Changing Focus

For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 

but when completeness comes, what is in

part disappears. When I was a child, I talked

like a child, I thought like a child. When I became

a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. 

For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror;

then we shall see face to face.

-1 Corinthians 13:9-12

Before one really knows their "God" one knows the symbols for God, and they take those symbols as the reality. And really, people don't often take it much further than that, because going any further would require them to give certain things up that they don't want to give up. It is like someone who lives in a shed. He paints flowers on the dark wooden walls of his shed and uses broken mirrors to shed light on his false flowers from the shafts of light that filter down from the broken-down roof, but there is a whole real garden right outside the shed door. He doesn't want to go out there though, he doesn't really want to give up the darkness and mustiness of his shed. And he genuinely would have to give some things up. 

There is a great deal of pain you have to open yourself up to, to open that shed door. So he stays inside and paint flowers instead. Symbols of the real thing.

As anyone who has read some of my other blogs from the past would know, I used to be a Christian, and one of the most valuable insights I ever had as a Christian was when I fully understood that I was far too selfish to ever live out a tenth of the love that I felt the New Testament was calling me to. I felt I was physiologically incapable of doing that. It is like asking a stone to become a bird, there is no pathway for the one to become the other. I did not understand any way for that to become possible. I was firmly in the shed, and did not even see the door.

Of course I am not a Christian now. I am an "animist," but that is only a word. It is a metaphor, for a non-metaphoric reality that I am not sure I can ever adequately explain. 

What is communication, and what is love? Is it not a sort of going-outside-oneself to the other? Our society takes the Self as the ironclad bedrock of each of our realities, a reality that you can never truly get outside of. Even the things we see and hear and touch, these are representations of reality in our minds according to conventional understanding. We never get outside the black box of our heads. But is that really true? Are we not connected always with that which is outside? 

The very substance of our bodies comes to us from outside and goes outside. We do not contain the same atoms we did when we were born, we are not like a piece of granite retaining the same crystalline structure over centuries. Our bodies are a river constantly taking things in and removing things. As an organic vegetable gardener I take in food from the plants, but nutrients also leave my body and go to the plants since I recycle my pee into plant food. We are a circle, the plants and I. We are part of one body. Atoms come into my body, leave, go into their bodies, leave, and come into my body again, and into the bodies of the other living things around here. Whatever might be going on inside my mind, that is the actual reality. 

This is what I am fumbling to explain: that this solipsistic black-box-in-your-head worldview is a choice, not an inviolate fact of your nature. That you can and really must find that shed door and start living as part of LIFE, not as only YOUR life. That you can and really should start thinking not as just a person, but.. and this sounds a little weird... you should start thinking as all the life around you. 

In other words, get out of the black box. Think and experience as one node in a whole network of living things. The lines of communication are not perfect, any more than love or communication are free from possible misunderstandings. You will assume things that aren't true, you will try to help and hurt instead sometimes. There is a learning curve. What I am saying is that the lines of communication are there, neglected and half-forgotten, but they are there, like an extended nervous system. You can open the shed door. You can get outside the shed. 

I sometimes talk of some things as gods or goddesses, Mother Water for instance. Mother Water is a goddess, but saying that gets you no closer to her. She also isn't a goddess, that is just one way of explaining my living connection to her, my respect and awe and love. Goddess is only a word. I call them my mothers and my fathers, my brothers and sisters, this says nothing except that I am connected to them in a fundamental way and there is no way I can explain that connection for you. Explaining does not connect you, it may just get you on the road to being connected, but it doesn't connect you. You and only you can do that, but you do not do it alone. You truly cannot reason your way from the solipsistic black-box self to this other connected self, you must simply reach out from the heart.

There is no substitute for this, and the lack of this and the lack of people who live this connection on a daily basis is responsible for so many troubles in our world. We live hate and isolation, not connection, and this hate and isolation poisons the whole planet. Poisons us, poisons the plant and animal life, poisons the seas. Our seas are poisoned with trash and chemicals, sure, but because we were poisoned with hate and isolation first. Our ground is poisoned with lead and mercury because our hearts were poisoned first. Our air is poisoned with carbon and acids and sulfur dioxide because our hearts and minds were poisoned first. Because we forgot that connection, we cut ourselves off from it. We are part of a living body, and we decided to go our own way. What happens in the body when some of your cells decide to secede from the rest? It's called cancer, and we have it. We are it. 

I don't know if I can make any of this make sense to you. I am trying the best I can. You just have to reach out in love to every living thing, no matter how apparently humble. Think an ecosystem's thoughts. You can change focus from only yourself to everything around you, live and think as both yourself and everything around you, and by extension live and think as part of the whole planet and the whole universe. You aren't just an isolated self in the black box of your mind. You are part of the cosmos, and that cosmos is inside you and outside you.