I think Humanity is beautiful in all of
its aspects but - sometimes it repulses me too. What I love about
people is their ability to fight on, to transcend the baseness of
the world and somehow find their own place in it. Humanity can
find perfection in the imperfect, and that is beautiful. I come
from a Quaker background, and Quakerism teaches that there is that
of the Divine inside of every person. I believe that it is our
humanity, our search for Truth, for Beauty - which Keats believed
to be one and the same - that is our Divinity. And I believe that
Love, could be described as this same thing - the recognition of
Truth and Beauty in another thing, or another person. We all have
it inside of us, it just manifests in different forms. Some of us
find our Bliss- the focus of our Love - in art, in the driving
inexorable need to express our innermost being to another person.
Some of us find it in interpersonal love - which is really the
same thing, in reverse - in Love one finds oneself wishing to know
the innermost being of another person and to have that person to
know yours - in short, for perhaps only a brief but none the less
real moment, to become one with another human being. For some of
us, our Truth lies in each other. Others find their Bliss in the
Truths of the outer world, the mechanics behind things. These are
the physicists and the clergy, those who quest for the Truths
beyond the scope of humanity. Well, I shouldn't say beyond the
scope of humanity - many of the truths these people search for
deal with humanity and their place in the world, what it means to
be human and what it means to live in this world.
And then there are those that no longer
search, who have become mired in the pursuits of their day to day
life. This is not necessarily out of choice. Indeed, people have
really only recently had the option of concerning a decent period
of their lives with non-mundane activity. Many people still spend
their entire lives, nearly all of their time, just working to get
by. But this is not exactly what I am referring to - I am
referring to an attitude. Many of the people I know who have lost
their bliss are quite well off enough not to spend every waking
hour in the pursuit of subsistence. But they have lost themselves
in their possessions; they have achieved a love of money instead
of a love of Truth, content in the baseness of commerce instead of
the nobility of pursuit. They have lost that very drive that
defines us as human, whether it be in their own possessions or in
the quick fix of a drug. Not that I am necessarily saying that
money or drugs are bad. It is merely the love of these substances,
the infusion of them with artificial meaning to the exclusion of
all else that robs these individuals of their drive, robs these
individuals of their humanity.
What about me? I guess you could say I'm
a little of the first two with a bit of grounding in the third -
we all have grounding in the third, the desire to stop the madness
and hold everything in one golden moment forever. But I have
always been a searcher, and I think - I think I have always seen
the Truth of Nature and the Truth inside another human being as
really the same thing: the desire to Know, the desire to Be.
Everything else is secondary, including the means of approach. On
the one hand I sit here thinking about the nature of Love and the
meaning of life and on the other. I have walked at nights through
city streets drenched in rain looking for someone to talk to,
someone to connect to for one brief moment. I have walked, and I
have seen the people talking to each other - and I have seen my
own reflection in the sidewalk made wet by the water soaking my
coat through to my undershirt. And I have walked through life,
trying to find someone to connect to for a brief moment - for at
this point I think I have come to the fairly certain realization
that my personality cannot sustain a permanent relationship -
finding that person and moving on in a whirlwind of confused
passion, eclipsed bliss, and a certain soreness that lingers under
the tongue. I go through an increased cycle of desire, connection,
and expulsion tightening as I reach my adulthood . and all I can
do is think to be petrified of the day when I am bedridden, with
no-one to talk to, no-one to visit me, and the burning need to
express myself. In the end, all we really want is to Understand,
and be Understood.
I think I have seen the face of God, or
almost anyway. It was almost a vision, inspired by a conversation
about the Universe. To me, and in my vision, God exists as a
single point of impossibly bright light, within which exists
everything else. Humanity, as a creation, had to exist as a part
of that singular whole. God created life with the ability to
observe the rest of creation, and with the ability to arrange the
other parts of creation according to its will. With our powers of
observation, we see the rest of the world, the inanimate world,
going through a perpetual fall, a perpetual loss of energy that
brings it closer and closer to stagnation. We observe the
overpowering effects of entropy. We have also observed that by
traveling at exceedingly high speeds, by increasing our energy,
the Universe itself begins to collapse - to collapse into the
beauty of a single divine point, out of which everything grows.
(see Special Theory of Relativity). Given the ability to alter the
world in which we find ourselves, we have the power to, in more
than one manner, bring ourselves closer to the Divine Essence -
but the way we see to get there, the path through energy to the
Perfection from which the universe is cast, is not the way that
will bring us home. I guess in this sense you could say that I
believe in original sin, the thing which cast us from the creator
and will never let us go back, or at least will not let us go back
the way we came. We still live in the Garden, but we do not see it
for the trees.
In the end, it's all the same, isn't
it?