Here's the new religion. I provide all, and pray ye dine on as much as fills ye. Marvel at one illustration [poorly written no doubt and always already in revision] of Atum, God of Relationality.
God as I as I am God as God is All as All is I
I might have said that my God was the Universe- by which I meant the total system of physical, multidimensional relations, which is the time-space in which we are constituted.
I, however, know to whom I pray much more certainly. It is the God I discovered summer of 2004.
One night, I had a terrifying experience on MJ. I began to consider my own mortality, a frightening concept when you begin to abandon the afterlife idea. I must have had time to think, and to finally put to bed my agnosticism.
Throughout high school, experiences at home, and information at school were clearly pointing towards the lack of an all-powerful God; man had arrived at a consistent theory of evolution which involved no sand turning into man, and history has shown the domination and destruction that has been attached to religious societies, customs, and states.
I was still uncertain, though; I had the proof I needed, both rational and emotional, but I was still afraid to give up the idea of God. Years of religion, bible studies, prayers and forced fasts, church members, and hopes for God’s help had above all made me certain of one thing- I was going to die, and was either going to heaven or hell.
Heaven or hell, hell or heaven, eternal bliss or eternal pain, fire and dark or water and light. Heaven or hell. Fear is often a tool of justification for the domination of the false. It goes from in our psyches, the unconscious portions of our minds, all the way up to the way are societies are organized; from our delusions to the very structures of societies. You must slave and work or you will die, you must give up pleasure or you will not survive, you have to obey authority or society will fall into chaos, you have to respect authority and the state and the president or God will be mad at you, you have to love America or terrorists will kill you. Fear. Very powerful emotion, and society’s structure is based on powerful emotions like fear, guilt, and father love.
I figured, if there is no God then there is no heaven or hell. Logical deduction. Both if there is no heaven or hell, what is there? Uncertainty. Unknowns. Unknowns are a very strong source of evolution, and human evolution. That which is unknown is puzzling, it raises questions; the questioning mind is the freest and most vigorous a mind can be. It is the most engaged with the universe that consciousness can be. Unknowns and uncertainties helped us form language, religion, culture, philosophy, astronomy, science, etc.
Unknowns and uncertainties, then, like fear, evoke powerful intra-subjective emotional experiences. At its most stable, the emotion of not knowing can cause a tickling like a mild electric shock. At its most explosive, it can generate earth-shattering experiences such as deep fear. As we have seen, fear is a tool to justify domination (at least it has been throughout all of human civilization)- electrical uncertainties helped start language and even primitive religion (mother of all religion), and fear of uncertainty is the essence of conservatism, cultural backwardness, and domination.
Fear of uncertainty might have made me justify a clearly illogical system of thought, but I have always been a child/man living in the electrical uncertainty; I am used to being deeply puzzled a.k.a. curious. As such, this uncertainty after death was not terrifying- at least not immediately. No heaven and no hell; ok, what else could there be?
Slowly, electricity becomes unstable, high levels of energy begin to emanate from my psyche; I realize that there is probably no form of life after death. No eternal return and reincarnation, no fuzzy zone in between galaxies, no memories and no family. Nothingness. This is the name for it. Nothingness. The MJ began to mess with me, mixing with the high levels of neuronal-emotive energy my growing fear of uncertainty was rushing throughout me.
Ok. Nothingness. That doesn’t sound too good. (Increase energy) Darkness and darkness and darkness. That’s the only thing it could be (INCrease energy). My perception of the world around began to change. My head was swimming; my imaginative capacity (akin to hallucination) was increasing uncontrollably. The darkness of no-life was enriching the borders of my self-conception. I was born, I live, and I will die. No illusions, just plain life and death, being and then nothingness. (INCREASe Energy: Passing threshold of curiosity, entering fear) That’s when it hit me.
Not only was I going to Nothingness, no friends, no family, no nothing, but I would also continue to exist in the Nothingness. (WARNING: Leaving fear, entering DEEP FEAR.) My mind, my consciousness would still function in the Nothingness; I would have to know this nothingness, live as this nothingness for the rest of eternity. (WARNING: Decrease energy! Entering extreme unpleasure...WARNING, WARNING, WARNING!!!) This is when the radar went straight up and past red into the critical zone that read ‘DEEEEAAAAATTTTTTTHHHHHH!!!!!!” (Death!)
The borders were certainly enriched. Enriched with the darkness of that which surrounds. The shadows seemed to swim with a darkness that was alive. Darkness shattered light's force, invaded light's territory and conquered all.
I fell to the floor, my eyes open but only Darkness surrounded me. Slowly my perception of this world returned, moments after any soul I possessed was crushed by my conscio-connection to the Universe. Every thing in the room seemed to mention Death’s name, whispering the darkness into me. I began to see skulls everywhere I looked; in the darkness behind that brown dresser, in the dark reflection of the television, in the mirror and in the darkness in my eyes, in the darkness behind my closed eyes. Everywhere. Darkness. The shadows reached out to swallow me for eternity.
It is a disturbing experience.
When you really taste
the idea of Death. When
it reaches into you, or rather you reach into
it, the death that is
inside of life, the death that
is wed to life, the death
that we all are.
When you really taste
the idea of Death. When
it reaches into you, or rather you reach into
it, the death that is
inside of life, the death that
is wed to life, the death
that we all are.
I was, of course, tripping off the MJ. I had consumed enough to replicate my highest levels of inebriation. It increased my neuronal activity, and this only increased the strength of the displeasure, but it also opened up passages in my memory (emotional residue in the neuronal canals). I am more capable of considering death than most, perhaps, as I have had an increased experience with it. (One can obviously imagine a variety of circumstances that might lead to a de-sensitization of the honest consideration of the concept of one's own death) More importantly for this story, this experience had changed me, in three significant ways;
1. It helped me finally give up the Christian idea of afterlife: I now had a fear more terrifying than even hell.
2. Next, I recall I looked at myself differently in the mirror. Perhaps death was always lurking, somewhere unseen in my eyes.
3. Lastly, I begin to have a strange slip of tongue. When looking in the mirror, sometimes this phrase would leave my mouth without my forethought, “God As I.” How strange, I would think immediately aftering saying it. I had no idea what it meant, nor how it got in my head, nor why I was randomly saying. But every once in awhile a glimpse in the mirror would lead to it. “God as I.”
2. Next, I recall I looked at myself differently in the mirror. Perhaps death was always lurking, somewhere unseen in my eyes.
3. Lastly, I begin to have a strange slip of tongue. When looking in the mirror, sometimes this phrase would leave my mouth without my forethought, “God As I.” How strange, I would think immediately aftering saying it. I had no idea what it meant, nor how it got in my head, nor why I was randomly saying. But every once in awhile a glimpse in the mirror would lead to it. “God as I.”
I have had quite a bit of philosophy since then. I began taking philosophy much more seriously than I had ever taken religion, even though I had once truly believed that a blue-eyed children book Jesus could solve my family's economic situation. I learned that religion was only a type of philosophy, rather different religions were different philosophies, and that no religion had any more validity just because it claimed so than any philosophy had any validity because it claimed so. Further, theologians of the Middle Ages revised the religion just like one revises a philosophical system of thought; Revelations was of course added much after the works of the Disciples, and its inclusion was highly contested. What’s more, the Christian religion is clearly just a combination of different myths, proverbs, and teachings floating in the culture around the time it was written, especially Egyptian myths.
Highly influential philosophy of the modern period was highly influenced by religion; rather, it arose from a world (feudal Europe) where all serious thought was on monotheistic religions (especially Christianity). Religion, and theology, birthed modern philosophy; history birthed the steps past it. Advanced thought (what I consider advanced) slowly moved away from idealism (belief in spirits, ideals, and other realms) and into historical materialism (the universe our human life lives in).
The key element was slowly taking ultimate importance and determination of what we experience as reality out of the hands of something outside of us ( in heaven, in the non-physical, in the transcendent, in the Absolute Idea) and into our human hands (into our minds creation of what we see, into our historical place in the chain of the universe/necessity coming to know be/itself, into our natural humanity and our actions on the world to change the world, in our ability to create ideas such as God and infinity, into our essential freedom to decide what we believe and do, the laws of our civilization, and our union with the universe in and around us).
Advanced thought went from granting ultimate power to some strange entity in another universe who we could never know or understand, to ourselves and our society and religions and cultures and our humanity, and now to the understanding of our human, animal place in a vast universe that definitely has extra-terrestrial life teaming all over it.
What I have since discovered, then, about my strange statement ‘God as I,’ is that I am the only God I can know. I create who I am, what I do, and what I think. This is the only way that it can be. God as (is) I. I have chosen to by King Rucks, a new age sort of storyteller. This, then, is authenticity for the American citizen legally recognized at birth as Jody Rucks, Jr.
King Rucks is the story I tell myself I am striving to be, as I can never be anything truly. I also found that the Nothingness I feared is inside of us and all of Life; who we are, the it behind the consciousness we have- is pure nothingness. There is no I, there will never be a King Rucks except for the story that history tells those who come after ‘I’ merge into Nothingness. God as I, god as King Rucks, god as…the story you want to be before you die. Come up with a name, my god and I will call you it for the rest of our story.
And finally, regarding Death, I have no fear now. My philosophy has done away with it. I discovered the truth of the matter was the first thing that popped into my head that fateful night. It was the truth before pure, sweet, refreshing, curious electricity became earthquakes of fear. It was the truth of Nothingness. As I said above, Nothingness is within Life; there is no Being without Nothingness and no Nothingness without Being. No life without Death. No change without destruction. Nothingness shows that there is ‘no-thing’ (that always was and always will be the ‘thing’ it is). As such, there is no my mind/consciousness/ego/brain/soul; as such there is no I that knows the Nothingness. There is only Nothingness; neither dirt, nor air, nor ‘I’s and ‘we’s in Nothingness.
Death is not painful, though dying may be. Death is Peace. Peace is a state of stability, it signifies a continuous constant in the state affairs; peace, then, is the opposite of chaos, continuous instability and change. Death is a return to the maximum stability of the womb, the human mental state just before any form of conscious perception. The greatest Peace possible because there is no you who has Peace, you ARE Peace in death. Not heaven or hell, not fire and red or sun and yellow, but peace in death. Simple.
God as I, I in I am Atum, Atum is all, All is Atum, Atum is King Rucks, King Rucks is All, King Rucks as God. The web beneath these things (Being) we see is greater the sum of all the things (us) combined. We are the web, the Web is ‘god’, we make up ‘God,’ We are God. God as I.
