Part 8 REVELATIONS
War, Hummph, what is it good for…Absolutely nothing!
Now I’ve done more than my fair share of hallucinogens in my day and honestly I have had some pretty obscure hallucinations but believe me this was no chemically induced manifestation. The most remarkable thing happened. Cosmo’s arms came right through my computer screen and grabbed me by the shoulders. As if I had been transformed into a wavelength of pixilated energy I entered into the story I was writing coming face to face with the god I thought I had created. I was confused beyond galactic proportions and I somehow managed a statement. “Oh My Cosmo, did I die?” My mind was racing, no harp music, that has to be a good sign, but there he was big as life. His voice was less godly than I anticipated, no thundering roars, just a friendly statement as if he were a college professor or just a bar mate, “I understand you have some profound questions JT. Come with me and I will try to give you some answers. We’ll be traveling through various dimensions in a way you are unfamiliar with so just remain quiet and observe” I was stunned, in a sort of trance but I decided to take the RAM by the horns. But Cosmo grabbed my hand and even though I had a keyboard full of questions I was dragged alongside this sprirty thing in silence. We moved through some sort of crowded city street then through a bustling building into another building. I thought it was the New York Stock Exchange but it was cold and unlit. I could hear people trying hard to yell over each other even though the place was empty. Through another dimension and we found ourselves walking through a bank, also cool and unlit this time filled with voices in a language I could not understand, like Japanese or something. Through another dimension we found ourselves in some sort of foreign government building, a palace or some ultra rich home, and finally through a concrete graveyard. Just as quickly as it had gotten cold and dark a light appeared and a wave of warmth spread over my body. We were walking along a beach I had gone to many times in my younger days, and then through the familiar streets of my youth. The seaside city that watched me grow to a man. The ball field I learned to play baseball in, the playground complete with see saw where I learned the mechanics and necessity of teamwork, school, cars, bars, all of my youth. I was feeling giddy. He led to some sort of park that was filled with all sort of life. Everywhere I could see and hear children playing and laughing squirrels darting to and fro, birds jumping from branch to branch, and I even thought I saw a small fox. I couldn’t help but smile as Cosmo walked me through the most carefree times of my life. At long last we came to a path in a wooded area that led to a clearing. “There JT, over there. We can sit there and talk.” I almost ran up to the clearing and found a spot to sit. I had so many questions and I wasn’t sure where to start but as it happened I didn’t need to. Cosmo looked me in the eyes and this is going to sound strange but I got the feeling I was looking at everyone I had ever known. Cosmo spoke clear and soft. “JT, you have many questions and I will try to answer them as simply as possible. You ask of the purpose of life?” The largest and warmest smile I had ever seen.
“Its not God that works in mysterious ways JT, its love. Love has the power to create misery or mystery, irritation or elation. You remember one of your favorite all time movies? How about this line, “You’ve always had the power to get home. You just needed to learn how to use it?” Its not a co-incidence that it’s a wonderful life came out the same time. “To my brother George, the richest man in town” Love tried in the year 1933 to remind the humans what’s important and what is real, but it never caught on as anything more than entertainment. People still went about learning to hate, to be greedy and jealous. The opposite emotions of love overpowered the minds of humanity.” He sat and stared reflectively out at the children playing so I took the opportunity to ask a question, “Am I dead?”. Again the warm smile, “JT my son, death is not something to fear, its merely a stage. What’s important here is that you understand life, not death. Things are what they are because love lost out to power and greed. That’s the classic Good versus Evil if ever there was one. You see the planet earth really is a garden, like a giant rain forest and it needs cosmic tending. I am the gardener. I got all of life here started and have just shown you your history.”
I was not quite sure I grasped what he was saying, I mean just like if there is a God why would that God allow so much misery? “What’s the matter JT, did you not understand?” I reflected a moment and responded. “No, I understand on a certain level, you say something like fate that you created determined our paths on earth but something still bugs me I mean ….well why wars? Why did you allow war with its devastation and destruction to evolve. Its like history was written in blood and not ink. Why does it seem like we are constantly at war somewhere?” I watched as Cosmo thought deeply, I assume to give an accurate assessment. “War as it has come to be is hard to explain it’s one of my biggest disappointments along with my dinosaurs. Let me start at its beginning and see if I can in some way outline it for you. When the garden was still quite young many different tribes were forming all over. They shared one common concept. They understood and observed my law of life. This understood law was quite simply that every creature has the right to achieve its survival in the garden. What a creature cannot do is deny any other creature its right to its own survival strategies without reason. But in one little garden corner, or more accurately a crescent, a certain species figured out a way to manufacture and horde food. They penned animals behind fences and learned how to cultivate and manipulate vegetation. This would eventually become known as the agricultural revolution and they horded so much food that no one in the tribes ever went hungry. They prospered, and when a species prospers it has growth spurts. They were eating and fornicating so much the population doubled, then tripled. This created two major problems, first it was getting too crowded, and second by hording so much food it was depriving other creatures of an opportunity to feed. To make shit worse, if a fox or a gopher or a crow or any other creature tried to eat the horded food, they not only killed the hungry thief, but they attempted to annihilate that entire species of the hungry creatures even if they themselves weren’t taking food. Just because they MIGHT take some food at some point. But it was the crowding that really set the fecal matter hurling towards the rotary oscillator. These tribes began forming imaginary lines and began laying ownership claims to the land, and all the animals and vegetation on that land. My land! As a few generations passed by the people began forgetting the time when the garden belonged to everything and soon the people were growing up with the notion that their parts of the garden actually belonged to them by virtue of their imaginary lines. As they worked the land they tried to figure out why some harvests would suffer droughts or flooding storms. They began to fear that a higher power was responsible so they invented gods. Oh mercy did they invent gods. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands. A god that made it rain, or a god that controlled the wind. Even the big beautiful sun was a god. And they started making sacrifices to these gods. Animals, other humans, whatever they felt would make the gods happy so they could continue to horde food. Somewhere along the line one culture came up with the concept that there is only one god, the true god. This somehow gave them superiority because they were the culture that knew the truth. When other cultures challenged that belief they would destroy the threat brutally so their god wouldn’t think them wimps. They began building armies to protect their belief and to protect their imaginary lines. The weapons they once farmed and hunted with now became instruments of death and destruction used on any human that challenged their land ownership or their one true god. They began a strange custom of burying their dead which further denied other creatures the right to what belongs to the garden. It broke the cycle. So the armies began killing in the name of god and they began killing any who trespassed their land. Their land! Oh that makes me laugh. No, it makes me angry. They began to get crowded, they were charging people money to live on my land which they called their own because of some stupid imaginary lines. They wanted more land, they made the imaginary lines longer and wider.” Cosmo stopped to catch his breath as he was visibly upset. I wanted to change the mood so I asked, “You keep saying imaginary lines, are you talking about borders? Borders are important because they separate areas of land.” A funny sound came from his nose like a nasal windstorm or something, and I wasn’t sure if the smile on his face was sincere or sarcastic. Maybe both. “Where do you live JT?” I proudly informed him I was born and bred in New York. “And what makes you so different form someone born and bred in Connecticut, or New Jersey? Or even Oklahoma for that matter? Do they have three arms in New Jersey? Five legs in Connecticut? Perhaps they are half bovine half human in Oklahoma! Of course not. Aside from a slight difference in the way they pronounce words, or the words they use to describe things like soda in New York and pop in Oklahoma you are all the same. You see JT, borders don’t separate people from other species of people, they are just arbitrary lines that make you think you belong to something special. Like New York which you so proudly proclaim. You are no different from a JT from Oklahoma just different environments. 0You can’t step over a line somewhere and not find people similar to the one on the other side. You look for the differences in each other instead of the similarities. That’s part of the problem. You have forgotten that in the end you are all human. You all want to love and be loved, you all want to live a happy and healthy life, you all get sick or injured and you will all eventually die. When you really think about it there are much more traits you have in common to others than there are that make you different. Why even more similar if you take religion out of the equation. If there were no Jews, or Muslims, or Hindis, or Christians how would you define your differences? But I suppose you will go on believing that it is important to consider yourself in some way better than other humans. That’s why war JT. That was how it began, war was a child protecting its ego from the rest of the world.”
“And the armies got bigger and stronger, and the weapons more and more advanced to give whoever had the most money to pay for the best equipment. Ah yes, once greed reared its ugly head in it humanity was done for. The larger landowners had better weapons and machinery and therefore built stronger and deadlier armies to protect them. It wasn’t enough to have more than enough food, they wanted to have it all. Control the food and you will control the world. Wars raged on in a struggle to control the food and hence the people, and to keep everyone in line it was important that everyone believed the armies had god on their side. Sounds a bit ridiculous when you think about it. All loving God wants you to kill or maim other humans. In the name of God my ass, it is clearly in the name of gold, or oil, or rubber, or anything else that can make one rich with the false perception of power. War had and has terrible consequences. Death and destruction resulted in a bid for the powerful to become even more powerful. It’s easy to see what horrible atrocities could come out of war but there were unintended consequences occurring as well.. The most hideous was the buying and selling of other humans. Slavery was a direct result of war. When one army decimated another those unfortunate enough to live were turned into slaves. Why? To work the land so the owners could own more and not have to pay. Buying another human being. Despicable, yet an accepted practice everywhere. Now they owned the land, the food, some of the animals and even other humans and industry flourished. War had become a teenager feeding on greed and lust for power. Yea, things were out of control, people killing in my name, killing for power, killing out of lust. That’s when I sent my son down, to put them back on track. To get them to understand that they should worship no one but accept everyone. They needed to revert back to a culture of existing with the rest of the garden”
Como paused here as though reflecting on a happy moment in his past. I know the look because I do it myself quite often. That was okay with me because my head was spinning anyway. After a five minute pause, he continued. “ Well that sure didn’t work out too well. When my son witnessed so much greed and lust and crime and trickery it pissed him off. He began to use my name to warn them of my fury so instead of a message being go back to living together they continued to worship. They gave him so much shit and many of the humans wanted to mess him up so he changed his message. Out of anger it became more like follow me and listen or my Dad will kick your ass. Just as quick as a nuclear fission things turned from bad to worse and religion split off into a few different major religions, all agreeing on only one thing. That their religion is the one and only true religion and all others must perish and give the world to them. God created earth for humans after all, but only for the humans that know and understand true religion. Bah!. So they did what they always do to a theory they can‘t comprehend, they killed him. A horrible way too. It’s almost like they had to think of the most heinous way for him to die. I guess it made them feel all chest puffy or something. They had no idea how little and insignificant they were. Like any other gnat in this galaxy, their entire species could be wiped out in one giant swat and the universe would continue as though they never existed. But war was now becoming a young adult, and the weaponry just got more and more advanced. Bombs, missiles, planes, tanks, all the best and biggest in high tech murdering. Not that they should stop there, why of course there would be biological and chemical weapons as well. All the way up to the ultimate bomb. The atom bomb. The garden was ultimately taken over by the most destructive species that ever roamed the planet.”
TBC
Terrapin - The Journey 