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Archive for February, 2011

Reaping

Posted in Uncategorized on February 27, 2011| Leave a Comment »

I guess the theme of the week is whether or not evil sews the seeds of its own destruction. My own logical conclusion, as well as observations, is inevitably, yes! However, that being said, I don’t believe in evil. . .

Don’t get me wrong, I do believe in horrendously awful. I do believe that certain things are in no manner whatsoever helpful aside from being a perfect example of what never ever to do because it obviously sucks for all existence involved. I do believe that there are people who are apparently incapable of making positive decisions because they have been formed into being that severely damaged. But, evil itself is a concept I flatly reject.

How is it that I refuse to believe in evil? Two reasons: 1) If there is some ephemeral force of pure negativity that wants only destruction and wants us to do what is worst for ourselves, by virtue of the concept I’m always harping on “it shall be done unto you as you believe,” by not believing in it I can turn my focus toward actions more helpful, not giving it the slightest bit of energy to be able to work around me because I live life as though it doesn’t exist and the work required to make what I want to exist does. Of course, I believe in no such entity; that would be superstitious and akin to believing in monsters under my bed and a bogey man in my closet. So, 2) What I have seen of what people call “evil” manifesting in other people, I see as something other than “evil.”

Think back as far as you can. Can you ever remember a time in which there wasn’t some kind of war happening on this planet? I mean, can you conceive of a moment in time in which some government wasn’t actively engaging in the use of death for either monetary gains, or to defend themselves from somebody, interested in either power or money, for even one brief second? And do you think your parents can remember such a time? Or there’s? Now consider this, have you ever heard the term “post traumatic stress disorder?” And do you think that such a condition is isolated to only our time?

So the world as I know it has been fighting itself for a very long time. I contend not only is this not helpful to those people dying, but also not good for the families of those dead, and also not good for the families of those who live and can’t stop replaying the war they just lived through in their heads. And if they’re really lucky, they won’t try to kill the pain with alcohol, or beating their children, or succumbing to whatever genetic form of mental illness that tends to get passed down in their family . . .

So I guess what I’m saying is that if this were a world in which people weren’t constantly being made into the mentally ill by “power possessing” individuals who decide it’s a good idea to murder and disrupt the lives of other individuals, that have nothing whatsoever to do with them, because of their desire for money, or power, or to fulfill a point of pride because inside they’re nothing more than a broken little child, or whatever, maybe we could see objectively if there is such a thing as “evil.” But, the fact is that since the causes of “evil” perpetually abound, while I do believe that it is rather easy for people to find themselves in such a set of circumstance in which mental illness is the natural result, and that the effects of those mental illnesses can certainly look a lot like this strange misnomer “evil,” I can not with a clean conscience believe that “evil” exists. I mean, even that “president” that is nothing more than a scared little child inside, and thus taking that fact out on others in a really lousy way, like invading sovereign nations, killing its inhabitants, and thus spurning on civil wars and economic corruption, even he isn’t evil. He just should have been given an outlet to discuss his sister dying when he was young, and later not been paid by multi-million dollar organizations to sit behind the trigger of half the world’s nuclear bombs.

What does my psychoanalysis of the state of why people look like they’re acting “evil” have to do with God? Because there is no “evil” in God. And God is everything without exception. And in acting, two wrongs do not make a right. Slaughter to prevent slaughter merely causes slaughter. And if you’re concerned about a particular dictator I say to you, check out Egypt’s possibilities when its own people decided they’d had enough of something. They didn’t use slaughter. They acted together as God. Let’s see the psychosis/evil toll there as juxtaposed to if their land had been ripped asunder by “do-gooders” looking to make a buck by “freeing” people.

While this strange nothingness of a word “evil” has certainly been used enough to manipulate people into acting in the image of something other than the divine, it is the belief in the implications of said word that tend to bring about what people are talking about when they use it. So, I don’t believe in evil, though I do believe in cases of severe mental illness. And I don’t believe that violence helps anything, ever; at best its like pushing the food around your plate to make it look like you’ve eaten more than you have. And I do believe in compassion for those around us who need it, I do believe that Love is more helpful even if that means we merely have to turn away from someone who we wish could live in such a way that they wouldn’t need to harm us, and I do believe that in extreme cases of serious physiological brain damage, our jails become a viable option. But in that last case resort, I also believe in having pity on a person who has committed their crimes because their brain is broken. And I have pity on that person because I personally cannot imagine any greater Hell than not having the option whatsoever of claiming and using freely and with full heart one’s own sanity no matter what one does. I can imagine no greater horror than being locked so deeply into one’s mind that they cannot make claim to being the sort of animal they were born as, because they have no choice of acting like a different kind of beast entirely.

“Without Love deity, insanity’s king.” -Robert Hunter

Peace

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To Serve

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on February 19, 2011| 1 Comment »

When I think about organized religions, especially the western ones, and I compare them to the way I perceive God, it looks to me something like this:

Many, maybe most, not all, who subscribe to the organized bunch generally seem to have some, if not in the very unfortunate cases all, of their thoughts on the matter written for them somewhere in some book, or thought into their minds, without a direct experiencing of what it is they think they believe. I have trouble believing something in a book, no matter how old it is or how many people buy it, because, I have read a lot of books. What is on a page, and what I can feel with my hand, seldom mesh. Mother Goose and Grimm is nice in its way. Porridge is better than starvation, and when one falls down a hill their likely-hood of death does increase. But, on a whole, I’m able to perceive that a story is not necessarily written to be congruous with my life as I am living it. It may contain a good example of something. Maybe make me think of something that does have an actual, real world, application. But on a whole, a story is a story, and when I’m not a crazy person, I can usually leave it in the book it came and walk away happily.

But when one can’t tell the difference between a story in a book, and the life they are living, there seems to me to be a problem. When a person takes the words of some man, or woman, and believes that the validity of their life rests solely in the words written by a human being, they have stopped seeking their own individuality and have stopped seeking their own connectivity to the divine form the perspective of their own unique individuality.

So, since everything, from my perspective, is God, and since every person is given the capacity to choose, if they choose to use that capacity, I see a metaphor for two distinct approaches to God. In this metaphor one has no choice but to serve the divine. One may be serving the adversarial aspect of the divine, HaSatan, but nonetheless, no one has choice but to serve wherever they are best suited to serve, within the context of an Omni-Divine universe. That being the case, the choice lies in this: In one version, in which one lives out the words of a book as though it were their own perspective, one chooses slavery to a God they choose never to want to have a direct interaction with. In the other version, one chooses to serve God and take their orders directly from a living entity creating existence in real time.

Because they think that stepping outside of their book and having a real relationship with God is too scary, one would bow their eyes below the light of the divine and see its light cast only on a man-made representation of the world. In the other version, one serves actively the creation of the world as it exists and is being made to exist by the light provided; their eyes resting where the intention of creation is at hand.

Not that one can’t derive good inspiration from some words passed down over the ages, but at the point in time in which one has been conned into being afraid that someone believing something different is damned to Hell, they seem too over-joyfully to begin creating that Hell amidst us on Earth in order to save us from the very thing they are so anxiously afflicting upon us living folk. At which point the desire for death to “go to Heaven” or in different terms “make it stop” suddenly becomes all too clear.

The alternative seems to be to eat our food with bits of salt. While understanding what we are creating in some moments hinges on once glancing and cognizing a handful of words in a book, it is the results we live outside that book that is the real test of the validity of our capacity to serve all creation in all its form. And may we be able to serve all its forms well, for appearance may deceive, but a kind action from one’s own hand never lies.

TTFN

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Good V.D. and How We Got It!

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on February 13, 2011| 1 Comment »

Well I wanted to open with the video from the movie “True Stories” for the song Love For Sale, but was only able to find the video with someone else’s music over-dubbed. So, instead of artsy to cultivate a point, I’ll instead settle for “I dare you to find a nicer song for the holiday” and I do expect comments with links . . . And here’s where I’ll begin:

Happy Valentines Day Everybody!

So, in honor of the holiday, a little about it’s Catholic origins because, contrary to popular belief, Hallmark did not invent it . . . they just perfected it . . .

So, for starters, most of this info, if not all, is gleaned from this site and this article: http://www.history.com/topics/valentines-day and I’m giving the short version that I think is particularly interesting and pertinent to my ongoing theme, etc . . .

So apparently, before being commandeered by Christendom for the sake of converting more and slaughtering less, February 15th was a major Roman fertility ritual. The Roman’s would sacrifice a goat, a symbol for fertility, at the cave where Romulus and Remus, the alleged founders of Rome, were supposedly raised by wolves. Boys would then take slices of the hide of the sacrificed goat and dip it in the sacrificial blood and run through the streets of Rome lightly slapping the crops and the faces of young ladies, who were happy to have the blessing of fertility. Then a lottery would commence in which the boys and girls of the town would be paired up according to lot, which often led to marriage.

Given peoples misconceptions about relationships, and confusion of what love means after watching one too many Julia Roberts movies, I totally think we should bring back the skinned goat. Compared to today, just seems more civilized, but, I digress.

So, once the Christians took over, that went away, but they needed to convert the happy Heathens somehow, and enter the legend of Saint Valentine, or Saint Valentinus as he is sometimes known.

Now, the legends are apparently murky at best, but, according to this article, at least two stories about Saint V seem pertinent to me. Supposedly, around the third century, one of the emperors, Claudius the 2nd, decreed that young men couldn’t marry because he believed that unmarried men made better soldiers. A priest named Valentine was said to have then performed clandestine marriages between secret lovers, thus securing him a place as the patron of love. Claudius finding him out and having him killed, secured him the sainthood.

The other legend is that Valentine, while in prison for performing marriages, fell in love with the daughter of his jailer. And remember, it wasn’t until well after the third century that priests were no longer allowed to marry in Catholicism. In fact, it was at least a good thousand years or so after Christ had kicked it that the church began writing in its new policy of child molestation. Anyway, again pardon the digression, the point is, Valentine, while in jail, was said to have fallen in love. And before he was killed he was said to have written his love a letter signed “from your Valentine,” and hence the valentine giving on Valentine’s day was born.

So, that’s the interesting bits, more or less, of how we have arrived today with the yearly ritual of stimulating the production of oxytocin in the minds of the women we love, as well as bringing them flowers that cost way too much to compensate for the fact of any who should probably be bringing them flowers a lot more often when the price is reasonable.

In a modern world, where we are blessed to love as we please, may anyone reading this have a blessed day to celebrate happiness. And if one’s initial impulse is lacking in happy, may you find a big box of chocolate to take the pain away!

Happy Valentine’s Day!

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Air

Posted in Uncategorized on February 5, 2011| Leave a Comment »

The particulars of subject matter have left me on the eve before when I agreed with myself to post, so, I’m wingin’ it!

To breathe is to take in life. The oxygen from the air flows into the lungs where it is taken by the heart and into the blood, where it is transmuted into, and for, the rest of the body.

And immediately I’m reminded simultaneously about the forthcoming Valentine’s day, and last week’s posting about water. I’ll put martyrdom in the face of love aside for next week. As for this week, immediately an interesting comparison exists between these two “fundamental elements.” Both are givers of life. Both teach about life. And so, from first noticing what seems most fundamental to sustain me, and reflecting briefly upon the prior week, a topic is born!

Air may carry varied substances in it, but it is the essential element in all things biologically living. All living creatures need some form or variation on “air” to exist. To breathe is to live.

In Indian theology, Brahma breathes all of creation into existence. In Judaism God breathes into Adam to give him not only life, but a kinship to divinity. In Christianity in the beginning was the word, which presumably is the intentional exhalation of God. To breathe is to live.

And, again, the most fundamental subtle transmutations of matter revolve around breath. To speak, is to breathe, is to create.

I suppose a redefining of God could be “that upon which we must take in to live.” In which case, light begins to be the obvious energy of which we living beings regularly transmute. And, in light of the above mentioned, forthcoming, Valentine’s day, Love a subtler energy still; one which is perhaps the necessity of consciousness.

And next week I’ll pick up from there. In the mean time, thank you for baring with a little improvised rambling for the sake of writing something pertinent this week, and, here is some music:

TTFN

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