The Goblet and the Wine

I feel that we are designed by Nature to be in unceasing and regenerative development; that we are meant to reveal and fulfill potential — to our very last breath and probably beyond.

Unfortunately, we live amid a culture that condemns and denies both potential and age. Time is the instrument not of maturation but of decline — indeed, we speak of our “declining years” and “the downhill slide” (not in a good way). Why live then, if all you can see before you is regression and loss?

We sell growth short because we do not know what it is, or forgot. Growth is more a casting aside than an accumulation; more disburdenment than attainment. Maturation is the process of the vessel becoming the energy of its atoms; of the goblet becoming the wine.

By contrast, our reigning religious myths all run generally along this rather aberrant track: of the light taking form among men. The light comes down and becomes a Buddha, a Messiah, or a Prophet (or soon will). In other words, our prevailing mythologies teach us to seek the very opposite of Nature’s path of growth. The light of heaven becoming solid and human is not the way of maturity; transformation — and certainly development — are meant to work the other way.

So regression and passivity are programmed into our ideologies, the thought-architecture that informs our law, our customs, much of our education, and infiltrates even our science. Truth comes down, is made solid, and becomes more rigid as it meets the slavish passivity of its adherents. It is no wonder that ours has become a land dominated by prisons and nursing homes.

Perhaps we cannot change all that while we are alive. Vapid politicians, perverted priests, corporate CEOs, infantile pundits, and gossip-mongering mediaheads will remain among us for as long as we permit within ourselves the system that feeds their darkness. But if we choose the way of natural growth, then we rob the system of its energy — ours. If we consciously choose maturation over acculturation, then they may steal our goblet, but they cannot take our wine.