BELIEVING AND LIVING

Oh good, the rain has begun. The green world is ready. A couple weeks have gone by without rain, but for a welcome shower one night. I went to Carpenter's house earlier to water a young mountain laurel I'd transplanted from the woods a couple weeks ago. They are hardy. I'm watering it every other day to keep it wet, give it a liquid diet while it grows new root hairs. The leaves are perked up and happy. The Dutch irises transplanted a couple weeks ago stand straight up like green rapiers, telling me they're happy. The large patch of wild violet leaves, out the window, flutter in random patterns, make a dance, bring to mind Philip Glass music. It's a visualization of his music, like the continuous flow lines in the films he scored, Koyaanisqatsi and the unspellable others. I heard him in a radio interview a few days ago, the occasion of his new memoir's release. I actually allowed self to spend $45 on the cd collection of Einstein On The Beach. That was when $45 was $45. Never regretted it. Haven't yet gone to amazon to see about his book. If it is under 500 pages, I may look into it. I'm still stuck in the middle of a thousand page Van Gogh biography, taking a diversion after 500 pages, like gimme a break. I feel like I'm creeping up on getting back into it, but facing 500 more pages is like, Lord have mercy. I've read six books during the respite from Van Gogh, and may yet read a few more.  

While looking within at the trails of destiny leading to today, I have a note on the desk to my right written on a piece of pocket-sized nobebook paper, "to see what you believe, see how you live." It has been here for a few weeks. I look at it fairly often, awareness it's there. I have never been able to answer the question, what do I beleive. NPR used to have people write in their stories of what they believe. Every time I'd hear them start, I'd wonder what I'd say, and couldn't put what I believed into a capsule form of one thing that makes a good story. Where do you start, and where do you end? I believe that if I cross the yellow lines in front of an oncoming car I'll have a problem. Haven't tested the hypothesis, but believe it. It's a belief I've gained by noting other people's experience. It's part of what I like about reading. I like reading someone else's story, seeing through someone else's point of view, good practice in awareness that others do, indeed, have a point of view particular to their own experience. Somebody I used to have lunch with regularly was convinced, by a belief about his point of view, that his was the only one valid---he's right, everybody else is wrong. A time came I was unable to put self through the torment again of my own volition, to take the first step toward the door. The people I know who read are comfortable with a point a view besides their own. Someone else's point of view tells me I share this world with others of very interesting points of view, if I can put my own out of the way enough to allow the other. 

How I live will tell what I believe. On the obvious level, when you walk in the door you see clutter. My workshop is the footstool to the chair I read in, watch movies in and listen to music in. A piece of plywood on the footstool is the workbench. Parts for things I'm putting together lie around in stacks, boxes filled with jars and tubes of paint, finished objects, magazines, books on shelves, books in stacks, a variety of pictures and African masks around the walls. Two of them are the real deal, three of them made for tourists. I don't care if they're all made for tourists. Some people are afraid of them. I believe they're good medicine. One has pointed teeth. It looks frightful to a Westerner. I've looked closely at the person it was modeled on in the mask itself and see a striking likeness. It's just a human face. The feeling I get from it is balance, so I think of it as balance. It is the image on the wall daily reminder of balance. I think the masks are beautiful, the purpose for having them. Pictures of Meher Baba on each wall. Asked, Don't you think you have enough pictures of Baba? I say, No. He has a great deal to do with my destiny. set me on the path to being able to find my destiny within, my path itself within. My work along the way has been to keep bills paid and basic needs taken care of. The way I'm living now is the way I wanted to live in my youth, but wasn't ready.

By here, I mean the place I see from, gazing out the window at the donkey meadow, green, the fence, a fly exploring the pane of glass looking for a hole in the invisible wall. He can see where he wants to go, but can't find a hole. I live simply. It doesn't mean self-sufficient. That's too much work, requires too much focus of attention, more than I'm willing to pay for something I can buy at the grocery store for so little. Growing it costs more than buying it. I know, better for ya, but if eating like I eat is deadly, because I didn't grow it, why am I not dead yet? I know the answer to why I'm not dead yet: science. Praise the Scientific Method! I live below the poverty line by choice. Don't have much to offer the world of money flow. The boycott of one says no to a belief system I don't share. Because I don't want to participate in the System, does not imply resistance. My form of resistance is nonparticipation. Be like water, flow around it. I believe television has wrecked American life, but can't struggle against something so big. I lose before it starts. I go around it and stay out of television, I don't like to infect my head with the mystery of the obvious, preferring a life where everyday life is not so obvious. The subliminal application of graduate-school Psychology is not guiding an ongoing effort to seduce my attention when I'm not watching tv. None of the books in the house are spun by the propaganda fear machine, nor is the music. No Tom Clancy novels. No commercials here. No pop radio. Only NPR for absence of commercials. 

photos by tj worthington

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PILGRIM WAY

The quotation, Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, from the red letters in the NT that I quoted yesterday, stays with me. Pausing to think about it, I realize it has been in my head every day for a number of years. We have people who call themselves Christians ranting about taxes, demonstrating, attempting sedition from the inside, talking ignorance so blatant it embarrasses them, and they don't get it. It's not necessary to mention names; they're all over the headline-with-picture corporate news. I used to wonder in my youth why Jesus talked about love and compassion, yet the people in the church didn't even like each other, certainly not their neighbors. Love never came up as an issue. It is one of those issues you don't mention when you're a kid, because adults don't take kids seriously and you learn early, don't make adults think. How else can a warrior society adopt a message of love and peace to themselves and only adhere to OT you-better-not mind? Didn't Jesus say that old way of following rules is over? I already hear a particular voice, That's not how it is at my church. I say, Hooray. I'm not talking about any church but the churches of my experience. I would actually like to go to a particular church sometimes, but can't do it by my own inner guidance--I have to follow the rules. Told I'm expected to attend regularly, I never went back. And will not go back. I've had to clarify for a few preachers in the past that my life and my decisions are my own, whether or not he believes I have the right. I don't ask for permission to live my life as I see fit, nor do I accept guilt for not living by somebody else's opinion of something they know nothing about--another human being. They don't even know themselves.

It's a sight, looking back, how many people along the way have believed they knew better how I ought to live my life than I did. I heard so much in youth and younger adult years from people who believed they knew better than I do what's right for me, I confess to reaching a place of confusion such that I couldn't see a way out. Everybody was using their authority voice to show they know what they're talking about and I don't. By the time I was 30, I had not yet learned what was right for me, what direction to go in, what to believe and not believe. I have chosen for myself to call my path my Pilgrim Way. A solitary pilgrim who walks his own path and lets the group-think people go their own way. I used to be told by the group-think people that I'm unable to make an intelligent decision for myself without the guidance of the group. There was a time I believed that. Then I learned to my satisfaction that God indeed Is. No more group-think for me. I am so far removed from the fundamentalist churches of Kansas, it is like another lifetime, except I remember it. My mother is of group-think mind and cannot allow that I will make my own decisions. A few times I've had to jerk the illusion of reins out of her hands. She has serious control issues, the reason I live half a continent away, her control backed up by being a Christian. I'm reminded of a joke told by the VW Boys bluegrass band's guitar player, a stage joke. "My wife, she's an angel. She's always up in the air harping."

 She pushes the same issues without end, and one day I said I am never going to do any of these things she continues to ride my back about tirelessly. I removed my saddle and took it to the landfill. For years, it was: I wish you'd find a church. My answer: I know you do. There came a time, when I passed fifty, the year I found the freedom to say no, I woke up and said, I will not enter another church the rest of my life; all the church going in this lifetime is in the past. All of it. She cut it out. Now when we talk it's like she's holding her head under water unable to say the only thing she has to say. Choked. All I can say is I'm sorry she has control issues to such a degree. I've spent my adult life usurping control of my life by moving as far away as land allows. Since I won't go to church, I'm the same thing as an atheist, an atheist that doesn't take care of his responsibilities. Now that she has added Faux news to her faith, a greater divide is opening between us. She's given up on controlling my life and has no more interest in me. As I knew would be the case when I left for the coast all the many years ago. I knew then that who I am had nothing to do with anything--only the control mattered. Take away the control and nothing is left but sorrow she can't make me obey. It's been a big struggle along the way, much like dealing with a drunk, somebody drunk on an agenda, the one and only way, through Jesus Christ The Lord. Like Jehovah's Witnesses at the door pushing their agenda. I finally learned to open the door enough to say, I don't want it, and close the door. All they have on their minds is pushing their agenda. Take it someplace else. 

 

A friend I sometimes watch the races with said, "When I want to really be judged, I'll go to church." I had to say, Amen, brother. I don't care that my mother believes differently from how I believe. I don't even like to use that word, believe, because it's a long spiral like DNA. We both believe the same at the core, but she's bogged down in dogma until "the word" and the dogma are the same. I had to run for my life from the dogma where she stays mired down like a rock in mud. And wants me to do the same, to settle down, go to church, get married, have kids, buy a house. I tried to follow her demands to keep from disappointing her, making her feel bad. But it was not my path. My parents gave me such an horrendous example of a married relationship, I could not live my life in that kind of way, never saying what I mean, never admitting to anything but obeying. Punishment amounted to worshiping God, another word for Fear. Now that she's plugged into Faux tv, I'm not only the same as an atheist, but a liberal too. She says she prays for me. I say, Please do, I need plenty of it. But it's not going to buy me out of my intractable nature. She's a believer in duty, and, by example, taught me duty is not where it's at. She taught me marriage is not where it's at. She taught me church is not where it's at. She taught me group-think is not where it's at. She taught me controlling others is not where it's at. I cannot shut myself down far enough to live by her will. I cannot live my life a rock in a bog.

I tend to stay in place because my adventures are within. I don't need to climb a cliff with my fingertips to feel the thrill of living on the edge. I'm on the edge every day. Heart can stop, or not stop. I go with whichever happens. I don't like adrenalin rushes. I don't like fear. I see no point in taking chances with dying when I don't need to. My interpretation of the spiritual path is that it is one's own. My spiritual path is not about telling other people what to do. Mother's spiritual path is alienating by browbeating everyone around her about church and the Lord. A few years back, I wrote about the nature of my spiritual path. I thought she might be interested so I sent it to her. Her reaction was that I'm not afraid enough of Satan. I said, I'll leave Satan to you. As I see her recede the other side of a widening divide, I ask myself what I can do to narrow the divide. It's her divide. Now that she is married to a Limbaugh parrot plugged into Faux news, and his son is a preacher, she's gone away like a ship to sea. Bye, bye, Mommy. Her son left the fold, will not do his duty, is out of control, goes his own way in defiance of Satan. He doesn't know what to say to her anymore and she doesn't know what to say to him anymore. He can't even pretend to believe what she believes and brought him up to believe. Funny, slipping off into third person, when it gets down to the nitty-gritty, separating myself from it. That's how I feel about it, third person, answering why I cannot allow myself to honor other people's expectations of my behavior where their belief systems are concerned. That's what I call group-think, and I can't go there, thanks to a lifetime of reasons why.

 

 

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CONCLUSIONS

     backstage by tj worthington

I've been wondering all day today if I could cease the use of abstractions, generalizations and conclusions from my writing, speech and thought. It's a tall order and it may not be to the better. I can't see self clearly enough to look back over the recent past to see how much I have used abstractions and generalizations. I tend to try not to draw conclusions, yet continue to draw conclusions, though less than before. That's what I can look toward, using abstractions and generalizations less. I don't believe in stopping a habit by cold turkey. I guess it works if heroin is the issue, but I've found that in my own inner issues cold turkey invites a backlash. I like to let something drift away until it just fades out from lack of need. I've recently listened to a friend for three days who only talks in slang, abstractions and generalizations, draws conclusions unconsciously and makes my head swim. All the time he talks, my mind is continually translating what he says into what I assess he's trying to mean in the English language as I understand it. I don't want to drop slang, because I like slang in context. Slang is a private language for a given group. Like for a long time the word "cool" was only overused by the young. By now, the word had been in popular use since about the mid Fifties. The people that were young using cool are now old using cool. It has become a part of everyday usage. It's particular group has grown older.

Slang out of context is often meaningless. Then you have code words to avoid saying nigger and nobody outside your group (republican in this case) knows you're saying the N-word, so all can cheer, "We're not racist," believing nobody gets it but them. It's not that the right wing is newly hateful. It has always been hateful and now the right wing has a voice in the post-Reagan Party, so we get to hear it daily. With Rupert Murdoch's money they buy tv networks and now the middle ground is struggling against the step-by-step walk through legislation unto police state. Since the republican coup with the "sequester," not much has been going on except seeing the working poor progressively less able to make ends meet. I tell myself that hard times become good times. Muddy Waters sang about hard times like it was not something desirable. Ralph Stanley made a banjo instrumental called Hard Times. I still have a hard time with Obama bailing out the banks, rewarding the banks for fucking We the People. Nobody who lost hundreds of thousands and millions in one second was rewarded. You see, the banks are too big to fail. We individuals are too little to notice. We have no voice. Somebody lost his retirement. Tough shit. Too little to notice. This is how We the People became We the Nobodies.


There I've done a whole paragraph of generalization and abstraction. Didn't use a lot of those kinds of words, but it all came from a generalizing and abstract imagination. I see the whole paragraph was about drawing conclusions. Searching for meaning by drawing conclusions. That's the Western way, but I'm wondering if it is a productive way, if it really does come to understanding. What if it comes to just something else to draw a conclusion about? I see Alex Jones harping his paranoid madness like if you don't send him all your money now an asteroid will hit the earth, and I laugh at where drawing conclusions can lead one. Pat Robertson draws conclusions in favor of his agenda, because that's what we tend to do. He is recently on utube telling us that religious scam artists are everywhere and we're to beware of them. Of course, everyone but him gets it. Seeing different people with political agendas drawing conclusions that pave a path to their bank account, I fall into distrust of conclusion drawing. The republican use of 1-2-3-therefore has come up with some surrealistic conclusions, something like Duck + Water + Tree = Moose. If you're a party faithful, you'll believe it because you're supposed to, if you want to be a member.


I can't join a Christian church because of an article of faith to swear to is the virgin birth, which I cannot accept. First, I see no reason to. Too many people get adamant about I'm supposed to believe it because it's the truth. Well, I don't see any truth in it. I don't see it in the gospels. I'm not going to argue about it, because it's not a social thing for me. Somebody says I'm supposed to believe it, I say, Why? The answer comes back abstract, concluded, not first hand information, but belief because it's required to believe it if you want to be a member. I don't want to be a member for that and many other reasons. I suppose we have to draw conclusions on a regular basis. I go to jaywalk, look both ways, see two cars, conclude it's safe and cross the street after these two cars pass. That's a sensible conclusion in practice. The emperor of North Korea, whose name I'll neither attempt nor look up, is challenging American Intelligence. He's saying he's going to nuke USA. Everyone on earth knows if he does, he and his entire country will be nuked to desert in one minute. But that doesn't mean he won't. It is a difficult conclusion to draw on how to take it from the American end. You know he won't do it, but that's not necessarily certain. He's already proven himself to be a sociopath, starting with his own people. If his attitude toward the rest of the world is the same as his attitude toward his people, an attitude similar to Dick Cheney's toward the American people, there is no guessing what he might or might not do. Conclusions are being drawn in DC, and none of them are certain.


It's looking like I can't get far without drawing conclusions of some sort. Like, if it's midnight, it is reasonable considering where I live to draw a conclusion that it is dark outside. The conclusions I want to be careful of are the conclusions that affirm whatever my agenda may be at the moment. I see too many times conclusions drawn to support an agenda. That's what it is that makes me distrust conclusions. I don't deny that Alex Jones has his finger on something important, it's just that his Limbaugh style of hysterical presentation makes me suspicious. It's his performance that repels me and makes me distrust conclusion drawing. I believe I'd rather be open to see what else may come along. This is a world of ever-changing everything; a conclusion is like a file drawer. In the drawer, it is out of circulation, not being tested, just held for the sake of being held. I asked my mechanic why my tires were wearing on the outsides and not in the middle. He said I don't have them inflated enough. I said I'd been told to leave a little bulge on the side of radial tires. He said it's not like that any more. Radial tires have changed and that bulge is not a good thing now. Oh. How many years have we been told that coffee is bad for us? Now it's good for us. Conclusions are constantly subject to change. Maybe conclusions are something like ego, like ballast in a ship, necessary to keep the ship upright.


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THE KEY

          hillbilly sculpture by tj worthington

A moment yesterday of internal panic. I had backed into a parking space by Lowe's grocery store. A woman sat in the car beside me on the right. I know my car well enough now that I can easily back into a spot. I was watching the car behind me, not wanting to touch bumpers, and stopped where I estimated would be about right. I touched the brake. Suddenly, I was going backwards fast--there's a car behind me--hit the brakes. My foot is on the brake! What's going on? The woman in the car beside me had been waiting for me to finish my maneuver, then she moved forward out of her parking spot the moment I stopped. Very unsettling feeling. I was looking over my right shoulder. The car beside me moving forward gave the illusion I was going backward, like I'd put my foot on the gas pedal by mistake. It was unsettling that I did not hit the car behind. After about a second, I saw it was the car beside me pulling out of its parking spot. Immediately, I thought of Tolstoy's story, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. At the moment Ivan's spirit starts leaving the body, he feels a sensation like he is sitting in a train, thinking he's facing the front of the train, and when its motion begins, he started going backwards expecting to go forward. In my moment, it was about a quarter second of fear I'd ruined the front end of the T-bird behind me; get a town cop, accident report, insurance, major bother, insurance rate goes up. No problem. Just another optical illusion.



Even though I had my car under control, the movement of the car on the right threw me into a swivet: Oh no! Messed up my day! And just as immediately: it was illusion. The shock of wondering if I'd put my foot on the gas pedal instead of the brake was very much in the realm of the possible, even though I knew I had not. But I've learned from experience that my perceptions are not necessarily true. I mean true like a well-focused telescope, or an arrow fletched well. Curiously, at the moment I recognized what had happened, at the very split second, Ivan Ilyich came to mind. My association with that kind of perceptual error is dying. My immediately next thought: does this mean I'm dying? Is this my warning like the way animals sense an earthquake before humans do? Next thought: No. Don't be so dramatic. It was just a perceptual switcheroo. Of course, I'm going to die. I don't need a "sign" to tell me. I'll love the rest of my life that my doctor, when he diagnosed heart issues said, "You're gonna die." I laugh about that every time I think about it. He grew up Polish catholic, so he wouldn't have much understanding that in the Baptist religion I grew up in, the first thing you're given to KNOW is you're gonna die. I've known that very well from early childhood. You're gonna die. You're gonna die. Yeah. So are you, I wish I'd been quick enough to say at the moment, instead of turning the key in the car's ignition in the parking lot.



Immediate next thought was Country Joe in the original Woodstock film singing, "Whoopee we're all gonna die!" Yeah. So what's the big deal? What's to be sad about it? I suppose it's the unknown that makes it sad to think of someone close dying, and frightening to think of self dying. Just about all the people in the world are informed by half a dozen major religions that are the same at the core, but culturally different from each other. Like we people are the same at the core--the reason parables about sheep and goats in the desert apply to us in the machine age--though with different personalities, different experience. The different religions are collective personality and experience differences. After hundreds and thousands of years of misinterpretation by the human mind, which becomes a kind of cancer over time, the religion is threatened, because the spiritual part of our lives that religion symbolizes cannot breathe with the python grip of dogma, and fantasy for truth, mind. Like I cannot join a church that requires me to attest that I believe the virgin birth. I don't, and I don't see why I should. Just because a lot of people believe it so they can be acceptable?



A lot of people still believe the earth is flat and square. A lot of people still believe God made a clay doll, breathed life into its nostrils and named it Adam. Whatever. A lot of people believe a lot of things. Me too. I believe God is everything and nothing. I like for what I believe to be a result of my experience. I don't need fantasy. I'm satisfied this world as it is around us qualifies for fantasy enough. Perhaps it's why I like having what we call nature all around where I live. A chickadee on a branch in the rhododendron, holding a sunflower seed with a foot that is also gripping the branch, pecking at the seed like a woodpecker, is much more interesting to me than sitting in the left turn lane at a green light in Sparta, watching a continuous line of cars go by on Friday afternoon, waiting for the light to turn red so I can make the turn. I'd rather watch my feathered friends than walk the aisles of the grocery store, except that sometimes I see someone I've not seen in awhile. Like in the grocery store after the incident parking the car, I saw James Caudill, someone I met probably 20 years ago and remembered. Remembered for his curious mind. His daughter was with him, granddaughter too. Both had curious minds. We talked for quite a while. The chance encounter was worth the dreariness of a stroll through the supermarket, pushing a grocery cart like the urban homeless.



 Getting down to what I believe, since I don't believe what's expected of me, I'm going to have to start with a general definition of believe. Seems that to believe something is to say I don't know by experience, but for one reason or another, or a host of reasons, believe it to be so. Belief is pretty powerful, nonetheless, because it takes believing God Is to get "saved." I don't mean by church, but by the way of the spirit. Scripture after scripture says you must believe first, then the spirit manifests in manifold ways that are invisible, inaudible, and you get it. It's like it took believing God Is to become aware of universal loving consciousness that is intimately personal and happening all the time. It's like believing is having God's cell phone number. It's not whether it's a creative aspect of believing that matters, it's a simple thing like a key to a door that opens to fullness of life, understanding experience, an attitude toward life that one can live with comfortably. Belief as the key to the unknown. I don't see that believing "in" the virgin birth does any good toward anything but a correct answer on a checklist of what you're required to believe if you want to belong.



That doesn't mean I haven't learned from experience that Jesus is, indeed, who he says he is. By now, I don't think of that as something I believe. It seems silly for me to say I believe Jesus is who he says he is. I believed it in the past. By now, I feel like it is experiential knowledge. Not just Jesus, but Rama, Zoroaster, Krishna, Buddha, Mohammed, Meher Baba. Each one is "different" from the others only in the way each color in the rainbow is the rainbow itself. They are light itself. They are darkness itself. They are everything in between, itself. They have brought us the secrets of life and death, taught us the way to have a good life. What does it come to? Oughta, should, needta, gotta, s'posed to, and the big one: Better Not. The God I know isn't like that at all. The God I know is a lot of fun and a really good friend, the best, most reliable, most loyal. But I've only found that by throwing off a heap of cultural beliefs I was trained to believe along my way from childhood to present.



I could, in good faith, practice any religion, because the God I know is the core in every one of them. Muslims pray several times a day. Ok, that's what we do. Christians go to church. Ok, that's what we do. In my association with Meher Baba, I find my path is experiencing everyday life paying attention, allowing Creater to spray WD40 on the hinges of my heart to pry it open gradually with a pipe wrench in each hand. It's in my own heart I find the "reward." The reward is actual peace. Very real peace, not just the idea of peace. Absence of conflict is what I mean by peace. Minimal conflict inside, minimal conflict outside. This peace is the subject of all scriptures, how to get to inner peace. Duh: absence of conflict. The parables and teachings concern getting through our lives here on earth at peace with neighbors, family, strangers.



We are social beings like horses. Solitary confinement destroys us. Through the playground of "this world" we get there, to heaven in the heart, inner peace, a little bit at a time. When I say I have peace within, I don't mean completely. I mean compared to what it used to be. Conflicts within, not much. I know a few people I'd prefer not to know, but don't let them bother me. We don't resonate. That's all there is to it. It's natural as a nuthatch and a titmouse not resonating. It's true certain people stir up potential for inner conflict if I'll allow it. It's all under my control. But some are like landmines, you don't see them, then they blow up in your face, or between your legs--Eek. I've got them and I know it. One event several years ago had me furious for a year, wishing I could allow myself to plot a murder. Then I realized it was to my favor, anyway. A little slow. But eventually got it.

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