The Western Gate

This was written on Nov 2nd after the initial writing prompt was listed on Oct 29th No apologies for late submission

It was a writing prompt, “What three wishes would you want..” I sat down and began typing, then stopped as it warranted that old emotional brake, ethics! I did not answer on the day the prompt was given, but it swam around my head like an annoying ‘jiminy cricket’ prodding my grey matter, “come on then… answer !” So three full days after the initial question, it has resurrected, post Samhain (Halloween) that old New year as we descend like Hecate into the cave of unknowing…. (“Stop wittering, get on with it !”~Jiminy cricket)
Wish one could easily be, “to have everyone do as I command.” Well first of all am I that narcissistic to want everybody to follow my command? And the answer is no, what makes the world go round and more enjoyable are our differences, dynamism in our personality is as much a part of life, and the reason for it, as harmony. Imagine being like those dictators, emperors, Putin, Thatcher where everyone nods and agrees, sycophants, the world becomes your image, it must be an awful place to inhabit. Id long for the arguments over why a football team won and the other side didn’t, why I think a film is great and you do not. To be in a world where you are seen as perfect and correct…. I could think of nothing worse.
Am I vain and insecure enough to ask of a wish, “I wish every woman I meet would fall hopelessly in love with me”, well first of all it would be carnage, jealous boyfriends would stab me eventually, jealous women would fight, and then the real question. If I am manipulating someone’s will, then I do not really have that person at all, but, a zombie, a shell. If I ‘control’ then the free will inherent in that person is lost, and in effect, I do not know the real person but a moulded entity, a golem. It is like the black magicians who compel a person to do their bidding, usually some perverse rite or carnal exploitation, but still, they do not ‘make love’ to that person, in fact they are only making love to their own ego which will never be satisfied as that is how the ego works, continually building its temple, higher and higher until, never reaching wherever it thinks it wants to go, it collapses.
So I have three wishes granted, and still have no clue what to do with them.
Perhaps I could ask that at a command I become invisible! oh what fun I’d have, what sights I’d see and secrets and information I’d uncover. Ethics comes into play here by the nature of moral trespass. People let you see what they want you to see, it is everyone’s right to privacy, even if really, they maybe hiding something that everybody should know. In which case if you disagree and believe you should know everything and damn the question of ‘moral trespass’, would it not be reasonable that everybody knows you have the power of invisibility, and if the answer is, “no, not that secret”… then we are hypocrites, and again, doing as our will above that of others we become maddened by that power, our ego inflates and again we build that great tower of Babel, reaching for something we can never attain, harmony and satisfaction, peace, but in our drive to attain our ego we end up farther away from harmony, and as the old philosophy knows, the tower collapses into pieces and alike ourselves, each of us is a fracture of the whole, but we speak in different tongues and cannot see.
I could wish for money, cash, fortune… hell, every time I put my hand in my pocket I would pull out a few hundred pounds? I’d get whatever I wanted, be able to satisfy my guilt by giving some to those needy, perhaps, for a while. Then be a glutton and eat the finest foods, buy the finest presents for myself, beautiful watches and pens and fine bound books and get stabbed by the thief who espied my wealth and opulence, who hated me for the things I had, who demanded I give him money and I reach into my pocket and pull out the magic wad, and he’d say “more?” at that point the thief realising I have a magic pocket will either keep me captive or stab me anyway for being a demon.
Now of course with three wishes I could also add, that I would never be in danger.
The faculties of our senses are built on self protection, our awareness constantly checks for danger, our memory serves to guide us on the possibility of whether something we do has inherent danger or promise. If the mind knows that whatever we do, we will be safe then it will shut down, we will become in effect a walking imbecile. The mind retires, and like the person who has worked hard all their life, at retirement their mind becomes stilled, un-acting and unresponsive.
Given that, and the fact that I analysed over and over the wish for wealth, what could I possibly really want? The want for this and that and the chase for it, is in fact the driving force of will. We desire something, we create a path to achieve it. If that thing is handed to us because our wish is granted, again, we become slovenly, self gratifying. There is no dynamism in this scenario of life, no drive, no inertia.
The more I looked into the question “what three wishes”, whether it was healing, and that person I healed turned out to be a murderer, or world peace, and evermore the population grew in that peace and exhausted the limits of the Earth, and even in peace and with smiles on our faces we starved and were happy that we had no heat left to warm us or food to fill us, we each become the fool at court, gibbering nonsense, dribbling clowns happy at our fate to be the lowest of the low and damned.

I then decided, in point of fact, my first wish would be to ask the Genie, I wish you to tell me what I should do with the other two wishes if the wisest person on Earth and in all history were to answer? because honestly, in the words of Socrates, I know that I do not know.