OSScast

how can we even pretend in our reaching to think that we are touching, touching anyone let alone ourselves? in this age of sound bytes\technology\social networking\webo-blogo-fucko-spheres, who REALLY touches anyone on a personal or authentic level? is this by design?did someone\thing bring us here, or did we just stumble to this impersonal ded-space as a species all on our own? is there a way for us to see past, to drag ourselves from the quicksand of our own inadequacies to reach out REALLY stretch past our isms and practices, our judgments and willful blindness?
we are the baby crapping angrily on the kitchen floor, we are the child holding its breath till mommy listens, we are the teen drinking and crashing the car, we are the adulterer, the abuser of ourselves and those around us. we are the all seeing all knowing hive of adolescent, prepubescent pimply faced summ totall of all the wrongs we ever thought were done to us as a species and we are taking it out on the only ones we can reach…
OURSELVES

Stream of Life

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day
runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth
in numberless blades of grass
and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth
and of death, in ebb and in flow.

I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life.
And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.

-Rabindranath Tagore

“Our minds are continually active, fabricating an anxious, usually self-preoccupied veil which partially conceals the world.” Iris Murdoch

I love this because it feels so true for me. I am not proud of my continually active fabricating mind but I am proud of my honesty with myself around my anxious self-preoccupied challenges. It is part of walking “The Path” I guess. The constant stumbling. The strengths disquised as weaknesses.

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” - Philip K. Dick

A challenging concept.

I have friend who always dates the wrong type of guy; usually extremely good looking sometimes violent steroid abusers with very little education. Every relationship she has always ends horribly. She consistently chooses the same type of guy to date, and she has expressed to me that she knows she keeps making the wrong choices, to the point that as she makes the choice she knows its wrong. She says that in any social situation she will find herself drawn to the one guy who turns out to be exactly like all the other guys she has dated, without even trying. But she seems to be powerless to act in any other way.

A lot of people (me included) have weight problems. These people cannot seem to control their eating habits for any length of time. They know that eating certain foods is bad, yet they are also powerless to act in a different way over time. The same thing applies to drug abusers and gamblers.

I think the opposite end of the spectrum may be true as well. Maybe successful people are driven to succeed by the same force as those who are driven to fail. People who excel will tell you how hard they work to achieve their goals, but do they really have a choice other than to push harder? Could a successful person make a long term change to not be successful and stick with it?

In any given population, there is a range of success. There are winners and losers. In every wolf pack there is an alpha and an omega. So maybe in the human population there are those who are going to succeed and there are those who will fail. And no amount of intervention will change that. This is a societal component of what it means to be human. Its part of what we are and how we function in groups.

I’ve always been fascinated by FBI profiling. These people can look at a certain number of behavioral characteristics and extrapolate an entire person’s life. I think I have seen it explained as “the human mind behaves abnormally in predictable ways”. There are certain ways that a serial killer will act, depending on what type of conditioning was received in his early life. Shouldn’t a human mind behave normally in predictable ways as well?

I think the concepts used in FBI profiling could be developed into something to predict the behavior of everyone. There could be a database that if given a few facts about a person, could tell you all kinds of things about that person’s choices, down to the label of beer he drinks and the car he drives. Maybe the choices I make are completely predictable by our imaginary database as much as a serial killer’s are to the FBI database.

I think these two ideas about human behavior are interrelated. The behavioral profiling based on a few facts about your life is a good predictor of other choices in your life, but your overall station in life is part of how you relate to others in society. And you don’t have a choice in either one.

I’ve always thought of Freewill or the lack thereof as a function of time. If time is linear, then every decision I think I make has already been made. If I could step outside of time, I could look at my lifetime as a series of events laid out from beginning to end. All the choices I have made or will make are already there on display in my timeless view of myself.

But now I think that my choices may be made by my role in the human group; my pecking order in our pack. Anyone with a big enough database of human behavior and a few facts about my past could know exactly how I will react in any given situation.

If this database is built in the future it might not be able to tell us why we are here, but it may be able to tell us what we are going to do about it.

Building on my Déjà vu house key idea, here is my latest crazy spiritual concept:

Suppose there are multiple universes, and as we advance spiritually we jump from universe to universe. Your life, who you are right now, is actually one instance in an endless string of lives you have inhabited.

It’s like playing a video game. You log into a character that has already been built, has a back story, and comes fully immersed in the game world. But unlike a video game you come complete with memories. You don’t even know when you started playing because the game play is seamless.

As you advance spiritually, and grow and learn, you play other characters. You get to live through the whole range of human experience. You get to become more advanced as you learn, overcoming the hardest hardships humans can endure, and also reveling in the greatest triumphs. You move from universe to universe until eventually you ascend.

It’s almost like reincarnation but nonlinear. You move sideways to advance. If you play long enough you could become everyone you know eventually. And people (and things) your brain isn’t big enough to imagine.

This theory answers some nagging questions for me. I’ve always wondered how a loving and caring God could allow the most horrendous tragedies to occur. How could God allow children with cancer? Well now I believe that the child with cancer is there so that I might learn to deal with the emotion he evokes in me; to accept things that are senseless, and just be. In my new belief system that child might not be real. It may be a non-player character for my benefit. It may also be someone who needs to experience what it is to be that child. There is no growth without conflict, and pain.

I have also wondered where are all of the truly spiritually advanced beings? Why do we not see anyone walking on water, or raising the dead? Maybe this particular universe doesn’t allow that sort of thing. In my video game analogy the lowest level characters do not start on the hardest levels. You need to gather experience and develop your tools and skills. I’ll meet the people who can shoot fireballs out of their hands; I’m just not ready yet.

I’ve also questioned life after death. How can the experience and deeds of one life give you eternal happiness or torment? How can our little blip of a life be enough? Now it doesn’t have to be. We could live an entire lifetime to learn patience, of a couple of seconds to learn remorse. Over and over again. Any when, any where, any how.

I had a thought about what déjà vu might be.

Physicists believe that there are alternate realities all around us. Part of this theory is that every instant our universe splits into an infinite number of alternate universes. Some have extrapolated on this idea, proposing that universes close to our own would be much like ours, and those not so close would be much different.

What if our spirit or souls or energy shifts universes from time to time?

My house key fits in my door upside down – or right side up, depending on its mood. Everyday no matter which way I try it in the door it is wrong. If I put my key in the door today right side up, and tell myself its right side up, then tomorrow it will be too. What if tomorrow when I come home from work I jump, or shift universes. In the universe I was in, my key went one way, and in this new universe, it goes the other.

In this universe the key goes in upside down. If I had written down the direction yesterday or this morning, my note would clearly say upside down right now. If I research the lock maker there would be a definite reason why the key goes in the way it does, complete with a history of how long it has been this way.

This doesn’t change the fact that somehow, in some way, I know it was the other way. So this is my theory – as we jump for one universe to the next, we bring with us an imprint of the way things were. Just a tiny remembrance of what we just experienced. But once we realize it, or try to grasp the difference, it slips away as we settle into our current surroundings.

Our soul remembers, even if our brain and our memories have always been here, in this universe.

Déjà vu is the overlap of these universe shifts. As we make the jump from where we were to where we are, our record skips – just for a second.

“Just think of the trees: They let the birds perch and fly, with no intention to call them when they come and no longing for their return when the fly away. If people’s hearts can be like the trees, they will not be off the Way.” - Langya

I hate going to Wal-mart. The average Wal-mart shopper is poor, overweight, unhygienic, and ugly. They aren’t like me. I’m better than the average loser.

I can convince myself of my superiority when I’m home. I can watch the beautiful people on television and delude myself into thinking I am one of them. If the only people I see are primetime waifs and buffed out guys, they become my tribe, my link to other humans. See how beautiful we are?

Then I go to Wal-mart. As soon as I take my shopping cart from the septuagenarian greeter I start feeling it -

The despair of a life of poverty, the slow shuffle of welfare recipients as they look for items on which to spend their government hand outs. The greasy haired middle aged women slowly pushing their unwed daughter’s mixed race toddler through the store. The completely undisciplined feral children with sticky fingers and snotty noses practicing their consumer training, begging for the latest Chinese imported crap toy, that will be forgotten by the time they reach the parking lot.

Fat old women in house coats using the motorized handicapped scooters. Their only handicap being the inability to see what they are, and feel any responsibility or guilt for what their lives have become. Dirty people in dirty clothes mortgaging their souls to buy cheap pieces of plastic they don’t really want and don’t really need.

The body odor the bad breath the noise the sticky coating of funk that shellacs the entire warehouse from the deli meats to the garden center.

And then I realize that I am one of them. Once I cross that threshold I am down in the muck with the rest of the human garbage. Then I realize that I have always been down there, I was just able to delude myself into thinking I was something more. When I go to Wal-mart I can’t pretend that I’m better than everyone else. I’m worthless and disgusting. Unlike everyone else, I’m just smart enough to realize it.

That’s what is scary about talking about spirituality. My ideas transcend normal humans. I see patterns in everything – it’s all connected, I swear. I am a hair’s breadth from deeply, truly understanding. I hear the call. I see the light. I am about to ascend into a new form of life – the next step in human evolution. I AM BECOMING!

But if I share my thoughts with you, I become like everyone else.

God I hate Wal-mart.

I will start off by saying I haven’t been here since November of last year. Every now and then I wonder if there is anything new going on here at osscast. Spirituality, seems like maybe the most interesting discussion topic in the world after sex. And yet there is a surprising silence on this website. I am curious as to why? Why don’t people clamor for a place around this virtual table to talk about the notion of spirit?
I just noticed that I was about to write, “talk about the afterlife” but then I thought, not everyone embraces the notion of an afterlife as the stuff of spirituality. So I made my statement more general. Is there trepidation around offending others who may not believe what you do? There is for me. Maybe that explains the quiet.
Or maybe it is because open source spirituality by its very nature is open to interpretation. You can say anything you want, and not be right and not be wrong. What is there to discuss really?
Osscast member one says, “You know, I believe that when we die we are sent to gather around a great Bran Muffin in a glorious donut shop in the sky. The Bran Muffin is the creator and keeps the true believers regular.”
Osscast member two responds, “Ok.”
And that really is that. That is all the discussion there is to have around that particular belief. I suppose Osscast member two could rebut with a statement, “I am a Bran atheist.”
Osscast member one might then respond, “ok”.
Maybe there really is nothing to talk about because there is nothing to “push” against? I don’t know. I would be interested to hear what others think. To see if we couldn’t generate some lively conversation.
And may the Great Bran Muffin be with you.