I’m afraid I’m going to snap.

What? Where does this come from?

You can see the symptoms for yourself. I am always tired, yet I can’t sleep. I eat, but I have no energy. My mind runs around in tight little circles like a rat in a cage, exhausted, but unable to stop. You have given me an impossible task. You have sent me out to this wasteland to find God-knows-what, and I can feel the wheels beginning to smoke. You ask too much. You expect too much.

Too much?! I ask only that you find yourself. I ask only that you seek the truth. This doesn’t require any of this excess dead weight you are dragging with you! None of it! Nothing could be easier. I ask you not to burden yourself, but to free yourself. I ask only that you leave your beliefs, your opinions, your cherished notions, your discursive mind back in the confusion that bred those things. Leave them! Embrace this reality now; look at it, feel it, reverence it. Live it, and live with it.

Haven’t you considered where I came from, what the human condition is? It’s impossible to live without beliefs, without some form of certainty. The mind can
not breathe in a vacuum of nothingness, yet this is exactly what you propose that I should do! What am I supposed to do: chop the floor out from under my feet? Walk on air? I have tried; I have whittled my notions down to a bare minimum. I see nothing but an abyss before me. You keep me out in this desert day after day, and I watch my sanity crumble away. I have heard the stories of others who were drawn into these arid regions and never returned. I cannot continue to question everything, I just can’t do it. If the great truth of things has a dowry of lunacy, then I’m sorry, but that is too much to ask. I want to leave this empty land. Let me go.

I brought you to the desert for a purpose. You can’t see it; I can’t even see it. But I have been assured that the answers are out here. I can feel it in this silence. A promise of sorts. There is something to be discovered out here. Something more than is apparent; maybe some new synthesis of reality. Something that lies hidden now. Something beyond what we can comprehend. I brought you here to discover that.

You’ve felt the promise, too. You know why you are here; you are here to consummate some sort of final union, to make your truth and this desert’s truth one and the same. You have that chance now. You complained about the superficiality of your life. You said that it was a waste, and you longed for the chance to escape that triviality, to be alone, to delve deep within your soul and offer what you found as the supreme sacrifice to petition the mysterious powers that reside here.

I’ve watched you struggle, and I’ve suffered with you. Your mind is being purged, and purges are never painless. The vastness out here is leaching the meager resources of your ego dry. You feel as if you are dying, and in a sense you are. But the feeling is misleading. How do you think the sagebrush, that bitterbrush, or the bursage there came to be? None of them could have come to be if the seed had not died into a fuller and greater life. You are like a seed clinging to its dormant future. You cannot see where it will end.

Your naiveté astounds me, it really does. Have I ever lived anywhere but in my mind? Have I ever lived without thinking, planning, remembering, anticipating, believing, and acting upon my beliefs? Have I ever existed without an ego? Has any human being on the face of this earth ever moved willingly into this terrifying void I stand on the edge of? And been the better for it? I am looking for bedrock, certainty, for some ground to take my stand on and build my life on. You lead me out into this desert and maneuver me to the edge of this canyon of nothingness, and then you tell me that security lies in surrendering to it; this chaos pressing in on me from all sides. You must take me for a fool.

Certainty is what you crave. You say that you want to take your stand on bedrock. What could be more sustaining than discovering the immediacy and self-sufficiency of life itself?

What could be more uncertain than this annihilation that looks me in the face now?

It is your choice, of course. But you know you can’t go back. There is nothing to feed your soul back in that world. Your hunger was what drove you out here in the first place. So you have two choices. You can stand here alone and feel increasing pain as the chaos presses in on your resistance. Or you can trust and step forward into it. You can curse this desert and suffer, or you can accept it for what it is and move through it.

No verification from anyone else. No way to see beyond without going forward. And no way to retreat if this happens to be a terrible mistake. Do I have this right?

Yes. You’ll have to trust.

I’ll have to trust. Can you guarantee my safety, my sanity, my life? Do you know what will be?

I cannot guarantee anything.

Do you know what will be?

No one knows what will be.

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