Holiday That Was Not...

 

It's almost the end of the new year period and that means that I'll be back in my job next week :P I had anticipated spending some time during the Christmas-New Year season getting some rest and getting some stuff of mine straightened out.

That never happened.

The holidays this year was ....  very busy... I ended up meeting hordes of people I did not want to meet......:(

After that highly unfortunate incident with that "person from my past" my folks announced that a family friend had died and we were going to attend the wake and funeral. As he was the minister of a church, well, there were hordes of people at the wake. Unfortunately they were all the people that I grew up with :(

It was also unfortunate that we went to the wake on Christmas day :( I had never seen so many people that I had wanted to avoid.

The minister was a good person and I remember him best as an excellent counsellor. I think he had a good understanding of human nature... (something unfortunately that I did not develop in my younger years... and that resulted in me making the acquaintance of people that I today REALLY want to avoid) he certainly could see the issues in the people that I knew... (something that I failed to see for many years)....

However, it seemed (for me at least), this event was like Fate or Karma or something asking me in abstract terms if I wanted to turn back now and return to where I once was... in fact I had people asking me to come back :P 

Honestly... I hadn't thought a lot about why I left it all behind... When I did leave that life so many years ago, I had done so because I felt terribly unhappy about being where I was. Reflecting on my decision, I realised that being with that particular community did not make me happy because my faith as it was back then was based on fear and not on a belief that this was what I had decided to stand for....

The problem with the community I had come from was that for the most part, it attracted people who talked more about hellfire and brimstone than the love of God. In fact, my own father was of the opinion that Hell was an important concept that was not preached enough in some "modern" churches because he felt it helped to "save souls" :P

I should have listened to Mr Cow in the university I attended. Mr Cow was a lecturer who taught a minor module in my course of study... He was a very very strong minded chap who had his own unique views and did not take any crap from anyone... not even the authorities... He was also a man of uniquely strong faith and I believe his grasp of theology was also pretty sound...

One, he had proposed to myself and some students of similar faith the following notion...

Were we believers because of fear... in particular the fear of burning in hell.... or did we choose this path because it was something that we felt was worth standing for?

He was of the notion that it was a poor poor basis for faith... if the reason it existed was because of fear.

Unfortunately, I had not really understood his reasoning back then because I was too deep into the whole thing... I think I even felt a little bit... surprised that he had even raised that question...

I think I asked him if he wasn't afraid of Hell at all... i think he said that... if his faith was based on fear alone... he'd rather be in the fire .....


If I had understood him earlier... I could have avoided all those mistakes.. years of it... 

The problem about having a faith that is based on fear is that... you are always wondering if you have "made it"... so to speak... Honestly, the standard of holiness that was advocated by the community that I was in is... in today's world... unrealistic... Moreover, as the community was fringe and not mainstream... they held to the belief that the religion as practiced by themselves was of far superior quality than in other groups of similar belief.... 

To most other people... the community I was in would be considered extreme or purist... :P

Naturally, being human and Singaporean... I found it terribly difficult to uphold the standard of holiness that was advocated... (there was one time I remembered a view advocated by some members of the community that - going to the movies was undesirable because most movies weren't exactly moral and the environment of the movie theatre was one that led to people, especially young people engaging in immoral acts... thus, some members did not go to any cinemas at all... since movie-going is a national pastime for Singaporeans... you can see how that presents a huge problem) ....that led to constant failure... and constant doubt regarding my own faith... half of my childhood was spent learning religious doctrine from members of the community and my own father... and because of all these views... I was never ever secure in my own faith... 


Kids aren't dumb... and certainly I understood what I read and studied... unlike many of my peers, I never had a problem with Shakespearean english especially when I started learning it in secondary school because the scriptures I read was in the same type of language... (some members of the community felt for the longest time that the only accurate translation of the scripture was the king james version, and rejected all other modern translations)...


Well... I was a thinking kid and really..... knowing all of THAT... never helped me feel like I had actually managed to attain the whole "salvation" thing...


So what happened was that I ended up wallowing in fear, guilt and doubt for years... and when a person becomes afraid and guilty, they also become extremely zealous... I can honestly say that I probably spent more hours "serving God" than my very faithful father....:( 


Seeing all those people made me remember my own childhood... 

I never want to go back to all of that... it was a terrible terrible burden being in that community... I could never ever really be myself in all of that... in fact, I had to invent this person who never really existed.... just so I could have something to show people on a Sunday....:P 

Now, I don't have anything against the religion in general and I think some of the best people I know are in it... but.... it is certainly not my cup of tea... and certainly not with the community I grew up with.... 

I shared my experiences with F who felt after listening to all of it, that.. well... my community was considered a very non-mainstream sect in christendom... 

F was once an ordained minister... it is pretty ironic that she's the one I talk to the most now about spirituality and stuff...


I think I have a huge hangup over this entire "faith" thing... in fact, F noticed that people who were once monks or nuns in their past lives or who are now in a religious order generally DO NOT like me at all... it's like they can sniff out my hangup without even me opening my mouth... 

well... but that's really something for another time...:P

Sometimes I Forget....

In this lifetime, I have met quite a fair share of people whom I have met before in another incarnation. Recently, I met someone whom I believe was a fellow colleague in my lifetime as a witch-hunting priest. Despite the centuries the person still exhibits the same kind of character traits that he had in a prior lifetime....

Sometimes I gotta remind myself that people generally don't remember who they were before and sometimes they don't even believe in past lives.

I wonder why people forget. I mean, if you really wanted to "learn lessons" lifetime after lifetime... so to speak... why do we forget? If you forget the sequence of events... how do you learn where you went wrong?

Anyways... I gotta remind myself.... people forget who they are.. and even if you could tell them why they are reacting and feeling a particular way... you can't..... dammit :P 'cos well, people cannot accept it.

Well, the person in question met me today.... and we spoke a bit.. and then he just sat there and because there was nothing else to say, he took out his nintendo and started playing a game. I really really wonder why he's even there in the first place. I asked him if he wanted dinner and he said no... he just sat around....

I mean I have a theory why he is hanging around.... well.. its not cos of me....:P However, right near the end, when I pointed out that it might be an idea for him to go home and rest.. he had something to say to me, but forgot what it was.... just like that... at the spur of the moment.

His face contorted for a fraction of a second and then he'd forgot what he wanted to say to me... it looked important.... but he simply could not remember.... he seemed very confused... like he didn't know why he was even there meeting me.... Personally I think he is pretty confused and conflicted.... which might explain his behaviour and reactions at times. I mean I would be too if the thing I believed in conflicted strongly with my own desires and personality.

Again... sadly I know how that feels. I spent years trying to deny that I had a great fascination with magic and the supernatural. It got so bad in my teenage years I felt a terrible burden. The thing I believed in no longer helped me at all.. it just made me feel guilty about being me. It took me years to admit that conflict... so I can imagine for someone else it would also take years... or never.... some people never emerge from that kind of spiral..... its hard for people to really put aside what they believe, especially if they have been in the system that perpetuates that belief from their youth.... I was in one such system.... it never made me feel good or confident about myself.:(

I guess... you might ask, if you don't feel good about yourself and if what you believe doesn't assist you in being a better person or making your life better... why go on? Well, I think for me at least, it was hard because the primary blocking factor was fear.... its the whole fear of going somewhere unpleasant when one does cos one doesn't worship the "correct" god. For some people, it might be the fear of not ever seeing their family or friends ever again....


I'm quite.... tired of this whole thing about "correct" gods... or not.... This issue has been hitting me in the face the whole of september till now. I've been meeting people with issues surrounding faith and conflicts about who they are versus what their faith tells them is correct.... 

I don't know why I am meeting them. Is it because I am to learn something from them or because I have to tell them something... I truly do not know

RIght now, I don't think I'll be sharing anything much with the ones who are showing up ... cos well.... I guess they aren't in a state to listen...

Also, I don't think I really really want to be groaning any more about how my dad can't understand me or how certain religions are terribly biased against who I am and what I do... I mean... it doesn't help...

I know that members in the local witchy community do feel prejudiced and persecuted.... and often they point out a certain religion or two as the culprits.

I think its pretty useless to groan....I'd rather focus on me... and on what I believe in now. Testing the boundaries of what I believe.... testing my conntection with the Creator.... testing my own magic and my belief in that....

I'd rather spend time being the best ..... magician or whatever it is that I am and finding the proof I'm always looking for.... I mean, I'd rather have access to a power that works rather than to a lot of empty words.

Different Realities... side by side.

Had a talk with a young fellow from the teams today. I always had him pegged for a bit of a joker... he's always full of wisecracks. He likes to pepper our meetings with irrelevent comments. I think once his team got a wee bit fed up and told him to shaddup. He does seem to have run with the rough crowd some years back, got into fights and I suppose some gangs, but I had always assumed his fighting was mostly confined to schoolboy confrontations and petty teenage gangwars... generally silly and mostly harmless...

Thanks to my tendency to slap labels on people I meet. I never really took notice of his comments and jokes - he always joked a lot about there being fights downstairs from where he stayed every night. I never really paid much attention to what he actually said because I thought he was just blowing stuff up, like most "smart alec" types do.

I found out the truth today when I had a slightly more serious chat with him.

He apparently lives in a rough neighbourhood somewhere in Singapore which has some pretty violent gangs in the neighbourhood. Also, he knows people who are into the local illegal fighting scene.... that's right, there is an illegal fighting circult in this dull bubble of a country. Apparently, some guys get into a ring and fight and people bet on them :P Now, I am still feel a bit doubtful about this claim, but he has said that photographic evidence is possible. I wonder if he will bring some of it to our next meeting?

Knowing what I know now, all his comments and jokes seem to take on a slightly sinister shade - a sort of hidden window to his world. He used to make joking comments about how he decided to quit and "turn professional"... I never really understood what he meant before... I kinda guess THAT refers to his current career choice. He said that he'd been in fights and gangs, but it was still better to "turn professional"... certainly I pointed out that gangs don't pay as well.... he laughed.

Talking to him I feel a little sorry for the predicament he is in and certainly, his irritating jokes and smiling demeanour seem like a tragic and somewhat heroic attempt to grin in the face of bad Fate. I just hope that he is not the sole breadwinner in his family or something like that because his old man is currently a jailbird for lopping off someone's arm in a machete fight :P

Listening to his colourful accounts, I sometimes feel that I am probably still semi-sequested in the protective bubble of normalcy that has been created by our system. I suppose something like an illegal circult of fights IS possible in Singapore, but as a Singaporean, I feel the disbelief rising in me. I did question him as to why I have never read about it in the papers, he said that the reporters sometimes suppress these stories because of either lack of interest in them or the need to create a sense that everything is normal...

Sounds like a bit of conspiracy mixed in with a fragment of Twilight Zone...

But when I think about it, THAT ACCOUNT is his view of his reality and if nothing else, metaphysics has taught me that any kind of reality can exist side by side in the same context. For instance, my reality is filled with conniving entities, astounding coincidences and weird magic... If I were to tell it to him, he would think I am crazy as well. I mean just the other day I was telling a friend that someone we know who "came back" (after being clinically dead for longer than the number of minutes they say you can be dead for before your brain starts to turn to mush) is really not the original inhabitant of that body...

So I really can't say his view of reality is fake.... all I can ask for is pictures ....

I think I'm just jolted out of my comfort zone by the thought that the Singapore I know is not quite what it all seems. I thought that THAT Singapore, with the gangs and the dingy one-room flats crammed with families vanished long ago with the world of my childhood. I do still remember the one-room flat we had, dinners of plain rice, soya sauce and tiny fish fried till most of the moisture dried up... (my grandma can't cook)... our odd neighbours... long dark corridors and dirty kids playing on hard concrete.

I suppose anything that has ever existed in time and space never really dies. It just gets swept to one side and keeps on going through other people even if you have left it long ago.

Reality... that does really take on a different meaning now. I have in this lifetime, met people who spend their entire lives travelling from one place to the next. With no idea where they are going to spend the night or what source of income awaits them and yet they march forward along the road without a single care, confident in that they will be able to survive comfortably no matter where they go.

As a Singaporean, I have to wonder... how can such people exist. The notion of a life that has nothing to do with work and saving enough for a nest egg in one's old age is ... unthinkable I suppose for someone of my upbringing. :P I some small way, I envy their carefree existance... and I guess though metaphysics I am able to gain an intellectual understanding of how the universe serendipidously arranges things for them... but trying to actually put that type of synchronicity into action for myself is really a tough call...

I guess it must take instinct to create that kind of reality... or faith..... heh..... well I guess it all boils down to THAT ... in the end.