2001-09-23 - 12:18 p.m.

God.

I've been doing a lot of thinking recently, as I'm sure we all have. There's a lot to think about. Emotions are running high right now, as they have to. Talk of calming down, being rational has about as much effect as yelling at the sky to stop raining, or at snow to stop falling, or at ice not to crack when the fire begins. We are hurt, and we will scream as the injured must. There's a lot to consider in that.

But God.

I've been thinking a lot about God, which is funny, cause I usually don't. I have my ideas, formed over years and experiences, debated with Ben and reformed as necessary. They're pretty stable now: I know what I believe. I believe that God is good, that Free Will is more important than safety, but most importantly I believe that I don't know if God exists. There's more to it than that, but those are the basics. And because I'm pretty set in those beliefs, I don't think about them too often. I've had to re-examine things a lot recently, as we all have. Not reconsider, but re-examine. What do my beliefs mean? In this re-examination, I discovered that I can not conceive of a universe without God. A good God, a bad God, a prankster, a loving fool, a merciless judge, or an uninterested and dispassionate audience: anything, but God must exist. Some of this has to do with pot: I wrote before about the feeling of disconnection I get sometimes, when I see myself through God's eyes. It's more than that, though. I can not imagine the universe progressing without someone seeing it, making sense of it all from the vantage point of millenia. Part of that is from History: I see through Kleo hundreds of years marching before me, I see events shaping events, and I see, if not a grand scheme, a grand story. It has no beginning, it has no end, but it has scenes, and acts, and characters. And that view is the tiniest sliver of the full story, which takes into account everyone, and everything. And under certain influences that sliver begins to expand, and I see more than just the characters of the drama, I see the struggle which is common to all humanity to create out of the unwritten potentiality and uncertainty of life as we find it a Meaning. To BE, and not just exist. That's a linguistic trope, but it's valid. I can exist, and it doesn't refer to anything, there's no antecedant, no referant, just the subject "i" and the verb 'exist'. I exist. And that's all. But to be, to BE, is something entirely different. I am Patrick. I am human, I am a waiter, a lover, an actor, a crier, a prophet and poet and coward and afraid and hurt and happy, and lucky. You can't be. You have to be something.

To put it another way: rocks exist; they cannot be. Being involves something else: the very sentence makes me use words that apply and do not apply to me at the same time. I am an actor: actors, however, are not me. There's an inequality there, an unstated understanding that I am a part of a whole, that my being 'something' does not describe me in my entirety. Being creates me even as it limits me. To be defined as undefinable.

And I can't explain this feeling, this view into humanity without believing that there is this point of view, one encompassing everything and everyone, or else how could I ever see beyond my own head? I'm tapping into something, but I don't know what. All I know about it is that it scares the bejeebus out of me, and that there is much more to understand that I can ever understand. And that something has to be understanding it for that understanding to exist.

So, God.

�

�

previous - next

[ Previous 5 Sites | Skip Previous | Previous | Next ]

This RingSurf New College Diaryring Net Ring
owned by Pretentious White-boy Musings.

[ Skip Next | Next 5 Sites | Random Site | List Sites ]