God Can't be a Luke-Warm Cup of Tea

     We can’t escape responsibility.  Each generation is responsible for inheriting the world, modifying it and then passing it on.  We only have temporary custody of this planet, but what we choose to do with it will have eternal consequences.  Pondering the profound and ambiguous may seem like trying to read in the dark – a futile attempt to extract meaning in a sphere where our senses are far too inadequate. 

“YOLO; Live for the moment, as long as you’re happy, it’s all relative.”  The acceptance of this apophatic existence may be mere excuses that justify living the way we want to.  “God may or may not exist...who knows, so why let it affect your life?”

See it can’t be a black and white issue.  Either this Entity/Force/Being/Power exists and the structure of things is the way that the prophets, saints and mystics have said it is…

…Or it’s not. 

Like C.S. Lewis said, either Jesus is a madman or real.  If he’s either then a vague respect for Him is inappropriate.

Sure there can be variation on what you see God as, but all the major religions advocate the fact that, since God exists, our lives should be rearranged fundamentally.  That’s the path to true peace.  The amazing thing is that this God, although infinitely bigger and deeper and transcendental, penetrates our lives.  Hello there ants, let’s have a cup of tea.

Boil that tea so that the substance transmutes to a higher state - from liquid to vapor.  Please.  If not, then ditch the tea and get your kicks from drugs.

“What is man that you are mindful of him, the Son of man that ...you set him a little lower than the angels”.  But God prefers human worship to that of angels because we have free choice.

Yes, I know you’re Mommy’s little angel.  Now what are you going to do about it?

 

True Happiness in this Life?

What's the meaning of life?  What is the meaning of that sentence?

Since the dawn of time our species has grappled with questions about the point of our existence.  Sometimes we have driven that point into other people in wars designed to further the interest of "us"; sometimes we have poked ourselves in the eye with that point repeatedly, causing pain and a certain kind of blindness.  "Oh but we've advanced far beyond those primitive days", you say?  Ok well what does our "advanced" culture tell us about what it means to be fully happy in this life today?

"The meaning of life is to be happy, and to cause others to be happy.  Set goals, work hard towards achieving them, accomplish things, prove to others your worth and thereby gain their respect, nurture your family, find your soul mate, live in the moment, get a white picket fence and an iPhone..."

Each of these bombs separated by commas above is a complex, lifetime quest toward achieving a dream that may or may not be in line with Reality.  Ok the iPhone acquisition doesn't necessarily take a whole lifetime, merely the majority.  Fun fact: the highest rate of depression is amongst the rich (money makes you happy?); the highest rate of suicide is amongst psychiatrists (education makes you happy?), and half of the uniting of "soul mates" ends in utter despair.

Don't mean to be cynical here, but let's define the problem.  Maybe the very problem is the lack of a definition: a definition about what it means to be human.  We are very aware that to be human means to have a body, to be of the species Homo Sapien, to be in relationship, to work.  These are objective facts that have been labeled so by the uprising of Rationalism in the Enlightenment of previous centuries.  Verifiable stuff = true, non-verifiable stuff = false.  Is that assumption verifiable?  Never mind. 
It's important to understand the historical context when we talk about things like happiness, because we are not an isolated moment.  In fact the very word moment has been produced by a series of historical interactions, and to ignore where we come from is to ignore where we are going.  We could pass all this up if the issue of happiness wasn't so pressing, but the fact of the matter is that there are more diagnoses of depression than ever before, and the highest incidents of this syndrome are in the developed first world countries.  Ok, maybe the developed countries develop these definitions, and then put themselves in it, but let's set that aside for now.

Quickly, because we need to talk about concrete things in the remaining 100 words too, let's take a step back and look at our progress historically.  We used to live a much more static life, where identity was defined by the role you played in your family and society.  The world made sense because it was all God's mysterious working.  We had our place in the cosmos, and cosmic peace had a place in our minds.  Don't get me wrong, these were barbaric times in other ways, but hear me out.  These people didn't strive under Western Individualism to validate their own worth.  They weren't competing in their own minds against a myriad of other options which they could be doing. 

Ok that touches on where we find ourselves today based on where we have come from: clearly it's the opposite in terms of how we achieve our identity, meaning, and thereby happiness.  That will have to suffice for now.  Let's get to the practical stuff:

We are body, mind, and spirit.  In order to be fully happy in this life, we need to feed each of our constituents. 
The body:  Feed it literally, with good stuff.  It's obvious what is good - things that we were created to eat like fruits, vegetables, nuts, natural meat...and chocolate (lots of it!)
The mind:  Question everything.  Don't accept the paradigm that was fed to you as a child.  That worldview is a product of our parents, the desire for organization that our society has conjured up, and previous thinkers.  Dare to question the very assumptions that they have been based upon, and do your own research to verify the facts.
The spirit:  Look, love is not just a series of neurochemical reactions, and meaning is not just an evolutionarily adapted survival mechanism that makes us feel special.  Don't buy into the rationalists dualism.  Look where they came from and then their reduction makes sense.  But you'll never find true happiness unless you feed your spirit with purpose and a relationship with the Transcendent.  How to do that is another article completely.

Hey, I'm not trying to preach here.  But as someone who is truly happy, and is a mental health counselor by profession, I feel my two cents is worth at least 1.5 cents.  Take it, spend it, invest it, or throw it into a pool and make a wish.  I bet you'll wish for true happiness.

You and I Share Symmetrical Colored Wings

Butterflies reverting to grey caterpillars

Forgetting the colorful fantasy flights of youth

Now time is money and gold makes the rules

The golden rule is sweet as honey to those who sting without mercy...ultimately causing their owns deaths

"Buzz off people, you're an inconvenient interruption of the self-instruction I'm engaging in.

Stop making me put down my spiritual books, can't you see I'm trying to be godly here, damn...(ed)"

The money markets mock the merchants

who have no cash to sell

It takes money to make money

And costs too much soul acquiring the former

Well ill keep discovering what I'm born into

Keep shedding these onion layers.

Ill use the tears to wash my soul,

Instead of mixing cement for walls.

Four walls is what it seems like I'm contained in

But the butterfly doesn't realize that the cocoon is self-induced.

Like the mind thinks its separate from Reality. 

On your Marks, Get Set, GO...find Meaning

It's laughable when you think about the condition humanity finds itself in: we have no idea how we got here, who we are, or where we are going.  We have conflicting assumptions that lead to individualized quests for meaning.  What are the characteristic responses to this unknown?  Let's check it out.

People take various paths when facing the Mystery that is existence:

1) The Ostriches bury their heads in the sand.  The sand can take the form of materialism, gossip, mindless entertainment, and indulgence.  Like their bird counterparts, they adopt the chicken approach and run in the direction of denial.  They seem to still live under the juvenile belief system that says if I can't see you, you can't see me. A game of hide and seek that lasts a lifetime - meaning never finds them, and they never find meaning.  Well done, you um...win.  I'm not meaning to criticize the birds, it's just that they often end up getting eaten by the void of regret, and I want to make myself as untasty a morsel as I can for that beast! 

2) The Fundamentalists fight for a set of beliefs.  None of the fun, all of the mental.  In a way they are more noble than the ones who refuse to pick a side 'cos "Better hot or cold than luke warm; the luke warm will get spat out of the mouth of God"...type thing.  The problem is that if these belief systems arent based on a combination of rational and experiential enquiry, they stem from emotionality and theory respectively.  The emotion-driven need to attack those who believe differently than us stems from an insecurity that our ideas might turn out to be wrong.  God is big enough to defend Himself, and the desperate approach to resort to injustice to defend Him is a self-depreciating irony.

3) The Yes people believe in everything.  They believe that truth is relative and hey, if it works for you, then it's true.  Pantheism, Theism, Agnosticism...yip, all true.  "It's narrow minded to deny someone their belief system".  Well the self-defeating argument is evident: if it's narrow minded to deny someone their belief system, then it is narrow minded to deny Fundamentalists theirs.

Oh you might think I'm on this high and mighty rant, criticizing the above stereotypes and that I'm finally gonna launch into an obnoxious set of reasons why my way of approaching things is the best.  Ya, I'm just not :)

Reincarnation and the Collective Unconscious

Such diverging worldviews lurk in the background of our modern life.

Never before have we known as much about other cultures' perceptions of Reality...
and never before have we known so little about our own.

The previous ages were called the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Modern Age.  What would we call the era we live in?  The Scientific Age, the Information Age?
And are we closer to having Information about what really matters?
Are science and mythology mutually exclusive, or different lenses to view the same human experience?
What does psychology say to the East's insistence on cycle and illusion, and the West's insistence on one shot at individuation?

Fact: when certain people are hypnotized, they spout previously unrecalled memories that they claim come from previous lifetimes.  And sometimes these facts are uncannily verified.
Fact: no one can verify what the true implications of this are.

1) Is it that the individual consciousness/entity gets transmuted from lifetime to lifetime, growing in wisdom until it reaches it's Nirvanic destination?
2) Is the subconscious a gateway to a reservoir of human memory spanning the depth of time?
[Maybe, like science and mythology, these first two perspectives are different lenses to the same human experience.]
Or 3) Do people traverse the Karmic realms until they come to the Realisation that the price has already been paid?

These things are beyond words.
Maybe the only thing that is, is God/Life/Existence.  We survive through the connection with things that are eternal.  To the extent that our essence is God's essence, that part of us will never die.  Time is a construct that has gripped us way too tightly since the late Middle Ages, and it's hard to untangle our rational minds free from a concept that was birthed in rationality.

These individual existences of ours may try many paths.  And until we realise it's not our trying that shatters the paradigm, we'll keep trying.

Drugs and the Ascent to Truth

It's been said that Truth or Reality is this mountain that we all traverse throughout our lifetimes.  And that different religions take different paths up the mountain, but all end up in the same point.  Well the validity of that claim is something to discuss on a day other than Thursday.

But, being Thursday, I wanna talk a bit about drugs and their role in our meandering up that pile of rock.
Maybe drugs drop you near the top of the mountain.  Not the very top, but maybe like 2/3 of the way up.  I'm talking about psychedelics now.  And Ive never done anything besides weed,  but have extensively researched LSD and its family.  Ive also had LSD like experiences on weed.

The paradigm shift that comes with this new found perspective blows our minds, and there is a profundity that we lack in the cardboard box every day existence.  But here's the problem:

When we ascend by following the traditional ways of religion, we are able to gradually see the perspective change - trees become neighborhoods, become cities, becomes the horizon.  Things make sense through that wisdom rooted in Rock.  Also, assets like perseverance, patience, and muscles are developed from the grueling walk.

These all serve to ground us and protect us when we reach the top of the mountain and start getting into other realms.  People who have been dropped there by drugs are vulnerable and dont have the muscle and perspective to fight off the metaphorical mountain lions and creatures lurking up there to devour people.

Door can be opened that can never be closed.
They were right all along, don't do drugs.  Drugs are bad.

'On' Miserables of 2013

Let's not lose Life in amongst the plastic

The haunting childhood anthems ran back through my veins, this time surging them with the shivers that I have learned are from God.  My mom brought me the soundtrack to the play from London when I was 7, and I've been tantalized by the other-worldliness of Les Miserables since.

It's a world that speaks of something worth dying for, and living for.  Of the raw emotion that cries out from not so distant times, to a world that races through Big Macs and Adam Sandler movies.  Don't get me wrong, Big Macs are funny, and Adam Sandler movies are yellow, but we've lost a taste of what it means to be human in this age.

Our freedom was bought with blood, our height comes from standing on the shoulders of previous generations.  The Lamb has paid, we have been raised, and we eat.  Let's not get de-sensitized to the taste of food.