what i believe

my beliefs are a synthesis of all religious/spiritual ideologies encountered through the course of my life.


i was born into a roman catholic family, and raised on christian principles; these shaped and guided my morals until i became independent and left home to become part of the larger cultural family.


drug and alcohol use became part of my life in my mid teens, and i attribute this to a variety of factors, one of which is the obvious, being made the sex partner of an older brother. [i had already been using before i was raped several times while in the navy, once by a stranger a knifepoint off base.] alcohol and drug use became a staple in my life, but love was the elusive drug that i could never get enough of. during this time, i began to explore eastern philosophies, but felt tremendous guilt over it, because in my christian upbringing, those who engaged in such practices were considered heathens.


after the service, i found a semblance of that love i sought in the context of the evangelical charismatic community that i became involved in. it made sense to segue into this type of faith expression, since roman catholic experience did not connect me with the experience of the living god.


i tried to live according to 'the bible' but my shame and struggles with the influences of the past just increased.


my dependence on substances escalated, and eventually disenfranchised myself from that evangelical community, since, even though i had made the tragic mistake of getting married, i was gay, and at the time thought biblical ideologies as enforced by straight heterosexual men would 'fix' me if i only tried hard enough.


as the bottom fell out of the marriage, i entered aa and died to the image of god i had come to believe in, and embraced the concept of a higher power, someone beyond myself who would shape and form me in the manner in which i was intended to be.


after that, i continued to include my practices and studies of eastern traditions, yet still maintain the christ principle as the foundation of my belief. i have learned to embrace my own spirit and those of other sentient beings as loved and valued for the fact that they have been created and brought forth into being. my belief does not include a punitive god, nor does it exclude anyone from the ranks of the 'saved'. all are loved by virtue of their being.


my current practice is non-dualism with a christian foundation. however, while i believe that all religions have valuable contributions to make, none of them contains 'the truth' to the exclusion of others. i don't believe i need to be 'saved' except from anything other than my self, but rather, enlightened, which has been for me a process of becoming dispossessed of the attachments of self, and its tendency to self-contract as it develops in the context of its evolution in time and space.


the world in my view IS the appearance of god arising in the form of creation and all ideas generated by people cannot possibly articulate the non-conceptual being that god is prior to language and thought.


today i see myself merely as being being being. and to the extent that i invest in dualist notions of separation and division, i will suffer. i cannot escape suffering, and the way to deal with suffering has been modeled by christ, who, in my understanding, embraced it as the path to freedom from the attachment to dualistic notions, such as those that i constructed throughout my lifetime. in the sense that i have died to those, i have taken up my cross, and been born again into a new relationship with the living being who is ever present as my life. his presence manifest among us says to us:


'why stand staring at what has gone before? don't get lost in things of the past. i, says he will begin something new, it's beginning already....haven't you heard?'


my practice is simple: in every encounter of every thought and every feeling that arises, i ask: who am i? who is the person behind the senses translating its experience into thought and feeling identification? how am i continuing to regenerate the invested notion of 'me' from moment to moment? how is the 'me' who i have come to believe myself to be, living in such a manner as to build bridges that transcend the human tendency to divide up the infinite whole into parts.


when i live from that perspective, i remain in the moment, and, as close as is humanly possible, to being all i am created to be.


that's 'me' in a nutshell!

Chronically Disgruntled: Legacy of Abuse

seems another aspect of this dis-ease has revealed itself in my process of recovery.

i like many survivors have had my share obsessive compulsive behaviors:
food
drugs
alcohol
nicotine
caffeine
relationships [no i didn't forget to mention sex, that's never been an issue for me, but rather the need to be validated, however that has played out on the stage of my sexuality]
workaholism
shame
anger
*[__________________]* fill in the blank
just to name a few of the more obvious ones. i am grateful that i have addressed each one of these and have put them to bed.

last january after 23 years of recovery from drug and alcohol abuse i made a decision to reintroduce it back into my life. this decision was not made in the context of any type of turmoil or tension emotionally, psychologically or otherwise. the decision was made in a challenge to unlock that door. so much energy was being poured into keeping that door shut locked, bolted, nailed etc. i felt in order to truly move beyond the 'ism' of OCD in the realm of alcohol that i needed to look deep into its eyes as a stronger and better equipped person. there was initially a period where i wrestled with the best way to include it back into my life in terms of quantity, but nearly a year later i am gratified that this formerly OC behavior is a thing of the past. how do i know this is true? because these things have ceased to become issues, and my relationship to them has returned to what it was prior to them becoming issues, as if they did not exist. the stressors that created conditions for their apprearance have dissolved

now, all those things listed above are the topside expression, the visible manifestation, of the deeper infestation.

did the disease OCB just go away? no way baby!

what i have come face to face with is the recognition of the disease at its factory level deep in the far reaches of the labyrinth of egoity.

as i look at my own self-history past the apparency of the visible manifestations of the disease, glaring at me now are the other faces of this disease:
self as chronic point of reference
chronic dissatisfaction
chronic search for affirmation

i could not have recognized the fact that i had been living my life, making all my decisions within the context of these, had i not addressed the most recent one, shame. yes, in a shame cycle these would have merely further indicted me, and caused me to keep focusing on, and dancing with the disease in its physical manifestations.

a lot of times there is a sense that what i say here lacks resonance of the community at large, but i realize too that this is another form of 'me-ism' that has kept me inside my own bubble all these years. we are all in different places and stages in life, and i fully get that i am outside the middle track of survivors who are at this point trying to reconcile the warring forces that need to be reconciled in the early stages of life. i myself am currently dealing with fundamental questions that one wold most likely not deal with in life stages where the ego is still fascinated by life's potentials and alternatives.

at any rate, here i find myself, confronted as the result of a self-history shaped and formed by an ongoing, lived and carried moment to moment, self-idea compulsively hunting for verification and validation; caught in rituals of self-contraction which loop back and forth between reactivity to rejection and retaliation.

there is my fundamental OCD:

the ritual of rejection and retaliation. an obsessive compulsive thought principle dominating my life and formerly manifesting itself in physical behaviors. and the sorriest saddest part of this legacy is the ultimate surrender that is inherent in the notion that his ritual/dance has so dominated my life all these many years, that i have forgotten who to be and how to live outside of its tether.

like my abuser, i cannot say no to it, because that would presume that other options were available, and in truth, for me, there were none then.

and the biggest knock on the noggin is that there existed a 'me' PRIOR TO the aforementioned one who arose to use these defense mechanisms for surviving. the never ending onion.

..........hmmmmm, back to pondering my freedom

habitual thoughts - groundhog day

habitual thoughts eventually translate into habitual behavior.

one of the topics that came up on a cyber forum i frequent raised the question concerning a member's tendency to see days as being 'good' or 'bad', and lamenting the fact that invariable, there appeared to be a pattern of one following the other in a sort of repetitive cycle.

here follows my response:

perhaps you may want to consider how the mind has a tendency to carry thoughts forward.

for instance, there was a time, when you did not have this recurring idea that

'I seem to inevitably have a bad day after a good one'

when did that idea being to take shape?

'I've noticed happening for a long time'

it seems that at some point, most likely without really making a decision to do so, that your mind established a reasoning process that resulted in this conclusion, that a history of good day/bad day was becoming apparent as a pattern in you life.

once this was established as a condition, it eventually became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as you began to live out of the presumption of it being the case.

you are now invested in this belief that your emotional life has an 'on/off' cycle and so you begin to live as if this were true. in doing so, you disempower yourself to change the way you react, and actually have created an script which cues you to react in such manner automatically.

once the pesky mind confirms a perceived pattern, determining it to be the case, there is no longer a need to continue to gather evidence to make this case. since it has already been decided, it will now not need any further active involvement from you, and you become a mere pawn on the stage of your own mind.

how return to the state prior to your investment in this self-thought? from my experience, the key is to inhibit the cycle, rather than reinforce it; keep in mind this conclusion is not proven fact, and it is merely an assumption you have made about the situation.

so once inhibited, then you must be willing to stand in the feelings that arose which caused you to want to escape into a rationalization of them.

there are no good days or bad days, there are just days and we label them favorably or not, according to how they advance or impede us in a self-determined goal.

december 5th of the year you were three years old, do you recall having either a good day or a bad day? i would say no, not because you don't remember, but really because you had not yet developed a system for assigning value to the criteria that would contribute to determining a positive or negative assessment of the quality of your day.

so here we find ourself situated in today's december 5th of the year 2008, after spending years of making decisions and reinforcing them in terms of what is 'good' [chocolate, days without dark clouds] or 'bad' [tripe, days with dark clouds]

the key is to not despair and take heart that you still have the ability to change what seems to have become a life principle.

like many other survivors, i have done the scrupulosity dance most my life, and truthfully, i don't know if that is in effect a result of the cause of having been sexually abused or not; the fact remains that i have a tendency to do this, and if i want my life to be as efficacious as possible, i have to learn how to detach from those emotional gut reactions that arise in the course of my interactions with the events of the day. otherwise the feelings go to my head, and take on a life of their own, at which point, i am but living the script written by me, and portraying the character that i cast myself to play.