Deflowering my Blog Pt. 2

Well, as promised, I'm not following any meaningful format, and possibly breaking a blogging faux pas: Two posts in one night. Also, this post, as I suspect many of the ones later will be as well, is LONG. Be warned.

Also, this journal has some very controversial beliefs. You are warned. If you don't agree, feel free to debate all you want, but please don't just flame me. It's pointless and makes you sound like an idiot.

I find it a bit pointless to start this without actually posting about the things I was thinking tonight, so here goes:

A few nights ago, I was being a geek (as usual) and searching for Mello on Amazon, to see if I could find any merchandise. For how popular a character he actually is, there's not much out there in the way of things related to him. Well, instead of finding actual Mello merch, what I ended up getting were a lot of books by the Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello. Intrigued and amused by the fact that there's a priest with Mello in the name (a couple of my many roleplay Mellos ARE priests), I looked the man up, just to see what kind of man he was. I wasn't expecting much, to be honest, but I was pleasantly surprised.

Father de Mello is the kind of Priest I like. Sadly, he died the same year I was born, so what I can learn about him is all based on the things he left behind. Reading about him, I learned that, as he got older, the views that he began to shape were ones that started to disagree with the Church. Being someone who's possibly a little too gleeful at the idea of a priest thinking for himself and thus pissing the Church off, I found a torrent of the only audio of one of his conferences in existance. Still very, very, very amused by the idea of a Father [de] Mello who, like MY Father Mellos in RP, is a free-thinking, tradition-challenging individual, I was actually excited to hear what the man had to say.

I've listened to what would normally be the first tape of the conference, and I think I may have found a kindred spirit. Not far into listening, I found myself grinning, my mind going wild with thoughts and ideas. Many of what he said right off the bat are thoughts that I already live by, or at least agree with. (This is even if I haven't grown to the point where I've garnered the will power to practice all of what I preach just yet. I'm working on it, slowly but surely. It's a grueling process, though.)

One idea that really stood out to me was the idea that most people don't want to be happy, and healthy. Most people who are sick (myself included) are terrified to do what it takes to get better, because in most cases, it's harder to go through the healing process than it is to remain sick and treat symptoms. He compared it to a person sleeping who doesn't want to wake up; who doesn't want to get out of his warm, cosy bed and face the world. I thought it was a very good analogy. Waking up in uncomfortable, he said. Getting better is uncomfortable. And it's true.

There were a few ideas in here that really sung out to me. They were very close to a lot of my views on the ideas that, 1.) Nobody can be helped who doesn't want to be helped, and 2.) That you should never, ever trust or respect somebody just because of a position. You should, instead, always question. Question yourself, question your friends and loved ones, question superiors, question God. (That last bit is all me. I'll go back to it a bit later.)

Getting a bit off-subject, I'm going to stop talking specifically about Father de Mello, and just start ranting based on thought trains brought on by things he said. Some of these may be things he did say that I agree with, and some may be from me. As I'm just ranting, I'm not going to bother to define which are which. Beside, the line blurred a lot, anyway.

The things that determine happiness are, 1.) Honesty, and 2.) Endurance.

Honesty means admitting to yourself, mostly, that you're wrong, that you're flawed, that you're still learning. It also means taking no shame in yourself. No one person--not yourself, not the people you trust, not the government or the church--holds the answers. Honesty is admitting that we're all human. While there are people whose ideas you can take above others; who have more credentials, who have learned more on a specific subject, there is nobody in this world whose ideas should be taken to heart without question (which includes that very idea in itself, but hey). There is no such thing as an "expert", because there's not a person in this world who isn't still learning. Honesty is teaching what you know, being honest and teaching what you believe in your heart, and it's being open to learning from those around us. We are all both teachers and students. We teach with our experiences. We learn from those experiences, and we learn from others' too. Father de Mello stated that there is no such thing as a "selfless" act, and I think that's a very realistic view. We do nothing that is not for, in some way, our own benefit. In the case of me, I've had a few people who have asked me why I counsel people so often, for no monetary price, and I do it because I not only take joy out of helping people (which is, in a strange way, a selfish endeavor), but because I learn from doing so. it also boosts my confidence and makes me feel good about myself, because it, in a way means I am to a point in my life where I'm smart enough and experienced enough to guide others. So yes, there's a bit of ego involved, and though it makes me sound a bit of a cad to admit it, I don't think there's anyone who helps others without it being the same to them. However, I think there's a healthy kind of selfishness in the world: That which does good, that which improves us or helps someone else is a good kind of selfishness. Honesty is admitting that nothing is pure good or pure evil, but that, while good acts may not always have the best intentions behind them, or bad acts not always bad intentions, that all of it adds to what I believe to be the point of life: Experience and growth.

This brings me to the second point: Endurance. Father de Mello stated (and I'm very loosely paraphrasing here) that the biggest gurus and messiahs in the world had a belief in common: That no matter how shitty life may get, that it's all alright. Life, to be frank, is a whole string of disasters, one after the other. People often look at me funny when I point out that I am at the same time both a horrible cynic, and an incurable optimist. My view on this goes back to my core belief that everything is just learning. We have the shitty times for a reason, because it helps us grow. Something I really liked that he stated was that, oftentimes, people have to reach the low points in their lives before they can wake up and learn to really be happy, and I couldn't agree more. Just looking at my life, my worst experiences are the ones I remember the most: Not because they were the most painful, but because they are the onest that really made me who I am today. By taking me out of my comfort zone, and by forcing me to endure the unpleasant things, I learned the most. The times that seemed at the time like wonderful things--a small example but one that's affected me a lot now being that I grew up very free as a child and didn't have chores--are often the things that have the negative impact later. They're the things that make me lazy, that make me complacent.

REALLY off-subject, a thought train of mine earlier led to me going back and thinking, as I often do, on my view of God. I call it God, not because I'm necessarily a normal Christian, but because it's the name my culture uses to denote a "higher power" of some kind. I've had a similar conversation to this with my friend Melissa, which if I'm not too lazy, I may post later, wherein I pointed out that I don't believe that God is an omnicient, omnipotent presence as the church defines it. The main factor to that idea how it fluttered around my mind this morning was the idea that we were created "in God's image". As someone who very rarely takes things literally, I don't think that means that God looks like a human being. Instead, I think that means we are a parallel to God.

If we go by Biblical standards, the creation of Man (and Woman) was the creation of a happy creature, innocent and naive, like a child. This new being was given the opportunity to encounter good and evil. This being was, if you will, given the opportunity to "wake up". God, like any new parent, wished to protect his child(ren), and thus warned against eating from the tree of knowledge. Like a good parent, God sought to shield his children from the horrors of the world. However, even with God's power, the children weren't guaranteed to listen to their parent's advice, and ate from the tree.

This raises the question of why the tree was there in the first place. If we take this story of God, Adam and Eve that most of us know and we use it to talk about what science states is the beginning of Man, we look back and see a fledgling species of animals, with a "God-given" power not afforded to other animals to diverge from their instincts, and to learn. The human race started very childlike, beginning as other animals do, and in finding knowledge, much of it dangerous, a lot of it leading to corruption, hate, and war. Like a single human being starts as an innocent and is, as it grows, exposed to the "knowledge of good and evil", so too did our race "grow up" in much the same way. If we are, in fact, in the image of God, doesn't it stand to reason that God, itself, is a presence which grows and changes and evolves the same way we do?

Making another parallel between faith and science, science states that everything is a creation derived from other things. If matter, if energy, if souls are "creations", and if God is everything, we are merely parts of God. Perhaps then, God, in creating us in its or His image, from a part of himself, simply created smaller learning creatures. As we grow, so too does God. As God grows, so do we, in just the same way that do characters in works of fiction to us. We grow, and the characters we create (which include, also our perceptions of other people. After all, aren't the people around us just "characters" in the story of our lives?) grow with us. They become more "human", more lifelike, more deep, more supple. They begin to gain "lives" of their own the more we grow, and likewise they teach us back.

I can't say how many layers of this phenomenon exist. Where does it all come from? Are we, as learning creatures, Gods to some "fiction" world that we can't see? Is our "god" the product of yet another learning creature?

Just some things to think about, and this journal's long enough. None of these ideas are finished, none of them things I'm sure about. They're only [half-asleep, unedited] theories, musings brought on by observing the world around me. I may be completely wrong, who knows? But if you got this far, thanks for reading, and I'm sure there will be more like this later. <3