Ego is Good/Ego is Bad/Ego Doesn't Exist at All?

I've just been reading a post and a lively set of comments about the ego.  And of course in such a conversational terrain, there is the usual argument going on ~ that of yes, there is an ego/no, there isn't an ego.  It's an interesting and frustrating conversation because I agree completely and utterly with both sides.

This is my personal take, subject to change or variation at any time.  I'm sure you have your own and it's probably different to mine.  But the way it seems to me out through my eyes and after pondering and daydreaming about it ~ I think that I absolutely do have an ego, and it is part of my responsibility as this particular human to learn to balance it, to learn to love myself no more or less than anyone else, which is, in fact, an entire life's journey the perfected aim of which would be me being totally in love with the entire world because I Am That. 

On the other hand, at the same time I feel like my aim is to learn to stop loving myself too much (a sort of love which, if it really is love at all, is a much lower form of it), or else I will forget that I am the ocean and that I don't believe there is any fear in death.

Because in that respect, no, there is no ego.  Damn right.  There is no such thing as an ego, just like there is no such thing as bloody anything.  The full and beautiful void.  The no-thing.  And you know the drill ... go down far enough and it's just more empty space than molecules.

So I think we can get caught up in these distinctions where different sides say "No, you're wrong.  There is an ego," and the other side saying, "No, you're wrong. There isn't an ego."  But the way it seems to me is that they are both exactly right. 

What a fucking trip :)

The Glittering Net That Enfolds the Universe

Modern science speaks to us of an extraordinary range of interrelations. Ecologists know that a tree burning in the Amazon rain forest alters in some way the air breathed by a citizen of Paris, and that the trembling of a butterfly's wing in Yucatan affects the life of a fern in the Hebrides. Biologists are beginning to uncover the fantastic and complex dance of genes that creates personality and identity, a dance that stretches far into the past and shows that each so-called "identity" is composed of a swirl of different influences. Physicists have introduced us to the world of the quantum particle, a world astonishingly like that described by Buddha in his image of the glittering net that unfolds across the universe. Just like the jewels in the net, all particles exist potentially as different combinations of other particles.

So when we really look at ourselves, then, and the things around us that we took to be so solid, so stable, and so lasting, we find that they have no more reality than a dream ...

Impermanence has already revealed to us many truths, but it has a final treasure still in its keeping, one that lies largely hidden from us, unsuspected and unrecognized, yet most intimately our own.

The Western poet Rainer Maria Rilke has said that our deepest fears are like dragons guarding our deepest treasure. The fear that impermanence awakens in us, that nothing is real and nothing lasts, is, we come to discover, our greatest friend because it drives us to ask: If everything dies and changes, then what is really true? Is there something behind the appearances, something boundless and infinitely spacious, something in which the dance of change and impermanence takes place? Is there something in fact we can depend on, that does survive what we call death?

Allowing these questions to occupy us urgently, and reflecting on them, we slowly find ourselves making a profound shift in the way we view everything. With continued contemplation and practice in letting go, we come to uncover in ourselves "something" we cannot name or describe or conceptualize, "something" that we begin to realize lies behind all the changes and deaths of the world. The narrow desires and distractions to which our obsessive grasping onto permanence has condemned us begin to dissolve and fall away.

Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

++++

What maketh thee of this? I find it resonates so strongly within me. Perhaps the most disturbing concept to the Western mind is the statement about nothing being "real". We may tend to skip to the notion that he therefore means that nothing exists. I'm not so sure that Sogyal means that - although if he does (and I can understand the conclusion reached), this is where I perhaps begin to depart in my own thinking from Tibetan thought.

But then, in the very same breath, I do begin to wonder to myself whether he and I are not simply looking at the same thing from different sides of the mountain perhaps. I do think here, when he refers to things not being real he is speaking about the appearance of things. That things do not exist simply within their own little containers, separate to everything else. Indeed, the container we look at contains more space than it does anything else. This I can subscribe to. This is trippy. And truly, nothing stays the same, ever. Not even me. Thank God :)

Pic: Nirolo

The house of rattling mirrors

Some ginormous cosmic-sized semi trailer with a massive smoke machine on its back is driving past the earth. Blowing away the land of smokescreens and rattling the house of distorted mirrors. The economic reckoning we have sensed was going to come - had to come, was untenable in its not-comingness - the living under the illusion that we have all been used to because we don't know any different - it's all starting to topple, to wobble, to rock and to roll. Perhaps we can learn to dance in the middle of it all.

Do not fear. Breathe. Good reminders in heady times. I think I need to double my centering prayer practice. Even though I trust that amazing things are going to happen on both sides of the reality ledger, there are so many fearful things facing us. Environmental and economic. Do I fear? I would lie if I said I never do. I can feel it lurking at times, sure. And pretending it's not there on the edges just makes it lurk more. But yes, I think we are living in amazing times and in a lot of ways we need these things to happen to get us moving. Gearing down and getting centered are vital to keep the fear away. That and faith and hope and vision, too.

This evening my time, there has been a coordinated effort to lower interest rates from the US, the UK, Canada, Sweden and Switzerland by half a percentage point. China also cut theirs by 0.27 percent. Whether they are able to stave off the next Great Depression remains to be seen. Whether people's hearts fail them for fear and set the markets toppling again is another story.

I like here what Poser or Prophet says:

Not that I know anything about this stuff, but I reckon that, if the global markets were to crash and we were to be heading for some sort of Great Depression at some point in the future then… well… then it makes sense for the Spirit to begin stirring now-ish in order to create communities of Christians who are learning how to share the basic elements of life, who are economically dependent upon one another, who are making connections across national boundaries, and who are trying to bridge the gap between the West and the Rest of the world.

There are many different scents on the wind. Some of them are scary. The house of economic mirrors is built on flimsy pretexts, on greed at one end and fear at the other. This world is greedier than it has ever been. Robbing its kids and grandkids to feed our own appetites. Perhaps the roosters need to come home. But don't forget to sniff the wind. There are all sorts of amazing things going on. The media won't report the most beautiful ones. Breathe.

PS: I love what the boys at The God Journey had to say about all of this (it's the podcast called The Unshakeable Kingdom). Wayne talks a lot about living with expectancy and trust and not fearing in these weird times, and this has been a sweet listen, for me. In fact, I've listened to it twice. The way he talked about his dad, who was going in for possibly-life-threatening surgery, was just so cool. Recommended listening for some encouragement.

Before Now

Okay, Jon, this movie is messing with my head :) The comments on YouTube are just as interesting sometimes as the portions of Waking Life movie chunk they're talking about.

I can understand why some people think that at some times this ventures into psychobabble. I can understand how some people would think all of it is psychobabble, but all that means is that the ride is not for them, as far as I am concerned. Luckily there's more than one ride at the fair. I guess it's just how much you want to think and ponder stuff. It can all get too much, definitely. I think and ponder stuff so much that this is not too much for me. Except for those days when I'm so sick of thinking that all our surmisings seem like self-absorbed psychobabble wank - as pointless as dancing to architecture (thank you Brian Mannix for that thought, thrown up like a dead fish from the 1980s).

I did a few Philosophy subjects at uni when I first began this degree way back in the Paleolithic era in 1998. Blew my mind. Got me excited. To sit in a room with a group of people throwing this stuff backwards and forwards - was like swimming in an ocean of 75% dark chocolate. I have toyed with the idea the last few years of going to a Socratic dinner, but that time isn't rght for me yet. Maybe some time in the future. I don't quite trust my mind to stay on track enough to indulge in philosophising in shared company for several hours without muddling or getting performance anxiety, but we shall see :)

Been thinking about the lines between things. About how the best kind of philosophy can lead into psychobabble. About how the best kind of art can lead to pretentious bullshit. Seems to be the process of things, this shelf life of certain expressions. Maybe it's a good thing. Maybe the new wineskins just need to keep coming.

Anyway, I loved this part too of this movie. Because Before Sunrise is one of my favourite movies ever. And I didn't realise until before that Richard Linklater is involved with both, but the internet makes five minute experts of us all, doesn't it :)

I have had far too little sleep. Got myself all excited about thoughts and concepts and reality and time at midnight. Kept me awake and up like caffeine and viagra :)



Why does one eternal soul have to be an "ego thing"? :)

Liminality and Transformation

Let me introduce you to a concept anthropologists call "liminality." It's also called liminal space. The Latin word limen means threshold. It is central to initiation rites and is a good metaphor for preparation for transformation. We discuss it frequently in our men's retreats. We find ourselves in a strange position in the West. We alone, of all the centuries of civilization, culture, and tribe, do not have initiation rites for the young, especially for young men.

Other cultures have recognized that people in general, and boys in particular, are not born; they are made. These cultures took it upon themselves to transform a boy into a man. Certain things had to be told him because he would not come to them naturally. The boy would naturally want to ascend, and religion had to teach him the language of descent. He had to learn the way of tears and how to learn to let go.

These initiation rites are always about leading the boy out of the world of business as usual (the cultural trance we sleepwalk in) and leading him into liminal space. It's a voluntary displacement for the sake of transformation of consciousness, perspective, and heart. People didn't assume that just by getting up every day they would learn what they needed to know. They had to be displaced and shocked to teach them that this isn't the only world. There is another world, much bigger and more inclusive, that both relativizes and reenchants this world that we take as normative.

If we bring to a retreat all the baggage and mentality of business as usual, we aren't really making a "retreat." So nothing new or transformative can happen. I've given lots of retreats. Certain people come to hear what they already know. If I say something they don't know, I can see their arms cross and they mentally pack up and leave. But if we hear only what we already
know, we simply cannot learn or grow. That attitude is a sure ticket to ignorance. Alcoholics say that without humility and honesty, nothing new happens. These virtues, humility and honesty, are the foundation of all spirituality, but they are hard won. Most of us have to crawl our way back to them. Usually we don't go unless the pain of circumstance forces us. Jonah didn't dive over the edge of the boat; they threw him in!

Liminal space induces a type of inner crisis to help us make a needed transition. In brief, it should wake us up a bit. That's what is meant by a liminal experience. The two greatest liminal experiences, of course, are birth and death. My mother's death experience was a liminal experience for me as were two births I was privileged to attend. We can't understand such events except through experience. Many people try not to experience them. We use denial or drugs to prevent us from really experiencing what is happening.

The experiences don't have to be so difficult, though. A visit to another culture can jar us awake, if it is truly a visit to another culture. If we go and stay in an American hotel, eat at McDonald's, and complain because things are not like they are in Chicago, we really haven't left home. We've
let go of nothing. We have to see that others don't see things the way we do. We need to have our fundamental assumptions questioned. Maybe our questions are not the only ones and maybe America is not the center of the world. Maybe our religion isn't the only way to look at reality. Or maybe I haven't really understood how my religion has transformed many people, as
have the other great world religions, each in its own way.

Liminal space is always an experience of displacement in the hope of a new point of view. No wonder Jesus called it "turning around." Unfortunately, the Greek word metanoia, which literally means to move "beyond the mind," is usually translated "repentance" and no longer points to its much deeper meaning.

- Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs

The Environment

Been thinking about our propensity to refer to this giant slab we live on and depend upon at 'the environment'. There's something a bit creepy about that term to me. It's always bothered me. It's like a reminder of someting that we vaguely know is important, but there is a disturbing emptiness about the term, a commodification of the land which is pretty apt, when you think of the way we treat it.

Maybe it's living in suburbia. AS we get out on sealed bitumen roads, maybe 'the environment' becomes the tree we see outside the shopping complex, the far-off place where the vegetables in the little plastic containers come from.

Some people go for days and days without feeling anything but man-made fibres under their feet. What happens, if anything, when your body touches mainly plastic, nylon, laminate? Does it make us more plastic, less grounded?

There seems to be an inbuilt need for us to return to basics, to the earth, to doing stuff with our hands. Maybe this is why more people are doing craft work. We can only consume so much that's made by hands or machines we will never see or touch before we start being unable to see ourselves.

I think about how for the majority of human existence people lived in environments where they could look around and see everything familiar because they'd made it themselves or someone they knew did. I wonder what they would think of our houses, packed to the scuppers with stuff made by people who don't even live on the same continent? How strange that would seem to them, how cold. Maybe scary, when they see the extent their kind can stretch into alienation given the right environment. Maybe they didn't think it was possible.

Or maybe it would be completely understandable to them, how easy it is to live alienated in this world? Maybe they would look at us, and see our helplessness to change the system, our unwillingness to enter into ourselves and God because we are terrified of how little we will find there (or how much). How the system shapes us. But we are bigger than the bottom line and than what we consume, whether a little or a lot. But our consumption makes it harder for us to enter in the dark door. We have unlearned all the necessary things or not been taught them in the first place. What a strange little society and what bizarre times we live in.

It scares me how us people love to be so ignorant, love to think we know when we don't, love to have someone else tell us what to think and say and do. We are a people who live in the terrifying place that rejects the authentic and embraces the counterfeit and we can't even tell the difference half the time. We clamour for kings and reject the King, because he is a pauper. We scare me, how easily we slide ourselves into small places advertised as spacious, and even in there can still reject the small dark path that leads to cracked-open reality.

I think we call it 'the environment' in the same way that we call God a small bastard and ourselves random matter. We have lost touch with all of those things. And so if any of us feel we have had encounters with those intangibles that are called Reality and God and OUrselves, it is not through coercion, or control, or condemning people to hell that they will begin their own journeys. It is not through reminding people of their unworthiness. They already know those things, whether filling the void with plasma TVs or chroming it up through a plastic bag. People don't need to be brought low - they already are. They need to be loved. Any of us who claim to have touched the ineffable need to be willing to allow God to do whatever needs to be done to enable that to happen in us and through us. The way has always been sacrificial.

True contemplation, true religious experience, dissolves the fortress of "I" by abandoning its defences. It looks out from a place of perfect simplicity. You can't stay there, I know, but if you know this simplicity once it is enough for a whole lifetime. If the veil parts once, and you know life is radically okay, then you are - to use the normal Christian language - a child of God. You are in union. There is nothing to prove. Nothing to attain. Everything is already there. It is simply a matter of recognizing and honoring and trusting. All spiritual disciplines exist to help you rust this personal experience of yourself, which is, not surprisingly, also an experience of God. People are usually amazed that the two experiences coincide: when we know God, we seem to know and accept our own humanity; when we meet ourselves at profound levels of recognition, we also meet God. We don't have any real access to who we are except through God, and we don't have any real access to God except through forgiving and rejoicing in our own humanity.

- Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs

Peace road

...be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.

Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Happy solstice!

If I wasn't so self-conscious of my body (thanks, advertising, thanks past history) I would go dancing naked around a bonfire this evening. Instead, I think I will stay home and write meaningless posts about my couch.

Today is the Winter solstice. This time last year, I was scrabbling to get to this point, feeling already like I was hanging on like crazy to the notion that the days were going to get longer. This year, with better health, the lack of light isn't affecting me as much. I used to cry with the unfairness of it all that when you're sick, and you really desperately need things like good sleep, and functioning adrenal glands, and circadian rhythms that function at something like half speed to help you get better, that's the very time you don't get it. How cruel that is.

I guess one thing I've learnt out of that experience is to not judge other people when they say stuff like, "I can't get out of bed in the mornings" (seeing I still can't do that. Indeed, I slept in this morning and woke up at noon - which is late even for me). But when people say stuff about how they're really affected by certain things, and I can see other people who have blessedly had good health all their lives and who totally take it for granted, I can see the judgment in their eyes, you know? And it's just a reminder to me of how blind we all are, and how quick we are to condemn and judge and criticise those things that we don't understand or that scare us, and how it is that I'm just as quick as anybody else to do it in many areas. And yet I take solace that when it comes to health issues, I ain't gonna be doing that because I have learnt, through experience, in my own body and soul and spirit, what that "law" looks like when it gets walked out in the flesh.

We get to walk all the laws out in our flesh. When we really understand them, it's because they have smouldered themselves in, often with a sickening smell of burning flesh along the way, and it's all the difference in the world between learning and knowing it up in your head, and learning and knowing it in your entire body and soul and spirit.

Anyway, happy Saturday, bloggers. I'm just swimming in it this morning, the freedom. It feels so damn good. And happy solstice, too, Winter or Summer. I get this visual of the earth being finely and evenly balanced on the day of the solstice, the long day at one end balanced out by the long night at the other. And yet, in some way future but peeking itself into now, it's all perfect all the time. But we won't know that till we walk out into it ourselves, body, soul and spirit.

Reality

Realism ... has no more to do with reality than anything else.
~ Hob Broun

Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
~ Jane Wagner

Everything you can imagine is real.
~ Pablo Picasso

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.
~ George Bernard Shaw

I was chatting to Health Food Shop Ed the other day about how, if in some future age we humans have come into our own as co-creators, how cool it is that there's a big palette of empty-looking planets sitting there, and maybe we would get to play with those? Papa, can I play with Venus, please?

Talking to Ed is like getting stoned. Speaking of which, I had a hankering this evening on the train when, standing in customary spot in doorway, I noted that the girl in front of me had pulled a quick one before going out. Nothing major, just a certain look around the eyes.

But ahhh, I spent enough years sucking my creativity into my lungs and then sitting on the couch. Lately, I prefer the version that breathes my creativity out of my lungs and into something that manifests itself in front of my eyes.

I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together

There can be no writing without the creation of a persona.
In order to write intimately ... one has to invent an I.
~ Helen Garner

That statement by Helen Garner (one of my heroes, whose personal essay writing ventures her bravely forth into morgues and gun shows and her own heart) would have made me balk several years ago. I would have hated the thought that the me writing was any steps removed at all from the me whose body and soul and spirit I have gotten around in for the past 37 years. That would have felt, to my rather-more-fundamentalist mind, that somehow this creation of "I"s and personalities and identities was somehow fake, unrealistic.

It doesn't worry me so much these days, being so much more the good postmodern girl now and knowing that reality is a much more fluid thing. And anyway, I think I understand from experience the concept now I have a blog all my own, and spread my guts abroad on it with great regularity. If I felt like the me exposing my ugly innards was purely me without respite, with no buffer zone at all between me and thee, I would have spontaneously combusted sometime back in May when I first started this whole blogging business.

Of course, we are constructing outward identities all the time. It doesn't mean that we are false within these identities, but there is no way to fit all of ourselves into our projections at any one time (we will probably need extra dimensions and more God gentlenesses and lovings and healings and tricks and shenanigans to do that sort of thing).

The me here, while truthful and real, and in many ways so very, very open and horribly vulnerable, will never be and can never be the real and true and total me. Wherever I am, I am never displaying the full me. What a sadness that is sometimes. Lovers feel it the most, this urge and desire to fling themselves into each other, to fuse together, but we are all to varying degrees yearning to know and be known. It's one of the reasons why living in the urban 21st century West is so disheartening. Community - and perhaps our identities cannot be forged alone anyway - is the way we are made. But even longtime married couples celebrating their 75th together in the nursing home fall far short of 'knowing' each other in the way that they yearn to. Fusion occurs ultimately in God. How strange to think that one day we shall know God in that intimacy, and shall be known even as we are known now - and it will not be a frightening experience but an amazing one. People take drugs to get to that state. One day we shall be there as a matter of everyday drudgery (that word, I imagine, shall fall into disuse, unless we are ruminating about the past).

Having just said that being so open about myself on here is only possible because it is an "I" persona - as paradoxical as that is seeing the I is me but is still a projection - I am sorely tempted to delete the post below this one. A bit of self-hatred indulgence is probably the times when I feel most raw. I don't feel comfortable at all indulging in those kinds of things (which is probably an indication that I probably should be indulging them somewhat) but having a post about such a thing sitting there feels terribly vulnerablefying. Perhaps I shall delete it. Perhaps I won't.

I have climbed off the self-hatred wagon today. Yesterday was an especially large whack of the stick, and really, the world looks so much more like a pile of poos through the harsh staccato glare of the self-hatred lens. But sometimes there's nothing for it but to immerse yourself, swim around in it, get it in your eyes and up your nose. I've lived with it in varying degrees for the past 18 months. Leaving a marriage will tend to smack you across the face with the self-hatred stick, and when there's a bit of it flying around inside you anyway, it's like flies to flypaper.

The interesting thing about bouncing up and down on that particular elevator so it threatens to plummet me to the ground is that ... well, it's really boring, even with the threat of plummet. There is enough excitement and danger in life without indulging in it through my shadow side. There is not enough to hold me in that self-hatred room for long anymore, certain rooms of my soul having been aired and dusted somewhat, those rooms experiencing the headiness of joy and gentle April morning sunlight so that I don't want to live like a limpet with the self-hatred indulgence anymore. So much of the last 10 years have forced me into a small hole of unlife that the last thing I really want to do is chuck myself into a mood that makes the gilt edges look tarnished no matter how much sun is shining on them.

Excuse me, your chakra needs aligning

I think I am still absorbing my art therapy session. It was fun! (It was also nerve-racking. I had the biggest comfort eating session I have had for YEARS - or at least the biggest non-munchies-related one. On the way up the mountain - which is really a hill rather than a mountain - I had a double cheeseburger with fries and a chocolate thickshake even though I was hardly hungry at all, and then on the way down the mountain I had a Maxibon ice cream and a packet of cheese Twisties. Disgusting. It sat in my stomach like a stone and felt shite. I don't plan on doing that again anytime soon ... but gee, it was kinda fun at the time! It filled the empty nervous hole quite nicely, thank you very much.

I took along my collages and also some dreams I'd written down since I first spoke with Maggie last week. She is the most lovely, non-judgmental, accepting person, a real sweetheart. I felt immediately comfortable with her. She sealed the deal when, after hearing about my tree fetish, at the end of our session took me out into her backyard where she has a 200-year-old something-or-other-I-can't-remember which was sitting there reaching all his amazing spindles to the sky. I wanted to marry this tree. Is there something wrong with that? :) We are going to sit out there in one of our sessions, under this tree, with such a beautiful, commanding presence in her lovely garden.

Maggie saw linkages between my collages and my dreams, which I couldn't particularly see at all. My dreams seemed like so much gobbledegook, but after a few symbolic elements pointed out in one in particular, suddenly I realised how congruent this dream was, what a story it was telling me about myself, a story about self-nurture. I get the feeling I have quite a bit to tell myself if I'm willing to listen (I am; I love the sound of my own voice, even internally ;) This dream ended up including, surprise surprise, elements of creativity and, yes, sexuality :) Those damn phallic symbols - they're just everywhere.

Anyway, it seems that creativity and sexuality share the same chakra, and mine is out of whack :)

Now, see, this is where I would have balked 10 years ago and called this woman names in my head about how deceived she is and all that stuff and considered not returning. But you know what? I don't think, from observing where I am sitting at this juncture in my journey, having learned what I have learned over the past 10 years, that Western Christianity seems to have all that great a monopoly on the truth of reality. I am not talking here about the ultimate Truth of Jesus, who is a deliciously hidden treasure in the field of time, but about the propensity of Christendom to try to fit absolutely everything in the outer world into a paradigm taken from the Bible, to the extent of ignoring the facts in front of our noses if they don't fit into our sometimes narrow interpretations of a book that does, you have to admit, from our very limited perspective, contradict itself.

This is not to say that I don't hold the Bible in the highest regard. Indeed, I still give it a big capital buh. There is something magical about that collection of books. They are, however, not a science document. And when I look at the human body, it seems obvious to me that it is a body of energy. (It is also a body of water, and a body of clay, and all sorts of other wonderful things as well, all at the same time). It makes sense to me that if the body has some sort of energy thing going on in it, that it could have "centres" of energy in the body and those centres could get blockages in them. And if it's possible to get blockages in them then I imagine it's somehow possible to unblock them.

I don't know what it takes to realign an out of alignment chakra, but if I get that radar buzzing, that easy to ignore but nevertheless real constriction somewhere in my soul that tells me that Papa doesn't want me to go there - then I won't. But if I sense this is something that will be helpful to me physically/spiritually/emotionally then I will go with it. There have been so many things that I have discovered along my Christian journey that would be labelled as bad that have turned out to be either neutral or even good ... I'm not interested in hearing people who operate out of a system of fear to tell me what is right or wrong anymore.

See, this is the thing that annoys me about Christians too. We get into this paradigm of good and evil - even though Someone somewhere has told us that we don't have the ability to know what is good for us and what is bad for us - and we willy nilly throw things we have no understanding of into the "good" or the "bad" basket, creating barricades for ourselves. Not only that, but we often refuse to believe that anyone who is not a Christan could possibly have any kind of contact with the truth. Chakras? What a ridiculous concept, evil hocus pocus from Satan. We don't stop to think that perhaps a certain group of people in a different time or place to our own have been free to see certain realities because they have or haven't had a certain set of presumptions to blinker their view.

Even the way we read the Bible can endorse that kind of black and white thinking (but really, the Bible can endorse any kind of thinking we want, containing as it does some kind of strange spiritual mirror that reflects us back to ourselves). Then you can get all godhatesfags.com about everything, going around with the divine right bestowed by an angry God to root out the evil from amongst us to throw out of the camp so that Jehovah will deign to shine his face upon us and bless us, even though elsewhere it says he sends his rain on the just and unjust alike, and even though Jesus didn't see fit to rile with anger against anyone except those convinced of their own rightness and the blackness of others' hearts because they weren't walking the same way.

So anyway, may your chakras all be aligned. I watched Robin Hood (the British TV serialised version) the other day (I might watch it again; all those blokes getting around in jerkins with vast amounts of facial hair was edifying). There was a woman on there being drowned for being a witch, and I couldn't help feeling a certain kind of camaraderie :)

The Truth (Vertigo)

Pliz be watching this to the end, pliz. Posted by Brian at Christian Universalism: The Beautiful Heresy.

What Archetypes are Calling You?

How we all ever get anything done with all of these self-assessments to do is beyond me ;) The latest one I have done is a spiritual self-assessment called What Archetypes Are Calling You, which I first saw at Dangerous Christian's blog.

I scored:

Revolutionary. You are tired of playing by the rules. In fact, you may be ready to take this job/relationship/habit/way of thinking and shove it. Or, just find a way to express that wild child in you.

Magician. You have a strong desire to heal or transform people or situations. Now is the time to develop your power. Explore the art of changing your own consciousness in order to influence others. Be the future you want to see.

Creator. You have a strong need now to express your creativity and imaginative potential. Find an art form and practice getting good at it. You may not be Picasso, but you do have a vision. Now is the time to encapsulate it in tangible form.


This all tends to resonate quite strongly with me, so I think it's quite close to the bone. In my more negative frame of mind, though, after doing this self-assessment I got thinking about how fun it is to do these, but I also reflected upon how drawn we are as a culture to being told in black and white what kind of person we are. Identity crises are a dime a dozen when you live in the West in the 21st century, seemingly. There's just not enough of us which gets reflected back to us unless it's been airbrushed first and resembles no one we know. Least of all ourselves. And those of us who call ourselves Christians or who follow Jesus are not immune to the identity crisis. In fact, the Church is in a state of analysis just as deep if not more deep than the prevailing culture. Kinda interesting, huh. Our identity crisis likely stems from our misappropriation of God crisis. Which seems to be undergoing a bit of a change itself.

This is an interesting time to be living in. I think there is a whole lot of change on the horizon. Can you feel it? Strap yourselves in, kids :)

Being disorientated is a good thing. It really is. Not that it's good at the time. At the time it's scary, frustrating, alienating, fearful. But what it leads to is always worth the pain. I like how Wayne Jacobsen says that being disillusioned is good because it means you had illusions that needed dissing. I think that is happening in spades in the Western Church. How lovely the approaching freedom smells :)