28 July 2009

I read excerpts from Philip K. Dick's Exegesis today. I was quite taken aback by his insight and vision, and his accounts of his extraordinary spiritual experiences and encounters. I read how he was searching for truth within his own writings; charting his own voyage of discovery and revelation on the pages of his own novels. He was an explorer, a pioneer, a pilgrim. He believed that he was touched by God.

I am beginning to understand how one can discover one's self in one's own words.

This past couple of weeks have bordered on the revolutionary for me. I have begun to see myself in a mirror made of words. At first I saw as through a fog, but my eyes began to focus and the haze began to clear and I was able to see beyond the layers of sediment and debris. I began to see that I am more than the sum total of my experiences; that underneath all of the lies I held so dear was a truth I had only known in my dreams.

I am not ugly. "You know what I mean," mom used to say, "ugly on the inside." Now that I am finally discovering myself I know that she could not have known what I might have looked like on the inside; what kind of person I had the potential to become. I never knew myself so there's no way she could have known me either. She was wrong. I was not repulsive to God. I was not His eternal object of displeasure and disappointment. He could actually love me. If only I had known that I could as well.

I'm unlearning every misconception I've allowed to pollute my mind. I'm undergoing an anamnesis, a loss of forgetfulness, as I rediscover my own essence, the source of my identity, which I forgot long before I reached the age of reason, having ingested the poisons of the great apostasy from birth.

These imperfections I perceive in my soul mirror are not flaws, disadvantages, evils, or ills, rather they are the earmarks of my character, my signature if you will, the identifying marks that define me as both an individual and a member of the collective of man.

I can see the disadvantage of adherence to my old mentality, the potential detriment to my inner circle, my sphere of effect. I can see, even though I may still be shaking off the shackles of my Old Way, that I can, and must, be a beacon of hope to my wife and son.

I can do this.

I used to sing that "He holds the future." That was during the years in which I read praises from a script written by a complete stranger and compiled in a nicely bound hymnal. I was almost grateful at the time, believing that going through the motions, mumbling in chorus with all of the other drones sitting in the pews, was sufficient for some of us to make it into heaven by the skin of our teeth.

Future? All I have is today. It's all anyone else in this universe has, including God.

Today I write. I pour out my heart. I expose myself to myself. I discover my own hidden truths, and I eradicate the lies. I disbelieve them. I conduct a self inquisition and excommunicate any thought, habit, or pattern that goes contrary to my benefit and that of my wife and son, and I burn them on the proverbial heretics' stake.

Where do I go from here?

Anywhere I want.