AM I THE NEW MESSIAH (?)
There is a
strong argument for assuming that I am such a man, and it derives in large part
from the quality of my religious writings, as evidenced, in particular, by
those appertaining to my philosophical literature. I'm not a crank to imagine myself literally
Jesus Christ come down from Heaven, or anything of the sort! If I loosely correspond to a Second Coming, a
Messianic equivalent, it's because people will discover that the best of my
writings pave the way for a new, higher religious orientation, and that I may
well qualify as the next saviour in the line of evolutionary ascent, so to
speak, after Christ for the Western peoples and, indeed, the world at large,
insofar as Buddha, Mohammed, and other such religious leaders were
approximately equivalent to Christ, and could only be superseded on terms
identical to my own.
I'm not by nature a vain person but a
truthful one, and so I wouldn't hesitate to consider the possibility of my
being the new and, in some sense, ultimate religious leader, if my work seemed
to indicate as much. After all, I'm well
qualified to step into the role of messiah, since, as the reader will have
learnt, I have never made love to a woman but lived in celibacy since the dawn
of puberty. Anyone who approximates to a
Second Coming is unlikely to be a lecherous individual, with a known record of
sexual indulgence behind him! I do not
say that I have enjoyed my celibacy, much less the solitude that goes with it,
but circumstances, ethnic and otherwise, have conspired to force them upon me
and the outcome, like it or not, has been a succession of literary works of
unprecedented spiritual insight and achievement - works, in all probability,
which wouldn't have been possible under any other terms!
Well then, the work is done, or nearly so
[I was wildly off the mark here in 1982], and if it's ever to be read in the
future, people will be obliged to admit, as they now admit about Nietzsche,
that its author was an exceptional individual who evidently lived under most
unusual circumstances. Whether or not
his subsequent life deviated from those circumstances to any extent ...
wouldn't affect the quality of the work already done, which should correspond
to the status of Messianic teachings, as relative to a Second Coming
equivalent. That the 'new Christ' began
as a saint and gradually became a sinner ... would not, were that to actually
transpire, amount to a condemnation or refutation of his work in an age as
de-mystified as this, when no-one can reasonably be expected to be superhuman or
divine. I don't know whether or not I
shall have the luck to find a suitable woman, but I doubt that I would remain
celibate just for the sake of bolstering my Messianic status. The depression I live with is surely a
sufficient argument against that!
And yet, if I remain poor because my work,
necessarily radical, is unlikely to find a large following in my own lifetime,
then the chances of celibacy remaining my fate are pretty high, and my
Messianic reputation will doubtless receive a posthumous boost in
consequence. Whether I could in fact now
acquire a woman, even if I were in a position to do so, is itself a debatable
point, since my past conditioning and moral intelligence combine to make me a
pretty spiritual individual whose spirituality may well intrude between his
sensual interests and his human integrity.
One does not, of course, know everything about oneself, no matter how
introspective one may happen to be.
Moods change, and so too, from time to time, do circumstances. It is better, I think, to keep an open mind.
But if my celibacy partly qualifies me to
step into the role of a new messiah, then so, too does the fact that I don't
smoke or drink, and have not done so for several years. Neither do I eat more than I need to survive,
since copious or expensive food would be beyond my pocket, and I'm obliged, in
consequence, to limit myself to frugal take-always. My sleep is light and, as a rule, fairly
brief. I doubt that I ever get more than
4-5 hours sleep a night and I have never slept during the day, finding it
impossible to do so. I have lived for a
number of years in north
So there are, besides my writings, a number
of reasons why I'm highly qualified to correspond to a Second Coming and be
equated with a new messiah, destined to supplant the Christian one, with the
termination of humanistic civilization and the inception of post-humanistic
civilization. The age would seem to be
ripe for the return of a major spiritual leader, even though the old
civilization has yet to end and the new one to officially begin. That the former civilization will reject my
teachings ... I don't doubt. But, then,
not every Western country is fully aligned with it, least of all
