The problem with christianity, islam and orthodox judaism is that they're primitive (you can't really call judaism on the whole 'primitive' -- its purpose was to preserve the jews, and no-one can argue with its success). The old testament and its accounts of 'yahweh the destroyer' are reminiscent of exactly what one would expect to come out of an ancient tribe in the middle east 4,000 years ago. But they do get a few things right: the name 'yahweh' translates into 'i am that I am,' which speaks to a deeper understanding of being. However, most of the old testament is really just a rule book for the ancient hebrews -- christians who cling to this and who try to reconcile it with a more contemporary interpretation of spirituality are fighting a losing battle. Yahweh is a primitive, tribal god, and is no longer relevant in today's world as we seek to understand what the universe is.
More advanced concepts of spirituality can be found in hinduism and buddhism (which often don't refer to themselves as religions at all -- a buddhist would likely be puzzled at the concept of 'god'). Buddhism and hinduism (which is really so disparate as to not be classifiable under one umbrella term) teach us that ultimate reality is one thing, one substance (this doctrine is referred to as 'monism,' a key component of hinduism), and that knowing the nature of this reality is a matter of cutting through the illusive nature of perception, logic, and the human mind. This is 'enlightenment,' or the sudden grasp of the true nature of everything -- what the universe, what everything, is (if there is more than one universe, this 'everything' would include all of them).
One doctrine of buddhism that I've never liked is that of reincarnation, which in a literal interpretation absolutely does not make sense to me. A lot of buddhists, even early buddhists, don't like it either, and instead sought to name the process 'rebirth' to avoid positing that the self is transfered from being to being, a concept that contradicts central buddhist philosophy. If I were in a charitable mood, I might be inclined to see reincarnation as a representation of the dead's matter and energy being recycled into the great oneness of everything, which is a bit of a moot point. However, I'm afraid that a lot of buddhists think about 'coming back as' a particular entity, like another person on this planet, a frog, a mouse, etc, and this is really nonsensical. Why would the mechanics of reality allow for that? Why would 'i' come back as a frog once I'm dead? And even it's assumed that living entities are somehow fundamentally different than nonliving ones, or that one can define an 'entity' to begin with (which in fact contradicts the central buddhist doctrines of everything being one, and the self not existing) and that they serve as receptacles for the soul or the atma or whatever, why would my 'being' be specifically transferred into exactly one other entity? Why not distribute it infinitely into all beings, or into all reality, since we can't make the distinction between this being and that being anyway? Why the nonsense of a little matt-mouse running around in the year 2050 or so?
Hinduism uses many (thousands upon thousands, enough for every person to have his or her own) gods as vehicles through which one might experience brahman, the hindi word for ultimate reality. I don't *think* hindus feel that 'gods' like ganeesha actually exist except in their own minds. Or, maybe it depends on the particular hindu -- it's a very old religion, and as I mentioned a very disparate one (the idea of 'india' as a single, cohesive nationality makes about as much sense as 'hinduism' as one cohesive religion, ie not very much). I also get the sense that hinduism tends to foster a much more fundamentalist, literal interpretation of 'reincarnation' than does buddhism.
The concept of using ideas of gods as conceptual vehicles for attaining enlightenment is common to wicca and some modern manifestations of neo-paganism -- contemporary pagans don't expect cerridwyn or cernunos to come bouncing out of the woodwork wearing antlers. However, these gods do exist in their minds, and this existence isn't seen as differing a whole lot from existing in another dimension, an ethereal plane, etc. Generally, the concept of 'magick' refers to the mysteries of the human mind and the interconnectedness of culture.
Science doesn't tell us what the universe 'is,' nor does it seek to. It merely describes the universe in terms of measurable properties, and in this reductionist approach to reality-perception can make some very accurate predictions, like the ones that enable your computer to display this webpage. But science isn't interested in anything beyond logical models of reality broken down into discreet quanta. Determining the one true nature of reality is an experiment inherently beyond the scope of the scientific method.
Discordians might be pretty close to being on target, but they reduce everything to a big joke, and focus on chaos. What if it's meaningful to me to express reverence for the universe, to respect it and hold it in awe and wonder? Discordianism doesn't allow for this.
Whatever makes you, personally, feel a greater sense of interconnectedness with everyone else and the rest of existence -- go with that. I don't understand why more church services aren't held outside. Well actually, I do understand it: the abrahamic religious tradition is disconnected from nature because it sprang up in the desert, where all the early religious philosopher had was his own mind. So, he started dreaming up all of this weird shit, basically, because there wasn't anything else around. But we're not in the desert now, and our extended awareness of reality (the earth's full surface, the matter inside the earth, the atmosphere, our solar system, galaxy, universe, black holes, the possibility of other universes, space-time, relativity, quantum mechanics, string theory or quantum gravity or something else to reconcile relativity and quantum mechanics, and untold weirdness out there that doesn't even begin to fit into our current scheme of perception) must be included in a new spirituality in which the one true nature of reality is demonstrated.
Or maybe we're there already, and just have to realize that we do, in fact, understand.
A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might t be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge. -- Carl Sagan
A religion that relates the philosophies of contemporary zen buddhism to cosmology and physics? I don't know. Maybe we don't actually need religion, even in an enlightened, contemporary form. Just be little yahwehs -- 'i am that I am,' and don't worry about things so much.
I'm beginning to see why talking about this and reasoning my way through it are futile in trying to understand it on a deep level. The more I talk, the more complicated it gets. As soon as I explore on facet, a hundred more facets are unearthed by the language I use to explore the first facet. Writing about this stuff is inherently flawed.
I've had a renewed upset about my circumcision lately. The foreskin is sexually sensitive tissue, and removing it hinders and dampens sexual pleasure. Now that I think of it, I haven't ever particularly enjoyed sex with anyone, experiencing a profound lack of sensation every time. This is a big reason I am not a big fan moslems or christians, and feel that the world would be in much better shape without their poisonous cultural influence. So, I've been permanently damaged, sexually mutilated, by the abrahamic tradition, and I will never forgive this.
Intelligent, educated, non-religious medical professionals universally agree that there are no benefits to circumcision. To get some idea of the public outcry on this issue, here is a relevant google search.
The principle reason circumcision is carried out by jews, moslems and christians is because it reduces sexual pleasure. It is clearly and closely analogous to female circumcision, or clitoridectomies, which are illegal in most countries (but are still practiced). It is this denial of the body's needs in order to bring people closer to the psychopathic petulant child of the desert known as yahweh (or jesus, or allah) that is responsible for abrahamic tradition's crushing and debilitating damage to the human spirit over the millennia, and of which male genital mutilation is only one facet.
I'm tired of taking shit from people. Although this has been a recurring thought, I've been hesitant to spell it out like that, because it's a cliched behavior of the head-injured to talk about not wanting to take shit from people, and to feel that the world around them is essentially an adversarial place. My feelings shouldn't be confused with paranoia -- I don't believe that there are people plotting consciously against me, but rather that something very fundamental to human interaction is adversarial in its nature. I'm also extremely acquiescent, regardless of human nature or cognitive injury-caused illusions. In other words, I really do take too much shit from people, head-injury notwithstanding. This has been an ongoing behavior pattern for me for a very long time, its inception certainly predating my brain-injury.
The reason I write so aggressively in this blog, and why I rant and rave in private, is that I do whatever people say or want when I'm face to face with them. Basically, I'm a pussy. I've never stood up to anything in my life. So, I make electronic threats to cut people's throats instead of telling them in person that I'd rather they not do something. And then later, I get incredibly angry about what I should have said, and I'm sure I perplex and worry my neighbors with my guttural screams. I'll picture some specific person saying something I don't like to me, and I'll fantasize about grabbing them by the collar and slamming them up against the drywall. Then I'll actually scream, at the top of my lungs: 'I DON'T FUCKING LIKE YOU. I'm GOING TO TEAR YOU APART,' and imagine what it would feel like to crush the bones in their neck, gouge out their eyes and take a big, ragged chuck out of their face with my unusually sharp incisors. I need assertiveness training so I can avoid this unpleasant situation.
In general, I'm absolutely furious, and I don't really know why. It's probably a combination of repressed shyness and not asking people for what I want and need, naturally rageful tendencies, temporal lobe epilepsy, shear damage to the same right temporal lobe, and unresolved anger at life events (like my circumcision).
Turning a human into a quivering pile of bloody, lacerated meat might be wonderfully fulfilling at first, something very much like an orgasm or eating when very hungry (my mouth often waters uncontrollably when I'm acting out killing someone). However, rationally, I can see that after it was over I'd have to look at this poor creature I'd just ruined, whimpering softly and in pain, crippled for the rest of its life by the terrible things I did to it, from those few seconds of orgiastic, murderous ecstasy. Or it might be dead, its family left grieving until the day they die. So, I must never do this. I must not kill. I need to find some other way of satisfying the killing-hunger.
Anyway, I'm very upset about my circumcision, but I guess there's nothing I can do about it now (i looked into foreskin restoration, but that doesn't work too well, from what I gather, plus it takes a long time and is inconvenient). The most I can do is to not circumcise a baby boy if I ever have one, and maybe inform the public a bit about it in this blog, if for some reason I can't manage to singlehandedly wipe out the abrahamic cultural and religious tradition with primal northern european barbarian rage. Perhaps this would involve antlers.
I feel that I should re-iterate at this point that I'm not anti-jewish. Far from it -- jews keep to themselves, or have at least tried to throughout their history. Judaism is not an evangelical religion; if jews want to circumcise themselves, then this is still barbaric and wrong, but they certainly aren't forcing the practice on other ethnicities. The problem is the christians, who have inherited both cultural and religious judaism from the old testament (with the added bonus of a real-life jew, jesus, who proclaimed himself to be the 'christ,' or foretold messiah for the jewish people), and then have tried to focus this ancient hebrew text through a lens of activism, and forcibly applied a recipe for an ancient, embattled tribe's survival in a hostile environment to the world at large. Essentially, christians are attempting to turn everyone into a jew -- to force abrahamic cultural and religious tradition (including circumcision) on everyone. Jews, on the other hand, have no interest in this -- many jews don't consider someone who 'converts' to judaism a jew at all, and in fact don't even regard judaism as a religious tradition, but rather a cultural one, simply concerned with the preservation of the jewish nation. Jews have no interest in circumcising non-jews, of violently converting millions of followers to the rote of ancient scripture. But christians do. And moslems do.
Moving on to the second problem: my lack of assertiveness. I wonder where assertiveness can be acquired. I'm quite tired of taking shit from people. It's as simple as that, and I don't care if the problem has more to do with my brain injury than it does the adversarial nature of reality. This is how I see the world, and if it's viewed as a problem to be solved, then one solution would be assertiveness training, so I don't feel so threatened all the time, and can ask or tell people what I want or need.
I got back from new york city yesterday afternoon. This is what I did:
Friday
I left my house at 12:00, hitching a ride to the metro station with alpesh. I arrived at lester's apartment about 11 hours later in NYC. The bus was 2.5 hours late in arriving -- I couldn't believe it. The driver actually got lost in DC, and went to the wrong metro station after leaving the bus depot (he was supposed to go to 'new carrollton' to pick up more NYC-bound washingtonians but ended up going to 'landover,' on the other side of town). The tail-end of rush hour combined with the nose-end of weekend revelry and a few rainstorms slowed traffic into NYC, making the bus even later.
Lester and I subwayed and taxied to a bona fide party in manhattan after I'd been introduced to her boyfriend. The party was held in a two bedroom, un-air-conditioned apartment with initially about 30 people stuffed into the living room. Nonetheless, people seemed to be having a good time, and I got a taste of the party atmosphere, and observed humans and their various interpretations of the 'I'm at a party, look at me' performance from my vantage-nest on the couch. This is about as fun as parties get for me, unless I become severely intoxicated and start performing sociology experiments on the natives. (un)fortunately, it was too hot for this (and I might be too old for this, come to think of it), and the party was BYOB. As far as parties go, I'd give it a rating of 5.5/10. It certainly wasn't boring -- there was too much going on. I guess that's the appeal of parties: the combined auras of social interaction create a tapestry of overstimulation that may be horrible and stressful, but is rarely dull. Really, that's the best way of looking at a party, for those of us for whom 'i hate parties' has become a mantra: look at it as a sociology experiment. Mete out some stimulus directed at one of the entities (an end table, a pet dog, a girl in a miniskirt, etc), and observe the response. It's a nice opportunity to become a part of the experiment. I was too inhibited to do this, however, and was instead a non-participating observer, which can be interesting too. Your standard-issue party is at least as interesting to watch as most movies, I'd say. Of course, these people might have been more interesting to watch, just because they were from NYC, but that's sort of a cliche, and I feel I should avoid subscribing to it, even though it might very well be true -- simply put, some locations on the globe are just more interesting and fun than others. But I don't know about that, really. Perhaps new yorkers are more interesting in the way that the media dictates people should be interesting, and that's all there is to it.
Saturday
We walked around in chinatown/little italy, which border each other. This was the principle 'walking around and experiencing city life' day (stores and restaurants). We ate at a place called 'big wing wong,' at which I ate a bit too much greasy roast duck. Later, I had some lychee ice cream which was probably the best ice cream I've ever had. There were also a lot of chinese stores, selling things like hello kitty, manga, and other sort of useless trinkets.
We decided to subway to the WTC site, or 'ground zero,' just because I had never seen it. It looks like a big construction site now, and one would never suspect a disaster-area if it weren't for the memorial signs, placards and souvenirs being peddled.
I had a longish nap back at home base, which was needed after staying out until 4am or so the night before.
Next was a social pizza/video game gathering in astoria (north of brooklyn -- perhaps one could even say 'north brooklyn,' but I can hear the hounds barking in my head if I make assertions like that, so I won't presume to). These were six of lester's closer friends, some of whom I'd met at the party the previous night. I gravitated to the computer, and sort of sat there for most of the evening. But it was actually a lot of fun -- I got to eat pizza, play with mac os x, select songs on i-tunes, talk to a few people, make one person a drink, play pac-man (which I lost at), and sit down for extended periods. I think people there thought I was weird and antisocial, because I said so little and just sat there on the computer, chatting on SDF and playing netris, while everyone played poker or watched television. Maybe it was a bit rude, but ya gotta do what ya gotta do to survive in a social environment. My mental health takes overwhelming, universal precedence over protocol and mores. Perhaps another way of saying this is that my happiness is more important than others' happiness, and perhaps another way of saying this is that I'm a borderline sociopath, or at least manifest some traits of antisocial, schizotypal, narcissistic, histrionic and especially avoidant personality disorders. But I digress.
Sunday
We took the 1.5 hour subway ride to coney island (south brooklyn), where I got a sunburn and failed miserably at a punch-strength measuring device, scoring about half as much as everyone else the second time I punched it. The first time I tried it, I missed the bag entirely, because I have this clumsiness/grace dichotomy, the manifestation of which depends on whether there are people around expecting me to do it. This makes things like playing guitar for people, talking to other people, playing sports, and really just about anything involving other entities wont to express 'yay' or 'nay' with language extremely difficult. I generally cannot perform as well when I'm being watched. Anyway, we ate a hotdog at nathan's, which is supposed to be famous (i think I'd maybe heard of it, in passing somewhere). We also walked down a pier which was occupied almost exclusively by puerto-ricans, many of them fishing for crabs using really gross old chicken parts placed in baskets cast into the water below. The coney island adventure was similar to the chinatown/little italy adventure (walking around visiting stores and restaurants, looking at things and eating things). Maybe this is a good thing to do in a city, but it's sort of not possible in some cities (like gaithersburg). It works well in ann arbor and new york, however. Coney island was similar to ocean city/rehoboth/dewey beach, with a more international flavor (in the form of puerto ricans playing personal sound-systems hooked up to public address speakers) and the kind of 'win a stuffed thing' game booths one finds at county fairs. Lester won a cow wearing a shower cap for her boyfriend at one of them.
Back at her apartment, lester and I watched a dubbed, early 80s, japanese movie titled 'the shogun assassin.' it was about a samurai called 'the lone wolf' who served as an executioner for the shogun, until the shogun became suspicious of him and had his wife killed. This caused the lone wolf to chop everyone up with his sword and the chopped to hose blood all over the place, which continued for the rest of the movie, all the while the lone wolf wheeling his young son along in a baby-cart. The movie was incredibly bloody, the dubbed english was very funny at times, and the music was inspiring (80s synth-pop in a cliched japanese harmonic idiom).
That evening, lester's boyfriend hosted a dinner party for his roommate, lester and me. We ate vast quantities of very good indian food (the main dish was tilapia marinated in mint, cilantro, garlic, ginger, green chiles, olive oil and salt) as well as drank beer. Then, we played charades, a first for me. I was all right at it.
Monday
I purchased at the deli next-door to lester's apartment a looza-brand, 1L bottle of banana puree to drink on the subway. Over the course of my visit, I purchased and drank 3 bottles of mango puree, and one bottle of banana puree, because the deli had run out of mango puree on my morning of departure. Looza mango puree is delicious (ingredients: mangos, sugar, water) -- I must find a local source, or make it in vast quantities with a blender.
Walked about 2.5 blocks to the NYC subway.
Took the local C-train downtown four stops from natural history museum to port authority.
After wandering in, I asked a port authority employee 'where do I go?' after showing her my ticket. I never would have figured this out on my own (i didn't see any corresponding numbers on the ticket and the gate), and I suspect that it might be one of those things you just have to know. New york is full of these exceptions to the rules. There is a rule-set, an algorithmic grammar of navigation and administration that can be followed in the city, but there are so many quirks and exceptions that simply must be learned and added to one's lexicon as one goes along that I would liken learning to survive in NYC to learning english as a second language. Many do both at once -- this must do strange things to the brain.
Sat in a restaurant ('the traveller's grill') for half an hour before asking a bus driver if I might get on the 8:30 express to washington DC rather than the 9:00 express. He said 'sure.'
The bus ride itself was uneventful, except that we were stuck in traffic in DC, making us about an hour and a half late. I'm beginning to understand that Greyhound busses never arrive on-time, and I simultaneously wonder why a better estimate isn't made of travel time based on years and years of DC-NYC/NYC-DC trips taking universally longer than Greyhound's 4.5 hour estimate. It seems that a reasonable thing to do would be to record the length of trips taken at the same time and same day of the week, discounting holidays or other days of unusual traffic patterns, and average the travel time of these over the course of some timeframe to get a better estimate. Even averaging 5-10 trips, time of day/year notwithstanding, would produce a better estimate. Even simply using the travel time of a bus's previous trip would produce a better estimate. I really don't know where Greyhound is getting '4.5 hours' for new york-to-DC -- they live in the proverbial dream-world.
Walked five blocks or so from the DC Greyhound hub to the union station metro stop.
Took the metro to shady grove station, about 45 minutes.
Waited on a grassy hill for the ride-on bus, about 20 minutes.
Took the bus to outside my neighborhood, about 30 minutes.
Walked about .25 miles to my house.
general observations
I can see how one could get the impression that everything in new york city is late, broken, dilapidated, dirty and ugly. While this is partially true, the city has organically worked out for itself a quirky and incredibly complex structure of interdependence that actually functions quite well, considering. All of the physical structures appear to be really old, strangely designed, and too small for the brunt of population they must bear -- the sort of thing one might attribute to poor engineering. But things actually do, surprisingly, seem to work, even though it doesn't look like they will. I didn't find new yorkers to be rude at all, just as I didn't find parisians to be rude. In fact, they were helpful and friendly. I think my observations on parisians holds true for new yorkers: that they are more hurried and overstimulated than rude and hostile. And, of course, there are a lot of things to do and see -- a concentration of variety in a relatively small area.