Rocking the House
I was out at the Crowded House / Supergroove / Pluto concert this weekend, which was great, except for being way too loud (a few decibels above pain level; my ears stopped hurting after about twenty-four hours). My brother and his wife, having done this a few times before, wore earplugs. For whatever reason I didn't bring any; I think a part of me wanted to experience such a big event (the reforming of Supergroove actually interested me more than the reforming of Neil Finn's band) as directly as possible, disintermediated. For future reference, though: earplugs == comfort.
The first two acts were lit by simple coloured strobes, and then Crowded House got the works: searchlights scanning the crowd, a multilayered backdrop/set that slowly erected itself piece by piece between songs, projected colours and logos over curtains over scultures. And Neil doing a perfectly calibrated mix of his new stuff and the old standards which have dominated NZ airwaves for the last twenty years or more. Ending in the big crowd-pleasing finales of not 'Don't Dream It's Over' and 'You'd Better Be Home Soon'. Words everyone knows and can sing along to, in a wall of sound like sticking your head inside a jet engine for four hours that puts you in your own private universe. (A universe of pain, for me, but I could at least appreciate the thought).
It got me thinking, though. Here's a stadium-sized rock concert, one of the defining acts of the Australian/NZ scene, as big as they get in this city. An arena full of people who are all delighted to be there. Huge amounts of talent, creativity and money thrown at the task of translating inspiration to art, art to performance, performance to technology, technology to emotion. Pretty much a peak of the state of the art of the defining art form of our era; an art form that only became possible fifty or so years ago, after electrical amplification techniques invented for or first applied to political rallies became used for entertainment. And I had a flash of how it must have felt in the early days of rock: this new thing, an electrified guitar; a military-specification sonic crowd control weapon wrested from the hands of authoritarianism and war, and repurposed for individualism, for the search for personal happiness and even love.
How it must have felt in those post-war years, the hopes, the fears about technology and for the new baby-boom generation in their cradles, and the silent generation who had been too young to go to war but were old enough now to see a new way to fight. How magical, spiritual the miracle of electrical amplification and the music it created must have seen, at least to some: almost a new form of worship. The Amp, counterpart to the Bomb. The tool for mental revolution.
How much intelligence, how much sincerity, how much dedication, how much time and money was thrown at rock music, and still is! And how powerful a force it was. And I marvelled, with my head in the jet engine, my ears in pain, thinking: how is it that with all this creative power focused on a point - on creativity, art rather than destruction - how is it that the world is still not saved?
The Beats and the sixties generation experimented, did their best to throw their best and brightest minds against the iron cages of the psychic prison that promised only nuclear war; how they randomised their thoughts with drugs and sex and music only to come up short, fail, burn out, defeated by their own hubris, their own darkness, or the sheer impossibility of the task.
(And even that mythology is a lie; the weapons industrial-science complex spawned creativity like the Internet; the entertainment industry was bleak and dirty and controlling, the more so as obscene amounts of money flowed in; teen rebellion was inspired by middle-aged teachers and slickly marketed as a commercial product from the beginning. There was no golden generation, just a bulge in the demographic curve and devastated international rivals and a trade surplus; there was no clash of cultures, just a change in tastes and marketing strategies.)
But still I thought: here I am, in arguably one of the best rock concerts, the best popular art our culture can create; and I feel nothing, or close to it. I feel a wall of sound, I feel a huge display of raw physics; I see beams of physical light shining out from the tiny distant stage; but somehow I expect more. I expect to see beams of spiritual light, feel a wall of spiritual empathy and emotion. I'm gathered in this place with thousands of my fellow citizens and fans; it is an iconic moment; I expect to feel something in the way of unity, somehow touch the vast oversoul that binds us; but I do not. I feel more alone here in my stadium seat in a crowd than at home typing on the Internet.
Why do I expect a spiritual experience from a rock concert? I don't know. A part of me just does.
And I think about fragments I've read in various prophecies and channelled writings: visions of Heaven, visions of a maybe future: thousands of people gathering in stadium-like enclosures, generating that kind of spiritual power that a rock concert does in raw decibels. Prayer concerts. Maybe without a stage even; maybe without a focal point. Maybe everyone comes in as they are, lift their hearts to the heavens, and invisible pyrotechnics begin.
I think maybe there's a time coming when we won't have the energy or infrastructure to run the huge audio amplification systems that power rock as a genre. But maybe this other kind of concert wouldn't even need that. I picture something like an event running for days, weeks even: people come in, people leave; the stadium remains packed. It's quiet. There's no infrastructure to speak of, no organisation; maybe some kind of skeleton organising committee, but without a huge sound and light rig, what actually is there to organise? Food, medical care maybe (and with a shiver, maybe in that possible tomorrow that's no small thing). Maybe things run themselves, anarcho-syndicalist collective style, like the Seattle '99 spokescouncils. There are no performers; the audience are the show. Everyone comes, brings themselves, their hopes, their fears, their visions, their inner stillness; the hush comes; something settles on the crowd. It's like the opening notes of a familiar guitar solo; but it's silent. Or at least, it's silent out there, in the air, but everyone feels it in here.
And the song begins, the song we heard a million years ago and all forgot until only just now. And maybe it doesn't ever stop.
And the house truly gets rocked.
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.
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.
The Sense of Being Stared At
It's time for some belated reviews.
The Sense of Being Stared At by Rupert Sheldrake is another interesting little piece in the puzzle of religion, spirituality and the paranormal.
Sheldrake has become infamous for his theory of 'morphic resonance' - which I'm not too invested in either way or the other - but what I find particularly interesting about his work is that in investigating paranormal phenomena (particularly telepathy-like occurences) he does not focus only on humans, but also on animals. If his findings are to be believed (and I see no reason why they shouldn't be, if you believe any of this stuff) then animals are at least as good as, and in many cases better than, humans at second sight or sixth sense. And that certainly fits with the pop mythology. It's a cliche in ghost stories that 'the cat/dog reacted strangely'. Oscar the hospice cat is a current example. This raises interesting questions about the nature of consciousness and the soul: like intelligence (or potentially sentience), it doesn't appear to have a hard cut-off point between species, if dogs are able to tell at a distance when their owner is planning to come home. An African Grey parrot featured in the book is apparently able to read its owner's mind.
(This opens all sorts of weird-science ideas to me. Could we use African Grey parrots in space missions, using telepathic instructions? If a parrot is able to access the psi dimension, which presumably means it has a soul, then what about a planaria, or an e. coli? If we either a) get enough computing power to simulate an organism at the atomic level, or b) develop a teleportation technology (remember, we can already destructively 'teleport' whole atoms, preserving quantum state) and get to the point where we can teleport living things, and then want to determine 'does the process of simulation/teleportation destroy the soul' - well then, don't bother waiting until you can send through a human or even a great ape - just run a psi-attuned African Grey through! And see if it behaves the same afterwards.)
One of Sheldrake's experiments involves the power of gaze: he believes that humans and animals have the ability to somehow detect when they are being looked at intently (or rather, I expect, that it is about the detection of the intention itself - the idea that the universe is constructed primarily of intentions rather than objects recurs a lot in the mystics and in the Gospels - the parable of the Widow's Mite, for example). I personally have never noticed that I have any particular ability to attract the attention of people by either looking at them or concentrating on them. In fact I feel like I'm spectacularly under-endowed in that department. But the idea is intriguing and it would be easy to run the fairly simple experiments he describes.
Sheldrake also has a fairly weird-sounding take on how human (and animal) vision works; he feels that (in accordance with ancient belief) it involves the eye sending out 'rays' to the subject, rather than the processing of incoming photons. This makes absolutely no physical sense, but it does have a certain kind of logic if you view the universe as a computational or simulation system, where the value of a quantity is not calculated until there is a request for it: in fact, this is exactly how the CGI methodology of 'ray tracing' works. I am not sure if this is precisely how Sheldrake is arguing, but I can see how (if attention is a real thing, at an underlying 'spiritual' layer to the universe) focusing one's mind on a distant object - by means of 'paying attention' to the signal path of a physical receptor - could send some kind of underlying 'probe' back up the line of sight to the object being studied. So even 'passive' sensors could leave an 'active' trace on the universe at a subliminal level. Which is a pretty freaky thing when you think about it. It's the sort of weird aliveness we take for granted in computing - that merely by interrogating an object you can alert it of your presence - but we moderns tend to live under the reassuring assumption that the outside, physical universe is 'dead' and doesn't notice when we pay attention to it, until we start bringing out the sharp sticks to stand well back and poke it with.
This 'deadness' is of course what religion has always argued strongly against - religion is all about the universe being alive, and is why the existence of religion seems so weird and unnatural to the modern mind - but intellectually subscribing to that idea is one thing. Becoming terrifyingly aware that everything you do, in fact every thought you think generates real and literal interactions with the cosmos - not limited in any way by any of the usual physical quantities like space, time, energy or matter - is something else. What does that awareness do to science? If our very breath, less than a breath, stirs worlds - how can we move, how can we possibly have any space to exist as separate beings? Science is all about making sure our sticks are sufficiently sharp and sufficiently long and then poking at will - if it turns out that you can't make a stick long enough to isolate you from karma, how can we move without hurting ourselves?
Or put a little more bluntly: If we can't vivisect a cat without scarring our soul, how do we develop new eco-friendly detergents to replace the ones that kill fish?
(The answer would seem to be: we're not separate beings and it is impossible for us to be. And that an acceptance of deep interaction, wired-in at the lowest levels of physics and sub-meta-physics, does us no harm. And that we have to accept somehow that there exists something more than karma, more than cause-and-effect blowback: forgiveness, release, repentance, centering, whatever it is that allows us to somehow realign ourselves with the True World. And that somehow there are two kinds of science, knowledge of the outer world, and knowledge of our inner selves, and our greatest ignorance seems to lie in the second.)
The Ashes of Pentecost
I sometimes tell people that the church in which I was born, and lived until I was seventeen, was at the time a 'cult'. The label is perhaps half true. Which is to say (to pick a random highly-rated Google link), we met most of the signs listed in the www.ex-cult.org indicators list: Leader claimed special exclusive ministry, we believed we were the only true church, we used emotional intimidation including total shunning to keep members from leaving, (we had 'free-will love offerings' rather than compulsory tithing), we had little time to ourselves (seven meetings a week plus Saturday afternoon labour), massive control over private lives, all criticism seen as rebellion, 'informing' on dissidents encouraged through an informal secret reporting system. Yep, we were objectively pretty much up there.
(A miracle occurred later, as these things do, and the church restructured itself; it's now a fairly mainstream Pentecostal/Charismatic denomination).
However. The word 'cult' only carries half of a meaning. What we actually were was a splinter cell of a substream of the Pentecostal church movement in New Zealand: an isolated fragment of a divided subculture within a subculture, that had become frozen in time around the 1940s while even the fundamentalist Christian world moved on. And the story of that movement, what happened to it, and how we came to be who we were, is one that has been largely untold but one that grows increasingly fascinating to me the older I get.
My Pentecostal heritage - and I have not completely rejected it, nor do I plan to, because part of it was good - is the reason why I am interested in anomalous cognition and psychic powers, because the Pentecostal faith was built solidly on the existence of such things. The reason why new denominations formed in the first place was because phenomena were occurring that were beyond ordinary comprehension, and those who chose to practice those strange powers found themselves outside of the boundaries of discreet, safely materialist 'Churchianity'. Naturally they flocked together to escape persecution and create their own identity; unsurprisingly, they found or created strong leaders who would champion their cause while reassuring them that all was still well in God's heaven; sadly, these leaders very often abused their trust, manipulated their flock, and fought among themselves like trapped sewer rats.
In New Zealand, it seems, the very smallness of our country combined with the wideness of our ocean and our many competing overseas influences to bring us a Pentecostal Christian subculture that was riven with discord and factions within a few years from when it began, in 1922. Healing began to come in 1975, but even now in 2007 the church landscape remains fractured. But denominational walls now seem to be dissolving even as new battle lines are drawn.
My main source for history so far has been the excellent 1999 book by Brett Knowles, 'New Life: A History of the New Life Churches of New Zealand 1942-1979'. As one might expect, it focuses mainly on the New Life denomination, but the story around the edges gives some of the shape of what must have happened elsewhere.
There had been of course spiritual movements, awakenings, revivals for centuries. The period from 1850 on had been filled with Spiritualism, faith healers, millennial apocalyptic movements such as the Adventists. But the movement that became called 'Pentecost' is generally acknowledged to have begun on New Years Day 1901, at Bethel Bible College in Topeka, Kansas. The phenomenon of glossolalia, or 'speaking in tongues' started there. The second major event on the American axis was the Azusa Street Revival which began in 1906.
Meanwhile, it seems the 1904-1905 Welsh Revival had influenced the Anglican vicar Alexander Boddy, who travelled to Azusa after visiting Norwegian Methodist pastor T B Barrett. A global network had rapidly sprung up leading to at least two (American and British) streams of this new, and yet faction-ridden, religious movement.
The Yorkshire Methodist layman Smith Wigglesworth, a plumber by trade, visited Boddy in 1907 and began a hugely successful public career as a healing evangelist. It was Wigglesworth's visit to New Zealand in 1922-1924 which led to the creation of a Pentecostal denomination - the Pentecostal Church of New Zealand - and the chain of events which led to my particular faith.
The PCNZ, similarly to other groups elsewhere, seems to have had a huge capacity for splintering. The Apostolic Church (affiliated with the Welsh revival) was the first to defect, followed by the Assemblies of God (an offshoot from Azusa) in 1926, a large unnamed group in 1949 influenced by both Seattle's Bethel Temple and the Latter Rain movement - which was later to become the hugely influential Indigenous Pentecostal or New Life Churches - the Christian Revival Crusade at some point, and finally the remains of the PCNZ in 1953 affiliated with the Elim denomination (also affiliated with Wales). Each of these groups appears to have bitterly fought with the others for converts and over points of doctrine, but more often, over issues of church government: specifically, the ongoing tension between centralised control and decentralised individualism. These rifts were to continue through the Billy Graham and 'Full Gospel' evangelism crusades of the 1950s and 1960s, until the Charismatic movement of the late '60s and early '70s led to the legitimising of Pentecostal phenomena within established church structures and a new rapprochement within the warring Pentecostal world.
Within this rather claustrophobic New Zealand religious scene, the founders of my particular sect were some of the more extreme. At least one of them bought into the controversial British Israel race-doctrine (though not so controversial as all that - William Massey, Prime Minister of New Zealand, held to it), and it seems that they must have dropped out of fellowship with most of the other branches by at least the 1940s, possibly as early as the 1930s. This period was not much talked about, except in vague and veiled reminiscence as a time of lost glory. Our particular church was built after WW2, brick by second-hand brick, with donated labour from members. It still stands today, remodelled and updated but on the outside still... a monument to something. Faith, pride, sacrifice, hubris, warning, redemption, sanctuary: all of the above?
It is easy to empathise with multiple sides, reading accounts of these emotionally jarring times. By all accounts, the early Pentecostal pioneers had a hard row to hoe. They - most of them - were hot-blood battlers, outcast from the mainstream denominations for practising what they believed was the original, pure form of the Christian faith, 'with signs and wonders following'. And many of them did appear to work genuine miracles, sometimes easily and sometimes at great personal cost. Though it is hard to escape the feeling that many of those preachers also brought opposition upon themselves, in fact relished it. The Pentecostal preachers who quietly and wisely sidestepped division appear thinner on the page than those who launched 'great moves of God' amid great splash and fury.
It is harder, looking back, to separate the pain from the dream.
WILFCTDRTAWIHBLL
A quick link before I go to bed. I've not been reading the post-evangelical / emerging-church blogosphere much lately (it's too big) but somehow stumbled on this:
What I Learned From Church That Didn't Ring True And What I Have Been Learning Lately
Yes, yes and yes. Not that I've been invited to 'synchro-blog', whatever that means, but I'd like to add my own notes to this particular pile shortly.
Project Love
The reason why I am interested in nonviolence is because it appears to be intertwined, at a deep sub-molecular level, with spirituality, and particularly the pragmatic, results-oriented kind of spirituality which manifests itself in literal miracles. It's annoying and awkward but there you are. Here's Agnes Sanford in 1947 in 'The Healing Light':
He had seen, for the first time, the working of that force that will eventually take the place of bombs and shells upon this earth. For as soon as enough people are able to use the power of love in such a way as to create thereby a perfect self-defense, wars will be outmoded. When one can obtain justice and right and friendly cooperation without money and without price, without bloodshed and without pain, it will no longer be sensible to fight for them.
"If an armed burglar broke into your house with intent to kill," the old question goes, "What would you do? Fight him, or lie still and let him kill your wife or child?"
Silly old question. One would do neither. One would project into the burglar's mind the love of God, by seeing him as a child of God and asking God to bless him. And if one were strong enough in faith and love, the burglar's mind would change. He would leave the family unharmed and go away.
"But hardly anyone can do that!" the answer comes.
Obviously. For if we could, we would not need to resort to war in order to defend ourselves. And we had best learn to do it, for until we do, we must suffer. Until we know the method of love and brotherhood, our choice of weak non-resistance or self-defense is only a choice of evils.
Project love. How do we go about doing that? How do you even begin to start training? What's the equivalent of basic martial arts? Are there dojos you can learn this stuff? Courses where one can practice? And what kind of politics - or metapolitics perhaps - does something like this translate into? It doesn't really map onto either Marxism, religious conservatism, libertarianism, or even law-abiding liberalism. I feel naked and alone pretty much everywhere on the political spectrum - about the only party anywhere that has nonviolence as a principle are the Greens, and some varieties of anarchist.
(This is in the context, mind you, of a practical how-to manual for literal physical healing using the power of your mind, not an abstract philosophical text. The existence of anomalous powers for healing is taken as a given.)