JON FERGUSON
There is the mother of all wars; this night I had the mother of all dreams. It is 10h15. I awoke at 5h33. I still feel like I did the moment I roused from the dream…
I am in circumstances of war with a few other people. We are in a flying vehicle. In the event that we find ourselves in a desperate situation, we have a special grenade that can blow us to smithereens such that the enemy cannot touch us or get any information from us. Simply tossing it on the floor activates the grenade. Once activated, it cannot be shut off.
We continue on. I inadvertently pick up the grenade without thinking much like I did at age sixteen one night when I was talking to my girlfriend on the telephone and pulled the chord that was attached to the radio next to my bed and began sucking on it. I got an electric shock that I remember to this day…
So, I am daydreaming and have the grenade in my hand, fingering it lackadaisically as one would a balled-up scrap of paper or an old tennis ball. Without thinking, I inadvertently toss it on the ground. Everyone around me turns and sees the grenade has been set off as it rolls on the floor. No one says anything, but we all know we are doomed and have only I few more seconds to live. We are all aware that nothing can be done. There is no panic. We simply look at each other and wait for the end…
I woke up with an absolute calm. Five hours later…now…I still feel that calm. Why? Because I have finally lived my most profound thought about existence, i.e. the realization that nothing – absolutely nothing – can be other than what it is. I truly believe this to be the reality of Being, that everything in the universe (and that includes suns, moons, galaxies, earth, wind, grasshopper, fly guts, extinct dinosaurs, apple seeds, sea, seashell, your mind, my mind, crabs, cars, stagecoaches, cavemen, Einstein, doctors, killers, viruses, virus cures, temples, teepees, and the millions of neurons that are thinking this thought) is what it is and can be nothing other. I believe that mankind is inextricably part of nature. And there is no “free will” in nature. Nature is what is. All of it. The human being is no exception. We are what are and we do what we do. All of us at every instant. Like suns, mice, butterflies, ideas, and tsumanis. None of us can be other than what we are at every moment of existence, forever and ever.
This is the most difficult thought for a human being to have. We think we are special. We think we are outside of “nature”, outside of the facticity of Being. But no! We are part of it. We are different, yes. We do different things. We have different thoughts. But we are part and parcel of Being.
This is what I finally “felt” in the deepest way in my dream. It brought on a seraphic calm. That grenade was going to go off and there was nothing anyone could do about it. So why worry? Why be upset? Even my reaction was part of the whole of Being.
This truly is the most arduous idea a human type can have. It goes against everything we have ever been taught. It goes against everything our “minds” have been trained to do. We think there is an “I” that “thinks” independently, that is free…But no! Everything our minds think is as inevitable as every star or planet or cloud in the sky, as inevitable as every cell in your body or the body of every other creature on this earth.
This is the mother of all thoughts. All existence is what it is. No thought, no word, no atom, no grenade, no god, no saint, no killer, no philosopher, no tree, no bush, no obama or trump is exempt. And “you” and “I” will continue to be what we are. Forever and ever.
When one sees the world this way, one can feel the serenity I felt on awakening and still feel as I punch this last key hours later.
J. F.Morges, February 12, 2020