"I am become the world, destroyer of time."
The first thing to go, of course, is this very forum, and I just deleted a couple of posts that never made it any further than a title. I thought about writing up one of them instead, changing the name, and then posting it. It would appear backdated, which would create the false impression that I've been more productive than is actually the case. But what the hell, what difference does it make? Time is a scam anyway – all-pervasive, omnipotent and eternal – but a scam nonetheless.
But this is beside the point.
The point is that I've had more than my fair share of satsang this past week. I've learned the six things that Bhagavan is said to possess in unlimited quantity (beauty, strength, knowledge, wealth, fame, renunciation), a new mantra (om namo bhagavate vasudeva), and a primer on sankhya whose pathos far outweighed its logos.
Fortunately, this morning I counterbalanced all this dazzling, dizzying, dubious theology with a healthy dose of literary malaise:
Take, for example, this passage on love:
"Love was the greatest thing, wasn't it? Love was what we had that no one else had or could have. And you were a genius and I was your whole life. I was your partner and your little black flower. Slop. Love is just another dirty lie. Love is ergoapiol pills to make me come around because you were afraid to have a baby. Love is quinine and quinine and quinine until I'm deaf with it. Love is that dirty aborting horror that you took me to. Love is my insides all messed up. It's half catheters and half whirling douches. I know about love. Love always hands up beside the bathroom door. It smells like Lysol. To hell with love. Love is you making me happy and then going off to sleep with your mouth open while I lie awake all night afraid to say my prayers because I know I have no right to any more. Love is also the dirty little tricks you taught me that you probably got out of some book."
Two things I know are true:
1) Ernest Hemingway is dead.
2) The Bhagavad Gita is a book.
2) The Bhagavad Gita is a book.
(a poem actually, but this may or may not affect its ontological status)
Do with this what you will, but my own attempt to reconcile these truths is looking more and more to be my life's work, which leaves me in an interesting philosophical no-man's land.
It can be a profoundly lonely task.
On the one hand, my True Believer friends often dismiss my point-of-view as 'merely the mind.' I readily concede to this tendency, but still, it seems that they are over-willing to overlook the assumptions and internal contradictions of their own belief. The end result is a devotion and understanding seems to preclude the devotion and understanding of others. I find it profoundly unsatisfactory, when met with the authentic, irreconcilable belief of another to dismiss their faith as either the wrong type or of insufficient quantity.
Many of my True Skeptic friends, on the other hand, suffer from atheism, agnosticism and the rigid dynamism of the dialectic. Pushing up against the limits of the mind, they seem unable to make that final leap, and I suppose my own faith must look like a mix of naiveté and dime store mysticism to them. The hell of it is that I know I cannot communicate what cannot be spoken, only sensed, and, ironically, the only solace I've found in times like these is in the second-hand translation of a scripture I've never read, whose name I cannot pronounce:
What I am is utterly beyond the capacity of your mind to conceive.
Therefore, worship me in whatever form appeals to you.
I promise in that form I will come to you.
Therefore, worship me in whatever form appeals to you.
I promise in that form I will come to you.
- Tripura Rahasya 7:79-93
Like Rumi and his Shams, I wait...
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