Two years back from yesterday, I finalized a story which originated from an acid trip some twenty years prior. It remains meta-fictional body horror, more autobiographical than conjecture, as it’s a conveyance of my thoughts, feelings and firsthand experiences where regards love and spirituality, with love and spirituality the elements of fiction created for the story just as they are the elements of fiction to be found within this or any life. Yesterday, my mom turned 67. For the past five years I alone have sacrificed day and night not only to keep her alive, but to keep her alive in a manner where she might retain some dignity and comfort. And it is a rich irony, these circumstances, where the one and only non-Christian she knows is the lone person doing the purportedly Christian thing.
By avoiding the realization her faith has wholly abandoned her, she endures. Likewise with politics, while she lambasts the liberals on her Facebook daily, programs such as Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act are what pay her bills, despite none of these programs stemming from her political party and despite her political party repeatedly attacking and defunding these programs. She voted for Trump in 2016, more for her rational distrust of Clinton than any other rationale, and was rewarded by cutbacks imposed by Trump robbing her of the food stamps her taxes paid for, as though an existence permanently confined to a hospital bed may allow her to earn a living. She voted for him again in 2020 nonetheless, because faith is never a rational construct in theory or in execution. In keeping with her faith, I have had no nights or days off in years, never seeing the opportunity for more than 2 or 3 hours of sleep at a time and often with days coming and going without any rest at all. For all our differences, while I do not believe in the objectivity of love, I do maintain the conviction that hate is a choice to be made or unmade. My role here and now or well and beyond is neither to love her or to hate her. Her need for assistance overpowers all of that.
That is my personal example for what I am on about in this one.
Whether I’m passionate about a job or not, accomplishing its aims can be rewarding when there is mental and/or physical stimulation to come of it. And I am not talking about pay. I have never in my life worked for an employer who avoided paying late or less than agreed. Too often they were guilty of both, or reneged on payments altogether without warning or explanation. But if there is a chance for me to exercise my body or my mind, the challenge of the work proves itself viable for me. I have been offered vocational opportunities in the past which promised big financial rewards, but even if I managed to find causation for trusting those employers, an impossible task given enough life experience, the brunt lack of mental or physical demands made the position entirely undesirable. My only trade-off for working is bettering myself mentally or physically, in terms of an afternoon gig or a lifelong career path. And it does not matter to me if it takes a helluva lot of work to achieve those strict standards. The sense of completion is a drug all its own, a rare resource impossible of fleeting its way into depletion. But time and time again I see how my actions helping others to meet what mental or physical obstacles they face carries with it benefits far exceeding my experiences and extending above and beyond whatever needs I have to be filled, through strengthening the ability for others to themselves know that rare resource impossible of fleeting its way into depletion.
In the country there’s this old saying, “waste not, want not” as inference to repurpose following a fulfilled purpose, to maximize usages of any given thing for more expansive problem-solving, a concept dramatically older than the modern phraseology of recycling. But the reversal is all the more true, that the less you want the less disposed you will be for potentialities toward wasting anything. Instead of observing all things as valueless stepping stones before the seductive illusions of a lucrative finality, value is observed innately within all things whether they promise personalized temptation or not. While most people are never themselves encroaching usefulness, purpose exists in all things whether there’s capital to be championed or not. Nobody plants apple seeds to ease the immediacy of their pangs right now, but so that others will find sustenance in the fruit of the trees to be grown and harvested, lessening those burdens.
The sustained attention of Hinduism’s Dhyāna invariably leads to the pure empathy of its Samadhi. I am no Hindu, but I see the reality of that euphemism. You don’t get at a truth by giving yourself over to appealing distractions luring you elsewhere in space and time. The natural intent of truth lacking flattery does not unto itself make a given truth remotely less true. You don’t learn to understand yourself by looking outside yourself, as your definitions are not refined by the perceptions or the fantasies of others, but rather by you yourself taking a hard fucking look in the mirror. A physical utopia is as unobtainable as a metaphysical nirvana for all the same reasons, in that shared experiences can never not be subjective ordeals, because there are mental and physical limitations for exactly how fully our experiences might possibly be shared. And when all contributors to a society and culture of self-worship are openly pursuing their own flavors of heaven, none have the faculties left for applying as much effort to you finding your own. The only choice is to buy into the promises of whichever branding, or sort matters for oneself.
Which requires a lot of time, a lifetime in fact, and a helluva lot of work.
The spiritual goal of Zen Buddhism is satori, which is peace of mind, emotional contentment, higher understanding and all that jazz. The grandest of paydays, if you will, which does not come by way of pills or any other abbreviated experience. In a specific way it is the acceptance of humility not as some embarrassment or inconvenience or tribulation, but as a necessary step to evolving beyond the point of recognizing any weight to embarrassments, inconveniences or tribulations. I think in this regard, when Saint John of the Cross wrote his Dark Night Of The Soul, it was not necessarily in reference to a singular night, or a singular burden, but to the span of human experience and overcoming all the natural and unnatural mental and physical barriers along the way. Like peoples of the frontier needing to undergo the prolonged labor of building their cabins before they can know shelter from the stormy winters. While the kindest thing to be said for organized religions is that perhaps they are best taken as metaphorical, in the same way is my theory reflected in regards to the old traditional English folk song known as the Lyke-Wake Dirge. While its words describe the travel a soul makes after life to whatever lies outside life’s restraints, specifically as being not at all a momentary passage but a journey of challenges unto itself, such a journey as well could be a summary of the human experience at large. And while there is no afterlife waiting in the wings, elusive elements of peace of mind, emotional contentment, higher understanding and all that jazz are certainly knowable within one’s lifetime of consciousness when and where one is willing to roll up his or her sleeves and clock in the time. As opposed to playing video games while waiting for somebody else to clean your dirty laundry literally or figuratively.
Whether persuasions of Church or of State or of Industry, the branding most insistent in claiming possession of your attentions and resources will never bring you to utopia or nirvana, what with peace of mind, emotional contentment, higher understanding and all that jazz conflicting with their one noted purpose easing the immediacy of their own perceived lustful and wrathful pangs with resources fleeting into depletion. The only way to arrive at bliss be it emotional closure or physical permanence, is by your own steam rising from the efforts of you yourself helping others to their own utopia or nirvana. Everyone promoting a promised land or holy grail, a supremacy or superiority of branding or identity, sells the voyage with great appeals as negligible means to a righteous end, when the reality is that the means are the end. Heaven is in that which self-sacrifice might teach you. Hell is in the lacking of consideration for others. They were never anything but.
The notion of the seven deadly sins stands the test of time and draws in my non-religious mind, for detailing the simple truth of the ego’s invariable self-isolation. The reality of good and evil is not a registered trademark of any self-interest, but a knowable experience, one not at all dependent on manipulative filters of scripture or dogma to understand but coming entirely from our own actions and inaction and presented irrevocably for our own individual sensory perceptions to interpret our respective places in the world around us. In covering the Lyke-Wake Dirge, Andrew Bird and Matt Berniger represented hand in hand the audio landscape of torment unleashed by unregulated ego. The reflection of those sins in the seven virtues as well stands the test of time and draws my non-religious mind, for mapping the guideposts to incomparable joy which comes of denying the ego, denying all egos. Likewise is there an interesting antithesis to the sentiments expressed by that haunted English traditional to be found in the song by Dan Deacon called When I Was Done Dying. The respective poetry of each hymn is a narration of the exact same events, with one observing the sorrow to be known by the ego refusing to let go, and the other observing the rhapsodic elation of the ego let go for good. The obvious contrast between them, the yin and the yang together comprising the one and same formulation no matter if others perceive your life as a heaven or as a hell, is a fine testament to how the ideas of utopia and nirvana either one are very much a personal affair, regardless of assertions made by religious zealotry or political partisanships or brand loyalty. The experiences of a lifetime have nothing whatsoever to do with their unknowing promises of what you might take from the end, but with what you give as the means in the walkabout there.