Canto I

2008-04-01T21:01:00.000-07:00

We have many reasons for doing things in life: approval in our peer group, comfort in our home, success in the workplace. We have many questions in life: is he/she the one? Am I happy with my job? Where should I eat lunch? Will the Chargers cover the spread? Some are mundane and fleeting, others affect us to the levels of obsession. But when we probe deeper, we find universal questions that cause us to look at deeper reasons and reasoning. The questions are those that philosophers, scholars, and the religious have been battling for millennia. Things like "Why are we here?", "Is there a God?", "What is the real purpose of life?" They, for me, are more important than a point spread. So I searched, and felt almost led to certain things. It led me to a newer (or, more likely, older) point of view. It led me to a view that our society was not in line with any of the possible answers. It led me to a view that the comfort and acceptance that we strive for is a distortion. It is as if Ponce de Leon, frustrated with his inability to find the fount of youth, instead spent his days rushing for a stagnant pond, and once there, wanted to have the nicest house on the shore of its putrid waters. It led me to quit my job - I couldn’t bear to be involved in dishonest rat races for false esteems and affectations. Not only did I quit my job, leave my home town, and abandon my friends; I did so in a fashion to try to ensure I had no exit strategy. Even if I found God, or caught what I believed a glimpsed view of divine, I wouldn't be able to run back to society, to go back and suckle on the breast of popular opinion when the formula got tough. I figured it this way: If there is a God, then more than likely, I shouldn’t ever want to go back to secular society, at least not in any way I had been immersed in it before.

People go to their churches and synagogues, their mosques and their temples, and there is debate over historical accuracies and translations. They wonder if Krsna was a real prince or a God or both. They debate which story of Siddhartha’s discovery of suffering is the true tale. They debate the approach to Allah. They beg to differ on when and where Jesus was really born. Sects within religions come to blows over dogmatic interpretations of the Trinity, or which Hindu God is supreme. Yet the one thing it seems that all people of all religions agree upon is this: by worrying about the minutae, about the historical details, we are freed from ever actually learning the lessons that are the true focus of the texts. A friend of mine asked me what my main issue with Christianity was. I said I had concerns, such as the absolute necessity of Jesus’ divinity, but when it came right down to it, my only real problem with the faith is this: the majority of the Christians in America today, if Jesus were to come up to their front door, they would yell at the bum to get off their lawn before they would ever realize who it was. A friend of mine, a Presbyterian Minister, quoted a bumper sticker, “Jesus called, and he wants his religion back.” I would much rather face St. Peter knowing I’ve sinned and known that I didn’t even attempt to put on the face of a good Christian yet spent the majority of my life searching for the face of God than debating how much of Caesar’s minted face I can hold onto and still get into heaven. Now, if there isn’t a God, then there is no real purpose to life, and why weigh myself down with the crap of society. I discuss this in detail in Canto II, where I hope to offend as many atheists as possible, at least the Richard Dawkins type. But whether there is a great purpose to this life or not, society is a bane and a bog to either way of living. Either way, it had to go. On the spiritual crap table of life, I’m not trying to place all my chips next to Blaise’s stacks. It’s an invalid argument, and just because there might be a ham sandwich hidden in my ass doesn’t mean I should to go digging around in it, since there’s no down side except a dirty finger. I would have to believe there was a ham sandwich in the first place. I’m getting my bias out right now. I believe there is a greater thing – though I didn’t necessarily always pursue the idea. And so off I went, looking for God, and planning to ask him/her/it, “What’s the deal, yo?” I don't, mind you, want to prove that God exists. I am not bringing Ahura Mazda or Yahweh or Vishnu or even dear Bokonon into court a la "Miracle on 54th Street". I will not justify shortcomings in various religions - "But how does Judas die two different ways?" or "Do Hindus really believe that moon shines on its own?" have no place here. While I have patiently listened to the theories of tower seven, and admit there are some irregularities, I’m not a conspiracy guy. I don’t think that Mary Baker Eddy is secretly behind the high cost of health insurance. If you want to debate truly horrendous fiction about Mary Magdalene catching rays on the French Riviera, don’t look to me. My apologies to Mad Max fans, but never start a conversation “You know, the Jews…” when I’m around. I am not searching for the infallible credo, I am not searching for the perfectly edited manuscript, I am not searching for a trippy or creepy story, I am searching for God. I am simply finding a foundation for my faith, and explaining it to myself. Rather than lying on the couch, I’m looking underneath it (where the boogeyman is hiding because he’s afraid of Chuck Norris). And I am inviting you to read along with my thoughts, and throw in your own. Let’s put it this way: George Orwell once wrote that an artist is finished with their work - be it a painting, a novel, a sculpture - when they can look at it and say "I am that!" Likewise, we can look at architecture and recognize Maybeck or Pei or Wright in the form. When the Bellagio in Las Vegas was showing the Boston collection of impressionist painters, one didn’t have to read the names of the artists; there was no doubt as to the Van Goghs or the Monets. The artist has left his brushstroke, his genius, and his personality all over the canvas. Likewise, I am hoping not so much to sit down for a cup of coffee and a scone with the artist, the architect, the author of our being as I am simply trying to divine the tell tale signature of the force(s) that caused us to be. Something else I am not doing is trying to justify one religion over another! Indeed, I am not of the opinion that I have a secret insight that billions of those before me were not privy to, and if I wanted to prove one religion right, I am sure I would fail miserably. When one chooses a university to attend, one may choose it for its reputation, certain members of its faculty, even its location. Perhaps the prospective student wants to go to the same place their idol went or is a legacy, it’s a Yale family, or all the women went to Skidmore. Perhaps Stanford’s 27 Nobels impress you, or Berkeley’s mystique makes up for it’s only having 20. Perhaps it’s as simple as following the high school sweetheart or best friend, or because it’s got a reputation as a party school. From the most austere to the most trivial, hey, that’s your bag. And those four or five or twenty, depending on how things work out, will affect your employability and life philosophy long after your school has become tired stories the spouse hates to hear. This is not the case for anyone who is remotely sane when it comes to faith. This is a probing of my mind, heart, and spirit, searching for a consensus on what is the divine truth.

So why, Bert, why did you do this? It wasn’t easy. When I started to write this blog, I started with the pseudonym it still bears. When people asked me, I hid behind the quaint little “Call it one part neurotic breakdown, one part spiritual awakening, one part hippy dissent.” The neurotic part, truthfully, only reared its head when I was, like Jonah, denying my calling to enemy territory. The hippy dissent rings false, because the liberal lifestyles that go with a supposed disdain of a consumptive society is at best contradictory, at worse, resentment hidden in personal lies. And I really don’t care for the Dead or smoking the weed. It was a call to the madness that took Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, John the Apostle, and Socrates. I am not saying I have half the faculties any of them did, I am saying I have their disease: the unrelenting urge to see beyond the veil.

Why though? What motivates a person to abandon all they’ve built up for a journey that much greater than he have perished whilst on? I have been asking myself/meditating on it/praying about it for a while. Fear of Death? Desperation? Loneliness? Forcing God's hand? No, this life, with all of its drawbacks, is quite tolerable, even enjoyable if I would make it so. And I don't think I have the chip stack to bluff God out of the pot, especially since I don't think the turn card has even been dropped. So why even bother, Bert? In my attempts at writing a novel, a bartender accuses the main character of wanting to cheat life, in that he is interested in seeing the answers to the puzzles we are here to solve. I'd like to go to that to explain my views. We all feel, deep inside, that we are here for a purpose. There is something, a spirit, an observer, a spark - however you feel comfortable describing it - that lives deep inside us, behind the senses, behind the ephemeral pains and ecstasies. Something... dare we say... immortal? In Aurelie, Gerard de Nerval speaks of it; in the Nag Hammadhi find of early Christian works, it is pervasive - even in the canonical works, Jesus and Paul speak of it constantly; Plato speaks of pure forms that we only mirror, and he attributes similar views to Socrates. The list goes on; one of the constant veins of spiritual literature is the "Watcher" or the "One" inside us. Throughout the major religions and philosophies, we are told that we are more than this corporal body. More importantly, if we sit quiet enough, we hear this truth from within ourselves. And our puzzle is to get closer to that. The puzzles are never easy. Take a Friday or Saturday New York Times. The clues are cryptic, have dual meanings. Even in an easier puzzle, a five letter word for "net" could be "income", or "caught", or "basket" (well the second letter is an 'a' and the last letter is 't'... wait, that doesn't solve it). And that's simply a word game! Imagine how much harder the puzzles of life must be! If, on newsprint, we find ourselves working a corner for what seems like an eternity, only to find out we've built a whole block of misconceived answers, the amount of our life that begs us to go back, erase it, and start again is unfathomable. The puzzle of life, like all the good ones, starts off with easier blocks. The first couple clues are fairly accessible, short answers not connected to the greater themes. But as we progress, the puzzle taxes us, causing us to search deeper and deeper into our memory, pulling upon answers we didn’t know we had in us. Some sections of the puzzle seem obvious, and we vainly wonder how they gave anyone else difficulty. We work in little areas just to get one letter, one Aleph, to help figure out a larger answer, to catch onto the great theme. There are some areas that we just can’t get without research (all crossword fans know Verdi wrote “Aida”, but I have no clue to “character from Don Giovanni”!). So we look for more than one set of clues.... If you've ever read Games magazine, they have a huge crossword right at the staples. It has two sets of clues. You can fold a page over and have some harrowingly difficult clues, or you can flip to the page of the easier, fill in as fast as you can write variety. One of the more keen points is that sometimes the two sets of clues come from astonishingly different directions. And even if you can't figure out the easier clue, you can glance at the hard set to help figure out what the answers may be. This, to me, is the profit of searching outside whatever base faith you may have. (A quick side note to dyed in the wool Christians: to me, this is implicitly suggested by the New Testament. For while you may read this and say 'Isn't my gospel good enough?' I turn precisely to those four gospels. The three synoptic seem to overlap, disagree, and validate one another all at the same time; the gospel of John takes that knowledge and deepens it with metaphor as the real meat of the four books of the good news. If within that scripture they find it necessary to have four versions, why would you not look outside of that for more verification. An author that quotes only himself is a rather poor author indeed. While not a Krsna devotee, I have attended many of their teachings, and if you allow yourself, when they speak of a lesson of Krsna consciousness, you may almost hear 'Christian Consciousness' and find that the lesson remarkably echoes the writings of some early church fathers. With that in mind...). Perhaps a certain parable of Jesus is beyond us, and there are no commentaries that satisfactorily answer the mystery. We can turn to the Tao-Te Ching, to the Upanishads, to a new age author, to a Gnostic gospel, where ever, and find another clue for the same answer. Perhaps, just as easily, we find that we aren't discovering the answers as we are remembering them. After pouring over this book and that, regardless of what everyone else says, when we come across the true and correct answer for one of life's little mysteries, something inside of us says "Oh, I can't believe it, I knew that all along!" Sometimes, while pursuing another answer, or not even consciously working on our greater meaning, we have epiphanies - during meditation or simply while grabbing something from the fridge or crossing the street - that make us want to run home a jot it down, or call someone and let them know, lest we forget this key to ourselves once again. The spurring of this intensity in puzzle-solving is two things: one is my unfortunate upbringing, which gives me the arrogant belief that I will write something that will bring at least one person into a spiritual life they did not have before they read them. My aunt used to call me Samuel in the hope that, like the judge of Israel, I would hear from God and proclaim his righteousness. I also have had a bunch of funky dreams. So I am either blessed or insane. Either way, life has been interesting and I’d rather believe I have a calling than running in circles trying to get comfortable. So there is the first point. The second is that I have, like so many others, tried to be part of the "Cooler than Religion Club". These are the people that sit outside religion, doing things like pointing out religion comes from the root religare which was Latin for binding, and that the famous pose of two hands in prayer is an offering of them for such thing; the CTRC likes to point out that they are better than spiritual slaves to some invisible master. They throw around Freudian claims that religion is just wish-fulfillment manifestations. They also, by either claiming a form of agnosticism (which is really self-insulting, as it literally means "without knowledge") or some strange, muted form of a bygone religion, keeping their own beliefs safely out of the barrel of fish they are shooting at. I, in the course of my journey, have attended many temples and churches. It is easy to pick apart those that run on blind faith – those who are the spiritual equivalent of “Love it or Leave it” patriots. I have also been privileged enough to attend a few classes and teachings by intelligent men and women, who don’t believe that intelligent thought and heartfelt belief must be segregated. I currently am attending service as a church which is ministered by two such men. This combination of knowledge and faith moved me to realize it was high time to lay down my arguments and start using the flexibility and strength I have hopefully gained in my path of jnana-yoga. I am turning in my membership card in the CTRC, and hopefully, I will soon be able to pursue something greater than the "Look at the Cool Kids Smoking" forms of faux spirituality. So I decided to go figure it all out. And this is my report back.

Before we get to the meat of the matter, there are a couple things that must be pointed out. The first, if it is not already obvious, is that I have a penchant for what my high school physics teacher used to call “bird-limbing”: A tendency to jump a little from topic to topic, only to find yourself on the other end of the conversational forest. If you think it’s bad here, you should hear me talk. This is as well focused as my brain allows. Please forgive this. Internal dialogue along the lines of “Man, I’m quoting C.S. Lewis. The first time I remember reading C.S. Lewis was at my aunt’s house, sitting there while she used that Tri-Chem cloth paint stuff my dad used to sell. The lilac color was actually scented like lilacs, or so I was led to believe, since I had never actually smelled lilacs at that point in my life. I assumed they didn’t smell quite like paint though. Dad had all that stuff. Man, that guy was a sucker for any of those Amway deals. Doesn’t Amway own the Orlando Magic or something? There used to be a club next to the arena in an old Firestone showroom. B.F.Goodrich, C.S. Lewis, what’s the deal with two initials instead of a first name? I was terribly disappointed when I actually got to try Turkish Delight when I was in Antalya, Turkey that was very much like eating a BF Goodrich product, although I got to see the remains of Saint Nicholas in a museum there, so yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus”, and my point, myself, and more than likely, you, my gentle reader, are lost in the darkness of the aforementioned forest. I’m sorry. It is who I am.
Back on the main point turnpike, I’m a big fan of the many, many aphorisms which all boil down to Socrates’ original statement along the lines of knowing absolutely nothing. As we learn something, it inevitably opens up a whole new closet of subjects. As our knowledge of sub-atomic particles grow, so do the number of them. As soon as we master a topic, we find twenty sub-schools of it to consider. I find that we have learned, in three different realms, which we should, as Rob Brezny says, only take anything to 80%, lest it becomes dogma. There are three major caveats to consider, one for each side. The first is found in the laboratories of science. Scientists have learned from history that everything is theory. There are no proven facts. The world was once flat, and apples fell to the ground because God gave them the essence of weight. Then the world was round, and bodies attracted one another. Then there were gravitons. Now, we believe that bodies cause a curvature in space-time. Or do they? Was Einstein’s greatest mistake the gravitational constant, or the later dismissal of it? So everything we "know" now may be fodder for future Umberto Ecos and Stephen Jay Goulds as they write their essays and novels with ironic eyes on the worldviews of the past.
And even within that, convention blurs the lines. The recent debates on what exactly a “planet” is demonstrates this. As Mike Brown wrote in his editorial on the subject in the New York Times, “Like continents, planets are defined more by how we think of them than by someone’s after-the-fact fact pronouncement.” Indeed, Mike, much of what we believe (America, in particular, ranks above only Turkey… have I mentioned I was there once, had some Turkish delight?… in a recent survey in whether or not evolution is a viable theory) has nothing to do with “someone’s after-the-fact pronouncement.” Any reference to science is also a reference to faith. A reference to a belief that no one has yet found a better theory or deeper truth, and that this particular one may hold out to the end of the ages.

It is also within this realm, although it applies across the spectrum, that I should mention something else: we love credentials. We like to see PhD plastered across a name who is giving us advice. A doctor of gastro-intestinal disciplines is of a higher qualification to judge our upset tummy than Nana. Usually, this is with good reason. I have none. My post-elhi schooling consists of United States Naval Nuclear Power School, which means I'm pretty good at evaluating fluid flow through a cross-section of pipe, or diagramming an LVP motor controller. Everything I know about cosmology, the Bahai, or Humme comes from reading books and going to lectures on my own time. I have no credentials, just like Nana.
That said, the second of our caveat parachutes is in the classroom of thought. Philosophical schools vary, but quite a few have decided that we can never know anything. Examples such as a table - what color is the one in front of you? Is it the same color during the daylight and when illuminated by artificial light? As you move, if it is perhaps a waxed redwood coffee table, the light shines off it differently. If you are wearing rose-tinted glasses, or are color blind, what color is it then? Since light, perspective, and quality of sight affect our interpretation of te tables appearance, which color is its true color? Is it smooth as you run your hand across it? What if you took a magnifying glass to it? An electron microscope? How do we even know we're not dreaming or in some Keanu Reeves film or Square Enix game situation? Why is that a table anyways? Is it because of its function, its shape, a combination of positive aspects, or is it because it is not a chair or an umbrella stand? Or is it a process? What does calling a table ‘a table’ have to do with Marxism? I’ve had a lovely evening, but this wasn’t it – no, that’s Groucho Marxism. Bottom line, knowing stuff about tables can be absolute, relative, confusing, or just plain lies, depending on who you ask. So when I talk about getting to the bottom of any of this, I mean so only within the context of not really being able to know anything.
In the Sunday schools of religion, according to one survey (so settle down with your “facts”, we’re going to resort to Colbertian “truthiness”, the point still works), the simple fact is this: even if you lump all Christians together, and we're talking Catholic, Protestant, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Bob's Church of Herb Flavored Communion Crackers and Cheeeesuuuss Christ, I'm talking all the different brands that want to sell you a new, improved, low fat diet of Christ - hey, congratulations, you've just labeled the largest group of believers in the world. They clock in at 33% of the world's population (according to one survey, I said settle down Team Islam!). So, even if you are a part of that, about two-thirds of the world thinks you're wrong. Two out of three think you're nuts, or at least barking up the wrong God tree. If you believe something else, well, more dentists believe in Dentine than in your beliefs. Let's not even get into the idea that within your own clique, a good crunch of them believe you're probably worshipping your messiah or wisdom teacher wrong as well.

So science admits the future may find the truths of today as laughable mistakes; religion, well, the vast majority of us are wrong in the present; and philosophy says we don't know anything to begin with, or at least it's probably not what we think it is. So, with that in mind, I plunge forward, studying whatever may clue me in to the truth, with the full realization that I may be daft and totally off the mark. For example, I'm currently mesmerized by a certain analogy (if you haven't noticed, I'm a fan of the metaphor, 'cuz they betta for 'splainin' stuff)... We often use the body when we talk of who we are. We can point at our knee and say "this is a knee", at our nose and say "this is a nose". I can also point at them and say "This is Bert/Sam". Yet we tend to differentiate between body parts and ourselves. When someone has a liver transplant, the old liver is no longer them, and the new liver - which hopefully is no longer anyone else's - is now part of them. Like clothes or material possessions. Our hand is our hand, but if we have it eaten by a lion, it is no longer a part of us, it’s just meat – unless you happen to be a character in a John Irving novel. There is a consciousness that we consider "me" and the body, at least in part, is its home. Yet the body is us. It's a great way to talk about the ego and Ken Wilber, Buddhists, and many others use it to differentiate ourselves from our bodies. Recently, I was attending a lecture at the local Krsna temple, and the devotee used this metaphor on the next level - much as we are our fingers and knees and nerves, we are more than that. We are those things, yet those things are not the whole of us. Such is God. He is the stars, the rocks, the trees, the whoop in the whooping crane, the laugh in the hyena, the fart at the opera, the electron playing wavicle jokes on physicists late in the night. But those things are not him. As to scripture, chanting, prayer: let's jump to linguistics real quick. Take the word "tree". It, in and of itself, really has no "treeness" to it. The four letters have absolutely nothing to do with those plants we think of when it is said. There are no leaves within the word. It only leads us to the idea, the forms, which comprise our thoughts of trees - be they Oaks, Pines, Palm, Boabab, Family, Sophist, those of Knowledge and Life, or a whole isle of yews. But there is an association. The word is a symbol of the things, it conjures the essence through it's hearing or reading. And so, the scriptures, the sciences, the idols also have nothing of "God" within them. But they conjure up an essence through symbol. It was one of my coincidences, since I was wading through Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, and Bach: the Eternal Golden Braid, which I think is an amazingly entertaining read. I don’t agree however, with his final conclusions, so I was trying to salvage some of it's beautiful work and apply it to spirituality. I hoped to – internally - elevate his arguments from a materialistic discourse to a spiritual symbol. The metaphor of two mirrors facing one another, constantly reflecting Descartes "I think therefore I am" into an infinite array of self-awareness is wonderful. But to say that it's the end of it - that is all the soul and the spirit are, simply a feedback loop - oy vey, that's kind of pointless. If knowledge, prayer and faith light a candle, and meditation and contemplation of philosophy and spiritual ideals hold mirrors to it so as to amplify the effect within ourselves, why stop there?

So let’s start an examination of faith, of essence. And, so there’s no shadowy elephant of disbelief in the room, let’s start by addressing atheism and agnosticism, in Canto II...

23 Cantos

Designing Brahman

Canto I

About 23 Cantos