Every once in a while, when I'm straight and flying right, people say things to me that I struggle to credit. They talk about a Divine love and a sense of power they feel from and in me, and it's always made me uncomfortable to think about for long. It feels like hubris coated in arrogance infused with bullshit. I've written about that before here

I'm nobody's divine figure. I don't think of myself as 'fallen' or 'lost' or any of those other epithets the churched hurl at heathens, but neither am I even close to wholly holy. You will never hear me claiming otherwise.

But the people who say these things...what if they're not all crazy? 

They're all seeing something they're calling by these preposterous "divine" names. What is it? Have other people reacted to its presence differently? What might theoretically happen to me and my world were I to lean more heavily into it?

First question first. Stipulating it's real, what is it? If I have any kind of spark of divinity in me (stressing once again we all do, and examining yours might be profitable for you), how does it manifest?

What they're responding to is me, living as authentically to my belief system as this world will allow me to. No, that's a copout. As authentically as my own issues and my not having squared all of them away allow me to. I don't get these glowing compliments every day, or every month. 

I got to thinking, last night, that maybe it would do me some good to actually examine this preposterous assertion (divine? moi? surely you jest) as if it might have a kernel of truth in it. I should define my highest self so I can express my highest self more consistently.

But there is a danger in this. Several dangers, in fact.

The first, and one of the biggest, is that people will think I am staking out territory as some kind of (ugh) guru. No, no, a thousand thousand times no. If my thoughts resonate with you, wonderful. If they don't -- and for most, they won't -- so be it. I do think that if more of the world thought more like I do, we'd be in a better place right now, and I'm not afraid to say that. But I will insist until I'm blue in the tooth (we are online, after all!) that accessing your higher self would benefit both you and the world, no matter who you are and no matter what that higher self has to say. 

I really don't want to be the face of anything, which is what people probably assume when I come out with grand philosophical statements. In the ideal world that exists between my ears and nowhere else, someone sees this, thinks I'm cuckoo, reads it to someone else who thinks I'm delusional, spreads it around because "wouldja look at THIS batshittery" and eventually it finds someone like me who is willing to go further with it. I don't need credit, if credit is ever to be given. 

• it could easily appear coercive, even though coercion is an absolute no-no in my mind

• it puts a massive pressure on me to be "divine" 24/7

• it automatically turns me into An Authority, when that contradicts the belief system too

• I could never ask anyone around me, not my biological family, not my chosen family, not my friends, to have any reason to relate, or more pointedly be related, to me other than those they choose.

• No matter how many times I say I am special, but no more special than you are, I know people will choose to overemphasize the first half of that thought, and probably completely erase the second, which is the half that really matters.

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Let's start there, because it truly is foundational. Without this first statement, nothing else follows.

I AM SPECIAL, BUT NO MORE SPECIAL THAN YOU ARE.

This phrase and phrases like it have been peated and repeated in this blog since its founding nearly 20 years ago, and they were by no means new to me then.  Actually, that's another thing that should be stated (just so you think I've even more nuts): I believe...I believe I have always believed this. Like, I came into the world knowing it for a certainty. Mark believes explicitly in past lives. He'll tell you he was a monk kind of like the ones in Kung Fu in one of his, and...okay, so this is woo right off the bat.

I'd encourage you to look into the number of people, usually children, who come out with the oddest details about past lives. Things they couldn't possibly know, things that make no sense until you research them. This is one of those topics science absolutely refuses to touch--which doesn't make all those experiences any less real, or any more easy to explain. 

At any rate, while I have come to believe in "past lives", you can certainly find some other mechanism to explain how we're born with Great Truths embedded in us. I didn't learn this. I've seen it repeated, yes. I've seen it expanded upon in various different ways. But it's like somebody solved a math equation in front of you and you knew the correct answer beforehand. Yes, two and two do in fact make four. Oh, yes, then of course two and two and two make six! I mean, I knew that, I just hadn't phrased it like that.

Much of the shit we fight and kill each other over, sadly, could be categorized as 'I just hadn't phrased it like that". You call your God Allah and Allah says I'm a heathen;  they call their god Jesus and say the Allah-people are heathens. Just a way to divide people, to de-emphasize our shared humanity.  

You are special, but no more special than I am. That makes neither of us "heathens", nor "lost", and certainly not "hellbound". 

The world believes the exact opposite. The world is obsessed not just with declaring who's special and who isn't, but always inventing more and more gradations of special. I mean, right away I've shut off anyone who deeply believes in religion...any religion. This doesn't negate any benefit you get from your faith in Jesus, Allah, Freyja or the wood sprites. But the division of people into "us" and "them"...and the demonization and degradation of "them"...is the root of an awful lot of the world's problems. 

Does this mean the championship runner deserves no accolades, or that the guy who stumbled on the starting line deserves the same accolades as the champion? Of course not. Nor does it suggest for one second that an A student and a D student know the same material, or that just anybody can be a doctor, an engineer, or a world-class pianist....or a food service worker.  What it does suggest is that the marathon winner, the brainiac, the concert pianist, or YOU...are no less or more to be valued as people.  Outside explicit competitions, you are not in opposition with others, no matter how many times the world insists you must be. Even INSIDE competitions, you're fighting yesterday's you and nobody else. 

What about that bum in the gutter, Ken? Surely you think HE'S less than others? Or the criminal. Hey, let's make the criminal a child murderer. That's the lowest of the low -- look, I just said "low" and "lowest", those are judgment calls and ranks.

Good, you're engaging with this. These are great questions. 

Bum first. 

There but for the grace of the Goddess -- or merely a different set of circumstances -- go you, you know. We rarely think about that sort of thing, but it's true. Everyone has a breaking point, and you should be grateful you haven't reached yours. If you ended up homeless and friendless, does that make you any less of a human being? I insist that it does not. People make messes of their lives all the time: some of us are just a tad more dramatic about it. Doesn't mean we should treat each other any differently. 

The criminal? The child murderer?

...is a more extreme version of the bum. I would say that criminals of ALL sorts need to have restrictions on their activities to whatever necessary extent keeps the rest of us safe, for as long as is necessary, and yes indeed that might mean "life". Not life as the Canadian justice system defines it, either: life as in "the period before death". 

But here's where Norway comes in. 

Norway's prisons treat people, even murderers, like people. The prison system in Norway would be dismissed as, well, skypie here or in the U.S. Norway, and in fact much of Scandinavia, has what are called "open" prisons. Prisoners sometimes get to keep their day jobs on the outside. They grow their own food. They keep pets and livestock, which teaches empathy and responsibility. They fraternize with the staff. And when their sentences are up, they're released with no conditions and welcomed back into society. You fucked up, you paid your debt. We have that saying here, but we load on different kinds of debt and say prisoners can never repay them. 

Norway's recidivism rate? 20%. That's less than a third the reoffence rate of American criminal factories. 

Most criminals are made. not born, and even the few who are born can be nudged to the good by the surrounding culture. Like the article says, you treat people like shit, you get shit. 

I will go further.

I will say that even the worst criminal, the completely unrepentant psychopath, serves an important purpose. He -- they're almost always he -- is an example of something we will not accept.  That's not a reason to venerate the psychopath, nor to give him freedom to offend, of course. It's only to suggest that even evil has important reasons to exist. See my recent post regarding "the slippery slope towards bliss-orb" for more. Those reasons should be kept in mind whenever you find evil. What is your response? It sounds pithy and dismissive and trust me, it's anything but.

I would suggest you need some laws in society, or your society will adopt an anything goes attitude straight into the shitter. But if you make "I'm special, but no more special than you are" into a founding belief for your culture, you'll find you need fewer laws than you think. (In my world governments and judges alone would not make the laws, or rather, government would consist of some percentage -- say thirty, but I'm open to suggestions -- of everyday citizens. This would hopefully minimize the kinds of laws all too common in our world, the kind designed to perpetuate the power of one group at the expense of others.  Because that's a corollary of "you're special, but no more special than I am": the point of a culture SHOULD BE to ensure the least of us is not left behind. This can not be eliminated entirely, nor should be it. But come on. Eight people on this planet have more wealth than three and a half billion other people.  I goggle every day at how this is not only acceptable, but ENCOURAGED and CELEBRATED.

Remember when great wealth meant great responsibility? Remember when the richest among us competed to see who could do the most public good? From Rome to the Rockefellers, that was the way of it. It's not like that anymore. It'll come back, I assure you, once time or (ahem) human action has dealt with this crop. 

I'll include today's multibillionaires in the same category as the bum and the criminal up there. They are, to me, worse than a serial babykiller, every last one of them. Like Noam Chomsky says, "evil" doesn't even begin to describe the mindset you have to have to wreck a planet for a few extra bucks in your pocket. I will admit when it comes to these cartoon supervillains, I have a lot of trouble walking my talk.

At any rate. I'm drifting. I will pull some of this back and say that even if you think perhaps that you're special, but no more special than some others, that alone is a big improvement over how much of the world thinks (either that they're not special at all, or that they -- to quote the delightful French idiom for arrogance -- fart higher than their assholes. 

So ends part one. In my next installment, I'm going to get really  controversial.