to love and follow his direction

Sometimes I feel like a cheat. A fake. A charlatan.



Now, I do not mean this in a bad way. Please do not take me wrong.


What I mean to say is that I am a zealous idea thief. I steal everything. Damn near everything I spit out that is even remotely intelligent is stolen. I hear someone talk. I pick something up in a conversation. I read something. Maybe a book. Or the news. I steal it. I regurgitate it. Or I add to it. Or I alter it to fit my philosophy. I steal it.

Pigmaei gigantum humeris impositi plusquam ipsi gigantes vident


I am pretty sure that this is normal. No ideas are really new. Every bit of knowledge in the human cannon is built upon the one that came before it. I rarely hear it discussed at any rate. Perhaps it is not so normal.


I was having a conversation with a friend at work. He is interested in raw food diets. We touched up diet, religion, Gandhi, Tolstoy.


If you are interested in diet you should read some Gandhi. I've read his autobiography. But I'm sure you can find some essays on his diet. Diet was an integral part of Gandhi's life both spiritual and material. He was a vegetarian. He was constantly torn over whether or not to give up dairy. He lived for many years on a diet of only fruit and raw nuts. He fasted often. His autobiography is a really great place to start. He wrote the novel in English. It was like his 12th language. So, while it is not superb in prose, it is not lacking either. It more than makes up for any deficiency's in writing style in content. He labeled the book 'The Story of My Experiments in Truth'. He didn't write the book about his public life or his political conquests. Rather, he focused his attention to his 'experiments in truth'. For Gandhi, 'truth' and 'god' were one and the same Many of his experiments involved his diet. Some involved the political realm. He fasted he prayed. In search of truth....

Leo Tolstoy, who wrote both War and Peace and Anna Karenia, was one of the more influential thinkers in Gandhi's life. Tolstoy, during the last 10-15 years of his life became a devout and, in many ways, radical Christian. Through the whole body of Christ's works the Sermon on the Mount is the most clear and direct message to mankind. Every man woman and child knows what is said in the Sermon and knows it to be correct. True. Yet everyone, or almost everyone, stands in direct opposition to this teaching. Good boys and young men, raised in churches and on the bible since day one, join armies. It is reasoned out. It is ignored. It is not thought to be applicable. It is not thought realistic to follow Christ's teaching to such an extreme. It is not realistic to follow Christ's teaching. Every nation in the world has a standing army. Good Christian Nations. The majority of people support this. The majority of churches support this. Citizens pay taxes that they know supports wars and young boys killing and being killed. It is legal for the state to murder citizens that broken laws. Leaders, good Christian leaders, advocate hunting down and killing enemies.


And let us not forget this one...


Sure hell is real. If you are going to believe in heaven you have to believe in hell. Without hell heaven has no meaning. I don't know that the majority of religions hold up without an idea of hell. And I am not talking about this silly nonsense about pitchforks and flames and such nonsense.

I recently heard a description of hell as a terror to all of the senses. You are crammed in dark pit, body of body with no room to move or even breathe. Everything smells rotten and terrible. A thousand times worse than the worst smell on earth. There is feces and things even more terrible in your mouth. Your entire body is engulfed in flames 10,000 hotter than any flames on earth. Yet your skin does not burn away. It stays there. Forever. Eternity is a long time. Imagine a mountain. Biggest mountain you can think of. Now imagine that mountain made out of sand. Imagine that it is a birds task to carry away that mountain in his beak one grain at a time. Now imagine that he can only take one grain every one hundred years. The time that it took the bird to complete this task would not even be a fraction of eternity. And that is how long you will be in hell for.

Hell does not need all that trickery. Hell does not need such grandiose stories and imagery. As a Christian, as any follower of a good and loving god, the most terrible thing imaginable is not this terror of the senses. The complete absence of god from your personage for all eternity is a fate infinitely worse than burning or tasting feces. That is hell.


I've been meaning to steal this one for a while. From Gandhi's Autobiography:

My uniform experience has convinced me that there is no other God than Truth. And if every page of the chapters does not proclaim to the reader that the only means for the realization of truth is Ahimsa, I shall deem all my labour in writing these chapters to have been in vain. And, even though my efforts in this behalf may prove fruitless, let the readers know that the vehicle, not the great principle is at fault. After all, however sincere my strivings after Ahimsa may have been, they have still be imperfect and inadequate. The little fleeting glimpses, therefore, that I have been able to have of Truth can hardly conve an idea of the indescribable lustre of Truth, a million times more intense that of the sun we daily see with our eyes. In fact what I have caught is only the faintest glimmer of that mighty effulgence. But this much I can say with assurance, as a result of all my experiments, that a perfect vision of Truth can only follow a complete realization of Ahimsa.

To see the universal and all-pervading spirit of Truth face to face one must be able to love the meanest of creations as oneself. And a man who aspires after that cannot afford to keep out of any field of life. That is why my devotion to Truth has drawn me into the field of politics; and I can say without the slightest hesitation, and yet in all humility, that those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means...
But I know that I have still before me a difficult path to traverse. I must reduce myself to a zero. So long as a man does not of his own free will put himself last among his fellow creatures, there is no salvation for him. Ahimsa is the farthest limit of humility.
In bidding farewell to the reader, for the time being at any rate, I ask him to join with me in prayer to the God of Truth that He may grant me the boon of Ahimsa in the mind, word and deed.