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Strange thing happened : I found my 'self' extremely wound up by a particular mindset of someone who believes very adamantly in very different things to 'me'...First time I have ever got really confrontational with someone over such ephemeral and silly things as concepts and thought patterns, which surprised me no end, since my position was just that : these are all just concepts and thoughts, and really don't add up to much...In which case why so annoyed?
Background : Dinner with my sister-in-law, who is really into the Assemblies of Yahweh. Now, this is one lady who cannot really finish a sentence without mentioning Yahweh, Yashua, or why and how everyone else is living their life wrong and is going to burn etc. etc. Every aspect of living is brought under the microscope of its scriptural precedent (or lack thereof) and judged heartily, though I always understood that this was not really, ahem, kosher (judging others and all that).
So anyway, I've never really been bothered by all this before, each to their own and wotnot, but on this occasion I was well and truly in the firing line. After a nonsensical assault of being told what i am and what I think etc., all of which was very wide of the mark, I gently pointed out that actually, I am none of those things, and if she cared to ask me about my position on such matters instead of jumping feet first into judgemental assumptions, then we could probably have an interesting discussion about it...
Reply : I don't need to ask you, I know exactly what you are.
Now for some reason this stoked the smoky, damp embers inside into a full force raging blaze in the blink of an eye, and a really testy argument ensued. Bear in mind, this is a woman who says of the fossil record that it is nothing more than a few creatures that never made it onto Noah's Ark and got left behind, believes absolutely literally in Adam and Eve (the whole spare rib business) and regularly accuses me, Oh Heretic that I am, of 'reading too many books' (she is a teacher, so I find this particularly obtuse).
What really got me, is when I started to discuss Yowd He Vau He and how I saw direct and obvious parallels with the Tao and Atman/Brahman concept (the Unspeakable Name of God, and the Eternal Tao that Cannot be Named), and how Tat Tvam Asi of the Hindu system and I am that I AM of her system were all pointing to the same thing, she had no fucking clue what I was on about. Although she is totally immersed in the faith, she had never heard of Yowd He Vau He (hence the 'too many books' comment) and couldn't, honestly, see any difference between her recollection of I am who I am and my recollection of I am that I AM.
Which sort of lead me to the conclusion, which I unfortunately shared, that she is just plain WRONG. Blindly immersed in something which, whatever wisdom it may contain, is absolutely beyond her in her present state of supercilious piety without any application of study or analysis of the doctrine.
The thing is, why the fuck should I care? I found it odd that I got so emotionally heated up by this wee chat, and wanted to ask you fine peoples if you have ever encoutered a similar issue...talking to someone with such entrenched dogma and narrow vision, that they are squeezing the immense mystery of it all into this tiny little neat box in their head, and burying their senses in the face of anything that challenges such a view...Now, it benefits nobody to even go down that road, but it's strangely compelling, like investigating a scab, or pressing a bruise...How do folks navigate their nearest and dearests madness? Is it worth ever even bothering with these talks, and if not how do you tell the preacher to keep it nice and private, where it belongs, instead of ramming it down yuour throat at every opportunity?
(I, completely free of Judeo-Christian mythology, feel quite at liberty to be a judgemental prick ;-)) |
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