#don't point to my family members they have each paid for their own salvation many times over | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

paganchristian · 4 years ago

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School of fish (of course) from the bridge where we saw the baby alligator. Anyway, hm, makes me think,.. fish in a school turn the same directions to swim from predators and things like that, so, maybe people have a similar instinct. Not exactly the same, well duh, because we don’t go around literally in herds running the same directions.

But similar in a sense, we might do things that kind of harmonize us to each other and make us go in similar directions often, or pressure each other to do that, and signal to each other when and how, maybe unconsciously. Religions might serve a purpose like this at times, as well as other belief systems and moral systems, ideological systems, cultural norms, and so on. They might serve a purpose of protecting us from danger, but also other purposes in which acting somewhat like a school of fish can be helpful to the group.

It makes it simple and easy to focus, to remember, to pay attention, to do what you need to do when a big group of people are all doing that thing. When they have been doing it for years, generations, or even perhaps centuries, and when they all offer support or punishment to keep you in line, too. It makes it quite easy and doable to just go along. So how do you get a big group of people over many generations to all do the same things like this? Well,.. It needs to be easy, it needs to be instinctive, and compelling, so that we are driven to do it, so that even the most basic or the most weak, exhausted or overwhelmed person can do it.

Because there are many people in any generation who are very exhausted, overwhelmed and weak in various ways, mentally, physically, emotionally, psychologically, and so on. In order to make a religion, or a moral system or a system of cultural norms carry on strongly over time in a large group, you need it to compel their emotions. Fright, or shame or horror, guilt, anger, us vs. them, protecting from perceived threats and enemies, protecting from damnation, attaining heaven, these are all things that appeal to this kind of very basic, weak self, and even they can get on the same page to feel motivated by such things, if the things they have to do are simple and clear enough, easy enough to do. Not that they have to be fair or sensible or good, but just convincing and easy enough to do.

I keep on running into this brick wall where certainty is the dividing line that keeps me outside the religious club. Certainty that their ways are right and mine are wrong (their certainty, not mine). And certainty that I have to follow their ways or I’m condemned, basically. I have to follow their beliefs or I’m not accepted by God’s grace and salvation and what not. So the thing is I just can’t believe it, I just can’t buy it.

There are so many different rules and demands that different groups say form the dividing line of who is condemned and who is not. There are so many rules and demands they make that cannot be applied fairly to those who aren’t even ever exposed to the rules so they don't’ have the freedom to even choose to do these things that they demand. And for those who are taught the rules, unless it makes sense to you, how can you be held accountable and expected to follow the rules? It’s always this forced belief that of course, everyone would see the truth, the necessity, of it all, and of course, if they didn’t choose to follow then they were willingly doing wrong. And they thus deserve to be punished or separated from God’s love or whatever. Sent to Hell, if that is the ultimate outcome they believe in for them.

And it’s very tiring. It’s just like fish in the school who need this visceral fear to keep people in line. Religions serve some purpose, and when they keep people in line, they serve some purpose. And just because maybe God is really there in religion, and maybe special graces are there even in some of the rules and the rituals, that doesn’t mean that those who don’t believe in those rituals are willingly wrong or that they deserve punishment and exclusion from God’s love.

Even if they refuse to partake of certain rituals that are indeed full of grace, that doesn’t mean they willingly refused grace, but that they didn’t know the grace was to be found in those rituals. How can rituals separate people from God?

If God is love, only a refusal of love would separate people from him. And who is less loving, those who refuse rituals or those who want to condemn those who refuse the rituals? You might refuse rituals but still be a very loving person. Many who do the rituals claim they are saved and good and God’s chosen and they still live lives full of unkindness, selfishness, arrogance, judgment, condemning others, turning from the pain and need of others, turning from the feelings and experiences, refusing to see another view. And often, outright hatred. Yet they feel they are God’s chosen ones and if we are a member of the religious group, we are told not to criticize them too. Maintain the group solidarity, that is the ultimate goal.

And it’s all again about the ego, because the ego often cannot cope without the school of fish type behavior and instincts. Even putting the ego aside, we often can’t survive without the school of fish type behavior, because we need the ego to survive, up to a certain point, until we have learned to be less egoistic, but still we do need it to survive, just less than before, and we have trained it to behave better and to think more clearly and not run the show most of the time.

But till we learn how to do that it automatically takes the wheel and runs our lives because it’s like a human instinct. Ego is how the human brain evolves and copes with the growing up process. When we’re very young, we are in some ways very selfless, nonjudgmental, caring, innocent, and even if we are in some ways self-centered because we are only aware of our own needs to a great extent when very young, still, (but babies can be so loving, almost like we’re an extension of themselves, and they have so much love, just lack certain awareness and emotional self-control). But we still behave in ways that overall are extremely loving, pure, and innocent. Many of the ego’s complex and most harmful mechanisms only develop later.

But as time goes on we very soon have to adapt to being a human in a society, a family and culture, a nd prices have to be paid to do that, so the ego develops to hold together the illusion of harmony, peace, safety, and certainty, to give us something to trust, follow, and plan to do with our lives, so that we have what we need, mentally, emotionally, socially, physically. We might not really have all we need, but we have to get by and convince ourselves we are doing ok enough so we stave off depression and keep going. Even if we’re depressed, and don’t fit in and fail in so many ways, we have to keep trying to fit in and make it work and scrape by the best we can so the ego remains to try to cope with all that the best it can, even if it does a bad job because it is so lost and confused.

And what can dismantle or weaken this ego stranglehold? Finding the grace of God, finding wisdom and unique insights and coping methods that are less about control, fear, judgment, conformity, anger, manipulation, exploiting others, repressing others or oneself, and things like that.

Because under all the ego’s unfair and untruthful tactics there is a self that is all about love, caring, peace, joy, sharing, but the ego has control over that self and largely distorts or stifles it. Somehow if you can find out what true love is, what true innocence is, you can start to get in touch with the peace and clarity and simplicity beyond and below ego. But what makes it happen, it depends,... Desperation and finding the same old group conformity behavior doesn’t work is one thing that can start to loosen its grasp. Finding the manipulative, controlling, and negative behaviors don't work is another. Spirituality in various forms is another. Loneliness and the need for love and finding real love is another thing. But these are all possible things and not the whole thing, and usually they say it’s a deconstruction to remove the ego, bit by bit, and find what is underneath, layer by layer, the work of a lifetime to really get there and get very far with it.

Some people start out already having gone through so much separateness, exclusion, difficulty and pain that they never learn as much of the manipulative and controlling behavior of ego, because it wouldn’t work for them. There’s only so much you can control and if your life is just uncontrollable you don’t learn the same norms of control that others learn. There usually are some ways you still try to hold on to some control but there are less such ways available to you so you might be able to see through the cracks of the ego’s façade better, at least some of the time and the crack is where the light gets in, as that quote goes (was it Leonard Cohen, not sure?).

I keep running into habits and practices they say I have to stop, but that I don’t feel I need to let go of or change them. And I keep learning and hearing more and more ideas, the deeper I learn on this path, I learn more new practices I didn’t know I was “supposed” to follow. But I don’t feel like I have to follow them, and they say I absolutely have to, no questions asked.

I feel like death might be staring me down (might be, but that is a big if, and still, such a big heavy if that it’s very intense, I feel cornered, in a room all by myself, to face down the most serious things anyone ever does in their life, with my family and daughter too that I’d have to think of how to leave them and what to leave them and so on, if I were to die, and they are left with this religious-spiritual-emotional-social chaotic world so what can I leave them to make any sense or find peace in it all?) and what am I going to do?

Will I try to be right, according to the rules and demands they say will give me heaven and save me from hell? Or will I try to be happy instead, because I don’t even know if I believe or feel there is any sense in what they say I have to do, but if I just do what feels right to me, I still have love, and I have joy and peace and comfort in things they say are condemnable. I don’t have to try so hard to examine every claim they make and every blame and punishment they try to say I will get. I don’t have to try to see what of all this I’m supposed to teach my daughter or share with my loved ones, if they were open to them (they’re not so it’s actually beside the point, except for perhaps a few little things I might, might, possibly, not sure, be able to share as light subtle possible suggestions and not advice or judgment of any kind). I don’t have to feel like just because I didn’t hurry up to get in line and pull all the others around me along with me into line too, that means something awful will happen.

But that’s not good for the whole school of fish effect of conformity and teaching the group things that the overburdened will only learn this way.

And finally I feel maybe I can find faith outside that reward and punishment system. Finally I feel like maybe love and grace and mercy and mystery and using my own heart and my own sense and my own experience can take back the power that was forcefully taken from me through egoistic fear and control tactics.

Yes, if there are some kinds of mysterious graces to be found in rituals and rules and practices, I’m not against that, even though I have to wonder why? But I’ve experienced such things, and I don’t know why but I know it is so sometimes. But why, though, really, ... Why? Why were mysterious graces hidden in things that don’t have any logical or even experiential subjective, emotional conviction in them, for so many people?

So like it’s almost like, you can do this thing, and it will be a life-changing experience, you can learn this subject, you can take this course, this lifepath and career. And some will say, ok, I believe you, I will do it. Others feel no pull towards it. They are not morally wrong, they just don’t feel convinced by something that is not on the face of it logically or emotionally convincing, in any inherent obvious sense, any more than any other emotional, spiritual tool or practice. And of course, many won’t ever encounter the practice at all, living in some culture where it doesn’t exist.

While many will concede that those who never are exposed to the chance to choose can’t be damned, it’s too unfair, many will still say that those who don’t choose to partake when they have a choice are damned. But I think that is ridiculous, because there is nothing on the surface of it to convince them it’s the way to go. No matter what others try to argue with flimsy egoistic arguments, saying that it’s obviously good and right and those who can’t see that are willingly bad and wrong, I just don’t believe it. I have been one of those who didn’t believe but I was not a bad, wrong person. I tried so hard with everything in me to do good, and tried much harder and did much better than many of the religious people who I see condemning others that are outside their group.

I might try the rituals and practices, but I finally feel free, broken free as though knocked out of a trance, free to listen to my own heart, sense and experience, instead of going along with the group. But since I’ve learned so much from the group that has helped me, and I know that such conformist behavior might have developed for very good reasons, I don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

But this all or nothing kind of extremist thinking is often what takes a good thing and makes it a harmful hurtful and very destructive thing. What might do great good for many might do bad in other cases. Like folk medicine can have great cures, it can also have harmful remedies that later prove totally bad for you, and it it can have superstitions that are counterproductive, instilling fear, and judgment, witch-hunting. So too can religions or other conformist things, moral systems, and cultural norms of all kinds can have these shades of reality, from always true, situationally true, mistaken and harmful beliefs taken as truth, and pure superstition, but they treat it all as being irrevocably true and exclude and terrorize those who don't’ do the same, or at least you can’t question it. So if you silently live your own life, ok, but if you try to openly disagree, you threaten the stability of the conformity and that might break up the good as well as the bad, or they fear. But a system that can’t see it’s own flaws, can’t learn and grow, and listen to other’s real experiences, can’t see how it’s hurting and repressing and denying and excluding others unfairly, that is not a healthy system.

There seems to be a persecution complex going on where anyone who challenges the conformity is seen as a dire threat to the health and wellbeing of the group when actually they could be helping them to grow and improve. But only a system that has to have such pervasive solidarity like a school of fish, all effortlessly aligning together, only that kind of group will be so reactive to disagreements. And yet so much of what exists in society behaves much like that. Maybe we sometimes need it, maybe much more than we’d like to admit or see for ourselves because we are smarter than that, we are more in control of ourselves and our emotions and our sense, so we think. But really in the final say, even no matter how smart we are and how well-thought out our views and ideas, often in the final say what we really do in our lives in the choices that matter the most or make the biggest impact, those things are very emotional and driven by things like fear, anxiety, confusion, loneliness, need, and social pressure and yet we do have some power to influence and step outside that. But it takes a lot of personal work to be able to do so, because each of us is born into this kind of storm, this whirling pool of chaos and confusion and need and lack and pain and rush and horror and hurt. Sooner or later it all catches up with us and that is when the ego drops its veil over our minds and hearts and souls and each of us has to grow beyond it. Maybe as a culture or society we could somewhat evolve to be better, and less ego-driven, yet it seems like maybe much of this is just due to human nature, and the nature of life, with all its challenges that are so chaotic no matter what you do. I don’t know.

Anyway, if it is something that at least in our current culture, and as far back as you can look in most societies throughout time, it seems much this way, if it is just this way, that ego rules so much of the world and culture, and becoming less egoic is a personal, individual journey to a great degree, then ok, I have to bravely take that on myself and share with those who are open, if I find them. It’s not something that needs to or has to be totally individual and in order to have real love often it doesn’t need to be too individualistic. But it does need to be out of step with much of society and many of the relationships that are available will be very out of touch with this too. You can still love, care, share, but your ego self will be forefront when interacting with many others because they are only able to relate to you from a very egoistic level of thought and reaction. All you can give them all they’ll listen or pay attention or care about and receive is largely egoic. There is still love, but real ego transcendence, not very much. Only a hint of that is to be found in much of the love that exists, even in acts of service and such, because service is not all there is to life, for most people and if they are to find their true selves, beyond ego, they have to get to uncover layers and layers of themselves, not just love others, but find themselves, unique gifts that others might not respect or value in this ego-based society, ego-based families, ego-driven love and romance, ego-infused religion and moral and norm systems, ego-based work and career, ego-driven life at all in society and culture.

Some of the things I’ve written about here are very much drawn from Richard Rohr’s ideas (and others might be very different from what he says, so I’m not trying to say I am fully in line with all that he says at all), but I’ve gotten much of these ideas from some of his videos I’ve been listening to lately. I thought I’d mention that because there are some great ideas on his videos. Even though it’s like he said in one of them, many of the ideas he talks about are kind of like universal truths and they are your truth, my truth, many or any body’s truth, because they are so widespread, basic, human truths, but often they aren’t even realized, and so it’s easy to just take them on as your own and start to talk about them in terms of your own feelings, thoughts and experiences, because they are yours, even if you weren’t able to notice and put them into words or even realize them if they were repressed. Even if these now feel like they might be on their way to becoming “my truths” in many ways, still I wanted to acknowledge the ideas were heavily shaped by his ideas, because it feels like I should mention it and give some credit where it is due and in case someone else might even read and be helped by the videos too, who knows. I feel a little uncomfortable repeating so much of what was said by someone else that I just listened to them saying and not mention that I got my ideas from them, of course, whether the ideas are universal truths or not. At some point I think I’ll stop referencing the source and internalize the ideas as my own, as it should be to some extent at least, I think. I am not one for gurus and such, because I think that’s a good way to stunt growth and self-expression if you always have to defer to others and refer to them, and in the process you might not notice your own insights, or you might feel less than just because you didn’t realize something and had to be taught it. I guess these days I feel an aversion to the whole authority-mediated approach. Authority and conformity has tried to control and restrict me and possess and expect from me so much that I try to free myself from it at every turn. The more I see how widespread its reach into every good thing in life, and how outside the norms I am and how they try to control and strangle my individuality all the more because of how weird I have to be, the more I feel extreme anxiety and discomfort at these authority and rule based things.

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