7:51 PM -:- Posted by Allen    

Exquisite Torment

I am not speaking of fate when I say that we have no choice in the matter of enlightenment. I'm only saying that no man knows the hour of his being chosen by lightning.

You might be walking down the street. You might be settling into the mail. You might have your headphones on, listening to music. You might have raged against the machine all your life, for centuries even, all the while demanding illumination, desperately seeking some semblance of the assumed comfort of understanding. You may have done all those things and come finally to be sitting on a rock watching a bird in the sky, holding no greater intention or desire than to be there doing the simple thing.

And there, in that simple moment, between any given pair of heartbeats, Heaven opens up and you are immersed in the magnificent terrible truth.

It's magnificent indeed. Beyond all you've ever contemplated, more immense than you can bear, more stimulating than you can contain, vast and intricate in its simplicity, fundamentally beyond anyone's normal vocabulary.

You run out the door (of your office or room or home), or you run into town from the field by the river where the angelic Susanne has just revealed to you not just her own perfection but the overwhelming perfection of the Whole Thing itself. You run to tell someone. Anyone. Everyone.

Why? Because you know that the world perishes for lack of understanding. You know that people live in misery and quiet desperation in their agony of ignorance behind a veil so thin that it can no more be perceived than the truth it hides.

And then you discover how terrible Truth is. No one wants to hear you slaver in search of any words at all that might begin to express what you've seen. And if you do have speech adequate to approximate your vision, they really don't want to hear it.

No one wants his cherished beliefs to drift away into the harsh light of day.

No one wants to face the humiliation of having to effect a complete change in lifestyle in order to come into consistency with Truth. No one wants to admit the inconsistencies, the pretenses, the doubts and the fear hidden behind a lifetime of energetic assertions made from complete and surprisingly embarrassing ignorance.

No one wants to hear that his fantasy is corrupt. That everything his cherished leaders and mentors have told him is wrong. That the world he lives in is not even an illusion.

Sure, people will walk around and speak sagely about the matrix, the lies of their political leaders, the corruption in the social system. But ask them to apply the same standards and suspicions to their priesthood and religion, and they'll strike you down before you can move.

They're fine with the idea of the matrix of lies, but only to the point that learning about it requires them to question the pavement upon which they stand. People will readily shed walls, but they'll cave right in at the thought of surrendering the floor too.

So you can't tell them the truth. Not because you can't articulate it, but because they can't hear it. Because they do amazing acrobatic tricks in their minds to avoid it. Or they simple can't see that far through their dark glasses.

But there you are. Maybe you see the answer to their misery, but you have to live with them in their misery because they will not risk their worlds to achieve freedom.

You say, "It's this!"

And they scream back, "NO! I can't have it be that! It must be something else; I will not consider what you say. I can't. I have too great an investment in the view I have and the world that I've built upon it."

They can't see the future your truth describes. So they fear it, they reject it, and they will try to destroy you for showing it to them while they can't see it.

And that's what you're up against when you try to tell them how the world really is, how the government has enslaved them, and how their mere existence as men and women of integrity depends upon their outright betrayal of a lifetime of disorientation.

That is also what I'm up against when I try to tell my Christian friends among you that there is a scriptural argument for the separation of church and state, that to attempt to legislate morality is blasphemy.

Shocked? Compelled to disagree? No longer listening?

See?

That's what I'm saying.

And that's why I'm not bothering just now to write it up.

Besides, I've already more or less said it, and not a single person has responded to the point.

And that, for me, the fact that not a speck of the argument against what I've said about Moore's rock has been on point, is the source of my personal torment.

It's not that I feel rejected, or superior but slighted. Because none of this is what I started out to say anyway. All this so far has been nothing more than approach, a setting of the table for my dark feast of truth, so to speak.

What happened to me a few minutes ago is what always happens. It's my curse. I can't just do the simple things, and go along to get along. Reality keeps revealing its unexpected self to me. Believe me, I wouldn't mind if that stopped. Many is the time I've seen that bumper sticker that says, "God said it, I believe it, that settles it!", or heard some dufus make any of a vast number of similar statements, and jealously coveted that mindless state of ignorant bliss. Yet, alas, that is not my destiny. I asked for enlightenment, and now I must live with the consequences.

And I secretly believe that every one of you reading this knows that pain exactly, because I don't think that any of you are as obtuse as all the rest of us think you are. I just think that I am the only one brave enough (or stupid enough) to lay such things bare.

Anyway, there is a destination to this journey.

I put on a favorite CD (Sixpence None The Richer's "Divine Discontent"), fully intending to take care of some overdue coding on a new website for a project you're all going to love (I'm just the mechanic, someone else created the project, so I can brag it up all I want),,,, and....

Wham!

I know why patriots, constitutionalists, truth-in-taxation people, (generally) fail.

It's because they're not on point. They can't stay on point when their lives depend on it. Not even when their country depends on it.

They're too busy fighting and drawing lines among themselves, over things that might be crucially important personally in the long run when you consider ultimate spiritual realities, but that are completely unnecessary to the immediate discussion regarding rights, property, freedom, the essence of America.

It doesn't matter where rights come from so long as we all agree that they are not created by the state. It doesn't matter what the nature of the creator is, so long as we all recognize that not a man or woman among us will agree that it is the state.

The state, that Frankenstein's monster our grandparents forgot to keep in its cage, that remotely-operated destroyer of all that is decent... IT is the enemy.

But it doesn't have to worry about us, because we're too busy arguing about whether God is in the government on the basis of somebody's religious icon.

I am supremely sorry to have to be the one to say it, but if you think that the absence of a material reminder is all it takes that god lives not in the hearts of the people who are the government, that the influence of the creator, be it God or be it some universal consciousness of which we are all parts, is not felt at the core of the universe within which the government lives unless it be through a rock or plaque or pledge, then it is you who is without God.

There is more divinity in the run-of the-mill agnostic than there is in any evangelist who needs an icon to anchor his faith.

And in the meanwhile, WTP and every other group that would do good in the world is losing members and being abandoned by donors and people who might have really made a difference, simply because the secretly uncertain are more concerned about proving their faith to everyone else than they are about resting quietly upon it.

Whether God is as you may say, a distinct in-the-image-of-man benevolent tyrant, lovingly allowing the destruction of his and our most grand experiments, or whether the creator is more in the nature of what I say, the subtle instantiating impulse latent within the very fabric of existence... Whether we are objects created by a paternalistic Other, or whether we are magnificent manifestations of the Thing itself... it does not matter.

Either way, it is you who must prove God who are without Him.

And it is posterity that will suffer the consequences of this folly.