a plea, an admission

[davaidavai]

I don't understand God. At my best, I am swimming in a sea of meaning, where wisdom from all religions rings startelingly true. I heard a girl the other day saying, "God doesn't like sin," and on my ears this rang so true, except replace the word God with the word everything and replace 'like' with karma and then replace the word karma with cause and effect and then replace that with the exclamation 'duh.' I've lived a sinful life and each indulgence has cut me. Retribution isn't the right concept, which makes buddhism seem the inner, eastern core of Jesus's teachings, the reason why we must turn the other cheek so as to break the cycle. It's a simple fact, a lie, a hate will cut you. I medicated with alcohol, pushing myself to the brink so that I could crack open and see the sublime poetry which flows through everything, stories whispered on street corners by lunatics as expressions of seeking. If only at times.

At other times, I grapple constantly with despair and loneliness. Why am I alone? Why has God given me this aloneness in the thick of life? Why have I failed to become something? A man in the world? A man for a woman? A man for human contact and timely placeness as opposed to 'fits anywhere' timelessness? It would be one thing if I could maintain that feeling of being submerged in the universal dialectic, of being a positive agent working toward the universe's restoration even as we all hang upon the cross of entropy. But I can't. And so, I'm here, cursing God like a screaming infant, questioning his existance, based out of another tiny little room, and the days stretch before me uniformly empty; another day, another coffee shop; another pipe dream. I'll be 34 in June. 2 weeks sober. Before that 4 months. Before years of mediocrity and self deception and never, ever, ever a word of advice from an elder, a wiser. I've had to do this all alone.

Meanwhile, how can one love God? This thing we are in? It's everywhere. It's everything. Or else it's nothing. It's not an it. It is an action, a movement, a migration we make every instant if we are lucky, from suffering to suffering's cessation, from error to illumination. Or else years of depression have birthed a strange mania within me, allowing me to find passing, slightly alarming extasy in the normally, everyday sate which the chemically balanced take for granted. Maybe that's why love comes so easy to them: because they take this foundation state which shocks me to the core for granted, and from their they launch into the stratosphere of love.

Concurrently, when I am spent on feeling I long for the God of my childhood, the simple light of the soul I used to feel strong within me. Although I question the existance of this God, which was much more like a friend than the lover of the sufi's, more like a father than a king among kings, a playful weather maker.

I'm sick in my soul. Still sick. I don't know when to apologize or not. When I tell you that I love you, it's really just a plea, an admission that I can't do this alone.

[langkah]

I found a stripping away process helped with my confusion in this area. The uncertainties I felt about all the separate spiritual conceptions and fragments of beliefs I'd been exposed to through my life was my guide. I'd examine each and mentally toss over my shoulder the ones which didn't have the ring of truth to me.

The simple statement of the girl you mentioned hit something in you, in her words was something you responded to as containing truth.

After discarding the ideas that held no truth for me and those I felt doubt about I was left with little, but I had no doubts or confusion about the little that was left. It was true and understandable and resonated with me.

In years since I've added conceptions to that as seemed correct to me, based on what I saw and experienced. I've never felt the need to force myself to accept ideas to which I respond to with doubt.

And I never talk in specifics about my beliefs.

Settling these questions is important to form a bedrock from which to begin growing. So far I've retained a thirst for more understanding and growth in this area. I try my best to keep my eyes open, looking for indicators and patterns that expand my understandings, and accept those things which seem to me to be so, though very often I'd rather they were not.