Recently had a long conversation with an old college friend about their spiritual journey or whatever you wanna label it, whatever religion you wanna prescribe. Of course we’re in the Christian variant here, but it’s more buoyant to consider some sort of salvation in whatever flavors you find in the world. It’s more fun to always leave a “maybe” hanging and it’s a habit I have rather unconsciously but is essential and probably relevant here.
It was a long conversation, three hours uncomfortably to some. After all it was a span of a year and more since last contact, and a lot of it explaining how he sees how God works, how the Bible works – it was filled with long silence nods while he worked through his conception of the world.
Toward the end he confessed that he doesn’t detect any God within me – that is, if you follow his flavor of the Christian ways, you need to open yourself to God and discard yourself in order to find salvation. Which jives with the whole idea of shutting down your mind and “letting God take control” or in other terms “the Self with the capital S” since majority of one’s suffering nowadays comes from one’s thoughts – is what I believe, at least. How I phrase it. Sanitizing it from the supercharged word “God” helps I think.
But in so many words I was deigned Godless, I did not have the eternal connection, my spirit was severed, and at the time I didn’t really bother to challenge it or care. After all, earlier in the conversation I ended up stumbling through some excerpts from The Brothers Karamazov which had some darker tones to it and honestly I was feeling slightly guilty being all dark about it. I don’t like being dark if I can manage, it’s why I deleted all of this website’s contents more than a few times.
In any case, I guess I would characterize this conversation as a long transfer of knowledge to where I would offer a possible alternative and my friend on the other end wouldn’t entertain it or couldn’t entertain it. And that’s fine, whatever works for you. Maybe my alternatives were but cavalier reflections on Christian theology and weren’t worth entertaining. I tried, but I didn’t really need to express anything at all anyway.
Because people will, of course, choose and sustain what they want to believe. In some ways I admired the confidence by which he thinks he has the world pinned and understood and conveyed. Maybe he does. After all, he’s following the Bible to the letter. And after all, it’s not like some of the things he was saying seemed outright wrong. I could find agreeableness with a good portion of it.
I got off the phone feeling all guilty and unsettled about my depressive depictions from the novel or that maybe perhaps I am damned and, in the larger scope, the irony of the conversation. Here we were talking about God but there was no heavenly component to it at all. There was no joy, Good News™ about it – it was a contemplation on our shared sinned state and how everyday we falter, the typical defeatist Christian mindset embedded into its origins.
So I went to sleep a little bothered and woke up a little bothered more wondering what am I missing. Why am I unsettled? Maybe I talked too much, which is definitely one component of it.
Sipping on a morning tea I remembered a conversation from many, many years ago. A call with a highschool friend who was trying to find the Perfected Form of Christianity – the one with the Latin Mass, making sure all the rituals worked and had an execution immaculate. Some grasping at Traditionalism™. And as he kept searching, he got more depressed about it, more abject, and all the churches are ruined and we’re all damned. Alcohol became the cure.
Immediately a parallel showed itself: as soon as one finds themselves convinced of how the world works, how things are, taking speculations as rigid facts rather than things to entertain – as soon as one falls into that game, it seems to be the path to misery. How can one possibly contain the incomprehensible anyway?
I felt bad about being, in the eyes of my friend, severed from the light, and that somehow The Creator is separate from us in his frameworks, and all of these others things for which, in a moment, I bothered to entertain to keep the conversation going, because otherwise when I offered that maybe angels contain both good and evil or beyond it, or that maybe it isn’t this way or that, it would essentially be a standstill – so I felt bad about it, but then realized that although we were talking about “Higher Things”, it’s no different from any other conversation.
It was the same tendency to forget that we all are salesmen. We’re all selling our goods, contraband or otherwise. World frameworks or otherwise. Blasphemous or otherwise. Or, of course, in one’s own view, Correct and everyone else is Damned or Just Doesn’t Get It Yet. And that the more others agree, the more one can dig into some self-assurance.
So I realized that, in a way, my friend cast me to Hell in order to save himself. In a way, by continually asserting how the world worked for him, he led me or my frameworks as sacrifice so he could sustain how he puts the world together, even if it is somber and even if we have to flagellate ourselves, which is a real shame because even if I always talk about how this world is transient and it’s something eternal that satiates, I still think it’s a long life and one may as well orient toward the joy in things, find some eternal in present, even if may be “falsehoods”.
At one point I tried to suggest some gratitude for the “meaningless” of this existence in a severed world, introduce some Transcendentalism inclination. Even if under his flavored Christian doctrine God is the source and meaning of everything, and as Ecclesiastes so underlines, everything else is vanity, what’s wrong with having a little joy about it? Ecclesiastes advised the same, didn’t he? And my friend wouldn’t comprehend having any gratitude about it at all.
And it’s not like he is intentionally doing this. A good true Christian man probably wouldn’t want to technically cast anyone to hellfire. But it’s an unconscious drive and it’s elusive and you think you’re talking logic and life logistics when it’s really just asserting your World and selling Your Goods for your own sake. It’s how most conversations work, if not all. There’s always a battle of words and if you aren’t careful you’ll get crossfire’d. Even if you think it’s a mutual-interest topic and there’s a goodwill between, like “Higher Things”.
So as soon as I realized I got peddled again, just like any other conversation, the unsettled feeling dissipated. I was blinded at the time because when it comes to “spiritual” things you think you could rise above our innate drive to assert our reality over others, but alas that’s rarely if ever the case.
And it’s interesting how one’s peddling can also be one’s doom – at least it seemed to be in this one, but I could be wrong. That is, the current issue in his framework was the difficulty in finding any of “God’s messages” in his life, something like that. Discerning between a Clear Sign and a lie. It didn’t register at the time, but it became pretty clear to me in the morning, whether you wanna label it “God’s sign” or “synchronicity” or “consciousness rising” along with “divine revelation” and any other label: we were so busy in the Certainty of The Order of Things, Souls and Spirits, Salvation and Expunging the Little Self and etc that we have deafened all resonance. Resonance.
What just resonates to you? There’s clearly no resonance in this Absolute Conception we walked through. I felt like I walked through a graveyard by the end and I felt guilty about it because maybe that was my fault. I mean, that’s how I often feel when I work through any Christian theology, honestly. All in all, it didn’t seem to be working, but who am I to say anyway? I would just be peddling my own goods.
And so while we’re talking about peddling and while I peddle to you my conception of things unconsciously or purposefully and constantly with every entry – while we are so I may as well offer that, as one’s tribulations come, so a reminder about resonance could help you find stability or the next chapter in things. That if you ever find yourself in conversations like this, ones where you’re feeling unsettled and guilty by the end – I hope you remember we are the peddlers, and you may have accidentally stumbled into some swindling.