1. go out 2. go in 3. prophet

The first struggle of all lives is to go out.  Out there, we piece together the Questions.

Questions are tricky: intellectually demanding and complex.  It is not enough to ask a simple question most of the time — just the fact of your frame of reference makes so much more detail necessary, in order to have the slightest hope of an answer with meaning.  So you go out, you travel, you experience, you learn, and you grow the ability to ask better and better questions, until finally you start to narrow in on the very few, very perfect, Questions.  In a glittering blaze of clarity, when you piece them together they will point an arrow of light that you can follow, if you have the gumption, to their goal.  

Then it's time for the second phase of the struggle of all lives:  to go in.  Inside is where the Answers are all buried.

You think I'm being facetious, but for once I'm not:  I've found truths in my knee; realities in my left shoulder; cures for ennui in my lungs — and I know I'm not alone.  We don't say it this way very much, but I'm gonna go all out and say that this one is an undeniable truth:  The Answers live, in every literal sense, inside us

And while they're simpler than the Questions, Answers (you may know) are much harder.  First of all, the inner land is massive, as vast as the Universe, and there are few roads and signs to navigate it by (but really, if there are any, you'll have put them there yourself, so gauge their trustworthiness on that).  It's not empty like outer space, either:  Inside is a whole universe populated by the landscape of your whole self, complete with mountains and monsters.  The hobbits had an easy trek compared to the decades you may spend in hard travel here. 

I guess, on average, people are lucky to encounter one Answer per lifetime.  Though plenty of people make an epic of it, and find a bunch of them.  And some people, I suppose, don't care in the slightest about doing the Main Quest, but obviously I'm not writing for them.  :) 

And they're not just hard to find:  true Answers hurt to look at; their realization tears up mountains, collapses whole planets in your innermost galaxy.  And in return for their knowing, not consciously but inevitably, they make demands.  Answers are the voice of God replying, the artifact of blinding power: they make you bleed out the nose and never really be the same again.  

But finding them IS the quest.  It's a two-parter, and zillions of people never figure out or make it to the second part — simply going out and gathering the pieces of the treasure-map is as far as most of us ever get.  Maybe we'll pass on the notes we've made to someone else, and they'll get a little farther.  Only some of us ever figure out that the secret world the Answers hide in is inside our own physical bodies, and not all of them will brave the journey through that terrifying land. Fewer still will survive to find one of the buried treasures, beneath the furthest mountains, there.  Of the ones who do, some will run away in fear when they graze the Answer with their fingertips and feel its effects; others will grab it but die, having not been made strong enough by the rest of the quest to survive the final challenge.



About puredoxyk

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2 Responses to 1. go out 2. go in 3. prophet

  1. samout says:

    to me this sounds like shamanism distilled to a few pure drops of liquid storytelling. i mean shamanism of the living, practical kind, of subjective personal experience. not the dead shamanism on the pages of anthropology books: pictures of exotic paraphernalia, fancy headgear. autopsies may provide useful information, though, scraps for piecing together a workable map for the Journey, to inner lands. kiitos paljon.

  2. Devon says:

    This is awesome.  So well put.  Thank you!

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