(excerpt)
...Your military experience was interesting! I was an officer in the Air Force. I retired as a Major. The Air Force is all about intellectual growth. They do have some physical requirements, but they are minimal. When the Iraq War (Desert Shield and Desert Storm) came up they gave me the option to go! Wow. That's really special because I did not have to feign being gay or using drugs. Then they paid for my bachelor's and master's degrees. At the end of my career they promoted me to LTC but then I had to go to Afganistan to wear the rank in retirement....
... o.k do you want to know about my drug use? It's been the opposite of yours but let me know -- you may find it interesting. Can you write me exactly what you said when they asked "was the pot any good?" I'm dying to know -- please!
Blessings Bryan -- Alan
Response:
Whaddup -- sure, you can tell me about your drug experience if you want to. By opposite of mine, do you mean that you've done everything 'except' for pot? Or that you haven't done anything at all? Did you do it while in the military?
Heh, I left out my response to the question because it was rather anti-climactic. The effect it had on the people in the room was drastically more interesting than what I said, which was a slightly over-enthusiastic "yes, sir."
-B
Friday, May 27, 2011
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Pillow Talk
"I know the devices of a demon. I was taught as a child about the demon lover. I was told about a beautiful temptress who came to a young man's room. And he, if he were wise, would demand that she turn around, because demons and witches have no backs, only what they wish to present to you. What had I done? What animal had I delivered into her? I had been speaking to her I think for over an hour. Had I been her demon lover?"
I used to share what I think of as my strange thoughts with the woman I was engaged to. I had never had someone to talk about them with. I hadn't trusted many people before.
She was the sort of woman who is constantly surrounded by suitors disguised as shining knights. She knew the gnawing pain that comes with the constant discovery and rediscovery of her friends as mere competitors in what could be considered a game for her romantic affection; of catching nearly all she knew in lie after desperate lie. Many women lead such lives -- some crave the attention, others may be oblivious to it, and many more, I suspect despise it.
I don't know if I was really any different from the suitors at my core, but she chose me, surprising myself and others; perhaps even surprising herself. As an oddity among my peers, I appeal to a certain type of mind. I was also prudish, tended towards blunt honesty, and was perhaps a touch more naive than the average 20-year-old, which some may consider charming. I accidentally met a criteria she had independently developed for the perfect mate -- he had to possess musical ability, speak three languages, and to look dignified while brushing his teeth (she called it 'looking sexy' but it's hard to believe someone could ascribe that to me).
I loved her because of her flaws. She seemed more human than human to me. She had a very ungraceful gait due to over-sized feet, and was easy to talk to. She was not afraid to shave her head -- to cast off the traditional gender logic. She appreciated art and music as voraciously as I, although our tastes were markedly different -- that was okay. Such subtle differences serve to broaden horizons. It is good to spend time with people who are not like yourself. Better still to fall in love with such people. At least, that's the way I used to see it.
She also said the damnedest things. The damnedest things any woman had ever told me before.
She said that when she imagined her guy friends jerking off to pictures of her that she felt disgusted, but not when she imagined me doing it. That was her way of letting me know she was interested in me.
She invited me to watch animal sex specials on television when we were alone in our hotel room, which, back then, merely served to make me blush and unable to speak.
She said once that Wayne Coyne's beard reminded her of ass-hair.
She was incredibly candid -- which was alluring to me. She was ridiculous as she was flattering. New and refreshing. Her attitude made my negative self-perception melt away. She was also funny, smart, and thoughtful. And despite her awkwardness, very pretty.
As is traditional with an isolated Christian upbringing, I had denied my sexuality pretty thoroughly, with but a handful of lapses, and it had never even occurred to me that women could enjoy sex until my conversations with her seemed to indicate otherwise. I had that Victorian, or perhaps, neo-puritan notion of sex as some kind of chore -- one which women begrudgingly obliged their lovers for the sake of a relationship or to produce children. It's an old notion; an oft-harmful one, but it is ingrained into thousands of minds every day. Loneliness produced a false confirmation bias in myself. I suppose I thought that women would be more overt if they actually enjoyed male (re: my) company, and since they weren't, it seemed to me they didn't.
It's embarrassing to admit, but I have often resorted to faith in order to reverse this Victorian conditioning. It is hypocritical -- for an atheist to deny his nagging suspicion that he is a hideous unlovable creature merely because people say he is not -- to pretend to believe that his loneliness is somehow his own fault. That he sabotages his own life and doesn't realize it -- a self-fulfilling prophesy; a demon all over again; hideous and unlovable -- apparently only to himself. And yet he does love himself. It is the others who give him a wide berth. Why?
We shared many places, her and I. It was a long-distance relationship. She lived successively in Wisconsin, China & Chicago; I, in California, Texas & Hawaii. We talked on the phone, we IM'ed, wrote thousands of emails, texted, and planned romantic liaisons around my leave times and long weekends. We never had a house or apartment of our own. Instead, we had hotel rooms; guest bedrooms; diners in towns neither of us knew. Rented or borrowed cars. Our entire relationship had the auspice of impermanence. It loomed on the horizon as a raincloud does. We clutched together for as long as we could bear the pain of the distance. Being less skilled in the art of loneliness, she couldn't last as long as I. It is not an intentionally practiced skill. Not typically. Particularly among the young.
But I especially appreciated how readily she accepted and respected my mind. My thoughts. In hindsight I realize she regarded me as something like a work of art. My friends and family have said that she would constantly steal glances at me when I wasn't looking, as if to confirm that I was really there. She told me that I became more and more beautiful to her. She had an overwhelmingly positive effect on me. She quelled the hatred I felt as a teenager. Snuffed it right out like a candle. She knew just what to do -- as if to arrive and simply ask, "no one's done anything about this burning fire here?" And then swallowed it whole. She softened me forever, an effect which lasted even after we stopped communicating. I would probably have not become a Pacifist if it weren't for her influence -- ironic because she did not believe in Pacifism herself. Her influence on me may have even made us less compatible in the long run. I believe she liked the angry me.
Regardless, we were engaged. When she returned from China she brought me two gifts -- a tiny jade mouse and a wedding band. Since we didn't know my size I sent her a piece of string that I had tied around my ring finger. She, then, stuck a rolled piece of paper through the hoop of string and used it as a guide for the jeweler.
And I used to share my strange thoughts with her.
Spending listless hours together, as I believe most couples do, we bathed in each other's warmth against the night air, sharing quirks or personal revelations, nude or near nude, half in dream. We helped one another understand those threads of humanity; how they interweave, unravel, or sometimes cut and fray. We laughed. We enjoyed each other's company. Inspired one another. Critiqued one another's work, ideas, and philosophies.
She once told me about a theory she developed, wherein the sum of one's personality could be described in terms of three colors; no more, no less. I was blue, green and brown -- the colors of a forest meadow; she, yellow, white and green -- perhaps with some red, but that would have violated the 'three' rule. I had a similar habit of assigning colors to people but I usually just chose one per person. I have found that some of my friends do the same. Do you, reader?
I described to her a feeling I would sometimes get whenever a stranger flashed me a knowing smile. I tended (or perhaps, pretended) to wonder if the person was really a time-traveler from the future, desirous of catching a glimpse of me from the era before I became...whatever it is I thought I would become. A rock star, I suppose. I suppressed such thoughts, meaning that I did not act on them or acknowledge them publicly when they arose, but they arose. A kind of delusion of grandeur -- as if I thought I were a temporal tourist destination.
I described how it was becoming harder and harder for me to believe in free will. I didn't understand how a future could exist without the present - its past -- being as unchangeable as our own past. I often felt distracted by how each of my actions were limited by their preceding moments and constricted to their future ones; how everything I did was already being done as I was doing it. My prophetic deja vus complicated this; when I tried to change the events of my dreams as I re-lived them I found myself merely confirming the dream-wherein-I-tried-to-change-the-dream, remembering the attempt itself, feeling tricked by my apparently (and uselessly) psychic subconscious, not quite believing what I was experiencing.
I described how I sometimes pretended that eye-contact caused people to suddenly and instantly switch souls.
Strolling down a corridor at work, I might accidentally catch someone's eye. I might wonder to myself what their life might be like compared to mine, and I'd pretend our eye-contact provided an answer. I used to avoid unnecessary eye-contact. I still avoid smelling people I don't enjoy talking to.
"Wouldn't you remember if you switched bodies with people all the time?" she asked. Everyone asks. Her smile and her eyes suggested the words, 'you silly, silly man.' I loved that expression of hers.
But see, my crazy hat is just as smart as the rest of me; it knows that memories are stored in the body, not the soul. The switch is so instantaneous and complete that you do not even notice. At most you feel a slight rush of excitement, of fear, or anxiety. Eye contact can cause funny behavior in people. Why should that be so? Some people are a joy to make eye contact with; others, not so much. Friends and lovers, making eye-contact often, feel intimate and at home with one another. Some people never make eye-contact with you. You can tell from a distance that you do not want them to.
Such thoughts led to others.
Considering the atrocities in Rwanda I had heard about -- was it Rwanda? I cannot remember. Abstracting the concept of the soul. I didn't know if I believed in heaven or hell anymore. My Christianity was a tattered rag, though the phrase 'God is dead and no one cares' could still make my stomach turn, depending on my mood (or how 'screwed' I was feeling). I was specifically concerned with hell. I hadn't pondered eternity often, but I couldn't believe that any punishment could deservingly last forever. If Hitler, to beat a dead metaphor, suffered 15 million lifetimes of torment for his crimes, that would not have put a dent on eternity, and I could not believe in a God that would condemn any thinking entity to such a place. It was literally the most brutal act I could imagine. I would have rather gone to hell myself than exist in heaven with such a monster.
But did that make me more forgiving than God? Me, the lethargic wraith? The demon in human clothing? The man whose brain chemistry locked him in Dante's outermost layer of sombre, tranquil hell? The one reserved for philosophers? Diet hell? Hell lite?
I couldn't get a certain image out of my mind.
I'm beginning to realize that we -- humans that is -- tend to use self-delusion to reconcile our ideals to the apparent reality of our world. I, for instance (and I suspect that I'm not alone in this) hold an ideal that most people are gentle-natured, fair, rational in their own way, and diplomatic. Even people who espouse violence as a solution to their lives' problems are violent only seldomly. When exceptions arise, they are punished with zeal. When they can't be, it seems people hope that someone, or something else, will do it for them.
Being no exception then, I taxed my mind in the following way: I wanted to rationalize my desire for an alternative to hell as a means for 'cosmic justice' while at the same time accounting for the brutal stories one inevitably hears of -- of genocide, of serial murder, of mass rape; forms of coercion -- or in the cases I'd been hearing about, all of the above -- of guerrilla soldiers descending upon villages in the night and mutilating those they find, stripping them of the flesh in their breast; cutting their faces, genitals, I mean, what was the point? They were irrevocably disturbed! Such soldiers are often drugged against their will and conscripted into military service as children. Did they believe they were punishing these innocents for the crime of escaping guerrilla servitude? Where do the madmen come from who create such armies, and what made them mad?
Why did I find it necessary to create a concept of cosmic justice? To cope with feelings of powerlessness, perhaps? Impotence to rid the world of wrong? Of unnecessary suffering? I don't know. I still felt that no one deserved hell, not even the very worst of us. Hitler, Stalin, Bin Laden, etc. Charles Manson.
You get the idea.
But what could people accept in hell's place? What could I accept in hell's place? These paragraphs crossed my mind one spent night.
I considered reincarnation. In the past I had pondered reincarnation as a possible explanation for my sadness. I wondered if I were being punished for a forgotten misdeed from a past life, or, perhaps, an accumulation of past lives. I often asked myself what sort of action would deserve such an all-pervading malaise. I really had no gauge for comparison. A recollection of the misdeed may have helped but I considered that part of the 'punishment', may in fact have been an oblivious nature to the scope of my deeds in the first place.
I also considered my confusion about time and free will. It is widely accepted, for instance, that time is non-linear. Past doesn't necessarily come before present, which doesn't necessarily come before future. Could reincarnations also be non-linear, I wondered? Could a person live a life into the future, then the past, then the present -- or for that matter, multiple lives at the same time?
My thoughts were still with the village women; the maimed victims left for dead, and of their mind-altered attackers. And of non-linear reincarnation. I thought, in that instance, that a fair justice would be for the attacker to reincarnate as his own victim -- or victims, one at a time -- after his death. And after that thought, it was only a small stretch to consider another and ancient thought; a vastly popular thought, but as alien a one to me at the time: What if there was only one consciousness? What if this consciousness lived every single life that has ever lived? Experienced every pain, every sorrow; perpetuated every crime and suffered as every victim? But more than that -- experienced every joy, wrote every song, sang it, sold it, bought it, experienced it anew time and time again (perhaps even remembering, in some mysterious way) -- and every book, every painting, every meal, every conversation, every single idea -- buildings, humans, animals, insects, rocks, gems, dirt, trees, water, air -- every aspect of the cosmos -- everything would be accounted for by such experience.
It was God's own worldview.
Was that what the soul truly was? God's direct experience of human life? Of any life? Fractions of God's awareness? Now there was a heretical idea. It reminded me of what I had heard about Eastern religion -- not that I had heard much -- and the doors to my mind felt blown right off their hinges.
It was different from any religious idea I'd ever encountered. It made the whole concept of heaven and hell seem like a children's game. For a few moments I didn't quite realize what I was suggesting to myself. A kind of justice that wasn't just balanced, but which had a kind of beauty. It had always seemed somewhat aloof to me that God would make all of these creatures and allow such strange and horrible things to happen to them -- then blame it on ancestral sin, greater purposes; what have you.
But if the 'witness' -- the me that experiences myself, the you that experiences yourself -- was not really "us" at all; but something altogether different...if God himself personally witnessed and experienced every life that ever happened, he'd be paying for his own mistakes, so to speak. That was much more sacrificial than anything Jesus purportedly did -- or was it the same story? The same ideology?
And as an omniscient mind, he would necessarily know what he was getting into. Did that void the sacrificial aspect? Perhaps the victim reincarnated as her attacker -- was that how God learned to forgive...himself? I liked that idea. Did he intentionally forget in order to re-learn? Did the joy of discovery serve a greater function than the discovery itself? Was that part of the mystery of life?
I conceived an entirely different mental image of God from the one I had always known. I saw a vast intelligence - unmatched, unparallelled - and completely alone. I could see him traveling backwards, forwards, even 'sideways' in time in order to interact with himself. Could he cut himself into pieces? Divide infinity in half and you have two measures of infinity. Could he do that infinite times? Would he wipe his own memory, reprogram himself -- what would such a thing even spend its time doing?
Would he spend an eternity in hell to prove a point? Would he role-play as the devil to give himself something to do? I shared these ideas with her as well.
It's sort of sad -- I really liked those ideas of mine, but eventually I decided they were mad. Christians don't want to hear them, atheists didn't want to hear them, and agnostics liked them but could only shrug their shoulders at them. And that was it. Life moved on. I had more pressing concerns.
I considered that I might have the sort of mind that could start a cult -- and I feared myself. Cult leaders have always been madmen. Horrible, corrupted, manipulators of the lost. A part of me felt like it could be easy to do. Somehow this shifted my perspective on religion. I felt like I had gained a profound insight into what God might really be -- and I could see pieces of it in other religions. These are the aspects which coerce people into behaving in ways they might never otherwise behave. The corrupted aspects, the hypocritical aspects. The power-hungry aspects.
And I learned to hate power. To hate coercion. To hate deception.
I thought, perhaps, that this inner voice of mine was a shadow of my paternal grandmother's schizophrenia. It was a relief to feel like I could brush it aside. Dismiss it. Keep from publicly acknowledging it.
Lava cools and creates a surface shell. It is safe to touch. Inside is another story.
-- The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
I used to share what I think of as my strange thoughts with the woman I was engaged to. I had never had someone to talk about them with. I hadn't trusted many people before.
She was the sort of woman who is constantly surrounded by suitors disguised as shining knights. She knew the gnawing pain that comes with the constant discovery and rediscovery of her friends as mere competitors in what could be considered a game for her romantic affection; of catching nearly all she knew in lie after desperate lie. Many women lead such lives -- some crave the attention, others may be oblivious to it, and many more, I suspect despise it.
I don't know if I was really any different from the suitors at my core, but she chose me, surprising myself and others; perhaps even surprising herself. As an oddity among my peers, I appeal to a certain type of mind. I was also prudish, tended towards blunt honesty, and was perhaps a touch more naive than the average 20-year-old, which some may consider charming. I accidentally met a criteria she had independently developed for the perfect mate -- he had to possess musical ability, speak three languages, and to look dignified while brushing his teeth (she called it 'looking sexy' but it's hard to believe someone could ascribe that to me).
I loved her because of her flaws. She seemed more human than human to me. She had a very ungraceful gait due to over-sized feet, and was easy to talk to. She was not afraid to shave her head -- to cast off the traditional gender logic. She appreciated art and music as voraciously as I, although our tastes were markedly different -- that was okay. Such subtle differences serve to broaden horizons. It is good to spend time with people who are not like yourself. Better still to fall in love with such people. At least, that's the way I used to see it.
She also said the damnedest things. The damnedest things any woman had ever told me before.
She said that when she imagined her guy friends jerking off to pictures of her that she felt disgusted, but not when she imagined me doing it. That was her way of letting me know she was interested in me.
She invited me to watch animal sex specials on television when we were alone in our hotel room, which, back then, merely served to make me blush and unable to speak.
She said once that Wayne Coyne's beard reminded her of ass-hair.
She was incredibly candid -- which was alluring to me. She was ridiculous as she was flattering. New and refreshing. Her attitude made my negative self-perception melt away. She was also funny, smart, and thoughtful. And despite her awkwardness, very pretty.
As is traditional with an isolated Christian upbringing, I had denied my sexuality pretty thoroughly, with but a handful of lapses, and it had never even occurred to me that women could enjoy sex until my conversations with her seemed to indicate otherwise. I had that Victorian, or perhaps, neo-puritan notion of sex as some kind of chore -- one which women begrudgingly obliged their lovers for the sake of a relationship or to produce children. It's an old notion; an oft-harmful one, but it is ingrained into thousands of minds every day. Loneliness produced a false confirmation bias in myself. I suppose I thought that women would be more overt if they actually enjoyed male (re: my) company, and since they weren't, it seemed to me they didn't.
It's embarrassing to admit, but I have often resorted to faith in order to reverse this Victorian conditioning. It is hypocritical -- for an atheist to deny his nagging suspicion that he is a hideous unlovable creature merely because people say he is not -- to pretend to believe that his loneliness is somehow his own fault. That he sabotages his own life and doesn't realize it -- a self-fulfilling prophesy; a demon all over again; hideous and unlovable -- apparently only to himself. And yet he does love himself. It is the others who give him a wide berth. Why?
We shared many places, her and I. It was a long-distance relationship. She lived successively in Wisconsin, China & Chicago; I, in California, Texas & Hawaii. We talked on the phone, we IM'ed, wrote thousands of emails, texted, and planned romantic liaisons around my leave times and long weekends. We never had a house or apartment of our own. Instead, we had hotel rooms; guest bedrooms; diners in towns neither of us knew. Rented or borrowed cars. Our entire relationship had the auspice of impermanence. It loomed on the horizon as a raincloud does. We clutched together for as long as we could bear the pain of the distance. Being less skilled in the art of loneliness, she couldn't last as long as I. It is not an intentionally practiced skill. Not typically. Particularly among the young.
But I especially appreciated how readily she accepted and respected my mind. My thoughts. In hindsight I realize she regarded me as something like a work of art. My friends and family have said that she would constantly steal glances at me when I wasn't looking, as if to confirm that I was really there. She told me that I became more and more beautiful to her. She had an overwhelmingly positive effect on me. She quelled the hatred I felt as a teenager. Snuffed it right out like a candle. She knew just what to do -- as if to arrive and simply ask, "no one's done anything about this burning fire here?" And then swallowed it whole. She softened me forever, an effect which lasted even after we stopped communicating. I would probably have not become a Pacifist if it weren't for her influence -- ironic because she did not believe in Pacifism herself. Her influence on me may have even made us less compatible in the long run. I believe she liked the angry me.
Regardless, we were engaged. When she returned from China she brought me two gifts -- a tiny jade mouse and a wedding band. Since we didn't know my size I sent her a piece of string that I had tied around my ring finger. She, then, stuck a rolled piece of paper through the hoop of string and used it as a guide for the jeweler.
And I used to share my strange thoughts with her.
Spending listless hours together, as I believe most couples do, we bathed in each other's warmth against the night air, sharing quirks or personal revelations, nude or near nude, half in dream. We helped one another understand those threads of humanity; how they interweave, unravel, or sometimes cut and fray. We laughed. We enjoyed each other's company. Inspired one another. Critiqued one another's work, ideas, and philosophies.
She once told me about a theory she developed, wherein the sum of one's personality could be described in terms of three colors; no more, no less. I was blue, green and brown -- the colors of a forest meadow; she, yellow, white and green -- perhaps with some red, but that would have violated the 'three' rule. I had a similar habit of assigning colors to people but I usually just chose one per person. I have found that some of my friends do the same. Do you, reader?
I described to her a feeling I would sometimes get whenever a stranger flashed me a knowing smile. I tended (or perhaps, pretended) to wonder if the person was really a time-traveler from the future, desirous of catching a glimpse of me from the era before I became...whatever it is I thought I would become. A rock star, I suppose. I suppressed such thoughts, meaning that I did not act on them or acknowledge them publicly when they arose, but they arose. A kind of delusion of grandeur -- as if I thought I were a temporal tourist destination.
I described how it was becoming harder and harder for me to believe in free will. I didn't understand how a future could exist without the present - its past -- being as unchangeable as our own past. I often felt distracted by how each of my actions were limited by their preceding moments and constricted to their future ones; how everything I did was already being done as I was doing it. My prophetic deja vus complicated this; when I tried to change the events of my dreams as I re-lived them I found myself merely confirming the dream-wherein-I-tried-to-change-the-dream, remembering the attempt itself, feeling tricked by my apparently (and uselessly) psychic subconscious, not quite believing what I was experiencing.
I described how I sometimes pretended that eye-contact caused people to suddenly and instantly switch souls.
Strolling down a corridor at work, I might accidentally catch someone's eye. I might wonder to myself what their life might be like compared to mine, and I'd pretend our eye-contact provided an answer. I used to avoid unnecessary eye-contact. I still avoid smelling people I don't enjoy talking to.
"Wouldn't you remember if you switched bodies with people all the time?" she asked. Everyone asks. Her smile and her eyes suggested the words, 'you silly, silly man.' I loved that expression of hers.
But see, my crazy hat is just as smart as the rest of me; it knows that memories are stored in the body, not the soul. The switch is so instantaneous and complete that you do not even notice. At most you feel a slight rush of excitement, of fear, or anxiety. Eye contact can cause funny behavior in people. Why should that be so? Some people are a joy to make eye contact with; others, not so much. Friends and lovers, making eye-contact often, feel intimate and at home with one another. Some people never make eye-contact with you. You can tell from a distance that you do not want them to.
Such thoughts led to others.
Considering the atrocities in Rwanda I had heard about -- was it Rwanda? I cannot remember. Abstracting the concept of the soul. I didn't know if I believed in heaven or hell anymore. My Christianity was a tattered rag, though the phrase 'God is dead and no one cares' could still make my stomach turn, depending on my mood (or how 'screwed' I was feeling). I was specifically concerned with hell. I hadn't pondered eternity often, but I couldn't believe that any punishment could deservingly last forever. If Hitler, to beat a dead metaphor, suffered 15 million lifetimes of torment for his crimes, that would not have put a dent on eternity, and I could not believe in a God that would condemn any thinking entity to such a place. It was literally the most brutal act I could imagine. I would have rather gone to hell myself than exist in heaven with such a monster.
But did that make me more forgiving than God? Me, the lethargic wraith? The demon in human clothing? The man whose brain chemistry locked him in Dante's outermost layer of sombre, tranquil hell? The one reserved for philosophers? Diet hell? Hell lite?
I couldn't get a certain image out of my mind.
I'm beginning to realize that we -- humans that is -- tend to use self-delusion to reconcile our ideals to the apparent reality of our world. I, for instance (and I suspect that I'm not alone in this) hold an ideal that most people are gentle-natured, fair, rational in their own way, and diplomatic. Even people who espouse violence as a solution to their lives' problems are violent only seldomly. When exceptions arise, they are punished with zeal. When they can't be, it seems people hope that someone, or something else, will do it for them.
Being no exception then, I taxed my mind in the following way: I wanted to rationalize my desire for an alternative to hell as a means for 'cosmic justice' while at the same time accounting for the brutal stories one inevitably hears of -- of genocide, of serial murder, of mass rape; forms of coercion -- or in the cases I'd been hearing about, all of the above -- of guerrilla soldiers descending upon villages in the night and mutilating those they find, stripping them of the flesh in their breast; cutting their faces, genitals, I mean, what was the point? They were irrevocably disturbed! Such soldiers are often drugged against their will and conscripted into military service as children. Did they believe they were punishing these innocents for the crime of escaping guerrilla servitude? Where do the madmen come from who create such armies, and what made them mad?
Why did I find it necessary to create a concept of cosmic justice? To cope with feelings of powerlessness, perhaps? Impotence to rid the world of wrong? Of unnecessary suffering? I don't know. I still felt that no one deserved hell, not even the very worst of us. Hitler, Stalin, Bin Laden, etc. Charles Manson.
You get the idea.
But what could people accept in hell's place? What could I accept in hell's place? These paragraphs crossed my mind one spent night.
I considered reincarnation. In the past I had pondered reincarnation as a possible explanation for my sadness. I wondered if I were being punished for a forgotten misdeed from a past life, or, perhaps, an accumulation of past lives. I often asked myself what sort of action would deserve such an all-pervading malaise. I really had no gauge for comparison. A recollection of the misdeed may have helped but I considered that part of the 'punishment', may in fact have been an oblivious nature to the scope of my deeds in the first place.
I also considered my confusion about time and free will. It is widely accepted, for instance, that time is non-linear. Past doesn't necessarily come before present, which doesn't necessarily come before future. Could reincarnations also be non-linear, I wondered? Could a person live a life into the future, then the past, then the present -- or for that matter, multiple lives at the same time?
My thoughts were still with the village women; the maimed victims left for dead, and of their mind-altered attackers. And of non-linear reincarnation. I thought, in that instance, that a fair justice would be for the attacker to reincarnate as his own victim -- or victims, one at a time -- after his death. And after that thought, it was only a small stretch to consider another and ancient thought; a vastly popular thought, but as alien a one to me at the time: What if there was only one consciousness? What if this consciousness lived every single life that has ever lived? Experienced every pain, every sorrow; perpetuated every crime and suffered as every victim? But more than that -- experienced every joy, wrote every song, sang it, sold it, bought it, experienced it anew time and time again (perhaps even remembering, in some mysterious way) -- and every book, every painting, every meal, every conversation, every single idea -- buildings, humans, animals, insects, rocks, gems, dirt, trees, water, air -- every aspect of the cosmos -- everything would be accounted for by such experience.
It was God's own worldview.
Was that what the soul truly was? God's direct experience of human life? Of any life? Fractions of God's awareness? Now there was a heretical idea. It reminded me of what I had heard about Eastern religion -- not that I had heard much -- and the doors to my mind felt blown right off their hinges.
It was different from any religious idea I'd ever encountered. It made the whole concept of heaven and hell seem like a children's game. For a few moments I didn't quite realize what I was suggesting to myself. A kind of justice that wasn't just balanced, but which had a kind of beauty. It had always seemed somewhat aloof to me that God would make all of these creatures and allow such strange and horrible things to happen to them -- then blame it on ancestral sin, greater purposes; what have you.
But if the 'witness' -- the me that experiences myself, the you that experiences yourself -- was not really "us" at all; but something altogether different...if God himself personally witnessed and experienced every life that ever happened, he'd be paying for his own mistakes, so to speak. That was much more sacrificial than anything Jesus purportedly did -- or was it the same story? The same ideology?
And as an omniscient mind, he would necessarily know what he was getting into. Did that void the sacrificial aspect? Perhaps the victim reincarnated as her attacker -- was that how God learned to forgive...himself? I liked that idea. Did he intentionally forget in order to re-learn? Did the joy of discovery serve a greater function than the discovery itself? Was that part of the mystery of life?
I conceived an entirely different mental image of God from the one I had always known. I saw a vast intelligence - unmatched, unparallelled - and completely alone. I could see him traveling backwards, forwards, even 'sideways' in time in order to interact with himself. Could he cut himself into pieces? Divide infinity in half and you have two measures of infinity. Could he do that infinite times? Would he wipe his own memory, reprogram himself -- what would such a thing even spend its time doing?
Would he spend an eternity in hell to prove a point? Would he role-play as the devil to give himself something to do? I shared these ideas with her as well.
It's sort of sad -- I really liked those ideas of mine, but eventually I decided they were mad. Christians don't want to hear them, atheists didn't want to hear them, and agnostics liked them but could only shrug their shoulders at them. And that was it. Life moved on. I had more pressing concerns.
I considered that I might have the sort of mind that could start a cult -- and I feared myself. Cult leaders have always been madmen. Horrible, corrupted, manipulators of the lost. A part of me felt like it could be easy to do. Somehow this shifted my perspective on religion. I felt like I had gained a profound insight into what God might really be -- and I could see pieces of it in other religions. These are the aspects which coerce people into behaving in ways they might never otherwise behave. The corrupted aspects, the hypocritical aspects. The power-hungry aspects.
And I learned to hate power. To hate coercion. To hate deception.
I thought, perhaps, that this inner voice of mine was a shadow of my paternal grandmother's schizophrenia. It was a relief to feel like I could brush it aside. Dismiss it. Keep from publicly acknowledging it.
Lava cools and creates a surface shell. It is safe to touch. Inside is another story.
Thursday, May 12, 2011
Thought - Spirit of Nonconvention
A year and a month (and a day and an hour) before I was sentenced, the fates, as I have termed them, told me that I was a spirit of nonconvention. They gave my life a grade: C+. Sometime later that night, I died in my car. Later still, a convulsion revived me. I could tell by Orion's new position in the sky that between 2 and 3 hours had passed since I'd last closed my eyes.
52 Reasons to Buy My Music - #s 5, 6 and 7
5. Ghandi probably would have bought my music.
6. My best friend is gay and we totally got trashed at a gay bar the night before I went away. It'd be sort of cool if gay bars nationwide picked one of my songs and closed the night with it every July 30th.
7. I really wish I could participate in some way towards making Denver a greater cultural contributor -- it needs bolder and more eccentric artists of every variety.
6. My best friend is gay and we totally got trashed at a gay bar the night before I went away. It'd be sort of cool if gay bars nationwide picked one of my songs and closed the night with it every July 30th.
7. I really wish I could participate in some way towards making Denver a greater cultural contributor -- it needs bolder and more eccentric artists of every variety.
Friday, May 6, 2011
Thought
It's been almost two years since I've stopped smoking. I haven't thought of cigarettes for a while, but I think I'd smoke one now if I had one. It's hard to say. I wish there were reasons other than my health not to smoke.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
