a steady, abundant flow of good-quality Loosh. Balance became dynamic. The Gardener added Collectors and Channels to gather and ship the product.
The Special Species
But his true masterpiece emerged almost by accident. He took one animal species and infused it with a piece of himself-a spark of consciousness, a drive for something greater. This sparked inner conflict: beyond hunger, they craved meaning, unity with the infinite, more than mere survival. And they started producing top-tier Loosh.
The Unexpected Discovery
The Garden ran smoothly for ages. Then, examining harvested Loosh, the Gardener found layers of incredibly pure, high-grade stuff-purity impossible from standard processing. He went back to observe. It turned out these pure bursts happened in special moments, when a being:
- protected another without thought for itself;
- suffered without reward
- felt profound loneliness
- yearned for the unattainable
- loved, knowing loss was possible
The greater the inner tension, the purer the substance.
The DLP Formula Itself
That's how the Gardener arrived the DLP Formula - Deep-Level Processing.
The most valuable harvest comes when a being keeps striving, even while knowing the goal may never be fully reached.
The greater the inner tension, the wider the gap between desire and reality - the purer the energy. To amplify it, he made final tweak:
- Beings were paired, sharpening longing for reunion.
- Made this species dominant.
Since then, the Collectors (those who observe) learned to wield this formula with precision. Their tools for triggering the most concentrated Loosh releases are painfully familiar:
- On a small scale: love, friendship, hatred, pain, guilt, pride, greed, self-sacrifice.
- On a grand scale: ideologies, nations, wars, religions, famine, technology, trade, art.
Thus, the meaning of the formula becomes clear: D - Desire, L - Limitation / Lack, P - Pain.
Across the Garden, nations, religions, ideologies, wars, economies, and even progress itself serve a single function: to maintain continuous inner tension.
Conclusion
Our lives - with all their pain and beauty, meaning and absurdity, love and loneliness - are that Garden. Our deepest experiences? Raw material for producing this rare substance that might fuel worlds beyond our grasp. We're not evolution's accident. We're the gardener's brilliant, painful invention, yielding the purest essence of existence (Loosh) from the stuff of human existence.
