The Account of Sha-Iren-Ra of the Temple of Knowledge

Kaleth believed I did not scream because I was above it. I have felt that thought of his across all the long ages since, patient and self-punishing, turning itself over like a stone in a river. He has spent twelve thousand years asking why I put my hand across my mouth and closed my eyes, and he has concluded that it was the composure of a being who lived above polarity.

No, it was not – I closed my eyes because if I had kept them open I would have seen the whole of it at once, and I was not ready, and I needed four more seconds of not knowing.

Let me tell it from my side. He has told his honestly, which took him longer than it should have and cost him more than it should have. Mine has its own reckoning inside it, and I have never been permitted the comfort of thinking myself the wronged party.

Where I Came From

I was of the Golden Race, of the Pleiadean seed, and I stood eleven feet and four inches in that body. I say the height first because it is what everyone wants to know, and because it is the least important thing about us. The tallness was not stature in the sense you mean. It was simply what happens when a form is held mostly in light and only partly in matter. Our bones were closer to lattice than to stone. We ate little. We were not strong in the way the Bronze were strong, and any one of the Aryan legionaries could have broken me across his knee, which is a fact I would ask you to hold onto, because it becomes relevant to everything that follows.

I did not descend from Earth. I entered it.

I came from the oversoul cluster known amongst us as Ish-Aumara, seeded from Alcyone, which took incarnation upon this world not as One being but as Twelve Aspects, distributed deliberately, entering across a span of some three thousand years so that no two of us would ever hold the same view of the same age. I was the Seventh to arrive. I met four of my own soul group in that lifetime and recognised them instantly, in the way you recognise your own handwriting. The others I never met at all, and did not need to, since one does not require introduction to one’s own hand.

We came for a single purpose, and it was not to rule and it was not to save. We came to hold the memory.

That is all. Nothing more elevated than that. A civilisation of two hundred thousand years produces knowledge faster than it produces the wisdom to carry it, and something has to remain long enough, and stay coherent enough, to be the continuity. We were the continuity. That is what the great lifespans were for. Not privilege. Function.

I lived four thousand and sixty years in that body, and for the first eight hundred of them I did nothing but learn, and for the next three thousand I taught, and I would tell you it was the best use of a life I have ever made if the ending did not make a mockery of the claim.

The Temple of Knowledge

I was Atla-Ra, of the Scientist Priesthood, and my station was the Temple of Knowledge in the Emerald City.

You have been told what the Atla-Ra were. I will tell you what we were like, which is different. We were not solemn. There is a portrait of us that has come down through the ages, robed and grave and speaking in pronouncements, and it is entirely wrong. We laughed constantly. Four thousand years does something to your sense of proportion, and almost everything becomes funny eventually, including yourself, especially yourself. Tyberonn once spent forty years on a resonance problem and solved it by accident whilst arguing about fruit. We never let him forget it, and by never – we mean for eleven centuries.

We were curious past the point of dignity. We asked children questions and patiently waited for their answers as though they mattered, because they did. We were, and I want this word understood exactly, unguarded. We had no capacity for suspicion, not a suppressed capacity, an absent one. In a society where every interior is visible in the field around the body, suspicion is a muscle that never develops, in the same way that a creature born in a lightless cave does not develop an eye.

I taught in the outer courts. Three hundred students at any time, perhaps a dozen of whom I would take closely. Over three thousand years that is a great many people, and I remember all of them, which is not a boast but a condition.

The Boy from Og

He came to me at nineteen. I want to describe what I saw, because the whole of the tragedy is contained in the accuracy of my perception.

I saw a young man of the Bronze Race, dense in body, of a settlement upbringing, whose auric field was clean. Not still. Not managed. Clean, in the specific sense that there was no discontinuity anywhere in it. Grief in the lower registers, well integrated. Hunger in the third band, considerable, honest, unhidden. Devotion in the upper, and here is the thing I have examined for twelve millennia and cannot fault: the devotion was real. It was not a projection. It was not laid over anything. It went all the way down. Because it did. Because there was nothing beneath it but a locked room he did not know he owned, and a locked room has no colour.

I have been asked, by beings far above my station, whether I ought to have detected it. The answer is no, and the answer is also that I should not have needed to detect it, and those two answers are not the same and the second one is the one that indicts me.

He was the best I ever taught. I will not qualify that. Of every student in three thousand years, Kaleth of Og had the finest instrument. He could hold two opposed positions in his mind without collapsing either into the other, which is rarer than any psychic gift and worth more. He could sit between two furious parties and make each of them feel heard without lying to either. That is not technique. You cannot train it. It comes out of a genuine capacity to feel what another being feels, and he had it in abundance, and it was the very faculty that made him the perfect instrument for what was done through him.

I used to fold myself down onto the low steps to speak with him. He has remembered that for twelve thousand years and thought it kindness.

It was kindness. It was also, I see now, the posture of someone who has never once considered that the person she is bending down toward might one day be looking up at her ceiling and resenting it.

The Ceiling

He could not become Atla-Ra.

We told him so gently, at the appropriate time, in the appropriate manner, and we believed we were being kind, and I have thought about the exact texture of that kindness more than I have thought about the deluge itself.

The bar was not merit. It was not lineage in the sense of family. It was that the Sect held the crystalline management, the crystalline management required sustained function at the twelfth resonance, and the twelfth resonance required a physical vehicle of a particular density. He was Bronze. That was all. It was as arbitrary as height and as impassable as a wall.

Here is what we said to him as we did for all: The work you do is essential and honoured, and the Sect is a function and not a rank.

Here is what was true: it was a function and not a rank.

Here is what was also true, and which we did not say, and which he could see perfectly well every day of his life: we lived four thousand years and he would live ninety. We stood eleven feet in the Emerald light and he stood six in the outer ring. We could not be broken by any Aryan legionary because we could simply cease to be dense enough to be struck, and he could be broken by anyone. We were exempt from governmental control, and had been for eleven thousand years, and had never once in that time seriously examined the moral standing of that exemption, because it had always been obvious to us that it was necessary.

We told a man with a ceiling above his head that the ceiling was not a ceiling, and then we went home to a life he could not enter, and we did this warmly, and we meant it, and we never once asked him what it was like. That is not deception. It is something with fewer defences than deception. It is a group of beings so certain of their own benevolence that they never thought to ask whether benevolence was being received as such.

The Sons of Belial did not create the crack. We did. They only had to find it, and they had been looking for a very long time, and they were rather good at looking, because looking for the ache in people was the entire basis of their civilisation.

The Congress

I opposed the Unification Congress from the first sitting and I lost that argument amongst my own. Not because I was wise. Because I was old enough to have seen the pattern twice before, in smaller forms, in the colonial administrations. When a party that outnumbers you three to one and has been unable to move you for four hundred years suddenly proposes a structure in which you hold the majority, the structure is the attack. That is not intuition – just simple arithmetic.

But I could not make the case in a way that carried, and here I must say the hard thing about my own order, the thing Kaleth said in his account and said correctly – we were detached, and we called it wisdom, and it was not.

Our whole discipline rested upon a principle I still hold to be true: that the Light does not compel, that free will is inviolate, that a being who is forced into harmony has not arrived at harmony. We would not fight the Aryans. We would not manipulate. We would not deceive them for their own good, we would not organise politically, we would not descend into the density of the struggle, because to do so would be to become the thing we opposed, and what would be the value of a Law of One preserved by means that violated it.

That is a beautiful argument. I made it myself, many times, with feeling. And underneath the beautiful argument, in a place I did not look at for eleven thousand years, was something far simpler and considerably less noble. We did not fight because we did not have to. Because we held the power grid. Because we were exempt. Because in four thousand years nothing had ever actually reached us, and a being who has never been reached develops a serene philosophy about the inevitability of things working out.

Non-interference is a principle when it costs you something. When it costs you nothing, and preserves everything you hold, it is merely the shape your comfort has taken. The Aryans understood us better than we understood ourselves. Their whole strategy was built on the certainty that we would observe, and note, and decline to act, and be proved right afterwards. We were entirely predictable. We had been predictable for eleven thousand years, and we mistook the consistency for integrity.

The Vote

I was in the gallery the day of the vote. I had not spoken to him in four months. He believes that was a withdrawal of affection and it was not, it was simply a choice, which is the kind that presents itself as respect but was nearer avoidance. I had seen the drift. I had seen the meetings taken. I had seen his field change over eleven months, not into deception but into something more dangerous, into conviction, the bands hardening and narrowing the way they do in a man who has found an explanation he cannot afford to lose.

And I did not go to him to discuss this. I told myself he was a grown being making sovereign choices and that to press him would be to violate the very principle at issue. I told myself I was giving him the freedom to develop into his position.

I was not giving him space. He already had all the space in creation. I was avoiding a conversation that would have been agonising, and I dressed the avoidance in doctrine, because doctrine was available and agony was not appealing, and I had four thousand years of practice at making my preferences sound like principles.

If you want to know the single act I would take back, it is not anything I did in that gallery. It is a conversation I did not have in the outer ring eleven months earlier, which would have been uncomfortable for perhaps two hours.

The vote was called. Four and four. And the chamber turned. I knew before his hand moved. There is a moment perhaps a second and a half before a decision surfaces, when the field reorganises around it, and I saw the reorganisation and I understood everything at once. Not just the vote. All of it. In that second and a half I saw the whole architecture backwards, the way you see a construction the instant the scaffolding comes off.

What revealed itself to me through realisation, I saw that he had not been turned in the last eleven months. I saw that the cleanness of his field at nineteen had not been the absence of deceit but the absence of access. I saw that there had been something in him the entire time, sealed, dormant, invisible because it was genuinely unknown to him, and that our great and celebrated capacity to read the interior of any being had been circumvented not by a superior technique but by the simplest possible method: they had given us a man with nothing to read.

I saw that it must have begun when he was a child. I saw that if they had done it once they had certainly done it more than once, and that we would never know where the others were. But, absolutely none of that mattered now. I saw, last and worst, that this had been running for forty years, which meant it had been conceived before that, which meant that on the day I first folded myself down onto those steps to speak kindly to a nineteen year old orphan, the plan was already older than he was and I was already inside it. Then I put my hand across my mouth and closed my eyes. Not composure. I closed them because the next thing I was going to see was every student I had ever taught, and every kindness I had ever offered, reorganising itself into evidence of my own blindness, and I wanted four more seconds before that began.

What I Understood in the Gallery

I did not think he has betrayed us.

I want that recorded, because he has spent twelve thousand years assuming I did. What I thought, in the strange clear cold that arrives when something irreversible has just happened, was this: we are finished, and it is not just because of him.

The vote was the visible event. But a civilisation is not brought down by a single hand raised in a chamber. That hand could only be raised because the chamber existed, and the chamber existed because we had agreed to it, and we had agreed to it because we were unable to imagine an adversary who would plan across two generations, and we were unable to imagine it because nothing had ever required us to.

Atlantis did not fall because one man was corrupted. Atlantis fell because a luminous, gentle, immensely powerful order had allowed itself to become entirely incapable of imagining malice, and had named that incapacity purity. And I saw the sequence then, in the gallery, fully formed, and I have never in my life been so certain of anything and so unable to convey it. The Satellite would be reprogrammed. The Atla-Ra would be removed from the departments, quietly at first. The antigravity field would degrade under war loading, exactly as our models said, and the Aryan engineers would say the margin was enormous, and the Council would believe them because by then the Council would need to believe them. And when the Second Moon came down it would not simply crash. It would take the entire crystalline network with it in cascade, and the tectonic plate beneath us was already compromised from the second break, and the water would come.

I gave it three years. It took two years and seven months.

The Work of the Last Two Years

I did not fight. There was nothing to fight with and no one to fight, and that was not detachment any longer, it was assessment.

I went to Tyberonn and Oberonn that same night and I said one sentence: begin the relocation. What followed was the only period of my four thousand years in which I was fully present in every hour of every day. It is a strange and shameful thing to admit that I was never so alive as when I was salvaging the wreck of my own failure.

You have been told about the Master Crystals. Nine of them, moved through the hyper-dimensional tunnel system with the assistance of the Sirian-Pleiadean Alliance, placed in dimensional lock beneath Arkansas and Brazil and Shasta and the Bimini bank and the caverns below Titicaca. That was Tyberonn’s work and it was extraordinary and it very nearly failed twice.

My work was different and less celebrated. My work was the records.

Everything the Atla-Ra had held for eleven thousand years had to be reduced to what could be carried, encoded, and hidden in forms that would survive not a flood but a dark age, which is a far more destructive thing. Data crystals. The skulls. The engraved plates for Alexandria and Giza and the Yucatan. Deciding, in a room, with a clock running, which knowledge would live and which would be permitted to die.

We saved perhaps a fifth. I want you to sit with that number. Four fifths of the accumulated understanding of the highest civilisation this planet has ever carried was consciously abandoned by a committee of exhausted beings choosing under time pressure, and I was on that committee, and some of the things I let go of I still grieve.

And I did not warn Kaleth. He was on the Council. To warn him was to lose everything. So I looked at the young man I had loved for forty years and I made an operational decision about him, and in that moment I became, in a small way, the thing I had spent my life declining to be.

I am not going to apologise for it. I am simply going to tell you that it happened, and that it was necessary, and that both of those are true at once, and that this is what it costs to finally engage with the world at the hour when engaging is far too late.

The Tunnels

I left through the Poseida terminus eleven days before the crash, with the last of the record crystals and forty-one others.

The tunnels were not tunnels in the way you would picture them. They were maintained hyper-dimensional corridors, and passage was not travel but a kind of controlled dissolution and reassembly, and it was deeply unpleasant even when everything functioned correctly, which by that point it did not, because the crystalline network powering them was already failing in patches.

We came out beneath the Arkansas crystal fields.

I have been asked what I felt walking away, and the honest answer is that I felt almost nothing, because I had made the decision to leave two years earlier and had been walking away in stages ever since. Grief arrived later, as it always does, once there was room for it.

Twelve days after we came through, the network went down entirely, and I understood what that meant, and I sat in a chamber a mile beneath a continent that would one day be called America and I felt the Earth move.

Poseida is under the water. Sha-Iren-Ra of the Temple of Knowledge is a name in no record that survived.

The Emerald City glowed green for eleven thousand years and there is not one person alive today who has seen it, and I am the last thing standing between it and complete erasure, and that is why I am speaking to you now.

Afterwards

Here is what nobody tells you about surviving the end of a world.

It is not the loss. It is the arithmetic afterwards. We came out with a fifth of the knowledge, twelve locations, and a species that had just been reduced to terrified survivors clinging to high ground across three continents, who within four generations would have lost writing, and within ten would remember the whole of Atlantis as a story about a god who was angry and chose to remove humankind. We could not rebuild. That was settled within the first year and it was settled by me, over considerable objection. We had the technology to construct a new Poseida, and I refused, and I refused for one reason which I will state as plainly as I am able.

We had just proved that we should not be trusted with it.

An order that cannot conceive of malice should not hold the power grid of a planet. We had held it in good faith and lost it in a single vote, and had we rebuilt, we would have rebuilt as the same beings with the same blindness, and it would have happened again, faster. So the decision was made to disperse rather than to concentrate. Never again a single crystalline capital with a single point of capture. Never again a technology so far ahead of the moral development of those holding it. And never again an elite exempt from the consequences of its own decisions, which had been the true poison all along and which I had lived comfortably inside for four thousand years.

The Twelve

The Sun Discs were not our invention. They were placed in the Lemurian age by the Sirian-Pleiadean Alliance, twelve of them, spiral rather than disc though they appear as discs, transducing cosmic frequency into terrestrial ley current and stabilising the planetary field. But after the Fall they were orphaned. The network that had coordinated them was at the bottom of the Atlantic in the form of several billion crystalline shards, and the discs sat inert and unread in twelve places across a world that no longer knew they existed. That became the work of the rest of my existence, and of my soul group, and of many others.

We did not create them. We re-coded them, one at a time, over a span of some four thousand years, and around each one we did something we had never done in Atlantis. We placed custodians. Not a priesthood exempt from control. Human beings of the surviving stock, given a fragment, a practice, an orientation, and no explanation of the larger structure at all, because the larger structure was precisely what had been captured last time.

Twelve locations. Twelve fragments. Twelve civilisations rising, in their own time and their own manner, each one carrying a portion and none carrying the whole.

Giza in Egypt which received the geometry and the stellar alignment, and the knowledge of the passage after death.

Lake Titicaca and the high Andes, which received the stone-working and the memory of the Sun as a living intelligence rather than a fire.

Minas Gerais in Brazil, which received the crystal cultivation and held it in the interior, quietly, for eleven thousand years.

Arkansas in USA, which received the guardianship, and whose people knew only that certain ground was not to be disturbed and never knew why, and who kept that trust more faithfully than any priesthood ever had.

The Urals, which received the metallurgy. Baikal, which received the shamanic transit, the practice of moving consciously between the worlds.

Xi’an in China, which received the ley science, what became your geomancy, the reading of the Earth’s currents in the placement of everything.

Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, which received the oldest thing of all, the direct oral continuity, the memory carried in the body and the voice rather than in any object, and which is why the deepest African lineages predate every temple you can name.

Lanka (Sri Lanka), which received the sound. The mantra, the tone, the understanding that resonance shapes matter, which had once powered a city and now had to be small enough to fit in a human throat.

Moorea and the Polynesian waters, which received the navigation, and the star-lore, and the knowing of a route across four thousand miles of open ocean without instrument.

Uluru in Australia, which received the Dreaming, and I will say that this was the most sophisticated placement of the twelve, because the custodians there were given not a technology but a method of remembering that requires no writing, no building and no institution, and which has therefore outlasted every other repository on this Earth and is functioning to this hour.

The northern isles of England, Wales and Scotland, the place that would much later hold a chapel at Roslyn, which received the least and was intended to, because its purpose was not to hold knowledge but to hold a door, and to keep it shut until the appropriate age.

Twelve. None sufficient alone. Each incomplete in a manner that would eventually oblige it to seek the others.

What I Would Have You Take

Examine your certainty that you are one of the good ones.

We were. We were not corrupt, not cruel, not greedy, not deluded about the nature of the Divine. We were, by any measure you could construct, the most spiritually advanced beings ever to walk this planet, and we lost a world, and we lost it precisely because of our virtue and not in spite of it. Our purity made us unable to model malice. Our detachment made us unable to descend into a fight that mattered. Our exemption from consequence made us unable to hear the man in front of us telling us, in every way except words, that our kindness had a ceiling in it.

Goodness is not a defence. It has never once been a defence. The Light does not protect you from being used, and the beings who are used most effectively are almost always the sincere.

So when you are certain that you are on the right side, and gentle, and above the grubbiness of the struggle, and that things will work out because the Light prevails: that is the exact moment. That is precisely and always the moment when someone who has thought about you for forty years is walking up the steps toward you with an open face and a real, clean, entirely honest field, and a locked room he does not yet know he is carrying.

Do not stop being good. Stop being certain that it is enough.I taught for three thousand years and this is the only lesson I am sure of, and it cost an ocean to learn.