“Listen. People are like knees that are hit with tiny rubber hammers. Nietzsche was a hammer. Schopenhauer was a hammer. Darwin was a hammer. I don’t want to be a hammer, because I know how the knees will react. It’s boring to know. I know because I know that people believe. People are proud of their beliefs. Their pride gives them away. It’s the pride of ownership. I’ve had mystical visions and found they were all so much noise. I saw visions I heard voices I smelled smells but I ignored them just as I will always ignore them. I ignore these mysteries because I saw them. I have seen more than most people, yet they believe and I do not. And why don’t I believe? Because there’s a process going on and I can see it.
“It happens when people see Death, which is all the time. They see Death but they perceive Light. They feel their own death and they call it God. This happens to me too. When I feel deep in my guts that there’s meaning in the world, or God, I know it is really Death, but because I don’t want to see Death in the daylight, the mind plots and says Listen up you won’t die don’t worry you are special you have meaning the world has meaning can’t you feel it? And I still see Death and feel him too. And my mind says Don’t think about death lalalala you will always be beautiful and special and you will never die nevernevernever haven’t you heard of the immortal soul well you have a really nice one. And I say Maybe and my mind says Look at that fucking sunset look at those fucking mountains look at that goddamn magnificent tree where else could that have come from but the hand of God that will cradle you forever and ever. And I start to believe in Profound Puddles. Who wouldn’t? That’s how it begins. But I doubt. And my mind says Don’t worry. You won’t die. Not in the long term. The essence of you will not perish, not the stuff worth keeping. One time I saw all the world from my bed, but I rejected it. Another time I saw a fire and in that fire I heard a voice telling me I would be spared. I rejected that too, because I know that all voices come from within. Nuclear energy is a waste of time. They should go about harnessing the power of the unconscious when it is in the act of denying Death. It is during the fiery Process that belief is produced, and if the fires are really hot they produce Certainty- Belief’s ugly son. To feel you know with all your heart Who made the universe, Who manages it, Who pays for it, et cetera, is in effect to disengage from it. The so-called religious, the so-called spiritualists, the groups that are quick to renounce the Western tradition of ‘soul-deadening consumerism’ and point out that comfort is death think it applies only to material possessions. But if comfort is death, then that should apply most profoundly to the mother of all comforts, certainty of belief- far cushier than a soft leather couch or an indoor Jacuzzi, and sure to kill an active spirit faster than an electric garage door opener. But the lure of certainty is difficult to resist, so you need one eye on the Process like me so that when I see the mystical visions of all the world and hear the half-whispered voices, I can reject them out of hand and resist the temptation to feel special and trust in my immortality, as I know it is only the handiwork of Death. So you see? God is the beautiful propaganda made in the fires of Man. And it’s OK to love God because you appreciate the artistry of his creation, but you don’t have to believe in a character because you’re impressed by the author. Death and Man, God’s coauthors, are the most prolific writers on the planet. Their output is prodigious. Man’s Unconscious and Inevitable Death have co-penned Jesus, Muhammad, and Buddha, to name but a few. And that’s just the characters. They created heaven, hell, paradise, limbo, and purgatory. And that’s just the settings. And what more? Everything, maybe. This successful partnership has created everything in the world but the world itself, everything that exists except for what was originally here when we found it. You get it? Do you understand the Process? Read Becker! Read Rank! Read Fromm! They’ll tell you! Humans are unique in this world in that, as opposed to all other animals, they have developed a consciousness so advanced that it has one awful byproduct: they are the only creatures aware of their own mortality. This truth is so terrifying that from a very early age humans bury it deep in their unconscious, and this has turned people into red-blooded machines, fleshy factories that manufacture meaning. The meaning they feel becomes channeled into their immortality projects- such as their children, or their gods, or their artistic works, or their businesses, or their nations- that they believe will outlive them. And here’s the problem: people feel they need these beliefs in order to live but are unconsciously suicidal because of their beliefs. That’s why when a person sacrifices his life for a religious cause, he has chosen to die not for a god but in the service of an unconscious primal fear. So it is this fear that causes him to die of the very thing he is afraid of. You see? The irony of their immortality projects is that while they have been designed by the unconscious to fool the person into a sense of specialness and into a bid for everlasting life, the manner in which they fret about their immortality projects is the very thing that kills them. This is where you have to be careful. This is my warning to you. My road warning. The denial of death rushes people into an early grave, and if you are not careful, they will take you with them.”
Dad stiffened, and his tempestuous face sent me torrents of inexhaustible anxiety while waiting for me to say something complimentary and obedient. I stayed mute. Sometimes there’s nothing as snide as silence.
“So, what do you think?”
“I have no idea what you just said.”
His breathing got loud, as if he’d just run a couple of marathons with me on his back. In truth, his speech made an impression on my mind so deep, a surgeon could probably still make out the grooves. And not just because it planted a seed that would eventually make me distrust any feelings or ideas of my own that might be viewed as spiritual, but because there’s nothing more distressing or uncomfortable to look at than a philosopher who’s thought himself into a corner. And that was the night I first got a good, clear look at his corner, his terrible corner, his sad dead end, where Dad had inoculated himself against having anything mystical or religious ever happen to him, so that if God came down and boogied right in his face, he’d never allow himself to believe it. That was the night I understood he was not just a skeptic who doesn’t believe in a sixth sense, but he was the über-skeptic, who wouldn’t trust or believe in the other five either.
Suddenly he threw his napkin in my face and growled, “You know what? I wash my hands of you.”
“Don’t forget to use soap,” I said back.
I guess there’s nothing unusual about it- a father and son, two generations of men, growing apart. Still, I thought back to how it used to be when I was a kid, when he carried me on his shoulders to school, sometimes right into the classroom. He’d sit on the teacher’s desk with me balancing on his shoulders and ask the shocked kids, “Has anyone seen my son?” If you compare times like that with times like this, it just makes you sad.
The waiter came by. “Can I get you anything else?” he asked. Dad stabbed him with his eyes. The waiter backed away.
“Let’s go,” Dad snapped.
“Suits me.”
We pulled our coats off the chairs. A crowd of haunted eyes followed us to the door. We walked out into the cold night air. The eyes stayed in the restaurant, where it was warm.