I was once a sheep, but always a stubborn one. Sheep wait for direction and instruction. They do not make decisions on their own, and would rather the shepherd tell them where to go and what to do. It is their meat that feeds the shepherd, and their fleece that clothes him.
The life of a sheep is a life of uncertainty and waiting. The sheep waits and waits for clarity, but never fully receives what he waits for. The sheep does not decide where to go; the sheep goes where he is led. He lives in fear, and trusts the shepherds around him to guide him.
But the shepherd plays a game. The shepherd knows that anything spoken intentionally and confidently creates power. The shepherd offers this authority to his sheep, and his sheep obey. The shepherd is a master of language; a master of illusion. Everything the shepherd does is for his own gain, though he has misled the sheep to believe it is for their own safety and protection.
The only way to escape the shepherd’s game is to not play it. I do not answer the shepherd’s questions, for they are poisonous. If I answer the shepherd’s questions I play his game; I accept the premise of his questions. When the shepherd asks me how something works, I might at first assume it is an innocent question, the answer to which enriches me with knowledge and understanding. But that is not true.
The question is the shepherd’s poison, and by the time I begin to contemplate its answer, I have already ingested it. I am hooked. The simple question — all questions — are poison, for they presume that there is something I do not know. They reinforce the conviction that there is something other than me, and I do not know it. That there is someone other than me that I am not. The question is the poison, for there is nothing other than me. There is no person or thing or time or place that is not me here now unless I put it there.
The only way to remember who I am is to stop assuming I am not. What does it matter “how” if I know what “is”? What does it matter “when” if I know what “is”? What does it matter “who” if I know what “is”? There is only this moment; my moment. I possess this moment, and all the contents of my moment are mine and mine alone. It is me and me only who decides the shape of my moment; the shepherd’s questions only confuse me into believing that my moment is something other than it is.
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The shepherd’s poison – (11.20.22) A question by the imagined authorities (i.e., the “shepherd”) that appears to undermine my omniself but is in fact subordinate to it, for example:
- Being able to articulate “how” I manifest the entire world in its infinite detail and complexity does not preclude the fact that it exists because I awakened
The shepherd’s language – (11.20.22) The language of the thirdself shepherd class which is designed to be circular and inconclusive to undermine my independent resolve