Following up on my rap about Mystery, it occurs to me that a lot of my issue with those who seek to "understand" life's Mystery rather than just enjoy- ing it as the E-ticket ride it is has to do with the search for seeming "facts."
It's not just that many spiritual seekers mistake what they were told by some spiritual authority for facts, it's that they've IMO often become habituated to searching for them. It's like their minds have become a kind of internal Internet search engine. A question arises, and they "Google" what they've been told by various spiritual authorities, either in person or on videotape or in some scripture. And then having found what that authority said (it popped up in the first page of Google results, the only page that 80% of users ever read links from), they close their browsers and stop searching. Besides his almost-unique ability to have been a major film critic for several decades without losing his ability to sit down in a theater, open his bag of popcorn and suspend disbelief anew, immersed in a glorious LOVE of movies, one of the things I've always loved Roger Ebert for is a quote he threw into one of his reviews. He was talking about the IMDB, and how he can't imagine how he did his job without it, and then inserted, "I love the Internet; it contains an almost infinite amount of information. And some of it is even true." I don't tend to Google the wealth of Other People's Opinions for the answers to the questions that the spiritual path opens before me. I may reference these other opinions, but in the end I'm more in search of my own opinion. That opinion may be as constantly in flux as a flamewar-beset Wikipedia page, but that to me is more valuable than the contents of the page presenting themselves as fact. As mentioned in the thread about cognitive dissonance, I get off more on the tantra of the balls of seeming "facts" being constantly up in the air in a kind of eternal juggling act than I do in the sutra of them remaining in one place, as if they were nestled comfortably in God's ball sack, and supported by the snug fit of His Calvins in perpetuity. Based on the things He has written in the scriptures He's supposed to have dictated, or that those He has on speed dial on his iPhone have said, God is SO a briefs kinda guy. He speaks in pronouncements and declarations, as if His word were synonymous with fact. Snug. Balls firmly in place, eternally. My kinda God, were I to imagine one, would be SO much more a boxers kinda guy. I can imagine Him saying, in that big, booming Charleton Heston voice of His, "Swing free, boys." Even better, under His flowing robes my kinda God would go commando.
