Revelation

No, I will NOT pardon myself for what I put in my last 'blog. I am who I am. Many of you liked it because of my juxtaposing style, many of you dismissed my real points because you could not see past the language (some liked the f-word usage, while others hated it), and a few of you just listened. You just plain listened. Thank you.

And what madcap, hyper-tangential and torrential word vomit adventures are we all in for today? you may query. Well, throw your presuppositions aside. Or let my past postings affect your way of thinking--do whatever you would like to do. Just be yourselves, but remember to introspect as you go.

Today I would like to expand that idea of the surreality of this existence. I touched on it once already, but here is a bit more inside my head as to why my mind sees our world as fleeting.

I learned this from a physics book: the elemental building blocks of which our bodies (and all matter) are composed are the result of either the birth or the death of a star. Only one or the other of those two events could create enough heat and pressure to combine atoms and molecules together in such a manner that existence could come to be. Chemicals pumping around in my thyroid, my fingernails, that photograph of your cat, were all created in a cosmic explosion millions of years ago, at least.

Our bodies are a medium, nothing more. A mere mortal housing for our intelligences. It is the tangible stuff, yes, the kind of stuff which will eventually wear out and DIE, within which our supremely wonderful and marvelous true beings are kept and restricted. Yes, restricted, by the paramaters of "natural" laws. I cannot defy gravity. You can't apparate. At least, we do not understand how to, but I believe that we can. My rods and cones interpret physical information and fail to see the metaphysical. My right hemisphere seems to almost battle my left for understanding of this garden universe, with seeds of knowledge and discovery floating around and waiting for a fertile mind in which they can bud and blossom. If we can see past the obvious, we can learn to do anything. Even fly.

I feel heat and cold, I smell aroma and odour, I see mauve and heliotrope. Yes, our senses. Not much gets past these ol' boys, do they now! Bullshit, I say. So, explain disappointment, desire, rage, love, camaraderie, and melancholy. Aha, a corpus callosum between our five senses and something beyond, something we understand, expressed by the word 'emotion,' but... do we really understand? What causes one person to love another? Crunch the numbers, gague the interactions, factor in the histories of the involved parties, and you will have a calculation for love. Again: BS!

Case in point, Kimi Maruji: Japanese-American, returned missionary from Japan, sweet, polite, fun and funny, intelligent, beautiful. My dream girl. I dated her once. Once. No chemistry. By every account, I should have fallen into twitterpation with this woman straight out of the chute... but, meh, no. And this is no discredit to her, because she really is all of those wonderful things, and more. So, beyond our apathetic five senses, there must be some kind of something which links our physicality to our emotions, and beyond. Emotion is a placeholder word to bundle feelings we experience, a description, but not an explanation.

Let us follow our emotions and our primal innateness. Let's explore a little bit as to why we feel disdain for one thing and complacency for another, yet lust for something else which is nearly identical. You all love somebody. Why? and how? A showing of love is some sort of act, a rite, which we perfom to communicate that feeling. "Wife, I love you, and will therefore place the toilet seat down." You are showing me a resultant action of love, but show me the physical STUFF! None of my five senses can detect the actual stuff love, but still I declare that I have experienced it.

I can see this world. Here I sit at my laptop in my basement plugging away, content with my life and happy, while beyond my walls, maybe next door perhaps, sits a forlorn young woman, bitter and depressed, hopeless and aching for a friend. type type type.

Down the street in a similar bedroom, two lovers are holding one another. type type type.

A man heaves a bluesy breath into his saxophone, he inhales cigarette smoke, and belts out his soul. And here I still sit, type type type. Spinning throughout this cosmic expanse, mindful only of finishing my thoughts before midnight, so I can get a good night's rest.

Pain is happening now. So is love, so is sleep, so is the David Letterman show. And already, 36 New York minutes have happened since I began....type type type.

What is all of this physical stuff? What is my body? What is my spirit? What am I doing just sitting here in my line of life, my own world, while so many other things are happening with every last one of us alive? These people have souls and feelings and are trying so hard to connect, to get involved in some sort of an emotional communication, where they are given a response to their call, and hoping it is a positive one.

Loved ones, this physical stuff, this is not real! This is not the real world! Why am I here? To become a good insurance salesman, buy a table tennis set for my kids, travel to Europe off my 401(k) and then die?

Who cares what I do for a 'career,' so long as I practice honesty? And where did this principle of honesty come from? Who defined it? That's right, the same Creator who caused the stars to ignite, who implanted a spirit into a beautiful body, and then told us to be fair one with another. If you believe in right and wrong, you believe in God. Right and wrong might be a creation of man, sure, but why is right right and wrong wrong? Feel free to argue with me on this.

No, when the concept of this world only slips away and virtues and integrity become more the focus of our desires and aspirations, we can see that this experience is oh-so surreal. This, my friends, is a great chance for us to see how we can learn from ourselves and others, with divine mandates of prescribed behavior, to be true to those primal urges of valor and charity. Can we see past the rat race, the statistics, the moneymongering, and decide that being a catalyst for love is far more important than any of this? I want to learn to love.

Yes, I said 'learn to love.' I am terrible at it! And I am glad that I know this, and equally glad that I have practically infinite chances to step up to the plate and deliver. I am a dick! But not all of the time. Sometimes I am blessed with the chance to shed my habitual dickheadedness and help a soul out. Everybody grows. I hope I can do that all of the time, but I probably won't. I am stuck in some pretty bad habits.

And that is okay! How would I ever be able to see how I have changed, if I didn't start somewhere? You cannot improve upon perfection and don't be so haughty as to say that you are perfect. We can all improve, and most of us have a little dickhead in us, and most of us have named him "Tagus Finbogadotter," after the Scandinavian explorer. Don't deny this fact. Anyway, this life is OJT, my friends: on the job training. Here we have ample schooltime to use this world laboratory, full of dicks like myself, as a place to hone our goodness, as defined by God, to see if we can learn to see past the excessive ruthless competitions in which people are used and hurt. Once we can see our existence for what it really is, we will be glad that we didn't waste our fleeting time on the frivolous things of a dead life. But love, ah, love. Yes, we can carry that across dimensions.

Love.

Let me tell you about two men I respect: Jesus Christ, Hugh Nibley. As wise as Brother Nibley was, and as much as I love his mind, the Nazarene trumps him in a most supreme way. So one day I was driving up 89 on my way to date a girl named Melanie. I was listening to a Nibley lecture on tape, in which he said (and this was later reiterated by Robert Kirby) that men are here for only two reasons: 1) to learn to repent, and 2) to learn to forgive. He said that these are the two most important things that we could observe and acclimate to.

Scratch scratch. Mikey thought about this one, oh, yessiree. But, didn't Jesus tell me that the top two were to 1) love God, and 2) to love my neighbor? Confusion: another emotion that goes undetectable by the five.

And then in a real moment, my mind was aided and things meshed. To repent is an exhibition of our Godly love. To forgive is the same for our dickhead neighbors.

My dear people, I love you. Existence does not shut off when we go on the 28-gram weight loss program. We do not cease to be! We move on to secondary school and eventually college. Finally we graduate and put what we have learned to practical use. Yes, and the fundamentals of these righteous principles of love and charity and benevolence can, and should be, born in our souls in this elementary school of life, while we cannot sense our lives for what they really are. Apply the scientific method to hope, my friends. Shift your paradigm, look for the brush of the God who is trying to paint our numbers and let your emotions, that obscure corpus callosum, link you to something more grand. See with your emotions, act with your body, be the personification of virtue in this shabby lifetime, and know that, as Proximo said in the movie "Gladiator," that what we do here and now "echoes in eternity."

Surreal now. The real world awaits. type type type.

love, Mike