Okay, this is probably entirely just me but two days ago I felt a change in the air. Like Autumn decided "Fuck it, let me seep some of my aura into the summer. Sneak it in there in between the monsoons." Its not necessarily weather oriented, more just a feeling. A ghost of melancholy? A trace of nostalgia? The tenuous ache of... fernweh. Yes, that's it.
Fernweh (n.)
Origin: German
Crave for travel; “farsickness”; being homesick for a place you’ve never been.
We're just moseying along at 1040 mph keeping to our selfies.
On the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Las Vegas facebook page the question was posed:
How do YOU – as a UU – think or talk about God? What do YOU mean when you say the word?
If you don’t ever use that word or want to, do you use a different word? Or do you just avoid the idea all together?
When someone asks me if I believe in God. I ask them in turn “Who’s asking? If it’s a Christian asking then I am an atheist. If it’s an atheist asking, I’m an agnostic.”
I hesitate to use the word God because it might be mistaken for that all-powerful creator described in places like the Old Testament and the Quran. Still, I use the word God because I believe we are talking about essentially the same thing –except not at all.
When I say God I am referring to something that does not have identity or intellect. I even hesitate to use the phrase universal consciousness because that might imply some form of intellect or consensus.
What God is to me is a state of awareness that allows we are part of something far greater than we can adequately express. It is a state of being that includes us but is in no way centered on us. Everthing –every thing- is connected. Everything is.
This understanding, that we only get glimpses of every now and then, is God. When we glimpse this we invent words like divinity, sacred, sublime. We are divine, sacred, sublime, and eternal because we are a part of this not a product of it. Carl Sagan told us “We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself.” Ask Neil deGrasse Tyson if he doesn’t experience the sublime in his work.
I think we have the capacity to understand this at least in an abstract way. We should be able to treat each other like the incarnations of The Greater Divine that we are. But it is much too hard to hold this in our minds and hearts. It is much easier to be swayed but the amygdala because we are still closer to that in our evolution than the awakened souls that we hope to be. It is far easier to create this Greatness to be something outside us and give it an intellect and an identity and a human physicality to identify with. At that point is an easy step to attribute to them the source of our morality, our compassion, our righteousness and our accountability. ‘They’ are divine and we are not. We invent books to tell us we are lesser things to be ruled by greater things. Heaven and Hell, the carrot and the stick: all of that is put beyond us instead our legacy in the here and now.
We are the blind men telling each other exactly what an elephant is like. God is the ones and zeros underneath the operating system that religions have overlaid with their proprietary user interfaces, logos and catchphrases. The underlying framework gets written, rewritten, stolen, re-attributed and the new versions rolled out with ad campaigns and keynote speakers. All we want is for our battery not to run out before we post those pics of cats photo-bombing our selfies.
TL;DR
We have forgotten that we are God
I just typed 'squirrel-fuckity Mario' in a conversation. I think I can go to bed now.
So, yes, the world may have ended but I don't get to notice because while digging through forgotten stuff in storage I found a box that was booby trapped with a flashback bomb: my Judo gi. I saw just a patch of that diamond pattern double weave and I was time traveling before I even felt that thick fabric in my hands-
-my sensei's gi, softer and frayed at the edges, was knotted in my fist as I twisted, pivoting backwards on the ball of my foot. I'm not sure when I had swept with my forward foot but it had happened and effortlessly so because (memory insists on slo-mo here) there was Sensei, spinning in my grip, -a pirouette parallel to the ground. I saw his eyes widen for the merest tick. I can't be sure who was more surprised but mine was enough that I forgot that I was kicking ass. So of course (forgive these hack edits but memory swears that time switches to fast forward at this point) he rewrote physics to land on his feet like a cat, instead of on his back like he showed us in the walk throughs. Once his feet touched the ground my world was whirlwind until I realized I was on my back and he was sitting on my chest pulling my nose.
"Why did you stop? You had me! You had me! Always- Always follow through! "-
Hai, Sensei.
#goodtimes #thedayIalmostkickedass #stillhatemoving
So I'm trying to wake up while watching Final Fantasy XIV cinematics. As always with FF there is an abundance of gorgeousity. It occurs to me that Square Enix is unacquainted with the concept of Less Is More. This probably why, in spite of all its overflowing beauty, I could never really fall in love with FF. Complexity killed the cat.