Ramblings on Incarnation (now with pain meds)

I've been working on the idea or more actually the reality of incarnation lately.

What does it mean to not deny my body is me, what does it look or feel like when I deny dualism - which is really stinking hard, let me tell you. I think this is and will be much harder than denying the tapes and voices of negativity in my head.

Part of this is an active denial of the concept of religion. I'd been working on this without language or guidance, but have recently found a book that is a lot of - yes, yes, exactly moments.

Religion seems to be something that Westerners invented to describe the interaction with transcendence of people that were not themselves and that they also turned on themselves. And it got wonky. I'm not saying that "The Church" hasn't been a thing for a long time, but I am thinking that the Catholics might actually have it right when they say that the laity are not part of the church. It keeps the church in check in the lives of individuals. Let's us give it a little money and do a little ritual but then really mostly lets us get on with living our lives in God's image as best we can without a lot of mumbo jumbo. Enacting the rituals often leads to the opposite of ingrained transcendence. It probably leads to the lot of nonsense that we do see in churches - too much forced joy (joy is independent of your emotional state) too much emphasis on exactly the right ritual motions or the magic doesn't happen (because we have embedded too much of our belief and reliance in transcendence in physical objects, which is kind of the oppostie of transcendence.)

I've been watching a lot of documentaries, and mostly they are about nature, but I was watching one on China and was so struck, as I have been before, on the simplicity of the life of tea growers and the rice growers of Yunnan. What looks like tedious back breaking labor actually looks like less work than tractors and fertilizer and all the other things that I experienced in wheat fields in Northern California. But it was a whole life- you didn't break the work from the play from the learning from the eating, it all just flowed one to another. And the ritual was embedded in everything. It's changing, TV changes everything, and children are leaving. I wonder how long it will be before these thousands of year old lives - because they are so much larger than one lifetime - will be gone forever. There are real reasons for people to hate Western society, we have our good points, but we are so blind to our bad that we become a blight.