Sincerity

Sent in by Embracing Ambivalence

Sincerity is among the most beautiful things to grace this earth. It is the result of a free flowing desire that doesn't get manipulated or distorted by the mind, but rather is blessed by it to go forth into the world as is. Sincerity has this precious way of striking you're affections and breaking down you're guard to protect some false image you wish to preserve. Sincerity of another sets you free to be yourself. It sets you free to be vulnerable, and stupid, and ugly. Its rips down the damns that prevent you from expressing yourself. Sincerity is infectious, it begets sincerity. A sincere life, is the fullest life.

I read this today:

"The world needs a missionary to denounce its conventions. Why should each new soul that is launched out of God into Nature be wrecked at the beginning of the voyage by following the charts of its mates instead the compass, the stars, and the continents?"

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

For so long i have been clinging onto the ideas of other men...using their words and their arguments to create in me some sort of personal identity, something that i was never able to give myself. Society certainly hasn't helped...they have thrown at me ideas and books and rules and morals and structures and norms and media...

Some preacher once sermonized about the Bible as an acronym for "B-asic I-nstructions B-efore L-eaving E-arth" I was younger, probably a freshman in highschool. I believed him too. I thought, "great, the meaning of life and how to live it in about a thousand pages." But over time following the charts mapped out by men thousands of years ago didn't seem to be giving me the same experience it apparently brought many of them...one of joy, peace, love, freedom, and courage. To pursure such precepts without the experience only lead to insincerity. For the writers of the Bible, it was the other way around. They experienced and then wrote about it. Whereas I, read about it, and tried to follow, without any experience of my own. Such a life only served to create in me a dualism of two selves that eventually became so strongly opposed to one another that one of them had to break down.

A professor once told me "we read to know we are not alone." Well i came across this words rather unexpectedly. Carl Jung once wrote: "Modern man has heard enough about guilt and sin. He is sorely enough beset by his own bad conscience, and wants rather to learn how he is to reconcile himself with his own nature...he is not eager to know in what way he can imitate Christ, but in what way he can live his own individual life, however meager and uninteresting it may be....He wants to break with tradition so that he can experiment with his life and determine what value and meaning things have in themselves, apart from traditional presuppositions...and though this desire opens bar and bolt to the most dangerous possibilities, we cannot help seeing it as a courageous enterprise and giving it some measure of sympathy. It is no reckless adventure, but an effort inspired by deep spiritual distress to bring meaning once more into life on the basis of fresh and unprejudiced experience."

I met a girl who had no religious faith, no alcoholic father, nothing that was likely to have created an aversion to the more impermanent pleasures of this world. But despite this, she didn't drink. I wondered why. I didn't drink because i would go to hell if i did. I was told that it was a grave error of the higher life and that it would only lead to greater misery. I internalized these ideas about drinking and turned it into an impossibility, though another part of me, a real part of me, still wanted to drink. I was fascinated with this girl because her choice not to drink was a sincere one. She didn't drink because she didn't want to, not because she couldn't. I was neurotic about it. She was not.

I have begun a new journey. A scary one that is unclear and unbounded by doctrines and creeds. I have begun a journey in search of what I like. What is interesting to me? what brings me happiness? what things make me feel alive? Its a risky one, and likely a painful one. But it will be my life. Not someone elses. Now i will follow the stars and map out my own chart for this little journy of mine, "no matter how uninteresting it just might be."

But then again Nietzsche did say, "In heaven, all the interesting people are missing."

Acts 9:18 "And immediately there fell from his eyes something like scales, and he regained his sight"

one day the dreamer died within me.
to be free from all my sin
the perfect lover i can not be
when patience grows so thin

true life, is all thats left,
without the pressures that never let me rest
jesus tries to pull me back
but I have never felt so blessed

i too was on a road
to be unified with thee
and i cried out in hopes to know you
but you never heard my plea

no not any of you three
the spirit gave no peace
the son no setting free
and father of that glory
i simply could not see

the scales did fall
just like our paul
though what we saw
his was the flaw

and now my strife is gone
my guilt has surely passed
but still i can't believe
that yahweh didn't last

Previous

Next