Struggle to Find Hope

a Spiral Dance essay

I slept well, but woke up early. Perhaps, as a result, or perhaps not, I am feeling rather cynical this morning. Remember that cynics are actually disappointed idealists.

I am disappointed in you, humanity. I am disappointed in so many of you individually, as well. You could do so much better, and yet you so often flinch away from the effort, settling instead into your little living hells, comfortable because they are familiar. Comfortable with suffering because enlightenment is just too much work.

I am not going to go into a rant that even I will find predictable, against the usual suspects, hatred, fear, murder, pain, suffering, doubt. I won't go into that rant because it won't make any difference. No one listens to such rants anymore, because the horrors have become normalized, and even those who would agree with you are eager to scroll on as quickly as possible.

I am not a believer in either the defeatist "biology is destiny" camp or the pseudo-Darwinian "humanity is inherently violent" camp; yet on days when I wake up feeling cynical, I can't really generate a coherent argument against the social and political consequences of entropy. But that's why I am disappointed in you, humanity, and you, people who choose to embrace entropy rather than defy it. You give in way too easily.

You disappoint me, humanity, because of your constant cowardly reluctance to look the abyss in the eye, and spit at it. Fuck nihilism. Nihilism is just another ideology, just another -ism, that looks at only part of the picture and thinks it's the whole. I cannot name a single -ism that does not make that mistake. You disappoint me, humanity, with your constant tendency to look at only one part of the elephant and think it's the whole elephant.

You disappoint me, humanity, because you constantly think too small, too provincial, and in the end too narcissistically. You are still primates, humanity, in that you embody the preconscious tension between group/mob psychology and the necessary urge to evolve, and all too often default back towards your personal comfort zone and simplistic easy answers to life's challenges.

You disappoint me, humanity, because you so often miss the whole point of what it means to be human: Biology isn't destiny, although it's the starting gate. We are given the gift of consciousness, which allows us to override and rewrite our biological programming. We are not locked into anything, we merely believe that we are. The elephant is much bigger than we think it is. Our potential is precisely as large as our imagination. We have the power to shape reality, and we usually fail to do so because we choose to be so small. Biology and biography are not destiny because we can overcome them. We can change our destiny because we believe we can. To do so, we have to defy the downward slide that is entropy, and walk uphill. Suffering is easier than enlightenment, because suffering slides downhill, while enlightenment means claiming the mountain in the worst weather, when you're already tired.

The mark of suffering that most individuals who work for and towards the light bear is sheer, constant exhaustion. It's an uphill battle, necessary and worthwhile and rewarding, yet the hardest work you will ever do. (Until you reach that point where you let go; then it becomes the easiest.) It can kill you. It can make you cynical. I am tired all the time, humanity, and it's directly caused by the majority of you refusing to take up your share of the load of the work that needs doing to make the world a finer place. I understand the anger of some social activists; it comes from exhaustion, frustration, and those days when it feels like no one actually wants to grow up.

Cynics are frustrated as well as disappointed idealists. We all have our days when it's too hard, there's too much to do, and the news reports how once again we have failed to grow up as a species.

Warfare has been continuous for more than a century now, because it's been made too easy. The technological advances since the Industrial Revolution have brought many benefits and changes to our modern world, but it has also made it easier to kill people in large numbers. Before the Industrial Revolution, war was always limited in scope; it is no longer. Terrorism is a word for warfare on a social scale, a different kind of battlefield. Extremists who use terror are always smaller in number than armies; but they are feared because their commitment is total, fanatical, nihilistic. Fuck nihilism again. The proper response to terror is to laugh at it, just as the proper response to the abyss of fear is to give it the finger, in fierce and laughing defiance. Fuck terrorism. You can't live in fear.

There are words I struggle with, when I am feeling disappointed in you, humanity, but the struggle is when it matters most:

Hope. Love. Faith.

Those are words that it is very easy to misuse, and when misused they turn toxic, deadly, violent to the spirit, even more than wounds to the flesh. So I always use them with vast caution. No one knows better than a bard or a wizard how easily the power of words can turn dark. Use them with caution.

Cynicism and disappointment are only fatal if you let them be. If you stop exploring the rest of the elephant, and give up, and stay in your cave. I am very disappointed in you this morning, humanity, but I haven't given up on you. You really need to grow up, and quickly. Take your hands off the stove, children, before they scar over and you can no longer feel the rest of the elephant. I'm not going to tell you what's on the other side of the door, you won't hear it, you won't listen. You disappoint in that, too, humanity. Children. But I will tell that there is a door, and the keys to open it are words that have to be used in the right tone, not with irony, despair, or the other faces of entropy. Entropy is going to tell you that have already failed. Don't listen. The keys to the door are those words, used in the right way, used in the proper frame of mind. Words which, when you get past cynicism and disappointment, even if it takes a lot of effort and all day, open up into the balm against disappointment, and the solution to terrorism:

Hope. Love. Faith.

Well, then, humanity. What the fuck are you waiting for?

Who Are We, and Where Are We Going

a Spiral Dance essay

It's pathetic, I suppose, that I'm now more comfortable in anonymous hotel rooms than anywhere I'm supposed to be living, I have a place to live in Madison, now, with a very positive and even supportive roommate, but sometimes I still prefer being alone. That's really why I stopped at a hotel last night. Too tired to deal with people. No spoons left for social graces. Too much effort to even talk to people I like and want to be with. I just wanted to be alone and silent. I don't know how to survive without silence and solitude, anymore. Happiest out there driving alone on the road, in the desert, or forest, or wherever there aren't many people, or any.

I've been kicked out of every group I've ever belonged to. It keeps happening. I should accept it by now, but I keep fighting it. Every group I've ever given my loyalty to, I've been forced to leave behind. I keep getting kicked out of the nest, before I'm ready to leave on my own. Either I've outgrown them, or the gods want me to move on, or it's time and I don't want to go, or fate moves the pieces on my board and I have to leave.

It keeps happening. It's happening again.

Madison, WI, isn't supposed to be where I live. During the crushing end of times in Beloit, when I was having to see everything I own, including my home, the only home I've ever owned, I dreamed that I could give Madison a chance. After all, I used to live there, and had and have many friends, and musician partners, and so on. I've given it a good try, but everything, literally everything, has told me not to make a hime there. No signs of inevitable placement. I've been prevented at every turn. That's the usual sign.

I went through the hell of trying to rent an apartment in Madison, only to be confronted by the unsolvable Catch-22 of: 1. You can't rent an apartment unless you have a job, or credit, or income source. 2. You can't get a job unless you have a street address of a place to live, like an apartment. That paradox is what me onto the road in early November, where I spent almost two months out West; two months, I must say, that were almost the only happy times I had in all of 2015. Everyone noticed. Everyone commented on it. I was happier out West than I had been all year. Less stressed. More positive.

Then I came back to Wisconsin. And the stress immediately got worse again. And then I got bullied, and had to flee a situation where I had been staying. And that pushed me back out on the road again. If only for more healing via travel.

Then I came back.

I'm exhausted, right now, because after two weeks on the road, to Ann Arbor then down to Tennessee and Kentucky to check out another possible living situation, which did not pan out, I had to immediately go back to Ann Arbor for a job interview. I sucked at the interview, and I don't think I'll get the job, but the more I thought about it the more clear it was: I am being invited to live anywhere except Madison. It's time to go.

I got really clear, driving back towards Madison, although stopping short at a hotel before getting there, that Wisconsin is hell for me now and I just need to leave it behind. I got really, really clear; it's so obvious that I should have seen it before, that all my remaining time spent in Madison will be about preparing to leave. It's true, there are details to finish up of this life. I won't rush, if the gods permit, and I know I won't be staying much longer. A few months, probably.

Wisconsin has been very hard on me for the past decade, and it's never going to emotionally neutral there. All that suffering will always leave an aura of sour apples behind. Maybe not in the greenwood per se, but everywhere there are people. So it's time to go. I have more Stuff to get rid of, from the storage locker, and I have time to say goodbye properly to some long term friends, but then I will be gone. These past few months were offered to me, in the words of a friend, as a Farewell Tour. And that's how I am treating them. I won't say de ice what kind of Farewell, just yet. It doesn't have to be that final one, although for awhile that too was in the cards. But it's definitely a Farewell to the life that used to be, that I have now outgrown, and need to put behind me, so I can actually live and thrive, elsewhere. That's the truth of this. That's also why hotels feel better than what used to be "home."

I've never been able to "go home again" in my life. (Cue Thomas Wolfe.) I've never really been able to go back, and stay, anywhere I used to live. I've always been required to live in a new place. I know that on some level that the gods park me in a new place, to be of service there, so that my frequency of light can be used to brighten up a dark place. I'm really tired of always being alone, of never finding a loving partner, although I accept this as part of my path. You're getting a lot more honesty from me, tonight, in this hotel, than anyone is probably prepare to deal with. Well, deal with it. This life path I am on is nomadic, is lonely, is demanding, and has its powerful rewards that sometimes make it all feel like it's been worth it, although not that often.

And I have to keep going.

Caroline Myss, one of my spiritual directors this lifetime, says: Loyalty is a beautiful tribal quality, especially when it is conscious loyalty, a commitment that serves the individual as well as the group. Extremes of loyalty that harm one's ability to protect oneself, however, qualify as a belief pattern from which one needs to free oneself.

That nails it on the head. When I first give my loyalty to a group, I am very conscious of it, and very aware that service is the key: serving others, we serve ourselves. Yet I tend to give my loyalty a bit too fiercely, and it does come back to bite me. Because I make the mistake of thinking that others also give their loyalty as I do. That's one reason I've been kicked out of the nest so many times. People change, and I find myself alone in where I gave my loyalty, with no reciprocation anymore.

I don't really want to die, anymore. I'm not really suicidal. But I do still have days when I just don't care, when I'm too tired to care, and don't want to go on. Lots of honesty, here. Days I can't face anything normal or socially typical. When I'd rather be out there talking to the Green Man God of the Woods than any human. When Dionysus has my love, and you don't. Days I just can't deal with the superficiality, the inanity, the shallow self-regard. Days when I could cheerfully be a hermit in the desert, and talk to the coyotes more than people. I'm half wild as it is, I guess I always was. Maybe that's why I keep getting kicked out of every nest I've ever tried to build. It's happening again, right now. Let me just pull the knife out of my back, before I continue. There. That's better.

The last year has been about getting rid of or being forced to let go of everything I owened, everything left to me by my parents, all my money, my condo, my belongings, my whole life here. Another nest just taken away. Apparently I'm just a drama queen for ever mentioning it, or for it affecting my mood, or for being so exhausted that I'm not perky or cheerful enough, for it giving me a "bad attitude." I guess that's true. Never mind that it's been the most horrific decade of my entire life, beginning with the deaths of my parents more or less in my arms, passing through almost dying from chronic illness, and finally culminating in the Year I Lost Everything.

Well, so what.

Time to move on. Time to start over somewhere else. Time to go back out to the desert, or the woods, and start over elsewhere, with a lot less baggage, including the physical. Since that seems to be the pattern of my life, I might as well embrace it. I don't know if I will ever live with people anymore, I'll just drop in for a visit. A good visit. With some people, a very good visit. But love and sex? Probably never going to be a permanent thing, for me. Always moving on. I can accept that, too. It doesn't hurt too much, tonight, to embrace that. After all, being pansexual or an omnisexual mystic means I've had sex with the sky and the mountains as often or more than sex with people, men or women or both.

I like people. I really do. I just can't build permanent love relationships with them. I mean, other than as family of choice, which I do love and am grateful for. I just seem to be the wanderer, the warrior, doomed to be homeless, rootless, and so on. That's not self pity talking, that's just acknowledging the archetypes that rule a life.

So, here I go, again. Writing this out in a hotel in the middle of the night after collapsing into sleep upon arrival. That's why you get so much honesty, at the moment, no point in lying to myself. No need to pretend anything other than what it is. And we go on.

Anentropic

I don't believe in apocalypse, which says that everything must finally grind down to its final end.

I do believe in apokatastasis, which says that there is nothing that cannot be redeemed.

When's the last time you went and sat next to a bed of flowers. Not to touch them, brush your hand through them, though that is good to do. Not to look at them, at their beauty, though that is also good.

Just to be with them. Just to be a companion to what lives.

I resist entropy. I refuse to succumb to that downward slide into black hole abyss without putting up enough of a fight to at least slow down that last end. Every time we do something that brings more light, more love, into the universe, we slow down entropy, we slow down the eventual heat-death of the universe, if only by a little bit. Every time we act to serve life, to be in the service of life's health and joy, we slow down death. It adds up. Every little thing helps.

There is nothing that cannot be redeemed.

Faith & Anti-Faith: Noble Enemies

When I was working as a typesetter in the mid-1980s in Madison, WI, I was the regular typesetter for the monthly newsletter of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, headquartered in Madison. The monthly newsletter was mostly news articles, originals and reprints, the occasional opinion or op-ed piece, and legal updates on the cases the Foundation was undertaking via their legal defense fund: many cases about the constitutional separation of church and state, many of which overlapped with ACLU cases of a similar nature. Typesetting the monthly newsletter was always a treat for me, and often made me laugh out loud.

The FFRF was co-founded and is still co-led by Dan Barker, and the core group is the Barker extended family. It is a non-profit dedicated to freethinking, agnostic, and atheist principles and activism. The name of the foundation states their purpose rather clearly.

Now, let me just be clear about my position here: Although I am not a politcal animal, and rarely engage in political debate, I am often intrigued by the psychology behind religion. I support the basic concepts behind a lot of the FFRF's legal cases, as I strongly support the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. I think the religious right in the USA, nowadays, is quite out of control, aided and abetted by the current trend of neo-conservatism (which is a serious misnomer—but I digress), and I support the FFRF's stated goal to prevent the USA from becoming a de facto theocracy.

Also, just to be clear: I am not an atheist, I am not an agnostic, and I am not a practicing member of any established, institutionalized religion. While I agree with the basic concepts behind the FFRF, I don't agree with all of their means and tactics.

Here's why:

Dan Barker, along with others in his family, had been a born-again hellfire and brimstone preacher prior to his embracing atheism. Apparentally it was a quasi-religious anti-religious conversion experience for him. I find that deeply ironic. What was most interesting and fun for me about reading through the FFRF newsletter was that the rhetoric was still very apocalyptic—but now the cause was atheism rather than born-again Christianity. The Cause was still the Cause, only the subject itself had changed. It was like looking at a mirror-image of a religious fundamentalist.

Frankly, it seemed to me that the only difference between Dan Barker the tent revival born-again fundamentalist preacher, and Dan Barker the crusading atheist, was the subject matter. The man had apparently exchanged one belief-structure for another, but his personality and rhetorical style had altered not a whit.

So, if Karl Marx and Mao Tse-tung were right about religion being the opiate of the masses, how is this not a clearcut case of one opiate being substituted for another? How is this not a clear case of one addiction being subsituted for another. In a very parallel dynamic, most twelve-step groups substitute an addiction to a quasi-religious system for an addiction to a chemical substance; no matter what language they use, most twwelve-step groups are based on religious belief-systems. Barker now spends 100 percent of his time fighting for atheist causes. But the rhetoric still has exactly the same tone, the same sense that "anyone who believes differently than me is an idiot." The Cause is still the Cause.

The problem with most atheist rhetoric, which is pointed out clearly by the example of the FFRF, is that it is "noble friend" or "best enemies" rhetoric: it actually reinforces the arguments of those with blind faith, because it attempts to make a negative proof based on the same beliefs and ideas as those of its opponents. Most atheistic rhetoric is denial rhetoric, attempting only to contradict and disprove its opposing rhetoric. It doesn't engage, typically, even with the agnostic idea that there might be some mysteries we don't and can't understand. At heart, most hardcore atheists are dismissive of agnosticism, even as they ally themselves with agnostics for political purposes.

Personally, I have never seen much psychological difference between atheists and fundamentalists. The mindsets are often nearly identical. Both seem to me to be identically emotionally and mentally committed to their positions. At their worst, they both maintain rigid stances with zero flexibility, and no one really convinces anybody of anything, because everyone is too busy shouting out their own positions at deafening volume. Truly civil discourse and dialogue are pretty much nonexistent.

Madelyn Murray O'Hair, the original crusading atheist, whom I met when she once visited my elementary school in Ann Arbor, struck me as being an authentic fanatic; she had given up everything for her cause, and devoted her total existence to that cause. Her work was an irrational pursuit of an extreme form of rationalism. The Cause was was the Cause. The delicious irony of this logical contradiction struck me even at age 9 or 10.

Eric Hoffer made the point brilliantly in his short, essential book The True Believer, that one may be a fanatic regardless of what one purports to believe, that fanatics of all faiths and causes have remarkably similar psychological and emotional states of being. Hoffer defines a “true believer” as “the man of fanatical faith who is ready to sacrifice his life for a holy cause.” The cause is irrelevant: it could be anything. What matters is that the strongly-held belief-system be held up as the answer to all of life's problems, with the corollary that those who disagree with you are wrong, and need to be convinced of the rightness of your beliefs over all others.

But this is still a binary polarity: two sides of a coin; two polarized positions that appear to be in contradiction, but in fact whose underlying assumptions about the true nature of reality are deeply shared. Noble enemies are those enemies whose resistance is fuel for clarifying one's own position. Best enemies are those antagonists that you can't do without; fighting them helps you keep your edge; without them, you flail around with no true purpose or goal in life.

In the ongoing argument between true believers and scientific atheists who view all religious ideas as delusions, it strikes me that much of the scientific-atheistic rhetoric is the rhetoric of fanaticism and the noble friend.

Matthew Fox, among others who include such notable scientists as Rupert Sheldrake, describes "scientific rationalism" as a quasi-religious belief system that has many of the functional earmarks of a religion, including: received dogma that may not be questioned; an aura of reverential Mystery around the pursuit of knowledge (which in this case means lab-coated researchers rather than frocked theologians); the worship of saints, many of whom were theoreticians and technologists (Darwin, Einstein, Edison, etc.); the de facto attitude that its own internal belief-system is right while everyone else is wrong; and so forth. What we are left with is an irrational pursuit of rationalism—another "noble friend" rhetorical trope that I find highly ironic.

The biggest mistake that scientific rationalism makes is to place itself in the position of being the One True Faith—which seems exactly parallel to what happens when a born-again Christian becomes a born-again atheist and continues to fulminate his views as the Only Truth—and it is in these circumstances that atheism itself seems most similar to a religious creed itself. Functionally, in terms of psychology, atheism is a religion.

It often seems to me, in these continuous arguments between polarized camps, that the only people who still keep open minds any more, who give third or fourth options, who think in genuinely different directions, who are willing to wait and see, and who are comfortable with uncertainty and mystery, are agnostics and mystics.

Agnostics are unsure of the answers, and unwilling to be placed into fixed belief-systems full of received dogma and imposed doctrine. Agnostics tend to want to look at the evidence, and decide for themselves. As Graham Chapman once said at the conclusion of one of my favorite Monty Python skits, "I've always said there isn't anything an agnostic can't do if he really isn't sure if he believes in anything or not." As the line from Richard Marx' song The Prayer goes, "Isn't faith believing that all powers can't be seen?" So, agnostics are seekers, but not true believers. They are willing to believe, but not willing to believe blindly. I've met a number of declared agnostics who are skeptical seekers, who respect the faiths of others while at the same time are uncomfortable with proselytization and missionary zeal, and who generally prefer to find personal answers rather than institutionalized ones.

Mystics are those who seek out, and experience, direct contact with spiritual realities that transcend yet infuse everyday life. Mystics, like agnostics, want to look at the evidence of their experiences, and decide for themselves. Mystics tend to explode all dogmas, and their belief systems tend to be based primarily on their personal experience, and very much not on received wisdom. This is why most mystics are routinely condemned as heretics in most of the world's organized religions. Mystics are chimera, not sheep. They take strange, unknown shapes, and report back visions of the divine as they experienced them, sans interpretation. Mystics are spiritual reporters, and spiritual technologists. They might seem otherworldly, but in fact they tend to be deeply pragmatic.

Mysticism tends to envelop and overarch binary-polarized arguments about faith and anti-faith. Mysticism is not "either/or" but instead is "both/and." Mystics are comfortable with paradox—the very paradoxes of opposition that drive the atheists against the religious. A paradox, rather than being resolved, can be maintained in dynamic tension: the same sort of dynamic tensions that the universe seems to be built on, for example, whether light is wave or particle or both.

As Hoffer says, the need to believe in something can supercede the rational assessment of what the belief is. It can make us be irrational about rationality. Rationality needs to be reasonable, rather than extreme. That seems so obvious, yet it is so rarely encountered.