| Battle for your Soul - December 18th, 2008 |
| Yesterday
I was thinking about the final hour, Judgment. The Christian,
Jewish, and Muslim belief that when you die you face a final review of
your deeds on earth and are punished or rewarded accordingly.
Being slightly intelligent, I of course don't believe in that
nonsense. . but the idea of going before a Being of Supreme Power and
being judged after you die does intrigue me. Perhaps the reality
of what happens when you die was lost in translation, or never actually
recorded. Maybe the final judgment is more akin to a videogame, something like Chrono Trigger. You literally have to fight for your right to exist after you die, either your own personal Demon or an Archon or the Demiurge himself, to the extent that the idea of Evil or opposition holds power over your beliefs. There's a quote from a tv series, Twin Peaks. . that has always blown me away with it's implications. I feel there's a great deal of truth to it as well, here...read it for yourself... "My people believe that the White Lodge is a place where the spirits
that rule man and nature reside. There is also a legend of a place
called the Black Lodge. The shadow self of the White Lodge. Legend says
that every spirit must pass through there on the way to perfection.
There, you will meet your own shadow self. My people call it The
Dweller on the Threshold. But it is said that if you confront the Black Lodge with imperfect courage, it will utterly annihilate your soul."
It might turn out that each of us must face our own dark shadow before we can attain the glories of heaven, or even keep our soul from being destroyed. Hell, it might even mean we get to sidestep an immediate reincarnation, without having the chance to enjoy ourselves in a higher vibration for as long as we please. And how do we confront this Ultimate Evil with our present earthly, fear-based consciousness? Perhaps the point of life is not to do or be good, but to find the power to face this evil when we die and render it defenseless to our strength. Each of us must find our own weapon to defeat the Oppressor and his minions. . . whether it's the love of our friends and family, the belief in ourselves, or a passion that uplifts our spirit. We all have the ability to face this evil and destroy IT utterly.....but only if we arm ourselves with a Power we come to realize here on earth. ?> |
| Anal, Oh Geez - December 17th, 2008 |
The number of times I write an analogy on this page, you'd think I should rename it. I actually was going to buy analohgeez.com to upload these thoughts, but who can afford more domains nowadays? At any rate, Jesus often spoke in parables so as not to confound the masses with the depth of his true teachings, so I too must speak in analogies...because whenever I liken something to something else, I often find myself approaching some sort of profound truth. Take for instance a video I was making for an update I was going to have today (It will most likely be tomorrow now.) I was trying to perfect this song from Chrono Trigger when you're facing the big bad inner shell of Lavos at the end of the game. And after several thousand attempts, I finally mastered a decent sounding likeness of the song...and I proceeded to my computer to upload it to youtube. But first I went to wash up, and as I was doing so I thought back to the song and remembered how it really sounded. It was a pretty radical departure from what I THOUGHT the song sounded like as I played a cover of it on my keyboard. So anyway, I went back to the video and played it. . and lo and behold, I was right. The actual song and the way I played it were wholly different. Not night and day, exactly, but diverse enough to warrant a completely new video. Now look at what happened to me and compare that to your life. I was frustrated as shit, trying over and over again to do something in an exact way just to find out that after all my hard work, I wasn't even playing the song the right way. Maybe the lesson here is that for all of our troubles, our trying to achieve and perfect and make things a certain way. . .we've forgotten that what we're trying to do isn't where we're wanting to get to. Our imagined goal and our actual desired one vary substantially, and it's up to us to slow down ....step away from our fast-paced lives just for a few moments...and remember what, exactly, it is that we're trying to do with our lives. Maybe then clarity will clear our head and get us back on track, keeping us from wasting our time working on something that doesn't matter in the first place. |
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| We Are God - December 14th, 2008 |
| A
thought occurred the other week, one which I've no doubt thought about
before. . .but which suddenly hit me as an epiphany while staring at
the bottom of a bottle of scotch. We are God in the sense that.
..you and I aren't, but as a collective we are. God can only
experience Himself through us, but more to the point. . He can only
experience his truest form, his greatest joy....through our
interactions with one another. It is our experiencing life in
relationship to eachother that is the embodiment of God within the
universe. In otherwords, I often feel like I would enjoy life much more if it was just me and nature, and like. . .everyone else disappeared off the face of the planet. Like in "I am Legend", or similar works of fiction. (Of course I would want to keep you TWO, but allow me to wax philosophic a bit and speak hypothetically). If I was the only person alive, would I really enjoy life more? Would I live in communion with nature and come to adore the simplicity that a life of quiet solitude would entail? I think it's far more likely that I would go insane. Life is not meant to be lived as a hermit on some mountain top waiting for enlightenment, or as a recluse in your parents' basement scouring the net for truth. Life should be a dynamic, interactive process of engaging fellow human beings and recreating yourself in relation TO them. When it's just you and nature, you have no basis for comparison....you take yourself with you wherever you go, but the process of creating, of becoming....is mitigated if not completely discarded without the presence of another human being. It is essential for our spiritual unfoldment and our journey here on earth that we're accompanied by other Selves experiencing the Infinite with us. That's possibly why the God of the Old Testament told us to "go forth and multiply" He wants us to be numerous so that his experience of Himself can be all the more varied, interesting, and nuanced. |
| A Festive Analogy - December 9th 2008 |
If I had the ability to come up with insightful, much less clever, analogies, I would be a much better writer than I am now. But as it stands, you'll have to deal with my present lack of awareness what makes an analogy both interesting and entertaining. . .and listen to me try to elaborate on a thought I had a few days ago. See, there was this line of white lights I simply NEEDED on my tree this year, since I'm putting up red and white lights and ornaments. . .(the end result is that my tree is the spiciest and angriest Latino Christmas tree our family has ever had). In any event, the line of white lights was massive. . with no discernible end in sight. It was a tangled clusterfuck of twists and turns, of knots within other knots which lead to utter confusion and feelings of hopelessness and despair. And while I knew there was a way out of the mess I had somehow gotten myself in with this line of Christmas lights last year, I had ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA HOW TO GET MYSELF OUT OF THIS HORRIBLE SITUATION!!!!! And then I paused and sat down, because I was slightly hungover from my friends bachelor party the night before and it didn't help that untangling wires was making the world spin like record baby, right round. . round round. I thought that maybe if I plugged it in the lights themselves would reveal the path, illuminating the correct way in which to escape the never-ending labyrinth of carelessness and stupidity that had gotten me to where I was at that moment. So I plugged it in, and WHAM. . it hit me! The lights were beautiful. Tangled though they truly were, they were gorgeous in and of themselves. Straightened or not, the lights still served a purpose, they only had to be turned on in order to achieve that purpose. Perhaps there's a metaphor for our lives in there somewhere. We spend the majority of our lives trying to find our way out of our debt, out of suffering, out of confusion, uncertainty and misdirection. We want desperately for things to make sense, for there to be some order and underlying LOGIC behind things. But perhaps we're missing the point. If we stepped back and remembered HOW to look at things,, maybe we could admire the entropy of the universe for how wonderful it really is. Not as an indication of the non-existence of God, but as a testament to the Divine . .a constant reminder that there is beauty in chaos. And it was there, in those tangled, frustrating set of Christmas lights that almost gave me a heart attack trying to unravel....I just had to look at them with the lights turned on. |
| Gamer for Life - December 1st, 2008 |
I got Chrono Trigger for my birthday a few
days ago, about fourteen years after I got it for my 15th Birthday in fact. It
was released for the DS this year as opposed to the Super Nintendo back
in '95, with a slightly better translation, a new ending, brief cut
scenes, and a new dungeon. To this day it remains one of my favorite
games of all time, and it's probably the single strongest stand-alone
RPG ever made. But I'll leave my flamboyant hyperbole for my Reviews
with Music page, because this is where I go to rant or make a point
with my writing. See, I think we're all gamers at heart. Human beings need distractions, they need to preoccupy themselves with a fun diversion to get their minds off of the monotony of work. This came easy when we were kids. As children, our imaginations were never saddled with the burden of having to provide for ourselves or for our loved ones. For many of us, our survival was guaranteed....therefore we could spend our days in make believe, creating new and intricate games, and playing until it was time to eat, go to sleep, or go to school. Life didn't have time to sap our energy or drain or mind of possibilities, that's why everything seemed so interesting and exciting. But even as we age, we keep time for play...and spend countless hours doing just that, whether we realize it or not. Everyone loves games. Whether they're videogame nerds like I am, or sports fans, poker-players or crossword nuts, people have a sort of biological impulse demanding that they take a break from reality and devote themselves to something seemingly arbitrary. But maybe there's meaning to the games we become invested in, perhaps theirs a spiritual significance to being playful and carefree. To be carefree is to not have a care, like Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. To not be concerned about the welfare of anything or anyone; to just BE and enjoy life. I feel that when Jesus said, and I'm paraphrasing here; "You must be like a child in order to enter the gates of Heaven," his meaning was probably in line with a fear I have about MoPH. In order to truly enjoy My own Personal Heaven, I will have to leave my cynicism and selfishness and allow myself to experience all of the wonders that exist within an infinite number of universes. To do, have, and be anything I want, whenever I want to. This is an extraordinary opportunity with staggering implications and perhaps the reason I'm not in MoPH RIGHT NOW is because I refuse to allow myself the luxury of such an unlimited experience. I'm afraid that even when I finally awaken in MoPH, I'll become bored and jaded to the experience if I get there with my present mindset. But maybe that's a mechanism of MoPH, put in place to ensure I won't go there UNTIL I'm capable of enjoying it fully, as a child would. So in order to return to MoPH, I think I've outlined it quite clearly...I have to become a child again, in awe and wonder of the astounding nature of the universe. However, it seems that if I become any more of a child in certain aspects, I may just go ahead and have to get back in the womb. |
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