The following article is a translation from the writings of a young Ukrainian novelist and science fiction writer Oles’ Berdnyk. Oles’ Berdnyk started publishing in 1957. To date he has 17 books to his credit. He, as other talented young Ukrainian writers, strives to add a spiritual dimension to contemporary Ukrainian literature. His writing, however, is of particular interest because it presents a synthesis of traditional Ukrainian Christian thought and some aspects of Buddhism. At present, he is being persecuted by the regime and all his writings have been banned. Our excerpt is taken from a collection entitled Zoloti vorota (The Golden Gate) published by the «Samvydav» in Ukraine and reprinted by «Smoloskyp» Publishers, Baltimore, 1975.
People of the Earth!
I was born among you, I lived among you, I studied in your schools, thought in your words, your ideas, and breathed the air of your planet. I became the son of humanity. For a long, long time I tried to understand your ideals, your aspirations, in order to find a path or means of which humanity could attain universal unity. And now the circle is closing, the meaning of further suffering has been vitiated, for the Compassion of Love, although inexhaustible, exists in a higher order of being. Today, the time of Love’s suffering for the Earth is crowned. The planet is obliged to yield it’s seed. The taut millennia of evolution have passed. You have received from the Cosmos invaluable treasures of spirit and of intellect, the teachings of freedom, the flame of manliness, the ideal of heroism. You have made the messengers of the Great Mother your gods, your idols, creating for them churches, museums, and mausoleums. But how did you use these gifts for understanding life, how did you remold by means of these high ideals society, the human soul, the body, activities, the word and thought?
You have cosmic energy, but you are impotent in face of the illusory hand of death.
You have the religions of love, but in their name you bless murder and hatred.
You have created the brotherhood of science, but in the name of the ideas of science you have split the body of humanity into inimical particles.
You have broken away from the gravitation of the planet, but the departure of your ships into interplanetary space did not free you from the web of petty everyday desires. The cosmic era became for you only the arena of a new struggle for trivial, earthly goals, it only spread the diseases of your spirit into star-studded space, threatening distant worlds. You have mastered the terminology of the Sons of the Light in proclaiming the ideals of a New World, but you carefully preserve in word, thought, and action the laws of Darkness. No community on earth has proclaimed the sanctity and the inviolability of life, as the irreversible expression world-bearing prime essence.
You seek panaceas for diseases, but at the same time, under the cover of your pseudo-laws, you destroy millions of people in prisons, in concentration camps and in hospitals. You wage unceasing wars, which have yet to produce a humane result, only the most base representatives of the human race have made use of victory.
You have created an infinite number of technical devices by exploiting the genius of scholars and scientists, but you have not raised by a single iota the moral-ethical level of the present generation: the order of a dictator or of a parliament easily removes from man any kind of responsibility to be a compassionate creature. The experience of the last century bears striking testimony of the total degradation of the inhabitants of the earth. All these terrible losses could be justified by the pursuit of a GRANDIOSE GOAL. But you have NO SUCH GOAL.
The idea of co-suffering, proclaimed by numerous proponents has been transformed in its opposite: it feeds the Draco of Hatred and Evil with the energy of love and goodness. Thus the painful efforts of the Sons of Light to lead humanity out of slavery were used for an even more ignoble cause, the imprisonment of the spirit.
You have converted the idea of the Spirit into a cult of barter with God. You have transformed the idea of freedom into the corner-stone of tyranny. You have concealed the idea of love with clouds of hatred and sex.
You have made the idea of cognition a slave of utilitarian technology.
You have raised death to an absolute. You have torn the twain of life’s continuity in the psyche of generations, thus you have alienated your own planet from the One Organism of the Cosmos.
Your world has become a gangrenous sore, a malignant tumor, which devours the fiery energy of primeval substance, creating nothing in its place, except psychotic images of baseness and hatred. The neosphere of the earth is the vampire of the cosmos.
