Speaking With Tongues

Chapter One

Chapter One, The Illusion Of Seeing What You Believe

I’ve grown up thinking not that God must be real, but that he simply is real, without need for proof, or even the thought that it should ever be proof-tested, the way no one would ever think to ask the president “Are you really the president? Is there even such a thing as ‘president’?” When your parents are God’s right hand man and left hand woman, you start to realize how people love to stick to things. They just love it. They stick and stick to just about damn anything, like an unbreakable addiction, and maybe that’s why I have what seems like an innate hatred of sticking to things and of people who stick to things. I wouldn’t have admitted this before, back when my pride was intact and I was shining it everyday like a 55 year old alumni football jock spitting on and rubbing his trophies, but the reason I hate people for sticking to things is that, whatever they stick to makes them happy. Whether it’s a religion or a boyfriend or dealing drugs, they are happy because their addiction gives them so much that a human being requires in order to be happy: certainty. And above all, the power to choose and determine their own life. Or at least the illusion of it.

Some people tell me that I am incapable of choosing my own happiness because I don’t believe that I can; I say that I don’t believe that I can choose my own happiness because I am incapable of it. Either way, no matter what cheery people say, no matter what Jesus preached or John Lennon sang, I know for a fact that it is some people’s lot in life to be unhappy, to not have the ability to choose happiness, to not have much, if any, say in the way fate maps their life out.

The problem with my knowledge is that it can’t be empirically tested, only thought-tested, because free will is an illusion anyway: you can’t prove that it exists, you can’t prove that it doesn’t exist. Free will agnosticism. And so my belief that it doesn’t will simply be ruled as cynicism, nihilism, and all the negative ism’s that are used by happy people to distinguish themselves from unhappy people in this black-and-white-with-nothing-in-between reality.

The truth is, though, that I will contradict myself a lot if I don’t keep reminding you that though I believe I have no free will, I also believe that some people do. Because it’s an illusion, some people are under it and some aren’t. Those who are under it truly do have free will, because illusions are as powerful as the reality of the skin on my bones and my eyes that make your blue, my green. All you need, to see reality, is to believe it. But who makes the choice to be under or not be under the illusion of free will? No one. And that’s the bottom line of my theory: we’re just born that way, stuck with free will, or stuck without it.

And you might notice that I tie these two concepts, free will and happiness, very closely together. Because who in their right mind would want to choose some reality that makes them unhappy? Happiness is believing in a reality which you yourself have made. It’s an illusion too; but a damn good one.