daniel pinchbeck

so daniel pinchbeck was at the mystic garden party, and the mystic garden party was a very small event as far as festivals go.  we gathered at a ymca campground on the edge of nowhere, in the middle of the jungle.  rocky coast.  waterfall country.  the gymnasium, an impressive high-beamed structure in and of itself, had been decorated up as a temple with flower alters for basketball hoops and vendors wrapped around the edge of the room selling their curative herbal drinks and paintings and statues.  something about merchants in the temple but essentially the gym was a giant slumber party by night and an elementary school assembly during the day, the only difference with grade school being the ever-loving air of hippiedom.  

pinchbeck... oh never mind that.

i am very glad to be exactly where i am.  this is a very empowering feeling.  i think about faith a lot and am finding ways to talk about it too.  its nice to think of faith as substance, as the texture of reality, that which makes experience solid.  faith is the feeling of your body walking into a wall that you know to be there.  and as real as the wall, faith is the feeling of the body interacting with a god that it knows to be.  faith is the substance of a sunset.  it is the experience of a sunset as divine.  

but faith only works when it is accompanied with some kind of theism.  some knowledge or way of categorizing the divine as a thing that exists, something that exists within and beyond our individual existence.  i have to believe that the divine is something outside of myself before i can realize it as the objects of my experience.  the faith in walls and gods substantiates the experience of stubbed toes and elated spirits. 

to realize emptiness is to realize the lack of substance.  when we believe in substance we orient ourselves around the reality of it.  this is the basis of both elation and desperation, the realization of a full spectrum of experience.  the way of the buddha (as they say) occurs beyond both abundance and lack.  it is the melting away of faith.  faith that has the power to create divine experience also creates mundane experience.  to believe in anything as either the self or the not self is delusion and the seed of dissatisfaction.  wisdom is the realization of no faith.  emptiness is the realization of no faith.  

whether or not they both make sense in the way i just typed them, they both make sense to me in how i justify things in my head.  that is to say, the idea of a god and the idea of no god seem equally logical and useful to me.  i think this keeps me from believing in anything.  i'm going to have to pick one because i think this keeps me from enjoying the peace of not thinking about anything.