I am lost and confused, walking through the swamps of the earth under an eternally dark night and in desperate search for light.
From all sides of the swamp I am surrounded by a sea of people, throwing themselves in the muddy waters, incessantly looking for dirt – eating and basking in it without shame. Many of them are playing with the critters, as if cute puppies – they smile at them and caress them. Panic strikes me each time a critter comes close to me but then again I am often paralyzed by them – somewhat attracted to them, finding in horror that I too often find pleasure in them.
Often I see other somnambulists like me, not quite awake from the muddy nightmare, but in movement – in the search for a way out. They too are repulsed by the critters at least enough to want to escape from them.
Today there are tears streaming out of my eyes. From afar I can see the luminous Mansions leading way to the Interior Castle. I still remember the times when Grace has put me close to these Holy Doors. Often, and especially when the critters have been sufficiently away from me for days, I am a man of courage walking diligently for the doors, hoping that the guards will let me in to its beautiful halls.
Oh, the sorrow that is to know these open spaces full of light where wisdom thrives and the confusion of our minds clears away. If only I could fly into these halls, but too often I see hungry and greedy men run to its doors, and the all-too-familiar haste takes them somewhere else altogether, to an alternative place where critters sit in disguise with riches.
Occasionally a man with a shining bright light will come out of the depths of such a phantom place, and sits around our muddy campground, far away from the Holy Fort where the Mansions lie. When these men come out, their appearance of light confuses many, but whenever I complain that these houses and these lights are not connected to the Fort, desperate men who come from rubbing themselves in the mud implore me to cease my preaching.
How can I not refuse such reasonable request when it gives men so much hope? For I too must confess that I have gone to these alternative houses many times. Oh, sometimes in my sorrow I even find myself staring at a luminous house, which I mistake for one of the Mansions, but on a closer look I see that it’s yet another plain house, which will give me the all-too-familiar jolt of lightning to fly me away and take me to a world of delights, only to drop me back down and remind me that the delights they offered me are just hazy dreams and illusions, far from the heaven they so hard try to emulate, but close enough that hopeful but lost men like me can fall for them.
Only the mansions have permanence. Only they are eternal. But how can I reach the eternal when I am so lost? Dazed and sleepy I go back to pleasurable thoughts of the flesh, suffocated from the turmoil that is all around me.
