Church

As usual, I’ll be honest. Although I might not be forthcoming about all that’s whirring in my head, it does not mean I don’t want to share. One must take care with what unrefined thought you let out at a given time. The thought may bear consequences for the one who utters it and the one who hears it, and by that time it will not matter if you wish to retain ownership of such a thought or if you think better of it, it’s work is done.

I’m annoyed. I’m annoyed with church and church people, and I don’t want to be. Church to me has been a very personal thing for a long time. Interpersonal too, but not as a rule. Church has been seeking out the spirit of a moment, which tends to be defined by one’s inner state and what the moment offers, then tapping into that spirit and communing with it. There is music in it, there is connection in it, there at times are mind altering substances in it. But there is intention. Perhaps I thought I’d left all that generic church business well and truly behind, and that I would not have to deal with it again. But it’s clear that I haven’t parsed out sufficient, communicable understanding of why I walked well away from it. I am asked to not seek fault and come with an open mind so I can see it for what it is, but I have no need for bias and no need to seek faults. In fact I need nothing from this besides continuing my education. What is really being asked of me might be acceptance, accommodation, sufficient generosity of spirit to allow what is, to be. This I do readily, but not blindly. Something wants to be known, and it will be.

I’m faced with the instance of myself appearing cocky about what I’ve learned, but that’s the age-old matter of standing on opposite sides of a lesson. Once you’ve learned the lesson you often don’t feel the need to be cautious about what you’ve learned, and treat the matter as delicately as the person who has yet to learn it. It is particularly the case with these lessons that aren’t scheduled on your predefined program. It isn’t written in your textbook. It isn’t a lesson advertised as part of your journey towards the higher planes of existence, carrying out the will of your God.

The lesson draws nearer when your reality begins to squeeze. One cannot induce such a lesson on another person, not unless you singlehandedly pressurise someone’s lived experience into a state of unsustainability. Fortunately, for those who truly live, these lessons come. Those who truly live embrace life as the essential dynamic state of human existence. It’s a state of maximal yet guided entropy. It’s an expansive, energetic unfolding. In the organic mode it is constantly seeking sources of nutrients and energy. If something does not feed a plant, it’s roots will turn toward a place where it is fed. If there isn’t sufficient light, it’s vines, branches and leaves will turn towards brighter light. This is continual, perpetual. If a plant stops doing any of this, it dies, and I find that to be a great analogy for the human spirit. Our bodies operate in the same way: we need nutriets, water and light to live and thrive. Metaphysically we are the same way: our spirit needs nutrients and light, both because it lives in and is integrated with the body, and because it has a higher level informational requirement. These nutrients also differ through our stages of growth. We may require more, and different nutrients as we approach maturity and seek to bear fruit. But bring yourself to watch a tree planted in a pot that hasn’t had it’s soil replenished in a good long time, and it’s only watered once a week. If it lives, it will not grow, and it won’t bear great fruit, if it bears at all.

The lesson at hand is one that shows you that although being planted in a pot may provide some security, the security isn’t yours, the one that must grow in it. The security is for the feeble minds who planted you in it, so your roots may not spread inconveniently wide and rearrange the treaded path. So you may not grow too big for them to handle. So your consequence and experience does not reach beyond what is known and what is written in a specific place. Let me extend the pot analogy one little bit further and suppose that perhaps you were potted as a seedling, and there you grew to the absolute capacity of your little pot from which you should have been planted out. The pot was good for you in that stage. Under good stewardship you were fed and nurtured and you did not want, you were safe from the wider world and the wind and the full sun and the long dry seasons. But now you have grown and your DNA is asking where are you letting your roots grow? Must they circle the pot until they’re in an unsalavagable tangle, stifled? Where is the nutrients for fruiting coming from? Must I remain this big? Why? Am I going to eat cereal for the rest of my life? Cereal with a nice bit of sugar on top.

So begins the lesson. Asking why is what changes a person’s energy signature. Asking why puts a spark in the eye. Asking why opens the floor for many an endless conversation that can carry you into your old age with vivacity.

There it is. That is what might be annoying me. When you can tell a person has not considered why they are doing any of this, beyond the reasons they were told they are doing this. What do You want? What do You need? Forget for a moment about all the other people. The nature of individual consequence is much like with a tree. When you grow big and strong, you bear fruit, and people get to pick up or pluck your fruit. It doesn’t matter because there’s plenty. But if you are wrapping yourself over a hollowed out log to be the drum that is beaten for a cause, to give and give because that is how it is written, you stay in that pot, you try to bear fruit for the few who consume you and the many beyond may never learn what you have to give in your DNA, waiting, hoping to be expressed. One does not give truly by the act of “giving”. One gives by being more than is required by pure natural expression of the code by which you were built. The act of giving is after all to let others have, and for others to have, they must take. One cannot force another to receive what you give, therefore it is never upon any of us to say who gives and who takes. So we come to who takes, and what do they take and why? What do they give to you? Lets make a competition of who gives the most unresevedly, let’s try our utmost to give our everything so that somebody may someday be pleased with us. Well here’s the thing. So long as we have something to give, we can give, or people can take, but once we institutionalise the giving we are in the business of giving, and then what gives must keep on giving. Are you a giving machine? No. You’re a human, tree, you’re a human that is like a tree and what you have to offer is entirely up to what fruit was born in your fruiting season lest your limbs are being chopped off for firewood or furniture.

Being disconnected from one’s essential nature causes one to become disembodied. You are uncomfortable with yourself in ways you never say with words. Perhaps your disembodiment is evident in your physical state. You are uncomfortable with your environment and the clothes you have to wear and the activities you have to partake in because none of it is properly integrated. Your body takes you everywhere, through all these things and it can do cool stuff, but are you treating it with care and respect? Is it your temple? Are you treating yourself as a race horse? Are you treating yourself as a factory of goodwill and remedy? Are you subtly, secretly but profoundly considering yourself to be in the business of satisfying the insane demands of specific others who may have given over the reigns to their pathology? Do you want your spirituality to be a business? Do we want it to be a practice of blindly stumbling after our coping mechanisms in the guise of embracing truth and redemption? Perhaps that is necessary until the lesson arrives.

So why aren’t the kids going to church?

Why indeed.

Because when the results never quite match the intention, and we can’t get sufficiently real about why that is, people notice, and they grow rightly suspicious. We will find our spiritual wares, elsewhere. Now one can ask: when a man needs to get paid for the good deeds, how good can they ever be? This is sadly often the matter, but not a given. When the volunteers find themselves overspent and unappreciated, do they ask themselves “am I here because it makes me feel important? Am I here because I’m karma farming? Am I here because I want a sense of control in an organisation, regardless of whether this organisation is actually producing net good or not, all funds and cost of resources considered? Or is this all just about belonging? Is it pure insecurity of worth?

Now there is much to be said for that belonging. We all need some of it. My question about it is, why? If one must belong in a crowd of people, why this crowd where no-one ever seems to root very deep? Where you find people trying to be rice, palatable to every, bloody mouth without the possibility of offending, as if you are not made to be utterly unique in every way. Why be this timid slave for fuck sake? I guess that’s another thing that annoys. It hearkens back to a time when Pink Floyd was born to sing to the world that we don’t want to be bricks and we don’t want to be puppets rolling off an assembly line. Back in the time before ’94 we were so thoroughly propagandized and brainwashed through school, through church, through the rule of law. It was baked into our social networking and too many of us did not see the terrible mistakes being made. The “sameness” has a survival function. When we achieve a certain degree of uniformity we can coexist and work together, but if one follows too far down the path of sameness then your inner being ossifies. This rice mandate just seems to resemble that on another dimensional axis. It’s bland. People with poverty of soul come to commune with people who haven’t much less poverty of soul and what is the point of the exercise? Temporary respite? There is a whole canon of words laying out the point of the exercise, but are we really getting it? Have you gone into the desert by yourself and communed with the essential?

Another thing: I always seem to have something better to do. I love my own company! Things to read, things to write, things to build, things to fix, music to listen to, lectures to listen to, things to clean, meaningful connections to make with inconveniently real friends. Sitting and staring, contemplating, meditating, exercising. I don’t want to spend my time with people in whom I can see right to the bottom of their bucket on the first encounter. I don’t need to and it’s utterly unsatisfying. Now one must plant a stake and make it clear that this might say more about me then about them. They can do what they want and I won’t sit in an ivory tower because there’s no utility in it, and it isn’t honorable. But there’s no obligation to facilitate cross pollination. I don’t need you to like me or approve of my ways. Where I belong will be with the relationships that hold me. Where I belong is in myself and in the world, in a dynamic state, not in the dictates of a legacy program that each generation tries it’s best to breathe new life into.

Shall I make one statement that points at high ground: if we want to help the kids, we must innovate from first principles, not renovate a conceptual carcass. It’s like running an orphanage and insisting that everyone is an orphan, so come to the orphanage. Who in their right mind is going to walk towards that and not feel like a credulous git? If you want to run a spiritual orphanage or halfway house then, by all means, do the honorable thing! Remember what it is then, and don’t expect more from it. Know your target market, it won’t be very sexy, and it certainly won’t be profitable. It’s a hard ask. However, if you want to run an institution of continued education, the model is going to look a whole lot different. Here’s the rub among rubs! People trying to do “one size fits all”.

It doesn’t work. It’s a lie. You can’t do everything for everyone, because you will do it badly.

For whom I love and for whom I care and to whom I give will remain a matter of personal sovereignty. I might not roam where you roam, but here, if you come here, I will show you love. Love that isn’t solicited, that doesn’t taste of tainted water. It might be rather strong at times, it might be served on the rocks at times, but it won’t speak so as to be trite and make a promise. It will simply be.

Drink, if you will.