There's an ongoing battle of light and dark.  Actually, calling it a battle is incorrect.  It is an ongoing refusal to stay in the light.  And the darkness isn’t some horrible place as much as it is pretending I don’t know what I want, or, worse…wanting to be nowhere, numb and nameless.  When I think about the light…well, it’s a little like when I used to refer my thought to my first Revelation in order to get back the happy feeling (something I don’t do at all anymore).  Now I am left where I am, wondering why I don’t say what I want.  I have “what I don’t want” nailed to a post, and I settle down and read the list over and over.  I don’t bitch about it like I used to.  Maybe that is the reason why I don’t seek the light like I say I want to; because the pain just isn’t strong enough. 

I went to see a little wise man today, up on some high mountain peak in my mind.  There is only room on the top of the peak for him and me.  I asked him (after thinking to myself that there is way too much information in this world to ever try and understand it all, that every world belief, no matter how broad, is a fool’s belief) what I am supposed to do?  Every page in his book of answers said ART and the color of every page was red.  I asked him what stopped me from going whole hog as an artist.  His book told us that it was the FEAR OF NOTHINGNESS, written on every page, each page colored a light blue.

What is the fear of nothingness?  I already knew.  It was the fear I felt right after I realized that nothing mattered and nothing could keep me from the experience of wholeness, of holiness.  That was a feeling of perfect peace and joy.  It was just there.  It didn’t include my kids, my friends, anything at all that I knew in the world.  Before the world literally vanished it turned all white, a soft white, and then I let it go.  That’s when the jolt came.  BAMMMM! I was forcibly removed from where I was, overwhelmed with fear from this jolt.  Instantly the world returned with all its places no one can see, with all its problems and misunderstandings.  I saw before I fully returned into this world dream that what I am looking at when I look around me and who I identify myself as being is that same jolt that shocked me out of the presence of simple pure holiness, but here it is spread out over the far reaches of time and space, to make it, it seemed, more tolerable.  I learned that the jolt, this horrible forced removal from perfect peace is the world.  One is instantaneous, the other entended everywhere in through all time.

So the fear of nothingness is really the fear of getting hit by the world, the universe all at once again.  This is what I must overcome to return to real peace.   No small task, it would seem.  From a worldly perspective it is no less than walking straight into death.  Eyes wide open, “Give it your best shot asshole!”  No defense.  No fear.

As paradoxical as it seems, wanting life is the same as wanting death.  Not for death’s sake but for life’s.  A fearless life does not fear death.  And neither life nor death is what it seems here.  Life is safe, it is eternal and free.  This is a world only of death…postponed.  We eat, we breathe, chase after other bodies, cuddle and fight, feel, strive, succeed and fail all for naught.  This is not living but a substitute for living. This life is surrounded everywhere by death.  It is a witness to death only, to constant change, to forgetting and loss.  It is death’s game, not God’s.

What then is the reason to do anything except to return to peace?  To keep fear as my standard?  What does it take to return to peace?  How do I know I ever left?  It could just as easily be that I am choosing to dream of something else because I decided I can’t handle peace. 

Any peace found in this world is bound to end.  It isn’t real peace.  Just like my first love isn’t real love.  It felt like something way back then.  So did my second love, my third and so on and so on.  I mean is love real or is it some transitory relief from a non-love state?  How can reality change?  How does truth become something else? 

So this blog is going to go a different direction than I had first proposed.  It will be a record of some guy trying to remember who he is, trying to move through his fear of living so he can let this mis-given gift drop by the side and accept what must really be his.  No substitutes!