The First and Last Request

How do I know anything at all? How do I know knowing, how do I know truth? How can I trust and believe? The concept of 'God' is a difficult one, as any teenager worth his salt will tell you. It lies like a deadweight across our freedom, an affront to our independence. And yet does the physical world itself have truth? Do we trust 'things' just because we bump off them? The spiritual element is always the forgotten one, like an imaginary friend, a child in the room you can't see. After all how do you know life except by its pulse, how do you know truth except by its current? In other words you know them by a refined inner sense which is simple and pure like a child's understanding. This sense is not suggestible, it's not open to figments or make-believe. To let this pulse of life or current of truth live in you is to overcome the deadweight of concepts.

But then there are the concepts which are so far-reaching they would have the inner teenager stomping out of the room in disgust. Such a one is 'resurrection'. How can we start again with ideas like that? Not in a religious sense but as a principle in nature and in the human being which we can feel as a current? For me it's an existential thing - the first and last request. I believe I came into the world asking if the body and the earth itself would be lifted up at the end of days into the pure spiritual existence I know by inner nature. I believe it's a childlike question. Not just, 'Is there a heaven?' but, 'Can everything I love go there?' And it's a question of justice (also beloved of children): 'Is it right to leave anything behind?' Can we really accept that our speck of dust in the cosmos will be wiped out?

The child dreams in simple inner truth, the teenager boils with indignation. What does the adult do? Have we reached adulthood yet? No, we can't accept deadweights or suggestions but neither can we ignore the child in the room, the imaginary friend. We have to learn to re-enter the refined inner sense for what is true and what lives. We have to keep the anger, the refusal to be fobbed-off. In the end, in that maturity, I believe it's possible to approach such great ideas as that of 'resurrection' and to feel the spiritual pull which will tell us beyond doubt if the first and last request can be answered.

Jay

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