Giving Yourself a Tune Up

I spent the day doing some work on my long-suffering car.  It's officially 17 this year, and has more than a few miles on it, it recently passed 230 thousand kilometres, and while compared to some vehicles it is in good condition, it has nevertheless reached the stage where it needs regular care and attention to keep it running well.  So today I changed the oil, replaced the oil filter, spark plugs, air filter, and most critically, I changed the fuel filter, as I had a suspicion that it had not been changed since the vehicle was new, and was probably blocked with dirt.  This was probably one of the reasons why I was getting worse fuel economy recently.  Anyhow, to keep short and to the point, afterwards all these little things meant that my previously deteriorating performance had been rectified, and all the lost performance had been restored.  Like all things though I found a few other little jobs I need to do, but that is the nature of things, that fixing one thing often reveals several other issues that will need correcting.

So how does this relate to us as people?  Often we are like a vehicle, working hard for many years with little major maintenance, until we suddenly find ourselves in need of major work, we might find ourselves suddenly getting sick or depressed, our strength failing us and we wonder what is happening as we struggle to figure out where we went wrong.  Often we may face a major crisis that forces us to confront a range of issues that need fixing in our lives, but how many of these are a result of neglecting the warning signs?  Are you stressed, getting more easily irritated, feeling run down etcetera?  Maybe your body and your spirit are trying to warn you that unless you take action now something major will break.  Like in a car how a little noise can rapidly turn into an expensive repair, so ignoring the noises our body and spirit make now by distracting ourselves or drowning out those noises may leave us facing a catastrophic chain of failure and damage in the future.

So as with a car we can invest in regular mechanical work, or in teaching ourselves to perform regular checks of things such as oil and coolant and tyre pressure, and having unusual noises investigated and repaired early, so we can invest in ourselves.  We can take time out to journal and write about what concerns us, what frustrates us, what makes us angry, what brings us joy and happiness, what we dream about and strive for.  We can take time to meditate and enjoy quiet times, by ourselves or with family or loved ones.  We can have regular health checks and eat healthy, while taking in some gentle exercise.  We can take moves to make our working life less stressful and start to question our lifestyle.  Do we want to spend all our life working to possess things?  Do we really need a new car or a bigger house or the latest consumer gadgets?  Will we be better off financially and emotionally with less debt and more time to think without all the distractions that are offered through the television and the internet?  Sometimes it is good to go to the park and let the kids play while you enjoy a good book.  A focus on acquiring less and being happy with what you have is perhaps the best tune up for your soul.

Great Intentions and My Fickle Focus.

It's another Friday night here, and I am sitting down at the end of a long week and as I seem to be making somewhat of a habit of doing, composing a blog post and wondering what the hell I am going to write about.  I don't feel appreciably like I am an anything approaching a journalist or professional writer, but I like to think I can empathise with those required to produce a number of words for an editorial on a regular basis.  I do seem to recall from the study I have done that living with constant deadlines is its own special form of hell, albeit one which can teach the virtue of discipline and help build character, helping force the often chaotic mass of thoughts to emerge in a reasonably orderly fashion.

I had planned in honour of the State of Origin rugby league series that we are inflicted with at this time of the year to write a long discourse on what I perceive as the homoerotic aspects of football and the way that men who would recoil in horror from the thought of actually being gay, will nevertheless publicly engage in full body contact, then afterwards shower naked together and in some cases, engage in group sex with one woman and a room full of naked footballers or manage to take naked photographs of each other.  In all of this their only expression of outrage coming when they are found out and embarrassed, rather than it seems, showing any genuine contrition for the people they manage to hurt along the way.  I was going to write at some length my thoughts on the shadow that seems to haunt many men in Australia, the fear of being gay or being attracted to another man.  I think it is the fear of this shadow that drives many men to be so aggressively heterosexual, along with the fear that being labelled gay will cause them to lose social standing and power amongst their peers.  Many moralists would say that pornography and prostitution drive men to be aggressively sexual, whereas I believe that men making use of pornography and prostitution may instead be a response to fear and an attemt at reassurance. 

Let me say in the midst of all this that I am a heterosexual male who has come to terms the fact that sexuality is a spectrum of behaviour and preference.  Very few are either exclusively at one extreme or the other, a person can be gay or straight, be bi-sexual or merely bi-affective.  Some people cannot meed their needs exclusively from a relationship with one gender while for some friendship can have a certain intimate aspect that may not become sexual in nature.

It seems to me in thinking about all this that human sexuality is, and has always been a more complex issue than has been set out in the laws of religion and the state, and that homosexual relationships have always taken place, in every society around the world, even though those who chose to express who they were often risked death and ostracism from their communities.  We here in Australia, are currently debating whether gay people should be allowed to marry, and to achieve the full legal rights that come with the institution of marriage.  It seem that the time is now right for us a society to not just think about taking this step, but to take this step and recognise that how people express their sexuality is biological, and not something that can be regulated away through law or through threat of damnation, but is for a section of society, as much a part of being human as being left-handed or having red hair is for others.

So, the Rapture Didn't Happen...

Lots of discussion the last week or so about the declaration by Harold Camping from familyradio.com that 6pm Saturday the 21st of May was the point at which Jesus Christ would return and the rapture would occur.  This was apparently supposed to happen at 6pm in every time zone, meaning those in the Americas would receive plenty of advance warning as the time zones progressed around the world.

Well first of all, what exactly is the rapture?  Those Christians who attend certain fundamentalist denominations believe from their interpretation of the Bible that as the end of the age approaches, that humanity will devolve into wickedness and evil, such that it will be intolerable for the believers and the righteous followers of God.  Therefore Jesus Christ will appear in the air and lift all His followers up into the air and bring them back to heaven, whilst abandoning the rest of the world to its wayward and sinful path, an event that marks seven years of tribulation beginning before the visible return of Christ and the overthrow of the antichrist.  This interpretation of the Bible was popularised in the early 1970's by Hal Lindseay in his book, "The Late Great Planet Earth," and most recently in the "Left Behind" series of books and movies.

The first thing to say in critique of this view is that this interpretation of the Bible represents only one of several divergent views that characterises Christian eschatology (the study of the end times).  I will not go into the others at this stage, as it is not completely relevant to the critique I am making.

Secondly, I find it sad, and yet faintly (if not outrightly) comical that people will continue to believe the regular succession of preachers who choose to place a date upon the end of the age and the return of Jesus Christ.  The reader interested in placing these latest events in historical context would do well to read up on the Great Disappointment of the 1840's, which lead to the Seventh Day Adventist movement, or the continual revision of the date of Jesus' return by the Jehovah's Witnesses.  Even the Bible itself has a passage that says that noone knows the day or the hour when Christ will return, and yet individuals insist on trying to predict a date based on convoluted interpretations and mathematics.

At this point let me add a disclaimer to my opinions, I spent a good deal of my 20's in various churches, and studied Biblical theology for a couple of years.  I will not claim to be a great scholar on this subject, or even a modest scholar.  The founder of the college I attended had though researched eschatology as the subject of his doctoral thesis, and was thus well qualified to teach the subject.  I myself completed a substantial essay on the various eschatological positions held by the churches and did considerable reading on the subject.  As I write this I do so from the perspective of an ex-christian.  I am not an atheist, more agnostic, although I believe in religious writing and mythology we see many valuable lessons and archetypes that allow us to grow as people and give back to the world.

In the end the question of why preachers feel the need to try and pin down a date is one we need to think about.  Christianity is a religion that basically promises the presence of the future.  The Kingdom of God as proclaimed by Jesus Christ is both an immediate reality, and a promise to believers of the shape of things to come, much as contemporary anarchist thought makes much of the establishment of temporary autonomous zones.

It may seem natural then for those in Christianity, who have patiently awaited their whole lives the promise of the future made present, and who fear they may not see it in their lifetime, to begin to contrast the hazy memories of youth, and what seemed like simpler and more wholesome times, the world re-imagined through the lens of Norman Rockwell to look upon the present and declare it to be altogether more evil or sinful or what have you than the remembered idyll of youth and to think that things are getting so bad that it can't be much longer before God hits the big reset button and makes everything right again.  In that way then it can seem that the desire to see the future made now and the world made anew and pure is a kind of longing, a longing for I am not sure what, perhaps a reaction against a sense of being betrayed, of justice denied, a response to disappointment. 

In response though we have to ask then how many more will pin their hopes on such predictions and be disappointed, disillusioned and jaded with religion as a result?  That could be seen as a negative thing, but instead see it as a positive.  It's a wake up for many people, not in the sense that religion would have us think, that we live in fear of the return of a jealous god who will punish the unbeliever, but rather as a lesson in bringing us back to the reality of our existence on this planet.  We cannot wait for a miraculous divine intervention to fix our lives, or to fix the planet.  We as human beings and part of this wonderful interconnected organism that we call the earth, need to accept that we are responsible for our fate as a whole, as well as individually, that we need to love more and hate less, practice compassion and good will to all living beings, and love and respect our mother earth who sustains us and gives us life through the soil, the water, and through the air we breathe.  We cannot continue to disrespect our world, or other people, or animals, because we all depend on each other for life, and we don't get a magic get out of jail free card from Jesus or any other god.  We are all here, you, me, all of us, and it is time to accept that as a fundamental truth of our existence, and to start to live it.

Friday Night

Here I sit, another Friday night.  Which is a statement that could indeed indicate the beginning of a great unburdening of a sense of quiet despair and boredom with the state of things.

Truthfully though, I don't feel that way at all.  I sat back and looked back at this blog, and thought about it as a meditation on my attitude to life and how it has changed in the last 4 or 5 years, or however long it has been since I decided to blog.  Tonight I realised with some quiet profundity that in this life I have spent a lot of time choosing to see the world as being against me, when in fact the opposite may very well have in fact been the true state of affairs, and it may have been me against the world, projecting all my anger and bitterness and cynicism onto all that I saw.

I read an interesting piece in Robert Wilkinson's generally excellent astrology blog here where he speaks about changing our perspective and seeing our lives unfold from the divine point of view, where the only blocks to our growth and progress as spiritual beings is the things we place in our own way via our negative attitudes and thinking.  Instead we should look to cultivate an attitude of mindfulness, gratitude, and good will to all things and beings.  When we start to look at the world differently, we may start to see that the world looks at us differently.

Writers Block

Feeling a bit of the old writers block as I sit here on a crisp wintry morning here in my secret volcano lair on the northern outskirts of Brisbane.  I also have a rotten cold that is doing my head in, which is probably why I am struggling to assemble a cogent and comprehensible stream of consciousness. 

Nevertheless, and as is often the case I use the ability to blog (or to write in my journal) as a prompt to lead me to write.  As per the advice I have dispensed to others, 'stuff is always a good place to start,' along with 'physician, heal thyself.'  Grrr, me and my bloody sound advice coming back to bite me on the arse.  Often it is one of the simplest ways to overcome writers block for someone like me, to just start talking about the everyday and the mundane, assembling my thoughts on the page.  Talk about the day, the weather, how you are feeling, how the people in your life are going.  Obviously being a public forum maybe we need to leave out the more intimate details or embarrassing anecdotes (unless they particularly emphasise the point and drive the narrative) and all names will have to be changed to protect the innocent (although no one is truly innocent).  Always remember that real life is always far more interesting than fiction but that the truth should never get in the way of a good story, although everyone has a story to tell.

In the end I think that is it, to write, you have to know your subject.  And what subject would you know better than yourself?  Tell your story, it's unique.  In the meantime, I am off to take more cold and flu medication and rest.  Regularly scheduled programming will resume soon.

One Small Step For John.

Been thinking all about pursuing some more higher education the last few months.  Not that I haven't tried the whole study lark before, but without a lot of success, most probably as a result of my innate desire to run away when things get difficult and hard.  That in and of itself is not much of an excuse for the time and money I have wasted thus far.  Ultimately we need to develop character and strength.  It is a great comfort to me this time that I have someone wonderful in my life who does her best to encourage me when times get tough, and who gives me a reason to see beyond myself and to keep on going. 

Before I derail my own train of thought though, yes, I have decided to pursue a little bit more higher education.  I am still forming vague notions of what I would like to eventually study and major in, but for the moment I am content to work and support Sue while she studies full time.  In keeping with that course of action, I have enrolled in online study with Open Universities Australia, and have elected to take a few philosophy subjects.  I am only doing one subject at a time at the present, but will look at increasing that load depending on work and finances.  

I have to say though, it feels like a bit of a step into a new and unknown realm to be back in the study game again.  I think this time I am trying hard though to not set myself up for disappointment by placing too many unrealistic expectations upon myself.  As philosophy is literally the love of wisdom, so I am choosing to treat this as an exercise in enjoyment and expanding my thinking rather than pursuing a career driven agenda.  To be sure I will out this gain renewed skills in critical thinking, writing, and research, but at the moment I am doing this for the love of it.

Wish me luck...

My thoughts on the death of Osama Bin Laden.


Just been watching the news of the American military's operation to take out the notorious leader of Al Qaeda.  All the news reports so far seem to have been interspersed with the same footage, file footage of Bin Laden delivering messages and firing his AK47 at a training camp, footage of planes flying into buildings on September 11, 2001, and various other acts of terrorism his group have claimed responsibility for, and finally footage of various world leaders responding to the news, Barack Obama's address on the subject, and cheering crowds outside the White House and the World Trade Center site in New York.

In all this I cannot help but feel I am witnessing some very ugly things. 

Firstly it seems that the once again endless replays of planes crashing into the World Trade Center.  These images are still powerful, and almost pornographic in their intensity.  Are we addicted to this imagery?  Do we need to be reminded of the point incessantly?  Will it intensify our rage against these acts of terror, or will it numb us into insensitivity?  Is it a case of the modern media being addicted to this mode of storytelling?  Are we really so numb as a culture that we need these images burnt into our brains through this hypnogogic repetition? 

Secondly, lets look at the descriptions of Bin Laden from the media and from individuals such as George W. Bush and John Howard.  Basically as evil personified is how he is portrayed.  I am not saying he was a good man by any means, but evil seems to be a word bandied about all too often.  Are people evil or do they commit evil acts?  I would wager those committing those acts would say they are fighting evil by their actions.  Could we therefore say that our perceptions of good and evil are then more about our perspective, and our beliefs and values than about any absolute objective definition of evil in this case?  I don't think we should necessarily call someone evil because they hold beliefs contrary to our own, or a lifestyle contrary to our own, especially in this case where it would seem as we peer through the murky depths of political machinations in the middle east that Bin Laden's fanaticism was harnessed by the Americans in their fanatical idelogical battle to overthrow Soviet communism. 

Finally, and in a related way, let's look at the crowds cheering and baying for blood on the streets of American cities, celebrating the end of a life, waving flags and chanting nationalistic slogans and anthems.  Apart from those affected by the loss of loved ones on 9/11/2001, how many have been personally affected by terrorism?  I am sure far more have been affected by the rippling effects of the 10 year war in Afghanistan and Iraq, a war which does not seem to have ended international terrorism, and is slowly but surely bankrupting the United States.  Is there a way people could come together and approach a measure of reconciliation?  I think the mutual ignorance seems to be a hallmark of this conflict.  Americans and middle-eastern Muslims blinded by rumours and half-truths and outright lies about the other side, often preached by deranged fundamentalists of all persuasions, and no longer able it seems to stop hating or fighting.  I know that not everyone in either culture thinks like that, but it seems such ignorance and hatefulness is capable of poisoning perception incredibly effectively.

In the end I think that Bin Laden, though obviously a paramilitary leader and planner, was merely one man, and despite his symbolic importance, he is not irreplaceable, and other terrorist groups may well now rise up and fight even more ruthlessly for their cause.  There is still a lot of bad blood to be dealt with and spilt in this ideological battle we find ourselves witnessing, and this conflict of fundamentalisms may well continue to mar our age for the whole of this century.  In the end, we become the change we wish to see in the world, and as human beings, members of society, and an organic part of this whole great organism we call the earth, as children of the universe, we need to start to live in new paradigms and tell ourselves a new story, that peace and understanding can be reached and that we are all part of the whole.

A busy weekend it has been, out for a bbq yesterday and today checking out a hot rod show.  I am still going through the pictures I have taken and will undoubtedly do a bit more editing, but for now I thought this one is ok for a start.  Back to my usual prattling in a few days when I think of something else to prattle on about.