so i'm in a class where i have no fear with regard to grade recieved... and it's become {much like this blog} an opportunity... anything else i say will be rdiculous, considering the state i'm in...
finite jester...
Without Symbol
On a shelf in my apartment, in a small box which depicts a gargoyle perched on a sarcophagus, I have a pendulum in a black velvet pouch. It sits among the other tangible mementos of those things that defined my life, and represents the closest thing I have ever known to faith. It was my mother’s.
It’s a simple thing really, this pendulum; a stainless steel chain with a ball at one end and a small stone of opaque green encased in a conic cage of Celtic lines at the other. You hold the ball, and as the cone swings, its movement will tell you things. My mother believed that it was a ‘gateway’ through which the spirit world helped her to heal others. So far as I understand it, the spirits would move through her and use the pendulum as a sort of focal point to allow pain and suffering, all that negativity which caused illness and misfortune, to dissipate.
As human beings, we all need to believe in something larger than ourselves, it’s a sort of fundamental requirement for the human creature. It really doesn’t matter whether this belief is in government, society, science, human nature, or something that can only be defined as spiritual. We all believe in something, but it’s the last one that’s been really successful, the idea of God has been an enormously popular one for humanity through the ages. The idea of God, as it has been understood by billions of brains and expressed in so many diverse tongues and by so many myriad names, has been an underlying concept of the human experience for at least as long as our records will allow.
Of my mother’s children, it’s no surprise that I’m the one who has her pendulum today. As the youngest by 13 years and the product of her second marriage, I had the benefit of a mother who had reinvented herself. My sisters were brought up in what I can only understand as a fairly conventional familial structure; their mom cooked and stayed at home to do- well, whatever it was that mothers did in those scenarios. By the time I was old enough to understand her, my mother had been through a divorce, graduated college, started a career, and given birth to three daughters and a son. She was forty-two when I was born in 1977, and she had me at home without the benefit of drugs or a doctor.
When I think of god, I think of a safety net, a hard and fast idea where our minds can find rest from the incessant questioning of existence that the mind is apt to engage in. The idea of god is comforting; it makes life easier to believe that there is something out there that has control, especially since as humans we seem to have so little.
I’ve got her pendulum; I’m the one who went to awareness classes with her. We’d drink herbal tea and breathe the incense, we’d sit and listen to those minimalist organ tones of new-age music and meditate to open our chakras; we would visualize our pineal glands, find them deep in the center of our brains, and give them a light shake. It was never quite clear what the pineal gland did, it was just a lump of matter that the scientific community had a loose enough understanding of to allow the new-age crowd to rush in with their own explanations. With my mother I learned how to affect it, whatever that effect was. The most important thing I remember learning was how to visualize a person surrounded by love and light, it was how I was I taught to pray, to visualize myself surrounded by love and light. That was as close as I could come to interceding with divinity.
I think we need something more exceptional than ourselves to take the pressure off. If there is something out there that has a plan, or if there is an underlying order here that can be understood by reason; that means we fit somewhere in the grand scheme of things. If we were created, by design or in accordance with logical laws, then life can have meaning. To believe that your life has meaning allows you to live it, for me the alternative is too painful to be contemplated for extended periods.
To my mother, god was everywhere and everything. Each individual atom in each individual thing in this great cosmic stew of planets and quarks[i] was part of some great amalgam that the English language represents best as God. As humans, our gift of consciousness would allow us to partake of powers most would reserve for God himself, but only if we could remember the simple truth of what we are.
Beautiful really, as far as philosophical ideas go, tidy even; my principle concern is for the limitless possibility it affords. To be a part of this amalgam, to grok[ii] the amalgam itself you simply must know your place in it. It is all well and good to penetrate the webs of illusion from which this life is woven and to peer into the infinite oneness that lies beneath, but you cannot forget that you are living this life. The problem is out of the infinite possibilities of experience you need to pick who and what you are.
When I was growing up my mother sold real-estate. She would read new-age books out loud with my father at night before they retired for the evening. I learned about near-death experiences, past lives and the fallacies of western medicine. I received acupuncture treatments to clear up my allergies, and one of my mother’s friends guided me on a journey into my past lives. I grew up believing that I could do anything, and I wanted to save the world. What I wouldn’t give to be able to talk to the person I was then, because today I have a hard time understanding exactly what I thought I was going to accomplish with my life when I was still an adolescent, and completely lost in the heady buzz of idealism at it’s most fiery.
When I was twenty-two years old I moved to Connecticut. I’d been given the opportunity to run a grass-roots environmental campaign, and I was off to save the world. It was only a few months after my departure that my mother moved to Arizona. I had no idea at the time, but when I was running off to save the planet, my mother was running to save herself.
She quit selling real-estate and was making what she needed to live by performing spiritual healings. It didn’t surprise me, nor did the fact that she was becoming more and more incomprehensible. As far I gave it thought, I assumed that she’d found a niche in the new-age community and was just about as happy as she could be.
The years passed, and I was back in Kalamazoo when I got a phone call from my sister. Two days later I was on a plane to Arizona.
When I think of faith, I think of something that gives you the strength to endure what would otherwise be unendurable.
My favorite picture of mother is from that visit, she’s wearing her smile, the one that everyone who knew her got to see so often they’d sometimes wonder if she ever took it off, it’s the look of someone who is completely and unabashedly happy. My mother referred to the get-together where the picture was taken as her wake, and she was pleased as all get out that she got to attend. It was the first time in probably ten years that all of her children had been assembled in one place. What better reason to celebrate could you want? Never mind the facts behind why we’d been assembled.
You could tell that she’d slowed down, but it was only slightly. We took walks, she laughed and wanted to take me to all her favorite shops, she wanted to introduce me to all her friends. She was incredibly vibrant despite the fact that, to put it bluntly, I could smell my mother’s body rotting as she walked around smiling and radiating love.
As far as I’ve been able to figure out she never saw anyone the western world would recognize as a doctor. My mother found the lump right around the time that I was packing my bags, and had been without the benefit of chemo or indeed any accepted form of treatment for almost four years when I saw her for the last time.
Leaving Arizona, I tried to comfort my sister with the thought that if anyone in the world was prepared to fight cancer with their will, it was our mother. Now I have her pendulum in a box, and her ashes have been spread across the shores of Lake Michigan.
It’s taken me a couple of years to fully come to terms with the way my mother’s life ended, but now I can honestly say that it had to happen that way. I treasure my last memories of her, and would never trade them for scenes in a hospital. My mother didn’t belong there; she would have had to trample her ideals to let the doctors touch her. She died like she lived, by her terms. While I can think of nothing better, I can’t escape this feeling that her faith let her down.
There are nights when I go looking for the safety of faith and find nothing that will comfort me. My esoteric notions of god, in as much as they are understood, are understood intellectually. I can best conceive of god as a social construct or an unknowable force. As a social construct I have only my outsider’s opinion on the varieties of dogmatic postulates which predate what I consider the age of reason. As an unknowable force god is precisely that. Unknowable, an entity I cannot sufficiently affect with anthropomorphism to take comfort from. My mother’s pendulum rarely leaves its resting place, and I am without a symbol when my mind goes looking for god.
[i] Quarks are one of the two basic constituent of matter in the Standard Model of particle physics…the notion of mass for quarks is complicated by the fact that quarks cannot be found free in nature.
[ii] Grok (pronounced grock) is a verb roughly meaning "to understand completely" or more formally "to achieve complete intuitive understanding". It was coined by science fiction writer Robert Heinlein in his novel Stranger in a Strange Land, where it is part of the fictional Martian language and introduced to English speakers by a man raised by Martians.
In the Martian tongue, it literally means "to drink" but is used in a much wider context. A character in the novel (not the primary user) defines it:
"Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science—and it means as little to us (because we are from Earth) as color means to a blind man."
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