Penance

I remember going to confession when I was a young 'aspiring' Catholic attending Catholic school and exactly what it was like. We had to go during school. We'd sit one chair apart from each other in the Chapel and wait our turn. When it was your turn, you always hoped you got the nicer priest. He had this way with people and was genuinely kind and wholeheartedly believed in what he was doing. We'd walk humbly through the door, sit behind the screen (if you were feeling particularly sinful) or just face the priest who was half asleep in his chair.

Sitting there spelling out all the sins you'd committed over the last week or so. Well, let's see. I lied about where I was going with my friend. I told mom X and Y, but I left out Z. I did bad on a test. Pretty pungent stuff at age 10!!

Afterwards you're given a penance. Say N number of Hail Mary's (squared) and you'd walk back to your place in the Chapel and say your penance.

This concept is now foreign to me. Particularly the penance part. Being a heavy believer in karma, it seems to me being given a penance is one of the following:

• An attempted preemptive strike at dodging the natural process of karma
• A mechanism to ensure punishment 
• A form of double punishment

Either way it's punishment. Which you would think works against the religion itself. Punishment means saying extra prayers. (oh come on, that's a little funny) Regardless, in no way are you taught about learning something from mistakes besides avoiding being punished. It's kind of like that statement in Office Space:

"That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled, that and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired."

This is not meant to be offensive to the Catholic religion or any religion for that matter. As previously stated, I am a firm believer in karma. But not in the sense of punishment. More in the sense of knowing myself and my actions so well that I recognize when something is happening to me that I've done to someone else before and realizing what it's like. It doesn't necessarily have to be a bad deed either.

I recall this odd instance when I was in my early 20's. I had my car broken into and the thieves tossed my purse into a ditch. A biker spotted it, picked it up and returned it to me. I have it written down somewhere, but I can't remember his name. Anyways, about 2 weeks later, I was walking on a trail through the woods and found a wallet. It belonged to someone with a name nearly identical to the person who returned my purse. It was one letter off. Well, of course I called the person and promptly brought it back.

I should probably get to a point, but I don't really have one. I'm more curious to know if anyone has a karma story or ideas about the whole penance thing. Discussions welcome...

enjoyment

There lives a dichotomy somewhere in this brain that produces a tiresome tension between desires. The desire to enjoy the Venusian side of life. Good food, arts, entertainment, socializing, music, etc. and the desire to create something of long standing value. It's like clockwork. Whenever I go off the deep end and run around living it up, this other side crops up and shakes a fist in the air beckoning me to use energy in less frivolous ways. To hunker down and manifest some lost vision into something tangible. Something to be given away.

As I'm fighting this urge through summertime, something occurred to me that has never occurred before. At least not in a way that snapped these items together. In the enjoyment is the creation of memories and that is definitely not nothing. Which lead me to thinking about the fact that one day, I will be very old. The people I know and love will also be very old. And when we're incapable of driving ourselves places and getting around with ease we still have the memories. Stories to tell grand kids and boast about with neighbors. And damn it if I don't want to have a whole slew of amazing mind movies to recall and, with any luck, feel my life was worthwhile.

Although this concept is so very simple, it managed to evade me all these years, caught somewhere between the opposing forces. It doesn't change the energy that strives to build something that really screams out what I live to say. One of these days it will come out with just the right skill and it'll be time to move onto the next wave. Whatever that may lead.

That's all I have to say right now.

Will

This interest neither ebbs nor flows
    Deposit a dime here a nickel there


  'Will' they ever collect into the same place
      in the same time
         to render a full bill 


             Some say only time 'will' tell
                or 'will' it kill
                   and destroy the 'will'

multiples with scruples

I had a rare conversation with someone yesterday. An older gentleman with a roaring sense of humor. There was a light buzz all around him and a keen energetic eye that definitely caught my affection.  Although I don't know this gentleman, he reminded me about a lot of 'stuff.'

He was describing with authority his 5 personalities and his new 6th personality which would lead him back to the real him. He said as the middle child he developed personality number 2 as a mechanism to stand out. What did that mean?

Be funny.
Tell stories.
Exaggerate.

Props for the pic

Now out of his more formative years he's testing out his quiet, serious (real) self on a new set of neighbors. Things were going really well until he invited them to a party where his old friends would be attending and know and treat him as personality 2. Funny, story telling guy.

Well, his wife asked him why he would do such a thing if he wanted to continue this new thread. He said he had no idea. Now they'd be rousing him from his quietude and hassling him about his exaggerated stories, thus blowing his 'cover.'

While the content of his story was fascinating and was told with an air of affluence that hinted that he was kidding, I still got that sense that he really wasn't. Kidding, that is. Afterwards, I debriefed with a friend who knows him far better than I who tried to convince me that he was teasing. "He's a born salesman!" he said. But still, I'm not buying it. I know what I heard behind the face that told it, or maybe I do...

Fine.

Well, what I do know, I can say from experience. I am NOT a middle child, but I did develop a certain personality to get me through the less versatile parts of life. At heart I am extremely serious about this whole life business. If you can't tell by my blog it's ALWAYS on my mind. What am I doing here, how am I growing, am I contributing to life in meaningful ways. Not to say that these things aren't fun, because they are! But on the same tack it's extremely important to me to feel that life has meaning, even if it's just by way of attributing meaning to it, whether it's "real" or "imagined."

Still there's always the wonder and there's usually the folk who prefer the funny, dramatic persona from me. I give it away because it shines back and my ego will gladly bask in it. But it lacks that real sense of depth you get from friends who know the darker shadowy self that wonders and notices the slightest measures of 'coincidence' and 'reflection' of life.

To complicate things further, the funny drama queen. She is real. And is an integral part of self, but somehow these two don't always get a long. She's always making light of the serious stories I'm telling or validating herself by others reactions to them.

Whatever.

I guess I know nothing other than they operate on such different planes it seems impossible to neutralize their discrepancies. And this older gentleman, maybe he's really onto something by testing it out on new people to be able to more 'organically' reveal his other side.

And that's all I have to say right now. I'm all ears...

something that mystic said

The mystic philosopher Georges I. Gurdjieff once suggested that the most important thing anyone ever needed to know for 'enlightenment' was that they are going to die; all wisdom would follow. In the face of our personal discontinuity, doesn't life's little consistencies begin to make more sense? For example, those 'flaws' and shortcomings of our character that never seem to change or go away. These same ones seem to refuse being cured, healed or 'improved.'

Gurdjieff called this tawdry set of consistencies our 'chief feature,' something we are identified by no matter how many changes we undergo in life. As change is accepted as a constant, it becomes evident that if there is to be anything of lasting value in our lives, we must be willing to make an investment of our time and resources to start building and sustaining and preserving it ourselves. Such are the ways the deeper outside shocks of death, loss and change can be polarized and handled with strength and will.

This whole idea of 'enlightenment' however is quite a quandry. I tend towards curiosity on the way this term is is defined by a variety of individuals. I will say, to me, 'enlightenment' is not overrated, it's misconstrued. It's more of a continuous process of improving the self by way of self knowledge and developing greater empathy for man(or woman)kind by a deeper set of knowing that insists we are all going through the same shit one way or another.

And that's all I have to say right now.