BRET ADRIAN KAUFMAN

"For the men and women on the Telesphere floor circumambulating the sleek obsidian box at its center as if it were some sacred Kaaba, the event they eagerly anticipated promised a day that would never again be followed by night. But for Eckhart, it had been a sordid weekday morning like every other he could remember of late. He was drawn out of a dreamless sleep by a cacophony of crow caws as a local murder scavenged the dumpster below his third story Main Street apartment window. He sat up—heart thumping—and considered finally using the Red Ryder leaning against the sallow wall before him. But killing a bird with a BB gun takes focus, and he was all out of focus. He swung his skinny legs over the edge of the bed, deciding to get on with the day instead...

While Eckhart was getting ready for work that morning—known then as the 21st day of the month of April in the 2031st year of the Common Era—engineers at the Telesphere, an advanced quantum telemetrics research facility located on the Rorschach inkblot Arctic island of Svalbard, powered up the facility's extended geomagnetic generator array. Lining the viewing platform of the orb-like structure, a ragtag cadre of onlookers—scientists, dignitaries, philosophers, and visionaries—stood poised to witness the culmination of their clandestine project, the first tachyonic antitelephone transmission in human history.

The Telesphere—so named for both its geodesic frame and for housing a device that was to create an evolutionary leap in our ability to reach across space and time—was pregnant that morning with the possibilities conceived by some of the brightest minds the human race had ever known. Their theories were fringe. Their hypotheses, paradoxical. They sought to harness the faster-than-light speed of the tachyon as a medium of instant superluminal transmission. But the only way to prove the existence of a particle that can essentially travel backwards in time was to trap an evanescent luxon wave in a reflective capacitator until the near-field reached infinite radiation. They ventured that the tachyon field would then emerge and that if they could direct it as a wave through quantum tunneling, it would subsume present matter, rendering it capable of manipulating the present by alterations to the near past, thus indicating the success of the transmission. The litmus test would be the philosopher's stone itself, for the goal was to transmute the molecular composition of copper into gold. Our complete mastery over matter was supposed to bring about a transhuman revolution, a so-called technological singularity. But the heralds of this new dawn would learn that they had placed a heavy stock in a fiat currency...

Eckhart's equilibrium tried to tell him that his mortal frame was falling, but his consciousness was already phasing out of the localized realm. With his last bit of physical agency, he leaned back against the shelf and watched through his eyeballs as his body slid to the concrete floor like a warm stick of butter on hot metal. Presently, he sensed a nonmaterial effervescence produced by the subspace oscillations in the tachyon field as he became a disembodied consciousness with pure vision and hearing.

Eckhart's first instinct as a non-local being was to return to his body, but he realized quite quickly that he couldn't. Looking down upon the vessel of his corporeal existence, which was now sitting on the floor with its back propped up against a shelf and its neck cocked to the side in apparent unconsciousness, Eckhart was filled with an ineffable compassion.

What a fragile thing, he thought. Yet, he also knew that this was a sacred thing, the temple of his being and the vehicle for the steady development of the faculties that he now possessed in full..."

"...A massive white cloud rises from the sea undulating toward the sky. It takes the observer a moment to recognize it as a flock of seagulls. Each seagull in this flock stays just close enough to the one next to it to avoid possible predators and just far enough away to avoid collision with its neighbors. Yet no one gull seems to lead.

Some systems scientists say that human consciousness has appeared out of a serendipitous confluence of elements and that it is ultimately no more than the biochemical processes of the human brain while others dare to posit that it arises from a non-local dimension to organize the elements necessary for its manifestation in the individuated mind...

...The Aboriginal Australians tell the tale of Wurugag and Waramurungundi, the first man and woman, who came into being by the power of the Unseen Spirit. Upon their advent, Waramurungundi taught the people language. She gave everything a name so they call her the mother of all things.

Long ago, the children of men purportedly gathered to build a tower to heaven, but it reached a height beyond the ken of mortal minds to conceive and, confounded by the weight of such a premature construct, the people dispersed in every direction in search of some other way to God.

Throughout my youth, I searched for the Realm of Being. It always seemed just out of sight. Then, one day, even as I began to give up and let go of love and hate and of all that I had ever known, I began to see with a new pair of eyes. Alas, in freeing myself from isness itself, I discovered a world without borders where truth shines like a resplendent sun above the horizon of certainty. Alas, I would only catch a glimpse of this world, but in that brief moment, the illumination released my mind from the captivity of nature and it has flown like a brilliant bird ever since..."

"We headed south along the west bank of the Tigris as the muezzin’s call to afternoon prayer sounded from minarets high above the pregnant stillness that had encompassed Al-Kazimiyah. With every stride, my young client quickened his pace until we reached the end of the reed-lined path where he came to a sudden halt and set his grip upon the straps of his rucksack so tight his weathered bronze knuckles almost turned bone white. He held the verdant garden of Najib Pasha across the water in his gaze, captivated as it seemed by an insatiable stirring of sentiment. So enraptured by that lush spot was he that he paid no mind to the aftermath of the recent flood waters which had completely obliterated and washed away the dock and even the wood-planked road.

Exactly twenty-four hours earlier, the whole bank side of Baghdad had been consumed in a cloud of obscuring dust and sorrow as throngs of people of every age, background and rank rushed to the river to pay homage to and catch one last glimpse of a most revered personage—some even say a prophet. The next day, the rain-soaked and muddied streets near my small but lucrative supply and trade store had been confounded by emptiness as most of my neighbors privately mourned the forced departure of that one who for a decade had been regarded by the inhabitants of this quarter as the very quintessence of every worldly attribute and heavenly virtue.

The Sultan’s decree­—instigated by the combined ecclesiastical and temporal powers that be—had been cruel and unjust, but the people were too sunk in sorrow to be indignant. Of course, the news of this holy man’s exile had been most distressing to the Babis of the area, for—after the execution of their first master in Persia—they had come to regard that same righteous personage as their leader and chief. No! Even more. Their divine father.

Tears flowed like rain as dark clouds drew in with unnatural swiftness from all quarters of the firmament to let loose the floods of heaven, sending the people back to their homes.

I had been preparing to close up my shop early then—assembling the last of the tinderboxes and placing them on the back shelf above the canteens and lanterns—when the rain momentarily ceased and I sensed a presence behind me. Being no stranger to the untamed wilds of the world, I was accustomed to this sort of prescience and had theorized that it must be a kind of extrasensory perception, a once highly developed yet now residual faculty of our ancient nature, for I considered myself then a man of pure reason, enlightened for sure. Yet, I had come to accept that there must be more to reality than the mind is capable of grasping—a subtle force that cannot be comprehended by the intellect alone—and there was something about this feeling unakin to the one felt in the usual human presence, something I can only now describe as primeval."

Literature Discipline Stream.

The Junior Youth Spiritual Empowerment Program (JYSEP) engages teens and young adults as mentors for their younger peers, ages 11-15. Mentors empower junior youth to develop strong moral reasoning, to resist negative social forces, to express themselves with eloquence, and to work together for a better world.

A global program implemented at the grassroots level, JYSEP aids junior youth from diverse backgrounds to navigate the transition from childhood to adulthood through spiritual empowerment—nurturing within young people inherent spiritual qualities of kindness, justice, honesty, and generosity. In developing their character at this critical juncture of their lives, they become protagonists of positive change. 

Human rights campaign at College of the Canyons highlighting the Iranian government's systemic efforts to deprive it's Bahá'í population of access to higher education and the Iranian Bahá'í Community's courageous establishment of the internationally recognized alternative underground university, The Bahá'í Institute of Higher Education. Featuring the film To Light a Candle directed by acclaimed journalist Maziar Bahari. Sponsored by the Associated Student Government.