Words are good servants but bad masters.
Aldous Huxley
When I look at the part of my life that lies on the wrong side of the arrow of time, I see a long sherry trifle pudding that stretches out behind and away from me, hiding its head in an unremembered land beyond the horizon.
It’s a homogeneous mess of unimportant achievement and transient satisfaction; a little that I can barely differentiate, but most that I can’t. The majority of my life has been vaguely pleasant, uninspired and uninspiring. However, there are one or two chunky lumps that really stand out from the mashed memory of my pudding past.
One of the larger pieces of the pudding that I can see with some clarity is a morning at school on the 17th of July, 1969. The previous day, Neil Armstrong had just set foot on the surface of the moon and everybody was abuzz with the sheer magnitude of the achievement. Even the habitually dour nun that was my teacher then, felt compelled to talk about the landing. “When they stepped off the ladder, what did they see?”, she asked the class. My hand shot up. I knew the answer. I had asked my father just that question, that very morning before school. Sister Kevin nodded in my direction, granting me permission to speak. “Green men eating green cheese”, I said.
I can still feel the red rushing to my cheeks and the powerful sense of indignation at those peels of laughter because my father was the smartest man in the world. It was only much later that I realized that he had been kidding but at that time and in that place, in my mind there really were green men eating green cheese on the moon. I knew because I was privy to a set of powerful and persuasive words that stemmed from an impeccable source. I knew I hadn’t been on the surface of the moon at the time, and I knew that I hadn’t seen the green men eating that wonderful cheese, but it didn’t matter to me. I had faith. I had faith in words, or rather, I had faith in an idea that could be described by words. An idea like this one, popularly and probably erroneously ascribed to Epicurus:
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?
At first thought this collection of words seems to be a compelling argument for the absence of God, but then a problem arises in that we need to define what is meant by “God”. Does “God” mean the God of the Christians or maybe even the God of the Whirling Dervishes? I ask this to try to illustrate the problem of definition, not seriously expecting any answer. Epicurus, if indeed the quote is his, lived before the birth of Jesus and so could not have been imagining the God of either the Christians or of the Whirling Dervishes.
Whatever concept of God was meant by the person who penned the words, a question that comes to my mind is this: Where is this God now and how can I get to meet Him? If He is a Christian God, the first step might be to try a Christian Church.
But…
Christianity, as I have experienced it and come to understand it, has no real tradition of a personal transcendence that can happen right here and right now; there is no expectation of actually meeting God. I’m pretty sure that if a person were to go to a priest and announce that he or she had literally met God it may be they they would be humoured, but it’s far more likely they would be branded a blasphemous heretic. Priests, especially in the more charismatic churches, stand in front of their congregations and parade the convoluted machinations of their own imagination as a series of “messages” from a God that is by their own admission and definition ineffable and beyond understanding. I would imagine that most of them are even sincere and well-meaning in this rather peculiar psychosis. The priest has faith in the words of a bible written by men of faith, and the congregation have faith in the faith of the priest as well as faith in the faith of the men that wrote the bible.
Perhaps this is why we need poets, to express the inexpressible. To find attributions that may hint of realities that lie beyond the cages of length and breadth and height. But a map of the world, no matter how detailed, is not the world. To really know the rippled dryness of the dunes of the Namib desert or the plump moisture of a cloud resting on Table mountain, you have to be there. You have to walk there and sit there and think there. So, even though John 1:1 says
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”
I don’t think that words are God.
To use an old Arthurian metaphor, to seek the Grail all knights must enter the forest alone at a place where the forest is thickest and where there is no path. Where there is no path, there is only the self. Perhaps it is because I am trapped in my own consciousness that I must find my own way to God.
An old Hindu legend tells of a time when all men were Gods who had abused their divinity. The Brahma God, the God of all Gods decided He had to remove man’s godhead. He wasn’t quite sure what to do with it and called a meeting of all the other Gods, so that together they could decide on a place to hide it where man would never find it. One God suggested “Hide it on the top of the highest mountain”, but the Brahma God said “No, man will climb the mountain and he will find it”. Another God said “Bury it deep in the earth”, and the Brahma God replied “No, man will dig for gold and eventually find it there too”. A third God suggested “Hide it on the bottom of the ocean”, but the Brahma God shook his head. “No”, he said, “Man will eventually go there too”. Then the God of wisdom said “Let us hide it inside man himself”. Brahma God agreed. “Man will never think to look there…”.
1943 was an interesting year for humanity. In 1943, construction began on the first full-scale plutonium production reactor in the world which resulted in mankind’s ability to destroy every living creature on earth many times over, and a man called Albert Hofmann accidentally discovered the entheogenic properties of a substance called Lysergic acid diethylamide or LSD.
Terrence McKenna said of LSD:
LSD burst over the dreary domain of the constipated bourgeoisie like the angelic herald of a new psychedelic millennium. We have never been the same since, nor will we ever be, for LSD demonstrated, even to sceptics, that the mansions of heaven and gardens of paradise lie within each and all of us.
Entheogen.
(“God inside us: “en εν- “in, within,” theo θεος- “god, divine,” -gen γενος “creates, generates”)
I’ve never taken LSD myself, but what if the denizens of the LSD induced state of consciousness really are transpersonal?
The chunky lumps that stand out – I wonder if they are located closer towards the beginning of your life, or more towards the end. And then if they are at the beginning I would ask, what does one do to ensure that there are more significant lumps toward the end?
I don’t know about the concept of God – as you know it is something that I have abandoned for a while now. Left to some twilight world that I visit from time to time, but interestingly enough going there interests me less and less. There are just so many other interesting things to write about, to think about, to read about. God or the concept of God has lost much fascination for me.
However the notion of experiencing things or experiencing things directly is experience.
But is direct experience the only way we can experience or really know things? What then about the beauty of books – or as you say poet who we need to “express the inexpressible”. Are great writers and philosophers not able to share with us some kind of gnosis by enabling us to experience (albeit by proxy) what they have experienced resulting in an epiphany or a shift or a significant internal experience that leads to a change in thinking or being.
What then about disintermediated experience – and here I think about the social networks where we don’t experience directly but we still can have significant experience.
As always a beautifully written piece.
I really loved reading it.
In my case, the chunks and lumps are concentrated toward the beginning of my life, before I learned to play the game called “fit In and start wanting the things you are supposed to want”. I hope there will be significant texture in the latter part of the pudding, but it’s really hard to stop playing the “fit in” game because it has become horribly difficult to sort my own desires from those planted by Messrs Saatchi and Saatchi and Procter and Gamble.
Talking about God is always a little problematic, there are so many possible meanings and attributes attached to the word “God”.
If you view the the Christian cross as a symbol, then the horizontal member can be seen as representing the history and dogma, and the “thou shalt not” of the church. The vertical member represents the transcendent aspect of a church, or put a different way, the notion that for your church experience to be complete you need to actually meet with God. I’m no great Christian scholar, but I’m pretty sure that this is the designed purpose of the seven sacraments of the Catholic church. The fact that, in my view, these sacraments seem to fail completely in actually connecting you to God does not alter their design purpose.
Some people I have spoken to who have taken LSD tell of a mystical experience and of a meeting with God. I’m wondering if LSD is not some new kind of sacrament.
To my mind, the question of experience is an easy one:
Gaz… maybe the trick (one that i will doubtlessly never master) is to return to a childlike state, where all is grace.
Maybe the trick is that you wend your way down Blouberg way, and meet up with ole mama mort for a cuppa at my local parlour, and we can wrestle with the question over filter coffee. I could sure do with a sounding board sometimes … riht now, life is more question than answer / solution.
I’m also unable to return to anything remotely approaching a state of childlike grace. I think the notion that “things” either are or are not might be a big part of the problem.
But I think you are right, that a cuppa joe might make all the difference. I’m up for it any time!