August 12, 2007: Message From the Free Will Zone

August 12, 2007    

Dear Friends,

I have been thinking about religion and all the horrors associated with it, particularly of the violence and hatred endemic to radical fundamentalism of all kinds, all across the world, and have come to a new spiritual conclusion for myself. I plan to live henceforth as a devotee of the religion of Art, Music and the Divine Guidance of Small Children, a refreshing, ad hoc trinity in a world seriously gone awry in its ideas of what God wants, needs, believes and decrees.

What if God has evolved out of the need for religion?

What if our ideas about what God IS have been based on a wrong assumption from the beginning? (The ‘Beginning’ being a ridiculously brief period in the history of the universe).

What if God doesn’t care what you do? How will you live in the de-fused, diffuse glow of Divine Indifference? Could we be more powerful, and less power-mad without the perception of a giant, punitive Watchdog in the Sky? For myself, the answer is a resounding Yes. Indifference doesn’t equal lack of Love, necessarily. I believe we live in a Free Will Zone. I believe the need to define the mind of God, and to apportion that God firmly on one’s own side, and to ascribe that God’s benevolence and particular favor and inclination to one’s own rigid set of beliefs, one’s own community, one’s own street and house and body, when the vastness of space and the endless potential of multiple realities exists just off the outer edge of our tiny blue planet, borders on the insane.

I lost a dear friend last month, to the disease of addiction. I am truly heartbroken over his loss. He struggled so much in his last year, and it got the better of him at the end of July. He killed himself, believing, I suppose, that no one could help him. He shut his friends and family out of his life, and descended the rabbit hole alone. And what happens to him now? Where is his soul, his spirit, and in what condition, if it, and he, exist at all? I talked to a few friends, who had widely diverging beliefs about the soul, the after-life, and the ramifications of suicide. Some were quick to state that suicide was unforgivable in the spiritual realm and that his soul would enter a sort of purgatory, and that any issues he left unresolved in this life would remain unresolved in the next. (It seemed odd to me that this conviction was mostly held by those who claimed the most spiritual ‘tolerance’ and who were more ‘New Age’ in affect than others). Another friend believed that if he died with drugs in his system that he would remain drugged and addled for some time in the spirit world, and his confusion would be slow to resolve. Another friend shocked me with her tolerance and acceptance, and, dare I say, Divine Indifference. She said, basically, that no one knows the larger story, that his life may have been a sacrifice in a complex plan that we couldn’t possibly discern, that passing judgment or even opinion was arrogant and that the only appropriate emotion was compassion. Wow. Okay. I like to be reminded how little I actually know. It is intensely liberating. Which is the whole point. I cannot pretend to KNOW the mind of God, or even if there IS a God. There are ‘holy’ books in this world – the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Torah– all written by people. No, let me be more specific: all written by MEN, who comprise only half of the total genders in the world. Doesn’t this all seem just a little…. provincial, if nothing else?

I’ll go out on a limb even further here. I think the same divine intelligence that inspired these holy texts also inspired Harry Potter and Mozart and Georgia O’Keefe and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. As my friend John Stewart says, ‘God gives us all different radio signals, hoping we’ll talk to each other’. I would add, ‘IF God is still in a phase of evolution where He/She/It indulges in such a prosaic occupation as hope’. What is beyond hope? Maybe Divine Indifference?

John Lennon said that God was a concept by which we measured our pain. I am beginning to think that currently God is a concept by which we measure our self-hatred. I am getting off that particular boat.

Please join me in some ritualistic worship of my own chosen trinity, if you will, or devise your own. See you at a museum or a concert, and keep your ears open for those stupefying jewels of wisdom which small children are apt to drop on you at any moment.

Ars, Music, Liberi, Consilium.

Love from Mrs. L, in the Free Will Zone.
           

< l a s t  |  n e x t >