Why Nature Grew Humans
A Maybe So Story
(With A Tip Of The Cap To Rudyard Kipling)
by Ramón Sender Barayón (1979)

 It all began, dear hearts, way back when the earth was mostly oceans, and the sun rarely shone through the clouds. But already the waters teemed with beasties of every shape and size. One day a daring youngster set out to discover the limits of the universe. Where did it go but straight up into the brighter realms, pushing higher despite the blinding bliss? At last it came to the edge of death and nothingness, and what did it see but a mirror image of itself staring back. When it moved, this strange sky self moved. Oh, how it yearned to merge with that shining image! But whenever it jumped, it fell back choking and gasping.
 It didn't take long for this sky dance to become the rage among the younger set, especially on those days when a special golden brilliance poured down from the heights. When the fierce eye beyond nothingness was identified by later and more evolved water creatures, she was greeted as 'The Sky Mother,' and Sky Self, the mirror image that always guarded the death barrier, the Daughter of The Sky Mother. What great sport to swim up and touch trembling snouts with your own true sky self!
 For our fishy sun-worshippers, calm water days were their favorites, their 'sabbaths,' when The Sky Mother's unruffled image poured energy into the oceans. When continents and islands emerged from the primordial deeps, the congregations discovered the pleasures of dancing in the shallows. Leaping in a synchronized ballet, they could merge with their other halves and taste for a glorious instant the blissful union with the Light.
 One day a water sister tumbled onto the beach by accident and by good luck was washed out by the next wave.
 "What a hit!" she burbled to her friends. "Your whole life passes backwards before your eyes!"
 The danger of the game only made it more zestful, and before long surfing outdistanced even the Sky Dance in popularity. It became the next great youth fad and evolved, as it still remains today, into a type of sun yoga. What fun to frolic on the fringes of the Upper Limits and find out how much bliss you could tolerate!
 The older fish were very shocked at the 'self-destructive behavior of the young'. Sometimes whole schools, caught up in a mating frenzy with the light, beached themselves by the thousands. Flapping helplessly in a fiery ecstasy, they gasped the air they were not equipped to breathe, relived their brief sojourns planetside and died.
 Finally one strange-looking, runty little guy stranded himself for God on the sand. "Hey, what's the big religious deal?" he said, looking around. "This is a cinch! I'm breathing the stuff, and it's probably habit-forming." A lucky mutation had provided him with lungs, and he was a creature of two dimensions, ocean and air.
 Amphibians fulfilled the fishes' dream of living in the golden realms with the Sky Mother. But they paid for the privilege by the loss of The Sky Daughter, their reflection in the world above. Instead, they stared down at themselves mirrored in ponds and puddles, and became quite vain for creatures as homely as they were.
 If the first Great Leap Upward was onto the beach, the second was into the air. Of course it all happened in easy stages, the amphibians first evolving forms that could stay out of the water all the time. Then a number of branches on the tree of life budded into airborne models. Of course one reason for the amphibians launching themselves further than their tongues could reach was the tastiness of the insects who, as meals on wings, watched all this evolutionary activity with a great deal of paranoia. It all seemed to be aimed at catching them for lunch.
 Increasing one's bliss tolerance probably was the first game ever played and no doubt will be the last. However I believe a deeper reason underlay this general lift-off, the same one that had spurred the fishes upwards -- the love affair with the Sky Mother.
 For many millions of years the Life Form remained caught up in the serious business of survival within the lower reaches of the air ocean, hugged to Mama Gaia's bosom. Yet if the phototropic urge to dive into the light ever was to be satisfied, gravity would have to be overcome. And so it was that nature evolved humans as beings intelligent enough to make the third Great Leap Upward -- into space. The planet seemed determined to create its own spores that could shoot out into the universe, like a plant wanting to seed itself.
 In common with the leaping salmon and the flying squirrel, humans-in-space were pioneers in a new dimension that could kill them unless special precautions were taken, but which expanded the awareness of their environment immeasurably.
  "Okay," you say. "So everyone wanted to discover how closely they could merge with the sun without crisping the body. But what is the Ultimate Purpose? Why this senseless rush to the sun, like a moth blinded by a candle? Why are we the way we are?"
 The real reason, the purpose of it all, so long in coming, I will now share with you, dearest of hearts.
 Once upon a time, Old Great-To-The-Tenth-Power Grandpa Lemuel, or 'Lem' or 'Ul' -- or even '!'  -- famous in certain mystical circles as Yod Unmanifest, Dreamer of All and Everything, was snoozing under his sombrero down by the old fishin' hole, the Pool of All Possibilities. Suddenly the fishline tied to his big toe jiggled. He sat up fast, reeled in the line -- hm, nothing! He crouched there, leaning over the water, and then caught a glimpse of his reflection and -- he saw an old man with a long white beard. Sorry about that, all you more sophisticated religious types. Now this came as a big surprise to Great10 Grandpa Lem because he had always assumed, quite naturally inasmuch as he was Endlessness Himself, that he was immortal.
 "I'm getting old!" he shouted that day beside the Pool of All Possibilities upon the halcyon slopes of Paradise in the Total Perfection of the Absolute Sun. He counted his wrinkles and white hairs in his beard before crying sweet tears. And as he cried, he picked up his guitar or oud or psaltery -- whatever you call it -- and sang The Death Rattle Reincarnation Blues from start to finish, missing only three Grand Barré's and a high G sharp. These are the verses and chorus.
[The 'arrrgh's' are inhaled loud snores, and the "Pfffffft's" are Bronx Cheer/raspberries].
 
The Death Rattle What-In-Tarnation Reincarnation Blues
 
Oh, I went on down, to the fishin' hole,
All tranquil -- without a care.
My face stared back, all wrinkled and old,
The marks of death were there.

Oh arrrrrrrrrrgh!  (gargle in the back of throat)
Pffffffffffffffft!  (do a razzberry - a 'Bronx cheer')
It's the Death Rattle What-In-Tarnation Blues!
 
Let me go, let me go, to the ocean sublime,
And ease my aches away.
Let me seed myself through the ages of time,
So death's dues I won't have to pay.

Oh arrrrrrrrrrgh! Pffffffffffffffft!
It's the Death Rattle  What-In-Tarnation Blues!

Well, it's just plain hard, to live alone,
And keep yourself in tune.
Much better to find yourself a friend,
To howl with at the moon.
 
Oh arrrrrrrrrrgh!
Pffffffffffffffft!
It's the Death Rattle What-In-Tarnation - Reincarnation - Take-A-Vacation - Blues!
 
 Every note of this bluesiest of blues became a ripple in the Pool of All Possibilities and each ripple a universe, and our universe is the third chord in the second line of the final verse (accompanying the word 'tune' for you esoteric types). His song quantum'd out in all directions and became manifest as All Time Everywhere in which a light century of ours is but a millisecond, a tachyon, a 'zt'. Old Ancient of Days Kingfish, crying and laughing and singing out across the waters from his perch, while coruscating galaxies coalesced and dissolved, while even in the coldest, deepest reaches of the pool something that was nothing stirred and resonated to his voice.
 Ah, Halcyon the Kingfisher, who combs the water for his water brothers, who completes the fish-to-frog-to-human climb into a circle by preying on us as we pray. His tears are the soul-essence-spirit-spark of our reality, the nothingness-sperm-hydrogen Great-To-The-Tenth-Power Grandma Hattie spins into dust clouds of baby stars.
 Grand10 Grandma Hattie ('Aditi' to you Sanskrit scholars), creator of all us Milky Way creatures, Queen Bee of our heavenly hive, tirelessly giving birth to great ionized clouds of hydrogen trillions of miles in diameter. They swirl out along her arms while she spins the energy from hand to hand
 Ol' Kingfish, she's thinking, that no-count husband of mine! Always dropping by for a quickie while she was still dozing before dawn. Well, she bed him and fed him and packed him off to the fishin' hole. Once he was out of her hair, she could get back to the serious business of preserving the realm by her endless efforts. What a cornucopia of good things she was! And Great10 Grandpa Lem loved and appreciated her mightily in spite of his roving ways. On their eight billionth anniversary he wrote her a song that actually made it into the Old Testament (check Proverbs 31:10 under The Sayings of Lemuel). It's the original alphabet song which Hollywood transformed into 'A you're adorable, B you're so beautiful, C you're the creature I adore! D you're delightful and E you're exciteful and F you are mine forevermore!'
 "Alright, so enough fun and games," you say. "How does the creation of all these dreamy universes guarantee Great10 Grandpa Lem his immortality?"
 Let's first take a closer look at what was really going on. Great10 Grandpa Lem, realizing that in spite of being Eternal Endlessness he was undergoing a gradual diminution of himself, split himself in two for the sake of some company and also so his 'better half' could plunge into the chaos of Time and duplicate his essence within all cosmic dimensions. Great10 Grandma Hattie took his seeds -- or tears, if you will -- and scattered them throughout the fields of space, an effort that took all her energy for quite a while. The first generation born included all the oldest stars, the red giants and dwarfs which pack together to form the dense central globe of our spiral. The second and third generations produced the blue giants and dwarfs, one of which is our Mother/Father Sun. Then Great10 Grandma produced seed-spores containing the DNA blueprint for planetary life and blew them like dandelion fluff through the infinite reaches. Wherever conditions were right, the spores took hold. The wonderful thing about them was that they were designed to replicate in the microdimensions all the characteristics of their originators, even on frozen energy surfaces of planets such as ours.
 It was damn hard work, but Great10 Grandma had help. Within the central core of older stars there evolved beings who could travel our galaxy -- shall we call them angels or Faralongeers? As the first snouty sprouts of baby beings poked their noses out of the primeval soup on Mama Gaia, along came a podful of Great-Grandma's intrepid Astral Gardeners headed up by none other than Metatron, the Seraph Sustainer, and Archangel Rafael, in charge of our solar system. Metatron preferred to be called by her ancient Persian name 'Farun Faro Vakshur' and stood as high as the clouds while squads of angelic specialists fanned out to check things out under the watchful eyes of Sealiah and Sofiel, the angels of fruits and vegetables.
 They poked into corners and tapped on shells. "Well, how far along are you?" they asked, and put a glowing ear down close to hear the tiny voice reply.
 They tried to boost things along a notch so that before too long a grateful-to-the-tenth-power grandchild would come along who could get his antigravity shit together and light out for the stars to start helping out. After all, there will come a day when even the biggest and brightest of stars will dim, and mankind's destined task is to go out and stoke up the celestial furnaces. So there you have it, the why-and-wherefore of it all. What? You don't believe me? Well, I can't promise this is exactly the way it is, but it sure may be so.

The Reset Button Theory
A 1998 Addendum

 Having given some further thought to this question, I've decided that humans may have been evolved as the reset-button-pushers for the universe -- or at least for our solar system. However one way that Great10 Grandpa Lem could make sure that the universe would not run away with itself forever or grow cold and dim was to create an ever-more-curious critter that always wondered, "Now what if I put these two things together and turned on the ---- OH SHI--!"
 As physicists investigate the Big Bang instant more and more closely, attempting to recreate the forces unleashed in that first micro-micro second, they build devices that duplicate that first spark ever more closely. Perhaps some day one of them will be able to reach the amazing temperatures required and -- WHOOM!!! -- the whole darn city-continent-planet-solar system -- galaxy? -- will explode into a mega-supernova that absorbs all of space/time into itself in a faster-than-light twenty-seven-dimensional unbelievable cataclysm.
 We are Great10 Grandpa Lem's reset button! It may be so!