The Seven Days of Wander

creates himself. Therefore, could not the man have created his god to create himself?

  Prosecution: Look at sheer proportions, then young fool, the gods are enormous to the man speck. Can the egg, the child, the spawn be larger than the parents whether physical or spirit?

  Beggar: Can we liken your god then to a great well, the essence of spirit being water? Hundreds come with cups and take a little out that they may live with the essence.

  Prosecution: Yes, good comparison.

  Beggar: But what if the reverse happened. The well was empty but hundreds came and refilled it from their collective cups. Is this not too creation?

  Prosecution: Yes, but where did the water in the well originate? Was it not from a filling by single drops of rain? That in itself being a likeness of water?

  Beggar: Where did the water in the will originate?

  Prosecution: Try this parable then young man. A father and a son have the same likeness but there is no doubt that the father created the son. For the father existed before the son and it was his act of procreation that the son has existence.

  Beggar: What was the father before the birth of a son?

  Prosecution: Call him a man, I suppose.

  Beggar: Who is greater a father or a man?

  Prosecution: One would say the father as he is still a man plus something more.

  Beggar: So in the birth of the son the man was transformed to a father. Was this transformation a creation?

  Prosecution: Yes.

  Beggar: So did not the son create the father?

  Prosecution: I disagree. The procreation done by the man enabled or caused him to become a father. Without that no son.

  Beggar: Anything the man does he remains a man till the son is created and thereby creates the father. How can we disallow the one sure fact of creating a father and stumble for others more obscure?

  Prosecution: What do you mean?

  Beggar: If I say the name 'wind chimes', a simple enough device, what do you see?

  Prosecution: Actually I do not see as much as imagine I hear. The chimes make a pleasant, tinkling sort of sound common to all regardless of shape.

  Beggar: When the wind blows?

  Prosecution: Yes, of course.

  Beggar: And if the wind ceases?

  Prosecution: The sound stops.

  Beggar: Are they still chimes?

  Prosecution: In their construction, yes.

  Beggar: In their construction they have a potentiality to be chimes, but are they not less than full chimes, musical devices, when the wind stops?

  Prosecution: Like any other musical thing, they are simply stilled when not played but they are what they are. We call a horn, a horn whether it is being blown or not.

  Beggar: It is a bad habit, sir, but one grown out of a need for simplicity. We are reluctant to redefine every tool to its use and to its disuse. Yet any book of words will attempt to describe the notes of a horn to clarify the meaning of a horn. May I not take a horn and use it as a hat, a club, a hammer, a door stop, a weight? At these times, is it less than a horn? Only when I blow in it, does it become truly a horn? The other times does it not merely have the potential to be a horn, but is not truly in the fullness of a horn? Just as chimes are not wind chimes till the wind touches them?

  Prosecution: Yes, I have to agree. It would be no grinning matter for a man to blow in a horn and use it as a hammer at the same time.

  Beggar (laughing): Though I have heard some musicians where it would be the preferred technique.

  Prosecution: Good point. The disuse of a tool makes something less of the tool; the misuse of tool makes something less of the user. And all pay more dearly for his product.

  Beggar: Apply spoken, sir. The truths in that little proverb whistles a tune in many directions. But back to our dilemma: If a thing of potential is not truly the full thing till the potential is transformed to actual being, is not then a child not a man.

  Prosecution: Yes, the child has the potential to be a man but we do not call him one till he is.

  Beggar: Yes, the child may have riches to inherit, or preordained wife, a full body to grow to, a mind of intellect to learn into, yet till he is of age and assumes these things he has only potential. Now at age, he is married, rich, prowess in body and mind, and the inclination; desire to father a child. Is he a father? Before you argued that his acts would create his own fatherhood but would it not now be said that his acts from birth to man are simply an increasing in his potential to be a father? For the child is much less potential to be a father than a man. But do you agree the potentiality does not replace the creation but that creation replaces potentiality? At the birth of his child, the potential of the man becomes the creation of the father?

  Prosecution: I cannot argue that cause is effect, though cause brings effect. At some instant of time, the man trades his labours for the finished product. A carpenter is not a cabinet maker till he finishes the cabinet. A lawyer is not a judge till her judgement. The man not a father till the child is created.

  Beggar: By the nature of the word father, is the father the creator or the man?

  Prosecution: The father, of course.

  Beggar: Then can we not say for the father: Creation creates the creator?

  Prosecution: Yes, we must. There is not way to create a father without creating a creation.

  Beggar: In all our discussions of gods and men, outside any physical sense what was the common methodology for either to create?

  Prosecution: Abstract thinking, though the throbbing between my ears makes me curse its existence now.

  Beggar: My fault, sir, for I have stumbled us against too many stone walls this day. But patience, I perceive a less dim alley. Whether god or man each one would think its thought and thereby create itself to the fullness of something more than it was. What sir, would you call the gods greatest creation?

  Prosecution: Being one myself and assuming all else as a rather shoddy garden for its play, man.

  Beggar: For a being of great potential to become the fullness of itself would it not then have to create its full creation? That is anything less and it is less?

  Prosecution: Yes.

  Beggar: Then a being of less than a god must create a man to be God. What methodology would this being use as determined by us?

  Prosecution: Again abstract thinking.

  Beggar: Then the being thought 'Man' and created itself, God.

  Prosecution: Yes, I agree. And even it does not seem for all our efforts such a startling change from most religions.

  Beggar: Let us, however, not forget our other half of the coin. In our previous talks we had two questions: One: who created who with god and man of the same likeness and two: How do we create the first creator when there is no creator to create it? Perhaps the full coinage will give value for this. What is the highest thing a man could create, that is, to think upon, to receive full exchange between his potential and his creation?

  Prosecution: Within his thinking, the loftiest thing a man can dwell upon besides men is a god.

  Beggar: Then the non-man thought 'God' and created himself, man.

  Prosecution: Yes.

  Beggar: So far what is now God and Man we can say two lesser beings thought of each other and created themselves and in creating themselves became their own creators. That is God thought 'man' and became God whereas man thought 'god' and became Man. Man created God and Man. God created Man and God.

  Prosecution: But that is an impossible equation to separate!

  Beggar: Exactly.

  Judge: For my own thinking, to clarify, young man, do you mean that God does not exist but has been formulated in man's minds as they developed to a higher plane of thinking?

  Beggar: Not quite your Honour. Men for eons have dwelled in high and low places in bleak stares. Spent lifetimes slowly moving agape mouths. Silent. Silent as they strove to form the true name of god and speak it as Herald to the watching crowd. Crowds that wait, then mock, then drift to another ho
llow tongue.

  This has been a perversion not in what was done but in what should have been done. All eyes to a god; none on the Creation. A man is judged by his deeds but a father is known by his son's deeds. Do we ask each son if his father exists? How long must a man be judged as an errant child? How long do we tighten his boots with the threat of someone absent? How long do we send him to the corner to look for father never returning? Not travelling to but rather travelling with and even gods falter. For the journey is parallel: 1 God/1 Soul. And the soul is here now! The body a wilderness; the soul a fire. Reason wondering to its light; not God's but its own fire!

  Creation itself becomes the new sanctuary. A place of virtue immortal but virtue for the god, not the stay of eternal punishment. This is not denial; not rebellion. It is journeying on after a too long grieve. Whether the father had our name or another's, we are not bastards to lie scorned in the universal gutters. If we must, let us offer minor things of remembrance yearly but let us daily ponder the creation. Not for his likeness but for our likeness to him. Look to ourselves for ourselves. For the great sadness and joy of a vibrant fire.

  Many religions speak of a god bringing light into dark. Think of yourselves in the dark, totally dark for near a year. Sealed within a cave. Suddenly you are pushed to the open in midday. Even with your eyes clamped shut, your mind shouts 'light'.

  Now think of this. Nine months in a womb. Suddenly you are pushed to the light. But you do not know the word. Later you learn a word called light but this was much more enormous at birth, light, life, breath, cold, movement, explosion, colour, sound, light,