What is Sin by Love?

The monotheistic paradigm of evil/suffering/sin can be challenged as not having anything to do with God, while still valuing morality. I do this by approaching sin as: universal needs not met. 

I.e. The consequence of unmet needs is suffering. This is a condition of all things that are alive. 

So all evil is, is the lack of a requirement we have to exist. If you need evil to be something more than that, the question is not what or why is there evil in the world. But, what is it for you, that evil explains the need for?

The idea space of evil can be used to provide choice, meaning and direction. Thus evil can be both good and bad. 

Let’s release ourselves from dichotomy and see the world in colour my friends. 🌈

  "If you can't fly, run. If you can't run, walk. If you can't walk, crawl, but by all means keep moving!" - Martin Luther King Jr.

Repeated Contemplation Prayer

 O Lord (and Lady), who hast mercy upon us all, forgive us for being undone, for things which we have need of.  ~ i

Expect Nothing

Expect nothing. 

Live frugally On surprise. 

Become a stranger 

To need of pity Or, 

if compassion be freely 

Given out Take only 

enough Stop short of urge to plead 

Then purge away the need. 

Wish for nothing larger 

Than your own small heart 

Or greater than a star; 

Tame wild disappointment 

With caress unmoved and cold 

Make of it a parka 

For your soul. 

Discover the reason why 

So tiny a human midget 

Exists at all 

So scared unwise 

But expect nothing. 

Live frugally 

 On surprise. 

~ Alice Walker ~

Empathy in Action

“...in an otherwise silent universe, we are responsible for the entire fate of our home. In this realising, one’s empathy in action, to strive for life, for all, against all expectation, is the miracle of hope.”

Om Pleasure

Pleasure is a freedom-song, But it is not freedom.
It is the blossoming of your desires,
But it is not their fruit.
It is a depth calling unto a height, But it is not the deep nor the high. It is the caged taking wing,
But it is not space encompassed.
Ay, in very truth, pleasure is a freedomsong.
And I fain would have you sing it with fullness of heart; yet I would not have you lose your hearts in the singing.

Some of your youth seek pleasure as if it were all, and they are judged and rebuked.
I would not judge nor rebuke them. I would have them seek.
For they shall find pleasure, but not her alone;
Seven are her sisters, and the least of them is more beautiful than pleasure.
Have you not heard of the man who was digging in the earth for roots and found a treasure?

And some of your elders remember pleasures with regret like wrongs committed in drunkenness.
But regret is the beclouding of the mind and not its chastisement.
They should remember their pleasures with gratitude, as they would the harvest of a summer.
Yet if it comforts them to regret, let them be comforted.

And there are among you those who are neither young to seek nor old to remember;
And in their fear of seeking and remembering they shun all pleasures, lest they neglect the spirit or offend against it.
But even in their foregoing is their pleasure.
And thus they too find a treasure though they dig for roots with quivering hands.
But tell me, who is he that can offend the spirit?
Shall the nightingale offend the stillness of the night, or the firefly the stars?
And shall your flame or your smoke burden the wind?
Think you the spirit is a still pool which you can trouble with a staff?

Oftentimes in denying yourself pleasure you do but store the desire in the recesses of your being.
Who knows but that which seems omitted today, waits for tomorrow?
Even your body knows its heritage and its rightful need and will not be deceived.
And your body is the harp of your soul,
And it is yours to bring forth sweet music from it or confused sounds.

And now you ask in your heart, "How shall we distinguish that which is good in pleasure from that which is not good?"
Go to your fields and your gardens, and you shall learn that it is the pleasure of the bee to gather honey of the flower,
But it is also the pleasure of the flower to yield its honey to the bee.
For to the bee a flower is a fountain of life,
And to the flower a bee is a messenger of love,
And to both, bee and flower, the giving and the receiving of pleasure is a need and an ecstasy.

~ Kahlil Gibran

"Fucking Ain't Conscious" Frenchie

doodles by tannay vora

 

“The mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.”

― Frank Herbert, Dune

Power concedes nothing without a demand

“This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Frederick Douglass

Nikolai Korndorf's Quartet

Tell all the truth but tell it slant

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind —

By Emily Dickinson

Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?

"This is an imaginary story (which may never happen, but then again may) about a perfect man who came from the sky and did only good.  It tells of his twilight, when the great battles were over and the great miracles long since performed; of how his enemies conspired against him and of that final war in the snowblind wastes beneath the Northern Lights; of the two women he loved and of the choice he made between them; and how finally all the things he had were taken from him save one. It ends with a wink.  It begins in a quiet midwestern town, one summer afternoon in the quiet midwestern future.  Away in the big city, people still sometimes glance up hopefully from the sidewalks, glimpsing a distant speck in the sky... but no: it's only a bird, only a plane.  Superman died ten years ago.  This is an imaginary story... Aren't they all?"

~ Alan More Superman# 423

Family Love 1993-2014

http://www.darcypadilla.com/

goodbye my one art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

~Elizabeth Bishop

 

 

Family meal practice.

Always clean up after yourself.
Do not take what is not offered.
Do not harm others with your speech.
Not too fast, not too slow.
Do not waste.
No one is finished, until we are all finished.
The food is prepared as an offering to the divine within.
Give thanks for what you have.

Cherish a desire with anticipation (hope)

Last easter sunday i went to a pentecostal service in kits (at the old hollywood cinema church) and words of st Pauls Corinthians 13:13  was read out loud: "And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love" and this got me thinking, what gets second place to love?

I really enjoy spring rituals and my very talented friend invited me to join him. He was playing slap bass - in a funk flea style with a white gospel choir, rock and roll drums and an electric sitar like thing. After the awesome service, giddy from the seriously good vibes, i met a beautiful sister named Faith who like the ancient daughters of Sophia had two siblings named Hope and Charity (commonly now translated as love). So i playfully asked, 'so in your family do you take second or third place after charity?' She replied that faith was more important than hope and the people there agreed with her, because faith was how we believed in god. I didn't feel the need to argue on such a beautiful day. But it was then in that moment that it hit me, hope is a way i make life beautiful. Rather than finding hope by being faithful, my play of hope gave me something to believe in. This was my revelation on the road that day.

Wikipedia defines hope as  "having an optimistic attitude of mind based on an expectation of positive outcomes" or more poetically "to cherish a desire with anticipation". In reductionist thinking, hope is the neurotic play of imagining a 'good' world, when it is a 'bad' one, a less symptomatic psychological description might be to think of hope as a self-induced placebo with a low risk of denial. The difficulty i have with faith before hope, is denial, let me explain. Sometimes the action of faith in a god gets used to close our understanding of belief beyond reason. While equally boring, having faith in no god is equally presumptuous with the certainty that god is dead and nothing lives forever. My problem with existentialist atheism  is in this infallibility. It replaces god with self, and as such provides a similar egotistical defence mechanism against death with the same avenues of guilty denials that theism offers.

Hope, alternatively gives us the choice to look up at that which is fine even if we don't know if it might exist. It is a mechanism to motivate us to notice a living future we wish to be faithful for. Hope manages our desire with only one presumption, and that is that maybe we well might be fine, okay or well. And that for me is a more modest and honest than a pre-requirement of faith or anti-faith for a lovely life. So faith gets third or at least equal second place with hope after loves charity.

keep the peace

The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy

Heading Home...

"Enlightenment is the project to make the world more of a home for human beings

...through the use of reason" ~Kant

OPPRESSED MAJORITY

Anteros

 

Oh cupids brother

strike me true,

that i might love

a one like you.

The statue above in Picadilly Circus(London) is not Eros, but his charitable and graceful twin brother Enteros. This God Enteros fires the second arrow. The one that goes into the heart of the one who is being loved, equal just retaliation to Eros's first cruel blow..

Everything good is on the highway

"In the morning I awake, and find the old world, people, places, the dear old spiritual world, and even the dear old devil not far off. If we will take the good we find, asking no questions, we shall have heaping measures. The great gifts are not got by analysis. Everything good is on the highway. The middle region of our being is the temperate zone. We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that sensation. Between these extremes is the equator of life, of thought, of spirit, of poetry, - a narrow belt. Moreover in popular existence, everything good is on the highway"
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The Trouble With Atheism from llamalamp on Vimeo.
Couldn't of said it better myself.

But if i was going to try..

i love being human,
i have faith in humans,
warts and all...

Science may be the only way of answering questions of reason but it is not the only way of asking questions of meaning....

Idea space belongs not only to scientists but the writers, artists, film-makers, lovers, philosophers, poets, magicians and prophets. To question the madness of belief as only a nocebo or a parasitic 'meme', is to ignore the placebo of faith, love or hope as unmeasurably questionable.

Any ethical foundation of human law would be dangerously bigoted to exclude the history of our specie's exploration of the meaning of what it is to be alive and aware.

 "If you subtract God, and you subtract the notion of an afterlife, then there is a real risk, particularly in the political utopianisms, which were so deadly in the 20th Century,  that you will attempt to create heaven on earth, go for a quick fix in the here and now, to have the arrogant illusion that you can sort of remake man and woman into some sort of new being, and that invariably results in hell for ordinary people.”-Michael Burleigh