I'm still freaking on Jung's quote about religion being a person or group's defense against an experience of God. I'm thinking that if I could figure out my defense system or systems, then I could figure out what i'm acting like God is. I've always wanted to know. Just color me curious.
I'm thinking that attacking me with material that might cause me to wanna murder them outright and be done with it would have a god-like place in my life. I'm fairly sure I would padlock that tendency and codify it in such a way that nobody on Earth could get me that riled. But, they have. It's just a fact I have to live with, and yet nobody knows.
My desire for other people to obey or at least respect my rules of conscience could get me killed one day. It's much more insidious than being killed by a jealous husband when I'm 99 years old. Heaven can't wait.
I don't think I'm the only human being in the world who truly wants other people to obey their subjective rules of conscience. It seems universal to me. Maybe homo sapiens have a neuron receptor for it, and some people occasionally learn how to pick the lock.
That seems like a weird thing to write because I'm perfectly aware that it's an unlearning that does the trick rather than the other way around. Unlearning seems simple at first nod. Withdraw the emotional support offered to the false gods. That's what rules of conscience amount to. REM dreams that get labeled out of sheer boredom and ennui. When is enough enow?
People decide to look at certain events as precursors to the pain they're trying to keep from their door. It's by making this very effort that they meet their fate on the road they took to avoid it. Blinded by the light, I learned to sleep in weird places that nobody would even bother to look for a wounded animal. I lived for a long time like a wounded animal. Why would I not? It wasn't a joke. It still isn't.
I keep wondering if I first grokked the concept of hiding from the time this kid from New Jersey came down to North Carolina in the summers and stayed with his aunt to get him away from the big city where his parents went to work. My family moved a lot when I was a kid. No matter where I found myself I was always the new guy. I was very friendly with anybody who showed any interest. Why would I not? I was the new guy. I never knew the pecking order that had been established before I came to town.
His name was Bobby. He was visiting his aunt and was a stranger in a strange land, and I was just a stranger whose family had moved there because of my father's job. The only thing I really remember about him is that he had stolen some Old Gold non-filtered cigarettes from his aunt,, and he wanted to know if I wanted to smoke a cigarette with him.
I was ten years old or so. Nobody in my family smoked tobacco. I guess my curiosity got the best of me, and I wanted to see what the big fuss was about. I said okay, how do we do it? He told me we couldn't do it in the open. His aunt might find out and beat his butt. We had to hide and keep it a secret.
There wasn't much hiding to it. He led me to this shallow ditch at the edge of an open patch of ground my family used to keep a garden. There were other houses in the area, and the place we "hid" could probably be seen from the windows of any of those houses. He fished out a crumbled pack of cigarettes with around five cigarettes in it, he got two out of it, and handed me one.
He lit the cigarettes with a big kitchen match, and we squatted down in the ditch conspiratorially and puffed away. I think we tried to blow some smoke rings. We didn't inhale that I recall. Suddenly, his aunt called out her back door for him to come home, and he jumped up and ran toward the sound of her voice. That was the last time I ever saw Bobby. In reflection, "Bobby" might not have been a young boy, or even human.
Smoking that Old Gold cigarette with this weird-talking kid from New Jersey was one of the most exciting things that had happened to me as a boy up to that time. I discovered that I really liked hiding to do something I wasn't supposed to be doing.
I didn't smoke anymore cigarettes until I was almost eighteen years old, but I took to hiding and doing things I wasn't supposed to like a duck takes to water. I needed to know for myself about anything I got warned off of. If I went off and found me a hiding place, I could do whatever it was, found out whether I thought it was good or bad, and that made me feel sure of myself, whereas other kids seemed to not really know.
When I feel like I have the straight skinny on something because I've found out for myself through experience what it means to me, I have a tendency to harden to change. It's the bane of my ex-is-tense.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
