| Qin: Slumber One morning, Lao-Tze pretended he was visited by a group of New Age types from California. He stood on his cliff and shouted into the abyss: "Something slumbers at the center of the world. Walk softly, or you may wake it. "First I will tell you what it is not. It is not the devil, not Kali, not a demon, an imp, or any of those things from a time when men saw with different eyes. "Now I will tell you what it is. It is very old, very stupid, very powerful. If both at all, it comes from a time almost before time, when the universe was younger. As matter condensed from energy this time, that time a long time ago, this thing was already widespread and numerous. It feeds on a certain kind of energy. As matter began to fall in love with itself, leading to all the problems with which we are so familiar, it produced natural concentrations of just the sort of energy this heart-of-the-earth thing loves. "Everywhere matter glopped into being, whether as a mote of interstellar dust, an asteroid, a planet, a star, whatever, here this thing came, wedding itself unwanted, feasting on the endless sparklets of light and other forms of electromagnetism to its taste. To this day its brother and sister things are out there, as far as we can see, galomphing down their energy feast. "But--ah, in a thermodynamic universe, there is always a but--there was a problem., Its gluttony drew it fatally and always to the greatest concentrations of matter-energy. This was bad for it, good for us. The thing wound up being enclosed, then trapped in the innumerable hearts of the newly burgeoning material universe. Go to the center of this mote, or that star, and you will find it, or one of it. "So too at the center of the earth. Just as this thing accounts for, or if not accounts for then takes a very active part in certain bizarre super-macro phenomena such as, oh, quarks and black holes, so too does this thing take an active interest in such local happenings as, say, war, pestilence, and the rapid growth of health food stores." When he finished, he was amused by the lack of laughter. "Well," he thought, "More good punch lines wasted." Back to Qin
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