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| 1:17 AM, Tuesday, July 08, 2003 |
I went down to the Stanford shopping center today, among other places. My home town, Palo Alto, has changed. A lot. My old computer store is gone, in favor of a Radio Shack and Quizno's. Other things have changed. The shopping center has expanded and grown. The old Sand Hill lot is now a large set of condominiums. It's not really my home any more ... I still recognize it, remember it all, but it's just ... different. Deer Creek has changed. Places I spent fourteen, fifteen years in are all different.
There are places I remember all my life
Some have changed, some forever, not for better
And some are gone, and some remain
All these places have their meanings
With lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life, I loved them all ...
Anyway. So I've been thinking about this for a while, and Blade of Tyshalle has somewhat helped my thought processes along, as has seeing the changes that have been wrought in California since I've been gone. Humans find it very easy, as a generalization, to worship and fear God. But it's very difficult for them to love and accept that God would want to be with humans. Why is that?
I think, and this is through a haze of fiction, non-fiction, observations, and general philosophy, that it stems from the human desire to make and mold their environment. To quote Agent Smith from The Matrix:
| I'd like to share a revelation during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. |
That's part of it. I think we find it difficult to embrace anything that we cannot remake into what we desire it to be.
Too, as a species we pretty much destroy the Earth. Crossing the Bay today, it was ... brown. There were blue patches, yes, but for the most part the water was brown. Smog filled the air, and it was ... unpleasant. We've taken the planet and industrialized it, turned it into something to serve our needs. Rather than working with it, we take it and enslave it.
The Blind God from Blade of Tyshalle is a wonderful example of this:
The "Blind God" is not a personal god, not a god like Yahweh or Zeus, stomping out the grapes of wrath, hurling thunderbolts at the infidel. The Blind God is a force: like hunger, like ambition.
It is a mindless groping towards the slightest increase in comfort. It is the greatest good for the greatest number, when the only number that counts is the number of human beings living right now. I think of the Blind God as a tropism, an autonomic response that turns humanity towards destructive expansion the way a plant's leaves turn towards the sun.
It is the shared will of the human race.
You can see it everywhere. On the one hand, it creates empires, dams rivers, builds cities - on the other, it clear-cuts forests, sets fires, poisons wetlands. It gives us vandalism: the quintessentially human joy of breaking things.
Some will say that this is only human nature.
To which I respond: Yes, it is. But we must wonder why it is.
Consider: From where does this behavior arise? What is the evolutionary advantage conferred by this instinct? Why is it instinctive for human beings to treat the world like an object?
We treat our planet as an enemy, to be crushed, slaughtered, plundered. Raped. Everything is opposition - survival of the fittest on the Darwinian battlefield. Whatever isn't our slave is our potential destroyer. We kill and kill and kill and tell ourselves it is self-defense, or even less: that we need the money, we need the jobs that ruthless destruction temporarily provides.
We even treat each other that way.
(Blade of Tyshalle, pp. 282-283, Matthew Woodring Stover) |
I wonder if we worship God because we need validation. Is this why we find it so difficult to accept the unconditional love He has for His children? Because we invalidate ourselves in our eyes by our actions on Earth?
The magickal races of Overworld - the primals, the stonebenders, and treetoppers - they can feel their connection to the living structure of their world. This is why they have never developed organized religions in the human sense; their gods are not objects of worship, but only of respect, of kinship. An Overworld god isn't an individual, a unitary Power to be appeased or conjured; it is a limb of the living planet, a knot of consciousness within the Lifemind, just as is each primal or stonebender or treetopper - each sparrow or blade of grass. They are all part of the same Life, and they know it.
They cannot avoid knowing it; Flow is as essential to their metabolism as is oxygen.
The tragedy of humanity is that we are as much a part of our living planet as any primal mage is of his. We just don't know it. We can't feel it. The First Folk have a name for our incapacity - for our tragic blindness.
They call it the Veil of the Blind God, and they pity us....
A religion that teaches you God is something outside the world - something separate from everything you see, smell, taste, touch, and know - is nothing but a cheap hustle.
(Blade of Tyshalle, p. 283, Matthew Woodring Stover) |
I wonder if maybe this is what the Holy Spirit is all about. And too, I wonder if perhaps everything we think we understand about the world is completely and utterly wrong.
No, wait, I don't wonder that. I know that much.
But perhaps this is why we find it so difficult to grasp the consciousness and reality of God - because we have distanced ourselves from the planet, we are distanced from reality. We cannot unmake that side of us, but we can submerge it. We can try to pretend it doesn't exist. And we can hope that we can choose service to the Blind God in order to mitigate that feeling of lack.
-David
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