The Nomadic Alternative – Page 45

Zion is not a City of Stone but a State of Illumination. Its citizens irradiate that tranquility of mind the Buddha called Nirvana. For the Muhammedan it was a Mirage of beautiful houris and fine-limbed boys, for Baudelaire the "Luxe, Calme et Volupté" of an artificial paradise, for St. John of the Cross "the height of spiritual perfection, which is union with God by the road of spiritual negation", and for Tolstoy's character, Ivan Ilyich, it came as a clear light of joy on his deathbed.

But here we shall part company with the "wanderers for God" who imagine their footsteps lead through a bleak vale of horror in this world to a heavenly Kingdom in the next and who morbidly insist that the body is a whipping-post which improves for being whipped soundly in preparation for the life everlasting. Belief in the resurrection signifies a disastrous inability or unwillingness to adjust to this world. And those professional, permanent travellers, the hunters and gatherers, have no illusions about this matter. They ignore both material and spiritual betterment in this world and deride the hope of immortality in the next. Gipsies have neither cult nor belief in the world to come. "When we die we die", the Kiwu Pygmies say, "and that is the end of us." The religious journey or pilgrimage beckons the settler to make up for journeying time lost in settlement, and tries to avert the horror of dissolution while walking through the Devil's Field. The death of the body is simply a moveable fixture in the 'progresse of the soul'.

A religion is a travel guide for settlers. The "great malady, horror of one's home" is not a disease at all. For when we analyse and compare the symptoms and effects, the disease evaporates. The malady becomes the cure. Movement, for its own sake, cures a whole Pandora's Box of afflictions which combine to form the Frustrations of Settlement. Many would like to blame our 'sins' such as our aggression and our greed on some flaw in our nature. This would allow them to sin more. But analysed as the sins of settlement, they are not necessarily the ills of the human species. Original Sin