Pantheism...

 

               Pantheism claims that everything is connected, everything 

                                                                 is Divine…

Although I don't like the labels that encourage us to isolate and categorize, "Everything is Connected, everything is Divine" makes so much sense to me that it seems rather obvious.

A given.

But we want answers, to the big questions about our place in the scheme of things. All the religions, superstitions, myth and conjecture about who, what, where, why, and how, are often no more than mental masturbation combined with struggles for power and control .

The fact is, I don’t know, and you don’t know either.

As metaphor though, the stories can help us understand things which cannot be understood. I think walking on water, because you believe you can, is about as cool as it gets. Doesn’t happen, but it’s a great metaphor for the power of belief.

Too often the metaphor is lost and “my way or the highway” becomes the norm with each group. The insistence that everyone else out there, look like us, be like us.

Oddly, each group is the only one to have all the answers. Just them.

Very divisionary, given the fact that we’re all more alike than different.

Democrats and Republicans lead the way with that stuff, insisting that it must be one or the other. No middle ground.

For any thinking person, that’s absurd.

Almost everything has middle ground and shows up in shades of grey.

Almost everything.

The one absolute and unchanging power that controls it all, everything, everywhere, are the “Laws of Nature”. One “H” combined with two “O” under the same conditions anyplace in the universe, yields the same wet results. Another miracle… as are we all.

“OK, then who put the Laws of Nature in place? It must be God.” No, that’s simply a personification our ego is unable to step away from. We want to create the story, rather than the other way around.  The story created us, bit players at best.

We can’t grasp the idea of something that just is, without a beginning, an end, or a creator.

Call that creator God if you wish. But know that the rules apply evenly across the board. It’s level. There are no such things as miracles, no god sitting comfortably in his observation office who may decide to suspend the laws of Nature if we pray hard enough for Aunt Minnie to not be dead in the recliner over there. She may look dead, but she either is or isn’t, there is no appeal process to push it in the direction of your own private wishes.

No little miracles, no anomalies outside of “The Laws”.  The miracle is all of it, everything that ever was, is, or will be.

The first sunlight peeking over the distant tree line? Now that’s a fucking miracle! Pick up a freshly fallen leaf and look at it under a microscope. Another miracle. A drop of lake water? Ciliated hairs drive protozoan bumper cars through chaotic traffic. Worlds within worlds.

No big deal. Just another miracle.

Our ego is so great that we question the possibility of life on other planets. “Could anything as wonderful as us exist elsewhere?” In the not-too-distant future I believe we will know the answer. Yes! Of course. Life is everywhere, but we’re in our infancy and the universe is rather…vast, so it takes time to discover.

But it’s out there… because the meaning of life…(drumroll…)  is life itself.

Life pops up like a weed between cracks in city sidewalks. It has the potential to exist in any environment… and does. “Alien” life probably won’t look like the undernourished human child with a head the size of a beer keg that we may envision.

As with ourselves, it all depends on the environment. Life grows, tailored along the way to fit its environment perfectly. Fish in water, birds in air, lots of creatures walking about encased in bodies made for their specific gravity.   

I wonder if we are up to the challenge of trying to communicate with a life form similar to a lichen? What of common ground? Could an alien be turned on by a bevy of deep-sea tubeworms 5,000 feet down in our oceans, all belly dancing seductively around a fissure? Perhaps one of those frisky snipe eels that hang out at the same club hoping to get lucky, would do.  Alien life may well look like another protozoa, swimming through the drop of pond water that is space, its own solar system simply another atom in a giant’s world.

No matter the lens we choose to view it through, life just is. Our own value judgements “good” and “bad” don’t apply other than when we ask: “Good or bad for whom?”. 

When that young Impala grazing on the savannah, a vision of beauty and vibrant new life, has its throat torn out by a Cheetah hiding in the grass…is that good or bad?

That’s life, a full spectrum. We’re part of it, connected by the elements that we all share, the stuff of life, stardust.

Everything is Connected, everything is Divine…

Trigger Fish Bucks $$$$

 

On gym mornings, my regular routine puts me on a treadmill at 6:50am. I appreciate the attached TV on those machines and usually catch the tail end of The Joyce Meyers Ministries show before “Parking Wars” starts at 7:00.

But for the ten minutes before I get to look in on the creative but illogical flood of reasons people believe that they shouldn’t be ticketed, I get Joyce.

If you don’t know her, Joyce Meyer is an American Charismatic Christian author, speaker, and president of Joyce Meyer Ministries. Worth around nine million, she and hubby own multiple homes and fly around in their private jet.

TV preaching can pay very well.

Certainly it pays more than enough that if you are unhappy with the face that god gave you, you can get a new one. So apparently Joyce brought a picture of a triggerfish in to her plastic surgeon and said “I want this face,”

I guess that god favors triggerfish.

It’s all good. Not my path but there are many paths and just because I’m not on the same path as you are, doesn’t mean I’m lost. Right?

Wrong! Joyce says I am lost. In spite of the fact that humans worship over 5,000 different “gods” in this world, Joyce knows that only hers is right.

OK, fine. It’s important to believe in whatever club or cult you join if you want the epiphany offered by that club experience, be it Moose or Mason, Baptist or Shinto, Boy Scout or Shaker, go for it!

Live and let live.

But this morning Joyce threw one out there, rather casually, that I couldn’t ignore. She said: “It must be horrible for people who don’t know Jesus, to have no hope. I can’t imagine what it must be like to live without hope. I don’t think I could even get out of bed in the morning!”

I’m not a Christian, but when I got up this morning, I distinctly remember hoping that the iPhone store opens at 9:30. That it will be sunny all day. That the dogs will like the boiled organ meat and rice I’m fixing for them. That Carla will come home early from work this afternoon. That Putin and Biden don’t start a war. That the last fruit on my Blood Orange tree is ready to pick.

The list is endless. The same is true for every human who ever lived. We all thrive on hope in one form or another. It usually has nothing to do with Jesus.

So I’m thinking that either Joyce is phenomenally stupid, which I don’t believe is the case, or she thinks her listeners who send her money for jet fuel, multiple houses and Trigger fish plastic surgeons, are.

Which could it be?

Hitchhikers...

 

When my friend said that she used to hitchhike as a teenager, my first thought was…I can't believe that you were out there hitchhiking at age 14!  But then I remembered picking up two 15-year-old hippie girls who were out hitchhiking years ago when I was a bachelor.

My house was a huge four-story place with three other guys back then. We each had our own floor. Party central.

The girls had been thumbing rides all over the Northeast for weeks and planned to keep going. Both were wrapped up in identical frocks, brightly flowered and flowing in tandem with their long blond hair in that summer breeze. They looked like an ad for Sun-In hair lightener standing on the side of that road, thumbs outstretched, pleading for adventure. Both stunk of BO and dirty laundry. I brought them home and let them take long showers, turning my bathroom into a sauna. The three of us lay around on my bed that afternoon, looking up at the undulating orange parachute that was the ceiling of my room, smoking a joint and listening to a new Ry Cooder album I had gotten my hands on the day before. Quadraphonic sound and an open balcony door full of blinding sunlight.

The girls wanted to stay with me, for the three of us to live together that summer, maybe even forever, and I wanted to keep them.

Those were the days of “love the one you’re with” but I knew my girlfriend who lived nearby wouldn't allow it.

Being ten years older than those two girls, I really didn't like the idea of going to jail either, so after an innocent afternoon of jabber and freedom, I gave them some cash, drove them to their next destination, and dropped them off. Wishing them well, everyone was full of smiles, good cheer, and reluctance to move on.

This time, they smelled of Ivory soap and sunshine. I knew they would get another ride in a heartbeat.

I've always regretted kicking out those two beautiful hippie girls, turning down a once-in-a- lifetime opportunity to create stories for my old age, but I’m forever glad and relieved that I did. That was an entire Pandora’s Box full of trouble that I did not need to open.

Dropping them off on the side of the highway, I worried about who they may run into next time.