To Be Both Happy and Honest

How can one be both happy and honest with one’s self? These are the four possible natures of God: 1)God saves no one, all are damned, 2)God saves some, 3)there is no God, 4)God saves all. These are the four possible outcomes of death: 1)one is damned to eternal torment, 2)one is purged, 3)one ceases to be 4)one is saved to eternal joy. How then can one be both happy and honest when we have no way of verifying either the nature of God or the eventual destination of our souls?

Oh God, save me. Save me and save my father. Save Hitler and the Jews. Save Jimmy Swaggart and the Dali Lama. Save the Buddha and the Christ. Save us all. Save us everyone. Save us and show yourself good and mighty. If we can forgive, can’t you? Who knows what is good for man in life, all the days of his vain life which he passes like a shadow? Who knows if the spirit of the sons of men goes upward and the spirit of the animal goes down to the ground? Do not be overly righteous, nor be overly wise: why should you destroy yourself? Do not be overly wicked, nor be foolish: why should you die before your time? Walk in the ways of your heart and in the sight of your eyes; but know that for all these God will bring you into judgment. Therefore remove sorrow from your heart, and put away evil from your flesh. Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: fear God and keep His commandments, for this is man’s all. God will bring every work into judgment, including every secret thing, whether good or evil. So I commend enjoyment, because a man has nothing better under the sun than to eat, drink, and be merry; for this will remain with him in his labor all the days of his life which God gives him under the sun.

How then shall we live? How can we be both happy and honest? As we do. As we always have. As we will until we die and finally know. Whenever you can, believe God to be good and mighty and your soul to be destined for heaven. Obey God’s three commandments: love God, love your neighbor, love yourself. Forgive and expect to be forgiven. Love. Work. Those two above all – love and work. Work was not the curse for our disobedience, seeing our innate nakedness as shameful was. Work is how we find our way to the garden we can no longer see with our eyes or touch with our hands. And love, love is still the atomic principle, the thing at the heart of it all. Love and work. Yes. Love and work.

Towards Complexity

04/16/2007 8:24 PM – 8:36 PM

To do is to be. To be is to do. Do be do be do. Who knew? And there we are. Doesn’t matter, necessarily what the what is, only that it’s yours. It’s the do. The do gives you the why.

One acts in spite of uncertainty. It never gets to the end of the thing. You forget yourself and the self grows into something of greater complexity, like a better beer, fit to be savored. You blink. Happiness. Flow. Act and forget. Rules and goals. Complexity and ability. To do is to be. To be is to do. Fuck it, Dude, let’s go bowling. To bowl is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be illuminated by the 10,000 things.

The mind spirals down to its own frightened demise when left to its own devices. It’s only by constant vigilance that liberty is retained. To be happy is to be and to hope. We are and we act and we hope. This is what we do. That cheap sentiments keep us afloat does not negate the fact that we are, in fact, afloat. Existence exists. Existence is good. The proof is in the choice. The choice is in the being. The being is in the doing. We are what we came in with, but, acting, we leave better than we entered. You take it in your teeth. You take it in your teeth and laugh the fear to hell. God comes down riding raindrops and sunbeams.

In Praise of the Boring

04/02/2007 8:41 AM – 9:03 AM

And if you don’t have something to look forward to, you might as well throw yourself under that train and finish the joke and find out if God is as cruel as the Evangelicals tell us he is. Other than that, optimism is the best option. Even simple optimism has its selling points.

The reason being that, in optimism, even this is just a part of the whole, which is good. So this is good. Make it so. Even the odd shakings grow to a distant memory, even if they occurred less than a day ago. Ahh, fuck it, Dude. Let’s go bowling. And so, remember, you’ve got to be doing something that adds up to something or you won’t see the point to your existence, imaginary or otherwise. And the They that say it’s a crutch haven’t noticed the crutch in their own eye. It’s all a crutch. It’s just being and being needs all the crutches it can get. It doesn’t need any at all, I’m saying. So you tell yourself a story and you write it down. You read a story and you change it to suit your whimsy. The Whimsy is the thing. It’s not the only thing. To say that delight is the only thing is as eyeblocked as to say that the only hole that needs filling is the God-shaped one. There’s also cooches. Nooch.

To be a part of the pageant, that is a good thing. It’s been going on for two-thousand years and it changes, but the Essence never does. Like the self, that there is no stable core does not negate the fact that it is and will continue to be. We are ourselves. Lift up your heads, oh yea gates. Be lifted up, everlasting door. And the what? And the where? And the why? And all these things obtain in accepting that they are there and that we cannot shovel free the hole from the earth that creates it. Open up your eyes. And perhaps the thing that is there and shaking is the thought that the Pirate You that you were depending upon turned out to be fiction and it was the Accountant You that saved you. And it isn’t the Beautiful Mind that saves the world; it’s the IRS agent that threw Capone in jail. That thing that we call the sad, boring, little man is the one that grabs us by the collar when we walk toward the glass and yanks us back and tells us to grow up. And that is perhaps the great disappointment. Our parents became our parents and we become someone else’s parents. And though I, crazy uncle that I am, wish that existence was cooler. It’s the boring ones that save the world. God bless ‘em and may their existence never weigh too much. And may the Dude abide.