A carpenter from Nazareth

Learn by ROTA, not by rote

2014-10-31T06:14:00.001+00:00

The philosophy is, Read Once, Throw Away.

Rota: early 17th century: from Latin, literally "wheel"
The idea is not to attach ourselves to thoughts or phrases, learning things by rote.

The idea is to get the wheels turning. Your own wheels. Let the wheels turn, quietly. Cogitate.

Don't do it because you have read this - or any philosophical/self-help/advice. Don't do it because you ought to, or must. Don't do it because you would like to change or be different.

Read out of interest. Read once, and throw away. Let the rest take care of itself, without effort.

Some final words...

2014-10-16T20:16:00.003+01:00

Sweeping out the wood-chippings - and any other carpentry-related parallels one would like to make. Last-minute thoughts, things spinning round my head, raggedy old draft of an essay I was attempting from ages ago, and whatever else.

"I am the way, the truth, and the life."
Chapters 14 to 17 of the gospel of John is a veritable patchwork quilt of Messianic sayings. It reads as if John had cut up a papyrus of Jesus quotes, dropped them in to a bag, and then dipped his hand in to see how they would come out, à la David Bowie's Life On Mars. Then he would absent-mindedly drop the quote back in the bag. Subsequently Jesus keeps repeating himself.

I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me. John 14:6

When Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life," he meant he was. He meant you are the way the truth and the life. The way, the truth, and life, can all be found within you.

He wasn't saying, "no one can come to the Father except through me," as if he were the means - the only means - by which others could get to the Father. He was saying the only way to get to the Father is to go inward - to go in to the "me".

"You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free."
The truth is, "I and the Father are one." One and the same. You and the Father are one. You are God. Or with a little "g" if you prefer it. Or not at all. God is nothing, and everything. The alpha and the omega. The yang and the yin.

The truth is, you are nothing. (And you are everything.) But this is not a conclusion arrived at and understood academically - anyone can do that. It is a fundamental realisation that arises unbidden. And then you are free.

I matter!
I, matter.

A COUPLE OF ESSAY IDEAS, (ONE SHORT ONE LONG)
First, the short - a title, basically:
The human race: Taking the game to evolution
"Survival of the fittest" is not a pithy summation of the evolutionary process. It is a frickin' movie tagline.

Second, the long - a collection of notes and shards of ideas:
Tracing the origins of human consciousness
It all starts with a thought. Yet, what is a "thought"? What is thinking, conscious thought, awareness? Animals do not think, or reason, or work things out. They are affected by circumstances.

Humans are animals with added sensations. (What is a sense?)

Humans want to maintain an animal instinct - the ability purely to exist, to be - but with the added benefit of joy, happiness, appreciation.

Conscious awareness can bring nothing but satisfaction and joy. We can learn and understand. Ignorance invents gods. Growing in knowledge brings calm, relief, clarity - "like a light that gets brighter." It is never meant to puff up, or give an attitude of, "I know more than you."

The problem: Awareness of ourselves has separated us. We each become an individual world/universe, fearful of our own destruction. Primarily, we believe we are in danger. We have not just become aware of ourselves as a species, but as individuals within a species. The first person to have experienced this would have been thrown in to confusion. It might not have been an overwhelmingly pleasant experience.

Perhaps it can be perceived through the eyes of a baby: The frown, the confusion, the fear. It can be soothed, pacified, by love. Reassurance. But, where did love arise from? Such a thing never existed. Love is not an individual emotion - it is an overarching definition.

Love draws from stillness, peace, security, nurture, reliability. What does a baby respond to? Having its needs satisfied, reassurance, skin-on-skin touch. Gentle touch, tenderness. Quiet.

We are fragmented within ourselves. At-one-ness.

Did self-awareness first arise when we encountered our reflection? When we first began to realise what we saw reflected was ourselves? Did this give rise to the archetype of the reflection - "image"?

There is a constant need to drink water. The repeated act of going to the source to drink - bending over, seeing the reflection...the hand moves here, the hand moves there...I do this with this part, it does that with that part...

This would gradually begin to register.

What would cause - or increase - man's fear? Sudden death. Attack. Sense of his own mortality. Detachment from life - a feeling of detachment (again, separation.)

Self-awareness translates into self-importance. He is not a part of life, he is all life, the only life that truly matters - all springing from not wanting to die.

The fear of sudden death meant having to defend himself from such a fate. Having to defend himself would soon turn into eliminating even the threat of death. Hence, attack.

This sense of his own mortality, his memory of fear, memory of pain, is then passed on to offspring, and so the continuation begins - the cycle.

Life experience teaches us in the most crucial years that we get everything for nothing - sustenance, covering etc. Then, at some point, it takes a radical about face. Evolution has done the same thing. All life simply exists...but in this incarnation we are left to fend for ourselves and consciously work to live. What happened?

Nature spat man out. After gradual awakening of consciousness - the knowledge of good and bad, or basically, everything - man gets thrust out of the Garden of Eden and its abundant security.

A baby experiences anguish and anxiety when its needs are not met. So it is with man.

Man is caught within a framework of evolution. He is experiencing it as it happens. It is as if he is trying to see the outside of the house while looking out through a window.

He is experiencing what it was like to be rejected because the eye did not work. Worse still, it is as if he has purposefully constructed things so that it guaranteed his failure. As if a particular strain of bombardier beetle had adapted in such a way as his self-destruction was inevitable. The bombardier beetle knowingly manufactured its own lethal combination of chemicals in order to guarantee its own self-destruction. Man's self-destruction is guaranteed, but out from the ashes will arise a strain of homo sapien with a fundamentally advanced thinking process. And even if that incarnation fails (because among them are gun-toting survivalists who have carried forward the sickness of this system) and the one that follows, the next will be more successful.

A monkey baby might die. The parent might prod it, turn it over, carry it around for a while - but is it fundamentally altered at its core?

Penultimately...
TAKE A PEEK AT GOD'S BALLS
I had set myself a tentative goal of writing a book by the time I was fifty. A sort of hodge-podge of old and new essays from this website amalgamated in to a book that I had planned to give away for free.

I was going to give it the title, "God's Balls".

The idea was that, "If there is a God, then he's got some chutzpah, courage, cojones," or, as I decided to go with, "spunk."

I was very amused by this title. The advertising campaign was all planned, and everything. "Have you seen God's Balls? Grab yours." Or, "Get hold of God's Balls!"

That sort of thing. Hilarious.

Anyway, knowing that writing a book was out of the question for various reasons - no compulsion, being one of them - I toyed with the notion of launching a website with the aim of addressing said question, "If there is a God, then why...?" and allowing anyone that wanted to to ask whatever question this raised in their mind. Then, all of a sudden, it just didn't matter any more. None of it did.

Anyhoo...
One morning I arrived at the house of one of my window-cleaning customers. As I set up my ladders he opened the front door.

"This'll be the last time you clean these windows," he said in his languid Suffolk drawl.

"Oh," I said, slightly crestfallen.

"We're having new ones put in. Should be ready next time you come."

I am not planning to pull the same fast one. I am not disappearing here at A carpenter from Nazareth only to resurface somewhere else.

And, finally...
THE OFFENDED ARE GENTLY ENCOURAGED TO GROW A PEAR
If there is a God he/she/it is certainly not offended by this infantile joke of a website title: God's Balls. If there is a God, he is complete, fully rounded, absolutely comprehending of his own self. It is people who are offended.

How to grow a pear
You could stick a seed in the ground and hope for the best. Better to ready the soil. Turn it over. Identify all the rocks and stones that could impede growth. Dig in to the past and see what makes you you. Ask, "Why am I offended?" With understanding comes forgiveness. Dig deep - go back far. The stones are not removed, they are pulverised - reduced to dust and mingled with the soil. They are not pulverised because it is believed they must be. They are naturally pulverised by identifying them without judgement.

Then plant the seed in the rich soil. The seed is there - it's why you're here.

Throw off every belief, nitwit. Nothing is the way I think. Faith as small as a singularity.

And then wait. Sit in silence. Slow down. Stop. Give yourself plenty of time to do nothing. Without you noticing, your pear will grow.

There is simply nothing else that needs to be said.

To be and not to be - that is the answer

2014-08-30T10:48:00.001+01:00

"We are not born in to this world. We are born out from this world." Alan Watts

Everything is born out of this world. Look all around at the growing things, all springing up and growing out, reaching up and spreading. But only so far as the fruits and leaves die and new ones take their place each year. Each growing thing reaches its limit.

This spherical earth is a rolling, broiling, seething, mass. Each plate heaving and turning, rock and mass rising to the surface, moving, and being dug under - the earth turning itself inside-out, outside-in. Topsoil turned continuously by the worm. The agony and the ecstasy. Being fertilised and giving birth. Living things spring from this earth. Seed is planted and life shoots forth.

Some say there are galaxies in clusters like grapes on the vine. On the earth life burst forth, all various kinds of living things blooming like grapes on the vine.

And mankind born like a piece of fruit on the branch, grows and expands, mostly water. Some fruit falls early, some when they are old and bruised, and are mulched back in to the earth and regurgitated. Nothing is wasted.

Much Ado About Nothing
Who planted the seed for the birth of the universe? What was the soil in to which it was planted?

Being planted it. To be. Existence, vitality, energy. Love. Call it "God" if you want - it makes no difference. God is not God, anyway.

The soil in to which it was planted was the nothing. Thing and nothing. They are one.

And God went on to create the man in his image, in God’s image he created him; male and female he created them.

Which brings us round in a circle like a sublime "O".

And who planted the seed that led to the birth of God?

Indeed.

We don't even know where we are headed for. If humankind is not flailing around in its afterbirth, it is certainly no more than an infant first becoming aware of itself. Fearful, paralysed, rebellious, futilely grasping for independence. We have hardly made a mark on the process. We are at the very beginning of the road.

Surely what we are heading for is what birthed us. We are God. Of God. Just because we have not reached full maturity does not mean that we are not made of the same stuff as God.

If the human race does manage to destroy itself, it simply means we have dropped off the branch too early and another piece of fruit will have to grow. This is not a one-off deal.

The stowaway

2014-02-11T08:54:00.001+00:00

Halt your vital search elsewhere for that great illusionist, God.
Turns out he was already on board all along.

He is in the cargo hold,
Hiding among the baggage.

In order to find him you only have to remove the baggage.
Of course he could be in one of the pieces,
So each item must be opened,
Pulled apart,
The contents strewn around.

Once the baggage is removed,
The stowaway is not there.
There is only empty space.
Nothing.

It is in the very act of removing the baggage
That the truth is revealed...

Relax - you're already dead

2013-11-19T16:29:00.002+00:00

The individual life is wafer thin. Hours and minutes and seconds are peeled off like sheaves of paper and blown away in the breeze. Looking back everything is a distant memory. We can barely remember anything, and what we can remember we struggle to remember accurately. We are only left with residual feelings and emotions, and even these may not be true. We are casting an eye over our own demise.

Every minute has passed away. The walk from one destination to another has happened and is no more. A muddy footprint like a memory is the only evidence of where you have been, not where you are right now. Just mud on the floor, footprints in the rain, even they will disappear. A scent a dog might follow, this too will disipate.

The only thing that exists is right now; this very moment. This instant.

You can not die if you are already dead. Do you believe in life after death? You have nothing to fear. Do you believe death is non-existence? Then you will never die. You are not dead tomorrow, for if you were, you would no longer remember this very moment of being alive. You are aware of being alive this very moment - then do the same tomorrow.

It only matters if we are anxious about time running out. Time can run out no more than life can. Life does not run out. Life is. I am. We can no more imagine life ending than we can imagine life beginning. What was there before life began?

Life is for ever.

What is the purpose of life?

2013-05-22T17:19:00.003+01:00

Life has got itself in to a spot of bother. It has turned down a blind alley; got itself in to an endless loop; it is a stuck record, skipping on a scratch; it needs to sit itself down in a corner and give itself a damn good talking to.

The problem is, in taking a monumental step in to self-awareness, life has encountered a troublesome side effect - the bizarre need to justify its own existence; to explain itself; to ask, "Why am I here?" In the very act of accomplishing one of its most significant feats of progress, life has managed to forget what it is for. It is not man who asks, "What is the purpose of life?" it is life itself, for we each of us is life. I am life. You are life. He/She is life. ("It" is life, but it belongs to a previous incarnation. "It" belongs to a period of time before it could take offense at being referred to as "it.")

In making this great leap forward life had failed to look in the one serious place where the danger might lurk. It had neglected to take itself in to consideration. It is as if it has caught a glimpse of itself in a mirror and let out an involuntary shriek of fear. Further still, life has not yet experienced that welcome feeling of relief - "Oh, it's only me." Even worse, life hates what it sees. Like a crow seeing its own reflection in a house window, it has gone at its own image in a most alarming manner, all flailing wings, outstretched scratching claws, and viciously pecking beak.

The monstrous irony of life becoming aware of itself is that it could be its undoing. Life has hobbled itself. It has short-circuited its own progress. We are not coping well with our self-awareness. In trying to answer the question of the purpose of life's existence, life has driven itself to the brink of its own extinction - certainly the edge of the abyss for this human branch of evolutionary progress. While feeling the need to justify man's existence, man has treated each other in a most inhumane manner. He forces man to work hard, to live in humiliating poverty, tells him he has to earn a living, enslaves his fellow man, and is rapidly rendering his precious home uninhabitable.

As grim as this prognosis might be, we do not need to remain as helpless bystanders. On the contrary, it is imperative that we do all we can to help life learn the reason for its own existence: Life doesn't have a purpose - doesn't need a purpose. Life doesn't need to justify its own existence, or agonise over why it is here. Life just is.

If we want to weave God in to the equation, we can replace "life" with "God". God is life is God. This outlook enhances a relationship with God. It no longer renders man an impotent partner. We are helping God attain his goal of growth and unhindered self-awareness. He is in the throes of being, and we can play our part in that process. Our role is vital. God has proved to be somewhat forgetful. He told Moses, "I shall prove to be what I shall prove to be," but he consistently forgets that he is in the process of becoming. Reminding him of this, by reminding ourselves, is no trivial part to play.

What can you do to play an active part in life's evolutionary progress?

Sit Still. Call it prayer, or meditation, or "occupying a space" - call it what you will, it makes no difference. We need to spend more time doing nothing, and less time labouring for what does not exist. Taking every opportunity to remain still and quiet is a necessary and active pursuit replete with unimaginable promise.

Think. Don't Think. The great secret to thinking is not to think. Out of nothing explodes life. Stillness, calm - from these things bursts the "Aha!" moment. Don't force it - it'll happen. And when it does, let it.

Slow Down. Take the advice of Miranda Priestley and, "by all means move at a glacial pace." The evolutionary process is slow. There is no rush. Time is inconsequential.

Be. Life just is, and the same applies to you. You simply are. You don't need to justify life. You don't need to earn your keep, or fight to survive. The way of life is merely to exist. Revel in the belief that "ignorance is bliss." Don't name anything, refuse to define things. Just experience.

Be Healthy. Refuse to pollute your body with the crippling junk that man appears to be dead-set on endlessly producing to the detriment of his very existence. Eat well. Sleep well. All the while, ABC - Always Breathe Correctly

Imagine. Create. Life could be evolving towards a corporeal life-form that does not rot away and decompose. A life-form that is able to renew itself indefinitely. A sensing, feeling being that is able to experience life joyfully forever. A race of humans finally able to love openly and unconditionally.

Don't Be Afraid. Don't fear death. The mere fact that life has manifested itself through you once does not mean that it is a one-off deal. Why should it not mean that it could happen again? Just because it hasn't does not mean that it won't. Every indication is that we are in the very early moments of this extraordinary development. The human species is in its infancy. We have not yet learned to crawl, let alone walk. Certainly it is bad luck to be born during such an unforgiving time, but that need not write off experiencing life again during a more carefree period. Life simply may not have learned to remember - yet. After all, each new manifestation of life has to remind itself that it does not need a reason to be alive.

Love. Most importantly, love yourself. God and love and life are synonymous. Focus on loving yourself and your love for others (and for life) will grow exponentially. In order to love yourself you need to forgive yourself. If you don't think you need to forgive yourself then you haven't done it yet and you will continue to be stuck. Forgiveness is a happy by-product of understanding. So, get to know yourself. Don't think in generalities. Social science has a tendency to lump all the categories in to one: All men do such and such...all women do so and so...Ask yourself, "Why am I like this?" "Why do I do so-and-so?" Focus in on yourself. Teach life self-awareness. Look at yourself in the mirror without attacking yourself. See yourself as you really are and accept it without judgement.

Remain Positive. Life is not able to regress. Once it has learned how to handle its capacity for self-awareness without destroying itself, it will not be able to unlearn it. Life learns and grows and develops. From the moment of the big bang, when life exploded out of nothing, this universe is forever expanding outwards. Like a blossoming flower. Remaining positive does not necessarily mean being optimistic. By all means be pessimistic. Identify the many areas in life that man has managed to completely screw up. Negate everything, as Krishnamurti might say. You can do this and still cultivate a healthy faith.

Finally, in summation, we could say, the purpose of life is to remind life itself that it does not need a purpose. Every new manifestation of life has to tell itself this truth until the message is firmly imprinted. We might yet be able to save ourselves.

Philip the Evangelizer, O.B.E.: You already know the answers to all your questions

2012-12-14T13:55:00.000+00:00

There is a legend told about Philip the Evangelizer (Acts 8:26-40). Apparently there was some government bigwig hailing from Ethiopia who had a mysterious life-changing experience while on a visit to Jerusalem. The power of this encounter - so it is said - led to a complete change in his life. It was in all the newspapers.

the story goes that this Ethiopian official found himself travelling by chariot on the road going from Jerusalem to Gaza. On the course of this journey he was reading aloud from the scroll of Isaiah when he became aware of a man running alongside his chariot.

"Do you actually know what you are reading?" This superman asked.

"How could I ever do so unless someone guided me?" Came the humble reply, and he invited the stranger to jump aboard, whereupon, starting from the verses he was reading, the man proceeded to explain to him "the good news about Jesus." As luck would have it, in the course of their discussion they passed a body of water. The Ethiopian took the opportunity to get baptised, after which the man bade his farewell and took off across the desert.

"What an extraordinary man," said the Ethiopian dignitary.

"What man?" Came his driver's guarded response, and indeed when the Ethiopian looked in the direction in which the man had set off, there was no sign of him.

To this day, Philip denies ever being there. Witnesses will concur that when the event was supposed to have taken place, Philip was found to be in Ashdod.

"It's a lovely story," said Philip, "but I was in Samaria, and I never got down as far as the road from Jerusalem to Gaza. It wasn't me...unless it was some sort of out of body experience."

And they all laughed uncertainly. You could never quite tell with Philip.

The truth will be even more astounding than the legend.

Let's say there was a man of some means travelling on the road from Jerusalem to Gaza - it's a visceral enough setting. It is a journey of some 100 kilometres (60 miles), which must have taken several hours to complete. Plenty of time to do nothing but sit and think. Perhaps he was pondering his own mortality. Maybe he did have the means and opportunity to be reading aloud from Isaiah.

"He was led like a sheep to the slaughter, and as a lamb before its shearer is silent, so he did not open his mouth. In his humiliation he was deprived of justice. Who can speak of his descendants? For his life was taken from the earth.”

There is enough here to get a man thinking about the inevitability of death. None of us are immune. "Here am I, in a horse-drawn carriage, a dignitary of sorts, but in the end even I will be gone and forgotten."

Invariably this leads to thinking about God, and the purpose of life. Perhaps he was thinking about God's name and what it means, and turning it over and over in his mind - Jehovah, Yahweh, I am that I am...

And, despite the noise of the horses' hooves, in mute stillness he drifts into a silent reverie in which he sees a man shimmering out of the heat like Omar Sharif and something, he doesn't remember what, reminds him of Joshua, whose name means "Jehovah is salvation." His mind shifts down into neutral, lulled there, trance-like, by the hypnotic beating of the hooves.

And out of nowhere it hits him like a bolt: I am! Isaiah is talking about himself, some other man, and every man. Suffering and the knowledge of death can be a doorway to understanding our own essential nothingness, our fragility.

In that instant he suddenly became aware of his own being - the I am that I am; his I am-ness, if you will - and it immediately meant his salvation. There was "the good news about Jesus." Like Joshua, that name means "Jehovah is salvation." It is the saving of us when we recognise that "I am."

The pounding of the hooves broke through as never before. He could hear the horses' grunts; he could see the sheen of sweat glistening on their muscular hind-quarters, their powerful legs. Their scent filled his nostrils, and there was nothing between him and the horses. This chariot, this forward motion, all were as one.

He felt the heat of the sun on his skin, the warmth of the breeze. Every hair on his arm, every pore, was tingling. He could feel the flap of his robe against his calf; the rattle of the chariot wheels on the road, the vibration through the floor of the chariot, into his feet and legs and up through his body. Every mote of dust became instantly visible, kicked up and chaotic, and all astonishingly separate. The trees, the clouds, the blinding blueness of the sky, all assaulted his senses. The sunlight danced off a body of water, and he saw himself washed clean. Clean, not in the sense of dirt, or sin, but just...different. Fresh, and new. He saw everything about himself, and with that his ego melted away, and a rolling ball of emotion swelled up from his belly, exploded in his chest cavity, came up through his throat, and suddenly burst out in an ecstatic primeval cry.

"How could I ever do so unless someone guided me," was the humble realisation needed to unlock within himself the answer to all his questions. "I know nothing, and there is nothing I need to know." And, in that moment of letting go enlightenment was thrust upon him.

The answer to all your questions lies buried beneath a mountain of seemingly unrelated subsidiary questions. Why is that question of interest? Why is knowing the answer to that particular question important to me? "Well, because." Why, because? And what is important to you about that answer - and so on. One question may uncover another as if we are traversing a mountain range in order to reach a destination. What we hope is the last peak only gives way to another one beyond.

Every question takes us a step closer to understanding. We begin to feel a light-headed relief as we catch a glimpse of the answers underneath. The ego will call it avoiding the issue, and that is because the ego fears its own annihilation. Questions about ourselves indicate an emerging self-awareness. We observe our own I am-ness - the I am that I am. The ego fears the freedom, the salvation, that this precedes, and so it tries to impede progress. However, it is essential that we address these preliminary questions because in this way our ego will begin to melt away and the answers will speak for themselves with astounding clarity.

By doing this we gradually become aware of the curious paradox that it is the ego that asks these questions in the first place, and it is the ego that impedes us from answering.

What is truth? What is the purpose of life? What is God? What happens when we die? The answers are already there within you. Some of these answers you may not be able to articulate in a cohesive way, but this does not matter. Words are unimportant. Dig through the questions and the answers will reveal themselves. They might not reveal themselves immediately, but in a moment of mute stillness and silent reverie enlightenment will be thrust upon you, and like the Ethiopian dignitary you will go your way rejoicing.

The solution to all the world's problems: Abolish money

2012-11-21T19:41:00.001+00:00

Certain questions (or statements) have now become so offensive to people's sensibilities that the mind instinctively rejects them. For example, anything John Holt suggests in Escape From Childhood, or Is anyone really "born this way", or would a different upbringing have produced a different result? Anyway, here's another one: Why does anything even cost money any more?

The world would be a far better place if money was eradicated. That does not mean a return to the barter system, which was simply a precursor to money anyway. No, abolishing money would mean doing away with buying anything. Everything is free of charge.

Money eradicates the need for love.

The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.
(1 Timothy 6:10)

This verse of scripture is often misquoted as, "Money is the root of all evil." There are those who take delight in reminding them that, actually, it is not money but the love of money, that is the root of all sorts of evil. They both mean the same thing. Anybody who jumps to point out what the verse actually says is only proving how much they love money by jumping to its defence. That's how insidious money is.

Capitalism is a conspiracy by the wealthy to keep the lower classes fighting among themselves. They dangle the possibility of changing social status by means of industriousness. Everyone has an equal opportunity to climb the social ladder - you just have to wrestle for it, in a battle to the death. So jobs must be competed for, and complete reliance is laid on money as a means of security. A better world would be one in which there is no need for any different classes. As it is, a system of slavery is perpetuated by the need to go out and earn a living.

"Everyone has a right to earn a living." What this really means is, no one should get a free ride. However, no one should have to earn a living. Living should be something we just do without having to earn it. Money is just an excuse not to have to love anyone. The same goes for the statement, "I worked hard for this..." It is a wonderful irony that a world hell-bent on adopting an atheistic outlook should be so determined to stick resolutely to a Judeo-Christian work ethic. It has leached into the whole of society. We are all religious.

If you seek to live outside of the bounds imposed by society you will soon find yourself forced to earn a living through incarceration. Meals and lodging will be provided, but you will pay the price through solitude, forced labour, and abuse at the hands of fellow prisoners and staff.

Natural disasters always cost something: 45 billion to clean up the mess from hurricane Sandy. Natural disasters shouldn't cost anything. The price is what it costs to restore the infrastructure, to put things back the way they were so that life can carry on as if nothing happened. We should be able to enjoy disasters without the stress.

You can't do anything for anyone for free because people are afraid you have one over them. Money restores balance. People feel like they have paid off a debt and can now relax. But debt is to do with the ego - "I did something for you, you owe me..." It is about rights, justice, laws, legality - all these are constructions to satisfy the ego. Love means there is no debt. Nobody owes anyone anything.

As soon as spiritual leaders, gurus, self-help experts, start charging for their advice they have simply become members of the medical profession. They lose credibility and become snake-oil salesmen. In the words of George Bernard Shaw, "Every profession is a conspiracy against the laity."

Doing good deeds has a category all of its own: Charity. This used to be how the word agape was translated. Doing something and expecting nothing in return. Now love is a business enterprise. Charity costs money.

Love eradicates the need for money.
There is the fear that people would be greedy. People would not be greedy because there would be no need for it. People would take what they need for the day, the week, or the month. The shelves would not be stripped because that only happens in times of crisis, and crises only happen as a result of this unstable society we have created.

Sure, there might be a silly season for a moment after money has been abolished, but this is only to be expected. Society has been imprisoned, suppressed, and subjugated. When they get set free they are going to go wild for an instant, but we can trust that love will lead us to an equilibrium.

"Nobody would do any work," is another ridiculous claim. At last people would work because they want to, not because they have to. People want to provide a service, or they like the social interaction. Work meets basic human physical and spiritual needs as opposed to unrealistic false financial needs, where a wage becomes compensation for mind-numbing tedium. Great hubs could be set up where people could go and see what needs to be done, and where, and they could go along and contribute to the work-load out of sheer enjoyment.

There might be a fear that people would want to have an aeroplane, or an ocean liner. (Or just a big boat would do.) This would not happen. Love is not being afraid of our own limitations. These things are a measure of success, they are a sign of social status. They indicate one person's riches over another's poverty. Abolishing money would eradicate this practice. Love does not need to brag. It is the ego that needs to publicly demonstrate its greatness.

Riches and wealth are a way for the rich to avoid associating with the poor. The rich don't handle money - they get other people to buy things for them. All transactions are carried out electronically. They don't want to touch the vulgar bank-note. They have become rich by means of every perverse treachery and trick. It is impossible to become rich without exploitation. You choose love, or you choose wealth.

There are countless benefits to abolishing money. Here are just a few more:

The industrial age would become a hideous memory - a time when society churned out product and spewed filth into the water sources and the atmosphere. Stuff could be built to last, without any planned obsolescence.
Light pollution would end. There would be no need for half the lighting in the big cities.
We could finally see a reduction in the amount of traffic on the roads and the growing stress that results from that. Most traffic on the road consists of people going to and from jobs.
No need for the huge gulf between rich and poor. Ludicrous overindulgence of some parts of the earth against the abject poverty of others. Adverts pressing for water in Africa. All of that would go away if it was all provided because of love. Nobody along the way needs to ask for payment because all our needs are provided for anyway.
Everyone could be housed.
Crime would be eradicated. Prisons would be emptied. Most crimes are committed because people need money to buy things. With this need eliminated, crime would all but vanish.
Petty law-suits would be a thing of the past. Most law-suits exist because people want compensation for lost earnings.
Substance abuse would be a thing of the past. Drug abuse, alcohol abuse, gambling, smoking - all these things would fade away. They are all problems created by the anxiety of having to make ends meet.
Call off the war against disease. The infrastructure must be preserved at all costs. The endless quest to discover a cure for cancer is for the preservation of the infrastructure because heaven forbid that it should have anything to do with the stress and anxiety of this competitive system, and its terrible diet. We have created this disease-ridden society. Abolish money and the fallacy of "earning a living," and we would see an end to cancer, heart disease, stroke, M.E., and all the associated ailments.

We do not implement this idea to abolish money because we are scared. Fear is at the root of ego, and that is what got us into this mess in the first place. But, fear of what, exactly?

No matter how hard you want to argue the point that capitalism has improved living conditions in many parts of the world, the tragedy is that we fell into that heartless abyss at all. It's high time we jacked it all in and did it all out of love instead.

God is not God is not God...

2012-11-07T19:29:00.001+00:00

Throughout the articles written here the term "God" is used. It needs to be made quite plain that "God" is not God. "God" is a perfectly inadequate word that is used to describe the indescribable. God is Love, Truth, Eternal, God is none of these things. God can not be defined with words. God is not something you believe in. It would be more accurate to say, "I believe in nothing."

God is what you get when you strip away everything else. God is what you get when you peel away every layer, every multiverse, every universe before this universe. God is not all that is left - there is nothing left. God is that nothing. Not the scientific nothing. Science does not believe in "nothing" - "There is no such thing as 'nothing'," - just as they say there is no such thing as God. Not the nothing that you get when you suck all the air out of a heavy metal container. Not the nothing that still contains energy - energy that can be measured. God can not be measured. It is the immeasurable. God is nothing. God is no thing. It is the void, the abyss, the bottomless emptiness. God is unfathomable.

Synonymous with "God" are "Love" and "Truth." God does not make itself love - it is love. Love is. It is the natural state of things. We know it instinctively, and we wither and die in its absence. The sound of nothing is the perfect chord, all waves moving in harmony. We are out of tune, discordant, and we must get ourselves in tune. The big bang was chaotic. It is a discordant cacophony. Gradually harmony is being achieved. Eventually everything will come into tune with the nothingness, but we don't have to wait for that to happen. We can start now. There is not much we can do about the tunelessness of this world, but we can recognise the lack of harmony within ourselves, and that we can do something about.

What is the opposite of "ego"?
Eons ago, when man crossed some threshold of self-awareness, already present self-defence mechanisms were thrown into a tailspin. We are a mutation, unable to satisfactorily handle this greater level of self-awareness. We haven't yet learned to cope with it. Matters of the mind remain a mystery to man. The dance of the honey-bee, mass migration, murmuration, instinct and intuition, we know nothing about. We can explain what happens, but can say nothing about the why or how.

A quick search for "What is the opposite of ego?" brings up such expressions as "sacred self", "the real you," or, "the authentic self." None of these adequately convey what is the opposite of ego.

Ego = self. Ego is selfish. The opposite of selfish is unselfish. In order to find the opposite of ego, we need to "unself" ourselves. We need to decouple from the self - throw off the self. All things associated with the self, everything we identify with the self, must be stripped off. We must become "not self", or "nothing." However, we can not just say, "I am nothing," we need to become nothing. We do this by peeling off everything that is something. We become aware of the beliefs and ideologies that make up me, and we strip them off, we get rid of them, layer by layer, peeling off the layers until there is nothing left. Like an onion. And, yes, like peeling an onion, we do it through the tears. When a child passes a certain threshold of self-awareness, the ego will kick in, a self-preservation mechanism based on a fear of dying. What danger has there been in the child's life to arouse the fear of death and insignificance? What guilt and shame?

God as nothing makes sense of the statement, "The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom." (Psalm 111:10) You might think, "I am not scared of nothing." But being a double negative, it would really mean, "I am scared of everything." This is probably a very accurate assessment of our state of mind. When we can say, "I am not scared of anything," we are really saying, "I fear nothing," and that is the beginning of wisdom.

(Except, of course, that the person who says, "I'm not scared of anything," is usually lying, and needs to go back to square one.)

The nothing is the first cause, the "How" in, "How Did We Get Here?" Out from this nothing came everything. What happens when you die? Nothing. And nothing holds the potential for anything.

Why is the truth hidden in the Bible?

2012-10-31T19:18:00.001+00:00

In his essay, "Why I Write," George Orwell put this reason first on the list: Sheer egoism. He explains it this way:

(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen — in short, with the whole top crust of humanity.

The Bible - the written word - is a product of man surrendering to the ego. It is man trying to explain man's predicament of being held captive to the ego, while himself being held captive to the ego. In other words, it wants to extol the virtues of freedom while choosing to remain confined to prison. Even if we agree that some Bible writers recognised the truth of man's condition, the fact remains that they recognised it while surrendering to their own egos. Because of this, it lacks credibility.

Man lives in constant surrender to his ego. His real self remains concealed from him. This dual condition must be unearthed from the Bible. It does not sit obviously on the surface. It must be read into the subtext. It can be found in the creation mythology and the stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Israel and Egypt, and in the countless lesser stories that make up the larger one. It can be found in the two ideologies held by the Jewish people - the Law covenant (ego/self) versus the Messianic hope (authentic self/not-self).

It is always the few who find the narrow path, and this is seen in ever decreasing circles throughout the narrative. Mankind starts out as the authentic self, made in the image of God. Then it is the nation of Israel, then the tribe of Judah, then the sect of Christianity, then the antichrist. Ultimately, no one in the scriptures embodies the true self in reality, as all those that picture it eventually succumb to the ego. Any who conquer it manage to escape.

Why were they hiding man's condition in history, myths, and legends? Because that is all they had to work with. The writers were embroiled in a system of worship which itself was a result of man surrendering to his ego. Even if he believed it the writer of Genesis chapter 2 could not write, "God is really you...you are separated from yourself..." because it would not have been accepted or believed, and would not have gained any traction.

The details of how man originally surrendered to the ego are lost in the past. They can not be retrieved. Legends about God, and the creation of man are only a result of that surrender. The ego is the result of fear. Man writes because he is scared of being insignificant.

On top of all this is the fact that it is impossible to use words to explain man's predicament. Words, language - these things define, and with definition comes confinement. You can not define or confine what is infinite. Writing locks belief down. Language binds and shackles.

Certain Bible writers knew of this contradiction. Genesis 11:1-9 outlines the confusion that arises over multiple languages. Proverbs 10:19 states, "In the abundance of words there does not fail to be transgression, but the one keeping his lips in check is acting discreetly."

Writing is to surrender to the ego. Wanting to lead is to surrender to the ego; wanting to teach is to surrender to the ego. "Do not call anyone on earth...'Leader' for you have one Leader, the Christ," might well have meant, "Be your own leader," but the weight of the message is crippled by a language that can so easily be misconstrued. It does not stand on its own but demands an interpreter, and the one who puts himself forward as an interpreter has surrendered to the ego, for why does he want to act as interpreter?

The beautiful irony, however, is that in the Bible we are left with a strange and mysterious work of art. It attempts to explain man's struggle by presenting the drama of life itself. The Bible is life - man's predicament played out against the backdrop of man's eternal captivity to the ego.

God, love, truth, whatever we want to call it, can not be taught or explained, it can only be experienced, and the only way it will ever be experienced is by throwing off the fear, and completely letting go of everything we believe in and hold dear. The very act of using language to describe the problem hides the problem. The attempt to reveal, conceals. Writing, by its very nature, shrouds the truth in mystery.

Snatching Christianity from the jaws of St Paul

2012-10-24T19:36:00.001+01:00

By the sixth decade of the first century the Apostle Paul was breaking into a cold sweat. It wasn't enough that he had been shipped off to Rome and met with a complete anti-climax, but he really sensed that he was beginning to go off the boil. He was being abandoned, confronted, and challenged. To make matters worse, the original Messiah was being quoted, and word was now out that someone had been following Jesus around with a moleskin, and had been taking notes, and now - would you Adam-and-Eve it - these notes had fallen into the hands of none other than John Mark.

Including, "Get Mark and bring him with you, because he is helpful to me in my ministry," in his second letter to Timothy, felt like too little too late. It was unlikely Mark had ever got over the quarter-of-a-century cold shoulder he had received from Paul, and being unceremoniously replaced by Timothy in short order after Paul's bust-up with Barnabas over whether or not to take Mark on the second missionary journey. "That deserter?" was Paul's response. "Not bloody likely."

No doubt there were several reasons why Christianity needed a boost in the second half of the first century, but I'm sure that Paul's methodology had not been helping matters one bit. The rift needed to be healed, and the gospels presented a simple message: The Christ came in the flesh, and his ministry was first to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Nothing there to misconstrue.

Mark's gospel was a short sharp shock. It was a quick and thrilling read, and Jesus was immediately presented as a warm and compassionate protagonist. Not only did it make sure to highlight the Lord's choosing of the twelve apostles before the end of the third chapter, but there was even time to include a crafty hint that, contrary to being a deserter, when all others had abandoned Jesus, Mark had hung on 'til the last. How d'you like them apples?

This dagger-thrust of a gospel was a necessary blow. Things had rapidly been going south since Paul had been in the driving seat of the new religion. Apparently the Lord's memo re. the lost sheep had not reached Paul, and in no short time he had managed to force a wedge between the Jews and the Gentiles - and he just kept on hammering it home.

In every town he went to he had made enemies of the very people this good news was meant to appeal to. He had squandered an opportunity to win converts, coming as he did from a similar religious background, and instead he had used it as a means of turning people against him. To begin with he had been open-minded - when once he had suggested that if you want to get circumcised, get circumcised, he eventually reached a point where he remonstrated against those who promoted circumcision, and likened the act to emasculation.

Paul gleaned from this rejection by the Jewish contingent that he must instead be sent as an apostle to the nations. To the Ephesians he wrote that the wall separating Jew from Gentile had been torn down, but in a bizarre fulfilment of the prophecy, "Tear down this temple and in three days it shall be rebuilt," he had succeeded in re-erecting the wall and this time the Jews were on the outside.

Furthermore, Paul had complicated matter with his elaborate theories about Melchizedek, and high priests, and nailing the Law to the cross. He had managed to denigrate the Jew's most holy customs. Paul's pitiful attempt suggesting that fleshly Israelites were like branches of a spiritual olive tree that could be grafted back on if they were faithful was just rubbing salt on the wound.

The truth is that Paul might have been on to something with his idea of a spiritual Israel, and that parts of the nations history were allegorical. It all points to a deeper understanding of man's psyche. But he was beginning to take things too far, and people were being driven away.

Sadly, Paul was still a man struggling with his ego. He gave in to his anger. He did not want to be challenged, and when he was he resorted to sarcasm and name-calling. Not only that, but he had bitten off more than he could chew with his Messianic parallels. He was well aware of this inner turmoil, lamenting as he did in his letter to the Romans, "For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing."

It had got so far out of hand that something needed to be done to redress the balance.

The gospel attributed to Matthew was even more devastating than Mark's. Not only was it addressed exclusively to the Hebrew people - twice he has Jesus declaring "I was not sent forth to any but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel" - but it also promoted Peter as the original troubled and struggling apostle-with-a-heart.

Luke, ever the healer, seeks to unite the two camps, and he does so by publishing two volumes of early Christian history. In volume one he tells the story of the Messiah, and in volume two he continues the saga by starting with the sterling work initiated by the early apostles, but half way through he turns the work over to Paul and demonstrates the extent of Paul's missionary accomplishments. Yes, Peter and co. started it, but Paul took it further than it had ever been taken before.

Peter, as ever, vacillates - faith/doubt, all or nothing. Though not a gospel writer per se, there is some suggestion that he was something of a contributing editor. He does mention Paul, though. His second letter is a study in vacillation. If it wasn't written by him, he had passed on a spirit of vacillation to his disciples. 2 Peter wants to chastise false prophets while still preserving the scripture's prophetic leanings. In this way he mildly disciplines the prophecy-prone Paul. At the same time, despite being publicly humiliated by Paul on one unforgettable occasion, he offers his support at the close of the letter, calling Paul, "Our dear brother." Of his writings he adds, "His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort." Some might call this "damning with faint praise."

In the end, whether it was because of Paul or not, none of this commotion would matter. The bloody carcass of first century Christianity would eventually be cast out into the wilderness for the scavengers to do with as they wished. They wouldn't even pick it clean, and the rest would just be left to go dry.

Hymenaeus, Philetus, Alexander et al: "They were not of our sort..."

2012-10-18T09:41:00.000+01:00

"They went out from us, but they were not of our sort; for if they had been of our sort, they would have remained with us."
(1 John 2:19)

Hymenaeus, Philetus, Alexander - these names may not be immediately familiar to us, but I like to imagine that the truth resides with these rejected fellows, these waifs and strays of the New Testament who are spoken of in rather abusive terms by the likes of Paul and John.

We have no real idea of the full extent of the wrongs perpetrated by these men, yet somehow we are quick to judge them negatively because we instinctively come down on the side of the Bible writer. However, in reaching a conclusion based on accusations made in several letters, we are only really hearing one side of the argument.

What seems to be undisputed is that towards the latter half of the first century there were those who were departing from the Church. Paul himself alludes to this exodus when he writes to Timothy:

"You know that everyone in the province of Asia has deserted me, including Phygelus and Hermogenes."
2 Timothy 1:15

No doubt there are various theories as to why members were deserting the Church, but I like to think that by the mid-60s, thirty-odd years after the supposed event, rumours of what Jesus really said were beginning to filter through, and subsequently men were coming to their own conclusions rather than be taught a message by the hand of someone who had never actually witnessed Jesus, ie. Paul.

By the end of his third missionary tour even Paul was quoting "the Lord Jesus himself", saying to the older men of Miletus and Ephesus, "In everything I did, I showed you that by this kind of hard work we must help the weak, remembering the words the Lord Jesus himself said: 'It is more blessed to give than to receive.'" (Acts 20:35) As it turns out, Paul is left with egg on his face on account of this particular quote ended up on the cutting room floor when the official versions of the biography of Jesus surfaced. Luke manages to slot it into The Acts of Apostles a little bit like a movie out-take saved for a DVD extra.

It is highly dubious to roll out, "It is more blessed to give than to receive," even when talking about helping the poor - more so when you are talking about yourself helping the poor - as it calls in to question the motives of the giver. One wonders whether Paul ever used this quote when attempting to rustle up financial aid.

When word about the mysterious man behind the proclamations of Messiahship began to surface, it was rather alarming to find that this Jesus was probably more of a you-received-free-give-free* kinda guy than a worker-deserves-his-wages** advocate.

Financial remuneration wasn't the only thing Paul promoted. Paul was all about suffering now and being rewarded later. He closes his first letter to Timothy with the exhortation to, "Fight the fine fight of the faith," in order to safely treasure up a "fine foundation for the future," which God would bring "in his own due time." The holy spirit was a "token" of what was to come - a down-payment, a guarantee. Paul turned everything in to persecution and suffering.

In contrast, word was coming through that this Jesus was all about living a stress-free life right now. Throwing off the dead weight of life's burdens; casting off - letting go. Becoming dead to what was and rising to life right now. "Your sins are forgiven," was doing the rounds. Not a future forgiveness, or a forgiveness that had to be earned, but a forgiveness that existed in perpetuity. Take it, it's yours.

Advance word was also hinting at this Jesus living a "leave them be" life. "He that is not against us is for us," was his philosophy. Paul on the other hand had already demonstrated himself to be an old sulk when Mark had abandoned him at Perga on his first missionary journey, even displaying a sharp outburst of anger when Barnabas later suggests taking Mark along for his second missionary tour. Paul was having none of it, and they went their separate ways. Singling out individuals for upbraiding was not alien to Paul.

John complained about Diotrephes wanting the first place among men and not receiving the disciples with respect, but Paul had demonstrated a similar propensity for this sort of behaviour. On the one hand he had declared, "To the Jew I became as a Jew", and yet he tore Peter off a strip when Peter attempted to follow this same idea. How respectful was Paul being when he publicly chastised Peter? He boldly relates this tale in his letter to the Galatians, a letter in which he had already referred to the apostles and older men in Jerusalem somewhat archly as ones who "seemed to be pillars."

Among those mentioned by Paul in his letters addressed to Timothy are Hymenaeus and Philetus. The need to become dead and be reborn might be what these ones had attached significance to, much to Paul's chagrin:

"Avoid godless chatter, because those who indulge in it will become more and more ungodly. Their teaching will spread like gangrene. Among them are Hymenaeus and Philetus, who have wandered away from the truth. They say that the resurrection has already taken place, and they destroy the faith of some."
(2 Timothy 2:16-18)

It could be that they were talking to others about a spiritual resurrection, and that you didn't need to wait for this to take place, that it could happen right now. They didn't think they had wandered away from the truth. Only a marked conviction could induce them to persevere with a course of action which would merit them being censured by Paul.

Another one singled out by Paul was Demas.

"Demas has forsaken me because he loved the present system of things..."
(2 Timothy 4:10)

Perhaps it could be that Demas had caught wind of the saying, "Never be anxious about the next day, for the next day will have its own anxieties," and had come to the conclusion that we don't rightly know what the future holds, that we are better off being fully aware of our life right now. Demas could well have been an early adopter of Eckhart Tolle's The Power Of Now.

Hymenaeus had already been targeted by Paul, along with a certain Alexander. They stood accused as men who have "thrust aside faith and a good conscience," and have experienced "shipwreck concerning their faith." Paul had handed them over to Satan, "that they may be taught by discipline not to blaspheme. (1 Timothy 1:18-20) It is very likely that these men did not consider themselves as having thrust aside their faith at all. That rather than having experienced ship-wreck concerning their faith, they had never felt more sure of themselves.

Alexander is mentioned again later:

"Alexander the coppersmith did me many injuries - the Lord will repay him according to his deeds - and you too be on guard against him, for he resisted our words to an excessive degree."
(2 Timothy 4:14)

Is this what Paul considered to be injuries, "resisting his word to an excessive degree"? Perhaps Alexander had stood up to Paul, or had vehemently disagreed with him on certain points.

It seems disingenuous for Paul to accuse others of experiencing ship-wreck concerning their faith when it was Paul who seemed to be the one whose faith was all at sea. For a while it appears that he was convinced that something more was due to happen as regards the Messiah. His letters to the congregation in Corinth indicate quite clearly that he expected an end of sorts to be near. However, the passing of time proved this to be a fallacy. In his early insistence, though, Paul was skirting very close to being a false prophet, and by the sixth decade he had already fallen foul of the fruits of a false prophet by reverting to the methods employed by the Pharisees: warning against sects; forbidding the questioning of things; shunning. (Titus 3:9, 10)

There is still disagreement as to whether or not Paul was the author of the letters to Timothy - but even if they are an amalgam of later Christian teachings and excerpts from Paul's own hand, they seem to reveal a disconcerting level of narcissistic thinking. He claims to be entrusted with the glorious good news by God; the Lord assigned him a ministry; he was appointed a preacher and apostle, by none other than the Lord himself. Much of what Paul had been teaching had come from his own interpretations. He talks to Timothy about "the pattern of healthful words that you heard from me." In 2 Timothy 3:10 and 11 he talks about "my teaching, my way of life, my purpose, faith, patience, love, endurance, persecutions, sufferings - what kind of things happened to me in Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, the persecutions I endured." Yet here he is doling out a form of persecution to others, with his name-calling and labeling.

However, there is something slightly more disturbing even than these already concerning traits. It is possible that the expression used to describe Alexander's actions - that he did Paul "many injuries" - was the same word used for an informant. It suggests that Alexander sold Paul out to the authorities. This is convenient as it puts Alexander in the position of a betrayer, much like Judas. By claiming that "all those in Asia have deserted me" Paul subtly hints at a "strike the shepherd and the sheep will scatter" fulfilment which suspiciously cloaks Paul in the guise of a Messiah figure himself. The trouble with this is that it makes Paul stand out as part of the sign: "False Christs and false prophets will appear and perform signs and miracles to deceive the elect," wrote Mark in chapter 13, verse 22. Perhaps this is what men were beginning to turn away from.

It could be that by the mid-60s some men were simply fed up with Paul's inconsistency, his insistence on doing things exclusively his way, and his discomfiting Messianic aspirations. Rather than being used as examples of a dismal lack of faith, perhaps it's about time that these men were celebrated for their courage. Perhaps they felt that this Christianity business was a lost cause, and they were becoming more drawn to the interesting notion that "the kingdom of God is within you." As a result, 'they went out from among them, for they were not of their sort,' and for this they ought not to be sneered at.

* Matthew 10:8
** 1 Timothy 5:18

Even if you don't believe in God, you'd better create one

2012-10-10T15:04:00.000+01:00

The question of whether or not God exists is of no consequence. What is vital is that even if we don't believe in God, we make darn sure we create one, and the sooner the better.

Even if we do believe in God, or belong to some religion, we need to set our God aside and create another one. We are each of us in a box, with all our beliefs, assumptions, prejudices - all the things that make up "me" - and God is right there in the box with us. The God we believe in is part of the problem, and the God we don't believe in is part of the problem.

So, we need to imagine a new being. A being that stands outside of the box. Someone that can see who we are, and have been. Someone that has observed every moment of our lives. Our newly imagine being is completely free. He/She/It is not bound by time or the physics of this world. He is free to roam through our thoughts and feelings. He can move back through time, and where we might remember certain events, our God remembers everything and lives it as if it were happening right now.

This God is compassionate, free from judgement, prejudice, or disgust.

Having a piece of the Exodus pie
As much as we might hate to admit it, the Israelites were on to something when they named their God "Yahweh". It could be that this name had quite a homely origin, that it was a tribal family God. Whoever it was that came up with such a name was a very insightful fellow. It has been commented that the description of the name given at Exodus 3:14 - "I am that I am" - suggests that He will become whatever is necessary in order for his will to be done. It doesn't matter what the Israelites went on to do with this God of theirs, what they made him say, or purport to do. Your Yahweh is not their Yahweh, is not my Yahweh. My God is not your God, because I have not been present for your life. Your God fits your mold. He becomes whatever he needs to be, for you.

This God is a jealous God. He is jealous for you. This God does not want to see you going after other Gods with their petty conflicts, hatreds etc. Your God is protective of you and your interests.

It is fitting that such a description be found in the book of Exodus. We are talking about a journey - leaving slavery behind and becoming free. It means "going out", and we are trying to get out of our box. Of course, we don't go into it with the intention of moving. It is not about self-improvement because self-improvement implies judgement...however, moving is what will irresistibly happen.

Leaving a land of slavery
You must be able to stand outside yourself, observe yourself and say, "This is what I am - violent, competitive, lustful, whatever we might be. This is why. This is how I became what I am. This is when it first manifested itself." Instead of running from what you are, hiding from it and trying to hide it from others, you accept it and embrace it unequivocally. We identify what we are, what we feel, what we do, without any prejudice or judgement

We need to be able to listen in on all of our thoughts, and ask, why do I think that? Why do I speak to myself negatively? Why do I think so highly of myself? Again, we do this without any partiality. We assume knowledge of good and bad must inevitably lead to judgement of good and bad, but our God does not judge, for there is nothing to judge - it merely accepts the way things were and the way things are. Acceptance and acknowledgement mean that we are able to let things go.

Eventually, of course, we will find that we have climbed out of our box - the watcher and the watched have become the same person...or, as Jesus put it, "I and the Father are one."

When this happens everything you are becomes unimportant, and with unimportance comes freedom.

It is not a case of believing in God - God simply is. And if it isn't, it ought to be.

Ghostworld of the excommunicated

2012-10-04T06:17:00.000+01:00

I died on Wednesday, April 4th, 2012.

Time was called at a little after 8 o'clock in the evening.

"Rory Sullivan is no longer one of Jehovah's Witnesses."

I had been sick for at least a decade prior to my passing, but it had not always been that way. For many years I was fit, healthy, and strong. I had grown to be a man qualified to teach and lead. Ten years ago, however, I was infected with a debilitating illness. It was diagnosed as a sympathy toward worldly psychology, but in reality it was a gradually dawning realisation that any lasting spiritual healing could only come from the inside out. Such thinking began to bleed in to my congregation ministry enough that eventually the local body of elders took issue and decided to let me go as an appointed man.

I worked hard to self-manage my condition. At one point I showed all the signs of a remarkable recovery, right up to the point that I was asked to serve again as an elder, but it was all a wicked deception. The disease had taken root at too deep a level. After eighteen months the sickness resurfaced, and I went in to rapid decline.

I had lost all confidence in the body of men self-appointed to oversee the organisation. It seemed contradictory to me that an organisation could lay claim to a monopoly on the truth while at the same time being less than honest themselves. I was only just learning that the Watchtower Society has not always presented its history accurately. Anything questionable written in earlier literature is carelessly brushed aside with a gesture, "The light is getting brighter." Past "mistakes" become those that the Lord has permitted. I couldn't understand why he would do that. Why would he condone years of his spokesman declaring something as truth which could potentially endanger the lives of his flock, or damage their faith, only to have it later revoked? When is it the operation of God's holy spirit, and when is it merely the whims of men? How can you claim not to be infallible and yet insist on calling your teachings "the truth"?

There was no point in going to the spiritual doctors about matters like these. There was no cure. There would just be encouragement to keep taking the medication - Bible-reading, preaching, meetings, prayer - anything to push those pernicious doubts back in to the darkness. By then I knew that it was too late. The walls were crumbling. Nothing was standing up under close scrutiny. It was all superficial nonsense anyway. The fact is, I was finally waking up. I was beginning to see myself clearly for the first time, and these men who had insinuated themselves into my life were just getting in the way. They were not a help, they were a hindrance, and I wanted nothing more to do with them.

***

Eventually Kate steeled herself for the inevitable question. The moment came. It was night, and the children had been put to bed. I heard her footfall on the bedroom floor. She creaked down the stairs and I braced myself for what I knew was coming. She entered the room, dark save only for the chilly blue glow of the computer screen. I felt her beside me.

"Are you going to die?"

"I think so."

She broke down in tears and I offered empty words of reassurance. Shortly after that I stopped all congregation activities. I was already refusing to report my field ministry, but now I ceased to go out preaching altogether. I stopped attending the meetings at the Kingdom Hall.

The qualified men sought advice and were told that even though I would not accept orthodox treatment I was imposing a sort of self-quarantine, and so they could leave me be and allow the sickness to follow its own course. Time would tell if it was benign or malignant.

In this inactive state all things become unsettled. Associating with others becomes stilted and unnatural. There is a phone-call or two. Promises of visits that never materialise. The community is kept very busy, and quite frankly, if you're not well enough to pitch in and help out, you have only yourself to blame.

Social gatherings are particularly awkward. There is a distinct atmosphere: They wonder why you are there. If you haven't done the work, why should you be entitled to the rewards? The well don't quite know how to handle the sick. The expectation of death hangs in the air. They are preparing themselves for the inevitable. They make comments like, "What are we to do with you?" and "It breaks my heart." There are furtive glances, a curled lip of displeasure, voices dropped to a whisper, enforced cheeriness when accosted, all the time the concern that what the sick one has might be catching.

Some are optimistic, but conversation is pregnant, all a prelude to the expected question, "When are you going to be back with us?" I can't tell them I don't think I ever will be. I don't need the final curtain to come down before its time. So I lie, and say, "I don't know," or "Never say 'never'..." or some other specially prepared phrase - sometimes it's just a shrug and a half smile - and they are a little deflated and touch me on the back or arm and shrink away and the conversation is over. One thing is a given: At all costs, don't talk about the illness. Only those who have the required qualifications are best placed to talk about such things. For anyone else, leave well alone.

Kate begins to go through a sort of grieving process. It starts when the disease is diagnosed as being terminal. Now she is angry, feeling guilty, blaming herself - perhaps there was something more she could have done, things she should not have done; now she is bargaining with God, pleading for him to show her a sign; now she is blaming me: "You knew what you were getting in to, why have you changed your mind now?" It is impossible to reason with her and be heard. Newcomers are only ever made familiar with a sanitised version of the Society's history. Furthermore, the set of beliefs you joined up with may not be the same a few years later. The organisation is allowed to change around you, and you are expected to change with it, but one is not permitted to change independent of the Society - not without serious repercussions. It is likened to Eve's rebellious eating of the fruit, the frightening punishment for which is expulsion from the "spiritual paradise".

She blames me for not doing more to keep healthy, for not declaring my illness earlier. Perhaps they could have done something before it was too late. But what was the point of arguing with the elders over things like failed prophecies and changing doctrines? I knew what the answer would be: "They are imperfect men...mistakes were made in their eagerness for the end to come...the light is getting brighter..." How could I explain that a dam had burst deep inside of me, and the rushing waters had washed away all the sand upon which my house of faith was built, and that this was a good thing? It was futile. I was a lost cause, a dead man walking. It was only a matter of time.

***

The sudden discovery of an alarming new symptom sent the qualified men into a flurry of activity. Some of them had found out I had a website and had been writing about my spiritual views and publishing them for all the world to see. To begin with they had tried to ignore it, but for some unexplained reason it eventually came to the attention of the other elders. Now that it had become impossible to ignore the qualified men met to discuss my condition. It didn't matter that nobody had read or been affected by my writings, it was all about the "what-if".

We talked briefly about my misgivings, but they were only really concerned with knowing if I was willing to accept their particular course of treatment. I wasn't, and after consulting with head office they agreed that there was nothing more they could do for me. The final diagnosis was "apostasy" - in other words, I had become mentally diseased. Because they feared the disease was contagious, and lethal, they saw no option but to exterminate the carrier. 2 Timothy 2:16-18 was used to prove that the spread of gangrene must be stopped:

But shun empty speeches that violate what is holy; for they will advance to more and more ungodliness, and their word will spread like gangrene. Hymenaeus and Philetus are of that number. These very [men] have deviated from the truth, saying that the resurrection has already occurred; and they are subverting the faith of some.

The rich irony of this scriptural judgement was completely lost on them. The Watchtower Society have been declaring that the resurrection has been occurring since 1918. "On this one basic point," declares The Watchtower of April 1, 1986, "What [Hymenaeus and Philetus] were teaching as to the time of the resurrection, Paul rightly branded them as apostates, with whom faithful Christians would not fellowship."

They tell me I only have a week to live.

At the end of seven days, they pull the switch.

***

I choose not to be present for the announcement - not everyone appreciates an open casket. There is an audible gasp. At the end of the meeting members of the congregation descend upon Kate and offer their condolences and words of consolation. One or two even weep. Afterwards she goes with some of them for a meal, like a sort of wake. She gets sympathy cards. She is a Watchtower widow.

Even though my death is expected, the announcement of my passing still hits Kate hard. However, she will pass through it, it will hurry her through to the last stage of grief - acceptance - and she can then settle back in to some sort of normalcy. There will always be a hole, but she will manage. I try to embrace her, but it is as if we are not in the same room. We do not occupy the same space. For now I am an apparition, barely visible.

Life is punctuated by other-worldly experiences as I drift by people that I know from the congregation. I drive by someone's house as she is loading her car. Everything slips in to silent slow motion as she looks up as if brushed by something uncanny. I pass someone I know sitting on a public bench and she looks at where I would have been, a small sad smile playing about her lips.

I don't see many in town. It could be that I am seen first and avoided. When I do happen upon someone, the reaction is all too common: Embarrassment, not knowing where to look, a hesitant step betraying an overwhelming desire to walk in the opposite direction. If I am somehow spotted, a spectre taken shape, I must be avoided at all costs, head down, or turned. If there is enough time, a road can be crossed. I know that if I was to try to make contact there would be a look of terror, or great pity. One or two forget - a big smile and vigorous wave from a car, or headlights flashed as I drive by - and I know that these will go on to reassure themselves that their merciful and loving God will overlook their momentary forgetfulness.

Would you believe it but the first people we bump in to after my expulsion is the family of my friend who was my best man at our wedding. We are shopping in a neighbouring town, and suddenly there they are. In these situations there is an unspoken protocol to be observed: Before approaching a Watchtower widow one must assess the situation from a safe distance. Is the widow carrying the burden of her dead husband? When it is determined that a reasonable moment has arisen, approach with caution. The conversation is low, the group huddled. The concern will be that reserved for the lost and lonely, the bereaved. "So sorry for your loss, we were shocked to hear...How are you coping? Is everything all right?" I drift around just beyond the periphery. No looks are needed. They know where I am and will sense whether I am straying too close. I turn my back for an instant, and they are gone. A little later we surprise the wife. My presence gives her a cold chill down her back. She grimaces at Kate and hurries off. They will have to leave the shop. They might even abandon the town.

Soon after my demise I bid a heartfelt farewell to my close working companion of twelve years. Even though he has no real qualms about continuing to work with me he cannot risk the disapproval of his fellow elders, and the possibility of upsetting members of his congregation. Now that I am a corpse, I must not be touched. If any of the living lay their hands on me too often they run the risk of losing their own lives. Although the organisation teaches that Israelite Law was nailed to the cross along with the Christ, in reality it is still very much alive and kicking. Apostasy is the worst sort of disease, most contagious. Even the qualified men are warned against any close contact. Each year the elders are encouraged to visit disfellowshipped people in the territory, and apostates are not included on this list.

Lapsed Witnesses are also considered to be at risk from contamination. Elders feel duty bound to act as inter-congregational informants, and local bodies of elders have been known to be particularly (un)scrupulous in dealing with deliberate absentees. On one occasion I return to the Kingdom Hall to attend a funeral. A companion of mine is there. He has not been active in the religion for a while, but still we must avoid acknowledging one another.

That funeral is a strange and sad affair. Right there on their home territory, passing among these people - men, women, and children I have known for twenty years - who must now act as if I do not exist. Eye contact is conspicuously avoided. Eye contact could betray true feelings - compassion, friendship, a yearning to smile, greet, or embrace. I can't even get the attention of the one sitting behind me in order to borrow a songbook, so I just remove it like a poltergeist.

I sing like an angel. They might not be able to see me, or talk to me, but they will be able to hear me - a voice from the afterlife. For one or two, it is simply too much. They can not bear to ignore me. A light touch on the arm, a whispered, "Lovely to see you..." Perhaps there is hope for some.

What is very sad is knowing that natural affection is being suppressed. Occasionally around town I catch a member of the congregation suddenly seeing me. At first there is an instinctive look of recognition and a smile, but almost immediately this is followed by a set expression and a bowed, defiant head, as they remember the way I should be treated now that I have entered a disfellowshipped state.

Even sadder is the subtle instructing of children in the ways of hatred. To see young boys and girls casting shy glances, but knowing that they have been primed - "We don't talk to so-and-so any more" - and they meekly go along with it. This despite the fact that children are not strictly bound by congregation law and are free to interact with the expelled should they choose to. But the grown-ups aren't so keen on them exercising this freedom. They get uneasy and hurry them along. Being so young, children can't really understand why someone should be ignored and avoided, but this is simply one of those facts of life they will have to come to terms with, until the spirit fades from their vision too.

Sometimes I happen upon Kate quietly weeping, the bathroom door locked, stifled sobs coming from within. Her grief is understandable. By default, the widowed wife is subjected to the same isolation as the deceased husband. Her house has become a mausoleum. It is too risky to visit. The path leading to our house rounds a blind corner, the front door part of a glass conservatory, and there is every possibility I might be sitting right there. Visitors could easily be caught off guard - a faltering step, a self-conscious laugh, stiff formalism, a visit cut short. Few enter beyond the thresh-hold. Most conversations are made hurriedly at the door accompanied by cautious glances over shoulders. Telephone conversations are quickly reduced to formal passing on of information. All social niceties are dispensed with.

The decision to expel me has stripped our marriage of a potentially valuable avenue of conversation. The extensive Talmudic notes on the subject of excommunication - those oral laws pencilled in to the margin that are not specifically stated in the scriptures, but become just as binding - state that no spiritual matters may be discussed with a disfellowshipped partner. By extension this would include philosophy, psychology, politics, and any other subject which might have a tendency to slip in to the spiritual. The laws of the Society hang like a shadow over our relationship rendering it monochromatic. Of course the marriage suffers as a result. It can no longer be a full and healthy relationship. We now move in two completely separate circles.

Once Kate said, "Talk to me about it. Maybe we'll come with you..." But we both know these are just words of desperation. Conversations like this are rarely successful. Ultimately, an overwhelming realisation must well up irresistibly from within, and it would take nothing short of a miracle for this to happen to Kate. Born and raised as one of Jehovah's Witnesses, an extravert who needs the love and approval of others, the only people she knows are Jehovah's Witnesses. As well as the huge embarrassment it would be to admit the religion could be wrong, there is too big a risk of losing ones friends and family. These can appear to be insurmountable barriers to overcome in one's own strength alone. It can only be accomplished with a complete over-turning of one's self-image, and that is not a road that many are prepared to go down.

For those who are ready to venture down that road, it is true that there are sacrifices to be made, and wandering this ghostworld of the excommunicated can certainly be a sad and surreal experience at times. However, if one is to live with any sort of love, integrity, and freedom from contradiction, it is a sacrifice well worth making.

Predestination, or is life just a bunch of stuff that happened?

2012-09-20T07:38:00.004+01:00

Is there a bullet with your name on it? Does everything happen "for a reason"? Perhaps, like Jung and Oogway, you say, "I don't believe in coincidence," and, "There are no accidents." Are you a "Que, sera, sera," kind of person? All of these have one thing in common - they are all attempts to make some kind of sense out of life. And there's no harm in trying to make some kind of sense out of life.

All of these statements could be included under the definition of "Predestination". Alternatively, we might call it fate, or synchronicity. Often it is assessed from one point in time, looking back - so we could also describe it as history written in hindsight.

The further back we go, the trickier it becomes. The Israelites, for example, were obsessed with predestination. They were experts in looking back from certain vantage points and plotting the events where God had intervened, even if these events were imaginary. The problem with this activity is that it runs the risk of crossing over into fabrication and falsehood.

Calling it "faith" does not justify the case that very few of their interpretations could be proved, so if in reality those events had not taken place, to say that they had was...well...a lie. And when one develops a religious ideology based on mythology passed off as incontrovertible "truth", firm measures will not be far behind. The lie must be protected at all costs, hence the need for the death penalty, or at least expulsion from the synagogue. The Pharisees practised shunning because they were hypocrites, hiding who they were. They had not learned the meaning of the expression, "I want mercy and not sacrifice."

Christianity developed from Judaism and naturally they carried the torch for synchronicity and predestination. Several times the gospels refer to Jesus avoiding the heavy hand of the mob because, "His hour had not yet come." (John 8:20) Paul was not shy in using the word "foreordained" and he even saw his own life-course as somehow being planned from his conception onwards. He had to make sense of living life for three decades as a Pharisee before his sudden conversion to Christianity, which was supposed to be the very antithesis of a pharisaical life. To the Galatians, he wrote, "God...set me apart from my mother’s womb and called me by his grace."

As far as my own life is concerned, I couldn't comment on whether there is anything which could be considered predestined, or synchronous. You be the judge...

Ours was a predominantly Catholic family. My mother had abandoned her Church of Scotland upbringing - much to her own father's dismay - in order to marry my father. I am the third of three boys. My father was a diplomat and his line of work meant being overseas for several years at a stretch. Consequently, there could be no better education for us than to be sent to Catholic boarding school. Age-wise, I am far enough behind the others so that when it was my turn to be sent to school I spent most of my years there alone. I have a distinct memory of being taken to Carlekemp by my parents, and watching as the car disappeared down the drive, leaving me on my own for the first time...

Actually, I was not entirely alone. That initial year was spent with my middle brother - me in first form, he in fifth - but anyone who has ever been to boarding school - probably any school - knows that this is a world apart.

Carlekemp closed down a year before I would be moved in to fifth form, and instead we headed up to Fort Augustus Abbey School a year early. Middle brother chose to leave Fort Augustus from fifth form at the same time my oldest brother left the sixth. Both Carlekemp - a primary school, of sorts - and Fort Augustus Abbey School - an upper school - were monastery-type schools run by Benedictine monks.

I missed my mum terribly, and hated my father. I felt like he had written me off. When I failed my O-Grades the first time around at the age of 16 and had to repeat fourth form it seemed like my dad gave up on me. I was a several-thousand-pounds-a-year sink-hole. He couldn't have cared less what I did with my life.

Towards the end of my time at school I began to ask questions about God. Why did he allow suffering? What was the point of life? I had a healthy respect for the Bible but I knew nothing about it. The only one I had was a miniature Bible on a key-ring which I bought on a school trip to Holy Island. No doubt I was panicking about having to leave the relative security of school and being released in to the world.

When I left school in 1983 I didn't know what to do with my life. I left it right to the last moment before opting just to copy my eldest brother and go in for Catering and Hotel Management. I scraped in to Robert Gordon's Institute of Technology in Aberdeen and found myself some digs on the outskirts of town. I was there for less than a week. I wrote some disparaging things about the landlord in a private letter. He read it, and threw me out. However, it turned out to be an eviction in my favour because the new place I found was in the centre of the city.

For the Easter holiday I went down to Rainham where the family kept its permanent home. At the end of the 70s we had moved house, and I had made friends with a boy named Richard who lived opposite. I spent a great deal time with him whenever our family was staying in Rainham. For much of that holiday we talked about God. It turned out his mother was one of Jehovah's Witnesses, and he was beginning to take an interest. His answer to why God allows suffering was appealing to me. He talked about the earth being transformed into a paradise, that we were nearing the end of this present system of things - "Five, ten years at most." He proved what he could by referring to scriptures in my tiny Bible-on-a-key-ring. At the end of the holiday, I headed off back to Aberdeen with a thrill in my heart. I looked up the Kingdom Hall - it was a stone's throw from the new digs I had found.

I started studying the bible with a young couple, and liked what I heard, but it only lasted four weeks before I had to go and work in a hotel as part of the course practical. I failed the first year of college and was thrown off the course, but by then I had decided that I wanted to be one of Jehovah's Witnesses and I returned to Rainham, found work in a shop, and carried on my studying. I was baptised on July 26, 1985, much to the resigned consternation of my parents.

In 1989 I moved up to Sudbury in Suffolk. My girlfriend at the time knew someone who knew someone who knew a couple living over the Kingdom Hall. They were expecting their first child and were about to move out. I rang the elders and they agreed that I could move into the flat. There was an older couple living in the flat next door. My girlfriend didn't want to come with me.

In the same month as moving to Sudbury, I went on a week's driving holiday to Scotland with Richard. While visiting Aberdeen the young couple who had first taught me the ways of the Witnesses informed me that two of the elders from their congregation had recently moved down to Ipswich to a neighbouring congregation. I got in touch with them, and they invited me over so that I could meet people in Ipswich. Through my new friends in Ipswich group I met Katherine Smith, and we got married in 1991. (One of my brothers went out with a Kathryn Smith, but that's a different spelling.)

In 1993 I was appointed an elder. That same year, my mother died.

The week in Scotland with Richard several years earlier had just about done us for the next twenty years. We barely saw each other after that. A few years after he departed from my life, however, I was introduced to another Richard - we'll call him Richard II. We shared a geeky interest in Star Trek, among other things, and we generally hit it off.

My father passed away in 2000. Both parents being dead, and having to sort out the family estate with my brothers, lead to a fair amount of introspection. Being made an orphan can do that. Katherine had been watching Oprah and told me about the tell-it-like-it-is psychologist, Dr Phil McGraw. Through his writings I learned the term "the authentic self". What he said woke me up to the fact that my life was a mess, and had been for a long time. I started trying to sort out my state of mind, and I began to feel a lot better for it. The idea that our lives are inauthentic made a great deal of sense to me. We live by scripts that have developed throughout our lives, and what we need to do is go back and see certain events in our lives for what they really were.

I was so enthusiastic about this new discovery that I thought I could employ some of the techniques in my ministry as an elder, but I came unstuck when I wrote a private letter to a member of the congregation making some suggestions that might improve her outlook. I included a set of questions gleaned from one of the books I had been reading. She passed these questions on to one of my fellow elders, and I soon found I was having to explain myself. It was felt that I had overstepped my bounds.

Richard II would say that he encouraged me to stand my ground, but I didn't need much encouraging. Soon I was before the whole body of elders, and they took the decision to dismiss me as an elder. I appealed the decision and the Special Committee that was set up to review my case was chaired by my best man's father. They upheld the decision. Once again, a private letter had got me evicted.

Around about this time, in an article published in the Watchtower Society's Awake! magazine, I came across a reference to Feeling Good, a book by Dr David Burns. The article was discussing negative thinking and it listed several distorted thinking methods from Feeling Good. That book helped me through the disappointment of being deleted as an elder. It was a necessary step in helping me reassess my motives. However, Burns encourages eliminating "should" and its derivatives from your mental vocabulary. This is a suggestion that jars when the Society's literature is replete with "should" statements. Also, I couldn't help noticing in the original article mentioning Feeling Good, that this particular negative thinking trait was conspicuously absent.

Also at this time I came across the works of child therapist Haim Ginott. I must have been loitering carelessly by the "Parenting" section in the local library. A random book plucked off the shelf at the library was going to result in a life-changing experience. The book was by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish. Essentially channelling the parenting ideologies of Haim Ginott, Faber & Mazlish make successful parenting seem eminently achievable. A year later our first daughter was born, in August 2004.

Along with children comes the inevitable question of school. Katherine had been averse to home-schooling, but after reading John Holt she changed her view. Of course, Holt does not advocate schooling at home. It is more akin to trusting that children are willing learners and that they will absorb what they are interested in. To my mind, Holt's relaxed philosophy, that no pro-active teaching is required as children are essentially self-taught, clashed decisively with the indoctrination practised by Jehovah's Witnesses. I know which one made more sense to me. Little did I know that it was another nail in the coffin.

Ignoring the red flags that had begun to wave, I carried on trying to bend my thinking to conform with the organisation's. By now I was reading Dorothy Rowe. Her suggestion that we ought to be able to find a "therapist" among our nearest and dearest harmonised with my own opinion. She included the view that ministers could work in the same capacity. Despite "elders are not therapists" being the mantra among the hierarchy of Jehovah's Witnesses, I felt that with a little adjustment I could carefully employ some of the tools I had developed, and before long I was reappointed to serve as an elder. It was 2007. Our second daughter was born that same year...December 21st.

After little more than a year I began to realise that I had changed too much to serve any more. Trying to shepherd members of the congregation, I soon found myself feeling uncomfortable. My spiritual views were changing and developing, and I was having to juggle with words to feel at ease with some of the topics I was given to talk about. After I received a phone call from an elder in a neighbouring congregation questioning certain aspects of a public discourse I had given as being too worldly, and being more concerned with methods of psychology, I decided to step down as an elder. From then on, I began to take less of an active role in the congregation.

Soon after this, my old neighbour from over the Kingdom Hall put an acquaintance of hers in touch with me. Apparently he was having some doubts about his beliefs. We agreed to meet for coffee. He was having more than doubts, he was on the verge of quitting. He encouraged me to read a couple of books by Raymond Franz. From very early on as one of Jehovah's Witnesses I had been familiarised [sic] with this name. Once a member of the Governing Body, now ex-JW and Society whistle-blower, Raymond Franz was the organisation's very own Emmanuel Goldstein. I resisted and resolutely toed the party line. After several meetings for coffee and a few weeks of e-mail correspondence I suggested that it would be best if we did not meet any more. We kept in touch via e-mail, though, and he gently refuted my argument that Franz must be a bitter old curmudgeon by simply saying that he had never got that impression from his writings.

So, one evening curiosity got the better of me and I searched for Raymond Franz on the internet. I came across four chapters from his book Crisis of Conscience and decided to download these and read through them. They were the four chapters in which he gives the account of his own dismissal from the governing body, subsequent deletion as an elder, and eventual eviction from the organisation. His experience spoke to my heart and I knew that the observations he made were similar to my own. I purchased both of his books and realised that my house of faith was built upon a foundation of sand. Particularly persuasive were his demonstrations that the Society has not always been honest about its own history. As he said, "I now began to realize how large a measure of what I had based my entire adult life course on was just that, a myth — persistent, persuasive and unrealistic."

Through Raymond Franz I discovered two new authors. One was M. Scott Peck and his book A Road Less Travelled. Peck talks about serendipity - chance, good fortune, happy coincidence - and he ties this in with what he calls the miracle of God's grace. Grace is an elementary notion now somewhat alien to us. Basically it is love, mercy, kindness which does not expect anything in return. According to Peck, opportunities presented to us which lead to a self-discovery, and the freedom and joy which results, can be put down to nothing else but the all-embracing presence of grace.

The other author was James D Smart. I purchased a book with an intriguing title and this piqued my interest enough to purchase his dissertation of the book of Romans, "Doorway to a New Age". In there he references the existential theologians who describe the sinful man as the "inauthentic self". I felt as if two tunnels being dug from different ends had somehow met in the middle and broken through.

By this time I had stopped all activities with Jehovah's Witnesses. I had no desire to shake up anybody else's faith, and so I was not viewed as a threat, and the local elders decided to leave me to my own devices for the time being.

Katherine once tearfully said that she had been asking God for some kind of sign. It has not dawned on her that she was instrumental in my departure from the organisation. She has introduced me to several writers that have had such a dramatic effect on my life. My coffee-shop friend and his wife are the same age as Katherine and me. They have two little daughters about the same age as our two. These are not the signs she was looking for.

It was also Katherine that questioned me about being pro-active. Discussion with Richard II sometimes covered the same ground. He might even say that it was he who encouraged me not to remain silent. I decided to put my spiritual and theological views down in writing and publish them online. I just opened up a blog and put my thoughts out there. I went public in August 2011.

Mid-September 2011, barely four weeks later, it was discovered. I have no idea how. Only a week earlier I had spoken to my oldest brother and talked about my journey. One week later, Richard II told me that he'd had a phone call from my elders. They have discovered my website. Thankfully he knew nothing about it.

(Just by way of a curious diversion: The very next day, I cleaned windows for a Mr Smith. We talked about religion. It seems he too had been on something of a spiritual journey. His wife had recently been dismissed as an elder in their church. His outlook has led him to question certain things. The way he was talking sounded very familiar. How would he describe his position now? "I don't like labels," he said, "but the closest you could get would be called 'progressive' Christianity." I had only been on their forum that weekend after reading Spong and his view of the Bible which seemed sympathetic to mine. "May I suggest an author," he said, and pulled out some books. The blurb appealed immediately, and I pointed this out. It referred to Jesus as a "religious revolutionary". I agreed and explained that I didn't think he was the Christ, that this was an Israelite view, but that he saw something others couldn't see. Mr Smith told me that this is the same conclusion that this author has reached. The author's name is Borg. None of this seems to be particularly relevant to my situation - both of these leads were dead ends - but it is interesting nonetheless.)

The elders decided not to act on the discovery of my website. Everything went quiet and another few months went by. Then in February of this year I got a phone call. Another elder: "We know about your website. Could we meet for a chat?" The passing of a few months had crystallised my resolve. Had they asked to meet with me several months ago I would probably have declined. Now I felt ready to defend my position.

I met with two elders. The discussion was frank and friendly. In the process I asked why they have left it until now to talk to me. "We've only just found out about it." What this meant was, they had only just found out about it. The original group of elders had obviously chosen to keep it to themselves, but now it had come to the attention of a wider group. It was plain from my answers that I was not interested in altering my position. Several weeks later I was called to appear before a judicial committee - three elders chosen by the body of elders to judge my current position and decide whether I was guilty of a sin which required punitive action. The charge was "apostasy" - the refusal to accept the doctrines of the religion as truth. It was not a long meeting. They decided I must be expelled from the congregation. Such a decision would mean that no one in the organisation is allowed to associate with me. All associations must be curtailed - including family. The announcement was made to the congregation on April 4, 2012. The next day they celebrated the death of Jesus.

One Richard helped me in to the organisation, another Richard helped me out. And while the second Richard can no longer associate with me in view of my disfellowshipped state, I have since discovered that the first Richard has himself faded from the organisation and he is now back in my life again.

I might have been thrown out of an organisation I had devoted half of my life to, but on the other hand, I had made a much greater discovery: I had found my authentic self.

Like Paul, I am left to fill in the blanks myself. I don't know the story behind my arrival into this world. Coming four years behind the middle child, was I perhaps a surprise? Unwanted? Was a mental adjustment needed by my parents, an adjustment my father wasn't fully able to make? Had they already decided to send us to boarding school, or had the arrival of one more child sealed the deal? I don't know. These are questions I may never know the answer to, but considering them helps to heal the rift I felt between me and my father.

The story of Adam and Eve is the story of every person. We gasp breath in to our lungs when we are born, becoming a living soul, beholden to our parents for everything. At some early point we strike out for independence, bringing us in to conflict with them, like Eve eating from the tree she was told not to touch. An event introduces us starkly to our vulnerability. Shame divides us off from ourselves. Gerhard Von Rad says of shame, "it always has to be seen as the signal of the loss of an inner unity." We desire to decide for ourselves what is good and bad and not have this decided for us. It might be as seemingly insignificant as using mum's make-up when she has specifically told you not to. The Genesis account ties being naked in with shame.

When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”

He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”

And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”

(Genesis 3:6-11)

The Israelites had a saying which was eventually woven into the story of Job: "Naked I came out of my mother's belly, and naked shall I return there." Only by identifying our shame and the events and experiences surrounding it can we once more stand naked and unashamed. Doing this will uncover the real you.

So, if there is any predestination, it is this: It all leads back to you. We are pre-programmed to find ourselves. God is referred to as the Alpha and the Omega - the beginning and the end. Every man's life has the potential for being a journey of self-discovery. This capacity is within all of us. We go in through the out door.

Can we plot the points and join the dots that lead to our enlightenment?

If you are reading this, what has brought you here? Retrace the steps back to your own Genesis experience. Don't worry about missed opportunities. Whenever you are circling around the town centre there is always another turning further up the road.

Once your eyes are opened you begin to see the seed scattered everywhere, from Inception ("What's the relationship like with the father?") to Kung Fu Panda ("There is no secret ingredient,") yes, and even in the Bible. You are not selling out just because you can see some wisdom hidden in all the blood and thunder.

But, hey, maybe it is all just meaningless drivel. Perhaps, after all, life is just a bunch of stuff that happened.

Oh, by the way, at one point M. Scott Peck suggests that certain beliefs are formed even when we are unaware of it, in the first few months of life.

Frequently (but not always) the essence of a patient's childhood and hence the essence of his or her world view is captured in the 'earliest memory'. Consequently I will often ask patients, "Tell me the very first thing that you can remember." - The Road Less Travelled (page 204)

It got me thinking about my own situation. Was my first feeling of rejection really that time I was dropped off at Carlekemp and watched my parents disappear down the drive? Then I had a memory of leaving Pakistan when I was very little, no more than two or three. There is a group of people crying in the porch. Among them is the ayah (nanny) I have spent much of my little life being looked after by. I had obviously grown very much attached to her. That was my first memory of disharmony - being taken away from my ayah at a very early age. And then it struck me. I remembered her name. It was Grace.

What is love, anyway?

2012-08-22T19:53:00.001+01:00

What is love anyway?
Does anybody love anybody anyway?

Can you believe it was almost thirty years ago Howard Jones asked that question?

A couple of thousand years ago Paul took a crack at answering it.

Love is long-suffering and kind.
Love is not jealous,
it does not brag,
does not get puffed up,
does not behave indecently,
does not look for its own interests,
does not become provoked.
It does not keep account of the injury.
It does not rejoice over unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth.
It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never fails.
(1 Corinthians 13:4-8)

So, love is a lot of things. To borrow Dr Haim Ginott's analogy, love is too large a concept. It is like a fifty-pound note. Having it might make us feel wealthy, but it's useless in a phone box. It needs to be broken into smaller change to be any use. You'll notice Paul spends a lot of time explaining what love is not. Paul didn't really know what love is. It's like one of those things, "I'm not really sure what love is, but I'll know it when I see it." Except you won't.

One of the best indications of love is this one: "Love your neighbour as yourself." Look at the way men treat each other throughout the world and it should give you a fairly clear indication of something: Men hate themselves.

Love is something we do to ourselves. Masser and Creed had the right idea when they wrote, "Learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all." They were not right, however, when they declared that this was "easy to achieve." It is not. It is very hard to achieve, so hard in fact that few barely attempt it and even fewer achieve it. Whitney sang the words passionately, but still found life impossible to cope with. Paul tried to explain love, but he didn't do love. Paul was all the things he said love was not. There is no shame in this, he was a man like any other man - he was constantly struggling with himself. Worldwide there is the clamour of resounding gongs and clanging cymbals. The world is noisy with the lack of love.

When men do not love themselves the ego comes to the rescue. It rides in like the cavalry. It kicks in the door like a social worker on suicide watch. The ego thinks it's doing you a favour but it's just making things worse. It masquerades as self-esteem. The ego is an idiot. I can say that about the ego without offending anyone because the ego is not the real you. The ego exists because you think you are withering away and fit only for death, and that you deserve it. We do all these things that Paul says love doesn't do to protect ourselves. We get boastful and rude, we make sure to look out for number one and we rise up fiercely in our own defence. We keep score, and we revel in other people's downfall. We behave this way because we are ashamed of something.

This is what we are ashamed of, and the guilt is too much to bear: We hated our parents.

This is "hate" being used as a broad brush stroke. On a spectrum it was occasional or it was permanent. It was the feeling that you wished your parents ill. You wished them away; you wished they weren't there; you wished that they never existed.

I'm talking about the mother and father who gave birth to you. Your birth parents. You hated them. You hated them for not being there when you needed them, and you hated them for always being there when you didn't. You hated them for giving you away, for abandoning you, for smothering you. You hated them for making you feel disgusted with yourself, or that you weren't good enough for them. You hated them for getting angry for no good reason. You hated them for making you feel like they didn't want you around.

If "hate" seems too strong a word for you feel free to water it down, but know that if you do you stand to risk losing hold of the gnawing shame that sits at the centre of your self-loathing. Putting it as plainly as that does not get you off the hook, either. Laughing and waving it away isn't enough. You need to get down and dirty with it. You need to know in what specific ways you hated them and why. Only by doing this can you realise that it is okay to have hated them. You won't disappear, or disintegrate, or fade away if you accept that you hated them. Remembering is a way of letting go. Understanding leads irresistibly to forgiveness. It accepts that the hatred was mutual at times.

Yes, there are times when parents hate their children. They hate them for keeping them up at nights. They hate them for being a drain on their finances. They hate them because they have the responsibility of keeping them alive when children are so determined to die: They run out into the road; they refuse to take the remedy to make them better when they are ill; they will not eat the food that is put in front of them, or drink enough water. Parents handle all these inconveniences badly because they have not yet learned how to deal successfully with their own shame - that they in turn hated their own parents.

Once we understand all this the shame and guilt dissipate. Now Paul's definition of love begins to make sense. Love is a reflection of how I perceive life impacts on me. Nothing in life can diminish me.

I can be patient and kind without any fear of reproach. I have nothing to be jealous about because somebody else's much does not have any bearing on my little. I have no need to be boastful as if that is a way to build myself up. I don't need to be arrogant or rude. I don't need to insist on my own way as if doing things any other way makes me any less of a person. Irritation and resentment only exist if I believe that I am in danger in any way - and, I'm not. Other people's wrong does not make me any better or worse. I can bear all things because I respect myself. I can believe all things because I live without the anxiety of my expectations being dashed. Trust and you make someone trustworthy. The fulfilment or not of anything I believe bears no relation to what I think of myself as a person.

This complete acceptance of myself frees me from the burden of the ego with its sneering face and hobnailed boots. Hating your parents and feeling guilty for it. Being glad to be alive but resenting the fact that you somehow had to feel grateful when life was such a struggle - a balancing act between relying so completely on your parents and wanting to strike out on your own. The eternal, "I didn't ask to be born!" A cry that echoes all the way back through time, generation after generation. And always the gnawing shame. This is part of what the writer was trying to address in chapters 2 and 3 of Genesis. Adam blames God for his woes, but this only brings us full circle because if "God is love," then Adam is ultimately blaming himself.

And so it follows that if "God is love" then God, too, is something we do to ourselves. Love yourself, and loving others will irresistibly follow.

What awakens the "third eye"?

2012-08-15T20:57:00.001+01:00

Man's inner life has captured people's interest for thousands of years. Whole religions and philosophies have been built up around this quest to find true meaning in life. In his eager search for the truth man quite literally delved inwards, carving up the human body to find answers to this strange enigma called man.

Eastern cultures reference what is called the "third eye". The Egyptians had the "eye of Horus", a symbol that bears a striking resemblance to the hypothalamus. It doesn't take much of a leap to imagine that even the ancient Egyptians could appreciate that a blow to the head affected one's eyesight, so there must be something in there that connects with vision. Couple this with man's insatiable need to know how things work (the inner mechanics), and pretty soon someone's head is being sliced in two, and the brain is being peeled apart like a piece of fresh fruit.

It gives me a curious joie de vivre to imagine Jesus borrowing this mythology when he said, "The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of light." It was as if he was carrying on the great Israelite tradition of pilfering beliefs from the Egyptians. The ten plagues stamp disdainfully all over several Egyptian gods; the story of Moses bears remarkable similarity to an Egyptian prophecy; they had probably nicked the ark of the Covenant (at the very least the idea). It was as if Jesus was saying, "Look, if you're going to steal from them, at least take something which might have a grain of truth to it."

The third eye - aka, the inner eye - is the eye that can see what is going on below, that understands that there is more to life than what is taking place on the surface. It speaks to the inner person. It isn't just that - it understands that everything that takes place in public can be described as an illusion because it all springs from man's ego, man's need to defend himself, to conquer, to prove that he is better. All these things arise from a false concept of self. They are built upon lies we tell ourselves, gathered from the wrong interpretation we have put on events that have taken place in our lives from birth onwards. Because they have come from birth onwards means that they are woven into our subconscious (or, the unconscious). With every man's ego vying against one another it has created this world as we know it. And, it's a mess.

I like this approach to "keep it simple" or singular. As Gandhi said, “You must first be the change you want to see in this world”. There is no need to get bogged down in the volumes of terminologies that are found in eastern philosophies. Once we begin to sort ourselves out a large percentage of these things take care of themselves. Terminologies are of interest in that they show how many different cultures have drawn similar conclusions about the nature of man. But they can also complicate matters. Vast arrays of names can serve to alienate people. I tend to agree with Dr Susan Blackmore when she says, "I fear that the memes of Buddhism can be as pernicious as those of any religion." Suffice to say that this experience can happen to anyone regardless of their persuasion. It is non-denominational, and doesn't care for culture or background.

The question is, What awakens this inner eye, this "secret person of the heart"?

Nobody knows. It is part of the mystery. It happens to very few people. Another quote attributed to Jesus alludes to this mystery:

And he said, "The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed upon the ground, and should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should sprout and grow, he knows not how. The earth produces of itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. But when the grain is ripe, at once he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come."
(Mark 4:26-29)

Paul was convinced that from childbirth he was destined to have a spiritual awakening. At Galatians 1:15 he says, "But even before I was born, God chose me and called me by his marvellous grace." This might be just because Paul was an extravert, and the possibility that he might have wasted half his life didn't sit at all comfortably with him; it might also be that Paul's was not really a spiritual awakening at all, but merely a shift from one form of Judaism to another. However, there could very well be some truth to his claim. Events and experiences in our formative years may well put us in a more favourable position to be receptive to the call of the inner life.

Who knows what triggers it, but when it is triggered there is something from within that begins to operate. The open eye will begin to see and read things that begin to make sense, and serve to accelerate the awakening process. Although the "all-seeing eye" has been co-opted by the State - and various other seemingly nefarious institutes - its mythology is also connected to the inner eye. Once this inner person is awakened all things begin to be clear.

Okay, so why? Why does it happen with some but not with others? Who knows, maybe there is no reason. Maybe it's the start of something big. It's not really necessary to know. It is enough to know that it is a massive relief to see things as they really are. It is enough to finally understand ourselves, what makes us tick, and the freedom that comes with throwing off the ego. That's not to say that it doesn't come tinged with a measure of melancholy. A sense of not being part of this world, of seeing it from the outside. There is a sense of alone-ness. There is not a fear of the future or an anxiety of not knowing the way out, it is more a vague melancholia attached to a yearning that things can be better. This is coupled with an optimism based on the belief/feeling that things can't continue this way indefinitely. It is unsustainable. Nature will find a way of rectifying this aberration. Life survives - we will survive and thrive, not through man's efforts, but just "because..." Nature is not at war with itself. This is man's interpretation in order to justify his own intense efforts to dominate over everything that stands in his way. Of course, these could be hindrances for people in wanting to awaken their "inner eye."

Another hindrance is that the mind has been hijacked by both science and the medical profession, and the spiritual has been engulfed by the religious and the mystical. So, when it comes to the inner person, or our spiritual need, one is either looked upon as mentally ill, or a New Age weirdo. The truth is neither of those things, nor anything else remotely connected.

However, just because it is sheer (bad?) luck that one is jolted awake, does not mean that we can't do things that might put us in a better position: Review your life; let go of all rock-solid beliefs you hold on to - let them all go. Pray/meditate - call it what you will - just call it sitting quietly without distraction.

The first, the life review, is most essential. The ego is man fleeing from himself. You know this is true because whenever a man is asked to recall his infancy, he automatically shuts down. Autopilot takes over. The police come out, it's still a crime scene, "Move along, please. Nothing to see here." It is fight or flight. He springs to the defence of his parents because he cannot conceive of anything else but their undying love - they take on the appearance of fantasy figures in a fairytale - or he blocks any further attempt to find out more. It is a Pandora’s box, a can of worms, a coffin full of bones. But here's the thing: If we have not yet done this, if we have not reviewed our life, past events and our interpretation of them, if we have not uncovered the source of our shame - that event which has uncoupled something deep within us, squeezing the inner eye tight shut because it feels so much safer in the dark - then we are still living life with our ego in the driver' seat.

This town ain't big enough for the both of us

2012-08-10T14:55:00.001+01:00

By iron, iron itself is sharpened. So one man sharpens the face of another. (Proverbs 27:17)

The beauty of this essay-writing experience is that it is a work in progress. Thoughts in motion. It can be nothing else. I find myself recording everything as realisation and understanding unfold for me. It is often a stream of consciousness methodology, which is why the essays can occasionally be a mite disjointed.

Today's essay on ego felt like a leap forward, and it was very helpful for me. I published it in the wee small hours, as dawn was breaking, and by mid-morning I had changed my mind about something. Two weeks ago Empathy Is The Skeleton Key, suggested an eventual amalgamation of the inauthentic and authentic self. Today, equating the ego with the inauthentic self enabled me to realise something: The inauthentic must die. There is no room for the ego. There is no need for it. We can live exclusively by means of love. It is man's instinct. There is no need for man to compile rules and laws, or to decide what constitutes good and evil, or right and wrong. Love knows instinctively what to do, and how to act.

Sparks, you see, they can start a fire. I am very much liking Josh's theory about Adam and Eve picturing the conscious and the subconscious. As I was turning this over in my mind, I kept getting stuck on why the ego, represented as the serpent wrapped round the tree of the knowledge of good and bad, should incept mankind through Eve, the subconscious. At last I reminded myself that the writer of Genesis chapters 2 and 3 was not recounting history, he was describing a process.

The ego/inauthentic self is established unconsciously. That is why we need to dig down and reanalyze, in order to uncover how it asserted itself in our lives. It becomes locked in during our formative years, programmed in through our upbringing, established primarily through our relationship with out parents. It becomes lodged in our subconscious/unconscious, manifests itself through our conscious lives, and we must take the journey inwards in order to dislodge it.

"That is why a man will leave his father and his mother, and he must stick to his wife and they must become one flesh." Conscious and unconscious is the amalgamation, and there is no room in such a relationship for the ego.

So, I find myself returning once more to the notion of a death of the inauthentic, so that the authentic can live. (Well, until this evening, that is...)

Everybody's Got One

2012-08-10T07:56:00.002+01:00

An expression I have often used throughout these essays is "the inauthentic self". There is probably a better, more familiar term that could be used: Ego.

The Rise of Ego
"Ego" is a word which may be more readily understood. Without labouring over the various definitions that have been discussed and debated - the Freudian id/ego/super-ego, or the spiritual ego - let's just start by saying it is derived from the Latin, meaning "I" or "Me". We instinctively know what the ego is. In many ways it can be equated with pride. Someone who is headstrong or opinionated might be described as being egotistical, but this would be to limit the scope of the ego. It is our views and opinions - our world-view. We bristle when these are attacked or questioned. Bricks in our protective wall are glued together by our various fears, foibles, compulsions and inhibitions. We get defensive and angry when we feel threatened - even if this is quiet passive aggression when perceived foes get too close. Beliefs we hold on to and are afraid to let go of because we think these things define us, they make us who we really are, and if we were to lose them we would be losing ourselves. The ego cries out for justice, it demands retribution. It seeks first place, desires to conquer, doesn't mind stepping on others to get what it wants. It is well illustrated by the occasion in Genesis chapter 11 when the people said, “Come on! Let us build ourselves a city and also a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a celebrated name for ourselves." It is man's ego that has elevated himself at the expense of the majority. It is the bruised egos of the majority that have caused them to push back and seek retribution through crime and violence, or consume themselves by any other means of survival - be it drugs, or alcohol, or sexual promiscuity.

The mistake is in thinking that the ego is the real you. It is compiled of everything that makes up you. It is what defines us. The clue we should heed is that when any of these abstractions are attacked, we feel hurt, stung, wounded. We feel like our world is collapsing. That is the ego, and such a reaction is evidence that it is not the real you - it is the inauthentic self. It is the self we think we must be in order to survive this existence. It is tender and fragile. It is about having certain expectations and going all out to have these expectations met. Expectations are a world-view, an attitude toward life. They are about "should", and "ought to" and "must" and when these are unfulfilled we feel our world crumbling. When this happens it manifests itself as various forms of depression. This, again, is ego.

There is one Bible translation that has taken Proverbs 13:12 and rendered it this way: "Expectation postponed is making the heart sick, but the thing desired is a tree of life when it does come." Expectations are not desires. Desires are what we wish for, what we would like to see. Desires lay below our expectations. We discover them by digging below expectations and asking what we really want. Mention of the tree of life takes us back to the garden of Eden. In the garden there was also the tree of the knowledge of good and bad. The knowledge of good and bad is related to the ego. Man's eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and bad pictures his determination to decide what is right and wrong. In reality, there is no justice. There is no right and wrong. The legal system is a short-cut. It by-passes the need for love. It doesn't need to ask why someone acted the way they did. Justice does not care. Lady Justice wears a blind-fold. Right and wrong, good and bad, these things only create expectations. These are elements of ego. Laws and legalities, right and wrong, have put mankind outside the paradise, away from the tree of life. Man is driven by ego, and not by love.

The Fall of Ego
Here's fun: When I was at school there was a thing that the boys used to do. If anyone had something they didn't want, they would shout out, "Quiz?" and the first one to respond, "Eggo!" could have what was on offer. I'm sure in ancient Rome children would use the proper call and response, "Qui?" (Who?) and "Ego!" (Me), but by the time it had reached the halls of boarding schools it had been pulverised into "Quiz? Eggo!" However, this schoolboy's pronunciation of "ego" can be useful for our discussion.

The ego is our shell - our protective wall. We don't want it coming under attack, we don't want it cracked. We don't want to come out of our shell. We want to stay inside. We prefer the security of the darkness. But, the egg is not the bird. The egg is fine for a while as an incubation process, but eventually the bird must leave it behind. The ego being comprised of beliefs that we passionately defend, that we cling on to, that we are afraid to let go of reminds us that the solution lies in forgiveness. Primarily that we have not forgiven ourselves. Forgiveness is a happy by-product of understanding, primarily a by-product of understanding ourselves. You are in a unique position. You can deconstruct the ego from the inside out. You have lived your life. You can go back a re-examine your life, and see what experiences and events helped build the wall.

It is not easy, it takes courage. But, remember, you are not a chicken. The safety of a shell is an illusion, it is a prison. The irony is that once we break out of the protective shell, we will be more free than we have ever been. And (just to see if we can't exhaust the bird/egg analogy) once it breaks out of its shell, some birds eat the shell. Bird and shell become one. So it is with the ego (the inauthentic) and the authentic self. The real must consume the ego. They must become one. (Bird-brained idea - ed. See addendum)

Once we alter the terminology and swap out the "inauthentic self" with the word "ego", everything in the world around us begins to make sense. We begin to see everything as it really is. The light gets brighter and brighter. It is man's ego that has driven him to destruction. It is because of his ego that man has constructed the great edifices of this world: The police force, the legal system, military might, the medical profession, banking, schooling, capitalism, political parties, religious denominations - all forged out of his determination to declare what is right and wrong. He has built the prison walls of this system. Great constructs it will not see challenged, taking power away from the many and putting it into the hands of the few. We are twice enslaved, first by our own ego, and second by the collective ego of mankind. So thoroughly are we enslaved that those two egos become enmeshed until we believe that there can be no safety without a police force, there can be no justice without a legal system, you are not healthy unless approved by the medical profession, and you are not educated unless you are schooled. When any one of these monoliths is attacked, we jump to its defence. The world's collective ego nurtures competition and stokes the fires of fear.

We might not be able to do anything on a world scale, but we can address our own ego. If we do something about the one, it will certainly make it more tolerable to live with the other.

When we have left the confinement of the ego, we are free, we are not tethered to beliefs, we can soar like an eagle. We are naked and openly exposed and invincible because no attack can upset who we fundamentally are. The real you is a perfect fusion of the ego and the real - the inauthentic and the authentic in perfect balance. Combined, it is a formidable force. It is immortal. It is unafraid of uncertainty. It lives peacefully and easily with the realisation that "nothing is the way I think." While all around everything can sink into chaos, we can float effortlessly above.

Addendum
This Town Ain't Big Enough For The Both Of Us

A world already ended on December 21...2007

2012-08-01T16:10:00.005+01:00

The dam burst at 3 am. “Rory, I think my waters broke.” We gathered up all our things in the dead of night, called a neighbour to come to our house, and made a decision we still regret to this day: We left our three-year-old asleep in bed while we drove off to the hospital. Lily was born on December 21, 2007, and the world of our first-born daughter was irreversibly knocked off its axis.

Poppy woke up to an empty house save only for a virtual stranger. I still can’t imagine what sort of a whirlwind was taking place in her impressionable mind. For three years she had been the centre of her own universe. Mummy, Daddy, and me, and the world had been perfect. It had already been infiltrated by a relatively unseen force as Mum’s tummy began to expand, but no amount of advance warning could prepare the poor child for the devastating reality of another small person muscling in and occupying the same space, demanding the attention of her property -- and to have that reality driven home with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer blow by having it preceded by a house devoid of any family members at all . . . well . . . is it any wonder that something decoupled in her psyche.

Five years later, and things have settled into an amicable acceptance. I still wish we had taken Poppy to the hospital with us that morning, but we didn’t, and that’s that. We have talked about it with her. We have re-enacted that morning with dolls and playthings, and re-written (quite literally) the storyline to take her with us, but all of this is merely balm for her soul. Eventually she will have to revisit that pivotal event in her own time, and on her own terms, as part of her own journey to discover her authentic self.

Although I was unaware of it at the time, while Lily was being born I was undergoing my own spiritual rebirth. I know about end-of-the-world predictions, having belonged to an apocalyptic religion for the last quarter of a century. I had joined up the moment I left school. I needed the end of the world to come because I was so petrified of the world around me. Dreams of a paradise about to arrive at any given moment were music to my frightened ears, and I would do anything to secure my place in the new world. What I failed to understand for so many years was, as wonderful a fantasy as a renewed earth was, it wasn’t the answer to my problems. That would have to come from somewhere else -- somewhere I couldn’t have imagined.

Through a series of interconnected coincidences I was led to reflect on my own upbringing. With the help of a photograph of my eight-year-old self I began to look back over events and experiences in my own life. I revisited certain pivotal happenings and questioned how they had moulded my world-view, how they had made me feel about myself and the effect they had on my attitude to those around me. I saw that everything in the present was viewed through the prism of the past.

As I reflected on past events, and reinterpreted those events with a clearer vision, my whole world began to change. Something inside of me began to die. The old personality -- the unreal me, the person I thought I needed to be in order to survive this world -- began to wither away and fade. He was being replaced by the real me -- the authentic me. The better I began to understand myself, the easier it became to forgive myself.

Forgiveness is a happy by-product of understanding. Forgiveness means to let things go, and throw off the burden of resentment and bitterness.

Along with this freedom came freedom from the need to believe in apocalyptic visions. I could no longer subscribe to a way of life that demanded adherence to a body of religious codes. I began to write about my spiritual awakening and was rewarded by being expelled from the church I belonged to. I am dead to them . . . and yet, I am reborn.

Not many of us are real. The real you lies buried under a mountain of guilt, grief, and shame. From birth onwards, life’s experiences have served to suppress the authentic you and allow place for the inauthentic -- a person who has built up a system of beliefs and habits as a way of coping with life’s traumas. It is the person you think you need to be in order to get by in life. It happens to all of us.

We don’t need to go through dramatic or horrific events -- even the smallest adjustment can have a profound effect. We are tossed about and stripped in ways we don’t understand at the time. We imagine we shrug them off and put them behind us, when all we are doing is finding ways to cope.

Until we go back and confront these personal realities we will only ever be living as the person who is coping. The problem you face is that the unreal you is blind. He cannot see. He has buried the real you by digging a hole. Climbing out of the hole is half the battle. Climbing out is recognising the problem. Moving the mountain is doing something about the problem. Looking inwards is not easy, it presents monumental challenges. It means shining a light into the darkest corners of the soul, uncovering things we would prefer to keep hidden. That kind of exertion could kill a man.

But, of course, that is what you want to do. The unreal you needs to die in order for the real you to live. The authentic self does not live in fear or anxiety. The authentic self is able to view the world for what it is without any disturbance to one’s internal harmony; it can clearly see man’s inhumanity to man without one’s vision becoming clouded by the demand for justice, or the need to return evil for evil. However, words like these will not help. It is impossible to convey the difference to life when it is lived as the authentic self. A convincing argument cannot be made -- it has to be experienced. And until it is experienced nothing else will make sense.

One day Poppy is going to have to discover all of this for herself. Her world might have changed on December 21, 2007, but it doesn’t mean that her real self needs to remain buried forever.

Originally published on Activist Post

Incarceration, The Sexual Jungle, and the rape of humanity

2012-07-27T07:06:00.003+01:00

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead

With this quote, Wilbert Rideau closes his treatise on rape in the US prison system. Written in 1979, The Sexual Jungle is a depressing account of man's inhumanity towards man behind bars. In a perverse power struggle hung on the twisted definition of what constitutes "masculinity", the physically powerful dominate over any who they can break. You either fight the system and face the terrible consequences, or you capitulate and become enslaved. This could mean anything from devoting yourself to one man and becoming his "wife", or being treated as a whore and passed around as a sexual slave. "Since the majority of prisoners don't own slaves, their need for sexual outlet creates a large market for potential profit. In an economic sense, a slave is capital stock, property that can be made to produce income, and prison pimps don't hesitate to put their whores to work hustling for profit." Justification for the behaviour is, "He can't protect himself. Hell - I just proved that. He can't make it in here and you know it. As his old man, I'll take care of him. He give me sex, I give him protection. That ain't no bad deal if you look at it right. Hell - it's more to his benefit than mine."

The inclusion of Dostoyevski's quote breaks down the high wall between prison and the outside world. What goes on behind bars is only a more sordid reflection of what takes place in society: The power struggle, and man's continuous domination of man, "to his injury." Rideau's key paragraph, aiming to explain why prisoners resort to the methods they do, is simply a broad explanation for any of man's actions. "Man's greatest pain, whether in life or in prison, is the sense of personal insignificance, of being helpless and of no real value as a person, an individual - a man." So, in order to validate their sense of manhood and individual worth, they channel "all of their frustrated drives into the pursuit of power, finding gratification in the conquest and defeat, the domination and subjugation of each other." These are the self-same frustrated drives that propel humanity in general. Capitalism is a competitive market. It is a fight for survival: Which company is going to get the business? Who is going to get the job? Employees must compete to win positions, and then have their work assessed and re-assessed in order to keep their jobs. Like a reverse parole board, his is not a bid for freedom, but a bid to remain enslaved.

In the prison system this power struggle manifests itself as violent rape of other men, but even then it is not seen as such.

The act of rape...is not sexual and not really regarded as "rape". Both prisoners and personnel generally refer to the act as "turning out", a nonsexual description that reveal the nonsexual ritualistic nature of what is really an act of conquest and emasculation, stripping the male victim of his status as a "man."

So it might be that we think it rather extreme to brand the treatment of humanity is a form of rape - and, yet it is an act of conquest and emasculation. There is no work that feeds the soul, it is all slavery. Factory work, retail, the military, the civil services - all are pressed into serfdom. Even in the fields in which employees believe they are doing some good they are so tied up with bureaucracy and statistical achievements that those who engage in these fields eventually feel the life draining out of them. It is all designed to prop up the system, cogs keeping the vast machine marching along.

Similar to the oppressed life behind bars, those who give themselves over to the system, who work for the system (and are only too willing to offer their credentials unsolicited - "I'm a doctor/teacher/social worker/nurse") find that once they are in that position they can be bought and sold as property. Authorities alter the system and there is nothing these workers can do about it. They must cooperate and enforce the changes whether they agree with them or not. If they do not co-operate they face the threat of losing their job. With people clamouring for work and the atmosphere of competition constructed by the system, there are plenty who are willing to take over. This is achieved by keeping work at a minimum and making it a competitive market.

Those who brush off this analysis as so much paranoia are those who choose to take the blue pill. More than a quarter of a century before the Warchowski brothers penned The Matrix, Ivan Illich had already made the observation that man had been "reinvented as a source of mechanical power."

Prisoners condemned to the galleys were not much use most of the time, since galleys were most of the time in port. Prisoners condemned to the treadmills produced rotary power to which any of the new machines could be hooked. Up to the early nineteenth century men in English prisons actually laboured on the treadmills to make machines work."
Ivan D. Illich, Tools For Conviviality

Why limit the power source to prisoners when the whole of mankind can be pressed in to service?

Workers find themselves turned out on to the streets when multi-million dollar corporations move their factories overseas to lands where labour is cheap. Obscenely, these same corporations go to great lengths to push their expensive products on to the population they have just turned out, thereby pressing their faces into the dirt of their own poverty. They work hard to make people feel worthless for not being able to afford the latest luxury item. They tempt them with "buy now, pay later" deals, and confine them to lifelong servitude as they work to pay off their ever-mounting debts. It is ironic that Apple chooses to have the forbidden fruit as their logo, a reminder of the first humans being turned out of paradise.

The poverty stricken turn to crime, or prostitution - further blurring the line between the free and the incarcerated. Eventually they too will find themselves thrown into prison, banged up for trying to survive a system that screwed them over in the first place. However, to end up in prison is merely a further way to maintain the status quo. Society has no intention of changing the prison system. It serves a purpose just the way it is. Just as the prison administration is content for things to remain the way they are within the prison walls, so the state is content for the prison system to remain. Authorities turn a blind eye. They want things to stay the same because the fear engendered by the prison system serves to keep the people obedient. Man is able to invent rules and laws which the rest of mankind must abide by under threat of reprisals (incarceration). The systematic rape of mankind, being held down and forced to engage in something you have not consented too. Taxes and fines can be extracted from a population who do not want to be processed, who do not want their fingerprints to be taken and their data to be fed into the system and stored. The prison system will kill a man, or break him. In this way it serves to achieve its ultimate goal and turn out the Compliant Citizen, a task that should have been accomplished in the first prison system we are ever introduced to in life - school. It's hard to read The Sexual Jungle and not look at your own children and think, "What kind of a world have I brought them in to?" Yet we send them to school and into the system to be processed. We set up college and university as a goal, and encourage them to carve out a career and become another cog in the whole monstrous machine.

A bullying mentality is learned in school. Older ones can take advantage of the younger. The younger have to take it because their turn will come. Once there was a term for it: Fagging. A small boy could give himself over to an older pupil, and in return for services rendered - shoes polished, errands run around the school, tea-making - he could receive certain advantages. Even if this practice has been abandoned, there is still a servile spirit encouraged, a heavy emphasis on paying one's dues, and to do unto others what was done to oneself.

Natascha Kampusch was kidnapped at the age of ten and held against her will for eight years until she made her escape a few days after her eighteenth birthday. Once free, she found herself the victim of a different form of incarceration. She was not allowed to leave the police station. She was not free to come and go as she pleased. She had to be processed. She could not process herself. She was not allowed to diagnose herself after her years of imprisonment, she had to be diagnosed by state appointed psychologists. The state would argue that this is for the best, that they are offering protection. Wolfgang Priklopil would make the same claim. In his twisted psyche he was looking after Natascha Kampusch when no-one else would. Priklopil often told her that her parents didn't want her and didn't care. The state insinuates the same thing. It is always on hand, watching over. It implies a parent's lack of care, their inability to protect. The State "cares". The National Health Service "cares". Parents? "Meh - not so much." The state has the monopoly on care, they have defined love. It has been decided democratically, and everyone else must comply. One must bend to the will of the nation.

So it is with this system: We must conform or face the consequences. Self-schooling is looked down upon. Self-diagnosis is scoffed at. We find ourselves enslaved to the state and beholden to the professional strata. We are not educated unless we have been through the school system. We are not healthy unless diagnosed by the medical profession. We are not safe unless policed.

One of the evil acts perpetrated by society is to use children as a bargaining tool. Behind the unspoken threat that children will be removed into care if you do not bend to the system, hospitals become houses of incarceration. Should families find themselves entangled in the medical system, parents are not free to leave the hospital on their own recognisance. They must wait to be processed.

Man cannot conceive of changing the system. There is no need to keep the system going the way it is - it is detrimental to humanity. An alternative needs to be found. Nobody needs to starve, and everybody could receive adequate housing. Instead, we would rather have warehouses full of obsolete product than hand it out in the street. Man changes our viewpoint in an instant as it suits him. He declares belief in the survival of mankind as a whole, but he cannot abide the thought of an individual getting something for nothing, without having earned it. So, he has warehouses full of obsolete junk he doesn't know what to do with because they contain metals that will bleed poisons into the earth, water, and atmosphere. He has landfills full of garbage, rivers overflowing with toxic waste, and prisons full of dangerous men. The whole sorry state is irreversible. The answer is to the incarceration problem is to empty the prison cells. Not all men are a menace to society. They rob and steal because the system is set up against them. They need money for food to survive. This is the system man has created.

Religion is not the answer. It is merely another method of dominance. "Do as we say, or bad things will happen to you." This method finds its roots in scripture as later generations of Israelites constructed a scenario to force people into subjugation. They had a system of laws, drawn up by man but claimed to be given by God. They suggested that in the past, under Moses, the people had not done what they were told and bad things happened. Today, government has assumed the position of God. They set the laws and exact punishment on the criminals.

We may choose not to believe in the Jesus story, but what can't be denied is that anyone who speaks out against the state and its systems will face humiliation. Today Jesus would not be executed - not directly - he would be thrown into the prison system and raped to death because there is a twisted concept of what is defined as a "man". What is more brutal, forty strokes less one followed by a crucifixion, or being attacked and raped by five men and then having a hand thrust into your rectum and a bloody mass of haemorrhoids ripped out? In reality, they both amount to the same thing: "Man dominating man to his injury."

We may not have time for the Bible's pronouncement of judgement upon mankind, but we may be interested to know that in the final analysis God rarely has to do anything. When Gideon's three-hundred men blow their horns and yell their battle cry, the men of Midian "set the sword of each one against the other in all the camp." Once the men of Ammon and Moab had united against the sons of Seir, "they helped each one to bring his own fellow to ruin." And in the pronouncement against Gog of the Land of Magog, "Against his own brother the sword of each one will come to be." In today's prison system men have taken this pronouncement and fulfilled it in the most humiliating way. And outside the prison walls men have succeeded in being no less ruthless in the conquest and emasculation of their fellow men.

Imagining a life beyond this one

2012-07-18T18:15:00.000+01:00

There is a scene in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds in which a German officer respectfully refuses to divulge the whereabouts of his fellow soldiers. "Actually, we're all tickled to hear you say that," says Lieutenant Aldo "The Apache" Raine. "Quite frankly, watching Donny beat Nazi's to death is the closest we ever get to going to the movies." He calls into a tunnel for Sergeant Donny Donowitz. "You might know him as 'The Bear Jew'". After a few tense moments Donny struts out of the gloom carrying a baseball bat. The German officer stares death in the face. The first blow strikes him across the head and sends him sprawling to the ground. He receives two more body blows. He is visibly alive. We then observe the scene from high up in the woods as the Bear Jew delivers several crushing hammers to the skull.

From up here in the tree-tops Officer Werner is witnessing the end of his own human existence. If life continues after death, this is the way it could be realised. A micro-second before the passing away - perhaps simultaneously - you assume the form of an entity observing the obliteration of your empty corpse. There is no pain with it.

At the same time more expansive than the universe, and yet smaller than the smallest particle, you are neither of these things. You are made of no material known to this life. You are part of a whole, but entirely individual.

This spirit/entity exists outside of time and in this way is able to take in the whole of mankind's existence from beginning to end. But, if we stand outside of time then, surely we would already know this life? No, our existence began here on this earth. The first sucking of air into our lungs was like the breath of life being blown into our nostrils so that we became a living soul. Only after we have passed from this life shall we be able to go back and forth, and truly understand all things. Why does it start so? We do not yet know. Perhaps it is as with everything: We will not be told. We will not listen. We must experience it to fully appreciate it.

In the life beyond this one, time is inconsequential. A thousand years will be as one day, one day as a thousand years. We will be able to go back through life and re-live it in real time, over and over again should we desire to. Rewind, pause, replay, re-live. There will be no need for, "I wish I knew that then," because life is as it is. It will be all about, "Oh, I see." We will be free to do the same through the life of our parents, and our parent's parents, to see how the various threads of our life all came together - what made us who we were. Our understanding will be complete. Our interests will be inextricably tied up with this world - our ancestors, our future generations. Like wisdom personified in Proverbs 8:31 we say, "The things I was especially fond of were with the sons of men." We will reconnect with our parents, and any of our family who departed before us. Our thoughts will be interwoven with their thoughts, our being with their being.

We can watch events from the outside or experience them from the inside. Once one way, then the other, over and over, as often as we wish. To observe it from the outside or experience it from the inside, being wrapped up in the thoughts, feelings, and emotions of all participants. To follow the course of one thread, and then go back and follow the course of another. Perhaps follow both at the same time. There will be no interference or participation, just observation and a growing in knowledge and understanding. "Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known."

We will be able to weave in and out of significant points of interest in human existence, or go back through the whole process of evolution, or whatever the method of life's beginning. We will be able to observe and understand. Nothing will be a mystery. Everything will be answered. There will be no need for thinking and extrapolating, for doubt and readjustment. All things will be clear.

As long as we are part of this system, with only these tools and this knowledge at our disposal, we are only ever going to be able to explain things in human terms. Thoughts are electrical impulses; an eye needs precise components in order to operate. But in the life beyond this one things will work in ways that we can't possibly begin to grasp. So we will be able to reach the outer limits of our universe. Partake of the breathtaking beauty, hold it in the palm of your hand (metaphorically). Plunge into the depths, and view the world from the peaks.

What then? Perhaps we get another opportunity. Placed on another earth, and sent off to repopulate complete with the knowledge of how this world operates. Another opportunity to get it right, or do a better job. "Your sins are forgiven." How often? Seventy times seven times? Ah, but now I am going off on a flight of fancy...

None of this is determined, of course. Imagining it does not make it so. A life beyond this one cannot be conjured up, just as God cannot be imagined into existence. There is either God, or there is not, and so far it seems in this world that we are destined never to know. The same goes for a life beyond this one. You may choose not to think about it, or to believe that there is nothing. That is your prerogative. There is no right or wrong answer. In this human form it is an unknown unknowable. If it is non-existence, then so be it. But while man has the capacity to hope, to dream, to imagine...Now that I am alive and aware of it, I prefer to imagine living eternally in some form or other beyond the bounds of our understanding.

Of course there is God - man is so ill-suited to life on this planet

2012-07-11T20:22:00.000+01:00

Nature is a delicate balance. An intricate dance of atoms and organisms, all interacting, all living and dying in order for life to thrive. Over countless millions of years natural selection* has sorted itself out, cast off what it doesn't need, improved what works. Slowly, imperceptibly, all this is accomplished.

So, what was it thinking when it came up with man? Within several-thousand years or so of civilization - barely a moment in the great scheme of things - man has succeeded in screwing up this planet beyond repair. Of course, evolution doesn't "think", it just does. Well, in a world where blind chance does an astonishingly admirable job of maintaining balance, man becomes an embarrassing aberration.

Man lives 70 or 80 years if he is lucky. From birth he is on his way to the grave, and he knows it. He cannot even enjoy the bliss of ignorance. It is not a life of ease, it is a battle. Job was right when he said, "Man, born of woman, is short-lived and glutted with agitation."

We cannot simply exist, we must survive. We cannot pluck leaves from the trees to eat, or get down on all fours and feast on the endless supplies of grass. Our stomachs will not tolerate it. Man must prepare his meals - cook his meat, mix ingredients, heat it with fire. He cannot kill a beast with his bare hands and feast on the raw carcass for a week. Our delicate constitutions would collapse before too long.

We can no longer find a glistening clear river and drink deeply to our satisfaction without paying the price with some gastric infection. The simple act of lapping water has become an ordeal that necessitates the introduction of several tools. Water is not there collected. It now needs something to collect it, hold it, boil it, cool it, store it. This precious commodity we rely on to live...we have poisoned it.

Animals defecate anywhere. Much of it is re-used, or fertilises the ground. Some is eaten by other creatures. Man cannot defecate into his water source like a herd of cattle. He tried that once and got struck down with cholera. Man must go outside the camp. His dung is a stinking cesspit of disease. And this he must do every single day, several times. He has made it his life's work to figure out how to safely dispose of his bodily waste.

Man walks upright, his dangly collection front and centre. He has studied torture and knows that these can be a source of great pain. And there they are, ripe for the kicking. Animals rough and tumble for dominance, they don't go about kicking each other in the crotch. Yet...we walk upright. Exposed. It's almost as if we were not meant to fear one another.

Do animals feel pain? Do they suffer? Maybe so, but man is able to dread pain, to imagine suffering. He fantasizes about his own mode of death.

Our hairless body is useless in any temperature. It burns in the heat and freezes in the cold, rendering us either delirious or frostbitten. We lose our minds or our extremities. To combat this we must seek shelter and clothe ourselves. What we have is not enough. Only one or two indigenous tribes can wonder about naked - and they are "savages". Even these can be coy, fashioning a little strip to conceal the nethers. This precious, exposed, area is the source of man's progeny. It matters to him. He experiences a yearning he cannot explain. He can procreate all year round. But whereas animals give birth with relative ease, man has managed to turn it into an ordeal which must be micromanaged under threat of having your offspring removed from your care should you deviate from society's norms.

Women carry sustenance for newborns but we are educated out of using these beyond a few months. Cows milk and a bottle are the baby's first introduction to our consumer supply-and-demand culture.

Monkeys have a whale of a time swinging from branch to branch. Bonobos lie around having sex. They don't concern themselves with protection. Perhaps they were the origin of AIDS. They don't give a damn. Even assigning them that amount of feeling is anthropomorphising them. They are completely unaware. They are not keeping a tally of how many have died from AIDS or any other STD. Death goes unnoticed. Only for man has death become a matter to be feared and delayed. Man has killed so many in his futile quest to put off the inevitable.

Man is only good for gaping in awe, and he's not even particularly good at that. He is aware of his weakness in the face of nature. Everything from the largest mammal to the tiniest insect has him running screaming for the hills. The invisible virus kills him daily.

Perhaps it was disgust that motivated the first man to fashion a pointed stick out of a branch and kill his first animal. One legend has it that it was Nimrod who first hunted for sport. Genesis 10:8 describes him as "a mighty hunter in opposition to God." He acted not out of love, but out of guilt and shame. "My father runs from the beast...I feel something I do not have the vocabulary to describe..." This feeling would turn out to be humiliation/shame which in turn led to anger and violence. And the pointed stick or club could be used on other men. It could be used to subjugate others. This in no way emulates the animal kingdom because they do not have to cope with humiliation, emasculation, evisceration. There may be an alpha, but the rest go about their business regardless.

In his misguided quest to improve life man has merely succeeded in enslaving man. He has made him poor and rendered him impotent. We can no longer look after our own needs and desires. We are beholden to "professionals", often under pain of punishment.

We have music, art, imagination. No. Some have these things, the rest consume. The ones who have them have them after training, being taught, blessed with natural talent. We have to build up muscles, finely tune our bodies. Would you prefer to swing through the trees with the greatest of ease, or soar through the skies, swim like a dolphin, or gallop and leap with the strength of a horse? We don't say, "Been there, done that," we stretch for those goals. Or do you prefer to sit in the cinema eating popcorn and being spoon fed the fruits of someone else's imagination? We can't recognise talent unless it has a price attached to it.

Man has the capacity to love, but instead he hates. He trusts no-one. He is suspicious. He is repulsed by bad breath and body odour. Our senses are offended. Our quality of life is profoundly affected by the way we treat one another yet we choose to treat one another with anything between indifference and suspicion - unless there is a financial remuneration at stake. We appreciate the truism, "The love of money is the root of all sorts of injurious things," yet money continues to be the bedrock upon which this system is based. We have managed to put a price-tag on human existence. Every limb and organ has a financial equivalent. Consequently, man lives in a constant state of believing he is going to be harmed, inconvenienced, or have his precious possessions stolen.

He has evolved to agonise, to question, "Why do I exist?" Even if he reaches the conclusion that there is no reason, he can only arrive at it by agonising.

Certainly, man is ill-suited to life on this earth. Unless, of course, man is in a state of transition. Like Australopithecus or homo neanderthalensis, perhaps homo sapiens are destined to be left behind too. Perhaps nature will right itself and eradicate mankind so that life can survive and thrive.

Unless it was never intended to be this way at all. Unless man was supposed to live with compassion and love. Perhaps love is meant to be the driving force for man's survival. Not to do things in order to be reimbursed, but because we want to. Do you know how to set a bone? Then set a bone out of love, and not because it is your job. By all means seek to improve our lot, but then make these available to all for free. After all, it doesn't matter how stupendous man's technological achievements have been, if he has only succeeded in creating items that are planned to be obsolete and yet cannot be successfully disposed of without contributing to the planet's poisonous condition, he is merely an idiot.

*Or whatever is the currently favoured evolutionary theory

What do you mean you'll help me with my poetry?

2012-07-06T12:49:00.002+01:00

What do you mean you'll help me with my poetry?
What needs to be improved? Can it not just be
Random words strewn across the page? Is it not
Enough that I have poured my heart out into these
Words but that they are not the right words
Or placed in the right order?

Who am I seeking to impress? Am I seeking
To win the approval of academics? Stuffy men
And women accelerating mankind to an early
Demise, jabbing at people with their disease-filled
Quills?

How much art, how much beauty remains
Undiscovered because a timid soul refrains
From self-expression, put off by ridicule
In the classroom, so often goaded on by the school
Teacher's sarcastic barbs?

My muse must remain unacknowledged
Because she happened not to choose
The appropriate couplet? She is not college
Approved?

What do you mean it simply isn't very good?
It doesn't meet the standards of some arbitrary criteria.
It falls short in rhyme and metre, when in fact
The very act of creation - the courage you need
To put pen to paper, to bleed out the word -
On its own that act renders this piece of poetry
Perfect.

Empathy is the skeleton key, or, How to dispose of the body in the basement.

2012-06-29T12:21:00.000+01:00

We all live our lives as fugitives. We all live life constantly in the fear of being found out. We all live like we have something to hide. Be we anxious, shy, nervous, full of self-loathing, turning everything into a joke, fiercely angry, passive aggressive, losing ourselves in work - whatever you do, it is all an attempt to ignore some long forgotten crime. People seek ways to feel alive, to convince themselves that they exist, to quiet the nagging voice that they are sleepwalking through life. You might not believe that you live life that way, but you do. You just don't know it. You want to keep denying that there is anything wrong. We passionately defend our beliefs and world-view because these things define us. They make us who we are. If these things are threatened, our whole existence feels threatened.

We all have a skeleton in the closet, a body in the basement. Collapsed, rotten and decomposed, all the pieces are there. Memories, events, guilt and shame, things we would rather forget about, but it is there, eating away at our inner being, and informing every thought and action down to the present day.

Some might say that the dead body is God - but let's not be rash. Let's not spoil things. What few of us realise is that that body, locked in a cupboard, shut away in the basement, pushed into the darkest corner - that skeleton is your counterpart. Abel to your Cain; Yang to your Yin; good to your evil. It is your authentic self. That is the real you, and what you are masquerading around in at the moment is a tragically imperfect ghost of your former self.

Carrying around that guilt is exhausting. Things are all out of whack. The spirit level is registering an incline. The bubble is over at one end. Life is an uphill struggle. For some it is a sheer wall, a rock face, people clinging on by their fingertips, petrified. It might not manifest itself as guilt in you. It might be bitterness, resentment. They all amount to the same thing: The inability to let go.

We want that body to go away. You can try and run forever, and kill yourself trying, or you can stop and address the problem. The first thing we need to do is stop being anxious. You are not guilty of murder. It was an accident, nobody meant for it to happen. More than this, what we do not realise is that the body in the basement can be brought back to life. Ironically, the only way it is going to leave the cupboard is by walking out on its own two feet. Just as you killed him, so you have the power to bring him back to life. We need to reanimate the corpse.

The prophet Ezekiel imagined such a reanimation:

Then he said to me, "Prophesy to these bones and say to them, 'Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord.'"
(Ezekiel 37:4-6)

The body might be dead and decomposed, but a disembodied voice is crying out for help. That voice is your salvation. A faint voice from deep within the cellar of your heart. This is the voice from behind. It is the voice of John Keating, enlightened professor of English Literature in Peter Weir's Dead Poet's Society, whispering to his charges as they peer at photos of long-dead old boys, "Caaaarpeee....carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary." As soon as you become aware of that voice, your inauthentic self will spring in to action and attempt to silence it. You will struggle with yourself: The basement door is locked, there's nothing down there, the light doesn't work, the closet is locked. The inauthentic self does not want the body discovered. It senses its own demise. It will raise all sorts of barriers. It survives on addiction, on negative thinking. When you cut off its air supply, it begins to fight for survival. This is evidence of guilt, and a powerful incentive for forging ahead.

The key to this struggle is empathy. My favourite definition of empathy comes from David D. Burns, MD, author of Feeling Good - The New Mood Therapy. On page 185 he puts it this way:

Empathy is the ability to comprehend with accuracy the precise thoughts and motivations of other people in such a way that they would say, "Yes, that is exactly where I'm coming from!" When you have this extraordinary knowledge, you will understand and accept without anger why others act as they do even though their actions might not be to your liking.

Empathy is a largely misunderstood tool. It will get you through all the locked doors. At its very simplest level, empathy is understanding. It merely acknowledges unquestioningly that an event took place, and it understands that there were consequences to that event. Empathy is a kind and compassionate listener. It diminishes the fear by explaining that it is not the event that is the problem, but the interpretation of the event. David Burns goes on to say,

Remember, it is actually your thoughts that create your anger and not the other person's behaviour. The amazing thing is that the moment you grasp why the other person is acting that way, this knowledge tends to put the lie to your anger-producing thoughts.

It is not what happened, but the message you received that matters. Understanding is the key. Empathy will allow you to look at yourself as one person looking at another. Your authentic self looking at the creation of your inauthentic self. As your authentic self grows in understanding, your inauthentic self begins to fade away. Things are coming into focus. The two can become one. Balance is being restored.

Reconstruct the skeleton. Join bone to bone by revisiting and reliving the events and experiences that resulted in this body's demise. Every dry section is a memorable event. We need to put flesh on the bare bones of our memories - sinew and muscle.

In order to level an uneven surface you can approach things in one of two ways - either build up one end, or collapse the other.

Every valley shall be raised up,
every mountain and hill made low;
the rough ground shall become level,
the rugged places a plain.
(Isaiah 40:4)

We can start at the beginning of our life, and try to fill in the gaps in our somewhat selective memory. Perhaps there is a particularly clear memory. Start there. A thorough examination of such a memory, and all the messages you received at the time is sure to shake loose other memories. Perhaps there was an earlier event you can begin to recall. Was it the first time you began to hear a particular message, or was it confirmation of an earlier accusation. Or, start from the other end: Take a particular world-view you hold to be true today, and question where it came from. Work back until its true origin startles you. In this way we can collapse what we have held true for so long.

We are not looking for amusing anecdotes from our past. We need to find experiences we would be quite mortified about were others to find out. It is not just about the event itself. It might be how we were spoken to. We might simply be embarrassed about the extent to which a seemingly insignificant experience could have such a profound effect on our whole existence. Our mortification might spring from accepting and acknowledging that the mother we love was able to speak to us in such a way, or the father we doted on really did act in such a way. It might be the horror of realising we have visited such iniquities on our children when we assured ourselves that we would not repeat the patterns displayed by our parents or guardians.

Empathy allows us to understand our parents. It allows us to reconstruct the skeleton of our mother and father. They are a mystery to you - they were probably a mystery to themselves. Anything we don't know for sure can be filled in with a little imagination. Empathy allows us to do that. It understands that nothing can come from nothing. There was a reason they acted like they did.

Nobody is at fault. This is not a way to ascribe fault or assign blame. Fault and blame expect justice or retribution. The expectation is too high. Empathy dissolves fault and extinguishes blame. It merely accepts and acknowledges. It understands, and with understanding comes forgiveness - for others, and more especially for ourselves.

It's not just our parents. Empathy helps us to understand other people. It allows us to realise that everyone is hiding a body in the basement, and all their actions are their way of making sure that the body stays hidden.

Once we have fused bone to bone, informed ourselves of how experiences have led to attitudes, and attitudes have led to choices, we will have given life to the body of our authentic self. We live again - we live at last. We are still the sum of our experiences, but now we understand. We know what makes us who we really are.

Ezekiel follows up his extraordinary vision of reanimated skeletons with a somewhat tepid but interesting illustration of two sticks that become one:

The word of the Lord came to me: "Son of man, take a stick of wood and write on it, 'Belonging to Judah and the Israelites associated with him.' Then take another stick of wood, and write on it, 'Belonging to Joseph (that is, to Ephraim) and all the Israelites associated with him.' Join them together into one stick so that they will become one in your hand."
(Ezekiel 37:15-17)

Look past the Israel-centric bias, and simply apply Ezekiel's words to our own situation. This is what happens to us. Our two selves must become one. We are not complete the way we are, not until we have taken the time to fully understand ourselves. Hold a finger up before your eyes. Look beyond it and your one finger looks like two transparent images. When you focus, the two become one in three-dimensional space. Life now has become detached from life back then - but, of course, the two are inextricably connected. At present they are both ghostly images and our aim is to make the two a solid whole. "Two are better than one," the wise man says at Ecclesiastes 4:9-12, "because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow; but woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up. Again, if two lie together, they are warm; but how can one be warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him. A threefold cord is not quickly broken."

Two for balance. There is a place for a measure of anger, shame, guilt, a healthy dose of cynicism or doubt. But when negative thoughts plague you, the authentic self can reason and regain balance. Throw faith in there - or, dare I say it, God - and you have yourself a cord that cannot quickly be broken.

Imagine if it was God, eh, that body in the basement. God might be dead, but you, you little rascal, you can bring him back to life. That's a bit mind-boggling. There is a famous speech supposedly given by the apostle Paul on the Areopagus in Athens:

“People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship — and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.

“The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’

“Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone — an image made by human design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.”
(Acts 17:22-31)

We don't want to fight to survive any more. We want to live, and move, and exist. To be alive, and not just to keep ourselves alive. Fish give birth to fish; ape gives birth to ape; God gives birth to God. This is too much responsibility for people. We bludgeon that God at the first opportunity, like Cain bludgeoned Abel, then, like Cain, we flee like a criminal, demanding at the same time that we be kept alive. Some Bible translations say that Cain "dwelt as a fugitive," but many say that he dwelt "in the Land of Nod." We are sleepwalking through life.

Paul dropped the ball on the Areopagus. He fumbled. He was doing so well until he mentioned the resurrection, and then he lost the crowd. Jesus would explain that a resurrection of sorts took place during his own life. John has him saying, "The hour is coming and it is now, when the dead will hear his voice...and live." We have an opportunity really to live. We need not be ignorant any longer - there is still time. We can look back at life and understand what made us who we are. Connect bone to bone, cover it with flesh and sinew, tendon and skin, breath life into it, and finally live as we were meant to live - as Gods.