Icon, can you?

The first time I saw God, I was digesting a bellyful of poison and processing a headful of one of the stronger psychoactive biological byproducts known to the sapiens crew. Staring at the placid surface of the pond, I grokked and grokked, alternately smiling and sobbing; feeling at once completely refreshed and utterly destroyed.

When the face-to-face confrontation became too much, I trailed my fingers through the water to disrupt the image. Narcissus' failure was not in his gaze, but rather in his inability to shake things up every now and then. We become enchanted with and enamored of our own iconized fictions, forgetting that they're no more than deep ruts of habit—and no more valuable than a scent whose strength fades almost as soon as it becomes apparent.

As the ripples settled down and my reflection rematerialized, I recognized that I finally understood everything. The pattern was clear. Through the course of history, the spiritual looking-glass had been clouded over by a multitude of cheap products and obscured by the patina of centuries of filthy rags.

As I see it, the truth that the snake-oil prophets would obscure forever is simpler than anyone would believe. As I see it, the truth of the universe (which is infinitely complicated or shockingly simple, depending on the layer) rests briefly in each one of us. But through a mad web of manipulation and an artificially structured society, we've been led to believe that there are paragons to admire and pinnacles to aspire to.

This is wrong. This is the product of living in a "community" of 300 millions, a number that the human brain can't even really conceptualize outside of an abstract comparison to grains of sand or stars in the sky. Bound together by a vague sense of patriotism, we sift through the proverbial hourglass while bullies with billy clubs keep us from disturbing the peace as we worship the plebeian promise of the American Dream.

But the truth of the matter is, the patsies always outnumber the iconoclasts, which traditionally means the latter are killed as soon as feasible. Nowadays, however, such individuals are simply paved over by the bland idolatry of 1/300,000,000. Even God has been rubbed out by those who refer to it the most.

©2011 Paul D Blumer