“Not being done out of hate” is not an excuse to take rights away from someone. The inquisition was not carried out because of hate; it was carried out to save peoples’ souls. Translated from the original Latin, “… for punishment does n…ot take place primarily and per se for the correction and good of the person punished, but for the public good in order that others may become terrified and weaned away from the evils they would commit.” That it was not done in hate in no way detracts from the millions of people who died for it.

Witch hunts were not carried out for hate. They were carried out for fear that somehow the actions of people who thought/believed/acted differently than oneself would somehow bring doom to those around them. Just like gay marriage is a threat to heterosexual marriage.

When you get to Heaven and God asks you why you worked to take away rights from your brothers and sisters; why you worked so hard to treat them as less than you and to teach your children that those people do not deserve the same rights as you, remember to tell him that it wasn’t done out of hate. I’m sure he’ll understand.

Two buzzwords, I’ll grant, and what I want to do here is to take the buzz out and leave something meaningful where the buzz was. (Buzz is, to steal a phrase from our incompetent previous Chairman of the Federal Reserve, irrational exuberance. Being excited for no good reason. Seeing something as A Good Thing and maybe not knowing why.)

Enlightenment is impossible to describe completely. There’s nothing I can say that will leave you, the reader, aware of the experience of being enlightened, without you having the experience yourself.

Enlightenment happens in an instant and happens to the degree that it does. That is, from one moment to the next, you are as enlightened as you are, and a moment from now, you may be more or less enlightened than you currently are. What is actually is, is a realization of something profound about the nature of your life, or of your experience. There are many of them. What you realise is not a truth; it may not even be true. It may be ridiculous, nonsensical, or paradoxical. What makes a realization into an enlightenment is the drastic and sudden change it brings to your experience of your life.

When you are enlightened, nothing actually changes, in the sense that before and after enlightenment, your life is exactly the same. When you are enlightened, everything changes, because your perception of everything is instantly and completely altered. It’s you who are doing the changing, and you change completely, even though you actually don’t change at all. “Before enlightenment, chop wood, haul water. After enlightenment, chop wood, haul water.” -Lao Tsu

Life becomes light and easy. Things that were challenging are easy. Pain ceases to cause suffering. Serious things are funny, and the seriousness with which you approached them is fucking hilarious. Everything becomes something worth laughing about.

Enlightenment is worth pursuing, though pursuing enlightenment won’t bring it about. In fact, chasing enlightenment is one sure way to keep it from happening. But now I’m getting off on a tangent.

Transformation is different from enlightenment. In transformation, things change. You change. The world around you changes. It’s tempting to say that transformation is applied enlightenment, but enlightenment cannot be applied to anything, or used by or for anything. Transformation, on the other hand, is really useful. It’s worth doing. Transformation brings about shifts in the nature of ones’ self, ones’ surroundings, and the world in which one lives. It is a process, rather than an event, and I’m pretty sure it’s never finished. There is always more that remains to be transformed.

The work that I am undertaking is aimed at causing transformation within and around myself to the greatest degree possible. Enlightenment is worth having because transformation without enlightenment is a total bummer. It’s basically intolerable to put yourself through the wringer that transformation is, without some degree of enlightenment to make it… well, light!

Who I am is the possibility of a world that works for everyone. I postulate that enlightenment and transformation being present in the world are the most important parts of making that vision into a reality. In service of this possibility, I am dedicating as much time and energy as I can, with integrity, to causing enlightenment and transformation among all the people I can.

‘Til I Hear It From You is an awesome, awesome song! I know, I know, I’m way behind the time but I just heard it on the radio and was really impressed with it. It’s stuck in my head right now and I’m really enjoying it; a few minutes ago I went and figured out how to play the chords on the piano and it’s really fun to play, too.

I was just about to ask how it’s possible that the same act that did this song churned out such a piece of shit as Hey Jealousy (see my previous post on the subject) but I just looked it up and realized the difference: ‘Til I Hear It From You was written by a professional. With some freaking taste.

I worked overtime this month, so I haven’t posted.

Tron: Legacy is awesome. Garrett Hedlund is ridiculously good looking. The soundtrack is excellent, except it should (IMO) consist of fewer, longer and more coherent tracks. It’s also got me thinking about my sci-fi fantasy world that I haven’t mentioned to anyone. It’s been over 11 years since The Matrix came out, and it’s time for another movie to do the same thing to people: make them question the reality that’s been handed to them.

(four hyphens)

I observed today that my anger / resentment / blame of the LDS church and its members, along with the whole of Christianity and all organised religion and all expressions of faith, seems to be closely related and/or connected to my sadness / depression / frustration / loneliness at being continually single.

Tonight I took some steps, made some requests, asked to meet some people. I discovered that I file people into three categories: More attractive than me, Less attractive than me, and Female; and that I don’t approach any of them for their own reasons. For those more attractive, I think the answer will be no, so I don’t bother; for those less, why would I anyway? And for females, well, don’t worry about it, they’ll be knocking down my door soon enough anyway.

Seriously. I love my women. But can I please have some more male friends? Preferably ones around my age, preferably gay, preferably attractive, single, and into me?

In therapy last week, I stated that I don’t trust many people. I won’t lend many people money (if I thought you could pay me back, you wouldn’t need the loan) or tools (if you don’t have a working vacuum cleaner, there’s probably a good reason) and, most importantly of all, I distrust everyone else’s opinion at least a little bit, and the more espoused you are to your opinion, the more seriously I will question it.

It’s a common mistake to think that, because people trust you, you are, therefore, trustworthy. Therefore, the way to be trustworthy is to get people to trust you. Consequently, we see a great many people doing all kinds of unethical things to get people to believe them, and many more people falling for it.

But I digress. The meat of this essay concerns you (the reader) and me (the writer), personally, directly, intimately. I don’t trust you. I don’t think you, specifically, are as capable as you think you are, of making sense of the world, and of drawing correct conclusions from the evidence presented to you. In fact, I think you pretty much stink at figuring out what’s actually going on based on the information at hand.

The pious are quite fond of this. I’m sure it’s not intentional, but they’ve made a real game out of getting people to trust them while distrusting everyone else–lean not on the arm of flesh, after all. (But me? I have your best interests at heart! Really, I do!) (Aside: My belief in God didn’t provide me with anyone who I actually could trust, and without that belief, there isn’t anyone to trust, which is a pretty sad thought.)

I’ve adopted, as a rule of thumb, that the more insistent a person is that they have my best interests in mind, the more sure I can be that they don’t, and that there is some ulterior motive at play.

Which brings us back to me. (Imagine that! Me talking about myself on my own blog.)

In late February of this year, I signed up and became part of a program by Landmark Education called the Introduction Leaders Program (ILP). The program ran from February through September, though I was no longer part of it as of mid-June (that’s another story) and it’s only now I’ve started to confront the real reason I signed up. I had something to prove.

The point of the ILP is to become a new kind of person: one who listens to people, who understands them, and who is empowered to offer them something that will really make a difference for them; something that will assist them in fulfilling on their inmost and honest desires.

For most of the time I was in school, I was the best student in my class. I finished every test the fastest AND got the most questions correct; I was the best at math, spelling, science, reading–everything that you got a grade for beyond just participation. And then, when I was in ninth grade, that changed, and very suddenly, I was performing much worse than students I’d run circles around in eighth grade.

Now, it’s natural for someone who’s the big fish in a small pond to find themselves closer to the middle of the curve when they move from the pond to the lake, but usually, it’s because they’re suddenly exposed to a community of people like them, or smarter. My oldest sister was an example of this, going from West High School in little old Salt Lake City to Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

But that’s not what happened with me. My experience was with a couple of really key teachers who had something to prove themselves, convincing me that I wasn’t good at math, or language, or music. “You’re not as smart as you think you are,” one teacher actually said to me. And for a while, I believed him.

That particular teacher, it turns out, didn’t like me because I was smart, and therefore, I got in the way of his chasing the tails of the girls in his classes. That was his only year teaching there.

Is there a point? Yes. The point is that I am driven to be the best at certain things, and that I invented that drive for myself, and it exists to cover up my perceived failure: the areas where I am the best are all I’ve got. I see myself as the very epitome of failure when it comes to things that happen outdoors or involve physical strength.

And where did that come from? That’s a story I made up about myself when I was probably six, and the other boys played rough and I didn’t like playing rough, and I didn’t like when they hit me, and to them it was no big deal. (Today, I find, I actually have a higher tolerance for pain than most of my peers.) I was not “hefty, hefty, hefty!” I was “wimpy, wimpy, wimpy!” And this story plays itself out today as I sit and think about how I really should go to a gym, how I’d really like to put on some muscle, tone some things, improve some things, and the inexplicable anxiety I have around the whole thing.

You see, I trusted my own judgment about myself.