Should we all, at the same exact instant, have a moment that truly defined humanity and its place in the world; or gelled us as the form and substance we actually are, thus doing away with all that anthropological ambiguity, what would such a revelation do to us? That said, would a moment really change all that much, or would we revert in a flash to our previous misalignments?
Thankfully/Tragically we will never find out as such moments are fleeting and never reach more than the few souls in proximity. Hence revival is often as widespread as a rain shower and holds the same brevity. Nevertheless, such enlightenments are miraculous and strike at the core of our identity; even brief knowledge of ourselves is enough to shift us toward a new bearing. It elucidates our ambitions and all our whimful ambiguities.
When it does happen to you, it is a bizarre sensation. You feel like you have a divine communication from the Evermore itself, but it is in a language you can only really let wash over you. You can understand the message with a part of your being that is rarely accessed. Ah ha! But in the same cruel flounce, that isolated part, due to the fact it is rarely conversed with, can lend you no explanation. Imagine it thus; you have a very, very heavy night drinking and you wake up the next morning, you know what organ is screaming at you, you know what it is saying, but you don’t need to understand the language of the Liver to do so.
So what about the great voice of enlightenment? Is it telling us to go straight edge, or to just go easy next time? I think, if I can turn things back to the bane of my life ‘the Liver’, we all know that it isn’t really talking to us. We all understand that it doesn’t have a mind to scold us for our folly. So any personified force we call enlightenment or revelation might just be an influence to push against and deduce our own message from; like playing pong against the computer.
I think, (and I only can, just barely, for myself) that when it comes to enlightenment and revelation it is most-likely found within. I’ve often felt as though it comes from the electricity around me, but really the motor of it is within me. It doesn’t matter what is powering it, the reaction is internal. So, like that jerky and awkward moment when the Terminator learns to reprogram itself, or when a puppy finally understands that there is a link between shitting on the carpet and the telling off that it gets; there are moments when each of us can use what we are taking from around us to power up that reaction within that changes what we are and how we think, regardless of the real message. There are moments when we need to change, so we find that change all around us. We’ve made all the Gods that instruct us.
Like the Bible, enlightenment is the product of a progression of mistranslation. We take coincidence and subtly shift it to suit our own purposes. But does that matter? Has enlightenment ever been all that enlightening really? When the message is that you should love, sell all your shit, and live a life of oneness with the world; is it really a divine message or simply you telling yourself that you hated your life and fancy a change. Enlightenment isn’t so much what we learn (as we have learnt) as much as about the fact that we do learn something and can manage to apply it, even temporally, to our lives. I think that is miraculous, fuck the messenger!
