Chapter 08: The Woman Who Wanted to Be God

 

Upon completion of my first journey to this new planet, I returned to my home world. I was reassigned to cover a new phenomenon. Throughout the history of the Mega-Universe, many life forms had had many different beliefs regarding their own creation and creators.

Many of the life forms had individuals from their world step forward and claim to be this creator. There were also many groups which had formed to pay homage to the belief in such an individual, while losing sight of everything that they had once told them. Most of these decided to go to the heaven of their god.

There was an interesting woman on one of the nearby planets. While she was on her planet, she was not revered as being a god. She was not revered at all and in fact, she spent most of her time in a mental institution. She believed that she was a god, but the others of her time believed that she was insane.

In the Mega-Universe, there were no mental institutions. The life of the universe believed that she wanted to be a god and to be loved as a god. I was sent to follow this so-called god.

Throughout her life, she had been laughed at. Despite this fact, all she really wanted was love. Now she was in power, and like those of her time who found themselves in positions of power, she exercised it freely.

She started with a small group of believers who would follow her. She taught them that it was the feces of the bovine species that was the source of eternal life. All her followers had to do was to bathe in it three times a day to achieve everlasting life.

Since our beliefs were such that we would not refuse any life its request, we started bathing in feces. It was quite hard to do since we had no bovines who produced feces because they all lived on light. We asked some of them to start eating grass which had sacrificed themselves for the love of this woman.

This made the woman very happy. For the first time in her life, she was being respected as the prophet she knew she was. She continued to preach. She told the people that only she should decide when they were to mate and the people listened. She chose mates for her followers only once every other year.

She continued on this way and very slowly turned to other facets. One of the most interesting facets of the religious life had been the belief that a life form had to be given up to the being to which it prayed.

The woman commanded that living sacrifices be performed and she found pleasure in eating the sacrifices.

Throughout this time, she was becoming more doubtful about what she was doing. She did not quite understand the changes that had taken place both to her and to the society. She asked herself about the origins of the universe and her own origins. She could not understand why she did not know how she started it all. She was beginning to feel disturbed over the inadequacy she was finding in herself.

In deep despair, she decided that perhaps she was not a prophet or a god, but a living being born without the power she had always believed she had. She tried to suppress this fact by having two virgins sacrificed to her.

These new thoughts left her feeling constantly ill at ease. She had never questioned her own abilities before.

The love that she wanted was being given to her willingly, but she was beginning to worry about her own inadequacies. Before, she was not given love and needed to hide in her imaginary glory and power. Now that need was gone, and as it disappeared, so did the need to be a god.

As this feeling left her, she realized that she was receiving love from those she was destroying. She wondered how she could be so terrible and still be so loved.

The day she decided that she was not a god was a distressing day for her. Several hundred life forms had been sacrificed to her. She saw people walking around with cow shit all over them. This upset her to say the least. She realized the atrocities she had committed. She realized the inadequacies of her own being and what she could accomplish. She decided that her life was no longer worth living. The only way to pay for the crimes she had caused to the life of this beautiful new world was to pay with her own life.

First, she ordered the life forms who were her subjects to kill her in a sacrifice to herself. She told them that this would make her more powerful than ever, and would make them good in her sight.

None of them could kill what they loved so much. They also sensed in her mind a dread of the death that she now asked for. They knew that she really did not want to die.

When she realized that they knew what she was trying to do, she was even more confused. She realized how wonderful the minds were that were obeying her. She realized that their minds were superior to her own and she could not understand how they could sacrifice themselves to her.

She went to the altar, laid on it, and tried to cut her own heart out, pushing the knife deep into her breast. But as with Chuck, she was not injured because the skin healed as it was cut.

Next, she ran from the room in terror, heading into the street. She took one of the vehicles and roared off into space. Once in space, she turned the vehicle around and tried to run it into the planet. The vehicle stopped itself because it was alive and loved her. The vehicle, knowing her fear, would not allow the life it loved to die.

She pushed open the door of the vehicle and stepped out into space. This should have killed her, but it did not. She found herself floating there alive despite the fact that she knew she had to be dead.

Fear welled up in her. Perhaps this was the hell her people had believed in. Perhaps the loneliness she experienced out here, alive but untouched, looking down on a living world that she could not reach, was the punishment that she deserved.

As she felt this terror, it was lifted from her. Suddenly, she was on the planet’s surface, alive and well, but very bewildered. In her mind, she sensed the being that called itself God.

This being said, “Why do you fear? There is no hell for you. For years, you were tormented by the life forms of your own culture. You were tormented to the point that your mind turned to insanity to make you feel the love and the power that every individual needs. You made yourself a god. I do not hate you for this, nor does the life of this time. They love you, as I do.”

His words made her feel even worse, and she broke down and cried. Even though she felt the love of the life around her, the thought of those who loved her and died for her pierced her soul. There before her was the true God and the knowledge that he loved her and wanted her to live was the greatest thing that had ever happened to her.

She said, “My Lord, I apologize for what I have done to you and to these people. I thank you for sparing me and ask you to spare the life that I destroyed in my vain search for my sanity.”

God said, “I will restore them, but your search was not in vain. You have achieved the goal your mind sought when it began this charade. You are now a healthy person able to exist in harmony in this world. You now know the way of these people.”

Around her were the thousands of life forms she had humiliated or destroyed. Together their minds said, “We let you do this because we love you.”