Yesterday's Israel and Hamas: Apocalypse Now? post at this blog contained a war correspondent Chris Hedges Substack opinion bashing Israel, my comment that what's going over there is caused by three religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and the Devil has everything to do with it, and God has nothing to do with it, and my round and round back and forth with an anti-Israel daughter of Christian theologians, who kept arguing religion has nothing to do with what's going in Israel and Gaza today.
Later exchanges with two other readers went off in entirely different directions.
Patris
A pox on all of their houses. No one on earth can claim the bloody high road. We’ve all been murderers. Always will be.
Sloan Bashinsky
Boink! :-)
Patris
Don’t you find these circular challenges exhausting?
Sloan Bashinsky
Of course :-), but maybe there's a cosmic point to it, or perhaps I'm just making out a case to put me in a looney bin in the afterlife, if not sooner? Her parents are theologians, and she still can't see it's being fueled by religions?
Patris
Theologians but not historians. If one without the other what’s the point of confronting the psychosis of fanaticism?
Sloan Bashinsky
Theologians don't study the history of their religion? I don't know her parents, and I don't know what they might say. She seems really angry about what's going on in Palestine, and elsewhere, and I don't blame her for that. Maybe when she gets to my age, 81, she will be more resigned to accepting what's in plain view, even if it stinks to high heaven :-).
Patris
I’m not much far behind you so agree that may be it. Just tired of the incessant pearl clutching (do theologians even wear pearls?). I do know the first person to ask if I was an N-lover was studying for the priesthood. Maybe that started it.
Sloan Bashinsky
I spent my youth mostly sound asleep. I have a much younger running mate, who woke up early in life, and then angels got ahold of him after he had followed a blog I was publishing for several years. Then, he woke up again. We do a podcast where we talk about stuff that the right and the left don't seem to like. He recently was nearly killed by assassins over resistance work he did in his part of America, and then he received the Stigmata wounds of Christ on both of his palms, which freaked him out and got a couple of other people's attention, but since he don't spend time around churches, it's not likely the Vatican or Christendom are interested in him.
Patris
Tell me more?
Sloan Bashinsky
More about what?
Patris
Your path to mysticism if that is what I may call it?
Sloan Bashinsky
It began, officially, in early 1987, my 45th year. I had moved to another state the year before, to start over. I realized the move had not worked, I was out of bright ideas and felt like I had failed in just about every way a man could fail. In that state, I prayed one morning, "Dear God, I do not want to die like this, failed. Please help me." I paused, added, "I offer my life to human service." About a week later, I woke up in the wee hours and saw two beings hovering above me in the darkness. They were shaped like shifts and were white with a little blue. I thought they were angels. I heard, "This will push you to your limits, but you asked for it and we are going to give it to you." I remembered the prayer. I saw a white flash and was jolted by something electrical, which happened twice more, quickly. The beings faded out. I was shaking physically, and sweating.
That's when it began. The changes came slowly, I was moved to another state. I met another woman. It was a long, mostly arduous journey, with some beautiful sprinkled in. I had a dark night of the soul, then a black night, which was unfathomably worse than the dark night, which was awful.
I was geographically moved several times. I was sent into churches, then I got into politics. I had money, and I didn't have money and lived on the street.
I wrote quite a few books, some were non-fiction, some were fiction, some were stranger than fiction. Many can be read at archive.org, which is a free internet library.
The podcast is called The Redneck Mystic Lawyer Podcast, and we launched it first only in audio at Spotify, and it was ad-free there until Joe Grogan shat and sat in it and Spootify dumped a lot of its small subscribers, who were not making Spotify any money.
Later, we launched it ad-free at YouTube, and then we launched it ad-free into the Torrent system, where we found exponentially greater receptivity. Because of so much flack from the right mostly, and to preserve that YouTube channel, we started a new YouTube channel called The Redneck Mystic Podcast. All the while, everything was put into Torrent. The last two podcasts were declined by YouTube, but went into Torrent. There are about 60 different podcast episodes.
Also, there is redneckmysticforpresident.blogspot.com. It's a spoof campaign, but the issues addressed are graveyard serious.
Patris
What a journey, Sloan. I’m going to look for your writings. I do not attend any church but I was raised in one both ancient and accepting of your experiences. We stand in one reality but no one knows how many others exist that we find ourselves dipping into.
Sloan Bashinsky
It's there, and you don't have to go to church to experience it, for when are we ever not in church? :-)
Patris
Very true. Very wise.
Julio
Sloan, what did you drink the night before you talked to the Archangel Michael? I'm an agnostic and agree that the biggest mistake that man made was to create God (religion) and the biggest mistake that God made was to create man, like Nietzsche said.
Sloan Bashinsky
I didn't drink anything but water, actually. Michael has told me many things over the years since he and another angel showed up in early 1987, in my 45th year, and then they started turning me every which a way up loose and upside down and inside out, and stood me before endless mirrors, and it wasn't a whole lot of fun, and then it got a lot worse at times. You are in good company, Christians wonder what I've been drinking, or smoking, too. I don't do either. :-)
Julio
Good that you don't drink or smoke the good stuff. I hope your celestial relations will improve and make you happier. I do drink and enjoy my bone and flesh friends but I have not had any revelations which makes my life easier.
Sloan Bashinsky
Can't drink beer, wine, whiskey, tequila, etc., which make my liver and my gut yell at me. I never took psychedelics grown by Nature or made in labs, but I did smoke marijuana for a while, until I realized it was giving me a bad headache the next day, and it didn't matter whose batch of weed I used. I live near a city park, which has an earth vortex in it, and I can go there and sit on a bench and ask God, Nature, the trees and shrubs to give me whatever they have to give to me, which is okay with God, and nearly every time, including today, after a little while I go into an altered state, which isn't like what I felt when I drank or smoked weed. I felt something similar when I meditated years ago. Mostly, I get information in my dreams, and sometimes in just plain English. Every now and then, information comes when I'm awake. I've been getting steered, corrected and advised by angels since early 1987. It's like being from another planet, and yet here I still am. I've met a few people having similar experiences.
Julio
I understand your experiences, I myself have frequently entered into an ecstatic trance while watching a sunset by the beach. But I have never been contacted by extraterrestrials. Since you keep communication with the angels and they know God, could you ask them this theological riddle: Can the Almighty God create a rock so heavy that not even himself can lift it? If you or any of your theologically inclined friends here know the answer I would appreciate it, if you could share it with me.
Sloan
Never heard that riddle, but it is said, With God, all things are possible.
The other angel that life-changing night was Jesus, which perhaps explained why I was stood before endless mirrors looking at the endless beams in my own eyes, and that's still happening.
Riddles are important, but living is where we are tested and measured. In one of his letters. Jesus' brother James said to ask him not about his faith, but look to his works and see his faith there. Many times I heard Christians say works do not get anyone into heaven, but only believing Jesus is the son of God who died on the cross for our sins, etc. is the only way to get there. I think they might be really surprised when they get to the afterlife to learn that, to the extent they lived as Jesus lived and taught others to live, they were saved by him, even if they were atheists :-)
I don't live a lot of time in parallel dimensions, but what's there comes to and affects me in the human dimension. I am in this world, I have friends. I have had quite a few very serious relationships with women, one at a time, who just showed up. Each woman opened up, or woke up, something in me, which I did to know was there. They enriched my life, and being in my life was not always easy for them.
I ran 10 times for public office in Key West and the Florida Keys, or was put up to do it, to help me learn about politics, which I still detest. I spoke at hundreds of government meetings. I participated in candidate forums. I was interviewed by the media. Sometimes I was told, l would have gotten elected, if I had not said angels and God made me run for office :-).
I wrote three novels, in which the central figures are a man and a woman walking back into paradise together, or trying to, through lots of flames and passion and ups and downs. You can read them at archive.org. I suggest in the order they were written. Kundalina, Alabama; Heavy Wait: A Strange Tale; Return of the Strange.
In a different forum yesterday:
Vision
By: Wendell Berry
POETIC OUTLAWS
NOV 5, 2023
Art: Homer Winslow
If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it...
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
here, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides...
The river will run
clear, as we will never know it...
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields...
Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling light.
This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its reality.
Sloan Bashinsky
It looks to me that what actually is happening is each generation is a little more deteriorated than the previous, reminding of clones of clones of clones.
David
Must reverse that flow!
Sloan Bashinsky
Some people are moving forward, evolving, but most of humanity is going backward. It's on each person to go one way or the other, or stand still, if that's even possible :-)
David
All my hope, such as it is, relies on people under 40. There’s a lot there. My son will be six in June….I believe the young see more clearly the mistakes of older generations than we baby boomers did.
Sloan Bashinsky
I hope you are right. I'm 81 and have no contact with young children and my only real contact with people under 40 is my grandchildren. I think it is really important for people to chart their own course and not get stuck in any kind of herd, which isn't easy to pull off.
Elizabeth
And can be lonely
Sloan Bashinsky
Very
David
No, but that kind of agency is the most important thing to pull off, and I ain’t putting’ you on!
Sloan Bashinsky
A guy in the Gospels said, the way to life is difficult and few enter the gate; many are called, but few are chosen; the work is great and the laborers are few. A poet named Robert Frost, who hung out a good while in Key West, wrote that he was walking in a wood and came to a fork in the path and he took the one less traveled by, and that had made all the difference.
David
Jesus, Robert Frost, Allen Ginsberg, and Alan Watts: the baddest good company.
Sloan Bashinsky
:-), and Bob Dylan, William Blake, Rumi, and Shams, Kahlil Gibran, Herman Hesse, etc.
Then there's Goddess Kali over yonder India way. The art piece of her standing on Shiva's chest, holding a man's severed head in one of her four hands, a sword in another hand, a string neckless of men's severed heads around her pretty neck, and behind her a legion of angry bare-breasted women holding swords aloft, gave the distinct impression Kali and her legion do not like how men think.
David
Virginia Woolf, Gloria Steinem, Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Patti Smith, Alanis Morisette…
Sloan Bashinsky
Yep, I'm especially fond of Gloria's quip, "The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off."
David
I definitely cannot argue with that!
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
No comments:
Post a Comment