My name is Leon de Ikal. Leon is not my birth name. I adopted it over the years as I began to study etymology. Before then, as I came to age, I was taught that my birth name was biblical and therefore God breathed and my destiny in life was to fulfill his promise to my bloodline. Supposedly, biblically speaking, my namesake was the grandfather of Noah. There is no more biblical record of him than the mere mention of his name in a genealogical reference. Later on in life, when I began to study the exponents of Christianity and the other world religions which bear a similar resemblance, I could not help but become distracted at the notion of the Jaredites in the Book of Mormon, supposedly one of the fist inhabitants of Newfoundland, or America. Later on in life, it was the discovery of this fact that made it possible to begin the difficult journey of developing an apologists thesis for that one great Mystery we hope to one day explain. Life.
Around the age of ten, I began to question things. Why did my parents believe they were disobeying god if they did not strike myself and my siblings for every phase of maturation, in accordance with corporal punishment? The excessiveness of two by fours, kitchen wooden cutting boards, handles of paddle boats and other instruments of purpose I could no longer reason with. All around me my friends would talk about their punishments but it was in passing reference, not the acute fear I found myself and my siblings displaying. My beatings consisted of my getting completely naked. Often there was blood involved, scabs, and finally scars that formed, only at times, to come undone at the helm of a different punishment.
At some point in my life, I remember thinking that what I was going through was probably not normal. The raw fear that I had towards the man who was my father was also not normal. I would shake like a dog terrified of a savage master more often than not. The only times when I was not afraid, is when I was performing at a sporting event or when he was simply not around. It was the fear that became normal to me, unsure of whether something I did or said would come back to be my undoing. The fear began to turn to hatred. There was a very definitive moment that I can remember hating the man.
We lived in Fairport, New York, a suburb of upstate Rochester. I can remember my eternal fixation with 9-1-1. Simply the idea that I could make one phone call and all the beatings from my parents and the persistent fear of them that I never could shake, I had the power to make disappear was an enduring fantasy. One day I found the courage and made the call.
Previous to this instance, the closest opportunity I had to live a life differently than the one that beset me as a youth was the one year I was allowed out of the confined shelter of homeschooling. It was a private school associated with our local church. However much my previous isolation affected me, it did not affect as much, I am confident, as the prolonged years afterwards that I was consigned to learn at home. It was my emotional detachment to, what the principle labeled as, "potentially violent behavior" that encouraged her to report me a sociopath to my parents. My behavior towards women is what she labeled as misogynistic and domineering. She said that I sought to emotionally unravel whatever social environment I was in and that I was a constant challenge to authority. However, the part of the report that my parents did not tell me was that she determined, in her view, that I was displaying the effects of a victim of some form of physical abuse and she wondered if I was acting it out onto my social environment. Before the end of that semester my parents had withdrawn me from the school and we found another church home. Their fear of consequence is what began the struggle that would define my early adult life: the knowledge of self. Because I had limited access to my peers and not many resources to probe, my sources of information were limited and so was my knowledge of what was social acceptable, amendable, cultural and appropriate. However, long after I had begun to question my parents' system of punishment, I made a decision that would change my view of my entire family.
One evening I was listening to the stereo. I do not remember what mys sister did exactly, but Irwin jumped up and pounced on my unsuspecting sister. grabbing a handful of her hair he dragged her up the stairs the way one would haul a sack of potatoes up the barn stable steps. With my sister screaming in pain and terror, I resolved then to call the authorities.
Not too long after the incident I asked both my siblings how they felt about the idea and we swore it to secrecy. That weekend, with my mom outside, and my dad in town on business I called 9-1-1. My hands were shaking, in fact I can remember my entire body trembling. But still I went forward with the act. When the operator came on the other line however, I lost all grip on conviction and hung up the phone almost immediately. I was pluralized with fear and in my paralysis I had forgotten that 9-1-1 has a call back policy. They called and my brother answered. Instead of having my back like he said he would, he freaked out and immediately to our mother, who immediately told our dad, when he got back from running errands.
I didn't know what was going to happen to me but I knew that nothing I had received up until that point would come close, in comparison, to the punishment I was about to receive. But before my dad could get home I attacked my brother for, as I saw it, ending my life. I was quite honestly afraid that I may not live out the punishment that I would eventually receive. I remember running around the house looking for him after my mother told me that she knew and she was going to "wait for dad to come home so I can tell your father." I ended up finding the Judas outside on the play set. I made no noise, I simply ran directly at him like a mad man. After I tackled him I straddled him and began to punch him as savagely as I could. He flailed and bucked and swung back but I just kept hitting him until, exhausted, I stood up and yelled down at him how much I despised him as well as how royally fucked I was. In my mind my brother was a coward who would place authority over friendship, and good favor over blood. In the same day therefore, I developed a long lasting hatred for my father that still endures to this day, and a loss of respect for my best friend. In hindsight, that was the day that I was no longer part of my family.
Without going into the minor details of the following rendezvous with my dad, I will give the facts. I was beat with a broken Louisville Slugger which had been broken previously due to a combination of flesh beatings, and batting cages.
I was knocked unconscious by said Louisville Slugger.
I was given the ultimatum to leave the house and live elsewhere, or continue taking the beatings. I chose the former and that is when I was knocked unconscious.
I woke up in a tub of my own blood and my mom freaking out trying to wake me up and my dad freaking out repeatedly mentioning CPS although, at the time, I had no idea who CPS was. I think what disturbs me the most, looking back on my childhood is the fact that, due to my lack of courage, I did myself the disservice of turning in my parents to the proper authorities; that because of fear, I allowed myself to stay trapped within such a dangerous and dysfunctional environment. School was starting the following week, and as part of the requirement for home educators, parents were mandated to give their children a physical exam. There was no way, I would pass any physical offered at any hospital or clinic. I saw the fear, and I recognized the fear. But instead of destroying it I succumbed to it. My parents concocted a story for me to tell the doctor, something about me falling out of a tree house that we did not own, scraping my backside, legs and back of the wooden stairs and knocking my head against a ledge somewhere. It was during the creation of the lie that I recognized the anxiety I felt towards the man as that profound hatred that would define my 20s.
Looking back on my upbringing, it becomes clear that my parents' primary objective in our early years was to first initiate, and then indoctrinate their children into a culture of fear. In my dad's mind it was necessary to fear him first before we could become respectable citizens of this society. In his mind, a lack of fear meant a lack of respect. If we didn't respect him we couldn't love god, and therefore would become antagonizers instead of contributors to this society of hard working tax paying Americans.
To this day, I do not know what to make of my father's methods. Quite simply, not only were they not acceptable to any society, but they were abusive and my parents were abusers. They abused their authority. They abused the trust of their children. They abused the vulnerability of their children. I begin this book therefore, basing much of its philosophy on the development of fear. I believe that it can be argued, demonstrated and therefore replicated that, if it is established early in life, shapes the ideology of developing minds and bodies. And that at the crucible of fear and vulnerability, the firstborn of destruction is born. Its name is the Ego. It is the antithesis of the Christos. It is the bane of spiritual salvation. It is the Ego which ultimately destroys knowledge of self, and yet it is the Ego that is born out of trauma, abuse, and the imbalance often between the Soul and Spirit of humanity. Without the Ego, man and Nature are balanced in harmony. When intelligence embraces its mother (Nature), miracles are done. But when Intelligence strikes its mother, violence has been committed and the miracles are displaced by horrors.
It is important therefore, to, in the quest for the principles of individualism, or self, to be made aware of the beast that is the Ego, and the Christos (Christ) that is intelligence. The Crusade of all Christians, the Jihad of all Muslims, must be- in the ensuing days of reading this book- not to destroy the gentile, or the infidel of external value, but the ignoramus of internal value. The ignorance that is within a man is the only sin that needs to be cleansed from nature and it can be cleansed with learning not violence. Nature and ignorance are not compatible. The willful rejection of ideas is not unseemly but the vilification and aggressive destruction of them are also incompatible. If humanity is to survive itself, it must first begin with the knowledge of the deity which we all seek. It is possible that we have, throughout the ages, falsely identified god according to our scriptures only because we have failed to recognize the deity riddled within the human organism. We cannot find god because we fail to study ourselves. We fail to acknowledge what we find, when we do study humanity, as the habitation for deity and choose to view it instead, as the creation of deity. We are afraid to view the physical body as the temple of god because of the infant initiation into the cult of fear which is singularly responsible for giving birth to the Ego. The Ego is the dark side of the Christ and we must become familiar with it if we are to understand individualism.
It is the belief of the author of this book, that there is no question, pertaining to the mystery of life that the study of the human, his body, and his psychology, cannot answer as to the identity of life or the favor of his god. All that is necessary for god to be found, is for the Ego within man to be subdued by the the firstborn of creation. Therefore the command of the Torah and the Qu'ran, should be modified in this way. For it is not nature that needs to be subdued, it is the ignorance of humanity that must be dominated and overcome.
If, however, in this society, we find that we are unable to develop ownership over the ignoramus within, it is only then that this effort is projected outwards and used to enslave others. The recourse that must take place in order to renew humanity's development cannot be had through reform, it can only be had by a thorough destruction of the path that led to his degeneration. In the spirit of the Nihilist then, may this book fall into the hands, only of those, who seek a life of balance and desire only the opportunities to learn that which is hidden.
This book is but a disheveled individual portrait of the studies of many learned men on the subject of the Ego and an examination, throughout the ages, of how our ancestors and educators attempted to explain this phenomenon to the rest of humanity for their own unique purposes. The gospel of the Christ is unknown to the industrial world save for the mythology confused as Jesus. Conversely the Ego is unknown to humanity save for the mythos presented as Satan. Christ and Satan are equal and the same universal force known as the Son of Man. How it is used and developed determines its name and therefore purpose. The soul of intelligence therefore lies in the wielder, and in this way it is humanity that is god. Neither good nor evil, right nor wrong, we are the conglomeration of purpose. Through each collective and defining decision made, we organize the integrity of the universe. The enlightened ones are the very gods of Heaven and it is through the imagination and will of such that the foundations of this universe are laid. These forces are only invisible to us because they are our own thoughts.
