Digital Alterity

I’m a very tolerant person. One of the descriptions that people always seem to apply to me after they’ve met me is “easy-going”. I ardently believe what I believe, but as long as someone isn’t hurting anyone else, I have no objection to other people having completely different beliefs. Some fundamentalist Christians perceive this as a character flaw or a dereliction of my duty as a born-again Christian, but frankly, this is a central part of my beliefs. I’m not “backsliding”. “The world” didn’t pollute me with its “new age” thinking. This is how I have always believed. As with many things, I could find passages of the Bible to back up this belief, but that would be a pointless exercise since my faith is internally driven. I decide how I believe, not the Bible or any other external source. Tolerance and unconditional acceptance are a central part of my ethos and a key component to any deity or moral framework that I would serve.

I’ve certainly not always succeeded in implementing my ideals. I can be intolerant. I have been rude to people who believe differently than I do. I have lashed out in anger at others who attempt to implement their own beliefs because I have felt judged when they almost certainly meant no judgment. However, these actions are contrary to my internal moral compass, and I am convicted by them in the quiet moments when I am alone with myself. I certainly fail to meet my ideals at times, but I do my utmost to use those failures as further motivation to atone and to bring my actions closer in line with the desires of my heart.

I admit readily, however, that my tolerance has a limit. I do not tolerate the harming of others. No matter what your beliefs, if you feel motivated by your morals to do something to the detriment of others, you have crossed an unacceptable line, and I will stand up to you. I will do my utmost to draw your hatred away from your intended target. My ethos requires me to stand up for the weak and the persecuted, and frankly, it is a job that I enjoy. In these moments, I become less like Christ or Buddha and more like Spider-Man or Great Teacher Onizuka, and the world has a clarity of purpose that makes me feel like I’m accomplishing something good. I’m thankful for the beauty of such moments.

There is too much intolerance on the news these days. It has been so for most of my life, but what used to be an undercurrent is quickly becoming a bubbling, whitewater rapid of prejudice. Don’t believe me? Did you hear about the Operation Save America activists disrupting the Hindu prayer in the Senate? How about the Pope’s recent statement that Protestant churches aren’t and cannot be true churches? It’s not purely a religious intolerance either. When was the last time you saw a debate between “liberals” and “conservatives” that didn’t end up resembling an elementary school shouting match? Having grown up in a staunchly evangelical fundamentalist Southern Baptist background, I can readily appreciate the motivation behind such actions. The people involved genuinely care about the wellbeing of those who disagree with them. In fact, they see such things as absolutely critical. If they don’t set you right, they fear, you (and possibly they for not attempting to set you straight) will face eternal consequences.

The dilemma, of course, is that such intolerance is never in the best interest of the spread of your ideals. The aphorism about flies and honey is actually quite applicable. From a more rational, debate-centered perspective, you can never truly persuade anyone until you intimately understand their true motivations for their beliefs and actions. Intolerance centers around the notion that your way is the only acceptable way of seeing things, and acting on that notion closes off the possibility of future discourse. If you truly seek to save sinners or enlighten your liberal co-workers, you really should start by truly understanding why they believe what they believe. In the real world, people aren’t motivated by demons tempting them into Satan’s will or by an ardent desire to build a totalitarian state. Every person you encounter is doing their utmost to bring about a better world. They just differ from you on the implementation details.

Even more importantly, I would implore each of us to follow the advice of Zen master Zengetsu, who advised “Censure yourself, never another.” I would implore each of us to follow the advice of Jesus who taught “Judge not lest ye also be judged.” When we act in a way that harms others or spreads judgment, we work to turn our world into a present form of hell. When we act with a spirit of mindfulness and genuine love, we help bring about the salvation and the enlightenment of all around us. This truth, like many others, are hinted at in many of the world’s religions, moral frameworks, and laws. Truth is wordless and unconstrained by human understanding. I began the path to enlightenment praying the sinner’s prayer with my father on our living room couch. Allyson began her path to enlightenment with a quiet revelation of God in a Catholic mass. Jen(na) found her next steps toward enlightenment in the ancient wisdom Qur’an. We are all stumbling toward the truth, and it’s only when we’re build up those around us that we come any closer to touching it.

Technorati Tags: Religion, Tolerance, Intolerance, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Zen, Wisdom, Truth

I’m somewhat (and rather purposefully) removed from the mainstream. I only watch TV shows via DVDs from Netflix. I get all of my news from Internet sites like Reddit, and honestly I spend more time on highly specific sites about politics, comic books, and food than I spend actually gathering general audience news. Occasionally a massive story like this Paris Hilton nonsense will crack through my shell of non-awareness, but for the most part, I am slavishly devoted to my obsessions and blissfully unaware of most of humanity. This is why you people think that I’m so productive.

When I am confronted by surveys of public opinion or news stories about public outrage, I’m often left profoundly confused. As I become more and more removed from popular culture and social society, some shared societal beliefs just don’t seem like big deals to me anymore. I’m getting exposed to way more of such things in my current secretarial job because, in four years working as a computer programmer, I had been working only with alpha geeks who had pretty similar social values and mores. These days, I often come home and tell Allyson with disbelief in my voice the things that people think and believe. This of course isn’t really news to her because she continues to live in the general public.

In an effort to talk more about me and my solitary genius/depravity, I hereby present a list of things that make little sense to me.

Separate sex bathrooms. I have completely lost any sense of why we have sex-specific bathrooms in public places. At home, we all use shared toilet facilities, and we all know the physical differences between males and females. I no longer have any perspective on why this is such a big deal. People think nothing of taking their kids into the bathroom with whatever parent is most convenient. Why not just have the grownups share toilet facilities as well?

The American nakedness taboo. Why are Americans so uptight about the naked body? We think nothing of portraying violence and death on TV shows. Heck, we even have people with guns in cartoons for children. I don’t get the big deal in showing realistic portrayals of the parts that human beings all have. I’m not talking about graphic shots of people fornicating here, folks. I just don’t understand why it’s a big deal to see a woman’s breast or a man’s penis. It’s time to drop the effing cultural fig leaves.

Why Americans only vote for Democrats or Republicans. The American public is pretty sick of this whole Iraq war thing. In 2006, they voted a whole bunch of Democrats into Congress to try to get out of/fix the Iraq nightmare. What happened next is hardly surprising to those of us to tend to support third parties. The Democrats promptly rolled over and further funded the war against the wishes of the populace that elected them. They did it because they know that Americans will vote for them in 2008 anyway. After all, the only choices are either them or the Republicans.

Repulsion toward gay people. As many of you know, I’m a vegan. Since I stopped eating meat and animal products, the idea of eating meat is personally disgusting to me. I would genuinely have trouble swallowing if meat somehow made its way into my mouth. Nonetheless, when someone who does eat meat tells me about a non-vegan meal that they genuinely enjoyed, I don’t suddenly act disgusted and tell people how repulsed I feel thinking of eating such a meal. Nonetheless, this is exactly how a large number of people act when some talks about being homosexual. Why on earth is it so vexing to see two dudes or two chicks (gasp) holding hands or hugging in public?

Truth be told I don’t even understand anymore why being gay is such a big deal to people. We as a species are having no problems reproducing enough to increase our numbers. Gay people aren’t telling you that you’re not allowed to have and enjoy heterosexual sex. I completely fail to see why anyone even cares. Even if your religious beliefs consider homosexuality to be a sin, why would you care about homosexuals any more than, say, people who wear cotton/synthetic blends (Leviticus 19:19)?

Why people must be solely identified with their career. I’ve come to hate the question “What do you do?” I think this is, in part, because for the first part of my life, this question never actually came up. In small rural towns, it’s not uncommon for someone to have a job and then do something they’re truly passionate about in their spare time. I grew up around guys who worked in a prison or farmed but made cabinets or worked on cars on the side. I “do” pretty much whatever I want. I write. I draw. I read comic books. I play video games. Each of these things has far more to do with my identity than what I choose to do for money forty hours per week. I understand and appreciate that some people actually do get paid to do something they’re passionate about. I’m not there yet, and frankly, I might never be there. The comics I want to create right now seem to be more arty than superhero. The articles I write don’t seem to have much of an audience. I don’t intend to let lack of economic incentive stop me from doing what I love.

The root cause of many of the divisions we feel in the “Culture War” I keep hearing about so much on talk radio and cable news is classification itself. Any time we simplify a complex person to a simple ideal, we are committing a form of violence. In essence, we are dismembering that beautiful person in front of us until they fit into a convenient mold.

I’ve had to do a lot of work talking to people to show by example that, while I’m one of those Christian types, I don’t fit into the classification they may have built from their youth. Likewise, I’ve had to learn that my own childhood notions don’t fit anyone other than some non-existent ideal caricature in my head.

One of the lessons I’ve had to really learn in teaching myself to draw is that lines aren’t really all that common in the world. Boundaries aren’t made with clear cut lines segregating things. Most often, when you really look deeply at the boundary in question, you see that what we interpret as a line is really just a difference in tone (or “value” to use my recently acquired artistic jargon).

In much the same way, our categorization of the people around us has fuzzy boundaries. Christians aren’t a single group mind. Both the lapsed Catholic and the fundamentalist Southern Baptist are Christian. Atheists are likewise a diverse set. Richard Dawkins is an atheist out to expose what he sees as harmful ideologies of the theists. Other atheists are just quiet people who don’t share a belief in God. There are theist Buddhists and atheist Buddhists, but both groups attempt to follow the same dharma.

I resist the attempts of my culture to balkanize us via religion, race, politics, ideology, gender, and sexual preference. Sometimes I don’t notice my biases, but I’m always happier when I do so that I can mindfully seek what they have to teach me about myself.

Technorati Tags: Religion, Culture, Difference, Culture War, Balkanization

Thich Nhat Hanh offers an interesting teaching on interdependence, the no-self, and ecumenical importance in Living Buddha, Living Christ:

Buddhism is made of non-Buddhist elements. Buddhism has no separate self. When you are a truly happy Christian, you are also a Buddhist. And vice versa.

In my evangelical Christian background, we have a phrase that gets used a lot during invitation altar calls: “You’ll never be truly happy without Jesus in your heart.” While I’ll admit that this concept is often misused to hit people over the head and coerce them into a commitment to God born from fear rather than love, there is nonetheless a very simple truth therein.

In order to attain true happiness and universal love, you’ll need to discover the same simple truths that Jesus and Buddha were teaching about thousands of years ago—that loving your neighbor is the same as loving God, that things change around us so constantly that we should not become attached to things of this world, that you can let go of your chains and transcend your imagined limitations.

When you remember that we’re only interacting with a series of signs that point to a series of objects/ideas that we never interact with directly, you can see the notion that both Jesus and Buddha are pointing to the same set of universal truths, stated in different ways for different audiences. In much the same way that each of us is dependent on the Others in our life for our very existence, Buddhism and Christianity are in fact interdependent.

When we truly encounter the teachings of Jesus and Buddha—or any other teacher of the truth, for that matter—we call truth, love, and their teachings into being here in the present. We become in that moment the christ that heals suffering in the lives of those around us. We see the gentle and wise buddha in our own mirror. We are both the Living Buddha and the Living Christ in that moment. Without someone to put teachings into action, even books from the wisest sages are so many empty and hollow words. We are the Other that calls Christ and Buddha into existence everyday with our actions.

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Buddhism, Interdependence

I am rarely confused about what I believe. I am almost exclusively internally driven, and I tend to follow my gut instincts way more than logic. Rare indeed is the occasion when I lack an opinion after someone explains a topic to me in enough detail for me to see the big picture. This could be a real problem, but since I seem to have no real internal problem with rapidly and wholeheartedly changing my mind when the situation or my perception of the situation changes, it typically works out very well for me. I don’t blow where the wind leads me. I sprint in whatever random direction has captivated my interest or inspired me—even if it means running in the exact opposite direction.

The real dilemma for me comes in when I have a vague feeling about something but I haven’t encountered enough information to articulate that proto-opinion. This is part of why I read so many books, have so many nerdy philosophical discussions with close friends, and write so many words in a week. Learning about these feelings and inspirations is an exercise in recognition. In fact, to a large extent, my life has been about steady progression and realizing what I already know far more than any Damascus road revelatory incidents.

I say that I became a Christian as a small boy of five or so. That’s when I formally declared that I sought “a personal relationship with God through His son Christ Jesus” and followed that salvation experience through “believer’s baptism”. This is my Sunday School assessment. In reality, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t already believe the things that central to my particular brand of Christianity. I have always sought to emulate the teachings outlined by Jesus, and, as an intensely internally motivated child, I’ve always been seeking that internal inspiration and connection with the infinite that us evangelical Christians identify as the Holy Spirit.

I encountered the teachings of Emmanuel Levinas in a critical theory course during my sophomore year of college in the classroom of Dr. Melvyn New. The I/Other notion of reality and the concepts of phenomenology articulated a truth that I had been struggling to put forward for some time prior. The notion of ethics spawned from this phenomenology directly validated the non-verbal beliefs that drove much of my behavior. The theory geek in me just reveled in being able to finally understand this fundamental foundation of philosophy that I had always stood upon but had never been able to describe—and the theory even explained why my attempts to explain this ineffable truth might even be construed as a form of ideological violence. Levinas explained why it had always been okay with me the way that God’s voice was strangely silent even in the face of its perceived real presence.

I can’t even begin to say when I “officially” became a Buddhist. In much the same way that I’ve always been a Christian and have always understood the importance of existing in the eyes of the Other, I learned somewhere along the way that attachment breeds suffering. I had felt the absence of self before during private prayer sessions, and everything I read just felt like someone had bothered to describe my beliefs to me in book form.

I became a vegan last year not because of any intense life-changing revelation. I always knew that I would be unwilling to kill animals myself. Instead, I decided to bring my external actions in line with my personal but intense internal beliefs.

I understand that my beliefs are a process born of classifying and accepting my beliefs rather than importing them. The moment of recognition is not a moment of genesis; it is a continuation of something that starts years before the realization and possibly even as my consciousness itself developed. I’m nothing more than a swarm of manifesting phenomena, a collection of beliefs that intersect in the now moment. The artistry of living is embracing each revealing brush stroke as it paints the scene.

Technorati Tags: Learning, Christianity, Buddhism, Vegan, Belief, Levinas

It’s not uncommon in Western civilization for artistic works to allude to the life of Christ in their plot and characters. Even for those who aren’t believers in Christianity, the religion serves as a convenient cultural common point for transmissions of themes involving sacrifice, atonement, and forgiveness. It should be hardly surprising to find Buddhist themes in a video game that originates in Japan. The storyline of Final Fantasy X, however, seem to be at times a discourse between the two, a conversation that reveals that, while the religions are clearly not one in the same, they are nevertheless also not two. Both have much to learn and much to teach in a face-to-face discourse.

Fair Warning

Since I intend to discuss the plot of Final Fantasy X, including the ending, you can be fairly sure that there will be spoilers involved. If you don’t wish to know plot details of the game, then you really shouldn’t read the article.

Who Belongs on the Crucifix?

In many Buddhist traditions, someone who foregoes the cessation of Nirvana in order to help others who have yet to attain enlightenment is known as a bodhisattva. These beautiful souls manage to transcend the notion of self to such a degree that they seek to help others see the true nature of reality. In Final Fantasy X, summoners seemingly take on the mantle of bodhisattva, leaving behind dreams of a comfortable life in order to ward off the destruction of Sin from those who don’t take up the summoners path. In the course of their pilgrimage, the summoners learn that their sacrifice will only earn a temporary calm, and with that knowledge in place, they still sacrifice themselves in battle for even a pyrrhic victory.

The problem, of course, is that Sin is always reborn in a new form that continues to harm others. Spira, you see, is trapped in what Auron rightly refers to as “a cycle of death spiraling endlessly”. The root of this problem lies in the church of Yevon. This false church teaches that suffering is necessary atonement through Sin, through perpetual sacrifice. The reality, in the end, lies in another path.

Defeating Sin through an adversarial relationship only leaves hate to be reborn in another form…which cycles suffering yet again. We must heal and stop samsara, the endless cycle of suffering, in order to truly resolve conflict. Eventually through bringing about the cessation of Sin’s suffering, Tidus sacrifices his very existence. The difference between the sacrifice of Tidus and the previous summoner sacrifices is key however. Tidus knows that the key to stopping the cycle is to awaken and cease the dreaming of Yu Yevon, who the Fayth tells us “is neither good, nor evil. He is awake, yet he dreams. But…maybe not forever.” The fact that Tidus is the player’s avatar in the world of Spira is the key here. We can’t be content with allowing someone else to sacrifice themselves for us. We have to be willing to take up the cross ourselves and actually be the sacrifice, and we have to give up our notion of self long enough to make that leap from saved to savior in the lives of those hurting around us. The story begins with self and ends with liberation from the very concepts of self and no-self.

This is all very familiar to Buddhists, but what can Christians take from this conversation? Quite frankly, Christ is not the only sacrifice required. You are the sacrifice. By truly sacrificing your self, you are reborn. Stop endlessly crucifying Jesus and take up the cross yourself. When we die with and like Christ, we are indeed reborn as new creatures. When we surrender ourselves to the will of God and become like Christ, we are reborn in the current moment into the fullness of life. Nothing ever changes until you surrender to that choice of choicelessness and change yourself. All else is a hollow shell of a religion. It is building a lie around the truth. As James wrote thousands of years ago, faith without works is dead.

Beyond this, there is a lesson in interdependence and interbeing to be found here. Sin, the characters realize, is just as much a victim as are those suffering on Spira. Sin is always a guardian from the summoner’s party who becomes trapped in the cycle of suffering in an attempt to defeat the cause of the suffering. The only way to liberate Spira from suffering at the hands of Sin is to likewise liberate Sin from the cycle of suffering, to cease the habitual dreamlike reality of Yu Yevon at the core of it all. True liberation and salvation is only possible through universal liberation and salvation.

Video games as a cultural phenomenon are a unique meeting place for East and West. Final Fantasy especially has become a unique fusion of Eastern and Western ideals. That cross cultural fusion serves as a philosophical discourse between systems of thought which previously existed in isolation. Every story has a cultural lesson to teach, and when those lessons meet in an interdependent forum, you have a unique opportunity to learn and to teach that yields returns far beyond the original scale of the initial lessons.

I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty(1).

Such quotes are often problematic for us since they aren’t geared toward being interpreted by our logical brains. Truth/God/infinity are absolute concepts that encompass more than our minds can comprehend logically. When a concept permeates the whole of reality, the very concepts within that reality—beginning and end, for example—suddenly lose their meaning. Opposites are no longer in opposition since they comprise a larger united whole.

My contention is that each of us has the spark of God/Truth/infinity within us. As a Christian, I often refer to this as the Holy Spirit. Likewise, as a Buddhist, I refer to this same concept as the inner buddha nature. The spark of infinity and the divine is always just a breath away, waiting patiently for us to knock so that it can open, seek so that it can help us find. The humor of this view is that we are, in essence, fragments of God rediscovering God. Since we start with God and enter into the cycle of suffering only to eventually rediscover God, there’s really no difference between beginning and end. There is no birth and no death. There is only God as a non-beginning and a non-end.

Adding to this, through omnipresence within our own presence, God (i.e the beginning and the end) is there even during the cycle of suffering. Every moment is simultaneously beginning and end and also non-beginning and non-end. Transformation is inevitable, but even transformation is really an illusion since we are really everything interdependently related simultaneously. We are infinite fragments who believe that we are finite in nature.

Footnotes

1. Revelations 1:8 (KJV)

Technorati Tags: Religion, Christianity, Buddhism, God

God is the ultimate enabler, giving us exactly what we’re already working toward. Want to be a slacker with no direction? God will avoid giving you any sort of guidance or assistance. Want to be a world-famous sumo wrestler? God will supplement the actions you’re taking toward your goal by putting just the right people, opportunities, and ideas in your path. As a being with the essence of God (the Holy Spirit) within our souls, in a very real way, we define the will of God every morning when we get up. This is the truth of free will. By listening to our inner christ/buddha nature, we discover the will of God already within us. Surrendering to it is not surrendering to the will of an outside entity; it’s giving in to the secret dreams that we’ve always yearned for and have never been brave enough to actually reach for.

When we take an art class, we are doing God’s will. When we write a novel in a month, we are doing God’s will. When we sketch really childish cartoons on index cards, we’re doing God’s will. When we write articles about football, we are doing God’s will. If sin is anything contrary to the will of God, then we sin the most when we tell ourselves that there’s no way we can follow our dreams, that we have to sit in our crappy jobs and be miserable, that we could never own our own business, that we could never manifest our dreams in our daily life.

When we shut off the still small voice of a creative God in our souls in favor of the dry monotone of the reasonable, the safe, the responsible, and the mundane, we still create something, but we create something that expresses none of that inner beauty that expresses who we are, who we were, and who we’ve always dreamt of being.

Technorati Tags: Art, Do It Now, Creativity, God

Think your children aren’t reading some heavy stuff in the books they check out from the elementary school library? I’m re-reading Sideways Stories from Wayside School, a favorite from my childhood, and I came across this gem:

You need a reason to be sad. You don’t need a reason to be happy.

This statement is spoken by DJ who has spent half the day smiling so brilliantly that he’s making others smile without saying a word in reply. Everyone has spent the whole day trying to guess why he’s smiling before he lays this rather profound statement on Louis, the PE teacher.

The whole chapter has echoes of the Buddha’s flower sermon wherein he walked to the front of a crowd he was to speak to and just head up a flower and smiled. The dharma was there in the Buddha’s smile, and it was likewise there in DJ’s. The only thing missing from the story is Mahakashyapa’s understanding smile in return.

Technorati Tags: Zen, Buddhism, Louis Sachar, Sideways Stories from Wayside School

At times, my life in Gainesville feels like the book of Revelations.

Growing up in a series of small Southern Baptists churches as a kid personally obsessed with the last book of the Bible, I spent a lot of time just waiting. Thinking about nearly every future milestone in my life would have “…unless Jesus comes back before then,” tacked onto the end. In my darker moments, I used to actually worry to the point of tears that Jesus would come back before I had the chance to have sex, drive a car, go to college, or make a difference. There were times, I’m ashamed to admit, when I would actually put things off since I was pretty much just waiting for the Biblically prophesied return of Christ anyway.

How often have I lived my life in Gainesville not accepting what’s here and not living with what’s in front of me?

Yeah, I could look for a different job, but since I’ll be leaving Gainesville eventually anyway…
I’ll need to pare down the amount of junk in my closet when we move out of Gainesville.
I need to write more sections of my book when things calm down at work.

Am I just recreating my life on a giant spin cycle, I sometimes wonder. Do I really just like sitting around waiting? Maybe I like having a convenient excuse for why I spend so much time talking about what I want to do instead of actually doing it. After all, I theoretically have some measure of control over when/if I’ll actually leave Gainesville. Instead, there are days when I’m just waiting for…something. An idea? A dream? A vision? A sign as obvious as a giant beast rising out of the sea with ten heads and ten crowns?

No more. Not again. Just no. The only time I have is right now. Waiting is just another form of attachment. Today I will be an artist. Today I will write something that will share my voice with the world. Today I will hold my wife close and rejoice that she’s there. Today I’ll stop just dreaming about moving to London or Salem or Brooklyn or Queens and actually make some move to either pull the metaphorical trigger or put the effing gun down and walk away. Today I will donate to charity that which I don’t need. Today I will shrug off my mantle of lethargy and excuses in favor of actually doing something.

Technorati Tags: Do It Now, Waiting