Sagea traced elongated figure eights on her notepad instead of taking notes. The speaker had started his presentation:

Dear Colleagues, Members, and Friends of the Institute:

It is a privilege and a pleasure to share our group’s latest achievements with you today. We now have the capability of being telepresent in several native species on the surface of distant planets...

Sagea had anticipated this technology over a decade before, during her stint in the Institute’s Robotic Department. Back then, she had felt that telepresence was the ideal way to conduct vanguard planetary explorations. There was no requirement to locate intelligent life; the creature’s only task was to provide a protective “suit”, and perhaps some locomotion, which would enable our scientists to “virtually” explore these planets.

Why then was Sagea getting restless in her seat, and why did she get a disagreeable whiff of “deja-vu”? The figure eights on her notepad became tall fences, which she eventually joined to form circular cages on the page. Was she going to travel once more past the memory of strong warnings and open the forbidden gates?

Suddenly, she thought of herself back in that Other Place she called “The Home”, receiving her Teachers' advice...

…because telepresence must remain an unconscious factor at your present incarnation level. You are to morph through complete immersion in the designated host creature. The Council of Elders strongly advises you to replace all the memories you have selected to take on your journey, back to The Place of Records. These teaching tools will always be available to you upon each return. Having access to your memories during your telepresence will serve only to confuse you, fill you with longing and homesickness, and distract you from your task.

Dejected and rebellious, she returned to the Viewing Room and searched for her own creature on the circular screen. She found the small being tethered to its umbilical cord, slowly rotating in the amniotic fluid.

There are no rules preventing me from downloading a few of my cherished memories into you, Sagea thought, as she etched some of her own tracings under the soft skull of the tiny being. She closed the “cache” with one of the universal Eternity Symbols, imprinting it forcefully, and almost desperately, in her foetus.

Then she had to hurry past several portals to join the Earthbound Group waiting for transport in the Hall of Departure.

In our need to find a way to prod other planetary species to exert maximum effort to reach beyond their limits, we found a workable language of universal symbols that our programs can implant in hidden caches accessible to these species.

Sagea drew a bizarre variation of her own symbol. In the lower circle, she had written "pleasure?".

Could there be ensoulment through pleasure? She asked herself. And was the longing to create, only a small part of that pleasure? Was shared recognition between thought turning into form, and the form turning back to thought, the ultimate pleasure? She intuited that she would eventually experience that aspect of the Teaching, and she marveled at the finesse of the Elders.

Even in this exile, she had often looked past her small shadowy portion to feel the greater joy of translating ideas and dreams into tangible forms.

Are we going to be as skilled and caring as the Old Ones in applying this new technology, or will we operate from our territorial greed, enticing the natives to play destructive games of “them and us” that they might not otherwise have had to experience? Will we use their thirst for pleasure to tap into the hidden symbolic “caches” until they exhaust themselves for our amusement, or some remotely-viewed kind of sport?

She remembered forcing that one symbol into the delicate wiring of the captive babe, and she felt sadness. To escape that thought, she traveled back to the ancient treatise of Chaldean Magic and whispered to herself:

Out of Love, The Father of all Beings seeded parts of His own Wisdom in thine human brain under the guise of symbols. Place thee today under The Light to discover and activate the symbols of The Father!

She stopped tormenting the leaf of her notepad and put away her pen. Next time, she might take her Teachers' advice and FORGET!