The full spectrum of life is only allowed to exist for one sole reason - because it serves as a spiritual lesson. We are its objects, the students of life. Humans like to think that we're casting complex, morally grey choices - we are not. We are only choosing to embody one of the many principalities that exist in this world, we are a combination of the primordial forms that allow for existence itself. These principalities are the original creations. Primordial beings - or emanations, on which all mysticism, religions and astrological archetypes are based on - and of which we exist as mimicry, imperfect shadows within the body of possibilities they have offered us in the hopes of our conscious advancement. Compared to their grandiosity, we are but a flicker of light - pure, unrealized, naked potential. And within this primordial body, anything and everything that will ever happen has already happened, whatever is starting right now has already ended - all prophecies are cycles. It's why they can be prophesied in the first place. Look at your current identity - who or what have you modeled it after? If you were truly, madly honest. Only the things that have existed before you, have you not? Your ideas, philosophies, concepts, beliefs are all shaped by outer influences. Because you cannot imagine anything outside of what you've been shown. Your very being, your egoic identity was formed by a combination of outer influence and an inner choosing. Go on, try to imagine the "shape that cannot be". Go and imagine something beyond yourself, beyond the forms this world has offered you. It is as futile as futility itself. Your identity, therefore, is an amalgamation of the many lesser gods or influences that permeate this world. Your existence, and mine, as an original being - begins only when we teach ourselves to transcend what we think we are and embrace what we are in truth, beyond the projections of this world. What you surrender to is what shapes you - the real you. Once you have embodied that higher truth, the need for this cruel game disappears. You do not exist. Not in the sense creation exists. You are but a shadow of those who have existed long before you, an imitation, a personification of forms that bind you to your human shell. Life, thusly, is not existence - it is an arena of choices. Not existence but expression. You are only allowed to paint with the master's colors, and the master's tools. Yet the painting is yours to make. And when that painting is finished, on it will be familiar forms. Nothing new under the sun. But there will be something else within it - the uniqueness of your brushstrokes. That secret something only you could add. That is what you are, no more and no less. A secret meaning behind a curtain of mirrors. What you are was formed not by what you happen to be now, or what primordial powers have animated you into being - but rather by what you choose to be, what you make of yourself. Your choices here, in this realm of passing, determine what you will exist as in the eternities that follow - within the memory of creation. In the face of this wisdom therefore, the only real choice you are offered as a human is this: When it is given to you - will you submit to the undeniable meaningfulness of your story, or will you rage against its truth? "The Court of Death" by George Frederic Watts (1902) ![[IMG_2303.jpeg]]