Tag Archive | truth is obvious

The Barbershop Diaries, Volume I, Issue 17: The Current Racism

Sep19
Sometimes A Klan Rally Is Just A Klan Rally

Sometimes A Klan Rally Is Just A Klan Rally

Now the right wing glue-sniffers are attacking ACORN, Justice Sotomayor, Aunt Jemima, Mr. Bojangles, and (acting) President Barak Hussein Obama.  Next up: Al Jolson.

I suppose it all started when the Egyptians, in a brief moment of sanity, released the Jews from bondage to spend forty years trying to understand why freedom wasn’t truly free.  There was certainty in bondage, even if such certainty was miserable.  Humans are nothing if not adaptable, and if given a choice between a duel of wits with the Sinai Desert , or trusting the largesse of a benevolent dictator, most people tend to lean towards the devil they know.  Onward through the fog of victimization and the tyranny of oppression.

As “free” men and women, we are free to wander the desert for as long as we wish, but I know of no human person who could, or would, tolerate being lost anywhere with their family for forty minutes, let alone forty years – and that goes double for being lost in any kind of a desert.  Methinks the whole “forty years” narrative was an allegory…on the banks of the Nile…with or without meaningful interpretation.

The choice to opt for freedom does not come easy to anyone at any time – or at any level of psycho-emotional development.  Like most things in life, freedom is a process and processes can be thought of as having bony elbows and hardened knees.  Most everyone realizes this important fact unless they happen to be a teenaged child or young adult.  In which case I am an advocate of tripping the little darlings, saving the rougher fare for the thirty-five year old non-relatives who have not learned to discriminate between bull feces and shoe polish. 

Ethnocentrists – a polite term for racist – seem to possess the fecund, counterfactual imagination that one, or a basket of, ethnicities offer all that could possibly be necessary for human life to sustain itself on this planet and beyond.  If we maintain open-mindedness long enough to follow this line of reasoning to some definitive conclusions, we arrive at such treasures as, “we can see accurately well into the future,” and, “we have supernatural powers not possessed by others.”  While absurd on their face, such beliefs are not far-fetched leaps of logic beyond the “faith” required to believe that dead people can reanimate themselves, or that we are all under the moral surveillance of an omniscient sky-spook whose job it is to mete out justice to one and all – simultaneously.  And while this paints most every religion with a broad brush, I would be remiss if I did not point out that the latest heap of effluent tossed onto the American political stage has been primarily the work of a fundamentalist, Zionist subculture within the United States which believes that humans fed dinosaurs, willingly and unwillingly, and that the entire planet is only 6,000 years old.  The zeal possessed by this subculture extends well past the point of credulity, past mere delusional thinking and lands smack into the outright insanity of, “it is because I was reared to believe that it is so.”  In point of fact, the zealously religious are among the most racist creatures on the face of this planet.  In activating the fear-based core components of any religion – be they phantasmagorical or merely perceptually-based science – we virtually ensure the emergence of racism and prejudices of all kinds to rear their ugly, demented little heads.

By way of intermezzo, I did just refer to perceptually-based science as a form of religion. 

For those not used to poring over journal articles or who are not familiar with the intercollegial backstabbing that takes place in the hallowed halls of academe, let me just point out that the existence of your physical form relative to anyone else’s is an article of faith to science.  Meaning, of course, that there is no certain knowledge that the fundamental building blocks of which we are all made actually exist anywhere at any time — we take it on authority that our interpretation of our perceptions means what we have been taught it means. 

By this logic, I make no absolute distinction between current scientific evidence that is tainted by human interpretation and much older human-tainted evidence based on outside organizational authority — both, in time, lead to the same sort of lunacy that we are observing taking place, right now, among the fundamentalist evangelical right-wing of the former Republican party and their corporate “amen” section. 

One can make the argument that the religion of Science is self-correcting, but my observations have not born that belief out to any greater degree than the self-correction that has taken place in most standard religions.   In a pinch, I would opt for the religion of Science over most every other religion, but this prejudice still leaves a huge gap between legitimate, age-old and sage tribal knowledge and the best of current scientific conclusions.  I and Ken Wilber agree that both sources of knowledge are crucially important to living a happy, meaningful human life. 

My disdain for the behavior of those who choose lunacy and pathological fantasy over more grounded, scholarly and spiritual religious interpretations reflects my belief that most religions lead to a variety of loathsome “us versus them” confrontations of which the current racism is clearly associated. 

For the scientifically inclined who remain unconvinced that two or three major intellectual revolutions in the Philosophy of Science have taken place just in the last 100 years, I am not alarmed.  Eventually the positivistic certainty with which the scientifically-consecrated enoble their own thinking and perceptions will come beating on their skulls to deliver, unto them, the requisite humility of the saints.

Restoration of sanity is a process and like everything else requires both a willing student and a clearly presented, easily grasped curriculum. 

Evidence of racism is evidence not of a poorly presented curriculum but, in the present case, evidences a strident, arrogant denial of the most obvious matters of fact.  There is no learning failure taking place in the case of racism, there is only a dedicated unwillingness to look at all of the evidence that is as plain as the nose upon the human face. 

I do not mean to be dismissive of  matters of obviousness since there are, by some accounts, over two billion (2,000,000,000) sense impressions available to our perception at any given instant in time.  My point is that we are not lacking for any information here.  What we are lacking is a reliable apparatus or process for sorting through all of this information and coming to some competent conclusions before the moment leaves us in the dust and we are served up, yet again, with another moment and another two billion slices of information to sort through.

In a pinch for time, racism is one of many processes human beings use to sort through all of the information that our existence makes available to us.  Hard as it might be to believe, only a dozen or so generations separate us from a period in human history of such hostility that, had we engaged one another during the twentieth century with the same enthusiasm for bloodshed that we once did a handful of generations ago, we would have mindlessly murdered twenty times the one hundred million we actually did slaughter during the twentieth century.  For those keeping score, that would have been that two billion number again.  What this means is that for most of human history we have been brutally bludgeoning one another to death, or running in mortal terror from someone who wanted to brutally bludgeon us to death.  War, terror, running – these are all snappy events that do not suffer contemplative types very well, if at all.  We need to get to the point and we need to get to the point quickly… because the (fill in the blank with your favorite social piriahs) are a-comin’.

Communities of shared values have been, in fact, THE way human beings have adapted to the threats we have encountered from each other for most of the time our peculiar genetic encoding has been in circulation.  Racism and religion walk foot in mouth together in terms of needing to get snappy, if not impolite, before someone I do not know drills a spear or an arrow someplace where I know it does not belong.  Build a wall, dig a moat, fashion a drawbridge – fairly quickly people develop a prejudice for family and community and a strident, if not arrogant, suspicion of anyone trying to worm their way into our Keep.  “Famly values,” as it has been used and misused in the present moment of cultural morality has been nothing more than an encoding of the term, “racism.”  It is not by sheer coincidence that as soon as Ronald Reagan started on his peculiar bandwagon of “family values,” that more demonstrably ill people of color were rounded up and thrown into more and more prisons, as a percentage of their total population, than demonstrably ill white people as a percentage of their total population.

Ethnocentrism = racism = war = religion = insanity.  Since most people harbor an affinity for both ethnocentricism and insanity, peace and the pursuit of happiness only require we rid ourselves of racism, war or religion, as single entities, to weaken the entire tangle that represents the pursuit of our unhappiness.  We have already tried to rid ourselves of racism and war to no avail…both have snapped back into prominence with a vengeance.

I propose, then, that we simply rid ourselves of religion.  We can still go to church, if we like, but methinks it is time to stop giving religion a free ride in the tax department.  And I, for one, will stop sending money their way that will not be spent  strictly on the flock of which I am a member.   No more tithing to an overarching, aging bureaucracy in some far-off land.  All politics are local, and so is all community.  I am done with religion as a means of creating a moral compass for the great unwashed masses, or as a means of saving my bacon for a better time and place.

The time is NOW, and always has been; the place is HERE and will always be.  

Let us choose to love one another simply, responsibly and compassionately – right here and right now, in this very moment.

Barbershop Diaries Volume I, Issue 16: Living Life Beyond the Test Pattern

Sep6

 

I'm Fine...Just Will Need Some Help Extracting This Chair Cushion Once We're Done Here

I'm Fine...Just Will Need Some Help Extracting This Chair Cushion Once We're Done Here

I never fully appreciated just how deeply I could sink my fingernails into the chair of my barber as a child.  One would think I was sitting in a dentist’s chair, and as it turned out, I reacted in this same completely unconscious manner with my dentist.  As soon as someone put their fingers inside my mouth and I heard the buzz of the drill, my mind would go elsewhere and my fingernails would keep me from floating off the planetary surface.

I have no explanation for why my barber’s chair elicited this same response in me.  Perhaps it was the buzzing of shears, or the incessant commands to hold still – tilt left, tilt right – that put something in me on red alert.  Not that anyone in the barbershop realized that just under the barber cape my knuckles were an iridescent white.  I was striving to be a picture-perfect consumer of male grooming behavior and with a high degree of precision I succeeded.  But it is to suggest that nothing of much import seemed to come my way unless I had previously removed myself from any personal consideration, or ceased allowing myself to experience any modicum of personal satisfaction as the result of “my” achievement.  Given that bleak forecast, getting out of bed every morning was a step into the heroic.

It was not until I had grown much older, experienced physical intimacy with women and then deigned to allow a massage therapist to touch my bare back that I began to loosen my hold on the arms of all modern torture devices, whatever form they might take.  Something had to give and it had to be in me not because there was something obviously wrong with me, but that everyone else had run out of reasons to contribute to my self-destructive behavior.  I hated myself, but I wanted you to love me so that I could then be justified in hating you, too.  Not exactly a conscious-level plan on my part, just a preponderance of the extant evidence.  This frame seems to fit the evidence well because I can see myself rolling and tumbling in the shame of it all to this very day.

Don’t get me wrong: I am positively joyous ninety five percent of the time.  But the other five percent of the time makes me want to poke out my eyes with a sharp stick.  The other five percent of the time I am caught in an obsessive web of want so sticky that I wonder if I will ever be able to just let it go and move on.  Inevitably I do, of course, but where in the hell does the motivation, desire or inspiration come from to go forward once the glasses are all empty and the party is officially over?

I remember running the stairs in our high school stadium.  The first few flights were easy, but then the burn started to take its toll and it began dogging me every step of the way.  I could still move my legs up and down, but I couldn’t really feel them anymore.  When I did feel them they told me to stop, that this was nuts, that there was no value in going any farther – but I couldn’t stop: you were still doing it, so I had to, too.  You were still giving it your level best, so I couldn’t let the team down.  And so it was the team and being a part of something bigger than myself that drove me to explore the area outside of my normal limits of endurance.

But where the hell does team spirit, or motivation, come from when, for more nights in a row than you can remember, you find yourself waking up alone to the glow of a test pattern illuminating your barely furnished living room?  And forget about the motivation to pursue this sort of sport to its logical conclusion, where does the desire to stop one’s self from picking up a shotgun, pointing it in one’s mouth and pulling the trigger come from?  It certainly will not be team spirit because I can attest to the fact that the “team” has long since found something more entertaining to do with their day than wait to see your head explode in a spray of red mist.  They can see that sort of thing most every day on cable television…before the test pattern shows up.

Fear of death might come close, except for the fact that I have seen death come and take its prisoners several times now, and not one of them seemed to put up much of a fight.  Once the diapers came out, once the wheelchair became a necessity, there was a quiet resignation that the fight had gone on long enough, that the fear was a waste of time and oxygen.  There may have well been some residual fear of death but I can assure you that there was an even greater fear that the torment would go on.  Still…no shotguns, no exhortations against a cruel supreme being and no drama.  There were even, at times, moments of contentment and peace.  One last walk up San Jacinto, one last trip through the old neighborhood to see children playing in the water and somewhere where the air is fresh, clean but thin, the yoke would leave its shell behind.  What was left behind would gladly be left for others to feast on – it had long since passed its expiration date, anyway.

We are at this place as a nation and as a people.  We have allowed ourselves to become the objects as well as the spectators of scandal after scandal, as if watching ourselves being eaten alive by parasites represents some call to a higher purpose, or a part in some drama foretold by an alleged supreme being who obviously cares nothing for our peace or our collective shame.

In these days of torment and torture, the demons sound like angels and the angels sound like demons.  These are the times that try men and women’s souls.  We ache for the heroic, but we refuse to turn our backs on all the scandal, envy and gossip-mongering.  We receive justice, but then we complain because it is devoid of mercy.  Those who can see no justice, no mercy and no heroism in the world are blinded to it by their choice not to see it.  Or, having seen it, move to trample it under foot.

Sometimes getting a haircut can be heroic.  But giving one never is.

Barbershop Diaries, Volume I, Issue 15: GOP = FEAR

Aug26
I'm All Out of Fear

I'm All Out of Fear

Something must have slipped my mind this past week at my barber’s place of business.  I must have forgotten what I went in there for.  It started out innocently enough: a few jokes and humorous asides, a mention about the burned popcorn last visit and the need to open the front door to let out the stifling odor of carbonized corn and let in the Texas heat.  But then the reality –  The Reality – of what we have quietly tolerated for more years than we choose recognize settled in and I could have pulled every last hair out of my head by its root in gigantic handfuls.

Cheney is using the Republicans again, and they are all too willing to be used as can be seen here.  That such a gallery of human waste continues to occupy seats in the United States Senate is insulting enough to the institution and to the country.  But that each of the halfwit signatories on this parchment of idiocy might actually believe the opinions expressed as facts therein speaks finally and convincingly as to their treason against the former United States of America.

Yes, gentle reader, I said, “former” United States of America.  I do not know this country I live in any longer, and I see the distance between the country we live in now and a country poised to relive the horrors of Nazi Germany to be paper thin.  As thin as the parchment on which our Bill of Rights were first handwritten some 221 years ago.

Yes, it is still entirely possible that in order to avoid prosecution at the hands of the United States, or The Hague, that rogue elements of our own intelligence and State Department apparatus will seek to detonate a nuclear device within the continental United States and blame this heinous act on someone, or something, “out there.”  It is indeed possible that the nuclear devices irresponsibly removed from Minot AFB and delivered to Barksdale AFB were intentionally mishandled or miscounted, sending at least one nuclear warhead to parts unknown.  To underscore the horror of such an act, and in an unprecedented move, the entire top level of the United States Air Force was removed in June, 2008, after it was discovered that the clandestine movement of these nuclear warheads was at the “request” of Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney.

Enough.

The fascist automatons burrowed deep within the bowels of our government have frightened every last nerve fiber in my being and set it on edge.  But by now it has gotten to the point where We the People have nothing left to lose by daring these 24-carat-plated northern-end-of-southbound-horses to go head and make our day.  G’head, jackasses.  Do it.  But know whether you do it or not, we’re still coming after you.  You and your families will still be looking over your shoulders 100 years from now because we will not stop until every last scintilla of your DNA has been removed from the gene pool.  The only evidence of your presence on this planet will be a catalog of your crimes against humanity and precisely how such human rubbish could have ever come into being in the first place.

We will kill your cars, your houses, your wealth and everything material that has ever given you reason to go on living.  And then we will chain you inside the coldest, darkest prison we can find, where we will leave you to rot until you beg for your own death to come.  Then we will ensure that you go on living many years beyond what you thought you could withstand.

We do all of this in the memory of the Kennedy Brothers, their children, their grandchildren and every patriot who has ever spilled a drop of blood in defense of what was once these United States of America.  Most certainly, we do this in memory of Marine General Smedley Darlington Butler, the last patriot to ever put a finger into your “all seeing” eye.

Pleasant dreams, jackasses.  Maybe that spot on your shoulder will be dandruff, and maybe it will be the last glimmer of light you catch before your lives as “free” men and women comes to a bitter, painful, screeching halt. 

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.