A Hitchhiker's Guide to the One Cosmos Bus Schedule

Sounds and looks familiar: before the beginning there is "A pinpoint of light in the very center of a perfectly still mirror-smooth and formless black ocean." Then a "creative and divine irruption" out of which ripples "an infinite number of concentric circles of of increasing diameter but diminishing light":

Christian version (↓)

The orthoparadox here is that the circles closer to the center should be smaller, but they are actually larger, if only due to the greater light (which makes them "qualitatively" more expansive).

Conversely, imagine the total darkness at the extreme periphery. In one sense it appears "infinite," but in another sense it is just an opaque wall where no light can reach, or perhaps which has the "power" to shut out the light. Call it the Wall of Tenure.

It seems that there are threshold guardians along each circle. Each guard "wants nothing from you. Except that you go away." The guard does everything in his power "to foil your ascent" toward the light. However, he is not the actual source of this power.

Rather, "his power is only the evil within you." To which I would add fear of change and attachment to illusion, or devotion to a falsehood.

If the evil one can get us to pledge allegiance to an evil doctrine, then his work with you -- the heavy lifting, anyway -- is done. He can be like a deist-satan, who merely puts things in motion and then stands back to enjoy the show.

For the evil one, a secular brainwash is the gift that keeps giving. Any idiot can fuck things up, but doing so to this extent requires a great deal of education and fanatical devotion to a promethean ideology.

There are guards who impede the circular cosmic flow and the messengers who facilitate it. For, this guy named Jacob had a vision in which appeared "a channel / Standing on the earth / Yet reaching the very heavens. / And holy messengers were going up / And going down on it."

Each morning we hold out a thumb in the hope of catching a ride on an ascending bus, or at least getting a card or ladder from a descending one. But sometimes

"The channel is not apparent" and "The upper worlds and lower worlds / Seem hopelessly isolated from one another."

Yeah, it happens.

But then, "in a moment, / In some very unlikely place, / A ladder appears where before there was only the void."

Woo hoo! At once "those who were below may ascend; / And those who were above may come down to earth."

I suppose it helps to invite them, or at least don't lock them out. Doing so requires a shift in perception that elevates the "trivial" to the world-shattering, or at least opens one to the possibility that miracles -- vertical ingressions -- are of necessity everywhere and everywhen.

This reminds me of when our son was, I don't know, three or four years old. He has always been at the extreme end of the person-oriented spectrum, so when he felt that he was receiving insufficient attention, he would say to his mother: open your eyes! From his perspective, either one was paying attention to him, or unconscious.

Probably the divine messengers are the same way: pay attention! Open your damn eyes!

So, "Blessed are You Lord who heals us with miracles."

"This overflowing radiance / These emanations / This holy light / Streams down from on High / Fills us and raises us up / And we reciprocate by permitting / The same holy light within us / To travel upward / And holy messengers were going up and down on it."

Down & upshot:

"[C]oursing through the veins of the / Universe at this moment is a kind of / Light in which man and the Holy One are / Yearning to be one."

(All quotes are from Honey in the Rock.)