Puzzle’s Stable

We live in Puzzle’s Stable and regardless of what we are told or read or experience, we can not recognize the paradise which surrounds us. Or did, once upon a time.

We have plundered and ravaged the planet we live on. We have cut down the forests and plants we need to produce the very air we breathe. We have decimated most of the species which once roamed the earth, and we treat the meek of our own kind as fodder for our canons forcing them into killing fields at worst , and at best force feeding them worthless goods at inflated prices. Regardless of the fact that this same consumer worked, often for a pittance, to produce those same objects of useless vanity.

We have covered the planet with brute ugliness, we have poisoned its skies and its waters with deadly chemicals and industrial rubble. We have created weapons capable of destroying worlds and we use them with glee.

If we treat our home and its fauna and flora in this way, we reserve worse for our own kind. Those who have tooth and nail slash and burn their way to the top and kill and maim to remain there. Such people seize the planet’s resources, relegating the rest of us to impoverished peasants with no land of our own to feed off.

Such people force us to fight their battles to our own death. In the name of greed and power and lust. The plutocracy build temples to their own glory, they buy super yachts and private jets. Their friend the tyrant does the same through different means with the same end result. The church of technocracy has come to replace the robber barons. They pretend to be saving the world with robots and AI and phallic moon rockets, but they are the mere successors to the same violent thugs who came before them.

So what of Puzzle’s Stable?

The dwarves sat in darkness, they could not see the light. They sat in paradise but could smell only the ordure of a stable, they could taste only straw. They were greedy, stupid, arrogant, selfish, cruel, disloyal. The dwarves are for the dwarves. Their world had an infinitely benign creator, but it was beyond even his power to make them see the wonderful place they had arrived at as it really was.

And so it is with our world, whether you believe in a creator or not. We have taken paradise and created Gehenna.

I have spoken much recently of “revelation”. I am embarrassed to use the word in some contexts, much as I am loathe to speak of love. And yet there are senses in which it can be employed so as to give no offence to today’s Church of Science, to today’s believers in a sad physicalist universe.

For those who do not choose to believe in anything they can not prod or measure or melt in a crucible, it may be defined as “something revealed or disclosed, especially a striking disclosure, as of something not before realized”. Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Einstein had such revelations. As have so many other men in white coats, or outfits more suited to their era.

To those who may feel that reality comprises something greater than mere matter or energy, revelation may serve the same purpose but the “revealing” may be disclosed elsewhere than in a laboratory or a particle accelerator.

A friend asked me the other day why I always express doubt. Have I seen reality or not? Has revelation convinced me that something or someone is out there, beyond the fields of force which we are told builds our world?

I answered that I express doubt for different reasons but that in fact I felt none. Doubt makes me sound less eccentric, less a part of the awful pattern of religion which has and continues to cause such dreadful carnage in our world.

I feel and have always felt drawn to what some would consider the divine.  Although I prefer to use the term loosely.  Non materialistic causation of some sort. A force or power behind all that we see with agency of its own.

From childhood I have worshipped the god of Narnia. In adulthood I have included other interpretations, representations of the divine.

All this I have documented elsewhere on these interminable pages.

Throughout my life I have sought divine agency, evidence of it. Of a reality other than what we see in our day to day existence.

I have been at home only in mystery, in the must of ancient churches, in the hypnotic music of chant.

And so yes, I do believe,  I have no doubt that reality is assuredly not just quarks and photons, weak and strong nuclear or electro magnetic forces.

And it has come to the point that I couldn’t give a damn what people think of me or my eccentricity. And so I will be unequivocal.

I feel and see things which others of a more prosaic mindset do not.  I have always had that shiver running up my spine when I listen to Mozart’s Vespers or stare at Poussin or Giotto. When I see a kite wheel in a leaden sky or watch an Atlantic wave crash mercilessly on a remote rocky beach.

Beauty is real and can not be explained by mathematics or placed over a Bunsen Burner. Well, unless you are a Jesuit and consider witches deserve it.

I have never felt such a very strong pull until quite recently.  It has become almost overwhelming. Age perhaps, a step further towards death and the ultimate truth have hastened my quest.

In any event I refuse to apologise for it and am perfectly happy with what daily and deep internal searching is telling me.

Just as muscle gains strength with use, so it seems with contemplation. 

When I began this post I became waylaid in a sadness for this world I thought I had contained.  What use are such tirades again injustice and human bestiality.

Over supper I regained my composure and took up my pen in a more useful frame of mind.

Humanity has very probably dealt itself out of the equation and if so, I will not mourn it’s demise. There is more than humanity and if we do survive I hope we are severely cut down to size and are persuaded to change our ways.

But I do not believe in an anthropocentric reality. However much I appreciate the culture of the Abrahamic myth, I do not agree with their basic premise.  God did not create man at the centre of the universe. To hold sway over all else. Man created his own idea of a god who in turn created man. And some have been incestuously worshipping that concept for a long time.

Reality is stranger and more compelling, kinder and better than the human clones we have worshipped for generations.

My footing becomes surer as I tread my path. I will continue to beat my drum. I will stray further and more often into realms most think do not exist.

And one day, that is where I will stay.