Sunday 29 June 2008

Sympathy for The Devil

I have been struggling with my inner Alf Garnett . Alf Garnett was the leading figure in the 1960s sitcom Til Death Do Us Part , who astounded the nation with his racist , mysoginistic and homophobic ways . He was seen as a bigot but was actually a bewildered man who could not cope with change and ranted against a world he did not recognize any more . Close to where I live , there is a Moslem mosque which causes all sorts of parking problems and when my driveway is blocked by one of the Mosque goers , I feel hate for moslems . When I am cut up by a woman driver , who are getting incredibly aggressive , I feel hate for women . When there is a gay guy in front of me ,holding me up in the supermarket I feel hate for gays . But then the guilt hits me – I shouldn't have these feelings .Society says so . The problem is that we all feel hate – the Moslem hates , women hate and gays hate , but we are supposed not to have these thoughts . We even have Thought Police now telling you what you can and cannot think . It won't work –these feelings cannot be denied and the more they are suppressed the worse the final outcome will be.

Sometimes I wish I was the Devil . He can do whatever he wants – if the Devil wants to smoke in a pub , womanise , swear , get drunk he will do it . But the best part is that he never gets punished . I think we can assume that God is ok with this as the Devil has being going since the beginning of time and nothing has been done about him . He appears to have total freedom – death, destruction , murder . Anything goes . He is guiltless and I feel jealous of this . Guilt is the most pernicious of our ' negative ' feelings .It stops us doing what we want to do and leads to repression and eventual frustration in ourselves and the world .The definition of guiltlessness would be innocence , but in our ' Alice in Wonderland ' world it is supposedly God who sees wrong but the Devil who is innocent .I do not believe in either a literal God or Devil .Our beliefs are topsy turvy – where guilt is good and innocence bad . It is Guilt where all the fear , anger and hate come from . Innocence is where Love comes from .

Tuesday 3 June 2008

All Our Yesterdays

Everything that we experience through our bodies is the past . Any object that you see takes time to reach your senses through light waves – anything you hear is received by sound waves after a short period of time . This might only take a milli-second for our senses to receive this information , but it is still in the past when your brain decodes this information . This goes for all our senses . We are literally living in the past .

Nostalgia is the sentimental yearning for the past . We mythologise our childhoods and convince ourselves that life was so much better at such and such a time . Again , we are living in the past . Our whole world is in the past . We fantasize about the future , but when we get there it is the past we see .

Philosophers talk about living in the ' Now ' . It is only through our spiritual selves can we actually do this . Our body lives in linear time seeing a past and future , but when we live in the Now , it will push us to think about the future or the past . They do not actually exist . As the old saying goes : Tomorrow never comes . This is most important for our relationships to realise that we are seeing people as they were and not as they are at this moment . We see them through our past experiences and react accordingly . It is only in the present moment , will we be able to see people in their true light and it is only in the present moment will you be able to see your true self.