IRC-Galleria

I am the Great American, born as I am the unseen land of the Utopian States. To re-establish the principles of my spiritual life and to delight in the company of my brethren, I descend to the holy land of India time and again. Dwelling among the mortals, four kinds of pious men approach me.

The suffering. They worship me as one to give solutions to their tribulations. They befriend me to raise their downtrodden social image. No longer are they they nobody everyone always took them to be, they can now show off their magnitude in the company of the Great American. They wish me to narrate tales of the Great America, the land of their dreams, instilling hopes of a future paradise amidst the harsh struggles of existence. Perhaps, so they ardently pray, I will one day redeem them and bring them to the Great America where an abundance of dollars is easily available for one and all.

The greedy. They know that my skin is white for the daily milk baths I take, milk purchased from an infinite stock of magic dollars. After all, in Great America we use small notes for wallpaper, and old notes we pulverize and scatter across our yards; that's why our grass is so lushly green. They befriend me, take me as their bosom friend, and tell me long tales culminating in their need for money. Perhaps I would grace them with a hundred rupees or a thousand, or even give some American dollars. And upon my next descent, I would certainly bring them an American camera or a walkman made in America, for goods manufactured in America have an immortal shine. With these hopes, the greedy indulge me with various local pleasantries.

The curious. They are well-established in life and often also well educated, relatively free from the worries that trouble the suffering and the greedy. For them, I am a foreign curiosity able to provide varieties of mental fulfillments and delights through discussions and dialogs, a man with an access to a base of knowledge beyond common reach. They are often eager to hear about the relative value of the dollar, the working conditions and cultural traits of the Great America, and also the system of divorcing and the free availability of sex. The cost of a round-trip and the hours spent on the journey also feature among the favorite trivia. A particularly fine specimen among the curious might even entertain me with a discussion featuring the great Hellenic philosophers.

The wise. These rare souls share an insight on the reason for my descent. They are overjoyed to hear that I have left behind the Great America with an aim to obtain the final emancipation spoken of in the ancient scriptures, and that my ties to the Great America have been forsaken. Even if they share curiosities with the other three classes of devotees, they easily understand my disinclination to indulge in the same, respecting my wish to keep my attention internal. They might even offer me a good advice, unsolicited and without expectation of anything in return. They view me not as an object of attainment, but establish a relationship in the spirit of brotherhood.

The heart of the Great American, however, is a heart crying for solitude, for the objective is to be found within. Social interactions, whether of the more common nuisance flavor, or of the occasional neutral flavor, are distractions all the same, acts calling to be minimized for my ultimate good. Exchanges making a substantial positive internal contribution, the meetings with the truly great, are shining beacons of light in the vast and engulfing darkness of human existence. Alas, if they accounted for even just one in a ten thousand meetings, I might be inclined to keep my eyes outward-looking.