Scripture.

I find that I have a very visceral reaction to people who quote Scripture: I immediately dislike them.

When a person quotes from the Bible, I tend to think to myself, Oh dear, please stop being such an insufferable, sanctimonious prick. You judge people as much as anyone else, only you sound arrogant in your humility.

I suppose there is nothing intrinsically wrong with quoting Scripture. The problem is that people cannot do it without sounding horribly pretentious. More problematic is that it's nearly always done in a hypocritical manner. The judgmental adulterer tells us to let he without sin cast the first stone. Et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseum.

Another part of my problem may be that many (if not most) people who quote Scripture do not know what they're talking about. Many so-called Christians cannot name the four books of the Gospel (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John). Many so-called Christians cannot name the first five books of The Old Testament (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy). And yet they're super-awesome at telling me that I should examine the log in my own eye rather than looking upon the speck in my brother's eye.

Regardless of why I have such a visceral reaction, I do. I cannot stand to be around those who quote the Bible or those who assert that they live and breathe the teachings of Christ, thereby refusing to judge people, all the while judging those who are not nearly as pious as they.

Spirituality is yummy.

I'm not much of a spiritual person. I'm not into religion. The God concept tends to elude me. I just try to live well, hope for the best, and prepare for the worst. It's the cautious optimist in me. Maybe some day I'll write a post detailing my thoughts regarding spirituality a bit further.

Today is not that day.

Those who know me know that my betrothed, Chris, cooks for me. All the time. I love it. The way to my heart was certainly through my stomach, and Chris figured that out really early on. The first date was curry. The second date was tuna steaks. And so on and so forth.

While I am not into spirituality, and while I'm not into cooking, I am certainly into eating. Which is why I was rather tickled my Chris's most recent blog post in which he compares spirituality to cooking.

On Hebrew school and improper word usage.

My parents made me go to Hebrew school when I was a kid. It started off as once a week in Kindergarten. By fourth grade, I was going twice a week. And by sixth, it was thrice weekly.

Hebrew school was awful. We learned bible stories, and the teachers weren't too fond of my questioning the faith. The rabbis? Oh, they loved my silly questions, but the teachers were young do-gooder types who weren't quite sure how to handle my rambunctious ways.

Because of this, my folks let me become a Hebrew School Dropout in the eighth grade. The teacher was an ass and we'd all had enough.

And speaking of asses... The most irritating thing about Hebrew school (to me, at least) was improper word usage. In the seventh grade, we had some sort of ceremony (for what, I do not recall). Each of us presented either an English or Hebrew recitation of one of the Ten Commandments.

Saving the best for last, I was to recite the English text of the Tenth Commandment:

You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, his male or female slave, his ox or his ass, or anything that is your neighbor's.

You know what they made me do? They made me say the word "donkey" instead of "ass." If they had let me just go ahead and use the A-word, everything would have gone smoothly. But because I was so very irritated that they changed the text for purposes of political correctness, I was so theatrical and so ridiculous in my recitation, that I was the only reciter who got a laugh from the audience.

The most egregious example of word usage tampering during my religious education was during the translation of my Torah portion during my Bat Mitzvah. I read Leviticus 26.3 through 26.13. To be sure, the text of Leviticus 16.13 is as follows:

I am the Lord your G-d who brought you out from the land of Egypt to be their slaves no more, who broke the bars of your yoke and who made you walk erect.

See the problem? If you guessed it was the word "erect," you are correct. Ding ding! I had to say the word "upright."

We all know of my penchant for proper syntax and my distaste of evolving usage (e.g., the fact that "melancholy" is now used as an adjective instead of a noun, the proper adjective form being "melancholic"). Given this, combined with the tampering with religious text for the sake of cleaning it up, is it really any wonder why I grew to hate organized religion?

Part II: God?

My current boyfriend is into the God thing.

He's not pushy about it, would never demand that I share is his religious or spiritual beliefs, doesn't chastise me for the way I act in this regard, or for my feelings on the matter. Once, in the beginning, he announced that I do "believe" in God, I just don't know that I do. Since that time, he hasn't said much, other than the fact that he doesn't wish to discuss God or religion or spirituality with me.

This displeases me, if for no other reason than I don't like people to unilaterally decide for me which tops are and are not off limits for discussion. Just because I am dispassionate about the matter (or even passionately against the active practice of religion (for me, not for others)) should not disallow me from speaking intellectually about something. In short, I don't like being told what to do, and declaring an issue off limits is a form of telling me what I am allowed to speak about, what is acceptable to speak about.

But wait. There's more. As much as I hate to admit it, I am a bit resentful. Not of his relationship with God. (As an aside, I cringe when writing the phrase "relationship with God." I find the concept of a personal relationship with something called God so egomaniacal. As if this Thing Called God has time to develop relationships with all of his believers.) It's not his beliefs I resent, it's merely what I perceive to be his sense of spiritual entitlement, if you will. A sense of religious superiority. As if I am somehow less compassionate, less good, less of a person because I don't subscribe to a definite belief in the Almighty. As if he (and others who are steadfast in their beliefs in God) is somehow more "right" than I, "better" in some way.

This is, of course, likely my own issue, developed by past relationships and past dealings with people more religious and God-fearing or God-loving than I. It's not that I disbelieve in God, per se. It's more that I don't care to think about it. And I am resentful of the fact that most religious folks are haughty in their beliefs and arrogant in their humility.

"Finding" God isn't going to make me better, or more capable, or happier. I depend on myself to achieve what I want in and out of life. Why isn't that enough? Why does there have to be more? Why must people insist that I cannot be a healthy and vibrant person on my own?

God?

I've never really been big on the whole God thing.

When my parents made me go to shul with them on Rosh Hashanah -- long after I'd turned thirteen and they'd promised that religion would be my choice -- I became irate. Why did I have to go? I didn't see the point.

I remember trying to feel something during services. But all I got out of it was a lot of standing up, sitting down, reading along, and boring lectures made by Rabbis who didn't have a very good grasp on proper grammar. It was boring, really. I didn't feel some overwhelming sense of community. The dogma was bothersome. I could (and still can) recite the Sh'ma, but it's wholly rote; it means nothing to me.

For a while, I dated someone who is very involved in spirituality and personal growth. When I told him that I sold my soul on eBay, he insisted that despite that, I still do have a soul. When I spoke of my refusal to believe in some higher power, he pointed out the fallacy of my thinking in ways that I could understand. And so I became interested, and even hopeful, that there really is a something out there, something more, something bigger than us.

I tried to be spiritual. I read a lot, I learned a lot, and I talked a good game. I developed personal philosophies and pontificated on them. I talked about nonduality as if I had a clue. I professed to be uber-learned about earth-based spirituality and polytheism. I developed my own mores, and was often told that I had an extremely skewed moral compass. I relished that.

At the same time, I began to loathe all organized religious acts. I had a visceral reaction at weddings, at the recitation of Hebrew words, and the empty acts of Jewish tradition (not empty unto themselves, but empty because the people partaking in them had no clue why they were doing what they were doing, but followed the tradition blindly). At work, I would listen to people talk about their relationships with God. I would abstain from comment, holding my tongue, lest I say something offensive and and awful.

These days, I don't really have a set of beliefs. I abhor dogma in any form, including some of the tenets of Judaism. The mysticisms are fascinating, but I know so little about them. I can't stand blind faith. I don't look to God for the answers. I don't trust that everything will be "okay" because God will make it so.

Instead, I have faith in myself. I know I haven't lived that long, but I have gotten through everything that's been thrown my way thus far. I am strong and I am confident that everything will be okay. In fact, it's not even so much that I'm confident that things will be okay: I know it. I know that no matter what happens, things will be, well, fine.

I wish I believed in something more, something greater. I wish I could have that sort of faith in anything. But instead, I have to be content with knowing that I make my own decisions and that I am what makes me happy, or sad, or successful, or not. That will have to be enough.

This concerns me.

And then God created the banana.

I don't think I really have much else to say. Thoughts?

Little burning villages.

I was still in love with him on October 1, 2005, when he took me into the middle of nowhere. Whatever relationship we'd had for all those months was deteriorating more and more with each passing day. We both knew it, but for once, stopped talking about it. He drove, and I sat in the passenger seat, miserable and silent, wondering how long I would have to stay before he'd be ready to take me home.

I was tired. Tired from waking up at 7 a.m. for practice. Tired of the ups and downs in the relationship. Tired of putting so much energy into something with someone who would never ever feel the same way about me as I felt about him. Tired of feeling. At all. And now what was I doing? Driving to a remote location to spend an evening at a bonfire with a bunch of people who I hardly knew and who didn't like me anyway. So many people. So. Many. People.

Even now, when I try to remember what I was feeling that night, it's just a melange of fleeting thoughts, unsettling feelings, and strange sensations. But I do remember one thing. I had lost him in more ways than one. He was off talking to someone else -- wherever he was didn't matter to me; I had lost track. I had lost track of time as well. It may have been midnight or 4 a.m. I was cold and sitting next to the fire, holding the hand of a near-stranger. I had been talking for hours and hours, and wasn't stopping any time in the foreseeable future. I gazed into the orange flames. Deep within the fire a log was slowly burning. As pieces of the wood burned, I saw within the wood what looked like several tiny villages of houses, flames licking their roofs and walls, smoke pouring from the tiny windows of the tiny houses that made up the tiny villages.

I pointed out the village to the near-stranger who sat next to me. He said something back to me, but I have no recollection of what it was. What I do recall was an urge to wrap my arms around him and tell him that everything would be all right and that he would be happy again some day. My intuition was telling me that the person beside me was as deeply unhappy and lost feeling as I was. Instead, I simply told him that I had no soul and no spirit. He didn't respond and I went back to watching the fire.

I feel that way again, though. Not unhappy, but like my spirit is gone. I've stopped caring and simply can't be bothered with such tawdry things as love. I work and I come home and I socialize with friends. But there's a strange empty feeling once more. No one ever realizes it, no one intuits it. I've become ambivalent towards people in general and don't think about the odd, disquieting emptiness. But on those rare occasions that I do, I simply close my eyes and see smoke swirling about the little burning villages.

Plagiarism.

Christians have been plagiarizing off of Judaisim for centuries. They get all pissy about the fact that Jews killed Jesus. But really, would they have a religion if it wasn't for Jesus being killed? They should be thanking the Jews for killing Jesus. As if all this Jews-killed-Jesus stuff wasn't bad enough, they go around taking all our ideas.

Let's look at the famed song "Santa Claus is Coming to Town," for example. He sees you when you're sleeping. He knows when you're awake. Given this description, Santa Claus could be charged with stalking. And this is someone we want coming down our chimneys? A creepy fat stalker? Then Santa Claus makes his list. He checks it twice. He's gonna know whether you've been naughty or nice.

Sound familiar? Huh? Huh?

The Jewish God was making lists long before Santa Claus ever was. "On Rosh Hashanah it is written, on Yom Kippur it is sealed." See, God looks down at all of us little people, and on the Jewish new year he writes down everything in his big ole Book of Life. He checks it once. Then everyone has until Yom Kippur to atone for hir or her sins. If they do a good job, God may edit what he originally wrote. Then he checks it a second time.

His list, however, is far more thorough than Santa's. It's not just about naughty and nice. Seriously, people. I mean, we all know that Christian folk stole the entire idea, but the least they could have done was get it all a little closer. You know how thorough God really is in his list making? I'll show you just how thorough.

The Gates of Repentance High Holiday prayer book (page 108) has the answer. God makes a list containing the following: How many shall pass on, how many shall come to be; who shall live and who shall die; who shall see ripe age and who shall not; who shall perish by fire and who by water; who by sword and who by beast; who by hunger and who by thirst; who by eathquake and who by plague; who by strangling and who by stoning; who shall be secure and who shall be driven; who shall be tranquil and who shall be troubled; who shall be poor and who shall be rich; who shall be humbled and who exalted.

This is some serious stuff, folks. Far more than making silly lists about naughty and nice. But much like television "journalists" merely rewrite wire stories, here we have Christians ripping off the Jews again. And they call us cheap. Hell, at least we're original.

Nonduality.

I got a strange email from a friend of mine today. We'd been corresponding as we generally do, which is to say we were talking about nothing. How was your weekend? Oh, it was good. Any wild plans coming up? The mundane Internet version of small talk. And then he wrote me this:

"Nonduality? WTF!!!"

I was in the middle of a rather stressful day. You see, a hearing was scheduled for Wednesday, and my boss more or less threw it at me. Which means I have to go to jail tomorrow afternoon rather than work preparing for the hearing I have on Friday. Which means that instead of writing this, I should be drafting a hard-hitting cross examination. Suffice it to say, the nonduality question more or less sprang up out of nowhere. So I responded to his email in kind:

"Nonduality? What the fuck are YOU talking about?"

His answer was oh-so-enlightening. It said, simply: "Nonduality." Well, yeah, we got that far already. I wasn't really thinking much about it. What I was really thinking about was how to get one guy out of jail and how to keep another guy from going in. So I emailed him back some bullshit linguistic answer about how "duality" means something comprised of two parts, so "nonduality" would thus be something not comprised of two parts. A bit of a wiseass answer, to be sure, but I was operating on high stress and low caffeine.

I went out for a cigarette break, thought more about it, and decided to write a more detailed message when I got home. Now, I don't purport to be an expert on such things as nonduality. I live inside my head most of the time, so some of the stuff that rattles around is buried pretty far near the bottom. My recall isn't what it used to be, so I dug around and came up with the following, not-so-great answer. I throw this out there in the hopes that there are people who know more than I.

* * *

The funny part about explaining nonduality, is that it can only be explained in terms of what it is NOT. It's a total mindfuck. And a horrible connundrum, in that the concept of duality itself is needed to explain nonduality. But I'm totally getting ahead of myself here.

It may be easier to think about if you consider what duality is first. For me, the easiest way to think about duality is in very simplistic terms. I generally look to Greek and Roman polytheism as a guide here. I dig thinking about the Greek gods and goddesses because they seem so very human in nature: they all have good attributes and bad attributes. One of the ongoing themes in Greek mythology is the struggle between good and evil. Indeed, this is the ongoing theme in most literature, classic or contemporary. In that structure, good and evil must coexist; one cannot exist without the other. There are so many examples of these sort of "opposites." How would we know peace if we did not have war? Without black, there would be no white. Yet the concept of nonduality takes all of this and throws it out the window. "Black and white?" is asks. "But what about shades of gray? Black is not black and white is not white -- they are ALL just variants of gray. All this gray simply exists, without the interaction of black or white."

Nonduality posits that there ARE no opposites, and that duality itself is merely an illusion. There is no male/female, active/passive, and so forth. There are no good words to explain nonduality, because it's a realization. How can one assign words to something that must be realized? Thus, ego (sense of self, sense of living, sense of time, planning, etc, etc.), the way it is commonly viewed, is bullshit. We do not think; we merely are present.

When I was a little girl, my mother presented me with the idea that people are not people, and brains are not brains... we merely float around, and this higher being (which some people call God), is really the force that controls life and thought and sense of self. As a 10-year-old, I pictured a huge cauldron over a fire with brains floating around in it like some odd soup, and some bigger-than-life "thing" (for lack of a better word) prodding the brain soup with a huge broomhandle. Strangely, I still sometimes get that picture in my head. Which may explain why I'm as odd as I am today.

I sold my soul on eBay.

Years ago, I sold my soul on eBay. "One virginal soul," I advertised. "Complete with certificate of authenticity." I charged $20 for shipping and handling. It was my soul, after all. I ended up getting more for the shipping than for the soul itself. I used to be very flip about having sold my soul on eBay. I thought it was an entertaining anecdote. I would tell people I had neither soul nor spirit, and would then launch into the story. It was some of my best material and got some decent laughs from the critics and cynics of the world. I'd even throw in a few quips about the problems with "truth in advertising," given that I'd touted my soul as being "virginal."

I was angry. I was bitter. I hated everone and everything. In retrospect, I abhore that I was so callous. Luckily, I came out of it all relatively unscathed. But it was only a little more than a year ago that I thought myself empty. With the help of some introspection and some good friends who were willing to talk to me when I called at 4 am, I've come a long way. But I realize that as far as my spiritual journey is concerned, I still have a long way to go.

The only part that makes me sad is that I've yet to find someone who really gets all this. My social circle is full of lawyers and atheists who don't have the humility to understand that there's more to the world than the spheres of their own experiences.

Do you believe in magick?

I'm well aware that there are many people out there who are spiritual who enjoy gallivanting with faeries and wizards and whatnot. But does that mean they have to spell incorrectly? Magick. What the hell is that all about?

According to a close source, "magick" is about to be included in Webster's Dictionary. This fact makes me even more irate.