DonaMajicShow

Reality. Film. Philosophy. Science. Theology. Magic. Hiking. Radiohead. Sushi. Academia. Books. Mormonism. Atheism. Semantics. Perceptual Realism. Landscapes. Spirituality. Cycling. Nature. Existentialism. Moderation. Piano. Family. They Might Be Giants. Writing. Buddhism. Transhumanism. Meditation. Cats. Photography. Paintings. the Absurd. Poetry. Alice in Wonderland. Nostalgia. Demythologization. Technology.

I am interested in cultivating a stronger relationship with the earth—my place in it and how I might be of greater service to those around me.

To be succinct, I want to learn how to harmonize myself with existence. It is not always easy to exist. In fact, a majority of my existence has been enveloped with sadness.

I would really enjoy learning how to practice effective meditation, reconcile my attitudes with disappointments, improve the quality of conversation I have with others, and divorce from the sometimes over-analytical mind I possess.

I have studied philosophy (in general) both within school and independently for the past ten years. I have also studied various world religions and am interested in discovering the common ground between them all.

Seeing how most religions typically battle one another for primacy, I find it foolish that we (as a world) predominantly choose to focus on what we disagree about rather than what is familiar to us.

I learned from a young age to overcome this intolerance by adopting a philosophy from Dr. Seuss’ “Green Eggs and Ham.” It has served me well ever since.

Sam, like most of us, lives his life in a cocoon of convenience, little knowing the joy there is to be found by breaching the confines of his limited perspective.

I am constantly in the process of opening my mind.

One of my favorite teachings from the Buddha is captured in the phrase, “Hard is the hearing of the Sublime Truth.” Truth is hard indeed! It pierces, tears and inflames the soul, finding most of us unworthy to be vessels of its nature.

I am optimistic, however, that if more people were to at least experiment with other cultures, religions, languages and philosophies, that this pervasive fear of ‘otherness’ that binds so many would be seen as merely an illusion, and that all of us would realize that we desire the same: peace, knowledge, happiness, and, ultimately, the Sublime.

I am the type of person who would rather stay at home wrapped in a blanket while reading a book than go to the party and pseudo-socialize with people I don’t really know.

I am often timid at first to meet new people because I feel as though there’s some invisible rule book I have to follow in order to be accepted.

Most people seem to have the script to engage in ‘small talk’; I have had difficulty acquiring that script for most of my life.

This you could say is my biggest weakness—that is, I have not learned how to sufficiently accept the beauty that hides within me.

My persona seems to be an amalgamation of all my heroes: Jesus, Socrates, John Linnell and John Flansburgh, mom and dad, etc.

I love contemplating the meaning of life: its symbols, contradictions, frustrations, magic, humor and more!

I have recently developed a title that could summarize me in a nutshell: A contemporary existential apologist.

I have extracted meaning where perhaps the meaner did not mean to mean, you know what I mean? I love more than anything to share my perspective with others.

I feel that one of my biggest strengths is that I carry the key to unlock the fear in others by freely sharing the light I have within myself without restraint.

My friends, family members and co-workers look up to me as a source of wisdom (though much of that wisdom is found in this simplistic truth: don’t block the road to inquiry).

As for calming hobbies and extracurricular activities that interest me, here are a few: hiking, fishing, semantics and linguistics, reading philosophical texts/fiction, creating and critiquing film, physical fitness training, writing poetry/parables, eating sushi, extracting the extraordinary from the ordinary, the smell of asphalt shortly after its rained, walking on the beach, and standing on top of a mountain.

When I was younger, I often would dream about heaven as being this magical city of wish fulfillment, eternal happiness and rest from all cares or worries.

I believed that when you died, you immediately went to this place and were changed in a twinkling of an eye to a state of complete euphoria. I desired so badly to be there and not where I was.

I kept projecting my happiness into the future, as if salvation and contentment teased and taunted me; always somewhere distant yet far beyond my reach.

Each time existence threw something in my way, I became discouraged and depressed. I rebelled against existence by desiring that existence conform to my will—not the other way around.

Through the years, however, my thoughts of heaven have changed. I no longer desire to go to the heaven I used to dream about.

I feel that I would be cheating the earth as well as this unprecedented experience we call “life” if I desired nothing but to escape it. I want to harmonize myself with it. I do not fully understand how to do that yet, but the desire is there.

I pray every day for an extension of life and try to treat my body with respect so that I might see this desire fulfilled.

I would not feel worthy to transcend this world until I learned how to get along with it. I am still in that process of learning how to do so but each day is an uphill battle.

It is not easy. My predominant desire now is to embrace my trials, knowing well the education that comes with them. I want to make love to the paradoxes that bug me, understand the great question:

“Who am I?”, consistently look for opportunities to share my testimony of life with others, and rigorously use the time given to me to prepare for that which is yet to come.

I desire to get involved with as many educational programs, philosophies and ideologies as possible because I need help and instruction on how I might be of greater service to the earthly family.

Who am I not? I am not the teacher—I am the listener. I am not the shepherd—I am the lamb. I am not the saint—I am the sinner. Please help me become one with the universe.

I have no ill-intention towards any living thing, and though my passion for life may seem somewhat intense, I am very sincere and would really like to get to know you.

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Sat Jan 7

Psychedelic and Religious Experience

Sam Harris has said, “It is impossible to communicate the profundity (or seeming profundity) of psychedelic states to those who have never had such experiences themselves.”

I think the same argument can be made for religious experience.There is an assumption, based on ignorance or a lack of participation, that religion exerts a negatively charged, conservative, censorious pressure on our creative impulses and conscience. While this holds credence to the extent that religion is caricaturized by sarcasm, the reality of religious experience is much more complex and much more interesting than our atheist friends will acknowledge.

Psychedelic experiences, like religious experiences, are very similar in that they hold no real meaning for the man or woman who stands outside their existential influence. Kierkegaard understood this principle best. It was he who taught that unless a man or woman has entered in upon a deeply subjective study and practice of so-called “Christian paradoxes,” they will forever stand outside with eyes looking in upon what is perceived as a strange, occult world ruled by otherworldly forces and agencies. They will perceive irrationalism, superstition, primitive taboo, and a disease born of fear.

And yet, I believe, much of this antipathy spawns from either their refusal or inability to make things real when it comes to judging religious language compassionately. This kind of compassion cannot come without having experienced the subjective core of what the religious call “God.”

Any language watered down with tired metaphors and recycled idioms will inevitably be met with doubts and eventually boredom and hatred. The failure to experience the subjective effects of religious language, I believe, much like the failure of the outsider who cannot understand the mescalin user’s trip, is a failure to make the scriptural language real to you. It is a failure to reinvent the language, to morph it and seduce it with your own brand of spirituality. It is a failure to wrestle with and love the nagging human diversity that churches have to offer. It is a failure to lose ourselves wholeheartedly in a school that asks us not to be mere consumers, but givers of the divine gift and its sweet and filling fruit.

And yet, even after all of these failures are counted and pontificated, the tensions between sectarian religion and individual spirituality represent the universal and ever-present urge to self-transcend.

The craving for release or sedation is in all of us. I have learned and grown thoroughly convinced by my own suffering that whichever “Doors in the Wall” we open to reach this self-transcendence ought to be the kind that does less harm in the long run yet more joy in the short run. I agree with Huxley that “ideally, everyone should be able to find self-transcendence in some form of pure or applied religion.” Whether it’s you taking a religious-surrogate like psilocybin or mescalin, like the Native Indian sacraments offered, or sitting through ninety minutes of Sunday school “boredom,” the challenge has always been to make the inner landscape of our minds worth exploring.

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