A Steamship Captain — as Pogossian supposedly became
In Meetings With Remarkable Men, the chapter on Pogossian begins with the paragraph:
Sarkis Pogossian, or as he is now called, Mr. X, is at the present time the owner of several ocean steamers, one of which, cruising among his favourite places, between the Sunda and Solomon Islands, he commands himself.
It doesn’t take much reflection to conclude that Pogossian provides the allegorical characterization of the moving center. Despite his eductaion at the Theological Seminary, he eventually pursues a career as an engineer, and as the above paragraph says, he eventually runs a steamship business.
Or does he?
He cruises between his favorite places the Sunda and Solomon Islands. The Sunda Islands is the name given to the cluster of Indonesian islands that include the four large islands of Borneo, Java, Sulawesi, and Sumatra. The Solomon Islands are not, and never were a major trade partner of Indonesia, so its unlikely that there was much regular steamship traffic between these places.
The Sunda Islands take their name from the Sunda Kingdom, a Sundanese Hindu kingdom that was established in the western part Java from 669 AD (to around 1579 AD). The name Sunda derives from the Sanskrit prefix su, which means “goodness” or “possessing good quality”. The term sunda also means “bright, light, purity, cleanness and white.” Sunda is also another name for Hindu God Vishnu — the preserver. Solomon, of course, signifies wisdom, more than any other figure from the Bible.
So this comment may indicate that in later years Captain Pogossian spent his time meandering between purity and wisdom.
The Captain
In The Meetings With Remarkable Men study group, when it became clear that there are some strong links between the First Series and the Second Series, the following question naturally presented itself:
Is Captain Pogossian the captain of the transspace ship Karnak?
Most likely he is. Very little is said about the caption in The Tales, but he declares that “I was destined by my father, as soon as I reached the age of a responsible being, for this career in the service of our ENDLESS CREATOR.”
Pogossian was sent by his father to a Theological Seminary. And it is the captain who explains the law of falling.
The possibility then is that, the moving center has a specific role in our movements from one state to another (from one planet to another).
The Tales and Meetings With Remarkable Men enrich each other.