25. Are you religious?
I dare not call myself spiritual or materialist or a cynic or christian or atheist or pagan or hindu or buddhist or taoist or muslim or whatever, because I am all those things, at one time or another. To deny any of those is to lie to myself. Like every human, sometimes I don't believe in God. I would be a liar if I said otherwise. To label myself one thing is to reject all others in myself, to not be Whole, to not see all things & all people in myself, including adolph hitler & gandhi, satan & god. I cannot call myself a hand, because I am also feet & eyes & kidneys. What I reject or repress comes back & rules me, whether it is purity or deep dark secrets. All things are states, all things are impermanent, and to try to label myself as one state is an attempt to freeze that one state in time. To call myself a day dweller is to deny the coming of night. To say that I favor summer is to close myself to the deliciousness of winter.
Excuse me if this sounds like I'm repeating commons sense, but it is common sense that most of us forgot:
I honestly don't care what you say you believe, whether or not you say God is a trinity or a pink, polka-dotted amoeba or Personal or Impersonal or even if you say you are atheist or not. The fruit you bear is everything that confesses who you are (Matthew 7:20). Judge for yourself: has repeating the Nicene Creed or "Jesus is Lord, Lord" or "Allah Akbar" or the Three Jewels of Buddhism guaranteed anybody would be more loving, any better off?
Our spirits (our lives and actions), not our talk, confess who we are or are not. Even the self-proclaimed Christians' own Bible tells us not to call ourselves Christian (Annointed One) or any other "spiritual"
label:
For it has been declared to me ...
that there are contentions among you.
Now I say this, that each of you says,
"I am Paulian," or
"I am Apollosian," or
"I am Cephasian," or
"I am Christian."
Is Christ divided? (1 Corinthians 1:11-13)
People constantly tried to tack a spiritual label onto Jesus:
"How long do you keep us in doubt? If you are the Christ [Annointed], tell us plainly. Jesus answered them, "I told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father's name, they bear witness of me." (John 10:24-25)
If people asked Jesus what or who he was, he would simply say, "I Am" (John 8:58, Mark 14:62). If people try to categorize you under a label, or try to get you to be something, all you can say, if you are totally sincere, totally yourself, is "I Am Who I Am." There is no other being, nothing else, but I Am Who I Am.
If people ask whether or not you are a Christian, or whatever, the honest thing to say would be what Jesus said, "What do my actions tell you?"
I find I'm not much of anything when my mouth is zipped. In the end, our mouths and our chattery minds, our beliefs, will be silenced, and all that will be heard is the True Language of Action. The Quran says this:
That Day shall We set a seal on their mouths. But their hands will speak to us, and their feet bear witness, to all that they did.
Spirits talk in action. People talk in words. Any spirit, any action, that does not confess the Word come in the flesh right now, right here, is Anti-Messiah (1 John 4:1-3: notice the present tense!).
In the end, this website & all its words will be gone, and I will stand silent.
That said, the essence of moneyless existence is faith. But sometimes I have faith, sometimes not. Sometimes I am myself, I am who I am, and sometimes I am not real. By accepting my faithlessness and my jadedness, my faith comes back shining more brightly. Faith is knowing I am who I am and can be nothing else.
