living for god

you may (or may not) remember when a couple of months back, a young woman boarded the bus i take daily to work, and proceeded to give her testimony about her relationship with jesus christ. at the time, i thought it was touching, especially because at the end of her spiel, she prayed for the bus passengers. even though i no longer believe as she does, i appreciated her sincerity, and as we got off at the same stop, i thanked her for her prayer.

fast forward to this morning’s bus ride. after the bus pulled up to the stop she was at, this same young woman handed out religious tracts to each person getting off. (the stop happened to be at a church ministry that provides free breakfasts every morning, and there are a number of regular riders who get off here daily for that reason). i thought, ‘uh oh, here we go again…,’ and yes, after she paid her fare, she passed out tracts to those of us remaining on the bus… except to me, but only because i politely refused. and then she proceeded to deliver a little sermonette about living for god.

i only caught bits and pieces of what she was saying, because i was trying to listen to a podcast on gnosticism (would this be called irony?). however, the gist of it was the usual ‘if you’re not living for god, you’re going to hell’. and, on one level, i can appreciate what she was saying, because i’ve been in that place. i’ve been where i earnestly believed that anyone who had not accepted jesus christ as their personal lord and savior was going to hell. therefore, i believed that people like gandhi and mother teresa were in hell because they were not born-again christians, but someone like jeffrey dahmer was in heaven, even after the horrible things he did, because reportedly he had accepted christ into his heart before being murdered in prison. forgive me, y’all, but this is rather fucked up theology. a person such as gandhi, whose life was dedicated to the betterment of humanity, is currently being tormented by demons for all eternity because he chose not to believe that the jewish version of a myth was a series of historical events? seriously? and you do realize that christianity really is little more than the jewish adaptation of myths revolving around various sun gods (and related goddesses, who are strangely missing in the christianized version) dating centuries before the time jesus was said to have walked the earth. the major difference between the christianized version and earlier versions is that, due to various power plays between political factions at that time, people were convinced (basically by the sword) that this jesus character was real. (and i mean no disrespect when i say ‘jesus character’.)

if there is anyone reading this who has known me for many years, but not had any real interaction with me, you are probably rather shocked at this point. a number of you know that i spent (or as i like to say, wasted) many years believing and living this. jesus was my life. i lived in what you might call a christian ghetto: i worked full-time in a christian bookstore, was deeply involved in a church (or two), all my social interaction was with other born-again christians, and i was afraid (i didn’t realize it at the time, but it all boiled down to fear) to scarcely listen to anything that wasn’t ccm (contemporary christian music) or even drink something as innocent as a watered down wine cooler.

what gradually but ultimately changed things for me first was developing close friendships with people who didn’t have such a narrow view of what it meant to love god, people who helped me to see that what i was really doing was ‘churchianity’. also, after moving away from columbia in 2000, i read a book that removed the foundation from under my feet, ‘why christianity must change or die’ by bishop john shelby spong. actually the first time i tried to read it, it made me so angry, i couldn’t finish it. i couldn’t believe this so-called bishop was saying all these ‘untrue’ things about what i had staked my life on. for some reason though, a few months later i tried it again, and got angry again, but for a different reason. this time i was pissed because i realized that i had been lied to for pretty much all my life. however, the unanswerable question was, whom should i be pissed at? i couldn’t be mad at the people who taught me this stuff, because they were only teaching me what they had been taught, and what their teachers had been taught. and it seemed pretty pointless to get mad at an institution. i remember right after finishing the book, i said to god, aloud, ‘all i want to know is the truth.’ and i swear, i heard a voice in my head say, ‘now we can begin.’ and my life has not been the same.

i’ve been through a lot spiritually, and religion-wise, between then and now. (spirituality and religion are not the same thing; trust me.) i’ve studied various world religions, some more deeply than others to be sure, but i’ve noticed they’re all basically pointing at the same thing. the problem with most religion is that people get hung up on the thing doing the pointing instead of paying attention to the ‘object’ (for lack of a better word) being pointed at. (not gonna use the finger pointing at the moon quote here, not gonna do it…) a couple of people who have met me in the last few years have accused me of being an atheist, just so i can ‘get away with’ doing whatever i want. nobody gets away with anything, but that’s a whole ‘nuther piece of writing. i’m not an atheist because i don’t believe the bible literally anymore. (actually i’m not an atheist, period.) my belief about the bible, and, by extension, about jesus, is that although the bible is true, it is far from being factual. it, along with other religious texts, is a collection of stories about the human condition, about how to (and how not to) treat others, and about ways to find deeper meaning in life. and that deeper meaning does not consist of literally believing that a man born of a virgin was sent from heaven to die for your sins so you don’t have to. that’s what my problem is with the young woman on the bus this morning. i know where her head is at, because i’ve been there. but she’s got to get outside her own head somehow, and see the bigger picture. she, and all of us, can embrace the experiences that brought her to this point in her life, but she needs to know that there’s more to this life than keeping people out of a literal hell.

maybe this life here on earth would be a little bit less hell-ish if we stopped to realize that there are as many ways to live for god as there are people on this planet.

(this post is an adaptation of a note i posted on facebook earlier today.)

mixed reaction

i hate to actually say this out loud (or type it, as it were), but is god trying to get my attention? first there was the cross dream from the other night. i didn’t feel bad about the conversation i had with ‘jesus’ in the dream (and still don’t). but i (foolishly) wonder if what happened this morning on the bus is somehow related to the dream, and if so, what message might god be trying to send me.

if he is trying to get my attention, i don’t believe the message is as obvious as the casual observer to the whole thing might think. here’s what happened: a cute young lady of color, probably in her early 20s, boarded the bus and paid her fare, while casually chatting with the driver. i didn’t think anything of that, but realize now that she was probably asking permission for what she was about to do. there were no seats on the bus, so she stood at the front, and asked how everybody was doing this morning. most everyone replied with some version of ‘fine’ or ‘good’ or ‘blessed’. then she asked if anybody on the bus needed prayer, to which no one responded, so she then said, ‘well, i’m gonna pray for y’all anyway, that god will provide whatever it is that you need.’ and then she started preaching, about how god had done so much for her, and for all of us, and how if we’re not living for god, we’re going to hell. then she prayed aloud, that basically everyone on the bus would repent and be saved, if they weren’t already. most of the people on the bus had their heads bowed and eyes closed (but not me). at the end of the prayer, ‘in jesus’ name’ of course, she thanked us for her time and was silent for the rest of her time on the bus.

so, my reaction to this? first i was pissed off that she was intruding into my thought space. plus, how dare she assume that everyone on the bus believes the same way she does. the majority of passengers on this particular route are black, which as a racial group tend to be pretty religious on the xtian side of things, so that was a safe bet for her, but still. i was pissed, especially when she started talking about living for god, and hell. i wanted to exclaim, like i did in my dream, ‘it’s all a fucking metaphor!’ then i calmed myself down by thinking about this being a blue/amber thing, and considered that maybe she is at a point in her life where she needs this belief structure to make sense of her world. maybe god, as she sees ‘him’, really has rescued her from some bad situations or a bad lifestyle, and feels that everyone else ought to know all the good god has done for her and could do for them. i get that. i was certainly as zealous as she, especially about not wanting folks to go to hell, when i first became a born-again christian back in 1985. so i could respect that and started being a little less pissed.

once she started praying, i felt tears well up in my eyes. actually, i suddenly had this huge urge to just start bawling my eyes out. what stopped me was the fact that i ride this bus daily, and while i see most of these people every day, we’re mostly essentially strangers. yes, i was worried about what they would think of me. then, even while she spoke, i was trying to figure out why her praying affected me so. one conclusion i came to was that it touched me that someone cared enough to pray for me, and the other people on the bus, all strangers to her. she put herself out there for us, and seemed quite sincere about it.

on another level, i think god, not big daddy god in the sky, but the ground of all being, used this incident to get my attention. over the last few months, i’ve not done much praying or meditation or even study of spiritual matters. it’s not that i need to go live in an ashram or a convent, but just that i do need to remember the divinity present in all people and things. today on facebook, one of my friends posted a link saying something about ‘if you want to see the fingerprint of god, look at a godly man or woman.’ i say (and almost commented to him), if you want to see the fingerprint of god, look at the person right in front of you, ‘godly’ in the world’s eyes or not. here’s a controversial thought: even hitler is a part of the fingerprint of god. (stay with me here: i’m just considering the idea that god encompasses all things, good and evil, and that evil, in its own way, is nothing more – and nothing less – than god’s shadow side.)

so, i am eating the fish i need and spitting out the bones from this encounter. when i got off the bus, i surprisingly (to me) thanked her for her prayer and her heart. (her response? ‘praise god!) i’m taking this as a reminder to pay attention to the divinity i see all around, even during mundane activities such as my morning commute. and i pray that god/the universe/the ground of all being will use this young woman to bring more light into the world, and that she will grow into an ever-expanding knowledge of who and what god really is (and isn’t).

guess which one i don’t do?

seen at the rally to restore sanity and/or fear (from buzzfeed)…

day 1: nablopomo, and i’m already cheating…

my first posting for national blogging post month will be a repost of the very first blog entry i ever posted, on bloglines (which is going away forever as of november 15). (is it really cheating to post something you’ve written somewhere else a long time ago?) i’ve tried to leave the entry as i wrote it on march 14, 2006. however, i did fix a couple of typos and i added in a few links that were not there previously. it’s interesting to see how far i’ve come in the nearly 5 years i’ve been blogging (first at bloglines, then setting up impolite conversation at blogger, and now migrating over to wordpress.com, and i plan to migrate again within a couple of months to a self-hosted wp blog), and how my thought processes have changed and not changed. i have a few other items from the bloglines blog (books music food) that i plan to repost on those days when the muse is settling in for a long winter’s nap. but for now, here’s the one that started it all. (and for the record, my opinions on the role of the devil, mentioned prominently below, have changed somewhat since this original writing. but only somewhat.)

blogging at the end of the world (… or damn, why didn’t i start blogging sooner?)

this is my inaugural foray into the world of blogging.  this may be something i do daily, or once a year, but most likely the frequency will fall somewhere in between the two extremes.  the things that make my heart beat fast are books and music and good food, so those things will probably be the focus of my writings, but i will also delve into religion, politics, sex, relationships, poetry, sports, racial issues, the war in iraq, and anything else that happens to present itself to me.  so… i am currently obsessed with the writings of andrei codrescu, npr commentator, essayist, novelist, poet, and generally a thought provoking human being.  i love it when my two very favorite topics of religion and sex intersect, and in what i’ve read of his work so far, they not only intersect, they collide.  over the last couple of weeks, i’ve completed the novels wakefield and messiah, and am in the process of reading hail babylon! in search of the american city at the end of the millennium and the devil never sleeps and other essays. i just recently paid attention to him for the first time through an interview on what is enligtenment? magazine’s website. i found him very relatable as far as  some points he made about spirituality and american society, so i thought i’d try one of his novels to begin with. i’m a huge tom robbins fan and when i read robbins’ recommendations on the jackets of these particular novels, i knew that codrescu was someone i needed to take a good look at.  it turned out that both of these books were everything i could ever want in a novel (with the possible exception of the ending of messiah – not entirely happy with the way it ended, but i don’t know how it could have ended any differently).  both books made me laugh out loud, made me cry, made me squeamish, made me horny, but most importantly, made me think. one of these continually evolving thoughts fed by these particular books is the role of the devil in our lives.  first off, let it be known that i am no big fan of the devil.  i come from a fundamentalist christian history, and while i no longer self-identify with those beliefs, i do believe that the devil is a real and powerful being.  however, he is not an equal with god, as i think many christians believe, and therefore have the tendency to blame him for everything bad that happens in their lives.  he is a creation of god, just as we all are (more on this in a moment).  anyway, in both books, the devil himself plays a central role.  basically in wakefield, the devil is the catalyst for wakefield (the main character, with one name, similar to madonna in that regard) to ‘get a life’.  but more interestingly, in messiah, i see him being portrayed as  being in charge of making life interesting for us here on earth.  he makes the excellent point that if life were all good or all evil, we’d basically be bored to tears. (i used to wonder this about being in heaven for eternity; i mean, being happy all the time, with no dramas or crises, wouldn’t that get boring after a few hundred thousand years?)  ultimately in messiah, the devil is the one who prevents the apocalypse from happening, namely because he likes the way things are here on earth now. (well i guess if you were going to be locked away in a bottomless pit for 1000 years after the apocalypse, you’d like it here on earth currently too.)  (and as for all this control that the devil seems to have in this story, apparently god, after having set things in motion, is just looking in on us and not really interfering unless asked.) okay, i’m not saying that the devil is this being with our best interests at heart, but i have come to see him as another creation of god, as stated earlier.  as created beings, aren’t we all created in the image of god?  i believe that we are all little localized pieces or aspects of god, so would that not be true of lucifer also?  in other words, i guess i’m saying that god has a dark side that most are just not openly willing to acknowledge.  but how would we know what good is without evil, light without darkness, or sweetness without sourness?  it is the ugly that makes the beautiful worthwhile and transformative to us, and not just another day in paradise.  if god is all-knowing and all-encompassing, then he (and i use that pronoun loosely) knew what he was doing by even creating lucifer in the first place. i believe this is one of the key messages in messiah, that the bad in life is necessary to appreciate the good, and that what appears to be good (major notz, felicity’s uncle, for example) can be evil, and what looks evil (the shades, a group of unemployed stoners) can be good.  it also illustrates something that i’ve believed for awhile (which i’ll probably touch on in future posts), that people make decisions and do things based on what they know and on their level of consciousness.  this doesn’t dismiss right and wrong (i mean, hitler was obviously horribly wrong with all the horrors he wrought upon the world, but even he was operating from what he knew; his actions did not just happen in a vacuum), but just means that people do what they think they need to do to get by, whether it’s to scratch an itch on the physical level or to satisfy an ego need. i could go on with thoughts about these two books for a long while.  this means that these meet at least one of the criteria of a good novel, as they have made me think long after i’ve closed the pages.  i’m sure i will bring up other aspects of these stories from time to time, but there are plenty of other things in my world to write about.  i’m off to explore some more of those things now.

repost: love of god

this is another repost of something i wrote back in march 2007. i think it’s something i needed to see now, at this particular juncture in my life. first of all, i would eventually like to be in a long term relationship, and this reminds me figuring out what that looks like for me is a continual work in progress. (however, i do have it narrowed down pretty much to these three criteria: a man who can make me think, make me laugh, and make me cum. anything else after that is a bonus.) secondly and somewhat more immediate, it reminds me that i should probably call or email my friend mentioned in the post, just to see how he’s doing.

The Love of God/The God of Love

To Love is to reach God.
Never will a Lover’s chest
feel any sorrow.
Never will a Lover’s robe
be touched by mortals.
Never will a Lover’s body
be found buried in the earth.
To Love is to reach God.
– Rumi

One of my good online friends who knows of my recent relationship woes (actually of my woes since 2000) asked me the other day if I had considered ‘finding religion’, I suppose as some sort of salve for my current situation. I replied that I absolutely could not set foot in a church right now. It’s not that I don’t have a belief in God, because I only get by because of that belief. Hoping I don’t sound self-congratulatory, I pray daily, I meditate some days, do some spiritual reading, and pretty much try to see God’s hand in everything that happens, even in the stupid shit I bring upon myself.

And yet, maybe he’s right. Not about me finding religion, but about at least finding a somewhat likeminded spiritual community. But I’m such an odd duck with my beliefs, and I don’t want a group of people who just pays lip service to what they believe, but who actually lives it. I’ve read a lot of Rumi over the past year. Rumi was a 13th century Persian poet and mystic whose only goal in life was to be one with God. I rather view him as a role model in that regard, and have tried to model some of my personal practices towards a similar goal. Then I get distracted by life.

I told my friend, and a couple of others, that I was taking a sabbatical this summer, from men and sex and relationships. I’m not getting any younger, and I really need to concentrate on figuring out what it is that I want and need in a relationship and for myself as a single woman. One way for me to do this, I think, is to follow Rumi’s lead, which is to just love God. Not to seek him/her, but just to love what already is. And in doing so, in any future relationship, I can find someone through whom I can express that love to God.

what kind of mind do you have?

i have this quote by socrates on the bulletin board above my desk: ‘great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.’ (and of course integral minds discuss all three…) looking up at this quote just now, it makes me think of americanized christianity in that most of its focus is on whether a particular person (jesus) existed and events that may or may not have occurred surrounding that person. in my own experience with other christians, i have seen relatively little exchange of ideas and meaning behind the person or events. it occurs to me also that gnosticism is a rare place where important ideas within christianity are actually discussed and not taken as literal givens.

i’m not saying i have a great mind, but would like to think that it’s above average. 🙂

interacting with god

the sgc doesn’t get it. anytime he starts talking about god, he prefaces it with ‘i know you don’t believe in god, but this is what i believe,…’ and i’ve told him time after time it’s not god that i have the issue with, it’s religion, especially the abrahamic variety, and the people in power within religion saying you have to believe a certain narrow conception of god or else you’re doomed. and he doesn’t get it with his reminders that i don’t believe in god, because, in reality, as far as semantics go, he’s right: i don’t believe in god, because belief alone in any person, thing, or idea is not proof that the thing exists. belief is based on hope, based on having seen some evidence or some sort of hearsay that something is true, but you don’t know balls to bones (thanks, oracle) that the thing is absolutely, verifiably true. so i don’t believe in god, but i do experience god on a moment by moment basis. i have to remind myself of this sometimes when i pass the homeless man on the street, refusing to look him in the eye, because i know if i do look, it’ll be into the eyes of god. it is my belief (ha ha) that we are all manifestations of different aspects of god’s character, positive and not-so-much (isn’t god described in the old testament as being a jealous god, with jealousy being normally seen as a negative trait?). our interactions with one another and life itself are really nothing more than illustrations of the myriad of ways that god has found to interact with god. god is so much bigger than the bible, so much bigger than religion, so much bigger than we can ever fathom, but because i have a different experience of god than the sgc does, we can’t even be friends (which i’m not sure could have happened regardless). another relationship bites the dust.

and i know this is the very best thing that could have happened, the best case scenario given our history. we’ve had our issues and i still think he is a selfish prick and he thinks i’m crazy and overly materialistic and really it’s mutual that it’s ending like this. aspects of god’s character interacting, huh? didn’t i just post yesterday that this shit needed to end? still it hurts. i did, and do, have feelings for the asshole, and it hurts that, okay, this is really not going to work, once again. but the reward is in being true to myself, not pretending to believe something just so i can have a warm body next to me at night. yes, it hurts, but the pain is overshadowed by the joy of knowing what i know of god, and the knowing that things are perfect exactly as they are, unfolding as things always do.

crouching asshole, hidden agenda

this has got to die

this has got to stop

this has got to lie down

with someone else on top

-from the song ‘elephant’ by damien rice

this whole thing with me and my sociopathic gentleman caller (the sgc) is just getting ridiculous. i just need to cut him off and not be bothered with him anymore and get on with my life. today it’s something like 95 degrees out and i live on the 7^th floor of a high-rise building with no air conditioner (but plenty of fans). earlier this evening, there was a knock at my door and i answered, thinking it was the pizza guy, since i had just ordered a pizza so i wouldn’t have to hang out in a hot kitchen and cook for myself. the knock turned out to be the sgc, holding a bag of raw chicken, wanting me to fry it for him. (mind you, i have never prepared fried chicken in my whole life.) he even noticed how hot my apartment was, but that didn’t stop him from insisting that my cooking his chicken would not make my apartment any worse than it already was.

i kept repeatedly saying no, and he kept insisting, and the only way i got him to stop was to offer him a piece of the pizza when it came. so we were waiting for it to arrive and i was trying to watch a movie i had just started (crouching tiger, hidden dragon) and he asked me out of the blue what i had planned for the next 20 years. i replied that i didn’t know, but i did know that for the next couple of years i’d be in library school and after i graduated i’d get a job as a librarian and go from. then he goes on this mini-rant about how education is useless; there are embezzlers and adulterers that have an education, so education has nothing to do with morality. he went on to elaborate that he wanted to know about my inner life, where i saw myself in 20 years. well apparently i have no trouble giving this information out to strangers via this blog, but there’s no way in hell i’m going to present him, the epitome of blue/amber on the spiral dynamics scale of consciousness, with ideas such as the evolution of my consciousness and a continuing interest in exploring shamanism and entheogens. (considering all the sex we’ve had, you would think he’d know something of this part of me, but our so-called relationship is pretty one-dimensional.) the fact is that these are issues i want to spend the next 20 years, and indeed the rest of my life studying, but if i bring them up, he’ll start going on about how all i need is jesus and how he can’t see how people get along without knowing jesus, blah blah blah. (we have had some interesting conversations along these lines, since i spent most of my 20s in the place where his consciousness seems to be parked now.)

anywho… i answered by saying something about wanting to do some extensive volunteer work in south africa at some point in the future (true) and i was probably about to get the god lecture again, when the pizza man (finally!) showed up. i threw a couple of pieces at him and he left (is there some sort of metaphor in that sentence?!) and now i’m just like, why am i keeping him in my life? the sex, while good, isn’t worth it, and he’s treating me like a girlfriend/spousal figure, which neither of us actually wants (i’m not a christian like he is, so he can’t marry me; he’s not a godless heathen, like i am, so i can’t marry him). i cook for him, i iron for him, i loan him money, i perform sexual favors for him. it all sounds like at least some sort of girlfriend to me, but whatever i may feel for him, it doesn’t involve any sort of commitment on any level, other than frenemies with benefits. so why do i continue to allow him to take up space in my life?

it really is my intention to be free, to evolve my consciousness to the point where it just doesn’t matter what my ego wants. recently my reading has included andrew cohen, 11 days at the edge by michael wombacher, and the uncommon path of awakening authentic joy by mick quinn. i’m in the process of doing some of the exercises towards the end of quinn’s book, and wombacher’s book affected me so that i’m reading it again. i’m excited about the concepts i’m coming across in all these books and more, and i want to see them come to fruition in my life. however, it seems like when i feel committed to a practice or certain ideas, the sgc comes bumbling into my life again. is it that my ego is afraid that i’ll never have the attentions of a male, that i’ll never be in a meaningful relationship again (although how much meaning does this current one have?!), that i’ll never have sex again? but, if i’m free from responding to the machinations of my ego, and if through my freedom i’m serving the greater good, do those questions really matter? i hope to find out the answers to these questions and more, but first of all, i need to cut the dead weight out of my life. i mean, the man had me cooking spaghetti for him when i was stumbling around with my frickin’ star wars boot a couple of weeks ago, and didn’t even offer to take out my trash for me. it seems pretty obvious what i need to do, huh?

the bag of flesh known as gail

where to begin, where to begin… i’ve been reading jed mckenna and his first two books (spiritual enlightenment: the damnedest thing and spiritually incorrect enlightenment) have proven to be nothing less than a major mindfuck. i’m anxiously waiting for the third (spiritual warfare) to arrive, which is supposed to be about waking up within what mckenna calls ‘the dream’.

before reading his books, i had already been realizing that life is pretty much a dream and trying to figure out how to be a more active participant within the dream instead of just letting it ‘happen’, or to live more lucidly, as it were. and then i come across mckenna’s words and now realize that the only thing that matters about the dream is that i wake up from it. however, the hard part about this realization is that this thing called *i* is also a dream. i’ve come to terms with life being a dream, but *me* being a dream? that means i don’t exist. there is no me. it’s all a construct: my thoughts, dreams, memories, preferences, opinions, the books on my bookshelf, the clothes i wear, all meant to make me seem *special*, *unique*, *important*, and i’m none of those things. i’m not. the only thing i am is full of shit. just like the rest of humanity. but humanity is not my concern at this moment, or maybe it is in that i can’t deal with most members of it right now. even friends and family are hard for me to spend large chunks of time with. i think i probably have one friend, and an online acquaintance, who would be most likely to understand what i’m getting at here, that i can talk to somewhat about what this is like. otherwise, most everyone else i know (and don’t know, for that matter) is thoroughly ensconced in the dream and think it’s absolutely real and they and their thoughts and beliefs are absolutely real and that even i, the bag of flesh known as gail, am absolutely real. and they are wrong.

so, at this point, *i* am still just a part of the dream. and if i figure out who the fuck this *i* is, i wake up. (i feel like i should have the who playing in the background: ‘tell me, who the fuck are you?’) so who am i? i don’t know anymore. i mean, i was born in 1965 under circumstances i’m not even fully aware of. my supposed father, the man whose name is on my birth certificate, was in bed with another woman the night i was born because he was so upset about his wife giving birth to another man’s child. growing up, i knew something was wrong because he and i never bonded (or rarely even spoke to one another) and i had no physical resemblance to him or anyone on his side of the family. still, i spent most of my life up until my 30s, believing that he was my biological father, because i had no tangible reason to believe any differently. i was told otherwise by my mother’s two best and oldest friends only because my mother was thought to be on her deathbed at the time. however, she did get better, then passed away a little more than a year later, but never did ‘fess up; even when talking to her through my psychic last year, she still didn’t confess to it on the other side of the grave. so i don’t know anything about my biological father, other than his name and what he did for a living. this means that even on the most basic, rudimentary level, i have no way of knowing fully what this bag of flesh descended from. and it just doesn’t seem fair, but it is what it is. however, if i don’t know this, what else don’t i know???

what i do know (or thought i knew), on this plane anyway, is that i was considered a highly intelligent child, having skipped a grade in school; i have an addiction to carbohydrates and sugar that i fight daily; i get a lot of compliments about my hair; i think certain forms of anarchy would be ideal; i’m bisexual; i’ve traveled to some interesting places, but have only been outside the united states for something less than 18 hours; i’m lonely but prefer being alone most of the time although physical companionship would be nice at times; i think i’m pretty smart but also feel like a fraud much of the time… i could go on and on with the trivia, but is any of it true? i, i, i…. who is this *i* that has interesting hair, who is bisexual, who has done some limited travel? fuck. i’m… can i even write a sentence without using *i*???

whatever. i’m trying to write something that i know absolutely without a doubt to be true, and i am finding that damn near impossible to do. to me, whatever is true is that which is not fleeting and cannot be destroyed. everything about me, everything in my life is fleeting; hell, life itself is fleeting. let’s say i live to 80; that’s a mere drop of mist in the bucket of time. my thoughts only last moment to moment; my body will eventually stop functioning and be turned to ash which i hope will be used as compost on flowers with a limited lifespan themselves; all this crap here in my apartment will be given to goodwill or stashed in the back of some relative’s closet or end up in a landfill or maybe burn in a fire or in some other way be dispersed amidst the dream when I’m gone (?!); my beliefs – well we have seen how my beliefs have changed radically over the past decade. ten years ago i was a wage slave in a christian bookstore, and now look at me, derisively denouncing pretty much any form of religion or belief. (wonderful, and imho, true piece of writing by julie, mckenna’s ‘student’ in spiritually incorrect enlightenment, page 256: ‘What is Christianity but a two-bit protection racket? Good cop/bad cop. The son, our blessed savior, saving us from what? From his psychotic freakshow father who’s hellbent on burning us alive forever. What kind of twisted fuck thinks this stuff up? What kind of pathetic slob falls for it? My kind. Me. I did.’ me too, julie. who woulda thunk it?) there is nothing about me that is real, yet i have this attachment to it all as if my life depends on it. maybe that’s because my life, at least as a part of the dream, does depend on me hanging on to the fantasy. and, while it’s had its moments, it hasn’t even been a very pleasant fantasy overall. wouldn’t i have chosen things differently if i knew early on that this was just a dream? maybe, maybe not, who the fuck knows?

what i know to be true at the moment of this writing is the only thing about me that is true, that cannot be destroyed, is my awareness, which i’ve had from before i was born until now; which, in reality i had before i was conceived and will continue to have long after this body stops working. everything else is just part of the construct. and i guess my job in all this is to rid myself of my emotional attachment to the construct and embrace the only thing i know to be true. my ego must destroy itself. if i choose to accept this mission, this is going to be sooo hard. being at this point so very much sucks, because right now i feel like i can’t go back to the way i was even a month ago, but going forward will be a nightmare, if i choose to detach from all this nonreality and pursue ‘enlightenment’. but it only makes sense that i do so, how can i knowingly hang onto a delusion??? i mean, detaching to this degree is a scary thing. how am i supposed to maintain relationships? what about being a part of a healthy, loving romantic relationship, which I still have hopes for (talk about a fantasy!)? how is this even possible if i’m on this quest to weed out falsehood from my life, falsehood being defined as anything that is not 100% true? how am i supposed to show up at work every morning, let alone move to california and continue my education, if everything and everyone i see rubs me the wrong way even on a good day because of ignorance? how can i listen to the dramas my family and friends role play in daily, when i know they are not real, it’s all just a big fucking sometimes tedious play? similarly with politics, it’s all just more drama that affects a larger cross-section of participants in the play. maybe one day i’ll be detached enough to look on it all with a sense of amusement, but right now it’s just painful, because it all seems so meaningless and a waste of time, and yet i’ve got 44 years invested in it.

so, this is going to be ugly, but i have to work it out somehow. i don’t even know why it has to be worked out, but it’s something like a compulsion, i suppose. and let’s say that, okay, eventually i am face to face with reality and have weeded out all that is not true – i am this enlightened creature with the interesting hair. what does that even matter, as opposed to me living out my life the way it is now, like everyone else is doing? one key notion in spiritually incorrect enlightenment is that the point of enlightenment is to realize that there really is no point. geez, talk about meaningless and a waste of time. yet deliberately allowing myself to be a part of a delusional world is not really an option. and i realize that, should all go well physically, i’ll be on this planet another 40 or so years moving around amidst the dream, but i hope to develop the ability not to take it seriously and not to look askance at those who do. (please hurry up and get here, spiritual warfare, for some suggestions on how this might happen…) in the meantime, well, here we go… …don’t take anything personally that i might write from here on out; it’s really not you, it’s me… and i know that most people who have read this far are probably thinking i’ve gone off the deep end. maybe i have.

truth in fiction

the short story ‘revelation’ by haven kimmel (from the anthology killing the buddha: a heretic’s bible by peter manseau and jeff sharlet) is the most brilliant piece of fiction writing i’ve come across. ever. period. it’s even better than the writing of tom robbins, and robbins is the gold standard as far as i’m concerned.

‘revelation’ is written from the point of view of a multitudinous godhead as it attempts to explain how the book of revelation ended up so convoluted. this story so inspires me that i once spent a weekend typing out the entire story, just so i could attempt to inhabit it a bit more deeply. i decided to revisit it over this past weekend and as always honed in on something timely:

Stay inside your skin and figure it out. We urge this upon you in your sleep. Be radically negative: not this, not this, not this. The Kingdom is not your clan, your country, your meetinghouse. The Conflict is not your government, your enemies, your struggle with entropy and degeneration. Use your history only as metaphor, koan, or parable. (page 275)

wow. this portion of the story really hit me, because the day before i had just finished spiritual enlightenment: the damnedest thing by jed mckenna, which really rocked my world (to use a stupid cliché). mckenna basically says that enlightenment has nothing to do with spirituality or bliss or nondual consciousness, it only has to do with knowing what is really true, and asking yourself the tough questions until you get the answer for yourself. i’ve been chewing on his words since i began the book a few days ago, asking myself about the nature of reality and what i can absolutely, without a doubt, know to be true, which i have no doubt i’ll be writing about in the future. right now, i’ll just say that i feel similarly to way i felt right after reading why christianity must change or die by john shelby spong a few years ago, which was a tumultuous time for me spiritually. however, this time i’m not angry or anything like that. (i think i got that brand of anger out of my system while reading not in his image by john lamb lash a couple of years ago.) it’s more that mckenna’s writing in some ways confirmed for me things i’ve already figured out for myself about religion and belief in general. but i don’t want to go into all that right now…

…i just want to tell y’all to go out and buy this killing the buddha anthology or check it out from the library or borrow it from me :). kimmel’s story alone would be worth it, but there are other wonderful pieces of writing within as well: travel essays written by manseau and sharlet as they meander through the spiritual backwoods of america, interspersed with other writers’ individual takes on individual books of the bible. however, mainstream christians, please take note: it is subtitled a heretic’s bible, so there are writings that some may consider offensive or, more hopefully, thought-provoking. if a piece of writing causes you to think every once in awhile on why you believe what you believe, what harm can come from that?