Ideas

I just started reading ‘The gospel According to Zen,’ and although I already knew this, it reminded me that I really cannot seek transcendence or I won’t find it, so I better change the title of this blog from "Faith Seeking Transcendence" to something else. Actually it doesn’t matter if I seek it or not. What I like about this book is it blends and compares Eastern ideas with sayings from Jesus, who was not the type of person modern day Christians make him out to be. I don’t know what he was, but he said some things that are very enigmatic and mysterious. My thoughts and feelings about God and the future are also presently under the influence of a couple shows I saw on the history channel Monday night. One show was about how the earth would bounce back so to speak if humans ceased to exist for one hundred to one thousand years and more. The second show was about USO’s, which are Unidentified Swimming Objects, although to be precise the saucers have been spotted swimming and flying, which makes sense to me. I definitely don’t like the idea of our earth being colonized by aliens, who would certainly annihilate us the way Europeans did American Indians and every other instance of colonization. I can accept that the aliens may even exist in the future and be travelling into the past to finish us off and take over (just an idea). What bothers me is that our civilizations today may be somewhere in the middle of the timeline, if one exists, of time since the beginning (which doesn’t exist) into the very end of time (which also may not exist). I would like to be at the end of this story because I want to know the answer, the end, the final point. The idea that things could go on forever and I’ll never get to know or see more is quite depressing. All these ideas, including the ones promoted by the book of Zen, are encouraging me to give up the idea of a personal God that is separate from me. All I want is very simple… I want to have a continued consciousness of myself after death in some form, and to not be parted from Michelle. I’m perfectly fine flying around and haunting people, or going to any other world or time and space. I just want to remember my life. But I would also like to experience other worlds here and now. I’m not satisfied with this view. From what I can gather, it isn’t up to me whether I might experience satori or nirvana or whatever, although I can prepare myself and make efforts to detach from everything that makes me, me. Supposedly, there is a core of me that will survive the detachment, and it’s the real me! Either way, this world is a bore most of the time, meaningless work and ugliness, stupidity. All people care about is getting more shit and throwing it away (into a landfill or the ocean). People in this country don’t even realize how rich they are. Even the poor people are rich. It’s a pointless dream for every fucking person to be healthy and wealthy. Everyone can’t live forever. People didn’t even used to live past 45 on the regular. It doesn’t make people happy anyway, health and wealth. Everyone is just sitting around waiting for something great to happen to them like winning the lottery, and if it doesn’t happen, they’re confused and depressed. Gross! It’s true for me also. It like to imagine being a Native American and being happy in my home with all the extended family around and a fire going cooking some rice or buffalo or something. Or I can imagine living on a farm or a small community where people learn their parents’ trade and have arranged marriages… I like that. I wish technology and industrialization could be reversed. Of course I couldn’t have the arranged marriage for myself, but they had “spinsters” in those days too and women are allowed to have close friendships. But some of the American Indians accepted inter-sexed people and gays too, because this type of love has always existed, but it’s just a question of it scaring certain types of insecure people.