by Robert Mertens
Fantasizing while jogging
You may know that I am a devotee of fantasy tales because fantasy is often more real than much of what passes for reality. Tales like “The Never Ending Story” entrain reality, dissolving borders into the “what can be” as two evolving worlds connected by a child.
So this morning I am jogging along fantasizing about fantasy. Consider the Garden of Eden, a compelling story breathing its meaning into 5 to 10 thousand years of Western human history. So what about Eve? She engages with the Serpent, who is more interesting to most than Adam: magnetic, demanding attention, mmmmm? And that apple…. good and evil, right and wrong: mmmmm? again.
Enter God. Straight forward…. ” I know what you did.” An angel with a sword… ( Don’t remember which one, just that Adam and Eve weren’t up to wrestling with it at the time… one of their descendants will be.). Where’s the gate? Is the angel with the sword still there?
Movie Night
We have movie and pizza nights up here in Badger once a month. The movies are alternately chosen by Marwan LoMele and Jack Huneke (Jack, an astrophysicist, is credited with first discovering what scientists now believe is the real age of the universe: about 14 billion years. He can also tell through the same technique if someone has set off a nuclear device, which makes him a highly paid employee at a lab somewhere up north).
We just saw the movie, “Lars and the Real Girl,” a 2012 off-beat romance taking place in a “Lake Wobegon,” somewhere up there in Minnesota or Wisconsin. I liked it a lot because Lars’s whole town accepts a plastic sex doll named Bianca, that Lars buys to be his girlfriend, as a real person. Bianca is diagnosed early in the movie as being ill with some possibly incurable disease, so the whole town takes her and Lars under its wing until Bianca dies.
It is a story of the surprising transformative power of acceptance. I also learned from the movie that an illusion is when you see things that maybe aren’t there and a delusion is when you believe something that hardly anyone else believes.
I think my brother and sister may consider me delusional because I believe in God and an afterlife. Nevertheless, they are very affectionate towards me, demonstrating the dominant power of love over delusion.
A Current Fantasy
Now, back to Subud California. I know a certain center is emerging from a long torpor. I see them developing their property with the help of other Subud members in California and beyond. I envision that center working with community partners to create a community center that focuses and vitalizes the pulse of that community. The physical development is beautiful and is a beacon for other centers that will follow.
Looking again at Bapak’s words on my desk:
To develop your life, you must strive for something more than what is normal.
Find something that is extraordinary for you.
Something new, something never done before.
That is how to make God’s love and Grace real for you.
Undertake and fulfill something without fear.
Choose a road and stick with it,
Never deviate from what is right, human, and correct.
Plan, calculate, work.
Success will come unexpectedly, in a way that can not be foreseen.
(emphases mine)
Love and Blessings to you,
Robert