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Diaryland
Falling through the Cracks October 24, 2003 @
Dear Loralea,
It is wonderful to hear from you as always, and through e-mail no less! I have to warn you, I tend to write long letters, and this may be my worse. Your message showed up just fine - I did not see anything irregular.
The Egypt trip fell through. I flew from San Jose to New York and had a layover there where I visited my cousin Andrea. She is studying forensics and criminology at a prestigious school in Manhattan. She showed me around midtown and Times Square and we had a good time catching up on everything. The next day though, I went back to JFK to meet up with my tour group at the EgyptAir Ticket Counter two hours prior to our flight to Cairo. Now they told us to be there three hours prior to our international flight, but when I got there I found only two other people from our group and no sign of our tour guide, who was going to provide us with our tickets amongst other things. An hour to flight time there was still no sign of the tour guide. So, we called the Visions Travel Office in Los Angeles to find out what was up. We got an automated message saying that due to internal office conflicts, the Egypt Trip had been cancelled. Information was then provided about how to contact the Attorney General and the Consumers restitution fund. So I ended up spending another night in Manhattan and exchanging my old return flight ticket for a trip back to San Jose the next day. It was a pain in the butt, because the earliest flight back wasn't for another day and I was unable to get a hold of my parents, who were at a wedding at the time.
After I got back though, we got a letter in the mail from Vision Travel's attorney. The letter explained that a couple of days before our trip, the manager/owner had not shown up to work. Employees tried to find and reach him unsucessfully. When they got into his personal computer, they found a letter from him explaining that his now deceased brother, the original owner of the travel company who had first chartered our trip, had embezzled much of our funds. The brother, upon inheriting the company, decided that he would try to sign up more people for the tour and thus make up for the lost money. Given the fact that Ms. Brown opted out and Americans are more wary these days about travelling to the Middle East, he was not successful. Having not even purchased our tickets to Cairo, he fled the country, and we got screwed.
This week, my parents got confirmation back from the restitution fund, and as soon as I go sign some forms in front of a public notary, they will be able to get almost, if not all of their money back. We had to waive any legal right to sue the company though, which is fine because now they are bankrupt anyway. So I never ended up going to Egypt, but I was not that bummed about it. Given all the problems this trip has had since the beginning, I was not really surprised. People in Novus Spriritus, meanwhile, have claimed that Sylvia made a wise decision given the bombings of tourist places that occured not long after that weekend. However, I am rather skeptical because those bombings took place in the Sinai pennisula on the Israeli border - not even close to where our tour would have been. I still think Ms. Brown was paranoid, but I do not really care anymore.
It is good to hear that you guys are having services again. When you say I was 'coming in strong', what exactly did you perceive? Did you have a vision or some other sensory experience, or was it more subtle? I was not consciously projecting myself or anything, although I have been thinking and contemplating religion constantly for the last few weeks, if not the last few months. I have been reading a ton of spiritual literature but I think I am going to break from it for awhile - I am tired of reading about other people's experiences and I need to have my own. The problem is I just do not know what to believe, what to do or even who to trust. Everything seems so contradictory and confusing. Are all the religions right, or none of them, or some of them, or what?
I have also been learning a lot about Old Testament times in a class I am taking at school on the historiography of the Bible. My professor is a renowned archaelogist who excavated sites in Israel/Palestine. All the evidence seems to suggest that the stories of the patriarchs, exodus, conquests and even much of the monarchy never existed as the Hebrew Bible depicts. The archaelogy, my professor and our books say that in the reign of King Josiah, late in the Judaen monarchy, was when most of the stories were created based on old legends about the tribes and pieces of the religion of the national god YHWH, which were edited, expanded and changed to include stuff that reflected the later reality. It seems sometimes from what I study that YHWH, the Jewish God, may be nothing more than an idea shaped and used by elite nationalists to scare people into suporting their ambitions. Originally, he may have been nothing more than just another pagan god. Contrary to the bible, the evidence suggests that the Isralites and Jews were two seperate peoples from the start, indigneious to the area, who began as polytheists and were gradually turned into monotheists. I am sure when we begin studying Christian origins this next week that we'll talk about how Jesus was an obscure figure who never did any miracles and how most of the gospels are made up.
If my acadmic studies aren't confusing me enough, the spiritual and magical literature I have been reading is making me even more worried. Some of the things I have read seem to even suggest that people can have spiritual experiences via angels, demons and other inferior spirits without ever having really experienced the True God. In the best case, an angel or teacher with the best intentions could unknowingly be limiting a person from the truth. In the worse case, a demon could even be tricking someone into thinking they are experiencing God. Sometimes it even seems that the human mind and subconscious are so powerful that they can create illusionary experiences like hallucinations where people think they are communing with a spiritual being. I do not believe that the founders of the world's religions are liars or crazy, but I wonder if they may have been tricked, whether by some inferior sprit or their own powerful minds, into thinking they experienced something real and profound when it was all just an illusion.
What god should I trust? If there is only One God, then how did the pagans have so many authentic spiritual experiences if they were just praying to idols? I see so much difference between the God portrayed in the Old Testament and the one in the New that I wonder if it is even the same God? Is God even trustworthy? Even if He is the Only One, does He really have our best interests in mind? Or is He just using us selfishly? Would we be better off on our own without any god? Even if our lives are mundane and our minds are fallible, would we be better off than risking becoming a vehicle for something false, limiting, evil or dangerous? Even if I have a spiritual experience like illumination, and even if it seems real, how will I know it was objectively real? And even if it was real, how will I know where it came from, and whether it is trustworthy? I know Tim and Jessica have good intentions, but how do I know that what they are teaching will lead me towards the Highest Truth? You have likely heard all this before, but I feel now like such issues are more important then ever. How will I know what the right thing to do is, and who do I trust? Even my own mind can deceive me, and the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I think the reason why this scares me is all the suffering I see in the world. Nothing seems to justify it. Even if our world is small and even if our joy may someday outweigh our sorrow, how could God allow all this? It makes me think He is not trustworthy. Even the most religious or spiritual people are not spared from suffering, so what is it all for? What is so great about the universe being interconnected? What is so special about light? Does having faith in God and practicing religion really make our lives better, or are we just deluding ourselves by trying to justify a meaningless and cruel existence that happened by accident? When it all boils down, I just don't know who or what to trust, if anything. And I don't want to pretend everything will be allright and have blind faith.
I have not meditated in several days. It feels like such a chore most of the time. I may relax my body, but my mind and spirit feel on edge. In my best sessions, I come out of it feeling relaxed and maybe positive and optimistic, but that is it. Most of the time something inside me just cringes when the thought of meditating comes to mind, for all the above reasons as well as just thinking I might rather be doing something else. In fact, it has been like this for months. At the best, when I am in a really good mood and I don't have a lot going on I will meditate maybe every other day. But for the longest time I have unconsciously procrastinated because I just do not like doing it. A lot of days I feel like I am wasting my time, even if I can visualize light all over me.
I just now read the 91st psalm that you mentioned. I have read it before (I read the whole bible), and It is very beautiful - I wish it was true. It just seems like it isn't - there are so many people in the world whose trust in God seems in vain. The whole world seems like evidence that God doesn't really love us that much. I do not know what to believe or do anymore.
Dave
"Details in the Fabric" - May 31, 2009
Not So Quick Questions - April 6, 2009
The Morning Stars - Lords of the 15 - April 9, 2009
Sincerity and Faith in Magic - April 10, 2009
Not So Quick Questions (2) - April 14, 2009
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