A Necessary Evil And Miscellania

(Before It's News)

I work in a very rowdy environment with typical blue-collar ruffians.  When I go to work in the morning I can generally count on the fact that I have to take my language down a few notches and expect to be thoroughly insulted in good humor.  Admittedly, there is nothing sacred where I work.  Generally speaking anyone that has a fragile ego doesn’t last long as they are unable to handle the type of ribbing that tends to go on there.  On one occasion I had called in sick. The next day my friends continually asked me, “Hey, Mitchell, I heard you called in gay?”  In that environment anything deemed “unmanly” like being too sick to go to work is referred to as being “gay”.  While I very much like the people I work with, there is little refinement there.   Most of my co-workers are drunks who would rather hang around bars than spend time with their families.  I never felt attracted to that kind of life.  Sadly,  many of them view  their own children as burdensome. As flawed as they are, I like these people very much and consider them my friends more than my co-workers.  I am often viewed as somewhat strange because I have four children, have been with the same woman for twelve years, and prefer the company of my family.  When I am asked to go out drinking it is usually done as a matter of reflex.  “We know you don’t want to come out with us, but the offer is on the table.”  I  don’t like to drink and I really don’t like going to bars or clubs because the “mental noise” tends to profoundly affect me.  I pick up very quickly on the “vibes” people put out.  I am often regarded as being anti-social in this regard even though I find people very interesting.  Again, it is not that I don’t like the people I work with.  I do. I like them so much in fact that I have had several of them spend the holidays with me and my family because they had nowhere else to go.

For me my employment is a kind of mask I am forced to wear out of necessity.  While I make every attempt to show kindness to my friends at work, and to treat them well, I admit that I am often times just as rowdy as they are.  As strange as it may sound, this is how many males, particularly those that are blue-collar show affection toward one another.  Years ago when I first began working and was getting picked on incessantly by my coworkers, I would get irritated to the point that minor jokes would almost turn to blows.  One day this old guy who worked with me saw I was getting frustrated.  He put his arm around me and told me something that I often tell other people I know, “they wouldn’t mess with you if they didn’t like you.” In that type of environment you just have to play the game.
I have told people on numerous occasions that I talk and act the way I do at work because it is one of those necessary evils. On one occassion a few years ago, a friend of mine played a prank on me that was so well played out that people still talk about it today.  When I asked him why he did it, he responded, “I’m just trying to survive.”   Like I said, it is all a necessary evil for the sake of comfort and survival even in very trivial matters.  I have found out that every part of my life, at least to  a certain extent, is a “necessary evil” that I am growing beyond.

The people I grew up with didn’t amount to much as they got older.  The ones who succeeded really succeeded and the ones that failed, often failed pretty hard.  I wound up somewhere in the middle.   Early on I knew that this life was not to be about becoming successful or making lots of money, it was about getting to the heart of my existence and answering the questions that my genetic forebears never answered.   My family, particularly my grandfather who was the biggest asshole I have ever met,  felt I was crazy and unrealistic because I didn’t care about “what I wanted to be when I grew up”.  The saving grace of my childhood was that I was allowed to roam free from the sometimes narrow religious upbringing of my parents as well as my fathers intimidation and abuse.  This allowed me as a young child to essentially experience the world in a different way than most children.  My childhood was a constant dialogue between my outward self and a living presence that hid itself within me.  In the moments of my greatest fear, when being beaten by my father or being chased down by someone who wished to do me harm there was always this “presence” that guided me toward the direction I was to take, even when I truly did not want to go in that direction.

It was believed that Socrates since childhood was in deep communion with his Seraph, known in those times as the personal “Daimon”.  According to Socrates:

“The favor of the gods has given me a marvelous gift, which has never left me since my childhood. It is a voice which, when it makes itself heard, deters me from what I am about to do and never urges me on.”

Till the end of his life the voice remained with Socrates.  It was likely a matter of knowing how to listen, a characteristic that often emerges once a persons “baggage” has been worked out.  Beneath all of these “necessary evils” there is a kind of unspoken understanding of  human nature: that something profound seems to be missing.  That missing “something” is what forces us to live with a great deal of uncertainty.

Yet there is more to us than just the Seraph or Daimon of the individual…Infinitely more.  There is the work of the soul and moving its seat beyond the constant rise and fall of forms in the material and subtle world.  This can only take place when a human being learns how to look within his or herself.  By “looking in” I mean that quite literally.  The major problem today is that this “inward” dimension is missing from many people.  This is very disturbing for many different reasons.  This lack of inward sight is really the reason for the many “spiritual innovations” emerging today (Tsarion, Braden,Weidner, Dwyer, Henry, Wilber, Chopra, Lash, et al). These innovations take place in that “outward” dimension only and seek answers  in the world of physical forms rather than at the noetic root, where the fullness of our humanity actually resides.  The constant invocation of “quantum physics” is one example of the modern spiritualists blind grasping for answers that aren’t “out there” to begin with.  Had these men been aware of the answers within them, just behind their eyes, they would understand very clearly that the systems they so boisterously promote are really the smoke and mirrors covering their own denial and ignorance of that divine and noetic root of which their own personal identity is only a privation and necessary evil.

No matter how one looks at it, the physical human individuality is actually a necessary evil, but not evil in the sense of mean-spirited brutality. I am talking about the cosmic process of evil, which is a movement out of the divine through self-delusion.  Evil is the privation of primordial light.   That is all it is.  The darker people are, the further away from the divine they are.  Mark my words, there ar a lot of dark people in the world today.   All evil, suffering, and hostility is bred from this privation primal light.  In fact, human identity itself as well as the physical domain as I mentioned earlier, arises in its physical form through this lack of divine presence, which is really a type of metaphysical self-delusion that leads to a cosmic precipitation of name and form.

Years ago while browsing the net, I mistakenly came across someones personal website that had pictures of their family and friends.  If memory serves me correctly this happened in 1997 or 1998.  As I browsed through this website it became obvious to me that even though all of the people were complete strangers and lived in another state, that I somehow knew all of them very well.  I just kind of let these emotions and sensations of familiarity ride without trying to stifle them.  I finally reached a point where I was able to name one of the people in the pictures. A few pages later this name was confirmed in a small caption underneath a different photo.  As this passive “empathic” state continued, I began to notice that the pictures of the area were also familiar, that feeling of nostalgia filled me to the point that my familiarity with the landscape and the people was undeniable.  I knew those people, but I didn’t know how I knew them.  It was as if I was a presence that inhabited that world.  A tunnel opened up within my individuality that somehow linked me to this little town in another state.

When I was 23 (shortly after the event above) I came to a shattering realization that all existence was taking place within me.  Every individual I encountered, and all those that had ever lived somehow were extensions of my innermost self. It wasn’t just the people,  it was everything.  The experience, to be sure, was eviscerating even though it ended six hours later with me in a deep state of paralyzing spiritual ecstasy saying, “Please, God,  I can’t take anymore!”.  I was hardly “learned” at that age, but I was somehow given a glimpse of this shattering reality of being ALL.  For years I struggled with a feeling of profound metaphysical loneliness in the form of solipsism.  For a time this caused me to be exceedingly harsh and mean to the people I cared for. To call this event the “dark night of the soul” would be putting it mildly.  The dark night of the soul would be the gravy train by comparison. Frankly I was trapped in a living hell.

As great as the experience above at age 23 might sound to some people, I do not believe it is the highest state of the human being, nor do I believe it is of monumental importance.  In fact, I find that it is just as much a part of the necessary evil as all other things that prevent us from seeing the truth behind appearances.  Let me expand on this just a bit before I end this post.

A couple years ago I would have told you that the human individual is at the center of my metaphysical schema.  At the time I was in a state of violent confrontation with the idea of death.  In many ways it was reactionary.  The more I penetrated into death’s mystique, the more I began to realize what had been taking place within me all those years.  Whether we will admit to it or not, the death and the ascendent path doesn’t preserve human individuality at all.  None of us remain what we are at present.  Death expands individuality to a more universal scope.  In other words, a being that is on the ascendant path in the postmortem state is in the process of becoming not only his or her self more fully, but also the self of all other individuals. In other words, the highest beings we could imagine before language and ideas fail us are those that possess within themselves all other individualities.  But it goes even further than that.  No matter how you look at it, unless the human individuality spreads from God down to the individual, there can be no communication between the divine world and the physical.  What this means, ultimately, is that from our present perspective the journey must begin here below and must end at the highest point.  A point that is elevated even above “the ALL” and every last vestige of personal identity.  This highest point is not “oneness” as it is understood among the new age, it is the point of consummation of all ignorance and shortcomings, a point that is beyond any expression whatsoever.

Some weeks  ago while sitting outside on a very breezy summer evening, a feeling of reverie came over me.  For several long minutes that sense of nostalgia almost overpowered me.  This inward state became so prominent that Terra Firma seemed to transform into Terra Lucida and very strange things began to happen. Rather than allowing this feeling to run away from me or to be overcome by its mystique, which was once common for me,  I simply accepted it for what it was.  I learned a great deal that evening, mainly that every disguise and contrivance is really just one part of the necessary evil that prohibits us from a more panoramic view of life.

To put this another way, all of us are rather deficient.  Large portions of our individuality seem to be missing completely.  We suffer and are born into a world where we have very few answers to the most pressing of questions.  Personally, I do not wish to preserve this deficiency in myself or anyone else-especially now that I have seen through it to a large extent.  Terra Firma is Terra Lucida in disguise.  The physical human being is the Seraph in disguise.  The Seraph is the Nous in disguise and the Nous is the visible representation of The Good, of which nothing can be spoken because it is beyond even the imagination of the most sublime Seraphs.  The ascent is really nothing more than a breaking through of these symbolic layers of the disguise into the Good.  Once again, once this point is reached there is no such thing as “within or without” or “subject and object” let alone time, space, and causality.  All of those matters exist as contrivances and when you get right down to it, they have little to no divine qualities.  Human reasoning cannot even come close in detailing this consummation or marriage between the Individual and the Good.

Years ago someone told me quite frankly that they didn’t appreciate my pushiness and want to ingratiate myself into their life.  I was told by this woman that I had gotten between her and God and that it was time for me to “get lost”. It was a very important moment for me because it was the first time I truly realized how dangerous even the people I loved could be, especially if I sought to control and subjugate them (or they me) in some selfish way.  A very stunning truth came to me sometime after this event.  I learned that there was no “individual” that loved me in a truly genuine way but God or The Good.  Every image in my life and sphere of experience was actually a clever disguise the Good employed to communicate the divine currents to me, but always these were imperfect in some way.  Even the idea of the Seraph possesses this imperfection.  These divine currents (manifested as normal human events), as flawed as they can sometimes be, contain the imperfect expressions of the presence of God and his love for the individual.  They represent a beacon.  That beacon calls me back to pick up the pieces of myself that have gone missing when “I” came here out of a necessity that I don’t entirely understand.  This can only mean that in some way I must change and grow no matter how painful it may be.  Even now I understand very clearly that I am not the same person I was five years ago, ten years ago and longer.  That person and all that went into him was consumed by cosmic processes both internal and external. A new individual is born within us every day and this alone reveals the nebulous nature of human individuality and its constant transformations.  Even ideas at some point must be cast off because they represent the imperfection, that necessary cosmic evil.

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