ET- Knowledge Bean

  E.T. picked up his geranium, and his checkerboard.

  “Goodbye,” said the other botanist.

  E.T.’s heart began to glow with his own goodbye, to this colleague with whom he’d shared the millions of miles on the River of Stars, and who had been the only one in the troubled days of confinement to show E.T. special kindness. The glow in E.T.’s chest intensified, and a tiny core glowed most brightly, in the center of E.T.’s heart. It grew in intensity, then suddenly became an agitated whirl of light shaped like a jumping bean.

  This bean contained the Tenth Symbol Code of the Flower, a special field of inquiry E.T. alone had mastered, of all the botanical crew. It was concerned with the inner purpose of the Flower Soul, the part not seen by the eye, the ethereal portion—latent and hidden until flowering; this was the deepest of all botanical study, concerned with the archetypal forms of the Universal Seed, and E.T. was an Adept in it. His colleague was not, had studied other matters.

  But the bean jumped, from E.T.’s heart into his colleague’s. And all of E.T.’s work went with it, the whole of his study, all. It would have constituted an increase in rank for E.T., and honors, and more; but he gave it away now, to his colleague.

  The other old botanist felt the bean of concentrated knowledge jump into his own heart, along an arc of light, which spread quite suddenly through his own body, and within moments he’d glimpsed and understood the spiritual significance of seed and chalice, of calyx, carpel, and corolla. He was dumbfounded at the gift, for a thousand years of work was in it, and more. Now it was his decoration, his wisdom, his honor, bestowed by a bean in a single flash. “Thank you, thank you,” was all he could say, as tears of joy trickled down his cheeks, the great illumination flooding his nature. He turned toward the garden of the ship, a garden he now comprehended as never before. So this, he thought to himself, is who my colleague has been.

- E.T. The Book of the Green Planet, chapter 2