Goan' tell you chillen a lil' story now, and hope ya's listenin'.

Once upon a time (or, as we start Fairy Tales in the South, "Y'all Ain't Gonna Believe This Shit, But..."), there was a planet, upon which creeped, crawled, and waltzed a multitude of creatures. The majority of them were six-legged, but we are not concerned with them. Instead, we focus on a tiny minority of domesticated primates who built pyramids and wrote books and hoped to escape the planet one day and enter the Galactic Community, for they had forseen that a planetary-based culture was an eventual death sentence, since their entire culture was largely based primarily on the refining of a non-renewable natural resource.

These were very clever primates, excellent at mimicry and even occasionally capable of creative thought. However, they had, over the last 4 or five generations, stagnated. They denied this, of course, pointing at the works they had wrought, but refusing to see that each step forward was countered with another step back somewhere else.

The problem was that they did not know they were misusing their brains. Only about 2 percent of the primates used their brains for fun and profit; the rest used their brains for misery and failure, and thought that something was wrong with the universe, and they called this the Problem Of Evil.

Experts on the Problem Of Evil were known as "theologians". They were very erudite primates, skilled in primate logic, who wrote long books trying to answer the question "Why did God create an imperfefct universe?" 'God' was their name for the hypothetical biggest-alpha-male-of-them-all. Being primates, they couldn't conceive of things being run without an alpha male in charge of it. They assumed that the universe was imperfect because it wasn't set up for the pleasure and convenience of the primates. It wasn't set up for the pleasure and convenience of the six-legged majority, either, but they weren't bothered by this. The comfort of planetside species has very little to do with the cosmic drama. A few of the primates realized this. They were known as cynics. Cynics were primates that realized the monotonous life/death cycle of terrestrial life, but did not have imagination enough to conceive of future evolution once longevity and escape velocity had been attained.

Planetary life is cyclical. For instance, the six-legged majority followed a life-script of four (or more) stages. In general, the pattern was: (1) an embryonic or egg form, (2) the larval period, (3) the pupal or chrysalis stage, and (4) the adult insect. During each stage, the biot (or biological unit - the so-called 'individual') passed through a metamorphosis where it was partially or totally transformed.

The same was true of the domesticated primates. Most passed through, and kept neurological circuits characteristic of, the following four stages: (1) imprinting and using the self-nourishing networks of the primate brain - The neonate or infant stage (oral biosurvival - first circuit "eat it or flee it" imprint), (2) imprinting and using the emotional-territorial networks of the primate brain - the 'toddler' stage (anal status consciousness - "dominate or submit" imprint), (3) imprinting and using the semantic circuits - the verbal or conceptual stage (symbolic rational consciousness - "either/or" imprints), (4) imprinting and using the socio-sexual circuits - The mating or parenting stage (tribal taboo consciousness - "good and bad" imprints)

However, what only that aforementioned 2 percent had discovered was that there were circuits above these four. A fifth circuit (sometimes known as the neurosomatic circuit) allowed conscious feedback between the "mind" and the "body". It also allowed those biots who had formed it to realize that things were not as mechanical as they thought, but could instead be as convenient as most biots claimed they wanted things to be. Many of these mutated biots became convinced they were divine, not realizing that this feedback mertely allowed them full control of their perceptual field. The feedback loop kept them looking and feeling better and younger, and some began to believe that they could "cure" others.

Regardless of these happenings, it was nearly universal that these fifth-circuit biots grew critical of the machanical responses of first-circuit approach-avoidance, second-circuit domination-submission, third-circuit either-or logic, and static fouth-circuit sexual roles. They called on other biots to be free as they themselves were.

The other biots usually either declared these fifth-circuit biots to be divine, or they killed them. Sometimes, they did both.

Almost no one in this comedy of errors understood the sixth-circuit (metaprogramming) that was possible. Had more risen to a fifth-circuit state, they may have understood that stagnation at the fifth-circuit level was pure hedonism, which, while fun, doesn't accomplish much. Unfortuately, they didn't. A sixth-level circuit would have allowed them to see not only quantum causality, but the static state of their own situation, as well as allowing them to see multiple reality vectors...thereby encouraging them through possibility.

There are 2 more potential circuits, but there's no need to go into that. These primates blew themselves up in a fit of second-circuit posturing, brought about by the alpha males, who usually claimed they did it in the name of the biggest-alpha-male-of-all.

But all this happened in the universe next door.