Category: Self Realization

Toward Unfiltered Consciousness

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This morning I found myself stuck on The Root.  For those of you who have never heard of it, it is similar to The Huffington Post, but with articles that are more tailored to the interests of a largely African American audience.  Some of the articles that I got mesmerized by were a 4 page article on African American Slave Holders, one on the push to get Dr. Ben Carson to run for POTUS, and an article about people’s reactions to the new version of Annie being cast with the little black girl from Beasts of the Southern Wild, Quvenzhane Wallis. As I read the articles, I monitored my thoughts around the subject matter to see what I could learn about myself and how I relate to the world.  You see,  I have chosen to be a person who checks in with myself a lot.  If a thought occurs to me that I feel is questionable, such as, “Why is Ben Carson a Republican?”, I am inclined to examine it to see if I can determine where it came from and whether or not it is a thought I really resonate with or if it was one handed to me.  Like with the Ben Carson thought, I can distinctly remember my father telling me that any black man who is a Republican these days must hate himself or other black people. With that in my head, my mind immediately tried to tie Ben Carson to the black slave holders who I had just read about in the previous article. That led me to consider other so called, “black on black” violence and exploitation.  I say so called, because if people of other races exploit each other no one calls it anything.  I’ve never heard anyone say “white on white” or “brown on brown” crime. Anyway, after a single thought starts making too many divergent connections, I usually stop the train and get off and then ask myself how I got there in my mind.  From there I determine whether I want to keep going with that train of thought or move on to other things.

For a long time, if I came to realize that a person I was talking with was jut parroting what they were told by their family without ever taking a look at whether or not those thoughts actually served them, I would start the process of removing myself from the conversation.  My reasoning for this was that I felt like that tendency among people to just go on automatic pilot mode is what allows a lot of dysfunction to keep moving through the generations.  “My mother or father did it so I do it.” never sat well with me. And besides, I really don’t see the point of that line of thinking. In this way, I am like Socrates, who said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” The way I see it, if my life is merely a consecutive string of undisciplined reactions to my environment and conditions based on what I was force fed to believe through propaganda, then in essence I was never really here. That being said, I don’t merely limit myself to the Descartes[ian] ideology, “I think therefore I am”. I see thinking as a part of “who I be”, but not the whole.  Other relevant aspects of how I express my being are feeling, intuiting, accepting, and surrendering to just name a few.  But all of these aspects or faculties or facilities of my being fall under the umbrella of Consciousness.  For me, Consciousness is the essence of who I am. Consciousness is the intentional observer/influencer of my being and the channel through which I deliver my activities into the world.  In my opinion, without Consciousness, the world is nothing but vanity.

If I were to draw a picture of how I imagine Consciousness being, I would draw Consciousness as the Light of Creative Intelligence, my mind would be the slides or film I want to project, and the projector itself would be my body.  As I project onto the world i.e. the screen, the Intelligent Light of my Consciousness is also observing what I project and engaging with the receivers at multiple levels.  This creates an expansion in Consciousness which then brings greater illumination to the slides or film which represents the thoughts that occur in Mind.  As the illumination intensifies, there is more clarity to the thought projections. This continues until the projections become an ideal representation of the Conscious Intelligent and Creative Light.  When that happens the slides and/or film are no longer necessary because I will no longer have anything to project onto the world or onto others in order to justify my existence. At that point, I will be functioning as pure Consciousness–an uninterrupted and unfiltered, freely giving and freely receiving creative being. I think this is how it works for all of us. I believe that that is our true nature.  As I said in the post Switched At Birth, I believe that we all came here as pure being, and then, for many of us, the inaccuracies and sometimes flat out lies began, starting with the very names we identify with. But beyond our names are the other associations that become the filters through which we give to and receive from Life.  And for me that is where The Root came in this morning.  As I read the articles, I could feel my filters engaging.

Before reading those articles, I was simply Conscious Being. Besides, my dog and some lady bugs, no one was home. I had done my morning devotions, meditation, and prayer.  I had caught up on this campaign called The One Great Hour of Sharing with my daughter, which has the tagline, “We are One”  and was feeling grateful that I have another day to get closer to the Root of my Being–my Source who I most often refer to as God. I will admit that for some time now, I have “fallen off the wagon” when it comes to remaining sober to what I believe is God’s reality of Life.  That is to say that without constantly checking in with myself, praying a whole lot, reading the Bible and other expansive material, and talking about the Higher activities of life, I feel the temptation to get intoxicated with the smaller story of who I am, the roles that I play in the world.  I know that I am not my roles any more than I am my thoughts. I am not a fictional character. But as many of us know, sometimes it seems easier to play one.

Tomorrow, tomorrow I love you tomorrow, just as long as you’re not yesterday.

When I looked at the articles, I felt some of my fictions coming up.  You’d have to read the article on African American slave owners to get an idea of what my feelings might have been, but I will say that, if I jumped into a time machine immediately after reading it, I might have caused some trouble for some of those people.  When I read about Ben Carson, I found myself thinking of him as having become a cartoon character.  He’s a brilliant doctor and I’ve read some intelligent things from him, but I will say that I have my challenges with how it seems like he has straight up bought into the vanity of the political world.  Granted I don’t know him or any politicians, but it all looks like reality TV to me at this point–even President Obama. And finally, when I saw people having a problem with a black Annie, I felt myself wanting to take it personally.  Besides the fact that I am a sensitive person and almost cried both times when I watched the trailer, I could easily project my curly haired daughter into that character and the thought of people tripping off of that bugged me.  Like the author said in the article, “Annie is Black, Get Over It”.

All this being said, I am confessing that my particular black filter was kicking in in every one of those articles. Of course there are purely human elements that I would bristle at such as slavery in general, Carson’s seeming disregard for people who do not identify as heterosexual, or people being overly critical of an obviously talented child actor simply based on her race regardless of what that race might be. Still I have more to examine about how my filter influences my work in the realm of Consciousness and how it effects my ability to give and receive freely.  It is really interesting because, while I believe that experience informs a considerable portion of how we engage the world, I do also believe that we are capable of transcending our experience thus enabling us to live in what St. Paul called the “newness of life”.  In the newness of life as I aspire to live it, everything about life is new and fresh and pure moment by moment, even our very selves and our relationships to others and the whole wide world. I’m not going to get into it right now, but what it basically means to me is that once we identify ourselves as children of God and citizens of eternity, then we live in a realm where as he puts it, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” and ” In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!”  As a person I understand as having examined his own life, I can see Paul adding a whole lot of other categories that we hold onto into that list–married, single, heterosexual, GLBTQ, rich, poor, healthy, unhealthy, red and yellow, black and white.  I know that I am a citizen of eternity where there is no division among us and for the most part I live out of that space with everyone I encounter, but I’m still working on that tension between that reality and how I encounter events in time that seem to thrive in anti-consciousness and denial.

Judge

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Judge

Am I jealous of your ignorance
Because I wish that I were too?
Do I call your innocence, stupidity
Because I can’t do what you can do?

Why do I judge
When I know that I don’t like it?
Is it because I know I’m you
But I have no way to fight it?

Did I create a “heaven”,
To prove that I’m better?
Is it because I think I am now,
And I just want to be forever?

Well if “God” is always right,
If I try to judge I know I’ll fail
So if I refuse to admit this
That’s what will keep me in this “hell”.

I wrote the poem above when I was on a flight from Baltimore to Orlando.  There was a family coming on the plane who had never flown before.  Out of nervousness, the mother kept apologizing for her family and confessing this fact as they loudly found their way to their seats.  They were the last people to be seated on the plane and essentially the rest of us were waiting on them.    My former wife and I were headed to the Sunshine state to spend some time at the Disney parks and go on a cruise.  I assumed that this other family was headed to Disney as well.  Needless to say their children were very excited and it only made sense.  However, despite the plane having several families on-board presumably headed to the same destination, it seemed that many people were judging this other family.

From my seat I could hear the surrounding passengers mumbling such things as, “find your seat already” and “it’s not that hard”.  Even my wife was a little bothered and probably embarrassed.  You see this family who had never flown and was having a very hard time were African-American like us. Now to some people reading this you might think that their ethnicity doesn’t matter, but you’d be wrong.  With a lot of Black people, we tend to take it personally and feel embarrassed if other Black people are doing something that draws public scrutiny.  I could go into the psychological reasons for it, but I will just make it simple and say that in a world that runs largely on first impressions and stereotypes, there is a frequent and underlying fear that what other people do will reflect back on us if we can be identified with those people.  We fear that whatever judgment someone makes about the offenders will be generally projected onto us.

I have found that this tendency is most prevalent in cultures with a dominant sense of collectivism but it happens with all people who see themselves as directly connected with others in some way such as family, teams, political party, nationality, etc.  It is the whole idea of being guilty by association.  I remember being a child and when the news announced a serious crime my family would be praying that the criminal was not Black.  Largely it was because we didn’t want to hear the bad news of another one of us being accused of a crime, but as I learned soon enough, it was also because we didn’t want whatever crime that was committed to reflect on us; further exacerbating the already existing and deliberate tendency of the larger society to view us in a negative light.  At first I couldn’t understand why my family felt that way until I noticed that if the criminal was Black, the newscasters would always state that fact, but if they were White, they would never mention it in their descriptions.

I thought about this as I watched the faces of the people on the plane.  Being the sensitive type, I allowed myself to feel as much as I could trying to get a sense of what was going on with not only the family trying to find their seat, but also with the other annoyed passengers, and my own inner person.  I tried to turn up my compassion and to think more about what the people were experiencing than my own judgments about how I thought people should be.  As I watched the family struggling to get in their seats and find a place for their carry-ons, I thought about what it might feel like to already be nervous about flying for the first time as adults not to mention having excited children tagging along.  I imagined that they probably were feeling very anxious and likely it was this anxiety that influenced their decision to wait until everyone else was on the plane before boarding.  Having never been on a plane before, they would not have known the carry-on situation and therefore did not anticipate having to try and find a place for their stuff because passengers who boarded earlier took their once empty bin.  Add to this that they were on display as all of the other seated passengers annoyingly waited for them to get their seats, and I could only imagine that this whole situation was torture for them.  Consequently, the wife was subtly pleading for compassion by constantly revealing their inexperience while the husband seemed to be pulling an Adam with a face that said, “this was all her idea.”

As for my wife and the annoyed passengers, I already mentioned part of what I felt was getting to her and some of the other Black passengers who barely looked at the family.  There were some passengers who could care less and were just settling in for the flight and then there were those who were projecting their frustration on the family as if they were doing something to them on purpose.  At first my mind wanted to make it a racial thing.  I wondered if the family was White if they would have been less annoyed.  And I think the answer for some of them would have been yes.  Is it personal? Sometimes yes, but more often it is no.  People just tend to have greater affinity for those who they seem to have more in common with.  It is like a programming.  They don’t even know they do it half the time it is so ingrained.  And then there are the people who are just people who are easily annoyed–which in the Metro-DC area is not uncommon.  There are a lot of people who live their daily lives in a rush.  Anything that seems to make getting to where they want to be take longer is subject to the wrath.  It could have easily been a snow storm and they would be angry with nature.  Everything  outside of themselves is an equal opportunity annoyer (made up word).  These stressed out people probably need a vacation more than anyone.  But it is probably likely that they if they were going to Disney, they were going to try and conquer it and ultimately leave their vacation more tired than they were when they arrived.  I’d say that they were as good of candidates as anyone for Jesus’ insight to “forgive them for they know not what they do”.  And then there leaves me.

I tend to be one of those people who is initially intolerant of intolerant people.  I judge people who judge people and condemn those who condemn others.  In reality, this is probably the worse kind of judge because those of us who have this tendency have the luxury of what people call righteous indignation.  We can convince ourselves that we have the “might of right”.  Usually we can point to religious texts like the one below to demonstrate why our point of view is the more accurate one.  Consider Matthew 7:1-6 which admonishes people for judging others.  It would be easy for me to point to this scripture when attacking someone I see of guilty of judging others unfairly.  Used incorrectly, I could do a lot of harm with this scripture.  Much like the away those who are adamantly against abortion can justify killing a doctor who performs abortions, using the “thou shalt not kill” defense, I could come to someone who is judging and say to them, “you are a no good dirty rotten judger of people and I hope that you get what is coming to you because you are just wrong because the Bible says don’t judge.”  And when I did, I am sure that I would have a lot of people supporting me who also have pent up judgments about themselves and the world around them that they are just waiting to project onto someone else so that they can get the nasty feeling of  self-condemnation off of them.  But here’s the thing.  That’s now passages like the one below are meant to work.

As the second stanza of the poem asks:

Why do I judge
When I know that I don’t like it?
Is it because I know I’m you
But I have no way to fight it?

Passages like Matthew 7 are spoken to and from a place of Oneness.  When Jesus speaks to the disciples and others about why we should not judge, he does not do so only from a position outside of us, but from a place within us as well.  He is speaking from the all encompassing reality that we all know and that we all are.  Paul touches on this awareness when he says in Romans 1:20,”For since the creation of the world His [God’s] invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.”  While I will not unpack the full breadth of this passage right now, I will point to the obvious implication made here that all of Creation knows the fullness of its Source.  We are not separate from Source–from God and consequently from one another. Therefore, we have no excuse for living as if the opposite is true.  As the Christ, Jesus lives this reality of Wholeness eternally and speaks to us from this place.  Thus, when he makes assertions like the one you are about to read, it comes from that place.  And from this place his judgments are true, because their only intention is to remind us of who we truly are.  For as it says in 1 John 3:2, “Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.”  Now, in this Light read the passage below:

Matthew 7:1-6

7 “Judge not, that you be not judged. 2 For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you. 3 And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye? 4 Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me remove the speck from your eye’; and look, a plank is in your own eye? 5 Hypocrite! First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. 6 “Do not give what is holy to the dogs; nor cast your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you in pieces.

This poem Judge attempts to convey the essence of this passage–that the judgments we project onto others naturally returns upon us precisely because, in Oneness, those others are in fact us.  When Christ through Jesus, advises us not to judge, it is because he knows that it is of little effect in transforming our collective consciousness.  Our judgments do not transduce the dark energy of ego resistance into the vibrant all-creative energy of realized potential as we deceive ourselves into believing it will (if you would like this sentence unpacked contact me).  Only consciousness can do this.  This is what Jesus is telling us in verse 3-5 above.  What we often find when we release judgment for consciousness is that once we remove the plank from our own eye, we will discover that there never was a speck in our brother or sister’s eye in the first place.  All we were seeing was our own projected planks out in the world.  However, if after removing the plank from our own eye, we still see a speck in another’s, our conscious Love for them will show us how it can be removed for the benefit of the All.

Rather than unpack the rest of the poem which mentions heaven and hell in the context of being the ultimate in the human struggle with judgment, I will leave you with this expression I found on the bottle of Dr. Bronner’s soap, “For we’re all One or none! Listen children, Eternal Father Eternally One!  We’re All One or none! Exceptions eternally? NONE.”  As it pertains to this poem, Heaven is acceptance God’s reality and hell is it’s denial.  When we deny God’s reality to others we deny it to ourselves.  “What we bind on earth we bind in heaven.  What we release on earth, we release in heaven.”  Such is the Way of One.

Nature and Beyond

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Nature and Beyond

In every grain of sand, a world
Times three thousand more
There’s more to the natural world than eyes can see
Thus impossible to keep score

Can we count the raindrops
Or the hairs on a single head?
It’s overwhelming to imagine
So we distract ourselves instead

Have you noticed the ants at work
Or a family of deer playing?
Have you listened to the honks of geese
And wondered what they’re saying?

Most of us can’t say so
We have better things to do
When there are things to be bought and sold
Who has time for nature too?

But we are in a relationship
With everything that lives
We can’t seem to get that what we receive
Comes from that which nature gives

So when we take and take and take
Hoarding for fear of lack
We, at the same time, hurt ourselves
Putting knives in our own backs

Now only nature can save us
That’s what it’s trying to do
By revealing to us her secrets
Hoping we’ll get the clue

We know that she is infinitely vast
Yet somehow infinitely small
Jam packed full of paradox
Yet able to contain them all

She gives us room for freedom
As long as we trust her law
Love everything as we love ourselves
And we will be free from flaw

If you doubt, this ask the sparrow
Or the lilies of the field
Like everything else, they live by Nature’s Way
Will we join them in what’s real?

© Copyright 2013 Pedro S. Silva II

I really don’t get how so many of us live our lives as if we are so divorced from Nature.  It really trips me out.  And I’m not just talking about the whole global warming, pollution, and endangered species piece.  I see all of that as symptoms of the underlying disease. It goes deeper than that.  Now, I’m not going to say that I “get it”.  I don’t understand a lot about life. But one thing I do know is that I am a partaker of life.  I am not separate from any life and that which I give to life I receive from life.  We are One with all that is.  This much I know.  And I know that any contrary thought is born out of illusion.  While we try to subdue or defy nature, we do nothing more than subdue and defy our own consciousness of who we truly are as beings in relationship with everything that ever was, is, and will be.  All we have to do is pay attention.  But as it seems, we see paying attention as a threat.  When we distract ourselves from the mirror of call of Creation the consequence is never knowing who we really are.

Lamentations On Forgiveness

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You tell me to forgive them
But sometimes it’s so hard
To let go of some of the things that people do
You’d have to be a god

If I loved them and I healed them
And then they turned on me
It’d be better for them if I stayed dead
Because they’d never get away from me

I could not have your power
And deal with what you did
And yet I say I follow you
Who am I trying to kid?

That’s why I still need you to hold me
To keep me in your embrace
To lift me when I can’t lift myself
And shower me with your grace

The above poem pretty much sums up why I seek Christ.  Rather than being an original part of the book, it was actually written to accompany a sermon I did based on the words, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”  I’ve been meditating on those words for over 30 years. Ever since I realized that my brother and my fighting would never end as long as I kept hitting him back, I have been using those words as the kind of “true north” of my conscience and my consciousness.  Whenever I find myself agitated and incapable of saying those words, then I know I have some more work to do on myself.  Even though I hate the idea of a crucified savior of the world or even the fact that God’s world needs saving at all, I cannot deny my experience that people do great harm to one another and that most of it is cyclical. I’ve seen many hurt people hurt people.  Some people are so used to being hurt that they live in anticipation of it, often see it when it isn’t even there, and may even go so far as to push others to hurt them in order to confirm the only reality that they have ever known.  I know this first hand and in my experience the idea of Jesus saying, “I am no longer going to contribute to this cycle.” through his willingness to forgive has been the only thing to really work effectively in my own walk.

As the poem demonstrates, I still get stuck on some issues.  Especially since becoming a father, I have found that I need to ramp up my forgiveness practice more and more.  I do not anticipate getting to a point where I will no longer need to work on this, because new things show up everyday.  I am not just talking about things in my personal life.  I see it as my job to forgive anything that disturbs me–anything that agitates my soul and tempts me to look away from the world that Jesus saw where God loves those who do evil with the same love as those who do what we call good.  I should say that I am not delusional, thinking that the world is going to become some utopia where people will be singing happy songs and there will be no pain and yet I work toward it because I am certain that the alternative is less promising.  We already know what doesn’t work in this world.  And yet we still do it.  So the way I see it, is that forgiveness is the most viable option.

So as hard as it can seem sometimes, I am committed to the practice.  But I should say, that forgiveness doesn’t mean anything goes and that there are no efforts to correct those who harm.  In my practice, it simply means that people who do evil are ignorant.  I forgive their ignorance and clean myself from using my pain to justify my reactions.  If I do that then I am doing nothing other than justifying whatever harm they cause based on their pain.  It is a cycle.  So what I do instead is to seek forgiveness first.  Then out of that space, I will take the corrective actions that are in my power to perform.  Hopefully I am working out of inspiration so that I can trust that whatever I do is born of the love out of which the person/offender is created.  The hope is that what I offer helps wake the person up to their own inner reality.  If you’ve ever dealt with someone on drugs who is detoxing, you know that helping them can take a lot of forgiveness and that in order to keep them straight, you sometimes have to look like a real a**hole to get them to see the harm they are doing to themselves and others.  The whole point is that whatever you do is out of love and toward that persons healing.  Surgery could be another good analogy where you look to hurt someone when it is for their own good.  Forgiveness can often manifest like spiritual surgery. It starts by working on yourself which then prepares you to work for others. That’s how I work with Jesus.  I see him as the forgiveness master that undoes the cycle of pain perpetuating pain.  When I get hurt I turn to him.  It helps to draw me out of myself and toward that higher way of being that he offers.  No matter how much I feel sorry for myself sometimes for being the person taking responsibility for forgiveness in some situations, I know that it is the Way.  Ultimately it is all I have to offer.

We Dig It!

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We Dig It

There’s something I feel I must say to you
Don’t get angry just because it’s true
This is something I feel I have to do
Now let me break it down for you
We dig it!

When we see those people with nothing to eat
Somehow it makes us feel more complete
So we dig it.

We see they’re so poor so we’re comparatively rich
But if it were not for them, there would be no rich
How would we know if we all had the same shit?
So we need the poor, ain’t that a bitch
Can you dig it?

Man, so and so’s kid is bad as hell
But it makes my kid comparatively well
So I dig it.

Now here is something else for you
Once again it’s extremely true
Someone has to be down to look up to you
So thank God for losers because I’m one too
Can you dig it?

If it wasn’t for the darkness
Would there be light?
So thank God for the madness
Does that seem right?
This is something I won’t explain tonight.
But still we dig it.

Now there’s one more thing I have to say
None of you are wrong today
If it wasn’t to be, it wouldn’t be this way
It’s all part of the process of becoming OK
Can we dig it?

Luke 18 offers a parable attributed to Jesus that tells the story of a man who, while in so called prayer, compared himself to other people and found himself to be comparatively righteous.

“Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, ‘God, I thank You that I am not like other men—extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I possess.’ And the tax collector, standing afar off, would not so much as raise his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other; for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”

How familiar does that sound?  Have you ever looked at other people and thought like the above Pharisee?  I’m sure most of you have.  I know I used to and I would venture to say that 99% of Americans do.  It is part of our indoctrination here.  And I think it is safe to assume that this is done the world over to the same degree.  It clearly was happening in Jesus’ locale and time and as we know it is still happening now.  The fact is that most of us would have no concept of who we are outside of the context of other people.  Like the Pharisee, we compare ourselves to others and either exalt ourselves or look down on ourselves in relation to the people we are comparing ourselves to.  This practice is rampant in humanity and operates at every so called level of society from the poorest of the poor to the richest of the rich.  From the highest IQ to the lowest.  From the least attractive to the most.  Do you see what I am doing here by calliing up these spectra?  When I say high isn’t that where you want to be?  When I say low isn’t that what you want to avoid?  The question is, who is determining what is “high” and “low”?  As you can see from the parable, Jesus doesn’t use our standards of judgment.  Most of us would be kissing the butt of the Pharisaical equivalent in our own time and circumstances.  We’d believe his hype and step all over ourselves to get into his entourage.

I remember one time some friends asked me to play basketball.  I tried to explain to them that I never cultivated my hoop game, but I was willing to play if they could concentrate on their game instead of mine.  They played all of the time and it was a waste of all of our energies to compare my skills to theirs or to get frustrated if I passed the ball into the bleachers or dribbled on my foot.  They assured me that they could live in the moment and just play for fun and drop the whole competitive thing.  “We’re just playing for exercise”, they swore.  Well, the game began and ten minutes in, I could tell that my partner wanted to punch me in the mouth.  It would not have been the first time I was punched on the basketball court for “making someone lose”, so I knew the signs.  But, this time  I was playing with adults, so I figured the frustration would not get pass the evil eye and the occassional scream of “COME ON!”  So I just did my best.  We were only playing to 21 and my only goal was to make at least one basket before the game was over.  I was actually having fun.  I was in my own world, rating myself solely by how close I actually got to getting the ball in.  Air, air, backboard, backboard, air, rim, rim, backboard.  Then it happened.  There was no hope.  We were going to lose, but I kept playing like the game was as close as one of those Mighty Ducks movies.

According to programming, my teammate was dying inside.  Why did he get me?  “Pass the ball,” he yelled.  I guess the possibililty of losing 21 to 6 seemed more appealing than 21 to 4.  But I took the shot and by God’s grace, we were 1 point higher on the defeat scale. 19 to 7.  I’m jumping up and down.  I made a shot.  And then the game was sealed as the other guys took it home.  As they reveled in their glory and proceeded to throw it in my face, I said, “Yeah.  You destroyed a guy who played the game 5 times in his life and only twice with other people.  Woopity doo.  But did you see that shot I got on you?  I’m only 5’4″ and I got that shot over your 6′ head.  How were you not able to block that?”  Of course he looked at me like I was crazy.  On top of that I took all of the fun out of his gloating.  “If Jesus were calling that game he would have said I won, but who’s keeping score?” I added.  After the dust settled and they decided that I was officially crazy, one of the guys asked me why I wasn’t bothered by the game.  I told him that I knew one of us was going to lose.  That’s just how it is.  If there were no losers, there would be no winners.  He needed me in order for him to feel like a winner.Because I knew that, in reality I had nothing to lose.  My role completes the universal balance.  It’s just how it is.

This is the reality y’all.  The Universe does not need our judgment.  It is pretty pointless in the grand scheme of things.  When we compare ourselves to others and try to determine our status in relation to them, it is an exercise in futility.  As long as we do that we will never be able to truly desire for the fulfillment of all life.  How can we?  How can we be happy for people if we think of them as being better off than us?  How can we see eye to eye with those in temporary need if we think we are in a position to pity them or feel sorry for them?  One of my favorite quotes is from the actor, Kevin Costner.  I read an article he was featured in after he won a bunch of awards for Dances with Wolves.  When asked how excited he was about all of the achievements he said, “Hey, I am just a guy living a life like anybody else.”  And that’s it in a nutshell.  We are all people living lives and making choices.  Comparing ourselves to others and gauging our value based on what other people are doing adds nothing to our lives.

With this poem, I hope the reader is willing to admit that we have this tendency to compare ourselves to others and base our worth on a false sense of value, if in fact that is the case.  We need to know that each and everyone of us is of infinite value to our Creator.  Do you know what it takes to get us here?  It takes everything.  God does not hold back.  God gives everything to everything.  God literally pours God’s entire Being into everything that IS. And then once we become self aware or should I say self conscious, we begin the futile attempts to break it down, categorize it, and judge it according to our limited points of view.  What if we could just stop it all?  What if we could just be with each other, appreciate each other, and just live our lives together?

So the next time you catch yourself putting yourself down or lifting yourself up solely based on other people, just admit it.  No one can really judge you, so don’t judge yourself.  And as Jesus beseeched us, “Judge not, lest thou be judged” (by yourself).

Matthew 7:1-6

Do Not Judge

7 “Judge not, that you be not judged. 2 For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you. 3 And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye? 4 Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me remove the speck from your eye’; and look, a plank is in your own eye? 5 Hypocrite! First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.6 “Do not give what is holy to the dogs; nor cast your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you in pieces.

The Man I Am

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The Man I Am

I am the man society made

I had no choice in me

Your anger, your love, your joy, your frustration

Are all that I can be

I am a man without a Voice

All I say is what you need

Never able to speak for me,

Until all of us are freed

Have you ever felt like you had no choice in the person that you are?  It’s as if everything that you do is interpreted in a manner over which you have no choice.  I’ve felt that feeling and I have known many people who have.  Sometimes it works for you–at least until you start to question it–and sometimes it doesn’t.  For a long time it worked for me.  I ended up looking like the good guy no matter what I did because that was the role people assigned to me.  There were even times where I deliberately set out to do wrong and it turned out good.  I couldn’t stand it.  I was trapped by goodness.  I couldn’t even be a jerk if I wanted to. I was what they said I was and there is nothing “they” hate more than being wrong. The ego is so crazy that even when I admitted to being wrong and tried to punish myself, the people who were invested in my goodness would not support my own summation of myself. That is how crazy we are sometimes. Here’s a good example.

When I was in the military, I started out as a super shiny and crispy airman. My uniform was pressed, my boots were shiny, and I was super respectful. I drank the kool-aid in basic training and asked for seconds. I liked the order and the core values and all that rut. When it came time for the reviews, I deserved a 5 out of 5 and expected it. I honored the system, followed it, and deserved to get the scores it said someone who followed it was supposed to get. So when my first supervisor who didn’t know anything about me since he was deployed my entire evaluation period tried to give me a 3, I let him know that wasn’t happening. Everyone else who got to know me in the office knew I was a 5 so they would not accept his recommendation.

I know I sound arrogant, but is it arrogant to call a red rose red? No. I was a 5, because “they” had already decided I was a 5 because I did what 5s were supposed to do. I had paid enough attention in life to know that there was nothing he or anyone could do about it without getting into some serious crazy stuff. Of course, he doubted my take on things and went into the NCOIC’s (Non Commissioned Officer in Charge) to tell him I deserved a 3. His reasoning was that I did not work well with others, because he heard me tell a fellow airman to do his job or get out of my way. Well, after a few minutes, he emerged from the office looking like he was going to cry. He wouldn’t even look me in the eye. I was then called in the office where the NCOIC proceeded to tell me to ignore everything my supervisor said. “Obviously he does not know you. I will do your evaluation and it is a 5.” All I said was, “Ok. Thanks.” After that, my supervisor and I never really talked much. He knew his opinion didn’t count for anything. The irony is, neither did mine.

Fast forward 2 years. I went from shiny and crispy to dull and flaky. I was overweight, angry, and was sweating alcohol. I put getting haircuts off to the last minute and my pseudofolliculitis barbae (that is medical talk for razor bumps) was getting out of hand since I had finally started to grow facial hair. I was a mess and I knew it. On top of it all I was having crazy heart palpitations. I was no longer 5 material even in my own summation–especially in my summation. In retrospect I guess I was in mourning from a relationship ending. But at the time I did not have sympathy for myself so I decided that I was just a punk. I felt so crappy I didn’t even think God wanted anything to do with me. And so out of anger, I turned my projection of God’s imagined sentiment toward me back onto my idea of God and then rejected it. In short, I didn’t even have God to lean on at that time. And I started going out to clubs and drinking and generally trying to make up for lost time when I was “good for no reason”. Still, somehow, like Solomon I was able to see myself acting like a fool with some clarity.

When evaluation time came around again, I was able to be honest on the form where it asked my opinion of myself. Being a little generous for the extenuating circumstances of my break-up, I gave myself a 3.5. I didn’t care that the lower score would effect my ability to get promoted or anything. I still had respect for what the system was designed for. I didn’t think someone acting like I was acting should be headed toward promotion anyway and so I told the truth about my decline. Guess what happened. I got called into the office and was essentially told what my old supervisor had been told. I was not getting anything less than a 5. I protested that it was unfair and that people like me deserved 3.5s or else the whole system would be corrupted. My new supervisor eventually begged me to accept a 5 for his sake and I told him, “I don’t care what you do because this system is fake.” He told me that if it made me feel any better, he would write in my areas of improvement that I talked too much and was too hard on myself. I remained a 5.

So you see. In that case, I was the man that society made. I had no choice in me. Unfortunately, I know several people who did not benefit from this human tendency to see what they want to see. And believe me, I have been on that side too. This place has a way of trying to force you into conformity with the story “they” have already written for us. I could have easily told you a story about brothers in my neighborhood who were convinced that there was “nothing for a nigga to do but sling” after being crushed by the pressures around them or of a friend who was so tired of being looked at like he was going to steal something that he snapped and did it and was consequently labeled a thief. I could have, but I used the example above because I think it is important to know that there are people who benefit from some of our systems who are just as trapped as those of us who don’t seemingly benefit. We’re all in this world together and I think that the sooner we realize that we are serving systems instead of being served by them and serving humanity as a whole, the sooner we will be able to erase the lines we think separate us from one another. Jesus told the religious robots of his time that the Sabbath was created for humanity, not the other way around. The same is true for all of the systems we have in place. I don’t think that there is anything wrong with systems, but when people are being herded into them like cattle forced to play roles that may run contrary to their spirit, those systems need to be questioned. If they are not open to questioning then none of us are free.

This poem calls to consciousness that feeling of despair that colors many of our lives. Like Eminem said, “I am whatever you say I am. If I wasn’t then why would you say I am.” That’s what many of us feel like after years of being fed this story of who we are or who we are supposed to be. I want you to know that we have a choice. When you read this poem, I hope that you acknowledge any feelings that come up around it and then decide whether or not you want to keep allowing them to dictate your life. Because you do have a choice even if it may not seem to be an easy one. The key is to follow Jesus’ advice to the rich young ruler in Luke 18:18-27. If we can do that, then we go from being someone society made to someone God created. That’s where the freedom lives.