Realizing My Insignificance

When we fear death, we are really fearing the realization of our insignificance. Life is a struggle for significance. We often perceive this as a struggle for power, or control. Sometimes we see it as a desperate need to be loved, or at least understood. But beneath all of these is the quest for recognition and significance. And death is the ultimate threat to that quest.

I have sometimes referred to the epiphany that caused me to stop wanting to hurt the people who had hurt me (i.e. society) and consequently stop killing and turn myself over to the authorities of the present world, as the realization that what I was doing WASN'T wrong (as starkly opposed to the realization that it WAS wrong, as one might assume). But, as I have often said, whatever it was that I experienced (or realized) that day was something that I have struggled with ever since to put into words, and saying that I realized that what I was doing WASN'T wrong is an example of one more failed attempt to express what happened in my "heart" (or "inner mind") that day.

What I was trying to convey with those words was the idea that I had somehow come to understand that my attempt to hurt society was futile, because all I was really doing (and later came to further understand that all I, or anyone, was even capable of doing) was hurting myself, and then projecting the pain I caused for myself onto society (i.e. imagining that they would now "feel my pain").

I have since come to understand that this is a very common sickness, exhibited not just by criminals and so-called psychopaths, but by anyone who has ever failed to sincerely forgive their transgressors. Any attempt to punish for the sake of retribution is rooted in this error of perception; this delusion, or outright fantasy, of power and control over those who we blame for our suffering.

And now, with yet more words, I have found a slightly better way to say what I was trying to say before; or at least a way to fail saying what I want to say just a little less:

What I came to realize that day was that all my attempts to make myself SIGNIFICANT were futile. That is what I was really doing by raping and murdering children. I was trying to assert my own significance, which had been repeatedly, and officially, and systematically denied by the society I was born into all my life. I was taking it back, in my mind at least, the only way I knew how; the way we are all taught, with force (i.e. the exertion of power and control).

But in that moment of awakening that I have described many times as I was a mere instant away from crushing the skull of yet another small child I suddenly saw not only the futility of my struggle for significance, but I saw that futility in the light of my TRUE AND ONLY SIGNIFICANCE! In that moment I saw the significance of life itself; a significance that does not depend on anything we do as individuals. It was this true significance that set me free from my self-defeating quest for personal (i.e. selfish) significance. I realized what "seekers" have been realizing for thousands of years or more; that we are only significant when we have eternal life, and we can only have eternal life by surrendering our attachment to the temporal one.

On the day I stopped killing and surrendered to the authorities of this world I had also surrendered to the One True Authority. You can call that "Authority" anything you like. I have given it many names myself (my favorite is still, The Living Truth), but no matter what you call it, IT is the only source of significance any of us will ever have; and we all already have it! (This is why one of the manifestations of my "awakening" had been the repeated insistence that everyone, not just me, is already significant, by virtue of their existence alone! And my struggle ever since has been the one to find that significance for everyone I meet, within myself)

(J.D. 5-25-2014)