Same-Sex Attraction Sufferer in Current Events

I don’t know what compelled me to sit through an “inspiring” speech by a priest about those who “suffer” from same-sex attraction. I was thinking about my own identity as a gay man this morning and how this means that I am at the mercy of those with a dogma. Then it pops up on my YouTube so I decided to hear the man out. I agree that a persons attraction is not an identity. Everything else he said was a disconnect for me. Long story short he explains how same-attraction is not a sin, acting on it is. He explained how he is a priest who has opposite-sex attraction but lives in celibacy and serves his lord. That we are called to love, not sex. Love in friendships and relationships. I pretty much disconnect with religions when it comes to my consumption of politics but a lot of the people I subscribe to and defer some of my sensemaking to (the complexities of the world require a collective intelligence) are religious and believe that homosexuality is immoral. Dennis Prager believes that in a free society an individual should be allowed the choice to subject themselves to conversion therapy. I agree that a person should have a choice and they are allowed to vote according to their religious principals but I don’t stand behind homosexuality as something that is immoral. I have the freedom to believe that and to live in the way I choose and so do they. So far. We can coexist and I’ve had many friendships with people who believed that homosexuality is immoral and we still got along.

I don’t know why I care so much about what those book clubs think. My mother was pressured to have us raised to be good Christians. She refused to make those kinds of choices for us. She had us dedicated to my grandfathers church instead of baptized. We did Sunday school until we didn’t. I used to attend Church with my friend Devon and his family. I enjoyed it. I liked the bible stories but a lot my angst during my teen years was me wrestling with my homosexuality and God. I closed that chapter and turned my back on religion as I thought it had done that to me. I found my own way to god (as I understand). Religions, to me, are like treadmills. Great for exercise but I wouldn’t use a treadmill to go somewhere. It is intrinsic to human intelligence to make that spiritual journey on their own.

Spirituality is a huge part of the human experience, in my opinion. It is the world of the unseen, the unknown. Serving something higher than yourself whether it be god, higher consciousness or a higher self. We’re all looking for god whether that be in a church, in a drug, drink, purchase, hookup or relationship. That calling, that longing that never goes away. Love, according to linguistics in most languages translates to oneness. You don’t want to be separate from that which you love. One who is whole and holy does not want to be separate from themself. A lot of us do want to be separate from ourselves because we live in a culture that doesn’t love us. Spirituality is about creating that loving, nurturing culture for yourself. It’s just an eighteen-inch journey, connecting your head to your heart.

That eighteen-inch spiritual journey is still a long one. There are a lot of beliefs to unlearn. It has been the job of mystics across time and culture to teach you that beliefs are not real. Beliefs are just conclusions that we make about things that we do not know. Thus, atheism is just another belief. Science does not know one thing in its entirety. It only lets us know how to use everything on this planet. Anyway, this “mysticism” is supposed to be about faith, not beliefs. The original sin, in my opinion, was not the disobedience of God by Adam and Eve. The original sin was trying to acquire the knowledge of good and evil by consuming the fruit from the tree of wisdom. The job of Mystics and Gurus was always to get you out of those contrasts. Out of this matrix, the agreements we are all born into. Jesus as portrayed in the ancient gnostics was more of a guru. E=mc2 says that everything comes from one energy. That energy is what the Mystics called god. We are from that energy. The cosmos cannot create something separate from itself. We are the cosmos, conscious. Jesus, as the ancient Mystic in the gnostic teachings, brought people to enlightenment. It was rewritten in the cannon we have today to say the light instead of enlightenment. Enlightenment is just about going from unawareness to awareness. It’s not an awakening, it is a homecoming.

The Moses Code, I am that, I am. God is everything. He is not in us, we are in him. He can work through you if your heart and mind are not contaminated. I am that, I am according to this Moses code is just a manifestation tool. We can wield the power of source, god or higher consciousness. Controlled studies show how atoms respond to consciousness. The double-slit experiment for example. Some experiments even show that photons respond to our DNA. I probably sounded like a science hater earlier in this entry but that is not true. I’m a huge fan, huge. Biggly.

Anyway, this has been a very esoteric entry. Do I think same-sex attraction is immoral? Morality is a human construct. If you want good in the world then be good in the world. That’s my take. Find a way to live your life in a way that is not all about you if you want fulfillment. We’re all here having a temporary human experience, together. All of our basic needs are met and we have time to sit around and ponder about our existence. I am not my body, I am not my mind. Those are just accumulations of food that I ingest and impressions that I get from my five senses. What I accumulate can be mine but they can never be me. I have a gender, I am not a gender. I have an ethnicity, I am not an ethnicity. I have a sexuality, I am not a sexuality. We are not politics, religions and whatever else we use to identify ourselves with. It is a powerful thing to be able to participate in those identities without having to belong to them. I stopped reflecting back what society told me I was. I feel a need to turn around and help others on their own self-love, self-improvement, spiritual journeys. That would be my passion. That passion would be for me and that service would be for others. I think that is the recipe for fulfillment?

There is no moral to this entry this is just me wrestling with an unrealized, unprocessed feeling and attachment to a set of beliefs that I forgot I had.