VOLUME VII, CHAPTER 8, SECTION 3
Reaching for the Stars Is Innocent: the Guilt Is in the Heart That Would Ruin Home
The last two sections held the Mars claim to the light and found it grave. This section makes the telling-apart that keeps the whole chapter true, so that its answer is not mistaken for a war on the reaching toward the stars itself. To reach toward the stars is innocent, even good. The guilt is not in the reaching. It is in the heart that would use the reaching as a license to ruin the one home we have. Here the same law the book has laid throughout comes round once more: the guilt is never in the power or the deed, but in the heart, and the five, alive or gone, in it.
See first that the reaching is innocent, even good. To lift the eyes to the stars, to wonder what is out there, to build the means to look closer, to send instruments and even people to see, all this is among the finest reaching of the human heart. It is the love of all things, stretched to the farthest reach of the heavens. It is the guarding of what is handed down, carried outward to new ground. It is the good heart's wish to know, to see, to understand the vastness we are set in. The reaching toward the stars, in itself, is the five in flight, and there is no guilt in it. A child looking up at the night sky in wonder, a builder laboring to send an instrument to a far world, a dreamer picturing a human footprint on another ground, these are good, and this chapter says nothing against them. To explore is human, and to explore is fine.
Where, then, is the guilt? Not in the reaching, but in one particular turn of the heart that would fasten onto the reaching and use it wrongly. That turn says: since we can reach other worlds, the ruin of this one need not be feared. It takes the innocent reaching toward the stars and makes of it a license, a permission to spend and spoil the one home we have, because there is, supposedly, somewhere else to go. That turn is the guilt. And it lies not in the reaching, which is innocent, but in the heart that would so use it, a heart with the five gone out, no love for the living things of this Earth that would be ruined, no mercy for the billions who cannot leave, no good heart to ask what it does when it treats the one home of the many as a thing to be used up and walked away from. The reaching is the innocent deed. The heart that would abuse it is the guilt.
This is the same law the book has laid at every turn. The tool is innocent, and the guilt is with the heart that set it on the person's place. The power over the Earth is innocent, and the guilt is with the heart that wields it with the five gone out. The reaching toward the stars is innocent, and the guilt is with the heart that would use it as a license to ruin home. In every case, do not turn on the deed or the power or the reaching, for these are innocent and can serve good. Turn to the heart, and guard the five in it. The reaching toward the stars, in a heart with the five alive, is a glory: it explores, it wonders, it widens what humankind can see, and it never once loosens the resolve to keep Earth whole, for that heart knows Earth is the one and only home. The same reaching, in a heart with the five gone out, becomes the excuse for spending the paradise: not the exploring but the excuse is the harm, and the excuse comes from the heart, not the exploring.
So the two are held apart, cleanly. Reach for the stars, and let that reaching be all it can be, wonder, exploring, the love of all things stretched to the heavens. And at the very same time, hold with all one's strength to this: Earth is the one and only home, the one and only paradise, and it must be kept whole, always, never spent, never abandoned, never treated as a thing that may be ruined because there is somewhere else to go. There is nowhere else to go. The reaching and the keeping are not enemies. A heart with the five alive does both at once: it looks up in wonder and it guards the ground beneath its feet. Only the heart with the five gone out sets them against each other, using the wonder above as an excuse to spoil the ground below.
And so this chapter closes on the same ground as the last. Earth is paradise, the only one. Mars is no way out, for it gives none of the seven gifts, and the claim that we may abandon Earth would spend the home of the many for the escape of a few. Yet the reaching toward the stars is innocent and good, and the guilt is only in the heart that would abuse it. Everything, once more, comes back to the five, alive in the human heart. Guard the five, and the age's vast power, and its far reaching, and its wonder at the stars, all serve the keeping of the paradise and the good of the living. Let the five go out, and the same power, the same reaching, become the means and the excuse of ruin. Keep Earth. Keep the five. Reach for the stars with a heart that would never spend the ground it stands on. The next chapter turns from the ground and the stars back to the innermost heart of the whole book, the great love beneath every word of it: originally, not a single thing, and a great love remains in the human world.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.