Chronogram - Esteemed Reader

Esteemed Reader

In their incompleted state human beings thought they were awake when they were really moving about in a state of hypnotized sleep. They thought they had will but they had no real will. They thought they were free but they were really slaves. They thought they had something called "I" but they had no real I, only a multitude of petty selves with different desires and different aims.

In their state of "waking sleep" humans voyaged from birth to death aboard a ship of fools. The captain was asleep, the steersman was drunk, and the navigator had forgotten the aim of the voyage. Any fool on board could push the steersman aside and try to steer the ship. The great human agglomerates that called themselves nations were just as much at the mercy of the fools in their midst as were individual men and women. The technological Titanic, modern society, was proceeding full speed ahead into the fog, but there was no one in control. Under these circumstances it would not be surprising if the vessel hit a rock or an iceberg. The surprising thing was that it stayed afloat at all.
—Robert De Ropp

Esteemed Reader of Our Magazine:
Recently, in a local esoteric circle of some note, the simile was proposed that the human situation is like one who inherits a Maserati convertible, having no idea what a car is, that it can take one places, and do so at varying speeds, with the top up or down depending on the weather. Instead the proverbial inheritor puts it to the best use he knows. He is a gardener and so he tears off the top, fills the car with dirt and grows flowers. Now you might suggest that gardening and flowers are good and useful things, and I will not disagree. I will only point out that this instrument—the Maserati convertible—has other possibilities also. With a certain kind of high-octane fuel it can perform very nicely in places called roads, and can be quite useful for transportation.

The situation of a human born into the world is very much like this. We are delivered in bloody, goopy packages with not an owner's manual in sight. There is no such text for parents, let alone for ourselves personally as we reach responsible age. Sure, there a lot of ideas that fly around about how to care for and raise children, and there are a lot of ideas about what a person's life is for, and what he or she is to learn, acquire, and achieve, but there is no definitive description outlining the fundamental design and possibilities of a person.

Animals at least seem to be bound to their nature to such an extent that they cannot but live their fundamental design. Sure, they can learn some new tricks. But when push comes to shove a horse is a horse.

People are a different animal. We are variable entities that can live at various levels of being. Looking around we can see that there are those (and it may even be us at times) that live at the level of a worm, seeking only the most basic satisfactions of comfort and physical satiation. Or we may subsist at the level of a sheep, finding solace as part of the herd (even as we are being shepherded to shearing, or the slaughterhouse).

No, a human being does not naturally live in ensconced at the level of full human-ness. Being human is not par for the course of being born and becoming a responsible and productive member of society. Instead it is something that must be developed through persevering work.

There are many qualities that we have within us, like the capabilities of the car in the simile, that can be brought to a much higher level of refinement and realization. These are capacities that we may we believe we already possess but in fact are mere simulacra of what they are in their fullness. Capacities like Love—but love that doesn't depend on attraction or requisition; Will—but will that isn't based on passing impulses and desires; Consciousness—but consciousness that isn't fleeting moments of wakefulness amid a vast sea of dreams.

Particularly during these dark times, real humans and people in the process of becoming such are desperately needed. It behooves us to find an owner's manual for our instrument and, understanding that it is a vehicle with immense unknown capacities, learn how to "drive."

—Jason Stern

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