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Reality, God, and Boundaries

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The “judgement of god” is to me a literary construct, thus amenable to a personal application rather to a rhetorical one.  In my youth, as a fledgling Baptist preacher, it was sermon fodder, stem-winder material, for an “hell-fire-and-damnation” sermon in which I could hold forth about the impending judgement of God.  I put myself in this position because this “judgement of God” was heavily upon myself and one of the most effective ways of dealing with the gut-wrenching exposure of this experience is to attempt to deflect it to other people.

For, from a literary and more personal perspective, this “judgement of God” is when reality sets in and stings us with the realization that, “Uh oh!  I’ve been found out!”  In that moment we are naked and vulnerable to varying degrees and it is an humbling moment.  It is a moment when the ego harnesses all of its resources and almost always it will aim these resources in the form of projection upon someone else.  That is the reason that my fragile teen-age identity needed the position of “Baptist preacher.”

Biblical terminology like this “judgement” and even “God” are terms I’m a bit hesitant to use; for the Bible and its terminology are highly suspicious given the history of Christianity and its present day expression.  However, now having the ability to de-contextualize the Bible from how it was presented to me in my youth as well as “de-contextualizing” even myself from my youth, I have a deeper appreciation for it as Holy Writ.  Yes, I would even deign to describe it as the work of the “Holy Spirit” expressed through ancient humankind and if approached with a degree of humility has value for this present moment.

With this in mind, this “Reality Check” is upon us and “heavily” or “grievously” so.  I am going to take this approach for a few days as I apply it to issues that are present in our world today.  “Reality” is speaking to us as a species just as it is speaking to each of us personally…at least it is to me “personally.”  Limits are painful to the ego which always sees itself as without any, especially for those of us who have lived our lives in the illusion of certainty, and its twin–piety.

 

Perspectival Entrapment vs Reality

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The perspectival entrapment that I explored a couple of days ago is egregiously being played out currently in the impasse of our government.  This impeachment issue is proving very divisive as the Republicans and Democrats have pledged their troth rigidly to their “pony in the horse race.”  Yes, I certainly see the Republicans being more intransigent…blatantly so, but either side of a disputation like this must remember that on some level they too have a “pony in the race.”  Otherwise they are as ridiculous as the bizarre and inane Republcan Congressman Louie Gohmert, who last year pointed at a Democrat being interviewed, and passionately declared, “Just look at him!  Just look how biased he is!”  This brings to my mind the New Testament admonishment, “We see through a glass darkly.” How tragic if we see darkness in others and not our own.  That is called “projection.”

Having a perspective, and feeling passionate about it, is very human and even desirable.  But when one is “dug in at the heels” on an issue to the point that he is willing to totally disregard another view on the issue, his “dug-in (ness)” will reflect merely a self-serving ego investment; and ego, when pushed to an extreme, cannot back down.  That would be admitting he was “wrong” and acknowledging wrong is a something a very insecure, fragile, egomaniac cannot do  They are inclined to double-down, round up the troops on their side of the disputation, and argue with great passion and intensity.  In an extreme they will use violence rather than endure the sting of humiliation at being wrong, a sting which could be merely the dawning of a very noble human quality–humility.  It takes humility to admit, “Oh, I was not as right as I thought I was.  I wish I’d have listened to the admonishment of the bumper-sticker, ‘Don’t believe everything you think.’”

My concern with this political morass is more than mere politics.  This conflict is about the very definition of reality in our culture, what is real and unreal, what is true and what is untrue, what is acceptable and what is unacceptable.  Oh, of course, distinctions in these matters are always more nebulous that we like to think; but, there are some basic standards of human decency that are usually more or less maintained.  Beneath the surface of the “reality” that we take for granted, there is a substrate which I like to describe as Reality.  Yes, with the capitalized “R” I’m teasing with the notion of “god”, but words like god and the rest of “god-talk” which is usually mere rhetoric I can’t help today but grimace and groan about.  To illustrate my concern, I offer a quote from Shakespeare that describes just about the whole of my spiritual life and what passes for a lot of spiritual life today, “With devotions visage and pious action, they do sugar o’er the devil himself.”  Oh for those days when my perspectival enslavement kept me in the solace of that darkness!!!

Misplaced Concreteness Imperils Our Soul

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Psychologist Irvin Yalom noted that the fear of death keeps people from living.  By that he meant that the infantile fear of death…a necessary fear at earliest stages of development…can keep people from actually living if it is never addressed.  The ego uses this death fear to tyrannize people into living an unexamined life, to prefer the security of a self-serving, sterile environment where we can plod through our lives, “like kittens given their own tails to tease.” (Goethe)

And here is how Shakespeare addressed the same concern in Sonnet 146:

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
Thrall to these rebel powers that thee array,
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body’s end?
Then soul, live

 thou upon thy servant’s loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more:
So shall thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And Death once dead, there’s no more dying then.

Shakespeare knew the dilemma of misplaced concreteness, taking for real that which is only ephemeral.  Plato explained this with his allegory of the cave.  Jesus understood this also when he declared, “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”  Jesus knew that being a slave to the “cave images,” taking them to be real, would lead one to live a life which was merely a caricature of what it is to be human.  He knew that succumbing to the temptation of merely reading our script…even those that include intense versions of spirituality…would be merely to live a life of bondage, bondage to the ephemeral while excluding the soul.

Interiority is a missing dimension of modern life.  This is because we take thoughts to be the “thing-in-itself,” which parallels our tendency to take social, political, and material things on a surface level and fail to look beneath the surface into the machinations of the heart…i.e. the “soul.”  Shakespeare knew that making this mistake was to let our soul, “pine within” from neglect, even as we paint the exterior dimensions of our life a gaudy, “costly gay.”  This is most manifest in my country’s current political situation where political leaders are mired in a horrible morass of ego and greed while we lamely avow, “Well, it will all workout” or “God is in control” rather than recognizing that the “morass of ego and greed” that our government is acting out for us right now is a projection of the hollowness of our entire way of life…including our religion.

 

See following link for commentary on this sonnet—https://www.nosweatshakespeare.com/sonnets/146/

Why I blog

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When I started blogging 6-7 months ago I posted about why I was doing so. I explained that I was following the Shakespearean advice to “unpack my heart with words” and also noted a verse from Job where a character reported, “My belly is full of words, like a taut wine-skin, about to burst.” Since then I have continued to find this process very cathartic and a very important element in my spiritual life. T. S. Eliot advised us to “offer our deeds to oblivion” and I think of this daily posting as one little deed that I toss out into that black hole each day, not having any idea where it is going and if it will be heard and even if it is heard whether it will matter. That is very freeing.

I want to share similar ruminations from another blogger that I recently met. Though his name and his picture mean that our back grounds are dissimilar…he did not grow up as an Arkansas honky redneck…his experiences are similar. And he has found blogging to be meaningful in ways that I have. (Now, I can only “copy-and-paste” his blog as I’m not smart enough to import a link to his blog.)

 

 

The following is from: http://santuonline.wordpress.com/
The question is quite old. It has been asked and answered by millions. Mostly the answers are quite same. But flavors are different. After all everyone is unique. Here is mine..
I was an introvert. Most of the time I used to swim in my own mind. I always felt like people were always out there to get me, humiliate me in public. I was a hell of shy kid. Apart from that I am very curious person. I like to to try out everything at least once. So, when I heard about the bloggers meet in my college, I thought of giving it a try. Watching my best friend Indrajit going around flaunting a new “BCET Bloggers” badge, I decided to have a blog of my own.
I first started one on blogger.com . It was a complete disaster. Then I came to WordPress. Another two disasters were born. I don’t even remember their names. Then came SantuOnline at last. It never had any visits or likes, because I didn’t know then about the resource called “tag“. It was September last year, that I discovered tags and my number of visits and likes grew. I got a handsome number of followers too.
I still didn’t know why I was into blogging? It was like beer. Bitter to taste, but drinking feels good. (just an example, I don’t drink ) At first, I used to search for different tags and related posts. I used to like all the pages I visited. I just knew the more I “like”-d the more visits I would get. It was a sort of race against time. I didn’t have much time everyday, but tried to do as many as possible “likes”.
Slowly, I began to slow down. Strange to hear, but that is exactly how it happened. Now, I didn’t just visit at random, and put in likes. I took my time to read each blog I visited, put in some comments and thoughts. It became a healthy outlet for my mind. My perspective changed. I met many like minded people on wordpress. Swimming in my own mind, I had accumulated tons of doubts and junk. They got cleaned. There is still a lot more to do, but it feels better now.
Needless to say, blogging has now become more than just an obsession. It is source of daily inspiration. I am not as shy as I used to be. I have opened up a lot. I am more confident. Now I don’t feel like people are always out there to humiliate me. Here, I can speak my mind without fear. I can ask any type of foolish question without being branded as immature. There are so many people here. One is bound to find at least another one just like self. It is so easy to relate on blogosphere.
Having found some exact matches of mine, I wonder “aren’t we all unique?!! then where did these people come from? ”