TWO VIEWS OF REALITY

This week's laugh in the news is Nuttin-honey-yahoo scheduled to speak to Congress, the cement-heads this side of the Atlantic, bypassing presidential approval. Another news ruse scripted by the Heritage Foundation. Some of the democrats are saying they won't go. Nuttin-yahoo won't show for sure. Three billion a year for military at stake, Mr Nutty will not take the risk. Who cares if he does? We the people are so separated from our government, concerns we have bear no meaning. We are given ruse news by way of corporate control, creation, and production of the ongoing serial of the worst things that happen around the globe in the course of a day. The journalist's creed, if it bleeds it leads, is predictable. And conflict, the stuff of drama. No time left for anything else. It takes gunshots and explosions to keep hands off the remotes. Why do I want to fill my head with the worst events of the day from around the world? It's called keeping up with the real world. Whatever that means. It means my life here at home and the lives of the people around me are not real. What's real is conflict someplace else, much of it created for the news. Reality is always someplace else. It is never where I am. I live in the non-existent working class world unheard of on the news and unacknowledged by government, except as the criminal class. It's either the 1% or the middle class. The talk is of the sinking middle class. Every time I hear it, I think, the working class already sank, been sunk throughout my lifetime. People of the working class are taken advantage of for their modest educations, easy targets for propaganda, guided with a ring in the nose away from their own interests, don't even know what their interests might be.  

I'm happy to report, attention I give to the news is waning fast. I turn it on for five minutes, top of the hour, NPR, a time or two a day. Not that I think NPR is better than the others. It's absence of commercials appeals. I'd rather read the cartoon page of any newspaper than the front page stories. Editorial cartoons are about all I care to see on the editorial pages. It takes a certain kind of clever wit to conceive editorial cartoons. When I had my first computer, discovering the internet, I found sites of editorial cartoons, looked at thousands of them. To tell a story in one picture and a few words comes from a certain kind of thinking I don't have. It's a beautiful art form, concise and clear as a Zen haiku. Sitting at the coffee shop I'll pick up the paper and look at the editorial cartoons, go to the cartoon pages and work the Jumble puzzle. Much more interesting than reading something about what somebody supposes Russia is doing in the Ukraine, WW3 in embryo, or conjecture why Seattle didn't run the ball when they had a human tank. Whatever. I've seen a quote attributed to Mark Twain saying America has wars for geography lessons. This leads me to believe our government was attacking poverty-stricken defenseless countries in his time too. Like whoever heard of Vietnam before USA set out to annihilate its people. Fear of communism. Now we're doing fear of terrorism. Then, our troops were killing slopes and dinks. Now they kill towel-heads, steeping impoverished countries in ongoing war to keep the oil corporations flourishing and American "defense" contractors in the right country clubs. Closer to home, when an interstate route is planned through a city, it goes through the neighborhoods of black and working class white, the people without recourse.

   
Talking with an aunt living in Florida on the telephone a decade or more ago, she asked if I'd heard about Conway Twitty dying that day. I had not yet heard the news. She let me have it for not living in the real world. I was told I need to get out of these mountains and back in the real world. Real world? Conway Twitty? Television? City? What I hear and read in the ruse news tells me the "real world" is evidently the world of media and malls, commercials, the world of money. In this "real world," value amounts to money and money only, like getting a great value at a close-out sale, 50% off, or buying a new car at three thousand dollars off the showroom price. Wow, really saved some money. Saved money by spending twenty thousand. I love the enigma of how I can save by spending money. I get junk mail telling me to throw my money their way for something discounted 10%, and save money. These were the questions that made me crazy in transition from sheltered by parents to figuring out how to be an adult by trial and error. I continue to have a hard time in this "real world" making out what the reality might be behind the deceptive front, whatever that may be, last week immigration, this week immunization. One is about keeping poor people out of the country and the other about killing poor people already in the country to get them out of the way. In that "real world" we have War on Poverty, which increased poverty, and War on Drugs, which increased distribution and funded much of it. These wars on, fill in the blank, criminalize the American people. Now we have police state regarding all of us criminals. This is hard to live with. Real world? I lost faith in the world of commerce as the real world before I withdrew self from the real world to what is evidently known by way of media to be the unreal world.

I looked at the window and saw Jenny with her back end pointing this direction. She raised her tail, opened her back legs and let go an astonishing stream of donkey urine. I thought: what a bladder. She was ready to drop some biscuits when Jack wanted to play neck-wrestle, Jenny preoccupied. She let her tail down and took a few steps toward the meadow. Jack stepped to the spot she'd wet, sniffed and sniffed. He raised his head to the sky with curled upper lip in a kind of goosebump spasm. Jenny walked on into the meadow to graze on the day's hay. Jack watched her, then walked behind her to join her grazing. This is where I find the real world. Out another window, buntings and snowbirds pick up sunflower seeds I threw on the ground for them. A chipmunk fills its cheeks. A red squirrel sits up holding a seed with tiny fingers, biting open the shell for the kernel inside. My real world is about people living their lives, working, having opinions, beliefs, doing what they can to get by the best they know how. My real world is knowing donkeys as conscious beings with minds. My world has no value in the world of commerce I've come to call the unreal world. In that world it is not important who a human being is, or any other conscious entity. Learning the doctor I went to for thirty-five years did not know me at all, it told me he was from the world "out there," the unreal world where who someone is bears no relevance, none whatsoever. The doctor I go to now is from my idea of the real world. He is interested in his own humanity and the humanity of others. He is also interested in lab reports and readings on an EKG or MRI. First doctor told me years ago, "We are chemical machines." My Pee Wee Herman within thought, I know you are, but what am I? I knew he would not get the reference, and thought, A doctor telling me I'm a machine? He lost a great deal of credibility. I understood what he was saying. I had a problem with consciousness left out. He told me I'm a what, not a who, a meat-coated skeleton, a file number.

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SCIENCE AND THE SPIRIT

Multi-tasking today. Was released from hospital after a two-night stay. Went to see doctor Thursday morning in a semi-emergency condition. After seen by doctor, he told me to go straight to the hospital and check in, now. I said, "Can I go home to get a book?" He'd suggested I might stay over the weekend. His answer was, "No." I walked to the hospital, about the distance from my door to the mailbox, leaving the car in front of doctor's office. Once in, they wouldn't let me out. Later, I pleaded that I be allowed to move the car to a longer-term space in the hospital parking lot. It was taken as if I were going to escape and not come back. I was allowed, reluctantly. Displeased with the prospect of staying over the weekend, because staff is reduced to just a few and the hospital feels desolate on weekends, I rankled at the thought of four or more days stranded without a book, nothing but television in the room; only women's magazines and men's hunting magazines in the waiting rooms. I already know there is nothing on tv I want to see. Last time in hospital, several years ago, I had to stay over the weekend. At one point in the day, Saturday, I rang the nurse's station, said I needed some assistance, waited a long time, rang again, same answer, will be right there. Nobody showed up. I walked to nurse's station,  Two part-time CNAs on weekend duty were standing there talking like between classes in school, in a doorway so nobody could go in our out. They looked at me like I was an intruder; they were busy. I said, "Does anybody work here?" Did that ever charge the air with animosity. By then, I was in a mood not to care what impression I made. I stated my need and walked back to the room. They were not friendly after that. They weren't friendly before, either.  

I saw right away a very different attitude among hospital staff in this visit to the hospital than I'd ever seen before. The supervisor of the nurses and CNAs dropped in the room yesterday and asked my assessment of their performance. I waxed ebullient. I said I loved the nurses. All were friendly and responsive to the point they'd ask if they could get me coffee or something else during the day. By the time I left this morning, I felt like all the nurses who'd tended to my needs in my time of incarceration were my friends. Like when I see any of them in the grocery store, they'll act like they've seen me before, will even stop and talk. One of the CNA's this time was a facebook friend. One of the nurses, Tina, who lived across the state line in Virginia, told me she and her husband had the house painted four years ago. The paint on it before was put there by Enoch Rutherford, Grayson County old-time banjo picker who died twenty or more years ago a legend. I told her that last year I'd given my friends Justin and Crystal a Willard Gayheart pencil drawing of Enoch Rutherford. Justin is a house painter. He'll love hearing that Enoch painted houses. Tina's grandmother and Enoch lived almost in sight of each other. She said on weekend nights the air was alive with fiddle and banjo music. The x-ray tech I've known over 30 years. We've seen each other's hair turn white. The ultra-sound operator is my neighbor. He'd also lived in San Diego, where I was born. I saw Richard Nichols, bluegrass bass player, and his boy Trevor, old-time fiddler, who do the hospital maintenance. I hadn't seen Trevor in several years. His hair is gray now. It took a second to recognize him. I wanted to shake his hand as I rolled by, the passenger in a wheelchair, and recognized him for certain a split second too late.  I was checked into the hospital by a beautiful black woman whose face I studied all the time she entered information into the computer. American Indian features, skin tone leaning toward bronze. I attempted not to be conspicuous gaping at her particular beauty.  I was thinking I'd like to paint her portrait. I know it feels creepy to have somebody staring at you. I couldn't help it. She paid it no mind. I was an old white guy. They're creepy anyway. 

The Friday night shift had a nurse, a CNA and another CNA, all three named Ashley. First one I met, the nurse, said, "When you need something, just call for Ashley." I recognized her when she stepped into the room as someone I've seen multiple times, have spoken with, unable to recall where. She said she'd worked in a restaurant before she became a nurse. With that for a clue, I puzzled over the restaurants in town, and couldn't find her in any of them, but knew she was there, she was so familiar. Later, I asked and it was the one I had not been to in ten years. That was when she worked there. I only recalled going there a few times. Now that it's in my mind and I'm seeing the interior, her taking the order, recollection is surfacing, I've been there several times. We have two shopping centers with parking lots. I tend to go to the grocery store in the other one from the restaurant's. I felt right away in her responsive personality that she's held nurse an ideal for herself and worked a long time saving the money. She seemed to me that she was at home in herself. She was where she wanted to be, doing what she wanted to do. Every nurse and CNA I became acquainted with during their shift gave the sense that they are doing what they want to do. The woman whose title I forget, she's head knocker of the nurses, stopped by and we talked. She had the same sense about her the others had, that this is where she wants be today, doing what she wants to do. Present in herself. A white woman's face of striking beauty that I couldn't divert my attention from gaping at. I was painting her face in my mind's eye while we talked. I was multi-tasking, studying her face and focusing on our conversation, right-brain, left-brain, both going at once, yin-yang in motion, balance. I was seeing the feminine, and every one with what I can only think of as goddess energy. I know that sounds corny, but it's the closest I can get. It was healing goddess energy. It was my first hospital experience where I felt healing energy in the entire staff, individually. 

I felt like every one of them I could paint a portrait of as an aspect of goddess, but could never reproduce the presence. It was powerful. I did, indeed, feel for the the first time in a hospital, healing energy in the presence of everyone I encountered. I couldn't help but think frequently, there's something going on here that's important. And the doctor, himself, he generates healing energy. I don't mean to get 1980s California New Age on you, but these are the words closest to what I'm reaching for, the only words I can use to avoid pages and pages of explanation. The sense I felt was this may be the future. First glimmers of the light of dawn in humanity's dark night of the soul. My experience took me from waiting rooms to all over the place. I felt at home and safe everywhere in there. Every experience in my time there was as comfortable as being at home. I'm not even intending this to be a review. It's just that this is my experience. And thanks to a new discovery of science a new pill for thinning blood that dissolves (or something) blood clots. Mighta went pop in my skull or shut down the heart. I went in unaware of the great white swimming under my boat waiting for me to jump in for a swim. This is the second time science has extended my stay in this body. Went through the hole in the big white donut three or four times. That was trippy. I wondered about people whose lives the donut extended by several years, if they gave credit to the scientific method. So much that is wonderful has happened in my life since my previous stay of execution by science, I can only feel grateful, as well as to the healing energy of my doctor and his nurses. Agnes Joines dropped by this morning before I was let go. She had brought Ernest for examination. She told me their boy who lives out West knows the woman who discovered this new blood thinner. That knocked me over like a bowling pin. In my mind's eye I saw the drawing of Enoch Rutherford. More than many interesting coincidences happened throughout the stay. Channel-surfing the tv this morning around 4am, unable to sleep, weary of reading, I found a Led Zeppelin concert. Saw the last hour of it. Raw chance. My experience from walking in the doctor's office to walking out of the hospital was so comfortable and so healing I feel it was divinely directed. Science and the Spirit flowing together, another good balance. 

photos by tj worthington

LETTING GO OF EXPECTATION

 

agnes martin

A doctor's appointment yesterday. Arriving home, I went straight to bed. Woke up later, watched a film of New York artist Matthew Barney, Matthew Barney: No Restraint. I have to confess to not liking it at all. In five or ten years I may find it the most fascinating thing that ever happened. I'll allow for that, because I change. But for this moment, it failed to trip my trigger. The film was about his process of making his art objects, sculptures. Several years ago I saw some of his work at the Whitney in a Biennial, and didn't care for it then. Didn't care for anything in that show but a couple of Agnes Martins and a Cy Twombly. They were so fine, they seemed out of place in the show. I remember leaving the show, out on the sidewalk, back in the world of cars and noise, I saw at the corner a post for the walk-don't-walk signal, next to it a post with a fire alarm box, and beside it a steel wicker-like wastebasket painted black, a black plastic bag inside with trash in it. I saw this and assessed it the best in show. I don't mean to play like Tom Wolfe and come down on contemporary art in New York. Not at all. I'm going by my own personal taste. It felt like a majority of the artists in the show were commenting on living in a trash society. I go outside the museum and find the best sculpture in show is actually a trash bin, a black circle with multiple colors inside making a composition particular to the moment. Next time somebody drops something in it, everything changes. Interactive sculpture. If I'd been stoned, I'd have said, Wow. I am in tune with art as comment on society, a mirror, but after seeing a show of the trash all around us, I'd rather make my own art a reminder of the world we live in that is not trash. In like reasoning, I'd rather shop locally than give my energy to Walmrat.

 

agnes martin

 

A doctor's office visit is as trying for me as taking a driver's license test. After taking the test I see highway patrol lurking everywhere. After a doctor visit, I feel like I'll be dead in a day or two, can't possibly live another week. Come home, lie down on the bed and get a vision of waking up in my coffin and it in the grave. I have confidence in my doctor that is total. He kept my old preacher friend, Millard Pruitt, going through years of heart attacks, living until the body couldn't hold out another minute. My friend Jr Maxwell he kept going until the body couldn't draw another breath. I've witnessed other people he has kept going with his knowledge until there was nothing left to cure. I don't want to hang on as long as they did. It's not that I'm more in a hurry to get to the other side than they were. I think I've come to a place where this side of the veil, the other side of the veil, it's the same; it's my consciousness, my mind, there, the same as here. Different stimulus maybe. Like everything that's around a corner, it's the unknown. I don't like to think about the other side, because I don't want expectations. Misinterpretations make false expectations. Expecting one thing, I miss another. I know I have expectations, but prefer not to entertain them. Dread is a form of expectation and I have plenty of dreads. For example: a meeting. Friday I'm having lunch with my friend Cynthia, for which I have no dread, only look forward to, expectation. This expectation is from experience; I always enjoy Cynthia. The mind I'm in, after a doctor's visit, identification with the body again, reminds me of how poorly I take care of myself, yet continue to get up in the morning to feed my donkey friends. I can't go to a gym. I hated gym in school. Hated lab too. Any class that had a lab, I hated. Had to take a couple of them again, making it all the worse.

 

agnes martin

 

One thing this crazy mind of seeing myself dead the next minute has brought to the front of the mind is a focus I see in myself and others around me on what is wrong. I'm tired of dwelling on what's wrong. Political involvement focuses on what's wrong that we have to change. It's interesting, because it denotes an evolving society on its collective spiritual path. It is something tempting to do on the spiritual path, to come down on oneself for not being good or not doing right or not meditating. It's part of it, possibly a phase. The social fixation on what is wrong in society is the macrocosm of our individual concerns about doing right, being acceptable, being good, wanting to be a better person. I can't help but call it a good thing. At the same time, there is the balance. King David is the best example I know of balance. He was a genocidal warlord, bi-sexual wild man who fed his passions liberally as a king, and in his heart was a love for God so intense that the prophesied Messiah must be in David's blood line. King David shatters for me the notion that good (godly)behavior is the path. I see atheism a place on one's spiritual path. In my case, it was the beginning point. I had to unlearn all the nonsense I'd been taught as religion. Only then was I able to be open to the spirit. The spirit came so convincingly that I had no choice but to go with it. And so clearly that I could re-enter the old belief-system I came up in and appreciate what is real in it. And so certainly that I could worship with any religion on earth in full accord with the people around me. I've chosen no religion, just my own pilgrim way through everyday life.

 

agnes martin

 

I take carrots to the donkeys in the morning, talk to them while they chew donkey hors d'oeuvres. I carry hay through the gate easier while they're chewing on carrots. Without the carrots, they crowd me wanting to get the first chew. It's ok. I stop long enough for them both to tear off something to chew on while they wait for me to put it down. I feel an upwelling of love talking to them and feeding them, watching them eat, walking among them in the meadow. It's a tremendous love feeling when I'm in the meadow. I look out the window at them and feel an upwelling of love. In my house I feel a love embrace. I've found a good balance of battery charging time at home and only the kind of social that doesn't exhaust me, with friends, people I care about who care about me. It's a sight how much love I feel with the donkeys. Caterpillar too, indoors. This is my religion. Baby Vada is my religion. Lunch with a friend is my religion. The car is my religion. Living in the heart is it. King David slaughtered a large part of the Middle-East, broke every rule there ever was, though in his heart he lived his love for God. I remind myself that dying is not the issue. The time between now and then is the issue. When something like a doctor visit throws my head into looking at my death date, I have to spend some time with self, educate self again to understand that when I focus on the end moment, I miss everything happening between now and then.  

agnes martin herself

 

 

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FULL MOON RAMBLE

 

These days of bitter cold have got me down. Playing like I'm in Norway and it's summer doesn't work. A friend with half Norwegian ancestry was thinking about going there and someone from Norway told him the snow is all the time, but for a very short time in summer. The snow makes everything you do a major bother, dealing with the snow. It sure is a bother here dealing with the snow. I've read that the Native American Indians, anyway the Lakota, had names for something like 26 kinds of snow. I've noticed over my years of dealing with snow in the mountains, which means less and less every year, I don't recall two kinds of snow the same. Surely it happened, but I've been struck every time it snows at how different one kind of snow is from another. Some of it is easy to walk in, some you have to punch every footstep through the snow. Some is wet and sticks to everything, some is dry and sticks to nothing. Some drifts and some does not. I've not given the varieties of snow I've encountered names, but I do know how to read it for walking and for driving from half a lifetime of experience. I have to admit, I'm all for global warming. Sorry, Polar Bears. I like a short winter. Winters here in the mountains used to be about half the year. It would start getting cold end of August and finally toward the end of May would let up. The hard part would be November through March. Now winter is a little bit of a cold spell we're going through. I've heard in Helsinki, Finland, the summer temperatures have risen into the 80s and people are buying air conditioners the first time.

I went out and walked a little over half a mile in the below twenty temperature Friday afternoon. My nose has been running, feeling a tiny bit feverish, though not. I'm waiting to see if it's going to turn into something. Spent most of the day in bed today attempting to sleep it off. I hope I'm feeling better before doctor appointment Tuesday. Anything I tell him I'm having issues with, he jumps to write a prescription and I have to tell him it's not a problem, I don't want pills for it. I just thought he'd like to know. He didn't want to know. I take enough pills per day. It's like with somebody involved in the psychiatric profession, they ask if you've ever thought of killing yourself, and if you say yes, here come the men in white coats. I made that mistake. Then I had to explain, Of course I've thought of it. I'm a human with a mind. Everybody has thought about it. Anybody who says they have not is lying. It must be one of their alarm signals. If you say yes, all hell breaks loose and you have to talk fast to explain I REALLY DIDN'T MEAN IT. I got an ear infection, I suppose. Woke up this morning unable to hear from the right ear. I so don't want to tell the doctor about it. Next stop, drugstore to pick up another prescription. I don't like to tell the doctor about anything that's not debilitating. This is debilitating. All sounds are like they're on my left side.

He told me once, "We are chemical machines," so I go see him like I see a mechanic, when the machine needs fixing. First lesson among mechanics: if it aint broke don't fix it. When he said that, I stopped myself from saying, "Maybe you are." Or like PeeWee Herman said, "I know you are, but what am I?" Then, I'm not really sure. I know he was right in the way he meant it. It just ran all over me the way he put it. I can't identify my body as a machine, the same way I can't identify my mind a computer. When he diagnosed my heart issue, he said, "You're gonna die." Only thing I could think to say was, "Duh." He's known for being off-putting when he talks. I like that in him, to a point. He's direct, tells it straight. Suburbanites moving here to the exurbs hate him as a doctor. They go a few times and find a new doctor. "He doesn't have a bedside manner." My feeling about that is, who needs a bedside manner? I'm not going to bed with him. Though I do have some problem with him. I've gone to him thirty-five years and he has no idea who I am. He has his charts. All he wants to know about me is in the charts. A few times I attempted to give him context around something that happened. He wasn't interested. He's jaded by years of being a country doctor, dealing with people who don't take care of themselves as he instructs them, like taking their pills as told, instead of when you think about it. I think he's of the belief system that losing someone to death is a failure. Like wanting me to get a new heart so I can end up in a nursing home having strokes and staring at the ceiling, watching auction shows on tv, shitting in diapers. Glory Land cannot be that bad. I have so many friends and pets over there, I don't have a lot of resistance to Glory Land.

Forecast says the temperature will be up to 50 Monday and 60 Tuesday. I'm past ready. I'd forgotten how miserable below 20 can be. My game of pretending I'm in Norway and it's normal is not working. I'm thinking of how miserable it must be below 20 half the year. And wind off the North Sea. In Kansas, I grew up in Scandinavian protestantism. I understand why Norwegians I see in movies are largely quiet and don't make chatter. I got it when I saw a documentary of conversations with Ingmar Bergman in his retirement. I wrote about it in I WAS A TEENAGE EXISTENTIALIST. He had the same kind of protestant austerity through his childhood as I had in mine. Different, of course, because his was in Sweden and mine was in Kansas. Growing up with a Swede for a preacher was austere. Absolutely austere. I learned how to play along in appearance and go my own way in my mind. It got me through those years where only appearance of being controlled was required. I learned how to be out of control and it not show. Sometimes I like that, then sometimes I don't. I've no idea what it would take for me to break loose and express myself emotionally. When somebody really pisses me off, I act like I have no problem. Learned that from being lorded over by daddy, who would hit me again if I reacted. Whoever it was will never have a chance to piss me off again. I have control over second time. I stay away from that individual like I stay away from crocodiles. So I just took it and acted like it didn't matter, when what daddy was really doing was making me hate him more than I hated him the day before.

Mother was a churchaholic, dead and buried in denial, and daddy a mad man. The kid didn't have a chance. I reparented myself after I got away from them. Coming to the mountains was a big part of the reparenting. I had discovered Meher Baba on the way to the mountains, so arriving here was a spiritual path thing for me. New understandings, new knowledge, I came to the mountains as to a monastic situation where I lived by myself with Meher Baba my abbot in spirit. It doesn't mean I meditate around the clock. I don't meditate at all. I don't do austerity except for what my meager income cannot afford. Don't believe in it. I don't do yoga or tai chi. I've come to believe in living my life. I didn't know that before. I don't worry myself over sins. I have a fair enough understanding of what sin is not to be bothered by it. Largely sin is a control device by protestant preachers and catholic priests, religionists generally. Mother told me she's had it with the grand children. They don't visit her and they don't invite her to their birthday parties. I couldn't say it, but she's a wet blanket to kids. They know she's watching every move they make and hearing everything they say, judging them. And they know they can't get away from her without being told she wished they went to church more often and would get saved. It wouldn't matter if I told her. She wouldn't do anything about it. She's on automatic pilot for the Lord's work. It's her duty. And the grandkids only see her when it's their duty.

A couple weeks ago somebody told me that some kind of behavior was my duty. I said, "I don't do duty." Nor do I do should or s'posed-to. I make my own decisions for my own reasons and nobody who watches television is going to advise me on should, s'posed-to, or duty. The philosophy of television is if it can't be seen by a camera it's not real. In my way of seeing, it's the other way around. If it can be seen by a camera it's not real. Like after so many years of medical school, doctors tend to give little attention to the subjective. Only the objective is real. I'm of the belief that only the subjective is real. Not a belief like a religious belief. It's just obvious to me. The subjective is where intent is formed by attitude toward life, which is created by all kinds of subjective influences. Objective is excellent for the scientific method and I have no problem with the objective. Thanks to the scientific method I'm writing this on a laptop online. Without the scientific method I'd be using quill, parchment and candle light. This is faster, but slower is surer. Still, I see the scientific method as a tool, not as the nature of existence. It's a good tool for picking apart the nature of existence to help understanding. If the kingdom of heaven is indeed within, that seems to me awfully subjective.


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