The Science of the Irrational

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.
Mark Twain

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics 
Attributed to Twain, but said by someone else.  Experts differ on who said it.  Attributing this quote to Twain is a lie. 


Mark, you have cleft my heart in twain.  And yet, the saying is true.  As I haz previously stated:  those who know do not speak and those who speak do not know.  Another saying is true:  sometimes those who speak actually do know, but they tell a bunch of lies when they are speaking.  Sometimes the lies are true, "noble lies," and sometimes they are goddamn lies.  And then statistics is the physical world, which is a lie itself.  Sometimes being exposed to Truth is so staggering that if you were just told it outright, (1) you wouldn't believe it and (2) you might have a personal crisis that you couldn't recover from.  Sometimes, that way madness lies.

I am confident there are people, right now...who could tell you EXACTLY what the meaning of life is, but they're in a room with mattresses on the walls and they are wearing pajamas that have really long sleeves that buckle in the back.  This is what makes the character of the Joker in the Batman funny books, and of course the portrayal of the character in Dark Knight, so compelling.  I mean...what if he's the sane one?  If the Joker and Bruce Wayne both have bats in their belfry, which one is in the right?  A scary concept is that they both are, and they are both examples of Chaos and the struggle between it and Order and it seems that Chaos is always getting away with murder while the Agent of Chaos finally catches up with the villain before he goes too far.  And sometimes it's hard to tell who is the good guy.  Batman is a person who we feel understands what THE GREATER GOOD is and we trust that his actions are necessary, but damn, when he dropped that mob boss off that fire escape and snapped his ankles...didn't you wonder?


But back to bearing false witness:

A noble lie would be when, if you believe this, Franklin Delano Roosevelt knew that the Japanese were going to bomb Pearl Harbor well ahead of time, but did nothing about it, because America needed to join into WWII and needed to be pushed.  Because the US of A wasn't a war-mongering nation scared of boogey-men back then.  We were just getting our heads on straight after the Great Depression (which wasn't really great, was it?) but didn't really see what all the fuss was.  Blitzkrieg shmitzkrieg.  Americans weren't displaced Europeans back then, most Americans had forsaken the ways of their various homelands and cut ties to a lot of their traditions and weren't returning the long-distance calls from their ancestral deities, who tend to call collect anyway.  Europe can take care of itself and hey, I left Europe for a better life anyway.  Good riddance.  So, yeah...FDR may have known all along, but for THE GREATER GOOD, Pearl Harbor had to happen, because frankly...we may have then realized too late the threat poised by Nazi Germany and I don't know about you, but I do not look sexy in lederhosen. 

But Roosevelt, like Batman, is just too BIG a person to haul before a Congressional committee, and this is also why there has never been a satisfactory result into the investigation of the assassination of JFK.  Nuff said.

For examples of goddamn lies, I'll refer you to the Fox News Channel.

Another noble lie would be to say that I know how the universe was created.  A goddamn lie would be to say we're merely shaved apes or to claim conclusively that there is no such thing as gods, spirits, banshees, Keebler elves or anything else in that category.  That's fundamentalist talk and someone who claims they know the Truth and says they are sure about something should immediately be ignored and shunned like that stuff growing there in the back of the fridge that might have been potato salad once, but now it's hard to tell.  That new organism is right now wondering if there is intelligent life outside the fridge.  And your insistence on watching bad teevee still has it wondering.

I have made some rather cosmic claims in this hyar blog and have come to some rather heavy conclusions but what I want to make perfectly clear is you need to take what I'm giving here and come to your own conclusions.  A great deal of what I have offered for consideration here is plausible and I try to arrive at each conclusion logically and reasonably.  Except when I'm clearly talking rubbish.  And I'm trying to dispense Truth in small enough increments so you don't lose your mind and begin to go around wearing too much make-up while asking people, "you want to know how I got these scars?"

I believe there are somethings we can be sure about.  There are some small Truths that we should embrace.  One of them, atheists, is that if our minds are just side-effects of our nervous systems, etc...then we have no Mind and we're just biological robots who have been tricked into thinking we are self-aware.  And even atheists don't claim that.  I pity them, the way I pity the executives of Blockbuster Video.  They knew their company was doomed...but only made it worse.  Most people when they are in hole, do not ask for a shovel so they can dig deeper.  But this is how atheists and some corporations are currently operating.

There is a cynical attitude in the general public toward more "esoteric" philosophical ideas.  That it's all rubbish, lies, nonsense and when it goes over their head, they employ the term "mumbo-jumbo."  Even those folks like me out there who are willing to dip their toe in the forbidden puddles, having found out that fundamentalist, institutionalized religion's puddle is full of soul-eating acid, often read one book, etc and then go "that's interesting" but then they go find someone else's ideas and read those, and then move on...never stopping to graze on any new pasture for very long.  At some point we need to say, "yes...this I can accept and embrace and actually practice, while keeping my mind open and continuing to employ critical thinking so I don't start hanging around on rooftops dressed like a flying rodent."

This means checking out all the ancient wisdom and knowledge that has accumulated throughout human history, especially for the last 10,000 years, while also taking a look at modern science and seeing what it has to reveal as well and see where there is any synergy between what appears to be opposite mindsets.  I'm getting an awful late start at this, and I'll need a couple hundred more years to be able to absorb only a certain percent of that knowledge.  And then modern science and technology right now is advancing so much, no one person can be expected to be able to take in everything in order to arrive at a good Theory of Everything.  Which is not to say it would even be the Law of Everything, and if there is one evil being practiced in the scientific community, it is treating Theories as Laws and therefore closing down the mind and trying to tie reality down into what are really just guesses.  Pretty good guesses, but shots in the cosmic dark, nonetheless.

Yes, it is true that some physicists who explore the Big Bang Theory are also students of the kabbalah and see a harmony between those concepts.  Our science has progressed to the point where we see able to see some wisdom to some things that ancient peoples practiced, regarding their relationship to the natural and "unnatural" world...although all phenomena would be part of Nature.  It's all one fruit salad, mixed altogether.  You can pick out only the bits of apple if you want, but that's going against the grain, it is more tedious and you're not able to enjoy the whole salad.

I have tried to read The Golden Bough by James Frazer.  "A Study in Magic and Religion."  Originally published in 1922, it is an exhaustive examination of the religious practices and traditions of indigenous peoples...and a dismissal of them.  It's a perfect time capsule of the prejudice in the Western World at that time, which still continues today, that aboriginal peoples have lived in ignorance for millennia and that everything they believe about how the world works can just be summarily dismissed as "superstition."  Atheists love this word and relegate all religion to superstition.  A better definition for the word superstition, if your are a fundamentalist, is "someone's else's religion."

James Frazer, for example, goes to great lengths to inform his readers that in some "savage" cultures one of the most desirable roles to have is that of the shaman/witchdoctor/medicine man.  And one of the responsibilities of this person is to intercede on behalf of his village, etc to make sure the weather is agreeable considering how his tribe "makes its living."  Frazer then describes how this wanna-be shaman then tricks and deceives his gullible tribesmen into thinking he actually has some power over the weather and thereby lives a life of priviledge with his own private hut and basically lives by the principle:  I Don't Want To Work, I Just Want To Bang On De Drum All Day.  Frazer, in the next breath, informs the reader that the penalty for not making it rain...or not being able to make the rain stop, etc...is DEATH.

So...Jimmy...let me get this straight.  This cunning dude wants to be the shaman because of how cushy a job it is...he cons his simple-minded people into thinking he can make the sun shine...but if he can't, he is killed by his tribe?  Seems the risk doesn't match up with the reward, there.  I mean, Jimmy...please don't appear on the teevee show Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader, because you will go home in disgrace.  I mean...seriously.  Yes, Godfather, I can whack Bobby "Big Nose" Linguine for you.  Sure sure.  (A week later.)  No, sorry, Godfather, I wasn't able to whack Big Nose for you and he's taken over the wharf and the dogtracks, too.  My bad.  Oh well.  I'll be going now.  What?  Take me for a ride?  Sure, thanks.

On a more speculative note, Frazer also dismisses stuff like the practice of say, making a clay figurine that represents someone and then doing something to it and expecting that person to have a reaction to it because there is no invisible energy field that connects similar or dissimilar objects so therefore such a practice (despite such folks using such practices for centuries) is impossible and just childish superstition.  And then...scientists have now discovered dark matter/dark energy which is at least 85% of the total contents of the universe and yes...like George Lucas' force...it binds the universe together.  Dark matter/dark energy is pervasive throughout the universe and particles of it are passing through you right now.  It fills your home, it's in your refrigerator with the intelligent potato salad, it's in your pants.  So, invisible energy field...CHECK.  Now where is my modeling clay?

I have stated that a plausible reason why there is so much chaos in the world and why it seems people consistently seem to be oblivious to common sense and continually make wrong decisions is that the universe is alive with consciousness and we're all on this "ride" as Bill Hicks put it.  We want LIFE to be a roller coaster ride because we want thrills and spills.  A little order goes a long way.  And yes, as stupid as many people seem, as frustrating as our jobs seem to be at times, it's because there is no constant other than constant, seemingly pointless, change.  We are all capable, when faced with a decision, to make the right decision, to research, to plan, to decide what is best.  And yet we seem our own worst enemies at times.

This is the challenge.  To realize that the universe resists the inertia that occurs when things are orderly and perfect, but also to try to realize that perfection as much as we can, even if it is impossible, from our point of view.  It's irrational to become an Agent of Chaos, right?  Yet such people are also part of the system.  Bruce Wayne needs the Joker because it would be too easy to be content with what you were able to do as Batman, yet an Agent of Chaos like the Joker reminds the Hero that you cannot rest and let your guard down...being an Agent of Order requires constant...VIGILANCE and sometimes you, yes you...even you there in the back nodding off...YOU may be the only one who can do anything about it.  Whether it's speaking your mind, or going to Mount Doom on a fool's errand, you cannot put up you heels if you care about what is right and expect the hottentots to just gather up their toys and go home.

Part of being able to do this is to try to understand what THE GREATER GOOD is, and one of the first steps is to give up the arbitrary ideas of morality and such, and know that our understanding of right and wrong is not a result of evolution and we do not need religion to teach us right and wrong.  What is right is right and what is wrong is wrong and one Truth is this:   because we are part of the universal consciousness, we are already illuminated and enlightened.  We are not lost, we are found already, we just have to go within to discover ourselves.  The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.  And maybe we can even find where all those missing socks disappeared to.

We need to embrace and believe in change and try to enjoy the ride.  But I also believe that we are also in charge of both up-keeping the roller coaster and, like an erector set, we can change and modify the ride because physical reality is an illusion, always in a state of flux and change, everything from mountain ranges to soap bubbles.  Therefore, the implication is that reality is mutable and malleable.  Do you pray to your deity?  As the Pink Floyd song puts it, those are your "softly spoken magic spells."  What are you praying about?  For your deity to intervene and change your world for the better?  Yes, shape the clay, yon potter at yon wheel.  And we are also potters, even if your name isn't Harry.


Being rational about irrational things makes atheists get all red in the face.  But what we continually have to remember is that we do not experience reality directly, as I have already covered.  We experience a Consensus Reality that is based on the feedback our senses receive from our environment.  But reality for you is different than the reality your housecat experiences.  The spider making that web in the corner of the ceiling experiences a different reality.  Humans, cats, spiders...so on and so on each have what could be a called a rational reality that obeys certain rules and meets certain expectations.  And yet, those "realities" are fictions. We're like the blind man touching an elephant, it's different wherever we just happen to be touching it.  Rarely are we able to touch the elephant all at once.  Doing that requires escaping the prison of our limited sensory apparatus.  There is a higher reality that defies the abilities of our senses (or the scientific equipment we make using our limited senses and worldview) to comprehend.  That higher reality is consciousness, which is the real you, the thing you really are.  As a Jedi Master said once, "luminous beings are we, not this crude matter."

Pinch you in your narrow ideology I will.

Thinking reality is solely that which you can see, hear, taste, touch and smell, or what can only be reproduced over and over in a laboratory or which has to be proven by mathematics is like saying you can build an earthquake-proof skyscraper out of Legos(tm).  The physical world is the Legos, it is built out of atoms which are empty space.  Behind the Wizard of Oz's curtain is the real reality, the mechanism that produces the dog and pony show of the Consensus Reality and sometimes you need the perception and innocence and irrationality of something other than what makes us "human" to pull back that curtain.  To pass through the veil of superficial reality, to knock down the false storefront on the movie set and see the director sitting there.  You don't go to the theater to see a play or a musical where the curtain is never opened.  And yet, that is our current lot.  The really interesting stuff is going on not only behind the scenes, it's going on in front of our eyes, but we immediately are bombarded with physical stimuli which has us going, "ooh look shiny" when the real brilliance is not seen with the mortal eye.  But to most of us, it's like looking into the sun, we can't bear it.  Thinking outside the box is itself a limiting idea.  We need to not only think outside the box...we need to obliterate the box, because we make our boxes, or allow others to make them.

If you can do this, you're not in Kansas anymore, because you realize there never was such a thing in the first place.  There is an area of flat land in the middle of the United States but it doesn't have a name, we have created these boundaries, these restrictions, these cages.

Your sense are lying to you.  It's a noble lie, but if you rely upon them solely, you're misunderstanding that you are your Mind, you need your senses to function while you're a golem made out of meat and bone, but they are not revealing reality to you.  And your Mind is able to do more than just react to stimuli and it has its own "senses."  Sometimes your mind can itself be the stimuli, the catalyst.  This is what the ancients realized when their nervous systems became advanced enough to allow them to be aware of consciousness at the higher levels.   Those who want to control the Consensus Reality and dictate to you what is right and wrong understand this.  They want you to be obsessed with stuff, whether it's your wealth or your ideology or your cultural identity, etc but you cannot serve *G*O*D* and Mammon.

Get on the roller coaster, c'mon.  Strap in. Yes, it'll scare the fertilizer out of you sometimes...but you'll find it's a lot of fun, too.  And later on...you might be able to turn right instead of left and get on a whole 'nother ride altogether.  Do something irrational today, when no one else is looking.  And when someone asks if you want to see their "disappearing pencil trick," politely decline, and then run in the opposite direction.

And all I have just told you is a lie.  It's up to you to decide if it's noble or not.

Selah

In the Beginning was the Woohoo

Space, and space again, is the infinite deity which surrounds us and in which we are ourselves contained.
Max Beckmann

My main point here is that if you are the child of God and God is a part of you, then in your imagination God is supposed to look like you. And when you accept a picture of the deity assigned to you by another people, you become the spiritual prisoners of that other people.
John Henrik Clarke

All of us have mortal bodies, composed of perishable matter, but the soul lives forever: it is a portion of the Deity housed in our bodies 
Flavius Josephus

 Well, you dirty angels you, how did it feel after reading my last blog entry and finding out that you are a god?  You didn't get up on top of the roof and jump off with a tablecloth around your neck thinking you could fly did you?  Good.  Now lissen.  When I start talking "nonsense" like I did last time, the most important thing is not what I am saying but what I'm not saying.  I used to love Mad Magazine when I was younger.  Yes, you can blame Mad Magazine along with W.C. Fields, Groucho Marx and Mark Twain among others for how I am today.  Mr Fields, Marx and Twain or currently unavailable to receive your feedback.  Please press nine if you want to hear a raspberry.  Sorry all operators are busy, your negative feedback is important to us, please hold for a couple decades.

But back to Mad Magazine.  The wonderful Sergio Aragones would do these little cartoons in the margins of the pages.  Just little small cartoon strips a half-inch high or so without dialogue.  Reading between the lines of Mad Magazine was for some issues the funniest stuff in there.  And when you're reading a sacred text, or sometimes reading this blog, that's what you'll need to do, read between the lines, to stop being so literal minded and let Truth sneak up on you side-wise.

When the bible says Adam and Eve were in a perfect state of bliss and that they were evicted by eating the forbidden fruit, an event that Terence McKenna has referred to as "the world's first drug bust," that didn't actually happen.  It's not important if it actually  happened or not...what is the most important thing, is what it means.  It's a story trying to express a Truth, not trying to document tru fax.  The people who wrote that stuff were keyed into the larger picture, which is why the bible still captivates us because there is a lot of Truth in there amongst all the fiddle-faddle.  Those ancient writers are rolling their eyes at all the folks still suggesting the earth is only 6000 years old in terms of human activity...and it's so hard to do that today when we now know that, f'rinstance, the Sumerians were already building little pink houses and grilling in their backyard and reminding each other not to wear white shoes after Labor Day at least that far back.


But that's what happens when ideology is more important than facts and reason and otherwise using your gray matter.  Spirituality isn't supposed to be the province of flakes.  Oh yes, there's plenty of bubble-headed folks out there for whom every day seems like a Renaissance Festival and they create for themselves silly, desperate religions because Dungeons and Dragons wasn't realistic enough for them.  I don't want to offend someone here, but if you go around calling yourself a witch or a druid, I'd like to see your diploma and a few references.  The ancient Druids spent a dozen years or more learning all their mystic knowledge and memorizing oral histories and had their own secret coded language, etc...putting on a white bedsheet and wearing exciting jewelry is playing dress up.  Yes, I know you've read a few books, but please.  It's like when Dr Howard and Dr. Fine and Dr Howard put on surgical smocks and administered anesthetic by rapping someone in the noggin with a wooden mallet.  I don't think they finished med school.  Call me crazy, porcupine, but if you claim to be something that you're not, it's not helping some of us folks who are trying to un-educate and dis-inform.  You're scaring the straight people.

My wife slipped one day and called me a "shaman" which I denied immediately and I could technically be called a "mystic" but I shun such labels and categories.  I'm just a loser from Middle Tennessee who is trying to kick it old school while trying to reconcile 21st Century science and knowledge into a Theory of Everything.  Or the Theory of Woohoo.  I don't see that there is anything special about this, just like the Ancient Egyptians didn't think themselves weird for practicing what we would today call "magic" if they wrote a spell on a piece of papyrus then dunked the papyrus in a dish of water, allowing the vegetable-based ink to dissolve into the water, then would drink the water, and the magic spell, because they woke up with a headache, or wanted to catch a lot of fish that day, or wanted to shag that chick down in Memphis that they know, the one with the awesome wig and perfect almond eyes.  Tapping into the mysteries of the universe is something folks used to take for granted, somewhere along the way a significant population of humans lost their contentment for that and I'll be examining that when I do my "let's all go back and live in wig-wams again" blog entries.  And yes...modern religion gets the credit and blame for modern civilization.


Now of course fundamentalists like atheists and Xians and such people who are likewise mesmerized by the 24/7 brightly-lit and spasmodic carnival that the superficial material universe is write myth and such off as being created because people didn't know any better before SCIENCE.  Which is a fundamental misunderstanding of myth.  When you read about the Cherokees and that they thought that the earth floated on a big ocean and that it was suspended by four cords at the cardinal points and that the sky was the underside of a big dome of rock and that the sun didn't go into the sea, but slipped over the sky vault at night and then traveled behind that rock arch to reappear in the morning, that was their unique interpretation.  This story meant something to them.  It didn't matter, the sun rose and set, just the same.  And the same go for gods.  The idea that people created gods because they wanted to explain where thunder comes from, for example, because they didn't know the science behind it is just plain wrong and that is making the mistake of applying our modern sensibilities onto ancient and aboriginal peoples.  No, the Ancient Egyptians or aboriginal Australians didn't/don't share your same modern concerns.  The Rainbow Snake wasn't created because they didn't know any better.  The ancient Aussies shifted their consciousness so that they went to where the Rainbow Snake lives and discovered him/her/it.  Science serves sometimes to take the wonder out of life, not to really enhance it where it counts.  This is why many atheists are also mean, arrogant, hard-core people who will call you ignorant and closed-minded at the drop of a hat if you disagree with them.  They are lost and deny their own humanity if they claim science can explain all phenomena.  That's why they're so grumpy.

Which comes to the point of this here blog.  I know you were wondering about that.  I want to try to define what gods, spirits, fairies, elves, boogey-men, rainbow snakes, etc are.  Yes, we meet the definition of being a god as we are spirits.  The principle of spirit/soul/mind/consciousness are all the same thing.  You are your own invisible friend.  You are a mind, currently linked (and in linked I mean by a chain, the "mortal coil") to a physical body composed of perishable matter.  And by shifting your consciousness via meditation or other methods, some including magical mushrooms (which I have never taken) you can also send your mind to places other than your local latitude and longitude.  Ancient peoples, when their nervous systems were developed enough to receive consciousness and also transmit it, realized that not only were they more than just an another animal, that they were also not alone in being self-aware and repositories of consciousness.

Let me take a moment and show you a passage from the New and Improved Testament:


And when he was come nigh, even now at the descent at the mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to rejoice and praise (Yahweh) with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen; saying, "Blessed be the King that cometh in the name of (Yahweh): peace in heaven, and glory in the highest."  And some of the Pharisees (boo hiss) from among the multitude said unto him, "Master, rebuke thy disciples for verily they are noisy waterheads."  And Jesus answered and said unto them, "Get off their backs, you jerks.  I be droppin' some knowledge 'ere that if they should stifle it, why even these rocks around here would immediately shout and holler."


Luke 19: 37-40  New Woohoo Version


Consider the stones:  taking into account the previous  miracles that Jesus was said to have performed, seeing stones crying out and singing Amazing Grace might be impressive, but not necessarily unexpected.  The implication here is that if the people weren't going to praise Jesus, seeing as how the multitude of disciples (and you thought there were only 12) are better equipped to speak, then the stones would not be able to contain themselves and they would then speak up.  The implication here is that the stones were aware of the importance of Jesus' arrival into Jerusalem.   I won't even mention the talking ass from the Old and Outdated Testament.  Talking asses in this day and age are a dime a dozen, anyway.  You can't throw a talking rock without hitting one.


The ancient (and present-day) shamans, medicine-men, witch doctors, by modifying their perceptional apparatus and expanding/altering their consciousness experienced (and experience) other layers of reality and other expressions of consciousness.  They met entities, we believe mostly totemic animal spirits to begin with, then as humans evolved and became more sophisticated, the types of beings they encountered also became more sophisticated...consciousness in general was evolving and growing up.  Revealed to them was a cosmos alive with energy and sentience and that man, as highly evolved as we are, was just the tip of the iceberg.  Yes, we qualify as gods and maybe even the gravel in your driveway has a limited understanding of the universe.

I didn't say we were doing a very good job of being gods, did I?  We're more like gods who are currently in kindergarten with attention deficit disorder.  We spend most of our lives being told that *G*O*D* is this and that and being taught how to read and write and therefore having reality pinned down with labels and strict definitions.  Language both allows us to express the wonder of reality and at the same time limits our understanding of it.  We build ourselves and others build for us what Robert Anton Wilson called a "reality tunnel."  And "tunnel vision" is the idea here.  It may be safe to live in a well-provisioned bomb-shelter of ideologies, but you don't get to go fishing that way.  In the Western World, in a Capitalistic society concerned with wealth and stuff, we are taught that reality is the material world and stuff can make you happy.  Jeep currently has an ad campaign with the slogan, "What we make, makes us."  Bull biscuits.  Yes, you probably have some religion in there, but Xian offspring are taught as early as possible that you are forsaken by your deity and that you have to go to where he is and obey his rules to even have a taste of what it means to be a child of god, not that you, as an expression of consciousness, not only are custom-built with a connection to divinity, you yourself are part of that same program.


There a system of control at foot and the policy by the "elite" is to keep the multitudes under the boots of the rather small minority of folks who are actually keyed into spirituality and then pervert it in a quest to accumulate power and wealth for themselves.  Both George Bushes weren't memorizing the Psalms when they were members of Skull and Bones in college, they were learning the stuff mother warned you about.  Make no mistake, Glenn Beck is not an idiot, he is a spiritualist of the first order and may very well be currently shopping around for just the right black goat to sacrifice to whatever god he's hitched his wagon to on All Hallow's Eve, while giving lip service to Xianity because he knows so many people are, as Flannery O'Conner termed it, "Christ-drunk."

Many successful people in the Western World wear the official uniform of Christendom but when you're not looking are doing things that would offend even Marilyn Manson.  Because, as I have previously pointed out, Yahweh is not the king of the mountain and regularly has sand kicked in his face by other deities.  And don't get me started with all the rock stars, actors and other celebrities who are also keyed into these higher energies.  When you see Robert Downey Jr appear on Craig Ferguson and he makes an off-the-cuff remark about sexual "serpent energy" while CraigyFerg drinks from a mug shaped like a rattlesnake, try not to notice.  Oh, the Rolling Stones never have hid the fact that they were and may still be using the occult, they just don't necessarily advertise the fact.  You may think Madonna is a great artist and may think her belief in Jewish mysticism is indicative of a celebrity being eccentric but has no bearing on her continuing success...and hey, Madonna wouldn't mind you continuing to think that way.  She doesn't want any more competition.

We because of how complex and advanced our nervous systems are, can tap into the larger picture of consciousness and thereby expand ourselves and our relationship with nature, with reality on all it's levels.  You don't have to be a star to do this, because you are a star already.  We are however, like most sentient life, cursed with a collection of dodgy and imperfect sensory apparatus which does not allow us to experience reality directly.  And the human senses are by no means the gold standard.  Far from it.  We see through a windowpane that is smeared by the limitations of our senses.  Grass is not green, we only perceive it to be green.  True Reality is something else altogether.

I just caught our male tuxedo cat Pippin staring up at the ceiling.  There's nothing up there except a light that is always there.  He was seeing something.  I joked that it was a muse hovering overhead to my left.  This cat has a different experience of reality than I do because of how he can see, hear, smell, etc.  Some of his senses are better than mine, some are just different.  Because his vocabulary and therefore also his language, the size of his dictionary, is small, and because his nervous system is not as sophisticated as mine...he could very well be seeing something that would cause me to have a religious experience...but to him, it's just part of his unique perception of reality.  No big deal.  He is probably just wondering when breakfast will next be served, when he had it just two hours ago.  Cats are intelligent, sure, there's a whole range of intelligence from rocks and Sarah Palin to Stephen Hawking (who is so smart he even outsmarts himself)...but cats are also are not wise and have a tendency to favor curiosity over self-preservation.  But that's not to say they don't have a religious life and maybe they're not always sleeping, sometimes they're actually meditating.  I wonder who rocks worship?  And if they're supposed to make a pilgrimage to Devil's Tower in Wyoming in their life time.


Here's part of my Theory of Woohoo, so strap in:  In the Beginning all energy and matter were compressed into an impossibly dense, impossibly small point.  (Sound familiar?)  When we have energy and at least the potential for matter we also have consciousness.  The idea is that energy/matter/self-awareness are part of each other and are not separated and we can call this original pure unification of all energy *G*O*D*.  Since this perfect point of energy was also all the consciousness there was, it was self-aware, but in a very limited way.  Because who we are is defined by our environment.  We are stimulated by stimuli and our response builds us, brick by brick.  Conflict builds character.  This entity was all alone, there was nothing besides itself.  It had no experiences, no personality, no name, no hobbies.  It was a blank slate, like someone in the mental ward who has to be tied to his wheelchair because his brain doesn't function enough to remind him to sit up.  So this perfect, pure consolidation of energy was also staring blankly out into space much like Goldie Hawn does and just saying "DUHHHHHH."  This culmination of all energy wanted to BE, even if it didn't realize what it was wanting.  It wanted to have experiences.  Nature abhors a vacuum and wants to go running through tall grass in its bare feet.

So, then *G*O*D*...well...ahem...it commits suicide, sorta.  It stops being what it is and destroys itself, tears itself apart at the seams, knowing however that consciousness will continue, it knows that much, it will just be dispersed over infinite space.  So all matter and mind explodes out, and I don't want to get icky here...but this small point of matter, by ejaculating out into space, which is the womb, then is able to create little versions of itself in an infinite number of manifestations.  Instead of being nowhere...now...*G*O*D* is everywhere and also everything.  The Godhead sacrifices itself in order to share what it is with an entire universe and we along with all matter are also the cells of *G*O*D*.  Catholics believe when they take communion they are actually eating the body and drinking the blood of Jesus, who they believe is *G*O*D*.  We are actually the body and the blood already.  We are pieces of this entity and *G*O*D* may one day be looking to unite and put itself together again, a being that now has all the experiences of all the atoms of matter that it cast out like break upon the waters, and that...maybe...we'll also be self-aware even at that point, as part of that perfect being.  Or maybe this will never stop and *G*O*D* is already fulfilled and stills looks forward to the rest of eternity to learn more about itself by creating new paradigms.  It's hard to satisfy such a being, contentment is not a virtue, which I believe is why humans were not content to live in caves and hunt and gather and communicate by a limited series of grunts and gestures.  We wanted to learn because we were part of a system that was all about growing and learning.

Your understanding that there is a *G*O*D* is because you are part of that, we all give our consciousness to this ultimate being and that is reflected back to us, yes even you atheists who really don't realize what you're saying when you deny the existence of anything you can't see/hear/taste/smell/touch or reproduce over and over in a laboratory.

As both physicists and students of the kabbalah believe, matter and energy has slowly coagulated and condensed over time.  The further down the kabbalistic Tree of Life you go, the more the spheres become grounded in material reality, until you get to the bottom, which is the material universe that is the mixture of dust and deity, the sacred and the profane, the spirit made flesh.  Now the Tree of Life doesn't exist.  No one is going to look into a telescope and see a technicolor windchime hanging somewhere in the Milky Way, or the Lactose-Intolerant Way for that matter.  It's a metaphor, an allegory, but it overlays very well with the Big Bang Theory, which is also a pretty good teevee show.

The metaphor of the Garden of Eden is like the metaphor that *G*O*D* was in a state of bliss, but had no knowledge.  You see, when you do not know good and evil, you know nothing.  *G*O*D* had to "fall" from that state of grace in order to be anything meaningful, and Adam and Eve had to "fall" from grace in order for there to be a human race.  Because just as there was no death in the Garden, there was also no Sex, there was a fixed, static reality of Man, Woman, the garden and the animals.  Animals didn't eat other animals, everyone was a herbivore.  The matter of the universe had to leave perfection in order to be something greater, even if it meant a lot of suffering along the way.  There is nothing evil or dirty about death or sex, it's all part of the plan, the matter of the universe gets recycled over and over so there can be more experiences, consciousness gathering knowledge to itself the way a lint roller picks up kitty-cat hairs off your sofa.  There has to be suffering, loss, death, disaster and other manifestations of change.  You can't make an omelet with breaking some eggs.


Basically, the divine perfection shattered itself, sending its essence out into space and I believe has been slowing putting itself back together again so it could share that with everything else and be bigger and better than before.  It's taken a long time, and may still take a long time, because when you're that high an order of consciousness Time is experienced in a much different way that we mortals understand it.  A few billions years seems like a long time to us, not so much to *G*O*D*  So now, the collective unconsciousness is not stuck as it used to be in a very very very very very small egg, it's found in all matter.  It's a kid in a candy store the size of the universe and it can have all it want.   And the more sophisticated the nervous system of an organic being is, the better you can experience this principle.  Gods, spirits, fairies, etc...are also expressions of consciousness and saying that consciousness can only reside in a person is like saying water can only be found in a bottle.


If consciousness is only a side-effect of our nervous system and certain bio-chemical processes, then we don't actually exist.  We would have no more importance that algae growing on top of a pond, or the fuzzy mold growing on those hamburger buns you forgot about in the pantry.  But no...we are part of nature and when we look out the window on a beautiful, sunny Autumn afternoon, we realize it is beautiful because we are part of it, we're not programmed to think it is pretty, we cannot and no one does, look dispassionately and coldly on the universe as merely the result of convenient accidents.


Even the scientists who are also atheists who go to conventions and preach their gospel admit wonder when they gaze on the universe.  They speak about how we are made of stardust and get cold chills talking about it.  They are far closer to Truth than a fundamentalist Xian is.  They are just human-centric, which is also them realizing how important people are...since we're gods.  The ability to reason is a big, big deal, but atheism has naugahyde to do with reason and critical-thinking.  This is why atheists frustrate me so much and why I pity them.  They are so close, so very close but are hamstrung by materialism and the testimony of failed religions.  They see Xianity as false and bad for you, but then they throw the baby Jesus out with the bathwater.

No...we are not organic robots that have just been programmed to think we are individuals and unique persons.  We are more than that, so much more than just meat-puppets.  This is what atheists don't understand, blinded as they are by superficial reality and made spiritually incompetent by "religions" like Judaism, Xianity and Islam that are really just political systems meant to control people while the Secret Chiefs of the world accumulate wealth and power unto themselves because they have read the old grimores and understand some of the old mysteries and take advantage of them, while keeping their underlings in the dark and at the same time, via Hollywood and the Inquisition and other means of propaganda and oppression warn them against anything that might expand their consciousness, like Yoga, having your palm read, horoscopes, etc...the "gate way drugs" to being able to later take a long walk one afternoon with a deity or two other than Yahweh and Jesus and having your mind re-calibrated and realizing that you're a part of *G*O*D* and it is your birthright by simply being alive of being part of something not only bigger than you...that you are a part of that bigger thing.

Yes, we are gods, but we are imperfect and not very good at the job right now, we're slackers, gold-brickers, not even fit to do the landscaping around or clean the windows of the mansions of glory.  We do things like leave the oven on and eat too much and watch bad teevee and write run-on sentences.  We've got a long way to go before we can slip off the overcoats of our mortality and soar on the wings of our higher selves.  And as soon as we take off the concrete overshoes of our small, petty ideologies and leave behind narrow-mindedness, as soon as you dig your way out of your cramped reality tunnel, you'll be able to see the sky...and you'll see someone looking back.


Selah

Nothing is Real, Everything is Woohoo

Out, out, brief candle!  Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Macbeth Act V Scene V

Well, no.  Sorry, campers...not going to examine city-building and "civilization" and why protestant Xianity is to blame for nasty, unfortunate things like the Industrial Revolution and stufflikethatthere.  Nope.  Gonna do something a bit diff this time around.  And I had a long blog post last time and I'm going to have mercy.  The anti-civilization blog will probably be a two-parter, too. Taking down Babylon brick by brick is no easy task.  So no, that comes later.  Now comes this:


Imagine a wooden rocking chair.  Just picture one in your mind.  Give it as much detail as you want, etc.  The rocking chair I'm imaging is a big one, the type they sell at Cracker Barrel, painted Tennessee Volunteer orange.  I know it's a wooden rocking chair because the words wooden, rocking and chair all define what I am seeing and I know what the words wooden, rocking and chair put together describe.  Language allows me to recognize something by it's shape, etc because we have categorized reality with these defining words.


Beyond the immediate image of the big orange wooden rocking chair I can further describe it by it's size, weight and other physical characteristics.  Like maybe I can see some of the wood grain even though it's painted orange.  And then there is all the history of the chair.  How it got there, who made it, the whole process that went into making the chair...the type of wood it's made of, the machinery and tools that were used to make it, the people all involved in the process.  And then there is the history of chairs itself, when we first started making chairs and when we first figured out if they could rock...well, that would rock.  Think about your chair in these terms, all the descriptive terms you could employ and all the backstory you could give it.



Now I'm going to take an axe to it.  Chop chop chop.  Until it's little jagged bits of wood.  Where is the chair?  If I wanted to, and had enough time and wood glue, I could maybe put the chair back together again.  I recognize the bits of wood as what the chair used to be.  So I'll put the jagged bits of wood in a wood chipper.  The wood is still there, so I'll now burn it until there's nothing but ash...and I'll take this up into an airplane and dump it out over the Atlantic ocean.


Where is the chair now?


It doesn't exist does it?  Wrong.  In my mind is the memory of the chair.  And I can go to Cracker Barrel and maybe see a chair just like it.  Or have them order me one.  So let's say Mars Attacks! and they beam up all our wimmin and all our chairs.  Every single friggin' chair and every single whoaman...because, y'know...Mars Needs Women and Chairs.  Even now, we still have the memory of chairs.  We could make chairs again, because the memory of the chair exists even if the chair...and the women do not.  And even if we could not make chairs again, the memory of them would persist in our minds, until a future generation forgets chairs altogether.  The memory of the chair is more real than an actual physical chair.



But we cannot make women.  We have the memory of women, but we can't just order more from the factory.  Then think of humanity in general.  And that while we can make a bunch of chairs, we can't make people.  And then, just like the chair you imagined is different from my chair, everyone of us is different.  There have never been two people ever on this planet that were the same.  Because we are each individual expressions of consciousness, we are each a different mind, unique, special.  *G*O*D* don't make no junk.  We are not born bad or evil or doomed, we are each a unique mirror that the cosmos holds up so it can admire how fascinating and beautiful it is.  We are so much more important than chairs.

Now consider that all physical matter is made from empty space, the atoms that matter is made of.  The physical universe is continually in a state of flux, of change...it is an illusion, a hologram made by energy that vibrates at a slow enough speed.  Nothing is real, everything is true.  Only the mind is real and we cannot prove via science that it exists, although we all know we have a mind.  Consciousness, something that defies a scientific explanation, is the only constant.  The only concrete and permanent thing.

When a person dies, whether they died in their sleep, or were pushed into a wood chipper...that person will not appear again.  One brief candle flame and whoosh...gone, never to darken our towels again.  We are all different, single facets on the immense diamond of human experience, we wink once when the light hits us and then we are not there anymore.  Yet we are remembered by those we leave behind, the memory of us persists and certain people cast long shadows after their "death."  John Lennon would have been 70 years old now, and his memory persists in us now, whether you liked him or not...he still affects our consciousness.  He is 70 years old now, but he will always look young.  Joan Rivers needed plastic surgery to pull that off, the dirty cheater.


John Lennon is a god.  John Wayne is a god.  Marilyn Monroe is a goddess.  JFK is a god...etc.  These people have reached their apotheosis...have reached godhood in our minds as they, being dead and gone...are not gone at all.  It doesn't matter if John Lennon can appear before you with all the Hollywood special effects or not, atheists, John Lennon is ALIVE in our minds still.   Having a conversation now with John Lennon may be a fiction, but that doesn't mean it isn't true.  Lennon, Wayne, Monroe, Kennedy, etc...these people have become ideas, they represent so much more than just that they were once alive and are now dead.  They are now more alive than they were when they could actually sit in a chair.



And now think of those in your life you loved who are gone.  Are they gone in your mind?  No?  They are still alive.  You keep them alive.  Some of you have shrines in your homes to them, as you still display photos and other objects of their lives.  Because what we actually are are MINDS, we are linked to our bodies, but we are minds, expressions of consciousness that is not just the chemical and neurological side-effects that our body generates.  We are invisible beings, we do not exist and yet we do. You cannot see your mind, but it is really all that you are.  Your brain and the rest of the nervous system is a receiver and a transmitter of consciousness and your body is how your mind is moved from place to place, usually, and your body allows you to interact with your environment, nothing more.   And when we are burned and our ash is spread over the ocean the memory of us will persist, who we were.  People will remember your face, but what they are actually remembering is your mind.


No, Macbeth, you Nazi shithead...live does signify something, it signifies much.  And we are the epitome of intelligent life.  We are the bomb.  Words fail us to describe what we are and words just serve to limit us into categories: white, male, American, long-haired, progressive, sexy, eccentric, sexy, handsome, artistic, sexy, near-sighted, etc.  We limit ourselves with these labels when we shouldn't.

We can call a chair a chair, but how much more description goes into describing who YOU are, when you will be the only you who ever exists.  How can we fill such a void as that?  How can we dare to put ourselves in boxes and limit ourselves and let others control who and what we should be, what we should think?  Free your mind, the rest will follow.  Drag yourself out of the mud and slime of ideology and prejudice and circumstance and all the limitations and definitions, pull your ego down around your ankles and walk out of it and become borderless, immense, walk the earth like a giant...you'll then realize the only real sin is to not become all you could be, to settle for living in a safe, narrow box when you could spread yourself over the earth like a sunset.  The solar system is your rocking chair and the earth is your footstool.



We are all divine, we are how nature expresses itself.  We are the narrator of the universe's story.  We take on roles on this ephemeral stage, say a few lines and then we make our exit, some of us are in the the lead roles, some of us are extras, but we are all important.  We are angels with dirty faces because our faces are covered with meat...but we are alive, invulnerable, immortal, our mind/soul/spirit exists temporally while linked with our bodies and when the organic structure we inhabit no longer functions, when the rocking chair our mind rests in is no more, we will persist and continue and be alive.  And we will still rock.


Like the Police song goes... We are spirits in the material world.



WE ARE GODS



Selah

Be Vewwy Qwiet, I'm Hunting Yahweh

“When lip service to some mysterious deity permits bestiality on Wednesday and absolution on Sunday, cash me out.”  Frank Sinatra


Good Day to you and yourn, folk-heroes.  Pope Gregory here again and no, I won't be doing a blog on city-building as I foreshadowed at the end of my last emission.  City-building may be bad, very bad.  Yes, centuries from now folks may be flitting around on their jet-packs saying, "Hey, remember when we built cities?  What a trip, huh?"  "Yeah...and what about that internal combustion engine thing, what where they thinking?"  But no, not this go-around as the wheel of fate has turned and the muse over my left shoulder is most insistent.  It's a beautiful Sunday Morning, a white dove is outside eating birdseed, I've got some coffee down my neck, so let's rock the Rock of Ages.


I'm going to follow up on a few points I made in my last blog Random Woohoos and look deeper into the Semitic god of passive-aggressiveness...Yahweh hisself.  Last Tuesday I got sick, reckoned I was in for a few days of a classic early fall cold.  I was running a fever, sore throat, fuzzy-headed, I thought Katy Perry had a wonderful singing voice, the whole nine-yards.  (Lissen, there are two good things about Katy Perry, but they're all from the neck down.)

I joked on Facebook that I was making no connection between feeling puny and my recent blogs where I was basically pulling Yahweh's pants down and giving him a good spanking with a graven image.  That's a pretty good joke, IMHO because YHWH has a reputation for having...well...a homicidal temper.  He's big on vengence and preemptive strikes, like Dick Cheney, who himself is like Darth Vader, more machine now than man, twisted and evil.

I mean, this is the same god that Xians and such reference when they say that Abortion is against his will.  However, Yahweh killed every first born child in Egypt.  He didn't have to do it, because according to the myth, he "hardened Pharoah's heart," with the implication that Pharoah was ready to let the Jews go a few curses and plagues back.  This "God of Love" also told Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac to him.  And Abraham went ahead with it and was stopped at the knive-stroke, because Abraham knew Yahweh fairly well, and when the Semitic god of cattle-ranching asked this of him, Abraham said, "Yep, that's just like him.  Okay, Isaac, pack your shit."  I could go on and on with examples of Yahweh's psychopathic behavior in the Old Testament, but y'all can...and should...read all that for yourself.


So you may ask, why would a mere mortal such as I persist in turning over state's evidence against such a powerful, and completely deranged, god such as this?  Shouldn't I be put into the Jehovah's Witness Protection program so he couldn't find me?  Seems it would be saver to go over to Hannibal Lecter's house and ask him to fill out his census form, when he was feeling a mite peckish.

Well, let's look at what makes a god powerful or not, and that would be worship, right?  I mean, let's agree that a god's power and influence and the size of his schwanzstucker (and according to his PR, Yahweh's is enormous) is in relation to just how many people worship him/her/it.  Upon examination, I intend to declare that Yahweh is a wanna-be god, a god who was just a couple numbers off on his lottery ticket, a god that had great ambitions but couldn't succeed because he is completely unhinged, not to mention jealous and selfish.  You could compare Yahweh to a child in a sandbox who not only wants all the toys in the sandbox, but wants the entire sandbox to himself and needs his mother to come and grab him by the ear and say, "No, Yahweh, it doesn't all belong to you, you have to learn how to share, you brat."

No, I got over my sickness in a couple days.  So there.  Also, "Jehovah" is just another word for Yahweh, a mistranslation, really.  So all you folks worshiping this Jehovah person...nope, we'll delete you from the list.  *POOF*

So, here are the witnesses for the prosecution:  In my last blog I rather glibly said that the Jews had ceased to worship Yahweh after August 70 AD, because without their temple, they can't practice their religion.  They are practicing a religion now, obviously, but it's not worship of Yahweh according to the Old Test.  They realize this and neighbors, right now in Israel and elsewhere there are Jews who are trained to perform the ancient rites again.  That's right, vegans, the Jews, if they are ever able, are ready to put on their priestly robes and funny hats and sacrifice animals to Yahweh again in Jerusalem.  Now that is really kicking it old school.  However, since the Jews have not and cannot worship Yahweh sans Temple...delete them from the list of Yahweh Worshipers.  *POOF*  Sorry, Yahweh, Trix are for Yids.

So, let's next examine those pesky Xians.  They worship Jesus, who has been marketed as Yahweh's son and also Yahweh in his fullness.  Now of course Jesus has as much in common with Yahweh as a marmoset has in common with a wolverine and it's quite clear that Jesus has a whole different set of principles in mind.  No, in Jesus' case, the apple not only didn't fall from the same tree...Jesus is an orange.  Yahweh was all about taking care of Israel, except when they were stiff-necked and rebellious (which I'll come to in a minute) but all other peoples could go and get fucked.  JOSHUA, GO INTO CANAAN AND KILL 'EM ALL.  Joshua answered while rubbing his hands together, "heh heh yes master yes master hee hee kill em all yes master."  God of Love, my eye.  No, nothing about the Old Test is suggesting he's preparing to sacrifice his son for the salvation of all humanity.  It's just not there, which is why the Jews rejected Jesus as Yahweh's son and their messiah. 

So Jesus is a deity, but he is not Yahweh, clearly.  He could be called a bad Yahweh-impersonator.  I mean, picture Jesus at the Improv doing his Yahweh impression:  "Love thy neighbor and bless those that curse you," Jesus would say in a sort of deep, booming voice.  "You don't sound a thing like him, getoffathestage!  BOOO," would be the response.  And of course, Xians...if you want to then say that you worship Jesus and Yahweh separately, then I'll have to remind you that is Polytheism.  Poly meaning more than one.  And one plus one is two.  Are you keeping up, this is hard math here.  I won't bring up the Holy Ghost, which makes three.  Which is more than one. 

Now, wait a minnit, what about all the folks who say, God Bless You, or God Bless America or Goddammit...aren't these folks invoking the Judeo-Xian god, Yahweh?  Nope.  All they're doing is they are demonstrating that the Xians and the Jews have done such a good job separately of selling Yahweh as the God of the Universe that people say God, when they mean Yahweh.  Again, Yahweh wants to be the only game in town.  But, these people who routinely use the word God, don't really worship Yahweh and most of the time, they're using the word God in vain anyway.  No, Yahweh is a god, small G.  This equating Yahweh with God is because Xianity and Judaism have, through their propaganda, relegated all other gods/goddesses/shoggoths to the realm of mere myth and legend.  But if you believe in Yahweh, you also have to at least entertain the idea that the gods of other cultures could also exist, because you believe in at least one god.  But modern man in the Western World demonstrates spiritual incompetence regarding the nature of *G*O*D*.  And I'll elaborate on that towards the end of this epistle.

But first, how about those Hebrews before the destruction of the Temple?  Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you're being held against your will in Egypt.  After a litany of curses and plagues, after several miracles afterwards as you are led to freedom, after the glory of Yahweh appeared above Mt Sinai...if you were to say...oh, I dunno...make a golden idol to worship...are you worshiping Yahweh or a golden calf?  Hmm.  Yahweh didn't make a very good impression on you, did he?  Part of the, or the entire, reason why the Hebrews didn't worship and accept Yahweh after all that is the Exodus story has turned out to be about 180 degrees from what actually happened.  The Hebrews were not enslaved or in bondage by Egypt, we have since found a city where we know Semites lived.  We now also know that slaves didn't build the pyramids and temples and bowling alleys in Ancient Egypt, skilled laborers did, in cities built close by the worksites.  In fact, there is sufficient scholarship to say that the Jews in Egypt were a formidable population of fairly warlike folks and Pharaoh was glad to see them go, and the passages where the Jews are given gold and like treasures before they left could have been bribe money.  Here's a few Krugerrands, get the hell out.  Then maybe the Egyptians betrayed the Hebrews, came after them in their chariots and there was a mishap at a body of water, because, y'know, Egyptians find it hard to swim what with those big black wigs and all.

But no...clearly the Hebrews, although they physically came out of Egypt, really never left Egypt, did they?  In fact, look then to the rest of Old Test history.  The Jews had a on-again, off-again relationship with Yahweh and seemed to be continually a-whoring after strange gods.  Because again, Yahweh wants a monopoly.  So he warned them against socializing or marrying with those other peoples lest they be influenced.  But from a perspective, the Hebrews in the Old Test weren't as much a people who had committed themselves to Yahweh and backslid once in a while, but the history can be seen as a people who did their own thing, and recognized other gods while Yahweh is jumping up and down, waving his arms, saying "HEY HEY, LOOK OVER HERE, I'M YOUR GOD."  The Hebrews time after time, kept on picking Baal, Astarte/Ishtar, etc to play on their team, while Yahweh  is over there with his bottom lip pooched out, "PICK ME PICK ME." 

Even today, such mystical and "occult" traditions like the Jewish kabbalah, are said to have their origins in Ancient Egypt and that other traditions like Tarot, etc come from there as well.  Which is another reason Egypt is used in general terms by Jews and Xians as evil and satanic and why the myth of the Exodus is so important and why Yahweh is said to have went on his curse and plague rampage to demonstrate his power over the "false" Egyptian gods, and is the rationale why Yahweh murdered all the first born of Egypt when he really didn't need to.  Because Egypt has to be demonized and pictured as representing everything bad, from a religious context.  The Curse o' Rootintootin's Tomb just being one example.

The last thing Xianity wants is for its followers to have independence and be exposed to things that might interfere with their conditioning and programming.  But the evidence suggests that modern religious and mystical understanding came from Egypt and when an Xian says that Jesus was killed by Satan, but then resurrected and was fulfilled as a deity and was triumphant over Satan, the Egyptians already had that, because Osiris was killed by Set and then resurrected as a deity and then is shown to conquer Set.  Gandalf fought the Balrog and the Balrog was defeated but it cost Gandalf his life, but he was resurrected to be more powerful than before...it's the same thing, folks.  Yes, as the writer of Ecclesiastes pointed out, There is Nothing New Under the Sun.  Read Joseph Campbell, you'll see one mystery permeating the human religious experience, there is one Solution, one Truth out there somewhere, if we can just wipe our psychic blackboards clean of centuries of propaganda and misinformation and find a state of tabula rasa so we can go THERE. 

Instead of staying away and coming out of Egypt, the opposite may be true.  That Egypt may actually be the "Old Tyme Religion."  Let's go back to the old landmark and shout hallelujah.  I mean, are you an Xian but also read your horoscopes?  You're in Egypt.

But the reality, from my perception, is that the vast majority of people who give lip service to Yahweh as their god would poop their pants if they ever had a true religious experience.  They have just enough religion so they can feel good about themselves, but are in reality deeply materialistic, carnal, vulgar people, very much concerned about social status, wealth, and whether they're getting enough Vitamin D.  Living like the devil during the week and acting like a saint on Sunday is no way to go about achieving your apotheosis.  Ol Blue-eyes had it right, the song My Way is the national anthem of Uhmurkah, not God Bless America.

But back to the point...the Hebrews were either in near-constant rebellion against Yahweh or never really did recognize him and the writers of the Old Test used invasions from other more powerful nations as proof that Yahweh was punishing "his people" for their "wickedness."  This is an old trick as we have witnessed in recent times.  I mean, I didn't realize that the attacks of 9/11 were because of the gays and that the earthquake in Haiti was because of the population's history of witchcraft until some religious leaders pointed it out, did you?  I admit I was shocked.

But no...let's hit DELETE and just subtract most of the Jews from the Old Test as worshipers of Yahweh *POOF* and you can see that no, Yahweh is small potatoes.  He's an also-ran.  He's Michael Dukakis riding in a tank thinking that is a good idea.  He's the guy who showed up at the party in full costume but it wasn't a costume party.  He zigged when he should have zagged.  So, go ahead, don't be shy...kick him in the rear and tell him to get lost.  Throw all his CDs and his collectible action figures and his tennis rackets and the rest of his shit out the window and change the locks.  He's currently being employed emptying out the wastebaskets and cleaning the toilets over at Allah's place.  I almost feel sorry for him.  But he had it coming, didn't he?  Funny to think the god of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob finding out that karma is not only a bitch, but it smears Ben-Gay in your jock-strap and drinks your milkshake.

Yahweh is not/cannot be the almighty, omniscient, omnipresent *G*O*D* because we have no real idea who/what that could be.  Such a being is beyond our ken.  Consider that this being would be cognizant of every single person, and every single organism, every single ATOM on this planet all at the same time.  Next time you go to the movies try to look at everyone else in the theater at the same time.  No, you can't do it and you really can't imagine how you could.  Now understand that not only could this being do that...HE/SHE/IT would also be aware of everything in the past and the future simultaneously.  This is beyond our comprehension, we have no frame of reference to understand how that can be.  This is not about having faith and saying he moves in mysterious ways.  This is about the realization that we could never have a personal relationship or understanding with such an entity because trying to imagine such a thing makes our head swim.

It would be like trying to drink a tidal wave or lighting a cigarette with a volcano or trying to fill the Grand Canyon with a 10 lb bag of topsoil.  It is so far beyond our mental capacity that the idea that such a being could enter your heart and all that is ludicrous.  What is comprehensible is that there are gods, goddesses, spirits, etc that are expressions of the great collective consciousness that we can relate to, beings we have used our imaginations to fashion into animal and humanoid forms that we can understand and that certain of these entities have areas of responsibility, such as gods of war, love, fertility, weather, language, gods of the sea and the earth and the sky, and so on and so on.  We can relate to such gods, because they seem not that different from us in some respects, and they may well also be within, not without, anyway.  More on this concept in a later blog.  But no, the question isn't "Do gods exist," because there is no such thing as an atheistic indigenous culture, people naturally when they are living with nature instead of isolated from it in hermetically-sealed, air-conditioned hives have relationships with such "invisible sky-fairies," the question is:  "Gods exist...but what the heck are they?"

*G*O*D* cannot and does not bless America, or bless you when you sneeze, don't post on your Facebook praising him because it's sunny where you are on earth today, etc. such a being like that is too big, too vast, too cosmic for such small, petty concerns.  Yahweh is not *G*O*D*, and he's no better, and in some cases no worse, than some of the other gods.  And if your people are from Europe, Africa, Central/South America, etc...Yahweh is certainly not the god of your people.  And guess what...neither is Jesus of Nazareth because even though Xianity came from the Greco-Roman world, Jesus is a Semitic god.

You can worship him, if you like, and he's worthy of that...but like I've said before, if you do not love your neighbor...even Barack Obama...as you love yourself, you're not worshiping him.  You can sing all the praise hymns and put all the fish magnets on the back of your car that you want, the bible states clearly what it takes to be a member of his organization and you do not meet the qualifications if you think Jesus is okay with killing maybe a half-million Iraqis under false pretenses and withholding welfare benefits and health care to people who need it, even if they can't pass a drug test or if their parents are illegal immigrants.  Jesus doesn't know you...and you. do. not. know. Jesus.

In an age of globalization where so many of us are living somewhere other than our ancestral lands, choosing which god(s) to recognize is like going to Shoney's Breakfast Buffet and choosing pancakes and sausage instead of eggs and bacon.  So you can worship and recognize Yahweh if you want...but I'd read his resume first.  He is not a team player, for one thing, and sausage and bacon will be off your menu if you do worship Yahweh.  Would you give up BLT's when you can choose another god, like say...dunno...a more agreeable and less homicidal god like Ganesha and have just as good a spiritual life?

Now tell me, which one would you rather invite to your square dance?  A serious, angry-visaged god with furrowed brows and poor shaving habits who threatens to burn you forever in a lake of fire if you don't go steady with just him, or a god with a cheerful disposition that offers to bring you good fortune and remove obstacles in your path, among other things, but is also okay with it if you want to worship someone else?  Seems like an easy enough decision to me, chief.

Next time, we'll show how this city was built on a rocky road.



Selah