How do we become REAL?

 Humans live in a world of unreality. A good example of this is money: we all need it, but what IS it actually? A unit of measure for human necessity and desire. There is no reality behind it other than you and I and everyone roughly agreeing that X is roughly worth a dollar, or however many dollars, in value. Bernanke, the former Fed chairman, essentially let the cat out of the bag in 2009 I think it was, when he said that the Fed just changes numbers in their accounts with banks whenever it is deemed desirable. Inventing money out of thin air. Nor does our taxes have any real relationship with spending. When necessary, they just add zeroes.

This is by no means the most relevant or pernicious example. When a prairie is bulldozed to make a strip mall, a real thing - a prairie full of life and living creatures - is destroyed to make room for a fake thing - a human economic construct. We are continually in the process of destroying life to make way for death, destroying reality for the sake of unreality.

And hundreds of millions of us are employed in things that are either not necessary or conducive to life or should not be. Just one egregious example: the cosmetics industry. What is the worldwide cosmetics industry worth, how many billions? How many animals are tortured for the sake of it? So that people can pretend to be what they are not. The real is sacrificed on the altar of the unreal.

How many of you get come-on advertisements in the mail which try to deceive you into buying something that you don't need? The people, and more relevantly to our topic the institutions, that send you that stuff want to trade your actuality, the truthful mind of a living being, for the unreality they value most: money.

How many people spend their lives inside office walls and cubicles, imagining they are doing something with their lives? And then they spend two hours a day in a commute, all the while imagining they are free, when they are in a cage. A cage of human constructs and structures and rules and imagined realities. A prison, for their souls.

The Torah is a relatively small set of books, and lots of stuff was left implied because it was not that relevant to the time. Had the Israelites followed everything that G-d said to them, this would be a different future, and so the Torah is focused on instruction to them, then. One of those instructions is not to create graven images or worship them. Now today we think of this as an instruction to people who were prone to pagan idolatry and isn't relevant now (as if modern people didn't practice as much idolatry!) But if you unpack this instruction a bit, it is an instruction about not substituting human constructs for reality. What is a graven image? What is an idol? It is a human construct, pretending to be a divine reality. What typifies G-d's creations? They are alive, they are living. Even the angelic beings depicted in Ezekiel with their wheels within wheels and so on, it is said that they are living creatures. Human constructs are not alive: no human can create life. If you had to pick one great brainchild of human genius as representing humanity's power of creation, you might pick the computer. And computers are capable of many sophisticated things, indeed things that humans would find difficult if not impossible to do. Crunch tremendous numbers quickly.

And all computers have one thing in common: they are all as dead as a brick. Even if in future we could create computer simulations of human minds, they would still be dead as a brick. The people, futurists, who want to escape death by becoming cyberized: they just aspire to become dead in a different way. Still way dead, but with a simulacra to keep your place occupied on the Earth.

So getting back to the title of this: how do WE become real? If we assume, which I absolutely do, that human society and human social and economic intercourse is a place of unreality (indeed this blog itself is in a sense unreal because I am not talking to YOU, I am just printing words,) okay: how do we break the spell?

The average person, indeed almost everyone outside of some primitive tribes, is absolutely dependent on the human system. That means, they do what the system tells them, or at least they do what the system rewards them for doing. The person who is still trapped in the human system but not participating is what we call a street person, and nobody wants that kind of life. And that human system absolutely reeks of unreality, of fakeness. Of the death of reality for the sake of unreality.

I would be lying to you if I told you I had a simple answer. However, the answer starts with rejecting the whole fake human machine and all its values, and substituting values that are relevant to real living beings. What are those values? Here's some of them:

Truthfulness: a lie does violence to life.
Valuing life: living beings are more important than money or human constructs when that money or construct is not necessary to your life.
Simplicity and self-restraint, because desire leads us to do violence to the world not from need but greed.

The Worship Our Father Desires

 With Passover and Easter over, this has come on my heart. This isn't mine, it couldn't be. The Prophets said it all before, and G-d told them. I could quote you chapter and verse from the Prophets, but I won't. You either know in your heart it's true, or you don't.

When the Temple was set up and authorized, for whose benefit was it? For human benefit of course, so there would be a place where symbolically G-d dwelt with men. How long it actually served that purpose is unknown, but since Solomon built it and since he started putting idols in it immediately, it is possible that it never served its purpose at all. Humans corrupted the place from the instant they built it. Now it is possible that at later times, like in the reign of Josiah, it did fulfill its original purpose, but it was always ever intended as a gift for us. What does G-d want? Does G-d want thousands of people bowing down to Him in a big house? Did He want burnt offerings, the blood of lambs and bulls? That was a system of human governance: you do wrong, and you pay a lamb. You do well for yourself and you give a lamb, so that someone other than you can eat. That was the idea anyway. So that was for us. Just like church services and so on are for us. When this becomes our only real worship however, that's a problem.

What does G-d want?

Does G-d want you to be a big tither at church?
Does G-d want you to witness?
Does G-d want you to sing at church?
Does G-d want praise?
Does G-d want rock bands behind the pulpit and big stadium seating?


He wants you to love justice.

If millions of people are slaughtering their innocent sons and daughters, and the State protects them doing it, and you say nothing, how are you loving justice? You aren't. Now, you can't change it and I know you can't. If any act of mine could end abortion forever, I would do it. I would lose my life for it. But it's not possible.

But what does it cost you to move your freaking lips on the topic? To write some words on a keyboard? You might alienate some friends, oh no! People may not like you. They might think you're some sort of anal retentive Old Testament type. You're repressive, is what you are.

If you won't love justice when all it requires is for you to sacrifice the "love" of your friends and your good reputation, you won't love it when it requires blood and sacrifice. The answer to the question of what kind of person stands by and watches as the Holocaust happens is, most likely you are exactly the kind of person. If you won't even speak out against abortion when it costs you so little, you are that person. "The Jews aren't really humans, they're just tissue." "My country my choice."

We already know the answer to the "good" German question, those of us who understand. There's a holocaust now and nobody cares.


G-d wants you to love mercy.

Now, mercy isn't always what it seems. Mercy can seem cruel, but if its intent is the well-being of others, it is not actually. If someone is on the street with a heroin needle in their arm, and I tell them they need to stop that shit and get with the Lord's program, that probably seems unkind to them. Remember that what they would consider kindness would be for me to give them a packet of heroin. This is a confused time and land and world, nothing is at it appears. Remember that to love mercy is to intend the well-being of the other, and to act in accordance with that if they are willing for you to. In this crazy mixed up world, it is not necessary that they see it that way, only that you genuinely intend it to that end.

I had friends once. Not many now. What cost me many of them is speaking truthfully to their benefit. If someone is expressing a godless nihilistic viewpoint and I confront them on that, it is because I know the benefit, the priceless blessings that they could receive by rejecting such a worldview and turning to the Lord YHWH. I seriously would be dead multiple times over had I not accepted the Lord and embraced His teaching. Because that's what such a worldview is, the path of death. My mercy, intended for their well-being, caused them to dislike me.

We tend to focus on the more emotionally tugging examples of mercy and those are important too. It's important to feed the hungry and tend the sick. The thing is, if we do not try to teach them to turn to the Lord, we are only putting a band-aid on their real sickness and the sickness of this whole world. If the whole world turned to the Lord, there would be a lot fewer hungry or sick because the Lord would be their shepherd.


He wants you to speak truthfully.

If you lie as a regular thing, lie to other people, lie about things, how can you please G-d?

G-D HATES LIES.

A falsehood is an insult to the Creator who made all things. You cannot please G-d if you lie. And lies are EVERYWHERE about us. You see them when you turn on your TV, when you watch your Youtube videos. I used to get a bundle of lies in the mail every week, people trying to sell me stuff. Actual living trees died for that crapola. A world in which good living trees are killed to print lies, that is a confused world my friend.

I used to work in telemarketing, I know how it is. You do the job they give you so you can survive. I don't have any rancor for those people but for the people who hired them.

People bathe in lies, they breathe lies, they live by lies. "It's not a person" is a lie. "Only idiots believe in G-d" is a lie. "Science explains everything" is a lie. Hell, honest scientists know that science explains nothing, it only offers a workable framework for understanding things, tentatively. Nothing is less certain than science, but science does offer a workable framework for understanding and doing things. When science becomes metaphysics, it stops being science.

You want to do one beautiful thing for G-d (and ultimately yourself,) do this: stop lying.


G-d wants you to walk humbly with Him.

What is this, to walk humbly? He's the boss. He's G-d. You are but clay. Nonetheless He will let you walk with Him, but only in humility.

I guess the first part of humility is obedience. You are not being a humble child if you are being a disobedient child. Now we all have our issues with obedience, if we were capable of perfect obedience we perhaps would be less in need of humility. But we are in need of it, because we can't be perfectly obedient and even if we were, we would still be clay. Still be Creature. What can you even offer G-d who has everything? If you were perfect in your walk, what would that by itself be to G-d?

What He wants, is you: the only creature who can make a decision to reject Him. If you decide your own way for yourself, and decide that what you really need is not your own way at all, but G-d, that is the only thing He wants. You.

But you aren't really coming into relation with Him if you don't love what He loves and hate what He hates. Would you marry someone who, when you tell them you hate abortion, says "I love abortion and have one every time I can." Would you marry someone who, when you say you hate lies, says "I love them!" I hope not. Well, you will never actually know the true inmost self of your wife or husband, their inmost self is hidden to you. Their essence is hidden from your view. It's not hidden to G-d. If your inmost self is not being purified, how will G-d come to live with you?

This is what G-d wants:

“My people, what have I done to you?
How have I burdened you? Answer me.

I brought you up out of Egypt
    and redeemed you from the land of slavery.
I sent Moses to lead you,
    also Aaron and Miriam.
 
My people, remember
    what Balak king of Moab plotted
    and what Balaam son of Beor answered.
Remember your journey from Shittim to Gilgal,
    that you may know the righteous acts of the Lord."


With what shall I come before the Lord
    and bow down before the exalted God?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
    with calves a year old?

Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
    with ten thousand rivers of olive oil?
Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression,
    the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?

He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
    And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
    and to walk humbly with your God.


~Micah 6:3-8