Surprised by Joy.

"The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet.  But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape."
-C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

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God lives, and He loves me.

I have struggled in my relationship with God for what seems like forever, but in reality is only a few short years.  It had started with a moral disagreement with the church I grew up in, but evolved into a "logical" inability to accept a higher being on the grounds of something so inadequate as "faith."

I tricked myself into thinking that inquiry for inquiry's sake was a virtue.  That to accept such supernatural and seemingly irrational theories as the existence of God was pure folly.  I prided myself in my so-called "humility" that allowed me to end every theological argument by throwing my hands up in the air and quoting the eternal words of Socrates, "If I know one thing, it is that I know nothing."

Nevertheless, despite my firmly held non-faith, I used terminology and held certain beliefs that betrayed my deep desire to believe again.  I intensely studied the religions of the world and the philosophies of man.  I became obsessed with the pursuit of Joy, which I came to define as a sort of Eternal Happiness.  I glorified the Eternal Nature of Love as the one Eternal Truth that existed far before we were born and will continue to exist far after we are dead.  I bastardized the name of God into becoming a sterile, empty term that meant something along the lines of Everything and Nothing At All.  I searched for, and found, mystical experience.  I enjoyed a certain perverse pride in my ability to attribute the fruits of those experiences to my self-created concept of God, Everything and Nothing At All.

In short, I made for a terrible atheist.

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I now see the guiding hand of God (in the literal, Christian sense of the term) in guiding me along this entire path.  After disillusionment with my childhood faith, I suffered a kind of first death.  The concept of God was shattered in my mind, and I could not, in that state, return to Him with the childlike faith I used to own.

I went through a long period of that sleep called spiritual death.  I had a chaotic couple of years, experiencing brief moments of extreme spiritual ecstasy and insight amongst a mostly troubled day-to-day darkness and uncertainty.  This period is evidenced most strongly through this blog.  I look back and chuckle at some of the things I have written here.  I feel a sense of pity for that young man, searching but never finding, thinking his way into convoluted, mystical beliefs, struggling for truth but inherently unable to take anything for granted.

One redeeming trait my old self carried always was his determination to find Joy.  That Joy was something attainable seems to be my only truly held belief.  God understood this, and so He presented me with a series of people, books, and experiences that kept pushing me in the right direction.  He was patient and loving and did not demand my immediate return to Him.

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Apparently at some point during this turbulent time, I had told my friend this statement: "There is no beginning or end to your relationship with God.  There is only the moment of realization that you are in it already."  I must have gotten that idea from somewhere else because I said that when I was pretty firmly non-theistic.  It now serves as a sort of prophecy for where I am now.

My moment of realization came a few weeks back, right before I travelled to Hawaii to spend an amazing week with family and friends.  I was sitting outside on the back porch, reading a book on Emotional Intelligence.  I had just finished a chapter and was enjoying the sights and sounds of the small oasis of beauty my parents have cultivated behind our house.  Out of nowhere, a feeling came to me that said, "It's ok, God is real.  You can accept Him now.  You don't have to be scared anymore."

I say it was a feeling, and not a thought, because it affected my soul and not my mind.  I could do nothing but accept it.  It was not a choice, yet it was not something forced upon me.  It just was.  And it brought tears of unexplainable joy to my eyes.  I felt free for the first time in a long while.

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In Hawaii, I experienced God's love in very subtle ways.  I appreciated the beauty of His world in a way I never experienced before.  The joy I felt while hiking and exploring the island with my good friends and family was overwhelming.  It was different in that I could now look out on a beautiful horizon and feel the love of God made manifest in His creation.  Before I would appreciate the beauty, but be confused about to where I should attribute its goodness.  The same applies to my relationships with my family and friends.  They now have a flavor of the Divine in them.  I am able to love more fully and sincerely through God.

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I could write down every detail and describe every person, event, and book that were essential to my path back to God, but I will end this short summary with the finishing blow to my non-theism that came just yesterday.  I was reading C.S. Lewis's own account of his conversion from atheism to Christianity, aptly entitled "Surprised by Joy."  

Lewis went through many of the same intellectual struggles I went through in his path to God.  He too was caught up in the hyper rationalism that prevented him from taking that leap of faith.  He too was, despite it all, motivated by the pursuit of Joy.  He too was dragged kicking and screaming to the seat of Heaven.

While reading Lewis's account of his conversion, I was suddenly and unexplainably overtaken by those same thoughts and feelings that I had experienced so long ago as a high schooler kneeling in prayer.  I ugly cried.  God told me that He lives, and that He loves me.

They say that man cannot survive looking into the face of God.  I'm not sure about that, but I know that I felt an almost physical pain overcome me in that spiritual moment.  It felt like a violent cleansing of all the doubt, pain, and anxiety that I had built up over my period of spiritual death.  A baptism of fire, so to speak.  And after all that, I was reborn.  I am surprised by God.  I am surprised by Joy.  I am now free. 

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God is the source of Joy and Love.

God lives, and He loves me.

God is God.

I originally wrote the following to a friend, but I think it is valuable enough to share here because it captures an organic and focused attempt at a logical description of the logically indescribable. I cannot focus my thoughts this clearly on my own for myself; I need an audience that does not understand for my words to become didactic.

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"Be with those who mix with God
as honey blends with milk, and say,
'Anything that comes and goes,
rises and sets,
is not what I love.'"
-Rumi

For me, this "'mixing with God" represents carrying your love of the eternal with you at all times, and directing your love towards God rather than temporal things (things that come and go, rise and set). Of course, by "God" the poet and I mean something a bit different than the personal deity of Christianity. We mean just the eternal itself, the I-am-who-I-am representation of God. It's what the Christian anthropomorphic God points towards, I think. All these religious symbols point toward the same thing, and that is what I think is the true God. The true God is not Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, or anything else. The true God is what underlies everything.

I do not have faith in God; I love God. There is nothing to have faith in. Look around you: God is everywhere. If you can see God like I can, there is no possibility of denying God's existence. One last thing, God is not a He or a She or an It. God is God, and God can never be reduced to a simple pronoun or gender.

My vision of God is mystical, and comes from the heart rather than the mind. I cannot give logical arguments for the existence of God, or describe what God is, because it would require a pure language of the heart, which does not exist in verbal language. I suppose some poetry or scriptures can point towards this language of the heart, but they only do so by virtue of the author's own relationship with God, which we can share in if our hearts are open and we suspend reason.

BUT, if I were to try to describe God, I would use words like "eternal" and "infinite." These concepts in themselves are beyond human understanding, save for an intuitive understanding of the heart, and that is what God is. God is the eternal, is the infinite. God is what preserves all temporary things eternally, and gives all meaningless things infinite value. God is what gives Form to the universe.

An understanding of God is not empirical in any sense, and trying to grasp God through reason will always fail. Thinking God is reasonable is in itself a step away from understanding. It requires a leap of faith, an abandonment of fear that stems from past experience, and a deep openness to yourself and the fundamental. It requires stripping your soul from everything you know and love, including your mind, and spelunking into the deep abyss of nothing-and-everything that is the mystical experience.

It is like the feeling you get at church when you feel at peace and "in God's love" or however you describe it. Except it's more than the feeling; it's also understanding of that feeling without words. The feeling is fleeting, but the understanding of the feeling lasts forever. You live with certainty, and all your fears and questions disappear. It's beautiful.

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Endnote:

Ponder the question "Who is God?" until the question falls away and all that remains is "GOD." Until you are happy with the seemingly nonsensical, meaningless statement "GOD IS GOD," you do not know God. You will believe in this god or that god, but you can never believe in the true God. You can only know God. You can only love God.

Until you love God, you do not know God. Until you know God, God does not exist. Until God exists, you do not know God. Until you know God, you do not love God.

Do not cast your pearls amongst swine. Do not believe in shadows.

Know thyself. Know God.

Late Night Chaos.

words.  so many words.  we get so caught up in the words that we mistake them for the real thing.  they just point towards the real thing.  always pointing, never seeing.  mistake my finger for the finger of god.  my finger is god's finger.  and I pick god's nose with god's finger.

the boogers are the words.  icky icky words.  smelly words.  and that's as good as words can be.  the most beautiful words are just boogies compared to the real thing.  the real thing being, obviously, god.  words are gods boogies.  boogies boogies boogies.

recycled thoughts.  thinking for thinking's sake.  spontaneity and combustibility.  spontaneous combustion.  such a beautiful way to go!  one second man, next second flame!  let our thoughts be spontaneous and combustible.  no thought is worth two lives.

we only have one life.  and THIS is IT.  past future present.  all are illusions.  i will point to the naked earth, and that is one life.  i will point to the open sky, and that is one life.  i will point to you and then to me, and that is one life.  i will never point to a clock, that is no life.  that is illusion.

as i contemplate time, the universe, god, and all the other imaginary things, i am overcome with religious ecstasy.  it all flows.  through me, around me, however you want to say it.  it flows.

cuz beyonce.

i want u.

lights.  breathing lights.  smell the yellow.  orgasms in my fingers.  orgasms everywhere.  black orgasms.  pink orgasms.  i see the music.  surfboardt.  i feel it in my fingers.

im drowning.

always drowning, each breath is the first.  somehow i breathe submerged.  the water kills me and gives me life.  the breath escapes, the lungs fill, and i die.  the breath enters, the lungs fill, and i am born.

reincarnation.  the cycle of death and rebirth.  it happens to us every moment.  we are fools to think otherwise.

the chaos of the world is God.

God.  this word is good.  i would not be without God.  God is all.  God is love.  God is hate.  God is pleasure.  God is pain.  God is good.  God is evil.  God is beyond good and evil.  God is eternal.  God is me.  God is you.  God is me when I am with you.  God is me and you when we are with Him.  God is He when All are We.  We are God when All is He.

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But listen to me: for one moment,
quit being sad.  Hear blessings
dropping their blossoms
around you.  God.
-Rumi

Fear.

I must not fear.  
Fear is the mind-killer.  
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. 
 I will face my fear.  
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.  
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.  
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing....Only I will remain.
-Litany Against Fear from Frank Herbert's Dune

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Once again, I fell.  Once again, I drowned.  Once again, I died.

Once again, I was consumed by fire.

But this time, I'm the one who lit the fire.  I overcame fear, and embraced the furnace.

But this time, the kiln did not harden this flesh of clay.  This time, I went in pure and unadulterated by any element as basic as clay.

I went in as a stream of water.  The coals were kind.  They annihilated me completely.  They did not allow me to walk back out, blackened and hardened, as they did last time.

Now, I am free.  I am a river.  I am an ocean.  I am a glacier.  I am a cloud.  I am all things and all things are me.  Only now am I capable of existence.  Only when I've lost track of past and future, can I be in the present.

Letting go, I gained the world.  Detaching from desire, I learned to love.

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The ship rocks back and forth, back and forth.  Sleeping passengers are lulled deeper and deeper into the netherworld by the slow rocking.  Suddenly, the ship cracks, then sinks swiftly to the bottom of the ocean.  Momentarily, there are screams and horrors beyond horrors.  Then, only sleep.  No survivors.

Should we weep for the sleeping ones?  Should we cry for those dreamers?  Or shall we dream ourselves into a similar sleep?

Like the aquatic sleepers, we will be overwhelmed by a momentary terror, but soon face the peace of eternal slumber.  Such will it be when we kill our egos.  Such will it be when we let go of fear.

The Heart.

No matter what happens, I find comfort in the fact that what I am doing is a beautiful thing. A beautiful thing that is film-worthy. No matter how much pain, disappointment, and sorrow I suffer in the future, I will act in such a way that in 20 years I will be able to look back and say, "Yes, that was me" without shame and with my head held high.

To act selfishly is not to act at all. It is to cower in fear behind an imaginary self and to idolize our most base evolutionary trait--self preservation. You may live to be a hundred years old, but if you have never let your heart belong to another, you have not lived at all. The selfish man will never know true joy.

The walls that surround us are illusions. Break them down, and you will know reality. Love, and you will know reality.

Do not try to master or possess. You cannot carry an ocean with you. If you want to be part of the ocean, you must jump in, and allow yourself to be carried away by the currents. Do not mistake grasping for having.

It's good to be resolute sometimes, even if it is foolish. It gives life meaning and affirms the potential for beauty that the world contains. If we never acted against our logically sound conclusions, we would be nothing more than zombie-like robots, living dispassionate lives without hope.

Feelings are what make us man. We have programmed robots able to think. But, will they ever be able to feel? We may one day program them to one day appear to have feelings, but they will never actually have them. We can program ourselves to think in certain ways, but feelings are much more spontaneous. And spontaneity is beautiful.

"Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage." - Lao Tzu

The Enlightenment was a failure. Our brains and hands are overrated. The heart wins.

Let us restore human dignity together.

Childish Things.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. - I Corinthians 13:11

I'm thinking about going back to church.  Yes, MORMON church.  I still don't "believe" in it, but I've realized that there are other reasons to go back.

My late obsession with "truth" has exhausted itself in a great big subjective heap.  There is only a deep void where there used to be purpose and meaning.  I've made friends with this void, yes, but it is still very lonely.  It does not speak when spoken to and nobody else loves it like I do.  It's silence is deafening.

So, what does one do in a world where nothing is real?  My answer is: I Act.  I participate in the great drama.  I involve myself with other people through the drama and learn to act for action's sake.  This, to me, seems to be the pinnacle of maturity and enlightenment.  It is the fulfillment of dharma.

I will go to church to fulfill dharma.  To act for action's sake.

I will do it for my mom, and for my grandparents, alive and dead.  When I read stories about my grandfather in the church, I am filled with the Spirit, as they call it in the LDS Church.  I am certain, for reasons that either transcend or precede logic, that the Church is "true."  It may just be my emotional connection to my grandfather, but in any case, I know that the feeling is true, if not the thing it tells me.  I have a desire to be reunited with my grandparents.  To live with them again, as they say in the Church.  I can't do that on my own.  I can only do that in the Church.

Even if my mind doesn't believe in it, my heart does.  And if I've learned one thing in my short life, it's that the mind is only a tool to be used to experience greater happiness.  If your logos has taken over and is only causing you pain, you are doing it wrong and are sick.

I want my mom to be happy.  I know she experiences so much pain because I left the church.  It is just a small sacrifice for me to go back, and in doing so I can bring about so much happiness.  It seems obvious what I should do.

I want my brother and sisters to stay in the church.  For their own sakes and for my mother's.  My brother once told my mom that it's hard for him to go to church and live the Gospel when his dad and his brother don't.  I want to be a good example for him and my sisters.  I want them to be proud of their older brother and look to him as a pillar of stability and love that they can turn to for anything.  The framework that they have been raised in is the church.  They have been trained to trust most entirely anything that comes from the church.  I have to be part of the church if I want them to feel most comfortable with me.  For Chris, Rachel, and Hannah.

There is currently a rift between me and my family that exists because I do not go to church.  I am a black sheep.  I want to be white again.  I want to restore the family unit.

I am growing into an adult.  Part of becoming an adult is putting away childish things and an overhaul of my entire outlook on life, etc.  My childish thing was viewing the world in terms of absolutes.  In terms of "true" and "false."  I am beginning to disvalue truth.  I am beginning to really think for myself.  Rather, I am beginning to listen to my own feelings.  I am beginning to be.  I want a simple existence, a happy existence.  It seems that the most pure and simple and happy life for me would be to return to church.  It is my dharma.  I have been born into it for better or for worse.

Goodbye, childhood.

Maybe I'm a Tree.

I'm a tree.

I say this a lot.  Nobody really understands what I mean by it.  I typically receive a weird look like, "really? ok..." or a few guffaws.  I typically just laugh it off with everyone else.  Just pretend like I'm joking.  Like I'm just that guy who says crazy things, but isn't really crazy...

What is insanity anyway?  It's a societal evaluation of the atypical.  A person cannot be a tree.  Trees do not feel.  Trees do not think.  Trees do not talk.  Trees do not work.  Trees do not earn money.

But what if I am?  What if I have the soul of a tree, but was mistakenly put in a human's body?  What if that's why I'm happiest sitting by myself on the nice, cold dirt?  What if that's why I don't understand the vast majority of my race?  I don't understand social life.  So maybe I'm a tree.

I don't like noise.  I don't like large groups of people.  I can't go to a club.  I dislike rock concerts.  I would rather sit in silence, or with some nice Baroque music playing in the background.  So maybe I'm a tree.

In my most peace-filled, enlightened moments, I genuinely identify as a tree.  I also identify as the earth, the sun, God, and everything else in the universe, including the universe itself, but firstly I identify as a tree.  So maybe I'm a tree.

But I guess I'm part human, too.  I do like some things that other humans like.  I used to believe in God. I feel things and I think things and I talk and I work and I earn money.  But maybe I'm a tree.

I'm happy as a tree.

Why can't I be a tree?