Confessions with a Priest

Feeling bereft yet again, I remembered an invitation to church I’d received already weeks ago and thought it serendipitous in the least that the invitation should occur to me then being just blocks from the very church and with a few hours to kill.

See, I’m used to boredom finding its own self-soothing with a nearly endless cacophony of complaints and disease. Apparently, boredom finds purpose when one has become bored and ill-at-ease with the entirety of life. Then will you look directly to God to entertain you.

I have been struggling to hear some kind of calling in life beyond satisfying my next craving or whim for years now, all the while entertaining some notion of notoriety and acclaim, which I have dressed up in some vague pretense of service. My life has rendered the under-ripe and decaying fruits you might imagine from such a childish, petty, constant demand of life. Many call me crazy. In effect, I am poor and homeless. Nonetheless, I am often content, if not more so. This was just one of those times that were…otherwise.

The services were pleasant at first. Pleasant was, of course, a little less than I had hoped for. My joints ached louder than the music. But the sermon struck me as a curious message, if it were to be interpreted as “from God…to me”. The pastor put together and gave an incredible sermon. Indeed, reports were that it was even unusually so. Such reports were no deterrent to factoring myself in a special way as part of the equation of the evening’s events. The sermon was on Complacency. The pastor talked of growing fat and rich and keeping your own counsel and I understood it instantly to be a bad thing, but still it would be funny to see it as relevant to me. I didn't necessarily see it as irrelevant, if not very ironic. He said something to the effect of “If you’re not in constant spiritual warfare, then you’re not working hard enough.” He made a playful analogy of his pursuit of a decent barbeque recipe, making it seem personal and frivolous, but which had pleased so many. I thought of all I had suffered and lost in search of…meaning. Constant, incredible meaning.

Looking on I know I have eased the burden of very few people. Deep within my bones I still regard “pleasure” as a puritan sin. I have gladly chosen my own hell, but damn me twice should anyone fall with me. Somewhere in my chest, a chuckle cracks. Damn me twice. How inherently absurd. You ever hear the one about the guy in heaven who says, “God, what I wouldn’t give for a cocktail…”?

My point would obviously be that I can’t live my life “like this” any longer. I’ve fucked with some variables relentlessly, tweeking to the point of not being able to keep track of the results. And there are obviously some, maybe a ton, of possibilities I’ve never even entertained. The possibilities that I do entertain, though, are obviously the driving force behind manipulating any and all variables with which I do play. They are, to date, merely possibilities, and I entertain them insatiably. But now is neither the time nor the place to list them. I am acutely aware right now that listing them is the longest possible route to manifesting them, as I can demonstrate with the last 27 years of my life.

After that sermon, I was keenly manic. So much flooded into my consciousness, yet I managed not to be swept away by it. Admitting that if I were to continue to attend this church, I would have to be honest with someone about myself, including but not limited to myself, I sought confession with a self-professed man of God. Who can venture to understand the horrible, self-obsessed things I was about to say? He listened attentively and was noticeably underwhelmed. I was simultaneously enormously grateful and slightly annoyed. I talked as calmly and matter-of-factly as I could about how I had never functioned or fit in, about hearing voices, and even about visions of a great storm and all of its harbingers. I admitted to being a prophet that wished to disturb no one.

I, as much, do so now to all (any) of you.

I admitted to him that I did not believe in hell or sin. I did so not as prophecy, but so that he could make a for himself a fair estimation of me as quickly as possible. The truth is I do believe in hell and sin very much. But I have heard countless time that I do so merely to my everlasting chagrin. I find this interesting.

He asked “how I dared so roundly to assert” such things. I told him how God just logically disproves it to me time and time again in a Socratic game of cheese I almost never tire of. Obviously because it relaxes me on many levels. Thusly, proving that I worship luxury and leisure and that God is my own daydream. Accepting that that is true, though, one would have to know that my God is a man of luxury and leisure, and, will, therefore, chat with you over your morning coffee and cigarette or perhaps instead of watching TV.

Basically, I tried to tell him that God has convinced me of there being no sin as swiftly and unapologetically as I do so with him now.

What’s important to acknowledge right now is that I am deeply connected. I am. Not just to my body. As to say, the connection does not stop there. But it does have to be acknowledged as well to keep the channel open.

The point is to REALIZE THAT THE CHANNEL NEVER CLOSED, although perhaps you are not engaging in it at some given moment and when you do it’s not pretty.

The Christians say that sin is just “missing the mark”.

The only SIN is MISSING THE POINT. ah. Exactly.

For all I know, I’ve finally admitted that I am a greedy sinner who consorts with the devil. If there is a devil, I’m sure he’s just that clever. But I am just as clever and have now confessed and found place with a man of God. So according to the universe that the devil occupies, I have bested him. For now at least. But I do try to play on the safe side.

Giving meaning to something: Babbling for God

Salvation is slavery. Service, responsibility, WORK. You will exist, your needs will be met, to your chosen level of comfort, but the work is there, and acceptance is the key. The duality of man lies in leisure, and effort. But in reality, experience is, every moment, a sort of career, that you, I, one, is perfectly suited to. The ability to be entirely business-like at every moment, is the key to reality, acceptance and ease. Work is ease. Leisure is an escape from time, from presence, an illusion that one needs time to release stress, to escape responsibility. Surrender to effort, to belief, to the life of everyone. One can only create an eddy in the flow of existence, before eventually being swept away, via death or via life.

Outside we see every other being as a reflection of our personality. We infer meaning from time being spent in any given situation, the moment we understand our place in a situation, our relevance to everything, is the moment we forget to confuse ourselves with a situation. YOU ARE NOT YOUR SITUATION. You are perfect and imperfect and broken and fixed. Everything that goes on belongs to a life, a global life of which we are all a completely significant part. Accepting the responsibility of one’s part in life, one’s piece of the whole, becomes the only real and concrete form of acceptance.

Surrender. Pulling the ego out of the world. Your experiences are global and shared and perfect. Will is an illusion, because will implies a contradiction in life. We have power over nothing, and everything. Our power is transitory.

Honesty is the key. Society is built on a level of in-sincerity, a rejection of what is real. Images come and go and become “true” as a virtue of the conscious agreement between niche communities. We want to be part of something, but the joke, the surreal fact, is that we are all part of something, something awesome. The search for meaning, like all searches, is fallacious and temporary. To search for anything, implies that you have yet to find it. To want implies lack, to need implies loss, to feel brings peace, and to ignore, ignore reality, delude oneself, is much simpler than accepting that everything that occurs, in our sphere of reality, is meant to happen. It is meant to happen because it cannot happen in any other way.

Discomfort does not exist. Think about discomfort, think of the feeling, think of the way you entirely feel “uncomfortable” with any given situation. Does that change the facts? One can make an entire room uncomfortable if one desires, but does that change the facts? Does that make anything wrong, or different? The refusal to speak one’s desire and one’s calling, has become the foundation of western culture. We look at ourselves in the mirror, literally or figuratively and we see dissatisfaction, or dysfunction. To perceive a lack, or a difference, as inherently negative, is not only counter-productive, but false. Things exist because they are meant to, because they would and could not be any other way. Crises erupt when collective groups of man reject their place in the world, when dissatisfaction with reality becomes too much to bear anymore. That is where we all stand at this very moment. To really survive, surrender and accept is the key.

Technology keeps us together and breaks us apart, feeling lost, alone, wrong. Feeling the need to belittle other forms of reality in order to keep ourselves sane and safe and okay, in order to rationalize, and vindicate, our own brand of time. In technology the fact that every community can be completely and utterly separate from any other, becomes reality. Men can live almost entirely as only ideas. The classics of literature, the ones who live on, via masterworks that touch the hearts of new generations, have achieved true immortality. The truth is always immortal.

Mistakes exist only as a function of our personal cognitive dissonance. To judge mistakes, one would have to admit that one judges everything utterly, that one creates wrong and right. It’s frightening, that we, as a simple race of sentient beings, control all our perceptions of events, that communally, and individually, we decide what is cruel or kind, what is wrong or right. We decide what to believe, what we condone as rational or irrational. What we can prove as empirical facts. A man born to a barren island would no more believe in the theory of gravity than to believe that a benevolent (or not) force, controls everything. A single persona, a God, can constantly decide whether the man on the island floats into space, or stays connected with the earth, with experience.

The voices we hear all the time tell us what to think is right, tell us our opinions, what should happen, what doesn’t happen, what becomes in the end. Trying to understand any of this is a useless struggle. What can any of us really understand? Understanding is simple a realization that something is, something comes in front of our eyes and tells us the reality of our current situation, which is “unreal”. If one’s house is burning to the ground, they see the facts, they then deny the facts in their mind, they see all the possibilities that could have been, were her house not on fire, were her existence not grinding to a halt. But her existence is not stopping; simply moving forward. The past is a construct, completely relative to opinion, the options that we did not pursue are not options at all. Options imply impetus, imply action and reaction and happening. Things that haven’t happened will never happen. They are invented by frustrated souls.

No one watches us. And at the same time, we always have an audience, our minds see us as a manifestation of our desires and fears. Common men exist at the exact intersection of his greatest desire and worst fear. Our audience is ourselves, we watch ourselves in a grand human drama, we decide whether our actions are heroic or villainous, whether we are victims or victors. In the end, we are all heros and we have all achieved our personal sort of victory. If every person on earth were to write their memoir, would they illustrate themselves as simple pieces of a whole, or as the hero of their own complete narrative? Would every human story be worth hearing? Yes, of course, and each piece would be necessary to understand the whole. Each piece of human experience builds upon each other piece. Every lifetime is precious and right, and right now. All fiction is true, all fiction brings us closer to reality, because divorced from our own reality, all experiences are valid.

And even the concept of experience implies some sort of judgement. Can we divine a truth from any sort of media? Can we be brought closer to the truth from the invented situations of people we will never know and never speak to? At once we are seeing everything we need to.

Is madness a fact? Belief in rational thought negates all real experience. To hear different sides of one story is to hear separate truths that combine into a whole that brings all of us closer to what is. If all things must be categorically divided, we will all live on as two separate parts of a whole. Duality is the downfall of man. Our minds, our internal dialogue, laughs at us, hemispheres communicate between us. We are all children of hemispherical divorces. We tell one part of ourselves what another part has been saying, and we interpret the answers according to our values.

“Can you type what I’m saying right now? Okay. I’m a gossip, I feel bad about that, that’s what I do, I pass messages between my mom and my dad. They’re ashamed to ask what the other has been doing, but at once relieved to know what the other has been doing.”

GOD IS BIENJG COMFORTABLE IS YOUR EXPERIENCE NO MATTER WHAT

DOES HTAT PROVE IT ENOG FOR FOR YOU.;…