F O C U S

Revelations: A conceptual comparison between religious myth and the human condition

This is the 90's. Welcome to hell. Two more years to the end of the world, and I feel fine, don't you? We are all connected, but disassociated, we are all extremists but more afraid than ever, we are all full of information and starving for knowledge, we are dying so we race ahead faster, and we are exposed, but no one looks.

What is happening in the world today was already told hundreds of years ago in the story / prose poem by John Milton called "Paradise Lost."

The English poet John Milton was born in 1608 in London. His Christian epic "Paradise Lost" assures his stature as one of the finest poets of the Renaissance. Raised in a strict puritanical and catholic home and school, Milton rejected Catholicism at an early age. His writings in Paradise Lost dispel the lies he was told, and brings a mortal and emotional quality to the tales of the wars between the angles in heaven before the creation of the earth. Milton's metaphoric sense of the human condition is unparalleled in this graphic and mystical tale.

This take of the crumbling kingdom of heaven and it's fallen angels brings forth the despair, agony, and hell brought on by the temptation to aspire for power, the burden of lust and the pleasures of the flesh. Milton's intense and emotional accounts of violence, greed and envy brought on by the powers of aspiration and temptation are so human in quality it's enough to make your gut wrench with the realization of where we are now. All attention to spirituality has been lost in this dark day, and all of us are blind to our own crumbling and agonizing fall and extinction. Organized religion has become a poisonous, hypocritical hierarchy, our sense of self is slowly decaying and there are a hundred sides to every plagiarized smile you see now. The similarities between Milton's account of the beginning and what many believe today as the end are uncanny.

"Which way shall I fly
infinite wrath and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is hell
And in the lowest deep, a lower deep
Still threat'ning to devour me, opens wide
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven"

And are we blind to this war, lusting after money and the flesh, living transistor dreams and pseudo-reality?
Are we the fallen angels? What the past has written, whether lies, truth or neither, is a prophetic metaphor for ourselves, self inflicted or not.

"Our torments also many
in length of time
become our elements"

What have we done, to make this our element……that only brings sadness and lust.

"In dim eclipse
disastrous twilight sheds
on half the nations
and with fear of change
perplexes monarchs"

And why would we change, what would we change into - this is who were are, every fiber, we have evolved, advanced, seen too much potential. We say we fight against time, but all we do is blindly flow into it, maybe we need to kill time because time is killing us, maybe there are no answers - maybe we're not asking the right questions…. Whatever it is, we're here - we all have one chance to scrawl our message on the wall of immortality - what will yours be?

Milton told us the story of the rise and fall of humanity in 1608. I invite you to read "Paradise Lost." You may purchase them below from Amazon.com

• Paradise Lost -- John Milton; Library Binding
• John Milton's Paradise Lost -- Harold Bloom(Editor), John Milton; Paperback
• Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained -- John Milton, Christopher B. Ricks (Editor); Mass Market Paperback

We are all reaching ahead, into the nothing, feeling around in the dark for a warm hand, while time dissolves behind us. There are no words in that darkness, the nothing gives birth to blank pages and empty thoughts. As you stare at your blank page, ask yourself what you are reaching for.