PART 2, TAKING IT TO ANOTHER LEVEL
APRIL 6, 2011. Literature, plays, films, and television are littered with stories that contain a mystery—and at the end comes the payoff, when the mystery is solved.
For a moment, the audience is absorbed, and then there is the let down.
It’s as if a voyage through a rich forest suddenly ended in a vacuum, in a Nothing.
As long as the secret and the mystery can be prolonged, you have the audience with you. But when the solution is revealed, all you have is the thirst for another mystery. “Tell us more! Tell us another one! Give us another puzzle!”
An ancient manuscript, an unexplored cave, a probe sent to a distant planet…there is a powerful desire to come to the punch line…and then…boredom edges in.
I once had a conversation with a modern guru in the field of self-improvement. He is a very successful author and lecturer. At one point, he said, essentially: You know, I have nothing left. I’ve written these books, I’ve told my audiences what they need to know. They keep wanting more. The next book, the next lecture. I’m tired. I don’t have any more secrets. They don’t really want to know what works in their lives. They want stories. They want the thrill of the hunt for the next big thing. But when they get it, I can see them go over the edge into depression…
It’s a paradox. People want to massage a secret, but they want it to be solved. Yet, when it’s solved, they don’t care anymore. But if you give them a real secret, one that doesn’t resolve, one that challenges them in a different way, they throw up their hands and give up. They claim they “don’t understand.”
Several years ago, I went to the Vatican, to the Sistine Chapel, to see the Michelangelo fresco. I sat in the room with several hundred other visitors. We all craned our necks, looking at the famous ceiling. I’m sure that for many of those people, it was the fulfillment of a dream: to finally witness the greatness of one of the most famous works of art on the planet.
Afterwards, outside in the corridor, I watched them leave. What I saw on their faces was a neutrality tinged with boredom.
The mystery was solved. They had seen the thing in person, finally. It was the end.
I could have papered over that ceiling with a modern painting that would have puzzled them for the rest of their lives—withholding its mystery—but then the travelers would have been angry. They would have said, “I don’t understand!” No, the secret must be revealed, even if the outcome is a let down.
I’m sketching in here the anatomy of The Voyage to Discover What Exists.
It is one of the great enduring passions. But it has a vast and gaping downside. The payoff melts into a sagging passivity. “Well, that’s over. What’s next?”
Remember the Mike Nichols film, The Graduate? In that middle-class drama, the young Benjamin goes to extreme lengths to win Elaine, the daughter of Mrs. Robinson, who has seduced him. He storms into Elaine’s wedding; she deserts her fiancee. Outside the church, Ben and Elaine catch a bus and take their seats in the back. As the film ends, Ben just sits there. He has captured the prize. The secret is his. He stares vaguely at nothing. No joy. Only a blank.
Here is a statement attributed to Nobel Laureate Albert Szent- Gyorgyi (1937 Prize for Physiology and Medicine): “In my search for the secret of life, I ended up with atoms and electrons, which have no life at all. Somewhere along the line, life has run out through my fingers. So, in my old age, I am now retracing my steps…”
Try to count the number of cosmologies that have been floated since the dawn of time on this planet. Each one is a picture of What Exists behind What Seems to Exist. Even at that level, the search goes on. The master of them all, Plato, formulated a Theory of Forms, static and perfect Ideas sitting above and beyond ordinary reality. What a “discovery”–and yet, when he tried to put together a political state based on it, he was forced to conclude that utter fascism was the only possible authority.
In fact, fascism tends to become the outcome of every metaphysical search for What Exists, once an answer has been settled on. High priests, despots, mad rulers, kings who claim divine right run the show.
Up the road 50 or a hundred years, we will see whether science itself and its voyage of discovery turns into a genetic dictatorship.
Something that appears so right and so real and so entrancing, the attempt to nail down What Exists, has such a strange result.
What is going on?
How many seekers after the grand conspiracy behind all conspiracies become bogged down in their own journey, especially after they believe they have the answers to their ultimate questions? How many travelers along this road decide their findings add up to a portrait of a hopeless locked-down future, from which no one can escape—and then give up the whole enterprise in disgust and disillusionment?
How many people will fall into a weary swamp after December 21, 2012, passes and the revelation, the secret they have been chasing, doesn’t yield up the kind of personal illumination they were counting on?
Many years ago, a friend told me about a UFO cult that had existed somewhere in the Midwest, in the 1920s. The leader informed her followers that a great ship was coming to take them all away to a better place, a wonderful planet. The date and time were set. The leader had been receiving instructions from alien ET guides.
On this basis, all the members of the cult sold their houses and belongings (as if money would be useful on Planet X?). On the appointed date, the group was sitting in room, waiting for the ship to arrive. After several delays, the leader emerged from another room and said the UFO guides had just told her they weren’t coming after all, because the catastrophe that was supposed to decimate Earth had been sidetracked and avoided.
So there they were, sitting in a room, all dressed up and nowhere to go (and nowhere to live).
The result? The effort at recruiting new members expanded, and the cult grew! The leader told them a new story about what was coming in the wonderful years ahead—a new mystery was in progress.
THE OBSESSION TO DISCOVER WHAT EXISTS.
What Exists is, on a significant level, the greatest con game ever invented.
Everyone wants to chase down WHAT EXISTS and reveal it.
If Jesus really survived the crucifixion or was never hung on the cross, and escaped the Middle East, and if he married and had children, and if those children had children, and if that bloodline still exists…
Ten or 20 years after this great secret is exposed…how many of the millions of people who were originally galvanized by it still care or think about it….it’s old hat…we want another story…tell us another story….
Oh yes, that whole business about Jesus…that was pretty fantastic, wasn’t it…so tell us another story….
Well, perhaps I could tell you one story that keeps on driving its way through time and space and even beyond the Continuum. I don’t know whether it would interest you. I don’t know whether you would be willing to buy it. It has a few unusual wrinkles in it. It cuts across the grain of all human programming, especially the programming you’re sure doesn’t exist in your particular case.
And it definitely contradicts the whole obsession with finding out What Exists. It’s definitely not one of those I-have-a-mystery stories, so you might be exasperated. It might puzzle you and make you turn away. But on the off-chance that you would enjoy it, I’ll give it a shot…
Coming: Part 3.
JON RAPPOPORT
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