Praying Over Food

You, pancakes with egg and bacon in between; you, double espresso from Carmo de Minas; you, delicious bolo de fubá with crunchy, sugary crust on top; you, shot of sparkling water: my belly is your Heaven, for I see you for the energy you are. Let me bow my head over you and pray, and my prayer will be a contract to use the energy you give me to do Good. Your destiny is a gesture of kindness; a timely moment of self-restraint; a smile; that hidden extra effort that I put into Loving Life and my Fellow Human Beings will come from the energy that each of you provide me with now, at breakfast.

So worry not, oh food of Foods, oh energy of Energy, oh cooperative vibrations of the celestial orchestra grouped in your respective forms like the drums, strings, and trumpets at the gates of the Kingdom! See that my teeth are the Pearly Gates and my body is the karma burning furnace in which your tastiness, your Love, will know both an End and a Beginning, and that you shall be dispatched, post-haste, through Acts directed at the King of Kings, the God of Gods, as flowers of celebration at the wedding of opposing houses from which the Prince of Peace will be born.

Amen.

Vibrations & Silence

At the horizon where a

Now larger than

you might

imagine

meets a tomorrow

beyond Belief,

Saint Truth awaits you.

He will appear at

the doorway,

heart-shaped,

and you'll say,

no way, I don't believe it,

how obvious, how

can it be?

You will be the silence

digesting your own questions

into quarks and quasars

beaming back upon yourself

and when you are the silence

your body is not of skin

and forms exposed by light

but vibrations:

You are either music,

noise, or static within

your hitherto silent eternity;

but it depends on so many things

and it is a formidable task

that the sharpest logic

should shake hands with Truth

and not need to see its blood

to know it lives.

What I've Learned from Dogs

I was a cross country runner at Cornell University from 2001 to 2003. The city of Ithaca New York, where you will find Cornell, is beautiful because of its rather balanced relationship with the natural environment. In Ithaca, you will find waterfalls, gorges, hills, woods, and Cayuga lake, among other wonders of nature. And as a runner I had the special opportunity to know these places in the intimate way that only running, hiking, or biking can offer.

Our team would leave from Bartel's Hall and follow one of many paths that covered anywhere between 5 and 30 kilometers. There was one path that was mostly pavement – relatively quiet streets shaded by trees lining the road, along which there were modest, middle and upper middle class homes with yards and dogs and so forth. On this running loop (I forget the name of it now), there was this one house in particular that had two dogs and they would always, without fail, dart out of where ever they were and race toward the street where were were running. And they would be barking madly.

A dog's bark betrays the emotions and/or intentions of the dog. Whereas the dog may simply want to show that it is excited or happy, the bark, at least to the human ears, sounds the same as the bark of an angry attack or a threat.

I remember the first runs, responding with fear, thinking that the dogs would come chase after me and bite me, which is not unheard of. It took me a few times to not be afraid or to respond with my own “bark” to show that they weren't going to psychologically dominate me, and they would either retreat or stop barking and run more calmly behind me until they determined they were far enough away from their home or running with me simply wasn't as fun without the barking.

My self-awareness evolved considerably, I'd say, because of these dogs. After conquering my reaction and indeed rendering it a conscious response to their barking, I still had a sensation of annoyance. “Why do these dogs always come barking every time we run by?” I thought to myself each time. And this irritated me. I thought that the dogs were irritating me and felt that irritation evolve on its own, conquering my opinions of dogs in general, even, creating limits within my heart and mind, reinforcing the feeling of irritation with the labor of constructing arguments to the end of validating my reaction.

The truth is, the dog is a dog. Dogs bark. That is a part of what they do. I don't underestimate the dog's sensitivities and capacities. Indeed, I am sure that the dog has an awareness equal to mine, even though I could not tell you how it is equal and in what ways a dog, specifically, is aware and spiritual and so forth. But I believe it.

I am a human being. At least in terms of rational thinking, the dog and I are not equals. From the human stand point, it is less the dogs responsibility to stop barking and “behave” then it is my responsibility to not permit the dog to have the power of irritating me. In the end, it is my emotional response. Correction: it was my emotional reaction that the dog elicited.

Much later, years later, it occurred to me that the special feature of my being is that I can train myself to respond in a manner that protects my peace, my happiness, or whatever it is I wish to preserve. This is the difference between reacting and responding. The dog was reacting to our passing by. The dog had no reason to change his reaction, no reason to fashion a response. I did. My reaction was my problem and, as a human being, I had to do the intellectual labor of reshaping that reactive energy so that it did not perturb me.  If my emotions bother me, it is my responsibility to examine why and see what I can I can do to alter my response before I blame whom or whatever elicited said reaction.

"This, I think, is the definition of 'response-ability'", barked the dog day after day to me -- I just didn't understand, at the time.

The Meaning of Life III: Competition and Institutional Goals

In which competitive sport does the competitor wake up and complete everyday?  Outside of abstractions of what "training" is, the answer is, "no sport has a competition everyday".  In the same way, why would our entire economic system, which has significant influence over our politics and thus inter-national communications, be based on competition?

Our political system should be based entirely on cooperation.  In the same way that a teacher must acknowledge and address the level of a student and his or her learning preferences, so too must a international community evaluation its constituents in terms of the "hidden curriculum" which is to Love.  I know it may sound absurd to say that a Nation's curriculum is to Love, but it is True, regardless of its silly, non-political sounding humanity.  It is true because all Peoples seek to survive, and in order to survive one must be well-verse in Love, especially when those People seek to survive in a diverse global community such as ours today.

Now, this means that any Nations with seemingly everlasting historical conflict need to invest, politically and economically, in the resolution of that conflict.  Institutions should conscientiously, openly, and by design have this as their end.  And this is not the responsibility of just the nation with the conflict, but of all nations.

So, if one nation does not have the means to resolve its conflicts due to the fact that it feels it must, first are foremost, compete in the global market, then that nation should be pardoned from competition in the global market and all other nations should contribute to the operations of that nation, so long as that nation focuses, for whatever duration of time necessary, on the resolution of its crippling conflicts.

The Meaning of Life

The purpose of Life is to Love Well. Thus, in ourselves and our surrounding, will we witness Meaning bloom like a fruit come to sustain we who husband the Land of Love, sacrificing its pulp to perpetuate our good cause.

To Love Well means that we acknowledge the gift that is our capacity to love and explore its magnitude, with both a scientific and religious spirit. Scientific insofar as we test it, we dare to hypothesize (e.g. that it is infinite) and then endeavor to prove that it, in fact, is as we hypothesized or is not. Religious insofar as we resurrect love -- even when it seems dead and gone, even when it seems like it never was -- with the breath of our belief and the tenderness of our humanity.

When I say that the purpose of Life is to Love well, it is to accept this gift of Love, first; to know it, second; and through knowing it, allow ourselves to be changed by it so as to not kill the enemy, not trespass on other students of Love, but to destroy our very own mal-constructed knowledges of what Love is.

This day we may not see as easily with the imagination of the mind, but indeed, with the heart we are obliged to hold fast to this vision.

The purpose of Life is to Love well. In order to to this we must study Love and in order to do this we must endeavor to first and foremost love ourselves, for in ourselves, we will find every law of Nature and of Man, every theorem of mathematics, every philosophy of every philosopher, and so forth. In ourselves we will find the light and The Light, the flesh and the bone and the Spirit and the Soul and in there, somewhere, we will find what all men, since the dawn of consciousness, have intuited to be greater than which any single man can imagine: that wondrous capacity to Love, that capacity that knoweth no limits save for our own failure to act, our own unwillingness to believe (which is to say, act with the love of a mature heart, even when the mature mind counsels otherwise).

Be not shepherded by Temptation, but by Love, and only Love.  And if thy art shepherded by Temptation, it is to learn the difference between Temptation and Love.  Once the difference is distinguished, that phase of your growth is over and you should endeavor to release temptation and this is also done with Love, for Temptation has taught you.

Loving well is not easy and in our efforts we are sure to fail. In this cycle of believing, trying, failing, we are left with the final gesture of loving ourselves again, despite failure; which is to say, believing in Love and its eternity, despite any quantity of empirical results suggesting otherwise.

To Love holistically is to recruit all orders of thinking, including that Highest Order Thinking which we tend to believe is preserved for difficult problems of a mathematical, philosophical, economical, theoretical, academic, even moral sort sometimes … when, in simple fact, this high order thinking is nothing more than that faculty to Love and the intensity and rigor often required to do so, well.

"Endeavor to Love well", is the proposition here, friends.  And if you do so already, endeavor to do so to a degree you cannot presently imagine; the whole World of Man, and the whole Universe of Energy will conspire in your favor.  For in this Life, Love is the Alpha and the Omega.

Jimmy and the Angry Birds

Jimmy went walking at the nearby University a little while ago. He soon found himself being attacked by birds. He thought to himself, “what's up with this? Why are you attacking me, bird?” Of course, he said this only in his head and, of course, the bird did not respond.

Or, at least, the bird did not respond in the same language that Jimmy used to ask the question.

Unable to deduce why the bird was attacking him, Jimmy continued walking in the direction he wanted to go, for he thought, “I need to go this way to get to where I want to go.” But the bird's attack only grew more fierce and soon, Jimmy was running as fast as he could away from the bird.

It occurred to Jimmy as he was running fast away that there was a nest there on the ground and the path he took to get to where he wanted to go took him pretty close to the nest, which belonged to the bird. The path did not belong to Jimmy, but he supposed it was well within his rights to walk where he walked, the way he walked. Plus, the bird did not have any signs up, nor did the bird speak the language of Jimmy's preference, which was the lingua franca of Human Beings; very particular to Human Beings, indeed.

Jimmy later realized that he was too close to the bird's nest and that the bird was right to defend the area around the nest. Jimmy apologized within himself, as if the message would, somehow, eventually make it to Bird. He said, “Sorry Bird. I didn't know you were protecting your babies. My bad.”

Having heard Jimmy recount the tale of the Angry Bird, I was compelled to analyze it. Firstly, the bird was able to communicate to Jimmy in a way that got Jimmy to do what the bird wanted; namely, to keep Jimmy away from the nest. Jimmy,without knowing it, succeeded in communicating to the bird that he understood neither the bird's language nor message, and it was in response to this ignorance that the bird got more fierce on Jimmy.

The second observation is this: the Bird is not always so aggressive. Indeed, the Bird can be seen flying around peacefully, eating things, caring for her fledglings, standing on branches or electrical wires singing for no apparent-to-humans reason. The Bird does, however, possess a violent side, and this side is installed in the Nature Software Bird as the application Angry Bird. Any part of Nature using the Software Bird will possess the app Angry Bird otherwise the part of Nature operating as Bird will have a low survival rate (it seems that Nature is interested in Survival – this may have something to do with the song of the bird on the branch or electrical wire).

In the same way, any organism born of Nature will possess an Angry X software designed for the very same purpose: to survive. Not that it is the only Nature App contributing to the survival of the Natural Being, but it is one that has proven successful for the period of time Living Beings have been around.

Now, I daresay that an organism is not just a Single Form organism, like an amoeba (single cell) or a bird (single body) but a society of human beings, too, is in the category of Natural Living Organisms (NLO). As such, it too has all the codes and special apps found in Nature. So, while not all of its parts may express the same range of emotions, behaviors, interests, etc., indeed, the collection as a whole, once it is full and alive, will have, among all other codes and apps, a member or group of members who are the Angry Birds, so to speak. They will have the Angry code, they will be the defense mechanism of the NLO and, like the bird, when they are engaged, they will not yield unless their terms are met, one way or another. Their presence is natural, their function is natural and fueled by a most primitive Purpose, and there are only a few ways to stop them:

1. take another path to where you want to go, do not consider that path your own, forfeit your “right” to take whatever path you want, or;
2. simply run because, in the end, your goal was not to awaken the angry bird, nor to injure the angry bird or her children, but simply to achieve another end, or;
3. engage in the bird's aggressive physical dialogue decisively and silence the bird once and for all; and don't feel badly about it when it is over, for you are a part of Nature.

An Interpretation of Biblical Miracles

You won't understand anything in the Bible until you know what the book seeks to tell you about. It is a Creation story, but not of the physical world, of Life. And the Creation story presented in the Bible is not and does not seek to be scientific. Indeed, its purpose is precisely to call your attention to an aspect of Life that cannot be explained sufficiently with the language of science.

You will not understand anything that Jesus says until you accept certain premises about who He is and where He comes from. The idea is that Jesus is God incarnate. Before you go and affirm that this is impossible, know that this affirmation is born of your mind, and that your mind has been molded, trained in a way. This molding and this training is not necessarily complete and you might want to practice some mental flexibility by considering hypotheses which, at first, seem quite unlikely and seeing what these hypotheses produce within you if you follow them to their conclusions. You will find that text like the Bible work in this way: they render you the proof of the Nature of the Truth they profess. You either accept or do not. You either put in the effort to understand or do not. You either believe or do not.

To accept a premise and to believe that it is true are two very different things. To accept a premise and see where it goes is simply responsible intellectualism. It is also respectful to he/she/they who created the story and/or argument. To some humans of this modern era, accepting the requisite premises of Sacred Texts is an exercise in intellectual humility for many are exorbitantly proud of human achievements until now. And, almost all of these achievements lay outside the domain of Faith. They seem to provide a view of Life such that Faith and her stories seem lies better suited for gullible children.

Recalling that Jesus Christ is God incarnate will help you to contextualize any and everything that comes out of his mouth. Remember that He speaks of the Kingdom of God and that his purpose is, in effect, to remind men of spiritual values in a serious way. He does not address men and woman as the common man does (an imperfect creature of mortal flesh to another imperfect creature of mortal flesh), but as a perfect, eternal living spirit addressing other perfect, eternal living spirits ( the Aramaic "aba" was used in the sense; see Dr. Errico Rocco). Jesus does not think of Life as the common man thinks of Life. He does not think of Death in the common way, either. He is here to talk about the Eternal. He is here to talk about God and the truth of God and everything that he does revolves around this singular purpose. He is not just talking about this stuff, either. He is living it.

Finally, the Bible is a powerful argument not only for the existence of God, the Kingdom of God, and the relationship between common man and the divine, but for the simple Value of Belief and the need for the awesome Power of Belief to be aligned with something that is Eternally, Fundamentally and perfectly divine, in the human flesh, ergo Jesus Christ.

The Body and Blood of Christ

The Eucharist/The Lord's Supper/Holy Communion

Bread is a chemical substance. Those chemicals, when examined under a microscope, are molecules and the molecules have atoms. When we look at the bread this closely, we see that is is mostly what appears to be “empty space”. The nuclei of the atoms are so small and far apart, like the space between the sun and a planet. If we were to see it with our naked eyes that way, we would not think that it was bread, nor would we see the color of it (it would not reflect light) nor would we perceive, with any other physical sensation, that it was the bread we know bread to be.

Scientists today say that bread is energy. I mean, the say that everything is energy. They say that even the nucleus of the atom, which was the smallest physical thing for a long time, is also actually just another form of energy. No actually solid stuff. Yet it is so easy to grab a piece of bread, eat it, taste it, and then say, after we ate it, “I just ate bread”. Despite Science's fanciful description of physical and chemical stuff, there is no argument about the reality of the experience of eating bread. The experience had effects like touch, taste, and so forth. Certain effects can be measured the the human organism itself. But can we feel how many miles 4 slices of bread will permit us to walk? No, this would take a more holistic analysis of what bread, according to chemistry and physics is. We would have to interpret bread as a type of energy and not simply as the bread the human organism so unhesitatingly accepts as Real.

Understanding that Bread is Energy To Do Stuff is the the same Variety of Reasoning employed in talking about God and Jesus. Bread is energy, and bread, from some perspectives, from certain microscopes and eyes, is a miracle. When you stop shoving it in your face along with other stuff (the substances of which are also unknown to you) and you actually sit and contemplate that bread – that plain old boring bread – you find that you are wrong: the bread is neither plain nor old nor boring. You find that it is molecules you can't see, energy that you can taste and burn and use to move your physical body. The bread gives your physical body Life. Seeing the truth about bread might help you see the truth about what Christ.

The same logic is used to understand the blood. The body and blood constitute our physical presence here. What we do, what we consume, and how we use that energy we consume and seed our environments with that energy after it has passed through our human organism.

Water into Wine

Who wants water when you can have wine? I met a guy in the Italian Alps, in a small town called Chamois in the state of Val d'Aosta. He was 73 and the only guy who was born and raised up there in that village which, when I was there, had all of about 13 people. He said he never drank water. Only milk and wine. Because he was a man.

Now, Jesus turned water into wine. How did he do it? Jesus said, “look at the water.” Then he said, “what is it?” You thought about where it came from. A fountain somewhere. And then continued thinking about the origin of the water in the fountain, maybe even the fountain, itself. The water came from a mountain on which it rains occasionally. The rain came from a cloud and the cloud from the ocean and the water from the ocean got lifted up to the sky and turned into a cloud because of the heat of the sun and some wind and air pressure and a few other of Nature's phenomena. The water as two constituent molecules. It is soft and seems to have pretty much no flavor. Who made the water? Why do I know to drink it? Why is it so good for me? I think when you understand the water, and then you drink it and feel how real it is, you also feel how real Realness is (in a Platonic or even Heidegerian sense) and it isn't what you thought it was. You original idea of Real was a fraction of what is known today and what is known today is yet a fraction of the Whole. The Whole Real Truth is way, way, realer than what we are used to, that it is so hard to describe ... understandably, then, it is hard to believe.

This truth is ten thousand times more intoxicating than wine. This is the truth of Jesus Christ.

The Fish and the Bread

Soldiers are sitting around, starving. Dude named Jesus comes around and tells his friends, “get two fish and five pieces of bread 'cause we're gonna feed these guys.” They're like, “no way, bro.” Jesus is like, “Yeah way.”

Imagine yourself there. Hungry as hell. Living in a time in which there is a guy who some people actually believe is the Son of God. Like, God in the Flesh. You might not believe it, sure. But there are dudes around, rational, sane human beings, who believe it. You try to fight it off, but you can't help but be at least a little bit influenced by your environment. You have to keep on telling yourself, “this is Jesus guy can't be for real. I don't believe it.”

But then you see the first guy handling the fish. He is delicate with it. He takes such a small piece. Thissoldier is emaciated, shivering with hunger, looking like if he doesn't get half that fish, old dude is gonna die. But he takes just like a lick of the fish. And then when the bread comes, he pretty much just touches the bread and then licks his fingers. Licks his fingers like the taste on them was gonna save his life. All the guys do this and eventually, but the time the bread and the fish get to you, there is still like the entire fish and the entire pieces of bread and all the dudes in front of you are smiling and talking now. They aren't as grumpy as before. Not even as weak and famished as before. They are lit up. Maybe the moon is out, shining on them. You don't know. You have your eyes on the barely fed faces of five thousand soldiers. Your disbelief is dissolving in the truth of the light of their mood, their smiles, their camaraderie.

You, too, lick the fish and graze your fingers on the bread, then lick your fingers like there were endless noodles coming out the tips of them. Jesus noddles. "Fake". "Fictitious", according to your old way of seeing things, according to empiricism (or what you thought it was) but empirically, you are passing the fish, passing the bread, smiling, talking. The fish and the bread are the occasion that invite loving, even when there is almost nothing.  This is the light and when two or more emit, give or basque in it, there you will find the love of Christ, the presence of God.