The Trap, the Fast, and the Resolve of Faith
- Bill Dandie
- Jan 2
- 3 min read
During my forty-day fast, I learned something simple, ancient, and unsettling.
What draws a mouse into a cage is not the cage itself.
It is food.
The trap is only effective because desire precedes it.
Humankind designed these devices—artificial mechanisms that override natural law. In nature, there is no metal snap, no baited wire, no calculated enclosure. Yet these traps exist, and they work, because they exploit appetite. They do not force entry; they invite it.
As the fast progressed, my body quieted. Hunger softened. What remained was not need, but memory—the echo of desire long after necessity had passed. I could feel the distinction clearly: nourishment versus appetite, sustenance versus impulse.
And that is when the question emerged, uninvited but undeniable:
What if this same principle exists beyond the physical?
What if desire itself is the mechanism?
What if there are traps not made of steel, but of longing?
What if appetite—unexamined and unmastered—is how a soul consents to containment?
This is not a statement of belief.
It is an inquiry born from experience.
Beyond Natural Law
Natural law is elegant. It is balanced. It does not coerce.
Traps do not belong to nature—they belong to systems. Systems that require compliance. Systems that depend on predictable behavior. Systems that function best when desire overrides awareness.
Food is neutral. Desire is not.
During the fast, I was not fighting hunger. I was watching desire detach from need. I was witnessing how often I had mistaken appetite for truth, craving for wisdom, indulgence for freedom.
When the fast ended, the body was ready.
The reflex, however, lingered.
The holidays provided what I later recognized as a “hall pass”—permission to indulge without reflection. I wasn’t trapped. I wasn’t starving. I was choosing, knowingly, to revisit an old pattern.
And then, on January 1, something quiet but precise occurred.
A mouse was found dead beside a trap.
Not caught by it.
Not punished by it.
Simply finished.
It avoided the obvious danger, yet the identity that once responded to bait had reached its end.
The Higher Parallel
I did not see this as an omen. I saw it as a mirror.
The mouse did not die because it failed.
It died because the pattern was complete.
The trap did not kill it.
Desire had already run its course.
This is where the higher parallel crystallized.
If physical traps exploit appetite, then spiritual traps may do the same. Not through force, but through attachment. Not through violence, but through unexamined longing—control disguised as reward, confinement masked as comfort.
Perhaps this is how cycles repeat.
Perhaps this is how souls consent to limitation.
Not through fear—but through forgetting.
January 1: A Framed Cycle
January 1 is not mystical because of a calendar. It is mystical because it is a frame—a moment where the mind recognizes closure and opening simultaneously. A threshold.
On that day, I felt resolve—not emotional, not dramatic, but settled.
I stepped fully into one of my four principles:
FAITH
Not belief.
Not doctrine.
Faith.
Faith as recognition.
Faith as remembrance.
Faith as trusting what the body knows before language interferes.
Faith as Truth Remembered
Faith, for me, is not about hoping something is true.
It is about remembering what already is.
What you feel—beneath impulse, beneath conditioning—is truth.What you remember—before explanation—is truth.
The fast stripped away noise.
The mouse revealed the pattern.
The threshold completed the lesson.
I no longer negotiate with appetite—physical or otherwise.
I no longer confuse desire with direction.
I no longer need traps, rules, or permissions to guide me.
I eat to nourish.
I act to align.
I listen inward.
What ends does not always collapse loudly.
Sometimes it lies quietly beside the thing that once controlled it.
And that is how faith announces itself—not as belief, but as certainty remembered.
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