Apotheosis

Repetition without purpose is meaningless. Have an endgame with repetition.

Don't dawdle. Do reflect.

Take advice but do not be a fool.

Give advice but do not be a moralist.

Know your own aims and know that sometimes you won't know your aims.

And on and on and on.

My name is Jim and the banal precepts and slogans of every era and civilization now wash over me and I can perfectly extract their truth and falsity. I am the ideal no-bullshit individual, a historical-level prodigy of not being taken advantage of.

But a man is only as good as his means and ends. And for a long time I wondered what my ends really were. And I still don't really know.

I come from what some would call a "sect". From the Appalachians of the old United States, that is: there was a group of huddled subsistence-level nomads and the men had beards and the women held spears on sticks. For a hundred and fifty years we'd hunted the rabbits and found our way through vegetation lush and vegetation bare, and we'd survived, and until the zoning incident everyone had a reasonably purposeful and happy life, if relatively short. There isn't much history but from what I've gathered it was founded as a utopian colony harkening back to ancient and modern ideals. And while the colony or its wandering sequel certainly wasn't ideal, I'd look at people in my life after the zoning incident, in the new world of America, and surely they suffered in their homes, just as I did in the wandering. And surely I do today. And the people in the States I know had their own myths to explain the suffering, as we did. And when I'd come into contact at a gathering with those few that yet remained of the nomads, they were not shocked catatonic by our modern civilization - if anything, there's sympathy and a struggle to empathize.

Not that we were mystics or anything, but same as anyone else we had our customs, our beliefs.


And I'm starting to think my family and my gathering were quite precise and right on one account, one particular belief. I have a savant-like mind for evaluating claims but the mind to bear fruit needs experiences to water the seeds. And the experiences I'd need to make the judgment are by nature nearly impossible to gather.

Before I get into that, may please I delve into something briefly, a troubling question for me? Can a human being (born on this real Earth we have shared) become a god? The very thought is narcissistic at its core, is it not, even if it's not necessarily *you* doing the ascension. Implying that the human form is capable of such consummation, such ascendancy, such richness.... That capability goes against everything we are taught about sublimating our desires and happiness for others (or at least our displays of ego), for if a human being is capable of godhood, then, naturally, who knows what other states could be attained? If I could be any transcendent being I doubt I would choose the route of pure godhood. Like a candy shop for children of another era, I see the options before me: Infinite life, omniscience, omnipresence... all of that mixed in a recipe of the possible? Yes, to all but the purest human being (who is perhaps the only deserving such member), the natural consequent thoughts and desires of becoming a god turn quickly to which recipe is most advantageous in human turns. I hate to say it, but if you can - in, let's say, the old video game or movie terms - level up all your attributes indefinitely to unfathomable potency? Almost by our nature we will spring to the path that will guarantee us and ours the easiest possible lives, and only as an afterthought reach all the others. Our impulse to nourish ourselves, to get what we can and hold it in our hands, corrupts the whole apotheosis process.

What's the problem with this? After all, why not be a god of infinite mercy and bounty? Well, because you can't get something from nothing, is what. For just as god as sui generis makes no sense, an infinite bounty of pleasant human existence suddenly attacks our identity of wanting and scheming to achieve what is wanted. Suddenly, there is no need of attainment, but also no satisfaction in earning what is attained. And you can't make every human existence into a storybook without removing their ability to change the ending or by fundamentally altering the process by which they themselves choose their ending, to put it one way. We by nature will take and take until we can take no more, rather than when we are satisfied. I hesitate to think of the dictatorships an individual, warped by regime, could create with the tools of an infinite bounty. And an existence biased towards a couple of members is even worse, conservation-of-existence-wise. Human nature is not meant to extend to a region, much less to our realm entire.

Anyway, maybe I'm overthinking the classic problem of evil from theology (which I'm poorly rehashing), and it's not like theology has done humanity a whole lot of good when it comes to actual experimental evidence. But it seems to me that changing a human into a god and wondering what they'd do, if it was truly *they* that'd ascended; that is to say, that god having an analogous mind and soul and experience of the world to its human source, and not simply a god that had sprung up and acted perfectly mercifully like The God of some religion from the outset. Mistakes, perhaps that could be undone, are part and parcel of what I mean. Fallibility, gullibility, misuse of one's power until one fully grasps one's power.

But anyway, what my family and the travelers said bears mention at this point... they held that purification of the self, combined with the extension of the self (or internalizing and subsuming to the other), is indistinguishable from divine ascension, and that the process could in fact be partial, and that we were not in fact in an initial or final state as far as the gods that existed were concerned... we were ever in transition from one to the other (or the other to the one), and arguably had been since the beginning of time. They believed that you could never become omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, even eternal as a human being (for humanity also implies mortality). But you could purify yourself somewhat as an essence, as a force, and you could extend that force to other things, or you could become those other things and then purify your larger self. And that was in its way a form of god-becoming. Whatever the case, the basic message was: Purification as a causal essence allowed one's transitional state between man of flesh and god of transcendence to proceed, for what is more locally omnipresent, in human experience, than an essence pervading a room? What can be more locally omniscient than a curious savant? What can be more locally omnipotent than a fastidious conqueror? These subsuming purifiers that were called the Great made themselves into gods until their humanity caught up with them and ended their lives, and a part of them lived on in society as an essence, and in this way they showed the way to transcendence, albeit in a naturally finite way.

Anyway, I think it's interesting that my family had somehow derived all of this while hunting a rabbit or, failing that, trying to get to carrots before that rabbit could, so to speak. But frankly, I wouldn't have minded any of this, for indeed it was a quaint and peculiar belief for someone so long immersed in modern ways, the zoning incident having happened in my formative years. But lo, as the progress of man has continued unabated and the only people left from our nomadic society are few and scattered, and as the mechanisms of faster-than-light and urchemistry and ultrabiology have brought back the richness of the organ of life to the cold, dead universe, suddenly the old questions return, and as I look upon the beating heart of this universe a hundred thousand light years from where I was born and to which I can never return, the old questions give me something to ponder.

I know all the tells, I know all the slogans, and I know the banal, and I know the vivid, for I have tread on the limits of what was called an infinite universe. I can see the exact truth and falsity of any statement I have experience with, and I can see the exact way truth and falsity evolve, example being: my United States and its myths that have abated and re-emerged a hundred times as the next frontier keeps getting pushed further out.

I knead the heart, which is my chosen task, and massage it with planet-sized arms. And I know that this is one of the three most important tasks in all the universe if the universal organism indeed has survived, or perhaps this blood pumps to a dead brain and liver and we just have not seen the belated announcement yet from the blood pouring in. But who can tell. I knead the heart and humbly I work for the indefinite future.

I could stop this heart if I chose. I could purify this dewdrop realm of all the humanization, the hegemony of the human being, writ large upon the cosmos. We have made a human being in utero whose womb is the universe itself, and I massage its infant heart.

They say with its birth we will find answers to all the noblest questions. But what is a man but one that finds questions to all the noblest answers? I can't even look at the void anymore, all the stars were sacrificed for this child. I can't even look at Orion's Belt, and the constellations only exist except in obscure academic journals I was not permitted to bring along, nor would want to, not being of the past.

And all I can do is think and knead and think and knead, knead the muscle in the correct places, keep it beating, keep on thinking, not to look at stars, not to need to eat or sleep. All cares have been taken care of, and no one has to speak to me, and so I sit, working the hand-machine that kneads the heart, and I think and I try to purify myself and I try to purify myself so that kneading the heart and debasing the sky and destroying what's left of what is not human and subsuming what was not ours cannot continue one day and the god that we're making in dumb progress in our own image can perhaps be replaced by a god in my own image, mine, but pure, and I await the signals every day from the brain and I wonder what I can do to shape this kid's future, if it is a kid at all, or if the scaling up of physical structure and proportion of chemicals makes this entity a new type of thing and so I think and knead and think and knead and pray to whatever is left that is not ours that this thing can reason and that now and again I can be forgiven to permit myself a few feelings of desperation and depression now and again, undiagnosed by even the most fastidious psychologists of Earth, and maybe with that desperation whatever is left of god not ours can understand that desperation as mercy and if you have mercy let us abate our human confidence for a little while and feel that other feeling mercy as one, together-feeling, and instead of letting that together-feeling of mercy pass in the night perhaps we can feel that mercy forever and we can stop this heart and not lament it, but then and only then.