The Unpretenders - Chapter 12

For some reason I began to recollect a book that I'd once read. It was about a woman who, due to an inexplicable event, found herself completely alone and isolated in a rural environment. Everyone around her appeared to be dead, and she had to face the possibility of being the last person alive in the world. And yet, rather than pray that it wasn't the case, or live in hope of finding others, her simple life, tending animals, was overshadowed by the perceived threat from other human beings. So as well as having to deal with the practical issues of everyday survival, she also had to worry about defence, and the need to protect what little she had. A shotgun was certainly never far from her side.

But were her fears legitimate, or mere paranoia? Both history and human nature tended to reveal the answer. And, as it turned out, she wasn't the last person alive, after all. Which was unfortunate, from her perspective. Because when that second survivor finally showed up in her life, his first action was to slaughter her beloved animals, leaving her with nothing. And so she, in response, had no choice but to defend her life, which meant killing the only other human being on the planet.

In the end, it seemed, there could be only One.

Isobel was right, in a way. Suffering was caused by other people; the madness of society; the insanity of normality. But only because that society, those people, couldn't see beyond the unholy distortion of individual and collective conditioning. And neither did the majority want to see, either, because the light of truth was not, to them, illumination. It was, rather, the light of a lighthouse, warding them away from the bedrock of their own being, from which they had long since fled.

Perhaps that's the reason why most people felt uneasy about public nudity, or nudity in general. They weren't cognizant of it, of course. But on some level they apparently understood the metaphor all too well. For clothes symbolised identity, and role play, and helped us to create the illusion of great differences between us, even though we were all basically the same, underneath. Which, for many, was not just unsettling, but downright unacceptable.  

Could nudists, therefore, I wondered, be the most spiritually enlightened people on the planet?

In any case, it seemed to me that by engaging in role play we had merely swapped one intolerable reality for another. Although, that may also have been the point. For our suffering on Earth would surely, eventually, lead to a new perspective on - and appreciation of - our natural, limitless state. What was formerly perceived as boredom would then be experienced as the bliss of solitude. What was formerly perceived as meaninglessness would then be experienced as unbounded freedom.

Until such a time, however, duality offered people the stimulation and meaning that they obviously felt they needed. Until such a time, competition would continue to trump cooperation. Melodrama would continue to trump equanimity. And fear, of course, would continue to trump love.  

Only by knowing the self, it seemed, unclothed and unmasked, could we ever hope to see our own reflection in others, and everything that implied. The many, as the One, as the many. Embracing such knowledge, as a global community, would mean the immediate end of rules and regulations, governments and police, courts and corporations, religion and politics, war and abuse, tyranny and fear, drama and suffering. But then, those are the very things that have allowed us to see our true home from another perspective. And which would cause all of us, ultimately, to return to it.

Know thyself, I pondered.