Last night, Tracy and I went to a bonfire with some naturalists, who are professionals at making the most mundane of experiences to most (a pine cone on the forest floor, the call of a bird, the shape of a cloud - all imbued with meaning and poetry) engaging.
Some of them told goose bump generating ghost stories.
One of them, an avowed atheist, who does not believe in an afterlife at all (which is itself a tricky binary, and/or gambit), worked in a nursing home where she would hear the voices of recently deceased people calling out.
She told a gripping tale of a suicide victim called up via her oiji board. Most of what she heard, she ignored. She never saw anything, like the other nurses.
Regardless, as real as everything is, reality only exists in our brain chemistry, until we resist the urge to call the brain the self.
And our brains are haunted with the relics of an eternity.
Escaping the self is an adventure we can not comprehend in our conscious minds, only be guided by the story tellers, urging us on.
And that brain creates barriers of its own, especially as you begin to escape the notion that what we think is our I is actually only the flesh, clinging to this mortal coil as if it were a life line, rather than umbilical cord.
Next year, Jerusalem. He is risen. Every being a free being.
The tales are in different languages, but the truth is there, the truth of liberty, of release, explained as best as they could.
The scariest part of all, that none of them could tell, is that there is no guarantee of anything comprehensible to us in our present state. Just the promise of a mountain top, that they themselves were building in their own experience, explaining as best they could.
This is the promise that awaits us in envisioning an economics, a world that is beyond anything we could imagine individually, on our own, but can construct, the more able we are to hear the tapping from the prison cell nearby.
I'm not that worried this year about who assumes the presidency for precisely that reason. John McCain has heard the tapping through a prison wall. If nothing else, he will oust as much insincerity and hypocrisy from his party as he can. Obama IS hope. No doubt about it.
While it makes HIllary flipping mad, now is not her time. This is not about any one individual, any one stake, taking us back to the schism between abolitionists and suffragettes.
But electing Obama represents, at the very least, a repudiation of many demons within, demons we will have to face if we are to realize the promised land. Demons we will have to let have our way with us, in the scourging of the self, faith alone helping us along.
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