Sphinx Speaks – The man arrived at the hour when the light first starting rising.

Many have come to this place before dawn – to experience what I have seen every day for millennia. Most come with a camera. A few come with a question. He came with neither, which is rarer, and which usually means the person does not know why they have come at all – but come all the same.

He was perhaps sixty. Everything about him was well made and quietly expensive, and he stood between my feet in the manner of a man accustomed to being the most senior person present. He looked up the way such men look at things: assessing, comparing, placing it somewhere in an order.

And then he said, to nobody, believing no-one and nothing would hear his words.

“I have come a long way to be here. Forty-four years I worked. I started at the bottom and worked my way up, just like climbing the pyramid, all the way to reach the top of my profession.”

He was not boasting, there was no one there to boast to. It was more of a declaration, a report, delivered at the end of a long forty-four year assignment, to the only thing in the area that seemed old enough and important enough to receive it.

The Stone Guardian of the Horizon that had faced the rising dawn of the eastern horizon for longer than anyone can honestly declare, didn’t turn to him and didn’t need to. The man heard the words:

“I care nothing for the position you believe you hold. I care not for who you believe you are. I will show you what you are”

He did not startle, it would be rare for people to do so, in that place, at that hour. They simply find that a thought has arrived which is not in their own voice, and he answered it before even deciding where it came from.

“It is not a belief. It is proven as a matter of record.”

” Records are the measurement of something. They are not the thing itself.” – came the instant response.

“Then what should I say – that the forty-four years was nothing?”

“I would have you say what you actually did, not just to declare where you finished.”

He was silent for a while, thinking of what reply he could give, cleverly, calculated and meaningful.

“I built something purposeful,” he said. “Two thousand people in four different countries. It did not exist and now it does. I made a great company , it is not a small thing and I will not apologise for it.”

“Apology is a currency the small use to purchase peace. I am asking a different question.”

“Then ask it plainly.”

“You have described a climb, now let us examine the shape you climbed. The pyramid stands on its base. Wide below, narrow above. Every stone at the top is carried by the stones beneath it, and each of those by more beneath them, and the whole of it rests upon a foundation that nobody ever sees and that is never mentioned in any story or account of the height. You stood at the peak and you called that success, and in doing so you counted only the distance from the ground to yourself.”

“Now turn it over.”

“Turn what over?”

“The pyramid. Set it upon its point. Balance the whole mass of it on that one stone, and stand beneath it. What is now above you?”

The man did not question or argue. Something in the body understands an image before the mind has finished processing it, and his shoulders registered it first – as a shrug.

“Everything you climbed over is now on top of you. Every stone you stood upon to reach the next is bearing down. This is simply accounting, performed in the only direction that produces a true figure. Gravity is now upon you. Let us look at what it weighs.”

He stood silently, waiting for what was to come.

“There was a woman in the fourth year.”

“There were a great many people, men and women.”

“There was a woman in the fourth year – whose work you presented as your own. Not intended maliciously. You were simply asked a question in a corridor, you had thirty seconds to explain. You chose not to say her name because saying it would have complicated a simple answer. You have not considered this in forty years.”

“I remember it.”

“You do now. That is different, and the difference is the whole of what I am.”

He said nothing.

“She left eighteen months later. Not just because of what you did but because several others did the same as you. None of you had considered what you did was wrong. Your portion was small, but it has weight and that weight is now above you.”

“That is not a fair way to count.”

“It is the only fair way to count. You counted the height. I am counting the mass. You have spent forty-four years measuring how far you had come and arrived declaring this – but no time at all measuring what came with you.”

“There was a man you kept.”

“Which man? What do you mean kept? You mean employed”

“You kept him. He was capable but he was cruel and the cruelty was efficient. You told yourself for ten years that his numbers justified the friction he created. Sixty people came and left beneath him. Some of them carry this still. His words carry in the voice and actions of others towards their own staff and their children. They do not remember how they learned it.”

“Well, I let him go.”

“You did so only when the risk of discrimination by him exceeded his value to you. That is calculation not correction, you know the difference, because you made it consciously, after a meeting with a disgruntled staff member on a Friday morning.”

He turned away towards the rising sun, which people do, when there is nowhere to turn to.

“My words are not given to break you. The weighing that counts only one direction is not a weighing at all.”

“There was a young man in the twentieth year who was to be dismissed and you would not permit it. You had no particular reason to intervene. You considered that he was showed potential, even though he was slow rather than stupid and that distinction mattered to you. Your instinct was correct. He is now responsible for four hundred people and he is careful with every one of them, and he is careful because the conversation you had with him in your office. You have forgotten but he has never forgotten.

“I don’t remember that.”

“No. You remember promotions and acquisitions and the year the revenue doubled. You remember what you were counting.”

There is much I don’t remember. It was forty-four years.

“You remember what you choose to remember. There was a policy you wrote in the thirtieth year, and nobody thanked you for it. It has prevented a specific harm happening to a specific number of people, none of whom know your name, and none of whom ever will. It is still operating. It will outlast you by many years and then it will be quietly superseded and nobody will remember the change and what came before it. You do not have it on your list. It is not on any list.”

“Then what verdict are you placing on me?”

“There is no verdict. You have misunderstood what is happening here, as all do when they are presented with their own actions. I am neither judge or jury. I am not weighing you against anyone else. I am not deciding anything, and there is no sentence I issue. You will return from here in the same manner you walked up to me. All your actions and words and thoughts create something. I am the shadow, the something casts when the light finally strikes it from the correct angle. Nothing has been added to you and nothing taken away – but nothing can be hidden away without the light shining upon it. Instead of standing in the Light that already shines on top of the Pyramid, you have simply been shown from beneath, which is the direction from which everyone else has been seeing you for the previous forty-four years, and which you have never once looked back.”

“Everyone else has seen all this?”

“Everyone else has seen their portion of it. The woman knows her part. The sixty know theirs. The young man in the car park knows his. Not one of them has the whole, because each of them stood in one place beneath the structure and experienced the weight that fell on them alone. You are the only person who holds the entire weight, because you are the only one who was present for all of it. That is the privilege of the peak, and it is the only privilege that survives the inversion. Everything else it gave you was borrowed from others.”

The sun was now shining brightly in the early morning sky. The darkness had faded away to reveal the new day that lay ahead.

“Now. You are sixty. The climb is finished and you will not make another the same. The question is what you do now, whilst standing on the ground with the mass above you. Most in your position aim to turn the pyramid back over, to set it on its base and resume looking at everything from the height it creates, and then spend the remaining years defending the number. This is comfortable and it can be sustained until the end. I have watched a great many men do it, they are not wicked, but they are not free either. A few remain inverted. They live with the mass above them, deliberately, and it is uncomfortable every day. But it does not become a burden of guilt but of accuracy. And a strange thing follows, which nobody predicts.”

“Which is what?”

“They become useful in a way they never were at the top. A man standing at the peak of a pyramid can congratulate himself on reaching the top but feel’s nothing beneath him. A man standing on the ground beneath an inverted pyramid focuses on the journey that brought him there and feels every stone.”

He stood for a long time after that – waiting for something, anything further.

“You may go. Nothing has been decided and nothing is required of you. There is no mercy granted – it is simply the truth about what this is.”

“But you will now find that you cannot un-see the underside, and that is not something I have done to you either. You had the account of all things the whole time. You never considered it in the direction that produces the true story, the shadow that the Light now shines upon.”

“Go and write down what you were shown here, whilst it is still sharp, because within a month the Ego will begin its work, and the work of the Ego is to reset the pyramid back on its base and tell you that the view from the top was the true one all along.”

He went down the road toward the gate as the light came properly across the plateau, and he looked, from behind, like a man carrying something. Which he was. He had been carrying it the whole time. He had simply been holding it at the wrong end.

There is a version of this available to you without going anywhere.

Take whatever you count as your achievement. Whatever you would say if a stranger asked what you have made of yourself. Hold that shape of it in mind, wide at the base, narrow where you stand.

Now invert it.

Ask not how far you rose but what the rising rested on. Name the people who are beneath the thing you built. Not the ones who benefited, since those come to mind unprompted and are the pleasant half of the memories. The ones who remembered all of what you did – with them.

Then, and this is the part everyone omits, count both directions well, and count it honestly. The quiet good you did that never made any list, that nobody attributed to you, that is still operating in someone’s life without your name attached. That is real, it is on the books, and refusing to count it is not humility, you own all that you have done. It is the same inaccuracy in the opposite direction, and an inaccurate weighing serves nobody. Both halves. The full mass. Above you rather than below.

The Guardian of the Horizon faces east and does not judge and never has. It simply stands at the angle where the light comes in, and casts the shadow, and waits for someone to come at the correct hour and look down instead of up.

With Love and Blessings ❤️

Paul Dobree-Carey / Polaris AB

Blue Ray Cosmic Messenger