Living Things

by Douglas Mercer

WE LIVE AND WE LEARN, they say; but the ones who “live” without learning don’t live at all. For to learn is to earn, and in the spiritual world only those who work get to eat; and one only gets what one pays for. To learn is to develop, to evolve, to figure things out, to extrapolate, to put two and two together, to read between the lines, to take a limited body of data and make deductions.

The world is in a constant state of evolution, and in the entire history of the Universe (13.4 billion years and counting) not the all the suns, the galaxies, or the planets can hold a candle to the human brain; indeed, it is the human brain which is the point of the Universe in the first place; as far as I can tell, the human brain is a machine for understanding and creating and it has only one flaw; in order for it to work, one has to use it.

The prophet William Pierce wrote in On Living Things (1979) that man is not a spectator to this evolutionary process, but a participant in it. That is, he is an actor on the stage of eternity — and one with agency. And indeed not only is man an agent in the Universe, he is the agent in the Universe, the one and only, the one without whom the Universe cannot achieve its destiny.

This destiny is of course the final disclosure and revelation of the Creator’s purpose, the purpose which is, according to Dr. Pierce, “the self-realization of the Creator, the self-completion of the self-created.” That is, the Creator is using us (we who have Divine Consciousness) to achieve its aim, which is to show itself to us and to thus finally merge itself with us. This is as far as far can be from the notion of a “savior god” that descends from the sky to become incarnate flesh, or emerges from the clouds to save the day in the nick of time. Indeed, in reality the reality is the reverse: That is, the opposite is apposite — in simple terms, the Creator needs us in order to self-actualize. Even closer to the truth is that the relation of ourselves to our Creator is an equally reciprocal one in which the one needs the other as much as the other needs the one; that both are only partial without the working together of both. The final feast of the gods will be a joint effort, a joining of hands in Valhalla.

In order to achieve this perfect state of reality, to complete the purpose of the Creator, we must become activated. To do this is to learn how the Creator operates, and what the plan is for the world. That is, we need to listen to what he is saying; and, to do that, we need to listen to the Creator speak. In doing so we attend to a strong cluster of words built around the word work.

Work has many levels of meaning. For example, the Universe is the work, the artwork, of the gods. Then there is the fact that we have to work (meaning both “struggle” and “operate correctly” as in “does it work?”). And the word can also mean an artistic achievement — an opera, a drama, an “opus.” It can also indicate the means by which an end is achieved, as in “how does this process operate?” (how it works). And work is nearly the same word as word (98/104) and “the word” is how many have expressed throughout history how the Creator works in the world (also nearly the same word as word).

Once one has seen between the Creator’s lines, one will no longer see this as merely doing magic with words, but as the serious working out of the plan. For language is not only alive, it is the living voice of the Creator, and one must attend the words and listen to them and interpret them properly. For if language is alive, we are not yet, not yet wholly and not yet holy. For “to divine” is to understand, and to be divine is to finally fully understand — to understand the Creator and its creation in its completeness. That is, we will then become real, we will realize (one might say “have real eyes”), we will have become the self-created Creator having created ourselves. We will become the one who creates, the one who makes, the one who wills, having finally learned the last lesson: that only those who work may eat, and you don’t get what you pray for but what you pay for. For dead things float downstream, but we living ones swim forever upward against the current, working and making our way to the sunny uplands which will be our home.

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