Hype

I’ve known all along that divinity is equipped with a sense of humor. We have news. Fake news, bluster, advertising, propaganda, lies. Falsehoods. Not the damned truth by any means. Every resume’, every job application, every interview is filled with images of self that probably originated in the carnival house of mirrors. Putting your best foot forward, presenting with a winning attitude. Believe in yourself, don’t hide your light under a bushel. Don’t sell yourself short.

Whether I am selling myself short or not, I truly prefer not to be offered for sale in any fashion. Let’ face it, the only reason one needs to be hired for a job is to gain ready capital for survival in a capitalist economy, and the only way to truly advance in a capitalist economy is by brokering the labor of others. We are all opportunistic infections on the landscape, no more and no less. My Mother told me so, and I do not doubt Her.

We have infected a thriving biosphere and modified it for our own comfort and short-sighted vision. I’m not sure that’s how we see it, but it is what it is. We’re racing headlong into the end of planetary integrity, and we seem to care very little. I’m not big environmentalist, and in these times I truthfully consider all that low on my list of urgent concerns. I’m just trying to survive out here, and pretty much on my own in that endeavor.

And what of those who have gone before me? Is it simply a fantasy that ancestors and progenitors are still part of my present reality, or had their time passed? I remember many of the lessons taught, but as I also remember – you won’t understand those lessons until you are ready. It’s one of those little gotchas that have been mixed in for us to navigate. The Divine has a sense of humor, and sometimes we are the butt of all the jokes (whose bright idea was it to invent mammals that have live births followed by a parade of hormones and societal expectations thereafter. Society is a killer, and so are its expectations.

The past is immovable, although our memories and perceptions of it can be manipulated very easily and our psyches are fragile. We don’t get a do-over or a rerun, don’t get a dress rehearsal for anything but stage plays. Why does it taunt us so? If we knew then what we know now, would that cancel out the experience. If we knew now what we learned then, I suspect we might bore ourselves to death. Nobody likes an orderly growth spurt or predictable surge in consciousness.

Collectively and individually, we’re a messy non-stop jangle of contradictions complete nonsense, but it seems to work for us. Well, it kind of works if you don’t count the wars and long periods of creative stagnation, but I suppose nobody’s perfect. I just find that we’re a bit behind in defining our purpose. Instead, we’re stuck in our heads worrying about centuries old books and denying history. That’s productive. (Not.)

Why are we here, and what do we want? I know what I don’t want far more than I know what I do want, and I’m not sure if that’s how it’s supposed to go. Regardless, that’s where I find myself the vast majority of the time, saying no rather than yes. No fascism! No authoritarianism! But what, then? Well, democracy of course. Right? But what exactly is that? It’s an oversimplification to say that democracy is the absolute ideal for an equitable and just way to share a rock hurtling through space with 12 billion of your closest friends. We’re more complicated than that, and with each passing day we discover more complicating factors that we do not understand. It was kind of a kicker to be given brains that cannot keep pace with our hormones, with our insatiable (and self-defeating) need to control just about everything. (Bless our hearts, y’all.)

I have to wonder if the Divine is actually sentient in such a way as we might be able to comprehend. That’s what most of us are taught, that Divinity is kind of a superhuman and otherworldly force of nature as we know it. That’s what we call God is humanoid, in some cases with blue eyes and gentle eyes (though that is but one of God’s persona). I truly believe that we lack the scope of intellect and experience necessary to actually see divinity in its true form. Accordingly, we have created a body of mythology to comfort us in our unknowing, but comically we engage in playground conflicts about whose vision of divinity is the best one. Christians get the prize for conceiving of the most complicated design, incorporating three aspects of deity into one package, with one of the persona consisting of a non-human form. The holy trinity is a test of faith and blind obedience, if nothing else.

Most ancient civilizations dreamt of non-human powers greater than themselves, in multiplicity. The Greeks and Romans had a hierarchical staff of gods, goddesses, complete with offspring and even family pets. The Egyptians got creative and came up with superhuman/animal chimera – dogs with a human body, humans with the head of a bird, and so on. India came up with deities sporting multiple arms, legs, and in some cases the principal parts of animals like elephants. Forest dwellers had trees and fairies, and humans had special powers that were inherent (not super-natural). Africa had warrior goddesses, and wars. All of them had creation stories and stories that depicted some cataclysm that separated humans from the gods, from the source energy. I believe that’s where we’re living now, in the void that separates us from the divine. That’s probably what our true purpose is, to make our way back to our start, our origination point. Not a bad quest, although I’m not sure we’ll ever be successful in understanding it.

We are wayward, we are prodigal, we are flawed and incomplete, but we are here. We screw up a lot, and we repeat ourselves a lot. We also have short memories, and we’re very impatient. Our vibratory energy is rather low, and we need to have complex things run by us more than once. Our biggest enemy is our arrogance, and our biggest asset is our compassion and kindness. On any given day, we stray from both and make things more difficult than they have to be. I believe we ultimately want peace, but we’re doing a fine job of blocking that on a collective level.

If only someone could return from the “other side”, just to let us know if we’re on the right track or need to do immediate and drastic course correction. If we knew which of us had the right answers for those really big questions, like whether the light bulb stays on in the refrigerator after the door is closed. Unfortunately, the joke is on us, because if someone did return from the “other side”, we’d most likely continue to argue about their validity and engage in serious conflict over their ability to present a clear and unbiased picture of what they had experienced. What is truth worth if you can’t have a war over it and bludgeon others into accepting your view of it? What indeed is truth worth?