Is there anything more horrific than life?
It carries the price of a death sentence issued at birth. Everything that moves upon this planet is doomed to be eaten by something else. Our sole purpose is to end up as food.
Now we can intellectualize that this is just the way the system has to work. That “nature, red of tooth and claw” is the world we exist in even if killing seems morally repugnant on some level. But kill we must. Gotta eat.
Like most men, I am a hunter. I generally hunt about the same time each week. Every Tuesday morning I can be found in the meat section of my local grocery store. Hunting in the most convenient and modern manner.
Most of us don’t enjoy killing so we are happy to pay others to do the dirty work. But why? Why do so many people dislike murdering animals? It is because we possess a combination of empathy and imagination that allows us to vicariously experience what it must be like to be on the receiving end of the slaughter. And it doesn’t feel good. To deliver fear, pain and death upon another living creature seems evil somehow.
Many of us truly do not want to do evil things.
So, what’s the deal here? Is the universe inherently vicious and evil? We don’t want that to be the case so we make up other scenarios. Perhaps it was originally a place of love and compassion that somehow fell into it’s current state. Maybe we are being punished for something we did wrong either personally or as a race. Perhaps we are paying the price for offending Someone.
So why do we exist in this slaughterhouse of a world?
It’s actually just because we’re dumb. Or to put it less harshly, we lack the full data-set. We assume that death is a bad thing because we tend to fear the unknown.
Once we pierce the Veil by whatever means, we can see through the illusion. We can see that life and death are an exquisite dance within the One Consciousness.
Therein lies the value of the Philosopher’s Stone. To obtain this understanding that your true self is immortal allows you to transmute the entire world into what has been called the “Kingdom of Heaven”.
To dwell therein is to know that there is nothing to fear. There never was.
But to now have the eyes to see that.