Senseless... banter.

[pj]

Ah, the joys of free publication and unwitting accomplices in nefarious deeds. Senseless, you say? That is achievable. In fact, it could be argued that it has already been accomplished, if not completely then to a brilliant degree. We have climbed the mountain, only to discover nothing that we did not carry up with us. Senselessness begins to be understood with the realization that we have carried far more than we ever would have suspected or believed. (The sages tried warning us, knowing full well that their warnings would mean nothing until we had suffered the results of ignoring them. Sages can be an awfully self-serving lot, can't they?) Was the climb senseless? If not, what has it accomplished? The question is pondered, quietly, before we close our eyes and seek that single point of consciousness where there is only existence without interpretation or reason. We hope that perhaps in senselessness we can genuinely be, but discover that all we purposed to leave behind has followed us. What we unwittingly carried up IS us. Here on the mountaintop, we might even recognize that we have carefully bought and built the prison we carry, while looking out the same familiar barred windows on the magnificent vista. It is the only thing that really has changed. Our inability to simply BE has certainly not changed. It cannot, unless we ourselves change. The climb cannot change us. The hope of a climb having such power is indeed senseless on afterthought. Ah, but what of the banter, the eternal din of the tormented soul? The spirit screams as the intellect denies its very existence, both plying the jury of reason with endless banter. Banter is the sword of the zealot and the bane of the heretic, the sleight of the comic and sophist. We learn one another through our banter. If we aren't careful, what we learn might even approach truth. Alone on the mountain, the banter is revealed as the essence of the prison, the very mortar holding it all together. In ironic futility, we wield banter as the tool of choice in our feeble effort to understand, overcome and escape from our prisons in seeking that single point of existence, but the tool is useless against itself. Put the two together and you get something that sounds a lot like this seemingly pointless diatribe. Place it here, and it may just protect a small patch from the ubiquitous veneer of banter, resulting in a flaw in the finished product revealing a seldom viewed peek at the canvas itself. Visible through that hole, woven right into the fabric of the canvas, is our prison. Our prisons exist because we insist on them. They are inescapable because we fear freedom. Servitude is familiar and comfortable. We are willing slaves to our senseless bantering, though perhaps a tiny bit less comfortable with it all when we trek up the mountain to discover what doesn't wait there for us. Perhaps it isn't so senseless after all.