Tag: God

God and Lou Reed

Well, let me tell you something: my God – I believe in God – my God is a capricious little fucker. Or should I say “big fucker”? I mean, here’s a guy – we’re all clear here on who God is, right? The most powerful being in the universe! Has to be, if He weren’t, if there were some other being more powerful than Him, well then . . . he’d be God wouldn’t he?

My God is all powerful. He can do anything. My God could feed every hungry person on the planet Earth – like that (Snaps fingers) – tomorrow! He could rid the world of disease – like that. All those little bald children on the Cancer Channel? Gone, healthy, in great shape! (Snaps fingers) God could do that.

He could give us an extra hour of sunshine every day. Create a few more parking spaces. But noooooo! That would be too easy. He doesn’t want to do that! No, my God doesn’t like to do the easy stuff, it’s boring to Him. He doesn’t want to do what everybody wants Him to do. Kind of like Lou Reed, He does what He wants to do. He’s got integrity. He’s not going to sell out.

Wake Up and Smell the Coffee
Eric Bogosian

We make our own Gods …

Consider how some people attempt to make what can only be imagined feel real. They do this by trying to create thought-forms, or imagined creatures, called tulpas. Their human creators are trying to imagine so vividly that the tulpas start to seem as if they can speak and act on their own. The term entered Western literature in 1929, through the explorer Alexandra David-Néel’s “Magic and Mystery in Tibet.” She wrote that Tibetan monks created tulpas as a spiritual discipline during intense meditation. The Internet has been a boon for tulpa practice, with dozens of sites with instructions on creating one.

Jack, a young man I interviewed, decided to make a tulpa when he was in college. He set aside an hour and a half each day for this. He’d spend the first 40 minutes or so relaxing and clearing his mind. Then he visualized a fox (he liked foxes). After four weeks, he started to feel the fox’s presence, and to have feelings he thought were the fox’s.
Finally, after a chemistry exam, he felt that she spoke to him. “I heard, clear as day, ‘Well, how did you do?’ ” he recalled. For a while he was intensely involved with her, and said it felt more wonderful than falling in love with a girl.
Then he stopped spending all that time meditating — and the fox went away. It turned out she was fragile. He says she comes back, sometimes unexpectedly, when he practices. She calms him down.

Fun read in the Times –
T. M. Luhrmann OCT. 14, 2013