What Would You Do?

The other day as I was going to class I saw one of those whiteboards that a traveling...preacher?  We'll call him a preacher, because I don't know what else to call him, had set up.  It said

"What would you do if you were free from all obligation to law and goodness?"

Of course, that got me thinking.  What would I do?  It's not like I go about my day to day doing lots of illegal activities on the sly that I could suddenly do in the open if I wasn't bound by the law, except...ya know...jaywalking.  I like to think I don't do certain things, like murdering people or stealing simply because I don't really have the desire to do them.  Upon deeper self-examination, I feel reasonably certain that that is really the case.  But then I wonder, do I have these desires (or lack thereof) simply because I've been taught that they are "good" and to want to do "good" is what society, and God, expect of me?  And if I tap the deepest parts of me, will I find that human nature is murderous and covetous without some exterior force to keep it in check -- that is, without fear of God or society, punishment or rejection?

I've grown up being told that "the natural man is an enemy to God."  And ya know, maybe the guy with the whiteboard proposed the question "what would you do if you were free from all obligation and goodness" because he wanted people to admit their deep dark desires so that he could "prove" when you take away obligations to laws and goodness, the "natural man" is worse than an animal--he/she is an "evil" entity (after all, God is good and therefore the enemy of God would be evil...just follow my logic here.)

I'd like to submit to you two things: a question and a proposal.  First, what is evil?  Or rather, what does the word evil mean to you, considering I believe the term to be relatively subjective.  I know that that idea will bother some, but I think that the idea of evil is personal and is based on experience, trained values, and societal values as a whole.  For example, many young children have a tendency to shoplift until they are told not to do so.  They are not born knowing that stealing is "wrong," it is something they have to be taught.

Now, I submit to you this...  I don't believe I am innately "evil," at least, not by the parameters of our society.   Nor do I think I am innately "good."  I simply am, but what I am is hard to define, and will take more time than I'm currently willing to give with class in six hours.  Anyway, I honestly think everyone is born with such different inclinations and curiosities that are labeled as evil or good.  I mean, I want to think even without being told it was wrong, I wouldn't have the desire to kill (to go back to my standard example) because if nothing else I find blood and gore distasteful and physical pain (my own or others) upsets me.  But then, maybe those ideas have been conditioned in me, too.  Or maybe the natural man is neutral ground.

What do you think?

Illusions

Today, I finished reading a fantastic book called Illusions by Richard Bach.

For any of you who haven't read it, I would highly recommend it.

There are a lot of little excerpts from a companion book called The Messiah's Handbook which is featured heavily in Illusions.  All of the little... I guess you'd call them "lessons" really spoke to me in one way or another, and a lot of them interconnected, in my opinion.  So I just want to talk about them a little bit and try to make sense of the meaning I took from the story.   Regardless of how the book ended, and my general feelings on the subject matter before the plot...twists (I'm not going to say what happens) this book made me really think about myself, my life, and what I want to do with the time I have here.

Your only 
obligation in any lifetime
is to be true to yourself. 
Being true to anyone else or 
anything else is not only
impossible, but the 
mark of a fake
messiah.

In Illusions, the "messiah," Don Shimoda, frequently asserts that people need to be their own messiah.  Or rather, he implies it when he tells Richard (the other protagonist) that everyone has the power to do what Shimoda himself can do, they just have to learn to use it.  So I guess that the "mark of a fake messiah" doesn't necessarily have to mean performing miracles, because though people have the potential to perform their own personal miracles, they often don't, instead looking for someone to easily save or cure them.  The simpler things that one can do to be one's own messiah involve being true to oneself, making oneself happy, and so on.

I had a difficult time with the idea of making oneself happy for a while.  Shimoda has actually quit being the one and only messiah at the beginning of the book, having been told "I command that you be happy in the world as long as you live."  For some reason, it seemed a selfish notion to me, as if "being true to yourself" meant "living only for yourself without a care for others."  Then I realized that the point is not that one should be selfish in one's happiness, rather one should never sacrifice what will make one happy, no matter what other people may want or expect.  If people have the ability to save themselves, there's no need for anyone to be anyone else's savior.

For a long time now, I've felt like I've been an observer in my own life, and a tentative observer at that.  The kind of person who comes to class every day, does the reading, and pays attention, but never raises her hand to speak, even though she's sure she knows the answer.  I have a lot of desires and impulses that I squelch within myself because I'm afraid of how people will react if I just learn to let go.

I am tired of clinging.  Though I cannot see it with my eyes, I trust that the current knows where it is going.  I shall let go, and let it take me where it will. Clinging, I shall die of boredom.

When I read this at the very beginning of the book, I was struck by how much the creature reminded me of myself, as corny as that sounds.  I easily dismissed the idea, however, because I, like the other creatures, was convinced that boredom was worth safety.  My paradigm shift really didn't come until I read the first aforementioned passage.

Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself.  I'd been wondering about this idea for quite some time before I actually read it.  I wondered who I was really servicing in holding back pieces of myself and my desires from my friends, family, and acquaintances.  I thought that if this life is the only time that I have to do what I want to do, and when I die I will inevitably be forgotten by the world as those I know also die, then the only thing that should matter to me is doing what I want to do with my life, regardless of my fear of the consequences.

Just in the last few days (right before I read Illusions, and then after I read that particular passage) I have had what some might call a case of the f*ckits, but really, I'm just letting myself be free and follow my impulses.  And it's fantastic.   It's not like I've done anything crazy.  In the last two weeks or so I have not, in fact, skydived or given up college to become a traveling troubador.  I have, however, told people what I think and feel for the most part, when before I would have just kept my mouth shut.  And for me that is a big step.

Anyway, I'm sure I will want to write more about this incredible book later... it's really one of "those" books, the kind that stick with you forever and make you look at things with this sort of poetic sadness that weighs heavy on your brain and makes you want to write sappy poetry about the beauty of life until you snap out of it and walk around in a general literature daze.  This is just the beginning of me trying to dissect my feelings on the material.  Hopefully it was coherent and I didn't get redundant or anything.  Who knows.  I have run on something like 7 hours of sleep in the last three days combined.

Look at me, making excuses.

Argue for your limitations,
and sure enough,
they're 
yours.

Goodnight, internetworld.

It's just one of those days...

Today was a freakin' lazy day. I'm sure you all have those days where you don't wake up until one, then you go to Burger King for breakfast because screw it, you don't care about being healthy any more because you are too tired to care about anything. And then after that, you go to work for two hours and as soon as your manager asks who wants to go home, you raise your hand. As soon as you get home, instead of doing your relatively easy homework and going to sleep so that you can actually participate in class, you get on pinterest and learn how to do your makeup like Lana Del Ray, even though you're still not really sure who she is. Then you make brownies with your roommate and while you're waiting for them to cook you eat frosting out of the can with a fork, because it's a day that the chins are demanding tribute, and they will not be silenced. Then when the brownies come out of the oven, you smother them in not one, but two cans of frosting that ends up being thicker than the actual brownies, and you eat them with icecream directly from the pan without cutting them while listening to Ingrid Michaelson songs you pulled up on youtube. And you are not ashamed of this, because it is just one of those extremely tired days. Or maybe you guys have different lazy day rituals?

Me Time

So I was just thinkin' about me today. Cause I'm so narcisistic. I can't spell that word. I'm sure you know what I mean though. I'm like Narcissus? Ya know, the guy from greek mythology who stared at his reflection until he turned into a yellow flower? Yeah... Actually, I was just trying to decide what to watch on Netflix even though it is 1 AM and I have an interview tomorrow morning, and I found myself, as usual, being drawn to the True Crime shows. And I thought to myself, "self, are you a sociopath and you just don't know it?" And then I thought, "probably not." But then I got to wondering if other people enjoy true crime TV as much as I do. I'm talkin' Deadly Women, Disappeared, Solved: Extreme Forensics, and so on. So here are some things about me I like to pretend are super quirky, but I kind of hpe you all (haha...like people are reading this. Hahaha) do these things too. I love True Crime TV. I support gay rights like I'm an actual gay man. I get annoyed (just a little) when guys and girls act like makeup is a way to "cover up" what you really look like. I just think makeup is fun to play with. Sometimes when I see movies with Emma Stone or Zooey Deschanel in them I get distracted pretending they are my real-life best friends, because I am also super famous and adorable in this scenario. Sometimes I think if I will things hard enough, I can make them happen. For example, if I just think hard enough that I'm very good at tap dancing, my body will suddenly know how to tap dance. But then I try to tap dance (or whatever) and I still suck. Sometimes I have a family sized hummus in my fridge and I think "yeeeah...that's not going to make it through the night." Then I go buy more hummus. I give out "points" when people say things I like. For example, a good Shakespeare reference might earn you...I dunno...ten Bard Buddy points. Sometimes I refer to desserts as my "husband desserts" because I would literally marry that dessert. For example, carrot cake icecream. Yeeeah. Well, that's all for now I suppose, because I feel like I am digging myself into a very deep place that no one wants to visit, like Arizona. Goodnight internetworld!