And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.
What sort of molecule machine emits a vapor that produces a sense of consistent memory? What sort of biochemical effluvium enlivened with electricity postulates a subject, plays the blues, weeps for the fallen? What tree has a fruit that is a living agency freely selecting? Where is the ground of consciousness – if not a ‘ground of consciousness’?
What if I-ness and You-ness come into being together, in a region beyond time, in a helical winding, and this great waterfall out of the void is the mind of God, who’s searching of the vectors of possibility are particulate searches that manifest as Lucretus’ swerving particles in a rain. And from this creation torrent, this geyser out of night, a great tree of organization styles gives birth to series of species. If you have never been out of yourself then maybe this sounds impossible. But I bet there are moments when you knew it – the fountains of creation are something that children can see.
Like Spinoza says and Einstein agrees God is the prime Substance, there can be nothing that is not Substance, naught that is not part of the Substance, the Substance all beings are reflected in, rooted in. God sings Being like the Tonic note of His profound understanding, the vast and cavernous lacuna of all possibility, the full void somethingness, whence the universe spills forth like a mouth, while Creative Agencies and Angels and infinite beings form in overtone sequences over the God Mind bass tone of aeonic breath.
God and Being are what is. The atheist, and his monkey the marxist, opposed to What IS, prickly at their parents and probably envious of their peers hates the idea of an impersonal Mind that can see them as they see themselves when they arent pretending themselves. The atheist is sick and wounded by the apparition of his suppressed knowledge of his mind’s contingency on Mind, or Nous. He suffers the return of the repressed. God comes back like a zombi. Religion torments them. Faith and optimism torment them. Love and friendship sickens them on a gut level. Unless they are allowed to spew opinions like a sprinkler, tic tic tic.
The atheist scuffs and bristles against the notion of an accounting, a register of their pride and pettiness. They know how silly they really are and hate that all deeds are written in the mind of God. That all the things nobody noticed someone did. That all thoughts are written on the soul for many aeons. The atheist slips and slides through life afraid to let eyes land upon the outlines of their evasion. Which evasion you say? The evasion of Purpose. And it proposes the idea that there actually is a distinction between that which you were created most apt for, and that which can satisfy you most. That in order to do you you must deny God. This is called the Luciferian Parallax. Its a perceived drift between your nature or destiny and your identity and selfhood. Between what the Lord has fitted you for, and what you see fit to do. In modernity, this often manifests as the fashionable dandyism of aimless rejection. A kind of blind, wanton, limp rejection that is almost a mere gesture. A faux cicada shell of rebellion, for this smug chinyness is actually the tainted stain of colonization. A colonization of Mammon, and what Lacan calls the Symbolic Order, the conglomerate of Worldly Powers. It is a hatred of the nature of things that manifests as Luciferian aestheticism, the cult of the self. An endless chase that leads back to where it began, but lower, more insect, this is an octave closer to the bottom of the endless loop of lust that is chasing “myself”.
This activity of the Luciferian, the aesthete of the self, who unites an ethical fundamental to the slipping ego, the ego who is always chasing its own allegiance. Always Judas to Judas to Judas. The ego is an endless coil of Judas. A transactionalism infolding, imploding. This is what is called the Kicking Against The Pricks. This is the grudge against the sky, this is the anxiety of influence. This is the denial of the Universal, the Tao, the Order. It is the denial that character is destiny. Lucifer is the endless idea of youth, and of endless youth, and the unintentionally vampiric.
The wound the atheist carries is the butthurtness of embarrassment, of being exposed in his dog and panty show, been seen. The pain he feels is the disintegration of the cast (caste) that keeps him twisted comfortably in his illusion of ontological primacy. The atheist doesn’t so much imagine a world without God, so much as go around with a sweater pull up over their heads where they hide from seeing theirself. For this is what it is to let fall the backdrop that is academic neoliberal materialism. The experience that Being is ‘looking through ones head’ exposes the simpering tired squid of the ego to itself. It is the sudden witnessing of the ontological dependency of one’s mind. It is realizing that your ‘self’ is just like a scale on a dragon’s back, not an essential part, not the center nor even a main organ or eye. The realization of ones frivolity. Here is the confrontation with it in Psalm 39
My heart was hot within me,
While I was musing the fire burned;
Then I spoke with my tongue:
“Lord, make me to know my end
And what is the extent of my days;
Let me know how transient I am.
“Behold, You have made my days as handbreadths,
And my lifetime as nothing in Your sight;
Surely every man at his best is a mere breath. Selah.
The struggles of the Psalmist are not just emotional notes, the songs disclose the shapes and outlines of a real untwisting, an ontological process in fact, whereby the soul withdraws from the satanic entanglement into the virtual. Satan’s worlds are always virtual ones, they lead into semantic systems such as ideologies, or into ‘games’ like politics (surrogate or performed wars), or into fetishes. It is going into a world within a world, and investing ones being, ones ‘outer’ soul into this virtuality. It is like you are a genie who is coaxed into a bottle. And there you live, inside your virtuality.
But if the Lord thinks you are worth it, he may, he very well may crack your bottle open one day. Sadly however, instead of flying out like a genie, you will be simpering, wiggling out like a wet noodle who just got ripped out of the jelly cocoon in the matrix. When the Lord comes with down his asteroid hammer of lightening, he comes in His Third Person. He comes through the office of a mighty Angel. This is the Tower of Babel struck down. This Tower of Ego which is built into and around a trellis of propaganda and fiction, that is the comforting gift of Mammon to his tasty human cattle.
This is a gargantuan trellis that is always collapsing under its weight and magnitude, where humanity is crushed in its rifts and folds like blue berries. But here is where the smug have learned to scuttle like crabs to the top of the trellis, where they work to become the “experts” who so nobly explain for the TV audience how laughable it is outside this collapsing trellis of Self, how pathetic the thoughts of those who don’t swallow the pills that lead you to aspire to the top of the crabs on the collapsing trellis of Babel. There they are, laughing at us, on their sky scraping ship of fools. They laugh at us, because we are not twisted into the casts they wear, because we have not agreed the all the talking crabs. They laugh with strained grimaces though, and you can see this anytime you talk to an atheist, a nervousness crackles through their tight teeth. And you point to that space in the back of their mind where a shutter appears. And just as they are pontificating, a crack of light busts through, and who do you suppose is peaking through?
