Dear Friend,

We should really start seeing things differently. There is a battle of ideas going on, and you are about to be the millionth casualty. Forget your sense of security for a moment, stop looking at what everyone else’s doing, and just stand still. You have only one life, one mind, and one breath, and there are a thousand foreign voices trying to invade that sacred space. Already they’ve entered and built their comfortable nest. And now if we’re honest that “original” idea of yours can be traced to a couple of Hollywood flicks, a greeting card, a novel, and an idealistic slogan. And yet you insist and say I’m free! I’m free! And I know how to choose! But what about that best-selling author or that catchy song lyric in your head? And how come your words come out like it has to agree with a general, and harmless thread: “There’s really nothing wrong with me”, “You’ve got to live by the moment”, “Baby, love is all that matters.” The same things wrapped in different disguises. Just the same things uttered by people who could care less about your own existence, your personal fears, and the prospect of your personal death. All the words you utter now flap like a copy of a copy of a copy, just like that children’s game of passing the message. But still you insist! Why? Because you consider yourself educated? “Yes, far beyond the brainwashed masses! And I appeal to bright minds and names you’ve probably never heard of!” Ah, the arrogance of thinking you wield ideas when they really wield you, beliefs you’ve really cut and pasted from books you’ve only just… half-read. But tell me, what is the truth? Truth is you have never been original and at this rate you will never be. And you have never found yourself and at this rate you never will. Because when you say you’re mind is open what you really mean is that you’re mind's been open for anyone to finger with.

Oh, we should really start thinking differently. And I think it begins with shifting through this mess. And realizing that everyday there are a thousand different invisible persons vying for your mind, hoping that you are more blind today than you were yesterday. Whispering in your ear: yes, yes, you’ve found yourself, when you’re really just a dog on a leash. It does not matter to me if it’s Marx or Darwin or Coelho on your shoulder, are they really any different? They’re all qualitatively the same. It is about people manufacturing ideas for their own gain, for their own repute, without the least personal concern for who you are, for where you’re headed, and how your heart can rend. You feed off hands that do not even know you exist. They each feed you a messed up pastiche: "We are all descended from the apes, therefore let us love one another" or "There is such a thing as God, therefore go ahead and do what you want." This has become the age of feeling good, of believing in anything you want to believe, the dog-eat-dog drama called a pursuit of happiness. And yet who has defined your happiness? You and I both know it’s no longer you. Today you swim gladly in dreams of romance made by people who cannot possible care whether you ever find love or not. Now you’re really just a hapless creature caught in their fishhook. You are an inaudible echo in a choir of indifferent voices.

If you can only see things differently, you will understand that Truth cannot come from men, and that Truth will be that which you will like to hear the least. If you can only stand still and get away from the narrow confines of your room and stare into endless space, then perhaps you will see... oh, but perhaps you will not. Right about here you will expect me to talk to you about religion, but how can I? When religion to you is just another echo you’ve picked up along the way. A couple of humorous remarks, a couple of plastic crosses. Realize first that all those thoughts which do not really concern you, your very life, your soul, they only keep you from what’s truly yours. And only after that, then maybe you can take a step forward.

===

Dear Friend,

For the past few weeks I guess I’ve been wrestling to reconcile the Great GOD with Jesus Christ. But I cannot tell you what unspeakable comfort it is to finally realize, with a deep and lucid conviction, that Jesus Christ is God revealed. You see, I thought I was already blessed to take that first step. That first step involved making GOD as big as possible, bigger than my mind can contain. It meant ridding ourselves of all these little gods, these plastic conceptions that people play around with. The real GOD is not the god of the philosophers, that abstract and formless cloud that hangs around and does nothing but watch the philosophers debate. The real GOD is not that god that the atheists say they do not believe in because they can’t stand evil in the world. You know what the real GOD is like? The real GOD doesn’t need to explain himself to you. He is the GOD who is beyond all your petty notions of what good and evil is like. He is the GOD whose name cannot even be put into words, whose image makes neural synapses snap and short circuit. The real GOD is the GOD who devastates the stars and eats them up, the GOD who lets all flesh be like grass, withering and chaffing in their final moments of death. This is the GOD who has the devil on a leash, and lets him run rampant on the face of the earth.

Here is a real GOD! A God of wrath and God of love, who is unpredictable beyond your wildest dreams! Tell me now, if there was such a thing as a god why should be subject to your reason? Why do we fancy ourselves so capable, so haughty, so proud? As if we needed to prove His existence! As if He owed you and your fickle mind! Why, you can’t even decide how to live your life! Whatever it is you will prove exists, it won’t be God but a figment of thinking too much of yourself. But you say, “show him to me! show him to me! until you show him to me I’ll make do with my own custom-made version!” But wait a minute here. We’ve not yet introduced goodness or benevolence. There is no onus on God to listen to you. We’re talking about transcendence. And transcendence means a God who secretly laughs while you grope in the dark. A God who could care less about you, who shouldn’t even deign to stain himself with your issues and your dirt.

The first step involved tiring of little gods. When Nietzsche cried god is dead! we also cried in relief! And if it isn’t dead already we better go about killing it, then maybe we can move on to the real thing! The first step involves fear and trembling, it involves the next dimension, it involves the shattering of all your reason. It’s like riding on a hot air balloon and getting rid of all the ballasts, except now you’re headed straight for the burning sun! But where will this leave you? I don't know, but it sure left me worried and sobbing, because I thought to myself maybe all this is just a game, a comedy so tragic you can’t decide whether to weep or laugh. But my mistake was I thought Jesus was just another character in the play. It was so hard, so hard indeed to see the Son and the Father as one.

But the second step means seeing the Son as the Father, and do you know what breathtaking sights you will see? It is beyond me. Good God, It is beyond me. That the God of fiery tempest, of anguish, of storm, is the same God who called out to a blind man begging on a corner and asked him—oh, wait, you must see it first! you must let it ferment in your mind!—That the GOD who is beyond all human comprehension would ask a man, “what can I do for you?” Unless you’ve taken the first step you will not see the incongruence of this situation. You will not be able to walk past all the warm and fuzzy Church sermons and run to bang your head on the wall in disbelief. By His own design He allowed the blind man Bartimaeus to ask for sight, and He gave him that much. And you too, when you see Jesus, do you see Him with eyes closed shut, or eyes wide open?

In the middle of the field floats an orb, perfect and smooth. It is the perfectly drawn circle come to life. In it there is no groove, no crack, no microscopic fissure. In the mist and the rain it beckons you to step closer and touch. It permeates the air with an electric aura of mystery. It seduces, it sings an entrancing tune. It says, "Come into me and I will tell you the secrets of the world, the rise and fall of civilizations, the secret longings of man." As you peer into it you envision a flawless circle enclosing the whole universe. The knowledge of the beginning of time to the end and back again, like an alchemical snake coiled in a circle swallowing its own tail. You raise your hand ever so slowly, letting the final moments of your humanity drawl, while your fingers come closer to the immaculate surface. And then your skin touches and tingles, kissing the forbidden fruit, while it whispers: "You shall become like God."

In the middle of the field hovers an orb, perfect and smooth. The light of the sky shines pale on its polished surface. The mist has disappeared, and as hard as I looked, so have you.

===

Recently I've had to privilege of coming across an unknown writer named Lev Shestov. It's that wonderful excitement of discovering something long neglected, while blowing off the dust from books with browning pages. I found him quite by accident, while following a rather unpromising lead in Nikolai Berdiaev that left me wanting. He mentions Shestov as a friend with a "negative philosophy", and as I placed back the books of the Russian writer I casually pulled out the books right below it, and boy what a surprise. These were the things I've always needed to hear.

Philosophy is the manifest pride of man. It has turned into an obsession to subject the world under laws and theories and generalizations, laws which are unbreakable and unyielding. These laws seek to circumscribe real life under its own dictatorship. And granted yes, that to some degree it has been useful in science and technology, in its extreme it has also tried to subject even God under laws, tried to make him impotent, as though he can't help but follow the unflinching laws of nature. That is why the God of the philosophers always goes something like this: the omnipotent, the omniscient, the omnipresent, whose function is similar to a cloud that hangs overhead unable to do anything at all.

But wake up! Wake up! Toss away your blinds, toss away this illusion that you can circumscribe reality inside a theory, and everything will be open to you. Real life is mystery piled upon mystery. Every laugh, every tear, even every curse. They say that 1 + 1 will always be two in all possible universes. But in this life one and one make three, as the man makes love to the woman. They say that nothing can be created out of nothing, but unconditional love springs forth from emptiness. In philosophy you'd like to make God harmless and understandable, want him to genuflect to your reason, but the words of Tertullian will do you much good: "The Son of God was crucified; it does not cause shame because it must shame us. And the Son of God died; again, it is credible because it is absurd. And having been buried, he rose again; it is certain because it is impossible." In the logician's world A must always be equal to A, but admit the possibility of the supernatural and you see the world change, and change, and change. Lives are transformed, people are born again.

Do not ever let philosophy force you to slumber. Admit the possibility of the divine, the miraculous, the incomprehensible. The universe is already full of signs to convince you of the real state of life. The metaphor of dreaming and waking, the cycle of night and morning, the seed that dies before it grows, the child that is born from an empty womb. And even in our waking moments we still sleep, and we walk in a night that waits impatiently for the morning. We lie inert, amusing ourselves with dreams of understanding, chewing still on the forbidden fruit. But the truth is that when man tasted the forbidden fruit he only saw his nakedness and felt his shame. In the final days too, many philosophers will come to the throne blushing and completely embarrassed.

"When we laugh, fill our smiles with You."

How I feel that once you peel the layers of the real, when the end comes or the eyelids close in eternal sleep, the first thing you'll hear is a thick and cheerful laughter. I laugh at myself sometimes, especially now, because beneath all these guises of being serious and sombre, well, really, to be honest, very little of it matters. It's like the feeling of trying to keep silent, because everyone else has their lips pursed, presiding over a funeral, when suddenly the dead celebrant comes back to life and exclaims, "gotcha!" And well, no one really knows what to make of it, except a blessed few who roll on the floor laughing, hugging, shouting; turns out the funeral was one surprise celebration after all. And then all these worries, all these years of lamenting, all these struggles of mind and soul, they just get swept away, just like that. Someone in the crowd cries: Hallelujah!, in a very jolly manner no less.

The humor of life translates to two different possibilities, I think. The one is how, if you live your life in shallow and petty side remarks, snickering in ridicule of those most precious and rare things, then when the curtains part and the gods finally appear the laughter will turn on you, biting and ironic. Go ahead, make fun of the deepest, the most profound, and the ancient, but for what? For a few hollow laughs that do not even sound human, like laughing amongst a pack of drooling hyenas. That's the laughter of the world, I think. Make fun of God, treat things casually, as if they mattered so little. Be carefree, use and discard, embrace the whole world and then deride it. And if feels so good, yes, laughing heartily like an obnoxious little boy, but boy won't it be painful to be laughed at in the end. The crime of lese-majesty, the insult of a sovereign, the joke that eternally backfires.

Oh, how I'd rather have the second possibility, the laugh that is healthy, that takes time to build up. Like a good joke that needs time to draw itself out, with a punchline ingeniously timed to explode with all the senses. See, the superior humor will captivate, it will make you take things seriously first, keeps you in suspense and in respect of the Teller. Maybe you don't even see the joke coming, maybe you weep and you cry, maybe it all breaks your heart. But what is better than a laugh mixed with joyful tears in the end? Now I understand why many of the saints can't help but be so serious, so intent, because there's this part of them that just can't wait to hear the end, and not just to hear their own laugh, but the laugh of an innumerable host, the laugh of the Sun and the angels and the stars. The laugh of the One they love, wide and deep and frightening, enough to make the whole world tremble. Someone in the end will naively smile and say: "Well, did you ever, in your entire life, expect this ending?" I guess it'll give new meaning to the verse in 1 Corinthians 2:9.

I perceive, when the years have passed, when I am older, more mature, when I have been baptized through more sufferings and trials, then I'll learn to quiet down. I'm still young, in a rush, in a hurry to take in more than I can really handle. I still like to be proven right, I still like to be proven right. And sometimes it's really embarrassing, catching yourself in mid-thought, in mid-sentence. Like having an everlasting mirror right before you which reflects every negative criticism back automatically. But I pray there will come a time, years from now, when I can resist as little as the wind, when instead of using humility to cover up my pride, I will need pride to cover up my formlessness.

Growth is an inversion. It is learning to see the world upside down, so you can fall feet first into the sky.

===

That being said, as I borrowed a book on Spinoza, I was entertained by the vandalisms of a previous reader. He writes under the philosopher's name:

"In the Philippines, unread, unnamed (even), uncomprehended; from which one can safely infer how philistine these people are."

And also,

"That justice may be done to this spiritual giant, in this semi-barbaric country--this book is read."

I'd just like to say: Um... no. For all his or her sophistication, half of the book has been vandalized with intrusive underlines and comments that run through the entire margin. I thought it really funny though how they stopped halfway through the book. You'd at least think he'd finish the whole thing through.

Anyway, the older books in the UP Library seem to also function as a really romantic means of communication. You can leave a message on some really ignored book, let it gather dust, and who knows, maybe after five years you can check it out again and read your reply from a kindred soul. Which gives me a wonderful idea... 

There was this refreshing, wide winged, seawater scent in the air. When I stepped outside, right beside an empty lot, I felt its tropical and fertile caress come over. I looked above me and the leaves shook in the wind, the sky blushed slightly as if in a fever. How do you capture this? Is it possible to capture this? It enwrapped me in a sense of foreboding, and yet of something so lovely and ancient and free.

I imagined, whimsically, how this same scent, this same breeze, came from a space in the world were no one has ever sailed. A vacant and innocent circle in the ocean, where the waves still lap and rise since before anyone can ever remember. The waves embrace, they beckon, they weigh fathoms deep, yes even deeper than anything inside me. The sky over that place still broods, with its gray clouds, its sheltering. Tufts of thought, encircling, compressing, worried and then relieved. A private space in the world where no man has ever seen.

And in this moment, oh this pitiful, unworthy moment, as I look up into the sky, blank-eyed and human, I feel that there is so much we keep missing. I run around the house, go out about my business, type on the computer; people in the city dream their material dreams, ache in their hearts, sit behind closed doors; while somewhere in a distance never measured, the waves still spread themselves under a white, thoughtful sky. In the middle of every storm yawns a calm center. In the middle of our stories is a patiently waiting peace.

The cat came slinking with his padded paws, and in the twilight dreaming, lapped the milk in his bowl. He said, “Nobody sees me! Nobody sees me! Cause I crept in so soft! And nobody hears me, nobody hears me, no one knows my name!” With the stars all twinkling, he wagged his tuxedo tail, to the gentle sound of breathing, to the warm inhale.

In the dim throbbing jungle, I thought I saw a crucifix dancing.

“Life: I’ve made too many mistakes! Too many mistakes have I made! Oh, God, sky bless us thus the farther sun, wobbling legs a-crumpling, oh palms embracing the cement, embrace.” The man who was I, who was you, staggered and fell like a lumberjacked tree.

Swirling, swirling, aureatic aura of divine light-ening, where crystal moons swirled like snow flakes, and I just so suddenly remembered: I have never known love in this way. In this manner: a whirling dervish of compacted energetic emotions—a powerful electrified kiss.

I snuck behind the cat, while he wagged his smug and unsuspecting tail. I wondered now… hey, I debated with myself for countless lifetimes, should I step on this annoying and striped little tail? And it was a perfectly classical dilemma: whether or not I should step on a classic cat tail. And we were a sight to see, as the moon drifted by: a man behind the cat, the cat ignoring the man, the man forever undecided: should I step on the cat’s tail?