NOEMAYA

The elder, breaking his vow of silence after 146 years, said to Alexei, “you’ve come to my room and prayed at my feet more than the other monks in this monastery. Now, I shall speak to you, the son of Cain! It’s not your prayers that compelled me to speak; what compelled me to break silence is that which compelled you to ceaselessly pray; it’s rising wave in all of us, felt in the core of our Being, that compels the collective impulse. Your confusion is the darkness between the dusk and the new dawn. I, too, speak because this wave is reaching a threshold in our time.”

“Alexei! You’ve asked, like countless others, for god’s vision or the coming of the messiah. I tell you this Alexei, if god were to decent today, all those who’ve longed for him, would murder him again. Man is better off not seeing god, for its simplicity is too dull and threatening for man. Let this man make merry with the thought of god; let him worship his own little idols instead of the truth, for this man can’t handle the truth. God is nothing man has ever imagined, nothing he could ever imagine; the vision of god is the most disturbing, and disappointing, experience a man can have. Let this man entertain hopes and heavens, things that must have a fantastic appearance for him. This man values only the more and the phenomenal. God is the opposite; god is less and noumenal. So, be content with your church, for it is the best vision of god you’ll ever have, for it’s an idol, a body of man’s deep desires for ecstasy. But there’s nothing ecstatic about god. God is dull and too passive for man, for this man, the false man.”

“I tell you this Alexei, the true man hasn’t walked this earth yet. The present man can’t bear the true man; it’s too much of a threat for him, his simplicity I mean, and his embrace of the body. The true man needs no spirituality, no religion or display of idols and fantastic edifices. For him, the earth is the meaning of all things, the body is the true spirit. He has no other world; he has and needs no other Being. The false man must think in order to be, for he’s too weak to hold and tolerate conflict and indeterminate Being. In contrast, the true man just is and his Being determines the thought. This modern man, the false man, the virus of this planet, the new preachers and idolators with their new churches called schools and universities, is the most despicable of all generations and species. He sees himself as the highest of all but he’s the lowest of all forms, the one who can’t bear the truth, i.e. his body, and buries it under, and yet he makes an idol of it in his own image watered down to his own limited capacities, and then he populates and rules this earth with the miniatures of what he’s murdered a long time ago. We, the false man, we are truly the children of Cain.”

“Alexei! Keep coming back!”