The Heart of the Law

“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”

 ~Mark 12:29-31

It's been a while since I have posted, sorry about that.

The world is sick, suffering from a spiritual sickness. I have the disease, you have it. The people who are supposed to be responsible for helping, however, are too busy arguing they are right and that others are wrong. I'm talking about Christians now, though I assume that other religious leaders are just as culpable. Christians have a persistent habit of ignoring what is right in front of their faces. When Jesus is talking to the pharisees, he's not just talking to them. Christians like to think of themselves as the anti-pharisees, and they were once, but that was a long time ago. Christians are the pharisees now.

The ones that aren't busy trying to defend the indefensible, are busy denying that there is anything much wrong with the world. They are in fact, as much a part of the World as the Romans were. The folks who believe that the world was created in a literal seven days are in a sense less far gone than those who don't really think that the world has much of a problem. The world has a problem, and we human beings and our forms of spiritual death are the cause of it.

First things first: the idea that the Old Testament for the most part has anything to do with who God is, is completely indefensible. Moses was not a prophet, he was a mass murderer, the Pol Pot of his age. God did not tell Moses to kill tied up defenseless women, God did not tell Moses to slaughter infants, if Moses heard a voice in his head it was more like the voice of the supposedly satanic dog that urged David Berkowitz on to slaughter than anything divine. Anyone who is still hanging on to the Old Testament as the word of God is deluded, and their belief has nothing to do with God but with rigidly hanging on to something that has gone past obsolete into the ridiculous. To continue to speak of the Old Testament as the world of God is to hang onto something evil. 

What is the heart of the law? Jesus said it. Love God and love each other, this is the heart of the law. Everything else is fungible. Our only dogma should be that we should seek God and try to love one another and all creatures. There should be no dogma aside from that.

Why do I say that the world is suffering from a spiritual sickness? First of all, I don't mean by spiritual that it isn't suffering from a literal sickness. Pollution and climate change are continuing apace, the world is reaching its carrying capacity, millions of people all over the world believe that the world is not structured so as to benefit everyone but rather only to benefit the few. The pervasiveness of money as a value in life threatens to overwhelm all other values, including ultimately maybe life itself. If it is a spiritual sickness, it has physical symptoms. But most damaging of all, and the ultimate cause of the other problems, is the lost condition of humankind. Meanwhile their supposed shepherds are either in denial that the problem exists, or are fighting over doctrinal issues. Blind guides. 

What will happen, ultimately, while we are all in denial? I am speaking of those who call themselves leaders of God's people. Redemption will happen even so, in the streets, in the gutters, in the back yards and crackhouses, but it will pass you by. Jesus was in the street and was hungry, and you fed him not. Jesus was in the street and was naked, but you gave him no clothes. While you fiddle, we all burn. Woe to those who call themselves Christian leaders in these days.

As he approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes. ...you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you.”

~Luke 19:41-44

Ultimately, if there will be healing we will all have to do it ourselves, one little bit at a time. Those backyard and back-alley redemptions of the soul. And there is no law, only love God and love all creatures. These are the only commandments. 

Hidden

For you died, and your life is now hidden

with Christ in God. 

-Colossians 3:3-4

I had the uncanny feeling a few days ago, that my life as I now know it is not my life. That one day I would exist, but not know that any of this had happened. And that this life, that I did not know, was in fact more real than the life I do know. I suddenly felt that it was not necessary or helpful, to concern myself with my life here as if it were important. As if it were the destination rather than the sideshow.

Now we shouldn't trust too much in uncanny feelings, but when that uncanny feeling starts resonating with all kinds of loose ends and puts them into place, giving you that context-unveiling "aha!' experience, it bears a closer look.

First there are two paradoxical assertions that need resolving. First, that some people find their way to spotless bliss (Heaven) without a shadow of sadness or pain, and second, that some don't (Hell). If you think about it, the second offers a bit of a challenge to the first. After all, people get to that spotless bliss by bucking the prevailing trend and becoming Children of God, who are distinguished by the fact that they are selfless, merciful and good. If they are all these things, they would almost have to be disturbed by the sufferings of those people who are still in "Hell" (actually this world).

And yet here I had this feeling, this seeming knowledge, that not only would I not know that anyone else was still suffering on this Earth, but that I in fact wouldn't remember my life, my name, or the sufferings that I myself went through. Nevermind anyone else's.

“He will wipe every tear from their eyes. 

There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain,

for the old order of things has passed away.”

-Revelations 21:3-4

The first approach to this Heaven/Hell quandary is relatively pedestrian (to me), but I might as well get it out of the way. If one believes that the very existence of souls implies choice, and that the most important choice is between God and Self-as-god (rebellion), which we are equally free to choose, then actually being free to make that choice is important. Even if from an enlightened point of view, Self-as-god is folly; it only appears such to one who has already made that choice in favor of God. A soul is distinguished by the fact that it is free: the opposite of soul is automaton. Jesus was distinguished, among other things, by a total absence of coercion: Jesus didn't force himself on anyone. He didn't even defend himself against wrongful physical attack, and taught his disciples to be the same way. Forcing that fundamental decision is equivalent to removing from a soul that which makes it a soul: choice. Mercy in this case is neither possible not desirable.

This was not what blew my mind though. What blew my mind is the experience of the world as fundamentally unreal. It is one thing to think it is unreal, another for that unreality to become palpable in some sense.

No one is required to recognize the importance of an unreality. If you go to a Broadway play, you will see the depiction of all kinds of situations, emotions, drama and so on. You may in fact get very wrapped up in this play. When the curtains go down and the lights come on, however, you return to your actual life. You will probably soon forget what the play was about. But what if you couldn't ever leave the play, or didn't want to?

Taking the reality of the world ultimately seriously is in fact the prison bars of the reality we have locked ourselves away in. Now, obviously in a prosaic sense the world is perfectly real. If you hit me in the head with a broom handle, it will hurt. If you drop a piano out the window, it won't magically be suspended above the ground by pixie dust. It will really fall, and might really hurt someone. However, this "prosaic sense" is of course defined by the rules of the world itself. If in a video game I hit the "fire" button, the image on the screen will actually show a shooting animation and the appropriate realistic damage, but it doesn't mean that any of it is "real" in a higher sense.

(Interestingly, I had a sort of prefiguring of this experience decades ago, when for a period of a week or so I saw the entire world as made of pixels. Seriously. Where other people saw real objects, I saw pixels. I attributed it to too much computer gaming at the time though.)

Similarly, the world is perfectly real from the viewpoint of the world. From outside the world, it looks like that Broadway play. Everyone is acting as if it is real, but it isn't. Meanwhile, your real life is hidden from your view.

This idea is of course old hat. Twenty-five centuries ago, Plato wrote his "Allegory of the Cave" about just such an appraisal of reality. The real question is, why should anyone believe it is true? Their senses, after all, tell them it is false. There cannot in fact be evidence for something that transcends the system of evidence, any more than the existence of non-numeric values could be proven by arithmetic.

To believe in God at all involves believing in a "higher reality" that you cannot directly experience with the senses. This reality, consequently, is a lower reality: i.e. "less real". Of course most believers in God take 1 step forward and 2 steps back in this respect. They believe in a God, whose job it is to make their lives in this world more agreeable. To get them a good job, a mate, excellent sex, intelligent and well behaved children, abundant food and jolliness, freedom from excess pain, and so on. They don't in fact believe in God per se, they believe in a beneficent zookeeper; the zoo in question being the World. I believe there is in fact such a zookeeper, but good luck getting treats from him.

You only have to take a gander at Luke 6:20-26 to see that this is in no way the God Jesus was talking about. If you look closely in fact, you will see that the real characteristics of a godly person as versus an ungodly one, is how seriously they take the directives of this reality. The godly person as Jesus describes him:

• Is probably poor (Luke 6:20-21 among others)
• Is nonviolent even in self-defense (Matthew 5:39)
• Is more likely to weep than laugh (Luke 6:21 among others)
• Is hated, excluded and rejected (Luke 6:22 among others)
• Is willing to sacrifice himself (John 15:13, Luke 9-24)
• Will give to those who ask him (Matthew 5:38-42 among others)
• Is not sexually lustful (Matthew 5:27-28 among others)
• Does not seek or enjoy human praise (Luke 6:26 among others)

In other words, these values are the inverse of those of the normal natural man who believes in this reality as the only one. These values in fact only make sense if you believe that this reality isn't that important, that there is another more important reality. The apostles had a label for the reality of our senses, they called it the World (which I capitalize to differentiate it from the mundane definition). The World as far as they are concerned is a bad thing.

Do not love the World or anything in the World. 

If anyone loves the World,

the love of the Father is not in them.

-1 John 2:14

What is highly valued among men is detestable in God's sight.

-Luke 16:15

That's pretty unambiguous, right? Why not love the World? Even if it is a lower reality, why is that necessarily bad? If the World is a prison, those who are Worldly are the Trustees. They are following the system and want everyone else to follow it too. They are supporting the system that enslaves them. The godly ones are those who are digging behind the vent with a spoon, trying to escape. The World is a prison, and whether the inmates agreed to go in originally or not, the fact remains that they are slaves to an illusion. There are some who don't want to break the illusion, who want to remain in the prison. In the movie The Matrix, there was one of the rebels who had second thoughts. He wanted Agent Smith to plug him back in the matrix, and he was willing to betray his friends to do it. Not everyone wants out, but it is a prison nonetheless. A prison whose bars you cannot see. And what is it like outside the prison? What were we supposed to be, before we got in the slammer? What inheritance did we give up to humor this illusion? Being Children of God. Being angelic beings. Being like Christ.

I had a momentary preview of my life that was hidden in God, beyond the World.

 Dear friends, now we are children of God,

and what we will be has not yet been made known.

But we know that when Christ appears,

we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.

-1 John 3:2

Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.

 -Matthew 13:43

The Bones

 
I am taking care of my mother with Alzheimers: the lions share of the labor falls on me. She is unable to take care of the most basic daily tasks. Words cannot express how difficult it is; it is the hardest thing I have ever done. Hard emotionally, hard in terms of hours spent, hard in every way. I will spare you the details. You cannot imagine it unless you have lived it.

I am able to take a time out now only because my youngest brother is here from out of town today. The middle brother told me, "When you think you are at the edge of cracking, the edge of insanity, don't go over. We can work something out".

I asked him, "which edge is that?" The edge of nervous breakdown I was at yesterday, or the one today? I keep finding new edges, new breaking points. Every day, I think that I can't go on, I think that I am already at that breaking point, but I find new breaking points every day. Every day I stand at the cliff's edge, only to find that yesterday's cliff edge was just the lip of a larger cliff.

I mention this by way of explaining that I am learning more and more the truth of this saying:

"For we live by faith, not by sight." 

-2 Corinthians 5:7

By faith, not by sight, not by feelings, not by thinking. What we feel is a symptom of a problem. We need not to act on feeling but act on the problem, whatever it is. It is easy to say but hard to understand, that feelings are not nearly as important as we think they are.

In the beginning, I believed in my mind. After, I believed in my heart. Finally, I believe "in my bones": deeper than mind, deeper than heart, as deep as the soul. And I disregard my mind and even my heart, until there is nothing left but these "bones". The difference between believing in God and being a blank canvas for God to paint.

Belief counts for nothing in itself and feeling counts for nothing in itself. Belief and feeling are only steps on the road.You have to be broken, really broken, before you can get God out of your mind and into your heart. You have to be broken more to get God into your bones. Human beings are not naturally built to do this; the natural man keeps God at a distance, whether he admits to it or not. Man has an unseen primordial dread of God. You cannot admit to that which you yourself do not see or realize. It requires Light to even see the Darkness. It requires light to even know you are going the wrong way.

Then Jesus told them, “You are going to have the light just a little while longer. Walk while you have the light, before darkness overtakes you. Whoever walks in the dark does not know where they are going.  

Believe in the light while you have the light, so that you may become children of light.”

-John 12:35-36

 
A sort of metaphor: the mind is me and that; the heart is I and Thou. The bones are only Thou. The furthest distance is the mind: but even the heart is a distance.

I don't know if I can ever explain it. That for me, intellectual belief does not matter and emotions do not matter, only actuality matters. And the actuality is that I am a leaf in the wind blown by God. And that it does not matter what I think and it does not matter what I feel, it only matters what is. God is, and I am not.

The Cross and the Desert

White Sands dust storm, New Mexico

And Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost returned from Jordan,

and was led by the Spirit into the desert...

Luke 4:1

There seems to be two poles in my life with God. They are the Cross and the Desert. 

The Cross is self-sacrifice through suffering for people and for the world. The Desert is selflessness through annihilation in God, through emptiness. These two are not the same thing. The Cross requires engagement with the World, the Desert requires disengagement from it. The Bible says in many spots that Jesus liked to withdraw from the crowds to solitary spots to pray. I don't visualize him as praying for individuals during these times, or even praying for himself, but in fact being in communion with God. This kind of prayer does not ask, it already has what it seeks. 

The Cross is easy to understand, if difficult to practice. It is basically loving your neighbor, even if that means pain and difficulty. There is no trouble in loving your neighbor when it is easy, there is no Cross in that. The Cross comes in when you have to love your neighbor even at great personal cost. I am being led to the Cross a great deal lately, with my mother's sudden illness, pretty much everything falls on me. No one else is able. But like I said, understanding the Cross is not at all hard in theory anyway, so I will leave it at that. Easy to understand, not easy to do.

The Desert seems to be leading me in a totally opposite direction, away from the world, away from myself. I once thought that an actual solitary place would be helpful, like those that Jesus liked to retreat to, but really the Desert is everywhere and nowhere.

I was sitting outside a few days ago, after being at the hospital every night for five days tending to my Mom who had a sudden and debilitating health emergency. I was absolutely exhausted: beyond being at the end of the rope, there wasn't much of the end left either. It was breezy, and I sat in the back yard watching a strand of my hair wafting back and forth in front of my face in a hypnotizing manner, and suddenly I was there. I was in the Desert, and I had gone away.

The Desert is silence. It is not literal silence, it is human silence. It is the absence of human BEING in a sense, you are no longer aware of having a self. We spend all our lives running away from silence, building lives and self-importance and our own version of "meaning", trying to make a noise. We are in mortal fear of silence, of the Desert, because we have been running from the Desert since before we were born. The Desert is the place where you meet God, and you can either meet that place with profound relief or with mortal terror. You can either dance with God or run from Him. Words are futile, it is emptiness, fullness, solitary and communion. The Desert cannot be categorized, it is beyond human existence, it is the opposite of it. There is a refreshing total absence of everything human. In the Desert, you are a spectator of God, you bear witness, but you are not. And yet you are with everything. You can only describe it with synonyms of emptiness, because it is empty of human evil and conceit.

And yet as a living being in the world, the Desert and the Cross have no conflict and in fact are inseparable. Jesus' words in the New Testament seem to partake equally in the Cross and the Desert: in practical love and in mysticism. I am not sure you can do the Cross without the Desert entirely, and if you could do the Desert without the Cross, you would no longer be a human being and no longer be in this world at all. The Desert informs the Cross, and gives it the power to do what it does.

God in the World is the Cross. God in Himself is the Desert. We are of both.

I've been through the desert on a horse with no name
It felt good to be out of the rain
In the desert you can't remember your name
'Cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain 

-"Horse with No Name", the band America

Abandon Intellectual Security

"Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment." 

-Rumi

In every religion, no matter what it is, the vast majority of its practitioners and especially its leaders want you in some sense to foreclose your accounts with God. That God is X,Y, and Z and not some other way. This is because a book or some other authority tells you that it is. They may be well meaning in this, to give you commonly accepted bounds for your life. What they are not doing, however, is bringing you closer to God.

To desire absolute security in your knowledge of God, is to obstruct God's will in creating in you what He wills to create. I do not say you should abandon security in knowing that He is, that is altogether different. Depending on your beliefs about God is not the same as depending on God. Security in knowing exactly how or what He thinks is neither possible nor beneficial. Limiting what God chooses to do in you is not wisdom but foolishness


It is possible to talk to converse with God, to interact with God, but it is never possible to know God completely. God is unknowable.  A God that was not beyond you, would not be God. It is possible to encounter God, to see His effect on your life, even to be swept up by Him, but not to know Him absolutely. Abandon logical thought where God is concerned, it is beneath Him.

A conversation requires that you neither stop listening nor stop talking altogether. Only the very wise can stop talking and just listen. If you stop listening however, it is no longer a conversation. In a sense, this is the story of our lives, the story of our conversation or non-conversation with God. And God may have a plot twist planned in this story that you know nothing of, and that you will miss, if you stop listening. If you stop being open to whatever it is that God wills to work in your life now. Maybe something wonderful, maybe something beyond wonderful, even if it is something you never thought of or planned or desired or willed.

"Knock, And He'll open the door
Vanish, And He'll make you shine like the sun
Fall, And He'll raise you to the heavens
Become nothing, And He'll turn you into everything." 

-Rumi

Reason is fundamentally tied to self-will. We want reasons for God and we want God to be rational, because in so doing we take something wildly out of our control and think to put it under our own control. We have not thereby controlled God at all of course, we have deflected our primordial desire for God into a safe useful neutered container so that we can be rid of it. We have been sidetracked, if our desire was for God at all. The way to God is not control, it is surrender. Surrender, that He may recreate you. Surrender yourself, your will, your reason. God is not doing comfy, God is not doing secure and stable, God is not doing conformity, God is doing BLOW YOUR MIND. God is doing bliss. God is doing beyond your understanding.

This is the powderkeg that it is every organized religion's job to contain, because the people in them aren't prepared for it and maybe don't want it. God is a danger that must be contained in safe, comfy and cozy forms. Remember this quote from Jesus?

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to. 

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are.

“Woe to you, blind guides!

-Matthew 23:13-16

We can pretty much make a general rule, that whenever Jesus is talking about the Pharisees, he's not just talking about them. He's talking about religious leaders generally, whatever their religion happens to be. It pissed the Pharisees off so much, they had him killed.

It is not however fair to blame them. Just like in the economic marketplace, when nobody buys a product, it goes off the market. When people buy a lot of a product, it stays. People complain about the malaise in the Church these days and the decline of membership, but spiritual sterility is not accidental. As computer geeks like to say, it is not a bug: it's a feature.

Knowing God is not about having something to hang onto. It's about letting go. Letting go and listening.

The Bridge

This is not a typical post for this blog. It isn't really a post about God, not really. I would say more that God has put this message on my heart, for those who do not speak for themselves.

You know this bridge I am sure. It's world famous. It might conjure mental images of streetcars, fog, hilly steep streets, great food, or even Rice-A-Roni (which ran many ads featuring San Francisco streetcars when I was younger). It has appeared in many movies. It is an iconic emblem of San Francisco: The Golden Gate Bridge.

What it probably doesn't bring to mind, is that it is the number one location on Planet Earth for suicides. Not just in California, or the United States, but it is the number one location for suicides IN THE WHOLE WORLD. Even the Aokigahara suicide forest in Japan only takes second place to the Golden Gate Bridge.

And yet, despite decades of attempts to have it built, there is still no barrier to prevent people from jumping. The fence at the edge is only 4 feet high. Some argue that anyone who would commit suicide by jumping would do it anyway: they are wrong. Suicide is an acute threat: someone who is prevented from killing themselves in a 72 hour period of their worst risk is actually unlikely to do it at another time. Every minute of delay or inconvenience could save a life. The Golden Gate Bridge is like having a publicly accessible loaded handgun in a public place, where everyone knows it is there and anyone can use it at any time.

Many people who are having a suicidal crisis believe that nobody cares if they live or die. While that is not true of their family and friends, I am afraid it is true of the public at large. The reasons that the barrier has not been put up on the bridge as of yet boil down to issues of money and power. The bridge is a symbol of San Francisco, a contributing factor to the tourist economy. Almost any barrier will be less aesthetically pleasing than no barrier. The appearance of the bridge is a financial asset that people want to protect: lives lost are not really a concern since they are lost "voluntarily". People are also largely very unsympathetic to the depressed, as to the mentally ill in general. People raising funds on the street for a barrier are often accosted by people yelling "Jump! Jump!" and people throw soft drink cans at them. It's sickening.

And in fact there was no problem building a barrier partly on the Oakland side, because it overhung the land and people were dropping objects like bowling balls over the side. It was a public safety issue then. Assisting the emotionally distraught apparently is not a public safety issue.

So the people who think that the world is uncaring, that nobody cares, sadly for the most part they are right. There is still a huge stigma on mental illness in this country. Most people are very unsympathetic to the suicidal, to the point of even encouraging these extremely distraught individuals to end it all. One suicidal man wrote a suicide note saying that if only one person smiled at him as he went up the bridge, he wouldn't kill himself. Apparently, no one smiled. Most of the people who jumped, had a treatable mental illness. If there were a 72 hour virus that could kill you, but which was very much treatable, people would be urging people to get treatment and would be sympathetic to their situation. Towards people with a treatable mental illness that could end their life, however, there is often a great deal of hostility. Even hatred. Even in liberal San Francisco. A city where you can find groups that believe that pets should have human rights, isn't quite as enthusiastic about the human welfare of some human beings. We have removed stigmas about all sorts of things, even stigmas against gays and those with AIDS, but this stigma it seems, too few have the heart to fight to remove.

Anyone who wants to keep up with the barrier project, the link is http://www.ggbsuicidebarrier.org/

For anyone who is suicidal who might stumble across this page, I want to say this:

******************************************************************
DON'T DO IT, PLEASE. THIS IS ONLY A TEMPORARY AND TREATABLE CONDITION. YOU CAN GET HELP.

I know that it might feel like you are nobody and nothing, but that is a lie. You are in fact special. You can in fact make a difference for somebody else, just by being here. Don't buy into the lies that the World tries to sell you, to your detriment. You may not think or feel that there is a God, you may in fact be adamantly opposed to the idea, but I know there is one, and He doesn't want you to leave before you get to know Him. God loves you, and there are people who are sympathetic and know what you are going through. Find them, and Him. The results of suicide are tragic and permanent.
****************************************************



Suicide Crisis Hotline:
1-800-SUICIDE (1-800-784-2433)
1-800-TALK (1-800-273-8255)

The Will to Power

"The World is a will to power, and nothing besides."
-Nietzsche

In order to understand where our hope lies, we have to truly understand this reality. We have to understand that if truth, love, harmony and peace are our guides, hope in this world (but not necessarily hope for all those within) is irredeemably lost. Lost from the beginning, lost by design.

Friedrich Nietzsche was the poet laureate of the Will to Power. Many people do not like to read him and see in him a symbol of evil, but this is mostly because he tells them a terrible truth (about this world anyway) that they do not want to hear. While Nietzsche thought of the will to truth as a variety of the will to power, in fact those who are the most interested in power hate the truth because it undermines their power. With this in mind, lets hear a few more words from him:

"My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (its will to power) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on"

-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §636

Every living thing, in other words, strives to be God. Not to follow, love or obey God, but to be itself God. This process is by no means limited to human beings, but is implicit in every living thing. The first woodpecker with a beak suitable for drilling wood, its beak gave it a power over the grubs living in the wood and so it prospered over its neighbors that were without that power. The first bacterium that was able to eat its neighbor, extended its power over that neighbor and assimilated its material for itself. Human beings developed tools, to do what their weak bodies could not do. Because part of their success depended on cooperation and because of the advent of language, human beings became much more subtle in their methods of obtaining power, and power became much more dangerous. They used and twisted language to gain power over others. Their knowledge gave them power over the atom, allowed them to mitigate space and time, made them lords over all other living beings. The Will to Power didn't start with them, they simply took it to its logical conclusion.

But like Sauron's One Ring in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, power corrupts all, even those who say they want to use it for good. The nuclear power plants that we build to supply us with bountiful power in electrical form, are subject to disaster and poison the land and sea. Political power leads to war and destruction. Power over the ecology leads to ecological disaster. Power over men destroys mens lives and the souls of the ones who wields that power. Physically, power gives life: spiritually, power destroys life. And in the end, this massive all-encompassing Will to Power, is a plan destined to fail. Even if humans become immune to old age, extend their power over the stars themselves, become like gods, their end is unavoidable. Eventually the stars will grow dim and cold. Eventually the Universe and Power itself will die.

And yet to live here and now is to compromise with power, even to get what we need to keep surviving is part of that all-embracing Will to Power. To eat is power, even to breathe is power. Life itself in this world is a will to power. This is part of our nature, our original sin. The best thing we can do is to know this will to power for what it really is, to use it only when we must, to shed the light of God on the darkened world and in our own minds, to uproot the lies of power. In this, perhaps in this alone, Nietzsche was less than honest: his religious upbringing led to his thirst for truth (such as it was). The will to power only allows that truth that extends its power: shedding light on power itself undermines power. Human power hates the light, and lives in the darkness of lies and half-truths where it can work its evil will undetected.

Our bodies are slaves to power by birth. I believe our souls need not be.

We know that the Law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the Law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.

-Romans 7:14-20