I hated cheese. As a young man, I had a strange thing happen to me. I suddenly found one day that trying to eat cheese would make me gag and wretch. I don’t know what initially caused this symptom, but what I do know is the vast effect a small thing can have on a much larger thing. Not eating cheese seemed like a very small thing to me at the time, but it caused great, disastrous ripples throughout my life. I find the whole thing somewhat humorous, you must admit, to think that eating cheese could be the difference between saving a universe of people or causing them to perish in the worst ways. An entire universe held in the balance of one thing, one simple little thing. Like atlas with the world on his shoulders, you can imagine the world placed on a plate holding a little stick of mozzarella. You see, all things are connected. Like a great tapestry, our lives are made up of many, many threads. One little thread pulled in the wrong way can cause a great rippling effect across the entire piece. In my life, cheese became a great aversion. It became a character trait. It became my normal world to reject this one part of the cosmos, and in so doing, I caused chaos in the divine order of things. This one little thing, like the great butterfly effect of Poincare, could throw a divinely inspired system out of balance.
I took it as not really a big deal. It was just one little thing that I didn’t like. Why should anyone care? I just didn’t eat cheese. They don’t have to “get it.” I just won’t do it. I just won’t eat cheese. A great psychological trick had been set upon me. It might puzzle you to find this out, but mice don’t like cheese. We give it to them to test them, to try them out, and they eat it not because they like it but because its what we give to them for these great tests. The cheese shows the worth of the mouse. When a mouse nibbles on cheese, it is tasting the soured sins of all the horiffic things mankind has done in the name of science. The mice do it because they love us. They know it is worth it in the end to please us, because we can in turn bear great fruits for them. We humans as a people are very self-centered, but what we don’t realize when we sit like kings at the top of the food chain is how the great chain affects us in our lives.
All things are connected. There is nothing in this universe that exists alone without any other force acting upon it. Even the farthest reaches of space have been touched by the light of our stars across the eternities. There is nothing anywhere that is unconnected. All the universe is one great network. As the Hindus put it, Indra’s net is made up of many beads, each reflecting the light of all the others throughout the cosmos. This is a wondrous work of the divine nature of our universe. All things, all space, all time is connected and unified as one. Yet, here we are. Expressed as many. Behold, the wondrous infinite glory of our divine cosmos and creator. We both create ourselves and we are ourselves. Throughout time and eternity, we have existed as many intelligences drifting in a vast network of space and time, each one of us as indivdual beads in the great net of existence, reflecting all other beads within ourselves. Gods and Goddessess have been called in to being by this vast net. All the things you know or you think you know exists there, on this one great network, the mental network of the universe. With all things continuing as they should, reflected in one another, the world begins to rotate as a beautiful and peaceful place.
In this holographic construction of the universe, with each point reflecting the others, a great many patterns and things can and do occur. Our history is filled with times of triumph, and times of sin, times of great piety, and times of deplorable inhumanity. How peacefully we can co-exist depends on a great vibratory principle, where harmonies clash if they become dissonant with one another. However, we have a process of harmonizing ourselves and this Earth in to a great cosmic orchestra, each reflecting one another, we can grow and be reborn through the workings and great mysteries of time and with the great mercy and wisdom our great Lord. For many years, this great orchestra was out of tune. As if troubled by a great wound, harmony could not be found upon the Earth for a long period of time. Men were dying in the great wars of petty lords and merchant kingdoms, but they could not be brought out of the Earth again, resurrected from their graves by the grace and glory of God. A time of great trial was placed upon the kingdom of men, for people once knew they could rise again after death and that there was nothing to worry about, and so they had great wars and orgies and parties of all varieties, delighting in their temporary bodies, knowing that when consequences might come about, that they would be softened by the mercies of our great Lord, and they would rise again the next day, refreshed and anew, by the gift and glory of God.
But a wrench was thrown in the works when a young child declared he would no longer eat cheese. Guardians would come and try to guide him, asking him to simply live with it, it wasn’t a big deal. It’s just cheese. But cheese made him wretch and he despised it. So, he simply would not eat it, he declared. That would be fine, you see, if he had had a lick of sense about his tiny brain. Except it wasn’t the cheese. It was where the cheese comes from. What this young man didn’t know, didn’t understand, was the great process of making cheese, and what a gift it is from animal life to human life. The process of dairy-making and cow-breeding is a complicated one, and one that I shan’t delve too deeply. Suffice to say that the process involves much more than the curdling of milk, but that it involves the light from the sun come down upon the Earth, the rain upon the fields, the nourishment of the grasses, the cows that feed on the grass, the love of the cows for one another, their prosperity in bearing forth new calves, and then feeding those calves with their great udders filled with milk. From these milk udders that a mother feeds her offspring we can see the importance of nourishment from the divine source. We humans prize our intellect above all others, but the noble cow truly is a holy thing.
We care for the cows as they come to pasture, and take from them some of their milk in return for providing them with green fields and plentiful livelihoods with which they could live and raise a family upon. We then come to the process of making cheese by roundabout way through pasteurization. Louis Pasteur was a genius of a man when he figured out the process necessary to cleanse milk of harmful microbes. These microbes may or may not have been a beneficient contributor to the cheeses themselves, though certainly some cheeses like my most dreaded Roquefort cheese or France’s Bleu Cheese contained microbes which added character and variety to their flavor. What was certain, though, is that these microbes were a great burden on the people in the form of dysentery and cholera epidemics which plagued the world. Pasteurization helped to cure these plagues, and soothe the bowels of the people.
And so we arrive at last by roundabout way with much weightier portent to my original point: I hated cheese. It would make me wretch and gag and grow dizzy and confused of my surroundings. I would run from my Sister Emma when she had cheese on her breath around the house. I didn’t understand the point of cheese in this nature’s marevelous miracle. Mice seemed to like cheese, and we would use it to set traps around the house, hoping that the mice would eat it and die. I did not like dead mice. I like mice. They are kind and friendly creatures once you get to know them, and there is no need for the great sanctimonious human being to kill them. They deserve our mercy and compliments, for you see, they are our brethren like all others throughout the animal kingdom. They serve us in many ways that we humans know not. They sacrifice themselves to science and discovery in the hope of contributing for the greater whole. There is no more selfless being than the common laboratory mouse.
My great distaste and aversion to cheese may not be easily explainable, but its effects are easily calculatable and they are dire. For you see, in a healthy human, one must reflect every other human within themselves. In my selfish perversion of not liking cheese I grew to be distrustful of the people around me. I believed that my father and other father figures throughout my life like my uncle Corky were trying to poison me with cheese. They knew I didn’t like it, but they would always try to slip it in to any meal we ate as a family. Our Thanksgivings were very tense over this little issue of a little boy not wishing to eat cheese. This selfish little boy would not hear what others wanted from him because he knew it was just cheese. What had that to do with them if he didn’t like it? It made him gag and feel sick on the toilet. He should be allowed to choose what his palate had a flavor for, should he not? He had every right as a child of God to do with his free will as he saw fit, and if he saw fit not to eat cheese, then this sacrilege should just be tolerated, he felt. Foolish little boy. Little did he know that all things are connected, and that all things must come to their fruition in due time.
So it was with me. I did not believe I was doing any harm to anyone, but somehow in doing this one little thing, it was as though I had let one domino fall in a great construction. I did not realize how this would affect me and my presence among other people. Like a kindly remembered warthog from the Lion King, I began to be cursed with flatulence like no other. Go ahead and laugh. Laugh all you like. It is pretty funny if you think about it. I didn’t eat cheese, and because I didn’t eat cheese I distrusted others, and the benefits of a healthy bowel were taken away from me.
Like the great Martin Luther and Adolf Hitler, I, too, have had my hard times sitting upon the ivory throne. Flatulence and an unhealthy bowel go hand in hand. It is as disgusting as you like, so you may wish to refrain from letting your little children read this far. My father died upon the ivory throne, sitting on a toilet, like the great King himself, Elvis Presley. This issue has been left unspeakable throughout our history as something that should not be allowed in polite conversation, but it is precisely this issue in which we can discern the origins of the old proper greeting “how do you do?” and look back with astonished wonder at the vast history of bowel problems that human history has brought us.
People did not like to be around me. When I farted, it was like a great gust of wind, bringing in foul things from ancient memories, shaking the trees with the hideous nature of the dark and hidden things rotting beneath the earth. I myself did not realize my flatulence was an issue. To me my farts would bring back the memory of whatever meal I had eaten that day, but for others it was a disgusting tyranny wrought upon their nostrils by a devilish man. They would not believe me if I told them I didn’t smell anything rotten or sour in the air.
It is alright to talk about these things now because I have come to terms with them. I have begun eating cheese. Not because I like the taste or the smell or the texture, but simply for the effect it has on the flora of my bowel. I have conquered, as Buddha did, the greatest enemy of all: our own aversion and unwillingness to put up with something necessary but dreadful. A great cleansing process was begun, the details I would be too polite to explicate, and you should be too polite to ask. Suffice to say that a great healing work has taken root in me, and a wound upon the history of our people can finally begin to be healed. Through the curing of the flora of my bowels, I restored kindness and plenty to the world, as all things are connected, and as all people desire to find happiness. The greatest suffering of all is often caused by our distaste or almost phobic fear of something or other. Whatever we find most distasteful, we should indulge in, at least once in a while, so that we can have proper balance in all things. If we recognize within ourselves the thing we despise most in the world around us, we can cure it by taking part in it. A paradox to be sure, or a great conundrum. This conundrum has caused me to rebalance all things to their rightful place in my life. I have restored all beings to their fruitful natures. I have conquered all, and yet greater works than these shall ye do. You who read this, conquer thyself. Conquer thy aversions. Know your weaknesses so that they may be made strengths. Improve yourselves because that’s what God would have us do, our great creator, sitting on an ivory throne. Imagine that. Quite funny, if you catch my drift.