Personal Revelation Essay

Anyone who claims that they have never had a revelation in their entire life is lying. This revelation doesn’t have to be life changing, but everyone has had some sort of revelation. Whether this revelation opened their eyes to the inner workings of the human mind or simply gave them a new idea for fishing, it is still a revelation. I personally have had my share of revelations, though few of them life altering. There has only been one revelation in my life that changed my outlook on the world, and that revelation has a lot to do with Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. I’m not sure when I was first taught in detail about the theory of evolution but I would assume it was around 9th grade. At first it didn’t really faze me, I understood it and everything but I didn’t really understand its implications in real life. That was when I read Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos and even though Vonnegut himself doesn’t love it, it changed my outlook on the human race. The revelation was that humans are just animals, and when it comes to surviving, none of this stuff that I had viewed during my life as important is actually important. Suddenly it seemed to me that the values of society didn’t make sense, because humans are simply another animal.

This revelation changed the way I acted in daily life. Because I now viewed humans as animals (or at least I though they should act more in terms of survival instead of personal pleasure) I felt that many things were less important. This revelation caused me to perform poorly in school, because it caused me to not really care (though I have overcome this ‘issue’). It also caused me to view social relationships differently. Though I didn’t actually change any of my relationships (due to me still being insecure about my revelation and not willing to share it with others) I saw how seemly pointless all the rituals of meeting, friendship, and dating are in terms of survival, and the only survival perk of relationships is the reproduction of the species. I didn’t quite understand anymore what was important because I was having trouble understanding the revelation due to the deep affect society had on what I viewed as important.

Galapagos was the catalyst of this revelation, so it is possible to mark my prophet as Kurt Vonnegut, though I would also understand if Darwin could be considered the prophet. Though the messages of those two men and the text that influences me aren’t exactly the revelation I came to those two ones are the messages that helped me form together mine. In a sense, they are just the pre-prophets, and this revelation was the prophet’s first understanding of the message. That would make me the prophet, but I have yet to attempt to spread my message. The types of the revelation trope that go along with the prophet were not really that apparent. The ignorant masses I would assume were just those who had not yet realized my revelation, and a vision of redeemed society was not yet formed, all I understood was the problem.

Before I was able to form my revelation further the opposition to the revelation cut it off. While my mind had initially accepted this message and saw how it could change my life, it had subconsciously decided against it. My mind drove this message out of my head, and caused me to act as if I had never had this revelation. While I still understood the revelation I no longer viewed it in high regard. I still thought it was true, but I was nowhere near as passionately into to it as I had been before. Now it was just another idea I had no real opinion of floating around in my head. In the end the opposition to my own revelation was myself, almost as if my mind decided it wasn’t ready for a change without consulting me (I find this sentence strange because it seems as if my mind is a separate entity from myself, but it is still how I feel. I feel as if I never consciously rejected the message, but I just let it float off due to the blockers my mind had unconsciously made.)