A Great Spirit
There are only three more Hershey's Nuggets in the canister on my mother's kitchen counter which was full a few days ago. Yesterday, when it turned out that he would be coming to New York in three weeks instead of three months - and that his dad was taking care of the air fare instead of me - I was so excited that I felt like dancing a jig.
The trouble is that once I said he was a hard-nosed skeptic on the blog and proceeded to deliver a rebuttal to any argument I could imagine him making, I felt isolated and alienated from him. In real life, he was at the movies with his dad and brother, then he was asleep.
It's a safe bet that he and I are going to go around and around about this spirituality vs science thing - especially since I've had an idea percolating in my head about how his political beliefs depend as much on intuition and deduction as my own airy fairy way of looking at the world. The idea is still percolating, but it occurs to me that since any example of a functioning communist society, or socialist economy, has been so rapidly undermined by neighboring capitalist countries who made deals behind closed doors with revolutionary leaders (if I've got the stories right) that there's no empirical evidence or data that proves Socialism and/or Communism is best for humans. There is a basic premise, and then there's Marx, of course, but really, the whole idea only works if you're the kind of person who believes that a functioning, sustainable community depends on people caring about and taking care of each other and the planet. Using the format of a Logic proof, wanting to put human needs over individual greed would be the Given. Given: Human needs are more important to a sustainable community than accumulating individual wealth. It's unlikely that Dick Cheney would sign off on that Given anymore than the French Aristocrats or the Romanoffs would have accepted that premise without a sharp blade on their necks.
Let me say here that I've never read Das Kapital, and I'm not going to. I haven't read the Bible yet, and I'm not going to read that either. I'm going to read something by Tom Robbins, most likely - or maybe the book by Barbara Kinsolver that my sister got me for Christmas. I am willing to accept, however, that Marx was right because both Woody and ABear say so and I respect their opinions and because I've discovered that all the educational theorists who have influenced my practice were Marxists. Ergo: I'm like a Marxist once removed. Even still, I'm not reading the book even though I do enjoy this little video Pinko showed me:
One day, I might settle on a name for that man. Sometimes he's ABear and sometimes he's Pinko. It just depends on the context. Sometimes he's Brad, but that's about as often as I'm Patricia. Mostly I'm Tricia or PENolan, depending on the context. But whether we're talking about Tricia and ABear, or Pinko and PENolan - either way, we're talking about two opinionated, mouthy individuals who will tenaciously argue a point they consider fundamental. I'm not so sure about Brad and Patricia. Apparently, they're well behaved which could explain why we both only use those names on official documents like drivers licenses.
While we've been with our respective families of origin, we have naturally ran into each other on Facebook since that's where we met to begin with and we've both been hanging out in the suburbs without much to do. That's where I noticed that he'd challenged and pooh-poohed an article a friend posted in a way that I considered insulting not only to the friend who posted it but also to another friend who has cooked a delicious dinner for him with her very own hands and served him copious amounts of red wine. From the way that thread went, as well as from a comment the friend who cooks made in a different one - it looks to me like the witches are fixing to gang up on Pinko. Here's a link to the article: Scientists finally show thoughts can cause specific molecular changes (TunedBody)
Whatever with genetics, thoughts, scientists and empirical data. I don't care about any of that shit. I care about Pinko.
When we are so attached to our ideas that it seems like those ideas are our essential identity, that's Ego in operation, working very hard to keep us isolated from each other so we don't experience love through a human connection. I am not my ideas or my problems or even a body, for that matter. I am Spirit. Call it energy or any other vocabulary word that feels comfortable - the point is that each of us is consciousness, and we connect to each other via that consciousness. Hippy Dippy Airy Fairy New Agers like me believe in Unity Consciousness which means that we are all part of one universal consciousness.
Since there's no way any living human can say for sure what happens when we die, all anyone can really do is listen to various stories and decide which one is his/her favorite. Personally, I like the idea that our energy is released from our bodies and is absorbed back into the universe - we go back to The Force from which we came just like Obi-Wan Kinobe.