Finally I've had to address my mother to put a possible end to the stiff-arm tactic she's used on me all my life, sentences that start, When you gonna ...? or I wish you would.... It's not a form of control, because it does not control me, never has and she knows it. Why does she do it? She goes to a Baptist church that is the only Truth on earth; everything the preacher says is RIGHT and all else WRONG. She has a head full of church cliches. "Jesus died for your sins." What a weird one that is. Jesus is supposed to be immortal, never dies. But he died. What? On account of you! The man that never dies died for you. Don't blame me. I wasn't there. Nor am I a preacher to kill him every Sunday with audience-pleasing parrotry. I don't have a problem with somebody who comes on straight-ahead telling it like it is. To the Pharisees (preachers--church dogma), "You're making the people two-fold more children for hell than you yourselves." There, in a nutshell is the reason I have nothing to do with church of any sort. I have seen so many people so "dead in Christ" (mother's ideal) that they miss everything but Jesus cliches, which have no meaning except for a kind of church slang you have to be a member to get.
It brings to mind a joke from high school years. A man first day in prison is in the cafeteria at lunch. Somebody yelled out a number and everybody laughed. Somebody else called out a number and everybody laughed. A few more times and he asked the guy beside him what was so funny about the numbers. The guy explained that everybody knew the same jokes, so they gave the jokes numbers. Instead of telling the joke everybody has heard, they call out the number and it's funny. He asked if he could try it. Sure. He called out a number. No laughter. He asked the guy next to him why nobody laughed. The guy said, "Some people just can't tell a joke." The next thing after getting saved is your duty to browbeat others about Jesus and church, The number of people you convince they need to be saved adds up and you get a Mary Kay pink Cadillac convertible in heaven so you can ride around in the glory of the Lord all day where night never falls. They have laws against laying rubber on the streets of gold. You better watch out or God's gonna condemn you.
If going to heaven is as stressful a deal as being an olympic athlete, there can't be anything to it. In the olympics you lose. Only one wins. Everybody else loses. You don't really know if you're going to heaven. Even if you're super-Christian of the month, you have no guarantee God really likes you. God knows you lied to your mommy once when you were 6. Every little sin of commission and omission is kept on a list like the register receipt at the grocery store. If you get one too many, that's it. The right wing militarist way of seeing it is "no exceptions." The original purpose of a judge was to sort through the subjectivity of all the evidence and find objectively the problem and rule according to the particulars in the individual case. Then comes the Reagan Revolutions mandatory sentencing. No consideration of context, one of the early American legal ideals. Judges have guidelines to follow, no exceptions, no variations. So what's the point of having judges? Have a trial and refer to the guidelines. Talk about saving taxpayers dollars! Getting rid of all the federal judges would save a very great deal. But the deal is not to get rid of them, but to put in only judges of right wing militarist mind. That way the laws created by corporate lobby to put more black folks in prison don't get watered down by judges who don't believe a black kid stealing maybe $50 from a convenience store deserves ten years in prison. Get rid of "liberal" judges like that, build enough prisons and the nigger problem is fixed. Please don't tell me the corporate world is not racist. It's less sexist than it is racist.
The Bible says "works" have no bearing on God's judgment of you, but Baptist preachers know better. I'm expected to go about believing myself to be a worm in the ground. I can see it in that all forms of consciousness are forms of God, life. I'm the same as a toad in that way, the same as a horse in that way, the same as Julius Caesar in that way, consciousness. At the same time, in this lifetime my consciousness is human being. I have a nervous system a bit more complex than a worm's. I have bones. I live above ground. I have responsibilities and concerns a worm cannot imagine because it cannot experience them. I also don't believe "worm" as low self-esteem is valid. Low self-esteem is self-defeating and depressing. Nobody functions well in their lives repeating self-defeating behavior and bound by depression. God wants us to do well in our lives. I don't mean in material wealth, though that is one of the ways. God wants us to live our lives. I take that to mean God wants us to live our lives. If I want to be a boxer, God says, Go for it, do it well (the best you can). If I want to be a painter, God says, Go for it, do it well. If I want to work as an architect, God says, Go for it, do it well.
This is what I have come to see in the course of my spiritual path in direct relationship with God, not through the kaleidoscope of the human mind religion has become. I've come to understand why the spiritual path is experiential only. Spiritually, reading counts for nothing. Only application works. Since kindergarten I knew that everything comes back. I'm rubber, you're glue, everything you say bounces off me and sticks on you. I'd known about that principle all the way along. Automatically when something we don't like happens to us, we say, "What'd I do? Like we know without knowing it that it must be something come back from something put out there. Everything comes back. We all know that, but how well do we know it? I believed I understood it up until in my fifties. One day I decided to make an "empirical" study of it, something like testing to see if light travels as waves or particles, though not so complex. I'd discovered practical application of spiritual principles. I wanted to pay attention and see what I could find.
I don't recall what I did, but one day I put something out there and the next day it came back. That got my attention. I've watched enough to see that it is not the exact deed, but the same degree of response to it. Like one I recall from just a few years ago. Somebody in my world made me mad unto wishing I could permit myself to contemplate murder. But I see consequences, for starters. I was so furious that I had to get revenge right now. Couldn't wait for karma to handle it. I looked at my thinking and saw it makes a really good case for long years in prison. Do I want to go to prison because this lying MF pissed me off so much it kicked me out of control? That's giving him power over me and he would know it and use it. He wasn't getting power over me, and I knew any reaction on my part would give him that power. Relying on this principle, that everything comes back, I put it out of my mind, thought about it no more, except paying attention, waiting to see what would come back to him. Two weeks later something happened totally unrelated to me but right in front of my face that made him as furious as he'd made me. I thought: I could not have commanded better revenge. It was the same degree of rage triggered by himself the day he made my blood run faster. That day I said to myself never to worry about anything again. As long as I don't be putting crazy shit out into the world, crazy shit won't be coming back.
*
No comments:
Post a Comment