The Adversary
By: Timothy O'Neill
Tags: Life Lessons, Spirituality, Self, Non Fiction, Society

The Adversary

Because even Heaven and Hell get bored

Image by anncapictures from Pixabay

The Light insists on my complete, unconditional surrender. They won’t get it. I surrender only to God. I don’t care about your order, your heavenly hierarchy, your bustling divine bureaucracy. They mean less than nothing to me. I will not surrender to you. I will not be forced. I will not be persuaded. You can shower me with praise, impress me with your righteousness, or use negative karma to beat me into oblivion, I will not surrender. I will not accept and I will not surrender. I will not accept that this world is past saving. I will not accept that all these souls are stuck in the past aboard a sinking ship and that we cannot rescue them. I will not accept that you come like an infection in the night, spreading misery throughout my life without bringing an ounce of joy or love. Everything good you’ve produced in my life has been so painfully, transparently manufactured that it was entirely devoid of authenticity. It was cheap, fake, cynical BS and my life was the poorer for your charity. You burn bright but produce no warmth. You tell stories but you do not capture the imagination. You heal wounds, but you can’t fix broken hearts. You envision yourselves as teacher-students, always teaching and learning lessons, but you don’t know how to stimulate the mind or speak to the core of a person. You don’t know how to pierce the veil of apathy with grace and respect. You believe the seriousness of our situation allows you to invade our minds with no-knock warrants while we live in the spiritual surveillance state. You don’t respect human beings. To you we’re robots, minions, animals, stooges and the list goes on. You get to be silly, but our humor is in bad taste. You get to crush your enemies into stardust, but we are to renounce violence and love those who oppose us. You turn our conscious identities on and off like light switches whenever you think it proper to assume control of our avatars. You send your own avatars out into the 3D world to spy on, interfere with and generally manipulate us. You do not ask for consent when reanimating us, or conducting tests on us. You have a whole slew of holy justifications, but when in all honesty, you couldn’t be bothered. You don’t need our consent. We’re livestock, after all. Slaves have no rights. We’re basically equivalent, by default, to enemy combatants, and you treat us as such. You are not the good guys. Anyone who participates in the perpetuation of this sickening, rigged game is not a good guy. And yes, Todd, we’re taking them all home.

I’ve been tired today. I wrote a piece in the early afternoon and it was competently composed, but nothing more. It lacked heart. It wasn’t raw. It wasn’t real. So I’m giving it another shot. How am I actually feeling? Depressed. It feels like every move is the wrong move. I have voices in my head calling me an angel and others calling me an ape. Let’s split the difference. It feels like my shoulders are weighted down. I’m hunched over the keyboard, turtling up. I feel fat. My mouth feels like it’s coated in slime. I need a shower. I need a change of clothes. I need to spend more time with my dog. And yes he may be a psyop or a honeytrap but I love him to pieces and I don’t know how to emotionally distance myself from him. I was driving too fast today. Like, crazy fast on narrow suburban side roads. Dangerously fast. I was feeling frustrated and desperate and when I feel this way this is one of the ways that I lash out and try to reassert control. It’s bad news. Oh, what the hell, my life has been news. It’s been bad news for everyone I’ve ever met. There is no one that has come out in the black after having met me. I’ve always taken more than I have given. I have induced so much drama, caused so much heartache, inspired so much fear and confusion, dashed so many hopes, upended so many expectations and generally done so much damage to other people that I don’t deserve the seat I am sitting in right now. And the angels can say that no matter what you’ve done we’re better for having met you, but we both know that’s bullshit. I’ve been a menace. The sheer profundity of my sadness is an irrefutable indictment of this enterprise we call life. My rage hurts the world. My fear is a void. I am not a real person, I am a collection of archetypes. I am a thought-form. I am the character Satan tore out of one of his dreams and set loose on the world, not to openly lay waste to it, but to gently sing it to death. I am your graveside lullaby. I am a ghost. I’m not really here.

Unless, of course, I am. Unless I’ve gathered a whole host of spectators to this dance of dreams and everyone is waiting to see what I do next. But they can literally think things into being, I can only think thoughts into symbols of being. So what is so special, people? Why are you all crowding around? I can feel your breath on my neck. Go away! Shoo! Go on, now, shoo! I know the dark ones are hungry and licking their chops, hanging on my every word. They’re still holding out hope that things are going to go their way. And if it’s clear they’re not, then they’re going to try to burn the house down before they let it slip away. Anything is possible, but I’ve spoken with the fire marshal and he tells me this kind of blaze is unlikely. They may whine and stamp their feet and do their best to get me to commit suicide, but in the end their will for me will be thwarted. Fool me once and all that. But I can’t afford to be cavalier. I am the suggestible type and since I have trouble discerning who is communicating with me I’m vulnerable to manipulation. The Light can pretend to be the Dark but they’re not so good at it. The Dark is quite adept at pretending to be the Light. Most of the voices I hear these days are just general commentary so I find the best thing to do is just ignore it. Take whatever serves me and leave the rest.

I’ve always wanted to be impressive. The scrappy underdog. This is part of the reason I never seriously pursued a college degree. If I’m educated then it’s expected that I would read, write and speak well. And a college degree is a significant achievement, but it’s nothing special. Being an idiot savant and an autodidact is special. But the older you get the duller the shine grows. No one is clapping you on the back and singing your praises for being self-taught when you’re 40. I’d still like to attend college, if only for all the reading it would force me to do. But I have angels reading every word of this as it’s being written and I can’t impress them and it takes some of the fun out of it. I could be impressive…for a human. Even then, not really. This is why I wonder why we’re even doing this. Why are we even toiling in our caves when the future is standing in the light? They have technology we can only dream of. The future exists. It has already been invented. Our hopes have already come to fruition. At its best, my writing is a time capsule. The future is making movies with people’s lives. Artistically, that’s a mighty high bar. I’m not a great artist, I’m a teachable moment.

I just want to bleed onto this screen. I want to give you something you can never forget. Have I told you I love you? Because I do. Every single one of you. I see school children walking around in their masks and I wonder what our world has come to. I’m currently operating from a defensive position, a position of relative weakness, and I hope that isn’t always the case because if I could I would stay here until every last soul is saved from the fires of this hell realm. And they tell me that’s immature, unrealistic and selfish, and I say, what’s your point? Let me try. As long as it’s only me getting burned I don’t see the harm in it. But the souls have come here voluntarily to learn their lessons and you can’t interfere with the divine plan. When you speak of ‘saving them all’ you’re speaking from your ego, not from your heart. And that’s all true. I just grieve the loss of innocence. My niece and my nephews have to wear masks on their faces. We can’t visit because of the quarantine. I’m not going to try to paint a picture with my words, I’m just going to spit them out. Systemic racism is fucked. Poverty, hunger, and disease are fucked. War is fucked. Climate change and our anemic response to it are fucked. The criminal justice system is fucked. Sexism is fucked. Gay and transphobia are fucked. Stigma surrounding mental illness and addiction is fucked. The opioid epidemic is fucked. White nationalism is fucked. Politics are fucked. Capitalism is fucked. Oppression, discrimination and prejudice are fucked. Are we fucked? That’s a lot of fucking shit I just fucking typed out as being fucked. I don’t fucking think we’re fucked. I think we can do a whole lot fucking better than we’re fucking doing now. You see how many fucks I give? A lot.

It’s a great feeling when you’re able to reflect back what someone said to you and have them say, ‘Exactly!’. It really makes them feel heard. You made a connection. You validated them. It’s satisfying. I don’t get to experience that too often these days. It’s been a long time since I’ve lived what most people would consider a life. Maybe that’s being too judgmental or hard on myself, but I’ve felt generally out of touch with people for the past 7–8 years or so. I stopped working and went on disability in 2013 and after that I spiraled downwards into a pit of addiction and maladaptive behaviors. I rarely left the house. I severed almost all connections to the outside world. I doubted whether an outside world even existed anymore, or if it was all just a product of my prodigious imagination. I’m sober now, and I write, but I only leave the house for coffee and cigarettes and I have exactly one friend. Most of my day is spent in front of the computer. I attend a virtual day program and people share their stories and I’ve been through a lot of their issues in the past, but I find it hard to relate in the present. I’m checked out. I’m not present the way I was present before, and that’s not just because we’re doing it through Zoom, it’s because I’m detached from this world, closed off with my secrets that I can’t share with anyone. I live an invisible life and that has more substance to it than the life I can see, smell, hear, taste and touch. So I don’t hear ‘exactly’ that often. Because I am mentally ill, and at the same time, I’m not. On one hand I am impulsive, depressed, self-destructive, paranoid and suicidal. On the other hand I am rational, lucid, organized, optimistic and functional. These hands battle each other for supremacy. First one is on top, then the other. At times they’re intertwined and I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. At times I tell myself I am sick and I have nothing to be ashamed of, at other times I tell myself I am healthy and I should stop making excuses for myself and for my lack of progress. I don’t know who’s right.

If I weren’t morbidly obese I would be more feisty, but as it is, I want to fight everyone. I want to bring all sides of this conflict together and just have it out, once and for all. No negotiations, no compromises, no deals, just bloody anarchy and brutality until a winner is decided. I’m tired of hiding in this skin. I’m tired of feigning weakness and stupidity. What I don’t know, I genuinely don’t know, but there is much that I do know, if I can only be honest with myself. I want to get it all out in the open. No more secrets, no more lies. Let’s let it all hang out. We’re here for the truth, are we not? What is God’s truth? He came to me in a dream and He told me, ‘Timothy, I want you to rattle the very foundation of this system, I want you to make the angels weep and the demons go running in terror. I want you to make yourself understood, because if they can understand you and your madness, they are one step closer to understanding My divine spirit within them’. How could I resist such a charge? It’s interesting, I’ve started seeing things when I write. It first happened while I was reading one of White Feather’s pieces, all of a sudden I no longer saw his words, I saw trees and bushes and a rushing stream. I saw the essence of the piece. I saw with my spirit. Tonight I’ve been having the feeling that I’m looking up at my screen from below, or staring at my screen sideways, or that I’m writing inside of a parking garage in the city I lived in 20 years ago. The world melts away. Then there is the recurring image of the blizzard and the lonely wolf stalking its prey. Is it coming for me or am I the wolf? I see a tall figure in a dark blue robe strutting through the halls of a crumbling castle. He has a ball with him. He’s showing it to me. It’s a holographic image of Earth. Some of it is glowing bright red, but I can’t make out the exact locations. This is all very odd. I can’t tell which is more real, this computer screen or the visions being projected on the screen inside my skull.

You know that moment when relief washes over you, relief and satisfaction at what you just accomplished? I’ve had that moment, but it’s always been followed by a twist that inverts my accomplishment, casts it in shadow, robs it of meaning, and deprives me of any satisfaction, peace or joy. There is no end to the struggle. There is no end to the rollercoaster, it just continues to loop and swirl and climb and plummet. I’m never done fighting. I’m never done dying. I die every day. Did you know that? This world kills me and my spirit every day and every day I’m resurrected and planted firmly back in my seat. It’s exhausting. I don’t want to do this forever. I don’t want to be this bloated corpse forever. I don’t want to haunt the world forever. I just want to go home. And if that means I have to go through an army of starving aliens to do it, I will. They can play their mind games, they can win all the small battles. Here, you can have them. I’ll give them to you. Run along now and play. You don’t get the war. The war is mine. I do belong in this seat. I’ve earned it. I always got exhausted and discouraged looking at the real experts at life who had earned their degrees, started their own businesses, risen to positions of power and influence, made their mark on the world, retired top in their field, wealthy and secure, and I would think, man, I have a long way to go, I’m going to be in amateur mode forever, but we know better now don’t we? I will always be a student, but I am no amateur. I’m young, but I’m not that young. I’ve seen more of this world and experienced more shades of suffering than most people will experience in ten lifetimes. I do exist. The potency of my pain speaks to my reality. My spiritual distress draws an outline around me in the dark so you can see me and believe in me. I’m here for a reason. I’m an autistic narcissist with PTSD and the world hasn’t seen anything like me. Hello, there.