Wednesday, October 31, 2007

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.



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.

8 comments:

Unknown said...

Great post, G&G.

Can we ever really know the truth while wrapped up in our human form. Does the truth even stem from this dimension. Perhaps the truth we seek can only be glimpsed by following the way and rediscovered on our return "home".

Anonymous said...

On the lighter note, I got a much needed chuckle on your thoughts on success! Thanks for including it.
Amber :)

Yodood said...

Absonilla, it would seem we can know nothing while raptly rapping about wrapping that human form in more rapid, rampant prosthetic relief from our absolute reliance on the quality of our relationship to the real source of our health, the wealth we squander trying to own it, Gaia.

The truth seems not to stem from anything or where, it is the stem, the way of all. Seeking implies a place to go or a thing to do belying the reality that there is no where it isn't. It is the myriad manifested variations on truth's theme that tend to lose us by fascinated distraction.

Amber, I found the words in an anonymous posting while surfing, but I liked it a lot too.

Lilwave said...

Although my words are glass shards to you, I have them to say non-the-less. Delete them if you feel the need but maybe you can find a way to use them to make a sun catcher instead…………
“Butterflies to be the only example of life while slapping mosquitoes.”
I LOVE that analogy. That is a great way to describe how I feel when someone tells me that my God is false. All scream only butterflies exist while they consistently say the mosquitoes they are slapping aren’t real because they don’t look or act like butterflies. Prove it, prove it, prove the mosquito is real, they say. All it takes is being still to let all the noise and confusion stop. The proof is found in the quietness of our souls. If only we would open our eyes and see beyond the butterfly. That is just how easy it is to prove to ourselves if God is real or not. It only takes a simple invitation from your heart and soul and God joins us there to fill all the empty places with his intense love. There is where you will hear his voice clearly. No, Dad, I’m not saying I cannot hear my own voice. I’ve heard that clearly most of my life. It is just awesome to finally know the difference in mine and Gods.
Truth is misinterpreted because of the selfish need to control a power that does not belong to us. God’s power was never ours to hold a debt over one other. But yet, He gives us that power freely. It’s so easy we often don’t know what to do with it. Rather than controlling it, if we could just be satisfied in being a part of it.
I do understand your anger with Christianity. I often get angry myself. It’s sad for me to see people destroy what Christianity is supposed to be by trying to control the power of God as a means to justify their selfish intentions and hateful judgments. After all, we are not supposed to be at war with one another. Jesus himself never came to condemn the world. He came to save it. Isn’t that what we are supposed to be doing too? Our world is dying a slow painful death and as it increasingly comes to an end, we die with it. Shaking fingers at one another only speeds up the death process. Everyone has an opinion and each voice is so loud, one more will never be heard. Words are useless. If we loved the way God loves, all would not come to an end. Can the human race honestly love each other and all the things of this earth enough to save it?

Yodood said...

Welcome back Li'lwave,
I am glad you haven't given up on me yet. I cannot reply to you about what you said since your opening statement showed that my mosquito/butterfly analogy was taken in exactly the opposite direction to what I meant. So discussing what you said after that would bring us back to my giving you my views of your words which, quite frankly, don't seem any less exclusionary of everyone not agreeing with you than you have ever spoken about your recent passion. I guess if your righteousnes wasn't based so strongly on the wrongeousness of things outside the admissibility of your belief system I might feel more inclined to get into it, but I don't require agreement to know what I think, so there's no motive for me to argue your points. With belief only in myself, I know I love you no matter what path you are on.

Lilwave said...

It's okay. I'm not asking you to agree with me anyway. I only ask that you leave the option open that I'm not making my choices because of some self righteous need to be better than someone else. I have no self need for anyone to agree with me just for the sake of me being right. I just found something really real that everyone should have a chance to know for themselves. It's beautiful Daddy. I feel like someone who found the cure for all the diseases of this world but no one cares to hear the recipe. How selfish would I be if I didn't try to keep sharing it and encourage everyone to see it too?
Give up on you? How do you give up on someone you love? Love doesn't stop or give up, does it? It may need a break every once in a while but it still doesn't stop.
No matter what, your the only Daddy I'll ever have.

Yodood said...

I just found something really real that everyone should have a chance to know for themselves.

I'm fairly convinced that what you say is what you believe. My differing with you is in your inability to realize that what you feel is from a seed within each of us sprouting in whatever unique soil our life experiences supply them. Sometimes the growth is a gradual accumulation of wisdom over a life time. Sometimes there are circumstances, situations perfect for triggering the breakup of great log jams of wrong, deluded conclusions clearing the stream of fresh thinking and direct vision in such bursts as to seem miraculous in comparison to the tedious pain life without it seems to be. Sometimes that growth is stifled altogether in the sterility of certainty found in the made up mind.

Buddha arose from Hinduism, Jesus from the Jews and Mohammed from the Muslims, all in highly contested separations of the heretic able to see further than the traditional myths of the separate cultures in which they lived. Expressing their revelations in the language of that culture with all its traditional metaphors rephrased was reqired to make new ideas have some relative sense. The collection of people claiming to be followers of each of these three and many other prophets may very well have had log jambs busted by the trigger their words served for their own vision to become clear, but the process is the very opposite of exclusionary, so claiming any formula by name is a total misunderstanding of out connectedness in the one the universe is.

Lilwave said...

"My differing with you is in your inability to realize that what you feel is from a seed within each of us sprouting in whatever unique soil our life experiences supply them."

I hear what your saying and logically that makes sense BUT...What I've tried to explain is that it is not a "feeling" being only felt within. It is a reality that I'm living in. The interaction between God and me are as real as the interaction between you and I. It is a reality that is shared with many at the same time, so no...I'm not going insane. I don't know, it's like I said before...proof is only something you can do for yourself and it doesn't matter what someone else says....words are useless. You have to search it out for yourself while allowing the option that it might just be true to be there. Anytime your interested, I could share some of my amazing stories with you.......
I love you :)