Childhood’s End

In Clarke’s novel all the kids on earth—and it’s just the little kids, the ones who haven’t yet reached puberty—some genetic switch flicks, and they all spontaneously evolve an über-mind-meld that flashes around the entire globe. Mind alters and consciousness expands. So radical in fact is the meld, the altering, the expansion that the kids no longer possess minds as we know them:

They have no more identity than the cells in your own body. But linked together, they are something much greater.

Childhood’s End, p. 221.

What happens is that the kids spontaneously mind-meld and simultaneously (a) they lose the ‘me’ that individuates and separates them, and (b) they are possessed, taken over by “something much greater.”

The kids engage in what Clarke calls “the Long Dance”:*

Three million of them, moving in a controlled pattern over a whole continent. We’ve analyzed that pattern endlessly, but it means nothing, perhaps because we can see only the physical part of it—the small portion that’s here on Earth. Possibly what we have called the Overmind is still training them, molding them into one unit before it can wholly absorb them into its being.

Childhood’s End, p. 221.
*Parenthetically, Clarke’s image of the Long Dance, all the kids in lock-step, strikes me as thoroughly wrongheaded and utterly antithetical to the “molding” we actually need to trigger our evolutionary leap, our “inconceivable metamorphosis,” as Clarke so wonderfully phrases it. I’ll get back to the Long Dance in a future post.

The kids are in fact an entirely new life form, 

utterly alien

Clarke tells us,

yet it is something wonderful.

Childhood’s End, p. 201.

Alien and wonderful. Or good and terrible, as Dick would have it—but ‘terrible’ in the sense Jacob used the word when he awoke trembling from his dream of wrestling all night with an angel and said,

How terrible is this place! this is no other but the house of God, and the gate of heaven.

Genesis 28:17

Indeed, the kids stand at the gate of some ‘heaven’—some higher dimension, some parallel realm in which they will experience reality in a way beyond our conceiving. Ultimately, they transcend the physical entirely—as Jesus does, as Obi-Wan and Luke do—but in their case lasing into a beam, or rather a being of pure consciousness.

In a soundless concussion of light, Earth’s core gave up its hoarded energies.

There was nothing left of Earth: They had leeched away the last atoms of its substance. It had nourished them through the fierce moments of their inconceivable metamorphosis.

Childhood’s End, p. 236; Clarke’s italics.

“There was nothing left of Earth” is most telling. Like Jesus shows his disciples, like Obi-Wan shows Luke, Clarke’s Kids show us that matter dematerializes when mind ceases to make it so. “Matter is plastic in the face of Mind,” as Dick says.

VALIS, Appendix, ¶ 4, p. 257.

Dick and Clarke show us two sides of the same coin. The one side, transubstantiation. How the matter appears to the senses matters not; only the mind can perceive the Real Presence of what’s really present. The flip side, Jesus, Obi-Wan, Luke, the Earth itself actually dematerialize. Matter is only and always nothing other than the Real Presence of Mind.

Clarke’s Kids’ inconceivable metamorphosis isn’t mere fiction, Dick tells us:

The machinery for this transformation … is at work now; in eternity it is already accomplished.

VALIS, p. 268.

In fact, we don’t have to take even Philip K. Dick’s word for it and we don’t even have to wait for eternity.

---

Father Francis Tiso, a Catholic priest, has written an astonishing book about the phenomenon of the rainbow body in Tibetan Buddhism. The rainbow body is pretty much exactly what Obi-Wan manifests when…

Coming 12 November 2021