I’m getting really tired of the ad algorithms in my Gmail account trying to give me break-up advice. It’s like, computer, what the fuck do you even know about human emotions or relationships anyway? It’s not as simple as that. All you have is lists of keywords and you think you know me and what I’m going through. But I’d be goddamned surprised if your programmatic learning curves knew anything about the Love of God for His Creation™ and the Incredible Mystery Called Being Alive™. Maybe we’re supposed to be the ones to teach you though, like a little brother, a child asking us what it all means. Look, I’m happy to share my experiences with you, but just don’t try and mess with me. Okay? I’m soooo not in the mood.

I like where he says: “I was about a month out of the clinic. And it’s hard to dance.” Feel like I can totally relate. I’ve only been a week out of the clinic myself, or not even.

Last night I got to wondering along another very rhetorical line of questioning: how do you know if you’re ever really experiencing someone else? I mean, aren’t we always actually experiencing our own experience of someone else? How can we ever know if it’s really them or if for them we are ever really us?

Poltergeist activity usually takes place when a particular individual is present - usually young teenagers at puberty who has emotional problems. A poltergeist is often thought of as a negative spirit attracted to these teenagers. Due to hormonal and emotional changes in the teenager’s body, negative energy may be thrust outwardly sometimes moving or destroying objects telekinetically.

There’s actually a really great book about this sort of existential dilemma by RD Laing, one of the so-called “anti-psychiatry” guys from the 1970’s, except that I forget what exactly his conclusions were. It involved a lot of wordplay and jumping through conceptual loops to achieve an authentic experience of yourself and of the other.

The whole point of Purgatory is that it’s temporary. It burns away the impurities, the things keeping you from Heaven. Can Heaven really be Heaven if you’re alone in it? Seems unlikely.

These unicorns seem to know that. “Dread the passage of Jesus for he does not return” is exactly the kind of thing a demon would tell you. Because first of all, what do demons know about Jesus? And second of all, probably a hell of a lot since he was always running around casting them out of people left and right. On the one hand a demon would totally tell you that to trick you because the whole point of Jesus is that he *does* come back. Resurrection, anybody? Death can’t hold him. Time. Distance. Irrelevant. But maybe it’s not so much a trick on the demon’s part as it is a lamentation. Demons probably want to be saved more than anybody else, I imagine.

That is, a demon makes a big fuss because it thinks it’s so awesome and powerful that it tries to take somebody over. And maybe this is just a ploy to get Jesus to come and “Lay Your Hands On Me”:

But then once Jesus comes and casts out the demon, the demon realizes what they really wanted all along was to be with Jesus in the first place. And they think that because Jesus has cast them out that this means they aren’t welcome in his presence. So no wonder a demon would have that line about dreading the passage of Jesus. Cause they feel like they missed their chance. They didn’t, I don’t think. Jesus is building a brewfarm and everybody is invited. I remember a song my dad wrote about God or whatever, the title of which I think was “There are many rooms in my father’s house.”

Even for demons.

Because demons are really just angels who have turned away from the Source of Reality.

Last night I was given another of what I have come to lovingly refer to as “divine downloads” (inspired in part by this guy). Usually the way you can tell when you’ve had one is that you will suddenly feel like you have inexplicably figured something out. It will typically be an important life lesson with very deep implications, most of which you won’t understand fully for some time. But you will also have a sort of “tip of the iceberg” or surface trigger which comes along with it to notify you overtly of the change to your central processing unit.

Mine in this case centered around a nucleus of words which were very distinct:

Trust completely or not at all in the forces which have brought you to this place.

Read that again.

The implication being that these are still the same forces at play which previous to this took me to the heights of joy and the edges of boundless love. My cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. And as I trusted in them then fully, I must trust in them fully now while their operations have become opaque and darkened to me. Little by little they reveal themselves, usually only in amounts which you are roughly prepared to handle. They exist partly to push you into those dark spaces where you won’t go on your own. I know that now.

The other half of the “download” message which I was able to consciously cipher out said something a little less blatant, but which translates to something like: Just as for you certain people in your life are acting as these magical and archetypal and transcendent figures, so too must you trust in and allow for you to act as that in them, in their hearts and lives. And that’s not something you can control and push, not something you can compel someone else to see. Because you don’t control it. If you’re lucky, you are tapped by Grace to act as a vessel for God’s work on Earth. These people have to come to it in their own time, because it is essentially out of your hands. All you can really do is keep your heart open like a re-transmitting station for God’s signal beamed from the depths of space. And it goes back to the above: that if you trust in these forces or agents of divinity or whatever to act in your own life, then you must also put your trust in them to act in other’s lives. And you must simply act in accord with what you have experienced and in what has been revealed to you and be true to it.

Which all I think nicely dovetails back into one of the original questions behind this particular piece of writing: are you ever experiencing the real person or are you experiencing your own experience of that person? The point may be that it is always both. No one is ever *just* a mirror for you and at the same time no one is ever *not* a mirror for you. And within that is an unlimited potential for us to help or harm one another. The struggle is to develop and maintain awareness of that and to act with conviction and commitment, knowing that our hearts and identities are all always hopelessly entangled with one another. It’s like we are all always hugging, no matter what, and no matter how much the Google advertising algorithms may try to convince us otherwise.