If you reject God, and eliminate Him from your ontology, and deny His existence, do you also reject the idea of good and evil? If you refuse God, what is your reasoning for right and wrong? It could hardly be innate human nature, since the natural course for man is to gratify urges, and we only curb those urges and control them on the basis of either what is right or wrong in God’s eyes or in society’s—and right and wrong in all societies has been determined over generations of time by their belief in a deity, and the will of that deity shaped right and wrong. (Think of the Janes, who believe it morally reprehensible unknowingly to step on a bug and kill it.)In fact, on what moral authority may man act? Can right and wrong be determined by measure against absolute truth? Does someone who rejects God accept absolute truth? Generally not. But even the acceptance of absolute truth does not give the answer to what is right and wrong. Can a moral standard then be created on the basis of traditions? How were those traditions formed? What happens when cultures merge that have had traditions that contain ideas of right and wrong that clash? Do you accept the traditions of Athenians? or Visigoths?

The cannibals, or the Quakers? If you reject God, how can you judge right and wrong, good and evil? How can you say what is moral and what is immoral? It seems that those who reject God also reject His morality, and accept only Rousseau’s, that all the morality of our actions is determined alone by the judgment we pass on them, and nothing we do is wrong unless it harms someone else. It seems to me that in the main it is the immoralists who claim there is no God, simply to remove the accusations of their own immorality.

 

 

 

Living in the Lord: that’s Option A. It has been previously discussed. Living without God in the world, that’s Option B, also previously discussed. Those who are living in the Lord, meaning they do things and think things always through the filter of pleasing God or not offending God, or just trying to do His Will, or seek His guidance, are happier. I don’t mean they are lacking in sadness or free from adversity, travail, affliction, or the negatives, the hard things, the things that we think of as cause for sadness or depression. In aggregate, they are happier, in spite of days or times when they are troubled. On the whole they are happier, even if in particular there are stressful times.

 

On the other hand, those who go with Option B, and are living without God in the world, are not as happy. I could even make the case (as I have previously explored) that they cannot be happy at all, to the degree that they are keeping God out of their lives. For every moment, in other words, that they turn away from God, they have a moment of unhappiness. That unhappiness of course is not abject misery or deep dark depression, and it may even be, and often is, hidden deep under many layers of fatty fun, entertainment, thrills, and energetic pleasure seeking. Usually, when the music stops, though, the realization is quick to settle in, that they are basically unhappy, and peace, true peace in heart and mind, is elusive. In fact, the reason for seeking thrills, fun, excitement, entertainment, and in ways that do not allow for God, is to forget the unhappiness. Like a drunk who drinks to forget his troubles, all brought on because he’s a drunk.

 

Those who opt for Option A and are living in the Lord, or trying, will be doing things that tend to bring happiness. They will be serving others, and in their quest to please God they will eschew practices that in and of themselves tend toward unhappiness. I quit Option B a while back, and I’m trying very hard to be in Option A.

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

Matutinal ontogeny:      : : :  the daily recreation of self, or the choice of personality for the day.

 

Who knows what effects the nocturnal life, the alternative life, the oneiric, Doppelgänger’s ontological impression, has on our Self, the person and personality we are once we wake up each morning and put on our Self? How much of our personality is of our own choosing, as much as choosing our “look” for the day? Who am I today? Jim Reid used to introduce himself as an assassin. It was something between a joke and a cry for help. It was not a fiction, however. He was a SOG and worked the Phoenix, doing in a village cadre in the middle of the night, leaving a black calling card with a white eyeball in the center of it, in the slit. Imagine a 250 pound ninja! But it can be off-putting to some to announce what you really are. Yes, he had been an assassin, but he was also a father, a husband, a student, a veteran, a friend. We are all an assortment of things, so each morning we decide what we are for the day. Will I be positive today? Will I be a curmudgeon? Will I be the person I was yesterday, more or less? Hopefully, we keep within the parameters of the Self we have been perpetrating all along, or they’ll think we’re just nuts.

 

 

 

Affliction is a treasure,” wrote John Donne, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by it, and made fit for God by that affliction.” —–What do I know of affliction? I am humbled by the stories of the Mormon pioneers, all of them, but more especially by those who suffered the most. But who did suffer the most? The sister whose feet were amputated when she arrived in the valley? The parents who buried children on the plains, hoping the wolves or the Indians would not disturb the grave? The children who buried parents along the trail, and then went on alone? Or the ones who arrived in the valley, hale, but having left family behind forever, cut off from them, disowned rather than renounce the faith? Affliction of the body, or the heart? I cannot enumerate my past and present afflictions. It’s too complicated.

 

It’s 2:30 of a rainy morning, and as the clock chimes the half-hour I begin to write. I looked at the clock whilst lying in bed still: it was 1:20, too early to get up for purposes of taking a pill; and yet I need to get up to frequent the room où le roi va à pied — where even the King goes on foot — plus, after an hour and half (all precise times) of lying on my back, I have some trouble breathing and my back feels lie it could become a problem my morning, and the back of my knees are beginning to sweat because they are supported by a pillow with a pure rayon cover. I lie there going in and out of my two alternate minds, sometimes conscious, sometimes not, snorking, until I look at the clock again and it’s 2:20am. I get up, with much pain in the process, trying to be as silent and still as possible so as not to disturb her, and go into the bathroom. I could have gone from pillar to post s is my wont, with left eye open and right eye shut—Pillar A the toilet and Pillar B some drink to wash down the pill, then back to bed. I think myasthenia gravis has something to do with my right eye wanting to stay shut after I get up, either in the middle of the night or in the middle of the morning. But just now it did not have much trouble opening, which I took as a sign that I could write down some of the great stuff I just had been writing in my mind, ergo in my sleep: écriture automatique, to a point. But by the time I had finished with mon petit pis-pis, I could no longer for the life of me recall any of it. What I did think worth writing—that other having been lost---was that in fact I had been composing in my sleep, or in my alternate mind. I am quite used to hypnogogic hallucinations; but in the past few days, but only rarely, I have been going from one mind to the other at night. Hypnogogic recitations, or even perhaps realty, alternate reality, or dreams, are not contiguous, and not sequential, perhaps therefore, and are isolated from each other, hopping from one scene to another completely unrelated scene. But what is happening now, in my dream time, is somewhat lie I was experiencing in Gresham in April, at the time of the trip from hell, or to hell, or in hell, where I was not the only one cracking up. (But nobody noticed mine.) I have my main reality, in which I am presently operating, writing this, reporting it; and then I have another, minor reality going on, and when I go out of this one I go into the other one, like changing channels on the TV. The question I have not yet answered, but only think I know how to answer, is, Does the minor reality pause when I am in this, the major reality, or does it continue to play on while I am in the major? As with the TV—if I am watching a show on the History Channel, and switch over to baseball, I catch the bottom of the fifth. Then I go back to the History Channel. The ball game does not stop: these are real players playing in real time. So when my history program is over, I go back to the ball game, and it’s the top of the seventh. But! If I am watching the ball game, and I have a movie pulled up on demand, if I go over to the ball game, the movie pauses. Then I go back to on demand and it starts up where it was. I happen to know that, in God’s view and in reality, there is only one reality. So how does this Doppelgänger reality work? It’s a function of my mind. And if I have two “realities” going on, not to mention the little bite-size realities, almost like mini-éclairs of hypnogogic hallucinations, and two is bi, am I beginning to go insane, entering into some bi-polar condition? So far, my alternate reality is much like the major reality. I don’t curse or do—mentally—evil things; but there are those who have lost their marbles, or moorings, and their alter-self is a nasty, profane Id, some Dionysius let loose from the abyss. Besides, which one is the pleasanter?

 

 

 

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!

 

 

I have never robbed nobody. I have never kilt nobody. I have sinned, I have sinned, I have greatly sinned. How great a sin it is to injure God’s kind and tender grace; but I have broken His commandments with my peccadilloes and my pride. And now I sorely regret any misdeed, unkind word, untoward thought ever conceived and acted in all my life. But let no one assume the worst. I never robbed a bank. I never killed anyone. I have never been a secret criminal. I am not guilty of gross sins, my sins are bad enough but not to alarm anyone. They are the quotidian sins of commission and omission, not those that make the news or require a bishop’s absolution. Still I regret them one and all. I am not St Augustine with his “not yet.”

 

 

 

 

 

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

How long has it been?

 

Let not memory be so fine as to glean from all the corners, but let much lie untouched and undisturbed ‘til covered over with years of dust it is buried deep and ne’er disturbed. Who would want to remember everything ever said, done, and thought? That is the fear put in the heart by thoughts of the last judgment where the books will be opened and we are judged by thoughts, and words, as well as deeds. There are so many things I never want to think of again: sins and peccadilloes, lapses in judgment, foolishness, foolhardiness and stupidity, meanness and irascibilities. Keep them locked away; I have learned my lesson: I don’t need reminders to say never again. What shame I will be crushed under if all those come to light. Cut off all remembrances if with the good go the bad.