Questions, Dey Be Good

What seems to happen in the evolution of pretty much anything is that at the start, it's something small.  So small that lots of people don't even notice it.  Maybe nobody notices it.  Maybe except for one person, who happens to notice this new thing nobody else has ever noticed before because they've spent many hours poking around in that particular spot with a stick, because they can smell something that's there that they can't see yet.  And then one day this everyday person DOES see this new thing.  They come upon it through their own inquiry.  And it's something new, and true, and real.  And it's always been there, but then in another way it didn't exist before this time when suddenly nobody could see it, and now suddenly someone can.  

And so that bit of true the person discovers, it shines.  And then other people start recognising it too.  Somewhere deep in themselves, the beautiful real vibrates to the beautiful real.

I think maybe something like that happened around Jesus (if he existed).  His insights (or at least those ascribed to him) were profound (but not limited to him.  He even said that himself, after all.  We are all gods).

And then what happens in response to an instance of truth-spilling is that the powers that be, that have existed like parasites for at least as long as our grandparents-to-the-power-of-10 were alive, come along and try to snuff it out.  It scares them because they believe that they already have the truth.  And generally, those at the top of the pyramid don't want other people to cotton onto anything that might level the playing field out a bit.  Human nature.  Not necessarily the way the system has to play it out, though.

And so fast forward a few thousand years and in the place of some carpenter with profundity you've got rich old dudes with questionable morality whose institution sits upon a vast, vast fortune that has entrenched itself in place of that carpenter guy.

It's always the way.  And between the start and the finish of that situation, everyday people are first empowered, but then silenced.  Questioning is powerful, and so you must enforce the silence of the people by instilling fear.  Tell them they're not as powerful as they really are.  Question their motives.  Tell them they're evil, or they're going to hell, or nobody will like them.  Tell them that what they see is simply not possible because of prior evidence that you have amassed.  Because everyday people asking questions change things.  It has always been the way. 

This silencing happens in every institution in which we allow it.  Fundamentalism is not simply the province of religion.  It is rife in the areas where it is hardest for us to see it happening.  Like in the realm of science, for instance.

I don't know a whole lot about Rupert Sheldrake apart from what I have seen in this clip.  He has been working in the scientific field for many years.  I don't even know if his hypotheses about the 10 dogmas of science are necessarily correct.  After all, despite evidence to the contrary, there are still plenty of open-minded scientists around.  But whether the establishment is as open-minded as its components is perhaps another story.

And anyway, it's always good to question what we think we know.  It's a fruitful space.  And a humbling one, too.

What I do know is that discussion should always remain open, and that the things that are unknown to us are too often framed as evil or as pseudo-science by those who get to wear the pointy hats at the pointy end of whatever field they happen to be in.  People should not be labelled as mavericks because they are evaluating, inspecting, analysing - to wit, being scientific to the best of their current ability - areas which have not in one way or the other been proven to be false.  And their questioning should certainly not be allowed to be silenced by gatekeepers.

After all, the earth was once flat, women and gays were once second-class citizens, slaves were once simply a necessary by-product of existence, and indigenous people were heathens whose land was there for the taking.

Like the narrative in the Old Testament, where God is complaining about her people wanting a king, we still want to be told what to do.  We want benevolent kings to tell us what to do, but there very rarely are benevolent kings, at least in the current climate.  Humans do not seem to be able to handle the power we give them without it exploding into something disastrous.  It is us who need to keep them in check.  Just as it is religion's role for people to control themselves, not criticise others as the Dalai Lama says, it is humanity's role to learn to empower people to not need kings and priests to tell us what to do quite so hard, so often, and so unquestioningly.

It is surely time that humans stop being teenagers and start living in the middle of the now, with all of its ripe uncertainty.  There is pungent fruit there, with spill-open seeds inside.

The New Birth

We're all in the process of giving birth.
The pain is high but there is no epidural.

The baby we are giving birth to
is a golden child who has
enough teats for us all to suckle.

Sometimes, everything collapsing is not a bad thing.
especially when you have prior warning.

The new to come will be so much better and simpler
than the beast we are now used to,
which alienates everything in its path
us from each other,
us from our best,
us from the earth,
the poor from their share.

There is no epidural, but the clear-headed pethidine
is hope.  Its bubbles are so wide I can lie flat out and fly
right up to the ceiling and see
the whole of the world.

~ ~ ~

(Inspired by Ted Trainer's The Transition to a Sustainable and Just World)

Espiritu de Mexico by Alberto Thirion (CC)

The Latest God

I've felt it so strongly, for such a long time.  Our native language is not spoken here.  Not readily.  Oh, some brave souls do.  More and more as time goes on, even though others misunderstand them and ridicule them.  But even though it is our native language they speak, and I drink it like water, when I read or hear their words they still sound funny.  Almost as if I should be ashamed to hear them spoken out into the air, speaking of childish things.

Even though it is our native language, forming the words feels weird in the light of the shape my mouth is in after speaking the other language.  That's the one we've been asked forever to speak.  It troubles our souls from the day we're born and then blames us for being troubled.  "Speak like this," the latest god says.  But I've never felt at home in it.  Its words itched.  They separated, divided, conquered.  Many of us have been impaled on its spikes because we forgot that our native language was real.  It was more real than the language the latest god has asked us to speak.  The latest god said, "This is the only possible way that you can see."  And we accepted what he said because that's what we are wired to do, to accept authority.  Even though it itched, and it quieted what should not be quieted.

"That language is primitive," the latest god said.  "Follow my way." And even though we didn't like it we did, and it took us years to be able to admit that as we followed along behind the latest god what we really were seeing was his bare naked arse.  Because apparently no one else was seeing it.  And anyway, the only way we could speak about the nakedness of the latest god would be to translate it into our native language, the old one, the one we have forgotten, and then translate it back into the latest god's language.  And when that happened the words sounded weird. 

And anyway, the latest god tells me that there is no space or room or time or necessity to see things in these old-fashioned ways - to see things as connected, to desire to do things for love.  And so for years you have felt this golden thread that connects you all is some weird mystical thing that you have to be a bit embarrassed about.  "Those are primitive concepts," the latest god says, "childish things, and you must put them away if you want to get ahead.  There is no space or room or time or necessity for those things that make your heart beat faster, or that enable you to see the person in front of you and the earth below your feet as anything other than elements completely separate from you, elements which you must transfer into goods and services to make money from."  This is what the latest god says because he has one eye in the middle of his forehead, like the chick from Futurama, and that eye has blinkers on either side of it so he can't look from left to right.  The latest god is like a giant head connected to a giant arse, that has spewed his shit all over the earth.

We are addicted to the latest god in the same murderous way that a diabetic is addicted to sugar.  But the latest god he has brought us so much, we cry.  We think that we have one eye in the middle of our forehead with blinkers on, too, and that all those things we yearn for are stupid.

But still we know, deep down.  Hundreds of thousands of years of ancestral knowing flood through our veins, and they know.

I listen to the news and the subjects of the latest god are talking about his dominion and about his growth and expansion.  The latest god is standing right beside them with his testicles hanging in the breeze like an ancient old man whose time has come, but they are blind.  They are terrified because they have forgotten how to speak their native language too.  There are no purple robes for them to wear in that land, and they have not yet developed the synapses that link the thirst they feel in their mouths to the words they have forgotten from since before they could speak.

But some have.  Like here, for example:

.

Chaos Theory

I love science.  We live in the most incredible time.  It feels like some sort of bizarre cosmic coincidence to me that so much is being discovered in this age that I want to learn about, and yet I'm so bloody information overloaded I could miss the most amazing things right under my nose.

Erin told me in an email exchange this morning that apparently they have discovered a neutrino that moves faster than the speed of light.  This has ramifications for the theory of relativity that I would like to have a month to sit down and solidly read all about - starting with learning what the hell a neutrino is - and then to ponder it, to turn it about in the sun, and see what it looks like in the dark, or when it's raining.  To see how different that makes the world feel.

Learning and understand more about science is an ongoing quest for me, because it's gotten bloody interesting.  What they've discovered over the past decades ... how it's so anarchic on that subatomic layer, that excites me in my guts.  But I can't hold together what I learn about subatomic layers and quarks and neutrinos.  It falls apart when I try to rearticulate it to myself, let alone anyone else.  And so I have to come back to it again next time.  And so I enter in the door again, learn and feel a little spun-out, and come out of it with nothing but a sense of wonder and a complete, utter inability to feed it all back.  It's like dream language.  It's a kick to my intellect but it's a buzz to my creativity.

I hate rigid systems that kill people's souls.  I'm very glad that the world we live on is proving to be anything but.

I decided earlier on that I would go and look up a little more about chaos theory ('cause this is what I do when I've got a spare five minutes, then I wonder why I feel informationally-overloaded).  I like this description here:

After nearly two decades now of work by Chaoticians made up of the leading scientists and mathematicians in a wide variety of fields, the evidence is overwhelming. The world is not a gigantic clock where everything happens in an ordered and predictable manner.The real world is fundamentally disordered, free. Chaos reigns over predictability.Simple, linear systems which are causal and predictable are the exception in the Universe, not the rule. Most of the Universe works in jumps, in anon-linear fashion that can not be exactly predicted. It is infinitely complex.Freedom and free will - the Strange Attractors - prevail over rules and determinacy.

Yet Chaos is no enemy and destroyer of Cosmos, for from out of Chaos a higher order always appears,but this order comes spontaneously and unpredictably. It is "self-organized." The creation of the Universe is an ongoing process, not just a one time event at the beginning. All and everything - and everyone - is part of this creative process. Over time all systems - from molecules, to life, to galactic clusters- are continually creating new organizations and patterns from out of featureless and chaos. The world is not a Clock, it is a Game, a Game of Chance and Choice. In the game random processes - chance and serendipity - allow room for free will, individuality and unpredictable creativity.

The Ultimate Paradigm Shift 

There is something about this chaos theory that reminds me of what it is that frustrates me when I look at how so many organisations operate with their employees.  I talk about this quite a lot on this blog.  It seems to apparent to me, but I find it hard to articulate what is so apparent.  I feel that the way business run shoots them in their own feet.  Ultimately it comes down to a control issue.  Because I think that humans operate best on a self-organised basis as well.  We need to have freedom to work spontaneously and unpredictably.  Or at least I do.

An organisation puts rules in place to keep it functioning effectively.  But those rules hamper and hinder and constrain because the people operating under them are not free.  For the rules to work properly, people would have to have enough internal freedom to be able to know WHY the rules are, their context, their meaning, what they're wanting to make happen by their existence rather than simply a punitive sort of a stick put there that will beat people who don't conform to them.  Then, if there are free people who understand the meaning of the rules, they still have to be not so rebellious as to be unable to function under the rules (my problem).  They have to be able to stand up under the rules so that they don't stop thinking, and using their nous and their consciences.  So that the rules don't make them feel claustrophobic so that it feels their personal turning circles are taken away from them (my problem), but that they point their thoughts in the right direction so that they can come to these conclusions themselves.

How does all of that work, though, when you are an employee at someone else's employment?  Even if you don't balk at being a cog in someone else's wheel, a chaos theory business would need to have a low fear level and a high willngness to make mistakes.  And I've never seen that in any organisation I've ever worked for in my life because they all by nature become conservative and boring.  Which is understandable.  People who start businesses are so invested, the business is so much of a reflection of themselves, that to let go, to let it fly off and be self-organised, is too dangerous.  Especially because you know that if you give that much freedom to employees, they will abuse the system.

But I've always liked that biblical suggestion to farmers that when harvesting their fields, to make sure they leave some for the gleaners to follow, those people who are poor and hungry.  I think that those who abuse the system are poor and hungry too.  Space should be allowed for people to fuck themselves up.  Because what is lost through those people is gained in the freedom of employees who have space to be individuals within a communal culture.  The right and the left combined.

But all that's pipe dreams, really, because I don't think I'm ever going to be able to find a company to work for that doesn't make my throat tighten with its rigidity.  Maybe some day I'm gonna have to do it myself.   Get me a co-op.  And a good idea.  Or maybe if someone publishes one of the four pieces of writing I've got out there waiting for a home, that'd be a start :)  In the meantime, I guess I'll just keep me and my rebellion here at home, typing transcription, dreaming about how it could all be so much better :)

Hail Technology

Anthropologist Brigitte Jordan is interested in how knowledge gains authority in various settings.  Jordan observed a contemporary hospital birth in which a labouring woman was desperate to push.  The nurse looked not at the woman but at the foetal monitor.  She was waiting for the doctor who was the only one who could decide whether the woman was ready to push:  '... every time the woman tries to get her desire - her expressed knowledge about the state of her body - acknowledged and made the basis for proceeding with the birth, her version of reality is overridden, is ignored, is denied, or, most frequently, is sidetracked, deflected, and replaced with some other definition of reality ... as might happen to an obstinate child whose parent opts for distraction rather than confrontation.'  In the contemporary birth environment, according to Jordan, authority rests with the doctor and the knowledge delivered by technology.  The woman's expressed knowledge about her body does not even rate as knowledge.

Mary-Rose MacColl, 'The birth wars', Griffith Review 22:  MoneySexPower

It's been a long-learned wisdom that I need to daily ground myself within my own body.  It's taken me years to really see how easy it is to disconnect, especially in this sort of world where I do not need to go draw my own water or plant my own vegetables.  There is a dread that comes with the realisation of how easy it is to switch off from the loudly sane inner voices saying perfectly reasonable, beautiful, wonderful things.  Many (all?) of us learn at some point that we can get up and leave, sit six feet above our own bodies.  That it is a way of getting distance on things.  That sometimes you can think better sitting up there.

Sometimes life calls for that desperate need, to escape, to suppress, to take flight.  If you can't buy a plane ticket, you can at least go on a six foot trip.  But there are payments to be made from taking this trip too often, and it does then become an awfully difficult and yet ultimately beautiful thing to learn how to crawl that six feet back into your own stuff and discover yourself.  How much more there is sitting in here.  

Of course, abdicating from ourselves is not simply as a result of trauma but is often what we learn to do within a painful life.  It is, after all, a terribly pedestrian thing to sit abdicated.

We do not believe what damage we can cause half asleep until we do, how many lamps we can knock over in the dark, how many dog's yelping feet we can step on in the night, how many pieces of dark furniture we can trip over in the dark and send ourselves sprawling.  We often do not want to stop being half asleep because of the terror, the terror, the terror of being awake.  

Because there is, isn't there.  The stark whiteness of freedom, like one of those godawful new energy saving light globes that make you, a living, breathing, pink thing, resemble a morgue inhabitant.  That's how being awake looks when you're half asleep and so some of us will never understand the awful irony that living where we think is safest is the most dangerous.  Of how much more we can see when we refuse to live half asleep.  That yes, it is terrifying but it is also beautiful.  It is life, and it's fucking messy.

You know, I really am not a technophobe.  But this human penchant to abdicate from the world, the way we abdicate from our bodies (same coin, really), sits heavily alongside big machines that beep.  We want freedom, we say.  But we are confused, we are scared, we are terrified of our choices, of making the wrong decision.  If only someone or something will just tell us what to do!!!!!   If we have a king, an expert, someone wearing navy, to tell us what to do next, then we will be safe.

But we will be even safer if we are allowed to be included in the equation too, alongside the machines and the people who have studied for years to gain expertise.  But what  can one single person do in the face of those things?

In this way I am glad I shall never experience this situation of giving birth, especially in a hospital.  I cannot think of anything more terrifying than being in a never-before-experienced, painful, scary situation with my own body and of being called upon to abdicate myself from it so the system flows better.

Not that a foetal monitor or any other technology is a bad thing.  But then, humans are not things either.  We have knowledge too.  In a different, more messy way, certainly, than a streamlined machine.  In a human sort of a way.  

You know, I cannot imagine that if it was men giving birth that they would still be relegated so, their experience downplayed and ignored, right in the midst of the amazing everyday sort of miracle that is bringing forth life, right from out of the middle of your own body.

The Good News/The Hmmm News

"Whenever you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

The Good News:

The good news isn't so much that Glenn McDonald resigned as pastor of the big 2000 seater Zionsville Presbyterian Church in Indiana, USA. (Though that could probably only ever be a good thing from my personal perspective but hey, that's just me). The good news was the transparency he displayed in his leaving. As painful as it may be, it is good to draw attention to the emperor's lack of clothes - especially if it's your bum that's hanging out the back of your non-existent robe.

The truth is that no pastor can perform the job that they are asked to do if the people surrounding them box them into what the system expects of pastors - being Jesus to everybody, and Superman to the rest. This is what happens when the system puts you on your little pedestalled ratwheel - start running. And keep running, it turns out, basically for everybody else except your wife, as ex-pastor Brad Cummings points out in the latest God Journey podcast (see below).

Glenn described the reason for his resignation as idolatry:

McDonald said he had committed the sin of idolatry by allowing the business of running a big church and the desire to please his congregation -- rather than God -- to become the focus of his work. The result, he said, was the mind-set of a workaholic who neglected his wife and his family and his own personal spiritual connection to God for the sake of the day-to-day machinery of the ministry.

... "You can make a church grow. It can meet its budget," he said. "People can be happy and full of ministries, and you can do it all without prayer, without ever checking in with God."

... He took a leave of absence this fall and entered a Seattle-area clinic for people with addictions. "In my case," he said, "it was for somebody who feels he had to keep pedaling the bicycle at all hours of the day and never stops."

From 'Zionsville pastor says he's quitting to refocus,' by Robert King, IndyStar.com

The Hmm News:

The church will soon begin the process of finding a replacement.

I feel hmmm about that statement. My cynicism says that things will continue on as they were, because some will not see there is a problem, because they will be powerless to change what is totally within their power to change because they will not believe they can. And in the process of that people will continue to objectify the ones they are called to love, all in the name of serving the system.

I wonder how many people in that giant 2000 person church would dare to do things differently if they were to listen to and take on board the truth spoken by one of the cogs. I wonder how many would care enough. I pray that maybe they will, because with God all things are possible, right? I pray that they will choose to put their care for each other as church as paramount, over and above the thing they are serving that we call "church".

I just hope that if nothing changes, that the next incumbent is not like the poor dude who could not see any other way out than this.

HT to Brad and Wayne, two ex-cogs in the pastor machine who I greatly respect for their willingness to follow after truth wherever it may go. They spoke about these two pastors above on the lastest God Journey podcast. All of the thoughts shared here I have really just vomited up from listening to them :)

What Is Wrong With This Picture?

Police have shot a man - who has now died in hospital - after a confrontation with him at his home. The reason they showed up in the first place? He was attempting self harm.

That's a sad case if irony if ever I heard.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/breaking-news/man-trying-to-harm-self-shot-dead/story-fn3dxiwe-1225799205100

The Flabby Body of Christ

What happens when Sunday services are structured around the power trips of one person who probably should have Narcissistic Personality Disorder to do his job properly: The Flabby Body of Christ :)

Haha :) Good stuff. But I agree with Wayne, don't call this church. This is just something parts of the church do.

Beyond this, there is life springing up and sprung up everywhere in the Body of Christ. It just doesn't often happen on Sunday mornings if people are committed to doing things the way they've always been done, either as passengers to the Lord's Anointed or alternatively totally burning themselves out, that's all.

Wheat and Weeds

I was standing pondering at the traffic lights the other day how it is that we are herds of sheep if we are asleep, and how easy it would be for some sheep to get themselves run over. People regularly cross against the lights if there is a break in traffic. Some I see just walk out behind the gaggle already crossing and come perilously close to getting themselves skittled.

I sat with my friend Jane yesterday feeling strangely emotional as she told me about the advances happening in terms of understanding the cause of chronic fatigue syndrome. Twenty five years ago it was called the yuppie flu and even when I first contracted it 10 years ago it was still a thing maligned and barely believed amongst the medical profession and therefore amongst the public. Now the snowball is beginning to roll after some evidence has been found linking a retrovirus found in 95% of CFS patients tested. The people at the forefront of the testing are a virologist whose career was basically ruined a couple of decades ago by the powerful who refused to believe what she was saying back then. It wasn't until she was tending bar and came by chance across a millionaire whose daughter had been sick with CFS for a couple of decades, and who funded the set-up of the institute she now is a part of that headway has begun to be made. So now maybe the ones who were far less lucky than me, who have been ill for longer than my scanty six years without seeing health on the other side, will now be enjoying renewed hope.

It's always small groups of individual people who are not blinded and made thick by the system and what power they have to lose, and who have learnt in some measure to refuse to live in their superiority and great ego, who are able to see what is often in plain view.

It is unfortunate isn't it that the people still want a king. We do; it seems to be some sort of element of our makeup that many of us are too fearful to question and instead want to be led. And of course Christianism-as-empire-religion-of-the-powerful has perpetuated that down through the centuries. What easier way to put people in fear and subjugation than to dangle them over the eternal hellpit? To teach them that they cannot learn for themselves but must be taught by those with greater authority?

We want someone to tell us what to do, what is good, what is bad if we do not trust that the kingdom is within. We have been taught over and over that the heart is deceitful above all things. But I believe that our hearts have been made good. That we can trust our hearts. That it is where God speaks.

These days the king is seeming more like the great structure itself than a person, but it still stands. We don't want to question the structure of the giant thing grown up around us because it would make us feel unsafe. We do not want to probe into the beginnings of things - for example, the police force, off the top of my head, or the law system - to find that they grow up all higgledy piggledy, created here and created there in response to needs of a particular age and then incarcerated into the system where they are carved in stone.

How squashed down humanity is under these things, the kingdoms of this world.

I understand how and why these structures come up. It's not like they spring up overnight, and it's not like you can really blame any one particular person; they just grow. But to stay safely ensconced in them out of fear is to blind yourself. The only real safety is in the freedom of people relating to people. The system kills in us the knowledge of what a powerful thing that is, but it remains so.

I saw a cool series of artworks a few weeks ago. All were composed of large architectural drawings of cities, in pencil, precise, clean lines. On top of each drawing was imposed something else, in but not of, full of colour and life. I can only remember one of them now because my memory is like unto a fish, but it was rows of buildings, and up on the roofs green grass and gardens, all connected to each other by walkways high above the traffic.

Outsourcing to the Nursemaid

I see President Obama went down to Wall Street yesterday and said, "Make sure this never happens again" on the anniversary of the global financial "crisis". And Wall Street yawned and said, "Whatever."

Like when you tell your kids to clean up their rooms, and your kids know that last time they made a big mess they came home afterwards and you'd cleaned it up for them.

Several weeks ago a 33 year old woman bashed an 89 year old man to death in a suburban Melbourne street. She has been remanded at this stage so we can't say what it was that caused someone to do such a horrible thing. Who knows? They were apparently unknown to each other.

There was some placard waving going on in that suburb several days ago. Ashburton is a respectable, well off suburb with an ageing population. Those people waved their placards in protest that their local police station is only manned part-time. They were angry, they were fearful at the increases in violence on our streets. They said that if the police station had been manned, something like this would not have happened.

I do not understand how this would be so. Even if Ashburton police station had 50 cops in it all day every day, what do they wish? For police to be patrolling quiet suburban streets where the occasional lone walker takes their dog for a walk?

The same quiet suburban streets where I'm sure all of those people go inside and lock themselves away behind their security screens, fearful, dependent upon the police force to maintain law and order.

Divide and conquer, I think it's called.

I wonder if modern-day scapegoating is called outsourcing. We outsource everything - our public transport system, our safety requirements, our personal authority, our kids, our ability to discern and assess situations for ourselves, our worship, our entertainment. In return we hope that none of it is our responsibility. In a sense it's not - after all, we didn't personally make it like this, did we? All this talk of the system that I go on with, but no one individually has set it up this way. It's just a conglomeration of thing laid upon thing. But maybe in another sense the system is simply the greatest reflection of what we do not wish to be responsible for. We can complain about it and beat our breast about it and then do nothing. In outsourcing everything we get used to sucking on the giant teat that will grant us the peace and safety we crave so that we can go about our business. Or so we hope.

Shit happens, I guess, in a messy world. But Wall Street gets its cleaned up by the government. Suburban streets must get theirs cleaned up also by a regimented police force trawling our suburbs just in case. Outsource. Outsource. Outsource. Then we can fool ourselves that none of this is our responsibility, none of this is our reflection. It's not my problem.

Like Kent said Ellul said: "all power gravitates towards totalitarianism. People are so willing to give up freedom and liberties in hopes of being given security in return. Truth is, security as people wish for can't ever be achieved...so all that has happened is you've lost your liberty."

I heard a story on the radio the other day about someone visiting hell, which was a table full of people and food. Each person had a spoon that was very long, so that they were unable to feed themselves. Then this person visited heaven, which was exactly the same scene except that the people were feeding each other.

In the end, that's all there is. Each other. Holding ourselves. Holding our own and holding each other. Holding God. Hold our own and holding our enemies. No outsourcing