A raven came to me this morning and woke me pecking on my head.
She said I had work to do.
“There is something you have to say.” she said.
“Let er rip!” …I sang her my song.
“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.“
—Bertrand Russell
I do not consider myself wise. I am just a wanderer in the deep woods who sometimes comes to the closest town for some food and companionship. I quickly tire of people though. I prefer solitude and the close companionship of my woman and dogs, my pack. My woman is the only master I have in life. I have willingly enslaved myself to her. She keeps me from running around the town naked. She makes a warm home for me to rest and be completely myself. She lets me stare at the wall for days even and scream at the sky. She is my muse and my closest companion. Such things are rare, but do exist.
I am allergic to fanatics, I used to be one, but I will suffer fools for a bit, if for no other reason than a sentimental feeling of brotherhood, for I know myself as the greatest of fools. I have a soft spot for them, for I was born a fool and will die as one. I do not say that from false humility. I know how easy it is for one’s feelings and thoughts to quickly become unclear amongst the buzz of our civilization. It is a terrible state to be in. Stripped of all certainty, one is completely and wholly their authentic selves, naked and shivering before raging nature all around. Terrified at the cracks of lightening. Cold when the sun sets. Longing for warm spring to return. This is my god. I can only know what touches me outside through my senses and inside through my intellect. I do not live in other’s contrived heavens or hells. When I read a book, I eat the pages to really absorb them. The books only satiate my hunger for as long as I digest them. They leave me ravenous. It is some kind of hellish torture to read the words of others. They never satisfy. Including my own. I will eat the pages these words are written on. My own words fill me up a bit longer than the words of others. I am cannibalizing myself in a way. I may visit though others’ heavens and hells from time to time. I have not found one that smells of reality to me. I quickly run back naked into the deep woods laughing as I realize how blessed I am to have this brutal bitch, we call nature, caring for me in the passive way she cares for all things.
Nothing in this life is given freely. One has to scratch in the dirt until their nails fall off to make anything of this life. One has to kill or be killed. I do not like killing anything really, not even cutting a plant. So I have others do it for me. I live cowardly. The whole eating to live thing seems barbaric to me. But I can’t deny my biology, so it is true, I am a born killer. Love does not maintain my body, it feeds my soul, my heart. And this is the really strange thing about us, we are beings, or acts of a play, in three parts. One must feed and nourish all three parts mind, body, and heart to be healthy, to maximize your life, or you die with a whimper. I tell you truly, no one who has gorged on love dies with a whimper. So it seems to me heart is the most important part of us to feed. Even when the mind and body whither, the heart keeps us going. Though some with crazed minds can last a very long time. So what the fuck do I really know?!
Not much it seems.
One cannot endure the elements long in a naked state. Stripped down, you can remake yourself as you see fit. Choose your coverings as you see fit. Paint your body as you see fit. Make and wear whatever mask you like. I like my horned masks best. I systematically removed every certainty I could find within myself over the last 10 years. It was smelly god awful work. The stink of certainty is toxic to the human heart. Nothing will kill your spirit faster than certainty and your mind as ideology. To be yourself is to be wild and spontaneous, a beast. At first, anger was my weapon of choice in battling my certainty, but over time, that anger was transmuted into love. My woman didn’t break my heart, she healed it. I became more gentle with myself and others. I invited certainties back later for tea, but they knew they could not stay for long. I am a goat after all and often would overturn the table and headbutt my guests. How rude of me! Rudeness can be transmuted to compassion and kindness too given enough work and heat.
What others do is not my concern. What others realize is on them to realize or not. I live authentically now, spontaneously, at peace with life and death. I live as a wild smelly goat mostly and at times as a happy bunny, and rarely, as a hunting wolf. Empathy is the real glue between human beings, not power. Power as an end is the greatest lie. For truly, no one has power over others, power can only truly be exercised over oneself and even then, it becomes a deep love of life and death and kindness. This is natural. There is no need to be hostile to those certain, they can just be avoided or taunted for fun. We need certainties earlier in life, no doubt. It takes humans a good 30 years to fully mature. This makes us freaks of nature. Due mostly to our large brains and small hearts and bodies. It is a way of protecting ourselves. But true maturity transforms us into lions of plain. Powerful, lazy, ready for action. Fortunately, we live in a time where one can explore themselves completely. The young are resisting the cruel lies of our culture. But they will succumb, as we all did. Fight the good fight though. Give em hell! We can strip naked and run through the streets if we want to. Well, we aren’t quite there yet, but they got close in the 60s to burning all the cruel lies down. I see many stripped down and ran around naked. They later clothed themselves though with money mostly and became shells of who they could have become. But there are a few authentic wild souls who kept going deeper into the wilderness I have found. They left breadcrumbs. You can follow them up to a point, but when all signs of a path have been lost, the only way forward is to shed your skin, lose your mind, fill your heart with passion, and run naked into the hills. The hills do have eyes. The 60s was an eruption of spirit of a kind that the establishment has fought hard to stamp down for over 60 years. It was not religious; it was raw spirit. Religion quickly came though and grew like mushrooms around their feet and stopped them moving. The establishment has done a very good job reenslaving the beautiful butterflies who escaped in the 60s. But some escaped them. Thank mother god for that. Some of their seeds fell on fertile ground.
The 60s birthed the Jesus movement. That is the spirit I came to know Jesus through. I never was religious. Though my mother became a fundamentalist evangelical, what an irony for a religion supposedly based on love, and terribly certain of many things I have always seen as lies. The maturing of a man takes a severing of their connection to their mothers. I took a sword and hacked that connection to pieces. I was a Jesus freak through and through as a kid though. I loved him it seems more than most of those around me. They hated me for that. Really hated me. It was shocking to experience. As a boy I had intense spiritual experiences. I saw visions and heard voices inside myself. Too many. Unlike most of my friends around me who were just there because they liked this girl or that boy. Well, my first crush was Jesus. I was always strange and weird. A true believer in love. I read Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Khalil Gibran as a kid for God’s sake. I was a born radical. I never fit in anywhere. This would be crucial to my later awakening. My alienation became my own personal salvation later in life. I burned with a frantic intensity as a boy. My mother never shared a faith of love with me. She was so broken and lost herself and struggling in a very difficult marriage, dirt poor on top of it all. She needed the certainty of her cult. Later she would go on to embrace the prosperity gospel, a twisted mockery of the real Jesus’ Gospel. The old tent reivial preachers created a new uniquely American cult based on prosperity. My mother fell hook, line, and sinker for every one. I hated her for it for a long time. They are the ones who have helped Trump rise to his position today. They were the first to get behind that orange pumpkin. How I detest him. So ironic they love a man who hates them so. Sweet irony to me those poor bastards waiting for the rapture would become the ones who would surround themselves with snakes who would tell them what they wanted to hear.
I walk with Jesus today. Not as a believer of any kind, but as a friend. This is true religion in my view, authentic and based on a common love, a shared heart, a deep empathy and trust. Jesus would not recognize the church today. He would turn over the money changer tables in the temple. He would spit out their false love. I’m being poetic of course and romanticizing the figure of Jesus. He was a man, as I am, but a man thoroughly with himself. He did not die I know for anyone else but himself. He did not physically rise from the dead, he arose in every heart who awoke to love of the other as themselves. We can love others as ourselves, because they are ourselves. This is a great riddle and secret. Carl Jung explored this through his theory of the shared unconscious. Jesus demonstrated a deep compassion that moved mountains. Our stories of him are mostly made up and manipulated, but don’t try to reason with a certain believer. They will claim authority based on this book or that book as their own actions expose them as liars and frauds. They fail to see embracing their lies and eating them is the first step to becoming a true human being. They want to kill you and cut you off for denying their faith, as they killed Jesus for denying the mainline religion in power long ago. He showed us an example of dying to oneself. His was a naive natural spontaneous love. He didn’t really speak of hell, that was a later addition added by the liars and cheats. The church became a controlling force in our culture for 2000 years. But love always finds a way through. It pools in the low places, not close to power. One’s actions makes a heaven or hell of their lives. Resurrection is of the true human being inside all of us, possible only while alive. Rapture is not a physical event, it is the smell of being close to love, filled with it, love for yourself, others, and nature, our real god. He shames those who wear the lie of religion today. I believe he was a true atheist, as I am now today. I and Jesus are certainly atheists.
The word atheism in English originates from the Greek word ἄθεος (átheos), which means “without gods.”
• ἄ- (a-): A prefix meaning “without” or “not.”
• θεός (theos): Meaning “god” or “deity.”
The term passed into Latin as atheos and later into Old French as athéisme. It entered the English language in the late 16th century, around 1580, during a period of religious upheaval and philosophical inquiry. Originally, atheism was often used pejoratively to describe anyone who rejected the dominant religious orthodoxy, even if they believed in some form of spirituality. Over time, the term evolved to its modern meaning of disbelief in deities. I am allergic to orthodoxy of every flavor and kind and glad to be. I know nature and it within myself, and this is all I or anyone really can know. As Carl Jung said, he had no faith, here in the middle of reality, none is needed for we can know ourselves fully, certain of nothing but that we are alive and will die. But within our lives are all the gods that have ever been and are yet to be. In fact, we are all gods!
We are all gods!
Heresy? Haha, the fool will say so. They will kill you for saying such things and acting thusly. A god is wild and unbidden and must learn on its own to lay down with the lamb and the lion. We don’t even understand our own language as it has drifted and evolved from the original symbols and meanings we uttered as thoughts and words as humans evolved. We are fools lost in a sea of meaningless words and groundless thoughts that seem to appear from nowhere, but they do come from somewhere, the nowhere within ourselves. What can we know? We can know love, we can be filled with it, consumed by it, giving of it. It can directly be perceived before all words. So how can any fool justify their faith with words?! Why can they not see through themselves and the lies we cloth ourselves with?! Not my problem now is it and I’m not theirs. But they can’t touch this. They can only hate this freedom and long for it themselves. How dare anyone live so free, right, haha. I’m just an Epicurean in the end I guess. So was Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, and Abraham Lincoln. I’m in good company. I’ll not get into Epicureanism now. Most can’t touch their intellect or get even close. Us smelly goats wander close to it now and then by accident. Reality has only briefly broken through the mud of our minds across time. Very rarely indeed. This is the pearl you will sell all to attain. It’s never free or given. One must dig their nails off to grasp it. Holding it is a whole other thing. Because the pearl destroys most who touch it. Vaporizes them. There is a trick to it, an ancient magick.
What I learned through this process was how much fear dominated my life. That is the ultimate puppet master who uses certainty to cover itself with. A human being can do the most awful things out of certainty. I remember the blanket of faith that I would wrap myself with. It was so warm and comforting. I could bury my head under it and keep out the world. But boys grow to manhood. Childhood comforts slip away as the stark reality of life and death are thrust upon us. There are natural saints who love spontaneously from all creeds and none and then there are those who love from fear. Truer today more than ever. Fools grip to their sacred books and thoughts because certainty provides security and identity, but they betray their fear by drawing such distinctions.
It is up to a human to take responsibility for their actions and willingly enter into unknowing. It takes time and a certain amount of heat to loosen one’s grip upon certainty. Nothing is certain but your death, period, full stop, end of story. We can’t be certain of what life and death is in the least or our love would be meaningless. To love in spite of this uncertainty is the purest thing in the universe. Yes, I understand this is terrible to most. But if one is being honest and authentic with themselves, this is the only conclusion.
All my love, and I mean that, because it’s all I have of value to give.
Quantum Heart 