Tillingborn wrote:That's pretty much how a person's religion is decided too.
Is that so? You could be right!
Tillingborn wrote:I would only add that it sounds like fun and I really wouldn't be so defensive, since you know you piss people off.
Although you might not think so it is to some degree a sensitive point for me. First because when what I call 'conversations' become acrid they fall into a vicious cycle from which they do not recover. The Internet over the last 10-12 years has opened up a new, and wider, possibility of conversation, which should be a good thing, and is, but I have noticed that if people are not serious about the way they go about conversing, if they don't demonstrate a certain restraint, and if they cannot actually listen to what the other is attempting to say, then the whole effort is lost, and this is a shame.
There are people who set out to 'piss people off'. It is a style of Internet presence whose purpose is to elicit reactions. It is a form of baiting and a way of operating in bad faith. But there is a wide difference between 'dealing on contentious themes' and deliberately trying to piss someone off. This thread was begun in good faith and its purpose is to speak about a current issue which is divisive and highly contentious. There is no way round that difficulty. The best conversations (in my view) are those that deal on the more difficult subjects but it is best, if possible, to try to keep things on as much of a good-faith platform as possible.
Now, what I 'know' is that in the present climate of expressions of contempt for 'Christianity' an apology for it will not be welcome. And the term is really problematic because 'Christianity' is such a huge thing, it cannot be contained by one word, and so it may be that someone opposed to 'Christianity' is opposed to any faith and any sort of relationship with a transcendental being, consciousness or presence ('spooks' as Skip said), or to the collusion between a hierarchical religious body and the State (as tillingborn described with the reference to the Anglican Church and its links to the royal family, to imperialist policies, etc.)
You might be a feminist opposed to 'Christianity' or a homosexual of a communist or a pantheist or an herbalist. It is simply a fact that, for political and social and spiritual reasons, this 'Christianity' is or has become a contended Symbol, in addition to being a 'fact' in a political and social sense (as a church-body is a 'fact' in time and space), and there are a great many people who hate the symbol and who hate the fact. It is my view that this 'hatred' has many dimensions and not all aspects of the oppositional stance are clear, in the sense of being 'conscious'. There does indeed seem to exist a 'revanche' (retaliation, seeking revenge) against what I can only describe as a Symbol because it is vastly complex, that is, what one feels 'revanche' against. How can one bring up this 'mood' and this 'activity' (revanche as an active effort, as a doing) without stirring up the inner core that nourishes and feeds the revanche itself? Put in reverse, how could a 'believing Christian' or a long-time practitioner of an ancient religion, not feel a form of 'revanche' when so many people come forward to strike a blow against both the Symbol and the Fact?
It is a very, very curious and complex situation. But, as in a complex and contentious relationship, if the parties are 'mature' and 'honest' they may be able to create something out of the conflict. In the most basic sense that is my effort. Certainly in what I write here and definitely in my own research. One of the reasons for this is because my reading on this subject is wide, and the wider one's perspectives become the less possible it is to simply dismiss something which, as I have attempted to say, is part of the very structure of ourself, in the sense that bricks are the parts that make an edifice. Yet if you attempt to explain that to someone 'possessed by revanche' and who, no matter what, 'hates' the edifice, in some sense you are wasting your words. On them at any case. But one characteristic of these forums is that there is always an 'invisible readership', and so the true beneficiary may not be your obvious interlocutor but someone else.
Tillingborn wrote:The vicar droned on for the entire lesson in response; I've no idea what he said, because I wasn't listening.
For me, reading this, there are numerous levels of irony. What is there
really to hear? Who
really is speaking?
I grew up almost absolutely outside of any structural religious organization. And my hippy-professional parents (late Beat-era types from San Francisco to be more exact) upended everything by selling their home, quitting their jobs, and talking myself and my sister to live in India. In my case and at a young age (13) I was exposed to some of the most exotic religious forms and not as ideas in a book or narrative but as an experience, a full-body experience as it were. In my particular case, and from an early age, the notion of spirituality and religion was always tinged with this force.
My parents, in their thirties, were in struggles to understand their marriage bond; they were both trying to define themselves spiritually and existentially; and additionally there was all the various undercurrents we are all aware of: political issues, issues of freedom and independence, issues of what indeed one 'serves' in this world, to what does one owe allegiance. They took this odd step of projecting themselves and their personal struggles into an exotic land and brought myself and my little sister along for the ride! Ashrams, trains, diesel smoke, ochre-colored sadhus, flower garlands, curries, jungles, unreal poverty and disfigurement, bizarre temples pulsing with sound and color, death and life all commingled.
The strange thing was that I was given great deal of freedom. I don't know what my parents were thinking. I used to get up in the morning, eat, and wander around Benares all day including around the ghats and then come back at three or four in the afternoon. At the same time I had my odd 'obsessions', some grounding mechanism perhaps: all the novels of Edger Rice Burroughs and the animal adventure novels of Gerald Durrell (brother of Lawrence Durrell) and a fascination with old watches---od English watches, broken, that you could pick up for nothing in the markets. Clouds and the weird Indian crow also held me in their grip. Those crows are the most bizarre beings!
It is not a hard thing to talk about, and yet it is a hard thing to talk about, but I used to visit one small Ganesha temple in Benares where a group of sadhus hung out. They saw me every day and I was something of a young celebrity. No one spoke English and we communicated with signs. One day one of them whose face is still embedded in my memory took me around to a side alley to have a view of the murtis (statues). It is impossible to describe what happened, I don't understand it, but through his touch---a sort of reassuring, friendly touch like when you put your arm around someone's shoulder---he transmitted energy in such a way that I had an overpowering, unexplainable visionary experience. Of the sort described, say, in The Varieties of Religious Experience (William James).
It would not be advisable or necessary to describe it in any detail except to say that while aware of my body I was also not in my body and in a more expansive state. The abiding element of it in it was twofold. One was the clear understanding, peculiar to visionary states (if you've ever had one you'd know) that the whole platform of existence---the 'world' as we say---was a 'temple', a sacred place, a sacred possibility, something to be taken quite seriously. It is the sort of experience that occurs at a deep place inside and is not possible to really describe. The other element was a vision of the way that 'divinity' is present at an 'atomic' level (if you will); a Consciousness or Awareness that, to me then (and now still) is 'inconceivable'. It seemed to be a way of understanding divinity as an underlying force, as Brahman as the Hindus describe it: 'the unchanging reality amidst and beyond the world'.
I had no language to explain this experience, especially to myself. I don't know if that makes immediate sense. You have to be able to 'translate' dramatic experiences to your own mind, to your personality. I just didn't have it, I did not have the 'language'. It became necessary, I realize now, to suppress the strength of the experience, and this is largely what I did. I got sick immediately afterward with a fever and delirium for about a week. A German lady doctor visited me every day whose energy is still infused with my memories of that time. This was an advantage because I was never able to tell my parents what had happened although they certainly noticed something in those first following days. I couldn't speak much. But it was all ascribed to the fever when it hit. We left Benares soon after and were located in other parts of India, and then Katmandu for almost a year. After another 8 months or so we returned to California.
For me it was literally hell. The whole experience of India was so very overpowering, not to mention the 'assault' on my own consciousness through the power of a strong visionary experience for which I had no language to describe nor understand. I could not recover a sense of 'continuity' with the social-cultural life of America. It represented a 'radical break'.
So, I did what any normal teenager would do in such circumstances: I rebelled against everything. I think it was like going crazy but in a somewhat controlled way. Or maybe it was a way to keep from going crazy by letting the strange energy out so as not to be consumed by it. All that that means is a did everything 'backwards'. Or upside-down. My peers were all sons and daughters of people variously connected with the 'human potential movement' in California at that time. Fritz Pearls, Esalan, Synanon, Zen---every trippy and hippy-dippy alternative 'consciousness' scene you can imagine.
So what did I do except become a first rate delinquent with a specialty in car theft. My 'girlfriend' was the daughter of a very well-known psychologist and writer whose name I will not mention. We were partners for a time in a mutually-shared rebellion-madness. (She later studied acupuncture and went to live in Brazil. We write from time to time since I live a hop-skip-and jump north of her). How close you can be to someone and how far away too! Drugs, sex, madness, always on the edge, living in anxiety and something like 'shame'. But car theft? That was because of my friend K. It would never have occurred to me, honestly. From the time I was 15 until about 17 we stole about 50 cars! I kid you not. Porches, Mercedes, BMWs were our preferred brands. K. knew were to sell them and we split the money 55-45. I can still feel the 'weight' of those fog-soaked dollars in my hands, strange as that sounds. Everytime K. and I got together our personal chemistry produced some outrageous adventure and crime. But we never got caught.
It turned out though that one afternoon---a Sunday---we stole a porsche and were also high on mushrooms I think it was. Or some mixture of drugs. I was driving, driving like a maniac, and going too fast around a corner on a country road I sideswiped a car coming the other way, spun around, lost control, and we went over the embankment and down the side of a hill. Strangely I remember clearly what we were listening to.
Life Goes On. I think it was on an old 8 Track. But it is such a weird Swiss band that I don't know if they ever put out on 8 Track. But I remember the song. What stands over us and supplies *meaning*, the meaning that comes to us through
words? Such a bizarre topic...
- "I.don't.know.what.I.am.doing. I.don't.know.why.I'm.like.that."
We ran like devils down the hillside (rural, coastal California) and then up to a hillside where we looked back down on the crime scene. Red and blue flashing lights, squad cars. Bloody, with a few broken teeth but unhurt, we were insanely scared but non-repentant. We thought the game was up though. But nothing ever happened. I was 17. It was the classic 'sobering event'. I never hung out with K. again. I kept expecting for the cops to track me down but it never happened.
Soon after that, under strange circumstances (all my circumstances have been strange), I left California for good. That was the event that 'cured' me at least on one level. I was still a minor so you'll have to forgive me my wicked crimes. No one ever got really hurt.
Anyway, because I said that I would earlier, I wanted to trace a little some aspects of the 'personal' events that have shaped my existence. For me, the need and desire to shut out of my consciousness because it was just too much to assimilate the 'sense' of the knowledge of a divine force was really how I began my life. But what 'bit' me would not ever remain silent or powerless. It is in response to that that my life has occurred/is occurring.
Skip wrote:...this thread seems to have wound down.
It ain't over till the fat lady sings...
