I know why you are here. I have watched you stumble and fall often enough. I have felt the same nausea and distress that you have felt from the sickening sweetness forced past your lips daily in your civilized world. I sense your fatigue, your disgust, your confusion and anguish. I have heard your silent complaints of losing touch with yourself and the magic that once permeated your being. You think you have forgotten your identity, and you have come into my realms seeking to reclaim what you think lost and to answer disquieting questions.
Yet “forgotten” cannot apply to that which was never known, and “lost” does not describe that which was never in one’s possession. You were never given a chance to learn your identity. You have never known yourself, and you do not know the truth of the world that gave you birth. Since the time you were born, you have lived your life surrounded by insulation. You have accepted your milieu as an inviolable given, as you were told, and you have woven your meanings from corner to corner, from floor to ceiling, wall to wall, tying them off in tidy knots, making your home habitable; you never suspected in those early years that a universe might exist beyond your web. Those strands you have spent so much time and effort on have been your friends and acquaintances, families, spouses, activities and careers, cultural assumptions and beliefs, all of which have at once supported and sustained you and kept you from knowing the truth of your condition. All of this insulation has occupied you, all of you – your thought patterns, value systems, beliefs and allegiances – and you have been effectively shackled and prevented from learning that any other world might exist, much less come to know the truths of such a world and your relations to it.
Most people never get to this point at all. Very few are perceptive enough to discern the nature of these constraints. Some of these may go so far as to wonder what may lie beyond. Fewer still suffer enough to be willing to risk a major effort in the hope of finding a way into the beyond. You are a member of a select group, a brotherhood of seekers. Though at this time it is probably small consolation to you, you are to be commended for a courageous first step. But it does not get any easier.
Everything in the world you just left caters to you. At once, your species is the fount, the measure, and the judge of all value there. What you have hitherto known as meanings, those of diluted quality and easily-managed quantities, have conformed to your dictates; they do so because dead meanings are always pliable and accommodating. Live meanings do no such things; live meanings can do nothing but overwhelm and dominate. Live meanings conquer and force a radical realignment in the subject. While dead meanings can be incorporated, live meanings do the incorporating. Live meanings are dangerous, and very few are willing to risk such an encounter. Because you have dealt with dead meanings for so long, you have come to believe that your commanding position has been ordained in the natural order and that the world lies at your feet in servitude, waiting to be shaped for your ends. Granted, this can be a comforting belief at times, but it is also a belief that is largely responsible for the suffocation you feel daily. The time must come for all delusions to end. If you desire to learn new, life-giving truths through me, you must voluntarily relinquish your pretensions and submit to my teachings. I have been called a deathbed for eons, but I harbor nothing but live meanings.
I am the desert. I care nothing for your meanings, your views, your opinions about reality. I am, and the truth of my existence in no way depends on you, your species, or your contrived world view. I need nothing at all to assert my existence. I have noticed a perverse tendency in you to think that reality conforms to your interpretation of it, in no greater or lesser degree than you determine. In short, you think your beliefs mold reality. This is the worst and most insidious form of idolatry. Continue to think in this manner here and I will guarantee a quick death. I am one of the harsher manifestations of reality, and it is one of my most important duties to ruthlessly impart this truth. You must learn the proper order of things. There is no alternative here.
My lessons will never be easy ones for an arrogant humanity. Some of my truths are difficult and painful truths. However, everything you come to know through me is a truth, and every meaning you will encounter in me is alive. I will not deceive you. All things are open in me. This is more than you can ever expect in the world you come from. That world does have certain vested interests in propagating the myths you have lived by.
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