26-07-2013, 07:13 PM
Stan Wilbourne Wrote:We think of ourselves as unique entities, but we are stamped out like so many loaves of bread on an assembly line, convinced of this "individual" we call me, deeply afraid of this undeniable no-thingness which lurks beyond all form and thought.
Reminds me of Mark Twain's story "The Mysterious Stranger" -
"Strange! that you should not have suspected years agocenturies, ages, eons, ago!for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities."
"Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insanelike all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hellmouths mercy and invented hellmouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites a poor, abused slave to worship him!" . . .
"You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaksin a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized them earlier."
"It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dreama grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thoughta vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!"