Flashbacks
I remember now. Emmanuel is one of the entities I was specifically warned against by name.
The memory took days to surface. I'm thinking it would be 1985 or 1986, either my year of hell when I was fourteen or just before it. Lying in bed hearing my parents' voices next door, trying not to hear but unable to block it out entirely. Mum reading some book or other, raising various objections, Dad fearful and not wanting to talk about such things. The Emmanuel story particularly had the makings of most of my nightmares: the idea of contacting an entity which could 'sound so right' but 'be wrong' left me feeling groundless, without any way of judging reality. I remember knowing that the first contact with this 'deceiving angel' was made through Transcendental Meditation; that left me with a terror of TM and of any other kind of meditative practice, including merely sitting in the quietness, even the words 'inner peace'.
And that the name Emmanuel is of course one of the names for Christ; that scared me sideways for a year. Because if you can't trust a voice which uses Christ's name and says the things Christ says... what can you trust?
I'm trying to recall what the more substantive complaints against Emmanuel were. (Also interestingly, I thought this memory had to have been around 1985/86 - but the first Emmanuel's Book didn't come out until 1987. Am I misremembering the year?)
Also I note the interesting reader response about Emmanuel's attitude to homosexuality, which does not appear to be at all a blanket endorsement. This seems very similar to the comments in the Ur-Text of A Course In Miracles which state that homosexuality is always an error based on a misperception of the other (while heterosexual relationships are only sometimes/often that). This makes me immediately feel a lot safer about Emmanuel, because gender as a basic cosmic principle (as in Walter Russell) rather than a socially constructed and malleable thing is one of those core intuitions I feel is very important.
I think the two complaints my mother had, other than TM being involved, is that the Emmanuel entity did not identify itself as or use the name Jesus, and that it mentioned reincarnation. I'm not sure if the Timothy Leary links through Ram Dass were as much of a problem.
The reincarnation thing is still one of the aspects of Emmanuel versus ACIM that I find offputting (but it does show up in other sources I'm more comfortable with, like Stephen). My mother certainly did believe in the preexistence of the soul, if not reincarnation as usually described. Stephen (and I think Zodiac) suggests that there's something more complicated going on with 'reincarnation' that's more akin to a kind of holographic clustering than a linear sequence. Whether any of these ideas are flatly incompatible with orthodox Christian views of the resurrection (and whether that in itself is a critical enough theological matter to outright reject an entity talking about love and forgiveness) is perhaps still open to examination.
Tired
I'm tired. Bone-deep, soul-tired. It's been creeping for over a year. I have a week off work in the hope I can recharge. But it's not really like a holiday because I still have commitments I can't walk away from. Or have chosen not to let drop in a flaming heap. I guess it all comes down to personal choice, but it still sure feels like I'm boxed in.
Reading New Age books doesn't always help, either. There are ones that resonate with me, and there are ones that... don't. Sometimes one will seem okay, will say things I largely agree with, but still give me the screaming yeemies - I mean the deep, oh-god-I'm-really-going-to-hell-for-sure-now kind of spiritual terror that I don't really know how to convey to people who haven't grown up in a fundamentalist household. I really don't understand how the heck this works, and I'm not entirely willing to chalk it all down to Those Nasty Fundamentalists, because when it comes down to it, I actually do believe there *are* such things as fundamentals of the faith, non-negotiables, I don't actually view the word 'Conservative' as an insult, and this sort of belief puts me offside with rather a lot of New Age spiritual guides and teachers, as well as maybe 98% of political activists.
The latest book that gave me the heebie-jeebies was 'Emmanuel's Book II: The Choice for Love'. The weird thing is, that I actually do agree with most of what 'Emmanuel' says. Most of it. And yet...
The New Age idea that scares me the most is that 'there is no external morality as such, anything you do is right if you do it out of love/compassion. When it comes to sex, sleep with whoever you want, break up when you want, it all helps you advance. Abortion/euthanasia is fine if you mean well. Everyone chooses their own path.' While this is quite probably true... as far as it goes... and quite possibly Christian... as far as it goes... (after all, Christ did hang out with 'publicans and sinners', defended prostitutes, overruled the morality systems of his day)... it grates with me to the point of inducing a feeling of intense physical illness, because there's an instinct deep in me that shouts, 'But there *is* big-M Morality, there *is* big-T Truth, it is *not* all subjective, the old-school Jewish attitudes towards, eg, sexuality and euthanasia are more basically correct than the modern liberal consensus of 'anything freely chosen by consenting adults is intrinsically moral', and even if I can't figure out how or if this weird old idea applies to other people, it still seems very important to me that I integrate morality into my life, and there are things that I do not want to do even if supposedly and allegedly I am free to do them - and I believe by making this choice I am doing something more than merely exercising personal taste, nor am I being a knee-jerk reactionary blindly opposing the cosmic forces of progress and light'.
This instinct seems to put me in a very lonely position, because quite frankly I'm out of step with both conservative Christianity and consensus pop-spiritual culture on a lot of social issues, and I'm not sure how I'm ever going to reconcile such opposing forces so that my head stops exploding and my heart stops breaking. There is a deep psychic pain in me from this out-of-step-ness that I've almost got used to being there, but hurts like heck when I stop to think about it. And yet I'd much rather it be there, because it feels to me like it's representing something important that should not be forgotten. And it feels like somehow I'm carrying it mostly alone, and I don't understand why.
And I wonder why I feel tired so much.
As a sort of hair-of-the-dog antidote, I read some Frances Bird, who seems to have been doing automatic writing around World War I, as part of a cluster of similar writers (mostly women, apparently). I generally seem to have had the best experiences reading material from this era, as it seems to be more aligned with my Christian intuitions, and puts emphasis on the idea of self-discipline as well as that of freedom. There's also a kind of, for want of a better word, solidity, a sort of intellectual and religious rigour, to both the writing and the thought-forms from this older stuff that I don't really get from a lot of the post-WW2 material. A sense of God's role as a real Father and Creator, separate from us and transcendent, in a way that's not present in much of the later stuff, which tends to major on interconnection, immanence and 'we're all God really', even though it's friendly and happy enough.
(I find it interesting that Frances Bird is almost invisible on the interwebs. Possibly it's because although she seems to have written in the pre-copyright era, the books I've seen were republished in the 1980s, and so will still be locked up for a while.)
By comparison, I tried glancing at Neale Donald Walsch's 'Conversations With God', not for the first time, and try as I might, I just couldn't stomach it. Maybe it's the record of a genuine personal spiritual experience, but as channelled material, it just seems incredibly... shallow. And very trite and pop-spiritual in its teaching. I suppose people have got something out of it, but it really doesn't do anything for me.
Bohm and ACIM: Holiness and Wholeness
I'm reading David Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate Order and it's interesting the very strong parallels between his thought and the ideas in A Course In Miracles (and in Mary Baker Eddy). He is very concerned with fragmentation versus unity - ACIM is concerned with separation versus unity (and goes so far as to identify this with the Christian doctrine of sin).
Some quotes from the first chapter:
It is instructive to consider that the word 'health' in English is based on an Anglo-Saxon word 'hale' meaning 'whole': that is to say, to be healthy is to be whole, which is, I think, roughly the equivalent of the Hebrew 'shalem'. Likewise, the English root 'holy' is based on the same root as 'whole'. All of this indicates that man has sensed always that wholeness or integrity is an absolute necessity to make life worth living. Yet, over the ages, he has generally lived in fragmentation.
...
It is important to give some emphasis to this point. For example, some might say: 'Fragmentation of cities, religions, political systems, conflict in the form of wars, general violence, fratricide, etc. are the reality. Wholeness is only an ideal, toward which we should perhaps strive.' But this is not what is being said here. Rather, what should be said is that wholeness is what is real, and that fragmentation is the response of the whole to man's action., guided by illusory perception, which is shaped by fragmentary thought. In other words, it is just because reality is whole that man, with his fragmentary approach, will inevitably be answered with a correspondingly fragmentary response. So what is needed is for man to give attention to his habit of fragmentary thought, to be aware of it, and thus bring it to an end. Man's approach to reality then may be whole, and so the whole response will be whole.
...
As has been indicated, however, men who are guided by such a fragmentary self-world view cannot, in the long run, do other than to try in their actions to break themselves and the world into pieces, corresponding to their general mode of thinking. Since, in the first instance, fragmentation is an attempt to extend the analysis of the world into separate parts beyond the domain in which to do this is appropriate, it is in effect an attempt to divide what is really indivisible. In the next step such an attempt will lead us also to attempt to unite what is not really unitable. This can be seen especially clearly in terms of groupings of people in society (political, economic, religious, etc.). The very act of forming such a group tends to create a sense of division and separation of the members from the rest of the world, but, because the members are really connected with the whole, this cannot work. Each member has in fact a somewhat different connection, and sooner or later this shows itself as a difference between him and other members of the group. Whenever men divide themselves from the whole of society and attempt to unite by identification within a group, it is clear that the group must eventually develop internal strife, which leads to a breakdown of its unity...
...
So fragmentation is in essence a confusion around the question of difference and sameness (or one-ness), but the clear perception of these categories is necessary in every phase of life. To be confused about what is different and what is not, is to be confused about everything.
I'd love to drop in some corresponding quotes from ACIM and Science & Health to point out the parallels, but don't have time right now. Suffice to say that the ideas which leap out at me here are 'the world is really one, but at a level beyond what we can sense', 'illusory perception of fragmentation' being (probably) the same thing as 'sin', and very strongly, the idea that there is only really one choice or classification to be made in this world: between things that are different and things that are the same, and we can't easily see this at all (possibly not at all without external help, which, however, is readily available as soon as we relax and look away from our immediate surroundings).
(ACIM/Eddy, I think, would follow this up by saying: everything that is created by God is holy and pure and one; everything created by sin or the ego is false and illusory and complicated and divided against itself; but somehow the difference between the two is not the line between mind and matter, but between two ways of seeing our world. If we choose Christ's vision, we see God in all things; if we choose our own vision, we see God nowhere.)
A Mission Statement, Of Sorts
Who are you? -- The Vorlons' Question
What do you want? -- The Shadows' Question
-- Babylon 5
I move through the day in the rhythms that I've known.
I've got this crazy dream of stripping down to truth and bone.
-- Heather Nova
When trying to write honestly about one's personal views on science, politics, religion, philosophy - but especially those last two - it is hard to avoid offending people. I have insulted a friend in the last week and that hurts. Another friend asked me in some bafflement 'you write about a lot of different things, but where are you going with it; how does it all tie together?' I was also baffled, since to me it's perfectly obvious: I write about who I am and what is going through my mind, and if what is in my mind doesn't eventually fit together, then I will explode or go insane; this weblog is my attempt to document part of the long process of slowly crawling toward sanity. And I try to avoid offending people, but I'm not always sure how to do that.
It's probably time that I tried to explain what I'm trying to do on this weblog, at least the general theme of my interests. There is a point to what I write about, of sorts. Less of a point perhaps, and more of a gently tapered ellipsoid curve. A kind of rounded blob you can wave in an overall direction.
There are several categories of posts here. Ones which begin with 'Dreamlog:' are probably the most confusing. They are exactly what they seem, which is documentation of actual dreams I have, or at least the fragments I can recall. Mostly verbatim, sometimes edited for PG rating. I write them for two reasons, one as a sort of vague spiritual discipline, two because it seems like good practice for creative writing and I've been in a creative writing block for about seven years, and three, because dreams amuse me and Slow Wave is one of my favourite webcomics. Possibly they don't really belong on the front page, but so far I haven't hacked WordPress to do anything else.
Some posts are marked 'Poem:' - these are original poems, generally ones I have written previously and have had up on the web elsewhere. I'm slowly migrating them over to WordPress, and when I do I tend to backdate them to a (usually fictitious) date in the year in which they were written, so they don't spam the front page.
One of my narrow interests is Interactive Fiction, a retro-hobbyist gaming genre with roots in the old-school days of 1970s Artificial Intelligence research. It's an interest increasingly honoured in the breach rather than the observance, but a frightening amount of my social life revolves around friendship with fans of this genre, and of board and videogame designed in general.
For the rest, they are generally responses to media or materials I have been reading lately, or to current incidents. I read insane amounts of the Web; I play video games; I watch movies and very occasionally TV; often things jump out of pop culture at me. These posts may be serious or unserious. I don't always make that much distinction.
I also read books of a spiritual or philosophical character, following my own personal reading track which mostly consists of following up ideas that jump up and wave at me saying RESEARCH THIS. I try to write reasonably serious posts about these, because what I am trying to piece together in this research feels something like a spiritual/philosophical archeology project: tracing the course of a cluster of interesting ideas which have emerged over about the last 150 years, and which center (for me) around a version of Christianity that I find appealing.
But although I say Christianity - and I consider myself to be a Christian of a fairly orthodox stripe - I am finding overlap with some of these core ideas in various religions, sciences, and political streams of thought. I very explicitly don't make a distinction between groups or disciplines: I believe fragmentation and the building of artificial walls between disciplines and organisations to be a curse, and I don't believe any human being needs any kind of formal theological or academic licence to practice study and free thinking. I go where I see the ideas going, or I try to. Sometimes I get scared and have to back off for a bit. Sometimes I don't have the academic skills to follow the path of an idea completely. But I'm trying for an overall, birds-eye, gonzo-philosophy approach here. I feel sometimes like I'm jumping from idea to idea like a frog across lilypads; if I stop too long I'll bog down. The important part is to get an outline of connections where they seem to have been hidden, and try to get what I think are maybe-useful insights down in text before I forget them.
If you want some words to describe my main themes, I could give you these: truth, peace, unity, love, Christ.
The search for truth is always important to me. I am possibly a little on the Aspergers spectrum there. I want to know and speak the true idea more than anything; sometimes this means I don't bite my lip when I should, and people get hurt. I don't always notice this.
The search for peace started in 2001. I got involved in the peace movement; it was the most fractious bunch of misfits ever in one room together; we just barely avoided fistfights. I loved it, and it nearly killed me. And I realised I had to seriously reexamine all my ideas, political and spiritual and scientific, to get a grasp on what I wanted to do with my life.
Unity is a true idea (possibly the One True Idea) which I have fought for a long time, but find myself drawn towards again and again. All things are connected. It is scary to me because a large part of my personal and religious identity has been invested in the idea of separation, holiness-through-withdrawal. But I looked for peace, and peace led me to unity, and unity is leading me to some fairly radical philosophical ideas in domains I had closed off as unscientific and occult. I'm opening those boxes and letting whatever is in, jump out. I'm trusting that everything will eventually fit together, even the bits that don't.
Love is a nice word that has scary consequences - at least for me. In the Christian tradition - or at least in some of the more fundamentalist sects - love is deeply associated with suffering. I'm not sure that that's intentional, but whenever I hear that word I have imagery of crosses, graves, violent death by torture. It is perhaps no concidence that I am single. I want to try to get past this deep fear of the kind of unconditional love described by the Christian faith - but the fact remains that an innocent guy who'd die staked out on Death Row and still love his enemies - and who says 'do what I do' - is deeply, deeply troubling, and if this doesn't bug you, it should.
Christ is a word burned into my brain from my childhood. It means a lot of things to a lot of people. Not all of these people can stand to live on the same planet as each other, let alone enter the same room without wearing explosives. Jews, Muslims, Christians, atheists, Buddhists, we've all heard of Jesus, and some of us (maybe not the Buddhists) are willing to kill each other over that name. But what do the formulas and rituals of the Christian faith actually mean? Is this Christ person... entity... force... thing... something real? If He is, what does that do to science, to religion, to politics?
(I've probably offended a dozen people just in that paragraph alone. See what I mean?)
Why do I call this blog 'Life in the Cultlane'?
Well, for one it's an anagram. For another: I grew up in a church that by most rational standards was a cult. Now I'm opening the doors to exploring philosophies which are also associated with groups which could be called cults. It's where I am, it's my patch, I'm claiming it. The word 'cult' means 'group of worshippers'. It's not irrational to worship, the important thing is what you worship and how well it matches reality. Not all cults are necessarily wrong; not all wrong things are necessarily called cults. We need to investigate with our eyes, our minds and our hearts, find the bits that fit, discard the rest.
Can any good thing come out of Nazareth? Of course. So can a whole lot of bogus messiahs. But that doesn't mean we don't go looking.
Comments are welcomed, though I would prefer that they are on-topic to the post at hand. You will almost certainly disagree with me on a number of subjects. I'm okay with that. If I contradict what you say, I'm not mad at you. I'd like it if you agreed, obviously. But I'm almost certainly wrong on some things and I reserve the right to make my own way to truth.
I generally won't delete comments, though I will point out if I think you're not on-topic. If you post comment spam however - by which I mean obviously automated content-free 'visit my site' messages - you *will* be deleted, rapidly and with extreme prejudice.
IFComp 07!
The 2007 Interactive Fiction Competition is open and the games have been released. I guess I ought to start playing them, with a twinge of regret that yet again I'm not among them. My own stupid bloody fault. I hate implementer's block. Lots of game ideas in my head, nothing that seems to gel. Or not enough time given to the hobby or something.
I walked around the streets tonight and found myself noticing how hard-wired my imagination is for 'heroic' interpretations of images. Which is to say: I walked past a park, saw an otherworldly glow and just had to go see what it was, even though I knew it was a streetlight shining on a cluster of trees next to a climbing frame. But they were Narnia trees, and the light was an eternal flame. Or at least out of the corner of my eyes it was.
I walked past the CityCare truck depot and the lights were on inside: stark blue-white fluorescents, vehicles and oil cans and hoists glowing under glass. And my imagination goes: robot exoskeletons in a five storey high spaceport.
It does this all the time. This, plus my painful sense of reality, is probably why I'm drawn to science fiction as a genre. I can't cope with things just being ordinary, but I need to be able to believe in them.
But an odd thing has been happening to science, since WWII. As technology expanded, the frontiers of science have been shrinking. Up to the 1930s, it seemed like science was all about finding whole new universes of possibility. Since the war, it seems to have been more about finding out - in great detail - what's NOT possible any more. No life on Mars, no life anywhere in the solar system (except maybe some bacteria on Jovian moons), no warp drive, no pocket atomics, no sentient computers. No WWIII, either, which overall is a net win.
That's where I get stuck. Where is there space left to dream? How can we even think, how can we live, without a frontier of some kind? But space isn't it, the ocean isn't it, the Net's just a big blog, and in our cities we're elbow to elbow with people we don't get along with.
If this is it, this is as good as it gets, why am I so dissatisfied?
God Loves You (Better Be Afraid)
This is my (belated) response to Monte Asbury's post that I stumbled on a few weeks back about 'What I Learned From Church That Didn't Ring True'. Since he was kind enough to comment, I figured I better actually write one.
There are many things I have learned from my various church experience that didn't ring true (and are only just starting to kind of gel together into some kind of coherency). The one I've chosen to pick is:
God Loves You (Better Be Afraid)
We don't outright say this, usually. But in a lot of (particularly evangelical and Pentecostal) church preaching and particularly evangelism, we convey this message: God is great and wonderful, he rules the universe, he loves you unconditionally, he has given you everything up to and including eternal life - but actually it's not unconditional, all of God's love is only available to people who reject every good thought about themselves and consider themselves utterly unworthy, broken, miserable failures. It's an Escher-like picture: you're rich, but only if you believe you're poor. You're guaranteed salvation, but only as long as you remain good and scared of Hell. You're a good person just as long as you see yourself as a bad person.
How can anyone reason coherently about a self-contradictory belief statement like this? As soon as you start to get happy, you check yourself and think that you're feeling good about yourself, which is pride, and that means you must be wrong; you start feeling bad about yourself, and then you remind yourself that your humility means that you're in a good place to receive God's uplifting power...
If we start thinking too seriously along these lines, we find ourselves starting to treat God a bit like an abusive parent: he beats us up, but it's for our own good, so we must have deserved it. He smashes the furniture in a drunken rage, so we try harder to paper over the cracks. We smile, we put on our best face, we praise His Name and insist on His justice even as inside we're dying.
Okay to be honest, a paradox like this - 'the last shall be first, those who lose their life shall gain it' - does exist in the Gospels and in a lot of the deepest Christian mystical material. But I think it's a lot simpler than 'God likes playing opposites, so whatever you think of yourself, He thinks the opposite; whatever you want, he wants you to have the opposite'. God loves us, period. And that means God thinks we're good.
I have never had an idea of God as 'a white-bearded old man in the sky'. I don't know who actually has that image; for me, it's so utterly silly that it doesn't even rate a thought. Of course God - the real God, the only kind of God worth thinking about - isn't a human, or any kind of human construct. Existing outside the universe and time, outside thought; how could any old man rise to that?
No, for me the lurking fear of God is that He is an all-powerful cosmic force; something deeper, wider, more fundamental than life. An energy that could completely erase me in the blink of an atom, and wouldn't even notice. Something utterly alien to me, my petty thoughts, my emotions, my physical body; alien to all biological life; a cold, empty eternity indistinguishable from death or a destruction more permanent than death, but with the added twist that He has moral authority on His side; that His judgement is final; that there is no arguing with Him, because even my own innermost heart would condemn me if I tried; a blackness utter and absolutely dark and cold and unforgiving as the vacuum of space. The Thing That Is There, the Cosmic Authority, aloof in mathematical purity, regardless of anything we might think or feel or care about. Sharing nothing whatever in common with us except for the fact of existence, and not even that.
The kind of God that creates Hell not out of any desire to punish, but just merely because The Equations Demand It; The Greatest Good Must Be Served; The Divine Plan Is All-Wise; There Is No Alternative; What Must Be Must Be. Those who do not love Him are erased from existence, quietly and without remorse.
Could I love a God like that? Not really, no; the human instinct is to hide and flee; love is too small a thing to figure in His nature. Could I believe in His existence, believe Him to be Truth Absolute and Eternal, and fear and respect Him (from a safe distance and with proper precautions) like I would geometry, physics, gamma rays? Hell yes.
But that God is not the Christian God.
When I sit down to pray, or contemplate, or meditate, whatever I choose to call it, somewhere in my gut still lives the shadow of that God; the Cosmic Force, abstract and unmoved, stern and terrible, inhuman in resoluteness, the Devouring Fire, the Purifier, the Refiner, the Mind who is Exalted Above All, who uses the word 'love' like a scalpel, calm and dispassionate like a Terminator, who cannot be fought, evaded, bargained with, and whose goal is the destruction of all my small, damp, fragile, messy humanity. The God of Plato, perhaps, or Pythagoras, or of Kabala.
But not the God of Jesus.
Coming to terms with the irreducible love of God - the All-Powerful as smallness, softness, gentleness, quietness - is something altogether different, and emotionally quite hard to process. There is a sense that this God is not fragile - quite the opposite - but something like it, that is hard to describe; smallness is about the only English word to hand. Humility, perhaps? A God who could perhaps easily be overlooked, moved with a breath. But slow and persistent like an ache, returning if we miss Him.
One day I want to get hold of the now out-of-print Exegesis of Philip K Dick, that sprawling pile of random notes from a mad prophet, broken and desolate God-lover, who in the midst of sex and drugs and psychosis and science fiction it seems somehow caught (or was caught by) a glimpse of the same God I know. So far all I've seen are quotes, but ones like this stick in the mind and cause my spirit to say 'Yes!':
One can see from this that that which we kick off to one side of the road, out of the way, which feels the toe of our boot - that may well be our God, albeit unprotesting, only showing pain in his eyes, that old, old pain that he knows so well. I notice, though, that although we kick him off to one side in pain, we do let him toil for us; we accept that. We accept his work, his offerings, his help; but him we kick away. He could reveal himself, but he would then spoil our illusion of a beautiful god. But he doesn't look evil, like Satan; just homely. Unworthy. Also, although he has vast creative and building power, and judgment, he is not clever. He is not a bright god. Often, he is too dumb to know when he's being teased or insulted; it takes physical pain, rather than mere scorn, to register.
Do I fear this God? No. Do I love Him? How could I not? Except... perhaps not so much. It's so easy to pass Him by, flinch and be a little ashamed, ignore Him for that glorious, merciless Machine-God of crystalline perfection, the Almighty Ruler and Judger, Who Lives In Unapproachable Light.
It's hard to let myself admit that the God who I like, not the one that demands worship, is in fact the most real.