Joel the God?

Posted on July 1, 2003 in Attitudes Book of Days Imagination Mania Myths & Mysticism

Note: This is part of a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.

Today’s topic: The possibilities are endless

I’d like to take a stand, force the issue, be contrary, and speak out for the limits of things. Physicists and wrinkled Eastern mystics say that everything connects, that the separations we see — the blocks of mass that we call ourselves, other people, cats, chairs, books, automobiles, wisps of fog, etc. — are illusions. I say, that like all judgements, they are conveniences. They ease our being. A little piece of the vastness filled with atoms, molecules, quarks, and star dust shoots electricity out to a boundary called the cranium and insists that it is alone. I’ve never been inside another mind while I’ve sloshed around in this imaginary body of mine, so I have faith in the existence of this thing quite distinct.

Believe it or not, I’m happy to be limited: I would not want to be omniscient and omnipotent though I don’t doubt that if I were, I’d probably see the universe pretty much as I see the room I’m typing this in. Bacteria might pray to me, invoke the intercession of my leucocytes for deliverance from unfriendly forms who trash the skins of my cells like developers chop down the oaks and put up subdivisions in these parts. I feel these invasions as sickness, take medications for it, and the “good bacteria” witness the poison clouds released in my system as God-sent, perhaps redemptive or perhaps as a plague to punish them for microscopic ill deeds.

“Ye shall be gods” says the Biblical text and perhaps we already are. On how many tiers does this happen? How endless is the string winding up and down reality, past me out to the heavens and into inner hells? I rejoice in my limited consciousness. Complete awareness would drive me mad.

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