Separation

A Short Story by Scott Newell
©2012, all rights reserved

Elder Cynthia entered the room. Everyone quieted and turned to face her.

"Good morning everyone."

"Good morning," replied a chorus of voices.

Elder Cynthia moved to a pillow along one wall of the room and motioned for everyone to sit down.

"Today we are starting a grand experiment. I see that many of you have met Maria, if you haven't had the chance yet you will soon enough. Maria arrived yesterday from Seattle, where she lived close to her mother, father and brother Ashton, whom you all know very well. Maria's mother, Andrea, and father, David, are old family friends and long time friends of Dr. Algiers. As you also know David became confused and disassociated yesterday as a result of his last cycle out and had to be rescanned into the memory banks until we can find a solution to his condition. It is auspicious enough for us to have his daughter here as we begin this grand experiment, yet even more so because Maria has brought an innate ability to our group which is essential to our moving forward."

Maria felt a wave of anxiety flood through her. Almost as quickly she felt a strong sense of security and immediately began feeling at ease again.

Elder Cynthia continued, "For many years now I have been tracing a belief system attempting to get back to it's origins in our human history, and trying to understand how and why we as a species devolved in the way we did, leading up to the great falling. There was a time when we communicated amongst each other without speech. There are many examples still in the animal world where this occurs, when a pack of wolves is hunting together, when a flock of birds turns at the same instant, when crows congregate en-mass, and there are other examples where we know that communication is happening without sounds or speech."

"I asked myself how did we get to a place where we are separate from each other and must use words to communicate? I know that many of us have become proficient at communicating without words using visual images and that we can communicate over great distances using that practice, yet I feel that there is more to this than what we have yet explored. I suspect that the origin of our separation coincided with a change in our physical brains. Bear in mind that even discussing our brains as I am about to, is making an assumption and a great simplification about what our brain's functions are. We have assumed for many generations that our thought processes are centered in our brains and a function of the brain's activity. There are numerous reasons to believe that this is not the whole story, that our consciousness is not contained inside our skulls and perhaps not even centered there."

"There was a time when the two halves of our brains were connected more fully and it is suspected that we used far more of our brains then than we do now. Early in our evolution as a species our brains divided into our bi-cameral minds with a limited connection between the halves. The communication over the connecting bridge seems to predominately be words, just as I am now communicating to you with words. Besides the words of which we have a conscious awareness there is also a non-verbal communication which can best be described as intuition. Of course, intuition encompasses more than the two halves of the brain, it is also connected to our surroundings and our environment. As we grew through the ages many of our ancestors began to rely on the verbal communication and the thought awareness and we diminished our intuitive, non-verbal communication, even to the point of degrading it as though there were a grand competition between the two and only one could be the victor."

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