And by this law, it is natural for some to starve and some to become obese; for some to prosper and others to live lives of abject misery; for some to live and others to die, and all in a world of plenty. And here is the nexus of my horror: we have a choice. We have always had a choice. And still we deny food to the hungry.
Innocent eyes speak
Mute they plead for life and hope
Hunger their reward
The power of choice is that which sets us apart. It is the blessing of consciousness and the ability to live outside the brutish world of nature. And we have abdicated that choice and yielded to a dreadful inevitability that is not inevitable. In doing this we have transmogrified wealth to poverty, joy to suffering, harmony to the mass murder of war.
Every time you see a homeless person, an abused child, a starving family, a bombed town, remember: these are the products of the choices we have made, that you have made. These things are not inevitable, not for the conscious being that is man. Possibly though, human choice mirrors the awful desolation of an unimaginably vast universe within which we are truly alone: accidental fireflies, soon to be consigned to eternal night.
Alone in the night
Whispering desolation
Silent is God's voice
Is every human being alone in her head, conjuring reality from the probabilities of the quantum froth? A solitary mind dissipated through the infinite matrix of time and space. Cogito Ergo Sum! (I think, therefore I am) - a full stop behind which lies nothing, for then I am the all.
On God's face I look
Eternal mirror of dreams
Alone I remain
And we marvel at children having imaginary friends! Worse, are we as the secularists insist, purely physical constructs, accidentally born of a spontaneously generated quantum universe? Then truly we are the damned.
Entropy denied
Knowledge in an empty space
Nature's avatar
The Hebrews say that God created a void, the Tzimtzum, a place from which it withdrew that the universe might exist. A place that is of God, yet within which freedom of choice might exist for its highest creation: humans. A place possibly, where the expression of God is confined to the laws of nature, unconscious and immanent.
And so we are isolated. But more than this, even within the physical universe we are most effectively quarantined, confined to a single world in a galaxy spanning one hundred and fifty thousand light years within a universe fifteen billion light years across. We are so small, so insignificant, so lonely. Abandoned by our Gods, trapped inside the grey tissue within our skulls, quarantined by light years of empty space.
As Douglas Adams' famous character, Arthur Dent once famously said, "You might think it's a long way down to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space!"
The dust blows away
A universe in my hand
I weep at the sky
Choose your reality! And remember, next time someone tries to convince you that the world is inevitably as it is - you have a choice. It's all that sets you apart from your dog. So exercise that choice and in whatever small way you are able, make the world just a little better for all of us. Then, even be we doomed to eternal night, we can claim the glory of valour unmatched and unique: the final voice of nature's avatar.
About the Author and the Thelema Trust
Keith Rowley is an engineer and practitioner of Kabballah and Magick. He is the author of The Aquarius Key - A Novel of the Occult and the architect of the Thelema Trust web site http://www.magick.co.za On the Thelema trust web site a wide range of original and unique Occult Art by South African artist Hettie Rowley may be purchased, commissioned or simply viewed. There are also a selection of poetry and short stories by Keith Rowley and a range of pages containing insights into Magick, the life and work of Aleister Crowley and much else.