Steven K. Berry - Straight Up: Himalayan Tales of the Unexpected

On the face of it the real world seems so ordinary, normal, simple even. There are the trees and their leaves, grass, plants and animals, insects, the earth itself, clouds and rain, stone and sky. So it would seem with the lives we have; we eat, we defecate, we sleep, we breathe, we move, we reproduce. Why should there be anything fantastical beyond this natural world? Why shouldnt mankind have stuck with hunting, growing things and protecting himself from his neighbours? After all thats what all the other creatures do. On the face of it everythings so normal. It should be normal, but then again its not. Reality in fact is not the slightest bit normal. The universe stretches to infinity in every direction, crowded with an infinite number of galaxies each containing such vast numbers of stars and solar systems that our stretched minds find it hard to cope. In the other direction our scientists tell us that everything is made of invisibly small spinning objects whose vast numbers are even more difficult to comprehend. Abnoreality is a very big thing indeed.

Well, even if reality is composed of an incomprehensible collection of scattered matter, that could be soaked up by sanity, provided it all followed a set of logical rules, but there do appear to be some pretty strange things going on behind the scenes. Life has designed some staggeringly clever things which for my money cannot just be passed off by theories of natural selection. At an atomic level DNA shows an intelligent manipulation of matter. This process of eggs and sperm coming together in a variety of inventive ways; thats not just luck, and sorry, but I dont believe that a billion creatures flung themselves off cliffs flapping their appendages until one day two of them rose into the air and started breeding as seagulls. Behind a front of normality, which we grow up to so readily accept, there are stranger forces at work.

Not just in the matter of creation, or the creation of matter, but in how the past, present and future are connected, how we as people are joined in inexplicably odd ways, how fate has a hand in normality, how every now and then there are solid markers to tell us we are going in the right direction, or not, as the case may be. How occasionally there are outrageous experiences which occur to dumbfound our conditioned selves. Telepathy, astral travel, levitation, communication with the afterlife, faith healing, visions of the future to name but one or two talents our motley race chances on from time to time. Even through our science we have almost inadvertently discovered we can speak to each other by the use of fashionable handsets, freeze time on celluloid, send moving pictures at the speed of light, look in detail at the insides of our bodies, and catapult metal objects to the far reaches of our solar system and beyond.

So why should we expect things to be normal, they patently are not, and we have every right to expect extraordinary forces to be working on a plan for our lives. Had I been asking these questions in Mediaeval times I no doubt would have believed God had the answers. Now all I see is a host of arrogant religions claiming ownership of the patents to the infinite, and fighting each other for the right to exist. A whiff of the absolute no doubt touches the mental nostrils of every culture but the existence of one God to rule them all; I doubt it. All the religions have got it wrong and mankind will continue his search for appropriate questions to discover the ultimate truths of the universe. All the tools we have in our individual search for perfection are the subtle power of words, and emotions to set them free. Will exemplary characters emerge wielding words to provide the all powerful answers in the end? Possibly. In any case forget normality; we are now a far cry from the simple, normal life of breeding and farming.