You all should read this, really.

The past is gone,
The future lies before us,
The present yawns like a gigantic gulf.
Into this gulf we are leaping,
Into this gulf we are leaping,
In space we will be dancing,
No ground required,
Happy, weightless, holding nothing,
Like stars adrift in void of space,
Like moon that vanishes without a trace,
And appears again, a thin sliver of silver
Delicately laid on sky of velvet blue,
Through which delicate stars like diamonds
Peep with infinite shyness.

Awake at three a.m.,
Awake again and again,
Awake at stroke of midnight
Awake in pale moonlight
Awake in broad daylight
Awake Awake Awake

Facing the challenge of survival,
Hour by hour and day by day,
Only men and women
Fighting to find the way
From dawn to dusk,
From dusk to dawn,
The human track goes on and on,
Out of the forests, onto the plains
Through villages of mud and dung,
Through festivals of battles won
Against the drought, the bears, the bugs, the other tribes,
A wonder anyone made it out out alive,
Yet here we are,
We’ve learned to drive.

Thanks to our brain and body,
The standard issue model
For humans of this day and age
Which after all is a passing phase,
We concretize this universe
Around us, wildly spinning.
Using fractals and hyperspace
We’ll accelerate to ever greater speeds,
The human race, so aptly named,
Someday will be galactically famed
For feats of daredeviltry.

Yes, ordinary folks like you and me
Will scale our own genetic tree,
Understand their neurons,
Develop their own brains,
Acquire beliefs that they think fit,
And of course ignore the petulant snits
Of ecclesiastical thinkers,
Those misanthropic stinkers,
Enjoy the fantastic,
But buy realistic,
Upgrade the concrete,
Easy on the mystic.

A million or a zillion years
In future, you agree,
People could be that damn smart
And know what they can see.
But not today,
And no way me --
Don’t try to take me there,
I need belief,
A life of grief.
There’s not much I can say.
You clutch your idols,
Worn with care,
You urge me to be kind,
You can’t depart your fixed ideas,
Your mind, my God,
Your mind.

You look away again, then
Look again this way.
For freedom you’ve been yearning.
Of freedom you’ve a fear.
Freedom is the fruit
You never dare to pluck.
And why bother anyway?
The milk of ancient teachings
Is always there to suck.

For certainly the truth lies buried
Deep in ancient caves,
And truth is not found in the sun,
But down in musty graves.
And men in robes
Know more than those
Who dress in ordinary clothes.

So some have said,
But for every outdated notion
That once was holy writ,
There's a now-forgotten nation
Whose citizens worshipped it.
From human sacrifice
To the Mormon paradise
From Nirvana to Valhalla
The gulf to cross is just the space
Inside a monkey’s skull.

So dream up your own paradise
Or dwell in someone’s hell,
Buy the keys to your prison
With money you print yourself,
Seduce the lovely daughters,
Drink all the wine in France,
And join your friends on the eve of victory
For a final, spellbinding dance.

As every leaf lifts up to heaven,
Seeking the sun’s brilliant light,
So you too have an impulse
To seek what is perfectly right.
In the seed of your birth,
In the bend of your spine,
In the light of your eye,
In the heart of your mind,
Of course there is wisdom.
Man is divine