Mesopotamia - The Redeemer (34 page)

“The Master of light is not the
equivalent of God?”

“No. The God of the Jews, Muslims
and Christians is Yaldabaoth, an inferior God, Creator of the
physical world. The snake is the Master of Light, who imparts
knowledge. Adam and Eve served the inferior God out of ignorance,
and therefore they were condemned to exile. They managed only a
small taste of Gnosticism, from the knowledge the Master of Light
had offered them, and then they were banished from Paradise. The
Master of Light offered them knowledge, but they chose to obey the
inferior the demiurge Yaldabaoth,” said Smoke with obvious
contempt. “Had they not feared the demiurge, they could have stayed
in Paradise.”

'Self-nullification is an attempt
to return to Paradise, or as Enosh put it, to have the pleasure of
being rid of the burden of desire,' Sophia thought. She asked
Smoke, “What did the Master of Light offer? What does the Tree of
Knowledge bear?”

“You mean to ask what was the thing
Adam and Eve were supposed to discover regarding the difference
between good and evil?”

“I suppose so.”

“What was it that when revealed,
filled them with shame?”

“Nakedness,” she answered.

“How are good and evil related to
nudity?”

Sophia looked up at him, waiting
for a reply.

“Truth says that they felt shame
over nothingness, the nothingness that came with their nakedness.
Clothing hides the fact that there is nothing to hide.” He stopped
so she could understand what he said. “Do you understand?”

“I think so. Go on.”

“The God Yaldabaoth told them the
truth. The truth being that they were empty. But it was said in a
critical manner, as if they were meant to be full. They hid behind
clothing so they could believe they had something to hide. The
truth, as known by the Master of Light, is that there's no need to
hide the emptiness. This is the deception of existence, of
substance, of Yaldabaoth; truth is nothingness, it is spirit. We do
not deny the nothingness, rather the deception of substance. While
you, the rest of humanity and the Pythagoreans in particular,
equate existence with the good and nothingness with the bad. We
know that the good is knowledge about nothingness while the evil is
the ignorance of it. Evil is the false belief in existence.”

“How then do you explain that Adam
and Eve experienced eternal pleasure in Paradise even before they
approached the Tree of Knowledge? Before the deception of existence
was revealed to them?” Sophia gently stretched the disagreement
between them.

“It was a fool's paradise!” Smoke
said angrily. “Fools who knew nothing about what is and what isn't,
who tasted neither from the Tree of Knowledge nor from the Tree of
Life.”

“Tree of Life?”

“Yes,” Smoke said with a Messianic
fervor which reminded her of herself. “Tasting from the Tree of
Knowledge heralds the truth of false existence but that knowledge
offers no release. Tasting from the Tree of Life gives not only
knowledge, but a release from existence. It grants
immortality.”

“I do not understand,” she
recognized the desire for self-nullification but pretended not
to.

“Physical life is limited by how
long the body can live. After the body dies, there is eternal life.
Tasting from the Tree of Life destroys the body which has trapped
the spirit.”

He murmured the last words
carefully. Sophia assumed that he regretted revealing too much
about his faith and too eagerly, that he was concerned he might
reveal his mission. But now she understood. According to Gnostic
belief, tasting from the Tree of Life offers the death they yearn
for. She had relieved his burden of concealment and used the
opportunity to steer the conversation in the direction she
wanted.

“If so, then your family members
who were killed in the bombing are actually living eternally?”

“Of course,” he was obviously glad
she understood what he was saying.

'This is a perfect religion, there
are no loopholes,' she thought, impressed. 'Even more perfect than
the Pythagorean religion. There is no death, only immortality. How
can you possibly undermine such a belief?' Suddenly, she doubted
her ability to influence Smoke. Could she propose a counter-opinion
to him? How could she sell him on the concept of actuality?

“What do you believe?”

'Finally, he is taking interest in
me,' she thought. 'And maybe he's just asking for the sake of his
mission, but nevertheless, it's still interest.' “I believe in an
organization, in order, in a pattern and a formula. I agree with
you that at the basic level there is nothing. However, grains of
nothing, when arranged in a certain way, create existence. I
believe that God exists and he is the order of the nothingness.
This was Orpheus' discovery.”

“This God, this demiurge
Yaldabaoth, do you believe in him? In the wayward son?” Smoke's
voice was impassioned once again. “You... create, generate! You...
are a woman!” He hurled the final words at her in anger.

Sophia was not discouraged by his
anger. His interest in her worldview encouraged her. “As a creator,
I am part of the divine order,” she said calmly.

“What is this belonging you speak
of? What order? Octavia, your homeland, is it so organized and
planned out like a space station? A Paradise of fools, who deny the
instability of this order! How can you see the light when your
order blocks the crack from which the light streams forth?”

'Enosh would agree with him on this
point,' Sophia thought. She flinched at his reaction but dared to
provoke his aggression even further. “Beauty is found in order!
Immortality is also found in order, not only in death!”

Her provocation worked, perhaps
more than she had anticipated. He hissed angrily, in an aggressive
tone, “When the bombers chased us to the edge of the desert, there
was no order. They did not bomb at a set time or place. They did
not kill the old before the young in any particular order. The
limbs that were torn apart did not arrange themselves in a perfect
circle around the crater.”

'Just like the Gnostic conquests,'
she thought, but Sophia passed on the opportunity to contradict him
with it. 'It is still early.' Now she understood Enosh's words, how
the tragedies that befell him influenced his worldview.

“But the Master of Light manifested
himself in a certain order, right? The snake with diamonds on its
skin—geometric patterns—is that not order? The coils he withdraws
into, is that not order?” She stopped, preventing herself from
saying all the things she was thinking.

'Isn't a mission directed towards a
specific goal a form of order? The hierarchical relationship
between Truth and the Master of Light, isn't that order? And why
would they call their God “Master” if not to indicate some order?'
Sophia realized that her ability to direct the conversation
according to her purposes was limited by the fact that she was a
Pythagorean and her subsequent reliance on the principle of order.
Enosh was enlisted to help her see beyond that limit. She reminded
herself once more that it was up to her to dismiss her preconceived
notions of existence so that she could relate to this idea of
nothingness. She thought with compassion about the chaos that had
reigned in his life before. Maybe she needed to stop instigating
conflict with him so that he could feel a sense of belonging, to
allow for the belonging of his feelings? She recalled another
conversation she had had with Enosh.

“It is imperative that a person has
free will and not entrust it in someone else's hands, but what is
the purpose of such desire? What can we know about what people,
particularly the Gnostics, want?”

“We can know,” replied Enosh
without hesitation, “that there is a basic desire to belong.”

“To belong to what?”

“It depends. Let's speak in your
language. Mathematically, the part belongs to the whole. But what
is the part and what is the whole? This is already up to the way
you interpret belonging.”

“I don't understand.”

“The limb belongs to the body, the
word to the sentence, man to society. Take you, the Pythagoreans,
for example. You build artificial planets in order to express your
belonging to the cosmos. You can say that you are a celestial body
which belongs to a group of celestial bodies.”

“And the Gnostics?” she asked.

“The Gnostics are outcasts, they do
not belong.”

“And yet, how do they exercise
their basic desire to belong?”

“They are the exceptions, the
outcasts, belonging to the group of outcasts. Because they feel
that humanity has rejected them, they created for themselves a
community of outcasts. This is not just a group of people living
together. I'm speaking of a theoretical group. A definition. A
category. This is a ploy of the Gnostic mentality. Once they become
part of a group of outcasts, they cannot be ostracized. If they are
excluded, they are further defined as outcasts. You cannot expel
them because they refuse to be part of the group in the first
place. There is no place to banish them to. They are already in
exile and they are trying to distance themselves even further.”

“And for what reason do they wish
to destroy?”

“In order to increase their group
of belonging. To expel the entire universe into a group of
refugees. You, the Pythagoreans and the Gnostics, are similar
because you deny the use of a line of separation, that which
defines those that belong. You drain it of meaning because
according to you everything, inanimate, vegetable, animate, and
speaking, everything belongs. According to you, everything is under
the jurisdiction of divine mathematics. The Gnostics, on the other
hand, favor a philosophy which preaches that everything nullifies
everything. The polarity of the two different approaches makes them
rival ideologies.”

“Why?”

“Because there is no rule without
exception, there is no group without a part that remains on the
outside. The exception makes the rule. That is why these two groups
consider the other an abomination. The premise for making
definitive boundaries for the group is based on who's left outside
of the group.”

“And how do the Socratics
belong?”

“The Socratic group is defined by
its living members, who are defined by not being among the dead
whom we remember. To live means to belong to the living and
remember the dead.”

“My Father." she looked up at
him.

“Oh, a living Gnostic is more a
part of your group than your dead father, that is if you remember
him. Belonging applies to the living people, therefore you belong
to the group of humanity. Either you belong to a humanity, if you
are alive, or you are on the outside, considered dead. In days
past, when they believed in ghosts and demons, ghosts were
considered the souls of the dead who were trying to rejoin the
group of the living. The role of the witchdoctor was to separate
between the living and the dead and to banish the dead to their
place, either in the netherworld or in the heavens, to restore the
order of belonging to its rightful state.”

“And now? What turn is required of
me?” asked Sophia.

“To recognize the finality of
death. To note the difference between the living and dead, to see
the living as a place of belonging. The social connection is what
enables humanity to belong to the group of the living. In the past,
the Gnostics took part in the order of humanity, but they stopped
believing in its existence. The Gnostic doesn't believe even in the
cosmic order of physical existence. Nevertheless, one of the proofs
of the Gnostic attempt to belong is in their effort to connect
their module with your processor. I suggest that you involve him in
the order of humanity.”

“How so?”

“In a dual process. The Gnostic
individual needs to retrieve for himself something that he pushed
out, and simultaneously return to the group that rejected him.”

“Again, how?”

“I will give you an example. When a
boy falls and skins his knee, he runs to his mother, receives a
kiss on his knee, and only then does he begin to cry. When he's
done crying, he goes back to play. Due to the fact that she cares
about his pain, and marks the painful place with a kiss, the mother
allows the knee to belong to the body, the pain is given a name and
plays an active role in the story of his experience. The crying is
the story of his experience. In order to restore a sense of
belonging, the mother returns the injured knee to the boy's
physical senses and the boy returns to his relationship with her.
This dual process, to return the knee to the boy, and the boy to
his mother, has been accomplished with one kiss.”

“How does the mother create an
environment of belonging for the boy? How do I do the same for a
Gnostic who feels hurt and rejected?”

“Try to answer that yourself,”
Enosh challenged her.

It suddenly became clear to her,
“The blood challenge!”

Enosh waited for her to
explain.

“Sin says that my father could not
foster a relationship with the Gnostics. He could not overcome his
disapproval of their beliefs. This was the blood challenge that he
failed.” Sophia stifled her tears. The deeper she went in her
training process, the more intense her emotions became. She took a
deep breath and smiled at Enosh's worried face.

“Are you alright?” he asked.

“Yes. Let's continue, I don't have
much time,” she said and started to breathe more steadily. “In the
blood challenge, you are required to accept them to the same degree
you would want them to accept you.”

“Correct,” Enosh said.

“I know I'm limited in my ability
to understand you, Smoke,” Sophia went on. “Unlike Earth, Octavia
has seen no wars, so I cannot relate to the experiences you've
described, the destruction of all illusions of order, and the
knowledge that comes with it. But I have also mourned, I lost my
father. I know that I am offensive to you, being a woman, but let
me remind you that it was the woman who first followed the Master
of Light in the biblical story you told me. I want to taste from
the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil. Would you include me? Would
you let me taste it?”