Straw Men

How would you feel if you spent your whole life tearing down straw men?

Standing there in a field full of the world's fallacies: Science, religion, disorder, the individual mind.

Feet covered in straw as you gaze upon the horizon for the first time since you were young.  How would you feel to know that all of the truths you have encountered along your quest for knowledge were the dissemination of lies put in front of you, not by nature, not by mankind's collective ignorance, but by storytellers and misfits.

Today I saw the periodic table in 3 dimensions, crudely, via rounded paper.  We want to put so many truths down on paper, in 2 dimensions - right or wrong, black and white, peace and war, love and hate, atheist and theist - but we're never satisfied by 2 dimensions.  Neither is the periodic table.  Try it, cut it out and fold the edges together noble gases to the alkali, and you will see how god created the universe.  Not on a flat surface, but along the edges of a sphere.  God didn't intend for discrete edges of stop and start, he created his elements one after another in a cycle that spirals like a trek across the globe.  And how essential is the north pole of the periodic table, Hydrogen and Helium, the stars upon whom the rest of the globe, and our globe, is contingent.  Then the particles seem to break down around the equator, they decay, they have minute half lives.  I wonder if that is where anti-matters periodic table ends too, at the equator of the periodic table, and it mimics all that we know about matter in reverse.  Maybe there's a link between antimatter and radioactive decay which would explain why there's an equal amount of hydrogen antimatter in the universe but we don't see any of it reacting with hydrogen.  Maybe they can't, being on the true polar opposite sides of the universal periodic table.  Madness? Only if you'd like to continue tearing down straw men.  You want to believe that God came down and said, "I think I'll make this universe out of 4 forces."  You want to believe God likes to knit, so he packed away the stitchings of his creation into what 7 or so tiny dimensions we'll never see, but from our perspective all we can see is a warm cozy universe made of 3 dimensions, err 4 rather - can't forget about time. Nothing arbitrary about that.  The big bang proven, they say, because they found what they were looking for, quakes in the cozy fabric, wrinkles in the cosmic sweater, proving it was once washed in warm.

On they go, spinning us through the cycles of their ignorances and inadequacies.  And we, the people, are just supposed to follow suit and sift between their theories.  But not just the scientists - at least the scientists are actually trying to see the end of the universe.  And like with trying to see the end of the horizon, at least it has the positive byproduct of taking in the horizon.  Then there's your so called religions. You know the ones given to you by people who disagree.  You ever walk up to two children who have been fighting and ask them who started it? Do you ever get one answer? Does either child actually believe, let alone concede that the other person might be telling the truth?  You ever walk up to two religions who have been fighting and ask them who started it all?  Do you ever get one answer? Does either religion actually believe, let alone concede that the other religion might be telling the truth?  But you want to believe their fables. You want to believe that God only endows men with his message, and the only ones who have ever seen him are all dead.  You want to believe He needs woman, but only for her womb and otherwise only for her fragility. You want to believe that the many carry the responsibilities for the few, and that there was a spot of earth given to you by the one above for your feet and your feet only.  You would spill blood, spread animosity, create division, teach hate shrouded in self-love, all so that no man move your feet from your beloved earth-spot, forgetting entirely what feet are for.  You would actually convince yourself that God is as petty as you, concerning himself intently with race, creed, gender and heredity, any more than he did with any other living species, because in the grand scheme of things your bloodline's relative exposure to sunlight and atmospheric pressure is a big deal.  Worse still, you would reduce God to the devil, and only see his influence or his plan when things go wrong, instead of in every other moment that has been tremendously right.

You think God will bring upon you plague but not every moment of life.  You think he cares about your peace but leaves you to commit war.  You think think he gave you the benefit of a planet in balance when instead he gave you the responsibility to balance it.  You will die.  You will die on this rock and you will be forgotten.  You'll be remembered too, but then they will die and you will be forgotten.  Nobody will remember your voice.  Record it - that technology upon which a copy of the sonar vibrations of your vocal chords created were recorded, those too will perish.  The visual phenomenon of experiencing you will become shrouded in mystery and at best folklore.  Your scent is a fable, told each day in a new way, and tucked away into the stigmas and insecurities that held you back from certain liberties is yet another truth, very few will know your taste and touch. You think that you can knock this universe out of whack with your loudest thud but you won't so much as move this tiny globe any more than anyone before you.  You think you create disorder, to the system, to history, to your relationships, to the grand scheme, but you don't.  If disorder is all that you are after then it's safe to say that you don't even create.  All that manifests as a result of your activity will return back to the gentle stillness of universal cold.  The cold, by definition, is order, and is everywhere.

So who are you, beyond the sensory fiction you at best co-authored.  You think you make an impact on your own, but are you an impact without others?  We discussed the effect you have on this rock.  Carve your name in stone, bury yourself within the rock, do as you please, all of that is decay.  You are nothing without your effect on me.  And today I am awaken as to what is worth my movement.  Not your science, not your religion, your desire for disorder or pitiful belief that your mind is important.  Your mind is only a vessel to reach me and mine and the rest of us connected, should you choose to block yours off I will still reach the end of knowledge without you.  It wouldn't even be a detour for me anymore, you're not in my path.  I am done with the lies that have lead me to your vessel in the path.  Out there, likely as far from you as possible, spatially and mentally, is a whole other realm of truth.  You can't even conceive of it.  I'll admit, I hardly can either.  But I've started to.  I remember what my feet are for, and I've lifted them from this field of straw and am happy to see they have not atrophied.

This is not a good bye, just an I'm not here.