Spirituality, the morphine of the masses
Hi, there! I haven't posted much here for years, but as the lyrics to the old Bob Dylan tune put it, ‘the times, they are a changing', and so it seems like I good time to say a few words. What really prompted me to write today was that I had just finished reading a piece by the ‘Radical Faeries', and then I did a little research. It seems that one of things that make ‘Radical Faeries' more radical than you average queer is that, in addition to being politically queer, and thus very radical, they are also very spiritual. Now this got me wondering just what was supposed to be so radical about being so spiritual, for I have never met a human who was ‘spiritual'. We are physical. We are products of materialism, which means that we have bodies. Now this can be a problem, but given that there isn't much one can do about the physical, for this reason we have the spiritual. I compare ‘spirituality' to its secular form, which is psychotherapy, and the way it works is that you really cannot address the problems in the human condition, because those are physical, but you can be spiritual so that when being a human with a body brings a person down, perhaps they can learn to live with and it won't bother a person so much. Learning to live with a sense of resignation and inevitability is the contribution of spirituality (or for those more secular in their inclinations, psychotherapy), for as Marx put it, ‘spirituality' is the morphine of the masses. It changes nothing, but you might feel better.I have been to the mountain top
The following is a little background story, and is just one example of why it is that I have for the most part avoided posting much on Indymedia sites for a few years. Such stories generate a deluge of sarcasm, but I am expecting that you will have to bear with me, before I get down to business, and those who find such stories to be just unbearable can skip ahead to the next part where I will get down to the real business at hand.Now much like a ‘Radical Faerie' I have my belief system as well. I remember that when I was five years old for some reason I was forced to attend something they called ‘Sunday School'. My parents were not church goers but they got this idea into their heads that such a place would be a positive influence on a five year old kid, and therefore I should go.
Of course, having arrived I was evangelized. According to what I was told there was this god of the dead that lived up in some far away place called ‘heaven'. For this reason this god of the dead has left us with full documentation in the form of the sacred scriptures of the Bible, lest we forget. This god of the dead had what was known as ‘the plan of salvation'. The way it worked was that first everyone would get into trouble and experience what was called ‘the damnation'. This happened when you were first born as a material being, who was born in sin, because apparently some guy named Adam starting shooting sinful sperm, and since he was the original penis, that made him the original sinner, and given how sinful flesh was passed on through Adam's sinful sperm seed, that meant everyone got some after that. But all was not lost, for this god of the dead had planned for our salvation by killing some perfect god like being by nailing him to a cross. This released a powerful blood cleansing agent, something like a bleach. Our task then became to toss a nickel, while locked into a very dark closet, and then guess whether or not the result of that coin toss was heads or tails.
We would not receive any hints, because that god of the dead gave us religious authoritarians who would then assure that the coin toss resulted in either heads or tails, and then our task was to have something called ‘faith' and just blindly believe what we were told. From that time on the god of the dead would begin to compile a complete dossier on us, and if we followed a long list rules, mostly about sex, then when we were dead a spiritual ghost, which at the present time remained trapped in our sinful flesh prison would pop out of our abandoned corpse, and then, following upon a check up on our dossier to see how well we obeyed the authorities when we were alive, that ghost would either fly up to heaven or get plunged down into some place called hell. It was not possible to double check any of this because no one could meet with that god of the dead while they were still alive. Only dead people could that. As for the reasons why that god of the dead was so very busy in the past and then suddenly vanished, never to be seen again, well there was a perfectly good reason for that, for you see, that was the Apostolic Age, an age when the god of the dead was busy getting church ready for everyone, and this was now the Age of Grace, when we have church and so therefore we don't need that god of the dead around anymore, for the Graces of church are sufficient for thee.
Well having heard such a dismal and damnable sounding story like that one, I came to the conclusion that the whole story was a hoax, a cover up, and that ‘theology' was just some excuse made up by some people in the hopes of cooking up some story to explain why it would be the case that some God wouldn't speak to them. I noticed that apparently some God had not spoken to anyone in the place for thousands of years, and assumed that they must have pissed off God, and that therefore, if I made up my mind not to so piss off God myself, there shouldn't be any problem in going up to the mountain top, because only people who had pissed off God were banned from climbing to the mountain top, for if God were to chum around with people who did things like that it would only encourage them instead of deeply discouraging them, which apparently was preferable.
It is funny the things that a person remembers, for so much must be forgotten given the limited storage capacity for such things, for one of the vivid and lasting memories of my young life was of the time, just after returning from that church place (they expelled me for my radical rejection of what I considered at the time to be a ridiculous story), when, sitting in my backyard, I made the decision that it would be the great goal of my life to climb right up to the mountain top so that mine eyes could see the glory of the coming of the Lord to that mountain top, once I finally made it all the way up to the very top of that slope.
It was about ten years later when I finally managed to crest the peak, although there were these other really weird things happening around me before that time. As an example, seven years later, when I was twelve, I felt this presence enter the room I was sitting in (the sensation was so real, that I looked up the direction it seem to be coming from) and then I heard this strange tinny sounding voice which said, ‘the telephone is going to ring...your grandfather is dead.' There was this short spooky silence, and then what seemed at the time to be the loud piercing ring of a telephone (my senses were heightened). It was the phone call. My grandfather had died. There are other weird sounding stories just like that one. However I would like to just jump ahead to that mountain top visit.
In August of 1974 I was in the mountains of Banff National Park. I remember feeling that same spooky feeling of a presence before the event occurred. There was a stationary bright luminous object parked in the sky, which suddenly moved and darted behind a small puff of cloud, and then the cloud dissolved, and there was nothing there. The object then reappeared, much closer and much more brilliant, and because of the humidity in the atmosphere, it was surrounded by a rainbow halo. I drew a sketch which was published in a letter I sent to some magazine shortly after the event took place. The following links are to scanned gifs of the magazine pages. My letter begins with the words, ‘The night of August 18, 1974'.
The cover ... The date ... Page One ... Page two
My point in telling this story is just to point out that I have a history, and what happens today is all part of some long running narrative. This narrative also includes some interaction with the Indymedia sites. Some of you, if you have been around for at least 8 years, might recall my ‘Summit of the America's Eden Wing Cloud' stunt. It seemed good to me that just as people unfurl their banners at demos, I should also unfurl my ‘return to the Garden of Eden banner', which would be this giant sized wing shaped cloud that would unfurl over the Sahara Desert during the Summit of the Americas in 2001.
There are still two surviving examples of what I am sure must have been the worst press release in history. In this example you need to click on ‘quoted text' to show the message that this guy responded to by saying ‘What the f**k?' A Newsgroup posting ... Another group posting
It is also possible that there might be some posts on some indymedia site somewhere, although this is the sort of post that would be sent into the dumpster, so perhaps not. You will notice the date on the two surviving posts above, and the photograph below shows the final result on Sunday, April 22nd, which was also Earth Day, which coincided with the Summit of the Americas on the particular weekend. I was quite satisfied with the results, and that it looked very much like a wing shaped cloud banner, but much to my great surprise, no one else was much impressed with that stunt. This I thought quite strange, for when someone pulls a stunt like that one, you really do want to pay some attention.
'The best writer on the internet
I spent a couple of years after that wing event watching carefully for the Garden of Eden to appear where the Sahara Desert used to be (something that I am still expecting to see happen, perhaps in the near future) and then I finally decided that the best thing for someone like me to do would be to scale back my general weirdness and devote some years to more mundane affairs. This turned out to be a useful strategy, for at that time I was getting feedback from people, words to the effect, ‘you are the single best writer on the internet.' I was also getting featured on the mainpage of indymedia sites all the time, so much so that people were getting pissed off and real jealous. This was an improvement. It was better than being considered the biggest weirdo on the internet, and I did have some years ahead of me and time to kill, and so that seemed like a good strategy at the time. Unfortunately, events have overtaken me in such a way that I can no longer deal with the mundane, and I am forced to go back to being a weirdo again, for there is just no way I can do what I am doing now, without being real weird. There is just no mundane way to go about doing something like what I have to do now.The Living Resurrection
A few years ago, in the spring of 2006, I posted the results of my first scientific experiment on the existence of what I called ‘biological algorithms'. This was one of the few really weird pieces I ever wrote that actually got front paged on that Portland site, instead of getting ash canned as would typically be the case. Of course someone had to annoy me by posting some meaningless chatter as a comment. You know, when someone is doing something that important, such behavior is just no appropriate, but then I usually get those kinds of comments whenever I get a little to weird. The Portland Indymedia post
The image above shows the results of the preliminary experiment. My nose had become age damaged by sun exposure (I am 50 years old) and the skin had become purplish and wrinkled and just ugly looking. I was convinced that biological algorithms were responsible for both the evolution of species and for that small percentage of unexplained remissions of fatal illnesses (about 2 or 3 percent mysteriously cure themselves, one of the great enigmas of modern medical science). It therefore logically followed from this that I should be able to use these biological algorithms to reverse the aging process. In short, I am a human being, and not some animal, and therefore I should be able to control my own physical existence and not just be subject to the operation of these algorithms. The experiment was a success, and I stopped as the purple skin was replaced by this pinkish looking skin (you can see the straight line where the transition is between these two skin tones in the photograph above).
Now I don't work alone. As I mentioned above, I have been to the mountain top. In the beginning of July of 2009, just a few weeks ago, I received some instructions to resume my experiment where I left off. This did not seem like a good idea to me at the time, because I was hoping to treat this phenomenon like a proper scientific experiment conducted in full public view, because people really do need to see something like this for themselves. It should not be done off in some isolated corner of the internet. However, instructions are instructions, so despite my misgivings, I proceeded to announce the continuation of this experiment on the following webpage. Biological Algorithms Experiment
It was shortly after this time that I noticed that what appeared to be some external force was drawing a line of light toned skin right straight across my nose. It wasn't my idea. I use some arrows to point out this line in the photograph below.
On July 31st, I noticed that what used to be a straight line separating the purple area from the pink had been invaded by this thumb shaped patch of lighter toned skin, so that the ‘triangle effect' was now replaced by a square shape. I also noticed that these small patches of even light toned skin were replacing the pinkish toned skin that had previously replaced the purple toned skin.
I also noticed that the large splotchy area of purplish skin had shrunk down to the smaller shape of a zig zag.
Now onto my updates as to the latest changes as of August 21. 2009.
In the image above you can see, in the earlier images, from July 31st, 2009, that small dots of paler toned skin had begun to appear where the pinker looking skin had been previously. The images from August 21st show that these areas of paler skin have been expanding (the effect is perhaps more noticeable in the two images in the bottom row.
In the two images in the top row, from 2006 and 2009, you can see that there was a dark band of skin run above the pinkish toned skin on the lower part of my nose. In the two images below, from August 21st, 2009, you can see that these expanding spots of lighter toned skin are pushing up into that band of what was once darker toned skin and replacing it. You can also see the expansion of those lighter toned areas shown in the previous montage from a slightly different angle.
Another effect that I have noticed, but does not seem to be captured adequately on any of the digital photographs is the disappearance of some prominent protruding blood veins that once formed the shape of the letter ‘M' on my nose, and now no longer do, because those ugly letter M veins are breaking up and disappearing.
Assorted Random Commentary
Garbled Religion
You might have heard about that stunt whereby a long line of people is formed and then a story is told to the first person in line who passes it on to the second and so forth until it finally reaches the end of the long line up of people. And then the last person in that line up is asked to repeat the story and lo and behold, it comes out all garbled as compared to the first version of that story when it entered into the head and then exited the mouth of that very first person in line.Now we know that Christianity is a religion which has resurrection as its thematic core. Now what I am demonstrating here is the reality of what I call The Living Resurrection. If you were to survey all the religions of the world you will not find one religion where the doctrine of this Living Resurrection is a thematic element. The reason why this is true is that religions are social institutions and as such they must be respectable and not go around destroying themselves by teaching idiotic doctrines that will never happen. If some church promised Living Resurrection to anyone who joined, that church would be closing its doors pretty quick.
Resurrection is, as far as theology is concerned, a weird abstraction that bears no real relationship to everyday life as experienced by everyday human beings. It is for this reason, therefore, that we have the invention of theology. The purpose of theology is to create lots of weird ideas that, hopefully, will make even something as abstract, meaningless and nonsensical as a resurrection useful for some purpose for some church. Resurrection itself is useless to churches, that not being something that means anything to anybody as they go through the mundane processes of everyday human life. Doctrines about resurrection are very useful to churches, unlike a resurrection itself, which is quite useless, and the proof that doctrines are useful is found in the fact that we have had churches for thousands of years, for while we had no resurrections, we did have doctrines, which were useful.
Now doctrines about resurrections might be useful to churches, but they are quite useless for any other purpose. No one was ever resurrected by some doctrine. To make matters worse those doctrines that are allegedly doctrines about a resurrection are not actually doctrines about resurrection, but rather seem to be some form of weird sounding garbled nonsense. You see, a resurrection is just a resurrection and that is all it is. No it is not the cow sacrifice of a bleeding god being whose shed blood could then be used to bleach sinful souls whiter than white, thus saving souls so soul ghosts could go to heaven instead of hell. A resurrection is just what it appears to be. It is the resurrection and the life.
Probably no other thing has ever had so much weird sounding nonsense cooked up about it than a simple resurrection. One good example of this sort of thing would be that bit about the plan of salvation consisting of reading very old musty documents, while believing each and every word, since, you see, before God buggered off God left us books, lest we forget. One then gets saved by scrubbing under the armpits and anywhere else that stinks using purposefully shed crucified lamb blood for the purpose. Salvation consists of flipping a nickel in a pitch black closet and then attempting to guess whether or not the result was heads or tails. For this purpose you will be bullied by bullies who will tell you the right answer, and you better agree with them or else, even though they are locked into the same pitch black closet and don't know any more than you do. Such bullying is called evangelism and this is how souls are saved.
None of this has anything to do with the resurrection and the life, but then resurrection is meaningless and abstract, and so therefore, since nature abhors a vacuum, we have had weird theology and doctrinal nonsense in place of resurrection.
Heresy
I have been told by some of my coworkers (thumb pointing upward) that I am to participate in ‘the imitation of Christ', which is to say, I am to be condemned on the grounds of heresy. Apparently the living resurrection is a damnable heresy because it is not included in our religion.Now there are many reasons why the Living Resurrection should be such a damnable heresy. It disagrees with the book of Romans, as just one example, and the book of Romans in the bible is the foundation stone for all that weird sounding nonsense that became the theology that filled the void left when the Living Resurrection vacated the premises of those very early churches. According to Romans everyone has very sinfully sexy flesh, and the purpose of the crucifixion was to condemn this sinfully sexy flesh. We know that flesh in sexually sinful because everyone grows real old and gets more and more corruption, and therefore, it just logically follows that God was damning and damning and condemning that sinfully sexy flesh thus ruining it for everyone. If God is just that must be why that happens, for why would God so obviously be damning sex so damned good and hard if sex was not really really sinful. Therefore everyone must go corrupt and then die for everyone has inherited a sinfully sexy flesh from Adam's originally sinful sperm shot, for in this way God be dualistic, being both the God that condemns all sinfully sexy flesh, while at the same time being a God of salvation who saves the ghosts that pop out of people when they die and go up to be saved in heaven, there being not much chance of being saved down here. That would be physically impossible, and therefore the resurrection must be the resurrection of ghosts, which is spiritual, and thus quite probable, as compared to the physical resurrection, which would be so impossible even God couldn't do it. Not that God would want to because that would prevent God from justly condemning sexy human flesh.
I figure I will just say to hell with that book of Romans, skip the part where I get damned by God because of my sinfully sexy human body, and just turn the whole thing upside down by experiencing the Living Resurrection in the here and now. This will mean that the end result will be that I will become very sinfully sexy yet again, winding up right back where I started from, but as it turns out, this really isn't a problem with God, and only some nut job would ever think that it was. As the saying goes, birds do it, bees do it, even the little chickadees and fleas do it.
Now my damnable heresy does not stop there. I have heard it said once by some Anglican during one of those divisive and quarrelsome meetings where Anglicans get together to quarrel over condemning or accepting some married fags, that the very central doctrine at the very core of what it means to be Anglican is the all important doctrine of The Holy Trinity. Now if we study carefully the example left to us by our very religious ancestors we can see that those who have such an eviscerated goose with all the marrow sucked right out of its bones as their core doctrine have a doctrine, this one being the Holy Trinity Doctrine, and that's all they have, and they all wind up getting really old and more and more corrupted until they finish off that process of corruption by getting themselves planted six feet under. Hopefully, during the process, they guessed the right answer to that enigmatic nickel toss in the pitch blackness of that darkened closet where they were required by proper evangelism techniques of the time, to get saved before getting planted six feet under.
I recall one of the sayings attributed to that Jesus character, where he was said to have declared, "Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father." (John 14:12) What he was saying here is that he was going to be executed by the religious authorities of his time on the charge of heresy, and so therefore, given the role he was going to be playing, it would be pretty hard for Jesus to become an example of the Living Resurrection, because you would have to be alive to do something like that, and what with him ‘going to Father' (translate ‘getting bumped off') it would be the one to do the greater works than anything that Jesus ever did in his own time. This is not to say that he will not face yet one more charge of damnable heresy for claiming to do the greater work, it just means that what with the power of religion having rotted away over the course of two thousand godforsaken years it would prove to be next to impossible to get someone crucified on the charge of heresy in the present time. This is helpful, because a person does have to remain a living heretic who remains alive if there is to be any chance of doing the greater work of the Living Resurrection.
Capitalism
One of the reasons I spent a number of years restricting to myself to the non-weird and the mundane was in the hopes that eventually I could construct a kind of role model for you people of the type of person who would qualify to experience the Living Resurrection. You see, the long term plan is that I am to become the first born of many such children.Now, with the thought of being a role model still in our minds, I thought I would return briefly to my habitual critiques of that capitalist economic system, in the hope that anyone else who might be interested in avoiding the fate of getting planted six feet under might be able to pick up a few more of those pointers in how to go about getting on the real good side of God and that Jesus fellow. For we all know just how sour that Jesus was when it came to rich people, now don't we.
But let us avoid simple moralizing and go into the deep end. Today we have capitalism, and before that we had the feudal landlord system, and before that the old Roman slave driving system. Each of these systems has one thing in common, in that they are all ways of creating an artificial clique of artificial alpha males. Yes, even old men who no longer look good in jock straps can seize upon the role of alpha male, for there is nothing sexier than a hard thick engorged wallet.
Marxism
This then leads me in the direction of a critique of Marxism, for it would seem that the term ‘revolutionary atheist' is an oxymoron. For we have had revolutions, and every revolution is failed revolution, if we are to judge revolutions as producing justice and equality with no artificially created elites emerging from the rubble of that revolution yet one more time, again and again and again.Marxists also produce failed revolutions, as we can see by the return of those capitalist oligarchs in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union (they wasted no time in grabbing all those state assets and arbitrarily declaring them to be their own private property, a nice trick, if you can get away with it, and it would seem that they did).
Now the problem here is that a Marxist proposes only to trim the tops off the weeds. The roots remain in the ground, and as we all know, when some week patch is only trimmed and weed roots remain in the ground, the inevitable result is the regrowth of a fresh new weed patch.
It is for this reason that classical Marxism was rejected and an attempt was made to replace it with what was known as ‘Frankfurt Marxism'. The Frankfurt Marxist makes a study of human psychology, eroticism, Freudianism, and so on, in the hopes of finding some way to address the deep inner driving force behind systems of human oppression. Unfortunately a Frankfurt Marxist is also an atheist, and since the problem that we have with the human condition is physical, and not ‘psychological' or ‘spiritual', and since no atheist can offer a solution to what is a physical materialistic problem, the end result of Frankfurt Marxism has been to produce nothing at all, and the most we could hope for would be the creation of a psychological palliative. People would continue to age and become less and less sexy all the time, but in much the same way as spirituality can be used to make people feel better, perhaps Frankfurt Marxists could find some psychological palliative so that people would continue to experience being human without having it bother them so much.
Revolution
It then logically follows from this that the Living Resurrection is the only really authentic revolutionary practice. If there is one thing we can say that we have learned from thousands of years of those ‘spiritual religions' is that spirituality is quite worthless when it comes to ‘the salvation of the world', for it is in vain that anyone attempts to save the world by ‘changing hearts' doing so ‘one single changed heart at a time'. After thousands of years of such ‘spirituality' the world has never come any closer to be saved, and certainly, given that people have had more than enough time to experiment with the idea, truly it can be said that the time has come to move on. It can be said that ‘spirituality' is the palliative relied upon by those who really don't have a single hope in the world while they remain in the land of the living, and so rather than doing nothing at all, they keep busy doing something, even something that never works and that never could work, no matter how long anyone felt motivated to keep right on trying.Comments
As I am preparing to close this piece, my mind wanders over to the thought of all those annoying comments I always seem to generate whenever I try to get to weird on some Indymedia site.Now, hopefully, assuming that I don't hit the trash can this time, and thus I am around to generate those comments, can I make a helpful suggestion to some of you people. Here is what you should be doing right now. You should double dare me. Yes, you should tell me to GO FOR IT, and then just sit there and watch me try.
That's really all I am asking for. No more than that. In the meantime I will be awaiting the inevitable overwhelming flood, which will rise up like a mighty wave and wash everything away.
(P.S. That was a metaphor, alright.)