All God’s Danger

Once upon a time in the rear of a very good used book store I was browsing around in, on my first (& only) personal visit to New York City, I came across a book stacked in a pile and not on any particular shelf. I came across two of my most cherished books in those piles. Stacked in the rear not because they lacked merit, but lacked covers.

But the uncovered and exposed first line of one said, “IN WATERMELON SUGAR the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar.” I tucked that book under my arm and have thought since that it had no peers for what it was. The words throughout make no sense and yet thrown into Brautigan’s imaginative senselessness I have myself had to confront attempting to make sense of deeds being done and done again as my life was done and senselessness became more and more the dominant ideology being proposed.

Or as history is done in the pages of the other coverless book, but one that was in worse shape and only had a few pages. I never found out the actual title until last night. I will return to that discovery at the summation of this article.

There was no beginning and perhaps only half of the other book I bought that day. I suppose that’s what attracted me, why had these pages been pulled from the book and survived? The story was a narrative of events from the perspective of an old black sharecropper who had been (it appeared from the material I had available) to have been a part of a cooperative sharecropper’s organization that clashed frequently with its white neighbors. I did get that this sharecropper supposedly telling the story was named Nate Shaw.

During one of Nate Shaw’s dialogues he begins to speak about history. He says we have “to see” history in order to experience it and connect our experiences with all of man’s history. “But” Nate Shaw says, “we don’t want to have to see it.” on, because of those who would teach us history as something not related to our own experiences.

Ah! and there it is…but maybe not…maybe what we see is not what we see (or don’t see) but what we have taught ourselves to see or not see.

When I switched from studying psychiatry to religion, it was a sort of conversion experience; but not where I became enmeshed in a theological perspective, but because what my psychiatric studies had led me to conclude that learning is not primarily what we are taught but how we teach ourselves to understand how we value ourselves and how we value others and that is intimately intertwined with how we see how others value us and I thought understanding the development of religious thought would help me understand how human behavior had come to be modified as it had been.

This is the world we see, and therefore the world we lens our experiences within. I have written recently about how the most important aspect of “infancy” is learning how he will learn that the first years of human’s life emerge. Robin DiAngelo’s take on “white fragility” is interesting but ultimately I believe she makes an error in her teachings. She starts off on the right foot…”white fragility”, rather than white supremacy.” To be supreme one’s personal tigers are becoming not supreme.

So the child begins his life by defining the tigers whom he will run from. The problem becomes what one is too “fragile” to perceive. The tigers one ignores have no effect, even if they are real tigers. The tigers that affect one’s life, that will continue to roar throughout our lives are the cause of the human fragility, or sense to try to not to feel devalued as a person.

Psychological prediction as to particular responses any given person might make in any given situation is no more reliable than trying to predict the motions of any individual quark, but we can make predictions as to the generalities and probabilities in which these particles will perform.

Similarly, I find it difficult to make more than generalities about how humans will behave. But in order to be predictive of events that any human will make we need to concede the three-layered cornerstone of human judgements and then the relationship of those cornerstone determinations with the consequences of the experiences that the human has developed to navigate through those judging cornerstones.

As such, I find we have to separate conceptions of superiority and inferiority, not from each other, but from what the develop(ing) psyche “wants to have to see.”

We all believe what we “see” is true. Since we believe that, then we believe what John next door says is true. But depending on what we think we see and not understanding that what we think we see is only what we want to see, the methodologies that our infant brain developed on the basis of its three tiered evaluations of what it will and will not “see.”

Erich von Däniken’s works became my first real battle (I thought) with utter stupidity. How could anyone possibly believe spacemen came and built pyramids. Yes they are massive, and there was a time when we thought computers would need to be massive, but even by the time of von Däniken we knew this wasn’t true.

I dwell for three reasons on von Däniken’s absurdities, first because of the personal consequences and its impact on what would become the rest of my life, so there resides the angered bias that still remains.

Secondly because I had a history of confronting my “teachers” with alternative ideas and they did not appreciate it, and even though I knew and believed (I thought) in seeking alternative ideas to every bit of information I encountered, I could never recognize that I was treating those who tried to open me up to the possibilities that von Däniken’s conceptions might even possibly be true made me irrationally angry at their own irrationality.

I shut myself from hearing it. If my tiger had always been limiting knowledge, of any attempts to let me try to learn or experience more…than what was I fearing from having to try to learn what so many people I thought should know better (including, at that time, college professors).

Well I had to face it (though it took many years) that I wanted to think myself superior to those who believed otherwise than I did. But others viewed me as ignorant—many close friends and my relationship with my own father were ruptured by this idea that von Däniken’s perspective had no rationality behind it. If the Gods came in their chariots to build pyramids why was the technology behind it inferior to our technology 6000 years later?

And damn it man, even the Biblical writers knew the hebrew slaves weren’t building the pyramids…just because Cecil deMille had the slaves building pyramids, the bible says they were building the pharaoh's summer palace (cities of Pithom and Rameses which does allow us to date Moses’ and question his reality even though the pharaohs themselves are unnamed). But by von Däniken’s time whatever the bible writers had written was no longer spoken from the pulpits because deMille had single handedly rewritten the bible to say the slaves had been building the pyramids. And von Däniken’s gods, written post the deMille bible, arrived in their chariots upon earth to build the pyramids around fifteen centuries after the pyramids had been built.

And so I had been formulated as dumb—by my teachers—but not dumb because I couldn't learn, but dumb because I wouldn’t learn “the truth” and sought alternative concepts to the truth. And I became sensitive. I was told I had an inferior intellect that was unable to accept truth and I wanted to show everyone I wasn’t dumb and my pursuit of truth was smarter and they were the dumb ones. (I suppose I am still on that quest to prove myself the intellectual equal of others; and still feel inwardly I am being rejected as dumb because I’m not credentialed smart.

So of course that is the third reason, although inverted. How can I claim to others they are dumb if they believe von Däniken and yet feel that I shouldn’t be labeled dumb for not believing some other idea had to be true.

It took most of my life, but I finally realized that whatever I may be right about I must be wrong about. Learning, for most of us, is to gain knowledge of what is true, but knowledge is actually gained by questioning what is accepted as truth.

But what I think is true doesn’t mean I can be any more right when I attempt to deny the truth of the one who believes in von Däniken, or in the chariots of demonic democrats who steal elections and feed on babies.

I have come to believe that superiority is not real, but that it creates inferiority and inferiority creates within us the desire to be superior to whatever tigers we view as the frightening monsters that are putting up the Inferiority Signs in our consciousness that sends us careening into some type of madness. One of those madnesses can be to maintain or become superior…and now we’re treading on the pathway that leads us to gods and drink; guns and other self-mutilating things to own that own us.

I tend to spend the last hour of every day watching lectures on youtube of various types. I came across a series of lectures by David Blight called, or sponsored by Yale Courses. I know blight primarily as the champion and biography of Frederick Douglass. It was while watching one of those lectures that he had begun quoting the words of Nate Shaw and I recognized the name and several of the quotes.

For anyone interested, and I highly recommend it, here is the publication reference: