Hades Gate
Matters or Matters Not
Whether you were well-behaved as a child, endlessly tormented your brother, or wouldn’t eat your broccoli – it matters not. Whether or not you got good grades in school or were on the football team – it matters not. Whether or not you went to an Ivy League college and then to Graduate school – it matters not. Whether or not you got a “good” job and made lots of money – it matters not. Whether you were concerned about your fellow man, gave money to charities or were a serial killer – it matters not. Whether or not your children became drug addicts, lived miserable lives and wouldn’t speak to you – it matters not. Whether you were self-disciplined, or pretty, or fat and sloth-like – it matters not. Whether you live a long and successful life full of service or you don’t – it matters not. That you even lived and then died – it also matters not. Life goes on with no need of mattering or justification what-so-ever.
When You Arrive
When you arrive at the Apex, the Zenith, sitting on top of the pyramid point, then where to move, except to collapse and fall back? With no place to go, most will try desperately to hold to where they’ve arrived, carving a niche, while others backslide to a safer, more stable platform. How about going to “no place?” Take a leap into the startling unknown, the void and nothingness, and maybe a new level and wholly different arena.
A Human Sacrifice
Man is the intercessory in a divine process. Man, the interloper, provides a degree of distinctiveness and organizational complexity that may be useful for the development and evolution of life on earth. Man is a disturbance to the natural, unawakened planet; a necessary irritant required for pearl formation but not the zenith of life’s accomplishment. Man is a human sacrifice.
Move It!
Humans never seemed to accord well with the teaching of Heraclitus, who said that change is the basic condition of the universe. Maybe for other animals, but not us. After the age of 25, most people believe that settling and sending down roots is what we should do, but we are not of the plant kingdom. Movement and change is us. We overly complex, denatured humans need to rediscover those simple qualities of shift and adaptation. Then when dissatisfaction alerts us, learn to SLIDE! Stop your grousing. Discontented with your position? Move your butt! When it’s time to shift (and we always know), the only question is, where to? So stop your bitching and just get going. And again, why aren’t people happy? Maybe it’s as simple as the process of feeling hungry. We’re rarely confused about what to do about that. We eat something and the problem disappears. If you start to feel a cramp in your leg, what to do? You move your leg, of course. You don’t call your therapist and consider biographical antecedents to the pain in your leg. You simply move. How natural. So when you receive the same kind of signal as hunger or a cramp, but in the form of unhappiness, why don’t you react naturally and move? Unhappiness is simply a matter of not being where your configuration wants you to be. You are not where you belong. You are in the wrong place and need to move yourself to the right place for you. The panther in the river knows that he doesn’t belong there and does something about it. He doesn’t try to perfect his breaststroke so he can become more comfortable in his surroundings, he gets the hell out as soon as he is able (back to panther country) without any desperate calls to his therapist.
Glorious Separation
Differentiation; it’s our uniqueness and separation from the whole. It is our chance at individuation before returning to the undifferentiated Mass. Embracing this moment of time, space and form to experience life because of glorious separation, and to know unity and true connection through the intimacy and poignancy of division, loss and aloneness.
Icarus Factor
We humans think that we are probably “better” now and will continue to develop, improve and refine. We are so much more complex and sophisticated than even a couple of decades ago and are on such a trajectory of accelerated development that the near future should be unimaginably wondrous. But, do we ever consider that all this technological development may just be a plaything provided by the gods for their amusement? May it simply be the song that we humans sing to the world during our earthly moment in the klieg lights? It also could be the Icarus factor; yes, the wax on our wings does seem to be getting a lot softer.
Erasing Our Imprint
We don’t have to wait for geologic time to erase our imprint. For most individuals, the evidence of their existences will have disappeared within a couple of generations. This means that almost everything you know now and love about this world will have completely vanished. It will be as if you and your parents and children had never even existed. Isn’t it wonderful to live in a world made of sandcastles?
