THE MASTERY
OF YOUR ATTENTION WILL COME
WHEN YOU WILL START SEEING the truth..
The old man next to me focused his attention on them for a few moments before interrupting. "I'll tell you why you exist," he said in a voice loud enough to be heard over the other conversations. The room got suddenly quiet. "You're here to fertilize the female, work yourself to death, then drop dead and fertilize the earth." Several people laughed but this time the old man did not join in.
The tallest and most imposing of the three professors looked condescendingly at the "rube" in the flannel shirt who had interrupted him.
"Are you saying, then, that we're just sophisticated animals?" he asked.
"No," the old man smiled, "we’re not a bit sophisticated." There was loud laughter, most of it in our vicinity.
The professor shook his head with dramatic sadness. "We'll never build a better world with that kind of attitude."
"Spare me," the old man replied, his voice filled with disgust. "What are there, four billion ants on this ant hill? And you think they’re gonna get their heads together about anything except breeding?"
The same people laughed, Leigh the loudest, and I finally realized that the old man next to me was Richard Rose. So far I didn't think much of him, but he did have a novel way of beginning a meeting, or whatever this was. I turned sideways in my chair to get a better look at him. On the ride over Leigh had tried to explain to me that Rose had had some kind of "enlightenment" experience when he was thirty, and that he seemed to have some unusual powers. I had to admit that he had a commanding presence, but he looked more like a longshoreman than a mystic--short, broad shouldered, and powerfully built. He was in his late fifties or so, and mostly bald. What remained of his hair was white and cut close to his head. His clothes were clean, but well-worn, giving the impression of a man without much money. Leigh told me he'd written several books, but his thick, vein-lined hands looked like they'd be more at home with an ax than a typewriter. As I surveyed him, he glanced briefly over at me and I was struck by his piercing pale blue eyes. He had heavy, hooded eyelids, giving him an almost oriental look, and his sparse white goatee added to this impression.
The professor seemed irritated. "I am merely speaking of a simple desire to improve the world. A basic..."
"No one who has seen the Truth would want to change anything but his own erroneous view of things," Rose said forcefully. "Forget about changing the world. There's something much greater and more important to be done. Each person must be concerned with saving his own soul."
"That’s right," said a woman near the back of the room. She was in her forties, perhaps, with a few streaks of gray in her long black hair. She wore a lot of jewelry and a loose fitting dress that disguised her ample figure. "God placed us here on earth for a reason," she said in a slow, deliberate manner. "Every human is given the opportunity to learn the lessons necessary to become complete and rejoin God."
Rose looked at her. "That’s not what I said. If you believe that, you’re kidding yourself. The idea that life is an education for the glorification of God is absurd. Why would an omnipotent being create a bunch of ignorant people then torture them to make them better?" Rose spoke with the ease and manner of an educated man, but his accent and grammar had a slightly backwoods flavor, and he pronounced certain words with an unusual inflection, such as "glory-fee-cation."
The woman’s face reddened. "You have some rather unorthodox presumptions about God."
"What makes you think I have any presumptions about God at all? You're the one that used the word, not me." He looked away from her and spoke to everyone.
"The way people use the word 'God' is shameless name dropping, that's all. We take too big a step when we conjure up some cosmic intelligence who’s supposed to transcend all time and space, then pretend to know him on a first-name basis. Everyone tosses the word 'God' around like they know what it means, but they don’t know the first thing. Overuse has drained it of any power it once had. Everybody feels so comfortable with the word, ‘God,’ they don’t feel the need--the necessity--to actually go out and find God. To become God."
The professor spoke up again. "We'll, since you seem to be such an authority on the subject, perhaps you can settle an old philosophic question for us. Does God exist?"
"Yes," Rose said quietly, "but you don't."
