The Monsters in the Shadows.
What are you? Are you a Demon? Or are you an Angel? Most of us bumbling through life – atheist or religious – usually lean towards Goodness and Light – we want to believe we’re Angels. We believe because of some…thing, some feeling deep down inside that there is a universal truth to arrive at; some perennial morality that doesn’t need an outside Force to exist. While that may be true, what of the Demons and the Monsters we also carry around with us? Are they some rebellious creation of our minds, destined to always torment us and make reality a painful journey to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful? I don’t think so.
How do you know what hot feels like? How do you know where you end and everything else begins? The feeling of heat can only be experienced only if you know of it’s opposite: cool. If suddenly, for some reason, the sensation of coolness were somehow expunged from reality, the feeling of hotness would disappear with it. There would only be one temperature, or rather, only one experience of temperature in this vast, wild universe. Hot cannot exist without its consort; Cold. And you cannot exist as a Self without your consort, The Other. If there is nothing outside of you, how do you know where you end? The only reason you have any idea of what you are is because the opposite of you exists in this universe - everything else!
I have spent thousands of hours already in my short life span searching fervently and madly for the answers. And I have nothing to show for it. If you meet someone and they tell you that they’ve found a destination – somewhere you can arrive at if you just keep searching. Run as fast as you can from them, before they infect your mind! Run extra fast if they think they’ve found the answer through Logic and Reason, don’t join that twisted and sick Cult of Rationality or you’ll sink into Nihilism before you can say, “I’m less than a speck of dust.” Rationally, what other answer is there?
Wake up! Look around at what it really is! It’s all One. Your whole experience of Being comes from a relationship with everything else. As Alan Watts once said; “You’re It!” So, Be It! It’s all unfolding together, it’s always perfect. Even if Lucifer himself shatters the gates of Hell and covers the Cosmos with Darkness, that Darkness cannot exist without the Light. They are one in the same. Any “Absolute Truth” you think you know, is only an illusion. If you find the Angel inside yourself, the perennial place, then you haven’t met your Monsters. You haven’t met the hateful and dark parts of yourself that want to destroy everything bathed in Love and Light. Because how can you know what an angel is if you’ve never met a demon?
If you think it’s all-good, all-benevolent, then you’re missing half of reality! And if you think it’s all-bad, all-malevolent, you’re just on the other side of the coin. Rather, step into Being! Stop searching for the answers and rid yourself of the idea that there is a “true way”. Meet and befriend your angels and your demons; they come from the same place. Take the path of Unknowing until you reach Nowhere. Just as there is no Hot if there is no Cold, there can be no You without Everything Else. The separation you feel from the universe is an illusion. The sum total of what you are is the Universe experiencing itself as the opposite of The Other; an individual Self. Go forth and live not as separate to the Totality, but integral and necessary to Totality. Be Hot or Be Cold, but really BE IT! Don’t waste time searching for answers (Or do, it doesn’t matter); turn on the tap and feel the temperature, remember what you are!