The Valley, the Hollow, and the Mountain

The Valley, the Hollow, and the Mountain

Samuel Bird

An unknown distance from nowhere, I found myself in a land forgotten by man and remembered by God. Aside from the long dirt trail that I was traveling on, no marks by man were to be seen scarring the landscape. Another thought crashed through my skull, hitting my seemingness values and seeking reprieve. I didn’t know if I could care for such a concern, and was in fear that my effort would be found fruitless. In foolishness, I knew that as long as I didn’t act, I would always have half hope, even if I had nothing hoped brought about. To take myself from this present conceptual concern, I came back to the rolling mountains of dark pine trees and flowing fields of light green grass that danced as the wind ran its fingers across. He was here. This place was recursive with fate as nothing but what was, was what was. Time only brought change, and yet, immortal persistence to this place. I could wander these woods for a lifetime, lay down for that forever sleep, and a thousand years would pass. Trees would rise and fall as the dead trees now demonstrated the pattern. Day and night, spring and fall, life and death would sweep over this valley. No one thing getting to be forever allowed this valley to be nearly so. Would modern man’s hubris look on the trees and see his buildings as taller? Would he look on the sun and say his lightbulb could be controlled? Would he look on the mountain and say the shape made no sense? All of this for entropy to work against the efforts of man, and for the efforts of God. Rise and fall. Don’t think about it, Samuel, it is too big of an idea. You can’t bear it on your shoulders. It will both crush you, and it will be for nothing. You will not solve it. Is that what my philosophy was about? Getting what I want? Instead, was it about being present and participatory with what presented itself before me? It was not the hubric success, but the holy try. I would now not just let the thought come to me, but I would pull it into my mind to handle it. My kind is going extinct. The magnanimity of the human race is going extinct, and it goes extinct shortly after the death of the soul. We must go someday, but let it be by God’s fate that calls to the divine next, and not our arrogance. If we are to die, let it be as we are maximally cherishing existence, and not as every mind is pitted against itself and no grander story is being lived out. I have ran through every contingency. We walk toward the death of not one man, but mankind. Those that seem to notice this contingent inevitability also seem to have no concern. Why would man want to live without the soul that gives him beauty, goodness, truth, meaning, and now, as I see it, love? If we are nothing more than flesh, let that flesh rot away. If our art was nothing more than scratched stone and colored paper, let it crack and fade. If the plight of the human soul was just a probabilistic event, given that it could, no reason for concern if it later could not. I looked on the human race in my mind with pity. As an outsider, I can better contrast to see what they are. I could try to certify their uniqueness, but let it be sufficient to say that God has chosen to participate with us. Evil men when asked about the persistence of the human race, critique any means to do so as it flies in the face of their enlightened reasoning. How would we achieve infinite progress? How would we suck out enough pleasure from this world? How could we stay away desperation? In their complex questioning, they can’t let go of the treasures for which they sold their soul, and forget the later cost that will be that they will then not be alive to enjoy those treasures. Oh God, care for us, and don’t leave us in the hands of ourselves. Let this collapse be the rarity I can’t foresee, where a natural and fateful world is left after the horror of modernity’s crash. Faces I have never seen, ran through my mind. Men, woman, children, of every appearance and sort raced across my mind. In their unified expressions were the words they didn’t say. No one could both see past the programming of modernity and had the means and concern to address it. Behind those faces was the back of a mind that knew where this was society was leading, and mourned not to be there for it. The faces ran through my mind with greater succession, speed, and intensity until a heavenly wind seemed to push my soul, and I stumbled to the side in a passionate frenzy, and to my knees. 

Ethereal and serene silence met my ears and mind. Cognition of any concern was traded for consciousness of my concomitance. I had not forgotten what was present in my mind last, but yet, it was also not there. I was nowhere than where I was and nothing more than what I was. The warm light floated in through my eyelids. The tender whispers of the wind rushed past my ears. The cool pine air flowed through into my lungs. God in His wisdom had brought me to the precipice of passion, only for the relief of reprieve. As the foundation and spire of human existence, my thought went to Him. I thought of my story with Him. When we first find this maximal Dao, Brahma, or Logos, we find Him because we have a hint that coming to Him gets us what we want. As we are present with Him, He becomes more what we want until that great day our wills are intestinguishable. I never purely loved God for His utility, but I certainly love Him more for Who He is and not for who I am. His degree of intrinsicness has become such that He is foremost so in my desired values, and in those values that come naturally, they want to want Him. I thought of my mind and the undue burdens I place on it. Concern for you and the human race is warranted, but how poorly do I navigate such? How many silly thoughts are welcome to take up limited territory? The kingdom of heaven is within. As God is God of this world I am nested in, the core of my soul is nested in the world I am God of. What demiurge or trickster I can be to the people of my mind. I am in embryo, and as such, I seek God to transcend the world that is His mind, to be here in the mind that I am within. I work to build a palace for Him to rest, and reign, and teach me how to be a God worthy of the control I have. I recognize the contradictory nature of my thoughts at times, but God can slice through contradictions, and so I will build Him a place within my mind. In doing such, He and I transcend reason and its assumptions for wisdom, which is nothing more than will manifest as engagement. I feel that such is my talent; the implications of representations. I think of what this Maximality is to the world, and how much He is to me. The world will never know that God is, but the mind will never know otherwise than then the “He” it can’t sense. Our values are closer to us than the object of the valued. I know I love you with more certainty than that I know you exist. These values in maximality have an instance in something both outside of the world and ever-present in the minds within it. He is more than just the grounding and greatest instance of our value. He is more than just the initiate of all being. He is more than just the grand closer to being. However, all these are energies to that wondrous essence I seek closeness to, and yet have no understanding of. What proof or precedent do I have for something like Him? Me. The subject can know the seemingness of being that subject, but not the object that senses the bridge between self and world. Thoughts had once again begun to flow, but now these thoughts were such that I valued the thinking of them. I was caught in some pleasant delirium. What century was it? Did Cesaer still reign? Did the mastodon still roam? Was I the last man, or the first? God sliced away all other variables for me to handle the most properly basic elements of being. I knew that reductionist reasoning was inherently flawed, but I also knew I had almost fractured my psyche to even attempt to see it in its partial entirety. I pulled out a notepad from my pocket and began to write the following:

“Existence doesn't make any sense. The closest it ever could make sense is being present with this unknown. You are at least not placing abstractions between yourself and whatever this is. To slice through the issue of thought across time, be in what moment you are, as it fades into another with no lines. Somewhere in my seemingness, being present in a grassy field with no gifted conceptual construction, meets the sense seemingness as the pinnacle of thought of void or God. How can a man do anything other than run from his existence to then do anything less than bow down before its majesty and hiddenness? We must remove the center of our being as knowledge and instead have the wisdom to not blink in our depth of gazing into this enigma. The lessons of silence are in a different language than the lecturing of reason. Here in this field, my object is where it belongs, and my subject is nowhere else but in its inescapable seemingness. There is only what existence is like to me, and all my assumptions and models of what consistent world could make it so. However, these models and even possible models are inconsistent. This is the mark of a miraculous world where we can't reproduce what God and fate only did in their unfathomable wisdom. This seemingness privileged to my consciousness through my mind over any sense or thought moves me past the playing of roles granted by a world that seeks to kill my soul. Here it is, found, alive, and with a vitality that can't seem to be quelled by death. I slip past any thought made in this life, ready for whatever came before me. To see a dragon, a unicorn, an angel, all would be welcomed with no surprise, as surprise is left behind in the world of my assuming the world's workings. That mountain, there is no reason God could not open a door from within and step out to greet me. Perhaps to tell me what was really underneath the foundations of the world. What was this really all about? What basic objects, subjects, or categories of such brought about being in its most reducible and metaphysical elements? I sit in my seemingness as one prepared, one listening to hear the silent mysteries of God. I hear Him now, and His word is unknowable. It is my being, object, or subject. I am not the sort of thing made to know the world around me. I could never find it with these feet, hold it with these hands, or see it with these eyes. Even if I could, I am not the sort of thing to know this sort of thing I stand facing. It is as simple as being a singularity void of any division, but slicing through to me in my seemingly multifaceted reality, its complexity in its oneness would be an infinite list of unpatterned and seemingly unrelated data. I could never comprehend, as this sort that I am, that one thing that could bring about everything from nothing. I don't want to know. Take from me my hubris and arrogance before you, God. Let me never know you as the child of a great Father, let me instead be held by You, cared for by You, and ever with You. Your presence, heaven, to those that align themselves with themselves and aim that selfhood toward you. Let you be my hell. Let me be near you, God, and let that proximity be a blessing or a cursing only because of the sort of thing I made of myself, given the fixed sort of thing I am. Let me be near you, and for that seemingness of your presence, not to give me what I want, but be what I want. I found you in true intrinsicness, but I stayed with you from utility. However, as I walked with my hand above my head in Yours pierced, slowly pull from within me all values that aren't yours. Let my love be manifest in the adoption of values and the surrendering of my own. Let my singular will be made your being. I afford this effort to all according to how I approximate them. I give it to you perfectly in that you are perfectly close to me, despite my being so far from the God that condescends to me. You found me where my beastly nature arose from the dirt. You placed in me that spark of what I most closely reason is you. Lord, when You will, take that spark back to your infinite blaze and let it be the light You have been to me. It is only you, Lord. I know nothing but You, the unknowable. You break every mode of being to slice through even reason itself. For you, then, nothing is impossible. As I myself who lament weakly in the practically possible, I stare up at you in wonder, God. Know this, Lord, I am nothing, but that I am with you. Esse Maxim was the means of structuring something in the void, but it is foolishness to accept that there is no void we built in. It is that place in my being I have built for you. LORD, sit on your throne built in my mind. Let delusion and necessity slip past you, God, as it is only me and thee. Let the world prove itself wrong, all while I never knew anything but you. Yes, Esse Maxim is not God, but the throne I prepare for Him. Is this what is meant by the kingdom of heaven is within you? Not to say we know the location of consciousness as it is not in time, but it seems to come from within this temple made primal and the rending of the veil.“

My soul poured through pen past the mind in such a way, I didn’t know where these thoughts came from, and even at moments, what they meant. I allow my writing to come straight from my existential experience. This leads to poor editing and outlining. However, what it does do is allow you to meet myself in my being. I will speak on this later, but the more we disseminate experience, the more that it won’t be reflective of it. For this reason, my journalistic writing voice is not just the means for my reader to address existence, but the means for myself to understand it as the words burst from me. I am then not a teacher, but an instance. I read through my notes with just as much curiosity of what I wrote as a stranger would have. I noted that I had mentioned the mountain. What mountain? I looked up across the yellow and green grass dancing in the breeze and across to a hollow, and behind that hollow, a mountain. Gravity of soul pushed me on with intrigue and wonder. The valley, the hollow, and the mountain. How had it taken me so long to see it? A few years prior, knowing the mission God and I had worked out, but being just as lost to know how to bring it about, I had an occupation where I would sit down with people and use philosophy to address their lives. I only had two people who met with me, both good friends. I attempted to utilize the praxis of the doxis of different ideas in philosophy, and of course, to share and demonstrate Esse Maxim. What I noticed is this issue of relativity to what one thought. This was not a coincidence as it was relative to where one was in the proverbial world. Then, where must one look from? If we look at the world from the forest, being presents itself as one way. If we look at it from the battlefield, existence is manifest to us differently. Where we stood in the world drastically changed what was even effectively true to us. We would make sense of ourselves in terms of a positional variable that could have been otherwise. As I met with these friends, I could not place their Esse Maxim for them; however, they were too lost to do it themselves as I was. I then asked myself where I proverbially decided to place myself in the world to make sense of it. I meditated on this until I had a curriculum response for these students of mine. What do you see in the world? Well, where do you stand in it? Where must this be? Well, where do you sincerely value it being? I set a metaphor of a valley, a hollow, and a mountain. No matter where you stand, you will have the same degree of perception. You can turn in any direction and look up and down as desired. Each position would yield the same degree of truth as information toward a subject. However, as we explored the metaphor, they naturally have their values select for the mountain over the valley and hollow. I would ask why. It didn’t provide more degrees of perception. They would then say something like: At the top of the mountain, I can see further. More importantly, it would be more beautiful to see from the mountain. Where must we stand in the world? Nowhere. However, we must stand somewhere, and we have some freedom in choosing where that is. I looked around me to see myself now in this parable. I had been in the valley, the land of wide open possibilities. This is where one has the most freedom to reason, but the least support in doing so. I was alone and uncovered to the light-giving sun that can also blind me. I, like my students, was called to somewhere, even if there was no external necessity in my being there. I stood up from the ground I had collapsed onto and began to wander toward the hollow as the yellowed sun warmed my face and the grass filtered through my fingertips. Time slowed as thoughts were traded for steps until the golden rays were now scattered through the chattering leaves of quaking aspens. My eyes closed as my mouth and even the corners of my eyes creased in a humble but sincere smile. I fell to my knees and tried to live out the wisdom of this genius metaphor that must have been gifted to me. First thought, the hollow was generally quieter as the sound of the wind was traded for the chattering leaves. There was less information to take in and overwhelm. There was less light, less sound, and less to be concerned about. This allowed my mind to rest in a place of belonging among some sort of peer. Existence wasn’t more understood, but there was less to understand. The valley was being naked against a bare reality, but this was to be present in a land contextualized by company. Here, I was with my kind. The trees had their thoughts. While they meant nothing to me, familiar voices filled the treed walls of this natural home. Humanity was in common. I could now collapse into being as these trees. My concern about participation is traded for the ease of becoming what I am next to. However, now I have others for whom to stand opposed to. I am not these trees. I can walk. I came from somewhere other than here, and I can be somewhere other than here. For most people, this is the place you escape to as soon as you can, and then stay at for as long as possible. You are not left bare against reality or like the mountain where... I don’t know. What was it like to be on the mountain? More could be said of the hollow, but my peers can be left to do so. What I can offer in contrast is to not escape to the valley until it feels reasonably conquered, and then to head to the mountain. To stay in the valley, you must have thick skin to take the sun you are bare against. To be in the hollow, you must know how to belong. To climb the mountain, you need a good heart. Strained muscles need honorable blood pumping through a strong heart. Even at a crawling speed, to the steepest of transcendental ascensions, the flesh is found wanting and us wanting as far as it is concerned. That is not to say that we betray the flesh and leave it at the foothills, but rather use those same material members available for the running from the divine to venture toward it. Where did Moses acquire the law? Where was Jesus transfigured? What lies at the top of our realm where it meets the next? Blindingly literal academics will break the world into categories they have no right to, and then conclude that things that didn’t make their categories, can’t exist. If they were to step from their office for long enough to gaze at a mountain in a moment of silence, their humanity as the religious animal would start to see it for more than they could synthesize it to be in their conceptual model. Instead, before any mental modeling, a sense, an experience, a seemingness of something more. Then, they are struck with fear. How can they still kill the God that would have held them responsible for their destruction of the natural world unless they destroyed the realm He resided in? They then, in their hubris, forget it is from that realm that we perceive that world they privilege so. As my ladder of realization would beg me to address, these ideas I share with you I come by honestly as how I seek to see the world. However, I am not passed the god-killing of abandoning the physicalist worldview. I then also have to attempt to visit the mountain in my seemingness. This is done by engagement with existence. One can employ mental activity and even more precise means for this engagement and further addressing via practice, but this second order to allowing pure seemingness. We will never know the world in itself or self from the world, but we can know these two variables from how they interact, or in terms of the other. This effort is divine. As such, the participation with this, especially socially, becomes the religious. I often ask myself if God and truth were to diverge, which would I follow? Before you say they already did or can’t possibly, I will mention this is an exercise in the intrinsic. I seek after truth because of God. There is historical precedence for this as certain sorts of religious sentiments espoused a seeking after a series of laws given by a Law-Giver. How else should humanity approach the altar of its being thrust into the world? If you give up all the values that spring from you, to solely find how the world is, you have to ask how you can value doing so when you curse those values that motivated the effort. The scientist will curse the land of values and then commence with his efforts because, well, he has his reasons. If a conscious mind does something, it, at some level, has a value that informs it, even if abstract or tertiary. What was I doing? I was climbing a mountain. It is worth noting that the degree of exertion or value-ofference would have to be equal to or less than the probable expected value. In this case, the sweat on my brow, the aching of my knees, and the constant modern questioning in the back of my mind, wondering if I was wasting my time, it was all for something. What was that thing I valued more than the cost? Putting it into words, it was God. Was God in the fire, or the earthquake? How cold He be in the mountain. It was not where God was exclusively, but where I had prepared myself to find him. Perhaps I could find Him in my office, but I had made that place unritualistic. Perhaps in a park, but there was no silence. Perhaps in my bedroom, but then I would never find the same sort of rest. No, I carried some portion of my relation to God to each of these places, but where I was carrying myself was a place I wanted to find Him in a unique way, if not a unique extent. I will note that I have a bad habit of needing overly frequent religious experience, as I am in need of perhaps too much of God’s reassurance. But why the mountain? It was to be closer to God. Was God then up? If so, someone on the other side of a globe earth would then have to dig a hole to be closer to Him. No, it was because of what it meant to me. Did God care proportionally to all the songs I used to place myself closer to Him? Who knows, but outside of such, it worked. Another may say the mountain was then just proverbial to me. Just? That is it? It is more than just some metaphor; it is the exactness of existence by what it is not. That is why the mountain, but why the misery of climbing it? This cost was not an economic loss, but something unto itself. It was the misery, exertion, and suffering that was not just a cost to get to God, but part of what I valued in God. When I was a child, I realized rules were largely arbitrary. Wanting to play games, I would change the rules so that every party received what they wanted each time. We all received points, never lost, and were all some form of special and equal. However, the games would soon become meaningless. Who wants to play a game you can’t lose? Yes, you want to play a game you can play again, but the second win would make the first loss redeemable. This was the meaning of life. To find the best thing to pour myself into, and then to pour. Modern humanists often can’t comprehend why someone would suffer, lose, and die for a belief. They make sense of the world in terms of their economic maximization, but the whole soul can’t be a merchant. I paused to breathe. I hoped it was no sin to stop moving toward God, given that it was to better move toward Him. I looked up to see large towering pines that dwarfed the previous aspens. They seemed to be angels, pointing up to the divine, and giving me something to grasp as I did so. Breath caught, I pressed my hands down against my knees to make my last push over the ridge. There are many ways to experience the true divine, and I don’t know which are valid and which are not. Some modern religious rites would likely be something I would guess was not valid, but certainly not all through human history. While I still hold as one manifestation of the divine, the grand emotional experience is not the only sort. This is the tears, being caught up in glorious rapture, and a struggle to speak over a quivering lip. This was the dramatic religiosity of my youth as a not-so-subtle person. However, at the birth of my first nephew a few days ago, I cemented a new sort of religious experience in language I had been wondering about. As I held him, I was not caught up in emotional ecstasy and rapture with a flood of tears. I was purely at peace. I rocked back and forth for a while with not a thought in my mind as I hummed to him. I have realized my reasoning came from an effort to bring about peace, and as there was little peace, there had to be much reasoning. Now, as I find some peace and accept the rest, I still have the patterns of thought and effort I now reserve still some for my own existent preservation, but it is ever more for you. As I crested the top of the mountain, there was the divine. I simply was where I was supposed to be, as what I am, and what He is. A thought of Moses as I took off my boots and wandered into a grove, and then... Well, I love you, but at some point, I have to preserve my privacy. A part of my wish is to take you to every divine point of my life, but then if I made my divine moments about making something worth writing about, I wouldn’t be as truly with God when I was in those moments. Besides, I want you to use that fantastical imagination of yours. I’ll leave it to you what the seemingness of this little tale was, and in that way, I actually better demonstrated it to you than if I brought you to the mountain with me. At the very least, I was an example that permitted your efforts in climbing your mountain. 

Please never ask me to explain it to you, but I am fascinated by the theory of relativity. It is the science of “in terms of,” which I speak of often. The mathematical elegance comes from a disprivileging of any one spot to be in the world. There is reasoning for this. There is then no absolute spacetime to hold the world to. However, to collapse something into a probability state, we have to measure it. We then measure it with something else. What is this something else we measure other things against? We can call it a mile, yard, foot, meter, or even a Robert. We can make such a measurement so long, much longer than that, or even much longer. However, we are a subject. A subject is fixed to a given relative point. That subject then has to privilege a point. If I asked you on this hike we went on, how far that mountain was, you wouldn’t say “to what?” You would assume I meant to me. You would also pick a measurement I am familiar with, for example, as I am basedly American, you would use a mile. Given the objective world, relativity has its say, and we have nothing more to add. However, the objective world is after the subjective. There are only subjects in a given position asking about these things in the first place. While on my hike, I saw a deer just standing there. Why was he there? Why was he not anywhere else or even nowhere? Well, up until you are not, you must be somewhere. It is not as if between eating and drinking, we go into homeostatic abyss until it’s time to do so again. We are always in the world. And where in it are we? There is nowhere we must be, but we must be somewhere. Given so, where do you value being most? You can be in the valley, you can be in the hollow, you can be on the mountain. However, their relative positions are not equal to you despite being relativistically equal to each other. You valued one of these more than the other, didn’t you? Given that, you have an obligation at least to your own authenticity and perhaps to God’s, to place yourself there. Once there, you now have views, thoughts, and battles you would not have had somewhere else. You may then wish not to have such experiences. While you can navigate god-killing to change your position, I warn you not to be disloyal against that which you find yourself honestly to be. Hate not fate, but bless your thrownness. I learn by repetition and so I annoy you by teaching with it: There is nowhere in the world you must be, but you must be somewhere. My last words in this chapter were my last words penned while at the top of the mountain. 

“Where do you value most being? Not just your fleeting wanting, but your deepest and most core will that centers you, your God? This primal priveleged will, how can we surrender to it? Anything can be good to a given value. However, not everything can be beautiful given a fixed you. You can change EM (Esse Maxim) like glasses, but you are a fixed subject viewing it. My hope for you, my friend, is to help you locate where you want to be and help you position yourself there. However, I do wonder if the place you will wish to be is the mountain.”