Why I Hate You

Let me tell you why I hate you.

Here's a key premise in Katie and my first book, "The Game of God: Recovering Your True Identity:" (a) the source of all fear is the unknown, (b) the source of all hatred is fear. In other words, what we don't know is what we fear and what we fear is what we hate. It is absolutely impossible for us not to fear the unknown and it is equally impossible for us not to hate what we fear. Fear and hate are simply the emotional/psychological expressions of flight/fight.

"Know" is a very big word and, like "love," "God" and "friend," much misunderstood. To "know" means to absolutely know. I once read that Charles Darwin became enamored of using the word "infinite," until he was advised by friends more familiar with the concept that "infinite" is a lot more than a very big number; it is mind-stoppingly powerful medicine.

The only thing I know absolutely is that some sort of experience is occurring. That's it. Everything else is limited by some degree of ignorance. I do not absolutely know that the sun will "rise" tomorrow. I do not absolutely know that I will live another second. And because my ignorance is vast and incessant, so is my fear and so is my hatred.

I grew up not trusting people. I did not know them thus I feared and hated them. I still do (and this means you). Of course I don't know myself either. That's why I fear and hate me too.

My life's work has been to discover what the flying duck is going on here. What is truth? Who are we and what is existence all about? A very important answer that my life-mate Katie and I arrived at is that the human race is universally insane. We define "insanity" as the state of confusing our mind-generated reality with actual reality. Insanity, to put it another way, is convincing ourselves we "know" when the truth is we don't know. Some anorexics starve themselves to death because they "know" they're fat. A more blatant nut case "knows" she's Queen Victoria. The more subtle nut case "knows" he's Arthur B. Hancock. All are delusional.

The antidote is humility: simply being experientially cognizant of our limitations. Humility does not make us weak. It makes us strong. Being in touch with the reality of our vast ignorance--and our insane beliefs that we really know who we are, what we are, where we are, when we are, why we are, what we're doing, where we came from, and where we're going--is to be grounded in the way it is, and opens the door to the possibility of meaningful learning and change.

Even as a child I knew something was wrong with people. It's taken a lifetime but Katie and I have discovered what the problem is: we're all encumbered with an insidious form of insanity. When I'm experiencing the actuality of my madness, and yours, I can reduce the fear and hate and have compassion for us.

Katie and I define "love" as the experience of unconditional acceptance of what is. Face/accept is the lone alternative to flight/fight. Facing our insanity means the end of self-hatred, blame, and arrogance.

Please do yourself a favor and read Katie's "We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity: The Mechanics of Compassion" and my autobiography, "Exposing Myself: A Life of Sex and Truth."          

Erotic Art or Porn?

I recently saw an art exhibit whose theme was women (and guns!) that included some nudes. It prompted me to think about the difference between "erotic art" and "pornography." Where is the line that separates the two?

What I’m coming to realize in my latter-daze dotterage is that lines do not exist. Whatever life, the universe, and everything proves to be, it very much appears to be one seamless thing. Everything is connected to everything else; there is no fixed line dividing anything, much less one that neatly divides the so-called artistic from the so-called obscene. I suppose I should say right upfront that when I’m reasonably sane I do not find sex obscene at all; I find it beautiful.

What I noticed in the exhibition was, with a couple of exceptions, a conspicuous timidity about sex. There was, for me, an overall coldness in the works that I soon realized was due to the absence of all sexual heat or passion. I invite the reader to Google “erotic art” (images) to see what I mean.

And then it hit me! Any artistic rendering of sexuality that conveys passion to the point of sexually stirring the viewer is deemed pornographic—and must be avoided like the plague. Throughout my life I’ve been aware that this screwed-up world of ours largely holds sex as something dirty, or shameful, or in need of concealment. We must not talk about sex in polite company, we must behave as though we don’t have genitalia, etc. Incredibly, I'd never realized that even sexual arousal itself was taboo! In any case, I checked my New Oxford American Dictionary and found this:

pornography (noun): printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings. [My italics]

It very much appears that Puritanical bullshit about sex remains not only alive and well among the general public but has infected and inhibited the avant-garde as well. Many artists are apparently so fearful of having their work labeled “pornographic” that they bend over backwards to make certain that nothing which could possibly arouse the viewer remains. From the same dictionary:

art (noun): the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power. [My italics]  

“Aesthetic” (in the pornography definition) and “beauty” (in the art definition) is used to delineate the wheat of art from the chaff of pornography. Say what? I suppose there are some people who find the sex act devoid of aesthetic beauty; I am not one of them.

 

“Emotional feelings” and “emotional power” are used in both definitions to distinguish “art” from “porn.” But is not sexual arousal an emotion? It is for me! And, if it is, why should this particular emotion be denied a seat at the gallery table? Why is any other emotion—anger and repugnance at a crucifix immersed in a jar of piss, say—fiercely defended as a legitimate artistic expression, while the emotion of being turned on by a depiction of sex is condemned as sleazy pandering to lust, as filth, as lacking in importance?

“Don’t do that! It’s a very important work of art!” said the home invasion victim to Alex in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Remember the piece? It was a white porcelain-like sculpture of a penis (not erect) and balls. The point I’m trying to make is that the object was as cold and devoid of sexuality as one could imagine.  Alex wielded the thing as a weapon and fatally bludgeoned his victim with it.

For me, standard pornography’s greatest shortcoming is its failure to communicate the beauty and honesty and fun of the sexual experience. Are the participants really enjoying themselves or are they faking pleasure? Do they really feel beautiful or are they acting beautiful? Is the artist—painter, photographer, filmmaker, sculptor, etc.—sufficiently gifted to capture and convey that beauty and honesty? 

Erotic art—including graphic depictions of human sexuality—would be included in any gallery, were it not for our mass lunacy about sex. 

The Abandonment of Reason Season

I hereby declare the seasonal holiday madness over as of today. It's time to get back to what passes for "normal" on this best of all possible worlds. I usually manage to ignore the mass lunacy that permeates the atmosphere (not unlike the full moon) from late November through year's end but this year the frenetic vibes really got to me. Mark Twain once said, "The less there is to justify a traditional custom the harder it is to get rid of it." 




In "Hamlet," Marcellus says,

Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes

Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,

The bird of dawning singeth all night long.

And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad.

The nights are wholesome. Then no planets strike, 

No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,

So hallowed and so gracious is that time.

How charmingly innocent. Today the bird of commerce singeth twenty-four seven...but my fear and loathing is not restricted to the commercialization of Jesus' B-day (and other "special days" invented by Hallmark and the florist cartel). It's more about the mindless adherence to custom. Our country is in peril, the rich are running the show, and way too many people actually give a shit who wins a brutal gladiatorial contest between muscle-bound meatheads. The environment is being stressed to the breaking point while "news" channels cover "American Idol" as though it actually merited serious reporting. 

Attention, shoppers and sleepwalkers: wake the fuck up and look around you. There's more to life than mindless conformity. And the clock is ticking.

A songwriter friend once closed one of his compositions with these lines: To make a song is all I mean to do/To fill the hours until the night has passed away/It’s like the day was never coming…

Experience Generates Reality

Experience Generates Reality

1. Experience is all there is. Experience is the absolute truth.

2. Experience is being, free of a survival identity.

3. Reality is being, encumbered with a survival identity, via amnesia.

4. Experience generates an illusion of reality, what we call the universe.

5. In amnesia, experience is restricted to varying levels of non-experience.

6. “God” is absolute experience; absolute consciousness: there is only One.

7. “Reality” is an illusion of duality; it exists in order to allow experience to experience non-experience.

8. Evolution is the process of awakening, of regaining consciousness: the steady reclamation of experience unfettered by illusion.

9. Experience is innate consciousness, independent of the five senses, the body, the brain, and the ego. It is the source of all creativity, intuition, and invention. It is the source of love and telepathic communication. It is immortal and infinite. It is the underlying true identity of the universe.

10. “Reality” is non-experience, dependent on the five senses, the body, the brain, and the ego. It is the source of all emotion, deception, suffering, and death. It is the source of fear, hate, and insanity. It is mortal and finite. It is an amnesiac illusion effectively posing as truth. It is a lie and as such can never deliver the satisfaction and peace only available in experience.

11. Experience generated the illusion of reality, what we call the big bang. At that instant experience was lost in illusion; the truth was lost in a lie. A boson, an atom, an electron, a star, a supernova, a planet in the Goldilocks zone, a unicellular life form—all represent experiences of non-experience with an observable trajectory and purpose: to awaken. The development of increasingly complex life forms with more sophisticated sensory capabilities, followed by analytical thought and self-awareness, further demonstrate this purposeful regaining of experience/consciousness. One might say that at the big bang, “reality” took control and generated non-experience. If one is born blind, the reality of one’s blindness thoroughly dictates one’s ability to experience.

When I was in my adolescence I always liked the “pulsating”  universe model: big bang—big crunch—big bang—forever.

A.   Experience generates “reality.”

B.   “Reality” generates the experience of non-experience.

C.  Ultimately, the experience of non-experience becomes experience.

D.   Experience generates “reality.”

E.   This cycle repeats forever.

  

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).