Fifty Shades of God Consciousness

 Rosy-Kins

a poem by

Robert Service

As home from church we two did plod,

“Grandpa,” said Rosy, “What is God?”

Seeking an answer to her mind,

This is the best that I could find. . . .

God is the Iz-ness of our Cosmic Biz;
The high, the low, the near, the far,
The atom and the evening star;
The lark, the shark, the cloud, the clod,
The whole darned Universe—that’s God.

   Some deem that others there be,
And to them humbly bend the knee;

To Mumbo Jumbo and to Joss,

To Bud and Allah—but the Boss

Is mine . . . While there are suns and seas

MY timeless God shall dwell in these.

In every glowing leaf He lives;
When roses die His life he gives;

God is not outside and apart
From Nature, but her very heart;

No Architect (as I of verse)
He is Himself the Universe.

Said Rosy-kins: “Grandpa, how odd
Is your imagining of God.
To me he’s always just appeared
A huge Grandfather with a beard.

OK then. . . I give up, I give up, I surrender utterly. I throw myself on the ground and beg. What does the poem mean? Why did this surge up from some dire trench in my fevered brain? It was all mixed up and wrong, of course. I first read an excerpt from it at the start of a chapter of a goddamn book that I am goddamned if I remember. It was a misquote that really read much better than the "real" version:

God is the Izness of the Is,

The Oneness of our Cosmic Biz.

Doesn't that sound a lot more harmonious than the bumpety version I've posted? But it's on every site (public domain, I might add, like everything I post, harrumph) in this strange form that doesn't scan. Doesn't scan! And it's Robert Service.

Robert Service who wrote The Cremation of Sam McGee and The Shooting of Quick Draw McGraw and The Defrosting of Frank and all that stuff we were forced to learn in grade school.

"When you're out in the wild, and you're lost like a child, and death looks you bang in the eye. . . " What next?

I couldn't even find this poem because I assumed it was called Cosmiz Biz or some-such thing. I have no idea why he had to call it Rosykins (with its vaguely pedophilic connotations) and bookend his philosophy with such gooey Victorian sentiment. Little Rosykins reminds me of that windup Edison doll spouting the kind of sweetness that makes you want to drop-kick it into the nearest sewer.

But this Cosmic Biz stuff still seemed pretty good in my mind. The lark, the shark, the cloud, the clod. In a sense the old coot is kinda progressive, in that he does not think of God as the "architect" who "made" all this stuff: "he" (pardon the archaic term) actually IS all these things.

Interesting philosophy, but how does one "worship" this pan-adoration of all nature-and-things? What IS worship, anyway, and doesn't it sound a bit heathenish, like sticking something up on a pole or having a drain in the middle of the floor for blood sacrifice?

I wonder about this stuff all the time, I really do. It comes down to the idea of a "personal God", a God that cares for each of us, loves us unconditionally, accepts and forgives our foibles and sins. So that even the very hairs upon your head are numbered. Oh how we long for this. Long long long and deeply yearn for a Someone or a Something (more likely Someone, as it's more personal and parental or even grandparental) that enfolds us and understands us, that "made" us somehow, formed us in the womb so that we are fearfully and wonderfully made.

Trouble is, there is not an ounce of proof for this. The world is full of dizzying hate, and if we are made in God's image so that we reflect his finest work, God is in deep trouble and had better watch out.

I wanted, needed, sought the personal God, tried to find it/him in Jesus who seemed to represent something I could hang on to. I read Gerard Manley Hopkins and The Hound of Heaven and tried to extract meaning, however obscure. For a while, oh yes, for quite a while I seemed to be doing it.

But it was all so - what? Wispy. I could not grab hold anywhere. I could only glimpse God out of the corner of my eye. When I turned, "it" was gone like mist evaporated in a flash. Or Pan ducking back behind the tree with a demonic chuckle.

I have glimpsed, felt "something" in the unthinking, selfless love of some (very) few individuals who love without loving or even thinking about it, who "are" love in fact, seamless. I have known, I think, two and a half of them (I am married to half of one, but I don't blame him. I stole the other half and devoured it.) I had a grandmother, and I knew a man in AA who did remind me of my grandmother, and everyone he knew felt like his favorite because in a way, they were. I have wondered if my grandmother, my mother's mother, perhaps saved my life by providing me with the only sure sign of love I ever knew.

So is this "God" or just human goodness, or are they the same? Once there was nothing, now there is something, yes, and how, and we are about to destroy it all too. It can go back, back to just nothing. From the void to the void.  Just as my life went from chaos, to grace, and back to chaos again. Now I sift through the ruins of my faith and find a bone here, a tooth there. Maybe I can match it up with some chart. Some scripture, like that incomprehensible Gospel of Thomas I looked up after seeing that silly Stigmata movie (only worth seeing for Gabriel Byrne, the impossibly gorgeous, completely-believeable-as-an-Irish-priest-forever-caught-in-a-crisis-of-faith-but-still-capable-of-loving-especially-that-nubile-young-woman-from-the-coffee-shop-who-eventually-channels-some-saint-or-other-and-provides-the-world-with-a-brand-new-and-completely-revolutionary-and-thus-potentially-Church-destroying-message-directly-from-Jesus-himself).

The Gospel of Thomas, I'm sorry Thomas, was a goddamn mess, just a jumble with no connective tissue. The "sayings" and "teachings" were like a jigsaw puzzle that had tipped out of its box onto the floor. Squiggly little pieces of meaning are not enough.

I seek, and I don't find. Not really. I carry on, and I worry. Things leap into my head, anxieties. I laugh and cry, and have orgasms, and function pretty well thankyouverymuch, in the usual way, but - what's missing? A little Cosmic Biz?

Grandfather: what does it all mean?

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html


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Take this cup away from me: blood sacrifice

Burnt offering

She came slippery and she came dark. She came along a stone place hollow with echoes. Smells of animals lurked, and moaning. She came dragging. A handful of hair.

This was the sacrifice, the Blood Sacrifice. It was time. Time to put it all down, to skin the dog and hold up its flesh. She was not good at hunting but knew when it was time to dismember prey.

The temple was dark and full of moisture and praying, moans. It was a dark and terrible God they appeased. Every day, every week the sacrifices. He was merciless. He had no name, because they were afraid to name Him. They were afraid to look Him in the eye.

If you come face-to-face with God, if you see God in person, stand before God, you will die. This was why Moses went around with a veil, for an ungodly light streamed from his face and blinded everyone as if they were looking directly at an eclipse.

Eclipse. Sacrifice was an eclipse, was it not? A raising of talent. A skinning, a hairing. A giving up. A lifting. The smell of blood was everywhere, and as she raised the head of the bull the dark thick blood slimed down the drainway into a hole in the floor.

The blood had to be captured in a certain way. It reminded her of menstruation a little, but that would be her own blood, and forbidden. Deeply forbidden. With blood everywhere, why couldn’t you touch a woman? But this is about talent, is it not? Burnt offerings, sacrifice?

Singed hair, gutted dreams?

Giving it all up for the sake of peace?

Take it out of me, take it out of me, takeitoutofmetakeitoutofmetakeitoutofmeGOD. Just remove it. Whatever desire I had to please Thee with my inborn gift, rip it out. You made a mistake, see? God DOES make mistakes, look at that two-headed calf over there. You call that perfection? Yes, sometimes you DO make mistakes, such as instilling in me the dream. The dream of fulfillment such as I saw around me. As if that were a sin, too.

Lift high the head of the calf, slit his throat, catch the blood in the chalice, lift it high. No, don’t drink it, that would be too theatrical. And you’re guessing at this, aren’t you? This isn’t any Charlton Heston movie. This is sacrifice. Burnt offering.

Given up, given up for You! For You, God, you big son-of-a-gun, my Destroyer. You shatterer of dreams. You who giveth with one hand and taketh with the other big, suffocating hand.

Here. Here have it back. Right now rightnowrightnow. Have my dream.

 

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What does God look like? I'll tell you.

Why do I have such awful thoughts?

Why do I have such awful thoughts on a Monday morning?

I’ve been writing a sort of informal ongoing series of posts about my complete disillusionment with organized religion.  After years of struggle and spiritual anguish, I had to cut the ties, drop out. Too many things were eating at me. There was not one single person I could talk to, and some of my very best friends were being told to leave. Run out of town. So who would be left?

So I left, but this was after a very long period of being. . . what? One day, years ago, I wrote in my journal a single word: Disaffected. It seemed to sum it all up. Whatever “affected” means, and it can mean many things beyond the obvious.

It can relate to “affect” (NOT the same as “effect”, you Philistines of non-grammar!), which is in a larger sense just a reference to emotion, particularly the expression of emotion. But then there are words like “affection”, and we all know what that means.

I wonder if I am doomed to enact and re-enact the rejections of my youth. I wrote a post called You’ll Never Get Out of the Playground which had a surprising number of views, at least for me - more than 100 overnight (and counting: I think it’s 200 now). This was about a middle-aged woman who was disaffected with the social media scene, feeling profoundly out of step. I wonder why anyone was interested, why anyone bothered. Being out of step? Does anyone feel this except me, I wonder?

I won’t tell you what happened on the playground, or in high school, and what happened later on in my church after 15 years of meaningful, if frustrating involvement and contribution (including financial: people used to visit us in our homes and subtly, or not-so-subtly, guilt-trip us into giving more than we really could afford). The thing is, in a church setting you are at the mercy of leadership, which is apparently chosen. Then why did we “choose” a leader who turned out to be jaw-droppingly destructive and wildly inappropriate? Does a group of people necessarily know what is good for them?

But this isn’t the bummer, the spiritual shadow that goes in and out with me. Maybe it’s early conditioning, I don’t know. My beliefs are such a ragbag, or a fluctuating tide, or something. They change and shift. They don’t get “better” and I don’t “evolve”, like I am supposed to: in fact sometimes I think I am devolving or even deteriorating.

The cold dense shadow that chills my sunniest day is wondering about death. I often have strong feelings that departed people are very near me, even physically. I know where they are in the room, and they seem to speak, though not exactly in words. They convey pure meaning, somehow. This could be imagination. The problem with being a writer is that you must flex your imagination again and again, constantly, like a bicep, until it becomes so monstrous your whole arm is disabled.

But what if it isn’t? What if this is a strange gift? I try not to close the door on it. Yet it seems to say, if there is any truth in it at all, that we don’t just disappear when we die. That something of us lives on. If you’re to believe mediums (media?), the soul lives on in much the same form, so that the departed person is recognizable even visually. Thus the Long Island Medium with her fake blonde hair, fake talent, and voice as grating as Fran Drescher in The Nanny.

So OK. What is the other option? We just disappear, we die like a tree, we become soil, or not even that. We “are not”, we are “no more”. We are “departed”. To where, nobody says.

Imagine there’s no heaven. It’s easy if you try. No hell below us. Above us only sky. This was John Lennon’s vision of Utopia. I’ve heard that as far as spiritual contact is concerned, John Lennon is damn hard to find.

But there’s another possibility, and this one just makes my guts quail as if there’s a big frog jumping around in there.

It’s based on a very old model, so I didn’t make this one up.

What if every wrong deed, every bad mistake, every unkindness, every slight to others, every bit of ungenerosity, every theft, every verbal slap, every sense of glee at someone else’s misfortune (sometimes known as schadenfreude), every cheat of every kind, was carefully kept track of, never erased, never forgotten? What if all of it has been strung together in a chain, and how long is your chain anyway? Is it “ponderous”, like the chain of Ebenezer Scrooge? What if all your nasty little deeds, most of them kept secret, were laid end-to-end, bald and visible to some awful judging Force that doesn’t let you get away with anything?

What if?

This model annihilates that all-loving, all-caring God that everyone quacks about. I just don’t feel that sense of God any more and wonder if I didn’t make it up just to make my life more bearable. But if I don’t believe, does my non-belief negate God? Does God only love believers, those who go to church and are pious and either never make mistakes and unkindnesses, or repent for them so mightily it’s as if they never occurred at all?

What a horrible thought.

The only meaningful God – and I really doubt any such being exists – is a God that does not know how to do anything BUT love, a God who IS love like Jesus was, if Jesus ever existed (which I now doubt: but look what we did to him anyway). This God doesn’t play favourites, doesn’t lay sins end to end like some poisonous necklace of doom. But if this God really does exist, why don’t I feel it any more?

Why did despair drive out the glory, the power, the honour, the trumpet-blasting  blah-blah-blah I used to sing about in those endless dreary hymns with 39 verses? You could blow the dust off this God. It had no vitality. It was conventional and tame. After a while I felt so lonely in my growing unbelief that I just couldn’t stand it any more.

So have I been driven out? Cast out of Eden with those other sinners (who shall remain nameless)? Am I alone after all, a huddled mass of confusion and fear?

Every time I find myself starting to pray, I cut it off. Come on, stupid, don’t.  It won’t get you anywhere. What does prayer accomplish anyway? What is it for? It’s asking God to change things, to change the way things are now. If God is a God who makes reality, how stupid is that? Aren’t things “the way they’re supposed to be”, as so many people like to put it? So why pray at all?

Pray for mercy? I can’t see how that works, either. A big hand doesn’t suddenly come down out of the sky. In fact, nothing does. Nothing changes. Pray for healing? Why? Will a big nurse suddenly. . . OK, you get the idea.

Pray “for” someone? If people knew what other people were praying for, they might be pretty surprised. “Oh God, please make Frank less of an asshole so he won’t bug me so much.” OK, that’s extreme. How about, “Oh God, please reconcile Karen and Rob and make their marriage whole again.” In fact, Karen and Rob’s divorce might be totally liberating for both of them, freeing them from a relationship that went dead years ago. Joe might want to die from that tumour, because he’s lonely and no one from his church comes around any more because he’s difficult and besides, he has stopped praying and believing.

So stay away.

And if two people compete with each other, praying for completely opposite things, which one will God listen to? Who will win? The political ramifications of this are frightening to contemplate.

So I can’t figure out prayer. It somehow has a Wizard of Oz quality to it. “Please sir. . . I am Dorothy, the small and meek.” And you know what happened there.

Did I pull back the curtain somehow, to reveal the little man pulling levers in a desperate sweat? Should I pay any attention to those strange luminescent figures in my room late at night? What is the mystery? I had an experience years ago of looking God right in the eye, of having a tiny glimpse for a billionth of a second through an aperture that opened, then closed again. I don’t know why this happened and I had a welter of feelings about it:

A sense I shouldn’t be seeing this, that it was a mistake.

A feeling I should take off my sandals because I was on holy ground.

A sense of "Me? Are you sure? You must have the wrong person."

A sense I had opened a door and saw my mother standing there naked and slammed it shut.

An absolute, soul-shattering awe.

A sense I was seeing everything: everything ever created, from the beginning of what we call Time (which is an illusion) and on into the infinite Future. This is beyond my powers to describe.

It was as if every question I had ever asked, every question I asked in the present, every question I would ask in the future, and in fact every question I could possibly ask, ever, in all the realms of possibility, along with questions I could never ask because I didn’t know what they were, had been answered in a single stroke.

This all happened under very deep hypnosis conducted by a friend who was not a trained hypnotist. The purpose was to restore my sleep after a bad bout of insomnia that had gone on for months, resistant to any drug.

I suppose I should have guessed I wasn't really under hypnosis, but something far more profound and dangerous. It was years later, taking an anthropology course, that I learned about trance, the altered state of consciousness that allows shamans to pierce their cheeks without pain or walk over glowing coals.

Did I somehow get there without knowing it? I had heard over and over again that in hypnosis, you can come out of it any time you want to. I couldn't. My "consciousness" was so far above my corporeal being that it wasn't visible from the ground. It was on the right-hand side in a specific place, not just in my head, and the "whatever" was in front of me, an aperture almost like a  strange-looking gate.

At some point I saw myself, my physical being, inert on the couch far below. I had been "under" for more than an hour, one of the many idiotic things my friend did. He was trying to bring me out of it and couldn't. He was trying everything. I was shit-scared. I wanted to come back and couldn't.

Finally there was a sense not of falling but of being sucked back, though instead of feeling disappointed (gee, heaven was so nice!), I only felt relief. But something was wrong.

"You look. . ."

"What?"

"No, don't look in the mirror."

But I did. I was grey as stone. Blue-grey, and cold all over. I wonder now if I really had been near death, and what would have happened if the life force hadn't decided to take me back. I did not sleep that night, and the next day my brain was on fire, to the point that I could hear it searing and popping inside my skull.

My Divine Encounter. I suppose a fundamentalist would say it was the devil or something. I’d say there was no sense of a Being or Presence, but there was – and, surprise, it wasn’t a being of Love at all.  In fact it was completely indifferent. Which is the opposite of love (not hate, but “not-love”).

If the Universe is indifferent, if God is indifferent. . . or was it a projection of the tragedy of my mother, a Being so indifferent she did not even list my name in her obituary, as if it would be better if I had never existed at all?

Officially, I have been wiped off the record, and that does get to a person after a while. How can you worship God if you don’t really exist?

But I did notice something else. There was some sense of a slightly ironic sense of humor, of a sort of indulgence, and a sense of “someone or something” touching or stroking my right cheek. But it was like a child finding a ladybug. Funny little thing. Look what I’ve created. Pssshhhhhewwwwww.

I don’t know if writing about this experience is a mistake or not. It disturbs me and I still do not understand it. Easy to say, “oh, you were tired, it was just a bad dream,” or “oh well, that wasn’t really God.” I was completely convinced I was witnessing Ultimate Reality, and it was totally disillusioning and terrified me beyond words.

If Jesus loves the little children, then I guess I am still an abused child huddled in the corner, waiting for some grace that never arrives. I suppose it will always be that way. If my sins are strung out in space like some spiky ugly necklace, I am done for.

If it’s some other way, I do wish I could find out about it now, in some manner that is understandable to me. I am not getting any younger.

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