A NEW ATTITUDE

A NEW ATTITUDE

I had thought for quite a while now that there is nothing new in the area of feelings and attitudes, now I am not so sure that what I knew to be true is so. Here is what has happened so far:

Until about two weeks ago it looked as if I could expect to live another three or four years; this is from the statistics for people who have what I have, and is a number not too far from the average expectancy for all men in this country. I am well aware that these statistics imply and I intend to do anything that I can to come out on the far side of that bell-curve; I also found the study that found people with heart failure often over estimate how long they have to go. I had asked a few medical people, found more than a few articles online that all said about the same thing. My chore had been to get my head around that notion, to accept what was and then to get on with my life.

As I wrote a week or so ago I had an appointment with someone who discovered that I have severe apnea, but that with treatment I can expect to add perhaps four years to this cruise that I am on. And one other thing, he now has probable cause for something that I had been told many times was idiopathic. Treatable and redeeming–quantity and quality.

In effect I have just have just been offered a doubling of my expectancy; this idea is taking a while to root in my cranium and germinate, but it will. There are events and situations all through life that cause feelings and attitudes; except that this business is different, what I am feeling and how I am seeing the world is not quite like any I have ever experienced. I am not ready to say that this is unique, it might just be a variation on one or more, I just can’t say yet.

Obviously I am happy with the news, I have long ago discarded any wish to be dead notions; have reached the conclusion that whatever pains and discomfort come along, no matter how intense, they cannot overwhelm that of being, of becoming. This new thing is a testimony to perseverance, to scratching at the tunnel face until the gold vein is completely discovered; and for that I am relieved, perhaps more than a bit smug. This that I have just received is a gift, more to God than from; but it is such an overwhelming gift that no words are appropriate. Perhaps it would be as if someone gave me a new car–then I see that it is a brand-new Rolls convertible; what the hell do you do with such a thing! A great problem to work at as I go on.

I may write more about this as I figure it out and believe it would be of interest to someone, anyone else. Let me add one more thing: To say that this is more a gift to God than from God is because I know that without man God is irrelevant; He is what we are about, that makes us what we are.

John Updike existentialist

FEBRUARY 24, 2009 WEBLOG

There is a lighted sky after five in the afternoon.

Snow and ice are gradually being reduced as the mercury peeks above freezing now and again.

People are responding to these changes even though February isn’t quite finished.

I awoke about four this morning feeling that abysmal dread that can arrive at that hour; a void that is filled with the blackest of blacks, and from which there seems to be no way out. As this despair swept over me I knew that I could avoid the strongest of what was to come by getting out of bed, turn on the television or go check the computer; I also knew that it was and is an honest feeling that is appropriate especially now.

I have an elderly patient in the hospital for whom I have consented to do medical approvals which are coming daily. I received lab results on tests I had done last week; I entered them manually in Google Health and noticed where they lay in their respective ranges. A very good friend who has agreed to do some things for me has just moved in a couple of blocks away; and I have another test this week.

All these combined as a perfect wave of anxiety that carried me upward to despair at that blackest hour; and today I read a review of John Updike’s life in the NYRB, how he recognized and handled the existential anxiety that he recognized early on and grew to be his muse. Reading that article meshed with what was going on with me, what goes on with anyone who will avoid the computer and television when it arrives. I didn’t get out of bed but lay there feeling and examining the great truth of meaninglessness that this despair brings.

And today the sun is shining through a thinly clouded sky, there are paths down most sidewalks that are free from snow; people are pleased to be experiencing these days because they have gone through a hard winter, a winter which tests but cannot destroy.

On seeing her photo

I recently came across a web picture of someone whom I had loved unconditionally but haven’t seen in many years. The photo caused a pang of remembrance of that old feeling, even though our mutual rejections were right and necessary conclusions.

Neither of us could have lived on as we had become, we had mutually created a monstrous situation. That picture was not of what came at the end of our scene, it is of the person whom I had loved and realize I still do. Is it possible to have had a religious experience, to know what it is like to transcend this mundane situation—-and then to not know it? No; it may be that I don’t always find myself in that holy place, but I don’t or can’t deny it nor would I try. So can I deny or should I try to reject someone whom I loved greatly just because of circumstances, would that not be a rejection of the honesty of my search? I cannot deny the great pain her rejection caused me, and am sure that I brought her unhappiness in turn.

And yet I cannot understand or accept the concept of rejection, it just doesn’t compute. As I write out my reaction to her picture I wonder what it means if anything. Is this just the nature of going along, that somehow feeling that loss again, that love once more means nothing other than the piercing of strong emotion?

Use Another Label

I was reading the review of Nothing To Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes in the Times Literary Supplement, there is this quote from him and an addition by the reviewer John Carey: ‘ “I don’t believe in God, but I miss him,” he admits — a perfect summary of the modern western predicament.’

That line stuck in my head, a day later I am putting down here my reaction to it. The intuitive need for a Spiritual life is the clue to follow, get to know what it is that summons, that offers more than is obvious. Become intimately acquainted with what you already know, have always known; be your own guide and tourist; for the time being stop using labels and rules, look to where intuition has always been willing to guide.

Never forget that the church is an institution, set up as an organization by a bunch of guys who wanted to please an emperor, have a creed that all would obey; they chose writings that would be allowed in the book, and those that would be forbidden, wrote that promise of obedience–the creed. I have no idea what the intentions were in these men, I do know about the emperor, the meeting on the island, orthodoxy; all may have been done for noble reasons, but no other person can know the divine better than any other, that is the essence of being acceptable, it has been the power of the example for two thousand years, it is in the nature of being.

The symbols, the rituals, the liturgy will return and be even more important, but only after one knows the nature of the divine, one has looked inside and found the truth. All the other stuff is nice, and it fits; it is supplementary, it does not lead one to understand the ‘ultimate concern’.

By whatever name one uses the absence of it does leave a void, the important missing part; the need and the quest to know are the basis of the First Commandment, true then true now.

The word “God” carries so much baggage for me, so much that is not my own that I refrain from using it when I look into my own soul and when I write; a term that often fits for me is “wellspring of being”, it portrays not only the source, but is active and ongoing, has the mystery of the source of the spring. Most often I use no word; attempt to be beyond words; to be beyond emotions, accept them, transcend them; step slowly and carefully into the void, with the courage to go towards the infinite.

Lydia Aello looks at me

 

LYDIA AELLO LOOKS AT ME

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I was a skinny, noisy kid who had an answer for everything, and an inability to keep quiet about it. Although I grew to six feet tall, before puberty I was usually the shortest kid in class, and had an answer for everything.

 

It must have been in fifth grade that this thing happened, I know that it was just before lunch time, that the weather was warm, I remember the walk home for lunch after it happened.

 

I read everything that came into sight, I was bright, considered myself brighter than anybody else in my class or at home, along with being small, considering myself the brightest led me to having a difficult time in grade school, and not that much easier in high school.

 

The teacher’s name was Miss Orr, at least I remember it that way, this happened about half a century ago, I know that it wasn’t Miss Coulter, because Miss Coulter gave me the strap a few times, she frightened me, which was her modus operandi.

 

When it happened I was sitting in the third row from the windows, it was a nice day I had been looking outside often.

 

Lydia Aello, whose father killed chickens, was looking at me. I’d known Lydia since I started at Memorial Public School three years before, she was the girl who walked to school with Norman Hope’s sister Muriel, they had a poultry business behind their house, she was bigger than I was, she had long dark hair, that’s about all that I can remember about her. I can’t remember much about any of the other girls either, they just didn’t figure for much in my world.

 

 

Anyway, Lydia was giving me this look, looking right at me with this funny smile that somehow told me that she liked looking at me. This had never happened to me before, I had never considered it happening to me, there was nothing in my vocabulary for this. The difference between boys and girls was a fixed thing, they were what they were, and a girl looking at me as if she liked doing it? I didn’t know what was going on. I can remember looking away, then looking back, there was no mistake, she did it again, right at me, with this funny little smile. For once I had no answer, and I always had an answer for everything.

 

I can remember walking home across the fields we called the ‘hydro’ fields, because the high voltage electric lines from the hydro electric power plants, that surround the falls at Niagara, ran through them, I didn’t have much to say to Tommy, Gary or Bob that noon hour. If I had been hit alongside the head with a sandbag, I would not have felt differently. That afternoon I smiled back at Lydia Aello.

 

Since that time I have not always been in love, but I can definitely say that I have never doubted its existence, would not even consider the question. I don’t understand love much better now than I did then, but that it exists is obvious.

What Lydia’s look signaled was that I was acceptable. I don’t know that anyone had ever given me that message before. Those were not the words that would have been used, the child’s term “she likes you” is as close as it ever came.

The notion remained as a ungerminated seed in my soul, not nourished nor often repeated, just buried in the soil, waiting.

 

My thing with Lydia Aello lasted two weeks, or a little less. I got teased about it, I can remember a smile from Miss Orr when Lydia chose me again to answer the multiplication exercise that she was monitoring, I chose her when it was my turn. I never did get to hold her hand.

 

Now jump forward about four decades to when I am about to kill myself.

 

A variety of pills are in the coffee grinder, stuff to make me drowsy, a glass of milk in which to mix the ground medications sits on the counter, a vinyl shower curtain is draped over the kitchen stove. I will drink the milk and drugs mixture, blow out the pilot lights and open the circuit breakers, and then climb under the tent, there will not be an explosion from the gas when I open the oven valve. The plan has been fixed in my mind for some time, simple, clean, final.

 

I am going to kill myself because there are no options left to me; over fifty years of fighting major depression that continues to worsen, I am divorced for the second time, my daughter wants nothing more to do with me, any career is long gone, there aren’t any friends left. I have looked for help since 1959, that is the first time I lived in a city big enough to have a psychiatrist, it had continued in half a dozen places, and with about a dozen and a half therapists, all the medication had been tried, multiple shock treatments, and it just gets worse, the hole gets deeper, all options are gone. This list of failure keeps running through my mind, the conclusion never varies, there is the only way to end this pain.

The list of rejections and failures went again through me, this time there was no “perhaps” that I might insert, my position allowed me for no excuse, there was no person, no endeavor, or place that wanted me.

 

 

I am standing, next to the stove, leaning on the counter, everything is in front of me. This is it.

 

I now see the void of death, in just a few minutes I will be of it. I have never considered the blackness before, there has always been some myth or platitude diluting it, but not now, this is pure, this is reality as I had never known it.

 

It was as if I was naked, standing on a rock, with a storm having blown every reason to live downwind. I stood there in this experience, the second hand didn’t move.

 

And then my stomach heaved, I began to gag, I ran to the bathroom, to retch out something bitter and nasty from my belly.

 

It took me a weeks to know that in that moment of nakedness, I had experienced something else, something other than the feral instinct to live, a notion that I couldn’t and wouldn’t see.

 

Regarding the depression, I made one more effort, using an technique that someone from Mayo Clinic had suggested years before, I started asking around, “who is the most effective person in Chicago treating depression?” The emphasis was on ‘effective’. I attended a couple of lectures, searched bookstores, and asked whatever doctors I could find that question. As had been promised me by the Mayo doctor, physicians are not loath to tell give their opinions. One name and one method came out of this. And the nightmare began to end, the depression was vulnerable after all this time.

 

To get back to whatever it was that I experienced at the time when I truly believed death was next. I thought on that, have been thinking on that ever since; it has become the focus of all that has followed. I experienced presence, not a presence, just presence, more of a verb than a noun. And even though it is more ineffable than love, it has been the subject of writings for several thousands of years, and continues to be.

It has another thing that cannot be doubted, no more than that love I felt when Lydia Aello first looked at me.

 

I assume that everyone I meet has been in love, it may not be true, but it isn’t far from it; I sometimes forget that not everyone has had a religious experience, the two seem so natural and obvious, available to everyone, when the situation comes to it.

 

I realized that it was at this point that the seed planted by Lydia Aello had sprouted, it came to life. That I am acceptable, not by any person, any code, but as an inherent part of me.

The Presence I experienced is that of Being Acceptable.

A truth that needs no argument. It just sits there as testament to my being.

 

Roger Johnson: April, 2007.

 

A man from Darfur

I met a man from Darfur; it was an early evening in August, I was walking in the livery staging area at O’Hare. The lot can hold about 200 livery cars and over 300 taxi cabs, a lively place to be on a pleasant evening. I doing what exercise I do, he the same, we walked and talked together for a while, I never saw him again.

The man told me that he had just returned from Darfur, that he had grown up in that area, emigrated to the U. S., had just returned from a visit. He described holding a child as it died, knowing there were other children in the village who were about to die, so many had died in the place he had grown up, so many more would die in the future. There was nothing he could do about it. He was sad, angry, confused, frustrated, and had to come back from that place.

He told me that he was a Muslim, but not a practicing one, that the religion based destruction and killing kept him from the rituals and ceremonies that he had learned growing up. They were responsible for the death of this child, the other child, and all of the others, they who were supposed to be his spiritual guides.

His angry argument against the religious authorities was familiar, I don’t imagine that there is anyone growing up in our culture who has not gone through the argument and history of religion based cruelty, it is something that we start in high school and keep through the early years of college: examples and blame, the frustration of not having a spiritual organization with clean hands. That there is no religious group that has not killed and injured. I don’t need to go through this old harangue, there isn’t anything new about it.

I suggested that he should temporarily lift the words from this business, Allah, Muslim, whatever the nouns are they should be set aside for now. Don’t throw them away, keep them close to hand, within sight and reach. Then go to how he had once felt, what feeling that the practice had given him, just the feeling experience. Stay with just that for a while. He understood what I was offering, agreed that it felt good, was a comfort against his frustration.

All of the words of a Spiritual life carry baggage, so much of it that it is almost impossible to grow from under that weight. Put aside God, Jesus, Christianity, Jehovah, Allah and whatever words, and let whatever it is that is behind those words rise to the surface. There is, always has been, something that needs to be felt, that can’t be ignored, it is the basis for all religions and cults. Just go to that place within, relive the feeling that that you find.

This is nothing more difficult than doing this, nothing takes more courage, and it is the most wonderful. Leave the safe words passed down from your father and mother, the authoritarian laws and directions that were to give lifelong guidance; set them aside, for a short time, be courageous.

The symbols, ceremonies, laws will always be there, they can be picked up and carried at any time—-but for just this short time set them beside me, when I come back to them they will have even more power than previous.

This piece has been the most difficult to complete, has taken nearly a week to get this far. It is far from complete, is disjointed, the words not exact. Writing about this is like engraving smoke. I feel as if I had done too much exercising, I am sore and creaky, and I have a headache; all for those couple of paragraphs. I’ll post this today, will come back to it again, and then once more.

Overcast skies

Before I went to bed last night I looked up the N. W. S. forecast, it predicted overcast skies, temperatures a few degrees below then a few degrees above freezing, nothing much else. My reaction was that I was in for a dull, gray day; nothing much going on in my life, Edita is scheduled to come in for a few hours to make me and this place civilized, I’ll clear out ahead of time, no sense interfering with her cleaning; it is time to visit Bert, who might be agitated or not, might recognize me or not; I would check my email to see if hoped for messages came in or they didn’t; I had a new bag of juice oranges- a treat for first thing in the day.

I awoke this morning with that bundle of expectations, my day to be defined and judged by those things, and a dozen more that hadn’t yet come to mind. As I lay awake I realized that that would not be the start or the definition of today; I want a different day. For the last year I have been doing mindfulness exercises that I have found handy, and yet here I was about to define my day with these things that may or may not be pleasant or interesting; it was time to remember the core of what this day will be, what I am.

For many years, throughout my decades of depression I found that being alone, focusing on just being, without sound and movement would make me anxious. It can be anxiety provoking to see and accept that existence is all that there is, everything else as an auxiliary, an accessory. And that out of that notion, that feeling, that place, can could come everything else; I pursued that idea with profit.

I was walking back from the Dominick’s store yesterday, coming up Damen Ave., where I was stopped by a couple of young men from the Church of Latter Day Saints, they were identified by badges pinned to their coats. One fellow asked if they could speak to me for a couple of minutes, I agreed. To his first question, which was whether I knew anything about their church, I suppressed a comment about having spent much of the previous week watching the latest disc release of Big Love, I answered that I knew little. He began to tell me that they believed this, they believed that, they believed the other thing; I won’t try to retell it all, but their beliefs covered just about everything one could list in life, then they asked if I would like to learn more of their church. It was now my turn.

I told them that my relationship with God was in pretty good shape. I said that I really didn’t need to read the narrative of others who had experienced the divine, that no one had ever come to transcendence by reading and memorizing what others had experienced, not one person, ever. That whatever I might need, I already have, its just a matter of looking inside again.

After this pompousness on my part I walked home, self-righteousness striding up Damen Avenue.

But how else could I respond to proselytizing, what to say to someone who intrudes like that?

I have read that there was a time when belief was a word used about notions that were tried and found to be true: Believe in the Pythagorean theorem; believe that the longer the lever I have the greater the force I can apply; believe that when I push against something, I will feel pressure back at me; believe that if I forgot my wife’s birthday I would sleep on the couch; and on and on. The use has changed to be that realm of notions where belief becomes the unbelievable, where one’s innate intelligence is to be switched off, where wishful thinking becomes reality. That Joseph Smith found gold plates from God, inscribed with rules and regulations that were new and exciting? Please, please, please let us bring back critical thinking. I will refrain from going further into the problems that believing has caused us recently. The phrase I respect your beliefs has caused more harm and misdirection that almost any other I know.

And no I am not currently married, no more sleeping on the couch.

The sun has come up brightly from behind the garage across the alley, part of the weather forecast wasn’t correct, not that it matters. I will be in the day, or I will try. I will meet more interesting people on Damen Avenue, or I won’t. I’ll have a semblance of a conversation with Bert in the convalescent home, or I won’t. I will rent a video that is interesting, or one like Once that I am returning today, a study in beige, color, music, story, whining, resembling nothing as much as sipping beige, lukewarm, water.

There are days when I am satisfied with what I put down here, and then there are days when I am not sure.

Writing about the creation

For the last few days I have been working on an article about “creation”, I’ll publish it here soon, I hope.

It goes slower than I had thought because there is tension within me: between wanting to show how I have sorted out the idea of creation and the presumption that this is too large and important a subject for a layman to tackle. This isn’t stopping me, but it is making me go through a number of iterations to get it right. And it is a wonderful thing to have going on in the back of ones mind as the other stuff of the day comes along.

There was a program on Charlie Rose the other night about the aging mind, or that was part of the program; if a person would stretch to look at the big ideas that are completely personal the mind would be challenged in a healthy way. No one knows more about the nature of God than I do, or you do, or anyone, it is intrinsically personal. No one knows more about the creation of the universe than I do, or you do, one’s universe is intrinsically personal. Good and bad fall under the same umbrella. It is fun to wake up wondering just how an idea can be put into words that someone else might find interesting.

There is also the benefit that I can write about writing.

More on why Jesus is not God

That so many worship Jesus, and yet fail to have a spiritual experience, should lead to realize an important truth:

Jesus is not God, God is God, and Jesus understood this.

That God is ineffable been realized from the beginning, it is the reason that everything written about God must be a metaphor, a way of understanding and passing along that knowledge; whenever a description is taken literally there is trouble, defending the interpretation, aggressively promoting it all end in ignorance and suffering, there are innumerable examples of this, this is a principle reason that so many leave the church.

Even the label ‘God’ is a metaphor.

When Jesus asked why God was not protecting him he came to know this great truth, God is not about the mundane, it was then that Jesus left the worldly and came upon infinite transcendence. He knew intuitively that he must be rejected and killed, he had assistance to have this take place; he had to carry the cross each step himself, had to feel torture and his own murder in order to get to that place:

This is the great truth that may assist us in transcending, to understand the holy.

I don’t see God as a noun, more of a verb, the Wellspring of Being; Tillich’s term the ground of being led me to find my own; I cannot ignore another term of his ultimate concern.

The search for the right term is proper, it is a tool for looking within oneself for the truth, taking that kernel of intuitive knowledge and making it relevant for the self.

Our intuitive and ultimately true task is that search, it has always been so.

Memorizing and repeating the writings of those who have had the spiritual experience doesn’t work, it has never worked, but it is easier than introspection, and so lies the reason so many do it.

Lack of response to ‘Jesus isn’t God’

I was surprised that there was no response to a couple of things I wrote about Jesus and God, but then I found that Pages are not published, just Posts. It is taking me a longer time to figure out what WordPress is about than I expected or wished, the time and effort needed to become facile with the features here could be spent on putting the right words down, words that someone might want to read and respond; I know that these quick posts are easy, but I’d like to start some kind of coherent string of things, ideas that have a lifetime longer than a bacillus.

Jesus is not God, the blind belief that he is misses the whole point of the Spiritual Journey, that is to have a personal relationship with God, to explore that wonderful area just beyond the mundane, the known, the easy. Jesus knew all of this, tried to explain it to some others, knew that to be rejected and murdered was necessary for him to know the true Him, and then to take it beyond that. The idea is and was transcendence, that most difficult of ideas that incorporates acceptance, forgiveness, looking beyond the mundane.

This is not an easy concept, the fundamentalists fear it more than anything else, the atheists cannot acknowledge the spiritual aspect of their humanity, the established Church erect ritual barricades to combat it, and they miss all the fun.