You Will See the World Change

"You will see the world change."

Words that keep coming to me lately - the voice of gnosis, always accompanied by a download of information in one form or another. Sometimes the information correlates with things in my own life. Other times, it's like picking up a book at random in the library, and not really having any clue what it's about. There's no cover and no synopsis, and the pages are out of order. But it's all there... just a matter of putting the pieces together. That's how it feels. Sometimes that's even how it works.

I've talked about it before - this long and winding road that stretches out across the desert. Route 66. Kelbaker Road. Nipton Road. Cima Road. Depends on what broken segment of it one is traveling what it's called. In the course of our business, we have occasion to be on that road a couple of times every year... and every time we pass along that way, I find myself thinking of how it seems nothing ever changes out there, except in the seasonal manifestations of summer blistering asphalt with dancing heat monkeys, and a glittering icing of snow on the mountains in winter. This time, ice crystals glittered like diamonds on the road to remind us of the storm that had passed through the night before, but other than these transient reminders of the changing seasons, the land remained exactly as it was the last time we were through there... and the time before that... and the time before that.

Impossible to describe the sense of timelessness that exists out there. Far more than almost anywhere else I have been - more than even in the isolation of the mountains when one is all alone. It is a sense that the world might even be laughing at us in our transient hurry to be always rushing from one location to another, moving our fragile bodies from point A to point B in search of... what? Out there in the stillness, that's what the All of it seemed to be asking as we sat in our car, pushed along by exploding gases in the engine, propelled along a road that is patches on top of patches on top of potholes deep enough to swallow a Volkswagen.

"Where are you going? What are you hoping to find over there that you would not find right here? What is your mission, little ant? Where oh where are you going?"

Oh, there's a rational answer. Simple enough. Going to Las Vegas for a trade show. But that wasn't what the All of it was asking as it stood there all around me, hiding in plain sight with its shivering chaparral bushes and its sea of dry grass and its stalwart Joshua trees. "Where are you going and what are you hoping to find?"

Impossible to put to words, but it often feels to me as if we live in a completely insane, made-up world. The All of it out there in the desert knows it, too. It sees what we humans try to hide from ourselves. It sees our transient nature, and it sees the madness we have built around ourselves in some vain attempt to deny that nature. It sees that the fashion runways at the trade show are just another manifestation of the road to death. One way street, then turn around and go back the way you came, such a short time on the stage, glittering one moment, gone the next. It sees the ruins built along that road to nowhere, and perhaps it even converses with the spirits of those who once inhabited those now-crumbling walls.

"You will see the world change."

The voice of gnosis - different in certain regards from the voice of the All. The place of silent knowing. The heart of the double. For a moment, it's as if the All is on the right, the east; and the double is on the left, the west. Not in any literal sense. Just how I interpreted it for the sake of being able to listen to both sides of this rather profound yet utterly silent conversation which had begun to take on elements of a debate.

The All:

"You pass along this road to nowhere a few times in the course of your mortal life, and then you are swept from the stage, just so much dust at the mercy of the wind, the broom, the hand of time. If asked where you are going, you will say you are going to meet your death so that you might break his hold on you through this state you call freedom, and yet not a single one of you has ever returned from that appointment to report your victory. Therefore, I maintain there is no destination and that the road which you call the path is just a dead end where humans, like lemmings, leap into the ocean to be drowned forever in the Nothing.

"You build monuments to the madness of your species - tall buildings stretching toward the sky like bony fingers reaching out of the earth in defiance of their illusory existence. You attach yourselves to cultures and morals and ideas designed to obfuscate the madness which has overtaken your species as a direct result of the knowledge instilled within you that you ARE transient, mortal, impermanent beings. You dispense intangibles to one another in the hopes of defeating the illusion you yourselves have created, but at the end of the day you are still mortal and still human and one day closer to death. You chase the illusion of fortune or fame or whatever it is among you humans that is called 'success', and you pray to your manmade gods to help your team win the SuperBowl, or your team to win whatever war you have manifested, never stopping for a single moment to understand that your prayers fall on the deaf ears of an impersonal universe, and you are therefore only enforcing your own impotence while walking along this road, each step bringing you closer and closer to your death."

Grim little bastard. But not incorrect. That's the hell of it. Somewhere inside of ourselves, we know all of these things. But the madness of our agreement will not allow us to turn and face that awareness. So we sweep it all under the rug and go right on pretending things are going to change. "They" are going to find some magical elixir that will make us all immortal. "They" are going to solve the economic crisis so "we" can go back to our petty indulgences and not have to be reminded of the mess we have made of the world.

And yet... outside the car window, there is only the snow-covered mountain, looking more like some free-form sculpture carved by the unwavering hand of eternity than any sort of natural occurrence. Just an etching on the big blue marble, hand painted with soft vanilla frosting.

It mocks me, with its illusion of permanence.

The Double:

"You will see the world change. This is something you know inside yourself, though at times it is difficult to simply Be what you know because of the chatter and clatter of all those places you have been and all those things you are doing and all those roads you have yet to travel. But in your heart, you know it to be true when I tell you that you will see the world change. 

"Within the hologram of your totality, you are no different than the All, no different than myself. What are we? Simply this: perceptions of the infinite. We are the experience of eternity - the creator of it and the creation itself. This is the way of the warrior, the task of the mortal self and the immortal other as we dream toward one another in the infinite sea of awareness. At this moment inside of time, you perceive the experience from the assemblage point of your humanform existence - the dreamer in the process of creating the dream. As your immortal awareness, I perceive the experience from some other position on the map of time, or off the map altogether. Such is the dance we dance together. Such is the fire that forges the Dream and breathes life into itself: phoenix of its own ashes, the quantum conundrum of the creator breathing life into herself so that she might exist to breathe life into herself. 

"You may perceive the crumbling ruins scattered alongside this strange road to Nowhere, while I may perceive those same ruins as a memory of a place I once lived in some otherwhen existence that is no less real than this moment. In a thousand years, perhaps you will walk this same road, or another one that has been built in its place, or perhaps you will walk the silence that lingers long after Man is gone, and you will see this same ruin, only dust now, and you will remember when you passed this way in your mortal manifestation and saw it for the first time. You will see civilizations rise and fall. You will taste the dust of all that has ever been, and at the same time you will Dream the substance of the All, bringing All things into being because that is the nature of creation and the process of evolution.

"You are the dreamer and the dream. And in that manifestation, surely you can see how it is that I tell you... You will see the world change."

________

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