Dream Download

It is 4:44 AM and I know I have been dreaming furiously for some time.  All kinds of philosophical, scientific, artistic, theological and mystical notions have been swirling about in my head.  But they have been coming in elegantly complete sentences; almost as if I was being tutored by a most articulate teacher.  Finally, I broke through into semi-wakefulness and wrestled with the idea of ignoring the messages and trying to go back to sleep.  But I knew that I would be very annoyed with myself in the morning if I didn’t try to record them.  So, I dragged myself out of bed, put on a very soft light, grabbed a pen and paper and started to write.  I am back in bed by 5:22 AM. Here is what I produced in the interim.  It is a very strong condemnation of how badly astray we have gone as a species.

We have captured an elegant gazelle, as it bounded like the wind through the savannah and reduced it to a bowl of soup. We stand, self-importantly, at the side of a dead elephant, one foot on his supine form, rifle mockingly pointed at his sad, silently staring eye, as we smile for the camera.  Photo op completed, we allow the sun, the hyenas, the vultures and the insects to finish the work, until only the rotting flesh and quickly bleaching bones remain.

We have traded the golden sands, blue-green lagoons and vaulted cathedrals of the great underground sea-side caverns for the mayhem of gas-fumed, horn-honking, hurried and harried commuting in box cars that snake impatiently and loudly along the concrete rivers of our city streets.

Like flies meandering randomly across the greasy, cobweb-occluded windows of an unkempt kitchen, we are mere millimeters from a freedom, which is our birthright, but ultimately, we fall on our backs on the dusty window ledge, feet pointing pleadingly in the air, petitioning a God in whom we no longer believe for a liberation that we no longer expect.

We have solved the mathematics of the cosmos but reduced the symphony of the universe to mere technology – the technology of war mongering.

We have explained away awesome sunsets as the random activity of helium and hydrogen atoms; and reduced mother-love to the cunning biochemistry of the selfish gene.

We have found a priceless painting by Michelangelo, stripped off the paint and liquefied it, winding up, triumphantly, with a pot full of pigment and a blank canvas.

We have taken the Complete Works of Shakespeare and grandly pontificated that they merely consist of X number of words and Y number of white spaces.

We are deadbeat dads, financing our follies with money stolen from our own children; while we deliberately avoid the fear-filled, tear-brimming eyes of the children of the ‘enemy’.

We have pulled planks from the hull of the ship that carries us over the ocean of evolution, in order to make a fire that will cook food for the elite in the cabin, not realizing that the resultant hole is going to sink all of us – the full-bellied first world-ers and the slack-bellied third world-ers alike.

The two-year-old, who met each day with awe, has become the 30-year-old who meets each day with angst, and, then, the 60-year-old who meets each day with cynicism.

We have squeezed the mystery out of the myths and crowed atheistically over the desiccated skeleton of a world without either meaning or hope.

Spirit’s sacred safari from Source has been interpreted as the accidental fabrication of the cosmos from the mindless meanderings of intergalactic winds.

Having murdered God, we are now in the process of committing global suicide.  We who are God have killed God and thus created a radical self-alienation.

We have replaced the dead deity with individual and global narcissism, unleashing again the four horsemen of the Apocalypse.  Only their names have changed.  They are now called, Deconstructionism, which dismantles art in the service of scientism; Reductionism, which chops up life in order to produce death; Materialism, which mistakes the senses’ knowledge for the soul’s wisdom; and Consumerism, which replaces cooperation among species with competition for fast-failing resources.

If we be the image of God, he be a demon god.

However, there is a solution. When faced with the mystery, we must resist the temptation to analyze it or to interpret it.  Instead we must stand silently in its presence; humbly worship it and thus become it.

Because the mystery is the message.