My Own Private Oklahoma

I sit at a table in the library down Northwest Expressway and May. It may be the only library in town open on a Sunday. No wonder I see about three hundred (exaggarating) people here all madly rushing to the computer line when the doors opened a few minutes late.

I stood off to the side with my laptop bag and my ears plugged with my Creative Zen Vision M and listened to my music on random. Though muggy, I enjoyed the drifting trees swaying to their own magical rhythm.

Now I just finished evaluating some of my students online work, and U2's song, "I Still Haven't Found What I am Looking For." Have I found what I am looking for. Well, today I am not looking for anything. At some point, this adventure has to end or at least settle in, as we stare into the distance and just relax and know that we are God's creatures regardless of our bitter, angry, or happy search into the solitude of our own thoughts.

I am 34, lived a good life so far, and yes, I am still searching, but my searching is different now. Perhaps that happens when 34 arrives. It's no longer about some absolute truth. I have read everything. Read the ancient writer. Read religious writers across the globe. Have studied in great detail Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Taoism (Daoism), Sikhism, Buddhism (Mahayana, Theraveda, Zen, and all the various schools surrounding each philosophy), Native American spirituality, and many many more, including Scientology. I have read the great authors of Eastern and Western Civilization. I have delved into mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, chemistry, and other areas beyond my expertise.

And, through it all, I can say that the best method of pinpointing any theological or practical system in which we abide through this universe is to become a solid tree blowing in the wind, as the roots of history and our thoughts continue to draw deeply into the ground and sustain us with their ability to provide us with the nutrients we need.

So, have I found what I am looking for? Sure! Peace, pain, beauty, suffering. They all blend together for me, because we are human beings. Pain is not a delusion. Pain is real, but we must recognize it, face it, and not react to it. Make yourself aware that it is there and learn how to make it fade with your entire soul still searching, for the body (the real delusion) passes and the mind (the spirit) urges on.

So, if your body is fading, prepare your mind!

Scientology, among other philosophies, discuss this notion of the bridge. The bridge is that moment when we leave our former reality of suffering and recognize something beyond the levels of this elusive and delusional reality.

The bridge, according to Hindu philosophy, is that movement to the Atman--the deepest self--and recognizing, too, the forces beyond the Atman, or what Jung calls the Collective Unconscious.

I have spent many years searching and gazing at the truth, and though most people might have a religious, metaphysical, or divine experience, it is difficult for others to believe.

I have always doubted these experiences with the universe, but I no longer doubt, for I have experienced some intense movements and moments that have led me across the bridge, so to speak, to gaze clearly at the entire world beyond me and beyond all with a clarified vision.

I think growing older might lead us all to these moments. I don't want to frighten anyone to believe that I am some kind of prophet or contain elemental energy that only a few can fathom. I am an ordinary human being with ordinary human strength and suffering. I am not special.

But, I have detached myself completely from the social boundaries of this existence, and people look at me as though I am "over the edge" or somehow depressed, when, in reality, these experiences have taught me a great deal about the other world beyond the edge of human restraints, oppression, and repression.

Now I know exactly what Walt Whitman meant when he stated, "I am large; I contain multitudes."

He was speaking about the entire concept of democracy and people, but also he refers to each blade of grass and his connection to all of nature--the good and the bad.

I understand that now, and as I progress through life, I have found this multitude of selves within me that no longer fight or war. They are at peace, and I am not speaking of multiple personalities. I am speaking of the intricacy of me--that I am a conscious self, but there are other selves existing, too, all the way to the bacteria that keeps me in balance.

I am a bacteria, a lung, a mind, defecation, blood, bone, calcium, fungus, etc. all wrapped into this symbiotic environment. I have written about this concept before, but I am writing it again, because I have recognized every piece of me for once, and it just didn't happen over night. It has always been there, but I was afraid to recognize all of me.

So, though I am only revealing one little aspect of this divineness above , beyond, and within me, there is much more to discuss, but I don't want my readers to think I have gone over the edge or that I have lost touch with reality.

Finally, I am NOT a messiah, nor do I want to be. I do not believe in levels of mastery similar to Scientology, Hinduism, or Buddhism. I don't really believe that one path can lead a person to enlightenment (similar to what the Hindus and Buddhists believe).

There are multiple paths, but I do know one thing for sure. In order to rise up, we have to let go and, at times, feel the darkest pain. Letting go hurts, and letting go also harms others, unfortunately. Who said enlightenment is not harmless. It is very harmful in some respects, because you have to give up what you love most to find something beyond definition that cannot be defined.

Does this mean you have to abandon the world and your family? Of course not! But, it does mean that you have to abandon your preconceived views of the world. It does mean that you have to act on the deepest of faith and jump into a situation that seems dangerous. It does mean that you have to question the entire ethical systems of religion, ethics, etc. to reach this higher or, rather, lower plane of knowledge. You have to go low instead of high to dig beneath the earth to find the roots of self once again not harmed by the dirty, exhaustive air.

More on these ideas later!

When we think about the term, ego, we sometimes wonder how we can perfect it, for we, unlike other animals, believe in the essence of perfecting ourselves, though we fall short daily. Therefore, in this search for perfecting the ego, we follow creeds, laws and commandments; we establish structures, systems, and regulations. We mythologize religious heroes, such as Jesus, Buddha, Mahavira, Muhammad, and others, to engender this ultimate goal of reality we denote as perfection or the embodiment of an ideal ego. However, we must realize that before we truly can assert positively our individual egos, we must first recognize the faultiness of idealism and taste the reality of imperfections and impermanent systems.

As a teenager, I gazed at stars and solar systems and believed that these cosmic structures somehow revealed the calming sensation of a controlled, absolute God, whose hand, like a Michaelangelo painting in the Sistine Chapel, sparked human perfection, held our little earth in orbit, refrained the sun from burning too quickly, and patterned the entire earth's infrastructure on laws established rigidly by His divine, unchanging breath.

Nearly twenty years later, I notice stars millions of years old waiting to burn up, to lose their intensity, and to float into a galaxy of un-intimate space like a meteor losing its potential energy to thrive. Nearly twenty years later, I watch a Tsunami completely annihilate Indonesian geography without the authoritative hand of God directing the flow of energy as it destroys innocent and guilty lives. While some people certainly view these tragic events as God's power reaching out to warn us of our limitations, we must also recognize that tragedy sometimes undermines, overwhelms and decimates our beliefs in absolute perfection.

From these above examples, I find myself realizing that humans, believing or disbelieving in utopians or a higher authority, tend to personify, idealize, or valorize the reality circumventing them. The scientist in the lecture room—the scientist who believes in rational thinking and evolutionary biology instead of creationism—represents an ideal as well. While he teaches the scientific method, a medical student sitting in a desk rapidly records the lecture notes on fusion, when thirty years later, that same student, now the professor at a major institution, delivers a similar lecture with absolute authority and almost robotically, as if he mirrors his original professor's form. The student, now a teacher, leaves the lecture hall, walks down a busy street to a local bar, and gets drunk on cheap beer while flirting with the female bartender, who is interested in tips and not some formal description of the big bang theory.

The reality of this example is that behind every view of Absolute God, an idea, a theory, or an explanation of reality, suffering and depression –no matter how much the system attempts to deny, refine, or lessen it—exists. Jesus, the closest example the Western World uses to view the perfect nature of God, suffered immensely. "My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me!" Is this statement the cry of a perfect man? While Jesus fails to reach that perfect state of utopian dreams on the heavenly earth, he does promise a world beyond our dreams—a heaven not bound by conflict or pain. On the other hand, Buddha believes that through a series of lifetimes we can achieve a state of eternal bliss while remaining part of this earthly kingdom. Pain and suffering still pervades, but our human consciousness—in its perfect form—can overpower the imperfections of the universe. However, I have always perceived the Buddhist brand of detachment to lessen suffering as a defense mechanism. Compassion and passion creates suffering, but it also produces commonality among fellow human beings. This communal bond, regardless of race, gender, class, or sexual identity, could be our only passage into understanding human reality as imperfect yet worthy of pursuit.

We are not born sinners in an imperfect world, but we are born to suffer. We are never meant to be balanced, harmonized, and completely free from struggling, from physical and mental anguish. Sometimes we are like dogs whose bark arises when another encroaches upon our terrain. Our body also contains an immune system, uncontrolled by our thoughts, that follows its own patterns by destroying and dismembering other living organisms, such as bacteria and viruses, which are simply trying to survive like us. Naturally, we inflict pain on other beings, and naturally, they, in return, inflict pain upon us. We can certainly argue that heaven exists beyond this evolutionary maze of the fit and weak warring against the other, but all we really know, without reducing God to his or her insignificance, is human carnality, destruction, and a shared knowledge of pain and suffering across the plant and animal kingdoms, across the universe, as a meteor nosedives its final death into the Sahara Desert, and as we, by deceiving ourselves, long to harmonize the imperfect universe.

So, let's be honest. We yearn for idealism and perfection, because we cannot achieve it. Hinduism teaches that we can achieve this enlightenment after a series of births and rebirths; slowly, we climb the ladder. Christianity, too, teaches that Christ is the ladder, and if we realize that perfection exists beyond ourselves, then he will carry us to its top. All religions ask us to devote ourselves beyond ourselves, sometimes at the expense of denouncing the ego, as a means of achieving salvation, heaven, enlightenment, or a good night's sleep.

How then do we compensate, recognize our incompleteness, and also learn how to achieve a positive outlook on our lives? Can we truly recognize the darkness of the human soul or body and find truth gleaming? It, of course, remains a difficult process, but hope can prevail. We have some choices. First, we either recognize our ego's inability to achieve perfection and rely on religious systems to navigate our soul's response. If this choice is chosen, then we must also recognize that religious systems are, by no means, perfect systems, but they certainly exist as methods—practical or elusive—that may lead us down a correct or broken path. Our second choice seems naïve at first, but I find some comfort in its statement. We simply must recognize that our natural processes as human beings may not allow for perfection.

If we believe the second choice, that all we know is the imperfect body, mind, and universe, then maybe we still have a reason to live beyond socially-define religions. We may never understand the essence of divinity or the perfection of soul, but we will learn how to survive in moments containing infinite variables, unknowns, and mutations waiting to redirect or shift what we considered before as a perfect thought process. "Change is the only thing constant."

But aren't our bodies mostly stable? Don't oxygen, minerals, vitamins, and other chemical processes contain a specific purpose? We are stable to some degree; we are born with the innate drive to equalize the imbalance, even if balancing creates pain for another. We consume meat, vegetables, and other once living processes to achieve immortality for seventy-five years. We kill our enemies and reprimand our friends and universalize our democracies as a promotion of a stable and effective society. At the expense of our democratic haven, heaven, utopia (though we know we are none of these concepts), we shift other equally stable societies and shake their foundations and remove their idealistic visions, until those kingdoms also represent burning stars waiting to ascend like meteors to the cold but fertile earth.

If we are imperfect, if we cannot reach heaven, if other utopias destroy our own utopianesque society, if we cannot achieve enlightenment , if we cannot attain liberation, if we cannot locate a religious messenger, if we cannot identify the messiah, if we cannot know the message of the gurus, if we cannot recognize the balance of yin and yang, then we are still human, still accepting our place as individuals seeking a connection to each other, still searching internally and externally, still shifting truths and un-truths, still reaching out to a reality beyond ourselves, and still swimming in a pool of energy with other human beings and searching for a shore that may or may not exist, even when we breathe our final breath, as we float to the ocean's floor, where we remain as a sunk treasure to be forgotten. Though we are forgotten, others twenty years later explore similar ideas, plunge into the same ocean, think deeply about their place in the universe, fall short, sink, and drift into the same paradigm as all of us. We cannot escape the ocean, but we do escape through myth, which does not determine our fate but does describe it.

That is the realism of human suffering and the disruption of perfect idealism. At times, we should breathe deeply and silence our pain. At times, we should stop listening to our internal strife and engage in all senses the disturbing struggle of our breath and other breaths, including animals, plants, the solar system, the ozone layer. At times, we should recognize how we, each of us on an individual level, contribute to the balance and imbalance of another's struggle, even when we do not consciously cause it. Once we realize our continuous involvement in suffering, we will stop feeding the ego's view of itself and begin tasting the bleeding ego of the other.

While perfection does not exist in our physical realm (and, I would argue, in our spiritual plane as well), love and compassion are the only utopians worthy of pursuing, even though perfect love and absolute compassion never exists entirely. Let's forget about heaven for an hour. Forget the philosophical and scientific proof on the existence or non-existence of God. Create for one hour the absence of heaven within us, and by suspending the utopian dream, we then achieve a practical and realistic view of everyone, including what we might consider as our enemies. Live in an imperfect heaven. Engage others in our imperfect viewpoints. Show a weak, limited, and suffering compassion to all creatures. Accept the suffering we all generate and develop a new concept of self (not a perfect self) and then change, shift, strive toward peace and balance, which could disintegrate harmony or harmonize dissonance, as struggle continually descends upon us or ascends above us.

--moon