soaked through and through from a cozy walk in the rain. lots of thought about the cosmos and its entities and its religion. in fact i'm almost never not thinking about religion. i have to come to terms with the fact that i love christianity but hate its generic followers. i love christianity as a sheer mythological, ritualistic religion. i love its iconography and allegories and cathedrals, definitely its cathedrals. but i don't believe in it anymore, and i hope i never do again. do i like to play with its imagery and themes and characters? yes. but as beautiful constructs of the human's search for significance and identity, not as concrete, absolute truths. that absolute shit gets you caught in regressive circles. i like juggling many truths. i like being open to possibility, to the idea that one system may get you through one problem but not all problems. being able to change my mind and move with the wind and trust in what works for me. i like being free, and not in indentured servitude to an inconsistent god.

i bury myself in the world, in nature, in life patterns and life rhythms, in knowledge and experience. i bury myself in harmony with the world, and not in the dissonant belief that i'm not of it and so must dominate it and all natural impulses.

i know that sounds like some spooky-kooky, blissed-out, new age nature gimmick, but it's not. it doesn't mean life is any more easy or that death is any less scary. it doesn't mean i've solved all my problems or got all the answers. it just means that i've found a personal framework for understanding things that i might be comfortable with in the long term.

for now.

a wad of phlegm took residence very low down in my throat yesterday morning. it has since climbed and now sits so very high up in my throat that every time i give even a pretense of swallowing something, it protests loud and clear. it does not like to be disturbed. i think this is why twenty-four hours of hacking, gasping and yakking have done relatively nothing but wholeheartedly encourage its continued presence. fortunately, my throat doesn't hurt yet. unfortunately, i can feel it coming.

in other news, new cloud cult kicks ass. so does new coldplay. in more other news, read charles de lint.

"'In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth.' But something had to create God. In fact, something made many gods, and that Something is deeper and darker than you could possibly imagine.

"In the beginning was a Force. Some call this Force a Life, but life had not yet evolved. This Force was a presence, a spirit, a personality. It had no form, no body, no molecules to make up a body. No atoms, no elements, no particles or electrons. Yet this Force had an energy. A vast and mighty energy. As there was no matter, it was not a kinetic energy, no. But as all energy does, it had Potential. And anything that has potential has a will, and the Force had a will that could not be denied.

"This Force had the potential to manifest an infinity of possibilities. To the best of our knowledge, there was no good reason for why this existence was chosen. To contemplate the reasoning behind the world we know quite literally ends in madness. But there is no good reason to take such a path; what is, is.

"The Force, it is said, wished to experience itself, to achieve a sort of self-awareness. At its present state, it had only the potential to be, it wasn't yet.

"So the energy that was the Force reproduced itself. You are familiar with amoebal division, cellular division? That is what the Force did: it replicated itself. The angels debate each other over whether the Force reproduced itself - gave birth - or whether it divided itself in two. That point is irrelevant; what is half of infinity? What is the sum of two infinities?  The only important thing is that the Force created for itself a mirror, its Twin.

"Now consider, for example, how a human infant begins to know itself. How does it begin to distinguish between Self and Everything Else? It recognizes its own desires as opposed to external events. It begins to understand the relationship between action and reaction. It discovers its own will. This is the path to self-awareness. To be able to see another, to know oneself in contrast to another.

"However, there now existed two opposing Forces, two contrary wills, equal in power and potential. The desire for one to know itself in relation to the other self suddenly exploded into existence, in each individual will - Do you see where I am going with this? Binary opposition, good and evil.

"No one knows why the Twins became opposites to experience themselves, but they did begin to oppose each other. I believe they recognized instinctively that no understanding could come from unanimity. How could it? It was from that unanimity that the dichotomy was born - why would they wish to return to such a state?

"In any case, you understand, I hope, that at this place before time, there was no such thing as a moral code. There was no right or wrong, truth or lie, beauty or ugliness. The Forces, the Twins, simply were. It is here where the great myths begin to speculate on why and how the capacity for time, space and life was created. Some say it began  ex nihilo in a matter of days, some say in billions of years.  But what is time to the infinite? Life evolved and so did lifeforms. Some sooner than others...."