10 04 08 Llam and Roy 'fess up
Sat Oct 04 23:01:34 2008
ROY: Looks like we both need to talk with each other today.
LLAM: Oh, I agree. Thank you for getting to work on this so quickly.
ROY: I should be thanking you. But, who's first?
LLAM: Would you mind that I began? You've not seen me upset before.
ROY: Yeah, go ahead. I haven't.
LLAM: I've come to a realization about my feelings.....my feelings about mortal humans and we devas. I have come to realize just how much we, or at least I, have short-changed you all, at least as far as our attitude goes.
ROY: Okay.
LLAM: To start, to start....I will never die. As far as I know, I will never die. Wait, wait. I have never been physically embodied. Instead all that I can say is that I've witnessed so many mortal human beings live and die. I see you live, grow old, and usually with great fear, you pass into the unobstructed universe, the unobstructed life. Minus your body. In your lives, all of the lives which I've witnessed, I've seen so many of you who have suffered. (pauses)
ROY: Take your time, bro.
LLAM: I've seen your wars. How you are gradually destroying your world. How one small group of you do their best to control a much larger group.....of you. The famine and the pestilence. Throughout all of it I have always maintained a kind of serenity because of my experience of my existence as an ethereal being.
ROY: Whoa, whoa, I've learned from that serenity.
LLAM: I think perhaps you may have learned from the serenity of Sara Jane, from Roland, from all of those you love. I don't think you've learned from mine. You've learned a serenity, yes, a peace, a lack of fear, whatever you wish to call it. But i sincerely doubt that you have learned it from me.
ROY: Perhaps I've never thought about it. But why do not accept that I feel I've learned it from you?
LLAM: I see that I have been too serene? I need to explain. I have been smug. I've just waited for every human with whom I've had to do to come to the realization that the unobstructed life is a wonderful life.
ROY: But Llam, my experiences have shown that it really is a wonderful life.
LLAM: (Looks down for a moment, then directly at Roy) You didn't always think so.
ROY: Well, of course not, I thought I was going to go to hell, I mean, I believed that no matter what I did I was gonna fry forever.
LLAM: That is kind of peripheral to what I'm thinking. Last night you and Sara Jane were talking about the first time that you died. And you told her how you felt, and for a moment you re-experienced that time. I felt what you felt, that awful sense of loss, your sorrow. I have never felt that before. I never knew how....tied you all are to your experience of being an embodied being, and how at its end you so often realize how precious it was. (bows head)
ROY: Oh, Llam. (holds him) Llam. That time. That time, when I died, I was totally lost. Wasn't fun. (steps back, looks at Llam) We all have that experience though, don't we?
LLAM: (quietly) Yeah.
ROY: There was no Llam there then. No Sara Jane. I had Stro, I had Mauthara but I thought that they were aspects of my own personality, I didn't know, I didn't think that they were real people in their own right. I was alone, really alone.
LLAM: Would you tell the story now? Please?
ROY: Would it help?
LLAM: If you can feel it as you did last night, it would help.
ROY: I've done what is call "abreacting" those emotions. They're still there, just as powerful as the first time, but they've lost most of their impact on me to the point where I don't, I'm not affected, or disturbed by them to the point where I'm panic-stricken as I was that evening. So I can tell it while feeling it, yeah. But I'm not as far as I know bothered by it.
LLAM: You must be grateful for that.
ROY: I am. Okay. It was a party I had had. My friends at that time were over. I was doing what I did at my parties then, drinking to excess and taking drugs of all kinds. This time was different, I had made a thick dark tea of every herb that I knew which contained psychoactive chemicals. And as I drank I kept sipping at this tea. I was getting really stoned. Many of the people there were musicians, some of them quite talented. And one was playing the piano, one was playing guitar. I was playing a recorder flute, settled into cushions that were spread on the floor. I gradually passed out. Nothing new there. But this time I was up on the ceiling and there were my friends clustered around me and they were all upset. I wasn't stoned any more. I was quite lucid and I knew that was having the beginning of a near-death experience. That lasted for a moment. Then I was nowhere.
LLAM: I would say that you had died at that moment.
ROY: I would say it too! But this "nowhere" was also "nothing." It was so nowhere and so nothing that I was horrified and totally panic-stricken. There was nothing I could use as a point of reference. I was this chain of thought, if anything. I'm at a loss, almost 25 years later. I was a thought, or I was thinking. But that's all that I was. And panicking. My thinking turned to what I had been taught about the afterlife. At any moment I expected to see God. I wasn't sure what God was gonna be like, but I was certain that that was next, and that it wasn't going to be pleasant. But I wanted to badly to know something besides whatever I was. I was all that I had. But God never appeared. Then I thought, well, the Devil must be coming. I had lived my whole life fearing the Devil, fearing that I was going to hell when I died and do you know? I was so alone I wished that the Devil would appear. At that time burning in hell would be a relief. But there was no Devil either. And I saw how I had wasted my whole life, how for all that I thought I was, I was a little speck of thinking in the middle of nothing. I began to cry. I wanted another chance. I wanted back and didn't think it would happen. Suddenly I was laying on the cushions and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. I couldn't believe that I'd come back, but I had. And although it took twenty years for me to work out what I learned that night, I think that I have.
LLAM: I felt again what you felt. I have never known such desolation. Even so, I know it now, but at one remove. As far as I know I never shall, either. After feeling your feelings, that's what brought me to the realization that I've never let myself understand life as you know it. And I am sorry that I never have let myself. But there is more to this story. There is a deva who took on a mortal existence. At that time I thought that it was odd but of no great consequence. I had no desire to ever do such a thing. In this one way we devas are like you humans, we're all different and we all have our own ideas, our own beliefs and experiences. But this deva is suffering in his mortal frame. I never gave it much thought. Or if I did I thought little of it. But I was brought up sharply about my attitude, my......indifference to the suffering that he is actually undergoing every moment of every day. I realized just how shallow my experience was, how cold my attitude was. I just didn't know what to do, so I resolved to learn from you in a quiet way, as quietly as I could. To pay attention to you all. (smiles) I hope that I've learned at least a little bit! Even though......even though I will never know what you all live with every day, what my dear deva friend lives with, I am open to it now. I see where I have been wrong. So I have asked him to forgive me. I am asking you to forgive me. And if anyone who reads these words has been in touch with me in some way, please understand me, if you are a mortal human being, I have sold you short, I have underestimated you and the lives you live, and I am sorry. I want to do better. To care about you in ways that I am only beginning to understand.
ROY: (long silence) If I don't forgive you, you won't be at peace, will you?
LLAM: No.
ROY: Okay. I forgive you. But Llam, it's like forgiving someone for being blind. Okay, you say it was your indifference, your smugness. I guess I should accept that and not say "but."
LLAM: I would really rather you do not say "but."
ROY: Alright. (long silence) Llam, I forgive you. (longer silence)
LLAM: (looks up) Thank you.
ROY: (punches Llam in the arm) Big Blue! You're welcome. I love ya, dude!
LLAM: (tearfully) I'm beginning to understand that word also!
ROY: (smiling ruefully) So am I!
LLAM: (smiles) So how can I help you?
ROY: (frowns) It's the God thing again.
LLAM: Okay.
ROY: So here I am, proudly calling myself an atheist. Proud and happy that I shed my notions about the big Nazi in the sky. The idea that there is one underlying "person" that we can or would call "God." And yet, I keep coming back to it. This whole long discussion, the discussions I've been having with Yvgeny, I've learned that underlying our universe is a quantum sea of light from which we all have emerged. You, Sara Jane, everyone and everything. You know that I'm an amateur linguist?
LLAM: Yes, quite aware.
ROY: The origin of the English word "god" comes from an ancient ancestral language which linguists call "Indo-Aryan." Much of this language is a painstaking reconstruction which has been done by hundreds of linguists for over one hundred and fifty years. No-one has yet found a document written in this language, but it is a reasonable assumption that it existed at one time. Both Mike and Stro, who were alive long enough ago to know, say that there were languages around a lot like this hypothetical Indo-Aryan.
LLAM: I didn't know this!
ROY: One day about thirty years ago I got it into my head, where this English word "god" came from. So I went hunting in etymological dictionaries -
LLAM: In what?
ROY: (smiles) Dictionaries which attempt to show the linguistic origins of a word - its etymology.
LLAM: Oh.
ROY: And Llam, you know what? "God" comes from an hypothesized Indo-Aryan word, "ghu," which means "the shining."
LLAM: Oh dear. And you made the connection between the quantum sea of light and this word "ghu."
ROY: Yes, I did. (laughs)
LLAM: Is this a bad thing for you?
ROY: Well, damn it, it leaves me back where I began!
LLAM: ......with God.
ROY: Who does not exist, of course.
LLAM: You once told me what happens when you attempt to define something. Do you remember what it was?
ROY: (looks blank)......uhh, no.
LLAM: You quoted one of those Greek philosophers you were once so fond of. Plutarch.
ROY: Uhh......umm......I know! "The more you attempt to define something, the less meaning it will have! It's like water in your hand - the more you attempt to hold on to it, the faster it runs out between your fingers!"
LLAM: Yes! So why bother with silly names? Why not just accept that some people prefer to think of "god," big or small "g," and others, like you, do not. So you've substituted "quantum sea of light" for "god." Fine. Do you absolutely know for sure that there is no God?
ROY: No, I don't know that. I learned that from Kris Michaels. I would have to be God to know for sure whether or not God exists.
LLAM: Can you live with that uncertainty?
ROY: Can I avoid it? is the real question!
LLAM: (laughing, punches Roy in the arm) There ya go, dude!
ROY: (from several light years away) Yeah......!
LLAM: Oh dear. He's out by Andromeda or someplace like that. If you will excuse me, I must go and retrieve our steward. Goodbye for now!
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