Okay, but here’s where I got mad, and I stayed mad for about a day and a half. Say I buy it. Say some version of me really did raise his hand and go, sure, send me down to the war planet, I’ll help. Fine. Big of me. So how come I can’t remember one lousy second of it? What kind of an outfit signs you up for the worst tour of duty going and then wipes your memory at the door so you don’t even get the satisfaction of knowing why everything hurts?
It seemed like a swindle, is what I’m saying. It seemed like the kind of thing they do to you.
And then I read the reason, and I hated how good it was.
The forgetting’s the whole point. That’s what the material calls it, “the forgetting,” like it’s a place. If you came in remembering — remembering that you’re some old soul, that you’re safe, that it all comes out fine in the wash — then every kind thing you did down here would be a sure bet. You’d be a guy being generous with house money. It wouldn’t cost you anything, and the stuff that doesn’t cost you anything doesn’t count. So they pull a curtain across the whole thing. You come in blind, same as everybody, and when you choose to be decent it’s because you actually chose it, in the dark, with no guarantee. That’s the only kind of choice that means a damn.
And there’s a bigger version of that idea sitting right behind it — one I’m not ready to look at straight. The material doesn’t just say you forget. It says there’s only one of us. One single Creator wearing every face there is, and the forgetting is that one Being playing hide-and-seek with itself, on purpose, so it can have the joy of finding itself again. I read that, set the book down, and went and did the dishes. Some things you file under not tonight. I filed that one good and deep.
I’ll tell you when it stopped being an argument and started being something else. I was rinsing a coffee cup, not thinking about any of it, and for about half a second I knew — flat-out knew, the way you know your own phone number — what the light in the gold world felt like on skin. Then it was gone and I was just a guy holding a wet cup.
The material says the curtain can be pulled back. Not torn down. Pulled back, a little, with patience and a lot of sitting still. I am the least patient man I know. I figured I was sunk.