ByDr. Paul Mach, DN

Today, yes and in every age man has existed, man has been fleeing from Self and God.  The ownership of Self and the embracing of God is far more difficult now than it was in the proverbial story when Adam stepped outside his oneness with God and made a conscious decision to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, claiming his Ego and separating himself from truth and Self-divinity. What distinguishes today’s Flight from God and the exploration of the deeper sense of Self from every other Flight through history is this: once Faith/Self/God was the universal.  It was a part of every beings existence.  Prior to the individual; there was an objective world of universal faith in God/Self while fleeing from Self/God was only accomplished subjectively, within each individual’s cognizant singular decision or choice (i.e. eating of the apple). 

Somewhere throughout our collective history, it came into being each individual choose his complete separation of their spirit from the world of God and the true egoless nature of Self.  This decision bolstered the darkness within, acknowledging the false Self.  This may have been a conscious act or decision, an entities manipulation of the universe or simply the groups’ consensus to change the rules of life’s meaning; nevertheless its ramification is now our earthly experience.  During this prior time in history a man who wanted to flee from God first had to derive his own Flight from his spiritual God/Self, his Faith, than make a conscious decision of action and operate from this premeditated resolution (such as Adam).  The opposite is true today.  The objective external existence of a world dominated through Faith in God and Self is no more.  We have lost both Self and God.

Faith in God and Self has to be remade moment by moment through each individual’s conscious act of decision, through each individual’s removing himself from the greater world of the diversionary Flight from God and Self.  For today in the 21st century it is no longer faith in God in which exists an objective world, but rather the Flight from Self and from God reigns supreme.  Every situation where we may tread, without making it so, is plainly employed an Ego enticed body running from our spiritual nature and God.  Every venture and exploration, everything this world exists in and has to offer is in the form of Ego replenishment purporting the death and separation of Self from God.  Only during active decision may the situation be transformed into a corresponding holy-moment-of-Faith, but this is hard, and even if one individual succeeds in tearing himself away from the world of the Flight into the world of Faith, he succeeds only for that single moment and only for themselves.  The world fleeing from God and from the Self exists as the Universal normality and totally independent of one individual making a conscious singular decision. 

There seem to be few of us outside the Ego man’s exodus of totality of Self/God ontogeny.  Society, the mass of man, exists only insofar as they share in the corruption, disintegration and annihilation of the soul, along with the corresponding gluttonous appetite of societal dictates that control the Ego-body’s role within the world of physical appeasement and consumerism gorged upon with insatiable demands.  To live from within our modern society and to flee from the Soul’s longings and aspirations are alas one.  Our society now has ownership over our

individual minds and bodies, contrary to what we may think we are conditioned as one who joins in the masses, fleeing from the Self.  It is only upon introspection and reflection that one may discover that we are stuck in an existence of contradiction, being someone we never intended to be and that there may be a part of us that does not, or may not want to flee.  Yet the denial of our spiritual nature has been so in-grained, rewarded and habituated through the appeasement of societal dictates, that this flight is the rule and not the exception. 

Once upon a time in the world: Faith/Self/God, all conflict, all wavering, was within man himself - the flight is now carried over into the dynamic of being outside and autonomous of men.  The flight has made itself independent and has a life of its own.  It has its own structure and power.  This disconnection of Soul from Being is now its own entity and continues independent of any conscious or unconscious act or decision from Self.  Nothing additional is needed; no specific act is necessary, the monster lives.  It has a life of its own, as though it had never dwelt in man.  It now is its own constituent and has its own laws.  It has conquered and devoured its creator and is its own master and continues regardless of man’s cognizance.  No additional and no specific act is necessary to make man flee from God.  Now that the situation of Flight is all inclusively enacted there is no more standing still, no alternation between fleeing and not fleeing.  The Flight is our world of existence and is always there, taken for granted as much as the polluted air we breathe and the consumables we are conditioned to purchase.  It is an existence of tragedy.  An existence hurling itself forward, ending up with less-than-nothing in trying to gain more-than-everything from an existence God freely bestowed unto us. It is so taken for granted within our society that there seems never to have been anything other than the way the world now exists.

In the world of God, man is born that he may realize Self as God, embracing the great truth that from the moment of our existence life is made to experience and know the Self/God. But in the world of the Flight birth is the end of this self-realization.  We are no longer able to free ourselves from the layer upon layer of falsity and distortion in which we are entangled. We believe the Illusion, we don’t see the Self as lost and now assume this as reality. All that is the facing, realization and owning of the Self seems to lie beyond and behind: birth and death.  Now with birth the Flight begins as our Identity, and with death the morose recognition of the reality of Self/God’s coexistence missed is actualized. 

When the danger of a sudden encounter between the Self and God may occur, the Ego laughs, the mental processes deny and rationalize, and a more rapid universal Flight at once begins.  It is the part of us that loves darkness instead of light, which rejects the Self/God and thereby renounces our Oneness.  Such is the demonic character of the system of the Flight from Self.  It knows that it can only move through the power drawn from within humans to create an external world force, changing it so much that no one any longer recognizes its origin within himself or herself.  At the core of its existence the Ego knows this and the more it recognizes this the more desperately it has drawn the world into the Flight – and the more desperately its existence fled the more sharply its origin was felt within ourselves and the greater became its dread in all manner of retaining its ownership of human Ego - and being confronted with the possibility of Spirit - the greater becomes its alarm - the more it subjugated everything and the more it expanded.  It now owns and possesses everything.  That is the greatest, darkest illusion.  The world is devoted to the cult of this shadow of a subjective reality of this false sense Self of ours that doesn’t really exist.

This system of obliteration expands not because man flees more desperately; opposition has ceased.  It perpetuates in an all-encompassing manner through its very size and strength; for through its very power it draws everything to itself.  Humans need no longer justify their Flight from Self before the law, values and morals within them; for the law within no longer exists and outside them there is nothing left but the immense and societal mass of the Flight from Self/God.  The system of Flight has retained ownership of all power, not the human-Self, and it decides and dictates all manner of existence in our modernized world.  It no longer cares specifically what is represented; this is a matter of indifference.  Only its quantitative mass and universal power count.  The world we see and coalesce in is not the world, but a world that the Flight along with the ego’s humanity has perverted. 

Like a living thing that is increased beyond its proper size and can no longer represent its real nature through its form, it engulfs everything because there is nothing outside of its reign.  This system has become so immense that everything is itself and what it consumes need not even be assimilated before it can be regurgitated, reused and transformed into its own heartlessness.  Its dynamic is so all-consuming within our society and world, that everything, including ourselves, is engorged and sucked into its ominous totalitarian continuance without even our realization of its occurrence. 

Thus this Flight rules over man and owns and uses him; man no longer has the capacity to know or intuit its existence.  It is sovereign.  Man is servant.  He dwells within societal dictates of the Flight, and his Ego is delighted that this massive hallucination appears to provide adequate subsistence, give a semblance of control in his little world, and actually give a feeling of some power over his destiny and existence.  He is enslaved, and exists only by finding a place, any place, within Gomorrah to exist.  The worlds destiny is to be ruled, controlled and regulated and left believing in democracy and freedom.  Nobody could even flee from the system if they wanted for the lack of human strength and resources now possessed is limited and drawn from and provided for in a monitored moderation by the despotism of the Flight.

Yet we go on. Anicca, the law of impermanence, the remaining open to what we do not know, the remote possibility of breaking free of our contrived hellish turmoil I believe still exists. Reaching Nirvana/Enlightenment/Heaven remains a topic of exploration/goal/ideal glimpsed in fantasy by the Self nonetheless. Surviving humanity must be undertaken with daily diligence. Despite the Flight I still believe the goal of this life at worst is palliation, at best is ascension and awakening. If my meanderings create a break in the walls we have built, a stumble in the Flight or a glimpse embraced for a moment of your God-Self within, I have achieved a success to help bail out the multitude of karmic debts, sins and shortcomings I have accrued over the eons. Thank you for the opportunity to spend these moments of time, sharing, struggling, learning, loving and growing…together…as One.