Of Ambitions And Giant Amoeba: It's 8 O'Clock In The Morning

You would like to believe that you have some control over your life. You prefer to think that you are quite reasonable, and responsible for the order, or disorder that surrounds you. Such illusions do pacify. But in truth, what do you know? What of the influences ever at work upon you?

You are subject, without wanting or willing it, to every sound, vision, view, vibration, thought and rainstorm that ever was - or ever shall be. And it is (I know) an even more noxious thought to you, that every fact and facet of your life has been decided upon in advance - perhaps in advance of your birth. Your perversities certainly were so determined, and determined too is your rebellion against this idea. Too your hard-wrought genius - all.


My peculiar combination of temperament and tastes easily accepts the idea of a predetermined destiny. Odd, is it not, in such an one you might think would be overweeningly convinced of freewill and a private, powerful control? And neither can I know where my reach extends or ends in the world, nor, most saliently, how my influence over another human being may work, for good or ill, or if at all. That good gestures can generate evil, and that cruelty and indifference may render up good, are but more arguments pleasing to my Whim to grasp that ineffable Deterministic. In a predetermined universe, I know myself as already as perfect as I shall ever be. My conviction of my own innate perfection, the direction this consciousness turns me in, sets me far apart from you striving free-willers, always in the agony of attainment. I have attained - and it had nothing to do with me.

You who insist most wildly upon your individual, free-willed grasp - you are anxious! Go on building your private metaphysic, insist that order is your subjective doctrine. You are nothing! For within I see there still must be that other - that Someone — who is Always Correct! The ideal of the Supreme Being rises to accede to your needful gaze. Must you be reminded that this “greater” is ever a fantasy? May you go insane under the imperative of a Perfection never to be realized.

Needless to say any attempt on my part to be a Perfection, for all of you, is a thing I will not hazard. But you seekers shall find me out, to rest in the shade of my pure conviction of Beauty and Strength. These virtues at times have little to do with pleasingness, and even less with selfsatisfaction. I am bound by a Divine Right to be utterly what I am and no more. I am grateful to be thus only slightly a cripple. My dread predetermination may not be pretty, but it is my only story.

Would you attain to True Submission? Would you know and love an One Who is Always Correct? Feeling, and knowing Void in yourself, that place where you know you have no control, I tell you to fill it with your passion, no matter what that might be, whatever the horror of it. Feed it to the flame of wild unrestraint - feed those flames, and your face to the flames. Our blessing thus upon you, to feel how faceless you can be ...

Burn, and reflect; burn and reflect. Then, turn your eyes again upon the Superior: you find you are gazing upon some massy, overwrought ego. But such as They are Certain, while you do remain eternally at odds. And though your Superior may yet prove unworshippable, still They are Gods and you are not.