Superstition

It is common in conservative circles to long for a return to the "golden days".  It is also common among progressives to put great faith in a future where the arch of history trends towards justice (that is if evil conservatives don't destroy everything before we get there).  Now, even in Socrates' time there were those who envisioned a return to the good old days, just as there were iconoclasts preaching faith in humanity and a coming age of peace on earth if only they were in charge.

The same strains keep coming up throughout history. However, perhaps the most insidious one, and especially so because it crosses ideologies, is the concept, conscious or otherwise, that we are somehow different, and superior now than before. Of course with the passage of time the civilization has accumulated great knowledge and achievements. We have an infinity of information at arm's reach through whatever you are reading this on. We live longer, go more places, have more experiences than at any other time in human history. However, the hubris of modernity has blinded us to the reality that as the island of our knowledge expands, so too does the coastline of the unknown.

We are drunk on information, and yet malnourished of understanding, and even surrounded with greater security and opportunity than ever before, we are fearful.  And so we prove we are not in fact much more advanced than nomadic ancestors by doing what humans have always done, which is to fall for superstition. 

We laugh at the idea of thinking we have to sacrifice woodland creatures to appease some maleficent deity, and we cringe at the thought of sacrificing a child to the same, and yet with superficial cosmetic changes, many still do both. 

Superstition is the dark side of pattern matching, the process of identifying cause and effect relationships. The problem arises when we deceive ourselves into such a relationship were there never was one, and yet so fearful of the unknown, do everything we can to manipulate a system that never existed in the first place. It used to look like the above example of the sacrificial woodland creature, or virgin, first born, etc. Now it looks like aborting a child because a test shows a possibility for genetic defects. The rationalization is that your are saving a unborn fetes from a life of suffering. When considering the fact, that, a) everyone suffers, and b) a "defect" has been the catalyst for some of the most transformational characters in history, and c) that the child doesn't have a context for viewing their life as suffering to begin with, it becomes obvious the original motive is nothing but a superstitious rationalization for the real motive, which that the parent doesn't want to suffer the unknown of caring for a disabled child.

This is a dramatic example, but this is found in banal forms everywhere. The self esteem craze I grew up with posited that high self esteem lead to high achievement. Many of us grew up being told we could do anything, be anything, deserved everything. Predictably, when we found out this wasn't true, many simple blamed everyone but themselves for being in a predicament as old as the species. You often have to earn your way to something you desire. In essence, the self esteem obsession was a superstitious belief that put the effect ahead of the cause, and trained a lot of people to be entitled asshats, a condition that is going to take some time and possibly a major drop in the standard of living, to give voice and action to the valorous ideals we, so many of us, hold deep in our hearts and minds. 

Take political correctness for example. We like to think we have moved beyond the Inquisition because we aren't heretics at the stake, and this is certainly an improvement. However, when something you said a decade plus before it was considered offensive can still destroy your reputation, we have an unbalanced morality.  Look close enough and we have all failed to a degree in the ways we most punish others. When group identity, which never takes into account actual complexity, like that the group itself is a construct, is more important than the choices and character of the individual, we are simply returning to the spiritual trailer park of codependency and group solidarity being more important than right or wrong.  

The only way out of this cave of shadows into the daylight of reality is honesty. Brutal self examination. Actually telling it like it is. Honesty is a blunt force weapon. And it is pain that will enlighten us. 

Changing Seasons

It is nearing the end of the year. The season has shifted, and with it, life has made itself more scarce. Whether it be the trees barren of leaves, the grass dead in the frost, animals in hibernation, the birds flying over the horizon, or simply the sun lower in the sky in the interludes between long cold nights. The whole world dies to one degree or another and each element in it's own way. And then, it comes back to life more forcefully than before.

Eons of experience points to the seasons eventually changing, life returning, and the cycle continuing. It is the natural order of things, and a process we have long come to expect and take for granted. Those who went before from the majority of cultures found spiritual significance in the changing patterns. Some spoke of thin spaces as the seasons changed. The natural and the super natural getting closer as we were driven closer to each other to avoid the cold. Death always brings near the other. Some saw the need to placate the gods with blood sacrifices when they sensed them approaching in these times of shifts to darkness. 

Newer faiths capitalized on the older customs and adapted them to convey new messages. Whether Christianity, Islam, or consumerism, the innate urge to commune with the other is a powerful force, and one for which we still sacrifice greatly for the chance to turn what is into what be wish it could be. 

Some would see the rampant consumption and mass placating of social anxieties to be noise confusing us from the signal  for the "reason for the season". I see it as something coming from our deepest being. We wish more than anything else to be connected, and most of all to the Divine Other. Whether we recognize it or not, it is as fundamental as breath. Nearly as fundamental is our notion that to get something, you must give something. Thus the sacrifice.

As with everything though, there is a deeper pattern. Something over the horizon. A longer trajectory. 

All things die. However when death passes, life reemerges more forcefully than before, as surely as the grass after the thaw, and cherry blossoms in spring. It is such on more than the obvious level. We sense the thin spaces. Our traditions originated from fundamental ideas about the world. Even if the original meanings have long since been covered in noise, we still sense it. 

I commemorates this time in memory of when the Divine stepped through the thin space into the physical, soon to die, and then, to rise. And with this resurrection, the whole world will follow. The ultimate winter, and the ultimate spring to follow. Such is the sacrifice all our attempts only pointed to. Carried on the winds of ultimate compassion, there is a ship large enough to hold all the world. 

Death is still among us and overtakes all things. Belief in that not yet seen requires faith. We are creatures of faith regardless of its object. 

I chose to have faith in the notion that the true height of mastery is not to bring good from good, but to turn that which is broken and dying to even greater good. This is what I see as the nights are long and cold and life retreats. This is what I look forward to when spring comes again. 

The Original Sin

It is common, and perhaps even an ingrained habit of the human condition to confuse symptoms with underlying causes. The real issues arises when you start exclusively treating/avoiding the symptoms and ignore the causes. Who ever heard of the black mold infestation in your shower going away because you just didn't go in there, or the check engine light fixing itself just because you stopped paying attention to it?

However, we do the same thing with much more serious issues all the time. We stay in jobs we hate because we lack courage to know what we truly want, and so we medicate the symptoms of our depression with all manner diversions. We stay in bad relationships, or avoid them all together because the status quo is less fear inducing than dealing with why we cannot love ourselves in the first place. We triangulate the pain and trauma of lingering emotional and spiritual injury away into surface conflicts with family, friends and the general public, or we medicate the pain away with whatever addiction so suits our fancy, preferably something that shadows the deepest longings of our hearts and deepest wishes of our psyches, which was what was injured in the first place.

The deepest human fear is not death. It is not being known. And yet to avoid the pain of disappointment at taking the risk to be known and possibly failing, we do all we can to avoid it in the first place, and instead substitute a shadowy approximation of who we think we are. We pose.

Because posing is ultimately an outgrowth of insecurities our deepest psyches cannot shake, the pain never really goes away and the need to medicate the symptoms continues. Apart from those who are simply and truly evil in that, due to brain damage, they have no moral compass, the vast majority of deviant behavior is nothing more than a symptom of the great divide between who we really are and our fear and shame of the same. 

The original sin is not the horde of external symptoms, and lascivious fleshly desires, whatever those are. The original sin is allowing false dichotomies to divide and fragment our living souls. It wasn't in black and white called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil for nothing. Of course there is good and evil in the world. I would not be writing if it were not so. However, the embrace of the same in favor of embracing life causes a fragmentation of our hearts and minds, which is only satisfied by either further fragmenting and  compartmentalizing the vast majority of reality to protect that which is seen as good, while that which is seen as evil seems never to fully disappear, kind of like the black mold infestation in your shower, or one can embrace life and thus address the underlying root cause of the issue. This however, requires courage and acceptance of who one truly is. It is only after this step is taken that whatever perversions have posed in your place can be corrected to their original form, which was is not perverse. 

We are ever presented with the option to stay backstage posing as players in some shadow of existence, or step out from behind the curtain and go live. 

How Abusive Relationships, Growing Up, Easter, And Red Dragons Are All Connected.

We in the modern world tend to have a hard time establishing boundaries. This manifests itself in several gradients of deviant behavior, ranging from not being able to take the keys away from your friend who is about to get a DUI, to staying in an abusive relationship way past the time when the significant other stopped caring whether it was your fault, or not, and just started taking advantage to no end.

Learning to make the distinction of where you end and another person begins is the foundation of all life giving human relationships. It's what happens when we can go our own ways from our parents. It's what happens when we don't give in to peer pressure and instead pursue what we want in life. It's what happens when we experience the best in committed relationships, both romantic and otherwise when we love people for who they are rather than what they do for us, and it's what happens when we are able to watch our descendants grow into their own independent selves.

The reason this is such a hard thing to determine and that it is such a source of friction in our lives is because it brings into question issues of core identity and insecurity that the modern social order does not at all help. Because we have been raised with a wholly western idea of moral relativism, we do not know what is up or down, what is right or left, or what is good or bad. We do not question that which we deeply want to, and only challenge those who do not conform to this ideal. Tolerance is only good to the degree that it makes people safe. Beyond this, it has resulted in a deep fear of questioning and conflicting over anything more substantial than those who are seen to be intolerant. Thus, in the absence of challenge, which, in this case, is the same thing as boundaries, we are left defenseless against the more malignants elements of, not only society, but our own personalities. 

One of these malignant elements is the need to belong. Like all perversions, it is nothing more than something that was, it its proper state, good. Finding your place in the world, and finding your place with other humans is good. However, doing so at the expense of your own humanity, and making sacrifices of your own identity to conform is not, and as has been mentioned before is the source of a vast spectrum of deviant behaviors. 

However, as with many things, there are second and third order effects to this deviant behavior. Deep within ourselves, we try to compensate for the violation of our spiritual immune systems because of our lack of boundaries by setting them up in other places. In essence, we triangulate our brokenness away because we cannot confront the root cause. 

The most profound and yet least obvious place we place boundaries is with any notion of something greater than ourselves, anything.......Divine. Believe or don't believe. The existence of God is something that cannot be proven, no matter how much the right wing types try, and cannot be disprove, no matter how ignorant the the Richard Dawkens followers' arguments get. It is not something that is debated intellect to intellect. It is something that bypasses the red dragons guarding our minds and snatches the perches right out from under their claws as it goes strait to the heart. Of course their is a God, and of course we all know this at some level of our psyches. And yet it is with the Divine that we establish the strongest boundaries, whether we believe or do not believe. We assume there is no God, or that we have killed God, or that we have to be good enough to be accepted by God, or that some are destined to Paradise and others to eternal damnation, whatever that is. 

If indeed there is a God, would the Divine not be anything other than the height of perfection beyond all that we heretofore see and the ultimate embodiment of all our deepest suspicions of what true love and beauty and good in fact are? Would God not in fact be the height of our greatest human ideals of good and compassion and acceptance and love and the ultimate expression of what we only grasp at when we admire great acts of selflessness? Would God not also be the ultimate expression of even the most natural love of a mother for her child or a father slaving to support his family? Could the truth in fact be better than we have ever imagined, even though our deepest psyches have supposed it for so long and driven us in search of it for as long as we have been who we are? At the same time, does not the suspicion of this at the same time cause apprehension, almost as if you don't want to look because you don't want to be disappointed? 

Today, many throughout the world remembered the destruction of the boundary between the Divine and the rest of reality, not that any such barrier ever existed, but the point had to be made clear. This is the essence of the Resurrection. The deepest longing of us all are there for a reason. They are there to be satisfied. Come into the great house where street dwellers, prostitutes, politicians, even pop stars, end even you and me become equals. This is the essence of salvation. 

Come home. The door is always open. 

Boundaries

The things we most often argue about are only symptoms of things hidden under the surface that we are not yet ready to confront.

Consider a romantic couple fighting over what they see to be bad traits in each other. A girlfriend accusing you of being too prideful. A boy friend saying you aren't giving enough to the relationship, or any number of other combinations.

In emotionally charged conflicts, which these tend to be, it is a safe assumption that whatever is being openly discussed is not the root cause of the conflict. It is both sides triangulating away from something hidden and too difficult to bring up. The question to ask is what is the underlying cause? More importantly, why can't we talk about it?

The reason has less to do with hiding things than it does with creating boundaries, or rather not creating them. On the one hand we avoid deep confrontation in favor of surface arguments because deep confrontation would leave us exposed for who we really are, thus violating the most fundamental boundary, but what lies in the depths of who we are is not always docile. When left in darkness, it has a tendency to run rampant and ravage. On the other hand, the reason things become hidden is because we did not pay attention to them and did not set boundaries around them to begin with. When not so restrained, and thus not in our control, they nearly always wonder to darkness.

In the case of people having gone through any manner of abuse at the hands of someone more powerful than them, this process is taken out of their hands and survival takes over. All the same, what is hidden must be brought out one day and must be framed for what it is.

To name something is to take power over it. It is the act of defining it and bounding it. It is also the first step to being free of the chaotic waves of fear and anxiety, and the first move to take hold of the weapons of reason and wisdom. This is seldom an act that is accomplished in solitude. However, the choice to take control originates with each individual.

So what is really under the surface? What is the real problem? What is it that you have yet to bring into the light and set a fence around, rather than leaving it to roam and ravage in the darkness?

Introductions.

The purpose of this space is to discuss that which is overlooked, and that which is lurking under the surface. This is as much because that which you don't know can indeed kill you, as it is because the stone that the builders refused will become the head corner stone. It is also for that which is too inconvenient to discuss in politically correct modern society. In fact, it will be made clear in successive conversations that the issues most talked about and most contended are far less important than what they are being used to cover for. 

This is because just as dysfunctional families triangulate away their greatest problems, so too do troubled societies substitute that which does not mater for that which does to ease the discomfort. That being said, do not assume there will be any Tea partying going on, and don’t expect to be welcomed if you preach conspiracy theories. 

The leaning here is not Right or Left. Neither is it Libertarian or Anarchist. Rather, what we will discus here is fear and courage, shame and wisdom, chaos and order, and how these influence and underpin all that we do or fail to do in the public world. Despite our claims to rational thinking and behavior, faith is as much a part of the modern secular world as ever it was in more religious times past. Logic is used post facto to rationalize what were always emotional decisions because all that we do is influenced thus. 

This does not mean though that there is not free will. There would be little point in debating what is best if we did not expect we could positively act on it. All action requires will to one extent or the other. The questions then will circulate around to what degree emotion will master us or if we will master them to be the horse we ride upon to a greater good.