Deep Shit

With a title like that, you know it's got to be a good blog post. Uh. Right? Um. We'll see.

So, Wicklow2012 comments thus on the Sorting things out post:

When you say that "it all ends" do you mean for the spiritual realms as well as the temporal? I had always supposed that there would be change and flux in realms beyond the material (as above so below) but I never pictured an absolute end to them, it's a rather daunting idea really (for me at least). If you wouldn't mind I'd love to hear more along this line. My personal death I accept (what else can I do?) but the ultimate void for absolutely all things, I admit that would be the most unkindest cut of all. 

Well, the last sentence has me a bit concerned, but nevertheless, I'm going to carry on and explain my thoughts and perspectives, and hope that everyone can see that it's not really all that unkind or cutting.

I do indeed mean "it all ends." The spiritual realms, the planetary spheres, the angels and demons, their homes, everything. Life as we know it from a temporal and eternal stance, everything we have documented from our dreams and visions, everything we've learned and experienced: it all ends.

As a Christian Magician, I see the end of all things foretold all through the Bible. Isaiah talks about the heavens being rolled up "as a scroll," Peter talks about it in his epistle, and it pops up in Revelations as well. In the end, everything goes away, and even Jesus gives up his crown and returns to the Source, and God is All in All. When it's all said and done, all that will be is the Source.

What happens to us? Well, first let's remember the Hermetic lessons of Who we are. We are manifestations of God, emanations of his essence that exist to enjoy existence. As Crowley put it, we are "but an EYE, and what eye, none knoweth." We are observers and participants. We are made in the image of God, and we are creators who manifest things through Words, just like God. We speak things into being, taking the invisible Ideas and giving them form that can be communicated and manifest. We are little drops of God, the microcosm of his macrocosm.

As a drop returns to the oceans that spawned it, we too shall return to God. "Self awareness" will fade, and we will remember who we have been all along. We shall not cease to exist in essence, but we will cease to exist as separate individuals. What comes next, we don't know. But we have some clues.

In Revelations, we get a New Heaven, and a New Earth, only this time without the ocean. We know that god is essentially unchanging. He created everything we experience at least once (the Bible hints that there was another phase of existence pre-Genesis; the waters over which the spirit of God hovered had to come from somewhere, and we know he's fond of ending phases of existence in floods). There's no reason to believe he won't do it again.

We also know that things progress. Life evolves, we grow spiritually, we progress through stages of initiation and understanding. I personally believe we'll do it all again, only at a higher frequency.

Now, these thoughts are all based on my limited experience. I can only barely remember what's happened to me in this life, and my memories of previous incarnations are less than perfect. I've always existed, to my conscious memory, within the matrix of time and space. Remove time as a factor, and everything happens at once. Remove space, and there's no room for separate existence. There is only all-knowing, all-being. Where we go from there is pure speculation.

Fundamentally though, I don't think anything will change. We're already God, we just forgot while we were playing around in the park. I think God manifested as us and everything else because that's what we wanted to do, collectively, as a whole, and we had the power and knowledge to do so. I think it's mostly fun, even though there's also the suck factor.

The most important thing to keep in mind though, imo, is that while everything ends eventually, and we don't really know what happens after that, it doesn't really matter much as far as we are concerned individually. Regardless of anything that comes after, we still get to live out every moment we have between now and whatever end cometh. Everything ends, but until then, life is what we make of it, given what we have to work with. The sky's the limit, as they say.

So in the final analysis, I don't take things that happen in one lifetime too seriously because it's all going to end anyway. I also don't take the end too seriously because we know for sure that what we get is what we have, and it's all for us as long as it lasts. This balancing act results in freedom. Freedom from the temporary pain and drama, and freedom to create my world as I see fit. It provides the thing Anton Ego was looking for in Ratatouille, that most rare and hard to come by item that puts all things into proper context: Perspective. I can't always choose what happens, but I can always choose what I'm going to do with what comes.