March 20, 2003

• Oh my name it ain’t nothin’
  My age it means less
  The country I come from
  Is called the Midwest
  I’s taught and brought up there
  The laws to abide
  And that the land that I live in
  Has God on its side.
  
  Oh the history books tell it
  They tell it so well
  The cavalries charged
  The Indians fell
  The cavalries charged
  The Indians died
  For the country was young
  With God on its side.
  
  The Spanish-American
  War had its day
  And the Civil War too was
  Soon laid away
  And the names of the heroes
  I’s made to memorize
  With guns in their hands
  And God on their side.
  
  The First World War, boys
  It came and it went
  The reason for fighting
  I never did get
  But I learned to accept it
  Accept it with pride
  For you don’t count the dead
  When God’s on your side.
  
  The Second World War
  Came to an end
  We forgave the Germans
  And then we were friends
  Though they murdered six million
  In the ovens they fried
  The Germans now too
  Have God on their side.
  
  I’ve learned to hate the Russians
  All through my whole life
  If another war comes
  It’s them we must fight
  To hate them and fear them
  To run and to hide
  And accept it all bravely
  With God on my side.
  
  But now we’ve got weapons
  Of chemical dust
  If fire them we’re forced to
  Then fire them we must
  One push of the button
  And a shot the world wide
  And you never ask questions
  When God’s on your side.
  
  Through many a dark hour
  I’ve been thinking about this
  That Jesus Christ was
  Betrayed by a kiss
  But I can’t think for ya
  You’ll have to decide
  Whether Judas Iscariot
  Had God on his side.
  
  So now as I’m leavin’
  I’m weary as Hell
  The confusion I’m feelin’
  Ain’t no tongue can tell
  The words fill my head
  And they fall to the floor
  That if God’s on our side
  He’ll stop the next war.
  
  With God on Our Side
  by Bob Dylan
  Copyright © 1963; renewed 1991 Special Rider Music

  
  

  
  God is not on our side.  God’s not on anyone’s side.  God wouldn’t take sides, I’m sure.  Oh, I’m not sure about your god; it’s my God that I know won’t take sides.  I don’t know about your god, and I’ll bet that you would have a hard time, in your own words, telling me about Your god.  One thing I know about your god, for sure:  If You have a god, you call your god “God”.  The reason for that is the same as it is for me and Everyone Else.  To all of us everywhere, our own gods are God or Goddess, Allah, Kali, Hera or Heyoka: capitalized All, even down to His or Her Divine Pronouns.

  
  

  Of course we don’t capitalize other peoples’ gods in the collective, though we do by convention grant them Proper Personhood in their individual names… even when we don’t believe in Them.  I think it makes just about as much sense to capitalize We, Us and Ours as She, His and Theirs, but I observe the conventions most of the time, anyway.

  
  

  Anyway, I was telling you about my god.  Oops, I mean God.  Either way, really, doesn’t matter, It doesn’t care if it is capitalized or not.  My divinity is big enough not to care for conventions or flattery.  My Creator, the First Source and Center of All, is not jealous or petty.  This is not a vindictive bitch or a micromanaging master.  He might have some pet project somewhere, or some local domain in Its neighborhood where She guides every step and sees every sparrow-equivalent fall.

  
  

  On this planet, though, Whatever Divine Source first set up the process whereby We came about, it delegated a lot of authority to Us.  It delegated one helluva lot of authority before things got down to us.  We’re not even Galactic Middle Management here, but we are potential masters of our own domains nonetheless.

  
  

  Through the power of our focused attention and the mechanism of our body/mind, we can do marvelous things.  It gave us all Free Will so it could watch us deal with this awesome power.  If it notices anything at all, at such a remote distance in spacetime, from such a minute mote within its Universe of Universes, what She notices is how his/her/its offspring differ from one another.

  
  

  It is big enough not to judge one from another, I know.  If It should have any favorites at all, I think they would probably be the Misfits, since It, in all of its manifestations that I have known, seems to Love diversity.

  
  

  I don’t say I believe this.  I don’t believe this.  I don’t even believe in god/Goddess/jehovah/Heyoka/All That Is, Whatever forever, amen.  I know God, my god, the divine spark of Light, Awareness and Oneness Within.  That’s not a belief, not Faith.  It is Gnosis, awareness, familarity, communion of Spirit with spirit.  That is all I know about That:  that there is a transcendent Consciousness to which I can tune mine.  All the rest is inference, supposition, intuition, reason and working hypothesis.

  
  

  The Thing or BEing I hold in awe is ancient beyond imagination.  By the time basic, primitive unicellular life showed up on THIS planet, it had already ordered and organized the Master Universe and delegated planning and production of the entire ensuing sequence of universes to Its subordinate creative intelligences.  It had developed an appreciation of variety and diversity.  It had found a basic pattern that worked and had built a staff whose task was to try every imaginable variation on that theme.

  
  

  The Intelligence behind the underlying patterns within the Cosmos imagined and initiated not just creation and destruction, Light and Darkness, truth and lies.  The First Source and Center encompasses not just those dualistic polarities, but also every shading of gray between the poles and all the colors of the spectrum.  If It is Anything, it is not petty or picky.  God is supposed to be infinite Love and ultimate perfection.  Why would Ultimate Perfection demand perfection of its Creation?  Why would It even bother creating a copy of itself if It was already Infinite and Complete?  If it had wanted a perfect creation, wouldn’t it have created one whole?

  
  

  Maybe it wanted to find out if it could come around to the same place by a different route.  What appears self-evident to me is that the Force within All, being Perfect and Changeless, desired Change and Imperfection.  That’s utterly logical to me and feels right to heart and gut.  In all that I can perceive, I perceive imperfection and change.  If everything is here because God Wills It, then change and imperfection are God’s Will.

  
  

  I infer, correctly or not, perfectability.  This reassures me.  If I wanted to believe in anything, that’s a belief I’d choose.  Being the multiple Virgo I am, with almost my entire chart focused at the top, in Virgo and Libra, in the ninth and tenth houses, I’m a living validation of natal astrology, focused on higher learning and the Divine, with extreme perfectionism.  I was all of that a long time before I ever knew that astrology says an extreme perfectionist is what I’m supposed to be.

  
  

  If I’m not perfectable, I’m at least improvable.  Improvement has come to me in my pursuit of perfection.  My Inner Vision has grown truer, my balance more stable, my peace more durable as I progress in my quest.  From past experience, I infer the potential for future improvement.  Awareness expands.  Life grows.  I Am.

  
  

  I know what I know and there is a lot more than what I do know, out there in the realm of all that I don’t know.  I think about some of what I don’t know.  I wonder, and I investigate.  I imagine and form opinions and working hypotheses, but I don’t jump to conclusions or adopt the beliefs of those who have jumped to conclusions before me.  I have done all of those things before in this lifetime, but have thankfully grown beyond that.

  
  

  I no longer need to choose one of several possible explanations for anything, in order to comfort myself that I understand what’s going on.  I am not comforted by blind belief.  I prefer to rule out all the false hypotheses and have some fair certainty and good evidence for what I accept as reality, before I buy into any explanation.  In my current reality, many things are a set of possibilities, one of which is always “none of the above.”  Some other things are just black boxes, inexplicable occurrences for which no conventional explanation makes sense and for which I’ve found no better explanations.  I’m okay with that, for now.
  

  

  • 11:03 pm
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