"I am afraid that I am lost if I put out the candle tonight..."
Such were the words I scribbled on a piece of paper on a morning that now seems like a lifetime ago. 13 years to the day to be exact. The sun had just climbed above the Mediterranean Sea, its rays piercing the velvet darkness of the Spanish summer night and exorcising the ghosts of nightmares of yesterday. I wanted to dream and drown in that light.
The poet and fool who sat on that beach is no more. The romantic notions of the beauty of the world and the loud narcissistic views of self have been burned in the flames of hell human beings refer to as "life", or merely "existence". They have been replaced by quiet irony, a clear sense of self, and stillness and silence of mind during the darkest dreamlike journey through time and space under the shadow of the fading stars.
Yet this stillness and silence I harbor are a sequel to that same dream. My domain may be in impenetrable darkness and in the furthest corner opposing the light, but I am neverthless existing, and I exist with purpose, meaning, rhyme and reason.
The question I get asked, more than often these days, is:
"are you happy?"
Happiness is the most clever form of self-deception human ego has ever produced. It is a product of a lifelong lie that human beings wrap themselves in and produce an utopia of self-made sense of fulfilment in a self-procreated world where perception produces a reality of sorts. A reality based on how others perceive and accept the individual, the tyranny of tradition and senseless attributes such as how much a human being is "worth", the garments and gadgets one possesses, and the preposterous assumption of the aforementioned having absolute value.
What reason produces such monsters? Human beings have the ability to lie even to themselves. What started out thousands of years ago as a minor survival technique somewhere along the ruthless path of evolution has grown into a serious case of hubris. Human beings have made the deception of others in order to survive into a permanent attribute defining a large part of the interaction with the world. Lying in order to achieve something is abysmal. Lying to oneself in order to achieve something is beyond description. And what kind of wonderful by-products do we enjoy as a result of this? War, religion and other uncounted acts of terror to name a few. The very existence of laws forbidding to do all things harmful. Is there a need of a structured legal systems keeping human beings from annihilating and inflicting harm to one another? Unfortunately yes, and the worst of all, humans are taking it for granted. The human beings have accepted the fact that they are dangerous, destructive and stupid, and looking at history, they are not about to change. There has been only a few brief periods in the recorded world history in the last 5000 years when not a single sentence was given out in any court. The first one is a period recorded in Sumer and second during the second intermediate period in Egypt.
I've been told that we live in the Age of Aquarius. No, we live in the Age of Individualism, no matter what any crystal-rubbing, pot-pulling, vegetable-munching sissy of a hippie says. There is absolutely nothing wrong with individualism per se, only how human beings instantiate it.
With individualism comes individual responsibility and not many beings can carry that weight.
You cannot be an individualist and hand out the responsibility of your actions, and the reaction they instigate, to anyone but yourself. Not even the tiniest fraction of it. The pinnacle of human stupidity, religion, has changed as a result of the Age of Individualism. The attempts of reaching the divine and taking part in any given godhead has become more audacious and even more laced with galactic proportions of self-deception. Ritual magick, the various forms of modern witchcraft, the majority of the new age cults and urban shamanism all embody the premise of altering the surrounding world with thought and will, acting as medium of supernatural powers, and in some cases, acting out divine will. I have not met a single human being with whom I would trust the keys of time and space, and with whom I would trust the fate of this world. It is a monumental statement of the ego to be able to say that "I can change this world with my will". And what would you do with it, you puny mortal? Would you change things as you see fit? Would you stop hunger, injustice, suffering and hate? Would you bring fulfilment, justice, freedom and balance? No, you would do "love spells", "talk to spirits" and "conjure metaphysical entities". You would use "the mystical energies of the universe". You would engage in a fruitless conversation with your own ego, your god, underpinning your self-esteem while entertaining yourself with entities to which you have given birth in your own imagination.
In days of the ancients Lord Sabaoth said: "I am Lord, your fucking GOD" and that was that. Now we have a bunch of teenagers dressed in black H&M rags and wearing crappy jewelry wanting to be gods or goddesses. Oh dear.
With the words of the great Thomas Gabriel Fischer:
"If this is creation, I feel misplaced".
