By Beauty Damned

Writing is My Religion: I Surrender

I'm reading this book right now called "Writing Down the Bones" by Natalie Goldberg. My aunt sent it to me years ago. She's always been really supportive of my writing and has encouraged me to keep it up. That book sat on my shelf for about 4 and a-half years until I finally really took it out to read it.

Reading this book is like reading about religion. Not just any religion. MY religion. The way that Buddhism never really has been MY religion, because I didn't choose it, reading and writing is it. I identify with Buddhism and have a mass of feelings and thoughts associated with it, but the many long hours of sitting through teachings of Buddhism as a child never resonated with me the way that the teachings of literature have. Saying the words that I would say over and over in Tibetan, a language I did not understand but could speak for the sake of my prayers, had the effect of gluing my psyche to my given religion, but did not help me to gain any understanding about what those words meant. Certainly not the way that just sitting down and reading Nabakov or Garcia Marquez has - giving me this greater understanding of people, life, the world, magic and mysticism; not the mysticism of ancient texts, but the magic of both truth and imagination...

Reading these words by Natalie Goldberg has reminded me and taught me so much more about what writing is to me and what it means in my life. Reading her words is to read the words of a person who is so wise in the ways of putting down thoughts that it fills me with the realization that I am her and she is me. I could blow myself off and think that a presumptuous comparison, but she's already taught me to try to stop listening to that voice that holds us all back.

Religion is a crazy thing. When I was growing up, it seemed extremely important to identify what your religion was. Other kids asked me in school. They knew I wasn't Christian or Catholic or Jewish. Some of them even went to their parents and asked what Buddhism was and they came back to school the next day to report that I was a devil worshipper. I never understood why they were so suspicious of our religion. But the more I understood about theirs, the more mutually suspicious we became.

My best friend was a Jehovah's Witness. The difference in our religions was only in the details when we were kids, because it was all the same to us really. They went to meetings, we went to meetings. They all believed the same thing, we all believed the same thing. My parents were overprotective (by a kid's unruly standards) and her parents were overprotective. Her parents told her what to think, my parents told me what to think. (It's okay people, that's what parents do.) The only real difference to us seemed to be that we had our holidays and they had none. (I always felt bad for my friend that even though my parents were Buddhist they still let us celebrate Christmas, Halloween and Easter, while my best friend was condemned to a life without birthday cake, christmas trees, easter bunnies or halloween candy. A miserable fucking existence if you'd have asked me.) As we grew into our early teens, the Jehovah's Witness lifestyle couldn't agree with me and I began to have opinions and strongly disagree with the ideas and beliefs held by JWs. I was too wild and my friend was too prudish and we no longer had a single thing in common. As my parents loosened their grip, her parents pulled her closer to keep her away from degenerates like me. The demise of our friendship could be boiled down to a difference in religion.

I wonder where she is today. My little friend from across the street. (Strangely enough, the first guy I ever really made out with was a boy from her Jehovah's Witness Kingdom Hall congregation. There was something really hot about knowing that we were [beyond!] forbidden by the religion to so much as make eyes at eachother, much less find ourselves in a tongue-tied embrace in the parking garage below my friend's apartment.)

Religion is constricting at the same time that it is intended to be freeing. As an adult I grew to feel that the only reason that any of these religions were ever created in the first place was to make us all feel better about the fact that we all ultimately end up dead. To give our selves something to look forward to after that happens. If you're a good Christian, you get to go to heaven. A bad one and you're going to hell, but that's okay, at least you're going someplace. Not just damned to an eternity of nothingness. Even the Buddhists who speak so highly of nothingness don't actually want to think of life after death as nothingness. If you are a good Buddhist you may become enlightened, or at the very least come back very fortunate in your next life. If you are a bad Buddhist you will suffer greatly in the Bardo, passing through numerous hell-realms until you re-emerge into this world as a cockroach. No threat of nothingness there. That sounds like a whole lot of something more to me. But you have to practice feeling like nothing anyway. Awesome. If you are a good Jehovah's Witness, after you die, and one day in the god-knows-when-the-fuck future (when Armageddon happens I guess), those who witnessed for Jehovah will be brought back and granted a place in paradise alongside god and all the other good witnesses. Bad Jehovah's Witnesses still have a chance if they repent. But not a Jehovah's Witness at all and you're straight damned to the dirt. There isn't even a hell...is there? Your sorry ass just gets to stay dead - that's harsh. As you go down the list, all of the religions have an insurance clause for after you're dead. It’s what drives the whole damn mess.

I think the scariest thing in the universe is that thought that you think - that we all think - when we really try to imagine where we go. Maybe an enormous number of humans have managed to brainwash the fear out of themselves with faith (an arguably unfair statement - but I'm making it), but I think it's an innate fear that lives within all of us. The fear of nothingness. Because we are so inextricably attached to the idea of getting up every morning and existing. Being seen. Being heard. Being acknowledged. Loved. Noticed. Wearing clothes. Feeling sunshine. Sipping coffee. Feet planted on concrete or dirt. Smelling food. Hearing birds. Hearing the world until you can't hear it anymore because it all just becomes the sound of life. Your life. Our lives.

And what of when it's all over? Then what? Well fuck all. Haven't people been asking that question since the dawn of mankind? They sure have. They couldn't think of anything except nothingness. Their minds, our minds, couldn’t possibly guess beyond that, where the fuck it is that we go. We, meaning, the selves that we are convinced exist beyond our physical bodies. It’s terrifying to think that we could possibly be anything less. Just a body. Just dying and becoming dust.. More terrifying than anything they could ever imagine. They would be gone. Forgotten. Placed in the dirt like the ones they'd seen and buried before, knowing that this fate was inevitable and inescapable.

So man invented religion. And man invented language and writing and wrote his religion in stone. And writers invented the practice of recording one's thoughts. Free thought may have gained popularity over the centuries, but to many, the word of religion is the only thing that’s truly written in stone. And to me, that is an even more terrifying thought than not knowing. To have decided definitively what will happen, where you will go, and to be bound to that belief by what I can only call brainwashing. It’s ironic that we use words both to write down that which oppresses us, as much as that which frees us. Letting go of religion is incredibly freeing. Because now you get to have your own thoughts and dream up your own ideas of what is reality. How we stay and how we go. You’re no longer chained to assuredness in beliefs that someone else thought up for you. Anyone who needs to be that sure is missing everything that is awesome about being curious. Letting go of religion allows your curiosity and imagination to grow.

Thus recording one's thoughts became a religion to people like me. In our passing, I hope to leave behind this imprint of myself. We will leave behind our children, if we are fortunate enough to have them (hopefully they aren't assholes), and we will leave behind the thoughts and expressions that made each of us unique. I refuse to believe that I am nothing. I am something and I want a place in the world when I’m gone.

I was struck with an epiphany when Natalie Goldberg wrote: "...[W]hat great writers actually pass on is not so much their words, but they hand on their breath at their moments of inspiration. If you read a great poem aloud - for example, 'To a Skylark' by Percy Bysshe Shelley - and read it the way he set it up and punctuated it, what you are doing is breathing his inspired breath at the moment he wrote that poem. That breath was so powerful it still can be awakened in us over 150 years later."

I want others to breath my inspired breath and feel my love for life 150 years after I am gone.

I was recently invited to join a Buddhist group here in New York. I felt so much apprehension about even being invited into anything having to do with Buddhism that doesn't have to do with my family - the two things are so powerfully combined to me. I also realized that I have a superiority complex when it comes to Buddhism. I can't help but feel like most of the people "practicing" or entertaining notions of Buddhism just don't fucking get it. It's a harsh perception, but it's one that I have recently begun to recognize in myself. My connection to Buddhism is specific to the experience that I have had, which was that it was integrated into my life growing up as effortlessly as having breakfast in the morning and dinner every night. When you are raised with any religion, you identify with it much differently than someone who converts to that religion as an adult. And I've come to realize that now, my old Jehovah's Witness friend and I probably have more in common than I ever thought we would, in the sense that it is rare to meet another adult who was raised in our particular religions. We mostly meet adults who have become enamored with it or have simply decided that it totes the most comfortable concept of what is going to happen to them after they die. As Christians, Jews and Catholics seem to continue to identify with their labels even if they don't practice a single thing that actually relates to that religion, I am the same. The difference is that I rarely meet another person who says "yeah, I was raised Buddhist too, but I'm not really practicing." Is it just as annoying to someone who was raised Christian all their life, to meet a “Born Again”? Like, how fucking convenient and terribly trite, or something…maybe I’m crazy.

I will never be able to shake that label off of my self image, and I will always respect its contribution to who I am, but as an adult I do not feel that I need a religion to tell me what is going to happen to me after I die and I don't have the kind of faith that is willing to hang in the balance of things that can't be reconciled with any of the truths that I've learned on this planet. (Heavens and hells and gods and deities.)

However, I do believe that writing down our thoughts can leave an impression that cannot be left in any other way and can give my life a kind of meaning that no religion could be capable of providing me.

That is why I have this blog. Not because the internet will last forever, or because my words will last forever, or because my opinions are particularly important, but because the simple act of writing is one thing I have faith in that cures me of that intolerable fear of nothingness.

Posted by Maria at April 5, 2006 12:31 AM | TrackBack