Reality?

Woke up in the middle of a dream about Grace: she was sitting on a wall holding my hand and we were talking with a third-party about all the ways we’d failed to make contact over the years. I was saying stuff like, but what about the message I sent your sister? and she was saying, oh, I haven’t talked to my sister in like twenty years. Then I’d get cross and want to weep for the sadness of it all. All the times I’d thought I was being ignored or shied away for fear of coming across stalky and she was hoping I’d get in touch.

At the end the third-party asks what we’re going to do now and I’m not really thinking anything ‘cos of all the sadness of years gone and never to be returned but Grace looks at me peaceful and loving and says we don’t know, but something…

I don’t know why I have dreams like this…

But before that, there was church, and more realisations about what I imagine my next step in life, which is a committed and proper and decent relationship. The more I get into it, the more I’d like a Christian-type relationship. One in which both partners have focussed their lives on a higher goal. Recognise their respective roles and strengths within the relationship. Want to work hard to give to one another and be the best they can be, rather than to be in it for what they can get from someone who has to be good enough for them. Something chaste and pure. I don’t miss sex one bit, and I certainly don’t miss the headaches it brings. At times I feel such a fool for allowing it to dominate my life so. Such wasted energy and time. It’s not like there’s even anything to show for it…

I met up with Nicky Saturday evening for dinner. I have a vague memory that the last time I saw her I was really mad and upset with her and being totally emotionally guarded but I’m not so good at remembering those things and so just go into it friendly and normal. Except I’ve not long since woken up from a nap and am a bit spaced out, plus can’t think of much to say. She talks and then I get reminded of what I used to be like, not even that many months ago but it seems like forever. Christianity must have worked its way into me, I guess, living with these five chaste and saving themselves guys; I think of her as immoral and cheap and I know it’s a reflection of me. I feel a bit ashamed. I guess if I was so inclined I might have even used a word like “sinner.” I mean, I don’t really want to go down that path – I don’t believe in sin, I believe in inevitable and instantly forgiven mistakes in the process of growth – but there’s something in it too. “Falling short of the glory of God” is another phrase that springs to mind. All for a bit of sweaty hump-de-dump that’s not even as good as a good game of squash!

I guess mainly it’s just a reflection of being in a better place.

Not really sure how all this business of “finding a wife” is going to take place. Laura seems out of the picture cos I’m just going to have to accept that I don’t find her physically attractive and, much as I know that’s not the main thing, it’s still a part of it. Nicky I feel a stranger to and now that sex is out of the equation I realise I’m not that interested in her. Grace is obviously just a pipe dream. So I guess it means someone new. If I was like all the Christian boys I live with I know it wouldn’t be too much of a problem cos in a year or two I’d select someone from among the flock and we’d work at it emboldened by our common beliefs. But although our level of relationship-realisation may be about the same – as I said last time, I’ve come to see myself as somewhat retarded in that regard – the fact is I’m substantially older on paper. In reality age difference has never felt less of an issue and I’m hardly ever conscious of it. But I guess the truth is it matters. The Christian girls are lovely and fun. But what one of them would want a mad old fellow like me with all his history when there are so many strapping young blokes around, with cash?

Of course, that’s not to say I’m without hope, or don’t expect it to happen, just that I’ve no idea how it will.

Patience, I guess; and I don’t feel in too much of a hurry. But when you’re thirty-seven and keen to get it on – know it’s your next step in life and that much-cherished growth depends on it – time is definitely a factor.

Time which is apparently an illusion.

But I suppose we only realise that when we die or discover our enlightenment.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a lot of things, and reality is one of them. Being back in the more spiritual life is probably the motivator behind that. Godly people who know not God. Me with my own pitiful level of realisation yet having had a taste nonetheless. I dissect and denigrate Christianity, I guess, because I feel I have to as I find my own relationship and status with it. Like trying to see the truth behind the words, the actual levels of faith behind the professions of belief. I want to find and know God and as an ever-student and beginner I look to others to show me the way, to learn from. But I guess I’m not the best at knowing whether they have it or not, and that’s why I have to figure it out and pooh-pooh if necessary. This is all a roundabout way of trying to say that whatever I’ve said about some Christians I know being ignorant or egoistic or misguided or into mad things is really a reflection of me wanting to know if they’re more advanced [in the knowledge of God] than I am and deciding that they’re not. The other and real truth is that I think they’re awesome lovely people making their own way in their own time and, as far as morality and goodness and selflessness and relationship-wisdom goes they’re quite a bit further down the line and that’s why I am here, so I can develop those things within myself, which is probably more useful at this time anyway. If that makes any sense. It’s a weird thing. And a bit of a ways off from where this paragraph began. But hopefully we’ll make our way back to –

Reality. What I was thinking is that, wow, it seems like hardly anyone really knows what reality is. And that’s a tragic shame. Those ‘realisations’ I had when on LSD. That actual life is so far removed from what we’ve told ourselves it is. Consensus reality. Bricks and mortar. Jobs and slaving when we were born to be royalty. All these questions of Jesus and theology and religion – but how possible to have any answers without the actual experience of it. What is reality? What is God? What if I’ve been barking up the wrong tree all these last few years, doing as Shawn’s angel suggested and “trying to build a false reality to survive in a world that my mind finds daunting”? I am but a child and I do find it daunting. Yet there is no guide to me save the polarising opposites of my perhaps-mad thoughts/ever-fading memories and the bricks and mortar of pretty much everyone around me. I mean, I know there is more to life than that, but where my path through it?

The point is, what I was thinking was what a shame it would be if I reached the end of this life without having answered the question. Like, a real shame. But…

I shake my head there. That’s where I come unstuck. That’s where I get those images and ideas of me running off into deserts and nature and plunging myself into the madness of solitude with the idea that worldly-deprivation and voyages beyond the rim of potential insanity would – nay, must­ – bring me to that place. To throw myself in the lap of the gods and make my very actions a statement of “bring me death or bring me glory!” Wilderness solos and forty-day fasts and journeys beyond body and mind. Except then I remember that I’ve tried those things before and always returned empty-handed and sheepish. The trip to Israelin 2011. Mexicohot springs the year before that. Mother Meera in 2001. Even Vipassana at the end of last year. Empty-handed and sheepish and generally thinking about women and work.

“You intuitively know,” Shawn’s angel says, “that the next step in your path is building a life with another. Learning to love and be loved. Going beyond selfishness.

“You cannot pretend to know the way. To surrender is the answer.”

Monasteries and asceticism and intense solitude and mad meditation are not for me in this lifetime. Hard to shake the idea but seems to be true.

To build a life with another. But I still want to know what reality is, want to solve the mystery of God. No use to myself or the world until I do. No greater gift one could give to others than that.

This journal entry’s getting weird…

I talked last night with another one of the housemates. I find again beneath the professed belief a lack of genuine faith, of actual experience. I’m stunned. I don’t know why I’m so naïve. I guess I just assume that everyone who studies God has had some experience of It, doesn’t doubt, knows the score. But then I doubt too, sometimes think the whole thing mad. Especially when I wake up from naps.

To know, to know…to know for sure. To have that experience and to experience it always. To understand the mysteries of the soul. We met once, I’m sure we did, and it’s a meeting I can never forget, against which everything else pails.

How to find it once again? How to shun pointless make-believe reality and know truth? Where this woman and how to recognise her when believing also that there’s no such thing as “the one”?

How to make one’s way in the world when merely a baby, a boy, a lonesome soul adrift on the weird waters of life, buffeted by the winds of others’ words and directions, leading not to where I want to go?

Whither teacher? Whither answers? Whither direction? Whither God?

Oh yes: definitely weird now. I guess one of those that I won’t post just yet. Just go to work instead and forget about it. Keep one’s eyes open. Keep dreaming of Grace and crying in my soul for the lack of a woman and for the mistakes I’ve made.

Lonesome boy seeks lonesome girl. Must be awesome and mad, but mad in a good way.

Must be willing to teach and to learn. To grow together in awesomeness. To save me from the bad madness I have.

To stay with me. To be true. To figure out together what love truly means and to burn with the desire for the things that really matter.

Like reality. Like God. Like the promised ecstasy of the life beyond this everyday world.

Something like that.

Answers on a postcard please.