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A beautiful, terrible world
(This early excerpt is from my book Bricks in the Wall, 2000, which discusses the way we, as humans, emerge to find ourselves in a world governed by external forces, tasked with the monumental assignment of finding ourselves in it)
-By Michael Jean Nystrom-Schut
New to this place, we emerged from out of a form of nothingness, and yawned our first yawn. It seemed nice to be alive...and then, the questions, like a steady stream, began to flow: What, why, when, how and where?
And more still.
Lots and lots more questions showed up on the scene of our budding lives. What are we? Why are we here? When did it start and when will it end? How could all of this being have come about?
Just where did we come from? We don't even know that, and can only guess.
Were we released from our mother's womb, end of story? Not quite. Later on, we would evolve to ponder where it is that she had come from, and from whence did her mother came from, and her mother, too.
Now we have begun to ponder the meaning of it all. Just as it has been contemplated down through the whole of time, we, too, add our individual curiosities to the great and befuddling mass of human wonderments.
We are, in doing so, entering the early stages of our philosophical existence; we're baby philosophers, all of us.
We somehow know that we always were. It comes to us at some point that they had tried to teach us otherwise. We may not come to see it accurately, and right away, but it will become clearer to us later that this is so.
We know that, in some way, we simply are
we simply are now.
We exist.
In some manner of speaking, our existence is real, although we will find that reality is something with which we will struggle fiercely to comprehend. It is fleeting, illusive and ultimately incomprehensible in its entirety.
We somehow know that we will always be. Even after our death, in some fashion - in a manner that we will ponder throughout our allotted days and nights on the earth but never come to really understand - we will continue to exist in some form, in some place
and somehow.
Intellectually, we will always vacillate on the matter of our being. But in some manner of which we are incapable of explaining or describing, we will know it.
Others see that we are, too. They are already busy gathering resources in preparation to render to us the truest meanings of life. It might be said of them that they have the "jump" on us, because they have played the game longer, run the race longer.
They are older than we. They have us in years.
They will represent their various perspectives and points of view, and they will, unbeknownst to us, in our blissful condition of relative newness, prepare to vigorously assault us with their perspectives, as these are issues that they themselves have arrived at with no small degree of work or pain.
They are interested in imparting it to us, partially because it will help fulfill to them their purpose, and also because they know we are in need of their valued guidance and teaching.
These "others" are our own parents. They are our teachers. They are cultural and societal leaders and influencers, movers and shakers.
They are sales and management and promotional personnel. They are entertainers and performers and instigators. They are "men and women of God." They are your friends and your "enlightened" peers and your neighbors.
They are the voices of authority and they are the impressions of sanctity and godliness and rightness that we somehow know we will sooner or later get around to having to know, and to reckon with in our existence.
It can even be argued successfully that they are our own inner leanings and tendencies, but for now, we will deal with the external forces of our world.
In this beautiful, terrible world that we all embark upon, we begin to experience, first hand, what others have already come to know. They have shaped their understandings of the answers to all things, while we, in the meanwhile, are just beginning to formulate the questions to them.
While we remain amateur philosophers asking what it all could mean, they are theologians, breaking it down for us. They are versed in explanations and apologetics, and are interpreters, now, of all these things.
They will gladly, gleefully, tell us what we are seeing when we are gazing into the mountainside, or casting our reflections on the seashore, or wrangling with a sacred portion of text.
They will create for us, with their superlatives, and with the force of their directives, how we are to explain the things we behold.
We are hardly left on our own to do this, and most often they do not ask us what it is that we think we see.
From the beginning, we are told what is good.
And we are told what is beautiful. We are told what is ugly. We are told what is terrible. We are told, we are told, we are told.
And so it goes
Slowly, we are primed and prepared to become a Brick part of the great supporting mass in the Wall. The strength-in-numbers notion that is embraced in others outside of us is now being passed on to us.
We are carefully mortared into it, along with a host of other bricks, and, in our cloistered uniformity, nothing sticks out or appears to reflect any sort of conflict. Relatively peacefully, we have given in and given up, with nothing resembling a fight.
We just weren't equipped to do so
not just yet anyway.
Our beautiful, terrible world is not really our world. It is a world given to us by those outside of us, and lived vicariously through us. We are, in one real sense, giving ourselves to them, to become part of their legacy, and to be offered up for consumption to those who have labored to recruit us as a part of their following.
As a card-carrying member now, of their clan, religious persuasion, political party, army-navy, constituency, consumer group, philosophical ideology, educational focus or team, we are now free to trench into the belief systems supporting our group, or our group cause, and merge our identities with it to the point of losing contact with our own selves.
Who and what we were, who and what we are, represent a faded and lost face, and a generally forgotten cause that never had a chance to bloom on its own.
(Note: This excerpt is from the first chapter. Later in the book, we find our freedom, but only after we leave the stationary uniform surfaces of the conforming Wall, and start the road to independence from it.)
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