Living in the present

   I've been on quite the Alan Watts kick lately and as a result I'm currently reading his book The Wisdom of Insecurity, which was written after he left the Episcopal ministry. One particular concept in it has really been forcing me to revaluate my perspectives. The concept can pretty much be summed up in this quote,
"If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o’-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death."

    I've come to realize just how much I've been basing my life on future hopes, as well as past memories.  I rarely seem to be satisfied with where I'm at in this particular moment...I'm always wishing for things in the past or looking towards things I expect or hope will be in the future. I rarely seem to just enjoy the present for what it is. I will give an example of this:

    In the two and a half years between graduating from college and joining the Navy, I perceived the good majority of my life to just plain suck. I had a degree in what I wanted but was still living in the same boring town, with a boring job, making crappy cash and an erratic social life; I felt like I was going through a midlife crisis twenty years earlier than expected. So, despite never having any previous desire to be in the military, I began to daydream about joining the Navy. I heard about so many exciting stories and places and developed an absurdly romanticized view of joining simply because I yearned for something (or anything) to give my life some renewed meaning. It seemed like the perfect escape route out of my increasingly mundane existence and so my mind lived in this hopeful reality for several months on and off.

    Since joining the military, however, I've had a few hard-hitting life revelations. One of the most important of those revelations being that my previous life really wasn't that bad. In fact, it was pretty good. Of course, things were far from spectacular but I had a lot freedom and key relationships that I regretfully took for granted. The first time I realized this was at some point in boot camp and it almost felt like I had died and my soul was unable to move on because of all I had left behind. The experience of being cut off almost entirely from your old life and old joys is an extremely painful experience that leaves you no choice but to view life differently. Anyway, the moral of the story is that my refusal to live in the present caused me to focus on a future that, once reached, only made me yearn for that present that had now become the past.

    I have been bewitched by this cycle of wanting things past or future for as long as I can remember and I suspect most people are to one degree or another. Watts did well to point out, however, that neither the past nor the future actually exists; only the present exists. All that is exists in the present, not the past or the future. So, to be anything else other than mentally and emotionally focused on this moment is to effectively be disconnected from reality. I don't take that to mean that all thinking about the past or future is inherently bad, but to be constantly taken by those ideas is to miss the full experience of life and that is something I want to avoid.

A "Relationship" with God?

    
    In a recent conversation, it was asserted by a Christian whom I've known for many years, that I had "given up my relationship" with God because of my changes in belief. At first this angered me because it seemed arrogant that anyone could claim to know what someone else's relationship with God was. After cooling down though, the event reminded me of something I've been wanting to blog about...just what exactly is a relationship with God anyway? 

   When I was a Christian, I perceived relationship with God as something initiated by accepting Jesus as "lord and savior" of my life and then he would "speak" to me through prayer, sermons and through reading the Bible. I also gauged my relationship (usually subconsciously) on how well I was living out the teachings of Jesus and the Bible, even though I believed God wasn't keeping score...it still felt like he was. Underlying those things, however, was another sense of relationship that I can really only describe as an overwhelming presence and an emotional connection to something beyond what I could see. I have described some of those experiences on this blog before, but some instances where I recall that feeling strongest include: jogging under a starry sky in the country, speaking in "tongues", various times of song and worship, watching people at a store and feeling that God loved every one of them and meditating by the beach. Each experience was accompanied by tears of joy, inspiration and/or a deep sense of peace and contentment. 

    In hindsight, it seems likely that what I often perceived as God "speaking" to me was more the subliminal playback of the teachings I had convinced myself were true, than they were representative of God itself. I mistook a relationship with the tenets of a religion as being a direct, unadulterated relationship with God, which is perhaps the same issue that the aforementioned Christian has and thus why he thinks what he does about me. The reason I think this happens is because these tenets were readily available for me to use to help describe and understand the "overwhelming presence" and thus it was very difficult for my mind to separate the two (as I suspect it is and has been for many others). The overwhelming presence appeared to be confirmation of the tenets being true, particularly when being experienced in-conjunction with Christian events.

    The thing of it is, that once I was able to mentally and emotionally separate the two things, I still continued to experience the overwhelming presence, which tells me that it was never bound by the teachings and rituals that I thought it was for so many years. It hits me at the weirdest moments, sometimes when I'm eating or when I'm working and the only thing I can do is enjoy it and to try and gain something from it. It is something I feel I have come to understand so much more and yet, ironically, so much less at the same time. It is now my sole basis of a relationship with God...not a set of beliefs that may or may not accurately unveil what that presence is or what it desires from us. This isn't to say that beliefs are not useful in our interaction with this presence or this higher being, but they are simply human attempts at understanding it and therefore should never contain it to a point that we assume that others that do not share our beliefs, must in fact, not have a relationship with this God.