Moderation

Over the past year or so I have moved from being faithless, cynical, and doubtful to faithful, hopeful, and questioning. It had been quite a long time since I was certain of anything even remotely associated with faith. There were ups and downs in my life within that time of faithlessness. In that time, whenever I was at the bottom of the hill I felt stranded there and when I happened upon the top of a hill I was pessimistic about the future, because a high always was followed by a low in my way of thinking. During this time I perceived all of the love I received as conditional, all of the hope as foolishness, and the world itself as being ruled by a dog eat dog mentality.

I was lost and I knew it. I knew that there was more to life than bleeding the hourglass. I knew that somehow, someway, I was meant to do more than supply someone else's demand. I felt like the opening lines of The Script's 'Breakeven' more than I would have cared to admit. Still alive but I'm barely breathing. Praying to a God that I don't believe in. I knew that there was some truth to what I was brought up believing in a twisted version of Christian doctrine. Even though I knew this, how was I ever going to separate the true message from the words of men that were tainted by a desire to have control and a monopoly on truth?

Slowly I realized that just because I wanted to accept God, didn't automatically chain me to the doctrine I was raised to believe. However, as I began to build my own understanding of faith and a relationship with the Spirit, I found myself falling back on my attributions of conditional love to God. I should have known that the spirit holds love that is unconditional. Luckily, I caught myself, corrected my balance, and started moving forward again.

I struggled with the conflict between my previous judgmental ideas and my current ideas of acceptance. I was arguing a futile debate, where the facts seemed to weigh evenly on both sides. In my heart I questioned the religious teachings that some behaviors are inherently bad and should be avoided. On the other hand, I was not sure if there was Truth that surpassed the answers that I had begun to pursue, which would ultimately leave my questions unanswered. I wondered if there were actual lines distinguishing moral actions from immoral ones or if generations before us had taken advantage of the blurred lines to exercise control? Were any of these seemingly trivial "taboo behaviors" really all that important to forming relationships with others, and by design with God?

During the course of this internal conflict, a voice from my past about something seemingly unrelated entered my thoughts:

Everything in moderation, that's all it really takes.

The words were originally my Uncle's advice on how to become healthier and lose weight. Although he was referring to only eating one piece of cake instead of three, the words themselves found me and seemed to be a near perfect fit for my dilemma.

[On a side note, I say near perfect because I realize that there is true morality that lies within all of us. I don't believe that behaviors and crimes such as murder, theft, deception, and others in the same vein can be solved by this mantra. I believe that these types of behaviors can be guided by the golden rule of loving one's neighbor as oneself. It is the 'gray area' behaviors that aren't easily governed by this rule that I am interested in. The behaviors that have been black listed over time to be looked upon with shame and judgment that this moderation mantra truly applies to.]

Using this new frame of mind, I began to alter my thoughts about certain behaviors that have negative connotations and that many religions tell us to avoid. These behaviors include the immediate tabooed behaviors that come to mind, such as drinking alcohol, doing drugs, premarital sex, shopping for wants rather than needs, gambling, swearing, et cetera to the less thought of behaviors that are motivated by vanity, pride, self-interest, et cetera.

Each of these behaviors has the potential power to get us into trouble if we don't pay attention. However, I believe that we can actively engage in them with a conscious effort to maintain or even strengthen our relationship with God. Each of these behaviors, as well as many more, have previously been perceived as distancing actions from God, but I don't buy it. As long as we don't let these behaviors cloud our hearts and our perceptions of our purpose in life, we will be fine.

It seems as though the alternative that I was raised to believe as truth (avoiding the behavior at all costs and judging those who engage in them), no longer holds much water. I now believe that we miss the point when we concern ourselves with whether what someone else is doing is condemning them or not. By participating in these behaviors with a conscious effort on moderation, we will be able to find our own personal balance. This balance will allow us to see what we need to do while engaging in these behaviors to strengthen the relationship we have with others and God.

This mantra may seem somewhat abstract, so to clarify I have thought of certain examples that can apply to everyday life. These aren't groundbreaking, they are just simple ways that we can utilize this mantra in everyday life:

For example, when a person does drugs they should do so with the intent of expanding their spiritual relationship with themselves and others, rather than using it as a pure escape from the problems in reality.

Similarly, when a person drinks alcohol, rather than using it to numb pain or drown sorrows, we can seek to build relationships with others and reframe the experience as one that can broaden our life experience.

When engaging in sex, whether it is premarital or not, we should be focused on knowing and celebrating the person on a different level than we already do, rather than being driven by lust and focusing only on the act itself.

When gambling, if we do by chance win, let our thoughts be driven by a desire to help those in need as well as fulfilling our own needs.

When shopping for our wants rather than our needs, for every outfit that we buy we could give two that we already have away.

The list can go on and on and is specific to each individual. Only we can determine what the right balance is for ourselves at different points throughout our lives.

Although this moderation mantra may not hold true for every behavior that people engage in, I believe that moderation is a decent guideline to follow when our body, mind, or soul is conflicted about a certain behavior. In my experience, I have found the balance to be a tricky one to maintain, but with time I have learned to catch myself. When I feel I am letting a behavior or emotion cloud my ability to truly love and serve others, I am able to step back and reevaluate.

We all create our own dance to navigate through this life, but we are not left to fend for ourselves. If we truly listen, this dance can be guided by the steady beat of our own hearts and the beautiful song of our souls.

Technologically Unsound

I have a cell phone which allows me to keep in touch with friends, family members, classmates, extended family, mentors, mentees, the old, the young, people I'm close with as well as with people I'm not. I can call them for a long conversation to try and grasp a little closer to how it would feel to be with them at that point in time or I can text them some information that doesn't warrant a phone call.

I have two email accounts, one that keeps me up to date with the latest spam, newsletters, special limited offers, and other information that I could really care less about. The other account provides me with some of the same useless information (but on a lesser scale), information from the various school programs and majors I am involved in, gives me pertinent information about my life at college, and keeps me in touch with people that I hold dear.

I have a facebook page in which I have hundreds of friends from both past and present, family members, acquaintances, as well as a few people I have never met or talked to in real life (and probably never will). This facebook account allows me to keep in touch with people without actually talking to them or by just posting an "I miss you" or a quote from a good time we had way back in the past. This account is basically a quick way of exchanging information about our current life, whether that be a status update with "mmm....coffee" or "fml...my life is over because of this French class" or a new set of pictures that help us remember our nights or to commemorate the birth of a new child...the list goes on and on.

I have a webcam and Skype that allows me to get one step closer to interacting with someone who is geographically distanced from me. Now I can see and hear the person that I am talking with and it is as close as we can get for the time being....

I also have a blog (as you all know, but may have thought I forgot that I had) which gives me a place to put some thoughts that I have about life in general. Not many people know about my blog, but I am grateful that some people care to read it whether anonymously or in the form of a follower.

With all of these various forms of technological forms of communication, one would expect that I would be pretty well up to date with people and a loss of contact with someone could be blamed on a technology malfunction. However, I often feel like very little of this technology has helped my life in significant ways. Sure, I am able to keep in pretty close contact with those that I choose to text or call on a regular basis. But I have found that when people only are present in my life through a facebook page, or a text message, or an email, I lose track of them. To clarify, when there is no other contact than an occasional message every now and then, it seems like I lose track of their lives and in the same vein, they lose track of mine.

I have a brother across the world in Oxford. I have a friend working in New Mexico. I have a friend going to school in Chicago. I have a friend going to school in Pittsburg. I have a girlfriend near Rochester. I have a friend moving to Kansas City. I have a friend moving to Tennessee. I have a friend moving to Ireland and one moving to London. I have friends that are around the state in Fredonia, Buffalo, Oneonta, Orange County, Syracuse, Binghamton, et cetera. I have family out in Western New York, in Texas, in Ohio, and North Carolina. I have friends who live two dorms away, two floors away, and a state away.

All of these people spread around the globe, and technology helps me keep in touch with them but also makes me feel guilty when I don't. I guess we all just get caught up in our lives now and have a difficult time imagining that others are living their lives without us there. They are surviving just fine without my physical presence and I am doing the same. Although there may be an ache in my heart or a thirst in my soul that is only quenched when they are near, I am physically okay and emotionally stable without their physical presence.

Although technology helps soothe this ache at times, I feel that it always leaves me wanting more. More conversation, more information, more feeling, more thought more interaction...just more. Something is missing from these artificial forms of communication. When we attempt to fill the void that we feel inside ourselves with this technology, we are about as successful as a child trying to fill a hole in the sand with water.

We have simplified communication with all of these technological advances. We have turned what used to be very interpersonal and moving into an artificial exchange of information that stagnates all forms of personal contact. As a close friend told me, "I think that all of these technological advances in communication are just more developed forms of noise." I agree with him on this because this noise interferes with how I perceive people and our relationships.

With these 'advances' I can no longer see people face to face, see the body language and microexpressions they give off, hear the real laughter, see their quirks, hear their heart or breath, and feel their soul rise as a conversation touches on issues which they are passionate about. With these 'advances' some part of the connection has been interrupted. Some piece of information has been lost. It's like putting together a puzzle and realizing you've lost the last piece. Like writing a letter and forgetting to sign your name.

There is a mark that each of us has that makes us who we are. A mark that we leave traces of on those we interact with. A mark that is unique to every individual. A mark that cannot be seen or heard, but only felt when we are in the here and now with someone. A mark that we will remember when people are removed from our lives. It is the mark that fuels the formation of a memory. I can only hope that our perception of this mark will not fade over time. Although our minds may be clouded by noise, I can only hope that our souls may have the strength to separate the truth from the artifice.

Of Cats and Dogs

What have we done to our sisters and brothers? How could we let our pride get in the way of our innate drive to become one with humanity? We have turned the world, which was formerly representative of Eden, into a place where the dog eats the dog.

But tell me, when the dogs prey on the dogs what happens to the cats? Yes the cats who represent the formerly persecuted and hunted which were below the dogs in status and merit. As the dogs fight over the bones and flesh of their most recent capture, the cats lurk in the shadows observing silently. They look upon the discord and the ravaging that is raping the land and species. The cats begin gathering and quickly reproduce in great numbers now that they are no longer hunted. As the dogs’ numbers dwindle, the cats continue to grow in size and strength, readying themselves for when they can take the thrown that they previously had centuries ago. As the dogs ignorantly continue to fight over which pack is better or stronger, the cats prepare for the attack.

As the attack is launched the dogs fearfully clutch to their tribes and are quickly overtaken. They attempt to cling to the rest of their brethren, but the once strong unity and power is nothing but a memory. The cats have quickly shifted from the hunted to the hunters and the dogs are their prey. The dogs howl pleas of mercy and aid, but their howls go unanswered. The cats fail to recognize that all though their language and culture is different, the howls that they utter are the same. After being pushed to near extinction by the dogs, the cats saw their chance for revenge and survival and they took it. These felines were clever and cunning in ways that were developed by their ancestors as a result of being oppressed. As they now take the reins and have ultimate control over the dogs, the cunning and cleverness will drift from the felines into the oppressed canines and will continue the cycle of oppressor and oppressed. So who is in the right within this story?

Neither is right and neither is wrong. They are just pawns in a cycle driven by the hunger for power and innate impulse for survival. The question is not who is right, but how can we fix this cycle? How can we turn our brothers and sisters from the tempest of power? How can we turn our friends away from striving for separateness and toward the unity that burns within us all? Is it too late, or is that what those in power would like us to believe? Perhaps the few felines and canines who can see beyond our few differences to the divine presence that exists in us all can convince one person at a time to lay down their arms. This may seem small, but as the word spreads, one person will become the masses. The dawning of a new era is upon us, one that escapes the strife that has plagued us for several millennia and will arrive at a place where the peace and love of Eden is revisited and recreated.

Some may call me an idealist or a dreamer, but those are only the people who do not want to see change or do not believe that it could occur. It can occur and will, we should not have to wait until we reach the heavens to finally rest in peace. We were born with the drive towards the peace that lies within, all we have to do is recognize and live this peace. Let us come to truly know humanity as it was originally intended. Let us move away from the fighting and the strife. Let us arrive at a place where we are no longer plagued by quarrels of cats and dogs.

Drifting Moments

As I move along in this life, I hope to become more in touch with my spiritual side each and every moment. I say each moment because this moment, right this very instant is my entire life. I cannot create a better past for myself, so I will not to dwell on it. Also, if I use this present moment to focus on the future and all the plans I want to make, I will lose track of my life as these plans either play out or are dissolved. There is little certainty in this life, but we do tend to believe that our hopes and wishes will bring a more concrete certainty. I can’t waste the present dreading or looking forward to the future, I need to make the present an adventure that will differentiate itself from the rest of my past when it passes as all moments do.

So here I am, attempting to live in the moment, because the moment is all I have to live. On my mind at this moment is the thought that will quell my worries and calm the storm inside my soul. I hope to make this statement one I live by. I also will recognize that others may be living by this belief as well and as a result I will let go of the jealousy, anger, and depressive thoughts that previously frequented my mind.

I will arrive at the belief that the person with whom I am interacting is, at that moment, the most important person in my life. This label is fluid as my day progresses, because to reserve the label of importance for one person is to negate the other 6 billion people on this planet. Nothing can take me away from the cherished time that I have with that person. Time is short and an opportunity like this may present itself everyday or never again, we can never be sure. This is a unique opportunity to know God through interaction with others. No interaction is the same, because no person is the same. But for all of our differences, the fact remains that we were created in God’s image and we all have that mark upon our souls. I seek to see and learn more about that mark within others as well as within myself. When putting no specialness or favorite label upon myself or others, I will be able to see people as the manifestations of the divine that they were created to be. Help me see this good and equality in others, as well as finding it in myself. You have been holding me and carrying me for my entire life. Now is the time that I stand upon my shaky legs and do your service with you as my guide. Help me cherish this realization as the trials and tribulations become almost too much to handle. Help me become all I was created to be.

To go with the drift of things,

To yield with a grace to reason,

To bow and accept the end

Of a love or of a season.

-Robert Frost

Quick Random Meditative Thoughts...

Fulfillment can be reached when we learn to love everyone and everything that is encompassed by the spirit. If we treat everything as the manifestation of the spirit that it is, our eyes will be truly opened to the importance of compassion in the world today. The spirit resides in all of us and transcends all of us. It goes beyond all of the individual differences in personality, belief, culture, dogma, while at the same time, including these differences. Once spirit is reflected on in this manner, it makes life simpler to attain answers to. Though, as with most answers, they do lead to more and more unanswered questions. However, this answer is unique in the fact that it can serve as a guideline and a launch pad to delve into deeper and more complex questions. When the realization of the all encompassing nature of spirit occurs, it brings a lot of thoughts to the surface that seem so simple, yet were previously never realized before.

For example, this realization has shown me the reasons behind why we feel bad when jealousy, suspicion, control, anger, and distrust overtake our minds and actions. Why are these emotions collectively viewed as negative emotions? I believe that it is because they put intense strain on both the spirit within us as well as the spirit in the victims of our expression. If we learn to treat others with the love that we would direct toward God, then we would be able to look at these emotions without judging them. Experiences or thoughts without emotion attached to them are quickly forgotten or tucked away in a rarely used portion of the mind. So, if we learn to treat each other as the true manifestations of God, Spirit, Divine, Soul, or whatever you choose to label it as, then these maladaptive patterns we have fallen into in the social realm will dissipate.

Also when in times of depression and loneliness, remember this ancient truth: “When you seek happiness for yourself, it will always elude you. When you seek happiness for others, you will find it yourself."

In this world, it seems like losing touch with the innocence that we had in our youth is not viewed as unfortunate, but instead it is expected. However, it seems to me that adulthood is nothing more than the most well thought out game of pretend of our lives. Never lose sight of your youth, because that is one game of hide and seek that may not end as easily as when your mom would call you in from the dark... so keep those eyes on the horizon.

Receive healing, strengthen peace on our planet.

Flickering Candle

As I said in my previous post, my spiritual journey hit a wall that I now recognize as modernist thinking and halted me for quite some time. However, after finishing a book given to me by my sister which was titled, “A Brief History of Everything” by Ken Wilber, I have realized that this wall was not blocking my way, but instead, tempting me to climb. One of the main flaws in modernity is that it left spirit out of the rationalization and reasoning that it engulfed the world in from the Enlightenment period and beyond. That being said, I believe that modernity has helped me move beyond the religion and blind faith that I had as a child and an adolescent. It helped push me to defend the beliefs that I have been raised in all of my life. I was very surprised to find that despite my strong beliefs in religion and my faith, I was unable to defend any of this with real reasoning. This realization sent me into a downward spiral of a loss of faith and my reason became the hammer and my faith became the structure that I began knocking down with increased dedication. This state of confusion and pain with regards to spirituality really stuck with me for many years, always lurking under my confident surface. However, I do believe that now I am at a better state with my spirituality, but I recognize that the scars and confusion remain from those troubled times of my faith.

With the help of Ken Wilber’s phenomenal reasoning and documentation of history’s collective and individual faith journeys, I was able to see that my spiritual predicament was one that is all too familiar in the world today. It may seem semi-obvious to some, but I was approaching spirituality from a very external and objective standpoint and disallowing it to enter inside of me as a person and the community as a whole. Wilber stated that this is very common within both the modern and postmodern movements and used a metaphor that really solidified things for me. Through the use of my approach to spirituality, I was just like a researcher who analyzes brains. Say, just for the sake of it, I was examining your brain and over the years I became an expert on every centimeter of your gray matter and was able to measure every blurb on an EEG from your brainwaves. Although all that I learned was true, it was not the whole picture, because no matter how much of an expert that I was on your brain as an object, I would never know what you were thinking, until I talked to you. Wow, that metaphor hit me like a ton of bricks. Just describing religion and spirituality isn’t enough, I have to experience it. Until I allowed for a communicative and personal approach to spirituality, the objectivity left me feeling empty and hopeless. Which, if I do say so myself, is pretty representative of my religion blog from March.

At the end of the blog I made it clear that I could not just give up all of the information that I had gleaned from my reasoning and rationality. In a way I was fighting the same battle that post modernity was fighting when it realized that modernity left it with nothing but an empty shell in a world that it had fully reasoned and rationalized out, but never truly understood. I still retain the same stance that I will not try to revert my thinking back, nor should I, because that would not work at all. I would truly get nowhere near the bliss that I used to have, because I would always know that my mind and soul had already moved beyond this clear cut faith of my childhood.

So this is where I was a few short weeks ago when school let out. Even after all of the soul searching I had done with one of my very close friends, a true soul brother, I had still not found what I was looking for. Even now, I still have not found a place where I would like to reside in my faith. Rather, I seem to have found the path that was previously overgrown and covered by ivy, shielded from view, that strays from the path that I was on. The road less traveled, to use a term from Robert Frost. I say that my faith journey is a separate path, but it does not mean that I am abandoning the other paths that I have walked in life. Instead, I have a new path that is still made of the same dirt foundation as before, surrounded by the same beautiful nature. In this way I have transcended and included the previous faith paths to create one that is both different and the same from my previous ways of thinking.

Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Rastafarianism, Hinduism, and many of the other mainstream faith paths teach that there is a path that we must walk in life to move up the spiritual ladder. Of course, at the top of this ladder is some divine form or forms who is pure spirit that is without all of the earthly temptations and connections. Once one is in touch with this divine form, all will be well with yourself and basically the world. In one way or another, these religions are striving after similar, but not identical, objectives. The one main problem that is seen with this is that they often teach us to follow the path to the top. But once we get to a high level, we are instructed to look back at our journey and the levels it took us to get there and reject it all. By reject, I mean that we are taught to look at the temptations and earthly joys that we had when we were at lower levels with disdain. And if someone tries to get you to let go and experience these desires then they are to be rejected too because they are not at the same level, or they don’t have the same relationship with the divine as you do.

I believe that this rejection of life on earth in favor of a perfect life in the heavens is not only foolish, but misguided. I feel that by rejecting the earth in our path towards the divine, we are missing the point. We should not only rise above these desires, but also include them into our faith. We should look at the entire picture, rather than just looking at a portion of it. This is where I believe modernity had its strength and rationalization through science accomplished a great deal. However, science was the savior, or so it seemed, but the rejection of the spiritual became its downfall.

Science and rationalization are basically in the opposite direction of the faiths that I mentioned above. Instead of traveling up the spiritual path to reach the top, science breaks down the path to its basics. In the process science and modernity have moved from higher levels and descended to lower ones, only to reject that the higher levels exist at all. In other words, they reject anything that they cannot describe and see with their eyes or microscopes. If you want a clear example of this, I suggest you read the previous blog about the doubts concerning Christianity I wrote about. In hindsight I realize that I rationalized many portions of the ascending faith only to internally reject those things that I was not able to see or grasp with my reason. To use a biblical term, I was being a doubting Thomas.

So now I was lost. I had moved from a purely ascending spiritual pathway to a purely descending spirituality. When I finally took a step back, I realized that neither really fit with me. Neither gave me the answers and confidence that I was looking for. I began to fear that I would be stuck on the fence until my will finally caved to one side or the other and then I would begin rejecting either the ascent or descent that I had made. I had this fear, until of course, I began delving more into Wilber’s book. Of course I haven’t let this book change my entire outlook on life, because I am not so naïve to think that one person can have all of the answers. But he did something that really altered the way I look towards spirituality. He didn’t choose one path and begin rejecting another. He didn’t even accept both in all of their greatness (and lack thereof). Instead, he began to balance both pathways, combining the truth within them, while leaving behind the finer details that had been misinterpreted in order to make one pathway appear more appealing than another.

This idea of balancing the two, clicked with me in a way that neither of the pathways on their own was able to. Instead of only worshiping the God of the heavens, while rejecting all of this earthly life, or worshipping only the beauty and physical materials that surround us and rejecting the God of the heavens, we do something different. Wilber refers to the God of the heavens AND the Goddess of the Earth, as Spirit. Instead of being separate entities, competing for the spot in our hearts, they are one and the same. That which we recognize as God is the one spirit that has no beginning and no end, which exists in all of us. It is what you truly are, not a body, or a mind or a soul; it is your entity that is truly you and truly me. That may seem a bit far out, but it is the spirit as a whole. However, this is not the only manifestation of spirit; it is present in everything on this earth. Every single pebble, dirt, animal, human, tree…everything. Everything has some level of consciousness, but not since the human mind have we been able to move far enough away from instinct to be able to consciously reflect on spirit.

This Spirit is far too large to be confined into one pathway. It is both One and Many, Personal and Transpersonal, Form and Emptiness. So in a way my newly formed spirituality is Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, Jainist, Rasta, Hindu; both Western and Eastern traditions. It is all these religious traditions without the rules put in place to condemn the descending path and other traditions which seek similar but not identical goals. My spirituality also includes the ideas that the spirit infiltrates and is represented in modernity, post modernity, Marxist, Freudian, Jungian, and Nietzsche realism that are philosophical ways of approaching the world in the past few centuries. I include these ways of thinking and approaching various forms of the spirit, and I transcend them in a way that brings them under a central description of Spirit in all of its forms.

So I believe that with this ability, we also have gained immense responsibility to take care of all of the manifestations of spirit. We need to take care of this Earth, from the One in all of us, to the Many manifestations of that spirit in the world today.

I do not claim to have all the answers or even be close to fulfilling this spiritual faith journey, but the connection between both sides of my quarrelling soul has been made. In fact, I am only just beginning this new (and old) type of spiritual journey and I am excited to see where it will progress to. There will always be questions, but now I feel more prepared to face these questions and find the proper balance in the way that I live my life.

I would like to close with a quote from Ken Wilber: “We want to include the liberating movement of wisdom that takes us from body to mind to soul to spirit, but also the incarnational movement of compassion and healing that brings soul and spirit down and into body, earth, life and relationships – both God and Goddess equally honored.”

A New Bloggining, I Hope

I have been struggling within the past few months to write a blog that would shed light on where I am within my spiritual journey since the last pessimistic, and dare I say, modernistic, blog. As I have reread the last blog many times, I often thought of what type of taste I left in the mouth of not only myself, but the very few readers I do have. How many of the fair few was I able to push away with my pessimism, and what type of blog would I have to write to gain them back? But then I realized my whole point of writing a blog was not really for others, but ultimately to put my thoughts down and create a kind of time line of my journey through this life. That being said, the dedication that I have put into this blog to document my life in the past few months resembles the amount of dedication I had when I was required to document my eating habits for a health course in high school. So with this realization in mind, perhaps this may be a turning point in my documentation…or I will acknowledge that it could be just another false start. So we shall see. Believe me when I say, I as unsure as you are, how much dedication I will put forth in the future. So until next time, (which I hope will be soon), enjoy every breath that you have on this earth, because we never know how sweet this one will be compared to those of the future.

May peace enter into your soul and reside there even when the world tries to tear it from you.