Trusting Oneself

I was raised to be a nicey nice person I think, or I wanted to emulate it. God it’s difficult! I think that some people assume having some kind of spiritual consciousness means letting go of fury at injustice and oppression and it’s so not true. I’m starting to read a new book which I’m really excited about, called The Politics Of Jesus: Rediscovering the True Revolutionary Nature of Jesus’ Teachings and How They Have Been Corrupted, by Obery M. Hendricks. I started reading it last night but I was fretting about some interpersonal stuff that happened earlier in the day so I wasn’t absorbing it as well as I wanted to. I’ll try again today. But I am interested by this process of co-opting liberating revolutionary thought and reintegrating it to fit the ruling elite’s dogma. It happens all the time, in all religions and philosophies including First Nations spirituality. I think maybe part of it is that people have a hard time accessing a variety of sources and drawing their own conclusions, it’s a lot more comforting to draw from one source and make it fit with something you maybe already decided.

I didn’t want to believe in Jesus. I do now. But I don’t call myself a Christian, and I don’t consider it the One True Way. I think he’s a fascinating revolutionary figure who has been co-opted by the dominant paradigm. I want to know who he is and what he thought, not what other people decided he thought. But reading about Jesus and his life was the step towards open mindedness that I had to take, which doesn’t mean it’s everyone’s step. I kind of threw him away before, based mainly on fundamentalism. Now I see it differently, learning about him taught me a lot, mostly how to think for myself. I was raised pretty liberal, but that also meant I wasn’t supposed to investigate ideologies which were utilized in the name of power and control over the population. But I think that’s precisly why I wanted to learn about him, in the end. Not that I want to have some kind of biblical quotation show down with Fred Phelps and Billy Graham, fuck that would suck ass. I hope to learn about Islam next, I know some things about it, but not a lot. I know Mohammed had some really feminist ideas, and that’s exciting. He also thought Jesus was a cool dude, which is sweet.

I know there’s some thoughts out there that Jesus is actually based on an early Phoenician myth, (it it Phoenician? I can’t find my source to cite) which supposedly means if that’s true then I shouldn’t give a damn about Jesus. But even if he is a mythical figure who has been reconcieved, that doesn’t mean the story doesn’t have relevance. Pan’s Labyrinth is a mythical story, but it had a lot of relevance to me. I feel like an Ophelia in a world of Captain Vidals.

I didn’t really want to devote this whole post to Jesus though. I actually just wanted to talk about learning to think for myself.

Tangent:

It’s Schrodinger’s birthday tomorrow, he is a year old! And a bad kitty! I had some triscuits by my bed from when I was sick and watching movies all day and he’s been eating them. Which isn’t so bad, except he’s eating them in my bed. So I’ll go downstairs and get into bed and find a crumbled up pile of triscuit crumbs. Such a mess. Anyway, last night I was fretting and he came along and climbed over the clock radio to get a triscuit (yes, I’ll clean them up eventually) and then he went away. And I was fretting about something and then as I was laying awake in the dark I looked at the clock and it said 4:47. And I was like “What! Have I been worrying for that long!?” And i got kind of weird feeling, like I couldn’t trust my perception of time even and I went to sleep and I woke up and the clock said 10:00 so I got up and dressed and went upstairs to feed all the animals and it was pitch black outside. I was so confused, and the clock upstairs read 6:00. And the funny thing is it did feel like 6 in the morning, but I wasn’t trusting myself, I was going by what my alarm clock said, even though my alarm clock had been altered by Schrodinger’s desire to eat triscuits.

Schrodinger is having a birthday party on Saturday. I’ve never gone to a birthday party for a cat, but a little boy who got two of his brothers has organized a family reunion of kitties, I have no idea what to expect. If Schrodinger turns into a big bully and beats up all his siblings we’ll have to put him in his kennel for the party. I’ve never seen cats reunited, I don’t know if they forget each other or not, but I guess I will find out.