God and other trivia
The childhood faith
You lost the childhood faith, my friend.
Is not that what we all did – back then?
One day, the cartoon pictures, the fat baby angel with toy trumpets and Santa Claus were no longer credible, and then they had to give way for a number of years in the wilderness looking for something that could be stuffed in the hole.
We go quite al lot of artifactact up the sleeves, and nice things in between – and other stuff we probably should have kept our fingers off.
Not everything was digestible and it was beyond scope to settle in a cave in the Himalayas and wait for the inner light.
But as the ancients said with peasant wisdom: Why go over the river for water?
Not that the metaphor can not be contradicted, for it may be necessary to cross the river.
Life is a road movie. There’s the way out, and there’s the way home.
The most important thing is that it happens in its entirety. Home is never the same as when you left.
The loss of childhood faith may be necessary to some extent.
But if the loss does not lead to anything and more than lifelong misery, then something went wrong.
This brings us to the following:
Perma-juvenile
A state of prolonged puberty as far as eyes can see.
A product of an entertainment industry that consistently portrays adults as helpless infantile wrecks.
The result of serious comedy with edge and bite no longer allowed by the politically correct terrorist establishment.
An extension of one of the main dogmas of generation baby boomers: That it was the very purpose of life never to grow up. Hey-hey Peter Pan!
An advertising-created pseudo-phenomenon called ‘youth culture’ – which rightly should be called youth cult – where people learned to say generation gap and confrontating the establishement and it’s all society’s fault.
Disneyification, life seen through a theme park filter.
The escape from responsibility in the form of a graded designer psychosis, where childishness is sold as hipster.
The combination of a dream of eternal vacation on a South Sea island and the fear of dying.
Fixation in a pubertal limbo, where Generation Curling 3.0 does nothing but cry baby when they meet the slightest resistance in the real world.
Over the hills
Somewhere in the Upanishads there is something along the lines of:
If at the sight of the snow-capped mountain peaks at sunrise you have to erupt an aah ! then you are participating in the divine.
So why is it that humans at all times and in all places and cultures – apart from a parenthetical enclave of a nihilist culture of just a few centuries – have needed a concept of the divine, the not immediately sensuous and yet at times sensual as at the sight of the sun over the mountains?
They did so, because it has always been obvious to people, until atheism struck with the Age of Enlightenment – by Goethe called a revolution in a piss pot, when he saw that the concept of enlightenment was a false trade name. It was not an inauguration that took place, it was a counter-inauguration. From being Children of God, we became a bunch of naughty children who had run away from home, after which we fell into the clutches of child seducers. From being a resident of the great miracle, we became homeless in a machine room.
They did so because the whole and non-blunt, non-reduced human being has contact with his own higher self, which is divine-human and thus not just a free-swimming, isolated cell in an icy sea of meaninglessness. We are, as it says, created in the image of God. Have we understood what that means?
They did so because people knew it to be true the very special way that in our culture is called faith. People who, in the maelstrom of materialism, have lost touch with themselves are unable to grasp the knowledge and certainty that lies in faith. The only thing they feel is a permanent lurking pain from the surgical scar that they have no word for, and yet when in a stroke of powerlessness they try to give it a word, they miss the target.
They did so because people had real experience, so what which was called faith was a matter of course. They were people living in the middle of nature, which confirmed their own nature. Human nature is religious in the non-institutional sense, and writing off this piece of human nature is a destructive denial that causes the religious need to sneak in by the back door in unhealthy and perverted forms like cults and designer ideologies in association with superficiality.
They did so in spite of the institutions that grew powerful and wealthy, whereby the institutions attracted human entities with a taste for just power and prosperity. Respect for the many who, despite this rotten core at the top, retained the inner core of the faith.
They did so because humans preserved a language for that which cannot be described in plain words. A paradox. One day the words became empty it seemed, because the machine had invented itself. One day the rituals became hollow, they said, because people had forgotten what they had come here for. It must then be time, it was shouted, to throw the child out with the holy bathing water and indulge in the amusements of this world.
I say:
It’s time to start remembering again.
It’s time again to look up and see the sun over the mountains.
It’s time to throw the merchant scumbags out of the temple and move on.
It is time to disregard the insults of those who created a dark cult of denial.
There was a piece of graffiti on a toilet wall:
God is dead – quote Nietzsche
after which a witty soul added:
Nietzsche is dead – quote God 😉
Blackbird
And then it’s at the times when I risk showing up to the surface of dreamland one early morning at around four o’clock to the sound of the sunbird sitting over there in the treetop, roaring.
That’s I have to catch myself getting annoyed at the beast, the loud musician, the cheerful disturber of silence who, in one and the same whistling exhalation, pisses off its territory and signals to the ladies that it is ready to produce the next nestling of squeeky fur balls.
Here it is that I must remember to say thank you for the song and sleep on, if it was not exactly meant for the day to begin at sunrise. Which, of course, would make perfect sense, and whereby I would be the whistle-happy fellow double thankful for getting myself out of the feathers.
Here it is also that I have to remind myself that there are 200 meters across the hill to the nearest rooster that is going crazy half an hour later, because this guy is reealy annoying!
GOD
In the West, there is the idea, that God is the source of all energy and life. In other cultures, the idea exists that God is the manifestation of the source of life. God can manifest compassion as well as anger. God can be a helper in winning a war, God can be jealous and vengeful, God can be paternal one moment for the next behave like a tyrant. God is the nature that one year brings abundance and prosperity and the other year brings drought, flood and famine. If God is angry, he must be appeased.
If on the one hand, we confuse the source and the manifestation, we may risk becoming confused. The source is a mystery. We can talk about the event and form pictures of it. We can personify the forces of nature. In a way, polytheism is more compliant, for it is not postulated that the mystery is solved. Monotheism easily becomes a starting point for autocracy in the unfathomable way. For example, the God of the Jews in the Old Testament, who in psychoanalysis would appear as a severely bipolar-pathological maniac.
The mystic will gain access to the mystery, the source. But he cannot bring it back and show it to us. Therefore materialism-nihilism is able to claim, that there is no mystery. We can’t grab it with our hands, bite it with our teeth, see it with our eyes, hear it with our ears og smell it with our nose, and it has never been reported on TV in prime time – ergo it does not exist.
On the other hand, Western theology is ambitious because it tries to understand the source. Theology is not entirely clear regarding its Gnostic starting point, for it is a Gnostic thought that the source is both unmanifest and manifested. Gnostic: the whole ancient and pre-antique understanding of the cosmos and a basic idea that the source as well as its manifestations can be experienced. Gnosis = experiential knowledge.
There sits an angel on your right shoulder and a devil on your left. The picture describes every person’s dilemma. You really know what’s good for you, you know what you need. But it is tempting to go for what you feel like. If it was not possible to go after what you want, even if it destroys your life, then you were not a human being. There has to be free will in order for you to choose righteously. You can not grow without the devil on your left shoulder, you have to be the one to make the choice.
The Great Seduction that materialism has subjected people to, consists in convincing people that there is no angel sitting on your right shoulder and that you can do whatever you want and get the opportunity without expense. Do what thou wilst, as the occultist Aleister Crowley preached for his time with the repercussions of the generation of baby boomers and what-followed. What was did we call it? perma-juvenile?
Hello Darkness my old friend
Darkness and silence are healthy for the soul. If we can also at the same time avoid 35+ WiFi signals as well as a horde of other dirty electricity farting through the nervous system, then we are not at all in a bad place. Then we just need that the food we pour inside not to be worthless junk at best and the clean-dirty poison at worst + that it does not fall from the sky with designer weather modification spray + that a demonic pharmaceutical industry does not succeed to reprogram our genetics with an experimental non-vaccine and zombify or kill the majority of the earth’s population.
People are afraid of the dark. It is, of course, an old story, and the darkness outside the village in the ancient world could mean an unfortunate encounter with beasts wearing claws and fangs. Like raving around in the middle of the night in certain urban landscapes populated by two-legged creatures with bad karma and sinister intentions.
That’s not the darkness I’m talking about. I’m not talking about the irrational fear of the dark that urban dwellers in particular suffer from. They do this, among other things, because they are poisoned by light pollution. You are always bathed in 1000 light sources combined wherever you go outside og inside. If you stood on the moon with a super telescope and filmed The Dark Side of the Earth, seen from here as opposed to the moon’s own Dark Side coming by once a day, you would see cities and highways bathed in trillions of lights.
I’m talking about the liberating and healing darkness. When did you, dear reader, last expose yourself to a night somewhere with rumbling darkness and silence where you could hear a needle drop to the floor? OK, then that’s a problem, because even the slightest unfamiliar sound then can make a difference. But deducting that, I can assure you that you sleep like a rock. Unless you’re running around with other worries that affect your night’s sleep.
So everything else being equal: Darkness and silence are healthy for the soul. That is, if you consider yourself the holder of such a thing. Otherwise, you can just rename it to something clinical-mechanical that makes temporary sense to you.
To a militant vegan
I can understand that you are opposed to taking the life of living beings.
Then I can tell you that recent research – and it is extensive – shows that both plants and trees are extremely living beings in all the ways that have so far been reserved for animals and humans. They have a sophisticated sensory apparatus, a communication system and a well-developed intuition. A plant behaves like an animal in slow-motion. The organisms in a forest and on a meadow have a community where these life forms help each other. By the way, they are equipped with DNA just like you.
I am very much in favor of giving animals a piece of welfare, a natural life and a dignified death, if that is what we have in mind for them. I then reckon you do the same with the living beings you have chosen to kill – you fucking mass murderer!
