Outlands Community USA

LLAM:  I wanted to congratulate you, the whole lot of you!

ROY:  Why, thank you, Llam!

LLAM:  It looks like we've had quite a few visitors these past couple of days.  Perhaps this is a good thing.

ROY:  Well, it's like how we do everything for free, you know?  The numbers are nice but it's the fact that we've simply done the impossible and no-one had to pay a dime for it.

LLAM:  That's an old hippie thing with you, isn't it?

ROY:  Uh, hippie thing?

LLAM:  Yes!  You said that during the 1960s you had hoped that the world would change over to not using money.  Did you really think that that would occur?

ROY:  Maybe in my wildest dreams, but I think I knew that it wasn't gonna happen.  Still, I've done a lot of things for free over the years, although I gotta say, sometimes my heart wasn't in it.

LLAM: Then why on earth would you do it?

ROY:  Negative as I was, I would hope that someone would notice that not everything has a price.

LLAM:  I guess that this is something that I'll never really understand about mortal life.  It seems that everything has a pricetag.  Sara was having a chat with Doctor Hamza the other day about that, and I marvelled at how well he understood that there is no money and no power in the unobstructed universe.  Usually people want money or power for things.

ROY:  Things are like vapors.  They may seem solid, but they're just a bunch of photons.  Long ago we put values on things.  In American culture we have a saying, "You can't take it with you."

LLAM:  I daresay that some have tried.

ROY:  You're familiar with the ancient Greek satirist, Lucian?

LLAM:  Only modestly so.

ROY:  He wrote a number of semi-philosophic dialogues, "Dialogues of the Dead."  They were humorous for the most part, but Lucian seemed to have grasped the fact that the rich and powerful will be pretty miserable in the afterlife.  And that the poor will be relieved of their troubles.  And he did it without making it seem like being dead is better than being alive.

LLAM:  That was something that only the Church could have thought up.  Except they seem to have turned that on its head, giving people the idea that no matter what they did they were going to go to hell.  What an awful concept.  But hey there, we have rambled off-topic here!  I just wanted to publicly say thank you, all of you, for the hard work on the Learn Telepathy Quickly thing.