The other day I decided  to return to the future and pay a visit to my
thirty year old son, to find out how he will be faring fourty years from
now, when his dad has become an old prat. Last time we had seen each other,
my son and I, it   was in 2025, local time. He was just about to get married
when I landed in front of the church doorstep . Happily enough, the sound of
the bells covered the noise of the  crash landing [ I still need to gain
some experiment with the new "Boliscom" type of spacecraft.  "Peter", the
....  computer who regulates flight parameters, always starts up first
time... ).
The only person to notice my late arrrival was a beggar standing in the
doorway. The celebration had been publicized and sponsored  by the local
Catolcoholic Church of the famous divine Piper Henessey, so the poor lad was
probably expecting a free drink of  "mustard champagne" after the ceremony
had ended ( "mustard champagne" was  the only one  available in that period
of time  since the german  phylloxera had invaded and destroyed the french
vineyards during the summer of 2014 ).
I brushed down my rags, put on my beret, and pushed the entrance door of the
church. There were billboards all around the main nave.  On one of them you
could read " We believe in the transsubstantiation of Christ in the Black
Host". Another said  : " If thou  Receive Communion under Cassia, thou  will
remain Pure in the eyes of Thy Lord ".

The priest was about to start his homily :
"Our virtues , my brethren, are older than we are."
"For the value of our instincts as a guide is of the highest quality.
Instinct is the crystallized experience of thousands of generations.  It is
the golden seed chosen of a million harvests and a myriad threshings. It
ranks lower than reason because less of individual volition enters into it.
But as a guide it is safer, and as a spring of action far more reliable and
effective. The beauty, the accuracy and the beneficence of the instincts of
the lower form of life have been the marvel and the admiration of every
observer and philosopher, even of theologians. But it is calmly assumed that
in our own species alone, they have utterly lost their force and value. Our
pride would not permit us to depend upon or even recognize them, lest we
should seem to admit our kinship to "mere brutes". Fortunately for us, they
still remain with us in spite of our haughty refusal to officially recognize
them.
Did any one  ever hear of a baby with an instinct for whisky, or a child who
enjoyed the taste of tobacco or the smell of a cigar ? Tongue, nose and
stomach unite in their disapproval of all three, as the comic horrors of a
boy's first smoke, and the racking headache of a freshman's spree abundantly
testify. It is only by systematic and repeated repression of instinct by
reason and intelligence that either of these habits is formed. Yet we have
the colossal impudence to say that a man who is reeling drunk has made a
"beast" of himself ! And this is by no means an excpetional instance. Indeed
one could say that the vast  majority of diseases are due to the neglect or
deliberate repression of some instinct.
Instincts are not only valuable in health, they are also tremendous
indicators of disease and recovery processes.  The sick man is popularly
supposed to want just those things he ought not to have, and to dislike
just  those things which are good for him. And indeed altogether too much of
both household and medical treatment was originally constructed on that very
principle. Unflattering as it may be to the medical profession, up to the
middle of the XIX c., the old "demon" theory of disease had far too much
influence over therapeutics. Disease was still regarded as an entity which
must be driven out of the body of the patient by more or less violent or
repulsive  means. This distrust of the instincts in disease .."

I knew that homily by heart, having been, in my youth, a member of one of
these  instinctive sects.
Was there  nothing to be learned from the future ? I managed to slip out of
the church during the cassia distribution. Not that I disliked cassia, just
the way   they were having it...  The beggar had disappeared, and in his
stead were two girls with black eyes and soft curly hairs falling down on
slender  shoulders. Even Bruno Comby would have noticed  that they were
sisters. The tallest, probably the eldest, came in my direction. Her mouth
was as round as her face. If it hadn't been for the awkward look that
teenage girls display unvolontarily when they behave as mature women, I
would have thought her name was "Love me".
"We know where you are coming from, and why you are here. Please bring this
message to your friends crudivores, so that they do not loose hope in the
midst of the storm".
I took the paper from her hand. It was an article from the New Scientist,
year 2129 . The girls had been traveling towards the past, while I had been
traveling towards the future, to meet me in year 2025.  The title of the
article read
" Cooked food relapse finally cured by selective unpluging  of nervous
connections in the corpus striatum, a structure of the CNS  associated with
long term potentiation of food likes and dislikes. "

I raised up my eyes again : the two girls had disappeared. I went back to my
spacecraft, vexed and frustrated, but my heart full of hope by the late
promise of the two young girls. As I climbed on board,  I saw the beggar at
the same place where they'd appeared to me. "Gosh !" I thought pulling on
the choke of my perlimpinpin fueled engine, " I will never get used to these
science fiction tricks...."

Cheers
Denis