Trance's Blog

Anime Relations: Boku no Pico

In the beginning, God was alone. He had all the powers possible under the possibilities that he himself sanctioned upon himself. But powers don't give company. So he decided to create the universe. After an exhausting toil of 6 days, he succeeded in his project. The universe was made and it was made best. God paid special attention to each and every little thing, each and every atom of the universe, and it showed in his creation. Everything was in perfect proportion. It wasn't just a technical marvel but also an artistic one. He made everything in pairs -- the dual nature of the universe -- so that nothing would ever be as alone as God was. All the principles of the universe were actually the opposites of what motivated God to create it. God was without gaps, the universe full of it; God was without flaws, the things in universe full of them; God was complete, universe is forever completing itself; God was alone, universe had not a single thing which did not have a counterpart. And perhaps the single most important principle of the universe, that of it being perfect despite being flawed, stemmed from God being flawed despite being perfect. God was forever atrophying, and so he made universe into something which forever became perfect. Perfection was extrinsic to God, and so he made perfection an intrinsic quality of the universe.

So much love went into creating the universe that it ended up being self-sustaining. It no longer needed God.

Again broken-hearted and alone, God created man. He thought if he couldn't have a counterpart which depended on him, he'd just create puppets to fill his lonely heart. He created man in his own image solely to lessen the pain of his existential loneliness. Man was wonderful, he thought. He had been a little careless in making him, but the end-product was nonetheless marvelous. He left Adam and Eve in heaven. But they erred. God knew that it wasn't their fault; he had been the wrong one to had been so careless in creating them. Just to hide his mistakes, he banished man to Earth. He had to somehow cover up his faults and to do that, he assumed the persona of a dictator. He never wanted to be a dictator; things just turned out this way. He was dragged against his own will to be what he was not. He was loving but he had to be cruel, he was listening but he had to be the commander, he was rewarding but he had to be punishing, he was caring but he had to be callous -- all to cover up his mistakes, all against his will.

To hide the reality behind his contradictory nature, he created good and evil so that mankind will get caught up in thinking about their own actions rather than God's. He created profound religions. The contradiction in his nature was apparent in his revelations but man couldn't make sense of it, wouldn't want to make sense of it, because God had him inspecting his own actions rather than God's words. Mankind loved religion. They wholeheartedly devoted themselves to religion. But alas, the bitter realization had to come that they were worshiping a God that wasn't God. God had messed up again. And this time there was no simple covering up. So he gave mankind ideas of religions that didn't have him as God. Hinduism, Buddhism, and all the pagan religions of the world were the result of that transcendental suggestion. If it cannot be that they worship me, then they must worship someone with no connection to me, God thought.

Ironically, Paganism was a serendipitous success. It got man more invested in forces of nature. In societies of Babylon, Greece, Egypt, and China, man had developed his faculty of conceptual thought to astonishing limits. This was God's chance again. Now that man could finally think beyond the most immediate concern, God sent his first well thought-out attempt at a religion through a man named Jesus. He chose the most illiterate part of the world at that time to send his appointed prophet because he assumed that the more educated parts of the world will understand his message by just hearing about it; so it must be sent to someplace where the people will not understand without sufficient explanation. The religion was so complete, so beautiful, that people thought Jesus a 'son of God' rather than the man that he was. Jesus couldn't convince them otherwise; he became more and more destitute, starved day after day, showed himself more humble than he was -- but all in vain. People still thought him 'son of God'.

The news of a 'son of God' was spreading. More and more educated people heard of it. They were incredulous! why would God send his son to the worst place on the Earth?! it must be a hyperbolic deception, the educated thought. So they set off on the quest to put an end to the blasphemy of the uneducated and thoughtless. Jesus was crucified. God was once again struck with a massive blow. The dear lovable man he appointed to spread his message was killed. And not even that his religion was rejected, but soon after Jesus' death, it was distorted and accepted in a manner which reminded God of his earlier, improper, attempts at religion. It was disheartening. This depressive phase lasted a good six centuries even under view of mankind's optimistic progress towards becoming thoughtful creatures.

God was done convalescing now. Once again, it was the time for him to interfere. He chose Muhammad as his appointed man. An amiable, peace-loving, creature he was. But God knew the error of being too passive. He had sent religion to an uneducated place before and it had failed. He was doing it again because the logic of sending it to uneducated places was infallible. The error was simply to be passive. He decided Muhammad to not only be a spiritual leader but also be a warlord. If the educated won't understand his message, he would make them understand it. Everything was going smoothly. An ideal society was created. Islam was, at once, both peaceful and violent. But that had to be done: the original sin of God, that of erring in man's creation, still needed covering up.

Mankind was slowly progressing. By the time God's latest religion created the ideal society, science, math, astronomy, philosophy, alchemy, and all the disciplines of man's ever-growing critical faculties were thriving. Man had become aware of himself.

Alas! the awareness of his identity led man to question God himself. God's contradictory nature in the newest religion, and even the old distorted religion, was coming into man's view. Man was recanting. The distorted Christianity was becoming more and more intolerable and that made man object to it even more. Islam was too extreme in both its lenience and its violence, and that led man to lose his respect for this religion. In this confusion, where some men were questioning God, others preserving him, and in the middle hordes of them believing in this or that religion (the biggest mistake of God: Not erasing older religions when introducing new ones), led to widespread violence and chaos. The world was in its Dark Ages. Man called it 'Crusades' as if it were supposed to be holy. God was the only silent spectator in all this; there were other silent spectators too but they were innocent. God was not innocent. He didn't even want to cry and as for laughing, he couldn't do that. Even after several glorious failures, God still kept his composure. He decided that it'd be best to not interfere with man any longer.

Without God, Man thrived. Stumbled many a times but ultimately grew and kept growing. Reason became man's fundamental mode of comprehending the world and science became the storehouse of his comprehensions. Many a philosophers had tried to get a view on God through whatever trails he had left behind now. But they had to realize sooner or later the difference between logic and reality -- that the latter was the subset of the other. No more fantasies were being created due to juvenile logic and its possibilities. Man now realized the gaps in his knowledge and he embraced them. God was a possibility he could neither embrace nor reject. God was simply not something he knew anything about. And man's maturity necessitated that he be content with his ignorance. His state of contentment assuming the form of an unrelenting quest for knowledge. The residues of religion still disturbed man here and there. But they kept on fading and are still fading. Man was independent and alone. Above all, he was free.

God was seeing all this. He was seeing man become his own God. Man was assuming all the qualities that God had, and even the qualities that God had so far only pretended to have. And undoubtedly man was more adept at utilizing his unGod-like qualities than God had been. Man was cruel but he was realizing that cruelty is for what outrages reason. Man was callous but he was realizing that callousness is for the stupid. Man could command, and he knew that commandeering is for knowledge. At last, there was a counterpart of God; and this time, it was dependent on God for God was the goal of mankind through all its tribulations, the end to its journey; otherwise man's quest for knowledge would be futile. God had found what he needed but he didn't like it at all. It was revolting. His counterpart rejected him, ridiculed him. Mankind didn't know that it was rejecting someone else and not what God truly was in himself. Man had learned to reject all that couldn't be confirmed, and that 'all' included the true God himself. God was insulted beyond limits: He had a counterpart but he couldn't converse with it; he had a partner, but it wasn't cooperating; he had something he could love and cherish, but it couldn't love him back. God knew that man could never attain complete knowledge of the universe because the principles of the universe necessitated that it be infinite. God couldn't tell which was the bigger mistake: Making man limited and imperfect or making universe unlimited and perfect? It was a paradox from which there was no way out. God could never be united with Man. The disappointment was overwhelming, the despair inexplicable. God knew that he could create everything all over again but things had gone so bad without his ever wanting to that he couldn't trust himself anymore to do anything right ever again. What's the point of doing anything at all when bad things are going to happen regardless?

On some fateful day, without anyone observing him or even knowing what day it was, God stood on the edge of Reason and gazed into the bottomless pit of Death. Death looked back at God and smiled. At least one thing in all of Eternity smiled back at God. Or did God see his own reflection? no one can tell. So he jumped. God committed suicide; leaving everything behind, the only piece that filled the gaps in the universe was now dead. 'God is dead!', some man declared on Earth. It cannot be said how this man came to learn of God's demise. Reportedly this man too was disheartened and despairing -- just like God. Maybe because he felt the same way as God and that God's death coincided roughly with his that this man came to learn of it? I don't know. At least it can't be said with any certainty. The word could never be filled again. The endeavors of man had no ultimate goal. Man will soon go back to concerning himself only with the most immediate thing in his grasp -- only that this time his grasp would be much bigger ; big enough to contemplate galaxies and milky ways. Nothing made sense anymore but man was content. His never-ending task of comprehending the infinite universe was enough to fill his heart. Man's predicament was strangely similar to one of God's pagan religion's stories. Sisyphus, they called him. He too was busy doing something which never ended. And he too, like the mankind now, was content with it.

God was dead. And man, alone and free, dazed away in his unavoidable, final, and the perpetual, trance.