New Year's Resolution #1: Practice Emersonian Self-Reliance

Happy first working day of 2014. I'm feeling post-partum blahs and blues. It doesn't help my mood to be reading Joan Mellen's "A Farewell to Justice," the definitive book on the Kennedy assassination, and realizing true civic freedom died a long time ago. My new nominees for paragons of evil: Richard Helms and J. Edgar Hoover. 

Although I took out this domain name in 2012, this is my first post at Bowl of Green Tea. It is born of that terribly defenseless, ultra-vulnerable spending season nominally called Christmas and ruminations on the fact that acrimony with my ex-wife has forced me to finally create a second family, separate from my first, where my son and daughter must do double duty as siblings in both. As sorry as I feel for myself, I feel sorrier for them. 

Look, I had earnestly hoped for a cordial afterlife with my ex, but she is determined to have nothing whatsoever to do with me--except to pay premiums on a $175,000 term insurance policy for me. I, of course, hope I outlive the policy which expires, I believe, in 2017. But it gives you some sense of her feelings towards me, since this grim fact of life forces her to gamble on my death. Imagine, those of you who pray a lot, sneaking a quickie death-wish for an ex-spouse. No wonder God refuses to take calls by phone or prayer. He fired all the angels at the switchboard long ago. 

Can you blame the proverbial "Him"? Say you're an angel on operator duty and you hear the compassion-curdling prayers of a woman who claims her husband abused her (and the children) and left her penniless during the worst blizzard of the millennium. You ask for a special audience with Le Padre. Can't we give the husband a nice dose of pancreatic cancer? you plead with the Chief Hombre. You are such a sucker for a sob story, God answers. The woman is lying through her dentures. And so it goes: God finding more excuses not to grant supplications for twisted fates than there were reasons for the Creation. Which leads me to a film recommendation that helped me get off the Wheel of Karma--or maybe squirm so much less on it that it feels like freedom.

TV Monde is currently showing a major docudrama, "J'irai au pays des neiges," about the remarkable Alexandra David-Neel, the first women to visit Tibet, in 1924, after an arduous 12-year journey that took her from the ghats of the Ganges to the mountain top temples of Lhasa. At every step and stop along the way, she discovers the miracle of emptiness and the concomitant insight that consciousness is the most vivid and reliable locus of divinity. The movie is about discovering the core of Emersonian self-reliance that is our inner Christ, Buddha-nature--call it what you will. Neel's initiation into Vedanta, fairly early in the movie, is as treasured and triumphant a re-enactment of true realization as any I have ever seen. Please see this movie. It may save you years of delusion and folly--as well as save your life.

Thinking of Neel's journey and its meanings to me, I offer the following: Faith in anyone but oneself is dangerous, no matter how tempting. I am convinced that religions invent original sin to make faith in one's self a crime against church and state and the remote, standoff-ish Freudian Father-God.  Personally, I think that Creator-God has Asperger's. Time to bury that  badly-begotten brooder and start dancing on his grave--for his good as much as ours. This Creation is God's garden or graveyard. Either way, he is inseparable from it.

Let me share a close encounter with the Sri Lankan Sufi teacher Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, who was my guru from 1974 until his death in December 1986. In 1983, after denouncing religion every day for 12 years, he built a mosque in back of his West Philadelphia ashram. At its opening, he gave a discourse in which he said, "The only messiah you will ever find is standing in your own shoes." He never again set foot in the mosque he built. Obviously, there was a secret double message in this construction project which few bothered to decode. Only Waldo got it because no one has found him on the premises since. 

For a few years after Bawa's death, I tried to become a practicing Muslim--only to discover that salmon are the only creatures equipped and meant to swim upstream against the current. Thirty-one years later, Bawa's ashram is a full-fledged masjid where people are chained to a shariyat that forbids self-realization. Fortunately for me, I stopped going to church in 2009 when I realized, as Quakerism's founder George Fox did, that the true church is the heart--and that all are welcome there. But if you want to see where religion leads, read Jon Krakauer's "Under the Banner of Heaven," about Mormon jihadists--and thank your lucky stars that Mitt Romney didn't win the presidency. 

Since departing the last faith I ever hope to espouse, I have realized that religion is a very poor delivery system for the word of God and an even poorer means of deliverance. 

So here's my proposition to you: If you want to worship in the open space that Whitman proclaimed, sit with me in my little tea house from time to time. And please feel free to invite me to yours. I promise to keep the light on since its oil is from an eternally renewing source. Let's trek together from insular to IN-SOLAR. 

Happy New Years. And try, as Wendell Berry wrote in 2006, to banish any thoughts of belonging to a "Chosen Few" or an "Elect." We're all in this together--as equals. And, as Berry continues in that beginning-of-the-year Sabbath poem, heaven's lowest rung is the ground below your feet. Hope Berry's words help. They sure helped me.