Concept of You What is a concept, And what does it do? What is a concept? A concept is you. For you cannot conceive Yourself without it, So there really is No doubt about it.
You’re a concept, An Idea, An Abstraction too, And You is your symbol For doing by who. You is a hashtag, For all that you care To attribute to one Who’s not really there, Who seems to live inside A skull that grows hair, But when we look inside skulls We find nobody there.
Concepts, ideas, Abstractions, oh my— Symbolic thinking That helps you get by, In this game full of symbols We made to get high, That we’re forced when we’re born To play till we die— Concepts, ideas Abstractions, oh my.
If you were not a concept Then you still could not think, Of yourself without concepts, You could not make that link. And while it’s true that There’s much more to you than your thinks, The rest of you smells But doesn’t know if it stinks, As stinks is a thing Only concepts can think.
Concepts, ideas, Abstractions, oh my— If you are what you think, This would explain why, It’s so easy to be terrified when you die. For thoughts cannot go on with thinking at all, If the body they think from can’t rise from its fall. The body won’t mind if it’s time to stay down, Alone it can’t know if it won’t be around, But the concept it has of itself, You and I, Will keep on conceiving right up till we die, Right up to the end of its walk toward the light, Or the end of its darkening descent into night, But neither the light nor the night’s really right— Conceptions conceive until their own fall, Because they cannot conceive no conception at all.
An Ever-Unusual Game (for Alan Watts) I am what I am, I am what I do, And I can be what I am Because I’m not You.
I am what I think, I am what I feel, I’m what I remember, But am I real?
Some of I Is, Some of I’s Not, And I could not remember If I never forgot.
You are what You are, What else could You be? You are what You do, You’re You and not me.
You are what You think, You are what You feel, And what You remember, But are You real?
Some of You Is, Some of You’s not, And you could not remember If You never forgot.
But If I don’t know I Unless I know You, And we both feel like I, What the hell do we do?
If not for You I never was born, And if not for I You neither— If not for the both of You and I, Nothing exists that is either.
If I do something to I, Or if You do something to You, Both You and I will find that we Both do it to I and You.
And if You do something to I, Or if I do something to You, Both You and I will still find that we, Both do it to I and You.
So if all that we do affects I and You, Then are we different or are we the same? Or just two-sided parts in a whole of no parts, In an ever-unusual game?
To the one who wants more truth I say, To get more I know a way— Just make it easier to be gotten, Then more lies will be forgotten.
For the ones who lie to you would not, If you didn’t make them feel they ought, To be the way you think they should, And bad your bad and good your good.
So if you want to get more truth, And be much less of a lie sleuth, Then bend with truth instead of break, And truth will out for truthness sake.
But if you make truth want to hide, For feeling it will be denied, And feeling that it will suffer Too much against your stiff truth buffer.
Then truth will often turn to lies, That utilize a truth disguise, To throw you off their lying trail And keep their true friend out of jail.
Truth with lies and lies with truth, They start collecting in our youth, Preserved on hidden, secret shelves— Secret shelves made of ourselves.
Sometimes our selves can hide so well, Which ones are true we cannot tell. They wait and want to be revealed, But some might better stay concealed.
I could expound this little rhyme of mine and philosophize away to my heart’s content. I could use it as inspiration for a sermon against the objectively false truth claims of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Or, I could simply let the words speak for themselves so I can move on with my work, and hopefully sometime in the near future I’ll finish some more poems— the one about honesty, the one about my place in space, or, if I’m lucky, I’ll finally finish the one about butt cracks (Take out your hand / reach around back / And feel around till you find a crack). For now though, I’ll just set “In the Whole of All Parts” aside in this post. I might be back…
In the Whole of All Parts No parts without whole, No whole without parts, No starts without ends, No ends without starts, No hearts without brains, No brains without hearts, In the parts and the whole Of the whole of all parts.
Star That You Are Everything happens before you become aware of it— Including you. And when you realize this to be true, Relax— There’s nothing for you to do, Except what you already are— Your being is doing, Your doing is being, And your you-ing shines on like a star— A star that shines back on itself and thinks “Welp, I’m not really shining that well. I should do my job better And be a go-getter, And shine more, or I’m going to hell.” But shines are directed By all things connected, And not by the will of the star. The will’s just a feeling That can act like a ceiling, To keep stars from shining too far. But even when you find out That your “you” has no clout, And that everything’s there before you come about, You can shine all you want on the shadows of doubt, But you will still be the star that you are.
If everything is connected everywhere and there are no gaps of nothing in objective reality, then GOD is not separate from us, except when made to be separate from us by self-conscious subjects in subjective reality. GOD is the sum of all parts of all things and all points of view in all realities, known and unknown. Thus the great GOD of all gods goes on forever, from all points and in all directions, and is one with and the same as the endless all-ways ocean of the universe.
Why did I write this little poem? Perhaps this is related to my past thinking about, to quote myself, “the endless all-ways ocean of the universe.” Perhaps this is related to my hearing of Joseph Goldstein saying “Everything changes,” or my deduction from listening to Alan Watts that everything is always connected everywhere, to which I added that there are no gaps of nothing in objective reality.
If everything is connected and everything changes, then essentially, this everything is the flow of existence, this is Dao, or, “the Way”—this is all that there is, and this is that which contains all things by not containing them—this is the one, true, all-knowing, all-powerful GOD which contains all gods. So just “go with the flow,” and if you feel like you can’t or won’t, don’t worry and don’t go with it it, as this too is part of the flow. You cannot go with the flow on purpose, and you cannot not go with the flow on purpose, for you are the flow, and whatever you do is a perfect expression of that which IS. YOU are, as Alan Watts said, “the which than which there is no whicher.”
The Whole of the Flow You cannot know the whole of the flow, Because the flow goes on forever. It always goes on in every which way, And it’s all there is which stops never.
Everything changes endlessly, And all of it’s part of the flow, But change is the thing that isn’t a thing, The whole of which we’ll never know.
For flowing is change and changing is flow, Eternally going with flowing with go— Unending sowing, reaping, and growing— And dying’s just part of the highing and lowing.
All things that arise must later come down, Like leaves that are green but later turn brown— Leaves which eventually fall to the ground— And after they rot and sink from the scene, Arise once again in the flowing of change, And appear on the trees as leaves that are green.
Here’s a little ditty I wrote and posted on r/exmormon reddit a couple months ago in the form of the meme-ish graphic above, and with the title “Does Russell Really Love Me?” I’d been having reoccurring thoughts about how both members and leaders in The Church can commonly be found telling people they don’t know that they love them.
Is it even possible to love someone if you don’t know them? No. You could say it depends on your definition of love and you could say it depends on context, but to that I could say that it doesn’t. It doesn’t depend, because not only can you not love someone if you do not know them, you cannot do anything to them at all which requires personal connection – in the real world, that is. In the completely subjective and imaginary world of ideas and thoughts and feelings however, you can do anything you want, and maybe that’s why it is such an attractive place for human beings to spend so much of their time.
But if it does depend on definition, then I would say the definition of love that I am talking about is one that defines love as actually acting in a way that shows you truly care as much or more for the welfare of who or what you love as you do for yourself. Talking is its own kind of action in a way, but just talking about it is never enough.
And if it does depend on context, then I would say the kind of context I am talking about is when a church leaders gets up in front of a large group of people and says that he loves them. This church leader does not know anything at all about most of the people in the audience – he does not know names, ages, faces, or anything about their life circumstances, except he knows they are members of the same church, of the same in-group as he is, and this gives him a warm feeling toward them, and therefore he declares that he loves them. And when he declares that he loves them, he feels he means it with every fiber of his being.
I will submit that in this context, the leader may in fact love the group if he acts in a way that shows he cares as much or more for the welfare of the group as he does for himself, even though he does not really love the individuals within that group individually. But the problem with this, in my opinion, is that some or all members of the group hear and feel the leader’s declaration of love as if it is a declaration of love for them personally, and not just for the group, leaving them vulnerable to emotional manipulation that can be harmful to their welfare if their leader leads them down the wrong path.
I also think that the leader himself probably really believes that he does in fact love everyone within the group individually and not just the group as a whole, and means his “I love you,” in that way, to each individual, as is evidenced most clearly in the Dallin H. Oaks quote from April 2022 General Conference in the picture above:’
“I love you, my brothers and sisters, I love all of God’s children.”
But what’s the big deal? Why do I care to comment in this way on the fact that leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, not to mention many members of The Church (as well as leaders and members of many churches and organizations of every kind), regularly declare an impossible kind of love for people that they do not know? I care because I feel that if every single one of us human beings is continually engaged in the act of sensing elements of our bodies and environment and then symbolizing those elements with labels, if that is the thing that most makes us human, at which we are the best and of which we are the only practitioners we know of, then let’s take pride in who and what we are. Let’s sense and symbolize accurately as often as possible, but particularly if and when we share our personal experience with others, and especially whenwe are using the personal truth of our private experience to exert influence and control on others who may or may not share our feelings.
People who love in theory but not in practice, but who have convinced themselves and others that they love both in theory and in practice, can be dangerous to society in ways very similar to those who do not love at all.
In the library of human experience, if we’re going to have sections at all, let’s have them and their contents be accurately labeled as often as possible. Let’s have the fiction in the fiction section and the non-fiction in the non-fiction section. Let’s not confuse fiction with history, or religion with science or politics, or biography with autobiography – at least not if we can help it. Why? Because in a system built on symbolic thinking, and in a system built on the ability to communicate via symbolic thinking, the more false symbols there are the more likely it is that the system itself will become false, in which case the system will eventually be cancelled and completely useless. Now there’s a certain point of view from which that wouldn’t be such a bad thing, but in the meantime, I’ll appeal to our selfish natures instead – don’t we all want things? And wouldn’t it eventually be impossible to know if we got what we wanted if we cannot trust it to be what we think it is?
Someone might say, who cares if we actually get what we want, as long as we truly think we get what we want, and to that I would say – well, what would I say? I guess if we truly think we have what we want, then that is good enough, isn’t it? Yes – until or unless it’s not…
For the Love of Strangers Never trust I love yous From those you do not know. You must know someone to love them, For the Bible tells me so.
If someone says “I love you” And they do not know your name, They’re loving an idea, In a goody-good mind game.
“I love you” should be special, Not for those you’ve never met. And saying it to strangers, Means you really want to get.
You want to get salvation And you want to get ahead, To do this life one better, And win a big prize when you’re dead.
This one’s for Uncle Alan. My favorite philosopher, the late, great Alan Watts, sometimes spoke about Jesus as “the boss’s son” and what an advantage he has over the rest of us mere mortals. He is also known for his ideas about how the universe grows people in the same way that an apple tree grows apples, and other related ideas. I thought of Neil deGrasse Tyson with the last line about “the stuff of the stars.” I think I learned about how we are made of stardust from him, but it might have been Richard Dawkins too…
The Zen Buddhist flavor of this little rhyme is also attributable to Alan Watts, from whom I also learned that although we can improve, we cannot improve ourselves, as that would be like trying to lift ourselves up by our own bootstraps.
In The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, of which I am still an inactive member, great emphasis is placed on self-improvement. In fact, we’re taught that’s why we’re here on Earth in the first place – to be tested, to prove ourselves by improving ourselves. We’ve got to make ourselves clean and acceptable for God, or he won’t be able to let us move back in with him after we die, and we won’t be able to inherit the family business and become Gods ourselves. Church doctrine is infested with this kind of thinking, that human beings can and should improve themselves, and that God will hold accountable those who do not. This is all very well and good for those who are blessed with the genetic and environmental influences conducive to growth and “improvement,” but I can see now, thanks to Uncle Alan, that this is an illusion, this idea that we can change ourselves on purpose. If we could, wouldn’t more people improve themselves more easily and more often?
The Universe Tree If we all should become like the boss’s son, Well that would be no fun. Even worse if he’s perfect, for how would that work – We’d be finished before we’d begun. It’s all right, he might say, Just keep trying each day, And when you fail please admit that you’re wrong. Then feel really bad, and be sure to be sad, And I’ll forgive as you’re failing along. And maybe someday when you’re dead he will say, “Come unto me, ye blessed,” I’ve prepared you a place in a heavenly space Where you will worship me and adore my face, Now that you’ve passed my test.
But should we find out who we really are, Well, that could get us far. We could find and face facts to help us relax, And shine on like those billions of stars. We could know and accept how perceptions have kept The truth hid in so many places, And feed ourselves then with helpings of Zen, That help us to see through all of our faces, And bring ourselves back where we started again. Then when we’re awake we’ll be able to see, How there really is nothing we really must be, Apart from what we are – The self-conscious fruit of the universe tree, That grows from the stuff of the stars.
Mormon Mouse 