The Mindstorm
Chronicles:
Chapter Thirteen
A work of fiction? A work of non fiction? The work of insanity?
You decide.
Having seen so many things it became a challenge how to memorize them all. Starting from the beginning I would work my way up to the present every day, a process which was slowly becoming longer and longer as the months slipped by, but the only way that I would be sure to remember everything I could, despite all of the hypnotic games bent on making me forget as much as possible. After a few years I felt as though I'd retained it all, and began to think about it less and less, it all took so long and was so greatly complex that it just wasn't the kind of thing that you could explain to someone. And at the level of things to which everything had risen there was nothing left that didn't at least seem important, which just left one endlessly pouring over details which would hardly seem significant unless you'd survived such things. Unless you knew what it was like to be "there". In fact it was all so heavy that even my memories of having memories became important moments in and of themselves.
I remembered sitting alone in my cold, dark, damp house looking at the burning candle and listening to the water dripping from the ceiling. Cold and hungry and never having felt so alone in my life, I thought about the previous year which had been entirely different, and wondered if I could ever sort out the precise meaning of it all. Nature hates a vacuum, and that is especially true of a mind which has no distractions left, just time to think. It is the odd moment that leaves one without a thought. And that becomes especially true of persons who have spent any amount of time surviving by their wits. Once that line of traumatization is crossed there will never again seem to be anything as important as how one thinks. Differences among survivors could be categorized either by exclusiveness or inclusiveness of thought. That is, for some the important thing would be to avoid certain thoughts and memories at all costs. For others, survival meant knowing absolutely everything possible, and especially about oneself.
What happens is that mind control victims are traumatized so badly that they then have memories with which they are quite sure that they will be unable to live. The mind controllers know this, in fact they perfect it by simultaneously traumatizing the victim and reinforcing the myth that thoughts or memories can be deadly. To remember certain things, or to think in certain ways then becomes tantamount to suicide. And if you knew the sorts of ways in which they traumatize people, if you knew what sorts of personally devastating horrors could be placed into someone's memories you would know why. Essentially this establishes a hidden control room in the mind of the victim which escapes any sort of inquiry and allows the victim to be, in ways subtle or overt, to become controlled by their worst fears. This is well known to the controllers.
All of this, if one waxed poetic, was about an age old argument, about some archetypical struggle which has been occurring since the dawn of time. What motivates creatures the more -and in this case specifically as relates to humanity, of course... Fear? Or love? This question, which often led to opposing philosophies and methodologies in ways large and small, would be answered quite dramatically within every savage wilderness, or upon every savage battlefield at some point or another. In the end the answers will have depended upon individuals and whether or not they had love and courage more than self interest and fear.
And the mind controllers, themselves a product of generations of the worst sorts of sociopathic manipulations, are aware of this, and they seek to make the most of people's fears so that people will not act courageously against them, not even in defense of love itself. And if they thought to do so, they would exploit as much as possible the worst of fears, to loose those whom we love the most. Savage, brutal, and ancient, one could find examples of the methodology throughout history. Perhaps the most famous being the stories of Pharaoh or of Herod. It is to terrify people with their worst fears, but it is a double edged sword. Once they have gone so far as to destroy everyone a person loves, or to destroy their love for life itself, they then have enemies with nothing left to loose. And those are the most dangerous of sorts. The deepest love to be replaced with some other phenomena- the deepest of hatreds. And perhaps, the only reason such an enemy one has left for living, to avenge their loved ones. And themselves.
Of course it is all more complicated still, complicated by love's various manifestations as arise from greater and greater philosophies. Love of God, love of country, love of humanity, love for the earth. At some point, like all abusers, the bullies must get us alone. Because the majority of people by all reason and logic understand such threats to be systemic, that is, what threatens one threatens us all, if not today then perhaps tomorrow. Something else that the bullies know well, they can never get us alone when there is accurate and timely knowledge of what they are doing available to the majority of people. So in the end they're forced to operate in the darkness, their power coming from deceptions and illusions more than anything else. And apart from which no one in their right mind would have any part of them whatsoever, because everyone hates bullies.
Alter personalities take the mind places it would never have otherwise gone, whatever one thinks of alter personalities. Michael isn't so much fascinated with Michael as he is with everyone and everything else. Though as one might imagine, it is difficult for him to say just how Michael fits in with everyone and everything else. Not that he doesn't go to great extents in order to do so. Just for all of that, at the end of the day he will still be quite unique. And alone in his uniqueness. Much his fascination with his brother who also goes by more names than can be counted due to the fact that being immortal, even while at sometimes learning quite personal lessons about mortality, results in confusion for most mortals, none of it is easily explained in any event. If immortals were to tell us their lives stories no one would live long enough to hear it all. But unlike today when so many people wouldn't even know the meanings of their own names, Michael's favorites are always those which brought into remembrance some purpose, some function, some archetypical principle worth remembering. Michael is the eldest, hence first there was Love, then Righteousness and after that, Mercy. Righteousness does love Mercy, and Mercy does love Righteousness.
Their existence is so different from our own that we could scarcely imagine it. Since all things are possible for God and by extension, those who love God, time and space are, well, merely conventions which give continuity to the story of principles and their development. Though words themselves couldn't do justice to such an existence, I guess any number of understandings could suffice for the moment. They spend some part of their existence here, in this world, and in any variety of ways, but they also spend some part of their existence in what we might think of as a lucid dream. And at any given time they are free to experience as we do the limits of corporeality, or the nearly limitless existence of the dream time limited only by their own imaginations, or anything in between. In short, their only limits are their principles and their imaginations.
Imagine such things as transpire in worlds where time and space simply exist as bookmarkers.
Michael is a rather different sort of personality than Gabriel. Being the eldest there are some things about which Michael knows more, but Gabriel quite often acts as Michael's conscience. Righteousness is tempered by Mercy, after all. And they are always teaching one another.
In one such, well, dream like circumstance, Michael had been creating creatures with God and had wandered into some series of thoughts about survival and about fierceness. But upon looking back at his creations he thought that perhaps fierceness wasn't the only answer to survival, since it seemed also self defeating that fierceness simply begat the need for fierceness, there are simply limits to any one principle apart from the principle of love which had caused all other principles to come into existence. For Michael, everything always revolved around first cause, though it would be difficult after so many mathematical relationships to explain precisely how this was so, but it none the less remained true to Michael, and in principles, first cause was love. It was the only rational reason that a universe would exist at all, that love is nothing without someone else with which to share it.
Upon looking back at all of his fierce creatures, Michael then invited his brother into the creative process. "Here you see the sorts of creatures created by Righteousness which are fierce in defending their young, are fierce in assuring their own survival. But now I am given to wonder, what sorts of creatures would be produced by mercy?" Without saying so much as a word Gabriel went to some place and time in the world and began to motion his hands around this way and that, producing an image of a living creature, not large, and not small, brown in color and with a short tail. When Michael saw the length of the creatures neck he thought surely his brother had made a mistake, and though he thought the oversized ears to be quite amusing, he was very taken by the creatures eyes. And immediately upon completing the creature vision with his hand gestures, Gabriel ran away.
Of course Michael was left to wonder why his brother had chosen to run away and hide from him. He thought for a moment, and decided that it was a riddle, and the answer resided within the creature of his brother's creation. So he began to appraise the silly looking creature with the sweet eyes. Why did it have such a long neck? And then he saw the creature reach down and begin to nibble upon a dandelion. Ah, Michael thought, to Mercy, form follows function and not the other way around. Humbling. And the oversized ears? Oh. Being aware of realities is even more important than creating them, in this way one understands what sort of realities one is prone to creating. And whether or not they are healthy realities. "Every time..." Michael thought, "He gets me every time." It was always like this with his brother, who Michael also called his conscience. And the eyes, of course... like the ears, but there is something else. Why are they so sweet, so endearing?" "...because ... so that...", the answer came slowly, "Hopefully Mercy will find you before Righteousness." Michael, tears now in his eyes, suddenly remembered from whence he had fallen. If Righteousness was not Mercy's friend, Righteousness was his enemy.
"But, um, how, how does this creature defend itself?" Michael queried. "Whenever Righteousness comes, Mercy runs and hides." An alarmingly simple answer, and ostensibly why Gabriel ran an hid, the first part of that lesson being that it was never enough to be feared or respected, the most important thing was to be loved. But here Michael began to reflect upon the many ways in which this statement was true. The males of many species would turn and fight while the females ran and hid with their young, and the females would turn and fight while the young ran and hid if and when it came to it. And Michael learned that this creature could also turn and fight, it's front hooves were by no means lethal, but sharp enough to be a decent deterrent. At that point, Michael realized that he knew nothing yet of the males of the species, in fact he was so engrossed he hadn't yet realized the sex of the creature that Gabriel had shown him. As soon as Michael asked, Gabriel was standing next to him with his hand extended. "Give me your sword." The angel said. And so Michael did, the result becoming antlers of course, more formidable, fiercely wielded, but still non lethal all the same. Michael was so impressed by this creation, that he determined that whatever some people would call them, that somewhere in the world they would be remembered by how Michael felt about them so that he would never forget this lesson. That is how some came to know them as "deer". Michael was always big on word games of one type or another, especially when it came to phonetics.
One thing was always becoming apparent. That neither righteousness nor mercy could live long without the other. This, because in one way or another they always sacrificed for one another. And even if this was not precisely the meaning nor the purpose of love, it remained the proof of love's existence.
End Chapter Thirteen
