Speak Your Mind if You Dare

What’s wrong with Christianity is what's wrong with politics: both are corrupted by money. A minister has to please the congregation in order to keep that collection plate full. Jesus didn’t give a rat’s ass what anybody thought—he spoke from his heart. He was, of course, crucified for his trouble but that’s not the point.

Or is it?

Here’s an example of Christ-like fearlessness in the early Sixties, from Taylor Branch’s great history of the civil rights movement:

In Baltimore, after nearly a decade of persistent negotiations, the city’s white and Negro Baptist preachers came together to discuss the role of the church in a time of racial tension. The meeting itself was a historic event, a gathering of uneasy strangers, and for the occasion the preachers of each race selected a representative to speak about their common religious heritage. The Negro preachers chose Vernon Johns, hoping that he would dazzle the white preachers with his learning. Indirectly, Johns was an employee of some of the white Baltimore preachers. His Maryland Baptist Center, which offered adult education to Negro preachers, was a kind of missionary program sponsored jointly by the white Southern Baptists and the National Baptist Convention.

On the appointed day, some 150 preachers met for lunch at the Seventh Baptist Church. There were no disputes over seating arrangements, the blessing of the food, the singing of “Jesus Keep Me Near the Cross,” or the meal itself. But as the chosen white preacher developed his sermon on the theme of Christian salvation, of being “washed in the blood of the Lamb,” Vernon Johns began to twitch noticeably in his seat.  When the white man finished, Johns stood up abruptly. He did not wait to be introduced, nor did he begin with the effusive salutations that had been established as the order of the day. “The thing that disappoints me about the Southern white church is that it spends all of its time dealing with Jesus after the cross, instead of dealing with Jesus before the cross,” he growled, and a number of the Negro preachers already were sinking inwardly toward oblivion.

Johns turned to the white preacher who had just sat down. “You didn’t do a thing but preach about the death of Jesus,” he said. “If that were the heart of Christianity, all God had to do was to drop him down on Friday, and let them kill him, and then yank him up again on Easter Sunday. That’s all you hear. You don’t hear so much about his three years of teaching that man’s religion is revealed in the love of his fellow man. He who says he loves God and hates his fellow man is a liar, and the truth is not in him. That is what offended the leaders of Jesus’ own established church as well as the colonial authorities from Rome. That’s why they put him up there.”

To a stunned audience, many of whom seemed to be leaning backward, Johns sputtered through quick explanations of Dives and Lazarus, and a story about how God rebuked Abraham for driving a stranger from his tent. “There is a world of disparity between the idealism of Jesus and the practices of men,” he said. “But Jesus is not crazy. We are crazy. The church has not formally denounced the Sermon on the Mount. It has merely let it slide. I want to deal with Jesus before the cross. I don’t give a damn what happened to him after the cross.”

With that, Johns sat down again, having consumed no more time than normally allotted to opening jokes and bromides. Faces were red. Appetites were lost. The tentative brotherhood of Negro and white Baptist preachers in Baltimore was stifled as a collective movement, and Johns soon was asked to resign his position at the Maryland Center. He drifted off again to the sermon and lecture circuit. In his own gruff, impolitic way, the old man had spoken up for the same idea of worldly religion that [M.L.] King supported at the Philadelphia convention, with similarly disastrous results. 

                                                                                                             Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch, 339-340

What's Wrong With Us?

In the motion picture "The Matrix," Trinity tells Neo, "You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad." What was wrong, as it turned out, [Spoiler Alert!] was that Neo--like everyone he knew--was living in a false reality: a computer-generated dream world.

Of course there's nothing wrong with our world, the planet Earth. There IS something very wrong with the human race. We--all of us--are living in another kind of Matrix; a false reality; a subjective mind-generated dream world. Because we believe this dream world is real we are insane. I'm not using the word "insane" lightly. Just because we have conveniently restricted the diagnosis of "insanity" to a more overtly disturbed minority, who can't hold jobs, who have to be medicated and/or institutionalized, doesn't mean the rest of us are in our right minds.

Notice that I said subjective mind-generated reality. The physical world, in all its perfection, is perceived by the objective mind: everyone with sight sees the tree. Subjective (individual) mind is the domain of value judgments, opinions, beliefs, tastes, customs, traditions, etc. that distort, like cataracts, our objective perception of the "real" world. It was the collective subjective mind of the Nazis that literally saw Jews as parasites in need of extermination. It is the collective subjective mind of one group or tribe to see all others as inferior. Hell on Earth follows: from slavery to persecution to exploitation to Doomsday. Fifty years ago today Lee Harvey Oswald pulled the trigger because his subjective mind convinced him he was fully justified in doing so.

The source of our self-hatred, our shame, our blame, and our arrogance is our subjective mind successfully convincing us that it is objective reality. Subjective mind is the source of our insanity: the state of confusing subjective opinion with objective fact.

If we could suddenly see physical reality undistorted by our subjective bullshit we would be in paradise. The key to enlightenment is humility. I like to say,"You can't be any humbler than nuts." The fate of humankind hangs in the balance.

Read Kathleen Brugger's "We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity: The Mechanics of Compassion," which is based on our life's work, and presents this theory in detail. For a personal account of madness and transformation, read my autobiography "Exposing Myself: A LIfe of Sex and Truth."

Male and Female Survival Strategies: The Tusk and the Pit

The male survival strategy could often be likened to a bull elephant stampeding through the jungle and crushing anything in his path. The female would be crazy to stand up to such brute force, such overwhelming physical superiority. She therefore compensates by using her wits: epitomized by a deep pit dug in the jungle floor ahead of the charging male, with sharpened up-pointing bamboo stakes embedded at the bottom and the entire trap concealed by a delicate lattice-work of branches and leaves. The trumpeting, bellowing (and not-too-bright) bull usually doesn't stand a chance.

I believe that the lone alternative to flight/fight survival behavior is face: the experience of unconditional acceptance of what is (my definition of love).

Puttin' on the Om!

I once had a friend, now departed, who always asked her guests to join hands at the dinner table and "Om" before eating. My late friend Ernie Mickler ("White Trash Cooking") and I wrote a devilish little satire of this alternative grace. It's sung to the (approximate) tune of "Puttin' on the Ritz." We called our song "Puttin' on the Om!" Here goes:

When you sit and face your plate just close your eyes and concentrate then start to moan
Puttin' on the Om!
Facing North South East or West just concentrate and do your best to hit that tone
Puttin' on the Om!

Hold hands with the people right next to ya
Feel that cosmic current flowin' through ya
Do ya?

When your chair begins to rise don't peek or open up your eyes it's best unknown
Puttin' on the Om!

Hold hands with the people right next to ya

Feel that cosmic current flowin' through ya

Do ya?

When at last it's time to eat the foods all cold but you can't beat that primal groan

Puttin' on the Om!

Puttin' on the Om!

Puttin' on the Om!

Puttin' on the Ommmmmmmmmmm!

In Praise of Fools and Madness

We are all familiar with Alfred E. Neuman, the smiling unhinged mascot of Mad Magazine. His world-view is encapsulated in the rhetorical question, "What, me worry?" And he clearly doesn't worry, his goofy lopsided face is always beaming with a kind of beatific serenity. Is madness the key to Mr. Neuman's happiness?

Or take Curly Howard of "The Three Stooges." Easily the dumbest of the trio, his charm lies in being a classic case of arrested development: a child's mind operating in the body of a grown man. He is always upbeat and of good cheer. No disaster, no pummeling by Moe, can keep Curly down. Like a cartoon character he bounces back and is ready for anything.

Ditto Harpo Marx. Groucho was rapier-sharp, Chico was the devilishly clever immigrant, Zeppo was vanilla, but Harpo was the child; the fool; the mad--and mute--genius (The Fool on the Hill/the jester).

Jesus said "Except you become as little children you will not enter the kingdom of heaven." A child is open to learning because they know they do not know. A child is willing to act like a fool because they have no rigid self-image to protect. The golden key is humility...and you can't be any humbler than nuts.

I'll leave this with one of my favorite quotes, from The Laws of Form, by G. Spencer Brown:

Discoveries of any great moment in mathematics and other disciplines, once they are discovered, are seen to be extremely simple and obvious, and make everybody, including their discoverer, appear foolish for not having discovered them before. It is all too often forgotten that the ancient symbol for the prenascence of the world is a fool, and that foolishness, being a divine state, is not a condition to be either proud or ashamed of.

Unfortunately, we find systems of education today which have departed so far from the plain truth, that they now teach us to be proud of what we know and ashamed of ignorance. This is doubly corrupt. It is corrupt not only because pride is in itself a mortal sin, but also because to teach pride in knowledge is to put up an effective barrier against any advance upon what is already known, since it makes one ashamed to look beyond the bonds imposed by one's ignorance. 

To any person prepared to enter with respect into the realm of his great and universal ignorance, the secrets of being will eventually unfold, and they will do so in measure according to his freedom from natural and indoctrinated shame in his respect of their revelation. 

In the face of the strong, and indeed violent, social pressures against it, few people have been prepared to take this simple and satisfying course towards sanity. And in a society where a prominent psychiatrist can advertise that given the chance, he would have treated Newton to electric shock therapy, who can blame any person for being afraid to do so? 

To arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practiced, requires years of contemplation. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behaviour of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what it is one needs to know. And yet those with the courage to tread this path to real discovery are not only offered practically no guidance on how to do so, they are actively discouraged and have to set about it in secret, pretending meanwhile to be diligently engaged in the frantic diversions and to conform with the deadening personal opinions which are being continually thrust upon them. 

In these circumstances, the discoveries that any person is able to undertake represent the places where, in the face of induced psychosis, he has by his own faltering and unaided efforts, returned to sanity. Painfully, and even dangerously, maybe. But nonetheless returned, however furtively.          

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!   

Desperately Seeking Rejection

I've been depressed as hell the last week or so, which has resulted in a falling-off of blogging activity. My book is finished and published. Now comes the task of flogging it, selling it, marketing it, promoting it--and the prospect makes me feel ill (in fact, I do feel physically under the weather today). I have long believed that wherever art meets business the interface is particularly abrasive. True art, I believe, springs from an irresistible compulsion to express one's personal vision of existence. I suppose one could say that business is also a compulsion to express one's vision. The difference, for me, is that with true art making money is never the primary motivation; with business making money is the whole point. 

But the artist has to eat and pay the rent! The temptation to conform, to compromise, to make palatable, to COMMERCIALIZE, is always beckoning. The more these siren calls are listened to, the more the art suffers. Commercial art is an oxymoron.

I once asked a successful screenwriter, "What if my script presents love as the solution to our problems but during the production the studio decides to change my message to 'killing is the solution'?" His answer? "Well, you got your money." 

To me true art is the honest--as fearless as possible--expression of the artist's take on reality.

Now Katie and my work--a philosophy of life is also art--says that we're all insane, that none of us have free will, and that we all hate ourselves. This is not an easy "sell." The last thing most people want to face is the idea that they're not in their right minds, not in control of their lives, and hate themselves. We have presented our ideas to quite a few "open-minded" people and I have yet to hear even ONE person say, "I get it! I'm not in control of my life, I see that my 'insecurities' arise from deeply suppressed self-hatred (born of not really knowing who or what the fuck I am!), and I'm literally insane for imagining myself 'happy' and content and satisfied with the way my life is!"      

Someone said, "If people agree with you you can't be ahead of the curve or revolutionary or original." True art requires the balls to starve if needed. Many have done so. 

Art is a communication. The communicator hopes, of course, to be understood, to be appreciated, to make a difference in the world. 

When you're ahead of your time you must expect little in the way of encouragement. Not to mention that artists are also encumbered with self-hatred, doubts, and madness, and can, as a result, become perversely addicted to rejection. After all, if I hate myself as a fraud and a loser, why should I be allowed success or recognition? And then the rejection feeds my insecurity: maybe I'm not on the cutting edge; maybe I'm self-deluded (aka full of shit). 

I once wrote, "Artists are usually discovered after their deaths because they are no longer around to sabotage their own careers." I speak from experience. I'm just becoming aware of how very much I've actively sought rejection.

I just realized that what I seek is confirmation of my story (the way I see myself). My story is that I am a loser unworthy of success.

My story says that I have always been rejected and always will be. So I seek/see rejection everywhere. Then another aspect of my story kicks in: "When I'm rejected I should just quit in protest."