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Politics : Should God be replaced? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: James Calladine who wrote (14872)	2/14/2003 3:10:55 PM
From: Solon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 28931

"What about telling me (and us) about YOUR path, rather than just re-judging mine, based on your appraisal standards?" Thank you for assuming that I have a "PATH" that I consider important enough to tell about! I don't consider it of any importance in the long run; but if it is important to YOU--then I will share a little bit! I have owned businesses and I have managed for others as well. I have done numerous jobs for many many reasons. I have enjoyed and agonized over many relationships...relationships which I will maintain my privacy on. I have won a lot, and I have lost everything at times--except for a stubbornness to survive when it seemed wholly unnecessary and unimportant. Have I had a "hunger for God"? I don't think so. I have had a thirst for knowledge. And I have sought meaning and understanding. Also, I have sought the goals that impel and inform all individuals who slide into this universe: I have sought to be seen, to be heard, and to be known. These last are immanent to the human condition, and cause the vast majority of human misery when they are not attained by the isolated, the alone, the suffering, and the dying individual. Plants and flowers die without food and water. People die (and cause others to die) without acknowledgement and affirmation. In the 70's and 80's I became involved with a number of workshops, seminars, and courses involving what was then known as "body work". It may still be so. There were "new age" initiatives coming out of Gabriella Island in BC which were analogous to the work that had been done in Esalen. As you did, I read with interest: Loewan, Reich, Rogers--and all the main people in that era. Unlike you I did not subvert my experience into something outside myself, but I came to understand (IMO) that EXPERIENCE was what Nature had equipped us to do, and that living in fanciful worlds could be done at leisure after death (if those fanciful realities indeed existed!). I have a hunger for people--not for God. I have a hunger for intimacy, for discovery, and for encounter--not for obedience to egoists and charlatans (of which, you must admit--there are a great number on our planet). Keats, when listening to the plaintive song of the nightingale, said: "I have been half in love with easeful death." Yes--there is a time to relinquish the "ego" and to dissolve back into the Universe--our eternal home. But that time is not here, and it is not now. We have bodies, we have awareness, and we have life. We can dance, sing, work and love, and we can experience ecstasy! In short, we can EXPERIENCE! To run from experience is to turn ones back on the very thing that Nature has so ideally equipped us for in this life. If there is a creator, then the denial of experience would be the penultimate denial of meaning. When I say "experience" I am speaking as well to the concept of living in the present and of encountering self and others in the immediacy of life. The moment is all we have. And it does not matter whether you are 50 years old...or 650 years tired...the moment is there, then it is gone. Well, I have been free associating and rambling as I tumbled along. Forgive me for not sharing with you the names of my employers, family, etc. I thought I would simply share who I was.