More on belief

I latched onto two pieces about Scientology that I find striking in their similarity to the backstory and issues of Mormonism:

L. Ron Hubbard’s Great Grandson

Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology

also this, relating back to one of my earlier posts:

End of Times

I know many Mormons who believe they have healed/been healed by the Priesthood of the church. It’s starting to seem to  me that some of the draws of these sorts of belief systems are the following:

1) When you give yourself over to the dictates of a higher power, listening to an inner voice that is not quite yourself, you feel happier and seem to be guided into things that you might not have discovered otherwise

2) When you believe that you are channeling this higher power (i.e. not acting on your own, but acting on behalf of the higher power) you may experience things that seem supernatural, like healing

This has similarities to an idea called “flow” that artists and athletes experience–when a writer is really in a groove she sometimes experiences the sensation that the words are coming straight through her, rather than from her, and an athlete can feel as though they’re not consciously deciding to move, but somehow being moved (though this is often attributed to training and instinct rather than some outside force.)

Hmm…I wonder…

The Journey Continues

I was pretty much done with the “should I become Mormon again?” thing, but it wasn’t done with me.

I’m really starting to think that this is my path. First I encountered the outer limits of my knowledge, the ultimate blank despair, and as I reel/try to recover from that, I keep coming across people uniquely positioned to get across to me right now, and to answer my very specific concerns in a satisfying way.

Yesterday, despite my self-reassurance that God is love and all I need to do is follow love, I felt incredibly fearful all morning. This fear drove me to finally face up to something I’ve been carrying around for a long time.

When I was fourteen I was babysitting a seven year old boy (this adorable seven year old who just loved everyone and told me all the time that when he grew up, after he finished his mission, he was going to marry me…despite the age gap). He was sitting in my lap and, horny, repressed little teen that I was, I sort of…masturbated against him. Very subtly. I tried not to let him notice, and I don’t think he did.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t see this as a “sin” and I don’t feel bad for it abstractly. In fact, I fully blame the confusing teachings of the LDS church, which say that masturbation itself is bad and you should repress those feelings until you’re married. If I had felt comfortable with my body and the desires that were so irresistible at the time, I would have taken care of my urges in a much more appropriate way.

My big problem was, I dated a man at one point who was touched inappropriately by a camp counselor, and it messed him up, big time. I know that kids can be confused about what’s their fault and in a puritanical society, they can feel dirty or impure just for being a target of someone else’s sexuality.

I’ve been worried all of these years that this kid noticed and that he internalized it in a negative way. I’ve been trying to get up the courage to talk to him, and I sent him a Facebook message which he never answered, and I thought he had ended his mission early and maybe that was my fault, tracing all the way back to that one time when I babysat him.

So this fear built up and my brain was looking for something to attach it to, and I fixed on this kid. I needed to talk to him ASAP, because what if he committed suicide or something, and then that was hanging over me forever, when I could have done something about it?

I called his mom, pretty terrified of her reaction. You know, mama bear, aforementioned puritanical society, what is she going to say to this. Her reaction? “It is so brave of you to come forward with this after all these years! God bless you! I’m so glad you were able to finally lay that burden down at Jesus’ feet! You know, I’m pretty sure he never knew about it.” She said he was very open with her about everything and she never saw anything that would make her think he was affected. I asked her to think about whether we(/I) should talk to him about it anyway, just in case. He actually did finish his mission, and he’s super happy and coming home soon.

Finally, after all of these years, peace on this matter. Peace I was driven to by fear. Hmm.

So I keep going through my day, feeling better, but still fearful. Still this powerful fear eating me up for no obvious reason. It starts to attach itself to my meeting with a man who could possibly help my career, who I’ve never met before. I start wondering if he’s going to hurt me, maybe. I take some minor precautions, like telling several people who I’m meeting with and texting a friend with our meeting location and time, and he picks me up and we go to dinner.

I like him right away, and the more we talk, the clearer it becomes that our world views are very, very similar, especially in terms of the way we believe in treating other people and why. Our approaches to life are similar, we have similar personalities–although he has a more aggressive streak, and whenever I hear a hint of it, or something that could be a subtle warning, my fear rises in me again. The whole time, I’m trying to figure out—is he going to hurt me, or help me?

We’re talking about our mutual friend who introduced us, and existential crises come up. I laughingly mention how I almost was driven back to Mormonism by this recent crisis, and…turns out he’s Mormon. He doesn’t believe in evangelism, but by now I’m curious to see how this very intelligent and compassionate man reconciles his worldview with an LDS one, because I’m still seeing some important incompatibilities.

Over the course of our discussion, in the way he explains things to me, I’m seeing hints of a patronizing viewpoint towards others that kind of bothers me. An investment in hierarchy, in some people being “more equal” than others. But the more we talk, the more I begin to see a picture emerge, and though he hasn’t quite said it in this way, I can begin to see a valid reason that the LDS church, as a whole, might be a little bit behind the curve instead of leading the way.

Because of course the first question I ask him is, “Why should I even listen to an intermediary? If god is love, why shouldn’t I just follow love? Especially an intermediary that seems to clearly enact love to a lesser degree than I want to, rather than a greater one?”

Some answers I came up with during/after our discussion, a combination of his explanations and my attempt to make sense of them on my own:

One: if there’s a plan for salvation, it’s for everyone, not just me. The church is suited to the society it’s in—it’s supposed to help people in the current society get where they’re supposed to be (just like the old testament form of governance was suited for a more savage time with people who understood things more physically and less symbolically). This might sound patronizing until you realize that the more advanced lesson, the ahead-of-the-curve version of how to love others, was already presented by Jesus completely intact, and people over the centuries have really, really struggled to follow that lesson in a way that remotely resembles what Jesus told them to do. We’re all hindered by our collective endeavor, and we’re all helped by our collective endeavor.

The LDS church puts Jesus’ teachings at the center of its philosophy. They’re actually called “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.” The advanced lesson was always waiting at the center of the less symbolic, more physical “thou shalt nots” so it has always provided the opportunity to keep pushing to love more, at the same time as creating a safe space for people to move forward according to what they already understand. No one says I have to love exactly in step with the church; I can keep doing my thing, trying to love people more and more. There’s nothing stopping me. I don’t have to vote against gay rights, I can support and pray for women to have the priesthood, I can refuse to avoid people, stories, etc. because they might “negatively influence me,” and I can specify that there are certain things I want my tithing to support and certain things I’m unwilling for it to contribute to (like the mall and other financial ventures that promote our consumerist society and the exploitation of people across the globe.)

I’ve got friends who do things like this, who hold onto Mormonism but resist the things that contradict their perception of love and their rational understanding of what the teachings mean  (I‘d always wondered why they didn’t just up and leave) and there’s nothing stopping me from doing the same. BUT. It’s not enough for me to be able to believe what I believe. I still need a better reason to be Mormon instead of just doing my best on my own.

One reason: I struggle to know which feelings to trust. This man across from me clearly means me good and not ill, this is more and more obvious as the night goes on. And yet here I was, spiking with fear every time he made mention of something that could be interpreted as threatening (like saying things about how resisting the system instead of learning how to work within it will get you squashed—my paranoia re: whether scary folks like the Koch brothers might try and squash me for my ideas about ditching our current structures in favor of a truly representative system, or how our currency ought to be a human hour of labor, if we have one at all, or how our financial systems are all a lie, etc. etc. goes into hyper drive…what if he’s about to kill me or something?)

This man describes himself as having total peace of mind and confidence. And he doesn’t blindly follow, and he doesn’t believe in that. (More on this later.) I need help figuring out which feelings to trust. I need help beating back my fear and knowing what is instinct, what is nurture, what is inspiration. Since our conversation last night, my fear has dissipated.

Another reason: my crisis. I trust myself, but I recognize my own limits. If someone has a better plan than I do for how to make this all come out okay in the end…I really want to get on board with that. Seriously. The ultimate conclusion of my personal way of seeing the world leaves me all alone, throwing myself a giant tea party that means nothing. That’s not cool. That’s pretty much hell, actually. Trusting my own logical conclusions, based on my own understanding of the universe, is just not enough. I need other people.

Last: I have been following my own instincts this whole time. I’m here, and these answers are being handed to me, and they are interlocking perfectly with everything I need to know and need to hear. It could be coincidence, it could be wishful thinking, but the more I zoom out and look at the big picture of my life, the more that picture makes sense. But I’m still listening and looking. There are still some serious conflicts.

Creatively Rethinking the Apocalypse

This week in hope:

It’s a common perception that as time goes by, the world becomes more and more corrupt. If more and more people are airing their dirty laundry in public (i.e. openly living in nontraditional relationship structures, getting divorces, openly doing drugs, consuming pornography, eating gluttonously, getting into ridiculous amounts of debt, etc.), this means we are getting too comfortable with evil and we’re on the path to our own destruction.

A recent report from NASA offers a different perspective on our impending apocalypse. Comparing the collapse of giant civilizations throughout human history, a team of applied mathematicians, natural and social scientists identified some common factors which predict that, as we suspected, our society is heading towards its doom, but not for the reasons we think.

According to the study, it’s not our inability to overcome personal vices that dooms us, but our complacency with society’s vices. In other words, we’re heading towards destruction because we have allowed the elite to establish economic growth as humanity’s top goal, not because we’re too supportive of prostitutes or our drug policies aren’t strict enough. Our world is collapsing under the strain of corporations who refuse to mediate their impact on humanity.

Ultimately, humanity’s survival will depend upon our willingness to save one another from destruction. If we stand by passively as the world descend into chaos, are we not culpable for one another’s deaths? There’s a saying about “the lion laying down with the lamb” in paradise–which I think is a pretty fine clue that we’re not supposed to be waiting around for God to turn the oven to self-clean. We have the makings of paradise right here and now, if only we’d help it along instead of waiting for death to deliver it.

Tune in next week for some prime examples of this phenomenon, as sufferers of mental illness speak up, insisting that their worlds are not so lonely, foreign, or hellish as one might think. At least, not until the silencing begins.

Life, the Universe, and Everything. 42. Done.

Why is this universe the way it is? Because it’s this universe. The answer is 42; or might as well be.

I had a very profound experience the other day. Mushrooms have always had the ability to suppress my will —I’ve always felt fearless, calm, and hyper-aware of all around me, which I now understand to be the natural state of being, when separated from will.

In any case, rather than my will being suppressed, this last time I was barely tethered to it. I existed as awareness, with only the faintest shadow of my will maintaining ties with the outside world. Lying in the arms of h, in one of the moments when I was feeling more time-bound, I told him “I am everything.” And it was true. Whenever I floated away from myself, I was the whole of Existence. I just was. And it was good.

The deepest part of ourselves is one with everything. Time and will make us feel cut off and alone, but the whole of Existence is always surrounding us completely and living inside of us at the same time. As I tumbled back into my will and my timeline, as my fears and desires started to assert themselves, I kept having two flashes of thought—first: would this new perspective somehow help me cheat at life? What practical application could this possibly have? And second: would this ruin life for me? How could I invest in my very specific timeline with such a keen awareness of how ultimately equal each possibility is? Knowing how much more I am than this human woman with her fears and desires, how could I care enough about her life for it to feel meaningful at all anymore?

As the knowledge settled in, it became clear to me that this is undeniably a blessing. I learned a long time ago that philosophical investment in or certainty of a meaning has no effect on my personal drive. I had decided that life was meaningless and there is absolutely nothing that can be counted upon, and I was all set to commit suicide. But then I started working out the implications of my internal discovery, and then I was thinking about coming home and writing about it and I didn’t want to kill myself anymore. Will is a powerful thing—especially when we are unafraid to live by it.

Since my experience floating in awareness, I know what my eternal self wants for my temporal self: it wants it to pursue its will according to nature. There are no punishments but immediate ones for our missteps; if we treat others poorly, we will have very little love in our lives. The natural way of things is the give and take of negotiating and weighing our desires and fears against those of others; there are natural consequences when we violate each other. When we are dishonest or coercive in achieving our goals, we are overriding this natural way of things, and even this has a natural punishment: just like any other shortcuts or cheat codes, we cheat ourselves out of the experience just as much as we spoil things for others.

Much of the misery in the world comes from the sense that our desires are at odds with some nobler purpose we embody. It’s quite the opposite. Our desires are the path to our higher purpose.

Why do people feel empty when they pursue only pleasure? Because an eternal being cannot be satisfied by the temporary. Pleasure can only be experienced by something which feels desire–pleasure is not eternal.

What is eternal is harmony–the sense of things aligning with their nature perfectly, the sense of things achieving their innate purpose. Happiness is the sense that all is right with the world, the feeling of being satisfied with everything and everything being satisfied with you.

When we pursue personal and communal growth according to our desires, we feel joy, the combination of pleasure and happiness. This pursuit can sustain us forever. Anything short of that will bring only a sense of frustration that our pleasure doesn’t translate into happiness; frustration that our happiness comes at the expense of our pleasure.

My drive is to document, interpret, and communicate experience, with the ultimate goal of helping humans to find our purpose. There isn’t much keeping us from ending all unnecessary violence, developing forms of self-governance that make any kind of logical sense, and eliminating some of the worst behaviors of humanity—all we need is the confidence that working on behalf of everyone will benefit us all. These thoughts and efforts sustain me, they live in me regardless of how reasonable or unreasonable this pursuit may appear to others, whether or not it brings me rewards.

I am will. I pursue what I love and avoid what I fear. Until time releases me back into the great awareness, I will try and do my tiny job in the universe as best I can. When I look into your eyes, I know the same is true of you: you are all of awareness, wrapped by time into a physical form. I know we are cut off from each other, and we are each other. I know that it is in my interest to support you in attaining your will, and it is in your interest to support me.

Consider the implications of this worldview. Consider the all-embracing love it encourages. I fully advocate this as truth. We have nothing more at stake than our mutual experience here; we are nothing more or less than brilliantly complicated little stories. If we start living this way, the world could get hugely better very quickly.

I’ve tried to break my understanding down a bit more in a series of questions. It’s hard to quantify. My brain isn’t made to hold the sort of dimensions that go into what makes up awareness; mostly what I remember is a feeling of well-being and certainty.  But the general idea of what I experienced filled in a lot of gaps in the philosophy I’ve been working on. A LOT of gaps.

Who am I?

I am the one who opened my eyes.

What is my purpose?

To exist as nature dictates.

What is nature?

Nature is will and being.

What is will? What is being?

Will is desire and fear. Being is that which exists and knows it exists; awareness, existence, form; the great everything.

What is the relationship between the two?

Being is the eternal self, the part of us that will never cease to be. Will is temporary. The eternal does not will; it is—unchanging, unmoving, permanent. It does not start or end. It does not live or die. The part of us that dies is the will. The part of us that does not die is being; Everything.

There is no separation between the self and the Other. This separation is an illusion of time. Time wraps around awareness, cutting it off from the rest of itself, which allows it to form will. When time releases awareness, it ceases to have will and becomes once more Everything.

What does nature dictate?

Nature directs being through will. Each life builds, or loses, in accordance with its wills and fears, a place in the balance of things. My very reason for being is to exert will. I am desire and fear; I am that I might desire and fear. I need not be ashamed of my fears or desires. I may pursue them without doubt or guilt. The entire everything supports me in achieving my will according to nature; I am everything and it is me.

What goes against nature?

Nothing is unacceptable to nature. Will can only exist in Time and therefore cannot be permanent; nothing can disrupt the eternal. Nothing good or evil is absolute; therefore good and evil are relative and timebound. They exist only in relation to Will. What is good to me may be evil to another; what is evil to another may be good to me. Therefore good and evil exist only in the relation of things to one another; in the relation of me to all that is not me, the Other.

What is the relationship of myself to the Other?

I am that which looks out of my eyes; the Other is Everything Else, being—which includes my eternal self. Each time I harm the Other, I harm myself. We are innately invested in each other.

What should I do?

Anything I like. Nothing is more or less important than anything else. Everything is important because I am will; nothing is important, because I am eternal. It is up to me to negotiate the difference between the two—to temper my will with awareness of the Other; to negotiate with the Other in order to enact my will. I can avoid harm to my temporal self or risk harm on behalf of the things that are important to me. I can pursue pleasure only, or happiness only, or I can seek out joy.

So much of our efforts are directed to criticizing and shepherding one another’s wills; justifying and defending our own wills. Once we turn our focus from all agreeing on the same pursuit to enabling one another’s various unique pursuits in the most harmonious way possible, we’ll be able to solve our problems very quickly and easily.

I’m no longer afraid of death, or confused about my responsibility to myself vs. the Other, or what my allegiance should be to my immediate will vs. destiny. I sincerely hope that you, too, can see what this means: there is nothing to fear. Everything is OK, always has been, always will; you may not see how yet, but you will. The part of you that you are so afraid of disappearing will never disappear–only the fear itself will. It’s ok. We’re all ok.

Transgression Healing

Transgression healing. I have a lot to say on this subject.

What is transgression?

Some of it I’ve said before. Like the fact that the people who insist the loudest that it is, in fact, possible for us to completely ignore and deny and not even think about the things that tempt us are often the ones doing the really fucked up stuff in our society. The people who think the best way to deal with unwanted thoughts is to somehow turn them off end up obsessing with turning them off which leads them to give the ideas more power than they deserve, since thinking about not thinking about something keeps you thinking about it (ad nauseum). The rest of us might spend some time thinking about our bizarre fantasies, might even integrate them into our sexual role play or find some other outlet for them.

You see, people who follow the big man in the sky (or rather, the group of people here on the ground who claim they can communicate with said invisible man) tend to do, or not do things for the wrong goddamn reasons. You don’t stop yourself from raping little girls because some all-powerful stalker thinks it’s a bad idea and will punish you if you don’t. You don’t rape little girls because it hurts them and fucks them up and makes their entire experience on this earth exponentially harder and you don’t want to do that to other people because of this crazy thing called empathy.

Temptation

People of true moral fiber don’t need the promise of some eternal reward or punishment to stop them from doing bad shit to others. That noise is just a distraction. You are in possession of the basic common sense needed to translate the pain of your experience to other people’s experiences, and the basic empathy not to want others to feel pain. Don’t outsource your sense of right and wrong, it just fucking confuses you.

Example: when I was a teen, I experienced the insane rush of brand new hormones that nearly ever human goes through. I wanted sex all the time. ALL the time. I thought I wasn’t supposed to think about sex, I thought I wasn’t supposed to masturbate, so I would just try…not…to think…about the incredibly tantalizing little red button between my legs which made such wonderful things happen to my body whenever I touched it…don’t think about it…don’t think about how good the anticipation already feels, even without doing anything…don’t move ever so slightly in your seat so that the crease of your jeans rubs it a little…don’t think about some man putting his hand between your legs…

Dude, I wanted so badly to be a good person. It was literally the most important thing in my life, nothing else came anywhere close, but try as I might, I could not be a good person. My desire to “be righteous” was an intermittent, still, small voice and my desire for an orgasm was a constant yell. I never had a chance, but I hated myself for not stopping. I thought of myself as a sinner, a weakling, a pervert. I was miserable.

The REAL Slippery Slope

Along with all of this lovely self-hatred, there was this strange equalization of all sins. I was a sinner. I understood there were greater and lesser sins, but at a very basic level, once I crossed the initial line, there weren’t any more lines to cross. Once I felt the temptation and didn’t banish it immediately, I was already in the country of the sinner, where anything goes. Sort of like when a dieter eats that chocolate he’s offered by a coworker and then goes to the buffet after work and stuffs himself because he already messed up. I was like that.

Because of this, I crossed some lines I shouldn’t have crossed. Did one or two things that common sense and common decency should have stopped me from doing. Still fairly innocent, but things I can now say with confidence I would never be remotely tempted to do now. My basic respect for others stops me where religion never could.

Religion and a Better World

Yeah. Go church. You didn’t help me for shit. You just made me feel really, really bad about myself over something that wasn’t hurting a single other human being ( and was giving me a pretty startling amount of pleasure) for many, many years. And we have plenty of evidence that religion is not so stellar at stopping people from hurting others. It sure didn’t help those priests. Or the crusaders. Or the Inquisition. Or the terrorists who bombed the world trade center. At the heart of nearly every major religion on this planet is a message of peace, forgiveness, kindness, and love. Most of this world belongs to one religion or another. So why the hell don’t we have world peace yet???

Pshhh. Religion. Fuck that shit. Humanism. That’s what it’s about. Loving other humans, being good to other humans.

Make decisions for yourself, kiddos. Don’t let a religion do it for you. Don’t let a society do it for you. The rules they’ve designed are entirely arbitrary, and they can’t keep pace with the way the world is changing around you, they way you are changing with the world. Don’t worry about “sinning.” Worry about being good to others. If that’s not your first concern, you’re going to fuck up on it way more often than is fair to the rest of us, trying first and foremost to love our neighbors and second, to heal ourselves so we can love our neighbors better.

The Self-Involvement of Guilt

Okay, so say you’re worrying about being good to others, and you fuck up. Yeah, that’s going to happen. No doubt. Now what?

You probably beat yourself up a lot when you do something wrong. You’re probably like, “I should have done better. I wish I’d known. I’m never going to get a handle on this. I suck so bad.”

Probably the most fucked up thing about religion, in my opinion, is the extreme separation of action and consequence. The normal, healthy, natural sequence is this: someone acts, they learn from the consequences not to act that way again, or they don’t and people revile them and eventually they learn from being reviled, or they don’t and they die.

With religion, someone acts, and then god gets involved and muddies everything up. Because now, you’re not just paying attention to what you did and how it affected others and how it made you feel, you’re also thinking about what this supernatural being is going to do to you because of the act, whether it’s going to mess up your chances to wear wings and play a harp someday, whether you can consider yourself a good person or not anymore, what rituals etc. you’re going to have to undertake in order to consider yourself a good person again, and have you noticed how entirely self-involved all of this reflection is?

If you think about it, guilt and shame are pretty self-involved. They’re unpleasant, they feel like a punishment, they feel necessary and deserved. But in the end that’s just more mental energy you’re spending on you and your feelings, and less you’re spending on what you can do differently next time and how you can genuinely make it up to them.

Guilt is a waste of time. You don’t need guilt to make you want to do better. We all have that drive, the drive to be better than we are. Cut out the middleman and channel it. Being a good person makes you feel good. That’s why you should do it. Treating others poorly makes you feel bad. That’s why you shouldn’t do it. Don’t waste time on any other convolutions or explanations. Those two are enough.

Self-Forgiveness

We all want to be perfect right now, and we all have a sneaking suspicion that we’re supposed to be…that we could be, if only we didn’t keep fucking it up.

It’s been an important part of my journey forgiving myself for the stuff I’m not good at already, for the things I don’t know but wish I did, for the mistakes I keep making. You knew what you knew; can’t change that. The only thing you can change is how much energy you put into knowing next time. You learn at the rate that you learn. No reason to beat yourself up about it. The only thing you can change is how you approach learning, how much time you spend, how creative you are about it.

It’s the sphere of influence. Don’t stress about what you can’t change. It just keeps you from changing what you can.

The better you get at doing this for yourself (“oops, ok, didn’t like that but it’s cool, how do I do better next time?”) the better you get at doing it for others. That guy who just chewed you out for getting in the wrong line? Chances are he’s doing the best he can do right now, or the best he knows how–so he must really be going through something. Brush it off and give him the benefit of the doubt.

And the best part? The less judgment you pass on others for the ways they fall short in your life, the less judgment you imagine them to be passing on you, and the more and more peace of mind you attain as you strive to better yourself. After all, if you’re always trying and observing yourself and being aware of others and learning, you’re really and truly doing the best that you can, and instead of defending that, you can just hold that for yourself, hold it in yourself, use it to feel calm and confident. Adjust course when it stops being true. And then sit back and enjoy being as right as you can possibly be at any given time–it’s a nice feeling.

How We Can Change the Entire World in a Matter of Weeks

We’re at a unique point, the first time in history nearly every human society is in contact with every other. It’s the first time in history it makes sense (and is possible) for us all to agree, collectively, on peace and trust. It’s the first time in history we’re all capable of communicating with each other faster than our governments can stop us. If everyone agrees, across the globe, that we’d prefer world peace to war, what government could convince us we need to attack those infidels in that other country?

Yeah, in the past if you had a peaceful society of humans, you were liable to get stomped on by some more vicious tribe. But now we can all talk to one another and say, “Hey, my people are getting ready to attack your people. How do you feel about this?” and we don’t have to kill each other instead of communicating. If most humans, worldwide, agree to band together, we’d be equipped to deal with any minority revolt against peace, equality, and justice (not to mention vastly better prepared for an alien attack.)

There’s literally not a single reason, outside of the desire to have a bigger piece of cake than anyone else (an antisocial desire), for us NOT to band together. Can’t you feel our learning natures, our collective conscious, sensing that it’s evolutionarily advantageous for us to all make a contract, individual to individual, outside and beyond the reach of our governments, to be good to one another and not do harm? To eliminate money and feed all of our people and heal them? To let people’s love for one another and desire for community and respect fuel our labor, instead of the desire to best one another and have more things than one another?

Who in a civilized country has not felt or denied responsibility for their comfort being built upon the backs of millions of exploited people? How many of us would not prefer to live in a world where such atrocities don’t happen?

Only psychopaths. Only people with a solipsistic worldview in which everyone else’s experience is relevant only insofar as it impacts their own. These are the people exploiting and manipulating the rest of us. Far from suggesting that we tar and feather them, I’d offer that this sort of illness and misdirection of energy deserves compassion and a certain amount of indulgence (which ends where hurting others begins.)

The only kind human behavior we need address at all (for the libertarians out there) is harmful antisocial tendencies. Tendencies like consistently prioritizing personal concerns over communal concerns. Like trying to cheat and rob others rather than contribute to a community. Like manipulating the trustful and exploiting those in need. And it’s to their own benefit to break those habits. Manipulating and coercing others, apart from destroying interpersonal relationships and communities (and therefore eroding the human fabric) cannot possibly lead to peace of mind. Dishonest and imbalanced relationships are destructive of both parties involved.

This change is completely within reach. We’re more alike than our ruling classes would have us believe. The religious right just wants to live in peace and be allowed to exercise and share their beliefs. The far left just wants to live in peace and be allowed to exercise their right to make bad decisions along with good ones. We all just want to live in peace.

Trust it. The people you think you have nothing in common with are humans. They don’t like being hungry, they don’t like being attacked, they don’t like being made to feel small. They like doing what they want to do when they want to do it, they like feeling respected and useful in their communities, they like being allowed to be themselves without attracting contempt, anger, or ridicule. As different as we are, as different as our individual goals are, all of us are seeking, in some way or another, peace of mind.

What could help us attain it faster than peace on earth? You claim to want that? Put your money where your mouth is and join the peaceful revolution.

Me and Jesus

Internet, I realized something cray-cray a couple of days ago. My current working ontology (which basically holds that all life on earth is fueled by the same sentience, so what you do to others, you ultimately suffer as well) is pretty compatible with Mormon beliefs on one level.

I mean, they believe that on this one night, this one man (out of everyone that lived, ever) suffered for everyone’s sins, experienced literally everything that happened to everybody on this planet on behalf of the rest of us.

First of all, this is essentially the same thing, if you think about it. If Jesus shared every single secret shame, sin, guilt, experience, etc., he might as well have been us.

Second, why would it be just for someone to pay for the sins of others? No way. That doesn’t make any sense. Unless…he IS us.

Say God is, indeed, some mind-blowingly complex being that our puny minds couldn’t hope to comprehend. Okay. Now say that Jesus is, indeed, his son in human form, only he has some advanced understanding of what this life is all about which allows him to perform miracles, help his people take another step forward in empathy and community, come back from the dead, and take on the sins of everybody.

Remember the story of Adam and Eve? How Eve was a piece of Adam that was taken out of him? What if all of humankind is increasingly splintered pieces of Adam? What if we’re all God The Incomprehensible Sentience’s child, singular? Mormons also believe that humans are on this planet to learn the patience, compassion, humility, and self-control necessary to wield unlimited power. What if this planet is a school of sorts for just one complex sentience?

So Jesus was basically our final exam, which could have come at any point in time because time is an illusion. We pass, we win. But that doesn’t mean we should throw up our hands and do what we feel like, because any pain inflicted on anyone anywhere is misery that we have to experience personally, when our pieces come together again into a single being.

Why not believe that, right? That everyone you encounter is some piece of your vast, powerful self, and you don’t need to fear any of them and you should absolutely try and understand and help them? Because if they are happy, you are happy. In the grand scheme of things. It’s taking the golden rule to a whole new level.

I’m not really invested in a Christian-based ontology, but the bad trip I had on molly in New York actually made me realize how invested I am in my former belief systems being wrong. I was so repulsed with the thought of falling back in that trap that I didn’t even want to acknowledge it has its good sides.

I’m finally reaching the point of viewing my former self non-judgmentally, examining with an impassive eye the things I once believed, allowing myself to remember the emotions that drew me in without fear of being caught again in the whirlpool of circular logic. As I knew, deep down, there was plenty I was missing out on being so reactionary and dismissive about Christian beliefs. My angle on the world has been shifting again, insisting on routine reexamination and recalibration.

I think I’m going to quit the dungeon. It’s been a good time but it’s shit or get off the pot and I’m back to square one: I just want to write my ass off for as long as I can, and this is just another distraction, another excuse not to give it my all. I’m done with excuses.

In addition to this blog, my goal is three chapters of my young adult novel per week. If I complete this, I’ll have a draft of about three hundred pages by the end of February. If I can finish it faster, I intend to. I’m done dicking around.

Out of the Ordinary

I really want to catch up on everything that’s happened while I haven’t been writing this blog, but there’s just no time, and of course life continues to happen in the meantime, so I’ll try and sum it up without selling some really interesting events short.

Back to M, and our time together. I’ve been missing him quite a bit. We haven’t even talked much of late, as my life has been hectic and my internet connection sketchy. We did a whole slew of quite lovely things while I visited: went to Zucker’s bakery, where we had avocado toast and peppermint tea, and date and halva roses. Picnicked in the park, explored tucked away community gardens, ate pastrami, pizza, and bagels. Visited Strand Bookstore, where I first tried to find c Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, which is just an excellent collection, and then I thought I might find a copy of a literary journal with one of my stories. They had some issues of PANK, but not the right one.

Other highlights: A visit to Evolution, a nature/science curiosity shop with the likes of exotic mounted insects, actual and replica skulls and skeletons of humans and other animals, preserved specimens in jars, suspended in amber or some other clear substance. Fossils.

The Dirt Room, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. There’s still a little part of me that wishes I’d done as I deeply wanted to and stepped over the plastic wall into the dirt, left my footprints there to be raked away again the next day.

A wonderfully strange moment with a performance artist in the subway who piloted a baby doll with its head on his middle finger, hands on his pointer and ring finger, and feet on his thumb and pinky, up m’s leg and torso to his forehead, where creepy puppet doll (playing a hypnotic dirge on a harmonic throughout) humped to a dramatic climax, whilst m giggled, turning very red, face squinched in good-natured repulsion.  This was after an excellent tapas dinner in Williamsburg, and would be followed immediately by a bunch of people clearing the aisles in the subway car in order to do some flips and dance moves for us. It was the sort of night you picture people having in New York all the time, though the others assured me this was not the case.

I think I mentioned last post m’s harem–he’s friends with several interesting women. A and m asked me one night what my favorite thing about New York was, and I said “the people I’ve met.” J, who reminds me of a younger version of another j in my life, a poetry professor, wry and wise and brash. I was somewhat intimidated by her at first but we quickly bonded over our opinions about a certain popular teaching program.  D, from Israel, independent, strong-minded, complex, and yet surprisingly vulnerable and subject to the opinions of others. A, who is like an intensely precocious child, pragmatic but prone to indulge in quite whimsical logic, earnest in a way that seems untouched by the harsh realities of adulthood. The Germans: k and m, attractive in a very Teutonic way, incredibly friendly, polyamorous as well.

I had a few conversations with my new friends about the NY obsession with social status, with having the best partner and going to the good parties and having the right friends, how it never stops because there’s always someone just up the ladder from you. I talked to b, who we met before the Makeout Party, about how it all reminded me of the scene from James Herriot where Tristan loves feeding the pigs because they only eat any one thing for a few seconds before looking around to try and see what the others are enjoying so much, jostling to try and get the best.

The Makeout Party was hosted by one of m’s friends who is bringing Kinky Salon from the Bay to the Big Apple. Kinky Salon is a lifestyle party for poly and exhibitionist types which takes place in a sex-positive space.

(Sex-positive means accepting sex as a stimulating, pleasurable experience to be freely shared within reasonable boundaries and without inhibition or arbitrary boundaries. It means refusing to be burdened by all of the negativity and stigma this puritan nation likes to assign anything sensual. It means never “yucking someone else’s yums,” an adorable phrase I learned recently which means just because you don’t like anal beads doesn’t mean you have to act all icked out about someone else’s preferences.)

H and I had a tiff about the party, because first of all I told him about trying some cocaine and he got upset that I forgot we were going to try it for the first time together; second, the promise not to make out with m was going to be rather awkward to uphold at something called a make out party. I got very flustered because everyone was waiting for me and it was clear the conversation with h wasn’t going well; I ended up telling him “I won’t make out with m unless it would be making a scene not to,” and we hung up on uncertain terms.

The party was at this dimly lit bar with this recessed area you have to climb a ladder to get to. I wanted to spend the entire time in the little box room, and I could have, I suppose. I was there with m, a, the Germans, a rather famous makeup artist (who told me that Rosario Dawson is a burner, she’s been going for the last seven years apparently. I don’t see why not. I would certainly keep going if I were a celebrity, and I’m still fairly certain I saw Susan Sarandon the day of the temple burn.) And b, this super friendly chap from England, and some others. And we were playing spin the bottle, and people weren’t really drinking, and they weren’t really kissing, except b and I. m said he was going to do some molly with a, did I want some.

Next thing I knew, I was crawling past the Germans out of the box and down the ladder, trying to outrun the bile, and then I was crouching over the toilet, mildly paranoid that I might die in a New York club doing drugs with people I don’t know very well, and this was so close to this image I always had growing up of the kind of rock-bottom moment that finally gets the hardened sinners to repent that in my drug-loosened mind I entertained the possibility that Mormons are right. I mean I was still holding it at a distance but I was allowing for the possibility that it might be the Truth somehow, which entailed temporarily rearranging my entire way of looking at the world. I did this for long enough that I started to think I might fall down the rabbit hole again. I’m sure that writing that post about religion triggered it; I had to remember what it really felt like to believe in order to talk about it. In any case, it was scary as fuck. I’ve always tried to picture just what could get me so worked up on drugs that I can’t talk myself down (I’ve watched my face melt, I’ve seen the devil in Jerry Garcia’s eyes, I just don’t get scared when I’m tripping because…well…I’m tripping) and now I know: the fear that the Mormons might be right.

It can be extremely disorienting to think back on what I wanted then, what I thought I was then, compared with what I want and who I am now. There are fewer and fewer references points, it seems. Once upon a time, my beliefs were my identity, and now I’m something else. I remember that fear: if I change my views, what remains of myself? What integrity do I have?

To venture beyond your comfort zone or your beliefs is always to open Pandora’s box. I remember the moment I realized that to decide alcohol is okay to drink, I’m opening myself to the possibility I might someday become an alcoholic or marry an alcoholic. Bad things happen to good people, but there are specific kinds of bad things that mainly happen to people who operate outside of the law, and there are specific kinds of bad things that you can be pretty sure will never happen to you if you never take certain risks, like dying of a drug overdose, or, you know, having your chute not open.

When does the departure from rigid order become the descent into chaos? At one point I would have seen so many markers of my life now as signs of depravity, of signs that my values are askew, my integrity and my dignity left behind in the name of adventure and pleasure.

I suppose it is now my soft lines in the sand that I’m crossing (well, obviously, because the hard lines are the ones I still think I’ll never cross). But evermore I’m realizing that true empathy for another requires truly walking in their shoes. The less I fear “evil,” the wider my circle of compassion becomes. More on this later.

In any case: New York. I don’t think I could have asked for a better visit. It was filled with memorable moments and general pleasantness. Just to adventure with m for a bit longer was such a treat. He’s a complex man, and his approach to the world resonates with me on so many levels.

I got chills when he told me a story about something which happened to him as a boy, and has continued to happen since; or rather, something he did as a boy, though it’s accidental at times. He says there are certain lines of thought that send him there and he avoids them when he doesn’t want it to happen. It’s frightening, he says.

The way he tells it is much better, and I’ve asked him to transcribe it for me so I can share it with you, but in the meantime: It’s a sort of mental journey beyond ego, beyond a sense of self. When he goes there, he says, he does not remember being m, or being a person. He’s just an awareness amazed at its own existence. Sometimes it’s hard to come back from it. Once, it was a great, exhausting struggle to return to himself.

I asked him if these experiences make him less afraid of death, or reassure him that we exist beyond this form. He said no. What he experiences “outside” of himself is still manufactured by the chemicals inside of his brain.

It’s this sort of conundrum that draws me to him. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up, the way he paints the world for me sometimes, the way he shows me how many mysteries remain, how deep this universe really is, how complex and interrelated; but he has less confidence, it seems, about the way he fits into all of it, about how meaningful or lasting or important his part in it could be.

I’d be more convinced that he see himself as just a jaded little ant crawling on an ultimately insignificant tiny rock for a meaningless tiny moment, if he wasn’t so enthralled by magic.

We did meet at Costco, after all.