I got it. After these years, decades really, that I have been at this: there actually was a resolution to it. It occurred to me not but a day ago, and this was IT. I mean, where does all of the world, the living and the pain and the struggle—where does it, where possibly could it all lead to? Could anything truly be worth all the struggle that I’ve put into it? The pain I’ve seen? And I’m still reeling from the realization. Let me build it up a little more, so that I shall say that one may see some meaning to life only when one has eyes to see.
Because in one swoop, I suddenly understood everything. EVERYTHING. The most obvious thing of all things, which is why no one has seen it before. So obvious! I’m kicking myself, because I had thought of it before, truly and truly. And I would think maybe you’ll need to assimilate it a bit your own self, read it over a few dozen times. I can’t believe it’s so beautifully simple.
Just this: there are no rules.
You don’t get it, do you? You glossed over the sentence, even though it’s in italics, and thought, yeah, that’s nice? Right?
There are no rules. There never have been. It is the Devil’s trick, and you won’t be free from its bonds unless you have the eyes to see. It’s not just a “nice sentiment” to think in this wise, that all I’m giving you is a rather simple note of encouragement. If you do not feel yourself breaking free, at the very core of you, you do not understand. There is truth, and other than that there is that which does not exist. For there is what is, and then what is not. That which we call having of these mixt, the is and is-not, may conceive of these as “potential”. That which is not which you say is, is a lie. The Black Iron Prison, its fundamental tenet is that you cannot survive outside its rules, that you cannot survive without it. But see, understand that this is a lie, that the prison never even existed! The only way the BIP can be measured is to see the black iron turns out to architect a world that does not exist. For others have seen the Prison, but none have ever touched that metal.
One good way to understand this, the final outcome is from a story from an Oscar winner, about how her grandmother was in a line to be shot ’round the WWII parts of the 20th century. She asked one of the guards what happens if she gets out of line? And then she gets out of line, and runs away, and finds freedom. That implicit rule, “you will not get out of line”, you see? Are all such things, shadows, shadows without a source.
All those rules, being of the myriad bars of The Black Iron Prison that usually no one is aware of. . .it controls everyone. It stops us before we begin, feeds our subconscious an enemy, makes us bow to kings, to submit to the rulers that count on the assemblies of these rules as the walls and streets of the class system, or whatever is the fashionable way to call what divides us. Not to ask any questions. Because. . .have you asked it of yourself? What am I allowed to? What am I not allowed to do? What have we merely shoved into the hole of, this is how it works? Nein, fräulein. You were never meant to know, never meant to find out, that being of the children of God, one of our inherited names is, “I AM”.
Instead of letting us find we are free, they point to the light within us and tell us that that is our master, and they happily hand us the translations of the million things that the light wants from us, except: we are that light.
Let that light free! It’s happening! We are beginning to feel through the imaginary distances of that which seeks to separate us, you see? It’s just a few words; it’s just the idea that the heart does not die; it is the aroma of childhood; it is all the beauty of the world we finally can see, for we have clarity if we simply ask.
It is not hate: it is fear. Gandhi said this. You may think it is hate, but it is fear. There are some lost who have been consumed by one or the other or both, reduced to the machinery of anger to shape all they do, and there are those whom we must let go of else we ourselves die. But often, the wound, the inner wound is not mortal. And to solve is not by believing, is not in faith: what can break through can only be in the doubt.
Observe where the border lies, where certainty becomes an appeal to common sense, a joke you are not supposed to get. One peek of hope I see ourselves developing, for maybe the first time in history: we can make some sense of all of it, of everything. Look and see: our very souls are comprehensible, at the very least. A “normal” person can forgive some other “normal” person everything. We have developed enough civilization that we need not lose the smallest part of someone in the translation of confession, one of us to another. Not to superstition nor ignorance. That’s where the fear comes from, after all: misunderstanding. That what you have been taught about “them” is merely the spreading of ignorance. Once such ideas hit the heart, if enough heart is left, the light may yet fill it again.
There are no rules.
There are only freedoms.