One Wild Rodeo Ride

by Dennis Green

People do some very brave, and some very foolish things. I am one of them. Taking a little religious quiz recently, I had to decide if I wanted to experience reincarnation, that Buddhist/Hindu version of eternal life. No sirree!

My life has been like one long wild rodeo ride, on a Brahma Bull, and it has lasted much longer than those eight seconds. I’ve had enough fun to last me forever, thank you very much, and I can no more understand why some believers would want to live forever any more than I can comprehend why others would blow themselves apart for 72 virgins in Paradise.

That said, I must admit the feeling of absolute liberation this realization brings with it. I’ve long believed that “The Kingdom of Heaven” in the Christian lexicon is essentially the “state of enlightenment” described by Buddhists, which I have experienced many times. And the “Kingdom of Hell” is just the obverse, a state of damnation and cursedness I’ve also known all too well.

My old pal Bladdy used to say that life is “a race between enlightenment and suicide,” and I certainly know what he means. A part of the “en-lighten-ing process” is the unburdening of the useless baggage of our illusions, those rationalizations which may also sometimes protect us from simply going mad. But the longer I live, the better I understand the nature of the human heart, that thing located about ten inches below the brain stem.

That’s where the irrational desire for immortality resides, in the heart. Who in his right mind would want 72 virgins? Who would want to live forever? Not I.

But the heart doesn’t know any better. It doesn’t even know when love is dead and gone, along with the loved one. It doesn’t know when the body has had way too much to eat, every day for years, until it has become morbidly obese. The heart is a lonely hunter, and sometimes a stalker too.

Science speaks mostly to the head, although a beautiful theorem or deep space telephoto can take our breath away. But only art, theater and music speak to the heart as eloquently, or as lucidly, as religion does. Religion attempts to answer the heart’s desire, and especially that hunger for immortality.

So these days, as I recapitulate phylogeny by an in-depth, independent study of comparative religions, I find the same themes emerging over and over, whether their adherents claim that their sacred texts are “divinely inspired” by God himself, or admittedly tales told by an idiot, filled with sound and fury, signifying nothing much. Regardless of the culture, or the era, the human heart remains pretty much the same.

Jesus even says, “In the Kingdom of Heaven, there shall be no male nor female, nor any giving or taking in marriage.” Take that, Prop. 8!

The themes? The gods, or God or the universe itself as a benevolent Spirit. Sin, wrong-doing, error, departure from the Process. Forgiveness, redemption, rebirth, propitiation. Immortality, eternal life, reincarnation, reabsorption, wandering forever, blind and dumb, in the Underworld.

And of course, some of the most incredible art, music and theater plays on these same themes. “And we but poor players on the stage…” Some of us are extras in crowd scenes, some of us play bit parts, and some of us ride that Brahmin in the very center of the arena for all its worth!

©2010 Dennis Green