finding God – Transcendence Diaries

Something Special is Happening

December 25, 2013

[An old draft recently discovered, transcribed and edited.]

Had to share this post from someone i saw on Facebook early this morning. Woke up at 3:45 am and couldn’t get back to sleep. So i surfed for a while. I usually avoid religious posts. I don’t Like them or UnLike them. I just don’t pay attention to them. Any kind of public religious zealotry tends to turn me off, whether it’s pro-religious or anti-religious. Atheists are some of the most religiously zealot people you’d ever not want to meet, though they don’t realize it. But many of them are prone to the same kind of proselytizing that radical evangelicals or Muslims are. Personally I find it peculiar, the apparently dire need some people seem to have to profess preach or proselytize their faith to others. Especially in a mixed setting like Facebook or other social media websites where we’re sure to encounter people from a wide variety of backgrounds and cultures, faiths and religious traditions. Chances are, we’re most likely in the minority; if not due to our religion per se — Christianity is after all a surprisingly popular religion globally — but in our desire or willingness to talk about it publicly. When religious views are so personal; when we are fully aware that our own personal religious views are not being solicited by others… and are most likely not even welcomed.

It’s akin to running around town buck-naked, this trend to go social with your religious views. We all get naked when we have to. That’s a given. It’s a fact of life we all quietly and humbly accept. But we don’t find many people asking anyone else to show it to them publicly. At least not if they’re sane or rational folk. Public displays of religion have always struck me in a similar fashion. Not only is your own nudity generally unwelcome in public places, it can also more often than not just be downright insulting to some; this assumption that everyone wants to see your wanker flopping around in the wind. So if you live in a world where everyone does their best to be respectful, you simply keep your clothes on in public. The same rule should apply to waving our religious flag all over the place every time you open your mouth or type something publicly. I’m not against religion. Certainly not against being religious. Obviously. I just believe that it’s a very personal thing. It’s hard to pull off publicly pronouncing one’s faith when it wasn’t requested in the first place.

When it comes to religion, especially as it relates to Christianity in the United States, there is an unspoken — unfortunately sometimes spoken — idea that some people have that “their way” is the “one true” or “best way” there is, insinuating that all other religions are somehow inferior to theirs — simply because they aren’t christian. When someone posts something super religious unsolicited in a social media arena for all the world to see, knowing damn well that the majority of the people who will see it don’t share their views, it comes across snobbish, holier than thou, cocky, sometimes downright insulting. But if you go deeper, and attempt to view them in a respectful way, it may not be as cocky or snobbish as it is just ignorant; just not being as aware as most people. I try to view it that way sometimes. To give them the benefit of the doubt.

So yes, I do tend to respectfully ignore those ultra-religious posts by others, regardless of which faith tradition they happen to entertain themselves with. For all the reasons listed above. Every now and then though something will catch me. This morning was one such occurrence. Perhaps it’s because it’s the middle of the night and I’m still half asleep. Or perhaps it’s because it just really resonated with me. We won’t know for years really… till this post becomes a forgotten re-read. But what grabbed me was a prayer. A simple prayer. A public prayer. Hung out to dry in the wind for all the neighbors to see. Just so happened that what this person posted resonated strongly with me; probably because I’ve been praying the same damn prayer nearly word for word for weeks now myself.

I’ve felt a strong compulsion to pray a lot more and connect with the Divine a lot more lately. Not sure why. Something special is happening. Has happened. Something bigger than usual, larger than just me or “us”. And I cannot help but feel that it doesn’t have to be inherently religious for those that choose not to go “there”. But science has now discovered a cosmology that is big enough, expansive enough, (magical enough if you will) to allow for this kind of thought and still permit “rational thinking” for those who normally would never venture into those waters.

It isn’t like the old days — ten yeas ago? Five years ago? Even one year ago? Where one had to choose between being religious or being intelligent, sane, rational or logically minded. We can clearly see that in times past this was a choice that one had to make. All of the great faith traditions or religions that humankind has come up with (excepting Buddhism, which is NOT a religion in the strict sense) have been rather kooky, to put it kindly. They’re filled with contradictions and hypocrisy, legends and myths so glaringly unrealistic and manmade that you’d feel a fool to take them seriously. Once you study them that is. [And let us remember that a lot of religious people never make it to that point — which is why I recommend being as respectful as possible when interacting with someone overtly religious. They’re raised in a religious household and they never reach a point where they study it from a historical or academic perspective. They just take it at face value. Based on what they were taught as children. It’s important to remind ourselves of this; for perspective and respect.]

But for those who have taken the time to study the world’s religions, or even their own, it becomes apparent rather quickly just how insanely irrational and made up they all are. Usually this leads to a slingshot kind of reaction. One minute you’re religious and the next minute you’re super anti-religious. A logical pragmatist. A realist. Some even go so far as calling themselves atheists, though that’s a religion too. The anti-religion religion. The smartest minds will tend toward an open minded agnosticism. Which is where most of the civilized world seems to comfortably rest now in consciousness and in our cultural tendencies. But this Divine Force still pulses out there. In here. It’s still alive. Living. Existing. Creating. Sustaining. How involved It is in OUR day to day lives, one cannot be sure. How available It is to us even, we can’t be sure. But there’s nothing wrong with trying. No harm in it. In fact I’ve always found it to be a beneficial endeavor.

Which is where we started here roughly an hour ago. The sun is rising now. I will drift back to sleep soon. But not without first praying. I almost always fall asleep praying. Whether it’s night time or day. A full sleep or a half hour nap. Just what or who we are praying to… that’s a difficult thing to qualify. For everyone the image is probably different. I once heard a friend casually explain to a small group of us that he almost always prays to Jesus “because he was human” and he finds it easier to pray to “something he can understand”. I found this idea remarkably peculiar. Only because I personally feel the exact opposite of this. I tend to shy away from “praying” to Jesus on a regular basis — precisely because he is/was a human. I see him more as a conduit to the Divine, rather than a divine force himself… Not that I “don’t believe” that “Jesus was God”. I would never claim to know either way. Frankly I don’t know how anyone can make a decision about that one way or the other. I wouldn’t dare. So I remain optimistically open-minded about it. But when I pray I tend to pray to “something very large, expansive, all-knowing, all-loving, compassionate and omnipresent”, something that is big enough to hold the entire universe in its mind and/or beingness and yet small enough to fit inside the smallest sub-atomic particle. But see, that’s MY version of the Divine. Surely very different than the next person’s.

The question is, can God (the Goddess? Not gender based at all? Completely removed, evolved beyond gender-based organisms…?) be flexible, pliable, malleable enough to encompass all that we attribute to it and yet still BE what IT IS in reality? If anything? I’d venture to guess yes, He/She/It can. And does. And it is precisely at this time in OUR evolution that we are beginning to see and understand this. Surely God / the Divine already gets all this. Waiting for us to get it. Slowly but surely it seems as though more and more of us are coming around. As I’ve already recounted numerous times here in the past, I didn’t find God or religion as much as IT found me. The gift of that is not lost on me. I still remain exceedingly grateful for those experiences. For I know very well what it’s like to use one’s head to try to “figure God out”. It’s a maddening process. Your heart may long for one thing but your head always gets in the way. Logic and reason. Without some kind of a super-natural or paranormal experience one is usually left with just human logic and reason. God doesn’t tend to fit too easily into a rational logical view of the world. Especially when approached through the small minded lens of one or any of the world’s major religions. But once God finds you, once you come face to face with It, heart to heart, mind to mind, soul to soul, once you FEEL this divine presence, or hear it… it’s hard to deny it, no matter what logic or reason or rational thinking tell you.

And now we’ve caught up, scientifically speaking, to just how grand this God-construct can be or possibly is. Our science is expanding way beyond what it used to be, how small it used to be. Physicists are finally starting to create cosmological constructs that are expansive enough to make room for this Divine force. And thus prayer can be not only possible, but encouraged. At the very least for experimental purposes. (And that’s out of respect for the still-purely logical pragmatists who find the existence of an external Divine force in the universe unlikely). But for many, ones who have extended beyond that kind of thinking, or who, like me, have experienced something other-worldly that has permanently shifted their views, prayer just may be the fastest way for us to get to the bottom of what this special thing is that we’ve been calling God for so many thousands of years. I am most fascinated imagining what our beliefs will be like in another ten years, or another fifty, or one-hundred, pertaining to this Divine force. Who will strike theistic gold first? The scientists? Or the spiritual? Or will it be a more subtle vectoring of both worlds simultaneously? A sudden realization of the merging of both worlds without a deliberate attempt to do so…? Seems very likely. But we’ll just have to wait and see. In the meantime it’s certainly an intriguing proposition.

– Posted by The Ambassador using BlogPress on an iPhone

Still in awe over the church experience

June 27, 2005

Still in awe over that church experience.

There is this antibiotic that the doctor has me on called leviquin. This is the fourth night in the row I have experienced this. it is now 3:21 am and I am wide awake. If you take it before bed you will at some point become aware during your sleep that you are sleeping and dreaming. It is a restless sleep to say the least, but filled with very vivid dreams, more like hallucinations. Filled with wild imagery and color. I have gotten two beautiful songs out of this drug so far, both while sleeping/dreaming. In the last dream I was just having I was dancing through a field with this young boy and Trophy wife, the singer. and we were in this imaginary world like hr puff and stuff or pee wee herman or neverland. All these rivers and tress and butterflies and we were just singing this gorgeous song together that we were making up as we went along. Finally I just thought this is enough, I’m going to wake up and record this song into a tape recorder. This is to good not to get down. So I snapped myself out of the dream and recorded some and now I’m just sitting here writing because my brain is moving so fast. it feels like speed. I cannot believe they release this stuff onto the market and just dish it out to regular unsuspecting people who trust whatever their doctor says. [and here’s the thing, I only take one half at a time because I’m just that way. more people die in America every year from legally prescribed prescription drugs than any other preventable cause. It’s the number one cause of death in America. I forget the number but its ridiculous. Like you hear it and you can’t believe it. so I always take really small doses of everything. I couldn’t imagine if I were taking whole tablets. I’d be jumping off the walls. But it has cured my ear ache pretty fast.]

Another side effect is this itching. My whole body itches. And this sucks. But it is worth this hallucinatory effect to be sure. My mind feels on fire almost. I would almost call it anxiety but I kind of like it, so I don’t mind waking up like this in the middle of the night to type or think or sing for an hour or two. If I did, I’d be hating life. but just what it does to the mind is so freaky and refreshing and exciting, I’m kind of welcoming the million miles an hour rapid thoughts. One caveat: this drug cost $368 for the bottle so this isn’t a cheap high, but worth it if you can get just a few. Also, its an anti-biotic, so its not the healthiest thing to be taking recreationally. If you’re up for it though and into mind exploration, this would be one to try. and I’m talking about purely scientific purposes here of course. if you’re into psychotropic drug research. I would almost classify this as a nootropic because the ideas fly out so fast.

Something I had come to understand tonight. about the whole girls saga that I write about endlessly. Quick before I lose my nerve to set it to paper. the thing is this. if you meet someone and they aren’t the someone, meaning you may have this great chemistry with them and be moderately attracted to them, but you aren’t head over heels with them, then of course yes the natural tendency is to want to hang with them. of course. so in me, that desire, its natural. Its not wrong. and all this time I had been making myself wrong for wanting to date all these girls who weren’t ‘the one.’ so for a long time now I haven’t been allowing myself to do it at all. but here’s the catch. If you already know they’re not the one. if you already feel that. that you’re not going to or not capable of or not going to be desirous of having a mid to long term affair with them, but just kind of in it because its moderately amusing or they are intellectually stimulating or you have fun with them, then you have to tell them from the beginning. You can’t just be dating them and playing along for your own selfish reasons because they’re fun in the moment. because to them you might be someone they really like. And its easy to use that to your advantage. But you can’t. you see its like if you meet the woman of your dreams and she introduces you to all these guys she went out with who you kind of say to yourself ‘well how the hell did you go out with him?’ its like that. we as men have to have the same kind of discrepancy that we expect girls to have. which normally we don’t. we just go out with whatever girl we can so we can shag them. because after all that’s our natural instinct, to do as many girls as possible. But we all know what happens after we bag a babe. Normally we lose interest pretty quickly. And that sucks for that girl and then it sucks for us because we feel guilty. And then we lose them as a friend. so the thing is about being real. Its about being real with ourselves and with the girl. Wow. that’s some heavy shit. I just never saw it through to its conclusion like that. I think this may have something to do with being a man. with being a gentleman. I think it may even be something like you can in the end actually date the girls because you may really enjoy certain things about them, but you just need to be totally upfront with them and let them know from the start that you’re friends. Kind of like girls do with us. you know how they do that? I know, it sucks. But they have that capacity. And we usually don’t. we’ll just lead any girl on just so we can sleep with them. but again, I think we have to start taking that attribute of women and applying it ourselves. There will be a lot less conflict and battle of the sexes going on if we’re upfront like that.

Last screening: frank Lloyd Wright biography by ken burns. Wow, what a crazy one. inspiring though disconcerting. Let us hope that it is possible to achieve the same level of genius without the same degree of dishonesty and creepiness.

Today I had an opportunity to feel what it felt like to get a “worry”

June 26, 2005

Today I had an opportunity to feel what it felt like to get a “worry” and then in that moment to say to myself, “well wouldn’t it be cool if instead of fretting over this, I could just enjoy the ride, maybe learn something from it, maybe not, but either way, just enjoy the experience. What if I didn’t look at it like a situation that I need to be fretful over or worry over? What if I just took as part of the ride?

[what is it with new Yorkers calling Florida ‘flarida?’ don’t they see that there’s an ‘o’ in the word Florida? what is that? and what is it with that word anyway? Florida? if you look at it for a while and say it a few times, it takes on this whole other quality… Florida. what kind of a word is that anyway? Florida? have to look it up. be right back…

the other thing I was thinking about while listening to some bible reading in church today was this: what the hell are we doing reading or paying any attention to for that matter the history of the Jews? I mean, the old testament is after all nothing more than a series of thousands of years of Jewish history. And respectfully one can understand the importance these historical documents might hold for Jewish people. that’s their history. Their tradition. So if they want to sit around every Sunday and read it, that’s cool. we would expect it. good for them. But as I looked around the church this morning I’m noticing that there aren’t any Jewish people in the hall. We’re not from Israel. None of us. And I’m thinking, so what the hell are we all doing studying this story about this cat named Abraham who was about to kill his son Issaac as a sacrifice to his God? I mean, say what you will, but I think that’s pretty fucking psychotic, and this whole old testament is psychotic. Its just one crazy story after another. But that’s beside the point. But truly, what the hell does that have to do with us. I mean, as Americans I understand that we don’t have any tradition or real history that dates back too far because we’re too new of a country, so if we want to look for some kind of meaning or spiritual significance in old traditions and history texts like people do with the old testament then we’re going to have to go back to the ancient writings of whatever country we’re from. for me that would be England and Italy. For other people that might be Greece or Ireland or some African country or Scotland or Russia or where ever. But sitting around reading the old testament as a bunch of Americans/Europeans just makes no sense when you look at it in the bigger picture. Its quite silly and makes no sense.

Regardless of all of this, because of course I could go on forever, and millions have — go to Amazon.com or any library in the world and check out the religious & inspirational, philosophy, theology, or comparative religion sections; hundreds of millions of words have been penned by humankind espousing countless ideas over thousands of years about God and religion and the like and none of it is any more significant now than it ever has been; at least it won’t be until an actual God shows up or an afterlife magically appears (and trust me, I’m not one to doubt the ability of humankind to create anything we want to eventually just by sheer thought-energy and our pure desire for either to exist, but for now its all up in the air). So even these words… as important as they may seem to me, as they have to millions who have come before me, are absolutely meaningless when it comes to the greater questions that befuddle our limited understanding of life in this grand universe.

But again, with all that said, I must make note here today as I have many Sundays prior, that this whole church thing I have been experiencing has been quite the miracle in my life as of late. call it what you will. I’m certainly not a religious man. I think I’m the only American alive who hasn’t seen Mel Gibson’s Jesus box office smash and if I’m lucky I never will. I don’t condone that kind of revisionist history. I don’t care what your religious beliefs are. you want to make a movie about an important religious figure then study your history first. and then make your movie. Tell the truth. or try to. with Jesus it would be hard because there are so many contradictory versions of his life. but at least try. show that you care. Show that there are at least two, three, four, different stories there that are all plausible. And until we address those we are never going to get beyond the myths that we continue to propagate century after century. No different than what the Romans or Greeks were doing with their God-myths. Nuf said.

So I’m certainly not religious, but something is happening to me and to my heart with this force that I call God. its speaking to me, its guiding me. and it feels great. I mean, I walk out of there every week kicking my heels and feeling truly blessed. God has really entered my life and he/she/it seems o.k. that I have these questions and concerns. And that my friends is what God is or should be all about. its all about the love. Its just love. And all these war mongering crazies out there killing people in the name of God are just the pretenders on the throne. One day the light will come to bear these truths to be self evident. Until then, we keep quiet and do our best to love each other as much as we can.
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Great brunch today with tomcat and his new babe from Nigeria. Got started on the whole 9/11 saga. He is to forward me a bunch of research reports and studies of sept 11 that are being conducted now by research teams in Canada that are pointing to more cover-ups and more evidence that the American government was indeed behind the whole thing and that’s why Bush didn’t flinch when he heard the news. and why the entire bin laden family was secretly escorted out of the country on private jets as soon as the towers were hit. And more and more connections between bush family and bin laden family which everyone’s at this point and evidence that points to that guy who got beheaded in Pakistan Daniel pearl actually being a reporter who was about to blow the lid on the whole thing and show the American gov was behind it, so they got him and used that whole ‘we’re a bunch of scary crazy Muslims wearing masks’ thing as a scare tactic to win favor and support for the continued killing going on in Iraq and they killed him. hey who knows. I mean, really, at this point who knows. all we can do as tomcat says is keep building our own little nest egg and keep quiet. because if it is true all that means is that they’re going to come after us if we open our mouths too wide. And boy don’t we know that’s the truth. just ask David koresh. Oh yeah, we can’t, because they burned him alive with a hundred and seventy nine other people on live TV. At one point tomcat looks up at me and says, ‘but you know bro, for all of that it still bothers me. I still have to go work everyday and know that my money is going to pay for killing all these Iraqis. I’m paying 36% of my hard earned money in taxes and its going to pay for people dying over there.’ he sips his coffee. ‘We’re killing people. we have blood on our hands. All of us. every single one of us who is paying taxes. And we can’t do anything about it.’ I couldn’t have said it better myself. so I just looked at the tomcat as if I were looking in the mirror.

I didn’t say anything back to tomcat. I just let him sit there and stare at me looking for an answer. the problem is is that he is right. we can’t do anything about it. America has always invaded other countries. All big countries have. America started out by invading America. Remember we aren’t Americans. We are the invaders still. the occupiers. We only call it our land and our country because we have the biggest guns still. and then America invaded Mexico and now they call it Texas. America invaded Korea and grenada and Vietnam. The people of big countries don’t mind when they’re government invades other countries as long as they still have their Coke and their sex and the city and their p diddy and their fritos and queer eye TV. Big governments know this. so they keep on invading and they’ll use every trick in the book to keep on doing it. and our taxes will keep on paying for it because we can’t do a damn thing about it. we can bitch and moan and complain and protest but its not going to do any good. Vietnam taught us that.

Take a look at the countries that didn’t choose to invade Iraq: France and Germany. Well study their history. Shit they know what invading other countries gets you. eventual revolutions and if you’re not careful eventually retaliatory attacks on your own land. So they butt out. 9/11 taught us that. should have at least. but our government hasn’t learned that one yet. and maybe they never will until it really hits home. and for us, the people of this great twisted wreck of bitter irony that we are, that will be a sad fucking day. because the truth is that we the people aren’t invading any countries. We’re not even in Iraq. Our government is. in our names. And with out tax dollars. So if the blow of justice and revenge ever lands upon these tired soils it will not come as surprise to a few of us. that’s just the hand of nature dealing the cards out.

Last screening: batman begins. well they finally did it. Hollywood finally made a good batman movie. In fact batman begins is the first good superhero movie that’s ever been released. I know what you’re thinking if you’re a regular reader, because that would imply that you’re smart as hell and you don’t believe the hype. So you’re probably like me and saw that first batman piece of doo doo and felt so insulted and bored and over-hyped and over-sold that you wanted to run screaming out of the theatre and if you were lucky you never saw any of the sequels or any of the spiderman movies either. But I’m telling you, they finally got it right this time. Christian bale, the man everyone should remember from his excellent performance in the twisted masterpiece American psycho, made a great batman. Just fucking great. Remember when michale keaton was trying to play Bruce Wayne and batman and you felt uncool just being in the theatre watching it because it was so uncool. Well not with Christian bale. I’m not saying this was the godfather or anything. But trust me, it’s a good flick and good time. inspiring. This is what g lucas should have done with his sadly disappointing star wars follow-ups. Paper disguised as bread those were at best. But this little baby was pretty cool. and not so Hollywood. even though there are plenty of cool actors in it. of course liam neeson dies in it because I think he must have that written in his contracts – that he dies in every movie he’s in. Gary Oldman was good enough. Michale caine was surprisingly good, because for the past twenty years he’s just been so ‘fine just write me the check and give me the script and I’ll show up, I promise.’ But in this he’s pretty good. leaves a nice opening for a sequel. Lets hope they get it as good the second time as they did here.

More hours spent viewing and time-logging footage for the show

June 8, 2005

More hours spent viewing and time-logging footage for the show. Endless and overwhelming task but getting through it. a few hours spent talking to Lil Sis and boo boo. About how hard it is to feel centered and grounded in New York. so hard to feel comfort and secure and nurtured here. because the energy is so high all time. hard to get together with friends. Everyone so caught up in their quest to make their dream a reality. Everyone always working so hard and striving so hard you can live five blocks from someone and not see them for a month. Surrounded by people and still be very much alone most of the time. I had always heard this about New York but never knew it really till I moved here. but yes it is true. a week flies by so fast it feels like a day or two because you are working so hard and such long hours.

Fishy says:
holy cow! laurence and i are speaking about you right now!!! how weird
Rosie says:
!!!
Rosie says:
hey
Fishy says:
i jsut asked him where the heck is ro?
Fishy says:
standby i will copy and paste some good news for you so i dont have to retype
Fishy says:
your brother is in the middle of preaching jesus to me right now. as always. standby…
Fishy says:
Fishy says:
i finally found a home-church here in manhattan after a nine month search.
Laurence- says:
wow, and what does that exactly mean?
Rosie says:
great!!!!! im so pleased for u! so hows the serach going….like spiritually?
Fishy says:
its ok. i feel a strong god presence all the time now. he led me to go into this church one day when i was walking by and i was filled with the most spiritually fulfilling feeling of euphoria i had ever felt before
Rosie says:
so you are feeling closer to the truth!! that’s great!
Fishy says:
Well perhaps. or just blind hypnosis… religion is hypnosis… haha… but perhaps its ok
Fishy says:
of euphoria i had ever felt before. a sens of peace and joy and love and comfort and feeling that he is there for us and with us all the time. so i got the message and went back to the church that sunday
Rosie says:
what ahhpend next
Rosie says:
happend
Fishy says:
good stuff.
Rosie says:
elaborate
Fishy says:
i went back to the church and felt immediately at home after going to different churches ever sunday for about nine months i knew i was home. couldnt explain it. felt like home. felt like old times. god spoke to me sort of like that and all of a sudden i felt this surge of him being very close to me and very close to this church.
Fishy says:
as if its a special place….
Rosie says:
cool
Rosie says:
what kind of church was it?
Fishy says:
christ church, united methodist
Rosie says:
ok…so do you think that the God they worship is true?
Rosie says:
based on the experience you had?
Fishy says:
the god? yes i guess. i know that i feel god, gods love, presence in our lives…
Fishy says:
i feel that we are all feeling someting akin to godness who are at that church…
Rosie says:
that is wonderful
Rosie says:
so…do you believe in the concept of salvation?
Fishy says:
i grew up in the church and went to christian schools so the community aspect is very importnat to me
Fishy says:
the spiritual community aspect of being with like minded people who walk the walk is importnat to me
Fishy says:
im jsut not sure about the details of the dogma…
Fishy says:
i do not beleive that humanity needs salvation from outside of itself…
Fishy says:
i beleive we can supply our own salvation.
Fishy says:
i know this to be true becasue it was me who supplied my own salvation in ’95 and onward… through discvoering the avatar tools and other tools that we can use to free ourselves of guilt and pain and regret and resentment and all that… it didnt come from outside of me. it came from me forgiving myself…. and then voila! i was happy and refreshed and filled with joy again
Fishy says:
i am sure god has something to do with it. i am sure of it. i pray to him eveyday and always have.
Rosie says:
you know what Jesus taught about salvation right?
Fishy says:
tell me in your words
Rosie says:
we cannot save our selves. god requires complete purity/holiness from us and we cannot achieve that our selves. jesus died for us so that we cam be completely forgiven and saved from our own sin
Rosie says:
we just need to trust in him, surrender our sins to him (aknowledging we cannot save our selves and need him and his sacrifice).
Fishy says:
i did this many times when i was a teenager and became so to speak born again. but im jsut not there anymore in my heart or mind. but i am sure god understands… to be perfectly honest, i beleive that god if we dare utter the word cares alot more about who we are and how we are and how we act than he does about what we say we beleive or not.
Fishy says:
walk the walk. talking the talk is pretty insignificant. this is my beleif.
Rosie says:
i get what you mean
Rosie says:
but it says in the bible that
Rosie says:
it is through Faith we are saved
Rosie says:
not by works
Rosie says:
lest any man should boast
Rosie says:
(Romans)
Fishy says:
when god speaks to me i listen. when he asks me to do something i do it. i listen.
Fishy says:
remember, that im not such a holy book beleiver.
Fishy says:
its nothing against the christian bible or the koran or any of them. i really dont beleive in any of them… not the bagavad gita or the upanishads or the koran or or the torah or any of them… i do not beleive that man can know god well enough to write his words or ideas down.
Fishy says:
this is my own personal beleif. god is in our hearts perhaps and can come through in our actions and how we appear to the world but not through written words that try to represent what god is thinking or saying.
Rosie says:
but if god is Jesus, then much of the new testement is just a history account about an encounter with god on earth
Fishy says:
fascinating ideas in the above sentence rosie…
Fishy says:
and one can go on forever pondering these ideas… unfortunaly we will never know. humankind will prob never know…
Fishy says:
for 2000 years we have pondered those ideas and millions of people have been killed because of them. everyone fighting over things like this.
Fishy says:
its best for us to move beyond all that and to jsut live by a human code of love and peace and morality and ethics and respect…
Rosie says:
that’s well and good in principle
Rosie says:
but try it
Rosie says:
it’s impossible
Rosie says:
if we really could live by a human code of love and peace and morality and ethics and respect…
Fishy says:
i find it easy. especially if i pray everyday.
Rosie says:
we would not need god to save us
Fishy says:
i pray to god to help me be true to my heart of hearts. i think holy books — no matter which religion they are from — only confuse humans.
Fishy says:
osama bin laden and george w bush are two great examples of religious people confused by holy books….
Rosie says:
yeah…but if the Bible is true…it changes everything
Rosie says:
if it is just a false religious book then of course you are right
Rosie says:
but if it is tru
Rosie says:
e
Fishy says:
well every religion could say that. and they do. so who are we humans supposed to beleive?
Rosie says:
then it changes our definition of truth
Rosie says:
exactly
Rosie says:
only God can show us
Fishy says:
that isnt even fair to think about…. really. its exclusionary to humanity.
Rosie says:
and he will
Fishy says:
well i hope he does eventually show us because im sick of reading the history of humankind killing each other over these very silly arguments…
Fishy says:
its nice that we created a god concept. its an awesome idea. now lets live up to it. lets make god proud.
Rosie says:
of course
Rosie says:
interesting
Fishy says:
yes….
Rosie says:
but what if the only way we can make him proud is to surrender to him and let him cleanse and save us
Fishy says:
thought youd like that chickie
Fishy says:
i know….
Fishy says:
jsut gonna have to wait till god comes down and tells us what the hell is going on!
Fishy says:
cause none of us know…
Fishy says:
until then we still have music and movies and dancing and lovemaking and romance and all that….
Rosie says:
well he came once and the next time it comes it will be too late
Fishy says:
I don’t agree
Rosie says:
then it says Every Knee Shall Bow, Every Tounge Confess that Jesus Chrict is Lord
Fishy says:
do you think maybe that i am the second coming?
Fishy says:
i look like jesus….
Fishy says:
do you remember when i was sporting that beard?
Fishy says:
hahahaha!!!
Rosie says:
well…i think you can answer that for your self my dear Fishy!!
Rosie says:
but you are cool!!!
Fishy says:
hahahah
Fishy says:
that would be funny if i were the messiah and didnt know it…
Fishy says:
at least you could get into clubs for free…
Rosie says:
well the messiah will and does no it
Rosie says:
well u can do that anyway already because you are such a rock star
Fishy says:
lol
Rosie says:
gotta go
Rosie says:
have an exam tommorow
Rosie says:
have not revised
Fishy says:
kick butt!
Rosie says:
thanks
Rosie says:
xxxxxxxx

I am glad to speak to my friends and family about these things. I am glad that I have friends and family who are still so religious. It’s a good discourse where we all can learn a little. Not into the ritual of religion so much myself. Believing now that God is actually more of an extension of us… or we an extension of him. that one day we will realize the secret that has been there all along for us to discover. That that which we seek is actually just a larger extension of ourselves. So even the rituals to me seem insignificant and meaningless in the bigger picture. It is our actions that are what’s important. the rituals change and shift according to what time in our history it is and what country we are living in. But our actions are timeless. They are beyond national boundaries.

In the “white house sucks ass department” from our friends at CNN:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) — A White House official, who previously worked for the American Petroleum Institute, has repeatedly edited government climate reports in a way that downplays links between greenhouse gas emissions and global warming, The New York Times reported Wednesday.
Philip Cooney, chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, made changes to descriptions of climate research that had already been approved by government scientists and their supervisors, the newspaper said, citing internal documents.
The White House declined comment on the report.
Well of course they did.

Current spin: husseine alizadeh, the art of improvisation. Persian classical music played on the dumbek and the taar. Beautiful. really effing beautiful.

Well you know perhaps there is such a thing as miracles after all

June 5, 2005

Well you know perhaps there is such a thing as miracles after all. not that we ever had our doubts mind you. [chuckle] the neighborhood is bustling. Spring has finally arrived. At least for today it seems. Sunny cool and breezy. Everyone walking around with the air that they are on their way to somewhere. Me I sit on the steps of the little brownstone I call home here temporarily, having an afternoon smoke and typing on the old laptop. As always. An almost constant fixture here in this neighborhood, so much so that residents on this block are so used to seeing me sitting here when they’re walking in our out of their respective apartments or walking their dogs that they feel at ease enough to stop and chat, ask me what I’m writing or what cigar I happen to be smoking. New York is like that. think sesame street. Remember sesame street? Well that’s what living in New York is like.

So about miracles. This morning I actually woke up before 11am on Sunday. Had enough time to sit in the bath for a while. As always I felt great; as we often do in the morning before our mind takes over with its incessant chatter of worries and concerns and fears and judgments and criticisms. I noticed these thoughts popping in and being that it was Sunday I decided that instead of running with any one particular thought that I was just going to give each one to God. turn them into prayer requests and then primaries. ‘God help me to become free of judgment of others.’ ‘God help me live the life of my dreams and fulfill my own personal legacy.’ ‘God help me to be a positive influence on others and a good role model.’ ‘ God help me to fully integrate this whole friends thing I have been struggling with and to open my heart again so I can recognize how blessed I am.’ ‘God help me to finally completely integrate my struggle with the God concept and that whole Jesus thing… help me to know you and to have a deep and meaningful connection with you…’ so on and on it went like that throughout my droopy-eyed bath.

Up and out and fast-walked to that giant church on the corner of park and 60th St. where I had first had that spiritual epiphany of an experience a few weeks back. plenty of time to get there this week. only seven minutes late. that’s certainly a miracle. for me at least. I’m bored now so I’ll quick note instead of prose it: overwhelming feeling of comfort and joy at this church. Been church-hopping/shopping for nine months now here. every week I force myself up at the ungodly hour of ‘sometime before 11am’ on Sundays and head to a new church hoping to find an hour of spiritual community for the week and not much more, being that I’m extremely unreligious to say the least, but still caught between worlds so that I cannot seem to shake the need to search out comfort and respite from the harsh and cruel world of the entertainment business in a church of some kind at leas tonce a week.

Cannot really explain the joy I felt there today. I even went down to the coffee hour afterwards. I swear to whatever the hell is out there that I really did this. walked around. talked with people. now of course I didn’t go so far as to wear the visitor badge but I sure came close. But I walked out of there with such a feeling of joy and peace and comfort that I’ve spent the last hour or so sitting here feeling as though I was breathing new life into my lungs with each breath. As if there may or may not be a God still, we’ll leave that to him/her/it to settle, but at the least there is a damn good community of fine people gathering not two blocks from my apartment in this place called Christ church and I feel slightly reborn at the discovery of it. had that feeling of ‘I am home; I have found my church.’ That’s the feeling that everyone gets when they are church-shopping and they finally find a place they feel that they can attend more than once or twice in a lifetime.

Last screening: Cinderella man. Great movie. Not amazing. but just good on the edge of your seat entertainment.

Current spin: al green. Green is blues. Starts off great. Can’t beat Al’s voice. Slides into extreme mediocrity towards the end.

Also, 50 cent, the massacre. A guilty pleasure.

You know, maybe we can and do spend our entire lives rallying against God

June 4, 2005

You know, maybe we can and do spend our entire lives rallying against God and all that, primarily I believe for two reasons, one because he’s never showed him/herself and only been an idea in human consciousness, as opposed to a “something real” that could be construed as undeniable – I mean put your hand on a red hot stove and that’s going to be pretty fucking undeniable; or run out into the middle of Lexington avenue in front of my apartment at rush hour and that’s going to be an undeniable experience to be sure, but God just hasn’t pulled that off yet. perhaps he’s too busy. Perhaps he’s moved onto to other worlds, his only mission here on our small planet was creation itself and then from there we’re all on our own. Of course our idea of God has always persevered; our desire for what God is and should be and what he/she could be has become almost undeniable to many and most; at least in the mind of many who call themselves religious. All that’s in place already. ask a Christian or a Muslim – they’re probably the most devout of the old-worlds left on the planet at this point (at least of the majors – from what I hear the Jane’s watch every step they take because they think it is a sin to kill anything, even insects.) — and they’re going to give you that confident “no I have no idea I’m in a cult but everything is just fine, really it is” smile and give you all sorts of reasons and evidence that God is undeniable. U dig deep enough and you’re going to discover that for them its all going to come down to what is written in their respective holy books. Yep, I’m not making it up. most people get to a point in life where the hand on the burning hot stove is going to be more undeniable than say what you may or may not read in one or two books. But not all people. some of these people will look you right in the eye and tell you that their certainty of what’s in that book is stronger than their certainty of their hand on the hot stove or any scientific proof you can prove or unprove in the known universe. And for them we leave a little bit of envy in our hearts, because that’s a faith that is hard to muster up in most of us. they’re crazy, granted, I mean, in a court of law they would be deemed insane, but that doesn’t mean that we cannot envy them.

But for the rest of us well we have to dig deep to find that kind of faith. because its not easy in the face of the nothingness that surrounds us. so we rally against and bitch and moan about the God concept because lets face it, God doesn’t seem to mind. If he/she/it exists at all, he/she/it understands I’m sure. So far God doesn’t appear in the form of an undeniable hot stove that you can’t place your hand on. More like a damn good idea that just hasn’t fully materialized yet.

The problem of course with being intellectual is that it’s an utter waste of time. we may find it mildly exciting at some stage. But you just reach a point where philosophizing over matters intellectual feels such a waste of precious time and effort. Reading and thinking and talking about it all. I mean, life hasn’t changed that much since we got here. and I don’t see it changing that much by the time we leave. Sure technology has shifted and evolved a lot, but in thirty-thousand years of recorded human history we are still right where we were thirty thousand years ago; no closer to knowing who we are or why we are or how we got here. I don’t think any debate we’re going to have over dinner or drinks tonight or at the university or in court tomorrow is going to make a difference. If God had any heart at all he’d throw us a bone, clue us in even a tad. But God the eternal joker –where do you think they got the idea for that character in the first place – is too busy with his own Thai massage at this time; hell, he’s probably got three hot Orientals at once as I’m typing this and he considers himself just too damn busy to give us even the foggiest notion of what’s really going on.

Life is so fucking short. Twenty years goes by and you come to understand in the wee hours of morning when you’re laying in bed contemplating it that it has seemed no longer than a few years…. that any day we’re going to be old and in the way and dreading the inevitable. Still clueless as we were when we first arrived all those years ago. I’ll tell you, I think that’s why we’re so obsessed with having kids. One because we hope that it’ll make life a little less lonely and miserable and two because way down deep in some kind of primitive or primordial sort of way we are hoping that having offspring will somehow extend our own lives.

So yeah, I dread the invitations to partake in the intellectual repartee at this point. You can only think about these things so much before you succumb to the dire hopelessness that most thought is.

Same thing with TV. People are always amazed and almost shocked that I don’t subscribe to television. But I still am unfortunate enough to catch a bit of news here and there in a store or in a taxicab. Today I was so cursed as to hear the following against my will just by riding in a taxi and sitting in a store for a few minutes. There was a funeral for a six year old boy that got shot. Three girls got killed in a bus. Dark force vice president Cheney was upset because amnesty international condemned the United States for being the most guilty of crimes against humanity this year and dark force secretary Rumsfeld warned of china’s military buildup. And lets not forget the Michael Jackson case that everyone is so obsessed with. So no wonder I don’t pay money to get this shit in my own home. American news sucks ass.

Man I’m starting to get this ‘fuck it who cares’ attitude lately that is very foreign to me. I was going to say I don’t even know it, but I do. I know it from times past. I used to be this way. why am I starting to become this way again? I’m sitting here and I swear to God I just chucked a soda bottle out the fourth floor window of my apartment building with that same fuck it attitude. A ticking time bomb. Just waiting for shit to happen. today when we were filming the TV show some homeless guy walks right onto the set and asks me for money while the camera is rolling and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t embarrassed at what the camera caught. I’m rude as all hell to the guy just yelling at him ‘get the hell out of here man what the fuck are you doing can’t you see we’re working here?!’ so unlike me. what is happening to me lately?

We shot all day today for the TV show. But it sucked ass because I’m still trying to get this iPod thing to work and its not working and so we spend the whole day wound up in technical problems. So we got a few minutes here and there of footage but mostly just problems that throw me off what I’m supposed to be doing which is delivering killer lines of deep and meaningful wit and wisdom. Instead I end up getting mad and waiting around all day while the techs try to figure out what’s up.

Went to an off off Broadway play tonight that a friend was in, les nuits de la colere. An old French play about ww II. Good enough. She was excellent. Pro. Believable. You know at this point I’m a comic book character at best. spend the majority of my time in these paranoid and pathetic pits of despair and panic that I don’t have enough friends, and then whenever friends do invite me out I almost never go because I’m so obsessed with working and getting things done. Very weird. I noticed that a lot the last few weeks. never going to anything. I always schedule it but at the last minute I choose my own work instead. and then during the day or night when I’m working I obsess on how I don’t have any friends. Hey I told you it was pathetic. I just think I’m at that stage that all men get to where it’s do or die. I’m either going for the gold or I’m jumping off the empire. Because this in between is just not suiting me at all. so I spend every waking hour either working or studying other people’s work. And yeah eventually entirely deleting your social calendar from your life can have a strange effect on your psyche.

Anyway enough about me and my pathos which I should get a special leather pouch for since I carry it with me everywhere now. the fact is that as I sat there watching the play about ww II I had one thought. I am bored with this. I am tired of hearing about ww II. Lets move on. Lets move on completely with the past. I mean, from this point forward lets say goodbye to the past. And lets start trailblazing into the future. Imagine entertainment that deals with the future of what we envision rather than harping on what’s already past. I’m yawning just thinking about these tired pieces of days gone by. Give me something new and fresh and bold and innovative and exciting. give me anything but humanity’s old news at this point.

Went to chruch today.

May 29, 2005

Went to church today. stayed up all night writing and watching this Mr. smith goes to Washington movie. What a great story. When I finally woke up it was 10:51. church starts at 11am. Oh shit. run forest run! I had 9 minutes to get there, let alone get up, have coffee, shower, shave, get dressed and make a mad dash to the church. Wasn’t going to happen obviously. I was planning on attending this church on park Ave. that I had gone into a few weeks before, the one where I had that glorious spiritual experience just wandering in and sitting down. But there was no way I was going to make it. So I jumped up, splashed my face, threw some clothes on, and ran down the street to the closest church I knew of, this Baptist church on 61st and 2nd Ave.

I was hoping for something. at this point I am resigned to the contradictory nature of who I am and how I feel in relation to God and religion and churches. I know it makes no sense. The poet asks me on the phone, ‘you went to church? If your family in town or something? or you just went on your own? why do you spend so much of your time rallying against religion in your diaries then?’ I tell him ‘well, throughout history there hasn’t been anything more harmful or hurtful or destructive than religion bro.’ ‘well I know that. so why do you go to church then?’ ‘I guess its because I still have this longing for community of the spirit. I just can’t shake it. you know, the heart really longs for things spiritual and a chance to be able to share that with others…’ ‘so how was this church?’ ‘not good I’m afraid. Not good at all. it reminded me a lot of growing up. I went to Christian schools all through growing up and it was fucking nuts. a lot of talk about ‘us versus them.’ they have this attitude of ‘we’re saved and ‘they’re not.’’ and they talk about it the whole damn time. they kept referring to all the people on my block, by the way did you know that on the block that I live on there are 7000 people?’ ‘no way.’ ‘way. seriously. that’s what they said at least. Anyway, they referred to everyone on my block who wasn’t a born again Christian as ‘unsaved, lonely souls, lying and dying on the side of the road, I swear to God, they really said this… as if they have to save us all or else we will be forever damned…’ ‘well they believe that…’ ‘I know, and its scary that in this day and age with all we know about science and religion and physics and astronomy and metaphysics that people still think like that. it was actually really scary because I hadn’t been in a church like that for a long time and I had forgotten that that’s out there.’ ‘it’s a reality though I’m afraid. What are you gonna do. that’s life my brother’ ‘indeed it is.’

Anyway so today wasn’t so good of a church experience. In fact, it was rather frightening. Last week at unity was fine. At least there are open minds there. I did get a chance to talk with God a bit and that was nice. ‘God/Goddess, what am I doing here? you know my heart. help me to know you God… help me to know the real you… help me to open my heart and mind and ears and eyes enough to really know you. you know me God, I can’t think like this. this is fucking madness. I’m never going to believe in any of this only through Jesus stuff or the Krishna stuff or the Allah stuff… show me the truth God, show me the real God and spirit… let me know you so I can serve you better God… in my own name I pray.’

The whole damn time they were praising Jesus and saying he was their savior and without him we are doomed to lie dead and suffering on the side of the road… and I’m trying to hold myself back from jumping up and screaming ‘people don’t you know that we’re our own savior? Don’t you see that every population in the world has an idea of a different savior and in the end none of it even matters because we’re the savior that we’re really looking for?! We don’t need a savior from two thousand years ago anymore than we need a Buddha or a Krishna or a Ganesh or a Mohamed or any of that. we’re all little pieces of God people. we’re God right here on earth. Here we are. millions of us. millions of little gods. Lets praise us. lets take this time to worship ourselves.. man I’m loving your music here, but use it to celebrate us!!!’

The other thing is that the minister had all the guys who had ever served in the armed forces stand up and had everyone pray for them. but not one mention of all the innocent Iraqis that have died in this war. Nothing. I stood there in shock and awe. Just total blindness as to the realities of what’s really going on.

God do I long for the day when we will be able to pray to a God of no denomination, no dogma, no religion, no backwoods hillbilly camel in the desert fundamentalist intolerant closed minded bullshit attached.

This lady comes into the smoke shop asking us for money to donate to animals. She tells us that your best friends in the world are animals. People will leave you, animals won’t.’ and then ‘there’re no animals in the next life, so enjoy them while you can.’ strange set of beliefs I thought. And then Lon tells me ‘don’t ever go out with a read-head. They’re all certifiable.’ Great now I’ve heard it all. we’re now classifying people by the color of their hair? Made me think about church this morning. Gosh, people will claim to have all sorts of whacked out beliefs. there are so many beliefs out there, people will just look at you with a straight face and recite them to you as if they are real. I swear to God everyone is just fucking nuts.

I am on the plane now reflecting on the previous two weeks

May 10, 2005

I’m on the plane now. reflecting on the previous two weeks. I am still just so in awe of the Avatar materials. Even though I was not on this particular course but just staying at the hotel working during the day and hanging out with everyone at night, as soon as the course kicked in i noticed that I immediately started processing myself as if I were on the course. when day one started I noticed that as soon as I woke up I started on day one exercises as if I were there and so on. This trip was all about being able to spend quality time with Princess Little Tree in the evenings and getting out of the city and into a clean objective large space by day, a hotel room in frisco in this case, so I could focus work on going through the sixty hours of video footage we collected for the TV show in order to get to the editing stage. I just couldn’t do it in New York. couldn’t find the focus.

So in frisco I set up an office and viewing suite right in the hotel and had no problem getting a lot of work done. More than normal I would say. Ps – bmg in London called our manager again. very cool. also great reviews still come in for NIC. And I noticed it get to #1,100 ranking on Amazon.com which was the highest I think it ever got (sales). I would like to see it get to number one. period. And I will do whatever it takes to make that happen. just got tons of good work done. kicked major ass in many arenas. Comforting to be in a relationship isn’t it. any kind of a relationship… provides a sense of safety and security and stability and routine that can augment the rest of your life. now if I could just get by the pain fear and resistance I have of relationships breaking up, and how all of that goes away eventually and seems to become meaningless…. well that would be a good thing… because frankly its hard for me to enjoy relationships now because of this fear… just seems so temporary. Like why bother… barely listened to music and didn’t watch anything for two weeks. just the TV show footage and wrote tons of great songs. My songwriting is kicking such ass right now. stellar. Completely enjoyable and satisfying for me as an artist. Scene in San Francisco part I and II, Thursday rain, and a new Indian sounding one.

Spent some time during everyday and night processing. Whatever was there that I didn’t prefer, I processed. Cleaning house. clearing space. no holds barred. Becoming more and more expanded. More and more able to hold more space, do more, be more, integrate more. feel more, feel capable of more. the poet called. He is depressed lately, anxious, life isn’t as much as he wants it to be. which is totally normal at 25 years old. He’s seeing a therapist, traditional therapy. Stone ages stuff which is way beneath him. must find a way to relate to him the importance of not waiting but gaining the Avatar technology/tools now rather than later. I hate hearing him how do you say it… it would be like if someone didn’t know that cars existed but you weren’t allowed to tell them so everyday they complained about having to ride around on a bicycle… and you knew what they were going through because you too once had to ride around on a bicycle and didn’t know cars existed… but now you know and so you’re sporting around in a brand new M3 and your buddy doesn’t even know that beamers exist yet, but you can’t totally relate to them the benefits of the car. you can just mention the car now and then… but they just don’t get it so they keep kicking their flat tires on their bicycle all the time and getting rained on and you feel sorry for them because you know it doesn’t have to be that way but they have to do it on their own. you can’t force someone to kick ass, you can try to motivate, but you can’t force them. you think of people who are overweight, who have drug problems, phobias, fears, mental or emotional problems, and ninety percent of them are totally unaware that the life that they are living, that the experiences that they are having, whether good or bad, are actually being created by themselves through their beliefs. we watch as most people, almost all people still, reach out to all corners of the earth OUTSIDE of themselves in order to try to find fixes for what ails them rather than going inside.

One of the new Avatars who was there learning the materials for the first time, this guy Mohamed (this name is actually spelled and pronounced Mohaamad’ in Arabic – in English we spell and pronounce it wrong – I never knew that…) wrote that he had always wanted to take the Jedi training, to become a Jedi, but of course that was impossible because that was just a movie, but now he feels like he has taken the Jedi training. Yes. exactly. that’s what it feels like, on the course, and then off of the course in real life. man I totally forgot about that analogy, but its true. you see that film and it reminds you of Avatar. So to the Poet if you ever read this, don’t wait, stop fucking around with middle-lane-common-man stuff now rather than later and go for the Jedi training. Go to the left lane, put the pedal to the metal and go for it. do the Jedi training. I tell all my friends this now.

As I was typing just a minute ago I had this hit that Humanity has now evolved to the point where it knows this. so we can’t say that humanity has not evolved to this understanding because it has. This last Avatar course in San fran was the largest Avatar course ever in America so far, the biggest one. every one gets bigger and bigger. I think it was about 180 new avatars. nuts. On my Avatar course there were three of us. that’s some serious evolution. So its not that we aren’t already there. we’re there but the majority of human consciousness is still being held back by the middle majority and by the lowest common denominator among us who just aren’t there. o.k. so that’s the reality check. That’s where we are now. but the good news is that everyday human consciousness is evolving and expanding. Everyday now somewhere in the world there is an Avatar course going on or some other cool course – Sedona method, Tony Robbins, Abraham hicks, Dan Millman, Lauren Holmes, landmark forum, to name a few — that expands consciousness beyond traditional old school ‘God does it’ ideas. people are going crazy to expand their current idea of what they can do and achieve … that’s what its like I guess. Its getting better all the time. absolutely no reason now why people need to struggle and learn the hard way by first going through old school traditional methodologies before they go for the real deal. Especially not guys as smart as the poet. Anyway, feeling much like Neo these days.

There is a sentence I read the other day which struck me so much that I had scribbled it down, “The principle dilemma of existence is what to believe; the philosophical abyss between the known and the unknown that confronts everyone.” I thought, what a fascinating concept, the idea that it is up to us what we believe, what we know… (first problem to overcome with many people when you first start speaking with them about consciousness and belief management is that at first without a lot of reflection they tell themselves that ‘beliefs’ are something that they aren’t sure about, but that they just have faith in…unlike ‘things that they know’ and that ‘things that they ‘know’ are not beliefs at all but things that are ‘real and irrefutable.’

This is a terribly impeding belief, because then the person walks through life feeling conflicted between what they ‘know’ and what they ‘want to believe.’ One of the first steps to enlightenment is to recognize that everything you know is a belief and that its up to you whether you hold that belief or not. this is huge for most people, the difference between your common victim of circumstance and the Gods that we all are.

[just thought of the sept 11th attacks in America. Which is a really good example of this. up until that time we did not ‘believe’ that anything like that could happen on American soil. If you asked someone about the potential of something like that occurring here they would tell you that they felt safe and secure and that they were pretty sure that that could never happen. if you asked the government they would say that they ‘knew’ that we were safe from something like that ever occurring. But then it happened anyway. so then our beliefs changed. Now, what we ‘know’ has changed. Now we ‘know’ that something like that can happen. we ‘believe’ that something like that can happen. To ‘know’ and to ‘believe’…]
[o.k. quick cause I have to run, but just got this due to opening up a new browser window, had CNN as my opening page and they had an advertisement banner on there for Billy grahm. He is a preacher for the Christian religion. You look at the picture and you see the militant and severe and serious look on his face, a proud man and a man who firmly believes in himself and what he believes…. and you come to understand, subtly but instantly, ‘this is a man who is operating from a very stuck and strict set of beliefs, although he doesn’t know it. he is defined by what he tells himself that he believes, although he may claim that what he ‘believes’ he actually ‘knows.’ which is common among humans. So its not like he’s unique or wrong in some way for this. almost everyone is this way. he will defend these beliefs till his death (in case you ever wondered what could possesses men to kill other men or chop off their heads when they are not directly being threatened – its beliefs). he will without a stutter claim that what he ‘knows’ are not ‘beliefs’ at all, but irrefutable facts. And he knows it and it has nothing to do with ‘beliefs.’ once a person tells you that they ‘believe’ this about themselves, I have noticed that it is very hard to have a conversation with them from that point on, because people that believe this about themselves do not normally believe that things that they ‘know’ can be changed, unlike beliefs, so therefore from that point forward it becomes almost impossible for them to ever change their mind about anything. They are then ‘stuck’ in a box of beliefs but do not know it, or should we say ‘do not believe it.’ consciousness is tricky.

O.k. lets break this one down just for the fun of it because I just saw it on the back of a car yesterday driving into the city. a little bumper sticker said ‘Jesus is lord.’ That’s a whole belief system right there. but again don’t try telling someone who is operating from that belief system that that’s what it is, because they aren’t going to believe you. to them that’s something they know, not believe, even though its clearly just a set of beliefs that they either adopted or were indoctrinated with, not dissimilar from how people in the middle east believe that Allah is lord or that Jews think that God is lord and that Jesus is not, or that people in India think that Krishna is lord. You know, it all depends on who raised you and what belief system you were brought up with or fell into so to speak. But that’s not the point. We aren’t downing any of these belief systems. Hell, I share most of them most or some of the time myself. I love the idea of God and Jesus and Krishna and Allah. Good stuff. but I don’t limit myself to just these beliefs because God knows if you study your history that any day now a new God might appear, a new belief about God a new idea of God or who he/she/it is… who knows. so in case a new God idea is created in the mind of man I don’t want to be one of the stuck people standing around shouting that I don’t believe in him/her/it. I’m ready for anything. We are a very creative people and its been some time since we created any new ideas of God, well that’s not entirely true, in the new age community there is a pretty awesome belief going now in human consciousness about who/what God/goddess is… its just that the middle majority hasn’t caught onto it yet… so yeah, digging that new definition… and also open to any new ones.

Anyway lets break it down real quick and then I’m outta here. “Jesus is lord.” Would first imply that one believes that ‘Jesus is lord.’ Simple enough. But also, implies that the person believes that ‘there is a lord,’ that ‘man is ruled by a lord.’ You see? Tricky. You go up to someone from central Africa and say to them ‘Jesus is lord.’ And they are going to look at you like ‘so what?’ because there are so many accepted/assumed/indoctrinated beliefs inherent in this three-word saying. its quite fascinating and also a little scary because of the implications of what humans can do with it. again, go up to someone who has no idea what this means and say ‘Jesus is lord’ and it will mean nothing. But say it to someone who knows exactly what it means and who actually believes it and then listen to what they tell you. they can and maybe will go on and on and on about it. check out this recent conversation, the “beliefs” being in “quotes” to illustrate the point.
The African says: I’m sorry “I don’t know what you mean by this.” I’m busy roasting this lion meat I just killed… do you want some? “Its delicious.”
no thanks. “I don’t eat lion.”
O.k. so what do you mean by this? Jesus is lord?
“well Jesus is God”
what is God?
“he rules over us” “he loves us” “he controls everything” “he guides us” “he created everything” [lots of beliefs there. a whole belief cluster. Would have to take them out one by one.]
wow. I thought “it was just nature.”
No. “its God” “he does everything”
So what is Jesus?
“he was a man like you and I are but he was also God”
wow. So God is a man?
No. “God was a man” “But now God is in heaven.” But “Jesus was God on earth for a while.” “then he died” and “then he resurrected” and “now he is heaven too.” “with God.” “his father.”
Tricky stuff. thanks for sharing all of this. I’m going to eat some lion meat now. you sure you don’t want some?

Three words and you open up a whole system of intricate beliefs all intermingled within one another. Try looking at a picture of Jesus next time you see one. not that there are any actual pictures of Jesus but I just saw one of those renderings of Jesus at the Chinese dycleaners I go to, thought to myself, ‘what the heck is that doing there?’ goes to show sometimes just a picture can trigger a whole belief system all on its own. a picture is worth a thousand words they say. What is meant is that a picture is worth a thousand beliefs all wrapped around that picture.

Now the weirdest part is that for a lot of people who are operating within a belief system like that its not enough to live through/within those beliefs themselves. They feel a very strong urge to get others to also hold those beliefs. the Christians along with the Muslims used to just kill and torture people to get others to believe what they believed. That was the easiest way to go about it. for thousands of years that’s how they did it. but for the last few decades save for a few people here and there, they have changed methods a bit and started instead going out on these pilgrimages doing what they call ‘witnessing’ which is their way of saying ‘sharing our beliefs with others in hopes that they will believe what we believe.’ Much like what I’m doing here now actually when you think of it. because all I’m doing is typing a bunch of beliefs. no truer that I write there and no truer than anything else I might ever write in the future. Its all just beliefs.

[I remember for the last few weeks I have been reading Gary nulls newest book on health called ‘power aging’ which is a great read if you are into health and wellness and anti-aging theory etc… but again, in the bigger picture its just a huge collection of beliefs. “vitamin c does this” “n-acytel-cystein does that” etc… have to remember this so we never so caught up in belief systems that we can’t get out.]

current spin: groove armada, lovebox from 2002. LOVE this CD. I don’t even know what you call this music. but dig it.

You know, I think you get to a point when you get so in the know/so rich/so there/so relaxed/so content with yourself/so at peace that you loosen up so much that you just don’t care about the things that we do when we are ‘middleclass everyday joes’… I can see a time when no matter what we do or where we go it won’t have the impact the charge the importance as things did when we were just kids struggling to pay the rent each month. Everything seemed so important… the achievement of all of these simple life things… but then it all seems to slip away… once you know that you can do all that stuff…. I’m watching it happen already. I used to care so much about “the house” and “the stuff” and now I am more content to have everything I own in storage and just travel as much as possible. You become content with just being you out in the world. without the need for a lot of the stuff that people think they need or need to do or have… most of all of that is so transient anyway… comes and goes. Only thing we have is the stuff we can keep with us, bones and blood and our ability to communicate with others. so for me the important now seem like keeping my mind and heart and body healthy and learning languages. And of course continuing to create, always trying to prove that I am here… that I was here…

At this point all I want to do is live in different places around the world. I don’t have any desire to settle here, or anywhere really. And I have no desire to travel as most people do in those little one and two week jaunts where they never rise above ‘tourist’ anywhere. Not my thing at all. thank God I have the kind of career where I can do whatever I want to for the most part and make money from the inspiration I derive out of doing whatever I want to. and thank God that I never settled down and got married so never was restricted to being like everyone else and having to limit travel to the status of ‘a vacation.’ the only things I don’t have in storage now are my clothes guitars and cds. doesn’t sound like much I know, but trust me its enough to fill up an entire apartment where you have to shimmy sideways around boxes to walk anywhere. Over a hundred boxes of clothes and cds and 27 guitars that I never play except for one now – the brilliant ‘68 Hofner flat top is my constant companion and inspiration. crazy. I thought I was just taking the basic essentials to New York with me.

so the thing is that once all this shit with Cleopatra is complete, once the TV show is edited and picked up and once the new album is recorded and in mixing I want to take off for a while. Put everything I own in storage – o.k. multi-dimensionalize here, maybe I can just sublet out my apt… better… cause in New York its fucking impossible to find a place, o.k. so that’s the plan. Will head to France to immerse in order to fully integrate the French language. Really want to be recording there too. hate the idea of having to compromise my music when I’m now kicking such ass just to learn these languages but I don’t want to give up speaking many languages fluently. That’s a major primary of mine. I had created ‘I speak and understand many languages fluently.’ Lt asks me how many is that. and I tell her I’m not really sure. Maybe ten or eleven is good. but I’d hate to put a number to it. who knows in an entire lifetime how many you will want to learn… would like now to take a basic language/linguistic class to understand the origin of languages and the roots of all of them. I have a feeling that would be about the only place I could get this kind of a class, a college, but I hate how regimented they are. always telling you when you your class is and all that. I have always hated that and hate it still. I like to come and go when I please. but that’s just me. so college of any kind is just not my thing. I’m a rambling man. Can’t be boxed in.

Anyway as far as the languages go I want to step it up a notch now. kick it into overdrive. I am extremely unimpressed with the progress I have been making. Especially with my retention which I think has been sucking lately with all the languages. Trying to do everything all at once is very challenging. Juggling the songwriting recording business promoting TV show journal writing language classes homework relationship family friends living etc all in one sixteen hour day is grueling at this point… [The Pimsleur language learning programs are the best by the way if you are wondering. There are a lot of them out there. but I found that the wealthiest and smartest road warriors all eventually go to the Pimsleur method. Expensive but worth it. when you say Pimsleur to someone who knows they will give you a double take because its like the Rolls Royce of language learning. I told someone recently that I scored the Pimsleur French I for a hundred and they couldn’t believe it. normally go for four hundred for each level. But I got it on eBay. I get everything on eBay at this point. Or Amazon. [and I don’t even think its to save money. for me its about the convenience of just showing up at the office everyday and having everything you want show up there so you never have to go anywhere to buy anything.] In any case, load the thirty cds into your ipod (which you also get on eBay for about half the price) and then wherever you are you are pounding out a language. It takes this kind of dedication and commitment I realize now. its not easy. it sucks. I am on the subway mumbling French along to the ipod and everyone is looking at me like I am crazy. but you have to do it if you want to be a Neo because lets be honest here, we’re not to the point where we are “plugging in” yet, so were still stuck learning things the old fashioned way — using our fucking memory. And that’s just too bad.]

Again, ever since the integrity course I really do feel like neo from the matrix. Constantly processing, constantly learning, constantly upgrading, refining, and improving my system. it all comes down to how kick ass do you want to be. what kind of a life do you want to have. you can think about it or you can set out to do it.

Loving clay for the hair still. Sebastian makes it. with clay you can set your hair into place with your hands and it just stays like that for days. its fucking great stuff. you don’t even have to shampoo for days, maybe even weeks. I’ll let you know. sometimes it’s the simple things in life that make it worth living. For me right now its all about hair clay and clarins and l’occitane toiletries.

You know that part of a kiss at the very end when you make the smack sound. Well is a kiss a kiss if you never make the smack sound? I mean if you sit there holding your lips together for like five minutes but then you never make the smack sound, you never seal it off with that, you just separate lips, well is it a kiss then?

And what about making love. Often times a man may have an orgasm but the woman won’t, I mean, I don’t know this from personal experience of course but I’ve heard about it from others you know… but I was thinking, if the man cums and the woman doesn’t is that still making love? And if the woman does but the man doesn’t, is that still making love? And what happens if nether have an orgasm? What is it then? what if you stick it in for a while and then pull it out and neither of you come, what is that?

An amazing ride home from JFK. I arrive and my driver is late, stuck in traffic. So he calls to let me know and apologize and eventually I just decide to hop in a cab. I get in with this Indian guy with a turban and this moustache, the whole look. His name is Syid. I tell him I’m hungry and we need to go through a drivethru somewhere. Now remember that from jfk its all flat rate at 45, no more or less, so he doesn’t really have to stop for me. but he tells me that instead he will take me to a secret taxi driver stand. At first I’m like ‘what?’ but I agree. So we go through a few tunnels and security gates and we end up at this huge lot filled with taxis. Must have been a few hundred of them parked all around this building. And then he hustles me into this building and it’s a giant restaurant and restroom area. Where all these hundreds of taxi drivers are waiting in line to order their food and they have everything in here. any kind of food you can think of, all just for the taxi drivers. I had chicken briani because I was with an Indian driver. Then he gets me in the car and off we go and as if it couldn’t get any better he then stops at dunkin donuts to get some gas so I’m able to score a few double chocolates for the road. then he tells me ‘please, please sir sit in the front, its so much better there. and here I am driving in the front seat which is what I prefer, eating this lavish Indian feast, a few donuts and coffee on the side, and he’s playing this great CD of Indian music by ravi shankar and zakir Hussein. What a ride. he went down side streets the whole way so we never sat in traffic once. And then to top it off even more he gives me the CD we were listening to as a gift. New York. gotta love it.

New York is unbelievably beautiful right now. just out of this world weather. you forget how many beautiful people live here. you can feel love everywhere in New York right now. just gorgeous. Spring. I will never live in a place that does not have a spring. One understands the need for winter now.

Last screening: to have and to have not. starring Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Good stuff. will try to see the rest of his films.

In the mailbag from Arabia from her current travels in India. Interesting stuff:

Greetings from Chennai, the sweltering city of South India. One would think that it would be comfortable to
have the ambient air temperature be identical to one’s body temperature, kind of like swimming in the womb
once again, but I guess back then, we got to romp around naked and suck our thumbs and sleep all day. It’s
just not the same anymore.

This place has always struck me as so sensual (or is it sensuous?!, let’s ask Professor Norman!). It accosts the
senses – smell, tastes, sound, sight. Ravi and I are using the decadence of film-less digital cameras to catch the
street scenes as we maneuver our way through traffic, riding in the back seat of mom and dad’s car. By day, the
city screams, car and scooter horns honk ceaselessly, the air a thick cloud of exhaust. By night, the lights of
temples and restaurants and stores illuminate the dark-skinned crowds and we sit tight in that back seat,
praying. “Look out!” we cry out, hoping Dad can see through the humidity-streaked windshield the invisible city
bus driving toward us in our lane with no headlights or reflectors.

Ravi and I landed at 2:20 am Thursday morning and by 6:00, we were on our way to my uncle’s for the kickoff
of cousin Ramki’s wedding to Ramya. They met for the first time six weeks ago – matched according to Hindu
caste, status, income, height-weight proportions, and astrological signs – and agreed to spend the rest of their
lives together. They’ve hardly seen each other in the interim; he didn’t want her to discover that he drank and
smoked, and surely she had her private habits as well. When he later found out that she has terrible vision and
wears contacts, he felt betrayed.

The first morning was just the groom’s family and a handful of priests, a rooftop gathering under a temporary
thatched structure that gave rest from the already-strong morning sun. From this roof, a good arm could toss a
hefty stone and reach the beach where the tsunami’s wave struck five months ago and snatched fisherman’s
homes and many lives. Lakshmi, who helps keep my uncle’s house clean and combs my grandmother’s hair
with a loving hand, and her mother, who did the same, lived in that fishing village on the Bay of Bengal’s edge
across the street from my uncle’s solid concrete house. Lakshmi’s dad is a fisherman who was safely at sea
when it hit. They lost their home and everything in it, but everyone was ok. “All my dresses…” she says,
“everything.”

But today the sea is clam and up on the rooftop, cousins and aunts and uncles and one beloved grandmother
(Paathi) all reunite. Paathi has already asked me a couple hundred times about when I’m getting married.
“Apparam, apparam,” I answer. “Later.” After the priests have Ramki repeat after them in Sanskrit for hours
(what could they possibly be saying, I think), after ghee has poured on the small fire that burns, after gifts have
been presented, and fruit blessed, and children and fertility prayed for, cooks displace the priests and it’s time
to eat. Eighteen separate dishes are ladeled out onto fresh green banana leaves, which we scoop up with our
fingers.

The real wedding begins the next morning, early the next morning and the groom’s house is chaos. I sit in the
main room, wrapped up in eighteen feet of green silk with gold thread trim, drinking the coffee with the creamy
water buffalo milk that I so love here. Around me, Ramki pulls freshly laundered underwear off the drying rack;
(aunt) Ambulu pulls a plastic comb through her long hair and then distractedly weaves it into a braid; and
Chandran chittappa (literally little father, my dad’s younger brother) does morning prayers at the puja corner,
where a large wooden wardrobe is filled with pictures of deities and burning oil lamps. The flower garlands from
yesterday hang on the cabinet’s door. I relieve his wife Santhi of cutting fresh jasmine garlands into eight-inch
lengths to give to the women so that she too can finish getting dressed. Oh the smell of fresh jasmine! There
is a rush to leave the door by 5 am, an auspicious time to begin new endeavors. Of course we don’t make it.
Although it’s only 5:10 when we leave, I wonder if anything that may go wrong in their lives could be traced
back to this very moment, when we were ten minutes late.

The rest of day is a blur of more priests, more Sanskrit incantations, this ritual where Ramki leads the bride by
the big toe of her henna’ed feet across the stage, that ritual where Ramki, then cousin Kala and I (as sister-in-
laws) each tie a knot in the symbolic string he has placed around her neck. They have now officially “tied the
knot,” so to speak, and at this moment in the days-long wedding, the deed is done. As the ceremony goes on
for hours, the bride in her nine-yard sari, and heavy gold jewelry, sits sweating next to Ramki as they go
through the motions. Neither of them seems to have a clue what they’re doing; they’re following instructions.
Ramki has never been a practicing Hindu and Ramya works at a call center answering our American 1-800 calls
until three in the morning five days a week. None of the three hundred guests pay much attention, visiting with
each other in the stifling room and roaming about, trying to find a breeze or an effective ceiling fan. Every time
I’m ready to complain about the heat, I just have to look up on stage, where they sit in front of a FIRE, for Lord
Ganesh’s sake, a smoky fire, dripping sweat. Ravi and I bring up water to Ramki and promise we’ll get him an
ice-cold Kingfisher lager as soon as possible.

The guests drift upstairs for another huge meal of rice, curries, sambar and rasam, pappadams and pooris,
chutneys and pickles. Down below, they’re still getting married.

After an afternoon siesta, I put on a fresh sari and we go to the reception. This meal is up to 24 dishes, and
cousins complain about the loud musical performance that features two saxophones doing south Indian musical
things that I didn’t know saxes could do, warbling and drawing out the reedy notes. Finally, a dj puts on Tamil
film music and then we are all dancing in a bouncing clump of sweaty bodies. I didn’t know we could get any
hotter, but here I am, my eyelids sweating. Being the sister-in-law, I have authority over Ramya, and I am called
upon by other cousins to use this power to drag her onto the dance floor, although she is begging me “Please,
Meera, nooooo.” I am torn, wanting her to feel comfortable and respect her wishes and wanting her also to
come join the circle, to feel welcome in this new family that she has just joined. Earlier, she sat on her father’s
lap and relinquished her family’s lineages for this legacy of the PR Mahadevan clan. There is no turning back.
Tonight, she will go to Ramki’s and sleep in the two twin beds of different heights that are pushed up against
each other in the house with his parents and grandmother. It is a new life.

Oh, shit, I meant this to be a short little update and now it’s two pages long. The abridged version: It’s hot and
I’m relaxing, now that the busy wedding is over. Oh, and it’s mango season.

Lots of love, Arabia

I want to talk to you God/Goddess

April 9, 2005

Today it just rocked me like a thunder bolt. I was in the shower. the water pounding on me, adrift in half-consciousness. There I was caught up in about two or three major conflicts or desires running around like blind mice in my brain. Just trying to wake up, and relax, and sort it all out… and I had this idea to pray. Why? I have no idea. it just hit me. pray. Talk to God-Goddess. ‘but I thought we don’t believe in God?’ I said to myself… ‘its not that we don’t believe in God,’ I answered. ‘its just that we’re not sure about it, that’s all.’

‘o.k. so what you’re saying, (and man, who are we talking to? who am I talking to? (‘you’re talking to yourself. You know that. its no big deal. Let it go. lets keep going.’) ‘o.k. you’re right. so yeah, I mean, what you’re saying is that we’re not really sure about God. but honestly I just really want to talk to God. I don’t care that I don’t know if he she or it exists or not. I just think it would be a good thing…’ ‘yes I would agree. Lets do it. the worst that can happen is that there really is no higher power-God-Goddess-force-whatever and what we’re really doing is just talking to ourselves in a different kind of a way, and you know, in the end, that’s probably cool anyway, probably nothing wrong with that… so yeah, I agree, lets do it.’ ‘o.k. cool.’

And it started from that. just me, standing under the hot shower, naked, head bowed, eyes closed, a slight smile on my face from the reassuring comfort of it. ‘God, Goddess, Force, what you are, wherever you are, its me Fishy. I want to talk to you if its cool…’

‘I don’t know if you exist but I would love if you did. I can feel you sometimes, perhaps see signs of you at times. I would love to feel you more. I would to see more signs of you.’

I listened to myself. I was in it, but a part of me remained outside of it, as always, as in all things. the experiencer and the observer. Always. In all things. rarely have I ever been one. At times. but rarely. So I listened. Wow. I am deliberately asking to give up my Source. To another. To God yes, the idea of a God yes, but still, it is a deliberate asking to give up Source to another being… interesting. Can I do it? do I want to do it? who would want to deliberately want to give up their own control/source of the creation of their lives to anything else? do I ask for what I want? Do I preface it with ‘if it your will?’ or ‘if it is meant to be?’ Man that is something. just totally giving in to this sort of ‘fuck it, its not me creating it’ kind of idea. that’s just not me. I mean, what? all of a sudden we’re not in control anymore? I’m supposed to start believing that now? no. there has to be a better way. think of yoda man. Yeah… think of yoda…

That we have no proof for a God-Goddess. We have never seen a God nor heard of a God. no God has ever shown up on earth or anywhere else in the universe. The idea, the concept, the construct, was and still is, a constantly evolving invention of human beings, for whatever reason. It is one of the only things, well, much like the idea of the ‘soul,’ or dragons, or vampires, that we created or came up with the idea of, before we actually experienced, for truly, in reality, we haven’t seen any God yet. haven’t seen any vampires or dragons yet either, but we remain hopeful, and So, for the mind, for logic, it’s a leap of faith, entirely. its just us going out there on a limb in consciousness saying to ourselves ‘o.k. fine, but what if?’

Yes. yoda. He would have no problem with this. God is God. or perhaps God isn’t God. that’s what yoda would say. But in the end we will never know anyway.. so if God serves, whether real or imagined, let God be.

So that’s where I am now. I have firmly resolved to seek out God. in spite of my mind. In spite of lack of proof. In spite of logic or rational thought.

I’ll tell you this, God isn’t going to show up in any books. He never has. One has to look for God in life. in the here-now. if God exists he is going to exist right here. wherever we are. and in the end, all we have to do is close our eyes and speak to that image in our souls. And listen. And maybe, just maybe…

Current spin : frank Sinatra, fly me to the moon. Another in the endless cycle of greatest hits packages that will inevitably be released till the end oh human civilization. But I bought it for Princess Little Tree because she wasn’t familiar with franks rendition of fly me to the moon, or Tony’s, only the Astrid Gilberto version, which if you have ever had the displeasure of hearing, you will know, is in all honesty quite horrendous. as with all frank best of comps this one is awesome. just good time music by a good time guy who knew how to deliver a great song. [for the record if I had to put franks fly me to the moon up against Tony’s in a Pepsi challenge I think it would be dead even. would never dare do it to either man. Tony’s has more spunk and pizzazz really, more carefree.

God gets a real laugh

April 2, 2005

The pope is dead. (I don’t like to use the term ‘the pope’ these days – as if everyone is supposed to know what ‘the pope’ means… if we said ‘the doctor’ when speaking about some witch doctor in Zimbabwe would everyone in the world know who that was? no. of course not. so instead let us offer the same respect to the catholic church as we would any other religion of humankind. Not more not less. Perhaps we should call him ‘the leader of the catholic church,’ which is, after all, in the end, all he is.) Tens of thousands mourn in St. peters square. It seems like just yesterday when Giovanna and I were skipping through St. Peters high on hash and Italian beer in the wee hours of the night, splashing in the fountains and jumping from square to square. “are you a catholic,” I ask her. “isn’t everyone a catholic here?” “of course I’m not a catholic,” she shouts back at me in her sexy thick Italian accent, as if I had offended her. she tells me how the idea that Italy is all catholic is a myth perpetrated by the church, that at this point in history the people of Italy are nothing now, they are no religion. They believe in God and Jesus but they sure as hell don’t believe in the catholic church. they are waiting to be liberated by some new religion or by a regenerated catholic church willing to represent the people rather than rule them with outdated patriarchic ideologies no longer relevant or acceptable to most. [looking back now I find it fascinating how many people stood in line at St. peters to mourn the death of this pope; certainly some of them must be catholic…]

She went on to tell me how many Italians are scared shitless of the catholic church [hey its not just Italians…] and would never dare speak up against them as we do in America—in that we are lucky in America she tells me, but at the same time they don’t go to church or pay much attention to anything that has to do with the church. Indeed this idea is so well known that I even had read the same thing in my American tour guide when first visiting the country. at this point the church is relegated to births and weddings and deaths and that’s about it. the people are waiting for something to inspire them and revitalize them once more. having been raised a catholic myself I noticed the same thing here in America. People didn’t seem to care much about the church here in the states. it seemed very matter of fact growing up… Catholics weren’t inspired; obligated maybe, but never inspired. The last dark veil around the beautiful face of humanity is religion; Catholicism and Islam and Christianity. We need to honor and respect our brethren’s beliefs but keep the truth in the back of our minds. Hold a candle for the light of truth to one day shine on humanity.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/04/06/pope.main/index.html

For me I stand in awe and amazement at how newsworthy this event appears to the world. the man stood against same sex marriage, abortion, birth control, women becoming priests – he still promoted this very sexist patriarchal hierarchy where men were above women, the obligation of celibacy for the priesthood.. which leads to… denial and then, well, you know what… and so many other modern and progressive ideas, and so to me, he stood against humankind itself in a lot of ways. Still, with that said, he united a lot of people and gave them hope… he was against the imperialist invasion of Iraq, good for him. he is against capital punishment, good for him. that actually makes sense given his stand against abortion, as opposed to most conservative Americans, who reveal the glitch in their thinking machinery by admitting being against abortion but pro-capital punishment… The person called the pope leads one of the richest, most powerful, sinister, and dangerous organizations in the world – the catholic church – what’s left of the gasping roman empire still today; a thinly veiled euphemism at best to those in the know. most people don’t even know that not only is the catholic church one of the richest companies in the world, they are also secretly their own COUNTRY. Just over the top crazy evil shit this company/country-disguised-as-a-religion has pulled off over the last two thousand years… but they won’t mention this on CNN or any other news network. The truth is only uttered under the breath of those brave enough to even have the thought in their heads.

Check out this photo:

grim right? but why? All of the former American presidents have flown in to sit and stare at the passed on priest’s body… but none of them are catholic… what is going on here? any guesses? Would they do the same if the leader of the Hindu religion died? Would they do it if the ayatollah died? Prob not. o.k., obviously not. not now. but I bet they would do it if the dali lama died.. yes? but still they won’t help the dali lama in his quest to free his country from the clutches of tyrannical empirical china… well that’s because china has more money than Tibet. And the catholic church has more money than both… the photo and the reality it portrays is quite startling… why are these men putting on such a show to mourn the loss of the leader of the catholic church when they weren’t even catholic?

Well, after studying his life the last few days maybe its just because he was such a great guy. and maybe its because he was so dedicated to promoting peace. He even issued a number of apologies on behalf of the catholic church over the last ten years for the horrors perpetrated by Catholics over the last two thousand years to the rest of humanity. That’s just fucking amazing. that alone makes him a good guy. better than many that preceded him. for sure.

I keep my eyes on the prize at the end of the right and wrong game when humans will no longer be satisfied being ruled by archaic dogma, but instead will choose self rule and self governance on all levels in their lives. But those days may still be quite a number of years away from us at this point in our slow evolution. People are religious I remind myself. This is real. It is I who lives in another world. the world is still in the world. and though I don’t see it, even I am in that world. I just pretend not to know it. people, I remind myself, are religious here on earth still. and dogma is king. Bureaucracy is king. Hierarchies are king.
Check this out: in his first papal “encyclical” entitled ‘redeemer of man’ he explained his convictions/beliefs by stating that ‘caring for human life springs for the love of Christ.’ If you are religious and that’s your thing, then it makes sense, maybe, frankly I don’t even see one follows the other but o.k., and I guess it makes sense to state it so everyone is clear about your ideas. But if you’re not religious then that may seem a bit twisted of an idea… after all, most people don’t need a love of Jesus or anything for that matter to love their fellow man… why does caring for human life have to come from a love of Jesus to this man? (I’m not much into the current trend of referring to Jesus as ‘Christ’ that’s become all the rage lately. Christ was not his last name, but rather the Hebrew or Aramaic word for ‘king’ and since Jesus wasn’t the king of anything then it really makes no sense. He never even claimed be the king of anything. For a time some Jews thought that he might be the king of them as prophesied in their old testament, but they quickly abandoned the idea and well, you know what happened next… but with respect to the Jewish people, why not just use his real last name and let the Jews decide when they find their king,) Or to any Catholics or Christians? That’s the real question. Why do humans still find a need to have a religion or a religious leader or a religious icon such as Jesus in order to care for others? isn’t this an innate instinct inside of us? is the pope trying to tell us something here? is he saying that he believes that many people are not born with this innate understanding and desire – to care for others? and so perhaps if we tell people that we should care for others because we love Christ then that will get them to play along better…. maybe this is it… but I would that eventually one day we won’t need any religions for people to just care for each other….

I am watching the people mourn on TV, very sad, very focused on this internal sorrow inside of themselves over the death of this man… I step back and ask myself what is happening here. some kind of shared mass delusion imagining super-human attributes about a mere mortal, someone who is just like us, but who they have put up on an imaginary pedestal based on many projected identities; a meagerly masked attempt to feel closer to a God-force perhaps… maybe it helps in some way for people to place this higher than thou honor upon another person, gives us something to look up to, something we project in our minds as being better than we are to inspire us to be better ourselves.

For me the death of John Lennon or Bono were and would be much more impactful on my own heart. Men who pushed humanity forward rather than trying to keep us held back. the catholic church has wreaked more havoc on the face of the earth than any other single organization in humankind’s history, shed more blood, caused more pain…. but the people pretend they don’t know it; they ignore their history and turn a blind eye because of the God concept… maybe its fear, maybe its mass hypnosis, maybe its just ignorance. In the future we will know. we will look at these things differently. We will transcend the barbarity of religion. But for now even the mere utterance of such things is blasphemy. [on the record, and in his honor mention that the pope himself even recognized this fact and made many apologies about many of the atrocities carried about the catholic church over the last two thousand years. he knew, and he was trying to do something about it. that’s cool.]

John Lennon and Bono… hey, call me a slave to the myth of rock and roll… [I once received an email from a screaming raging cursing maniac in north Carolina who said I was an idiot for quoting musicians when it came to politics [he was pro-Bush]… but if the musicians your quoting are Bruce Springsteen or Bono and the politician your trying to defend is George w bush, who’s the idiot? is how I responded…] I smile. I feel that either man better represent the ideals of godliness than the man they called or will ever call the pope. but that’s just me. but it helps me understand how people could be so upset over the death of someone they aren’t even related to… one cannot qualify the importance of one person to another… the idea of a God is a powerful one indeed. Without the idea of God I believe that many people wouldn’t know what to do with themselves here. I think many of them would go nuts. God is a very important idea to humans. Even to me still. and I stand at the razors edge, between the two worlds — the old world of imagined gods and the new world of humankind’s discovery of it’s own godness. Yes. it is a tough belief to shake regardless of how strong you try to remain. I’ll even admit to a deep and passionate longing for God to show up one day, but not under the guise of some manmade religion. Catholicism only represents 1 billion people on the earth today. if there is a God, he is bigger than that. he will represent all of us. every last man woman and child. And we will know him/her/it instantly.

From the mailbox:
“you know god gets a real laugh when we tell him our plans for our life. surrender your life to the god within you and then lay back and watch everything fall into divine perfect right order. its only your own higher self you are surrendering to but it sure knows more about what’s best for you than your conscious mind does. ha ha. roll with whatever shows up.”

The preceding was sent to me by a very well intentioned person… I read it just as I was typing this… this one little paragraph is completely antithetical to everything I believe about us. you couldn’t write anything more contrary to what I believe about who we are. I refuse to believe that there is anyone or anything controlling us other than ourselves at this point. We do not need to surrender to anyone except ourselves. God is our invention. If anything, we are God; we just don’t know it yet.

———————————————————

The thing is that it is not enough for me now just to create regular pop/rock. Not that it has ever been. Because from what I notice that’s the way its always been… but now I am very focused on trying to transcend the format entirely. God, all formats really. Can we transcend all formats? and if so what will that look like? Sound like? Can we do it?

I will not join the Abyssinian church in Harlem. Last night on the subway I had the understanding of why it didn’t feel right to me. I will return often I am sure. But it would not be fair for me to join their church. I would love and honor the learning and the connection with the long history and the community with others and great spirit that is present there, but the fact of the matter is that in order to become a member I will have to answer one question in the end: ‘do you Fishy take Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior?’ and my answer as always will be ‘no I do not. I only take myself as my personal lord and savior. And I hope that every one else will do the same one day’ And because of this fact I cannot honestly and respectfully go through with the membership. I will have to love and honor and respect their kind invitation but politely decline out of reverence for their sacred beliefs and the honest difference between them and my own. but I can still love them and their music and their message and show up now and then to celebrate us.

Last screening: I love the huckabees. One of the best movies I have seen recently for what it tried to say. this is what ‘what the bleep’ wanted to be. this is a great movie, at least in its intention. Totally new.

Current spin: Ed Hale & the Transcendence, rise and shine. wow. I hadn’t listened to this CD in years and years. only heard the first four tracks. But I really loved what I heard. how special. I think that finally, after all this time, I am proud of it, now that I am so far away from it. very special indeed… I really got caught up in this whole indie rock thing for a while didn’t I, really believing the hype, forgetting to just do what I wanted to from the heart. From now on that’s the aim though. Click heels twice: there’s no place like home there’s no place like home. and home… after all… is where the heart is.

God its me

March 8, 2005

Last night, tonight… When was this?
I was falling asleep, perhaps I was asleep… I was praying. I told myself I was praying… was I asleep? I spoke…
God
Yes
God its me. its Fishy.
I know.
Do I always have to introduce myself like that? God why do I always feel as though I need to introduce myself.
Silence.
God I don’t feel inspired. Yes that’s it. I need to focus on this. God help me to feel more inspired. fill me with inspiration.
Silence.
How can I not feel inspired? if anyone is inspired, certainly it would be me.
Silence.
If I’m not inspired what more could I possibly need?
Silence.
God.
Yes.
Are you mad at me?
Silence.
Have I done something wrong?
Silence. Then, you know.
Yes I know. you’re mad at me for my recent ranting and raving against you in the diaries….
Yes. not mad.
But you’re upset. You aren’t happy with me…
A knowing of yes.
But I thought that you wanted me to do that? I thought that I was on a mission of some kind.
You are. but you are missing the point.
I am missing the point. How am I missing the point…
I exist. you pray to me. you pray to me nightly. But you are leading people away from me everytime you write lately. you are misleading people by constantly asserting that I do not exist.
But you get the point. I get the point. People will get the point.
Will they?
Well I don’t know. I assume they will. I mean, o.k. you exist. I pray to you. I talk to you all the time. its true. I was born with the faith so I take it for granted. The God thing.
You take it for granted because you have the gift of faith. But you assume that everyone else also has this faith. so you preach against me assuming that everyone will get the point that you really aren’t preaching against me… so what exactly are you doing?
Well now that you put it that way… God…
Yes.
I know what I’m doing. I know you know what I am doing. My intention is pure God.
I know it is.
O.k. so tell me what to do then. I want to be doing the right thing.
Don’t lead people away from me.
I began to cry. I don’t know if I was really crying or just crying in my heart. God, I wasn’t trying to lead people away from you really…
I know… but perhaps you need to redefine what you are doing and why you are doing it…
What was I doing? What am I doing? I am trying to steer people away from religion. That’s for sure. God I fucking hate religion. God is that o.k.?
Its o.k. for you. have you ever considered that religion may be the only way that certain people can find a way to me?
No. but I see it now…
But you persist in rallying against religion at every opportunity.
Yes. well I hate religion God. this is not something new to you. you know how I feel. I will never be sold on religion. The closest I could ever come to religion is the writing of lao tsu. There is no secret in that. you know my heart more than anyone. I’m not going to convert to any religion God. not like my father. Not now. not ever. My father is a ridiculous fool. Being a logical pragmatist and materialist agnostic all his life and then converting to Christianity in his later years… what a cop out, what a sell out. like king Charles the second converting to Catholicism just before he died. Fuck that. I’m not that. I will be religious.
So you assume you know your whole life before you have even begun to live?
I believe I do. if I ever convert to a religion, strike me dead.
Do you mean that?
No. God. no. of course I don’t. I’m just talking. forget I said that.
Forgotten.
But I would prefer to lead us forward. Do you know what I mean God? I would prefer to lead us to a more evolved state God. I know you know what I mean… why are you arguing with me?
I feel a Smile. Am I arguing with you? who is arguing?
I am free to do whatever I want to aren’t I?
Silence.
Of course I am. I know it. free will. I could die tomorrow an atheist and still meet God. wow. Think about that. because I wouldn’t really be an atheist. I would just be saying I am an atheist. I would just be pretending…
Yes.
God?
Yes.
Tell me what to do then. I don’t care. I just want to do the right thing. God I just want to fucking be happy.
I know you do. then stop.
Stop? I get it. I didn’t wait for an answer. I thought about it. stop. Stop preaching against God. but what about humanity rising up to realize our true divinity… how do I persist in that mission… I cannot let go of that mission… but I have to do it the right way…
Can humanity rise to realize its own divinity and still know God?
I heard it. I listened to it. I thought about it. can God still exist if humankind realizes its own godness? That is the question. I do not have an answer for this. I would like to know what to do but I don’t know what to do.
Is that o.k.?
Sure. I’m tired. I don’t have to solve this now. I can go to sleep. God?
Yes.
Thank you. I’m going to do the right thing.
I know.

Be Happy Always and All Ways

March 3, 2005

Our manager called today. ***** record’s London office called about releasing the new CD. brought up my age as a downside to the group if you can fucking imagine. For years we were always too “green” or too young. And now all of a sudden I am too old… I’m only the fucking singer and songwriter, right, so dispensable. There is this thing about age and the music biz… we must find a way to open these turtles up a bit, get them to catch up to speed before they destroy everything we love about music entirely. some of the best music in the world is being made by girls and guys in their forties or fifties or sixties (sting, bowie, u2, Lou, Dave Matthews –how old is that guy anyway? Stones, Caetano, David Byrne, prince, Aimee Mann, on and on…. But these suits are just absolutely fucking clueless most of the time. I used to never think that because I never wanted to come off like or think I was some jaded or cynical wannabe bastard that could do nothing but complain. I have achieved enough now in my art, at my craft, that I don’t have that worry anymore – I mean, that’s just not me, one day I woke up and realized that I wasn’t going to be one of those ‘oh look at my cool vintage t-shirt I bought on eBay’ kind of cynical pseudo-cool people who cut everyone and everything down that is successful… that’s just not me… I don’t have to resist anymore I guess because I know its not me….

but I gotta say, its true what they say about the record execs… most of these guys are just fucking clueless about music or art. They’re looking and listening for money, not for soul… Not all of them, but a lot of them. we’re lucky in that we know a few who are really cool. But man… go to the underbelly of the beast and you just won’t believe what you will find in the corporate music world… (turn on MTV and see all the sort-of-long-hair bands that last year were short-hair bands that the year before were spiked-hair bands that a few years before that were shaved head bands who years before were super-long-hair bands, and you will see the belly of the beast that has ruined commercial music to the point where everyone is walking around wondering why music sucks so bad even though it really doesn’t – its just gone underground… its on Internet radio and satellite radio now.)

One minute a guy is jumping up and down raving about the new disc and in the next he is worried about how to cover up for the fact that the lead singer is over 30. we are truly an youth obsessed society right now, always have been, which is too bad because for all the beauty of youth, it offers us very little else in the way of stimulation or inspiration. The exces just need to get a fucking clue and realize that we love music. people love music. we all love music. we need music. we adore music. for many of us, music is very important to our fucking lives. And we don’t care who is making it half as much as we just want the music to be good and honest and real and speak to us in that really special way that our favorite music does… they gotta spend a lot less time looking for youth and a lot more time looking for career artists.. real artists who touch their soul, not their pocket book. Amen to that children. So we need to bring these people up, raise their consciousness a bit, rather than coming down on them. show them what’s its all about. nuff said.
current spin: noir desir, visages des figures. French version of radiohead or U2. good band. I’m digging them.

also check out this amazing Internet radio station: www.chondo.net if you want to dig into some groovy African music.

Last screening: 21 grams. Holy shit. wow. This may have been the best movie of 2003.

Between studying the history of Muslim Iran so intensely lately and the Jesus guy in the movie tonight, I was reminded of humanity’s mission at this time; man do we have a mission: in a nutshell, we must find a way to preach the same message that the religions are preaching without the religions in the message. Preach the same word, the same vibe, the same message, the same energy, but get rid of the Jesus and the Allah and the Mohamed and the Krishna and all the rest of it… Move beyond it in our words first probably and then our consciousness will follow. You know its not like we don’t dig the word you know… you gotta make sure that religious people understand that… the word can be a good thing.

sometimes…

But the problem is that a lot of the time the word is not good, but because of religious peoples insistence that the word is of their God and that their God is infallible, it creates a short circuit in what is normally rationally thinking intelligent life forms’ brains. So even if the word isn’t necessarily good, as in the Muslim religion’s word that women need to act or dress a certain way for example, the people will find a way to talk themselves into accepting it as “the word.” Even when its kind of obvious that it isn’t ‘the word.’ In all fairness, its not just the Muslims. Its all religions. The Jews can’t eat pork and the Catholics can’t eat meat on Friday and the Christians believe in capital punishment and the Indians can’t kill cows because they are sacred and the Tibetan Buddhists aren’t supposed to go to war to defend their homeland… on and on… ridiculous stuff.

He says ‘thank you lord for keeping us together, for giving us the meal. Amen.” I say ‘why?’ why do we have to thank someone/something outside of ourselves for anything? Can we not keep ourselves together? can we not give us our own meals?

He says ‘Jesus saves? Without gods word, the devil can come into our lives and take control of us.”
Can we not save ourselves? And what’s more, what do we need to save ourselves from? not everyone is in need of saving. Certainly some are… but can they not save themselves? Can we not help save them? and what about this devil? I mean, at this point how necessary is this? can we just put the devil away for a while?

He says ‘if a man hits you, offer him the other cheek.’
O.k. that is just plain stupid. the idea behind it might be a nice one, and I think we all like to get warm and fuzzy over the intention behind it, but lets leave fairy tale ideology to fairytales and not confuse ourselves anymore than we already are. I think too many of us offer the other cheek at this point. I say we start standing up more and helping others stand up as well.

He says ‘my duty is to God.’ totally missing the point.
Our duty is not to a God. Our duty is to the ideals that we currently project onto the God concept. That will be humankind’s salvation. Rather than ‘thanks be to God’ we need to start coming to and from more of a place of ‘thanks be to ourselves…’ imagine a whole room filled with people who are filled with gratitude for everyone else in the room. A whole room of people filled with gratitude for all of humanity? Imagine the possibilities of that… no more giving thanks to unseen imagined forces. Thanks be to us.

O.k. think fast, not an easy mission, but definitely our future — especially as the last two ancient tyrannical dinosaurs, Christianity and Islam, battle it out for what they think is world domination when in fact the majority of humankind could care less and instead just wishes that they would go away and leave us all in peace – so who is attempting the mission at this point? – spreading the word of power and empowerment and life-force and goodness and love and peace and compassion without the religious connotations that humankind has for so long erroneously thought necessary… Avatar is doing it, waldorf schools and the Steiner movement are doing it. oprah is doing it, Tony Robbins is doing it, ram Dass is doing it, Gary null is doing it, twyman is doing it, Dimartini is doing it, shit even scientology is doing it. plenty of people are doing it.

The enlightened on the planet need to be ever-tolerant of the religious among us and learn as much as we can from the glorious gifts that the religions have to offer us. But we also need to support and nurture the other modalities that are starting to come around the globe that are creating new ways to celebrate life and love and the pursuit of joy and peace and happiness using new methods and creating new rituals without old-world religious connotations.

Check this shit out. this is exactly what I am talking about. no mention of God or prophets or holy books but still very heart warming and spiritual fulfilling:

A friend of mine from Iran sent me this Norooz wish … I thought you’d enjoy reading it. Norooz is the Iranian New Year. (remember that new years as we know it today is not really “new years.” that’s just the massive grip that western civilization has on mass consciousness… its easy to be fooled into believing – even if you are really smart and enlightened that whatever the majority believes, that whatever the richest and most powerful among us believe, is the truth, when in fact often times it is not. Its just one group’s version of new years. there are still plenty of times of the year that are considered “new years” by other groups of us around the world. the Jewish people have a different one. so do the Chinese. And so do the Iranians. They happen to celebrate their new years at the same time as the wicans and pagans do: the spring solstice. Could there be a more perfect time to celebrate new years?)?———————————————————————————————-

To my dearest Friends and Students, Norouz, the birthday of the Mother Earth, and our New Year are approaching. I wish you all health and the Divine blessing of appreciation.Each day that comes is one of the most valuable gifts, incomparable to any other, that we will ever receive. We all know that each day is important, but the importance of a day for us is often based upon what we have accomplished. We place our life on a scale, and the weights that measure it have been given to us by this world. Everything is judged by failure or success. We make everything conditional in our lives. And what is forgotten is the value of existence, the value of this breath coming every moment and blessing us. This is the blessing. But we don’t know how to accept it. Yet we have been given a precious gift. It is given freely, without judgment, with no condition. Discover this life you’ve been living. Discover it the way it is meant to be lived—in joy, in gratitude, in beauty. Discover the potential of each day. Discover the rhythm as the sun shines on the horizon, light comes, and awakening happens; and then comes the sunset and sleep—everything is erased and another day begins. Discover that. That’s what this existence is all about. That’s what peace is all about. Peace is not in yesterday and peace is not in tomorrow, but peace is today. Tomorrow is anticipation. Yesterday is just memories. And today is the gift–the truest and the most important gift. Be Happy Always and All Ways Here & Now

Picture of a table at your average Norooz (Iranian new years) celebration

We are only human

February 6, 2005

Went to Abyssinian Baptist church in Harlem again today. The more I go to Harlem the more I like it. just so struck by the study of the history of slavery and the African American people… at one point the preacher said “You don’t have to be black… maybe you’re white and you’re with us in solidarity and you understand our cause…” So I went into this back room and became a member. Sat down and they laid it out on the table for me. strange feeling. For me its more about the community obviously and the connection I feel with the black people at this point in my life. I never felt a need to become a member of any church before I have to be honest. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m not even much of a believer in Jesus let alone God…. I love the idea of both of them, you know… great ideas… but I enjoy going to their church for the power of the human spirit that is present in the church. The power of the gospel singing. And the power of the reverend Calvin Butts. And because Abyssinian is such a world-wide famous church they have lines going around the block for miles to get in there. people visiting nyc from every country in the world are waiting in that line for hours just to get in so they could see this famous church and hear the preaching of reverend Butts. I figured if I was going to start going there now and then, I may as well become a member to avoid those lines…

The problem of course is that they want you to attend these bible study classes and then get baptized in the name of Jesus in order to become a full-fledged member. Now because I honestly feel that the bible should be put away and not looked at for a few thousand years, and that real salvation comes from humankind, from our own spirit, and not from any God… well, I don’t know if I really belong in those classes; nor do I believe that it would be an entirely honest gesture on my part if I got baptized a Christian at this point. After all, I was already baptized a Christian when I was a kid, and have worked very hard to liberate myself from those shackles as a young man. But for the life of me, I just wish that someone would create a church as inspiring and powerful and exciting and lively and meaningful as Abyssinian without the need to have it be about god. someplace where we could go to worship humankind and exult together about how wonderful we are and how good it is to be a good person… and even to pray… although I’m not sure how we should pray or who we should pray to… those are the minor details… but yes a church for humans who want to worship humans… that’s what we need.

For me it was an important step. Just for where I am now in regards to the black people, in my love for them and my respect for them and my admiration of them. And I do love the sense of community that attending the occasional church service affords the spirit. There’s nothing like it. I swear to God they were looking me up and down like I was an alien from another planet. This long haired pale faced white kid dressed in black standing there shaking their hands and thanking them for welcoming me into the flock… they must have thought I was crazy. and who knows, perhaps I am.

The NYU student – I feel close enough to her now to call her by her name, shall we call her Asyra — is still ‘shadowing’ me for her article and went with me to the church. When I told her I was downstairs becoming a member she asked me, ‘I thought you didn’t believe in religions…’ ‘I don’t.’ ‘I thought you weren’t into the whole God concept…’ ‘I’m not. At least not literally, not logically. Perhaps metaphorically… it is a wonderful idea… I mean, in my heart I want to believe in a God. who doesn’t? what a nice idea. what a grand idea. it’s very comforting, isn’t it? That’s for sure. It would be a great way to end a movie. That’s for sure. God coming out and all and finally revealing himself to us… I would love if God finally came out from hiding and turned out to be this really hot babe and just totally blew everyone’s minds… you know…’
You’re funny. So then why are you becoming a member of their church?’ ‘well, I guess for one, because I love going to black churches. And two, I don’t want to have to wait in those damn lines with all the tourists…’ I laugh. She could turn that one on me and I know it… ‘and three because I feel a need to connect to the black people right now… it feels important to me… to make this connection to them… it’s not that I’m against God or anything like that.’ ‘It would be hard to tell that from your diaries…’ ‘yeah I know. I go off sometimes… but its not against God… more against what people do in the name of God… there has also been some wonderful things done in the name of gods as well… its all very confusing if you aren’t from here…’

‘from where?’

‘you know, from here. from earth. If you look at us from a distance… none of it makes sense. Humankinds relationship to their various gods… and the things that we do in the name of these gods…’

‘yes I know. I don’t believe in God. So that is why I am asking… why become a member of any church? That is what puzzles me about you… as a subject. As a true believer…’

‘That’s the idea of the piece right? yeah I forgot… true believers… that was your assignment.?’

‘Yes. so why spend so much time and effort rallying against God and religion, with such an obvious humanist agenda… Mr. ambassador…’

‘what? and then turn around and sneak away to a church every now and then?’

‘yes.’

‘well church is nice. you know? I mean, I’m American.’

‘yesterday you said you were not American. You said that you were only human…’

‘touché. And that’s true. for all of us… that’s all any of us are… we agree on that…’

‘But I was raised an American… so that is where my roots are buried… in those traditions… of going to church on Sunday… those are deeps roots… and more than that… I like the idea of communing with others who are spiritual… so I’m not against God. I’m just more pro-human right now. the whole thing about being a humanist these days is that there’s no place to go to celebrate and worship.’

‘Who should we worship if not God?’ ‘We should worship us. humans. ourselves. We’re enough. Its just that there’s no place for us to go to get all caught up in the spirit and get a good dose of good vibage… where’s a better place than a black church? So when the say Jesus I hear ‘the human spirit.’ When they say ‘God lives’ I hear ‘the human spirit lives.’ When they say ‘God saves’ I hear ‘we save ourselves through our own determination and fortitude. Maybe they don’t know I’m thinking that. maybe they don’t know that in a hundred years they will come to realize that that’s what they’re talking about… who knows… maybe they’re right and I’m wrong… maybe there is a God. maybe God’s gonna come out of hiding one day… but in the meantime, I don’t know… I just think it’s a good idea for us to start acknowledging our own Godness. You know when they were talking about dr. martin Luther king in there today?’ “yes?’ ‘well look at martin Luther king. Look at what he accomplished. That wasn’t about God. even though he was a preacher… but his great work, his great accomplishments… that was about him. that was about who he was as a man and what he was able to do on his own accord. We don’t need a God for that… We should be celebrating him as a man. Not God. but people don’t see that yet. This is just my opinion… just a theory… but you know, man, when you got a person like martin Luther king or nelson Mandela or Malcolm x or even oprah winfrey… you don’t have to worship a God… you can celebrate those people right there and your own good deeds and your own moral standards and your own courage and your own honesty and your own spirit of goodness…. that’s enough. I don’t see a logical need for God to possess any of those fine qualities.’

‘and yet you just became a member of the largest African American church in the country…a Baptist church.’

‘Yes. funny right? I know. funny. Hey go figure.’ And we walked on to have a great brunch and made a few new friends.

I’m not sure if I make any sense or not. I’ll be the first to admit it. the whole world is so sold on God that only a crazy man would question it… at least publicly. But I just think that its about time we did… like I always say, if God minds what I’m saying, he’ll surely let me know. God knows my thoughts and my soul as good as any other mans. He knows what I’m up to. He knows what I’m all about. God knows my heart is pure and my intentions are honest and good. If he wants to lead me in a different direction, he surely will. I am sure of that. I pray just as much as the next guy. And I honestly feel that God is calling me to this mission. To preach the word of humanity.

‘This makes no sense you know,’ she tells me over brunch, ‘from a practical viewpoint. You are saying that God is calling you to lead people away from God?’ ‘Well if you put it this way… look, I know you know what I’m saying. And I know you well enough to guess that you probably agree with me. But you have to write an article and it has to make sense. I understand that….’ ‘George Bush is often quoted as saying that he believes that he is on a mission from God.’ ‘Yeah. I know. And so are all those crazy Muslims cutting people’s heads off in broad daylight. So maybe that isn’t such a good thing to say these days. o.k. look. If I am ever so lucky as to get married and my wife has a baby, that’s not going to be some pretend baby. I’m not going to have to believe first before I see that baby. I’m not going to have to have faith to hold my baby. My wife’s going to have a fucking baby and I’m going to see it and get to hold it and watch it grow. Period. Whether I believe in it or not. That baby’s going to be there in my arms. That’s as simple as that. if a man gets put in prison, he’s not going to have to pray or have faith in order to believe he’s in prison… he’s going to wake up one day and realize ‘holy fucking shit! I’m in fucking prison!’ That’s life. That’s the world we live in. that’s just the way it is. we spend too much time focusing on the things that we’re all making up in our heads and taking wild guesses on and not enough time on the shit that’s right in front of our eyes; like babies being born with aids, or too many black men being put in prisons. There’s no God helping those situations out… that’s all up to us. The help that those situations need is going to have to come from us. not from believing in God. it always has come from us and we don’t need a God to teach us that. We can feel it. And for some goddamn reason, forgive the pun, I feel this strange calling, almost as if by a God, to help us cross that barrier in our minds that tells us that it’s not o.k. to acknowledge this…

‘if on the one side you have a bunch of white people killing over a hundred thousand human beings – that would mean people like you and me — in Iraq in less than two years in the name of God, and on the other side you have a bunch of brown people sawing people’s heads off and flying planes into crowded buildings in the name of God… then I say that the rest of us should do our best to stop these people of God as fast as we can before they do any more damage. You dig what I’m saying?’

‘Yes. I do. So then why the need to wake up early on Sunday morning and go sit in a church for two and half hours and sing about Jesus with all these other people?’ ‘Well… the music sure was good wasn’t it?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And that preacher was awesome wasn’t he?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And you feel good now right? Kind of got the goose bumps and all, right?’ ‘O.k. So that’s it.’ ‘Yeah. That’s it. It’s a good time. Wherever good people are gathered is a good time. I just wish people would start waking up to the idea that we don’t need God to be good and to have good times. I think that’s it really.’

Today the pedometer read that I walked 7.58 miles, 16,046 steps. In one day. Yesterday it was 5.7 miles. That’s New York city for you.

Last screening: the rules of the game. This is the classic French film from 1939 by Jean Renoir. This is great film. often on the top ten lists of many critics. I really enjoyed it. hard to understand French. for sure. But getting easier to speak it. But this film… there is a certain something there… especially at the end.

Slavery in America

February 4, 2005

Check it:
From CNN.com.
“A Florida couple accused of torturing and starving five children in their care were captured Friday night in Utah, a spokeswoman for the Citrus County, Florida, Sheriff’s Department said. They are accused of using a cattle prod or some sort of stun gun to shock the children, securing them to spots in the house with chains, striking their feet with hammers and pulling the children’s toenails out with pliers…”

As if it needed to get worse in the world, here appear these assholes into our lives. I was so disgusted by this I had to stop reading. I hate CNN. I hate the fucking news. As if the world needs more pain. couldn’t imagine. Just couldn’t imagine. We need to send out some real positive energy, prayer if you will, to these children, and to these poor sick people. thoughts of forgiveness and goodness and kindness and ‘its alrightness.’ I can only imagine the hell these kids were living… life is fucked up sometimes.

I’m not much into revenge. In all honesty I come into situations like this with a real open heart towards the victims and the victimizers both. Understanding that there are plenty of people in the world who don’t look at things like that, so these two monsters are going to end up with more hate and violence aimed at them than they will be able to bear; because most people still come at life with an eye for eye mentality. Many people are still like this amongst us. not understanding some of the most basic of universal laws. Not understanding our evolutionary path yet. not understanding the profundity of rehabilitation and forgiveness and unconditional love and compassion. Not understanding that like creates like creates like. So they perpetuate what they disdain and punish through their own actions without ever being aware of it. And life goes on. And the few of us who sit silently watching it all like flower prints on wallpaper laughing and crying in convulsive bursts of emotion and horror at the pure absurd beauty that it is to be human in today’s world, where the wicked and the cruel and the unjust and unholy are both wrong and right, the determination depending only upon who has the most money and who calls the shots.

Broker than I’ve been in years. just broke. In the last two years I have spent more money on old and new businesses of mine alike than I have made. About ten times more. Infinito asks me today, ‘what happened to all the money from selling your house. you must have banked on that in that neighborhood.’ ‘Gone man. I’ve loaned five companies over three-hundred thousand dollars in the last two years — probably more, just cause I’m not thinking about it right now – and now I am pretty much totally effing broke. bro if one of them doesn’t pick up and take off then I’m back to square one. back to where I was in college’ ‘how do you sleeeeeeep?’ he asks me. ‘well, dude, honestly, I haven’t slept well in about two years now. I wake up at the crack of dawn with stress running through my mind and body like lightening sometimes. My thoughts going a million miles an hour…. its crazy.’ ‘well hey, that’s the ambassador, that entrepreneur spirit… yepper.’ ‘yeah dude. I know. I’m into being what I am. Doing what I do. I had a choice. its not like I didn’t have a choice. I just really believe in what I’m doing. All the different projects. So I wake up early. psyche myself up. I kick ass. I stay pumped up.’ ‘Yeeeeaaaahhh. The ambassador makes it happen. that’s the spirit that got you to the place where you had three hundred thousand dollars to invest in your own companies in the first place…’ ‘yep. You said it bro.’

Last screening: The history of American slavery, PBS special. volume 1 on DVD. O.k. check it. I am exhausted. It is 2am. I woke up from a dead sleep during this thing playing in the background to make some quick notes. I will be brief to allow myself the release so I can get back to sleep:

– Thomas Jefferson penned the famous words, ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal… etc…’ but by the time he wrote these words — the document itself is brilliant – and he was a mere 33 years at the time — slavery was in full effect in America. By 1790 1 in 5 Americans were slaves. it’s true. 1 in 5 Americans were enslaved, were owned by other men. Jefferson himself was one of the richest slave owners in the colonies, owning over two hundred human beings at the time as his own personal property to do with as he pleased. He later secretly wrote a friend ‘if almighty God is just, we will pay dearly for this.’ So he knew all along that what they were doing was wrong… Slavery was not the law of the land in America for the first hundred and fifty years. People don’t realize that. we are taught, I assume to make the bitter pill go down easier, that slavery was always around, that we as Americans just played a game that was already being played. This is not true though. It was one of our many American myths. In fact it was against the law in England already for one man to own another; but it slowly and craftily turned into what is known as ‘the terrible transformation’ over a period of many years through the hands of the colonists in America.
– Black men did not start out as slaves in America. They were equal. Many owned land and lived next door to white men as planters and farmers and regular folk just like you and me. It wasn’t until the mid sixteen hundreds that it started. By the mid seventeen hundreds the American white man had created, or recreated rather, something that was by this time entirely outlawed in Europe and England, the enslavement of one man by another. You could have servants but not slaves. But slowly, a sickness grew in humankind and slavery became something that was not only conceivable again but turned into law in America. They actually started writing laws to create slavery, to assure that if you were born black you had no rights and you were not human. These were called the Negro laws. This was right here in our hometowns all across America. Virginia, Georgia, South Carolina, New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, all thirteen colonies. By the mere color of ones skin you were considered born a slave for life and so were their children and their children’s children.
– Now in fairness to the Americans (can we call them Americans? Can we call ourselves Americans? I’d say we call them “the insurgents” since that has become such a popular term these days… and by definition of course… Different story…) once they decided to go for it one hundred percent, the Dutch, the English, the Spanish, the Portuguese, and even the Africans started following suit and participating in the slave trade with the colonies just like the insurgents calling themselves Americans were doing. Everyone started seeing how much money could be made from forcing other people to work for you for free. But the thing is that countries England couldn’t handle it. say they were more evolved than the barbarians in America were, or perhaps just kinder gentler people, but by the seventeen-seventies they outlawed slavery once again. America on the other hand kept it going for another hundred years and even considered the defense of their to slavery one of principle reasons they were fighting for their own liberty from England. (Twisted, I know. fighting to defend their liberty to deny the liberty of others. But this is the foundation of American independence. And it wasn’t as if this observation went un-noticed. Everyone understood the inherent contradiction in the America’s fight for liberty in light of their slave system. it was often spoken and written about.) Again, we are never told this. its never spoken about.
– America during the slave years which lasted some two hundred and fifty years was no different if not worse for the sheer length that it was encouraged than Hitler’s Germany; but many many years longer and equally tortuous. I find it fascinating that the subject is treated so light-footed in our schools when we are young Americans. And yet how horrendous the Hitler Germany years are portrayed when the very foundation for the treatment of Jews right down to the laws were incredibly analogous to America during the slave years. blacks were not citizens. Blacks had no rights. Blacks could not own property. Blacks could not have money nor earn money. Blacks could not be paid. blacks could not be seen in public without being attended by their owners. Blacks would work for free till they died. It was cheaper to work a black person to death and import another than to keep one alive. Blacks were put in ships to import and export, in the lower decks all chained together, sitting upright in each others legs. They were naked and were forced to sit in each other’s feces and urine for two to four months straight. Occasionally they hosed off. If they died, which they did by the thousands on those ships, it did not matter except how it effected the bottom line. They were not allowed to take their own life by trying to jump overboard. It was considered an injustice and they were to be shot before they landed in the water so they would die by the white mans hands rather than by their own. blacks had no rights to have families of their own. they could be separated from their spouses and children at the will of their owners. it was legal to kill a black person if you wanted to. blacks were hung in public. Blacks were whipped in public. Blacks were mutilated if they disobeyed. Men would have their testicles cut off or a leg removed if they attempted to escape. Women would have an ear cut off. Blacks were burned at the stake in public for all to see. They called them negro bonfires… sounds familiar.
– As horrific as burning Jews in ovens sounds to us, in the broader picture one sees that its just a more advanced form of burning black people at the stake; America had perfected this barbarous atrocity years before; the Germans took it to the next level. Either way, you’re talking about the worst that humanity has to offer.
– as a quick aside, there are some people who refuse to acknowledge the similar nature between the black-American-holocaust and the European-Jew-holocaust, as if one was any worse than the other, citing that the Germans were intentionally attempting mass genocide on millions of Jews, while the Americans were just torturing and murdering millions of blacks while they worked them to death… I’m just too fucking tired to argue with these idiots. Let’s move on.
– So on and on it went in America for two hundred years but we are taught things so different than this here in our young idealistic America. As a boy I never heard of such things in school. Never do I ever remember learning about these atrocities. I only heard about how great the “founding fathers” were. They never taught us that these same men were evil murderers and torturers similar to the likes of Hitler or Stalin… they never spoke of how wicked America was for so many years… only how great it was… I must question this. we all must question this. what is the reason for this? why are we taught the famous ‘I cannot tell a lie father, I did cut down that cherry tree’ story (which turns out is a fucking lie) but we are not taught the whole story, the real story, of who George Washington was and the fact that all of these men owned tortured mutilated enslaved and murdered other men so they could make money from them? Because I have a photographic memory, I remember the day that our teacher told us the ‘I cannot tell a lie story.’ I remember what I was wearing, what the teacher was wearing, and I still remember many of the names of the other kids in that particular class. I would be lying myself if I pretended that I wasn’t angered by the understanding now that that fucking bitch was lying to me and all those other kids; that we were just being manipulated and brainwashed like all the other countries around the world. I’ll tell you what occurs to me, day in and day out… what isn’t a fucking lie in this country? is there anything that we were told that is true? or is it all just a big fucking scam, no different than what they tell us the Iraqis or Iranians or Palestinians experience growing up in their countries. Is there any fucking truth in America or in American history?
– in honor of George Washington he himself in his will mandated that all his over-100 slaves get set free upon the death of his wife. She set them free before her death because she was afraid for her life. by the time of his death, before even, he understood that what they were doing was wrong and against the very foundation of the republic that they were creating. Good for him.
– the idea of the black or African holocaust is not something that is discussed in American schools or in American history… the idea of the black-or-African-holocaust is not even an idea yet. if it is, then it is an idea kept silent. And yet it should be. it should be.
– I wonder why there are not more slavery memorials in America… it seems that there is a new Jewish-holocaust memorial going up every year… this occurred to me many times while watching the show. Where are the slavery or freedom memorials for the black people who were beaten and whipped and tortured and raped and murdered during these years here? what is really going on here… I do not know, nor do I dare to conjecture.
– it was said that it is an enigma that through slavery mankind could sacrifice his very heart and soul for the sake of money… deliberately turning against what he knew to be right in order to profit… this is the puzzle of man. Myself, I will never get it.
– that by enslaving we became enslaved ourselves. Knowingly bringing bitter enemies into our very homes in order to profit. The slave owners became slaves themselves in their own homes unwittingly. Living constantly in fear and trepidation. But for the money…
– we have done away with slavery in America. Just as England and Europe had done away with slavery before America brought it back. I am proud of this. we all should be. I just wonder what took so long. I wonder if mankind will ever succumb to this sickness again in our future history? I wonder if the black man is born angry and we the white man just do not see it. I would be angry if I were born black. I would secretly hate the whites.
– I wonder why there is not an institution of obligated reparation in America for all people born black to attempt to pay them back… for so many years of enslavement. Is simply saying your sorry enough? Why do we need a united negro college fund? Why not just give them all free college or something for a few hundred years? I know all about the theory that that idea would be in itself racist to a degree… but I wonder if it wouldn’t also be appropriate. To settle the score.
– surely no one is so blind that they do not see that the remnants of our slavery past are still all around us. in every city in America. On every street corner and in boxes sleeping in the freezing cold on the steps of every church. And in our prisons. Surely they are enslaved no longer by law or by shackle but in mind and spirit they are still imprisoned by a system that seems still almost ingrained in all of us. what can be done about this? will it take another two hundred and fifty years for this illness to heal… by nature alone? Is there anything that we can do as a community, as a country, to quicken the course?
– I do not agree with the phrase African American. I am not called English Italian American. Black is black and white is white I guess. If one is from Jamaica or Bahamas or Barbados then they are surely not African American, but simply black or white. This term makes no sense anymore here. I wish we didn’t have to call ourselves anything.

I will quote a very old and famous slave song. A beautiful song. A haunting song:

“Your country, how can it be yours? Before the pilgrims landed. We were here.”

It is a simple song. The same verse repeated over and over and over again…

“Your country? how can it be yours? Before the pilgrims landed. We were here.”

On Sunday I will go to the Abyssinian Baptist church in Harlem again; not because I am a believer in Jesus as God, but because I am a believer in the spirit of man and I believe that the great spirit of man is expressed no more exuberantly, no purer, and no more divinely than in black American churches. But this Sunday, after learning what I have learned tonight I will look at the members of the church differently. I will wonder if they look at me differently seeing that I am white. I will feel appropriately most honored that they allow me to worship with them. I will pay them no disrespect by dissembling my own personal belief that we are there to worship humanity, ourselves, and not a God, just as I do not hide this fact from white people.

Perhaps one day the God bug will get under my skin, and I will welcome it if it comes honestly. But for now I am content to believe in and worship mankind in all of our glory, rather than a God who has never shown his face or the slightest concern for our troubles and woes since we have known of our own existence. A God such as this we surely do not need if he were to exist. We would do ourselves and future generations quite well if we were to do away with the God concept entirely and begin instead to truly worship and divinely respect ourselves and all that we are; and to sing praises and shout many hallelujahs for how far we have come all on our own in spite of our unanswered longing for help from the outside. There is no better place on earth to do this than in a black American church.

Being primary

January 23, 2005

I am at the airport. I have been at the airport for three hours now. I am on a small plane bound for Charleston South Carolina. I don’t want to go to Charleston South Carolina. I don’t know if I’ll ever want to go to Charleston South Carolina. I’m just trying to get to Orlando Florida. [I don’t want to go to Orlando Florida either really. But my friends are there…] Yesterday I had decided to spend the weekend down in Orlando to dine with friends this evening and spend Sunday relaxing on the lake getting some sun and doing Avatar processes with everyone who is down there for the wizards course that’s going on and which I am not attending this year. fly back early morning Monday and not miss a beat. Besides there is full on fucking blizzard attacking New York I thought. Better to get out of here.

Well the only problem was that a little less than an hour after arriving at the airport they cancelled all the flights to anywhere. Literally just turned all the planes away and told them not to fly into New York. we were all told that the soonest anyone would be flying out of New York was Monday. Like the rest of the shocked and discouraged passengers I politely started to pack up my things and face the fact that I was going to be stuck in New York City for days holed up in my tiny little apartment in a blizzard… I’ve never been a blizzard… not a bad idea, except that its already looking pretty horrible outside and people are saying the chances of getting a cab from the airport back to Manhattan is going to be pretty slim.

I thought about that for a second. Stuck at the airport thirty minutes from my apartment for two days in a blizzard. Could be a lot worse. They have TV here. plugs for my phone and laptop. Plenty of restaurants. I could even go sleep in one of those lounges tonight I’m sure.

Truly, the idea didn’t seem half as intimidating as being stuck in that little broom closet they call an apartment I live in for two or three days straight. I have no food to speak of in the house. its small as hell. and its always fucking freezing in there. so I could try living at the airport for a while. see what that’s like. Why not. Another experience.

But then it just occurred to me that as an Avatar — I mean here we are with all this knowledge that we have collected and all these tools we have spent so many years sharpening and perfecting — why not use them, it occurred to me that I would just create around this nuisance. I decided in that moment that I would go to Orlando. Blizzard or no blizzard. It wasn’t a one hundred percent knowing… not entirely… but it was damn close to it. call it a ninety percent certainty that even if I was the only one who would fly out of New York city today that that would be the case. I would create magic.

In Avatar this is what is known as ‘being primary.’ Meaning, your primary is you go to Orlando regardless of what the situation looks like and regardless of what anyone else tells you. period.

Uh oh. Standby. We are about to try taking off…. and there is ice all over the runway…

O.k. I’m back. we are in the air now. attempting to manipulate this small jet through fifty mile an hour winds with zero visibility. When I look out the windows all I see is pure white. We are flying through the storm.

So where was I? yes. primaries. So if you are not familiar with the Avatar knowledge or tools, real quick, a primary is anything that you create; anything that is created. Walking across the room is a primary. Having a baby is a primary. Making a million bucks is a primary. Flying from New York to Orlando is a primary.

And then there are secondaries. A simple definition of secondaries is ‘anything other than the primary.’ Easy enough. If you want a baby and you cannot make one, that is a secondary to your primary that you will make a baby. If you are still broke while trying to create your million bucks that is a secondary. If you get to the airport and are told that all flights are cancelled due to weather conditions when you are trying to fly to Orlando from New York, that too is just a secondary. [when you take a step back and think about it for a second, God still not showing up after all these years is a secondary for all the different people over the world who have been trying to create a God. they want a God. they imagine a God. they visualize a God. pray to a God. they’ve even gone to the extent of creating a God and a name for the God and numerous religions around this God throughout our history and in hundreds of thousands of religious texts. Statues of God. pictures of God. songs and hymns to God. But still no God has shown up. but this is just a secondary. I assure you that if enough people get rid of enough of their secondaries… one day this God is going to come into being. The people are going to create their primary. And God will exist. the people will create him/her/it.]
So as the agents at the ticket counters and gates were telling me that I could not fly out of la guardia, nor could I fly out of jfk, nor could I fly another airline because all flights from this airport had now been cancelled… I just smiled at her… she was a secondary. Her insistence that there was no way in hell I was flying out of the airport until Monday, a full 48 hours later, was a secondary. And frankly, it didn’t appear to me that she was really hearing me out. I was going to Orlando tonight. she just didn’t get it.

So what do you do in the face of secondaries when they are blocking your primary? You discreate them. that’s half the secret to being a fucking amazing creator of the reality you prefer, to living the life of your dreams. people think erroneously that creating things that they want is all about creating. So they push and pull and try real hard and pray and dream and visualize and chant and write stuff down and all that other ‘I can do this’ type of activity. When the biggest problem is that there are secondaries in the way. what they need to do is discreate their secondaries. When there are no secondaries, guess what? all you’re left with is the primary. That’s the magic bullet that most people on earth still don’t know about. you’ve created what you’ve wanted because you’ve discreated what was in the way.

In the concourse there were thousands of people in line. and one by one and two by two people started walking away dejected, back to get their luggage off the carousels to go spend three days in New York in the blizzard. Everyone was very upset and sad and disturbed and concerned with where they were going to sleep and all those other details that make weather delays such a daunting pain in the ass. all the monitors in the terminal read that all the flights had been cancelled. I sat down and drank some more of my coffee. I just really wanted to go to Orlando. I wanted to see my friends. I wanted to see Princess Little Tree. I wanted two days in the sun with friends using the Avatar tools and laughing and playing and creating magic. I wanted to get the hell out of this blizzard. I wasn’t ready to start walking out of the concourse with the thousands of other people who were now walking back. so I sat for a while chilled like Buddha.

In a few minutes I started wandering around the concourse making small talk with people about the storm. Sipping my coffee, just enjoying meeting people. I was intent on leaving. And its funny because this is the way that primaries are created… if you’re good, you can feel the moment when they create. You can feel the moment when you have flipped that switch inside that has somehow miraculously shifted reality. [if anyone ever tells you that ‘you’ or ‘we’ can’t create or change of shift reality, run fast and far. they just don’t know what the fuck they are talking about and are never going to have a positive influence on you. that’s a belief that doesn’t serve you if you are intent on ‘living deliberately’ or creating the life that you really want for yourself and for others.] so yes, I felt it, right in the moment, when inside I just decided to decide that I would not stay here after all and instead I would fly out of here. by this time the concourse was nearly empty. Twenty-three gates of emptiness, everyone on their way back home or back to their hotels, except for a few people scattered around. I looked on one monitor and saw twenty flights cancelled out in red, but I saw one blinking line that read “Charleston SC On Time Now Boarding.”

I walked up to the lady at the gate and the gate door was closed. She was Latin. The plane had already left and was parked out on the runway. I told her in my best Spanish, ‘I have an appointment tonight at eight in Orlando. I need to get there.’ ‘that flight has been cancelled sir she responded.’ ‘Oh I know,’ I answered. ‘what I’m thinking though is that I can get to Charleston and then from there get to Orlando. The plane hasn’t left yet I notice. Or even fly me to Charleston and then somewhere else and then Orlando after that. I don’t care. Just get me to Orlando tonight. The blizzard is just here in the northeast. Its not all over the country. I just have to get out of New York.’ ‘let me see what I can do’ she tells me and she radios someone on her walkie talkie. A quick dash to the ticket counter, and then she types a few things and rushes me out the door.

To make a long story not any longer than it already has been, I am in the air now. out of thousands of passengers in that terminal I am the only one that got on a plane. the plane wasn’t at the gate anymore. So the lady had to walk me through the blizzard in her little uniform skirt to get me to a bus and then take a bus with me to the plane and they lowered the platform so I could get on the plane which was parked on the runway. I hugged her goodbye and told her how much I appreciated her assistance. Outside the plane it was like … well… a fucking blizzard. You couldn’t even see a foot in front of your face. Here’s the funny thing. There are only six of us on this little jet. Six people. I don’t think there is a person on here that is going to Charleston South Carolina. I think we are just the six people out of the thousands who just decided that we were getting the hell out of New York no matter what.

As I boarded the plane I thought of all those thousands of people who are either in a cab or a bus headed back to the city now, or even worse, still standing by the carousel waiting for their luggage for a trip that they never even took; and I thought of the other ticket agents who assured me that I would not be flying out that day from any airport to anywhere. They said it with such straight faces. They were so sure. I was not. I just kept smiling and sipping my coffee. They weren’t wrong. they were ably describing their view of reality. But I had a different view of reality. Its that simple.

It made me think of other times in life when people tell us that we can’t when we can, but we just may not know it because someone is telling us that we can’t, and all around us it appears that we can’t. and yet… you can feel it inside when you make that decision that you don’t care what it looks like, you are going to make ‘it’ happen. you can actually feel reality shift around you. there’s a lot of power in that but it is very subtle. That kind of power, the power to shift realities, the power to bend and shape and twist reality around you in order to create what you prefer is powerful stuff. but it is light and soft and easy. its not all smoke and lightening and strong winds and loud noises. That’s the movies. That’s not reality.

Wizards exist in the world invisibly. They don’t dress any particular way or act any certain way. They don’t carry around anything special, such as wands or crystal balls or walking sticks. In fact from what I’ve noticed, people who still carry this shit around with them in order to create are usually pretty limited in their powers. Real wizards on the other hand just have the secret knowledge in their mind, and the understanding of wizards and gods in their souls, the tools and techniques perfected over years of practice at their fingertips, and the willingness in their hearts to go against all odds and all ‘seen logic’ in the world in the pursuit of magic and miracles. I first learned the wizards materials in 2001, so I am a baby wizard to be sure. But now and then I surprise myself.

The pilot just announced that we just flew over Philadelphia, that all the airports in the northeast are now officially closed, and that we were the last plane out of anywhere. The flight attendant has filled up the entire tray next to me with enough bags of pretzels, peanuts, and cookies to feed a whole plane and told me to help myself since there are only six people on the plane. I’m chilling, sipping bourbon, and typing. [People think that wizards or enlightened or transcended masters don’t drink bourbon… I’d say they should check their watches and see what time it is… gather some new data and restructure their consciousness in order to see what’s what. Wizards, masters, the transcended can do just about whatever they choose to in each moment. That’s one of the first things you learn. There are very few rules to reality creation. That’s the first rule. I think the second rule could be something like ‘if you don’t like a rule, discreate it and create what you prefer.’]

Last screening: mark twain, the ken burns documentary. I had no idea how many great books he penned in his lifetime. Nor did I ever know that he was once the most famous writer in the world, one of the richest men in America at one time, and then filed for bankruptcy ten years later because he squandered all his wealth on crazy speculation schemes trying to make even more money. this is a great story. Real Americana.

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Tag: finding God