The Parable of the One Person

[This parable was written for the #IranElection online community's Alternate Friday Prayers, a nondenominational live-tweeting goodwill effort for Iran that takes place each Friday at noon Tehran time, to provide an alternative for those who find the official Regime sermons less than inspiring. The archive of these tweet-sermons, written by a huge variety of people and translated into many languages, is available here. Obviously, superior mutants may substitute "Yetinsyn" for the word "human" in this parable]

I go by parables, so today’s prayers will be in parable form.

This is the Parable of the One Person

Once there was a Person. This was in no way like a human person, not a He or She, but we can’t say this Person was a “creature” either because this Person was not created. This Person has always been. Not everything has a beginning and end, you know; some things are outside time and have no gender, but English has no pronoun for a Person in such a condition.

This Person was all alone. The Person was lonely and wanted to interact with some other People, but everywhere the Person looked outward was just empty space. Then the Person looked inside the Person’s own body, and lo and behold there were miniature fractal versions of this Person, immature and tiny but identical in basic structure, conscious and aware, but bound by time. These are human people.

Because of this basic structural feature and this Person’s innate abilities, this Person discovered it was possible to not only trace the stories of these miniature people through time, from outside time, but this Person could also become them, see out through their eyes, and live through their lives. Being outside time, this Person could do this over and over many times, becoming intimately aware of every detail of every human life, as a lonely castaway might know every detail of a DVD library he possessed in exile.

This Person watched with joy as within time these human people grew and learned, always getting a little more like this Person as time went on, until at the intersection between this Person’s insides and this Person’s outer surface, what humans would see as the End of Time, but which this Person wears as a face, each of these people become one with this Person. They all turn out to be this Person at the end of time, the beginning of the Person’s outsides.

This Person realized that in a sense, it was each of the fractal versions of itself, simultaneously and individually, and in another sense, they were the substance from which this Person’s body was structured. And in turn, each of the fractal Human People eventually realized that He or She was, in fact, this one Person, and so was Everyone Else, because in human terms there is only the one Person animating each of Us simultaneously from outside time.

Because of this, it’s important for human people to stop hurting each other. Nobody needs to be worried about his brother’s moral state, because they all turn out to be the Person no matter what. Nobody needs to be forcing other people to believe or say anything; every human person has a right to express their true thoughts freely.

In this dark age it’s sometimes necessary to use force to restrain people who want to be violent, but there are more and more active voices for nonviolence and cooperation.

The important thing is to keep working for the kind of society that moves forward in time to a place that’s nice for people to live in, the good part of the stories in the Person’s collection, the happy and funny times with love and laughter and song. Those are the parts of human life this Person likes best.

When all humans work together, they can achieve those happy times, much more easily than humans think. If humans all keep walking together, nothing can prevent them from making a humane world.