God Doesn't Care Who You Fuck

God doesn't care who you fuck.

Or if you are monogamous.

Or how you fuck for that matter. He doesn't care if you're a whore. Or if you can't keep a job for your life. Or if you're a slob.

God doesn't care if you save money.

God cares if you lie and steal. He'd rather you not. But He loves you anyway.

I think its pretty damn amazing that there is an entity in this universe who can love ALL of us. Cuz we are pretty fucked up. The diverse formations of fucked-up-ness is as unique as a snowflake or a fingerprint. No two ways of fucking up are alike.

God cares that you try to be a better version of yourself each day.

God cares that you don't give up. And God cares that you don't give up on him. Because he doesn't give up on you.

By the way I can't imagine loving everybody in this world.

You mean the dirty cop who assaults you in your own home and tries to charge you as resisting arrest just because he can? You mean the grandmother who murders her grandchild by beating her to death and the father who watches from his deathbed and cheers her own? You mean the jerkoffs who know you have nothing to give but sue you and take everything just because you can? How can God love them?

Well he does because he sees the full picture. He does because he understands how they got to that evil place in a way you never can. And he has empathy. You and each individual on the face of this earth are tiny bits of the whole that is God. So when you hurt he hurts too.
Or she, or it or whatever.

Just remember. God doesn't care if you go to church on Sunday. Or if you smoke. Or if you have a spending habit. Or who you fuck. He just wants you to be happy and show love to everyone.

We are here to be loved.

The Divine Power of Mindless

I came across an article, yesterday, talking about the importance of being mindful.

Mindfulness, it said, was the act of being in the moment. Instead of thinking about the past or worrying about the future or just being elsewhere mentally, it is the act of bringing the mind back to the present and keeping it there. It identified meditation as a chief mean to achieving mindfulness but offered that if one did not know how to meditate one could simply practice mindfulness by cuing in to one's senses in the present.

Listening to sounds of the water at the beach or the birds overhead; noticing the brightness of the day or the whiteness of clouds above; noticing the coffee smell in a coffeehouse or the salty smell at the beach or noticing the grainy, rough feel of sand beneath the feet were all ways to zone in to our present sensory experiences and, thereby, be mindful.

I thought for a moment: This is great advice. Of course we want to be mindful. Of course we don't want to spend our time worrying about the future or ruminating over the past. After all our bodies react to the emotions that overtake us when we do. And when we imagine our fears of the future, the stress hormones come out to play, draining our energy and depressing our spirits or making us anxious and agitated.

Then mid-thought, and quite by impulse, my mind made a sharp mental turn to this book I read a month or so ago called A House in the Sky by Sara Corbett about the harrowing experiences of journalist Amanda Lindhout at the hands of her captors in the Middle East.

And it was then, an epiphany rose in my mind - well, I'm not sure its a true epiphany or if it just smelled like one. But I began to ask myself: If mindfulness is the gold star then what is the value of its opposite?  What would we even call its opposite?

Mindlessness?

Because that didn't sound right. Probably because being mindless has long been associated with being inconsiderate, or clumsy or a dreamer who can't do anything right in life because his head is always in the clouds.

Have you no memory of having been scolded as a child or teen for "mindless" behavior?  Because I sure have. You may have been told it's why we forgot something important or why we did not respond appropriately to someone trying to engage us. You may have been called mindless on being accused of not paying attention or having done something stupid.

Lets then just say, its not used to describe a positive aspect of ourselves.

Let me appear to digress again, (though I am not). I read another book about 6 months ago by renowned psychologist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. It wasn't the more popular On Death and Dying but a smaller more obscure piece of literature which seemed more a compilation of essays or shorter writings than a cohesive piece. It appeared to have been written earlier in her career when she was studying near-death experiences.

In it she details the immediate after-death experience as one in which we, no longer limited by the physical body, are able to transcend space and time. According to her, we are at that point, able to be in all places at once and from my understanding, there ceases to be any such thing as a past or a future. According to her, we have access to time in a similar way that we have access to space.

After remembering Kubler-Ross's recount of the after-live experience I then wondered: Is this description, the essence of what it is to be '"mindless"? The ability to move beyond the limitations of space, time and our body? Is our mindlessness in life, a ghost, a fringe, a leftover or foretelling of the state of our soul, or spirit when we are not limited by a body?

Of course, if this is true, pertaining to afterlife, it wouldn't even make sense to call it mindlessness since we no longer have a body and therefore a mind. It would just be the state of being.

Within our earthly bodies though, perhaps the closest we can come to this body-less, mind-less state of being, is through mindlessness.

I drew parallels with the book A House in the Sky because, aside from being a gripping memoir beautifully told, it recounts how the protagonist Lindhout, dealt with the horrible torture inflicted upon her by her captors. At its worst, she builds in her mind, as the title tells, a 'house in the sky.'

Basically, essentially, simply put, she imagined. She used the power of mindlessness to occupy, to the extent she could, another space and another time. She allowed herself to do, seemingly, what the author of the mindfulness article cautions against. She drew the strength to endure from the human ability to be mindless.

While mindlessness didn't prevent Lindhout from feeling the horrible physical pain, or maybe even the emotional pain caused by her captors cruelty, she indicates that it quelled the pain enough to allow her to get past the most harrowing of moments and by this, she found the will to live.

Could it be then that mindlessness is a gift and not a curse after all? I am beginning to wonder. I might even propose that mindlessness is a mercy - from God. Far-reaching you may say, but hear me out. I envision that he allowed us to retain this bit of magic when we came into this world as a means to endure, as a card we can play, a magical power we can exact at the moments we may most need it. Perhaps he foresaw in the human experience a likelihood of finding ourselves in horribly deplorable situations where were we unable to transcend our physical bodies even momentarily we might succumb to its condition, unable to endure and fill out our purpose. Unable to tell the truth that exists on the other side of suffering as Lindhout did. The truth of human resilience and who knows what else?

I'm even going to go a step further and speculate that our mindlessness is a leftover from our pre-life existence, when we were not limited by our physical bodies and thus had no concept of time or space.  It is a ghost of who we once were and perhaps even a foretelling of what we will be again.

In light of such divine beginnings, I’m going to then say:

Yes to mindlessness!

Just don't go crazy with it.

Let Us

Life is suffering. But what does that tell us about how to live it? I mean should we spend our days, melancholy or depressed, with shoulders hunched over, bemoaning our fate to live on this earth….ALL the days of our lives? ….Because that’s a lot of days, let me tell you!

Of course not.

The beauty of life is in the freedom to fill it with  experiences to process and pursue. Belief in who we are, what we mean to the world and in the next moment and our ability to not just get through it but to enjoy it, is the catalyst for hope right?

What perplexes and sometimes amuses me is that as humans, we are so desperate to hide from the idea that life is suffering that we build layers over it, or walls around it. We hope if we obscure this obvious reality then it will no longer be true.  We dream up rules for life and create categories such as class, race, and gender. Distinctions that, I’m not sure if are meant to serve as distractions to the reality of life that escapes no one but, serve to distract nonetheless.

The distractions are numerous. There is the distraction of race – the dominant “race” judges, and based on these judgements, sets up rules for how society should behave regarding race. The race in power then embeds these judgements into the institutional fabric of society to uphold and perpetrate the importance of race. The same goes for gender, for class, for intelligence level, for beauty and appearance. Through these judgements and its rules we can fill up threads on social media, we can create scores of news articles, and television news and make the millions of decisions that we spend our entire lives making.

In reality, the purpose is twofold: One is to distract us from the mundane, static, dull and basic reality that life is suffering and two: It serves to add richness to our lives. The richness is alive in the variety of experiences we can slide into, the variety of interactions we can have with those around us. And in this way we can have things to look forward to.

Hope.

Ironically, or perhaps not, it is the very distractions we create through which our suffering plays out. It is as though, without the rich layer we add on to distract us and give us hope, we would not have a channel for experiencing our fate.

Let’s take race for instance. The dominant group constructed race to distinguish itself and set in place a method to identify itself as standout, even superior.  It is human nature to do this.  When have you not seen a winning group express the reasons they believe they are the winning group? And naturally, they attribute innate qualities, which by default, are almost always in juxtaposition to the group that is not winning. We didn’t just win by chance. We won because we can run faster, play smarter. We won because we are better, bottom line.

Here it is our ego talking. Man since the beginning of time has been at odds with admitting his vulnerability and mortality. Man struggles with the reality that he is as capable of extinguishment as a small plant or insect. Man is so terrified of his own mortality, so confused by it, that he must find ways to tell himself that he is not just a man – that he is better than just a man. He is a white man, or a smart man, or a rich man. He is anything but just a man.

In modern society race gives us the opportunity to play out our illusions of superiority and serves as a distraction to the reality that we are all equally susceptible to the suffering that is inherently life. Race gives the dominant group a means of elevating itself above the drudgery of human suffering. Of course they are not really elevating themselves above the drudgery of human suffering but in life, perception makes it so. If we can delude ourselves to the idea that we are either more than we are and so we don’t deserve what life hands out, then we are justified in seeking a way out even if it is at the expense of those deemed less than us.

In life, locked in our physical bodies, our world is our feelings, sensory and emotional, as well as our thoughts. We can experience nothing outside of it. Every moment, every experience we encounter is colored, stained if you will, with our perception by our individual feelings and thoughts. If we can delude ourselves, distract ourselves, elevate ourselves above the baseness of being just a mass of flesh and blood, then we can muster the strength to go on.

Within the illusion though, we act out the script for our own suffering. What humans, because of their own ego, don’t realize is every time we hurt, we hurt. Every time we inflict hurt on someone else, we hurt ourselves. Every time we treat another human as less than human, we must within our minds build up another layer of denial and distraction and justification from which is borne self-hate or delusion.  We cannot hurt without hurting. We can shield our awareness from the pain we cause ourselves by telling ourselves that those we hurt deserve what they got but we still hurt.

We hurt because deep down, under all the layers of denial and ego, we know we are just flesh and blood. We know we hold no super powers. We know we hold no claim to anything magical or immortal. We know we are vulnerable, and susceptible and relatively fragile. We know our life can be extinguished by anything - from something as large and formidable as a bomb or a bullet to something as seemingly innocuous as opportunistic bacteria at the wrong moment. And the instigator of our demise will not care if we are of the minority group or the majority. It will not care if we are rich or poor or anywhere in between. It will not care our race, or gender, or how beautiful we are or how ugly. And we know that.

Why then do we have these self-soothing vices? Why then do we harbor these reasons, if you will, for claim to superiority when we know the elements of life (birth, illness and death) that matter most, don’t care or discriminate based on these “reasons”? I think it is because we are uncomfortable with our mortality. We are, it seems, the only species of living things that are aware of our own existence. Not only are we aware of our existence but we are aware of every thought, every feeling, and their genesis within us. In essence, we have a conscience.

 It is our ability to delve into the meta-levels of our existence that makes our existence so difficult for us. How is it we can, through our awareness of self, plan and execute such powerful effects on our world and at once be so naturally fragile and vulnerable? We know we are alive, we can feel our existence, yet at any moment we are aware we can cease to exist. Enamored with the natural beauty of life, we are desperate to keep ourselves going. So we work our entire lives to avoid,  to stop, the inevitable cessation of existence. We stand on the backs of others to survive and we assuage our conscience by telling ourselves they are less than us or they deserve it.  We plead with God, and display in the most outrageous ways, our allegiance to him, and therein our claim to His grace and mercy above all others. We sacrifice ourselves to the god of money in the hopes that it can shield us from the tragedies of life. And it does what it can, but it cannot change our ultimate destiny.

What then should we do? Should we accept the fact life is suffering and curl into a ball and give up? Or should we get up each day and distract ourselves for a moment with the beauty of the sun, and revel for another moment in the kind word or actions of our loved ones, and pass another moment laughing at the humor of life? I propose we do just these. But let us not do it on each other’s backs.

Let us, to the extent that we can, be mindful of the pain we inflict on others and understand that we hurt ourselves in the process so that if even by that rationale, we can try to avoid behaviors that hurt each other. Let us remember that whether we are the perpetrator of pain or the victim, we cannot escape the fate of life. That no amount of intelligence or beauty or likeness to the dominant group, can save us from the reality that life is suffering and our lives are, indiscriminately, the stages through which we play out the beauty and the pain inherent in it.

God Pt. 3: She Runs Away

When I say Faith is a slippery bitch, I'm not kidding you. She just doesn't give a fuck. She flits about; beautiful...fucking perfect, and we reach for her. She lets us hold on to her for just a little bit, but she's no ride or die. Things get hard and all we see is her in the distance, floating away. Those of us who are strongly connected to God, fight for her. We understand she is our connection to him. We can't hate her because she knows not what she does. She is just being her.

It helps a little that God infused us before he shuttled us out into Life. He almost opened our mouths and made us guzzle it. But he did that because he knew that Faith depletes. Just like that second Law of Thermodynamics that says things tend to atrophy. So too there is the apparently undiscovered law that Faith tends to slip away.

Like the school-child of my prior post, most of us who want to abide by Mother's rules and feel comforted by the security of Mother's assurances, must also have Faith in what Mother has told us. If Mother says we are going to be ok and we don't believe that then how far into the day do you think we will get before we begin to think and act like we are on our own - feeling either anger, fear or bitterness at the realization that Mother has abandoned us in this unforgiving and unpredictable place? It wouldn't be long I assure you. And the length of time before we begin to make up our own rules will depend on how fear-inducing the day is. Why? Faith inoculates us from the pathology of fear. Without it we are fodder for the natural slithering, hissing knaves of this world, one of which, is fear

If Billy the bully starts coming for us at 10am, if his taunts and shoves start sending our heart rates through the roof and our stomachs start burning from a release of adrenaline that make us either want to run and hide or kick him in the nuts, then nothing will keep us from losing it but the faith that, as Mother said, we will be ok.

Unfortunately Faith isn't loyal. She doesn't need you and she knows it. She knows even that you need her. She knows she is your connection to the Divine. She know she has the upper hand. She demands a certain environment in order to remain with you. She likes the easy life. Oh how easy it is to be faithful when the road is smooth and shoots out straight before you. Oh how easy it is to be faithful when the sun shines sweetly and the clouds pucker in a pillow of whiteness against a blue-blue sky.

But let tragedy, a characteristic of life, knock us to the ground, and any number of variables conspire to keep us there, and soon, to our dismay, she'll start to slip away.She may wisp away with the night air or flitter in and out of our lives for awhile. And with her beauty she steals our immunity from the debilitating fear that is a part of life. However exasperating Faith is, or rather her propensity to slip through the cracks at our doors, she is essentially, the God in us. Despite her elusive ways, she remains important and, therein, blameless and perfect because she just happens to be the Mother (and source) of the other important off-shoot of the Divine: Hope.

Ah Hope!

Like a breath of fresh air in a dank room. Like a cool running river on a sweltering day. Hope is pure, unassuming, purposeful, and entirely earthbound.
Hope the driver. The propeller. Our wings. Our superpower. If you ever wanted to be Superwoman or Batman but thought you had no superpower you were wrong.
It's hope.
We are untouchable - unstoppable even -  in hope. In hope we can out-wait the most patient opponent. Is patience not the evidence of hope? Out-hope your opponent and you can outdo him on any frontier. Remember that story the Tortoise and the Hare? Let me tell you what one likely had over the other: An immense amount of hope.

So what is this relationship between Faith and Hope and how does it connect us to God?
Let me break it down for you as simple as I can: Faith is our connection to God and Hope is our connection to Life.  Hope writhes itself out the loins of Faith and once it comes out, like a ribbon, it lays a path before us and sells us on it. Essentially it makes us want whatever is at the end of that path.

And so we set out on this journey called Life. Not knowing what we don't know;  filled to the brim with Faith -  oblivious to  the fact it is leaking out the back of us at some rate per second, holding on to our ribbon of hope, as innocent and purposeful and color-coordinated, as that schoolboy on the first day of school.

God Pt. 2 Mother

You ever witnessed a mother (or father) sending her kid off on the first day of kindergarten? His (the kid's of course) hair is perfectly combed and laid down, his face is so smooth from having been wiped at so many times, its almost puffy from irritation. His clothes are smooth and maybe color coordinated to his book bag or his shoes.

She may be teary-eyed or not. But without fail she places his bag on his back, equipped with everything she imagines he needs for the day. His lunch with all the four food groups, are somewhere in that bag. Pencils, something to write on, are in the bag. Perhaps a note for the teacher, but certainly a note with his address, the phone number to reach his mother and any other important information about him, will be in the bag. Mother will also have told the teacher what his needs are.
She may have had him repeat back to her certain information to make sure he knows it. She has told him that he doesn't need to be afraid of anything. That though she is not there, can't inhabit that space with him - that she will know everything important that goes on and that she will handle it. She has told him that everything he needs is in the bag and if it is not in the bag then he can do without it. She kisses him and hugs him and reminds him how much she loves him. She tells him not to forget all she taught him, including her love for him and the fact he is going to be ok.

Of course as soon as he enters his classroom, he likely forgets it all. I mean he is only 4 after all. He gets so engrossed in his surroundings - a mixture of anxiety, excitement or apprehension, perhaps fear and the pressure of expectations to perform though he has no idea what or how, heightens his pulse rate and causes his nerves to vibrate.

His reaction totally depends on his personality. He may descend into tears, absolutely overwhelmed and just wanting to be with mother again. Or he may immerse himself in the moment, determined to fit into the group and to follow along. He may sit on the outskirts, skeptically watching all the goings-on, unsure of whether to jump in or run for the door. He may become so focused on his nerves and pulse that he stops thinking all together - flitting about impulsively, unable to self-soothe. Whatever he does - he becomes lost in the moment. He remembers mother. He remembers she had some advice for him, some assurances, but in the haze of the moment, he can barely remember what.

And so is God's relationship with us. Like a child sent out from his Mother into the world, he sent us out. Like a mother who wrote the notes of important information and placed it in here child's bag, he wrote important information on our hearts. Like a mother assuring her child that he has everything he needs to make it through the day and that anything he does not have, he does not need, so too God whispered his assurances to us.

Now imagine that Mother has multiple children, and each child she sends out for his first day of school gets a note with different information on it. Gets different words whispered in his ear to assure him, based on what she knows he needs to hear to get him through the day. So too God tailors his assurances to us. He sent us out into a physical world he does not inhabit. He wrote all the important information on our hearts. He made us promise to remember that they are there. That we will read them from time to time and that we will abide by them.

But just like Mother, He also knows we will not. He knows once we are in this physical world we will forget. He knows we will become lost as to what to do or too engrossed in the life around us to remember. He knows we will look at Betty, our classmates' lunch, and wonder why we didn't get something as delicious-looking as she did. Why we got what we got instead. He knows bullies will hurt us on the playground. He knows we may come back home with a bloody nose, or hurt feelings. So just like Mother, He sends us out with Hope. Hope that we will remember. Hope that we will do the right thing when the moment calls for it. And hope that even if we don't do it the first time, or the second, or the third, that one day, we will do the right thing. Hope that we will believe that although he is not inhabiting this space with us, that we are ok. That he has already put that into place.

Essentially, then, hope for our Faith.

The second thing that God prepares himself with, is the intent to forgive. Because like Mother (or Father), he knows we will "mess up." He has already decided that he will forgive us. Because he knows it will take time for us to do the right thing. He knows this is a process of learning for us and with that, he is patient.
And now that we're done with that...OK Faith, you elusive bitch...I'm coming for you....

God Pt.1

Somebody asked me who God is. I wasn't sure how to answer that question. I mean how the hell would I know? I'm in this shit with y'all. As clueless as everybody. Why would I be able to provide some insight no one else thought of.  They must have just been asking my opinion.
I mean I don't have some secret access to God. Certainly not any more than anyone else.
But it got me thinking about it. And  stumbling upon that Death and Dying book by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross got me wondering even more. I moreso began to wonder why we are here. Clearly we don't know what the hell we are doing here? Doesn't it sometimes feel like you went to bed one night, quite comfortably in the security of your home, fell into a sweet dream and woke up in the middle of the desert in some other country you can't even identify? Like why the fuck am I here? How did I get here? What the hell is going on? And before you can even make sense of what the hell happened, people just start talking to you and shit. Asking you why you haven't done this or said that. Imposing their expectations on you. Kicking and pushing you when you sit there, still bewildered, still confused, because they're frustrated you're in their way. They have somewhere important to go after all. And there you are, not knowing what the fuck is going on. Getting in their way.
So you get up, and before you can get kicked and pushed some more. You just start moving. You don't even know where the fuck you are going. You just start going in the direction of the crowd because at least that way you won't get stomped on and kicked anymore. And people won't yell at you to get the fuck out of their way.

You hope that as you stumble along, it will come to you. You know? The epiphany of what the hell is going on? The epiphany of where the fuck you are going and why? The epiphany of why you are here. And better yet, how to find your way back to your warm bed. Except now you can't remember shit about where you were before. Because before you were so comfortable you never bothered to notice where you were. You were so NOT wanting anything. Not scared or anxious that you never bothered yourself with finding out where you were and how to find it on a map. You never imagined you would get lost. Now here you are.

All you can do is pretend that you know what you are doing and where you are going. And then to your amazement and confusion, maybe because you seem to have a purpose in your movements, people are following you. Kids are following you. Their eyes are wide with hope and wonder and fear. They too have no idea what is going on. But if you help them, they're going to pretend, just like you. Now you're trying desperately to remember.
And maybe you even stop and yell to the crowd like, "Can you help me? I'm lost. I don't know where I am or where I'm going?" But they look at you like you are crazy. Then their dismay quickly turns to impatience and anger. Someone yells back to shut up and keep it moving. Someone complains you are blocking their view, blocking their path. Maybe you fight - insisting this is not where you belong. Maybe you stand still hoping it will come to you - what you are supposed to do. 

Maybe you freak out and scream and fight. But the more you do that, the more you are dismissed as just an annoying idiot in everyone's way. You soon learn that no one cares. Mostly because they don't know what you are talking about. The worst part is the memory you had of your cozy bed and the events before this, before now - is fading fast. In fact at this point it seems more like a feeling, an instinct, than an actual memory.
With your memory failing you you begin to doubt you were ever anywhere else. You also get used to moving along. You get used to the purposeful faces you see around you. You get used to the flashes of shared confusion, dismay and fear you see on their faces. You empathize because you hide those same fears and confusion. You toughen up in the process.
You no longer bother to scream and yell and cry because no one cares. Because even those who care don't understand what you are talking about. And now you are not even sure you understand what you talking about. This vague feeling. This second sense, if you will. That something isn't right. That you knew something before you knew this. That you came from somewhere you can't remember. It doesn't leave you. But you bury it. You become engrossed, entangled in the here and now and it's not long before you can't imagine it any other way. This is where you belong, you tell yourself. And this, my dear - is Life.