As the Moon Draws Water

"In spite of our warnings and explanations, it drew [Dill] as the moon draws water," Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird                                                                                                                                                             

Dill Harris was instantly hooked on the mystery surrounding Boo Radley; he couldn't leave it alone, he had to know, had to see Boo with his own eyes.

Some kids are like that. A mystery drives them nuts. I was such a child. I used to tear small holes in my Christmas gifts to see what was inside. Forget waiting or deferred gratification. To quote the infamous Reverend Ike, "I don't want pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by, I want my pie right now with ice cream on top!"

My curiosity killed Santa Claus when I was eight years old. I'd already begun to ask myself questions like, "We don't have a fireplace. Does he come in through the heat grates in the floor?" In any case I sneaked around and discovered  the stash of "Santa's gifts" and had to be told that the preposterous myth was a preposterous myth (self-inflicting who knows what degrees of psycho-trauma). Santa Claus: God with training wheels.

Death was also a mystery. I was, like many children in the South, taken along to funerals and "visitations" and the lame explanations for the smiling Grandmother lying in a big shiny box made not only no sense ("She's gone to be with Jesus in Heaven") but radiated a quality of evasion and uncertainty that I suspected would fit quite comfortably in the Santa Claus category. I used to conduct funerals for neighborhood pets and even considered being a funeral director when I grew up!    

When a mystery was freighted with a moral injunction it significantly boosted the attraction-factor. Surely the finest example of this is the Garden of Eden allegory. Adam and Eve had it all--including hanging out with God Himself--and only had to obey one simple rule: lay off the fruit of a single tree. We all know what happened next. Clearly God didn't know much about child psychology.

For me sex became the ultimate mystery and my fire-and-brimstone Grandmother made sure I was well-versed in all the Southern Baptist strictures against engaging in any form of it--including nudity --and made me aware of the terrible consequences of succumbing to lust. Thus when I discovered that sex was deliciously pleasurable...

I wrote this in a song called Swimming With the Sharks:

They told me sex was dirty except unto a wife

They told me I was jerking off the best years of my life

But somehow I saw different

And guilt was worth the price

To all alone or with someone escape to paradise!   

I'd Rather Fight Than Switch!

Remember the old cigarette ads showing smokers with black eyes who defiantly proclaim,"I'd rather fight than switch!" (brands)? This puts me in mind of entrenched behavior patterns that are painful, self-destructive and in clear need of elimination. Why do we cling to the hurtful? Why, when all reason calls out to abandon a foolish behavior, do we continue to stick our hands in the fire?

The answer is because the behavior--and more accurately the beliefs that support it--would rather fight than switch.

A particular belief is what I call a "thought-form." It is a discrete entity that is bound by universal law to survive.
I define "survival" as the effort of a form to maintain its existent structural integrity. The universe is comprised of surviving physical and non-physical forms. Survival is the attempt to keep a form intact. Change is equated with death of the existent: once something changes, it ceases to be what it was.

Perpetual change rules the physical universe; no physical form can remain unaltered from one unit of time to the next. Thought-forms, on the other hand, have no physical mass and thus are immune to the interactional forces of change. A belief, "Jesus is coming soon," can remain unaltered for a lifetime in the mind of the believer; it can, and in this case has been, passed down from generation to generation.

A thought-form survives with all the ferocity of a cornered rat. It resists any introspection that can change it. The only threat to a belief comes from the person who believes it. It is a parasite-host relationship. The belief "Blacks are inferior to whites" need only keep its host believer convinced that it is true in order to remain unchanged; to "survive."

This is why we dislike people who challenge our beliefs. It is also why "all beliefs are equally valid" is so dangerous: there is no base-line, no standard that separates the wheat of objective fact from the chaff of subjective nonsense. One prays that the mechanic working on a jet engine would not hold such an easy-going philosophy.

Every belief would rather fight to the death than switch. This is why it's hard to change.