The Trap-Maker and the Pit

Sometimes when a mistake is made it can't be undone. We who believe in God want to believe that the symbolic and loving hands of that God are there to catch us when we fall. And those hands ARE there. But there can be situations where one doesn't believe he or she deserves to be saved; be brought back up into the Light. There are times when even though we do believe, we still don't want to believe in ourselves. And sometimes it is for good reason.

In the warm sunshine of youth, when you have it all – when you have been given a special responsibility, and you know it – dangers arise behind corners you can't see around. Each new day offers opportunities, optimism and hope for a bright future. It is then that you are most at risk for being hunted and trapped. And there is an unusually efficient kind of trap waiting for those who think they are ahead of the game.

Strangely, it is not a trap that you have created. No. Someone else set it up, right? If you are the animal, then the trap-maker is... someone... higher up the scale of reality. But that doesn't matter. That isn't the important part, as I will explain.

Like any good trap, this one offers you more than you have now. It relies on your animal tendency to fool yourself, by thinking you can grab the treat and still get away with everything you already possess.

The danger arises when you KNOW that you can full-well choose to walk in to grab your “reward.” And it is because of this ability to choose, that the error of self-pride tricks you into thinking you can out-maneuver the trap-maker.

But if you make that unfortunate choice, and the trap is sprung, because you aren't all that you thought you were, it doesn't take long for you realize that you now face the animal's worst nightmare—the end of freedom.

You are caught now in the jaws of something you can't control, when just a second ago you had been completely free and on top of the world. The kind of trap I'm talking about not only grabs your leg in its iron teeth, but then pulls you across the forest floor... toward... a hole... a pit. And it is not until you are pulled in that you realize THIS pit has no bottom.

Now, bottomless pits have some very interesting psycho-physical properties. For one thing, obviously, you don't have to experience hitting the bottom. That almost seems merciful. But it isn't merciful.

The first real thing to understand about bottomless pits is that the further one falls into them the harder it is to regain a notion of which way is “up.” Yes, there is the “falling” part, whereby you might intuit some sense of direction. But the gravity of the blackness below is unrelenting and causes the velocity of your fall to increase exponentially.

Of course, bottomless pits have air for some of the way down. And even air resistance slows a fall for a while. But there isn't enough air in the world to fill a bottomless pit.

Gravity pulls an object down with a rock-steady force. At the surface of the earth, that force is 9.8m/s² (meters per second squared). But for bottomless pits that earth creatures are trapped by and fall into, it's that little tiny “2” at the end that is the real killer.

Velocity describes the distance traveled in one direction for a certain amount of time. And when velocity is squared, it means that one amount of distance traveled increases from the first second to twice that amount in the next second, and continues to accelerate in this same way with each succeeding second thereafter. So... if you are falling, and you've fallen 1 meter the first second, by the end of the next second you have fallen 2 meters, and the second after that, 4, then 8, then 16... and so on...

Presently, as long as there is air to slow you, you reach what is called "terminal velocity." The air (drag force) negates the acceleration of gravity and one steady speed is finally attained. In that case it is impossible to go faster. A skydiver whose parachute doesn't open can never hit the ground at more than about 193 km per hour (120 miles per hour)... as long as there is air to hold his or her velocity from increasing.

But bottomless pits are different.

When some amount of time passes, the air from the world above begins to thin out and it becomes hard to breath. At about that same time, the velocity of the fall begins to increase again since air drag is lessening. Thus, if there were a way to save you from that pit, that chance is now decreasing proportionally at exactly the same rate that the acceleration of your fall is increasing.

The next thing to understand is that bottomless pits don't actually occur in the physical universe. This is something that dawns on you as the wide open mouth of the world you once knew above you – the top of the pit (for bottomless pits DO have tops) – is now receding. It quickly becomes circle, then a distant star. Then eventually, though you know it is somewhere “up there,” for all intents and purposes it is gone... And it is gone forever.

Your hair is no longer streaming upward, for the air has disappeared.

You can't breath, but... somehow... your mind is still functioning.

You can't see anything at all, but you know that if something were to appear you would be able to see it. But nothing will ever appear again.

You can't hear, because sound is not present in a vacuum.

And “where” you are is not a complete void (a placeless and uninhabited nothing), for YOU are still there. So you are still able to think... for a while.

And you ask yourself many of the most important and fundamental questions about existence: Are you dead? Are you in hell? Is this what everyone goes through when they die?

But over and over again you experience the constant and full measure of the fact that you can no longer receive answers to these questions. In a terrible irony, this biting fear only causes you to ask all your questions at the same time. You are dumping out your lifelong storage of curiosity all at once.

In desperation bridging the gap between what you've always known and purified insanity, you begin to form hypotheses and then dismiss them just as quickly: Maybe you are not falling any more. Maybe you never were falling. Maybe you never were alive... On and on it goes.

As your mind tears and scratches at empty space in the vain attempt to grasp anything at all, your memory of sunshine, your parents, your pets, of the world above, of love, of God, of friends and other people you saw but never met, seems more and more like a sick kind of fiction.

And then you can't even be sure if anything was or is real, including yourself. Yet you fall and fall...

With your last datum of volition you reach out to the God you once knew. You never denied God's existence. Seems that once upon a time you knew you felt it, not just next to you, but inside you.

And you summon all that is left about yourself to ask God for help. It is at these last moments that the full explanation is finally revealed to you...

The trap-maker built into the trap a fail-safe mechanism that required you to want more than you had, when you already had everything. You well-knew that, in reaching for more you were literally also willing to RISK more than everything.

And in order to do that, you walked into the trap fully aware that in order to grab the reward – what you thought you could get away with – you needed to be ready to actually sacrifice God.

Why?

Because God is everything, and the choice (itself) to risk everything is in FACT the ultimate abandonment of everything—God; it is the willful walking away. It is the realization that your choice is final, complete, replete and absolute. Additionally, this is before you even take the action itself.

I want you to know that I know. We should be honest. We should be forthright. There is no reason not to be. We all should know by this time that the “you” is ME.

I am the one falling. And though we also know that the bottomless pit is a metaphor, I can't help but think that the trap I walked into when I once had everything so long ago, was very, very real.

The trap-maker looks with a special kind of satisfaction in knowing that it really was not even necessary for him to lay the trap out in the first place. That's why, as I said at the beginning that his part in all of this doesn't matter.

Just my thinking that it was him trying to trap me, and not myself laying the trap, was good enough to spring the trap. But it could have been me too. I know now what a deadly paradox this line of reasoning can be. The horrible truth is: the trap WAS and still IS that paradox.

Either way, the Light of the world I once knew recedes. It was a circle but is now quickly becoming a distant star. It is getting hard to breath and the velocity of the fall is accelerating to equal the speed of my fading inability to be saved, even if salvation had once been possible. It may not be now.

Yes. Sometimes it really is too late.

No apology, no amount of begging for forgiveness, can ever be truly thought of as sincere, since by my own will I threw away the possibility of forgiveness. Mercy is not infinitely extended. And Judgment is not infinitely delayed.

I know for a fact that there truly are supernatural forces in the world today. There is mostly Goodness and Light. Were this stash of positive credits not there, then would the world have devolved into a collective pit, and would have ceased to exist long ago. Thankfully I also don't think that will happen for this world in the future either.

We do have just enough free will to live forever. The real trick of having it "all" is learning that forever is good enough. For, it is Everything. Be aware though, that free will also means having the freedom to give up that same will. And once it is gone it takes with it all second choices.