"God isn't up there, you know! Sitting in judgment, as it were, on a cloud with a long white beard, inventing awful rules so people feel guilty all the time, and so on and so on. That's somebody else, entirely. God is within. It's man who is without; Cosmic Man. Now if you don't understand that, don't worry, you're in good company, besides, you'll get the point eventually; I mean by the time your dead, when your spirit will become so agile that you'll find that you can leap from star to star in a single stride.
Oh there are of course people who would dispute that: mathematicians, philosophers, engineers, like Archwright, scientists, like Newton.
Isaiac, bloody, Newton. He's a most perfect symbol of that oppressive and routhless spirit, which is the governing force in our society, and an embodiment of that cosmic spirit, who holds our world in diress subjgation, and who with terrible laws oppresses us all, and sticks us down, and makes us know our bloody place.
Many people worship this horrible abomination and call it God; a good god and just one. They're wrong of course, for if this good god were in fact just, as they suppose, the world he created would be just too. The world isn't just. Society isn't just. Far from it!
I'm not usually so emotional, so volatile. I mean people usually get the impression I'm a steady sort of fellow with a mystical turn of mind and an actually discernable hallow. I'm often rather sorry to disappoint them. Of course what such people don't take into account is that our identities are never constant; we're changing all the time from the cradle to the grave.
When people are young they want to overthrow what's gone before, but when they're old they want to confine everything with laws, to bind and snare and trap. Their inner conservatism creates an political conservatism, which in turn creates the iron authoritorism of our present society and the stifling, choking unfairness of it all.
I've personified this force and given it a human form, his name is Urizon. He's the old man with the long white beard I was telling you about before. Who then can destroy him? Is there anyone? Anyone at all?
The question's not retorical, for I have also conceived another figure in everlasting opposition to the former, youthful, fiery, sparks flying from his flaming red hair. Ork, the demon of ungovernablness. The spirit of revolution.
I see it as an everlasting struggle between two contradicting spirits; a struggle between the state and those who would destroy the state, which neither side can ever really win.
Alright! look at it this way; imagine a desert, a red sun in a slate grey sky. Two figures locked in combat, their feet kicking up clouds of dust. One of the figures is old, he has a long white beard, and tearing at his throat is a boy, sparks flying from his flaming hair. Sometimes the man has the upper-hand, sometimes the boy, but neither can ever triumph over the other."
"The worship of God is: Honouring his gifts in other men, each one according to his genius, and loving the greatest men best; those who envy or calumniate great men hate God."
"The prophets Isaiah & Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spoke to them; and whether they did not think at the time that they would be misunderstood, and so be the cause of imposition.
Isaiah answered: "I saw no God, nor heard any, `in a finite organical perception'; but my senses discovered the infinite in everything, and as I was then persuaded, and remained confirmed, that the voice on honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for the consequences but wrote.'
Then I asked: `Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so?
He replied: "All poets believe that it does, and in ages of
imagination this firm persuasion moved mountains; but many are not capable of a firm persuasion of anything."
Then Ezekiel said: "The philosophy of the east taught the first principles of human perception: some nations held one principle for the origin, and some another: we prophets taught that poetic genius, as you now call it, was the first principle and all the others merely derivative, which was the cause of our despising the priests and philosophers, and prophecying that all gods would at last prove to originate in ours and to be the tributaries of the poetic genius; it was this that our great poet, King David, desired so fervently and invokes so pathetically, saying,`By this he conquers enemies and governs kingdoms; and we so loved our God, that we cursed in his name all the deities of surrounding nations, and asserted that they had all rebelled: from these opinions the vulgar came to think that all nations would at last be subjected to the Jews.
"This," said he, "like all firm persuasions, is come to pass; for all the nations believe the Old Testament code and worship the Old Testament god, and what greater subjection can be?"
I then asked Ezekial why he ate dung and lay so long on his right and left side? He answered, "The desire of raising other men into a perception of the infinite: this the North American tribes practise, and is he honest who resists his genius or conscience only for the sake of present ease or gratification?"
"God becomes as we are, in order that we may become as he is."
