Let Me Take You Down

During my time with Jenna, I was often immersed in her Christian/Catholic (I don't really know the difference), half-conservative, societally-normal family.  Certain instances and statements made by people in the family still stick in my mind as times when I could have either argued and/or explored a topic or concept more thoroughly.  Unfortunately, I never really had the courage to speak up and start those big conversations, so now their potentials just play in my mind every now and then. So now I give you a sampling of where my thoughts go when my mind goes down these paths.  Then I suggest some shit, then kinda apologize for suggesting it, then kinda lose you, but you'll get there.

GOD, LABELS, AND EVERYTHING

Mrs. Adelsberger once said how she thought everyone should go into nature and just listen, and eventually you'll hear God speak.  I didn't push her further because I was afraid of conflict, or starting a religion-based argument.  But I think I know exactly what she's talking about.  I feel like I may even have a better understanding of it than she does.*  Anyways, the words "God" and "speak" seem to me like simple labeling mistakes in an attempt to fit in with the cultural/Christian conventions.  Almost like trying to add this special godly dimension onto what you're doing, and elevating the experience.  But in my view of things, the simpler answer is the righter one (Occam's Razor, yo).  When you go out into nature and listen to nature, you hear nature.  By attaching God to the experience, you attempt to portray the experience as being above the experience of usual everyday passing moments.  For me, I find better understanding by getting below that everyday experience.  Based on my own experience as well as what I've observed, people tend to live from moment to moment and day to day a bit disconnected from nature (mainly talking about our society/culture here), and I think believing that a God-Dude is behind all this moves people further in the wrong direction from nature.

When I imagine this conversation with the Adelsbergers unfolding, I feel like it would come up that I'm an "Atheist."  Or an "Agnostic."  This opens another trapdoor that eventually leads back to the first thing I was talking about, so let's go down it.  Atheist and Agnostic are not groups of people that believe one thing or another.  They're just words that we slap onto these people after grouping them together based on some qualification that they do or don't meet.  Then after we've grouped them together and slapped this word on them, we take that word and assign feelings, connotations, associations, etc.  We do this because this is how the human brain functions.  This is not a representation of what people or nature or the universe actually is.  8=D Labels and genres are our own creations (same could be said about God) that we slap onto the universe/all things in order to reduce it to something our brains can comprehend.  But when you go out into nature, and you listen to nature, I think this is what you (I) realize.  That everything is just everything, and it's all just kind of floating around, and you're in with it.  And this soup of everything just floats, and from where you sit, trying to wrap your head around it all, it stretches out in every direction for as far as everything is, which is as far as far is.  Yeah, you can label it.  As a human, you kind of have to, and I don't think that that's a bad thing, as long as you understand that things are not their labels.  Remove all those labels and the universe is absolutely fascinating and endlessly beautiful in all its forms.  And you exist now with the power to explore all its parts in any way you can imagine.

CALL TO ACTION

When you repeat a word over and over and over again, you detach it from it's label and see it for the weird little thing that it is, either the odd marks on a page or the arbitrary stringing together of sounds made with your mouth.  This is what I'm talking about.  Just writing that gives me the idea that you can get to this point of understanding nature in this way by simple repetition, like feeling a leaf over and over and over again until the preconception and learned idea of "leaf" is completely removed, and you come to re-understand the leaf as the weird thing that it is.  But where I was going with this before I had that thought was to just go and listen to nature, like what this blog was kind of supposed to be about.  Sometime this week, go out into nature.  Set maybe an hour aside, maybe you won't even need that long, but I'd say at least half an hour, to sit in nature.  Close your eyes to all the things you give labels to, and stop thinking your thoughts, which only ever distract you from the infinite soup of everything that you're sitting in.  And listen to nature, and hear nature, and just let whatever happens happen, as long as you're listening and hearing nature.  And don't try to get above your everyday experience, but try to get below it.

*THOUGHTS ON THOUGHTS

I started writing this as just an entry in my thought-journal thingy, because I replay these imagined potential conversations all the time in my head, and I just want to get them out so I can replace them with new thoughts.  I hate to come across like I know more than other people, because half the time I feel like I don't know anything at all.  And I definitely think I came across that way in this writing.  But all I know is what I know, and for me I really love this way of understanding everything.  I'm still working at it, and it's mostly fleeting moments when I can see things this way, but I know it's there, and to me something about it seems really true.  I'm very aware that those last couple sentences could be said word-for-word by some Christian missionary or someone trying to force their views like that on others, and that's something I really don't like.  So fuck me, right?  Anyways, I'm still posting this because there's gotta be some shred of value in here based solely on how fucking long this post is.  So in closing I will say this:  if you see something especially douchey/wrong about anything call me out on it and also you guys are at least as interesting/coherent as I am and I feel like I've been dominating the blog (quantity-wise), so Imma chill out after this post and hopefully hear how you guys are all doing.

TL;DR:  That's fine.  Took me long enough to just highlight it in TextEdit to copy over here, definitely too long to read lol.  But to get you interested, I threw a penis in there that you can go try to find.