Riffin' On Fountainhead's Feral Folly

“God is spirit, and his worshippers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.” John 4:24

Given the nature of the reconditioning which takes place at the level of the psyche when one turns away from the inherited, general cultural world towards a religious-spiritual system, a reconditioning which sees one rooting their habitual-actionable perspectives in the “opulence of Infinity” or the “grandeur of God’s goodness” as opposed to modalities of dependence which acknowledge the finite nature of the very things humans actually are dependent on to sustain their biological activities, it really need be forcibly stated that devotees of the Father, particularly the newly awakened, seek Him not only in “spirit” (potentiality; the unmanifest) but also in “truth” (…the manifest). Because of our cultural upbringing, at least here in the West, we tend to see the meaningful problems facing the community as meaningfully separate from the very individuals in the community at their deepest levels of causality; global warming has nothing to do with our spiritual trajectory as souls, we think, nor our psychological states…and even if it did, we would assume that we’re the ones hopelessly conditioned by it rather than vice-versa…even though in the presented frameworks we’re supposedly the singular cause of it…something funny is happening there…

                It’s the truth that the universal truth presented by all of the world traditions of the day…of human history… is that  all problems of the world are in deference to some sort of meaningful lack in accrued wisdom within those meaningfully/actually encountering said problems…that it always boils down to the sinner and his performance of the act of ignorance/lack/sin…that it starts and ends with our personal development…and that we will develop rather than teetering off the edge and ending this thing for the other 8 billion of us…

                Given this rabid sort of optimism… people who are offered a glimpse of the Truth, no matter how lucid or confused that glimpse is… have a tendency to then motion towards what is culturally regarded as mania, and they tend to leave the moment at hand behind entirely. Be Here Now is a grounding mantra for such types; they’re instinctively motioning towards only seeing God in “Spirit”…in the unmanifest…unwittingly…because they are so used to habitually regarding the manifest as so fallow and off-kilter, and their plans regarding any powerful blessings they’ve been gifted typically entail big systemic changes to the world at hand…

                Certain people really suffer for the ecstatic religious experiences they spontaneously encounter. It flips their lids, and when those sorts of awakenings happen…it’s deeply embarrassing to those tending to the general condition of lids the culture over…their work is like that of the money lenders in the temple…the transcendental Christ is here to flip over their cognitive tables and doom their cultural Towers of Babel; the psychedelic experience in a context that is yet effectively utopian. Or just simply spontaneous ecstatic experience…if you’ve ever encountered both, they’re indistinguishable physically, and I don’t know that there’s been many opportunities culturally for people to ever reliably relay as much…

                Hilariously, all of this cynicism…it somehow drops off entirely. One of the weirder implications of synchronicity is that whoever is in charge of it could theoretically ensure that you don’t cross paths with entire phenomena… such as all of those prickly people who have not yet started affirming/actively buying into the society (for the most part…you still have to do charity and stuff)… the cynical… people who eat at McDonald’s, mosquitoes, nu-metal types….there is a potential reprieve! But no, the entire world changes.

                The entire world transforms in a way absolutely unfathomable before said transformation happens. After said transformation…all becomes clearly fathomable, and life a joy…I don’t know how much change a society that is doing well can actually display/project…especially during these times, but apparently the ride is bumpy enough that this thing can yo-yo violently on us…

                I’ve seen something akin to a world that is hurdling towards disaster…and not to scar any potential future therapists, this was the foundational culture transmitted to me in my childhood…it was a happy childhood…and it was a personal experience of reality…just something a child is going through entirely undetected,… and I’ve seen said world recede, as well as a somewhat vagrant yet utterly affluent and deeply respected religion, the Catholic Church, get corrected along the way…and in adulthood partially because of work I did cultivating my perspective on how God works or could possibly work… saw it all finally click into place for the first time ever…and the rest has been history/me prattling on endlessly…

                I’ve literally seen the open-eyed, day in and day out… look there’s John from the bank buying his groceries over there!...end of Hell/some looming apocalypse, and the rolling in of “the afterlife is actually eternity and we have access to eternal principles on this side of life and we’re basically already in a place where the pleasures of the highest levels of bliss are within reach because we were using concepts and words from this side of life…and if you can dream it, across time you can build it…and it turns out because we got the numbers in society right…somebody else is going to build it and release it for you at a respectable price point…”

                Just to show you where my heart really lies…I’ve seen the world where the adults didn’t understand politics at all and even the priests were framing the authorities as a bit devilish (relative to them)…the world where lawyers and politicians and judges were inherently dastardly gunslingers from the Wild West era, as opposed to our friends/spiritual brethren. By some silly miracle, reaching across the aisle, and trying to validate everyone around/on the map….the abstract social roles on the map…always somehow makes it click into place entirely for any generation.

                To put it in terms of today’s passage, I grew up in a social world in which stimulus…universal stimulus…which is what today’s passage regards as “spirit”… was not necessarily “God”. It could also be “the devil”…and so you were encouraged to at that point run everything through your personal judgement system…and things got whacky from there… mostly you’d just walk away from strong senses of a universal stimulus…into your own head…and from there you were on your own…

                The only reason you’d ever construe “stimuli” as “devilish” is that…obviously you need to tame your flight or fight… you need to know what proper action is methodically, in terms of utilitarian ethics, in addition to knowing that ultimately what is right always entails turning an open ear to the universe and asking what should be done at some level, and to parse the latter as if a simple motion toward doing it isn’t enough, that it entails these wild loyalties to specific incantations and methodologies the Catholics are circulating seems disastrous, as well as probably an unintended consequence of unrelated dogmatic moves they made so as to be able to operate, unintended assertions of supremacy they’d certainly never die on the hill defending… yet culturally I’ve seen the church double down on these practices year and in and year out in the most wildly unexpected ways when glimpsed from outside the day/context at hand…a clear indicator of anomaly at the level of universal stimuli which then saw them as the butt of some sort of cosmic framing…

                They’re lousy with that. It used to scare me. Say you’re spontaneously awakening to these things and dreaming up ways of accomplishing what you need to…and time and time again the signs in the tea leaves…time and time again the flies frenzy around them…

                But to get back to the mechanics of it all… to regard time itself, and what it potentially could manifest, or what it already has, as anything other than “God”…quite simply… is the only sin. It’s ignorance manifest. Everything is God. Understanding that in a non-ignorant way is a grind… the only way out of sin is to take up said grind…and that ultimately was the message of Christ, and is the message of all religious traditions. It warrants not the format that is the essay (moreso the idiom), but the essay is great for reprogramming… one’s…self…

                To act like there’s potential in there for anything other than God… opens the door to the notion that across time things don’t resolve as they should. Time as a potency for spiritual will…material life as a potency of Spirit meant to accomplish specific ends… all transgressions against the Self, and believe me, we’re wracking them up…suffering is horrendous… are utterly made right by such a cultural system. This is already manifest… you think like this, and your life works. To surrender not only your life but the frameworks of all life…the universe itself…towards the end of the spiritual mission…to equate it with God’s will/plans…with God even… is to see things as they really are. It’s to complete the mental problem quietly presented when we asserted that there was, in fact, a Creator.

                History itself has just been the spirit lifting up individuals. Individuals have faced time, and as they have passed through it they have truly done some wonderful things. Suddenly this widespread cynicism in every high school classroom the country over today seems bafflingly out of reach. All of these kids who don’t have a strong sense of what happened before them or that they need to get right with the generations of Man who preceded them, because their hearts recognize at some level the utter mutuality of every human who has ever lived…

                Maturation…actualization…well-being… it amounts to seeing the truth of the lives other Americans…other people…have lived. It’s rare, short of our families…or closest loved ones…that we get past that veil that makes our neighbors seem like faceless cattle…and which suggest we’re largely a stupid and normal people…rather than divine… it’s rare that we see others…as they really are. To do as much entails radically shifting what we think about ourselves…and where we are postured relative to the Most High.  I personally blame the idea of Hell or the devil or cosmic duality… we don’t have the utter conviction, culturally, that everything is, the grace of God triumphant…or that experiencing as such takes perspective/some real work/some effective ontological posturing.

        The truth is, the highest achievable form of beauty is at hand…the world as it is stretches far beyond even my expectations in regards to its potency, the impact of its Love/Bliss… to experience the light takes worshipping God “in Spirit” and in “truth”; in the unmanifest, and the manifest. Which is an action on behalf of Devotees, although it grows to be a rather passive one akin to simply…perception…across time… first comes a period of associating all with Heaven/Loving bliss. What’s left far behind along the way are the divisions the very notion of sin every quietly reinforced…which runs as deep as assuming anybody could ever have it all the worse or better than you (for longer than a temporary period of time…and if they do…help them!)…

It applies to the animal and plant life kingdoms, as well. We live in a world of an unglimpsed mutuality, the victory of the equality amongst lifeforms, as well as a victory on the front of quality of life, for the most part…

Mortal life, encapsulated