Insights
In everyone there is a place where time and fact mean nothing. It is consciousness, and everything begins there. It is how we learned the earth moves, although we do not feel it move. It is changeless, unmoving; the seasons pass through it, the aged die, the young are born, while we remain the same, a spectator, watching it all happen. And we keep account there of our gains and losses, and watch astonished, as one becomes the other. In that place we are free of the entire world. Its existence is a mystery, and because of it, all experience is ephemeral, life is always passing away; no matter what we do to savor them, the hours vanish. By this we know that consciousness is the most real thing, primary, and enduring, although we cannot see it, say why we have it, or be sure what it is for.
The one we call God is consciousness imprisoned in our mind and flesh. It suffers in us, trying to come to the surface, asking for liberation. This can only be accomplished by an act of will in which one shutters the senses, and concentrates the energies of the mind until consciousness arises in it. In this way we make god real within, become god in a sense, in our perfect control of body, speech, and mind, and in the order we create amidst our mind’s normative yet chaotic flux of appetite, desire, and memory.
Fear humiliates. It is a great obstacle to consciousness and the behavior it calls for. Present in the subconscious layers of the mind, fear is experienced as an expectation of illness, poverty, helplessness and suffering, privation, attacks from enemies. It reduces existence to a low plane, depriving us of the ambition to achieve the heights, and to realize our possibilities fully. It wraps consciousness in a thick shroud of perpetual self-concern.
The news media expresses an unarticulated question: will humankind be able to found a world-order that is just and fair, without tyranny or fear of the powerful? In other words, will people learn to love, to live in peace and concord? The theme involves not only national politics, but also those of the world’s nations. The drama or suspense in the stories lies in humanity’s attempt to realize its possibilities without war, social conflict, high levels of crime, and dissention; and the preoccupation extends to movies about crime rings, drug cartels corrupting police forces, wayward politicians derailed by personal desire, and disadvantaged people who must overcome adversity to achieve recognition. The precarious situation of justice, and the perilous condition of civilization, is a constant motif.
Over the earth floats a dreamworld, invisibly moving with it as it turns: a world more vivid, more exciting and real, more varied, lived-in, and satisfying than the world beneath it. But at ground level, all fall short of their ideals, their dream of themselves as beautiful, rich, famous, intelligent, so that all must strive constantly to measure up, to recast themselves, to improve and perfect. Thus, we follow our possibilities into the future, while they make it hard to be present, to live here, to feel gratitude, and to accept ourselves. And yet the possibilities with with their siren song are what makes us human.
In the final analysis, we must act in the name of the good, must do good without knowing why. One must deny urges, and silence instincts, without knowing why: all we know is that we are called upon, somehow expected, to do so. But all reasons, all faiths, fail in the end to explain the Mystery. The closest we can get is to say that love is the reason, and is why there is something rather than nothing. But even then the thought of what is coming—of the sun taking its place amidst a graveyard of stars, of all the temples humankind has built, all the constitutions, all the beautiful poems, dissolved to black dust—that is enough to keep one aware that the assertion of love as a creative force of order is but a mere faith. What one clings to is an intuition, a hope, that all the beauty must be more than a chance, more than atoms falling through space, combining and recombining, but why it happened this way, why we are conscious and ask questions, why we are called upon to excel and actualize possibilities, all of that in the end is an enigma.