The Double Agent: A Tale of Crabs and High Horses.

The Double Agent: A Tale of Crabs and High Horses.

The religious neurotic is a double agent. He is caught up in a perpetual conflict between opposing factions. These are Christianity and Satanism. Each has something to offer him, and though their offers are distinct their appeal is the same: delivery from his fractured Soul. The situation is a vicious cycle, because to the same degree that he pursues either path they both lead to the same end: a perpetuation of the schism that divides his Heart in two.

One begins to wonder why he does this to himself. If he is capable of finding fault with both factions, why should he feel the need to CHOOSE one over the other? Why not choose both? Or neither?

The answer lies in that his motives are entirely egocentric.

Between the two villages there stands a mountain. And any one who leaves any one of these two villages can avail himself of this mount, and from its peak he can behold the beautiful interdependence of the cities.

Yet the mountain does not offer the shelter that the warring villages do. And because he lacks the courage to leave and undergo the quest alone he stays the night at one of the two homes. So he spends his life in a perpetual state of guilt and guiltiness, running frantically from one to the other in the Dead of Night, abating sorrow only with anxiety and exhaustion.

He never can fully pledge himself to either God or the Devil. Amidst Christians he feels the burden of Christian guilt, because he knows in the back of his mind that he will return to the Devil some day. When he returns to the Devil he brings with him all of the pious peace of mind that the Christians bestowed upon him generously, and to which he feels indebted for eternity. So he looks the Devil in the eye with recrimination, not only towards the Christians he has betrayed but all so to the Devil whose own sanctuary he has corrupted with Holy Water.

Each of the factions deplores its opposite, unaware of its own pretension in this naive dualism. The Christians hate for the Satanists to drag them down like so many crabs in a bucket. But the Satanists hate the Christians for their condescension. The Christians insist that their way is the only true way. The Satanists have a common pretense with them, but it is more complicated by way of the passion for manipulation. Their pretense is that the Christians are trying to trick them by pretending to be better. Yet even as the Satanists preach this they are hoping that the uninitiated will elect Satan over Jesus, only because it seems easier than to side with a one-sided dogmatist. Yet the Satanists are no less dogmatic, for they too have chosen a side. Besides: it is they that do unto the Christians the violence of calling them a “dogma”. Dogma becomes a Satanist’s karma; they point the finger at the Christians and by so doing have four more (at least) pointing right back AT THEM. Christians do not bother to say “dogma”, usually. They simply say: We are Right.

Both sides appeal to some sense of ease. The easy way for the Rational Being is Christianity. The easy way for the Emotive Being is Satanism.

All beings are both Rational AND Emotive. So ideally we would all be both Christians and Satanists.

The Double Agent is a step towards this realization, but he is a dysfunctional one. He succeeds in being both Satanist and Christian, as well as being neither. But he is divided by time and bound by his own egoism and hypocrisy. He is never BOTH AT ONCE, but rather one at a time. He is never both and neither at the SAME TIME. He is rather neither only because he is never both at once.

When an agent of either party follows him into enemy territory and seeks to expose him, that agent is thrown out of the city on the Neurotic’s own say-so. Never does the Neurotic seek to convert Christians to Satan nor Satanists to Christ. He rather acts the part of the devout wherever he stands at a given moment.

We wonder: why does he HAVE to pick a side? If he can find fault with either, sufficiently so as to get a scout banished and excommunicated upon the Neurotic’s being followed, then why does he not abandon them both? Why MUST it be EITHER, if it can only be ONE, and if it MUST be either, why MUST it be only one, and not both? Why not either make peace with them both externally, signing a truce betwixt them, or otherwise seek one’s peace up in the Mountain?

The truth is that his religion is one of temptation. Each faction offers him something to appease his egoic addictions and alleviate (but temporarily and superficially) his Soul afflictions. Christianity offers lightness of Spirit, forgiveness, and solidarity. Satanism offers power, passion, and individuality. The former is Spirit, or yang, or Heaven. The latter is Earth, yin, and Nature.

The price he pays to each is the loyalty of a fanatic who is at the same time a traitor. He is the Nazi minister for propaganda who is secretly an American spy. He is the American Nationalist who is secretly a Neo-Nazi, doomed to admit that even if both parties want the same thing each would to that same degree annihilate him for even suggesting peace between the two. And worst of all fates would be to be found in league with either by its opposite, for then both would forego him violently.

He will never attain that state of Absolute clarity he so craves, all because it is simply a political ideal. It is borne out of ignorance: ignorance of the fact that both sides are part of a Whole. Each party DEMANDS fanatical devotion without even knowing what it wants. Its most pious adherents even startle the other party members, who retain their humanity only to the same degree as they are hypocrites. The Neurotic sees this all over, and yet it is only because he is the greatest Hypocrite of all of them. And the more that he perceives it the more he projects it, even upon visitors who belong to neither village but who simply visit it from the Mountain.

The Double Agent concludes that they are relative to one an other. But by so concluding he renders them both trivial. He becomes even more parasitic than before, all because he respects neither. His guilt is transmuted into hostility; why should he be made to suffer a poor conscience when he is surrounded by hypocrites on both sides? Is he not the most honest of all of them?

In truth: he is the most DISHONEST of all of them. For despite all their contradictions the dwellers of both villages do, for the most part, BELIEVE THAT THEY ARE RIGHT. Our anti-hero KNOWS that he is wrong, because he sees how THEY are wrong. Yet he PRETENDS OTHERWISE. And so he is the lowest form of life in this entire ecosystem.

There is only one form of salvation for him, and that is in the highest form of life: that of the Mountain-Dweller.

The Mountaineer is one who has left both of the warring Villages and found solace in Spiritual Heights, alone. He understands not only the attributes, virtues and vices of each faction, but ALL SO the various MOTIVES for which people pursue these paths, and any path at all, for that matter.

Some people pursue religion because they lack love.

Others pursue it because they have too much of it.

Some people pursue it because they want answers.

Others come to it because they all ready HAVE the answers and want to be Right Together.

Some people pursue religion because they believe they should.

Others do so because they KNOW that it’s the BEST thing to do.

Some seek because they find it comforting in theory.

Others wish simply to find words for what they’ve all ready encountered, first-hand.

The Mountaineer has a Vision of Integration: that the factions become reconciled and work in an external harmony. Yet this is a path that begins in solitude, for it is only by restoring balance to the Soul that the World can be redeemed. A one-sided man all ways acts out of harmony with the Universe, which strives daily towards Integration. And if the Soul is a map of the Universe, it is by nurturing the Soul (and not oppressing it) that the World can be saved.

The Neurotic condemns the Mountaineer for his freedom, for the Mountaineer insults every faction at liberty, and often without meaning to. The Neurotic in turn harms the Mountaineer, exploiting the latter’s kindness when they travel to a land that seems to be without rules. Yet all the Universe is God’s Kingdom. All religions, both those of the Spirit as well as those of the Earth, are intended to remind us that love is the whole of the law. But since they are factions at war with one an other we confuse this Divine Law for Religious Law, and in the absence of a Theocracy we act lawlessly.

The Mountaineer abandons the Neurotic, casting him off as a degenerate parasite. The Neurotic hates the Mountaineer, remembering all the times that the latter broke the rules and asking how this fool could think to condemn him. Yet those were rules that the Neurotic himself had broken, but in secret; the Mountaineer had simply broken them out in the Open. Besides: the Neurotic himself does not know his own defense. Is the Neurotic innocent, because he was allegiant whilst the Mountaineer was deviant? Did the Neurotic retain this innocence when the seemingly amoral deviant condemned him arbitrarily? Or is it not possible that the Mountaineer represented the Way of the Opposite Faction? And then is the Neurotic not guilty on their terms? Will he not return to them with remorse, accepting hugs and lodging only with resentment, tasting poison in the food offered to him by his temporary allies?

What the Neurotic forgets is that there is a Higher Way. He is guilty not only of disloyalty but all so of arbitrary loyalty. The sin of conformistic condemnation emanates for him from the same pit as does the sin of parasitic betrayal. So the Mountaineer is just as innocent in being condemned as he is right to condemn when he is betrayed. After all: the Mountaineer betrayed no one. His loyalty is not to either church, nor even to “himself”, (a veritable construct of either of the warring worldviews, which mimics virally) but rather to the True God that rests between, above and Beyond them all.

The Neurotic only ever takes sides. Because he is governed not by the needs of his Soul but rather by the wants of his ego he never attains the ideal of integration. His Soul is in perpetual disarray, and so are his relationships. He does not admit to his own failings, because he cannot afford to be honest with anyone. Instead he employs the same dualistic, reductionistic reasoning as perpetuates the war of the two factions. If the Mountaineer thinks to condemn him for being disloyal, he will accuse the Mountaineer of being divisive. If the Neurotic is accused of being divisive, he will accuse his critic of being disloyal. In truth, the Mountaineer is neither divisive NOR disloyal. He has simply attained peace of mind and clarity in transcending and including both the factions of Heaven and Earth. His Soul is refined, and so he is undivided and non-divisive. He belongs to both parties and neither, so he is totally loyal, but never to such a degree that his loyalty estranges an opposing party.

The Neurotic cannot understand this. He will immediately equate a lack of divisiveness with disloyalty, as he will sum up a wealth of loyalty as though it were divisive one-sidedness. In so doing he even divides the entire IDEALS of loyalty and unity from one an other, so that he might claim to represent one when held accountable towards the other. And since he has so many weaknesses to be held accountable for, he must perpetually switch sides, for it is from that many sides that the blows come. And in that he proves his disloyalty as well as his divisiveness.

The only salvation one has is in loyalty to a Truth that is Higher than Faction. But until one finds the courage to climb that Mountain, one remains selfish and Godless. All factions offer you something, yet to the degree that they require warlike loyalty in exchange they are inhuman. What they offer is a poison that only “nurtures” the addiction of the ego; it KILLS the addict, whose Soul is overwhelmed by the weight of this ego. Only the selfless one who climbs to a Higher Vantage point, of one’s own free will and guided by a Higher Calling, can transcend the poisonous aspects of religion and find the God that they all are supposed to point to. All others will remain mere villagers, and some will become Double Agents.

DM.A.A.