Road To PleromaRoad To PleromaA social and spiritual commentary from someone who once took the advice of major religions rather seriously and actually gave away all his belongings 
Articles
So much cheese, so few titles...
2008-04-26 00:57:00 A View To His Will? WebSights? A Room With A Pew? Oh, there's so many really bad titles for this post, I don't know which to choose - Someone to Watch Over Chi? Oh, bother...You know, I've said it before, I'll say it again - I like to repeat myself. I enjoy being redundant. Love beating Proverbial, an old dead racehorse. I like eggs and rehash. I'll stop now. So today's rehash is inside/outside views of the same thing. It goes like this:In any belief systerm or religion, we find that no one ever gets the real picture, like direction and velocity, you can only know one part of it. Those that follow a certain path, whether it be a "cult" or a vaguely defined belief system, inevitbly follow it into the valleys and sometimes even the canyons. From this low vantage point, other beliefs are clear out of sight; other ideas are so far away and poorly lit that we mistake them for other forms, or dismiss them as distant specks on an unsavory horizon. It is quite impossible to... More About: Cheese , Titles
Appearances
2008-04-01 15:35:00 I really can't say I've written any faith shattering work lately (whether I ever have is debatable) - because of course, I too am a slave of appearances. Anyone who's been here over a period knows that the layout of the blog has changed, and there's a few new arty deals. My thanks to Amanda at Bloggerbuster for a lot of ideas and programming introductions. She's got a beautiful blog about blog layouts and graphics design that helped me figure out how to make this thing look like it does. I'm working on a second blog now, the 23 Cantos, which is an attempt to turn my Berkeley musings into one comprehensive series (think "The Many Logical Offenses of Richard Dawkins"). More on that later...It's a fine line. Obviously, whether like Amanda, your blog is a technical how-to, it's an online diary, or it's self important collections of musings (hey! I resemble that comment!), it's the content that keeps others interested, or more importantly, expands a horizon. But the wor... More About: Appearances
Images and Imagination
2008-03-25 23:15:00 Don't get strung out by the way that I look,Don't judge a book by its coverI'm not much of a man by the light of day,But by night I'm one hell of a lover- Dr. Frank N. Furter, Rocky Horror Picture Show This week it became official: I'm a Texan now. Here in Texas we (yeah, I said "we") don't have DMVs. Apparently the "Republic" has DPSs - Department of Public Safety. Everybody's gotta be special, right? So I spent a couple hours at an Austin DPS, sitting with a California issued birth certificate, a Navy discharge paper that claims Vegas as my home, and a Social Security card so hooptied and ragged that two different DPS employees initially wouldn't recognize it as authentic. But once a kindly Sgt agreed that my documentation was correct (documentation that took two months and a hundred bucks to get my hands on!), I now have a temporary Texas ID! It's a way to define ourselves, and no doubt, in the not too distant future, I will don the proverbial cowboy hat and refer... More About: Images , Imagination
Easter of Eden
2008-03-23 17:23:00 It's Easter Sunday, accurate Christian churches have their witty "Got God?" jokes taken down and "Christ Is Risen!" placards up in their place. The less understanding of their own faith have "The Lord Is Risen", but we'll skip them for now. Violet had her first Easter Egg hunt, which went rather successfully, and there's family visits to do later this afternoon. It is, for the most part, turning out to be a rather typical American Easter Sunday.No one I'm going to be around today is, to my knowledge, a religious person. There will be no reading of the Gospel, or moments of silence for the risen King. Yet for some reason, people tend to be a little more serious on this day. Some offer quiet prayers, some treat it as a spring version of Thanksgiving. Everyone has the bunny ears and plastic eggs, ham and chocolate. Of course, it still perplexes me why Americans, with their proud Christianity of Convenience have such things. Easter bunnies and eggs have as much to with Jesu... More About: Eden
No Going Back To Blake's
2008-03-14 19:10:00 The Democrats have been bickering over experience quite a bit recently. It's been the cornerstone of Hillary's whole campaign, other than some not-so-subtle racism and a sense of entitlement. Of course, perhaps they are both actually human beings, and in a subjective stance has no possible way of knowing which of them has a higher quality library of past experiences that will actually come into play when talking to Prime Minister Putin or President Ahmadinejad, which will be best equipped to address the country when it is under attack from terrorists, meteors, or breakfast cereal toys from China. On the other hand, he hasn't dealt with how to handle the phone call he should have already placed to Hillary demanding her to concede, seeing his basically insurmountable delegate lead and calls from Kennedy, Kerry, and recently hints from Pelosi for Hillary to step the heck out of the way. Perhaps, as William Blake would say, he doesn't have experience, he's too naive on this thin... More About: Back
Thanks for the (false) memories...
2008-03-08 04:34:00 Democracy is itself, a religious faith. For some it comes close to being the only formal religion they have.-EB WhiteThe race is over and I'm done with it. We all should be. Look, here's the thing: if you break down delegates, Barak is up about 54% to Hillary's 46%. That's friggin' huge. He's up what, a half-million voters? Game's over friends. Remember reading some exit poll or early return where there was only 23% of the precincts reporting, and CNN tried to convince you that Candidate A was behind, but it was her or his best precincts that hadn't reported? Like in Texas? When they kept reminding us that Austin and Houston love Barak Obama, and they had such slow returns that night? Like he didn't pick up those delegates the first two minutes the polls were open there? What happened in Texas? With the exception of Florida in 2000, the front runner finished up where the first quarter of the people voted. Same here. Actually, worse. Because Hillary, in a des... More About: Memories
Waffles for Breakfast The Morning After
2008-03-05 15:13:00 What happened? Barak was supposed to win the Republic of Texas, and leave Ohio so close that Hillary would have no choice but to drop out for the good of the party. In classic style, Americans make the Republic of Georgia and Russia look like they have it together as yet one more "Super Tuesday" passes. By the time we're done with this, there won't be any Mundane Tuesdays left. So far, the Democrats, who cried foul the last two elections over voting machine irregularities and the Sunshine State (better known as the Lair of Jeb and the LobsterBoy) find themselves embroiled in another close election that involves voting machine irregularities and the Lair of Jeb and the LobsterBoy. The only problem is that those of us with liberal leanings have no Grand Ol' Party to blame this time.Since exit polls show that 67% of likely voters that base their wardrobe and mood swings on astrology columns tend to vote Democrat, we can assume that liberals refuse to take personal responsibilit... More About: Breakfast , Morning
Terry, Howie, Jimmy, and Hillary
2008-02-24 21:09:00 So, here's the thing: turns out Carey and I both had the same opinion: We thought we were going to be all about Hillary . Seriously. But something strange happened this season. Like the Chicago Bears in football, the Hill-meister totally imploded. Now we know exit polls aren't worth the news channels they're reported on, but she's in trouble. People say it's the war, or it's the economy, or she's an insider, or even the press would rather appear sexist than racist. I'm more of the opinion that there's much amiss in the Clinton Campaign Machine beyond the Bellaggio and lotsa donuts. Somewhere, somehow, Hillary forgot that the whole "two for one" comment referred to Bill Clinton coming with her, and so in an effort to fulfill the two for one role, she's become the Two Faces of Hillary.Here's the thing: If news channels ran their programs like NFL pre-game shows, we'd have the effect of them pointing out that you can't have Marty Schottenheimer and Steve Spurrier on t... More About: Jimmy , Terry
Strip Mining America
2008-02-24 12:44:00 Can I just tell you? It's been almost three weeks since I've arrived in beautiful, sunny, southern California. What a change. We live in the 'burbs: Strip Malls galore! I've been reintroduced to paying bills, shopping at grocery stores, cable television. The pressures of the financial situations are enormous. The rewards of a family are greater. So some brief observations... First, I was actually frightened when Carey informed me that we were getting that 3/100 deal. You know the one, whether it's Comcast or TimeWarner: Cable, Internet, and Land Line for $100/mo. The phone and internet - yay! I have a junky prepaid cell phone, so that 30 bucks pays for itself. The internet - freedom to write in the blog, keep in touch with my friends up in Berkeley, streaming sermons of pastors there, endless political blogs about how great/horrid various candidates are. I can deal with this. But cable tv? Do I need 24 hours of Law & Order? Do I need late night soft porn? Of... More About: America , Mining
Off-Keys to the Kingdom
2008-02-03 18:31:00 Watching the national primaries raises a lot of questions: If we are to give unto Caesar what is Caesar's, if we are to spurn the kingdom of man for the kingdom of heaven, should we really care about this election? Of course, for the ascetic, the answer is clear: nope, not a whit. Or is it? Isn't the Dali Lama changing the very way his faith chooses his successor to protect that faith from a hostile Chinese government? Is not Pope Ratfink repealing all the great works of John Paul II and Vatican II? And do these changes not alter and influence the way that faith is perceived in not just current generations, but in those to come so drastically that the very foundation of Jesus' and Buddha's teachings have been distorted into Ritz crackers and Manichevitz or hipster necklaces and "feel good" paths that have nothing to do with the difficult path to knowledge? So the earthly kingdoms do not influence the eternal. They do influence the way we can learn of the eternal, of the ... More About: Kingdom , Keys , The Kingdom
Who's the man?
2008-01-04 20:58:00 On Christmas day, I emailed several people; one was my last romantic interest, who I never really fell out of love with. After a couple scathing and a couple more inquiry emails, it turns out she never really fell out of love with me either. The weeks prior, I had gotten an offer for an apartment, an employment opportunity, and many lunches with friends debating these things. After all, I despise our society's emphasis on the 'filthy lucre' and it's materialistic obsessions, yet it seems I am returning from the rings of Saturn, perhaps even entering the atmosphere. So when a brief "Merry Christmas wherever you are." turned into "I'm still madly in love with you.", the pieces had been placed in front of me for a possibility of reconciliation. God loves freaky timing like that. If you don't believe me, go read Esther. I'll wait.......hmm, hmm......still waiting......see how everything was lined up like bowling pins? It happens like that. This morning I was called on by...
The Most Wonderful Time of the Year?!
2007-12-25 18:29:00 Well Merry Christmas, to both of you! Yes, I'm feeling snarky. The holly filled season, with it's debates over Merry Christ Mass or Happy Holy Days, with it's sardonic "You know the Christmas Tree is actually from Saturnalia", with it's consumerism and Saint Nick (I saw the real one - his jaw bone is on display in Antalya, Turkey - creepy), with drunk Uncle Eddie, with people constantly reminding us it's about the birth of the Christ Child (yet yesterday a minister was saying he must have actually been born in the late spring). Ugh, can we not wait for the new year? It's a time of confusion, and whether with family, loved ones, or friends, don't all of us get that feeling? You know the one... I don't belong here.We watch the children unwrap their presents, we become introspective. We feel the distance. We feel like the misfit toys. When did we lose that intimacy the children have? The immediacy? How are we sitting in our chair, looking at our parents, our siblings,... More About: Time , Wonderful , Year
Wise men say...
2007-12-18 20:57:00 The Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset says we fall in love on few occasions in a long life. It is a rare and fortuitous event, and it strikes incredibly deeply. When such love happens, it is for no other reason than the singularity of the object. Only this person. Not attributes and virtues, not voice or hips or bank account, not projections left over from earlier flames or hand-me-down family patterns, simply the uniqueness of this person whom the heart’s eye selected. Without that sense of fate in the choice, the romance of the love doesn’t work. For this sort of love is not a personal relationship or a genetic epistasis, but more likely a daimonic inheritance, a gift and curse from the invisible ancestors. James Hillman, ‘The Soul’s Guide: In Search of Character and Calling”Over time, the meanings of words and ideologies change. For me, the word “Stoic” always brought to mind my mother’s step-father. He had that long serious face, couldn’t bear to hear ... More About: Wise
The Reverend Tony Kornheiser?
2007-12-07 18:42:00 What person, however careless, who had to address someone of importance, would notspend time in thinking how to approach him so as to please him and not be consideredtedious? He would also think what he was going to ask for and what use he would make of it,especially if his petition were for some particular thing, as our good Jesustells us our petitions must be. This point seems to me very important. Couldst Thou not,my Lord, have ended this prayer in a single sentence, by saying: "Give us, Father,whatever is good for us"? For, in addressing One Who knows everything, there wouldseem to be no need to say any more.This would have sufficed, O Eternal Wisdom, as between Thee and Thy Father. It wasthus that Thou didst address Him in the Garden, telling Him of Thy will and Thy fear,but leaving Thyself in His hands. But Thou knowest us, my Lord, and Thou knowestthat we are not as resigned as wert Thou to the will of Thy Father; we needed, therefore,to be taught to ask for particular things... More About: Tony , Reverend
Scar Tissue from the Otherside
2007-12-05 16:32:00 Well apparently this little baby is still running, eh? It’s been awhile, and from Bravenet Stat Tracking, it seems that this blog has been forgotten all around. There was a time when readers where a couple hundred a month, and in the last two weeks, five people have come by, three of which were looking for directions to the Berkeley ISKON temple. Of course, when the author absconds, what do we expect? It’s a crazy thing, this life. It’s the same way with our spirituality: if we neglect it, and we come back to find it has quite dissipated, we act surprised. Because works done don’t buy us credit – we can’t be charitable and honest and contemplative in the springtime and expect to be content when we spend the summer and autumn in the world. We need to reconnect, and as Fred Astaire once sang, “Pick yourself up, brush yourself off, and start all over again.” Yeah, it's been four months since I even attempted to write anything here. It came back to the free wi...
Go!
2007-08-15 19:10:00 A friend recently introduced me to the game of Go. I've been avoiding board games, they're too much of a distraction to me from what I really want to do, though I'll play an occasional game of chess, and was introduced to Settlers of Cana (or something like that) not too long ago. Go causes a westerner to make a paradigm shift in approach. Instead of capturing pieces, although that is part of the game, the idea is to capture territory instead. In the game, which is played on a large board of intersections (rather than the squares, it is where they meet, again, a change for our brand of thought) changes it's outlook over the course of playing much more than chess. It is ultimately rather a rigid exercise in determinism and game theory, but it also is very representative of our quest for the truth. Certain parts of the board will become hopeless for one player, and so both ignore it for awhile, being not finished, but essentially forced in a certain direction. Ignore that area for...
My Retarded Friends
2007-07-16 21:22:00 I have a friend who believes in magic. By that, I mean he believes in one certain magic trick. Ever since he was a child, one of his daydreams has been that of telekinesis. So when a coworker on the night shift of a delivery company moved a pen "with his mind", his lifelong desire for telekinesis got its proof. I of course told him it was a parlor trick. We aren't looking to be members of a real life Fantastic Four, that sort of thing is a simple $20 trick at the local magic shop. I told him that it seemed to me that someone who had such a great mastery of this sensual world, someone privvy to the latent powers we prince and princesses of the responsive universe would best use those amazing powers beyond doing a little ditty for a friend at their part-time job. Of course, he believes, and no amount of stories about magician's tricks can dissuade him. He's challenged me to find a magic trick or book that can duplicate it, but I already know he'll respond with "That's not... More About: Friends , Retarded
Let's Review a very tired metaphor...
2007-07-09 21:28:00 As I wander through this journey of ours, I find a lot of people are, if not curious or intrigued, at least offset by my choice of tack in sailing these seas. And it can be a very discouraging conversation if I don’t stay on point. So you’ll pardon me if I go ahead and write a quick point of what I’ve learned so far, and why I believe it’s so very important that we set our courses with the utmost precision and mindfulness. There have been people that have been interested in helping me or in countering my beliefs. There have been people that have questioned the validity of my lifestyle, those that have idolized it, those that have been horrified at the lifestyle their old friend is now living. The most recent version of this conversation was with a lovely and intelligent woman who attends UC Berkeley. We weren’t discussing me per se, but when I said I didn’t believe that most of us operated from a very solid moral or social foundation, she bit and asked to... More About: Review , Tired
Barnburning in F Minor
2007-06-11 21:22:00 Some quick thoughts…I just recently wrote about re-evaluating St. Paul’s significance. Of course, it may lead to nothing, and that I will end up where I was, or I may find that he was a Gnostic, or an anti-Semitic Semite, or his wife invented fish sticks. In the end, of course, it doesn’t matter a whit what he was. The socio-political aspects of his ministry are historically interesting, but it is, of course, something of doctrine and dogma. The reason for studying such things should not be to credit or discredit someone’s viewpoint, but to immerse oneself in various traditions of the divine, looking for insights we may not have had before. I plead no contest to all charges of trying to be clever.Currently, I am reading the New Testament Code by Eisenman. His logic is faulty, he is the definition of eisegesis, and his bitterness to Christianity and Islam is almost wounding to the reader of any belief. Yet within the vitriol, he does something that Richard Dawkins does not: h... More About: Minor
Paul Hit And Run Pauline
2007-06-07 19:10:00 So as we all know, I've been railing against Paul ine Christianity for some time. My train of thought went something like this: In Matthew, Jesus declares Peter his successor. After Jesus is long gone from the sensual world, a prosecutor of Christians, Saul, a descendant of Benjamin (i.e. Wolf and relative of the original Saul) is running around hanging and beheading all these Christies. One day, riding down from Samaria, he thinks, "Jesus, I can't get rid of these people. Hmm... if you can't beat them, hijack their movement!" His main man, Luke, writes a gospel and an acts that support his claims. He runs in to opposition (Peter at Antioch), doesn't know anything about the earthly Jesus, etc. Of course, I used eisegetical methods, looking to prove myself rather than looking for truth. Other things have cropped up that make me weary of my thoughts though. For example, Paul tells us to ignore all the geneologies and gospels that proclaim them - wait, his boy's Gospel do...
Excuse me Sophia, but are your feet tired?
2007-06-06 21:16:00 I talk a lot about definitions. Words mean nothing in and of themselves – there’s nothing arboreal about the word “tree”. A tee, an ar, and two ees can’t house a family of squirrels or give us shade in the summertime. They are symbols, seemingly arbitrary ones that describe concepts. So it’s always important that we are sure that our symbology matches up with one another, or else we may get off track in our discussions. So before we talk about complex ideas, we make sure our simple ones are on the same page, and we expound from there. We are fairly sure, that when pointing at a couple across the room and say “her” we are talking about the woman of the pair. The simpler and more universal the vocabulary, the better the chance of accurately exchanging our ideas. This is the basis for many writers’ preference for simple language in their storytelling (Ernest Hemingway, for example). It leaves less room for error. It also leaves less room for specificity. In... More About: Sophia , Feet , Excuse , Tired
Drag Queens and King James
2007-06-04 21:21:00 This past week, LeBron "King " James , the newest face and superstar of the NBA dropped an amazing performance on Detroit in game five of the Eastern Conference Finals. It, for a basketball fan, was one of those performances that will define his career and be replayed constantly in the future. He achieved a level of dominance over another team, the game, and himself that hasn’t been seen since Michael Jordan – including his ability to physically overpower others (a rare facet that was not part of Jordan’s repertoire). He scored 29 of his team’s final 30 points, and willed his team to the next level. The following game, he scored twenty points, and a rookie led the way to the team clinching the Eastern Conference Title and the right to face the San Antonio Spurs in the NBA championships.During that series, like in game six, despite his amazing game five performance, there will times when he is merely human in his talents and contributions. He and his team will lose games. Even ... More About: King James , Drag , Queens
The Joys of Kicking Your Own Ass
2007-05-24 20:39:00 or, the last two posts come together under one roof...“If I’m one thing, it’s redundant. I also tend to repeat myself.”Fisch, Ally McBealIf you look at the past post or two, it’s obvious these are strains that are being repeated over and over. It’s not that I’m out of material, it’s that themes must be visited and revisited. We forget ourselves, indeed, many beliefs are centered around the forgetful nature of our material nature in why we are not so much better connected with the spiritual realms. Materialism is obviously a great concern of mine. As are the subjects of “divine vocation” and “cognitive dissonance”. The questions, after how ever long, are still unanswered: Is the material sphere to be shunned, or to be integrated? Must we do the former before we can possibly achieve the latter? Is that so much like the seeming amoralism that we see preached amongst mystics, which is too often confused with immoralism (a teaching, I believe Jesus harps ... More About: Kicking
A Novel Life
2007-05-23 20:12:00 Troy had felt, in his transient way, hundreds of times, that he could not envy other people their condition, because the possession of that condition would have a necessitated a different personality, when he desired no other than his own. He had not minded the particularities of his birth…because these appertained to the hero of his story, without whom there would have been no story at all for him; and it seemed to be only in the nature of things matters would right themselves at some proper date and wind up well…Thomas Hardy, Far From The Maddening CrowdYesterday in the Science Times of the NYT, the front page article is on life narratives. It’s from the psychological stand point on how “healthy” people view moments when telling stories of their lives, versus those that aren’t so successful. It focused on point of view in recapping episodes from life, with those that can view personal trauma and disappointment from a third person perspective score much higher as being ... More About: Life
Canto XX reduxx
2007-05-17 19:17:00 Canto XX Revisited: Go AnskyWhen I first wrote this entry last November, I had been going to a Christian church for awhile, and couldn't quite make it fit together. If it wasn't for the last eight or nine months of going to the Church, from "leaning in" and "field testing" the belief, I wouldn't have learned any of it. But now, sitting just a few seats back, I think I have a better view of the stage, I seriously think I'm onto something here, and so here's a revision...Certainly, there are too many prophecies of the coming messiah in the Jewish histories and prophetical writings that could be examined. But I am not asking for a proof, only a possibility. And once that’s established, once a reason for taking this leap is posited, then we can, in clear conscious, take a leap of faith, try on the religion without reservation, and see how it fits, how it acts within our life. For this is the test. The scientific mentality says posit a hypothesis, then test it in the lab. Yet it ...
Notes for a later post..
2007-05-10 20:26:00 It’s been a week or so since I’ve written here. So let’s recap real quick. I left the strict “leaning in” of exploring Christianity. I spent an afternoon meditating at the ISKON temple, which really didn’t impress much upon me, although I have to say, I had a greater awareness than when I had last been there. I seemed more sensitive to the energy of the place, but still felt a restriction. We feel these things constantly. When we go to a sporting event or a concert, in the worship service of our choice, whenever we are around others and there’s a level of excitement. Mob mentalities can run to positive or negative, and we often find the sights of them leave long impressions. At the Krishna temple, Sunday evenings are always filled with such (as Sunday mornings are at Christ Church Berkeley). People are opening themselves and projecting themselves to focused points, and the “vibes” are palpable. Most people are comfortable with terms like “crowd excitement” or ... More About: Post , Notes |
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