"DNRT" series intermission / my thoughts on god

alright everyone, our dear friend at The Lethal Text has put forth some things that have illuminated in me a need to address the whole god thing. that is, to clearly outline where i am coming from personally as i continue to post this series whereby this unknown writer-guy is fitfully destroying “god”.

one might read this series and put forth that there is indeed a kind of “god” within it. while the original author may roll in his grave as i write this, let him roll then, while i put forth that his god is “the real”, reality itself— “that which is not altered by thoughts, wishes, desires, beliefs, or number of believers, etc.” as such, through his words god as reality appears through the void, speaking clearly, concisely and irrefutably, slaying “god” the human thought-concept.

the difference is in the relationship. whereas the “god concept” is all about an imagined omnipotent, omniscient being, one that by religious definition is a “superior being”, or “the creator”, or “the father”, and so by psychological mandate reduces us lowly humans (and every other thing) to an imagined subordinate position as “inferior beings”, god as reality itself exists purely as being what it is, and therefore any and all judgments upon itself have no affect upon it other than those within the mind of whomever sees fit to condemn (or celebrate) it. one is always free to imagine that one is an “inferior being” in the face of an imagined “superior being”— be that a nation-state, parental figure, god, or what-have-you, and that this makes you “humble” or “god-fearing”, and thereby “holy” or “loyal and patriotic”.

but to do this amounts to self-harm no less damaging to your inner spirit than if you were to bash yourself in the face with a claw hammer. in fact, it might be better to bash yourself in the face with a hammer than hold belief in god/superior-inferior being. at least after you bash yourself in the face there is the possibility that harsh memory of the pain of it will cause you to think twice about doing it again. the god-concept belief is the self-bashing that keeps on bashing. the reason for this is because we can’t feel the pain of it. although there is pain, and the destruction to our lives it causes is clear and evident, the actual registering of it in our minds is one of numbness, or, “this pain is normal”. since belief in the god concept is present in pretty much everyone, we all share this pain as part of the zeitgeist, of “normal life” and so very few of us are particularly alarmed by it.

what this amounts to is a whole shitload of truncated, distorted human beings— myriad living examples of denied potential who accept their miserable lot as par for the course. of course, levels of personal misery can vary a little or a lot from person to person, but it seems to me fair to say that none of us lives totally unaffected by the mind-poison of the “superior-inferior being” myth. (want to be able to relate to literally everyone? get down into your misery, know it well, and you will be able to tip a beer and laugh with any given high-strung, hair-trigger psychopath. i’ve done it).

the truth is that reality exists, is what it is, and is not affected by what we think or wish or believe it is. sunlight makes our food and it can also burn our backs and dry us out in short order like so much beef jerky. so isn’t it better to just live by it without chickening-out and putting our own personal spin on it? or making up stories of creation and myths and gods and all that nonsense? what does all that do for us but stuff us inside of imaginary mental boxes that limit our relationships, stifle our potential and thwart attainment of greater knowledge?

folks who’ve read my countless comments over the past several years on the substacks of other writers, Charles Eisenstein, Paul Kingsnorth, Tessa Lena, et al., may be familiar with my bicycle metaphor:

learning to ride a bicycle can be likened to our relationship with reality. the most present and immediate relationship we have with reality is with our own physical body-mind. i put these two together because the fact is that body and mind are not at all separate and both ultimately act together as a single entity. what goes on in the body affects the mind and what goes on in the mind affects the body— constantly, and at all times, from birth to death.

our body/mind is the vehicle by which we travel through our life. it is our “bicycle”. it’s a really complicated, sensitive, high-maintenance kind of bicycle, but nonetheless a bicycle— a means of taking us where we’d like to go as we live. some bicycles are quite alike, some are very different from others, but as to their basic function, they all do the same thing. all of them work the same way. no exceptions. the bicycle will entertain no discussion, engage no debate, listen to no wheeling and dealing nor tolerate scheming from you of any kind. you either do what it takes to ride the bicycle or you drop it and walk away and do not ride.

if one wishes to extract from the bicycle the best of what it can do, it is necessary to learn to ride it. with ones’ desire to ride the bicycle, ones’ primary relationship to reality begins. you have the desire, so what is the first thing you must do? you gotta throw a leg over it and hop on. this means you might fall over right then and there before you even start moving. this makes you afraid to get hurt or embarrass yourself in front of people by falling over. before you even get started going anywhere you are confronted with an unpleasant emotion: fear. fear says “don’t do it, you might fall and get hurt or feel embarrassed.”

what happens next is up to you. your desire to ride the bicycle forces you to make a personal valuation: either your desire to ride the bicycle means more to you than your desire to avoid pain/embarassment, or it doesn’t. you then make a choice based upon that valuation. later on, the outcome of that same personal valuation may change and you decide to make a different choice, but in no case can you enter into a conversation with the bicycle and attempt to force it to behave differently according to your personal preferences. other people can help you learn the basics, but ultimately you are the one who must throw a leg over it and give it a go. we learn, basically, by screwing it up first and then trying again and again. what isn’t working is always clear and evident. we have only to take note and not repeat that which does not work.

is the bicycle a “god”, a “superior” entity? are the laws of physics that determine how the bicycle shall be ridden “superior” entities? are you an “inferior being” because you do not yet know how to ride the bicycle? does “god” teach you how to ride it? are you “bad” or “sinful” if you have trouble learning how to ride it, or if it takes you a really long time to learn? if you choose not to learn to ride the bike, is this a “sin”, whereby you have angered and disappointed the bicycle and it punishes you by forcing you to find other means of transportation? if you struggle with the bicycle to such an extent that out of utter desperation you consult the priests of The Church of Bicycles, who dutifully instruct you to get down on your knees and worship and pray to the bicycle, will the bicycle miraculously allow itself to be ridden the way you (and the priests) believe that it should?

it is my hope that with this metaphor readers are able to clearly see the absurdity inherent within the god concept belief. and as well how emotions originating in the body as feelings can compel the mind into making choices that stop you from getting where you want to go in life before you even start the journey.

again, the human body, it ain’t no bicycle. human beings are highly sensitive, perceptive creatures. lots of serious sh*t is going on inside of us that can spook the hell out of us. much of it is unconscious. and that’s the trouble— our fragility and vulnerability is such that if as children we aren’t given enough loving, knowledgeable, patient encouragement to keep at it while learning how to ride our bicycle, we quite easily become discouraged and in all likelihood remain at odds with our bicycle for our entire lifetime, vainly trying out all manner of mental manipulations and self-trickery to get it to allow us to ride it “our way”— something that simply cannot ever happen.

in the end, even this dreary outcome is not “bad” or “sinful”. only that your ability to travel as nature would have it, by your own vehicle and toward your own desired destination, was, in your formative years, stunted and commandeered to serve interests other than your own.

"Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted." — Vladimir Lenin, Total Fkg Bastard.

for many of us, maybe even me, if i’m honest, the notion that there is no god, nobody “up there/out there somewhere” who gives a fk about us, this is just too painful to bear. the question is why? i can only speculate, from knowledge gained by my personal journey/experience toward “wholeness” (or whatever the hell it is that i’m doing with my personal life-salvaging process), is that cognition of the reality of ‘no god’ brings us in contact with abandonment pain originating in our infancy, possibly ongoing as well, continuing to be exacerbated and compounded throughout our childhood.

i remember, in one incredibly painful therapy session, back when i was in L.A. at the Primal Center in the early 2000’s. i was lying on my back and reaching upward with both arms, in my mind imploring god to “pick me up!", over and over again, “pick me up! pick me up! please! please! i need you! can’t you just pick me up?” of course, no response. gut-wrenching tears of wretched abandonment and rejection poured out of me for a long time until my body just couldn’t take any more. even now it hurts just remembering that— it was dark. the small room with padded walls had a single mattress on the floor that was soaked with my tears. i’d rolled off of it while writhing in pain. the therapist was silent and gently pushed a box of kleenex toward my hands. i clutched at it and honked away. this is primal therapy.

we were both silent for a bit and then i said: “what the hell was that about?”, knowing full well that i’d been physically reaching upwards but not telling him that i’d been pleading with god inside my mind during all that. he responded:

“can’t say, really. here, we just know how to help your body do what it needs to do. coulda been baby stuff.”

“baby stuff”?

“yeah, you were born in the early 60’s right?

“right.”

“well….back then, a guy called Dr. Benjamin Spock was popular and his advice to parents regarding their crying babies was to just leave them alone and let them cry it out.” i thought of my life, the life of my older sister living on the streets freezing every winter in a northern mid-western town, and my younger sister who can’t be around a person without picking a fight with them.

it made perfect sense. i’d had some sense prior that my religiosity might have roots in childhood trauma but i’d never really put it together that at some point i’d transferred lack of parental love to lack of godly love. Art Janov, the founder of Primal Therapy, had always regarded the notion of god as essentially destructive to human mental/emotional health.

okay. so this brings me to why i’ve been able to dismiss the god concept, or “god as human mental notion”, and yet i’m not able to dismiss inside my own mind the existence of god altogether. where i’m at, (for now, ha) is this: reality is god. all of it. what this guy (DNRT) calls “100% reliable, immutable natural law” which are evidenced in discovery of “mind principles”, to me, this is god. not “god as parental authority being” or “god who demands saintly behavior” or “perfect, omniscient creator-being” to whom we must kneel before to remain in good favor, but something ultimately unknowable in its’ entirety and therefore i cannot say with certainty that it, in addition to being a continuous realm of material objects of various sizes and characteristics interlaced with dynamic energetic forces, is not also a conscious being. what i cannot dismiss is my own experiences. whenever i attempt to do away with god altogether within my mind, there is always this:

“okay but, what about that time where (such-and-such-incredible-experience-while-alone-and-not-on-drugs) happened?” these experiences, deeply personal and by all indications tailor-made for me and my personal struggles at that time and profoundly encouraging and uplifting in nature, could only have been visitations of a kind i cannot rationally explain. whenever i’ve told friends of these they always smile and look at me like i’m nuts. fair enough. if these experiences were actually self-induced mental aberrations of some sort, then yeah, i’m probably nuts. but this isn’t my sense of them. my sense of them is that they were real. more real than real life even— a feeling of “this sh*t we call ‘normal’, this is the bullshit dream. that was real”.

which brings us back to the whole point of these DNRT pieces: to blast away at the crap inside our minds, to expose the brainwash/mind control/lies that keep the totality of reality from entering our conscious minds and lives where it might just thrill us and enliven our every living moment with its’ incredible natural wonder and beauty.