ONLY FAITH CAN BE BETRAYED

"The experience is there, the reality is there,
but how to get at it?
Everything I type turns into a lie
simply because
it is not the truth."

Joyce Carol Oates

Once again Red Dirt Girl’s persistent query into the whole idea of belief and truth has catalyzed my own to again foolishly offer that my own poor approaches might be growing more inclusive in scale and comprehension but never more exact. The primary problem Joyce Carol describes is that, like science, language isolates any noun from all context in an effort to define its uniqueness, get down to its nuts and bolts, the atoms. This is a problem with any chosen, named and described subject; the only connection to the truth left of the original, real entity is the husk; the fact that such a description and invented name find general agreement only on being arguing points in logical arenas —— left for poets to remedy with a gentle return to the contextual background of the sublime cosmos from which it came. For truth the problem is insoluble because it is that ultimate sublime context of everything and is greater than any container. Truth suffers no such isolated interpretational authority by arguable, subjective belief systems; never truth in its total inclusiveness of all interpretations while being captured by none.

Tao is a word for the way, the nature of everything, a trinity of the perceiver, the perceived and the perception. Using belief to define truth more specifically, to claim a more exclusive truth is to declare butterflies to be the only example of life while slapping mosquitoes. Belief is powerful stamina for the individual who knows to keep faith in and to the capacities and possibilities of the unique self one finds oneself to be. Unfortunately such home grown energy is often wasted through a loose wire flopping around zapping random friends, foes, ideas and institutions with jolts of ones belief, trust, faith, certitude, hope. Belief has a positive effect only when applied to oneself and becomes an unrepayable, unrequested debt of behavior when turned outward upon others. Often the disappointment we feel about the world is the catching of ourselves in transferal of belief from our responsibility for our own judgment to the judged who never asked for it.

Since the advent of the written word, the record of events, it has become evident that although each word of a sentence or story may find agreement among many readers the story will result in as many interpretations as readers and hearers in attendance. That we ever come to anything resembling a truly mutual understanding with another seems to me to be the rarest of occurrences based on its ever happening to me. At best, we can have an almost unshakable faith in our assessment of others, but adhering to and not veering from our mighty strong theory about them should never be a concern of theirs. The lash of frivolous faith stings at both ends.

Sure, we all have the same general bells, knobs and whistles — so uniquely tuned that finding kindred spirits is as rare as four-leaf clovers. If they weren’t we’d all be crammed into somebody's kitchen. The key here is that such commonality must be discovered. Creation of a belief system to bind individuals to rigid concepts excludes the unique contributions and extensions necessary for any naturally evolving entity or its parts. Just as the history of mankind seems headed for the instability of a planet who’s biomass consists exclusively of humans and corn, the history of man’s belief in a grant from some god to do with the planet anything he could think up has brought us to the lemming’s brink.

Western civilization is like the drunk found seven feet below the water in his brand new Cadillac at a low water crossing during torrential rains who declared after being winched out to dry land, “I got so damned tired of all the detours and delays that I just speeded up for this one hoping to skim across.” Civilization does seem to be speeding up, but our ability to achieve escape velocity and leave the nest is bogged down in all the shits we’ve taken in it. Our salvation is in no ones hands but our own, I believe. Time to become a friend to the mother from which we all came, Gaia, the life of Earth on the path of Tao.

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On a lighter note,

SUCCESS:
At age 4 success is . . . not peeing in your pants.
At age 12 success is . . . having friends.
At age 16 success is . . . having a drivers license.
At age 20 success is . . . going all the way.
At age 35 success is . . . having money.
At age 50 success is . . . having money.
At age 60 success is . . . going all the way.
At age 70 success is . . . having a drivers license.
At age 75 success is . . . having friends.
At age 80 success is . . . not peeing in your pants.