The streets of heaven are purported to be paved with gold, which speaks to the nonvalue of gold in a selfless economy. The streets of this place are paved with God’s children, which speaks to the prevalence of evil in the world.
The soul requires meaningful work and satisfying rest. Meaningful work can be anything from janitorial work in a homeless shelter to serving fast food, to helping customers buy products in a big box store, to infant heart surgery. In a self-free world, not one of those jobs is more important than the others. Your income and net worth in no way speak to the value of your work in this world. (My total income from this site which cost about 30K to build and costs about $600 to maintain annually, is about $45 in total after 5 years – a shitty investment, on paper, but meaningful work for me.)
The soul requires genuine intimacy with people you love. The soul requires a deep, constant connection to its creator, (to God). Connection to God may be expressed in any number of activities from gardening to painting to car racing to matchbook collecting.
Ultimately the soul will thrive only at the expense of the self. Unlike the violent, lying, pandering, controlling, scheming, power-mad self, the soul will not fight for dominance. You have to advocate for your soul or it will end up in hell, tormented forever.
There is only one person who is a danger to your soul – you. God will not cast anyone into hell. We do that to ourselves. No one can penetrate that deeply into us, and God chooses only to do so by invitation. Choose to live, as Tolstoy says at the end of Anna Karenina, for the soul.
Just like empty spaces define objects within those spaces, so the size of the self defines the quality of your life. The soul is life. The self is death. The soul is the presence of God, truth, and liberty. The self is the absence of these.
Most religions spend the vast majority of their time showing us how to become self-less, how to overthrow the tyrant self at the center of our hearts. In many religions this process is connected to the cessation of desire, the continual use of prayer and self-discipline, and the use of rigorous meditation.
Starve the self, this is the lynchpin for living beautifully, living as I understand GypsyFaith, that is, a non-religious, non conforming, voluntary, non commercial faith that is meant to be useful, meaningful, and productive.
Some of the things the self uses to inflate are: comfort, delusion, hatred, rage, distraction, greed, and chaos. Comfort is the victim’s biggest enemy. Comfort is what is promised, but not delivered, by drugs, food, and stupefying media (all forms of passive entertainment including that which they call news). Binge watching 4 hours of screen will not make you happy; it will make you more full of self-hatred when you waddle up off of the couch feeling ugly and stupid and lonely. Binge eating, binge shopping, binge drinking will not make you feel good. You’ll wake up from those moments feeling unloved, lost, and strung out in terror. Hate thoughts, ie, spending the entire day focusing on hate for your predator, for malignant forces dominating this minutes’ news cycle, or on hating an infinite number of other targets from your daily round or personal history will make you feel worthless, powerless and humiliated. Grappling with the chaos of a life full of equally broken people, or chaos of a physically unhealthy life, or chaos resulting from unbalanced behavior will make you feel helpless and drive you deeper into self-hatred. The self absolutely THRIVES on self-hatred, hate is the currency, the blood of the self. The more you do it, the stronger the self becomes.
What’s the reply to this madness?
Easy Does It, they say in AA. What God says to me constantly, in my morning affirmations, is Softer NOT Harder. The victim reply to the incessant emotional pain of daily life is to fight it or to numb it, but in both cases the victim seeks to do this with gusto, heartily, violently, to really shut the pain the fuck up. Hence the tub of ice cream, the $5,000 credit bill, the 3 hours of TV.
I say it softly, just, no. No. Stay. Stay here with nothing in your hands, in your head, in your stomach. Be with God. Go slowly, so slowly. Do something real with your hands, something that takes patience. Learn something. Read a book that requires thinking and doesn’t numb you*. Look at a dog in the face, copy your cat, play with a child, walk, go fucking bowling, make ginger snaps, but don’t push, don’t pummel, don’t fight. And most of all, control what’s looping in your mind – every time a hate thought enters, ask the Holy Spirit to remove it. It’ll come back in an instant. You’ll remove it by the power of the spirit again, and 50 more times, and you’ll start to knit, or to walk, or to look at the leaves and to move your consciousness to something that isn’t about hate. It’s the work of a lifetime, this starvation of the self, the care of the soul, and the simultaneous acceptance of the light, joy, mercy, truth and love of the presence of God who is here right now, right here, right now. Right. Now.
Many ardent religious types love to bask in the selfhood of their morality or in the glorious rigor of their practice. They brag about how hard God is to please in their pretentious, apparently self-effacing manner. Calling bullshit on that. God is really, really, easy to please. Here’s what you do: breath. God’s delighted. Sit there in agony, asking the Holy Spirit to drive off the suicidal, homicidal thoughts you have. God’s giving a thumbs’ up. Here’s what you do, scream your ass off at God, blame God, cast your violence there. God is honored by your company. God’s yoke is embarrassingly light. There’s absolutely zero to brag about in the true redemption process. It’s ridiculously non demanding. Stop fucking trying to earn it. That’s another of the self’s games, earning it with absurd, impotent, and worthless striving for attention and praise and pride. Just be. And Know. That I am God. That will be enough. (It’s also the only way.)
*Books/Films I read and reread (watch and rewatch) that have had a lifechanging effect upon me (I reread the same books all the time, literally sometimes I finish the book and just begin again – same with films.):
-ALL of Leo Tolstoy, but particularly War and Peace and Anna Karenina
-All the Names and The Cave, both by atheist Jose Saramago
-Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
-The New Testament
-Simple Abundance by Sarah Ban Breathnach
-The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
-AA’s Big Book
-The Great Divorce and the Screwtape Letters, both by CS Lewis
-Walden by Henry Thoreau.
-Catcher in the Rye by Salenger
-ALL poetry of Franz Wright (but start with the poem called The Only Animal)
– The Gulag Archepelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
– Benny and Joon, the film starring Johnny Depp
– Groundhog Day, the film starring Bill Murray
-Nobody’s Fool, the film starring Paul Newman
– Shrink, the film starring Kevin Spacey
-The Gambler, the film starring Mark Walhberg
– The Matrix Series films
-Instinct, the film starring Antony Hopkins
-Silver Livings Playbook starring Brad Cooper