Chapter 33: Humans at their Best

You were not humans but you acted like them, merely animals with a body and brain that houses the wiring that They gave you when you were members of the line of Man a major inconvenience that requires near constant redirection and nearly continuous distractions if you are to ignore your purpose. Your body says, “Feed me,” so you eat. Your body says, “I have excrement building up,” so you go to the bathroom. Your body says, “I need rest,” so you reluctantly go to bed. Your body says, “I am cold,” so you warm yourself. Your body says, “I am hot,” so you cool yourself. Your body even says, “I need sex,” so you obey and oblige it as soon as possible.

You do anything your body wants and yet you do not realize you are a pretty sophisticate slave to merely be serving the commands of your brain stem as if you were incapable of anything higher, a thing your body drags along from one need or appetite to another with unquenchable urgency. So your brain atrophies and you become an animal with an inconvenient mind that is uselessly engaged in a boring job, a meaningless sexual relationship, unsatisfying friendships and filial involvements and an ever abiding feeling your life is passing you by and you are accomplishing nothing of significance at all.

You sigh, a lot! You laugh with decreasing regularity and with longer and longer gaps between and for shorter and shorter durations. Finally you find nothing to even smile about for long periods of time. Do you even remember the last time you smiled? Even while with your family members, your friends or even after sex you sigh and find no reason to smile if you even have sex anymore as your body is so used to the irregularity of it even your body seems to be losing interest in it and you wish it was different but do nothing about it.

And you are depressed as truly as if you were mentally ill but you behave that way by choice not because of any physical or chemical need your body doesn't properly supply. Are you not insane? Without excuse!

And on top of it all They gave you the capacity to at least question your worth, to experience boredom, and worst of all guilt. Guilt for what you haven't done anything in a long time to be ashamed of? What's up with the guilt thing? You have done yourself wrong and you know whose fault it is and you are full of remorse. But where did that come from, you never chose to feel that way. Why is you body, your master whom you have taken so much of your time taking care of behaving like that?

They have your attention, but you don't even believe in Them. They have allowed you to imprison yourself in a routine of sleeping because it was our own choice, going to work, endless hygiene, endless excessive hours of drudgery at work, endlessly eating more often or spending seemingly unending hours of ignoring your hunger, endlessly trying to veg out before the TV and listening to music, going to the bathroom only to start the cycle all over again. So you wake crabby and express yourself to everyone who gets in your way day in and day out.

Then someone suggests what you need is to party! To do get drunk and maybe have sex with a stranger. They even tempt you with drugs perhaps. It doesn't matter what you do. You don't get into it enough to get in trouble or addicted or anything. And if you're lucky it doesn't last that long or become a part of your lifestyle or who you are. And the next round of your meaninglessness is even more painful and even more profound and the guilt even more filled with remorse than it ever was before.

Are you not dead? Have you ever really lived, even just once? Your life is complicated and your emotions seem to be always destroying your peace and feeling of significance. You may even say you wish you were dead. But you put up with it longer than you ever thought anyone would who didn't have a problem. Your muscles ache. You are putting on weight. You are fatigued, a lot. Your dreams are uninteresting. You feel lonely even when people are around and no matter how complex or busy your routine becomes. But if you are lucky you realize it doesn't depend on how much or how little you change your environment. And if you are even luckier you realize you have to change yourself.

You start checking things out, trying new things, interesting things and you start searching for things you find interesting like clothes, people, and hobbies even, or even exercising. And it helps. You feel better, more alive, more significant and you think you are onto something. But in time everything you try becomes exactly what you wanted it to be though you are less and less interest, less and less fond of it, and even less and less interested in the new people in your life who like you are becoming less and less likely to even try to be interested in your presence and less and less often do you talk about anything interesting, do or even say anything interesting. And you become unhappy, they become unhappy that you are depressed again, or you do that to them, or both parties do it to each other. And if you are unlucky you think it is time to move on, to find a new crowd, new interests and maybe even a brand new routine with new people and an entirely new social environment.

But if you are lucky you listen to Their inspiration. You remember you thought it was you that needed to change not your environment, social or otherwise. And if you are even luckier you do not develop an interest in self-help quick fixes, but decide you are bored with things that require new interests and unwanted fixes in your environment and even losing weight. And there are only a few ways to go, back to the same old same old, onto that which was not fulfilling, the endless varieties of new things, people and places, and you realize you can become introspective and delve into self-pity or existentialism that seems to be boring a very short time later.

But if you are at your luckiest you decide the answer must be in being helpful and attempting to help someone even in a small way, so you help someone the next time you recognize even an unnecessary need and it feels good. You feel significant in the lives of others around you. You even start to view the things you did before and try to see what use it is to others. And you start changing your life based on being helpful to others and develop a drive to be as helpful as you can manage. And you find there are no shortage of helpful things to do and ways to be helpful on the job or even land a job helping others. Instead of crying out for help you find yourself answering that call for others.

But you find you have left yourself out of the equation. And you feel you don't belong helping the endless number people there are out there who need help, like to be helped and even are injured by your help. And it gets ugly. You know helping works, but that your haven't been selective enough and you have lost yourself in an endless wave of unfortunates that are not even thankful anymore, at least not past an occasional thank you or gift of appreciation. You actually become a sort of minor, very minor even, but minor celebrity as word spreads farther and further that you will help and that you are perhaps good at it to some useful extent. But you are increasingly unhappy even if in a new way.

You begin to realize you have begun to specialize and help more and more in more and more similar ways. But you never have any time for yourself and you begin to feel like you need help. And nobody ever helps you because your so capable. And you feel like crying out for help again. But even you begin to think you are capable of helping yourself, so you do.

You strive not to help so much as to achieve some sort of balance between helping others and helping yourself. When you realize you are not being rewarded enough, you reward yourself. And you even do the things you need to do for yourself, cutting in more and more on your specialized helping of others. And your celebrity status changes. Perhaps you marry and have kids and take your helpful position seriously. And somewhere along the line you find you have filled your life helping your own friends and family. And you feel you have arrived finally.

So where does the feeling there is more come from. Why is it harder to reward yourself? Your body is helpful, your brain is sharp, and your life is better than the normal unhappy life of those who are still slaves of their bodies, or at least slaves of their selves. Why do you have a feeling of not being fulfilled any more? Why is it ever more important to you to be praised by your spouse, your kids and even your relatives and friends? Why do they all seem to be such a burden to you? You thought you were loved and accepted, but you realize it is not really love? You thought you loved all of those people but you begin to wonder if you do, and whether you even know what love is?

You think it is irrational. You try to deny it. But no matter what you do you know somehow that there is more, a lot more, or there should be; not could be but should be. It just doesn't feel right anymore.

But if you don't do anything about it you will die with that feeling, knowing there was more and you missed out on it. And you know it. And you accept it no matter how uncomfortable it becomes. And in a sense you feel everybody feels there could have been more. And you don't know that you have finally given up and gone insane, just like you sensed you would have, had you remained a slave of your body, or had you become addicted to a lifestyle full of distractions that became less fulfilling with each time you pursued them and it became harder and harder to truly distract yourself even though you didn't become addicted to anything you were unable to get free of, and just like you would have if you had continued to live only for yourself knowing you would have gone insane, or even not achieved some sort of balance between helping others and helping yourself. But you don't have to rationalize being sane, you only have to rationalize not being sane, the most horrible way there is to die. You are wired to for something other than what you are doing. But you do it anyway.

And you die never knowing what it was to be sane. Your body dies and your spirit goes toward the Light that is a stranger to you. And you are unprepared for it. Nothing you ever thought, said or did mattered to Them, in fact They never knew you and you never knew Them, but in the Light you know only the depth or your insanity. You are nothing. You never were anything. And it is too late to be anything but what you are, and even you don't know what that is. And your spirit dies for it never did belong there. It doesn't recognize anything or anyone there. And you perish completely unable to do anything for yourself, no one needs your help there, and you make no sense to Them and They are nonsense to you. And you are so uncomfortable. And all you want to do is hide but there is no place to hide and you know it, no way you will ever be able to stand having once been a slave to your body, and you know that nothing you did was actually worth anything, and you realize you never learned how to actually love anyone, or Them, or even yourself for you never would have done nothing with the knowledge They freely would have given you along with so much more. And in a very short while you cease to be, to have never been, and to never be thereafter, realizing that everything you loved with your animal love you never really loved and that all the animal love you received was not real love either. None of them or you was as real as an animal for it to really qualify, for even that when the Light revealed the truth to you and you could not deny that there was nothing sane about you for anyone to ever remember you by.

And you had to choose only how long it would be before you stopped believing you could stand living in the torment you were in a moment longer and gave up whatever semblance to a spirit you ever had. And the Light shined where you had been but there was nothing left where you were supposed to have been. There was never anything there by the time you got to the place that would have been your place forever in Their presence.

When They make the new earth and make the place They are in, new also, how will anyone even Them remember what was never there? Why would They even want to? They are nothing also if They are not even sane at all.

And when Frank Li's writer stopped writing what he was inspired to write I was sad for the beautiful yet heartbreaking story he had brought into my life.

“That person was just like me,” I said.

And the Inspiring One said, “Yes. It was only a story, Frank Li. But not just a story. The character is like all of the stories about the dead. Their is no point to even thinking about them in reality. They never were anything but fictional, it only seemed real and true. And it needlessly affected you, your writer, and all who read it.

But in your case Frank Li, you never even really felt what your writer said you felt. You have never really even made a sound that you might have spoken one word of truth. You really don't even have a spirit just like in this example. Unless like the Messiah the One real Christians used to call Jesus the Christ someone saw fit to give all of their being to become you. You do know of course such love is not in the line of Man, only They are capable of inspiring that much love in anyone, even the one you call Jesus of Nazareth the same one the Jews despise and call Yeshua of Nazareth. And only with Them doing it for that very one could it have ever been done.”

Do you suppose anyone will even attempt such a thing in your case, Frank Li?”

“No,” is all I could say and be real about it. “But I hope someone who can be real understands now and chooses to at least get to know Them and become real and not just another story about the dead,” I said in my character as my writer intended. “But how does he know these things?” I asked, meaning my writer.

“He was inspired to know such things,” the Inspiring One said, “And much of what he knows came from Them whom he has talked to most if not all his life. Just like you?”