Tag Archives: religion

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The Rastafarian Town Council Meeting

Some say it began with the Jehovah’s Witnesses
ingesting sacred substances with the Rastafarians.
Others say that could not possibly be true or false.

What emerged one sultry August Town Council evening
when half the town had found some sleep:

We believe that direct and indirect health outcomes
derived from use of marijuana
are more family and community-friendly
than use of alcohol producing more pathological outcomes;
and that our economic and political policies
and procedures in public affairs,
as in private,
should reflect this shared sacred ecological belief.

Further, because we find little outcome evidence that consumption of THC
is less healthy and more pathological than ingesting alcohol,
and because we find bucket lists of evidence that THC can have therapeutic and far less addictive pathological outcomes than alcoholic beverage consumption,
we find it ecopolitically curious
that regulatory and legal support evinces more tolerance of alcohol Business as Usual
than THC busyness as sometimes unusual.

Such disparity of regulations and legal posturing
appear to suffer from Constitutional Rights Defiance Disorder,
as we compassionately expect our public sector and structures
to positively support what evinces health,
happiness,
and cooperative prosperity for all,
rather than their suppression,
making depressants more accessible than known
ecologically organic regenerative substances,
to toast the less organic degeneratively pathological substance,
which, in excess, is a poison causing death,
as compared to a more biotherapeutic holistic medicine
that has much longer,
and more spiritually,
withstood and contemplated tests of flowing nutritional time.

I cannot say from where this proposal came
but I can report why the Council passed the pipe to think about
what they could say that might fit with their own experience.

Most people learn most and best from personal experience,
we figured,
especially if we have a chance to reflect together on those experiences,
which we might choose to do right now.

Most people’s attitudes and feelings and beliefs
about health v pathology are influenced most by their own experience,
including the intake of substances,
like foods we eat,
and like or don’t prefer,
like beverages we drink and like or don’t,
and prefer nutritionally and tastefully,
like sensory outcomes of drinking alcohol and inhaling THC.

Most Business As Usual fundamentalists,
especially of the Christian and Islamic varieties,
believe alcohol is more or less not health viable
for beneficial ecopolitical outcomes,
as perhaps more favorably compared to THC.
However, most Christian and Islamic fundamentalists
do not have personal experience of either,
nor do they tend to share within families and communities
likely to learn from others’ experiential wisdoms
extending out to broader families and friends of friends.

Sadly, up to this PostMillennial time,
where there have been exceptions to such dually undiagnostic abstinence,
these have been on the side of not-quite-so evangelical cocktails.

Had we sooner leaned the other way,
inhaling THC
then talking about cooperative ecopolitically healthy outcomes
while exhaling,
well, then,
we might begin warming toward each other
and those still outside our monocultural religious walls
of self-protectionism.

As it is,
our spiritual and divine aspirations suffer
from lack of connection with our Eros-loving bodies
and lack of ecologically cooperative empowering WinWin thinking,
and ecotherapeutic climate building,
as in the newer testament gospels for community development,
transubstantiations,
transliterations,
and like those polypathic potheads over at the UU and Zen Center,
and don’t even get us started
on how much fun we had with the Rastafarian Warrior Witnesses.

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Doing The PolyNomial EquiValent Math

When I was eight
I knew Paradise could not be merely secular humane
and yet be justly and omnipotently divine,
when a Great Horned Owl
breathed her last sacred breath toward me,
left alone
while she flew away
to where I would thinly follow
in my robust adult time.

It took me eight cycles of octave eight
to realize why
Paradise must include multiculturing nests for fowl
and ecopolitically cooperative seas for fish
and surf’s bilateral co-gravity
eco-measuring timeless here and now eternity.

Because a monocultural Paradise
would be polypathically oxymoronic,
an economically and nutritionally ridiculous metaphysical paradigm,
not ecologically sustainable,
not even basic harmonic balance growth potential
because not multiculturally
and polypathically healthy intelligence
of regenerative/degenerative ecopolitical design.

Everybody knows that Heaven
begins and ends in an organically holistic Earth Garden,
with zero-balanced degenerative waste stream,
yes?

So how does denying our climate
and Earthscape wasting pathologies
help us become the ReForesting Paradise
we might cooperatively become
through healing these dissonant
decaying anomalies
together?

 

 

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Muddy Tree Family

I’m planting trees today.
Cherry trees in front,
Peter on the street,
Paul in the middle,
with Mary closest in toward the house,
all on the far side of our gravel drive.

On the same southern side,
along my neighbor’s new above the eyebrows 8-foot fence,
backside facing me,
which is fine,
more backdrop character for vines and ivy,
preferably less poisonous,
I also plant three larger fruit trees,
Dillen first,
then Spencer,
then Daquan,
after my three sons
in that original adoption-planting order.

Then, by the front porch
on northern side,
an apple tree
named Marvin after Gaye,
my first love before I knew what mine felt right like.

Three thornless blackberries
planted in the back,
Matthew first, of course,
with shared Beatitudes,
then Mark, progenitor of gospel vocation stories,
then Luke the ecotherapeutic Medicine Bush,
luxuriously black berryed, Agape.

All this vast recently adopted extending family
to greet and nourish my multiculturally mutually adopted,
and sometimes quite dysfunctionally malnourished,
human fractured family,
but rarely allowed to go to bed angry or frightened,
at least by each other.

While planting I go in and through our home
with my muddy gardening shoes,
remembering my mother’s exasperated voice,
Who tracked all this mud through my kitchen?!
and my standard response,
The mud-tracker prefers to remain anonymous.

I’ll just bet he does,
she responds,
as I reach for broom and dustpan.

Then later,
Why, of all things, would you choose to track through all this muddy gay identity?
I was really planning on birthing a Saint!
and my response, of course,
The filthy queer prefers to remain anonymous.

I just hope he does,
I can hear her thinking
as I plant Peter, then Paul,
then Mary, the cherries.

About that same time,
while sorting through syncretic interdependence of regenerative economics as power-politics,
my mother wondering why I would choose to head toward Hell
as an unredeemed Taoist,
and my response
The evilish Taoist-Christian hybrid
prefers to remain both atheistically anonymous
and power-theistically full of sacred diastatic abundance.
In other words,
polypathically and multiculturally empty,
and yet co-redeeming as co-loving interdependent fertility does,
not just pinefully and whinefully intends.

About this time I am singing
my final adoption by baptism rite with Marvin Gaye,
Otis Redding’s “These Arms of Mine”
dedicated to all those transubstantiating syncretic polyculturists
inside, as ecopolitically outside,
even if preferring sacred organic co-rootedness
to secularly remaining as anonymous as a wordless tree.

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Atheists are Panentheists

What is the difference between an atheist and a panentheist?

Atheists cannot discover any signs of divinity outside ourselves
While the panentheist uncovers what organizes interior landscapes and climates.

In Buddhism we have a principle of Emptiness
and a correlated principle of Interdependence.
Atheists stop rather abruptly with the Emptiness platform
while panentheists are so bogged down by all us Interdependents,
sorting through co-dependent relationships
but without the therapy bills,
Emptiness feels like an unfamiliar but theoretically welcome relief,
like solitude before it turns into sour loneliness.

So maybe a LeftBrain atheist
is also a RightBrain panentheist,
and the two together is a Buddhist.

There is no inconsistency here.
just two faces of the eternally timeless,
just as time is lost to sensory review
when it becomes most sacredly replete.

Other than that, one is harder to spell
and takes a whole lot longer to fully articulate.

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Sacrilege of Terror

The host-guest relationship is more or less sacred all over the world. (Gregory Bateson, Sacred Unity)

Except among terrorists, where host and guest are reversed in priority
and assumed to become mutually antagonistic
and parasitic,
which defines paranoia
which is blind to sacred unity of co-hosts and co-guests.

Sacred is the integrity of each moment’s organic,
timelessly regenerate potential.

Violence intended to power-over with terror
when power-with options remain as accessible as breathing
oxygen in and out,
to choose to competitively decompose
rather than power-with regenerate
Earth’s sacred organic host/guest relationships is,
by any cultural definition of all that we hold sacred,
a sacrilegious profanity.

Terrorism,
and its fundamental anthro-supremacist roots,
is as anti-Allah
as anti-Christ.

Terrorism walks wherever abusive powering-over innocence
exploits fear for ecopolitical gain.

The only ecopolitical line between sacrilege of abuse,
intended to raise terror,
and ethno-centric neglect,
intended to protect ego’s falsely independent security,
are the lines that balance my and your integrity of authority
within Earth’s global nutritional responsibilities
to mentor,
and thereby advocate,
co-redemptive healthy climates,
which are organically sacred
and not so much terrorist sacrilege.

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Bateson and Taoism: A Cordial Conversation

Bateson:
Pathology is a relatively easy thing to discuss,
health is very difficult.

Laotse:
Pathology is a functional issue for discernment,
organic health is difficult to miss
unless you have switched our cooperative evolution
for your personal competitive revolution.

Bateson:
…the sacred is difficult to talk about,
because the sacred is peculiarly related to the healthy.

Laotse:
Sacrilege of mere secular profanity is difficult to miss
because sacred ecology unfolds abundant healthy organic ecopolitical systems.

Bateson, on the history of Western religious culture:
The proposition for which they were burning each other was,
on one hand, ‘the bread is the body,’
and on the other, ‘the bread stands for the body.’
…this whole argument is one of fundamental importance
when related to the whole of the nature of the sacred
and to human nature….
the richest use of the word ‘sacred’
is that use which will say that what matters
is the combination of the two,
getting the two together.

Laotse:
When is yeasty bread and wine
notnot yet a diastatic body?

Bateson:
Because it doesn’t make any prose sense,
the material of dream and poetry has to be more
or less
secret from the prose part of the mind.
It’s this secrecy,
this obscuration,
that the Protestant thinks is wrong,
and a psychoanalyst,
I suppose,
wouldn’t approve of either.
But that secrecy, you see,
is a protecting of parts of the whole process or mechanism,
to see that the parts don’t neutralize each other.
Laotse with Jaynes:
Because it doesn’t make any LeftBrain languaged sense,
the inductive material of dream and poetry and sacred ecology
is also reverse double-bind decomposing nutritional effects with causes,
a protecting of too-reductive parts of our whole organic polypathic process
to see that all parts must (0)soul compatibly neutralize each other.

Bateson:
What are you going to do about the use of the sacred?
There is a very strong tendency in occidental cultures,
and increasingly in oriental cultures,
to misuse the sacred.
You see,
you’ve got something nice,
central to your civilization,
which bonds together all sorts of values connected with love,
hate,
pain,
joy, and the rest,
a fantastic bridging synthesis,
a way to make life make a certain sort of sense.
And the next thing is that people use that sacred bridge
in order to sell things….
We can be influenced, it seems,
by any confidence trickster,
who by his appeals
makes cheap that which should not be made cheap.

Laotse:
How are you going to invest in/divest of this sacred ecology?
We have beauty and ugly,
kind and notnot kind,
in civilization as on Earth,
bonding together all values with their disvalues,
our empathic trusts with our ecopolitical distrusts and immunities.
This co-arising nonduality of positive and double-binding negative notnot
folds and unfolds a fantastic sacred bridge of synthesis toward sense,
with dissonance toward nonsense.
Those who would reduce sacred Earth Rights
to what can be merely bought and sold,
cheapen that which could become even more densely rich.

Bateson:
…while it may be fairly easy to recognize moments
at which everything goes wrong,
it is a great deal more difficult
to recognize the magic of the moments that come right;
and to contrive those moments
is always more or less impossible….
to make human relations prosper is exceedingly difficult.

Laotse:
Recognizing moments at which everything goes wrong
as tipping points,
time to upgrade risks of anger management
into opportunities of and for more expansive love development,
to consistently
predictably
normatively
climatically invite faithfulness toward co-empathic trust.

Bateson:
We are arrogant about what we might know tomorrow,
but humble because we know so little today.

Laotse:
We are Yang-overflowing about what we may know of integrity’s potential tomorrow,
co-arising with ego’s humility to notnot balance
YinYin
WinWin
today.

Note: Bateson quotes are from Sacred Unity, pp. 265-270, “Ecology of Mind: The Sacred”, HarperCollins

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EcoPolitics of Psychologically Healthy Climates

If you don’t like the look or taste or smell of an Old Overly-Competitive Climate, then notice how it is slowly and intricately evolving into and toward dipolar abundance as a Revolutionary New EcoPolitical System, hopefully and empathically more trustingly and faithfully cooperative.  (A very loose paraphrase of Buckminster Fuller on great transitioning between old and new systems as  information-ing networks, and cooperatively developing ecopolitical climates.)

To love, agapic and/or erotic,
is a positive economic-political relational choice
to trust whomever
and whatever
is our Other right now
with our open caring empathy,
even when we may feel like withdrawing
into our suffering,
self-isolating
depressive,
repressed concerns of mistrust and dissonance,
because we have faith
that not only is this choice to integratively love,
to pay love forward,
how we define doing our ecopolitical and ecological best,
but also because we trust from prior experience
this is most likely to facilitate Others
doing their best as well.

Circles of affection and disaffection are both viral,
but only one is viciously so,
Both positive and negative psyches unveil viscous potential,
but only one tends toward sustained reiterative communication
in kind,
benign,
the other viscosity trends toward unkind, active distrust,
eventually hatred,
also a learned ecopolitical choice, at one time,
over several habitual and then hypnotizing times.

When this becomes most interesting for me
when I turn from thinking of Other as a person
or a group of people
or a set of people
or the human natural-languaged species,
and think, instead of Other as a member of some other organic species,
including those with root systems,
including coral reefs and tidal barriers,
or even other natural Black Hole environments and gestalts,
networking mandalas of seas
and mountain trails
throughout the changing of each season,
where love is my ubiquitously obvious and natural default,
not so much feeling like a choice,
but like what I have known as good and healthy and beautiful,
occasionally interrupted by pests.

Yet, even noticing whiney mosquitoes
and buzzing icky biting flies,
short of a horde swarming all about paranoid me,
is often cause for bittersweet slaps and swats
and imaginary battles between David and Goliath,
with me cast as the benignly-intended Monster Giant,
merely out to protect my own skin
regardless of mortal consequences
and risks
and ecopolitical opportunities
of Other,
smashed to bits.

When my days become overly clogged with strictly human discourse,
when human nature monopolizes my monoculturish time,
my symbol seems to be that of a molting snake,
awakening to a new but uncertain skin each dewy morning,
a somewhat different identity
than those accumulated through all my dreamy/nightmare yesterdays.

But, when I recreate outdoors
in and with and of more virginal embryonic Earthy nature,
then my icon becomes an inviting hummingbird,
always curiously flying about seeking and sending succulent rapture,
far too fast and urgently blissful for noticing,
much less slitherally eating, those pesky mosquitoes.

Inviting co-empathic trust
defines
Doing my best to follow
our Golden Rule,
for and of and with me
and my Elders
and our kids.

Inviting empathic cooperatively-invested trust
is to invite a climate of informed
incarnate
kosmic risks and opportunities
usually small yet sometimes Great Transitions
of Grace as Love as Karma as Positive Psychology
as a healthy regenerative ecopolitical gestalt,
mandala,
network,
ecosystem,
Earth,
natural-spiritual dipolar co-arising
profane-sacred
humane-divine
Tao-BiCameral Universe
of Snakes greeting Hummingbirds
and notnot dialectal vice-viral-versa.

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Blessing of Innocents

May there always be a God/dess for you
a Messiah with you
a Kalki in you
a Maitreya of you
a Twelfth Imam as you.

May there always be a God/dess
who sees her/his best self through your eyes,
who hears his/her most beautiful song in your ears,
who smells our most transporting fragrant presence
as you.

May you always breathe
and beat your heart
with and as,
in and for,
our divine Earth God/dess;
some Creative Becoming with a higher pay scale
than the Tooth Fairy.

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Christ and Laotse

A Tao (0)Mega Tipping Point Zen-Christ
could become no better or worse than your own spiritual experiences
of your own bicameral mindbody of Christianity.
These Christ-icons are all made of the same LeftBrain yeast
becoming fully diastatic bread
becoming RightBrain’s fully diastatically Beloved Community Body.

Jesus of Nazareth
was neither the first nor last
to recognize both Self and Other
as bread of life
sun of life
light of life
son/daughter of life
words of life
yeast of life
body of life
body and blood of life.

On the other hand
Laotse may have been the first and last
to see Self within syncretically enculturing ElderOther
dipolar yeast health-diastolic,
avoiding more static flat-line pathologies.

Tao of Yang body-life
reverse-facing double notnot humored YinYin
wu wei’s flow of diastatic ego-death,
reproduces a great deal of in-between cognitive-affective dissonance,
so the devil appears within details
inscrutable Eastern nondual co-arising ecometric politics of namaste,
LeftBrain Western enculturation dominance
tolerates, with chronic stress irritations,
all our yeasty Taos
of full 7-Grain Sabbath Breads of Life
longing to conjoin
in and through Beloved Spirit-Natured Communities.

I suppose a Jewish therapist
deeply immersed within the Torah,
reading words of Jesus
in the first three gospels
might easily imagine these the teachings
of an often depressed schizophrenic
with compulsive self-obsession
as a sacrificial lamb
living in an unredeemed economy,
but this sidesteps sacred truths,
yeast does transubstantiate diastolically through organic bodies,
a positively deviant virus becoming fertile nutritional commodities
for anthrocentrically benign-as-healthy
wealthy evolving purposes,
preferences,
norms,
traditions,
etching yet evolving through yeasty regenerations
of self-redeeming health with beauty generations.

If the original primal Christian intent
was also the Tao of Self+Other ecoconscious
egocentric sacrifice to (0)Zen Center,
then Jesus of Nazareth was also transubstantiating
Eastern nondual co-arising ecology of nature-spirit mindbodies
into Jewish sacred organic ecopolitically correct sheepish language.

But, this inquisition about
humane icons with divinely evolving spirit-souls,
each holonically RNA/DNA integrative-proportional-relational
instructions for a folding
unfolding
refolding
prefolding fractal Universe of organic health becoming
continues within each living cell’s core rooting system,
each yeasty plasmatic culture,
each health v pathology subclimate
with four equivalent seasons,
trinitarian LeftBrain traces
across bilaterally eternal co-present notpast/notfuture
RightBrain time.

Elder RightBrains never die,
they simply enter and exit deep erotic/agapic sleeps,
co-arising positives as notnot quite so much is more.

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Optimal Wins

What words do we choose for maximizing our ultimate accomplishments,
achieving our healthiest goals,
proportioning our 100% successful therapeutic outcome projections?

Why do these words,
and our feelings about these choices
wave in and out of optimal happiness and prosperity,
even when quantitative measures suggest our historical maximums
continue to trend up and up toward infinite irresolution?

We say we could become anything,
but do we mean we might achieve everything,
every power,
timeless omnipotence?
How do WinWin ecopolitical norms
accommodate WinLose evolutionary imaginations?

Permaculturists,
like environmental therapists
and holistic medicine practitioners of new life out of old deaths,
favorably contrast polycultures with problematic monocultural outcomes.
Weed patches, essentially,
where you intended your front yard garden
and which may infest where you intended to grow your healthy ego identity.

We might hope to become more polypathic achievers
by acclimating to less egocentric monopolistic gestalts,
climates of self and other awareness becoming atrophied subclimates,
static,
aging hoary traditionalists of thought and faith concomitant feelings,
calcifying empathic trusters of ego’s always limited
health v pathology hour by hour,
day by day,
decade by decade,
life by life contests, comparisons, contrasts,
each and all co-arising.

Yet, like Yangish competitive power over others
and Yin’s gooier cooperative internalized power with others,
these opposing bilaterals
are also dynamically recycling appositional revolutions
within and without climates and subclimates
of intricately networking change,
searching for optimal,
not maximal extreme fundamentalist,
but optimally sustainable healthy tensegrity, synergy, therapy,
softly contentious contentment,
peace through responsible and mutually-held flexibility,
in-between competition and cooperation and victimization,
in-between LeftBrain deductions and RightBrain inductions,
in-between monocultural ecopolitical maximization of human ego-natures
and polycultural ecopolitical cooperative minimization of all Earth’s Living Natures
lies a vastly complex, often feeling chaotic, overwhelming
transitioning
regenerating middle ground,
an in-between Tipping Pointed recycling networks of issues and platitudes,
a wu-wei spatial place of ego/eco-mind,
collective ecoconsciousness
and RealTime WinLeft/WinRight flexibly enlightening
enriching
endeepening thermodynamic balance.

In this in-between shadow place of becoming healthier balancing identities,
monocultures begin to look like what remains
of former polycultures,
artifacts of cherished Elders,
and what could continue to become part of a new wealthier
denser
ecologically balancing multiculturally thriving future.

What looks like monopolistic alien powers over little benign-ego me,
begin to look like what remains from our former shared polypathic
ecotherapeutic identity
hoping toward future powers with each other person and species,
imagination’s deja vu of a felt monopolistic forever compost
nurturing perfectly and deepdarkly enriching Black Holed wombs
of embryonic time’s regenerative evolutionary integrative
reweaving promise,
never beginning
and ever ending
timeless ecoconsciousness.

Truth with beauty natures of enlightening climates
do indeed continuously co-arise change,
invite flexibility of WinWin responses,
but these are changes that have traditionally favored health
and disfavored pathology.

To continue following your optimal light
is to become pilgrims of inclusive global health,
inside as outside,
gradually expanding Golden Rule awareness
to include intent and praxis and real-world cooperative/competing with, not paranoid against
ecotherapeutically ecoconscious ecological ecosystems
ecopolitically richer
and denser
yet lighter and happier
outcomes
that continue optimizing,
by avoiding extremes of fundamentalist maximizing Anthro-egos
and radical minimizing of Earth’s cooperative potential without us.

 

 

Note to Taoists and Unitarian-Universalists:

I suspect that universalists see Yang-optimizing monocultures where unitarians see Yin-nurturing polycultures; and we are all both Left-Universalist Egos and Right-Unitarian Ecos.

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