Spirits of Place by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Daily Grail Publishing
Published: 2016-12-01T05:00:00+00:00

Six: Beggar They Come

Everything about the virtual world promises successful outcomes – rich, happy, well-connected, well-informed. All knowledge made available freely to all, and all wisdom follows. Each act we take, fully informed, expresses a perfection of influence approaching the Absolute. Illuminated from within by this culture of knowledge, all things appear as lights: "Omnia quae sunt, lumina sunt." Yet our eyes see less than the whole, perceiving only what they can understand. We look upon our works and declare them good, for we are good and good can only create good. We judge ourselves leniently, one approval leading to another, then another, and another in an endless sequence that acquires authenticity by virtue of its own continuity. Seeing only good in ourselves, our works must be good.

The funhouse mirrors of the virtual world have their antecedents in each of our souls, for nothing can exist in the virtual unless we put it there, and we can only draw from our knowledge. This knowledge reflects the parts of ourselves that seem good – all the rest suppressed into the unconscious – so the warps and blindnesses within us look normal when we see them within the virtual world. They are our most familiar features. Pretending dark is light, we infuse all we look upon with that same darkness, ignoring our real essence – unpleasant and unfamiliar – replenishing it with nothing. The real world has been undermined by this progressive darkness, giving way to the negative absolute of utter virtuality. Triumphant, nothing surveys its kingdom, seeing nothing everywhere. We sleep. Dreams disturb this strange slumber – the only way in through egos so hardened by delusions of their own perfections that they admit no light. Revealing hell in rage and fire, these dreams shout us into another kind of wakefulness: the dark night of the soul. Woke. Aware only of heartbeat and anxiety, the world seems too small and too tight and too short and nothing too close for comfort. Light and dark reverse for a moment, illumination fades to black: has it all ended so quickly? All over, and nothing to show for it. In this moment we confront a choice: do we turn over and go back to sleep (in reality spending endless hours worrying into a timeless night), or do we rise up, and walk a different path. Sleep ends in fire and nothing, while a walk eventually comes to the Bo tree, and a moment's touch. Look hard enough – as Buddha did – and perfection disappears in reflection. The perfect, ever the enemy of the good, evaporates back into nothing. If we choose to look, we see it really does not exist. Once we see that, and are revealed to ourselves as broken and incomplete, we can approach the Absolute on its own terms, in its own time. Of this little can be said except that the attempt contains within it all that can ever be achieved.

Of anything else, what should we say? "When a monkey looks into a mirror, no god looks out.

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