Take a mind trip with me. No, not a drug induced purple haze mind trip mind you, but a mind trip induced from fresh air and a searching heart. A mind trip can be useless or we can learn something from it. You tell me which type of mind trip this one is.Imagine that ants from your backyard garden have invaded your house and what they don't know is that they are only days away from the exterminator. These ants were content to live in your backyard garden with all its juicy fruits and vegetables until a new leader ant from another anthill put himself in charge of the ants from your backyard. This ant knows just a little more than the other ants do and this ant doesn't want the ants to dig and aerate your soil or guard the garden from harmful insects. This ant has gone as far as to believe he should be in charge of the house and has convinced the other ants that they should have all those goodies from your kitchen.
The question is how could we save these ants from the exterminator? Could we post a danger sign? No, a sign wouldn't help an ant. Could we seal the house? No, ants can always find a way into the house and therefore into death. If we spoke to the ants at the top of our voice would that help? No, ants couldn't begin to understand sound as language.
It seems that these ants our doomed.
The problem is ants don't live on our level. They couldn't even begin to understand a fraction of what we know. You couldn't teach an ant sound as language because they communicate by chemicals. If an ant is in danger it releases a chemical that whips the other ants into a frenzy to fight. If an ant finds food it releases a chemical that says food is found. The ant mind is small and limited to very basic things. You couldn't teach an ant to use a cell phone, to write poetry or to convey even simple ideas like yes or no to his fellow ants. You can't teach an ant any of the most basic things that you do every day. It is beyond them. To make things worse, the ant from the other anthill speaks their language. This ant has released a food chemical trail leading right into your kitchen. The ants from your backyard don't know what else to do so they follow the trail strait to their future destruction.
There is one thing that you can do though. You can become an ant yourself. It is really the only way to save them. If you, a human, become an ant you would still understand about exterminators and kitchens and could help the ants live. No, you still couldn't explain everything to the ants because it would still be beyond them to understand. What you could do, because you are now an ant as well as human, is speak at their level by releasing your own chemical that would lead them back to the backyard garden. The ants would have to follow your path only because they had faith in you and what you communicated to them they could not rely on their limited understanding.
No doubt the ant from the other anthill would try and stop you because he would fight to stay in control of the ants. That ant would release an attack chemical to the other ants whenever you and the ants that follow you are around. This would whip those other ants into a frenzy and cause them to try and kill you and the ants that follow you. The more you and your followers release the chemical of the path back to the garden the more the ant from the other anthill would try to have you killed, but more and more ants would still begin to follow you. Even some of the ants that were tricked into trying to kill you would become some of your faithful followers.
Alas that deceiving ant would think that if he killed you that the battle would be over. So it would only be a matter of time before you would be killed. Your followers though would continue to communicate to the other ants to follow the path you started, and every ant that followed that path would end up back in the garden with all the delicious fruit. The good news for you would be that even when you are killed by the unbelieving ants you would still be human. Only your ant body would die, and since your ant body was from your human body you could bring your ant body back, and because you would have power over your ant life you would have power over any ant life so that all those ants that were killed following your path you could bring back and place them in the garden.
And that old ant from the other anthill days would be numbered because once you were back to yourself you could have the exterminator deal with him whenever you wanted to. You wouldn't do it right away of course, because you would want as many of the deceived ants to come to follow your path as would come. After all you wouldn't want the deceived ants to die along with the ant from another anthill without having an opportunity to choose the right path and live.
From the book: "Christian Poems and Other Radical Explorations"
