Post by The Pilot on Oct 13, 2007 23:57:37 GMT -5
|Written for an assignment in my Lit class.|
Rarely are epiphanies the kind of thing to cause the breath to catch in your throat, or you to jump out of your seat exclaiming 'aha!'. At least for me, it has rarely been that way.
In my experience, epiphanies were small things to have daily. When I look back on myself as a child, I find that I only remember thoughts. I don't know how other people remember things, but I can't recall a single fact, clear image, or complete sentence. I don't remember being told that God exists, I only remember believing it. I remember the satisfaction of having created a model solar system from my own initiative one day. I remember surprise when the understanding of how an animal's hind leg was shaped dawned on me. I remember the pain of realizing that there was no such thing as a personal God.
I suppose that was my first life-altering epiphany. Just like many people, I was subject to a less-than-ideal childhood. I can say with certainty that I can't for the life of me recall either of the divorces. In one memory my dad or step-dad were there, and the next, they weren't. I am quite content with Tim being gone, though. He drew a shadow into the house with him, and it wasn't cigarette smoke. It was oppression, fear, and heartache, and it took six years for that shadow to go away. And you have to grow up very quickly in situations like that. You have to understand why mom cries all the time. You have to understand why Tim punched a hole in the door, why he threw his wedding band out the car window on the freeway, why mom had to call the police those two times. But sometimes it wasn't as easy to understand as that. Why did mom always get angry with you on the drive home from church every Sunday? Why did dad marry a woman he'd known for only a few months?
And if domestic life wasn't hard enough, I was a misfit at school. After bringing a swift end to some friendships with a single violent outburst, I was without an identity on the educational front as well.
I would have to say my first year beyond elementary school was the most important year of my life. After that kick to the shin, I'd walked away from that group of girls completely liberated. That excommunication marked the beginning of my philosophical, intellectual, and spiritual exponential growth. Without the chains of social anxiety weighing me down, I was free to think.
It was about that period that I dismissed the Christian God from my life. I realized that he had done absolutely nothing for me save for preventing me from exploring other schools of thought. I suppose that is really the only real, complete memory I have. I remember pacing in a room of my empty house, talking to myself. In those crucial moments, I was rewiring my thinking, and then suddenly I turned up toward the ceiling and addressed God aloud. I remember saying I didn't need him anymore. If I needed anything done, I could no longer rely on an impersonal God; I had to rely on myself. And for a while, I resented that.
That's when I was twelve. After that, my brain woke up. I started to look at the world objectively; I studied people's behavior and understood why they huddled together in herds: it was for psychological safety. To stand out is a dangerous thing. I also vaguely remember pondering technology, and the media, and the state of our society. I made some strange conclusions about how the world would be better without us, and that to revert back to our 'primal' selves, to discard any superficial notion and superficial possession we might have, would be the optimum state for any person. To achieve perfect harmony with nature was to achieve perfect harmony with ourself. (I lived by that one for several years.) I even remember coining a term for people who were slaves to image and trends: they were 'domests', short for 'domesticates': my new friends and I were wolves, while everyone else were lap dogs.
In high school, my theories began to develop even more. By then, the old wounds from domestic upheaval and social rejection at a public school were healed. I had new opinions on religion and universal truths. I made amends with monotheism after three years of practicing Wicca, and it was for the better. The more and more I thought, the more I found myself leaning toward the idea of an impersonal god that permeates everything in the universe. By replacing these old, pagan deities of trees and air with a single presence, I found a strange sense of comfort. There was not one god here and another there, there was one god everywhere. In my head I began calling this perfect being 'The Omniscient Potential', though it took me several more years to understand what I truly meant in that.
Another thing that baffled me was how this idea of god could be so institutionalized by religion. I couldn't comprehend how, if this God was all-powerful and all-seeing, was he being described in terms that mortals could relate to? I eventually understood that naming was part of it. “To name something is to give it power.” That simple law has bears relevance to many things. It has the power to immortalize us, to kill us, to create gods or to bring them down. In granting something a name, we automatically ascribe to it certain properties. To name it is to limit what it can be. That was another small epiphany that grew over time. I realized that giving a nickname to a friend is much like naming the Omniscient Potential. To call it God would be compartmentalizing it by the standards of Christians; to call it Allah would be compartmentalizing it by the standards of Muslims, and so on and so forth. That law pertains to people as well, I realized. The only way that we know how to be immortal is through memory. The only way that anyone can ever truly die is to be forgotten. Even the ancient Egyptians believed that having all memory of someone erased after their death, it would cause them to die again, and their soul would meet oblivion. Funny that this idea should continue today, albeit a cruder manifestation: “There is no bad publicity.”
It was today that I realized that I was a Deist. I don't much like putting a spiritual label on myself as it might hinder my potential, just as putting a label on the creator of the universe might do to it in our minds, but it seems to me that the main theme of this school of thought is to know no bounds. There is room for infinite expansion. I like that.
I've had many other small epiphanies along the way as well. After going through fascinations with a myriad of things from criminal psychology, to cosmology, I now understand that because all is of the stuff of the universe's creator, all is truth, and therefore nothing is wrong or invalid. There is truth, opinion, and nothing in between. There is only relevance because we are here to experience it. War isn't bad, and peace isn't good; they are only these things because we named them and gave them these attributes. If it exists, then it is meant to be. There is not a single thing that isn't, cannot, or should not. Everything is, and the only reason we fight for one thing or another is based on how we perceive that truth.
Rarely are epiphanies the kind of thing to cause the breath to catch in your throat, or you to jump out of your seat exclaiming 'aha!'. At least for me, it has rarely been that way.
In my experience, epiphanies were small things to have daily. When I look back on myself as a child, I find that I only remember thoughts. I don't know how other people remember things, but I can't recall a single fact, clear image, or complete sentence. I don't remember being told that God exists, I only remember believing it. I remember the satisfaction of having created a model solar system from my own initiative one day. I remember surprise when the understanding of how an animal's hind leg was shaped dawned on me. I remember the pain of realizing that there was no such thing as a personal God.
I suppose that was my first life-altering epiphany. Just like many people, I was subject to a less-than-ideal childhood. I can say with certainty that I can't for the life of me recall either of the divorces. In one memory my dad or step-dad were there, and the next, they weren't. I am quite content with Tim being gone, though. He drew a shadow into the house with him, and it wasn't cigarette smoke. It was oppression, fear, and heartache, and it took six years for that shadow to go away. And you have to grow up very quickly in situations like that. You have to understand why mom cries all the time. You have to understand why Tim punched a hole in the door, why he threw his wedding band out the car window on the freeway, why mom had to call the police those two times. But sometimes it wasn't as easy to understand as that. Why did mom always get angry with you on the drive home from church every Sunday? Why did dad marry a woman he'd known for only a few months?
And if domestic life wasn't hard enough, I was a misfit at school. After bringing a swift end to some friendships with a single violent outburst, I was without an identity on the educational front as well.
I would have to say my first year beyond elementary school was the most important year of my life. After that kick to the shin, I'd walked away from that group of girls completely liberated. That excommunication marked the beginning of my philosophical, intellectual, and spiritual exponential growth. Without the chains of social anxiety weighing me down, I was free to think.
It was about that period that I dismissed the Christian God from my life. I realized that he had done absolutely nothing for me save for preventing me from exploring other schools of thought. I suppose that is really the only real, complete memory I have. I remember pacing in a room of my empty house, talking to myself. In those crucial moments, I was rewiring my thinking, and then suddenly I turned up toward the ceiling and addressed God aloud. I remember saying I didn't need him anymore. If I needed anything done, I could no longer rely on an impersonal God; I had to rely on myself. And for a while, I resented that.
That's when I was twelve. After that, my brain woke up. I started to look at the world objectively; I studied people's behavior and understood why they huddled together in herds: it was for psychological safety. To stand out is a dangerous thing. I also vaguely remember pondering technology, and the media, and the state of our society. I made some strange conclusions about how the world would be better without us, and that to revert back to our 'primal' selves, to discard any superficial notion and superficial possession we might have, would be the optimum state for any person. To achieve perfect harmony with nature was to achieve perfect harmony with ourself. (I lived by that one for several years.) I even remember coining a term for people who were slaves to image and trends: they were 'domests', short for 'domesticates': my new friends and I were wolves, while everyone else were lap dogs.
In high school, my theories began to develop even more. By then, the old wounds from domestic upheaval and social rejection at a public school were healed. I had new opinions on religion and universal truths. I made amends with monotheism after three years of practicing Wicca, and it was for the better. The more and more I thought, the more I found myself leaning toward the idea of an impersonal god that permeates everything in the universe. By replacing these old, pagan deities of trees and air with a single presence, I found a strange sense of comfort. There was not one god here and another there, there was one god everywhere. In my head I began calling this perfect being 'The Omniscient Potential', though it took me several more years to understand what I truly meant in that.
Another thing that baffled me was how this idea of god could be so institutionalized by religion. I couldn't comprehend how, if this God was all-powerful and all-seeing, was he being described in terms that mortals could relate to? I eventually understood that naming was part of it. “To name something is to give it power.” That simple law has bears relevance to many things. It has the power to immortalize us, to kill us, to create gods or to bring them down. In granting something a name, we automatically ascribe to it certain properties. To name it is to limit what it can be. That was another small epiphany that grew over time. I realized that giving a nickname to a friend is much like naming the Omniscient Potential. To call it God would be compartmentalizing it by the standards of Christians; to call it Allah would be compartmentalizing it by the standards of Muslims, and so on and so forth. That law pertains to people as well, I realized. The only way that we know how to be immortal is through memory. The only way that anyone can ever truly die is to be forgotten. Even the ancient Egyptians believed that having all memory of someone erased after their death, it would cause them to die again, and their soul would meet oblivion. Funny that this idea should continue today, albeit a cruder manifestation: “There is no bad publicity.”
It was today that I realized that I was a Deist. I don't much like putting a spiritual label on myself as it might hinder my potential, just as putting a label on the creator of the universe might do to it in our minds, but it seems to me that the main theme of this school of thought is to know no bounds. There is room for infinite expansion. I like that.
I've had many other small epiphanies along the way as well. After going through fascinations with a myriad of things from criminal psychology, to cosmology, I now understand that because all is of the stuff of the universe's creator, all is truth, and therefore nothing is wrong or invalid. There is truth, opinion, and nothing in between. There is only relevance because we are here to experience it. War isn't bad, and peace isn't good; they are only these things because we named them and gave them these attributes. If it exists, then it is meant to be. There is not a single thing that isn't, cannot, or should not. Everything is, and the only reason we fight for one thing or another is based on how we perceive that truth.
If this was for school then good god I hope you got a good grade!