Plane flight to Mystery

He couldn’t say what he was escaping.  A restlessness.  A certain ennui.  He was simmering a tepid personal stew..  He was tired of himself.

 The warrior monk  had grown old.  He’d  charged one too many windmills. Now he had sciatica. He’d counted coup on his enemies countless times. This new lot didn’t even know coup.  The took offence at neutrality.   They bashed forward like Vogon. The parking lot was the height of their artistic expression.   They worshipped an old drug in their new way.

Now he was on a plane.

“How much longer?” He asked the stewardess. 

Later he asked her again, “Are we there yet?”  She’d didn’t answer. 

There was only one more day in the year.  2018 was passing. It was the year that all the prophecies about Climate Change,  Donald Trump and fake news proved false, yet another year. The promises of annihilation were untrue but  no one seemed to  care  because truth was reduced like everything sacred to mere construction. The role of speech had devolved to a child ‘waaaaaaaaah’ of infantile protest.  The bankers, lawyers and activists chortled with glee.  

He stared at the passing night.

“I am looking forward to my own bed”, he thought.  He considered the problem of his expanding bladder and the two big men between him and the aisle.  

2018 was another year of waste. Urine, shit, plastic, nuclear. 

Outside the window  chariots ridden by gods  passed the jet plane. A saucer full of aliens descended again to  suck the brains from another Canadian politician. Rumors of intelligence are highly exaggerated. 

I dreamed of bugs crawling in my nose and rats eating my lips well still  i lived, unable to move, feeling the pain and dismemberment.   I was awake.  The pain wasn’t something I could distract myself from. I prided myself on meditation and stoicism but rats gnawing on lids seemed worse than the immediate pain and  loss of sight caused by huge carrion birds plucking out my  eyes.  The last sight , an image of beady beurocratic eyes and huge beak.  It just goes on interminably. The hope is fever and death but what if one remains a wake as the worms pass through the body as it turns to dust.  The problem really is the  attachment to this body.

I’m no longer attached to my body. I’ve eaten so much this year   I’m feeling fat.  No matter what politically correct CBT I do in my mind I can’t see myself as handsome with a protruding gut screaming my sins of gluttony and sloth to all that have eyes to see.   I’m no different than an alcoholic reaking of booze or a sex addict playing upskirt with the childrn. I wonder when I’ll reach my bottom. It’s certainly growing.

The rumble of the plane is exhausting.  The air is stale in this tight cramped position in economy. I think first class is getting their air before us.  I imagine a communist revolt using all that Lenin and Che Guevara taught us.  My shoes feel tight as my heart fails to circulate the blood efficiently through the swamp of my feet.  I have the urge to stand up and scream.  Panic builds.  The claustrophobia returns.  I have a  series of phobias I can indulge in like comic books.  I page through them.  I’ve dwelled on them enough all my life.  

The therapy dog lies at my feet dreaming of chasing rabbits.

I’ve had a grand time with family. As close to returning to a womb as an adult is allowed to in public places. I’ve suckled the nipple of nostalgia.  I’m treated as a white hair.  I have to intellectually construct myself as such, being an adolescent looking out on the world from this bloated corpse. I watched two frail old people adventurously boarding the plane and constructed them as adolescent lovers. I’ve lost the ability to look at old people as such.  We’re all children in a sand box.  

I don’t know how it happened.  Every month I learn of  another person close to me or someone I went to college with dying. The good die young we insist.   I live on.   I can only imagine God has a plan or use for me.  I haven’t a clue. I’m trying to embrace the mystery.  Catholics probably handle dementia better than the rest of us.

I’m reading Evelyn Waugh. It’s 1930. He’s at the coronation of Haile Selassie in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.  I’ve learned the source of the Jamaican name Rastafarian.  I also learn the source of “I and I” a  phrase  I remember from  a Bob Dylan song. Apparently the Syrian Christians since massacred in the millions by Muslims once came to teach in Africa. 

“Are we their yet?”  He asked in subdued voice.

My Relationship with God today

My God is everything and nothing.  I believe in a Creator who made the heavens and the earth.  There was no Creator and building blocks.  So today there is just God stuff. The Bible says I am made in the 'image' of God.  Genesis 1:27 "So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them."
"Image" to me is the 'imagination' of God. Dr. Carl Ridd taught me this in my first theological class at University of Winnipeg, "Literature of the Bible."  I never forgot that insight.
I am by nature God stuff and God dream.  It's good to remember in a hierarchal world where authorities are forever belittling, humiliating and dominating you to secure their own position and priviledge. In the eyes of God we are equal because there is no less and no more than God.
Science tells me that E=MC2.  Energy and matter are one, matter just slow energy in reality.  My sense of the duality of self is that of thought which is like energy and body which is like matter.  I believe that duality is a product of my mind which divides the indivisible.  I am a spiritual being living in a material world.
I further believe that I am like the orobunga (?spelling - the snake eatings it's tail).  The story goes that God being lonely divided itself creating the first duality.  In this God who knows himself as God is half and God who doesn't know himself as God is half.  So the journey is from God unknowing to Knowing God.  This is spiritual evolution.  There is no need for this 'progress'.  Indeed much of our sense of the spirituality is 'arbitrary' and based on the learning of childhood and culture.
What I know further is only this time for yesterday is gone and mere memory while tomorrow is yet to come.  All divisions are intrinsic or arbitrary.
I live in this flow.  God is a good word for the stream in which I'm becoming more aware of my liquidity one might say.  There are countless images of the transformation of self.
When I studied chemistry in the lab I enjoyed the process of changing solid to liguid to vapour and back again. I like that rain becomes cloud becomes rain.
It gives me hope for my own transformation.  I feel mostly forgetful of Godness.  I live in a secular limitted gravity dominated world with expectation of death among those who insist that everything is heavy and there is but death and taxes.
What I want is to soar free, levitate and dream manifestations.  My friend wants to pray a person alive or restore their lost limbs. I confess I'd settle for the capacity to manifest a porche. I am amused at my own materialism and the fear that underlies all such consumerism.  Trungpa, the great Buddist spiritual teacher describes the modern westerner as a 'spiritual consumer'.  I would hope that I could be more.
In the Christian sense this is 'disciple ship'.  The essence of 'black magic' versus the 'white magic' of Wiccans is that the 'ego' of the dark megalomaniac master is trying to make things go their way whereas the white witches work with the forces of creation and are trying to 'right' matters in the best interest of others. The Christian message, I think, goes even further.  Jesus was the  'servant king'. A great parable and image from the Bible is of God Incarnate washing the feet of his human disciples.
Bob Dylan sings that great spiritual song, "You've got to serve someone, maybe the devil or it may be the Lord, but you have to serve someone."
Dr. Willi Gutowski in his recent ebook at Amazon, called Living Life, says that we are all listening to a spiritual radio and have to learn to keep ourselves tuned to the God channel.
In the meantime I muddle along.
God is a kind of central office parental relational thing.  I pray and talk with God and thank God and try to remember God and life is better. It seems that way. Certainly there is extensive research to support the benefits of spiritual life.  Less pain, less fear, better mental and physical health and all statistically significant.
I am always asking for guidance. I think there's a better way.  I believe in Jesus Christ. I believe God became human and resurrected. That like chemistry is a message about my nature and my eventual return to Godstuff.  Death then is a passage.  But it may be a loss of ego.   I believe also the Bible is a Holy Book that can guide me on this journey in life.  Days also go better when I consult this regularly.  I've read it cover to cover several times but daily make a point of reading some passage and reflecting on it.  I learned this as a child and lost it sometime as an adult. I was glad to return to the practice.  There's no 'resting on one's laurels' in the spiritual life. I have to take care of my spiritual health on a daily basis just as I do my physical and dental health.  If I don't I'm that fat old  man with poor teeth talking about his last football game in high school.
The Yogi sings "I am the bubble , make me the sea'. In Hinduism there's much talk of the separation of self from the whole and the isolation of the ego. Hindu's don't see Jesus as the son of God but see him as an enlightened one as with Buddha.  His teachings are ranked high in India along with their own home grown truth.  Jews recognise Jesus as one of their own but don't see him as the messiah. He's ranked as best as a great prophet.  I loved studying at Regent College where despite the ecumenicalism of the day I heard it very distinctly taught , "The Jews are wrong" when it comes to Jesus.  No doubt in a Jewish school they same the same thing about Christians.  It's easy to forget that Moslems have been influenced by Judaism and Christianity.  The 'twist' they take on Christianity is 'wrong' in my mind but I think the Suffis have alot in common with the mystical traditions in Christianity. The great Catholic monk, Thomas Merton who studied with the Buddhists saw the similiarities.
Ecumenicalism is searching for similiarities. The fact is Adolf Hitler and Mother Theresa were 99.9% similiar according to DNA and genetic mapping. There is difference in the detail.  So while one must keep an open mind, hopefully it won't be so open that one's brains fall out.
The Christian mystic longs to  experience God more fully.  There's that sense of 'grokking God' which was Heinlein's word for the mystical ineffable union.  The Medieval called this also the 'cloud of unknowing'. I have a connection but it's often vague whereas sometimes it's crystal clear and absolute. I don't know why or what makes for the maintenance of that state of knowing the sacred so directly so that it 'works' all the time.  I have to be present, that's for sure. There's much that can be done.  Certainly prayer and meditation, reading spiritual works, studying the Holy Bible, sharing in spiritual practices, becoming a regular attender and follower of a spiritual tradition. It's too easy for one to consider spirituality as a 'smorgasbord' which may be fine at first but as one progresses in their spiritual life there is room for greater selection.

Personally,   I'm too often too mundane for my own liking.

So God fill me with your awareness. Guide me today and always. Thy will be done.