What is real?

Reality is just an illusion. Although a persistent one. -Albert Einstein.

Are the only things that can be considered real the things we touch? The things we can see and hold onto? Are feelings and thoughts real? Or are two dual realities real at the same time?

When European settlers first came to the Americas the Natives could not see the ships that they travelled on. They noticed strange clouds and that the ocean was making odd waves against the ships. The ships were not real to them though they existed visibly in this plane. In their realities ships like that did not exist until a medicine man was able to figure out what was making the strange waves and what carried the odd clouds. Reality did not change but the perception did. Is perception all that changes reality? Is something real if you feel it even if there is no way to prove it?

Just what is real? Are all things of faith real? Is there a way to be a real person? Is there a way to see reality in a totally unbiased fashion? Would you want to if you could? Is a color real even if you can not see it. There are studies that show that some people have an ability to see more colors than others because of the way that their eyes work. Are things only real to each person, so an experience that is real to one may not be something that the other would even realize. Is there anything other than a subjective reality? 

If things are only real when they are experienced by someone then how do we effectively share what we consider to be real? How can we not have respect for the holy that others consider real? Things that are real to us should be treated with care and should be given proper attention in order to ensure that they are treasured and understood.

We have to be able to trust ourselves. We have to be able to determine in our hearts and minds what is real and what is not. And when we are faced with something that we believe is real, that which we can feel even if we can not prove, as long as we have the sense and decency to share but not shove that on to others than maybe the best thing we can do is to have a little faith in our hearts. If our perception of reality is what is real then what we can have in our lives can be more than just what we see.

Maybe the best we can do is just let it be, and accept the reality that we see. As well as being open to the reality that we have yet seen.

Freedom without Responsbility

It was the sermon for the fourth of July and before I and my husband found our religious home three years at Piedmont Unitarian Universalist Church in Charlotte, we went to church with some friends of ours. They’re good friends and good people, when we needed a place to stay they opened their doors and we did the same when they needed help… and the Sunday that we went to church was an eye opener…

We learned that we wanted the opposite in a religious home.
 

He did pose an interesting question though, that I am not ashamed to admit that I was flustered on before I found an answer of my own that I could stand behind. The sermon was dealing with the fourth of July and how we receive our freedoms from God – this is hardly a revolution idea- and how liberals are attacking these very things with their secular notions (also not the first time I heard this). He asked us to think about things that we consider freedoms and things that we are able to do that are freedoms. Quite predictably I thought about this in the terms of the Bill of Rights, and freedom of religion (I wonder why), which was one of the answers that fit into the whole concept of his sermon. He had me. I admit it, and as he went on the explain that idea that you could not have freedoms unless you submitted to the will of Jesus and God and all of the ways you might be able to escape hell and liberals (though who could tell the difference by the way he spoke,) something about the way he defined freedom annoyed me… such as he really didn’t define freedom. He made a rather thinly veiled attack at the secular way society is and laid out an easy to follow plan with nice marching orders on how horrible a group of people are for simply pointing out that there are more answers that what he has on his short list but he never defined freedom. Never really explained it in a way that made sense, freedoms comes from you submitting to God, and freedoms come from accepting Jesus and admitting your awful sinful nature. But what is freedom really?

After this rather disappointing and annoying lecture, in which I had to stop myself from rolling my eyes a few times (Seriously—Thomas Jefferson had some REAL issues with organized religion…. Maybe he missed TJ being a founding father… Who knows) I stopped and pondering the idea of freedom. Because he had not given me an acceptable definition I was needed to find an answer that I could make sense of.

The definition you will find online if you use Lord Google of freedom is Noun:   The power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint/ Absence of subjection to foreign domination or despotic government.   

Both of these are acceptable answers but they are not really anything useful and they do not answer the question in the way that it was asked. Ignoring the fact that questions such as this are made simply to be answered the one way I thought about it some more. I also disagree with this notion of freedom as determined by Lord Google, though he too is a dear friend.

Freedom is nothing more that the ability to have responsibilities. When you boil all of the Bill of Rights down, it’s what it is. When you extract that loads of B.S. and factual inaccuracies that were littered throughout that man’s sermon years ago, and distill it into something useful you’d never find it. My definition really takes all the fun out of the idea of freedom, it cuts through all of the romantic, fanciful notions that we have about our ideals and culture. The ability to have responsibilities. That’s not so in dictatorships, where you must always follow marching orders or are only allowed one idea of reality, though that’s closer to the freedom that was being pushed by a church that we visited that Sunday.  That’s not so in Monarchies were you are given your rules by kings and queens who were “picked” by God or were in some way divine… Nobility make the rules. There wasn’t really even freedom in this church where your options are fall in line or fall to Hell.

Freedom being the ability to have responsibilities’ changes the way you look on what you do. It is different. It is more than being able to preach your religion because you have the freedom to do so, it is more than knowing that you are guaranteed due process and it does not need religion to make it valid. (Not that our freedoms do in the first place. Atheists are just as ‘free’ as anyone else.) Being responsible for what you say and do sheds a new light on it because while you are free to say what you please, you are also the person who is accountable for the way your words impact the world, for the way your actions make others feel. The freedom to be accountable for the way your life impacts the world is a responsibility, it is a job. It is one that we must be able to question ourselves so that we are able to do it well. It would have been an answer well received in a time when there are so many churches whose actions and words help lead the type of environment lead people to value their lives so little that they would take them. It would have been an answer well received when preachers call for the detention of same-sex individuals inside of a fence so that they will "die-out."

Responsibility would have been a wonderful call for the idea of freedom, because people who know they have freedom should have to deal with understanding of the charge that they are given. Any answer would have been wonderful. A call to question, not to shake the foundations of faith but to provide it with a more honest footing, would have been refreshing but that was not what was given. Instead, there was a none answer to an a leading question that was not meant to answer but meant to distract. To push people in a certain direction, to make people follow. And there's not much freedom in that at all.

Release

Just as in earthly life lovers long for the moment when they are able to breathe forth their love for each other, to let their souls blend in a soft whisper, so the mystic longs for the moment when in prayer he can, as it were, creep into God.
Soren Kierkegaard

Creeping in to god. Releasing all that is in order to accept all that could be. Most religions have some idea of releasing and entrusting the will of the universe into your life and I find this Ida something to be terrifying to me. Not because I lack trust in the Spirit of Life and not because I doubt that the Mother of the World lacks influence I our life but because of the things that are done by those who claim that this is the plan that was given to them by their deity.

In a statement released by Zimmerman he stated that his murder of Trayvon was God's plan, Anders who shot the children's camp in Norway made a similar statement about it being "God's will."

There's a program on Netflix called What the Bleep do we Know? In this program they tell about how when the English settlers originally began arriving the Native Americans didn't see the ships that they came in because they were not aware at the time that boats like that existed. This lack of knowledge meant their brains were unable to comprehend the images they were given. The way that something was odd was the waves that were hitting the bottom of the boat and the strange clouds made by the ships sails Eventually the Medicine Man of the village saw the ship and because the villagers trusted the Medicine Man they saw the ships as well. Anne Frank wrote, "The best remedy for those who are alone, afraid or unhappy, is to go someplace quiet. Where they can be alone with heavens nature and God."

Creeping into the Spirit of Life should be something that is challenging. Opening yourself to seeing how to make yourself a blessing maybe uncomfortable, it may mean facing some harsh truths but violent, hateful and mean. That isn't holy. You can tell a lot about a tree by the type of fruit it blossoms. It isn't difficult to see when you know what you are looking for. Things that do no affirm the worth and dignity of all peoples are not things that are holy and no matter who some people believe are inspiring them I have my doubts that it's god.

Being Honest

“If you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished?” ― Rumi

As much as I would love to be the solution, really I am just as much the problem. To me it boils down to the fact that I am being honest. Tonight, Shaun comes up to me stating that it is something that annoys him that I am costing money when I rent movies that I keep forgetting to take back. (I know I do this, it's not on purpose but I have the attention span of a gnat and things fall by the way side.) And Things will fall by the way side. We have six/seven month old who is working on making herself mobile but has decided until she does she wants to be held, she wants to be the center of the universe and really it's normal. She's just time consuming, and taking care of her and keeping the house clean is no small task when you're working a 12 hr rotation swing shift job on top of it all. Could I use better time management, sure. But there really just aren't enough hours in the day to ensure that everything that needs to get done will indeed get done.

The actual issue here though is that there is no cherishing for the tasks that are completed. There are no pauses to be glad for what we have (quite miraculously) gotten accomplished. Our daughter has been fed, as have our dogs and we squeezed in time to feed ourselves too. The yard needs to be mowed and the dished need to be done and maybe someday I will finish putting the clothes away (maybe someday there will also be a reasonable amount to be washed).

Shaun says if I ever has an issue that when I mention it he tries to work on it, and I won't argue that he tries, he may give it all he has but I know that I don't see it. Maybe I am not looking in the right places but I also know that to an extent I have accepted all the things about him that I really don't like somedays but overall I love him (Most the time). There maybe some quirks that I could live without (like sulking and pushing the hard stuff to the back burner) but I love his heart and he has one of the kindest spirits I have ever had the pleasure of meeting and I love the person I have grown to become with him. I am also quite fond of the family that I have built with him and even though things are not always easy to me that does not mean that they are really bad. But life can make the simplest things seem difficult. But when I say that chances are the quirks about me aren't things that I can change, it does not mean that I don't care that he has a complaint, it means that I am who I am and I have been this person for 21 years. Chances of a change happening now are not high, I am not being negative, I am being honest. I appreciate that honesty but I think I might be the only one. I know this is true despite the fact that I spend some much time trying to converse to him that there are things that I wish he understood that I needed but I know that who I am with is really who I have gotten and really that is okay. There are going to be things that we do not always agree and understand about each other but those are the things that we are going to have to work on over time to get to place where we can both live comfortably.

There are somethings though that are triggers for me, and maybe I can teach him to word things in a way that converses his point without making me too mad to listen. I know there are many things that I need to work on but how can I make myself better if I cannot seem to hear?