My Dharma

I've been trying to enlarge my spiritual life. Some times I am not even sure what that means. Here is the deal, I have found that I sometimes act like a jerk. Actually it may not be an act! Whatever! is the reality I want to change it. I want to be a much better person than I am. I have tried on my own for years but never really seemed to get anywhere. A lot of people have suggested asking a god of my understanding (they said God as if it was somebody's name but I know it's not) for help. This is tough to do when you have no god of your understanding. I have always figured any god I could understand wouldn't really be anything like a real god. If I understand it, it is not God, in other words. So you see that makes me pretty much an agnostic. It sucks, I want to be a better person, but consistently fail on my own. I can ask a god I understand to help me but I do not have one. And I know that if I did have one it would not really be God! So there!

I used to say I was an atheist. That was based on the fact that I have no theology. I thought atheist was short for a-theological you know, without a theology an a-theist. I am definitely not a theist. Apparently being non theist is not being atheist, who knew? I sure as hell didn't! Oh that's something else I do not believe in either, hell. Hell, from my infidel viewpoint, seems more important to most true believers than heaven. They seem to dwell on it more. The Devil seems pretty popular with the true believers too. (That's probably not a nice thing to say but, damn it it's true!) I have to admit I do admire Lucifer as portrayed in Milton's "Paradise Lost." God has devastated the rebel angels and Lucifer is literally flat on his back in a lake of fire (I hate it when that happens!) but instead of whining and crying he defiantly states, "better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven!" Man what a stud! I digress, enough sympathy for the Devil, that's not the main thing. The thing is how theology gets so complicated. A lot of these Christians (maybe Jews too) are not monotheists they really have two gods, God and the Devil, and they believe in both. I definitely do not believe in the Devil. I am iffy about God.

I turned non believer as a child. I asked for evidence and of course there is none so I quit believing in God. I got interested in spiritual matters after trying LSD. I had a buddy who was into Alan Watts (a translator of eastern spiritual traditions for westerners) and I read "The Book" by Alan Watts, it was awesome! I really got turned on to Zen concepts. (Zen practice not so much!) These eastern traditions seemed more organic, they have spirituality inhabiting everything. Western traditions seem to posit two planes one is the sacred plane, the other one, this plane we live on, is profane. Eastern traditions seem to posit only one plane, this one, which is either sacred or profane depending on your level of awareness. I like the eastern (as I see it) paradigm. The thing is this viewpoint does not include the supernatural. There is no separate reality where God the creator lives. There is just reality and it's either holy or not depending on how you see it. Sometimes I see it holy and those times God is everything, a lot of the time I don't, and these times God is nothing.

It must be so comforting to "know" that the almighty creator has your back 24, seven and that he loves you and all that sort of stuff. I tell you though and it is true, there is no act of faith more profound than praying to a god you doubt even exists! I am not bragging! I think really believing is a mental luxury I will never get to experience and in a way, I am kind of jealous I guess.

The reason I decided to expand my spiritual life was not the pursuit of mental luxury. It is because it seems to help me act like a better person than I naturally am. So I started attending and reading "A Course In Miracles." Now I won't even touch the premise of the course, it's quite bizarre. I don't care about that since I just want the karma not the dogma. Let the karma run over the dogma as they say. So there I was reading the text which is written in very dense logical extrapolations which are deliberate mind benders and I start wondering if the authors were on LSD when they wrote it. The sentences sounded like the stuff people say when they are using psychedelics for philosophical purposes and they're tripping their brains out! Spirituality is tough for guys like me.



Russell