Tag Archive | Agnostic theism

Deer Jesus Epistle: Papal Conclave Edition

Mar13
the-dude-tom-roderickProphecies of Saint Malachi, the final Pope being Benedict’s successor — apparently the Mayans were onto something with their “end of time” calendar that signaled a call to “judgment” for all humanity.
For too long, human beings have been walking this Earth under the mistaken notion that whatever pops into their conscious mind as being, “real,” must, in fact, be the way things are.  For those who see something different than a hastily gathered quorum, too bad, we find you to be, “insane.”
Don’t get me wrong here.  I’m not suggesting that there are no conditions for which bed rest, medication and professional supervision are warranted.  There are such conditions, it just so happens that the majority of those for whom adequate professional supervision, bed rest and medication might be applied are in charge of some of our oldest and most powerful social institutions.
Like, say, the Catholic Church.
Don’t get me wrong: I am no Protestant and I am not a Jew, outside of a couple Jewish women I gave serious consideration to converting for in order to woo.  I was raised a Catholic, but I implore you not to hold that against me.  I was educated by American Jesuits which qualifies me as a card-carrying agnostic.  I don’t know enough about God to portend its existence, and neither do you, skooter.
I can tell you, emphatically, that there are many powers greater than myself in existence in my universe today, starting with my wife and a mistress I am contemplating going insane and slashing off my ear over.  But that does not imply the existence of a supreme being, or even a heralding of a comeback of the Supremes, with or without Diana Ross.
So simply because the “integrity” of your faith demanded that you turn your back on the hypocrisy of the Roman Catholic Church does not ennoble your church in my eyes, it only makes your church a festering ward of the terminally insane because you are spreading the disease and not the cure.  Look at your snake-handling, tongue-talking, moralizing nonsensical Bible-thumping ignoramuses: is this a step above the decency and nobility of a single Roman Catholic Church or Jewish Synagogue?
Not in my judgment.
I save special ire for the community of Islam because your whole denomination is crazier than a gathering of Baptists at a Texas dancehall.  Yes, women have power; covering it up or trying to contain it does not change the fact that this same deity you piously proclaim your allegiance to created man and woman as separate and coequal lunatics in chief.  This same deity also guaranteed that you would never be able to impact any other form of life in the galaxy until you learned to stop killing and hurting each other.  The intent of Creation has been written all over our circumstance from the beginning: if there is a supreme being, it most certainly is not among any one of you, or us.  Mohammed was a certifiable and megalomaniacal lunatic and not someone to found any pursuit of truth in honor of. Nor was Moses, Abraham, Jesus, Martin Luther or Joseph Smith.  Nor am I.
The Day of Last Judgment is upon us.
Behold: are you a bigger dumbass than the Catholic Church that has for centuries used the exploitation of children to guarantee the hegemony of certain pontifical doctrines?  If you are not, then why am I the first one to inform you that every national government, including the UN, has come to use the convenient blackmail of placing the politically powerful on tape having sex with children as a means of guaranteeing their loyalty to certain vested interests?  Are you so retarded as to not see how potent a weapon in the arsenal of statecraft this Catholic tradition of “commercial” pedophilia has become?  Did this tradition of expediency arise out of sheer stupidity or the time-tested experience of dealing with the fevered human egos of the great unwashed masses?
Dorothy, wake up, we aren’t in Kansas anymore.  We aren’t even at the concert.  We are dealing with human evil of the most vile and horrific kind, the kind that would exploit and traffic in child orphans as a means of obtaining loyalty to a specific class of individuals with a very specific political and sociological agenda.  The agenda is the global enslavement of the human species through any means necessary and the politics varies depending on the expediency of meeting this objective.
Where we are, in this moment in human history, comes as a direct result of human judgment applied to the need to keep ourselves safe only from each other; we have not even begun to contemplate what might be required of us in order to guarantee our safety from the enormous challenge of cosmological calamity.
Does anyone remember taking a vote in favor, or in opposition, to imposing global slavery over the human species in order to guarantee our survival?  I do not.  I simply recall agreeing to buy certain products in the belief that if my breath were minty fresh, I might be able to attract a mate, a job and/or an adequate education.  I do not recall agreeing to join a federal reserve banking system where I agreed to pay a small cartel of families for the privilege of printing my paper currency on an annual basis, and, yet, it is so.  This is the best our human facility for judgment would allow. And now we sustain and support these unwritten, undemocratically imposed dictums by exploiting the sexual innocence of children and the depravity of adults who may well have been exploited themselves as children?
Enough.
Life is difficult enough without also having to shoulder the burden of rampant mental and emotional illness unleashed on the body politic.  We need to take at least ONE DAY set aside, globally, to decide whether we are going to continue allowing ourselves to be lead by human sickness or by human wellness.
In the days and weeks to come, I will observe examples of human sickness in full display and offer up how human wellness might set this situation aright and bring healing and light to all in the process.

Given: The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Asylum

Oct3

Living with an intractable problem that has been successfully solved is a lot like moving away to a foreign country. Or Texas. One can judge a foreign land based on externals and never move to that foreign land based on one’s findings. Many times a person’s externally-oriented judgments come to be proven accurate. However, no reasonable person can argue that individuals experiencing intractable problems in their lives have learned to properly identify a solution to their problems and then implemented the prescribed solutions. The first whiff of spent Betadine in an asylum generally cues new visitors to the obvious fact that they are not observing people living comfortably in a solution that is working for them.

In those few brief, pre-olfactory moments in the formation of a judgment regarding what one sees taking place in an asylum, I observed human beings in motion. The motion may have been with or without a specific purpose driving the individual to meet their basic need for air, water, food and shelter. Most often these individuals seemed externally comfortable until an attempt was made to interact with them from a basis of common understanding. Human beings cannot communicate with each other without a shared and shareable set of common symbols and meanings to interact with. As anyone who has ever interacted with a clinically insane person will attest, the clinically insane are operating from inside of a system of thought that only the most highly skilled and trained health professionals have a chance to comprehend – it is a fully self-contained reality. Sometimes even the best health professionals cannot gain access to the abbreviated or exaggerated version of reality occupied by the insane: they are living inside of a problem that they, themselves, cannot solve. They may not even recognize a problem exists or that they are unable to effectively communicate with other human beings. Truly very sad.

If an intractable problem is to be solved, a solution must be brought to the location of the problem, wherever that location may be. Just as in chemistry, the solution must then be permitted to dissolve the boundaries that defined the problem in the first place. Once the existing problem is absorbed into a solution set that incorporates a clear understanding of what the problem actually was coupled with a set of beliefs and actions that serves to keep the original problem resolved, our original problem is no longer intractable. In other words, our toughest problems cannot be solved by applying solutions generated from within a troubled system of thought. A problem that can be solved from within a system of thought cannot truly be intractable. Intractable problems, problems which repeatedly resist solution, require a newer, larger system of thought that must be adopted or the problem continues to separate the insane person from the rest of the physical world around them.

Like a lot of “seekers” in our world, I have tried a variety of systems of thought in order to resolve the problems I have come across as an adult child who grew up in a psychological theme park of mental illness and substance abuse. I tried talk-therapy, gestalt therapy, trauma resolution therapy (for five years), committing to being a positive person, reading the Bible, going on spiritual retreats, A Course in Miracles, medications, addictive substances, Moderation Management, Rational Recovery and Alcoholics Anonymous. I have even tried playing the guitar, taking more or less exercise and just not thinking about it. Then I tried mixing and matching one method with one or more of the others, when I was not busy trying to clean up the wreckage I left in my wake.

Precious few problem-solving systems of thought have been as thoroughly road-tested and documented as the system of thought provided to the world by Bill Wilson, the Twelve Steps (TS), the Twelve Traditions and the members in and out of the professional community who have, over the years, utilized TS “tools” to restore the lives of millions of alcoholics worldwide. It is true that this system of thought has failed most people, but this has been, in my experience, because systems of thought cannot be successfully judged as effective or ineffective by individuals who refuse or are unable to observe the system from the inside, out. If a problem, such as living in and around the mentally ill in a dependency relationship, has become as intractable a problem as it has in the United States of 2010, we must first accept the obvious: we do not have a viable solution that has, or can be, implemented. The time has come for each of us to humble ourselves and face the fact that either one or all of us are “nucking futz.” The solution may yet be upon us; however, the solution has not been placed anywhere near to the “location” of the problem.

By way of commiseration, most of the individuals who successfully utilize TS do not understand how or why the steps worked for them, creating a cult-like, “miracles and magic,” atmosphere in most TS meetings that can be suffocating for anyone who has had a snootful of people treating them like an escaped mental patient. The bar was made very low by Alcoholics Anonymous out of Depression-era necessity and under it a veritable bell-shaped curve of human incompetence, mediocrity and utter brilliance has passed and in about those proportions. Impatience with one’s self, or others, is punishable by one of the slowest, most painful, most heart-breaking deaths by suicide a human being could tolerate dragging themselves through. Such is the illness of alcoholism and drug addiction, a truly hopeless state of mind and body. Welcome to Twelve Step recovery and, “La Crème de la Scum.”

How could anything like an imaginary cloud being of “love” even bother to create such a pathetic illness responsible for the deaths, traumas and handicapping of tens of millions of people, globally, every year? How lame can any of us truly be to find ourselves skulking around roomfuls of people who want to talk about “Jeebus,” “tha-bibul” and “gawhhhhd?” A new, lower than whale-shit level of lame is what we have found and, along with “Father Knows Best” reruns and proclamations of daily miracle sightings, we have manifested a veritable host of turd merchants all wanting to help us help ourselves. Their way.

As a person of a somewhat intellectual bent, I can assure the reader that by following a few very unchallenging, almost insultingly simple, steps, a person can move their lives from a place of zero hope and negative prospects to nearly twenty years of recovery, a sense of peace and contentment (and for me, sobriety) that has surpassed my expectations and certainly my given life’s potential trajectories. Having had a number of relatives who preceded me in death, deaths caused in no small part by the abuse of alcohol and other addictive substances, I believe I can speak with relative assurance on that point. While I cannot say that I began my TS journey as an agnostic or an atheist, I can honestly confess that I do not understand why the word, “god,” is ever uttered in or out of any TS meeting. No verifiable empirical evidence for the existence of a supreme being is possible, let alone available, and yet human arrogance demands that we abrogate the obvious and substitute it with a tripartite delusion, labeling it as “faith,” and ostracizing the hell out of anyone who disagrees with us or has a different opinion. By the Twelve Traditions religious or spiritual debates are not a part of the suggested TS program, nor would these be a legitimate aspect of any TS meeting, and yet the debates find a way to rage on. “It’s not religion, it’s spirituality,” unless one doesn’t believe in a god like the group’s god, in which case one can expect a lot of friction between members. TS meetings are autonomous fellowships designed to extend hope into a community where only despair has been the sole comfort. The autonomy really inculcates the local culture and local mores, so if a person has always found philosophical trouble in a local community, trouble will eventually find them in a TS fellowship in the same community. The good news is that most people who benefit from the TS thought system learn that the majority of their problems with their local community were caused by their own misperceptions and misguided notions, making “tit for tat” the absolute best anyone in disagreement with them could ever hope to achieve. Such individuals tend not to attract a lot of stable friendships. In those cases where the local community was actually the major aspect of the person’s inability to thrive, the odds are very high that they were not alone in their troubling observations; an oasis of like-minded souls may very well be closer than such a person imagines. Failing these possibilities, TS fellowships exist around the world now; a community of more than 40,000 with an attractive appeal to a person should have an even dozen compatible individuals available for fellowship and community.

If being real, vulnerable and transparent to a host of friends has an attractive, if unrequited, appeal, a TS fellowship may have a big chunk of life to offer such a person.

If no possibility for a loving supreme being exists, the possibility of formulating a creative solution to a global dilemma does. In a pinch everyone is willing to at least try something that works. I had to open up my mind, take a lesson from Ken Wilber and recognize that holarchies exist and one cannot truly know a holon without first attempting to view the world from the inside, out. Everyone should move to Texas. </end pitch>

The business at hand is very grave, indeed. The lunatics have indeed taken over the asylum. In an old Texas idiom, “we’s in a heap a-hurt.” Into such a hopeless situation, a TS solution can offer a way out along with plenty of insight and hope for a better day. But we do have a few simple questions to ask and two requirements. If the answer to either requirement is, “no,” then the beatings will continue until morale improves. The two requirements are as follows.

1. Can you/we be honest with yourself/ourselves?

2. Are you/we willing to commit to a solution and a process that may change everything you/we have ever known to be true about your/our reality?

What an order, right? Obtaining agreement from even one person to these two requirements would be something akin to a miracle, let alone an entire culture. Happily, only one of us has to meet these requirements and one of us is twenty years down the road from you, gentle reader. So our choices are to meet these two requirements or continue to suffer from the effects of the problem, whatever the source of the discomfort turns out to be. Perhaps human beings may stumble upon another way out of this mess we have gotten ourselves in to, but one would think most approaches have already been tried and given a fair hearing as of, say, twenty years ago. A person of healthy temperament does not have to contemplate the choices offered here for very long at all; a person of addictive temperament, a person who would crawl through ten miles of thorny underbrush just to have eight seconds of relief – these unfortunate folks can spend decades mulling over these very simple requirements.

Once the transformation from the problematic system of thought to the solution-set system of thought takes place for one person, the willingness and faith in the process spreads quite rapidly. Alas, most individuals do not possess the stamina or the constitution to tolerate a reality that appears founded in quicksand. For these individuals more community support and experience is required to lift them up and out of the thinking that generated their part of the overall problem to begin with.

Why are we, the victims, required to do anything at all given that we did not cause these circumstances to come to pass?

Time for all of us to be rigorously honest and real. We – you and I, gentle reader – are the folks who are experiencing the pain behind the misbehavior of the few psychopaths we have allowed to slime their way into positions of power and moment within our society. Our society. The time for making excuses and fixing blame is over; it is our collective asses on the line here, not just the misanthropic malcontents down the street who burn through three jobs a year when they are feeling relatively stable. Even if we have been exceptionally active in organizing and staging protests against the onslaught of these craven fools, we cannot honestly suggest that we succeeded in accomplishing anything but, perhaps, a delay in the development of recent, and apparently well-planned, events. With each delay we simply pushed into the future the time when the attempt at global enslavement would transpire, perhaps congratulating ourselves that the end would come after we were long dead. No such luck, as it has turned out. When facing down a leviathan like the collective mental illness of an entire species of intelligent life, one needs to pack a large lunch and ask for a lot of help along the way, or at the very least demand that useful assistance be provided.

We might disagree about some of the details, but one thing is certain: we are powerless to stop these bastards and the autonomy some of us were fortunate enough to experience as children has been stolen from what remains of our lifetimes. Think about that distinct possibility for a moment. In every real sense, our lives have become unmanageable by us – we have outsourced our very existence to the whims of a cabal of criminal and near-criminal enterprises. For some of us, our lives have become unbearable, empty husks for which no solution seems possible. I know from personal experience that desperation is the fuel which powers the revolution in consciousness required to make our lives worth living again.

Or, at the very least, we need to be willing to hope that this is so.

Some of us have lost all hope, resorting to suicidal behavior and dysfunctional cries for help. All any of us have to offer each other, effectively, is the faith that comes from experience: honesty, open-mindedness and willingness to change one’s life can work wonders. Human beings can be very resilient and crafty if given the proper motivation. Should enough of us become familiar with a path that can restore disturbed human beings to some semblance of sanity and share that path with one another, we will have played a big role in doing what life brings us to consciousness for: evolution, the increase of fitness for survival and the joy of simply being alive while tapped into the marvelous machinery that is our known and unknown universe(s).

Branded By Jeebus

At this point, I need to interject yet another honest matter of fact to all believers in a loving supreme being: whistling in the dark does not help. Ranting, chanting and charismatic experiences do not alter the fact that when push comes to shove the god worshipped in organized religion is

precisely the opposite deity from the one believed to be empowered with all of our ego-inflating praise and snake-handling nonsense. My experience has been that any amount of fear or panic present in an individual bears witness to a god of human evil. Banal and mundane though it often is, we each lose our faith in a better tomorrow and pick up the charge of a life none of us wants in a battle of inches against our own egoes. In any confrontation where the opponent is permitted to choose the weapons, battlefield and terms of surrender, the outcome is certain.

A supreme being of anyone’s understanding can never be successfully defined: the instant anyone attempts to do so they have failed because of the meaning of the terms, “supreme being.” Non-conceptualizable entities, once labeled in any way, have been placed inside an all-too-tiny box in the mind of the labeler. Using the single word, “god,” becomes a potent prayer to have the god of lack, limitation and misery manifest itself, and this is precisely why organized religion always becomes a superb vehicle for channeling the world’s misery – they have dared to label their supreme being and worship the “graven image” of their definitions.

Emptying one’s self of graven images of a supreme being as the agnostic or atheist has committed themselves to do allows what has always been our birth right as human beings to come forth and manifest. Compassionate, caring and constantly aware of the presence of a mortal end, the atheist and the agnostic feel alienated by the worship of a god that may or may not have any relevance to our survival as a species. In fact, plenty of evidence exists that the worship of organized religion has played a significant role in the destruction of the human species. The “faithful” as they are often fond of calling themselves, believe that only faith in what cannot be empirically experienced can be called, “faith.” This is an error. Placing faith in a solution strengthens the communal belief in that solution. Placing faith in what could be delusional, or what could be someone else’s delusion, only makes human beings vulnerable to exploitation. A loving supreme being could not want this for its creations. However, an unloving supreme, or lesser, being could not get enough of such “praise.” The conundrum of this dichotomy is not lost to atheists and agnostics; allowing the level of cognitive dissonance inside a human mind that organized religion demands be present should not be considered a legitimate form of worship by any thinking person; this is mind control and mental illness, not a search for the honest trust of any matter.

I do not find fault with anyone’s freedom to believe in a supreme being of any sort; my problem begins and ends with individuals who use proscribed beliefs as a means of dividing the human family into pieces too weak to solve the problem of species survival. All are One. Anything less than Oneness is not whole, the original meaning of “holiness.”

Honesty, hope for a better tomorrow and faith in our ability to identify and implement a solution to our intractable problems opens the door to higher possibilities. When faith is not strong because we still do not have the confidence of experience behind us, we must have hope that this experience will come and that our contribution to our problem must be what can be corrected to reveal what has been missing from our lives inside of this “asylum.”

The meat of TS recovery is the fearless and searching moral inventory. Forget the origins of TS in the Oxford Group and the endless moralizing and shaming of one’s self for being less than a perfect human being. All that is required to accomplish a useful and productive inventory is the belief that life is better than death, that life is, ultimately, a beautiful experience not to be missed. The warm feelings of a sunset shared with one’s children or one’s lover, these are examples that bear witness to the possibility of the existence of an abundant, beneficent life force that would not be whole if any part of what is truly treasured in anyone’s life has gone missing at any time.

Connection with one’s subconscious mind, by definition, cannot be directly and consciously achieved. But one’s behavior patterns over time can certainly leave a trail of breadcrumbs back to the source of one’s own life force. Agnostic or theist, everyone experiences these patterns in our lives which confound and confuse us. Addressing these issues directly never seems to work completely. What is needed is a lightning rod of self-recognition that can bring the conscious and unconscious selves on a path towards congruence. This is the stuff from which peace and contentment are made.

Vacation Spot?

The lightning rod of self-recognition required is our resentments against people, places and things. If one believes in a love-filled abundance of Everything possible, then resentments are the termites that serve to rot the stability of one’s relationship with one’s self. A list of fears, too, should be written down. All of this should be written down. Something deeply meaningful transpires when a person writes down their resentments and their fears. What we begin to see as these resentments and fears are placed on paper is the edge of an awareness of just how self-defeating our behavior is, can be or has become. Do not attempt this process completely alone; invite a trusted and experienced friend in for a peek. Balance and moderation should be the final outcome or the process of inventory has not been completed.

Sharing these lists with another human being, feeling the personal content present in them, seeing how we have set ourselves up for failure repeatedly – we become ready to release the beliefs that buttressed the self-defeating cycle of behaviors. I guarantee that once a person accepts that their beliefs do not work for them, the beliefs that have blocked their personal evolution will be dropped like a hot rock. It is in the release of dysfunctional beliefs that the healing can begin of itself. No special incantations or rituals are required. All of this is as simple as properly dressing an open wound.

Identifying what wounds we have as individuals and which wounds we share as a community is beyond the scope of this essay, except to suggest that such wounds exist. These wounds have formed the basis of our many dysfunctional systems of thought that are both fed by, and which reinforce, our dysfunctional beliefs.

Beliefs cannot be critically appraised in a direct manner; the behaviors that these beliefs tend to generate must be examined along with the often painful consequences directly associated with the behaviors. Once the individual and the community recognize and accept the origins of troubling behavior, the release of the beliefs happens almost of itself.

As Bill Wilson and the first 100 sober drunks suggested in their book, Alcoholics Anonymous, “instincts on a rampage balk at inspection.” The flurry of assaults on civil liberties within the United States and abroad, the rampant destruction of cultures and civilizations, the callous treatment of the sanctity of human life – these observable and arguably self-defeating behaviors point to both our unwillingness to inspect our systems of thought and the urgent need to do precisely that.

Barbershop Diaries, Volume I, Issue 14: Whose Death Panel?

Aug16

  

Locate Your Fave Death Panel...Then Hike Your Leg

Locate Your Fave Death Panel...Then Hike Your Leg

People want to believe the Big Lie.  The haircut that looks great on someone else is what he or she wants for himself or herself.  What’s missing in their lives, they believe, is what someone else has, “just right over there.”  People will believe this lie right up to the point where they are hunted down like animals and shot in the street, with or without their children in tow. 

At first blush, the simple truth can be painful as hell to hear.  “No, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus,” is not a truth anyone wants to tell an innocent child whose only crime has been to wholeheartedly believe everything told them by the figures of authority in their world.  But where is the actual harm in informing adults that, as a result of their mistaken beliefs about themselves, they are cutting their hair too long, too short, or improperly, to compliment their appearance?  This seems like a trivial matter, indeed.

But multiply that seemingly trivial disappointment delivered to a few thousand human beings simultaneously and the consequences are no longer as trivial.  Some people will walk away and pretend the whole matter does not exist for them, but a charismatic few will organize and pursue the “bringer of the dawn” until they have found a way to defeat or humiliate him or her.  Depending on a variety of factors, they will indulge this instinct for revenge before they bother examining the information communicated for scattered signs of the simple truth.

My dog seems to defy this template of behavior and spends an inordinate amount of time sniffing and contemplating the lives of other dogs based on the information left behind in the droppings of other dogs.  I tolerated this bit of disgusting, pedestrian and mundane canid behavior for years until I became sensitized to the ways and means of communicating information from one entity to another.  Now that I have seen what passes for communication between human beings, particularly in the recent spate of “healthcare townhalls,” I am less likely to judge my pooch poorly for his preoccupation with simple, if disgusting, truth.

 

There can be no deceit or dishonesty in the world of simple truth inhabited by dogs.  Perhaps that is why they seem so contented and happy most of the time…the concept of dishonesty and deceit does not come easily to dogs because they are sensually flooded with indisputable matters of fact from the day they are born.  Not so with my fellow humans.  Most of us are taught almost from the day we are born to challenge the information provided by our senses and compare and contrast this information with the reality of our dependence on our elders as the givers and sustainers of our very lives.  And if our parents and caregivers always told us the truth of the matter, rather than what they’d rather we believe, this simple system of rearing children into adulthood would result in human beings who could always separate the true from the false in their interactions with other human beings.

 

But, as Doctor Gregory House is always fond of saying, “people lie.”  They lie to passersby and they lie to their own children, sometimes without any perceptible provocation, generally without even realizing it.  Certainly to everyone’s detriment.

 

In such a world, the truth must feel like a toxic substance, an acid that we throw on one another as a means of winning an argument or of confusing an issue, even though it is because of the very existence of some kind of truth that any of us is alive and breathing at all.  Truth is the soil from which every single form of life grows, and yet we give it less import than a dog gives the droppings of another dog.

 

So dogs have ascended the evolutionary ladder in my book, just as a result of their inability to lie to one another.  What has passed for “truth-telling” from the fake “grass roots” organizers at all of these healthcare town halls this past week has been less meaningful than dogshit.

 

What does have some meaning in the midst of all the chimpanzee arm-waving has been our continued willingness to believe that “the Big Lie” tells no lies.  Meaning that as I continue to believe in the relevance of appearances, that appearances will never deceive me.  So I am free to Astroturf any issue as a leader of others, convincing my subordinates that “to win means everything,” yet even as I win, I will eventually lose.  Most importantly, I will lose my freedom to choose because I have used a lie to defend something that required no defense in the first place.

 

Eventually the Big Lie is a house of cards that must fall, but the supposed brilliance of the capitalist system is that the house always falls on the poor and middle classes.  But this is true only if the poor and middle classes do not see the fall coming.  As soon as the poor and middle classes see class warfare for what it is – an attack on their freedom – they will respond in kind.

 

The first realization will be that we have always had “death panels.”  Currently, those who sit on our “death panels” occupy the hallowed halls of corporate America and are compensated handsomely for coming up with excuses to let us die early and often.  No such compensation or incentive could ever exist in a free and democratic society that elects its leadership “early and often.”  The attack on the poor and middle classes is becoming clearer and clearer with each passing day, as are the lies required to sustain such an internecine attack.

Truth has no enemies…but it does have a lot of detractors.  Identify them, early and often, and do not stop until your fellows gather around you in droves.  

Barbershop Diaries, Volume I, Issue 13: Spiritual Bankruptcy and the End of the Big Lie

Aug8
Stranger Than Kubrick

Stranger Than Kubrick

By way of introduction and in light of this week’s stunning revelations from Sibel Edmonds, John Doe#2 and former French President Jacques Chirac, I need to preface my comments for this week’s haircut by assuring the reader that I have never once found it necessary to suggest that I receive my “inspiration” for my sometimes violent, often insane behavior from an Almighty God, the Devil, the AntiChrist or any other foil designed to deflect my personal responsibility for my actions.  Not since 1991, anyway.   That would be the year I received my first “license” to offer coiffs to anyone in the general public who desired a trim above their ears.

Some readers, however, may deem it necessary to label me as one of the above because to those who inhabit a dishonest world, the truth-teller is pre-sage, sage and a god-damned liar all at once.  Call me the Antichrist if you must, labels matter not.  What matters most is that we begin to unwind our pre-programmed need and compulsion for a massive physical upheaval, and, instead, begin to focus on our rapidly approaching need for a spiritual one.  No requirement exists for a completely shaven head, especially when a trim will do; but a good trim can massively disassemble and reassemble the internal workings of a human being in desperate search for relief from insanity seemingly imposed from above or beyond their personal control.

Massive spiritual upheavals require, first and foremost, rigorous honesty of a kind which the reader may not be accustomed.  This statement is more obvious than it seems for if we were as honest as we needed to be in the first place, there would be no requirement, nor any desire, for any upheaval of any kind.  Truth being the simple, yet massive, artiface that it is, only requires that we look honestly at what we think we see and compare it to the sometimes massive dishonesties with which we have become far too comfortable living around, sometimes living with.  Enter, then, the basis of every good haircut – a confrontation and understanding of what makes for both poor clothing selections as well as bad haircuts.  Enter, the Big Lie.

Adolf Hitler could not have made his rise to power a success without the use of the Big Lie.  Nor could the Federal Reserve.  Nor could capitalism, communism, socialism, Catholicism, Protestantism, consumerism, atheism, agnosticism, materialism or many other “isms”.  All of these concepts, and more, require the deft implementation of the Big Lie in order for the ideas represented by each of these concepts to embed themselves into our conscious, waking lives.

The Big Lie is as much a lifestyle as it is a technique since, in order for the Big Lie to work its blackest black magic, one has to truly believe that they understand how the Big Lie works and that they, and only their truest, most loyal friends, understand how it can be applied to advantage them in their lives.  The Big Lie may lie to you and me – that is the evidence of its success – but its patrons believe that the Big Lie never lies to them.  The Big Lie demands loyalty among friends, so if anyone in the inner clique were to begin to see the Big Lie for what it has never said that it is, that individual must be immediately expelled from the clique.  Only the Keepers of the Big Lie can be trusted.

 

Which, of course, is also a Big Lie.

What is the Big Lie at its core but the belief that anything other than the truth of the matter has any relevant existence at all.  Nothing matters, very literally, in the lifestyle of the Big Lie because “nothing” is the very substance of which the Big Lie is composed.  The Big Lie is, and yet in every relevant sense, it is not.

The essence of the Big Lie is not its power because it can have none.  Rather, all the power the Big Lie has comes from you and me and our conjoint willingness to believe that nothing, absolutely nothing at all, can be worth more than everything we already have, and have had, since the beginning of time.  And I need to suggest, right Now, that time has no real existence because of one very important clue that is common among all the child-concepts of the Big Lie: we never seem to have enough of it.  Some of us seem to have none of it.  Others seem to be running out of it like sand slipping between their fingers.  But no one, absolutely no one, can have too much time – so we do what we can to hoard the Big Lie that is time.  More on time.  Later.  It will astonish you, the nature of all our twisted thinking caused by the Big Lie lifestyle.

And what is money but the clever attempt to steal and hoard time from one’s fellows that we might use it at some later date?  All Big Lies are related in some way to each other because each shares the same form, but each has no real existence outside of our willingness to believe that each Big Lie is real and, therefore, true, relevant and substantial.

Our willingness to believe in ANY Big Lie is an open invitation for any one of us to believe in any other Big Lie, hence the development of a way of living – a lifestyle – of the Big Lie.  Anyone over the age of forty-five can remember a time when the Sunday morning talkshows placed men and women of substance on television or radio who actually tried to resist putting on display their secret worship at the altar of the Big Lie.  Now we can see, over a period of time, that those put on display for all to see on Sunday morning television have lost all pretense concerning their embrace of the Big Lie.  Most are quite open about it, many actually revel in it.  Becoming aware of this observation, one begins to see personalities like Glenn Beck as infants who, after smearing their face with their own fecal matter, look at their parents and cry, “look at me, look at me!”

The Big Lie keeps us separated from each other because while we all share a willingness to believe in the Big Lie, all of us want to believe that our personal set of Big Lie beliefs is what makes us special – just like everybody else.  You might laugh at me because I am different, but I laugh at us because we are all the same.  It is at the level of our sameness and similarity where the kernels of truth begin to pop up and challenge the hegemony we have all given to our own set of  Big Lies. 

Of course, the end result of investing in the Big Lie is the same as if we had taken all of our time and poured it down a very cold, very dark, very deep hole.  And therein lies another clue common to all Big Lies: the more time we invest with a Big Lie, the colder, darker and deeper our personal “holes” become.  Some folks describe their personal holes as actual, “holes in the center of my chest where the wind blows through.”  And why would they not?  Being alive and thoughtful means we are, in some sense, children of some modicum of truth and relevance.  Our worship of the opposite of truth and its many “altars” can mean only one thing: self hatred, or a fervent desire to be something or someone other than whom we must now, always and forever be.  A purer formula for heartache and pain I cannot imagine.  Heartache and devastating emotional pain are sure signs that “spiritual bankruptcy” has taken hold of us and shaken us to our knees.

The knees have always been an important part of my spiritual or religious life.  While I no longer ascribe to the beliefs of any one organized religion, I do believe that every religion begins with powerful spiritual insight.  That one must be driven to their bent knees by life as we misunderstand it before we become actual students of a spiritual or religious path seems a personal, perhaps universal, truism.  The insights and revelations pick us up from our knees; our continued belief in the Big Lie drives us right back down.  Like a giant screw twisted into the Earth, we go around and around, seeing the same things over and over again.  Patience with ourselves and others will reveal that we are coming up and out of the ground over time, even though the monotony of our personal life patterns might cause us not to think so.

Up until the moment of complete befuddlement and willingness, we seem to be forever fixated by the notion that, somehow, our Big Lie will be proven true; as true as our presence as characters in this most profound appearance on Life’s disappearing stage.  Your Big Lie is a lie; my Big Lie is true.  If this sounds as moronic to you as it sounds to me, congratulations and welcome.  If my “personal” version of truth excludes you in any way from my relevant concern – forgetting that you are me and I am you – I am living the life of the Big Lie.  How and when your Big Lie unwinds is a personal matter, but the knowledge that it one day will is as certain as your present existence on this planet, right here, right now.

The Big Lie is the Anaconda in the jungle, or the Python that drops from the trees.  It’s goal is to strangle and then consume you while still warm.  That only a crazy and insane snake would try to consume its own tail reveals the one opening in the lifestyle of the Big Lie through which we can walk toward greater and greater levels of freedom and evolution.

While many of us see the path of virtue as the walk of the saints, it is actually the path of the utterly and completely exhausted.  No one wants to be forced to do what they would rather not; we become saints because we have debauched and defiled ourselves to the point where no other path seems viable.  At this most profound turning point, we either decide not to choose and end our experience of this life, or we put one foot in front of the other as our old delusions fall from our bodies like a layer of cloak.  I have often felt that this layer or that would be my final layer, even coming to the point where I feared for the end of my existence – the proverbial hole at the center of the donut.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  Freedom to leave means freedom to stay.

Yes, many of us do love being members of a “team” and everyone on the competing “team” is somehow and in some way less than us, but aside from the “fun” of temporary competition, the belief that there is a possible “master race” or a “privileged class” is a child of the concept of the Big Lie.  There do exist other ways of having fun that do not involve separating ourselves out into “winners” and “losers.”  If any one of us loses, we all lose – perhaps not in the same “form,” but as should be getting clearer and clearer, “form” does not determine reality or relevance.  More evidence that our world is worm-eaten by the ravages of the Big Lie is the belief that form drives content, or, that a book can always be reliably judged by its cover.  Content will drive form, but it is just impossible to know, via human perception, what form will be the optimum expression for which content.  I have tried, I have believed and I have found my reliance on my personal judgments regarding form to be in error.  We all have our preferences and rather than coming up with categories and critiques, I would like to suggest that we would be better served by simply accepting and respecting everyone else’s preferences and apparent individual differences.  We are all at least a little insane – living with lies tends to do that to people – so passing judgment on another’s preferences is like criticizing a person in the process of healing.  Rejoice that everyone is healing rather than separating out the unfortunate few whose healing process disgusts, annoys or troubles us: there are pretty good odds that their healing process does the same to them, they just don’t realize that fact yet.

Let form go, early and often, in your interactions with those who share your same terminal fate.  Focus on content.  Not the silverware, not the sacraments…the core beliefs that drive the behavior and, probably, the thinking, of the people you meet and the chemistry we experience.  This is the essence of spirituality and the pursuit of truth.  This is the unwinding of the coils of the Big Lie.  This is the upheaval for which we shave off too much hair in too many places, put ink under our flesh in order to recall and pierce our bodies to remind ourselves where our weakness lies.

The day of Last Judgment is the day when we read these words and recognize a deep part of ourselves within them.  It is the day when most all of us realize and recognize that we, alone, cannot successfully judge anything, nor are we truly capable of complete freedom of choice.  Every last one of us craves a pursuit of happiness and are driven by whom we really are to align ourselves with a happy pursuit on a path we deem most promising.  We have chosen the Big Lie, or one of its many children, and have come up short.  We must choose again, asking, instead, to be shown the nature of an honest, open-ended question that our deepest Self might be engaged to provide us with an honest answer. 

On a day of seeming fire and brimstone – of buzzing, snipping and razor-sharp knives, our Last Judgment will be made and our reliance on non-existent time will be loosed from its moorings.  For time is a device, sometimes helpful when properly applied, but the truth of the matter is that there is only One time and that time is right Now.  Always and forever. 

Amen.  Hotep.

Barbershop Diaries, Volume I, Issue 12: In Fitts About God

Aug1

God and Gravity

God and Gravity


The theologization of our thinking in US society is fast becoming intolerable. Catherine Austin Fitts’ latest Youtube missive ends with a profound, “if we can’t face it, God can’t fix it.”
??
We’re going to wait for God to come fix us?
I appreciate the importance of communicating important information to all people and connecting with them where they live. A great many people do harbor some notion of a cloud being to whom they can surrender all worries, perhaps even all responsibilities, but we can no longer allow this circumstance to go unaddressed. Addressing our religious mania is a critical aspect of our present crises and a key component to the social inertia involved in getting people into the streets where they should have been two decades ago. If we are going to be relying in any way on a higher power to dictate our thinking and behavior to us, we need to become absolutely clear what it is we are talking about and how such a relationship serves a practical purpose.
Religion and spirituality are touchy subjects with people, and for good reason. Communities of shared values and rituals are how humans bridge the gap between throwing a bunch of ambiguous-sounding air at one another, and actually communicating shared meaning. Without the transfer of meaning from one person to another, human beings cannot relate to each other effectively, nor can we be expected to trust that the words leaving one person’s mouth can be taken at face, or generally accepted, value. I am reminded of the old 1950’s sci-fi B-movies that addressed this issue by positing that all aliens were assumed to be hostile. This assumption spoke more about the dominant social paradigm in place with respect to differences of opinion and values in 1950’s America than it did about an interaction with a genuinely extraterrestrial culture.
The dominant social paradigm in place in 2009 has swung even more radically towards complete mutual distrust and miscommunication than during the 1950’s. In the 1950’s, we witnessed the spectacle of a single US Senator, Joseph McCarthy, electrifying and galvanizing an entire country, filibustering it and holding it hostage, as the interpretative frame switched from concerns over Nazis and fascists in our midst, to complete paranoia over a growing monolithic communist threat. Today, in 2009, we are witness to all three branches of our once great nation being taken hostage by a monolithic threat from radical Muslim extremists who are characterized as magically able to use box cutters and prayers to bring down the security corridor of the entire northeastern United States. Not only must our limited human nervous systems accept this pabulum as fact, we also are expected to surrender, without question or critical investigation, to the notion that two modern 110-story buildings were able to fail and collapse into nearly their own footprints in less than 15 seconds without the use of prepositioned explosives. The lunacy that passes for acceptable fact in our mainstream media is mind numbing, crazy making and panic inducing. Not only can citizens no longer trust their elected officials and their government, they can no longer trust each other.
To suggest that all of this chaos and confusion occurred by accident strains credulity to the breaking point. The facts are that the United States is the only nation on the face of planet Earth that has ever exploded a nuclear device over a civilian population, the only nation to have both opposed and yet financed the Nazi war machine during WWII, the only nation responsible for the projection of the powerful financial tentacles of the Federal Reserve banking system into all but two autonomous States and the only nation left on the planet that relies on the threat of assassination to control the behavior of its key elected officials. To suggest that such a nation-state, through pure happenstance, fell into a condition of interpersonal panic and distrust without the approval and sanction of an overbearing, ruling cartel outside of public accountability is to believe in the reality of the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus and the possibility of the physical resurrection of dead human tissue.
In fact, it is has been precisely the work of organized religion to ensure that enough members of a nation’s citizenry believe in “magic” to allow for the control of key minorities of its population through intimidation and brute force. Intellectuals, the scientifically-minded, atheists, agnostics and geniuses are all held in check, politically and rhetorically, through the use of the belief in magic that organized religion provides, as well as the intimidation and brute force that the State provides through employing “true” religious believers within its law enforcement ranks.
So who is this “god” that organized religion claims to provide ordinary citizens access to, and is this god the same god Catherine Austin Fitts claims can’t fix what we choose to deny exists?
We can stop with the endless muttering and chanting about a God who is going to save us from ourselves right…about…now. To suggest that any God, or truth, of the ultimate variety cares whether we live or die is ridiculous. Truly, we are better off dead as far as ultimate reality is concerned since the existence of imperfection anywhere is a threat to the existence of a perfect God everywhere and at any time. Stop with the useless blathering on of “it’s a mystery” and “we can’t know what God is thinking,” and grow up. Are you hearing yourselves? Do you actually believe a God of ultimate reality would make Itself impossibly difficult to establish contact with? Only rocket scientists and priests could begin to grasp the immense holiness of the one true God? Have you completely lost your minds? Creation always knows Itself and could never be alien to Itself: no one puts an apple pie in the oven and expects a chicken to pop out in an hour … unless … they … are … completely … bonkers.
It is incredibly simple to know God. So simple, in fact, that we need not be concerned about it. If such a relationship with God was to exist, and I believe that it does, we couldn’t possibly put the nature of our relationship into words and successfully communicate it verbally because it is, by definition, non-conceptualizable. That means that if we could have created a method for communicating the knowledge of the existence of God, we would have done so by, say, twenty years ago. We’ve been at it for some time now, don’t you think? God is beyond words, in other words. No point in discussing it any further, in still more words. So shut up about it, already. Focus. At the bunny. This one is for keeps.
People of great wealth and power have systematically and cynically lied to us, as a civilization, for well over 2,000 years. Think that I am lying? Explain to me how an all too common story of the execution of a champion of the poor by champions of the rich and powerful was summarily distorted to become a tale of those dirty, nasty Jews? Who do you think could afford the printing presses and scribes necessary to spin these tales of so-called ultimate truth – do you think that in between dodging plagues, famines and bouts with undrinkable water, the poor were able to scrape together enough money to buy a publishing concern? Where in their King’s Keep would they have placed such a device?
The problem was not that the Jews killed Jesus, the problem was, is and always will be, that the rich kill the poor; the have’s murder the children of the have not’s; the powerful exploit the powerless. Insert the label for the ethnic identity of any group that challenges the authority of any other group and you have your answer. The “Jews” could have been the Egyptians. Or the Syrians. Or the Persians. All that was required to fill in that particular role was an ethnicity that was actually taking steps to improve its lot, not unlike what Black Americans are doing in the United States today. Notice how “friendly” and “receptive” white Americans have been to the rising star of Black America – now multiply this most recent slice of humanity times 2,000 years and you have your next designated scapegoat for the downfall of yet another empire. And add the queers at the end to keep the ancient storyline consistent.
I am so over laying the responsibility and accountability for the despotism and reptilian monophonic thought of human beings at the feet of the baby Jesus; either as an expression of “hopium” or as a request for clemency. Our biggest problem today is not justice – for it has become “just-us” in the blink of an eye – our problem, your’s and mine, is a problem of mercy.
How much longer are we going to pretend that the lives that these scoundrels are leaving us with will truly be worth living this time next year? Do you really want to live to see your grandchildren expire from hunger, disease and grinding poverty? Do ya’ really? What about your children? Do you like the idea of feeling them die in your arms while you’re standing in a bread line, dying of thirst? Do you like this worldview? I hope you do because it is coming to a city or town quite near to you every day you sit on your fat, corpulent ass and let the powers that be take from you what was once your birthrite.
Enough with the hopium! Enough with the God talk! The most powerful prayers available to us are our actions. Use them wisely. Organize yourselves, now, or be herded into cattle cars, subgroup by subgroup. Do not wait for a god on a white horse to come save your sorry behind; this is your clarion call.