No Time to Rest

Ignorance is not a crime. That is, those who are ignorant are not culpable for their ignorance. But one of the greatest crimes among humans is hiding information, and worse still is constructing an environment which discourages thinking.

The first step in human development is cutting the umbilical cord, and the last rite of passage is cutting the apron strings. What begins with physical separation, of receiving an identity as a separate living being, was intended by God to continue, with the last stage being a mind free to follow its own path. Every influence in your life which seeks to maintain and prolong dependence is intrinsically evil.

As I look around me, I see vast stretches of humanity still tied to one false mommy or another. In one sense, I have dedicated my life to ending that sort of thing. If I am the teacher, plowing the field of the mind to open it up for the rains of Heaven, I must first remove the slabs of dependence. The truth of God cuts its own path, and I’ll never know the mystery of it. What I do know is the part I play, and I am permitted to see the things I am called to change.

God, and God alone, holds the right to establish givens. In the final analysis, that is the only umbilicus you cannot cut. It won’t matter how much you might desire to ignore Him, He won’t go away. If He did, you would cease to exist, dissolving into the constituent sub-atomic particles which He now actively holds together so you can live. You can call it religion if you like, because you think a label is like a handle, and you can throw it away, but this is the fact of our existence. What is established eternally must be a part of your calculations, or by default you are attached by umbilicus to Satan. You don’t get to choose outside that binary foundation of all Creation.

Nor is it particularly spiritual to write these things. Simply because I eschew an utter dependence of Aristotelian epistemology, and in particular the modern Enlightenment foundation of assumptions, should not signal a move away from pure philosophy on a human level. This whole discussion is eminently reasonable and rational, as long as you embrace the wider breadth of human knowledge to include the ancient mystical ways of thinking. It’s convenient to label this as the talk of mere post-modern literary fashion, but it was around before any written language. To assume humans didn’t really know anything until the day the secularist Enlightenment dawned is not just ignorance itself, but stupidity, a case of intellectual dishonesty, self-delusion. To wrap your intellect in the warm embrace of pure objectivism is another form of childhood.

We have no place to rest. The essential condition of humanity is acknowledging the Universe as one big unanswered question. That fundamental fact leaks into every interstice. When you embrace your place in this world as unsettled, because all things around are essentially unsettled, then you are in the place to actually nail some things down. In a very real sense, the anchor of being is the self. Not as God, but as the only thing you can hope to really know much about. And even then, what you know will be cast in forms of tension between many different pulls and pushes. The tension never ceases until you die.

You can be an adult, who learns that question is the fundamental truth, and question everything around you. Every answer is tentative, something you live with until something better comes along, because you can’t really control anything, not even yourself. There is no time to rest, ever.