ENTRY 7 - FRIDAY, MAY 5, 2023

I feel a great will to do SOMETHING. But if I try to narrow it, to make it one thing to do, I lose the will, it feels wrong and undesirable. Even the mindless, obvious procrastination appears undesirable. How is that suddenly the case?

I feel so much jealousy and envy for people who give the impression to the digital world that they are living the life I would like to live. One of creativity, of forward-thinking, revolutionary art and music. I am so jealous of the people living that life and being respected for it. Being admired for the traits I want to emanate and be admired for. 

And so, the conclusion I reach easiest is that I should be making more art. I should reinvigorate my energies and output that flashy short video I could post and then people I like would like it and I’d get the dopamine and it would be wonderful. But that doesn’t often prove effective. 

Or maybe I refuse to believe in its effect as an excuse so I don’t labor! Maybe that’s why I make the counterargument that I shouldn’t create for social approval or ego-driven dopamine release, but instead I should create for pure self-expression and open-minded exuberance for the world around me. 

But that breed of creation is quite a challenge to just sit down and do. So I’m writing. I’m writing because I feel so worthless at the music thing sometimes, and the very worst I tend to feel about my writing is that I write in a silly voice about silly things that only matter to me. But I don’t judge myself the same way in this medium. Perhaps, the lack of judgment is because I am not as schooled in literature as I am in sound. I don’t possess the same methods of analysis or the same terms of ridicule. I don’t think this is spectacular writing, but it’s not terrible. And that’s really all I can say. 

—

Today I finished the book I was reading yesterday, which I started the day before that. It was (and is) a good book. Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson. A very well written and compelling novel, by an old midwestern white lady, in the voice of an old midwestern white man, about 70 years ago, talking about events between 70 and roughly 170 years ago. Subject matters that I am deeply familiar with, but that remain foreign to the experiences in my life in this same country. Subject matters that have been a captivating distraction from my more typical worries and contemplations. 

The book is about religion, morality, and flawed people. It’s about people disappointing one another, generational disagreement, and questioning religious belief. It has a lot of very clever things to say on all these topics. Highlights for me included very moving descriptions of the beauty and religious significance of water, light, baptism, and love. It doesn’t talk about the holiness or blessedness in all things and enumerate them, rather it focuses on a few themes and substances, and harps on them for a good long while. And it does so in a consistent, compelling voice. I would easily believe that the words were actually written by the character the writer has taken on. 

As I wrote yesterday, it made me feel nostalgic for the future before me. It also made me love and miss activities I never much cared for, like theology, baptism, and prayer. And baseball, which of course I cared for, but haven’t given much thought to in quite some time. The writing on baptism in particular, and more generally on the experience of blessing people and things (not as an ordainment but as an acknowledgement of the divine beauty and grace already imbued in them), made me wish I was a priest. Or at least some sort of individual that claims religious or spiritual affiliation.

I’ve been in a state of relative equilibrium on the subject of religious belief for most of my conscious life. Which has been, put simply, that there is some sort of spirit or higher power out there, but definitely not one capable of being defined in human language, and definitely not one that is by nature good or evil, or even caring that much about human affairs. I have felt a belief in such a vague deity to varying degrees through the years. And, due to such variation, if I ever were to be informed that such a deity did not exist, I doubt I would’ve been surprised. 

But this book shifted my perspective on all that, and caused me to consider possibilities I hadn’t previously. Firstly, the sheer beauty of some of its descriptions and imagery was enough to tilt me in the direction of faith. Secondly, being written from the point of view of a minister, it provided great insight into the mind of a believer, which led me to characterize belief in god as almost a very mild schizophrenia (I do not mean this as a derogatory insult, rather in the literal definition of the disorder — an abnormal interpretation of reality), as it is an unrelenting insistence that there is some third-party great mystery behind and within every aspect of life, and it can never be known, but is certainly benevolent. Thirdly, the book makes some beautiful arguments suggesting that religious faith cannot and should not be proven, as providing logical proof often causes more doubt than reassurance. This made me reconsider religious faith as well: perhaps it is not even a “belief” as we usually use that word, but a feeling. Not an opinion, but a constant emotion behind and underneath your experience of life – an emotion that may be nourished or neglected. It can be neglected so much that it is no longer felt. And can be nourished to the point that it consumes the rest of your being. And of course if one goes through early life without instruction on nourishment, or with nourishment being discouraged by your elders, it can never even begin to be felt. 

The above is a kind of comforting and refreshing conception of religious belief. Anyone can have it, anyone can lose it, and anyone can never find it in the first place. A beautiful life can be lived without ever relishing in it, but I think it is nearly universally experienced to some degree. 

There is an interesting conclusion to be drawn from this characterization, though. If faith is an emotion, then it is a response to external input, as emotions tend to be. And if it is a response to an external force, and it has a universal potential, then the external force must be real and universal. Is this an argument for the existence of god? 

I don’t think so, but that might just be because I don’t want it to be.

—

Here’s an attempt at describing a framework for all of life that I’ve been pondering today…

There are three planes, or spheres, or what have you. The first is your self. Your physical body, your mind, your thoughts, your soul. The second is the rest of the world. Every other human, every animal, every plant, every physical thing. And every concept that can be dreamt up in other people’s minds that you’re exposed to. Both these planes contain the physical and the imagined. The literal and the figurative. Bread, bones, and belief. Memory is in the first plane, the self. Culture is in the second plane, your surroundings. Much of our experience of life is the interaction between the first and second plane. Breathing, perhaps the most essential function in our cognizant experience, is an oscillation between the first and second plane. You breathe in particles from the outside world that interact with your internal being, sustaining your life force, and then you exhale into your surroundings. 

And the third plane is the inexplicable. It exists within and between the two planes. Coincidence, luck, and miracles all inhabit this third plane. And dreams and spirits. It is hard to deny that this third plane exists; it is impossible to prove that there is nothing unknowable. This plane undeniably exists within ourselves, as dreams and wandering thoughts. It reveals itself in the world around us, as extreme coincidence and bizarre phenomenon. And it bridges the gap and blurs the line between the first two spheres, most notably in the case of love, when you feel an inexplicable bond with another human, who is outside yourself, but can quickly begin to feel like part of you. 

So that’s my framework for the definition and classification of all things in the universe. Simple enough. Now where does religion come in?

Religious belief is the process of ascribing meaning and definition to the unknowable. This is why it’s emotion and not opinion, analysis, or fact. Because to call it any such thing would be inherently contradictory. Religion speaks of the nature of the unknowable, disseminates such stories and calls them true, all while the central tenet is mystery and incomprehensible wonder. It cannot be taken literally. It cannot be rationally analyzed. Gilead says our language will always fall short when describing faith. I think that’s pretty accurate. So let me try to do so anyways!

In addition to my framework for the entire universe, I’ve come up with a rough framework for the degrees of religious belief…

The first step is acknowledgement of the third plane. A simple understanding that there are unknowable forces amongst us. The second step is supposing that such forces can have motives, which creates an additional plane of existence (the fourth plane), the unknowable motives behind the unknowable forces. The third step is something like believing that those motives are somehow interconnected or part of a grand design, which implies either the addition of a fifth plane, or the collapsing of the fourth plane into a simplified vector. The fourth step suggests that not only is everything so far true, but that the unknowable motives behind the unknowable forces behind the inexplicable phenomena belong to one or many deities. And the fifth and final step is the outlandish idea that we, in our human bodies living in the material world, can find paths to communicate with those deities, and that through that communication we might even wield a minuscule influence on their actions.

Perhaps you can tell by my description that I typically fall between steps one and three. This would give me a two out of five on the religious belief scale. Nice.

And if you’ve gotten this far, please know that in writing this I do not intend to cast judgement on anyone believing things I don’t, or being on a higher step of religious belief. It’s an emotion, so it shouldn’t be judged. No one should be judged for feeling happy when eating pineapple pizza. But it is pretty inexcusable to force someone else to eat pineapple pizza if they don’t have the same emotional response. That’s probably enough writing for me now; that analogy was pretty silly.

Sometimes, once in awhile, I aspire to create a sequence of words that conveys meaning, and to enjoy the process half as much as I enjoy making music. Even more rarely, I feel the urge to post such words in a public space. This is that space.

ENTRY 8 - FRIDAY, JULY 7, 2023

We have morphed reality. We have distorted the scale of time. We have modulated the pace of possibility. 

The geological understanding of time is not applicable to a world where mountains are leveled in minutes and oceans crossed in hours.

We are so distanced from naturally occurring logic that sculpting a rational understanding of the world takes a lifetime of effort. 

You might be tempted to believe that the most level-headed amongst us will also be the most deprived of speculative thought, as their focus is consumed by their survival. They are not granted the luxuries of time or leisure, so they know only one truth, that which is needed to survive, and don’t reach out for other ideas… BUT that analysis is flawed!!! People cannot be reduced to such a singular existence, even if the full weight of society attempts to make them so. We dream, and ponder, and work out new possibilities in the smallest and largest forms. And in community we have the means of revolution. 

If you seek a less distorted sense of the machine we live in, ask the one who has been thrown from the cogs and trodden by the wheels. Reach across the barriers of social respectability and love the rejected. Listen to their experience of the outside of our world. No sound mind claims to know the true nature of a system from only an interior perspective.