The single biggest challenge I can think of for a writer is to convey inspiration, to convey a feeling which comes from a greater perspective, as if outside your body. Rather above your body.
Each one of us is in God's Inventory. We can discuss what God is, we can agree to something simple and amorphous like a "higher power". We may be agnostic about human's ability to correctly perceive something immense and Objective through our individual lenses of subjectivity, through our personal filters. Nature and evolution have given us many filters to digest and synthesize the environment.
What I believe Soul is would be kind of like describing music, separate from the brittle cold wood of the fiddle, the silent alloy of the horn. When all the intruments work together and make a tune, that tune has a single identity. Some tunes are simple, some attempt to be identical. Some are jazz. Some split the eardrum.
I am seeing our brains, our habits, our livers, our lungs, our eyes and our nerves as "filters". All of these filters emerged and evolved to adapt to situations and environments which were either constant or statistically likely.
A filter is a wonderful thing. It regulates. It allows something to pass through it. But it also stops things from passing through it. Whether fed passively like open eyes filtering light spectra, or actively like the heart-pump jetting hot red plasma at the liver, whether the lower intestine or the mouth, every process we carry out can be compared to a clam on the seabed.
Rebirth or awakening or enlightenment... baptism. The moments of being "born again". To me they were like I got a brand new filter, or had my filter cleaned of sludge. Dirty thoughts and distractions keeping me from functioning clearly in my environment.
As you grow in childhood and adolescence, your filters change, and you become self aware.
Self-awareness. That is what makes it difficult for a writer to convey inspiration, to convey the feeling of enlightenment. The sensation and awareness of cleaning and rebirth are information to be processed through the filter of the human mind. It's like changing a filter in a car that is still in use. It's like heart surgery.
God has a use for me, I realized this morning. I have an obligation to maintain myself. Whether I am a broom handle God has set aside in case he needs an extra, or whether I'm a forklift, or a truck or a baler, I have some use. Probably in society.
My usefulness is not my consumption. Many days we may find ourselves kind of uselessly consuming, or pumping the same water already filtered through the same grundgy filter. Day after day, we can lose ours sense of purpose and awareness becomes a curse of boredom. It is sad to see consumption itself becoming like a "purpose" for people. We consume in order to create jobs for other people to productively make what we consume? This is a nightmare, a cancer on the earth, and it is our biggest challenge.
My purpose on this earth? That is going to be as hard as describing a painting to a blind man, or describing harmony to a deaf child. Every day, I need to thank God, as revealed to me in whatever tired blind-man-touches-elephant way, that I have this inner composition, like an artist creating song, sparking or pitching or gurgling out the back of my filters. What I photosynthesize into Value is not really understood much more than the way a leaf turns light into sugars... the ultimate type of filter..
I believe in photosynthesis, even if I cannot explain it. And I believe that I have a purpose on earth. That purpose is not to consume, like a fake leaf. It is not to hoard, like an umpteenth unhealthy fat cell. But unlike Ghandi, I have put friction into bad gears with force and conviction that I'm unlikely to win friends by putting on a big white diaper and eating simply.
What I will try to do is compose. I will try to record my sense that God has a use for me. I will try to find a way to harmonize that revelation with other Gods and other Churches and other prayers and revelations. Uniting them is no more a purpose for me than turning every musician in the Orchestra into a flute player. We make better music using drums and xylophones and oboes and cellos.
I see skeptics asking the preacher, like the heretics out to stump Jesus or the hypocrites twisting the words of the peaceful Muhammed... how do you know? And if you know, and you are a human, how do you know that I do not know, that MY interpretation of God is not equally right to yours? How can you claim that my campaign to destroy the woodwinds is not also directed by God? If I take away the musical instruments from every musician in the orchestra pit, and make them hold, bare-handed, balls of cold wet spaghetti, how do you know that mine is not the greater Art?
How do I know that music sounds better than 20 people holding wet spaghetti in their hands? It's a matter of taste, perhaps. Perhaps to someone, a choral of injured screaming infants is music. We humans have evolved not to like the sound of screaming babies so much. We deal with their screams differently, whether as native americans taking them out in the woods to cry-it-out, or by suckling and cuddling. But we respond to filter their expressions of unpleasant sounds, or at least if we do so, we are recognized by the crowd as a bringer of justice. Imagine a better hero than someone who magically touches and soothes a screaming pit of babies. Imagine the popularity.
That is the image of a Savior, and I am not a savior nor do I promote waxen images of the Savior. I believe that Organized religions and churches have, in some way, become a broken filter, a filter which provides centuries old dogmas and lectures as "revelations". I believe that there is a karma for 'graven images', that an image of Jesus, Buddha, or other Prophet can become "graven" in word, graven in simplicity, handed out like crackers. For many, the perfect Sunday sermon would be a bit like a Meth high, you go in, get inspired, feel saved and reborn, and go out and consume until the following Sunday.
The graven images are found everywhere in song, in sound, in dogma, in words. God needs editors. As more and more people land on the planet, looking for purpose, we'd be mistaken to let organized church machine complexes print out instructions like Chinese Cookie fortunes. But within the elevated, highest and most aware group, how do we find the antidote? How do we find a new Savior or inspirer?
I think my purpose is like a member of the choir. I remember in sixth grade, singing so badly and off key, that the other boys sang louder to cover me up, and when I forgot the night of the performance (stayed home watching "Horton Hears a Who" special on analog TV), I was told that the chorus suffered in performance from light-singing-boys. Who knows. God may have made me off key in order to embolden others to sing more loudly. People who are reporters, people who collect and synthesize repair, people who create positive fair trade between other peoples of the world, creating peace on earth through the miracle of vested interests in commerce.
This morning, I had a kind of epiphany that God has a use for me. But it wasn't like an awareness of being special. I felt like a forklift that needed be scrapped yet. I did not feel the need to be immortal, or a sense that I will always have a use no matter how long I live. It was a sense of infinite proportion, a sense of 50,000 feet, or 50,000 years of evolution. I experienced a strange harmony of knowing my place as a piece of dust, able to see the desert. And at the same time, like a discarded cell phone that's grabbed and used to place a saving TXT, in and unlikely miraculous deux-ex-machina "out of a jam" rescue by the hero of some Hollywood movie, I saw that I may still be of some use.
As I grow older and become less useful, I would like to die. The alternative to death would be living forever. It's not that "hell is others", but in the evolution of things, I hope that I don't leave a legacy that humans squeezed desperately at every last rag in fear. I hope that the calm I felt this morning, that I might somehow find a way to convey it to others.
It was a moment of filtering Self. It was a moment of seeing perspective as a way to filter the accumulated patterns, addictions, thoughts, habits, narcissism, and conflicts of interest in this particular human body. It was a moment of seeing myself no more nor less important than any other piece of a puzzle, but feeling extreme gratitude at having the potential to SEE that puzzle as a greater image.
If a bunch of enlightened people learn to play in harmony, I think it is possible we will create a Wiki-Religion. We will learn to play together, as violins and trumpets, and learn to incorporate the songs of birds and the swoosh of cuttlefish, to maintain all the instruments in the rain forest we haven't even ever listened to or seen yet.
My role, I thought, is to protect rain forests and create patterns of sustainable consumption for mankinds machines of explore-derive-smelt-manufacture-use-consume-waste. But I have other roles... as a father, as a balancer of books, and just perhaps, as someone who cares how he is used by God, of my subjective place on God's chessboard. I want to learn to listen and find the way that pianos and drums can sound good together, even if only when separated by commercials. I want to find a way to use words to help someone see our quest for a net impact as a hunger or demand for good purpose, and to document how an Ozarks boy can pick up the Tao and pick up Lester Brown's State of the World and pray to both Jesus AND Krishna, can meditate and yell in some kind of appropriate balance, and through those purposes, filter or insulate or shock-absorb the incredible force of humans on the planet's diversity. I want to preserve TYPES of life more than I want to preserve one life. I want to preserve not "this here fiddle", but the violin as an instrument. If I can find a way to mold myself just right before I return, as we all do, to the clay, I might just bring inspiration and science together into a kind of symphony or form of art. Unlikely that mine will be listened to, especially if directed by the pumps of ego and self-righteousness, and contaminated by self promotion and packaged in dogmas. But there have been too many centuries of graven image ideas and ideals by almost all traditional religions. If you care, and you moderate your consumption, and you listen to the chorus, and keep an ear open for change, difference, diversity, as inspiration...
This is a life worth something. I should take care of my health, and take care of my family. Today at least. And when my time comes, like a soldier, I'll consume not what I've earned, but what is appropriate for the value I can bring in future dividends. I don't need to live forever, I need to live appropriately, and I need to stay as long as I have a purpose and sense of that purpose, and that my impacts - positive on science, negative on carbon, whatever - are accepted as Gods charity.
Thank you. It's hard to write down exactly what the moment of inspiration was. All I could ever really do writing journals was a jam session inspired by that moment, like a musician's "high". I lost about all those journals, and almost never shared them with anyone. Writing a blog is a recognition of mortality and letting loose of etiquette. If my inspiration has had a positive effect on my own life, I can perhaps find a way to share without preaching, to lay it out like a product design for a life well led, or led in a very interesting, strange, unique and positive direction. Take this and be done with it, for what it's worth, as it's intended to capture a moment of completed puzzle, a feeling of what I am worth, what my purpose might be, as part of Gods inventory in this room of the universe, as one of an exploding population of humans who are hitting Earth slowly like a big lazy comet, capturing purpose and beauty, even if it turns out to be in a supernova of erasure, plasma, and death of photosynthesis. I don't think that's what God wants, and I suspect taking the time during my life to listen when God is saying something gave me some insights into the obvious. Those moments of direction are most like... love. I don't know if God is Love, or love is a god, but the moments of crystalline direction, humility and thanks feel a lot like mutual love. You feel like you are running again on a clean filter after you have just almost forgotten what it feels like. Reminded of great love, and re-experiencing it... it's what it felt like this morning. But it also felt like being completely alone on the silence of a mountaintop in the wilderness, and it felt like being 50,000 years away from the present. I am pretty damn sure other people have experienced this moment, and those, like the prophets or the priests or the apostles who took time to convey it to others, in song or in scripture, help me to recognize a good thing when I feel it.
