NOEMAYA

Give man freedom, and he’ll find a way to imprison himself. Give him peace, and he’ll find a war to fight.

This, man, has no shortage of chaos within himself. It’s his chaos that seeks rest and equilibrium, and he is nothing but a servant of this chaos, the helpless driver of this chariot of fire. Yet, he’s oblivious to this bondage, thinking he’s free and a divine messenger bringing fire to darkness; he thinks he’s Prometheus but he’s the charioteer of hell who’s whipped into motion by that burning chaos.

To quench and extinguish his chaos, he dries up all the wells, disturbs peace and makes wars, all in the name of peace and salvation.

What is freedom but freedom to choose, and to choose is to vanquish all choices except one, to abandon the state of having choices in favor of living in one. So, freedom is the freedom to cancel freedom. But it is in the exercise of freedom that one is free, that is, in the exercise of making choices which is nothing other than shrinking the very scope of freedom. This is the freedom to beat to death one’s freedom.

One who has freedom but doesn’t beat it in the head, is no free man; he’s enslaved to indecisiveness, and that’s the worse kind of slavery. Since freedom by its very nature is self-annihilating, for it lives for dying, then the indecisive man who’s not beating his freedom to death, is himself beat to death by the choices of the other. Choose or be chosen. And the chosen suffers the most.

In another room quite protected from chaos by chaos itself, the pilgrim blurted out to Rabbi Wiseman the following lines:

The nature of things is measured by the interior disposition of the soul; that is, the kind of person one is will determine what he thinks of others.

The Shaykh continued in the manner of those who knew by living the Doctrine of Unity, “All is He, and He’s none other than the Self, the very seeing, the very hearing, etc.. So, detecting fault is faulty detecting.” The Shaykh slipped into the golden silence before he continued, “In agreement with our doctrine, what one sees is none other than He (wherever you turn, there’s the Face of God), and He’s none other than the seeing Self, and hence what one sees is none other than the Self. A man who sees defect is seeing himself, and lacking wisdom, he thinks the defect is outside of himself and attached to this or that object or person. Only if he knew the doctrine by heart, and knew that the Self is free of all defects, he’d instantly recognize that in seeing defect he’s not seeing at all. If you can’t grasp the significance of all this, contemplate the two ways the eyes can see and comprehend a doughnut, and that’s the way of the knowers of the truth. And if you abandon even that and rise to the level of the lovers of truth, you’ll see that the lovers care not about the nature of a doughnut but rather drop away their reason to taste and take pleasure in the sweetness of the doughnut. And here’s a little secret for you: the Elect have favored the Boston Cream.”

What the mind struggles to comprehend, the heart already knows.

The circle of chaos tightens, and the burning man is on the run again. “What’s all the rush,” says the Shaykh. “I must run or else I burn up.”

Then burn up! The mind moves fast lest it falls into the abyss, like a toddler who does better running than walking with deliberation. What’s so wrong about the abyss, the chaos? Again, in agreement with our doctrine, you are the abyss itself. Your sin, the origin of your fear, is lack of faith, faith that the abyss won’t hurt you; and this, not so much because there’s a god to protect you; it’s not faith in god I’m speaking of, for you’ve murdered that god long ago. The faith you lack is faith in your nothingness, that the abyss won’t hurt because there’s nothing to be hurt, no you, no existence. Your hurt is as good as an imagination on fire. The fire that’s burning an imagined tree, can’t burn the imagining of the tree itself. So, your sin is believing that you are, that you are something of some kind of a fixed nature. And even the meanings that stream through as I utter these words, and I too, the screen, the zooming out and back into yourself, all that is naught but a movie that no one’s watching.

In another room, chaos wants me inside of it; it wraps its legs around my waist, pressing me hard into itself, to bear my child, to make a father of me, to reenact the eternal recurrence. The swinging back and forth between the form and the formless, between the rigid determinacy of order and the loving indeterminacy of chaos, between the father and the mother. All children are children of chaos; from chaos they’ve arisen and to chaos they will return. Be damned whoever brought us the fire, the tree of knowledge. All would be well only if YHWH hadn’t even mentioned the tree. It’s as if he desired the Fall, for he knew man too well.

That whole genesis is neither about creation nor about the fall; it’s rather about the psychology of man. That man, in virtue of his essence, is that which is driven to what he forbids himself to do; he loves to fuck with what can destroy him; he knows the fall can kill him and yet can’t resist but go to the edge to look down into the shape of that very death. Our brother said it well too, “to feel the urge to touch a wall with a note on it saying ‘don’t touch; it’s pained,’ that’s precisely what man is.”

Or even better, and in agreement with our doctrine, man is the embodiment of the very drive to shatter closed doors, and not so much because he’s a noble explorer, but he breaks door simply because they’re closed, and that’s all there’s to it. If that YHWY had left all the doors open, man wouldn’t have moved even a step further from the spot he was created. This man is the embodiment of the freedom to cancel freedom, of war-seeking peace, of a failed synthesis of the opposites; he’s a nothing at war with himself. Perhaps a paradox! And that’s precisely his essence.