Towards the end of the novel Butchers Crossing[1] there is an exchange between two of the characters, Mr McDonald an old trader who deals in hides particularly those of buffalo, and Will Anders, a young man influenced by Waldo Emerson, had set out to find something of his true nature in the Western wilderness.
McDonald states, “You always think that there’s something to find out ... Well, there’s nothing, … You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies in school. You live all your life on lies, and then maybe when you are ready to die, it comes to you—that there’s nothing, nothing but yourself and what you could have done. Only you ain’t done it, because the lies told you there was something else. Then you know you could of had the world, because you’re the only one that knows the secret; only then it’s too late. You’re too old.”
Although Andrews feels a vague creeping terror through what has been said he is unable to face it and declares, “That’s not the way it is.” However Macdonald persists and both are left to face their situation, the older man acknowledging that “I came out of it with nothing, too. Because I forgot what I learnt a long time ago. I let the lies come back.” For his part through hard experience earned high in the Rockies the young man is left uncertain, not knowing, but he senses that he will never return to a shape of life that had now relinquished him.
How do I know what I ‘think’ I know?
I was in my late twenties when I went ‘mad’, so called, for what is madness and who defines it so? Like dark clouds amassing over a mountain range the events leading to the eventful occasion had been gathering for some time. So obvious now upon reflection — the life I was leading was no longer compatible to the life I was being called to live, something needed to give, fortunately it did. Among other matters the employment I had at the time revealed irrefutably that so much that is taken as fact and truth is nothing but lies. It is easy enough to have it said to you, ‘don’t believe what you read in the newspapers, or what others tell you’ but when these words are eventually fleshed out in the body and are felt, it is a different story, you can go then in an instant from having an identity, a name, to having none. There is a ‘breakdown’ but that is only one way of looking at it, it can also be a break though or a break up which is a much healthier approach to the situation.
The overriding fear I felt that particular day was clear – what would occur if those without understanding reached me first and gave medication to help ‘calm one down’, instinctively I felt that if one drug was placed in the body, a fine and delicate process would be interfered with, hindered, maybe even irrevocably so.
The passage of a living body through time involves a chemical process; this also applies in what many refer to as the spiritual path. It reveals a gross lack of understanding to call this, as one popular ‘spiritual’ writer stated, blasphemy.
As the character MacDonald indicated we forget, forget to remember, thus there is constant repetition although it may not appear so. Contrary to Rhonda Byrne’s[2] advocacy there is no secret, its just that we do not see. Thus the first, long, fundamental step is to see – this is how I am, this is the essential step to becoming free of all lies and lying, firstly to oneself and then to others.
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Recognition not of habit, but of the FORCE of habit.
[1] John Williams Butchers Crossing p.250, nyrb New York, 2007 edition
[2] Rhonda Byrne The Secret Simon & Schuster 2006
