I Believe in... The Buzzcocks

 

on the nature of Belief... and sex and drugs and rock n roll,

  

      I was born in Australia in 1965 and raised in a typically working class irish Roman Catholic environment. they did a good job on me, making a true believer of me even though (maybe because?) their materiel was obviously gobbledgook, even to my infant self. It didn't matter. It took a lot of hard work and good drugs to undo the handiwork of my environment, ably assisted by the magical workings of Franciscan Friars followed by the rigid discplinarianism of the Christian Brothers. Our family just spontaneously stopped attending mass. I had been to mass, every Sunday of my life, and one week when i was fifteen we just didn't go. No one mentioned it at the time, we probably didn't want to put the jinx on what we considered genuine good news. But even I found it passing strange that silence continued for decades between my parents and their offspring. There was shallow acknowledgement amongst myself and my siblings of the new world order, it seemed we were all essentially left to our own devices to process what the new state of affairs meant as far as our self identity was concerned. The whole world was changeing, it was 1980, the innocence of the 60's, and my spectacularly idyllic childhood of the 70's were done. The world as i had known it was about to be rent asunder by the siren call of Sex and Drugs and Rock n Roll.

 

    I think the fall from the garden can be looked at as a psychological allegory for the process children go through en route from their initial state of wholeness and grace, (adam AND eve) to the fully self conscious, gender appropriate, fig leaf wearing egoic selves; rock bottom.  The myth of the hero/fool's journey and mystical techniques; both now available, thanks to the miraculous process that is the internet, with more varieties and flavours than Heinz; provide a map and a horse, that other wise people have found both solace and joy in, as a means of understanding and taking what joy may come from the journey we must make all by ourselves. Hopefully managing to escape from the prison we can become trapped in where we fully identify with the ego identity our consciousness unit constructed to facilitate our journey Home; through the gate of death, to the conscious reckoning, the reckoning of consciousness, that will finally bar all self deception and allow us to see and understand our true progress on that journey back to pure consciousness. Will there be implications? dependent on whether we have travelled the tao, (a tao, a way) back to origin points wholeness and grace. Who knows? But the accumulated wisdom of humankind; an ongoing intergenerational effort resulting in a shadow being who truly knows the hearts of men; has found that to choose a way, has been conducive to harmonious relations with ourselves and others.                                                                    Shamans, and others selected and trained specfically to venture to realms of the spectrum of reality which lie beyond the ken of our fivefold interpretation of that spectrum, all agree in their own way that story and symbol are the tools par excellence for leading a suitably primed candidate towards choosing to have direct experience of the Organic Light, a knowing that allows no doubt about the existence of god like archetypal energies and forces. Though, the one true creator God, is conspicous only by his total absence. He becomes superfluous almost. And one may always choose to go 'beyond', or even 'beyond the beyond', if they have maxed out on hierarchies of light, but i digress.
     I sometimes think, that like ego, belief is best used as a tool. For  short term use  of specific purpose. Gather the experiences as data, put the tools away, with the pocket calculator. Consult and allow the sub conscious to do its thing processing your experiences. Try to learn the language, in which it whispers its secrets and listen and attempt to reconcile the accounts that it brings through symbol and story, both internal and external, and integrate them back to a new state wholeness and grace. Sounds simple. Consciousness has no permanent boundaries. Temporary vessels and factors of constraint freely chosen, as much as that is an actual thing. it seems like free will, but maybe illusory. maybe.