GOD moves in mysterious ways, the sneaky bastard.
Did I push any buttons? Did someone gasp and call me “extremely rude” or even “blasphemous”? If you responded with a spontaneous guffaw, congratulations, you’re CLEAR! You’re not required to read this - except for the laughs.
Are some of you frowning? What’s bothering you? The word “bastard” or the word “sneaky” or the word “mysterious” or the much-abused three-letter word “God”? Or are you feeling indifferent? Because you worship some concept that goes by the name of Wakan Tanka or Hunab K’u or Ahuramazda or Allah or Avalokiteshvara or Arumugam or Subramanian or Brahma or Vishnu or Shiva or Krishna or Ishwara or Paramapurusha or Sugmad or Sangyang Licin or Sangyang Widi or Pater Omnipotens Aeternae Deus or Tua Pek Kong or Zeus or Caesar or Kaiser or Führer or Pharaoh or Jesus Christ or Buddha or Sai Baba or Babaji or Baal or Marduk or Yahweh or Waheguru or Ptah or Enki or Tiki or Miki or Moto or Quetzalcoatl or Kukulcan or Tlaloc or Tezcatzlipoca or Odin or Votan or Dow Jones or Amex or Forex or GNP or Wang or Wong?
Wong moves in mysterious ways, the sneaky bastard.
Not quite the same somehow. But let’s take a good look at a few of these potentially troublesome words, beginning with
bastard (
bas’-tard)
n. a child born out of wedlock; an impure, coarse brown refuse product of sugar-refining, used to color beer... (Old French
bastard, from
fils de bast, son of a pack-saddle). Well, forget about the brown sugar. It’s the “child born out of wedlock” definition that warrants our attention. Jeez, what a fuddy-duddy word “bastard” is! The truth is: anyone with parents feisty and free-spirited and passionate enough to enjoy a bit of societally unsanctioned coitus ought to be called “lucky.”
The way I see it, we are ALL immaculately conceived, regardless of who our parents happen to be - even if Dad came in the form of a dove or a black panther or pollen from outer space. Some women just happen to be kinky - but if the union is genetically sound, it will bear fruit.
Who on earth knows if God’s own parents (Mr & Mrs Prime Cause) were properly wed. Probably not. Which makes Him or Her or It the Bastard of Bastards. So we might as well delete the word “bastard” from the dictionary. No one’s going to miss it - except perhaps as a convenient swear word with no specific meaning.
How about
sneaky? To creep around in a suspicious fashion, not wanting to be caught, preferring a degree of privacy? Well, if you had a thing about impregnating virgins, wouldn’t YOU be a master of sneakiness? The cat considers the mouse sneaky. But the mouse is only being careful: survival mechanism. In a safe, friendly environment nobody has to be sneaky.
As for
mysterious: the word presents a problem only for obstinately logical types who mistrust anything empirically unprovable, anything in any way “mystical” (and therefore purely “subjective” and statistically unquantifiable under strict laboratory conditions). The rest of us find the mysterious rather alluring: a mystery seeks to be solved, especially if it arises from the mists of antiquity straight out of the realm of myth.
Now for the word
God. Humans tend to fall into three broad categories: monotheists who insist on addressing the Supreme Being by just one name; pantheists (who prefer several names for the One and Only Holy Being; and atheists who don’t believe in taking anything on blind faith. Whichever category you think you feel most comfortable in, remember it’s all just names. When it comes down to essentials, the Absolute Tao - the virtually incomprehensible amazing and amusing miraculousness and magnificence of It All is beyond names.
Calling God a “sneaky bastard” is really a term of endearment, indicating an affectionate intimacy, certainly not FEAR. Who wants to be feared? Only a horrible monster, to be sure. And God couldn’t possibly be as horrid as some folks make Him or Her or It out to be.
My daughters and I could never agree on the naming of our dogs. A black bitch I named Latipa they insisted on calling Smokey. The dog had no problem with any of this: she responded to whatever name we chose to call her, especially if food was involved. Even when “Latipa” evolved into “Tiparipati”, she still wagged her tail ecstatically when she heard any of her names. The point of the opening exercise was to demonstrate how easily we get entangled in semantic snares laid by our linguistic structures. I’m no antisemanticist, mind you, but I’m acutely aware of the limitations to clear perception caused by living exclusively in a reality defined and generated by language. How can one can escape from a mental prison constructed of word bricks? Recently I was re-reading
Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals by Robert M. Pirsig and found an illuminating passage (among many) which deserves attention:
Eskimos see sixteen different forms of ice which are as different to them as trees and shrubs are different to us. Hindus, on the other hand, use the same term for both ice and snow. Creek and Natchez Indians do not distinguish yellow from green. Similarly, Choctaw, Tunica, the Keresian Pueblo Indians and many other people make no terminological distinction between blue and green. The Hopis have no word for time.
Pirsig goes on to quote Edward Sapir:
The fact of the matter is that the real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group... Forms and significances which seem obvious to an outsider will be denied outright by those who carry out the patterns; outlines and implications that are perfectly clear to these may be absent to the eye of the onlooker.
Many seekers have tried STILLNESS and SILENCE as therapy, embarking on voluntary programs of non-action and non-verbalization for days or weeks or even twenty or thirty years. I must admit that I have never managed to shut my mouth up for more than 24 hours (due to laryngitis), and as for shutting up the mind - 24 minutes is something to brag about (and after the first 10 minutes, I may have dozed off). Yet I don’t doubt that Stillness and Silence are a powerful way to cut through the crud and crap of our sociocultural conditioning and achieve true seeing, feeling, and knowing.
If ever you have the opportunity - and the determination - to carry out such a program, you will be rewarded with the gift of direct perception: beyond words, beyond personal egoic constraints, and beyond preconceptions. Watch it, though: seeing the halo around your head, people might just laugh at you in their usual vulgar manner. And in that elevated state it would not be an appropriate response to say "Fuck you!”
No, you’d simply have to expand your heart chakra (the glowing dynamic energy field in the middle of your chest that pulses with unconditional love just like ET or popular pin-ups of Jesus) and cherish your detractors to death, resurrection, and ascension.
Take heart. There are MODERN ways to deprogram yourself. But most of these come with a price tag - especially in this “new age” of marketing when even the most arcane teachings of the ancient mystery schools have been streamlined, simplified, updated and cleverly packaged into painless seminars and workshops that run from a single weekend to over a week. Count on paying anything from $100 to $5,000 - but bear in mind that the costlier programs don’t necessarily “work better” than the more affordable ones; they just have slicker brochures and a more professionally organized planetary network.
I’m not about to endorse any specific deprogramming approach (“belief management technologies” is what a few of these systems call themselves) - though I would encourage you to go for it if you find yourself in urgent need of "ontological refocusing" and some quick positive reinforcement - and if you’re one of those who normally wouldn’t think twice about a $150 hair restyling exercise or an impulsive visit to an Italian boutique. For sure you’ll come out feeling as good as if you’d just bought yourself a $2,000 Zegna suit (I wouldn’t know, I’ve only ever worn a second-hand pair of fancy Italian shoes and driven a fourth-hand Alfa Romeo - but even those tiny indulgences perked me up considerably.)
Those who are too cheap to consider spending wads of cash on any sort of therapy - not even getting your car fitted with genuine eelskin upholstery or treating yourself to ten sessions in a samadhi tank - good stuff, you’re just like me! So you’ll just have to trust your native intuition and follow your nose (or gnose) wherever it leads you. I did. And I can promise you one thing - the universe always looks after one of its own, regardless of your bank balance or reputation. Don’t expect me to compress 30 years of private research into a 2500-word blogpost. I only want to drop enough hints to get you going - or at least confirm that you’re doing perfectly fine just the way you are. But did I hear someone ask:
What’s the purpose of “deprogramming” yourself?
Boy, do we really have to go all the way back to basics? Well, why not? It’s a pretty good place to start. When was the last time you sat back and said to yourself: “There MUST be more to life than the mind-numbing, soul-dehydrating daily routine I’m caught up in!”? Not too long ago, right? THIS IS A POSITIVE SIGN THAT YOU’VE BECOME A PASSIVE CONSUMER OF REALITY. Which means: you believe that there’s someone “out there” who’s running the whole show and who decides everyone else’s “destiny.”
Don’t feel too bad about it. Most of us probably feel this way most of the time. It’s really just a bad case of overprogramming you’ve got. We inherit two sets of “hardwired” beliefs from our parents - who got theirs from their parents and so on - and some of these beliefs work in our favor, and some used to but don’t anymore. Dig around your so-called subconscious and you’ll uncover a whole lot of rotting furniture and other junk that would make a beautiful bonfire in the backyard of your being. You don’t want all that “karmic baggage” impeding your further evolution. It’s a good idea to travel light if you want to reach insights you’ve never had before.
Approximately 95% of this “junk programming” serves as Inhibitions. Society doesn’t want you behaving too differently from your neighbors. In the Industrial Age it has been very convenient to keep entire populations happily and mindlessly conforming to statistical “norms.” It makes marketing all kinds of energy-depleting stuff a lot easier. If you’re someone who believes that everything is simply hunky-dory the way it is, it’s perfectly okay. On another level, you’re absolutely right. But be sure you’ve taken the cellophane wrapping off your Reality Sandwich before you sink your teeth into it.
Sooner or later everybody gets the urge to deprogram himself or herself. It’s inevitable. You can’t stop water from flowing just by throwing a heap of rubbish in the drains. Eventually a major downpour will occur, causing a huge flood that will blast away the debris and sweep it all out to the ocean (the “ultimate solution” as Frank Zappa called it). In a single glorious moment, your vital force will break through the layers of encrusted ego programming - and you’ll be absolutely perfectly okay, the way we were all intended to be. Meanwhile, I suggest you attempt this simple visualization:
Picture yourself in front of your computer. On the monitor screen is a series of icons....
(a) a stern-faced, white-bearded patriarch, looking like some kind of judge
(b) a voluptuous Venus emerging from the sea, stark naked
(c) a ferocious-looking martial-type in full military regalia
(d) a Dick Cheney clone in a dark suit sporting a red tie and a cold-blooded grimace
(e) a cherubic woolly-haired old lady with a merry twinkle in her eyes
(f) a grinning juju-man, black as the night sky, togged up like a Zulu chief
(g) a serene old sage blissed out in lotus posture
(h) a thick book full of incomprehensible utterances and sonorous exhortations
(i) a chubby child of three, smiling as in a cereal ad
(j) an extremely compassionate, white-robed, maternal figure smiling benignly upon you
(k) a brilliant ball of neon blue light, pulsating with vitality and intelligence
(l) a gruesome giant reptile, velociraptor or tyrannosaurus rex, ready to snap your head off
(m) a life-sized bust of Marx - Karl or Groucho
(n) a wild-haired scientist pointing at a flipchart covered with algebraic workings
(o) a dazzling, energetic/synergetic, everchanging, kaleidoscopic, mandala pattern that represents perfect geometric integrity
(p) a glossy poster of Elvis Presley, Bob Marley, Jim Morrison, Madonna, Marilyn Monroe, Michael Jackson, James Dean, or the artist formerly known as Prince
(q) a monumental tree that seems to tower endlessly into the heavens
(r) a gargoyle-like stone statue weighing 850 tons
(s) a fairytale treasure chest overflowing with precious stones
(t) an archaic torture device with a pathetically bony and very nearly expired person nailed to it
(u) a flotilla of disc-shaped lifeforms radiating an other-worldly light
(v) a sleek seladang or cape buffalo, muscular torso glistening with sweat
(w) diamond-like galaxies orbiting one another eternally
(x) your grandparents in a formal portrait
(y) your favorite photo of yourself
(z) a bold question mark
NOW...Select your image of God. Move the mouse around till you find an icon you favor and click twice.
REALITY WILL IMMEDIATELY CONFORM TO WHICHEVER CONCEPT OF DIVINITY YOU CHOOSE!
If you later decide to alter your concept of God, you must first exit the current paradigm before repeating the procedure. You are free to change icons as often as you wish. Whichever icon you pick will prove completely valid.
If you clicked on the Question Mark, it means you’re always seeking new inputs and keeping your mind open, which is lovely.
If you clicked on your own image, that’s excellent too. But please remember at all times and places that there might be a couple billion other individuals on this planet who did exactly the same. So don’t get too bloody bigheaded.
This piece was written in 1996. Can't remember if it was published in JOURNAL ONE, but it was uploaded on this blog on 7 March 2007 at a time when I probably had no more than 50 readers a day. I'm reposting it now with an enhanced layout because (i) it's still topical and relates to a recent piece I posted by Bob Wilson; (ii) I feel more humans have experienced a profound shift in perceptions since The Matrix was released in 1999 - and especially since the March 8th elections - and (iii) I'm tired of saying the same old things about the same old stupid, irritating politicians who stubbornly refuse to resign and are just waiting to be unceremoniously booted out as soon as possible...
"Let's be kissed into quantum consciousness on a bed of sapphire supernova rose petals..." - Dreaming-Bear Baraka Kanaan
As a voluntary exile from the land fictitiously called Malaysia (I still chuckle when the ad voice-overs go malay-see-yer), I have a few points to add.
Spiritual progress is a necessary part of sustainable evolution (i.e. becoming "better"). Paradoxically, material progress grounded in materialism is like building castles of sand - and this is where Malaysia has been heading over the last >40 years, under the "leadership" of materialistic goons.Gerald Lopez
Muntadhar al-Zaidi (Arabic: منتظر الزيدي Muntaẓar al-Zayidī) is an Iraqi broadcast journalist who serves as a correspondent for Cairo-based, Iraqi-owned Al-Baghdadia TV. Al-Zaidi's reports often concerned the plight of widows, orphans, and children in the Iraq War.
On December 15, 2008, thousands of Iraqis marched in Baghdad to demand the release of al-Zaidi. Crowds gathered in Sadr City district of Baghdad and called for "hero" Muntadhar al-Zaidi to be freed from custody. There were similar scenes in Najaf. The demonstrators in Sadr City and Najaf alluded to the shoes. Participants in Sadr City "waved shoes attached to long poles" and those in Najaf threw their shoes at a passing United States military convoy. The "vast majority" of viewers of al-Baghdadia who telephoned to the station in order to express their opinions said that they approved al-Zaidi's actions.
A Saudi businessman has offered US$10 million to buy the shoes. "The shoes should be exhibited in a museum as they resemble a rocket that talks on behalf of all Iraqis," read a posting on website of Arabian Business magazine. The Lebanese television channel NTV offered a job to al-Zaidi. NTV said that if al-Zaidi accepted the job offer, that he would be paid "from the moment the first shoe was thrown." Al-Zaidi's family turned down an invitation by the Venezuelan President to come and live in the Latin American country. "We are grateful to President Hugo Chavez. However we are Iraqis, we live in Iraq," Oudai al-Zaidi said speaking on the behalf of his family. Al-Zaidi has also been offered a six-door Mercedes, had a song written about him, had his incident reconstructed in an Afghan comedy sketch, and been offered the hand of a man's 20-year-old daughter in marriage. The young woman Amal Saad Gumaa said she likes the idea of being attached to a man she finds so honorable.
Or perhaps he or she recently took out a loan to puchase a RM6 million home in an exclusive suburb and really cannot afford to be edged out of a prestigious RM750,000 a year job as regional investment manager of a bank with close family ties to the finance minister. Besides, it would take another 30 months to finalize payments on the Ferrari which, unfortunately, spends too much time adorning the front porch. 
The first "inconvenient truth" that comes to mind about the Umno/BN regime is its insistence on heavy-handed policing of political dissent via a plethora of archaic and repressive laws - the most medievally grotesque being, of course, the Internal Security Act. It would appear that those who continue to endorse the ISA do so out of fear - mainly, fear of losing access to ill-gotten gains which translates as "special privileges" and "racial supremacy." Such a stance is absolutely unjustifiable and reveals abysmal upbringing and hooliganistic attitudes. It cannot and must not be tolerated - or the result will be precisely the terrible situation we are in right now. 
It's positively obscene that five months after Anwar Ibrahim lodged a formal complaint against the Attorney-General and the Inspector General of Police with the Anti-Corruption Agency, both these men are still holding their posts. They really ought to be made to take a temporary leave of absence to facilitate thorough investigations into the very serious charges they face, namely, falsifying and fabricating evidence with which to convict Anwar Ibrahim in 1998 of sodomy charges. The fact that the PM and the entire Cabinet have kept mum about this scandalous state of affairs speaks volumes about their complicity in serious criminal abuse of power.
Police harassment and intimidation of candlelight vigilers demanding abolition of the ISA; the arrest of a small group of citizens (including a 6-year-old girl) who were merely attempting to present a greeting card to the prime minister; and the more recent debacle involving a cycling campaign to publicize social injustices put the Royal Malaysian Police in a pathetic and despicable light. Under IGP Musa Hassan's questionable leadership, the police force has descended to the absolute nadir of its credibility, integrity and professionalism. 
When the CIA sponsored the 1973 rightwing coup in Chile that caused popularly elected socialist president Salvador Allende to be assassinated in his office, what followed was 17 nightmare years of rule by fear in which more than 2,200 people died at the hands of Augusto Pinochet's secret police and at least 30,000 were tortured.
The rest who spinelessly carry out orders they know are detrimental to their own pride in their profession will find that when the wheel of fortune turns - as it must and very soon too - they shall find themselves at the end of the line where they will no doubt be given a chance to begin anew... but from scratch!
