Nah. You're Not Worm Food. (Part One)

Remember when I said I’d get around to addressing the spirituality thing?

Here’s a taste.

We’re human beings at the end of it all, that’s our biggest title, our coup de gras, our uber-selves, beyond all the other roles we choose to take on, or are forced to take on. We are fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, we adopt racial labels of white or Black or Latin or Asian or Indigenous, we identify with nationalities of Americans or Mexicans or Africans or Russians or Filipinos or Japanese. Beyond all those tags of race, gender, class, economic level, career status, and political affiliations, across our totality of social and biological strata, at our most base, interconnected selves, we are sisters and brothers, a sum of parts. 

After it’s all over, it won’t matter much what we believed, in our heads.

What will matter is what we felt, in our hearts.

That’s a fact, Jack. And Jill.

And how do I know that?

Well, it’s hard to explain.

But it’s my job to try.

So here goes.

Our man made frameworks of organized religion and nation-state politicking are but temporary buzzes and blips among the cosmos. How we expressed our connections to each other, as well as we could, is what’s going to echo beyond this lifetime for us.

If your heart is filled with bitterness or regret, you have a longer road ahead.

If your heart is full of love and empathy for others, you have a leg up on your journey.

Most of us, by the time we hit our deathbeds, pretty much split the difference. That’s what it is to be human. Either way, we all get to where we’re all going. The speed at which we traverse there is largely a matter of free will.

There are infinite roads to enlightenment. Not a one of us gets to dodge that forward momentum, no matter which route we take, though we do have the option of dragging our heels.

It’s difficult for finite minds like ours to grasp infinite concepts, which is why so many folks adopt dogmas from organized religions, because someone in the past drew a map for others. It’s easier to follow a preset guideline than to explore the nature of existence on our own without directions.

It’s been posed that perhaps folks repeat earthly schooling via reincarnation and living more lifetimes on this planet. I have concerns regarding Buddhist and Hindu samsara rebirth doctrines. I’m the first to admit that could be my ego in play. My inability to embrace that possibility could stem from my unwillingness to relinquish all that makes me myself in this lifetime. Perhaps unversed souls, countless as they must be given the history of our species, continue lessons in other dimensions.

I have my intuitions, but I don’t think any of us can know for sure how the specifics play out after death, not until we open that door for ourselves. If one thing is clear, it’s that nobody returns to tell us the deal, except the purported case of That One Guy, which nobody can corroborate outside of those who were there two thousand years ago, and not a one of them has returned to earth since to back it up.

For whatever reason, we’re supposed to figure all this shit out on our own.

Even if it means enduring Jewish holocausts and Hiroshima nuclear fire.

Which, ya know. Ah-sucks. We bumbling simians could use a lil’ help.

Wherever higher existences await us, their denizens clearly have a Star Trek type of Prime Directive policy concerning us hairless apes in the great scheme of things: hands off.

It appears this policy is total, whether we turn the planet into a ball of charcoal and wipe ourselves out or not. There will be no interventions from on high, no raptures or second comings, no angelic rescues. I apologize to those theistic readers who may be taking umbrage with those latter assertions. I totally understand why your faith is important to you and how it helps you make sense of a world that has so much suffering in it. I respect it. I really do. You are free to believe what you like. If it helps you love others well, if it helps you empathize for all peoples of the world, then more power to you. You can believe anything you want, as long as it doesn’t do harm, because if supporting your beliefs indirectly or directly maligns others, you’ll eventually need to reexamine your choices in what you deem is true and what isn’t.

I will say this much about concepts concerning pre-determinism. That’s all horseshit. I guarantee you we don’t sign up for suffering before coming into this world, selecting from some heavenly scribed list of the types and ways in which we might torment ourselves so that we can experience the frailties of being human. Choosing to die at six years old from leukemia in a sterile oncology ward, or choosing to walk into Auschwitz’s ovens, is a ridiculously offensive thought. Many peers have told me over the years everything happens for a reason, that it’s all part of a grand plan.

I strongly doubt there is a plan.

Most terrible things that happen in life are either a result of our own shortsightedness or random corporeal dangers. There’s a shit ton of both the former and the latter. It’s a dangerous universe we live in, and our bodies are woefully vulnerable to the vast array of life-ending threats available to them.

Stephen Hawking once said: “I have noticed that even people who claim everything is predetermined and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.”

What people likely mean when they’re trying to make sense of awful events through the notion of planned destiny, is that we can learn from anything that happens, even the most horrible shit imaginable. That much is spot on. I’ll reiterate, though, we do not need a worst case scenario to occur before we figure out the right thing to do.

One of the most effective if widely underdeveloped tools of cognition we procured during our eons of evolution is the ability of forethought. Careful, premeditated circumspection, removed from primal reactive perceptions like fear or greed, used to analyze the greatest cost-effectiveness of actions, statistically tends to bear the greatest fruit.  

Yes, there is one fairly irrefutable tenet to all of human existence, no matter what gods we pray to or what doctrines we hold dear. We’re on our own here. Until benevolent aliens or hosts of heaven descend with tidings of peace and joy, we must assume we’re supposed to get our shit together ourselves.

Not one thing in our collective human history dictates otherwise, barring a handful of commonly studied tomes penned by men, men same as me and you, dudes who shit and drank and ate and slept and fucked, envied and feared and angered, men who were as subject to the limits of human perceptions, desires, and impulses as any other man, men who took the pains to document belief systems while yoked to their fragile humanities same as we all are.

I’ve no interest in slagging the Bible, or the Koran, or the Talmud, or the Tibetan Book of the Dead. They’re all worthy works of literature to ponder, and they each present principles which are admirable in practice. If you’re a fan of one of them, and you assert moralities you learned from them to contribute good karma and good works to the world, that’s awesome and you should stick to it.

Just be careful to ensure those dogmas you prefer don’t inadvertently marginalize others.

In my exposure to worldwide religions, Christians seem to have the most difficulty in this regard, because so many of them, particularly white Christianity and its two central umbrellas of Protestantism and Catholicism, often require absolutes in adopting their practice. Absolutism limits the forward progress of intellectual and spiritual development. By the very definition of corporeality, we cannot view a single thing in this world as absolute other than the certainty of our pending death.

Nothing, not any one belief nor a scientific precept short of the most simplistic biology and physics, can be a permanent notion, and even those established baselines aren’t so concrete yet that we can truly assert a full understanding of them. Every piece of knowledge we’ve learned and every practiced discipline we’ve adopted so far throughout our history may be subject to change upon further explorations.

Who knows, perhaps one day death won’t be as absolute as it has always been for our species, and indeed, some few of us who’ve experienced certain phenomena while being technically or clinically ‘dead,’ can attest to the very real probability it already isn’t. In the corporeal reality of Planet Earth, nothing is truly black or white. We’re still young creatures.

Ironically, this wonks up the apparent totalitarianism of higher existence tiers not giving us lower level grunts a little help here and there, a little nudge, an occasional small miracle. Why so strict? Why so adamant? Why so absolute? Why can’t Grandma come back and say hello for five minutes? Why is the prospect of nothingness, of the void, of no afterlife at all, such an apparently integral part of our all too brief earthly existence? Why would having a certainty of life after death be so disruptive or detrimental to our development?

A 2017 film called The Discovery, starring Jason Segal and Robert Redford, interestingly explored the possible whys of what knowing the certainty of an afterlife might entail, and it’s a common kitchen table hypothetical…because, if people knew there was something beyond, and when the going got tough, they’d just say fuck it, I’m gonna move on to the next thing and start fresh. Mass suicides and such. It’s certainly a possibility, I grant.

My metaphysics-oriented colleagues might say it’s a frequency issue. This universe has certain electromagnetic vibrations unique to itself, and it stands to reason other dimensions presumably do as well. Perhaps because of our mostly untapped potentials of these monkey brains of ours, we’re unable to perceive cross-dimensional attempts at communication, save for rare fluke instances and aberrations, which might explain the persistence of ghost stories and experiences, perhaps a number of famously heralded religious events as well.

My pals versed in evolutionary biological sciences, or those atheists and agnostics unconvinced of humanity’s spiritual futures, simply shrug and say we’re all worm food at the end, oblivion beckons, we’re lucky to get seventy years, it’s all a big coincidence, Big Bang to matter and energy, proteins and life-giving atmospheres and water happened to mix haphazardly and boom, we are lucky to ever have existed at all. 

My religious associates claim it’s a matter of faith, that life is a test of moral aptitude, and that believing in scripture or ascribed fealty to a higher power or committing to a cycle of rebirth leads us to a sort of reward after we live these corporeal lives, usually a measure of immortality of some kind, in some place, be it heaven or nirvana or jannah or shamayim or wherever.

I was raised Roman Catholic, attended masses at my local California mission, altar boy, communion, confirmation, the whole kit n’ caboodle. My mom actually lobbied pretty hard for me to be a priest for a good while in my childhood, but I renounced Catholicism when I hit early adolescence. My parents weren’t happy.

My skepticism about the truths of Biblical happenings were part of it, supposed recorded events like the Red Sea parting, Jonah and the whale, pillars of salt and burning bushes, Noah and a great flood that wiped the slate clean…geez, The Big Guy had quite a temper in the Old Testament, didn’t he? Plus there was the difficulty of accepting on faith the actuality of the booby prize itself, a divine resurrection.

Even if I’d disregarded the literal translations, I’d already grown disgruntled with the modern regimens of the Catholic Church. I never appreciated the strict patriarchy, I didn’t understand why women couldn’t be priests or why there wasn’t such a thing as altar girls, I didn’t understand why aspiring clerics had to take such stringent vows, and I sure as shit didn’t understand why the Vatican, one of the most powerful and wealthiest organizations on earth wasn’t doing more to share their resources and allocate most if not all of them to the world’s poor. It made zero sense to me that Vatican City could spend millions of dollars on stained glass windows instead of spreading that funding around to its faithful huddled masses in need. It still doesn’t make sense to me, honestly.

My mom was chasing a wild goose with that career push. There was no hope of me pursuing a vocation or calling that required me to give up sex for life. We’ve seen how well that goes for a majority of celibates. I had that famous Sports Illustrated swimsuit poster of Paulina Porizkova on my wall throughout my teenage years, as well as a number of Marilyn Monroe portraits. Lots of Playboy and Penthouse under my mattress, same as most Gen X dudes in the 80’s. Fat chance I was gonna give up women. No way.

More importantly, why force priests to take vows of celibacy, repressing an irrepressible human impulse?

I could go into a whole diatribe in the long tango between faith and sex, but that’s another row to hoe, and I’ve got miles ahead.

Continued…

*Compiled from September 15, 2020