Satan: An Autobiography - Yehuda Berg 2010
The Meaning of Life
Pitching The Pitchfork
WHY DO WE NEVER GET AN
ANSWER WHEN WE’RE
KNOCKING AT THE DOOR?
WITH A THOUSAND MILLION
QUESTIONS ABOUT HATE
AND DEATH AND WAR.
—THE MOODY BLUES
THE QUESTION
I’ll leave it to science to describe how physical creation happened. As for me, I will tell you why it happened, which is far more valuable. We start with the obvious question: If you were once soaking up infinite joy emanating directly from God, how did you end up here, today, in this fine mess? Where is God now? What happened to the infinite bliss? Where is the happy ending? Why did the Big Bang take place, giving birth to an airless, lightless, black vacuum?
Why did Happily Ever After give way to Miserably Ever More?
First, let me suggest that you should be raising these questions—not me! Therein lies one of your biggest problems. You don’t ask enough tough questions. Instead, you watch TV. You eat. You gain weight, or obsess about staying thin. You complain. You read tabloids. You’re fixated on celebrities, making idols of people that are every bit as lost and confused as you are, and probably more so.
You do as little as you can get away with. You wait around for things to change, or for someone to bail you out. But no one does because they are in the same boat.
You seek fulfillment from outside sources and get-rich-quick schemes. Or you work 70 hours a week to avoid facing reality—and your family. You worship money instead of searching for the truth. And all the while, you turn a blind eye to the suffering of others and a deaf ear to the cries of humanity.
Victimhood is the flag you fly. You believe that the universe has dealt you a lousy hand. You’re convinced life is random, grossly unfair, and coldly indifferent to your pain and suffering. It’s a dog-eat-dog existence, so you don’t have the time to think about it, much less question it; you’ve got to get as much as you can for yourself. Or, you just don’t plain give a crap about anything. At all.
Those of you who do ask questions only ask how. You never ask why. When you ask how, you are dealing with the symptom. It’s only when you ask why that you are addressing the real cause.
Big difference. Really big difference.
Well, it’s time to wake up! Start asking real questions. And don’t stop there. Start demanding real answers, too! Try your hand at a few meaningful conversations while you’re at it, and see how you feel.
I am going to lay it on the line here, so you won’t have any more excuses. I’m writing this book so you can lift the level of your game. In this manuscript, I spill my secrets. The tough questions will be raised and answered. And we’re going to engage in meaningful conversation as it relates to the story of my life—and, more importantly, your life. So let’s begin with you. Let’s find out what it is you are doing here on this small blue planet floating in a galaxy that appears to be spinning precisely in the middle of nowhere.
JONI MITCHELL AND THE MEANING OF LIFE
Joni Mitchell got it right. She nailed it with one line of lyrics from her song, Big Yellow Taxi, a major hit back in the 1960s. Incidentally, you gave me a run for my money during this turbulent decade. Love. Peace. Freedom. Flower power. You got close. But by the time the seventies rolled on by, I had managed to regain a foothold. By the eighties, I had turned that foothold into a stranglehold. I flipped “Make love, not war” into “Greed is good.” In the nineties, I started putting you to sleep with a choke hold.
By the turn of the millennium, you were out. All that was left inside your head was a pilot light. That remaining flicker of consciousness could only produce a fixation on paparazzi, celebrity, microchips, and digital toys, leaving you blind to anything of substance and meaning. Even your so-called spirituality was shallow. It was always about temporary relief, never long-term solutions. It was about idolizing so-called gurus instead of enriching the lives of people. Most of those gurus talked the talk, but they couldn’t walk the walk. Easy prey, those spiritual types who are so enamored of themselves.
So are politicians. And religious authorities. And the whole crowd in Silicon Valley, top to bottom. Scholars are a slam dunk. Physicists, a cakewalk. Wall Street bean counters, a home run. You’d fall off your chair if you knew how easy it is to manipulate all these folks.
Anyway, your false spirituality, your smugness, your pride, and your greed keep you from discovering the underlying cause of your problems. But I’ve got some good news for you. I’m going to help you do that now.
Let’s return to that Joni Mitchell lyric:
“Don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone; they paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”
There it is. Right in front of you. In black and white. On paper. A lyric as powerful, as meaningful, as anything written in the Koran, the Old Testament, or the New Testament. A lyric that captures the essence of all Scripture.
What’s the secret within the lyric?
CREATING CONSCIOUSNESS
When you—humanity, the One Soul—were originally created, you had it all. Everything. Unimaginable happiness. Unfathomable pleasure. Inconceivable fulfillment. But there was no appreciation. No genuine joy in the depth of your being. No awareness of what you truly had. Talk about taking something for granted! Let me explain.
Are you happy you don’t have a migraine headache right now? Of course you are. Were you aware of this happiness three seconds ago? Do you know why you weren’t? Your desire for this happiness was already fulfilled; therefore, you were oblivious to it. Get it? If a pounding, nauseating pain should start filling your skull, you’d become aware of this desire pretty fast.
Now, what happens when you have a migraine and the pain finally subsides? Suddenly you’re the happiest and most appreciative person on the planet. Your desire has been fulfilled, and you’re definitely feeling good about it. You now appreciate your pain-free existence!
Don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone...
In Act I of our Creation story, God created the human soul. The soul possessed infinite desires, and God filled every one of those desires with every conceivable form of happiness and pleasure imaginable. But the soul was oblivious. Unconscious. Why? The soul had been created in a perfect state of total fulfillment, right from the very first moment.
Are you following this? Just the way you were unconscious, unappreciative, of your migraine-free existence a second ago, the soul was unconscious and unappreciative of its perfect existence. The soul had no grasp of all that it was receiving. Why? The soul knew nothing else. It was made that way.
Genuine happiness can only be understood and appreciated when contrasted against the absence of happiness—unhappiness. If I am going to tell you all about myself for the first time in history, you need to understand this Universal Law. This is the way seedlings of consciousness are created.
The soul could only come to know and appreciate God by experiencing the absence of God and the loss of the fulfillment it once knew. Once the soul experienced the absence of God, only then could it be aware of the presence of God.
REPERCUSSIONS
The implications of this Law are disturbing when you stop and think about it. So, take a minute. Right now. Think. Real hard. I’ll stop inserting myself for this one moment and allow you some clarity.
The clock is ticking. Start reading…
You only value something by its absence. Candlelight is worthless on a sunlit day, yet it’s precious in the dark of night. You can recognize fulfillment only after having experienced emptiness.
I’m back.
As I said, the implications of this truth are frightening. How so? Well, in the beginning your soul was created full of contentment. That was all you knew. You were unaware of what you really had. You felt not one ounce of appreciation or consciousness.
Sit down. Take a breath. Maybe a shot of a single malt scotch. Now, brace yourself.
If the soul initially receives unimaginable happiness and it’s suddenly taken away, what’s left? Unimaginable sadness and depression!
If the soul was swimming in a sea of blissful pleasure, what remained when that sea disappeared? A desert of unbearable pain!
If the soul enjoyed indescribable serenity and it was removed in an instant, what was left? Indescribable chaos!
If God and truth are removed from the soul’s existence, what remains? Nothing but a Godless reality of lies and superstitions.
And, finally, the big one: If the soul was in a luminous dimension of immortality and it suddenly vanishes, what’s left? The dark dimension of death! And that’s what happened. The soul had no choice but to enter an opposite reality: A dark, Godless dimension of pain, sadness, chaos, corruption, and deep depression. And so its ultimate fate became death! This is right around the time that the Big Bang occurred, and the physical universe burst into existence.
TH E FIRST EFFECT
I’ll let you in on another secret. The Big Bang was my first special effect. I don’t just mean the spectacular explosion; I mean it was an actual Effect—as in, it was the result of a previous Cause.
This is a Cause that your entire world has no knowledge of, and I will divulge it in due time.
With the Big Bang, a process of learning for all of humanity was set into motion. Along this steep curve lie the purpose of this world and the meaning of life: To create a dimension where you can truly appreciate and forever enjoy the endless goodness that is your birthright. Unfortunately, based on the Universal Law you’ve just learned, your ego needs to experience pain and loss in order for you to appreciate this endless goodness. There’s always a catch, isn’t there?